#neil gilbert

[moonlovinliv]

the gilberts are allies and i cannot be convinced otherwise!!

[juicenet]

happy father’s day to neil gilbert, terry chadwick, and season 3 don sertori!

[cleo-serotonin]

the fact lewis bought emma’s dad a birthday present 🥺 i don’t know a better person

[moonlovinliv]

did the gilberts ever question why or how emma and her two best friends became such good friends with the woman who is apparently known around town as a suspected witch

[moonlovinliv]

love lisa and neil but the way they said nothing to harrison when he called rikki poor in front of the whole business lunch

[h2ojustaddmako]

Fun fact: in S2 ep 17, there's a BTS photograph of Lisa, Neil, Elliot and aunt Thea from Neil's birthday party framed by the stairs.

[rachelhills]

As some of my articles might suggest, I'm a bit of a Linda Hirshman fan, but the Sandra Tsing Loh (one of my top 'writers I want to be when I grow up') essay in the latest Atlantic Monthly makes a good case against her book, Get To Work!, itself a response to the whole 'Opt Out Revolution' hullabaloo of 2003.

Some of my favourite excerpts:

The Manhattan working gals of Sex and the City, whose days revolve chiefly around dishing over cocktails, are essentially ’50s suburban housewives, trophy wives of (in this case) glamorous if emotionally distant New York jobs—skyscraper-housed entities with good addresses and doormen that handsomely fund their lifestyles while requiring that they show up to service them only infrequently, in bustiers and heels. I want a vague job like the one Charlotte has, in the art gallery she never goes to; or the lawyer job Miranda has (charcoal suits and plenty o’ time for lunch with the gals); or Samantha’s PR gig, throwing SoHo loft parties and giving blow jobs to freakishly endowed men (actually, that’s the one job I don’t want); I want to spend my days like “writer” Carrie, lolling in bed in her underwear, smoking and occasionally updating her quasi-bohemian equivalent of a My­Space page.

And:

Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment,

mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have “real” jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities.

Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world. The professor admits that his own job in “university teaching is by and large divorced from the normal discipline of everyday life in the marketplace. It bears only the faintest resemblance to most work in the real world.” In other words, for the “occupational elite” (as Gilbert calls this group), unlike for most people, going to work is not a drag.

Indeed, when I was thinking about the issue a couple of years ago, I came to the conclusion that this was an issue that whacked both genders: women may experience more social pressure to give up (or cut back on) their jobs when they had kids, but men often don't have the option to leave jobs they find unsatisfying.

I did disagree with the suggestion that working outside the home gave women more financial independence, though.

But surely women’s economic independence is worth it? Oy. Wrong again. Here Gilbert launches into an exhaustive and rather depressing analysis of how far we’ve come since the 1970s. It’s a long way, baby … if chiefly in terms of the accessibility of appliances. Seventies luxuries—air conditioners and clothes dryers—are of course the new millennium’s necessities. ... No question, getting moms a paycheck has been very good for the U.S. consumer-electronics market, not to mention fast-food vendors, child-care providers, and—despite all those clothes dryers—the dry-cleaning industry.

However, while the economy benefits, for working-class families with young children, so much of a second income is eaten up by child care and taxes and other costs related to holding down a job that... the second wage earner might as well have stayed at home. Gilbert concludes, then, that financial need is not the force behind women’s shift in the past 50 years from work in the home to work in the market­place; rather, it is the desires of those who have made out like bandits in this new order, the tiny minority (3.5 percent in 2003) of women who earn $75,000 or more. Members of this occupational elite have created a host of cultural norms by which their far less privileged sisters—who, again, make up the vast majority of working women—feel they must abide.

This may be true, but it misses a crucial point: how is a woman who's spent 20 (or even 10) years out of the workforce to support herself if her marriage comes to an end?

It's also worth noting that a lot of those "occupational elite" jobs Gilbert identifies are ironically the easiest to do part-time or put on the backburner if a woman does decide (and is financially able) to stay home with her children.