So How Are Those Kids Supposed to Eat? Thinking Housewife

[emmiedahl]

The Thinking Housewife never fails to piss me off, but now he has really gone overboard. In a single post, he comes out against child support and against women working and government support for single mothers.

The Underemployment of Men

THE EMPLOYMENT rate among American men reached its lowest level in 63 years this summer. Not since 1948 had so relatively few men held jobs. But the news was already bad. The median income of working men fell 27 percent from 1969 to 2009.

When men are underemployed as a group, the consequences for society at large are far more dire than when women are unemployed in high numbers.

In fact, when women are unemployed, as history clearly shows us, the consequences are good. Society functions better when women are not working outside the home and are raising the workers of tomorrow. When men are unemployed at high levels, marriage declines, illegitimacy increases, crime increases, and overall social dysfunction follows.

We live in a world of fantastic denial of these facts, a world in which intractable differences in work motivations and performance between men and women are also categorically rejected. As we speak, companies continue to be hauled into court for the offense of employing men over women. Immense resources and vast sums of money are devoted to improving the confidence and work performance of women.

Is it any surprise the figures are so grim? In August, Mike Dorning of Bloomberg Businessweek wrote:

Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year, and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent–to $33,000 a year from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

In pondering why men lag, Dorning writes:

But for reasons not fully understood, college graduation rates essentially stopped growing for men in the late 1970s, shortly after the Vietnam War ended, perhaps in part because draft deferments were no longer an inducement.

“For reasons not fully understood?†Dorning must live in a sealed cave.

He may have slept for the past sixty years. As George Gilder wrote in Visible Man (ICS Press, 1995), during that time “under the pressure of an imperious feminism, all the public institutions of society - from government to Hollywood – launched an obsessive and successful effort to increase the earnings of women and to enhance their sexual independence and aggressiveness.â€

We can fully understand the reasons why men lag if we examine the feminization of education and the workplace. When men are forced to compete with women, a significant minority of them become apathetic and unmotivated. This is a perennial fact of human psychology. Feminized education bores the hell out of men. Only a person living in a cave could have failed to notice that men have been forced to give up sports teams in the wake of Title IX and that many institutions are ridden with the mission of enforcing reparations for female underperformance in the past. Medical and law schools now accept women at equal rates to men. This is so even though female doctors and lawyers have a far higher drop out rate once they achieve established careers. How could these equal numbers hold unless women weren’t being significantly favored?

There is one bright spot. We know what works. We know without a shadow of a doubt that when society devotes its energies to improving the work performance of one sex at the expense of the other, vast change is possible.

So now let’s reverse the process.

As Gilder wrote, “government training funds, job preferences, and other interventions must be channeled chiefly toward boys and men.†Affirmative action for women should end and non-mandatory, non-governmental preferences for men should exist as they once did. Honesty should prevail in fields where there are now high rates of female attrition due to motherhood. The quixotic and dishonest goal of “flexibility†in jobs should end, replaced by the understanding that merit and hard work are what matter most in employment.

Single sex education is a pressing need. Women are not going to college and graduating at far higher rates because they are smarter than men. Masculine competitiveness is good for men, and should be encouraged in boys. It is not good for women, and should be discouraged in girls.

Welfare benefits of all kinds should be denied to unmarried women, removing a major incentive for poor men to decline work. As Gilder wrote, “Deadbeat dad crusades should give way to the contrary principle that a woman’s claim on a man for support – and a man’s access to children – both come exclusively through the institution of marriage.â€

The underemployment of men is not just the result of the technological revolution, the loss of factory jobs or globalization. It is the desired outcome of years of concerted effort to create economic autonomy for women and to undermine the male provider. The underemployment of men is arguably not just a consequence of the lagging economy but a major cause of it. Vibrant economies are not found where male apathy is encouraged.

Buck O. writes:

Would you mind explaining this more fully: “Deadbeat dad crusades should give way to the contrary principle that a woman’s claim on a man for support – and a man’s access to children – both come exclusively through the institution of marriage.â€

I’m think that I understand what Gilder and you mean, but I’m not certain.

Laura writes:

The government should not be demanding child support from men who were never married to the mothers of their children or aiding children through public assistance to their unmarried mothers.

[tropaka]

yeah, so men should get off scott free if not married, I guess this is justified since they procreated out of marriage and the women and children should suffer?

[Burris]

Laura is such a spiteful, small-minded tool.

Rather than posting her entire rant, without interspersed commentary, however, Fair Use dictates you should probably just pick out the worst parts - and then snark the shit of of them. Please make a note of it.

[Patsy]

(I will mention - I never read quoted posts here. If I'm interested, I click to and read the original in its entirety, but I never read it when people quote an entire news story here. It's just tl;dr when it's in forum format.)

[emmiedahl]

Sorry, Patsy. I usually would just post the crayzee, but it was all crayzee this time. The main points are: Lawrence Auster thinks it is women's fault that men are in hard financial times, so women should be forced out of jobs and colleges. In addition, he is against child support for illegitimate children and also against government assistance for single mothers.

[rebelsaint]

Wow, so he blames women for the entire global economy being in the toilet??

O-k.

:evil:

[Patsy]

Sorry, Patsy. I usually would just post the crayzee, but it was all crayzee this time. The main points are: Lawrence Auster thinks it is women's fault that men are in hard financial times, so women should be forced out of jobs and colleges. In addition, he is against child support for illegitimate children and also against government assistance for single mothers.

No no no apology! Using the scroll bar or the back button is not hard :) just throwing it out there in case there are others whose reaction is the same - it's not "Good day to you madam, I shall not read this post! [and your obligation is to make posts I will read, and you should totally care and feel bad when you don't]" but that maybe this is something that does make it a bit harder to read or less likely to be read by other people, so, er, effective communication...

speaking of effective communication, I'm finding it hard to actually express what I mean, so: I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with what you're doing, just saying "here is a thing you may not notice, and if that is at all relevant to you you now know".

[Patsy]

and I have nothing to say on the actual topic at hand, because the thinking housewife is such a bundle of crazy, as emmiedahl mentions, that I can't be arsed reading it, barring some special exceptions (see: if you're not white you're not British)

[emmiedahl]

The no-child-support-for-illegitimate-children thing gets to me. I was abandoned by my high school sweetheart the night before our wedding. I usually refer to him as my ex-husband because ex-boyfriend does not cover the scope of our relationship, which lasted several years. I became pregnant at the end of my senior year and planned to give the baby up for adoption. He begged me not to and proposed to me. I agreed, and it all went downhill from there. I ended up supporting him and our family while he played college frat boy in another state, promising to marry me the day after his graduation (he was in the Air Force Academy, which does not allow married students). He told me the night before our wedding (we were in Nevada, with relatives, etc) that he had been having an affair and couldn't choose between us. He has been paying child support ever since, and damn straight he should!

[FundiesInMyFamily]

OMFG This raises my hackles like nothing else. I'm the single mom of a disabled child and have had to chase my ex for my son's entire life trying to get child support. We had my son out of wedlock, he couldn't handle my son's disablities so he bailed when Brady was 9 months old. They caught up to him when B was 3 and I started getting child support sporaticaly after that. He stayed gone for 10 years, and popped back up about 6 years ago. Due to my extreme stress of raising a disabled child alone, my "love" for him, and sheer stupidity and blindness, I took him back and married the bastard. 11 months later I threw him out after he had spent every dime I'd ever worked for. In the last 4 years he's seen my son 3 times, and at this point I haven't seen child support in a year and a half. He moved to Wyoming and that makes it more diffucult to collect, he simply quits his job and gets another one, and it takes awhile to catch back up with him and start collecting again.

So in her eyes my son should be punished because his dad is a sociopath and couldn't handle his responsibilites? Is it my son's fault? I did the "right" and "biblical" thing by eventually marrying him. Child support is for him, to make his life better and to take some of the burden off of me as the sole caretaker.

Sorry if this is long and garbled but child support gets me riled up like nothing else. Everyday I check the state child support site to see if they've collected a payment in the hopes that I can get him some new clothes, take him somewhere cool, and have a nice Christmas this year.

[Nurse Jenna]

Housewife is disgusting and is without original thought in his/her empty head. I'm not even surprised that she would quote George Glilder who was named "Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year" by the Time mag.

[emmiedahl]

He is so bitter toward women. He needs to reign it in a bit because no.women.would.say.that. srsly. Not even Zsuzsu or Kelly @ GC. It is not something a woman would say.

[last_one_picked]

I think the Non-Thinking Housewife must be one of the least Christ-like people on the planet. Just sayin'.

[koolmom]

What a douche -- so ridiculous these cretins keep dredging up the same old garbage, repeating it year after year. I've read the likes of George Gilder and his ilk. I've also read the tin-hatters who claim feminism is a construct by the Illuminati, that it was designed to reduce the power of men while exploiting the power of women so that controlling the populace would be easier to maintain. Story goes that a woman would be a more compliant employee, easier to control than a man, and would expect less pay to boot. Also, that to continue the mass consumer premise, two households would be consuming more than a dual-headed, single wage-earning family.

If you read my post in "Birth Order", this premise seems eerily familiar, that is, undermine the fabric of a society, and you eventually find women getting thrown to the wolves doing the very same things these pearl-clutches supposedly despise. Of course, they do nothing about WHY said women are left in dire straits (as illustrated by above posters), and simply lay it at the feet of the victims.

That is why so many fundies steadfastly believe in the male head of household "self-employed" premise -- figuring they don't need the bad (ebil) influences or vagaries of the open job market (which so many, ironically, swear by) instead, to operate in an extreme, narrow world. I say it's NOT so much that they want to remain out of the morass of the "free market" vortex to stay close to home, albeit it makes a nice premise and sounds oh, so COZY, but because they KNOW the job market is a bitch, and want to influence said dad and headship that, a la Amway, YOU TOO, can support an entire family "if you put your mind to it and PRAY".

My ex tried that route, too, opening a small business after working for one, which he determined it "would be a cinch if we did it ourselves". Ha, ha, ha, doesn't even come close to describing the debacle that turned into. Like all Peter Pan types, this also came to a crashing end when he got in over his head trying desperately to remain solvent. After I'd told him this wasn't exactly the right circumstance to attempt an endeavour of this nature, but did it anyway, did he cease and desist and close up shop...to describe him, you might say he was like "The Office's" Michael Scott wannabe who hadn't gotten the management job.

[JesusFightClub]

Nooooo!

This is a terrible attempt to foist ideology onto economics. Less men are employed, not because more women are employed, but because capitalism goes into periodic phases of boom and bust, and there are special problems with late capitalism which are starting to become globally very obvious. I know to the Lousewife every social ill is women's fault, but that is utterly inept even for "her". Fucking recession, learn you it.

There has never been a time when no women were occupied outside the home, outside of VF wank fantasies. It just did not happen, apart from a section of the bourgeoisie in developed countries. It's not going to happen now. They wouldn't like it if it did.

To be "practical" on their terms just for a moment, does "she" really think if women stay at home most men are going to be champing at the bit to take jobs as teaching assistants? Care home attendants? Midwives? Office juniors? Retail assistants?

Nope, thought not. Which is why "her" argument fails politically, economically and psychologically.

[bananacat]

I think his view is that men shouldn't have to pay child support, because they're not getting anything from the arrangement and they're the only people who count. Men should only have to pay for their wives and children when they are getting something out of it, like a full time maid and sex on demand. And it's the woman's duty to make sure she withholds sex until she gets that legally-binding certificate that says he has to keep paying her for it for the rest of her life. Marriage, sex, and money are very transactional in their worldview. To them, paying alimony or child support to a woman who is not providing services makes about as much sense as a corporation paying people even after they quit.

[1004srs]

Not getting anything from the arrangement is a stupid argument.

ANything about Child SUpport and Custody really bugs me. I no longer get Child support. My ex retired and quit paying. He sees our kids very sporadically. He's seen our 5 year old daughter once since January (he took both kids out to dinner).

He doesn't have time or money to see our children or help support them. However, he's on his second live-in honey this year. This one has kids our childrens ages. He does have time and money to buy those kids 2 horses.

He could have a relationship with our children. That is what he could get out of it.

[Eponine]

This is a small point in comparison to her overall disgustingness, but it bugs the shit out of me when fundies make the "women never worked outside the home before this century" argument. Wtf do they think poor families used to do? They just all magically had the ability to support a family on one tiny income? Or how about all the mothers that managed home-based cottage industries or were domestic workers? And when mothers couldn't work in very poor families children and parents often starved or had to beg. I guess in her eyes it is "better" for society to have poor people dying off in large numbers and high infant mortality than to have women working outside the home.

[FlorenceHamilton]

This guy (It cannot be a woman) writes things that are as painful to read as KKK literature. On one hand, I think that s/he has a very low opinion of males. Truly, if males were so much better, smarter, stronger then women would not have been able to negotiate the zigaroot and climb to the top as we certainly have. All that has happened is that some (certainly not all) of the barriers to women in education and business have become surmountable. Men still have a huge advantage. It just is not as absolute as it once was.

The recession is part of the cyclic boom and bust cycle as JFC already stated. The Great Depression showed us that strict Capitalism is not enough to keep a country going. We need to also have social programs to sustain the lower classes. This is more important during tough times than lucrative times.

The writer seems to ascribe to entitlement theory. People who ascribe to this theory are only the ones who end up being entitled.to.everything.

To maintain the perfect and god-given right of white christian males to control all of the resources it takes to generate money (capital), a certain social order is required. That social order is created by god. God says that wimmin stay home and make babeez and keep the house. God says some people are born into servitude and god even gave some rules as to how to treat them servant folks. Only the menfolk get to talk to god and to have domain over the earth.

It is becoming more obvious daily that a mixed capitalist/socialist economy with flexible amounts of each are necessary for growth and securuty. Women, who are biologically built to function in a fluctuating environment that sometimes calls for giving and other times calls for taking, have some advantage in this climate. As manufacturing has moved to developing economies because of the lower cost, we have become more and more of a service economy. Service jobs were not generally valued as much by males in western culture. This is taking a generation to recalibrate. Also, as developing countries move forward, the cost of labor will increase. These laborers will also begin to have resources to allocate to services. Over several generations, the manufacturing and servicing sectors will be more balanced globally.

These folks who are screaming for us to go back to a time that things made more sense to them is somewhat tragic. So far, every dark age which has pulled a cover over knowledge has eventually given way to light. The inevitable truth that we are just lifeforms on one little planet trying to make our brief awareness as meaningful as we can. Ultimately, what has the most meaning is that we matter to one another.

[fundiefan]

I can't even read that drivel. The ignorance is painful.

[ElphabaGalinda]

The writer obviously desn't care about children after they leave the womb. Does he have children? A wife? Because even the most crazee of women wouldn't write like that, so it must be a he. I thought all these patriarchal types were supposed to at least put on a show of "women and children first". But basically what he's saying is that women should starve unless there's a man who can benefit. I really hope he doesn't act as "authority" for anyone.

[NurseNell]

The Thinking Housewife never fails to piss me off, but now he has really gone overboard. In a single post, he comes out against child support and against women working and government support for single mothers.

I'd love to put her in the room with Judge Judy for an hour. JJ is great at chastising any parent, be it mother or father, who doesn't pay child support.

[NurseNell]

Not getting anything from the arrangement is a stupid argument.

ANything about Child SUpport and Custody really bugs me. I no longer get Child support. My ex retired and quit paying. He sees our kids very sporadically. He's seen our 5 year old daughter once since January (he took both kids out to dinner).

He doesn't have time or money to see our children or help support them. However, he's on his second live-in honey this year. This one has kids our childrens ages. He does have time and money to buy those kids 2 horses.

He could have a relationship with our children. That is what he could get out of it.

Shouldn't he have to still pay child support? He must have a retirement pay or social security. I'd take him back to court.

[Confused_by_religion]

What the ...? This makes "The Scarlet Letter" look pretty progressive in comparison.

[ThisOlGirl]

After talking to several of my friends and reading posts here about how a lot of women have to fight tooth and nail to get any kind of financial support from their ex, I consider myself extremely lucky. My ex-husband has never missed a support payment and I've never heard him complain about having to pay. He maintains health insurance on his kids and pays half the expenses that insurance doesn't cover (per our divorce agreement). He helps pay for any extra activities the kids want to do if I can't cover it all (he enrolled and took our daughter to "mommy and me" swimming lessons when she was 16 months old). In fact, on one or two occasions, he paid my rent and/or bought groceries when I had large, unexpected expenses (I did pay him back for those things). Legally, his financial obligations end with child support and healthcare bills, but he does a lot more. I rarely have to ask him for the extra help--he just does it. Why? Because he loves his kids and doesn't want to see them starving or out on the street. And he wants to give them the same opportunities that other kids have as far as extracurricular stuff goes.

Of course, The Stinking Housewife would probably say that my ex-husband is "feminized" and not half the man he should be. To which ex-hubby would probably say "Ah, suck it!"