08-20-2022, 10:31 AM
(08-19-2022, 02:12 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Around 1985 I was browsing a college library and found in a sociological magazine an article which started out something like this: How are you gonna get 'em back into the kitchen? You ain't!
That will be true of professional women who have responsible, fulfilling jobs. Basically, women who have achieved employment status as engineers, attorneys, physicians, nurses, dentists, accountants, research scientists, college professors, civil administrators, law enforcement, and the like will remain such and not be satisfied with "children, church, and kitchen". Such was so in the 1950's with those women (mostly Lost and early-wave GI) who got into the professions. Howe-Strauss theory suggests that elsewhere, women in more disposable jobs such as cleaning and retail sales clerking will be more likely to return to traditional household roles if their husbands have adequately-paying jobs. Such was the pattern after WWII and won't be again.
Wages have been depressed as a matter of overt policy since the early 1980's, and that has pushed women into the workforce to supplement the pittances that their husbands make. Policy for Big Business has generally been to export jobs that once allowed millions of Americans (especially men) to be successful breadwinners in manufacturing as manufacturers become importers. Meanwhile, employers have exploited the reality where they cannot export the job, as is so with cleaning and sales-clerking.
We need remember that women, like men, are on two different tracks that make childbearing less likely than was so before. The middle class is often "double income, no kids" in which two adult professionals have solid incomes but are consigned to tiny, child-hostile housing (apartments or condos) typically in the Big City. The other is the couple who both have cr@ppy, low-paying jobs that allow bare survival for the couple and little more. Have you noticed that fast food work is now often held by people far from qualifying as kids starting out? The first job for many workers in such a place as most see it at age 16 is often now the last job for someone around 60 for various reasons, such as never getting ahead in life.
The climate of hostility to children that existed in the 1970's and 1980's is past. Child-bearing and child-raising is potentially a fulfilling role, especially for women of limited opportunity. Giving up a job as a retail salesclerk to raise a family may again be more attractive than it used to be. Also -- men have far more pathologies if they are out of work. Men out of work may not be the only ones drawn to extremist causes, but remember well that Italian and German men often found that they could achieve purpose in life if they donned the uniform of a gangster cause (black shirt or brown shirt) and got action often resembling work complete with workplace-style regimentation. It may be better for social concord that men put their actions into making things instead of beating up others.
Testosterone versus estrogen is the great divide between men and women, and testosterone makes males much more aggressive than females of species other than us. I have seen that in dogs, animals whose social structure is much like ours (the human family and a wolf pack are similar); male dogs are much more aggressive (unless defending her puppies, in which case she is a typical bear or Big Cat in behavior) than literal bitches. (She barks, she has sharp claws and teeth, and is born with a reproductive system that is intended to bear puppies if given the chance, so that is not male-chauvinist-pig language. If you are to call someone a "bitch" then make sure that she barks. Men are more aggressive than women, and that manifests itself in far-higher rates of violent crime. Add to that, fascist movements are largely "bad-boys clubs" and most of the drug kingpins are men.
Men with first-rate educations and intellects can look at time off work as leisure. Men without those see such as scary. It is better that they make enough on the job that they can go bowling or play videogames in the arcade at night than get drunk and beat their wives because they are angry and aggressive and have no place to go and neither do their wives. To that end, women with cr@ppy jobs will likely leave the workplace so that men can be successful breadwinners.
As for sexual assault and abuse... that will be part of the no-no's of life. 1T's are typically more repressive sexually. LGBT rights are likely to stick, but spouse-beating and child molestation will be objects of repression.
Economic realities are part of the Cycle, and I expect that to be so again. I hope that I break no bubble.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
