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Why Today’s Girls Might Not Want to Be Girls
After reading Susan Quinn’s post about saving our children, I may have an answer to the problem of girls not wanting to be girls. I wonder if the problem is not that they don’t want to be girls, but that they aren’t keen on the feminist’s vision of what girls must be today. Perhaps they are not eager to be an engineer, or a carpenter, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Today’s society has nearly totally bought into the feminist version of females, who not only successfully compete with men in the job market, but are simply better than men in all walks of life. Girls are told that they must go to college, get a good job, and advance in their careers to become the head of something. Girls have it drummed into them from childhood that they can be anything they want to be, and if they don’t get there it’s men’s fault, or society’s fault. Girls are told, in school and subliminally in advertising, that getting married, having children, and raising them to be productive members of society is not making use of their best talents-that can only happen when they have a degree and a job on Main Street or Wall Street.
Maybe today’s girls actually want to have a boyfriend (or two), meet Mr. Right, get married, and be a full-time Mom. Maybe they see what society insists they must want, and turn away from that future. They are very conflicted when what they actually want for their lives is continually talked down by the wider society.
I have always thought that the version of feminism that denigrates men, idolizes women with high-level jobs, and values being a mother to a family much less than paid work, has had a negative effect on society. This level of feminism has led to disastrous consequences for many middle-class men, who see themselves as subservient to women, and devalued; which leads to “diseases of despair”, drug use, and increased suicide.
Maybe Feminism itself is the cause of today’s girls not wanting to be girls.
Published in Culture
My late wife was into carpentry. I got her a router for her birthday one year because she wanted one.
My thoughts are more inline with Unsk. Sexual mores no longer really exist anymore. When society can’t give people coherent guidelines in how to respond to sexual situations and feelings, people search for ways to signal and manage their sexual confusion to others. For many going trans enables them to avoid the hypercharged casual hookup culture.
Nothing really, but most women are not inclined to be carpenters. The issue with most “male-dominated” occupations, including the construction trades and high-level corporate jobs is that the majority of women prefer different lines of work. The patriarchy doesn’t insist that women become teachers, hairdressers, or human-resource specialists, but many women gravitate there. The patriarchy doesn’t any longer “keep women down” in the corporate world, like everyone loves to think. Maybe women just don’t aspire to the CEO position in the first place. The mode of thinking is still feminist-that the reason there are not more women in the C-suite is because society is keeping them down.
Spot on, baby!
Perhaps the issue isn’t the process, per se, but rather the goal. The product of sewing is, most often, something worn on the body, placed on the bed, or hung over the windows as part of home décor. It’s personal. In contrast, the product of carpentry is most often a portion of a structure or a piece of furniture. Furniture might have a personal quality to it, particularly if decorated with throw pillows and other sewn things, but it’s still a thing in a sense that a dress or shirt is not.
I know some people who sew custom sails for sailboats. They’re men, and they make things.
I’m reminded of something I found a while back, in a discussion about computer programming:
There’s carpentry, and there’s carpentry. When I was young, framing houses, we used to carry 24′ trusses into the house and stick them up on the walls by ourselves. I don’t think many women have the upper body strength for that.
All your notions seem true to me.
The conversations around feminism are indeed loud and shrill. Also they are contradictory at times, like when feminists applaud little 7 year old boys wearing dresses and makeup but think young women should avoid either of those things.
They also turn a blind eye to their leaders hypocrisy. This is one of many blonde white women celebrating with Kamela, with POC there only as busboys and wait staff:
But isn’t random sex alot more fun than getting your genitals cut?
Never having done either, I couldn’t say.
I think a lot would depend on a person’s psyche.
Then we’d climb up on the walls and toenail them in. This was before the widespread use of hurricane clips.