Back to the Rack!

Okay! I don't know how this will go. I had a very long day at work, I bought new socks so my feet are dry but my pants are wet. I have a screaming headache and I am exhausted. As an added benifit my stomach has decided that instead of turning food into useful energy it will instead distill whatever I eat into RAW PAIN. Which is liberating in a way because when I eat that half a pack of double stuffed oreo cookies later I know without a doubt that the pain I receive as a result would of been inevitable anyway.

The point being? I am not sure how this will turn out. What I wrote at lunch was frankly not good and deleated which is am absolute rareity for me. Normally I am proud of my aborted thought processes but not this time.

So lets start again this time from the top. Of course if it starts going tits up again tomarrow is another day.

The main problem with this article is that there are SO many passages rich with goodies that it is almost impossible to decide where to start. I am sneaky though, I thought of this ahead of time, and I didn't come up with the best answer. I did come up with a pretty good one though. We will start with the title, "For Women, Home Should Represent True Fulfillment". So lets see right off the bat we have a dichtomy set up. A line in the sand is drawn between people who are hands on moms and those who are not. This is an interesting move because anyone who isn't already on board with this argument is immeadiatly antagonized "like me" and tosses the article aside. This establishes the idea that there is no real attempt to convert anyone to the ideas contained within. This is not an article which cries out to the beligered working mother to return home to your children and let a man take care of you. This slashes the readership down even further. After all 50% of all marriages end in divorce (the other 50 IN DEATH!). The article doesn't even try to placate single women at all. This is to the married woman only. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. Again as I said earlier this is an article that has near absolute confidence in its audience. Presenting this at a women's study confrence would result in absolute hilarity. Or presenting this article to a group of single mothers who are working two part time jobs trying to make ends meet. They will paticularly like the letter in the middle where the "hands on mom complains about bordom" that would gove over really well. No over 50% of women need not apply to the ideas contined within this article.

Speaking of that letter, it is an interesting rhetorical move on the part of the author. The letter itself dominates over half of the article proper and while it could be argued that it is a form of expample I would say that it is closer to displacement. Take a look at this from a school paper point of view, when trying to your argument do you use someone else's words 50% of the time? It is pretty much the same here. Schlessinger delves into a pretty sensetive topic that could easily back fire, so instead of taking full responciblity she shares with some other person thus splitting the blame down the middle.

Okay so we got two linked threads now that are just sort of dangling. So it is time to tie them up a bit. This article is by far the closest I've seen to something saying "women back to the kitchen it is where you belong". First the article excludes anyone who by choice or life situation is unable to comply to the qualification of a "hands on mom" and it does that right off the bat. Putting a social ecconmic qualifier on telling people how to live is ever so slightly messed up. Next we have letter which dominates the article. It says you are not alone. I think I am going to get more into the nitty gritty of the letter in a bit. I wanted to just point out its size in comparison to the rest of the article and its possition as a criticism defense mechanism. Strictly speaking that paragraph doesn't belong.

Time to cause more strings, and to start less paragraphs with the word okay. Okay then (:P), so now lets tackle the phrase "Hands on mom". Well isn't that a happy little set of words. It harkens backt o the phrase home maker but with a greater sense of modern sophistication attached to it. It absolutly avoids the stigma attached to the phrase "stay at home mom". But why? If we are reclaiming lost ground caused by a group of over zelous feminists then why bother with a new word? Feminists of all stripes gloriously cling to the title of feminsit despite all the negative conotations that come along with it while I myself at times am relagated down to the possition of male dissident. I am not going to let that go because it genuinly upsets me. What we have here is an admission of the fact that we are taking a step backwards in terms of progress. What is being called for is taking a great deal of the progress made by women in the work place and taking an about face back it an area, not where they truely belong. That would be sexist. Instead it is a place, "they truly have time to grow spiritually, intellectually, and physically. They also lose much of their feminist-trained hostility towards their husbands and gain back the blassing of thier sexuality." You hear that women? The fact that you work is the reason why your sexlife sucks. Just saying there is something hinky going on with this line of reasoning. I am going to beat a dead horse here. Beacuse I like it and I don't know where else to put the following sentence. Women are not required to return to the home and raise kids but if they want to have better sex, be smarter, and more fit it is a good idea. Staying at home and raising kids is serious business. Jesus god what the hell.

Okay well much like Dr. Schlessinger I have been playing it safe so far. I have been picking out some of the worst parts of the argument and hugging them with my barbed wire arms (it is tuff to find love when your arms are made of barbed wire I just want to be loved). Leaving my horrible arms aside lets get into one of the larger issues raised inadvertently by this article. It is that work sucks. It really does. Here is something interesting. When the industrial revolution happened here in america for the first time in our history a majority of the working class had extra money to spend. For the first time in American/European history the average person could afford to leave one member of the family at home to raise the kids, and as an added bonsus the kids didn't have to work. THIS IS HUGE. So as a nation we sat down and contempated how the family unit was going to look in this brave new world. This is a debate that happened in news papers, through pamphlets, and in parlors all across the nation. Exparamental communities were founded and what we now call the nuclear family was formed. But it didn't have to be that way. Victorian america was very interesting. This is the time where it was decided specifically that the woman's place was in the home. This is mostly because women were morally supurior to men and thus better suited to raisning children. The idea that they were unable to do the work wasn't really considered as they had been doing the same work for generations. So they could stay at home because work sucks. Also divorce was less of an issue. Neat!

This wasn't a compleatly egalitarian process but for the most part and I have put a rosier terms than it prolly was. At the end of the day we decided that work sucks and since women are better at raising children anyway why not kill two birds with one stone, let they stay home and things will be perfect. The problem? There are times where people will start to loath what they take care of. I've seen it happen and it is not cool. :( So yeah work sucks. Somewhere along during the struggle for women to get back into the work force this fact got forgotten along the way. Even if you are lucky enough to be part of the 10% of people who find their jobs to be absolutly wonderful and 100% fufilling you are still going to have bad days, stress, and heart break. It is the nature of work. I've been thinking of how this disjunct happened. How is it that the basic fact that work sucks seems to have been forgotten in the struggle to get back into the work force. It ties back into the prodistant work ethic and the idea that you need to work in order to be fufilled. If you'll notice Dr. Laura (sorry but your last name is long and horrible) even points this out when she says, " Women's and parenting magazines declare that the most important thing a woman can do is make herself happy (through work)". She pins the blame on feminsim for spinning this line but it goes much deeper than that. It is one of the plusating threads that drives our country fowards. It is the reason why people will dedicate far more time and effort to jobs they hate. Look around at people working one day and you will see who I am talking about, the people who start working before they clock in, keep working after they clock out, voluteering their days off away, and the list goes on. There is an idea that life is the thing that supports work, rather than work is the thing that supports like. When I explained this to my boss one day I think I broke his head. Or maybe it was me not agreeing to come in on my day off despite getting over time I don't know or care. The thing is that when women went back to work they were in for a pretty rude shock, and that is that work sucks. I gotta get back to this latter/tomarrow though. First thing I need to do is to set out the fact that I am not trying to midigate the horrors of sexual harassment. That would be fucked up. So don't worry. Kay hungry and store closing.