The fundamental problem: 70's feminism had women trade in dependency on husbands for dependency on system
And to elaborate. If you look at so many of the jobs women are in, they are majoring in humanities subjects that may have lots of "self esteem enhancement" attached to them (aka, they are being sheltered and spoiled) and then given easy service sector jobs where they are not being productive but, instead, are dependent on the system. Therefore they have no leverage, they can make no credible threat of going on strike unless conditions change because they aren't producing anything their employers need, so they just have to be good soldiers, obey, follow orders, and keep quiet about all the double dealing and corruption they find out about.
This is in complete contrast to the way many women, before the industrial revolution, were involved in textiles, spinning thread, and producing items merchants and other businessmen sorely needed in order to make money and in order for the economy to work. Furthermore, merchants came to THEM to pick stuff up from their homes in a lot of cases, rather than this authoritarian workplace where you go to work and have to obey all the rules when there and can be fired arbitrarily and capriciously. Men, on the other hand, are more often employed in the sciences, infrastructure, things society needs. And there is more to it than just the quantity of money you are paid in salary.
The ability of management to be authoritarian and compel unreasonable obedience is directly related to whether or not you are producing something they NEED in order to make money, and whether you could stop producing it and screw them over if they make unreasonable demands. Furthermore, if you examine women employed in corrupt bureaucracies where, for instance, they apply mindless formulas in how they deal with rape victims and other gendered crimes (aka, the very simplistic Catharine MacKinnonite feminist theory which is so simplistic any idiot can easily understand it) so little competence is needed in those jobs, so little expertise or specialized skill, one person can be easily substituted for another, so no official can reasonably threaten to quit if the system doesn't change without the boss easily being able to find someone else to replace her (or him).
After all, the female officials dealing with rape, in my opinion, are little more than automatons -- "powerless women in power" as Naomi Wolf suggests in other cases -- who are just following cues from others regarding whom to prosecute, whom to intimidate, which cases to cover up, etc. MacKinnonite feminist theory, which they are allegedly applying, is little more than a fig leaf designed to cover up and help obscure from the public what the real process is that is going on. They seem to be little more than salary collectors, who follow orders from above and put on an act for the public -- and they don't even have to put up much of an act given how efficiently the mass media covers up any bad behavior they engage in. Are they really all that different, then, from glorified welfare recipients? Or the stay at home wife who is totally dependent on a husband economically?
Anyway, what I find interesting is how, apparently, in rape prone societies (which have parallel hazing of men, I ought to note), it seems the one factor that's most correlated to high rape rates is female dependency on men, where rape and blackmail and compensation for the crime of rape seems to be used systematically to help women extract resources from men. And I ought to link to the source but it would take time for me to look it up, so for now I won't. But, because of this, I think it's necessary to point out that, despite everything that's been said about how women have allegedly been advanced in the economy today since the 60's, maybe it's more complicated than mere average salaries would measure, and it's important to also look at the different economic sectors women and men are employed in. AKA, maybe women are just as dependent today as before, perhaps even moreso, and an economic system with a bunch of middle men is the only thing obscuring such dependency which was more obvious before in the 50's with the male breadwinner/dependent female caretaker model.
February 3 at 11:18pm · San Francisco, CA · Edited ·
I'm looking forward to seeing how many "hits" to serial rapists and perps show up when the 753 ignored rape cases that THE HAZE and Jim O'Donnell exposed - some dating back to 10 YEARS ago - are finally finished being "processed" at the San Francisco Police Department.
Such "results" are starting to happen in Memphis, TN, where 12,000 ignored rapes were exposed by Meaghan Ybos, Jim O'Donnell, and Keli Rabon and...IT'S NOT PRETTY. Please read my friend/activist Meaghan Ybos's...
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RemoveHeather Marlowe http://wreg.com/.../attorneys-motion-could-put-wrinkle.../Attorney's motion could put wrinkle in rape kit testing prosecutionAttorney Leslie Ballin contends rape victims weren't the...WREG.COMFebruary 3 at 11:18pm · Like · 2
RemoveHeather Marlowe #SYSTEMICFAILUREFebruary 3 at 11:23pm · Like · 2
RemoveLeslie King RIGHT ON!!February 3 at 11:24pm · Like · 1
RemoveBarbara Mhangami Heather Heather Marlowe I bow to you for your courage genuine heart and selfless labor of love!!!February 3 at 11:24pm · Like · 2
RemoveDamian Schloming Somehow the system -- or those who are in it -- should be held liable or accountable in some ways for the delay.February 3 at 11:27pm · Like · 4
RemoveHeather Marlowe THANK YOU Damian Schloming!February 3 at 11:27pm · Like
RemoveHeather Marlowe Damian Schloming instead of "the system or those who are in it" being held accountable, they are being REWARDED by a useless organization called The Joyful Heart Foundation lead by Mariska Hargitay. The Joyful Heart Foundation is partnering with Law Enforcement and inviting them to celebrity galas!!!February 3 at 11:32pm · Like · 2
RemoveDamian Schloming I know.February 3 at 11:36pm · Like · 1
RemoveHeather Marlowe Damian Schloming the fact that YOU, just one other person besides victims like me and Meaghan Ybos understands this, IS A START! Here is a picture of the Mayor AC Wharton of Memphis, who should be held accountable for this SYSTEMIC FAIL, parading around with Mariska Hargitay at a celebrity gala!February 3 at 11:42pm · Like · 1
RemoveHeather Marlowe I should have sued SFPD for their own SYSTEMIC FAIL. Meaghan Ybos's lawsuit is moving forward: http://www.localmemphis.com/.../10346/UFfAPWu1NUufJLVAuQXr7AJudge Rules Rape Kit Lawsuit Can Move ForwardA judge has ruled the lawsuit against the City of Memphis...LOCALMEMPHIS.COMFebruary 3 at 11:44pm · Like · 2
RemoveDamian Schloming Well I was raped too, you know. And then abused in other ways, framed, etc., on false drug charges, and there were all sorts of other things too, very complicated story. I also think more people understand than are willing to admit to it, though. Because the problem is, some of these people are dangerous. And the rules are, you criticize the system at your peril.February 3 at 11:45pm · Like · 3
RemoveDamian Schloming You should look up Naomi Wolf's face book page because she's very good. But also good at exposing other corruption and sloppiness in the media.February 3 at 11:48pm · Like · 1
RemoveHeather Marlowe Damian Schloming I do know you were raped and framed. I just have to keep doing my work with integrity...I don't know what else I can do.February 3 at 11:48pm · Unlike · 1
RemoveHeather Marlowe Damian Schloming I follow her!February 3 at 11:49pm · Like
RemoveDamian Schloming goodFebruary 3 at 11:49pm · Like
RemoveDamian Schloming I know how that is.February 3 at 11:53pm · Like
RemoveDamian Schloming You do the best you can do given the position you are in, which sometimes has constraints.February 3 at 11:53pm · Like
RemoveMiz Babzylonia Nadirehs It is like that in Alaska, too. Corruption and framing people who do not do the Anchorage Police's or State Trooper's bidding. The APD and the State Atty Gens office are the worst together.February 4 at 5:36am · Edited · Like · 2
RemoveDamian Schloming I wrote the following comment (in response to the article on gibbons) on Microsoft word. It kind of summarizes what drives the problem, re: the economy. .......
The article on Gibbons is very good. Because he's right, if you try to trace back who the blame originally starts with, you really do not get any particular group of people. I think, though, I remember reading an article on rape prone societies and I got the article, basically societies become rape prone often when there is scarcity and women are more dependent on men.
How dependent women are on men versus how independent they are seems to play a role. Furthermore, it isn't about society making choices to make women dependent, societies become rape prone when the actual conditions -- weather, technology, survival -- are ones that increase female dependency on men. But, I think abuse among men happens too in those societies – in rape prone societies there is a lot of brutal competition between men, including wars and murder, which is worse than what happens to women, but I think maybe it succeeds in mobilizing men to develop the extra hard work ethics they need to have in order to provide for everyone.
Well, I do think America was founded during the little ice age, when conditions were very harsh. Indeed, I wonder if the little ice age might have been an initial impetus or motive that led to the founding of America. The industrial revolution, in particular, took away a lot of the productivity women did at home -- textiles -- and put them in the hands of men, working factories. Or maybe not all in the hands of men but much more so. Furthermore, when you are working in a factory, you can be fired, it's not the same as before when women spun thread and made tangible items at their homes where merchants would have to come to them to pick them up. Male breadwinner female dependent model was created.
But what's interesting is, people say that, since the 60s and 70's the "feminist movement" (I put that in quotes because it's more big business and the overall economy that made changes) fixed all that and women back to work, advanced them in the workplace so they make the same as men. But, actually no. If you look at the economic sectors women are employed in, a lot of them are jobs that could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen -- aka, paperwork jobs which could easily be eliminated if the government repealed some of it's overly complicated regulations, service sector jobs that also aren't about making tangible items and are made necessary ONLY because of government action, as well as tons of political patronage jobs IN government doing, allegedly, a whole lot of good and being “compassionate.” Notice how these are jobs which could be seen as glorified welfare masquerading as work, where they need their employer more than their employer needs them, the dependency reinforced more stringently by the need to spend huge amounts of money on a college degree first, and needing to pay off excessive student loans.
Whereas men are more likely to major in the sciences, for instance, which DRIVE the economy, and they are more likely to be involved in construction and infrastructure, which are things that are absolutely necessary, things society can't do without.
So I think that, since the 70's, the alleged "advancement of women" hasn't really made women more independent. Their dependency on men is only obscured by lots and lots of middle men. Politicians LIKE putting women into jobs in sectors where cutting funds would cause them to lose money, because when women make a big outcry about how “we need more funds” for whatever, society is more willing to listen to them than if men said the same thing. Notice how the healthcare system is extremely bloated in the USA -- AND it employs tons of women. Who would be disproportionately laid off if we reformed healthcare? And, of course, women end up being involved in charity and do gooderism, but, in a way, that’s fluff. And, of course, the whole issue of rape presents itself when charity is involved – which survives on the VOLUNTARY contributions from the wealthy, which means huge efforts must be made to avoid offending any of the wealthy, and that’s exactly where issues of rape and corruption can start to unfold.
That’s why it’s a big advantage for women to be working making tangible stuff the way they used to, like spinning thread. Because, if you spin thread, society needs it, and they can’t cut off your money just because you offend them if you are spinning thread which they need. But the jobs women get these days are like fake independence, not real. It’s more complicated than women directly dependent on husbands and male relatives, but it's changed ONLY in the sense that there are now a lot of middle men in the picture. But, despite all the middle men, they really haven’t changed the economic equation. And I think that's at least correlated to the problem somehow.February 4 at 5:16pm · Like · 1
RemoveMiz Babzylonia Nadirehs That's an interesting analysis. I see some of it, though some of it I don't think is entirely accurate. Or, I should say, some of it isn't entirely accurate because it is oversimplified and nothing is that simple.
The feminist movement did force the change you chalk up to business and the economy. Businesses and the economy changed in response to women flooding the workforce, creating two-earner families and more single parent families. They had to force their way into a wide variety of fields our daughters take for granted. I knew women who were harassed, bullied, attacked, and even maimed on jobs because men resented their being there. A lot of us were routinely sexually harassed no matter what kind of job we had. If anyone helped the women in trades previously unavailable to them, it was young men their own age, not the older men (who are now all very old or deceased.) It was activism that led to outlawing all kinds of discrimination in hiring, so that women couldn't be refused employment if they were married, or fired if they got married or pregnant, as just two examples. When I was a young woman, it was still legal to ask a female in a job interview if she intended on getting married or having a family. Women couldn't get credit cards in their names or buy property by themselves. Forms and businesses didn't use married women's own first names but called them, for example, Mrs. John Smith. That was in the late-1970s, and I remember hearing older women spoken to that way in the early 1980s. The list goes on.
In really bad economies, women usually find employment when men can't because women will and are expected to accept employment is serving industries. Whether they are making anything tangible or not, in a really bad economy, it is the serving industries that keep hiring. Men think it is beneath them, and people don't expect to hire them for such labor, so they remain unemployed. During the Great Depression, that was found to be the case around the world. In fact, it was one of the contributing factors to Hitler's appeal to women when he was courting their support as he built his political base. Women were working as maids, laundresses, servants, and so on, while their men were taking their earnings and getting drunk to drown out their depression and hopelessness. Hitler told German women he was going to change all that. Many thousands of them ended up forced to work in factories far from home in other countries instead for his war machine.
Just one more point: Women entering the workforce in large numbers has changed the power dynamics more than you believe. For SAHMs things aren't really any different because society does not reward women for our work in raising the next generation or for doing what it takes to be flexible so that our husband's can pursue their careers without having to sacrifice for their wives' careers. At the end, women find out how little financial protection we have. But women who did not stay home full-time to raise their children and accommodate their husband's jobs, which is the majority (when I was raising my children, only 17% of American families had a full-time parent at home) they have much more power than did our mothers. For more than a decade now, baby-boomer women have been divorcing their husbands in droves after 20-35 years of marriage. Once the children are old enough or grown entirely, many women have been and are leaving their marriages. A generation ago, when divorces occurred after a long marriage, the vast majority of the time it was because men were leaving their wives, often starting new families. In one generation it's flipped, and it's because women have more economic power than they did and can afford to go out on their own.February 6 at 4:40am · Edited · Like
RemoveDamian Schloming If you zero in on the dynamic between husband and wife, maybe women have more of a certain kind of power than before. At least measured in terms of money. However, the close relationships women have now are with co workers, aka in some ways controlled by supervisors and subject to a certain kind of competition which can easily turn into back stabbing and lacking in loyalty. However, a huge amount of the power women always have had is derived from long term relationships (networking) with those in their communities, and social pressure that results from it which is very powerful. that's tended to weaken as society has atomized. Meanwhile, the relative income ratio and dependency between husband and wife is not the only thing in the picture -- what of the dependent relationship both women and men have on their employers? And who increasingly gets more and more bargaining power? Labor movement decimated, but women much more likely to be in the jobs where the employer can tell them "take it or leave it." Actually, second wave feminism happened after world war II and happened in conjunction I think with the economy changing and becoming much more of a service economy and the organized labor being decimated -- largely because I think certain types of jobs were outsourced to foreign countries and the US became much more of an empire with a trade deficit (importing tangible items from abroad and turning into a service economy at home). That's not the same as the positions women were in before the industrial revolution, however. Where instead of working in 9-5 jobs where they had to go out to work and kowtow to an employer who controlled a huge amount of their life, they would deal with merchants who would come to their houses and pick up work they did often, which was work they'd do with their hands like spinning thread. And it was contract work and no need to deal with the whole regimented employment structure at work and office politics. Oh and they didn't have to get hugely in debt getting a college degree (think of all the kowtowing you have to do to get a college degree) first before they could get a decent job. They just needed to be good at doing things with their hands, aka good at being indispensable. Useful. Whereas in particular the humanities departments in colleges are -- it's not like science where it's all about whether you can prove your objective "ability" in a subject. A lot to success is sucking up, popularity, and pleasing others. And, indeed, that's the same in the work force today. You go out to work and then you have to please others and that determines your advancement, which is less tied to your objective ability to do things.February 6 at 7:35am · Like
RemoveDamian Schloming What I'm talking about, Noam Chomsky refers to as the neoliberal order. And with the feminist movement, yes on a local level in local businesses, men did not like having their work places invaded by women, at the same time though I think the underlying impetus was the business world. Aka, elites. Elite business men may want one thing -- which those "on the ground" do not want or like. And the business world also wanted to control it in such a way so it would serve their purposes. Which it did, if you look at what happened to the labor market as well as the increasing concentration of wealth at the top. http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/19990401.htmNoam Chomsky and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism, by Robert W. McChesneyThe Official Noam Chomsky Website.CHOMSKY.INFOFebruary 6 at 7:42am · Like · Remove Preview
RemoveDamian Schloming naomi wolf in the beauty myth ties things to the industrial revolution -- and even talks about invalidism, women being declared invalids or incompetent, in the wake of the industrial revolution. That's tied to changing things with labor so, instead of women doing various decentralized work at home working with merchants who come to their houses, all their labor gets outsourced to factories run by industrialists. Where, increasingly, men go to work and women are banned. What happened in second wave feminism isn't really a return to the way things were before, which gave women much more autonomy economically with respect to those who employed them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA87gm_X-5sThe Open Mind - Naomi Wolf on Beauty - A New Trap for WomenThe basic premise of The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf is...YOUTUBE.COMFebruary 6 at 7:47am · Like · Remove Preview
RemoveDamian Schloming Steinem kind of makes the same point in a way here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmFxFmrcngkNEED TO KNOW | Gloria Steinem on men, women and power | PBShttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/video-gloria...YOUTUBE.COMFebruary 6 at 9:26am · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
RemoveDamian Schloming But, yeah, it's complicated. Hard to get a handle on it.February 6 at 9:41am · Like
RemoveMiz Babzylonia Nadirehs Bless Gloria Steinem. She rocks.February 7 at 8:03pm · Like