Doomed Harlot made the following comment in the discussion around The child support catastrophe:
Men benefit more from marriage than women, especially in more patriarchal societies. It is much easier to be content in your marriage when the other spouse is cleaning up after you, feeding you, taking care of your kids, handling your social obligations, cleaning your clothes, doing the shopping, and taking care of the myriad other tasks of daily life. I myself have often said, “I need a wife!”
I know this is boilerplate feminist martyrdom, but I have to admit I have a weakness for the classics. Those who have children know they are prone to think that they received the short end of the stick on any deal. The way around this is to offer to reverse the terms. Let them have your half, and you take their half. If the deal was unfair, they should be delighted. If they are just being childish, they will still feel cheated. Shortly after reading her comment I came across Alpha Women, Beta Men in New York Magazine. It opens with two women discussing an embarrassing secret. They are the sole breadwinners in their families, and support their stay at home husbands. One of the women compares it to the shame of being married to an alcoholic:
It’s like one of those things,” she says, “where you realize you’re married to people who drink.”
Like Doomed Harlot, these women wanted to trade places with men. They wanted wives, and they got them. But of course feminism is about being in a perpetual state of unhappiness. If women aren’t oppressed, how can they fight their oppression? And if they are happy, how can they know they are oppressed? Now that they have what they wanted, they of course aren’t happy. These husbands earning less than their wives are freeloaders! We learn about a public relations executive named Anna, and her husband:
He’d pay for groceries. He was running up credit-card debt to make it appear he had more money.
Can you imagine if a husband treated his wife that way? She kept her income to herself and her husband had to borrow money just to buy groceries! The line to shame a man who treated his wife like that would stretch around the block. You would have to take a number and wait your turn.
It also turns out that women aren’t wired to find men in a supporting role sexually attractive.
“Sex was not a problem for him,” she goes on. “It was a problem for me. When someone seems like a child, it’s not that attractive…”
Predictably, this is all caused by our patriarchal culture, since women are really just men who sit down to pee:
…as hip and open-minded as they like to think they are, they were, after all, raised on the same fairy tale as the rest of us—the one where Prince Charming comes to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty.
Going back to the analogy of offering a child the other half, it turns out that our divorce laws are somehow unfair. A divorce lawyer explains what happens when couples with breadwinner wives divorce:
“…the court bends over backward to be gender-neutral, and it is possible the bum is going to be rewarded for sitting on his hands. You do a flip-flop and make believe she is a guy.”
See Also: The problem that has no name
