A rant about "equality" and pregnancies

souredskittles · 2021-01-01T21:12:41+00:00

Child free. And your post just summarized one of the reasons. I see SO many women taking more on with the babies then the dad. It’s just ridiculous. Even if I don’t have children I can empathize that it takes a HELL of a lot of work to raise them, even worse if the father sucks.

Pasdepromesses · 2021-01-01T21:07:11+00:00

I’m childfree so I probably will never have this problem, but for me the only acceptable scenario is:

I take 3 months maternity leave right around and after birth. Directly after the birth there will be extra hired help in the house for the amount of time it takes for me to recover (in addition to the housekeeper we already have permanently) to ease the transition. When I’m happy and healthy again, I can do the childcare during the day while husband works and after work we split it equally.

After 3 months I get back to work and husband takes his paternity leave. He does everything during the day and we split after work equally. No hired help needed because he didn’t give birth.

DarwinsLittleBird · 2021-01-01T21:34:34+00:00

100%

We need time to heal. I’m due in less than two weeks!

Unfortunately, my SO doesn’t get paternity leave. His boss said he can “have a couple extra days off”. Luckily he’ll be working from home a lot thanks to the pandemic.

He knows that his duty is to take care of me the first several weeks and also the baby. When it wakes up every three hours in the beginning, he’s on poopy duty and then will hand baby off to me for booby duty.

He understands that he is also the parent and that I am the one taking on all the physical issues with pregnancy and is ready to support the best he can.

I try to school the soon-to-be mamas on r/ babybumps about this stuff. They seem to think it’s all on them, and the father should be praised for doing less than the bare minimum. Nah, sis, it was HIS orgasm that caused all of this, not yours!

_RustInPiece_ · 2021-01-01T21:49:05+00:00

I agree. Like I said in my last post: In patriarchy everything you do in the name of "equality" gets perverted and turned against women. Always. Things are not so simple that treating people the same will lead to equality. While I think men should be more involved in childcare (because - duh, he's responsible for 50% of the child's existance) I'm afraid the 50/50 approach will put even more pressure on women. I think it's realistic that men will take it for granted to have some sort of "newborn baby vacation" aka slacking of in the name of fatherhood and get celebrated for doing the bare minimum. Meanwhile the mother has to care for 2 babys while recovering from childbirth. Your example is one of many reasons I'm very skeptical about having children. You can't fully know if he's HV.

bpoloana · 2021-01-01T22:36:36+00:00

It was discriminatory, period. Your post shows a lot of misunderstanding about why making paternal and maternal leave equal is so important. Sure reproductive roles are unfair to women, but there is really nothing we can do about it so we might as well focus our efforts in making sure things are fair after the birth of the child. This is not about giving men a nice holiday, it's about making them as accountable to the care of the baby as women are. And thi right is not only good for men, FOR WOMEN AS WELL. In my country maternity/paternity leave was equalized recently as well, and it was to the betterment of women for the most part:

It helps women get jobs. One of the main reasons employers chose men over women for the same job with the same qualifications was that if women got pregnant they had to give them a longer paid leave AND pay a replacement for a longer time. Also before this reform parents could exchange their leaves, which meant that in a lot of cases women stayed longer almost double the time they officially could, while the dads would only use 2 weeks aprox to be with the mum/baby the first days then go back to work. Employers of course aren't idiots and KNEW this, which made them even more reticent to hiring young women when they knew they would be stuck paying maternity leave and her replacement for DOUBLE the time they officially would have to do so. Now both men and women have the same time AND it's not exchangeable (meaning, if a man doesn't want to use his paternity leave he simply loses those holidays and can't get paid for not using them/give them to the mom), which has made fathers use the time in full because if you are legally entitled to that leave and can't win anything by waving that right you might as well use the holidays to spend time with the baby and your wife. This makes employers think "Well, no matter who I hire, I will have to give him/her sixteen weeks of leave if him/her decide to have kids, so that's not a factor to count anymore"

It helps men being as accountable to the care of the baby as women are. As I said, in my country (and many other european countries, this model was modeled after others) men and women have the same leave and, very important, not exchangeable. But also very important, they can choose when to spend it. A couple can choose to spend the leave together to bond as a couple and as a family, but since childcare is so expensive most couple choose not to do so. This has made that in practice women take their leave first (to help their bodies heal and rest + bonding with the baby + feeding the baby) while men take their leave as soon as the mom's finishes, so they don't have to worry about childcare for the first few months at least. This helps a lot in making fathers bond with their children, since they have to spend sixteen weeks taking care of them alone while mum is working doing the whole feeding/changing them/bathing/playing with them, etc. This also helps a lot in making men actually learn how to take care of their children alone without their partner's help since they have to spend half the day alone at home alone with them and mommy isn't anywhere near to "rescue" them. This makes them HAVE to actually share on the childcare duties, which helps a lot with not viewing all of those duties as "women's job" anymore

It helps men and their children to bond. There have been TONS of studies about how good it is for men to actually take paternity leave and spend time with their children outside of the "taking care of things" part that traditional dads usually do. Men being emotionally stunted has a lot to do with young boys seeing their adult dads not conecting emotionally with them and not expressing their emotions, something they naturally imitate. This is why it's so important to choose HVM to procreate with that don't pass on our children those kinds of views and behaviours, but men who will teach them that being communicative about their feelings is good and something they should do. Giving fathers paternity leave helps men bond with their children (like having maternity leave helps women bond with their kids) which in all studies has been shown as creating closer relationships between dads and their kids as well as better adjusted kids who see their father in a more "caring" role than kids who have been raised with only their mothers having a caring role.

It helps children let go of internalized misogyny. A lot of the thoughts, behaviours and roles we take on in normal life are learnt. This means that men grow up to expect women to be the ones to take care of the kids and home because that's what they have grown up seeing. While they were growing up most of them saw mom cooking and cleaning and be the one to nag them to bath/clean their rooms/do their homework/study as well as being the ones to be on top of meetings with teachers and doctors and extracurricular activities and basically everything that has anything to do with their children while their dad just went to work, came home and had everything done for him by his wife. There is A LOT of internalized misogyny in the world and this will not end all of it, but having both mom and dad have carer roles at home and be equally responsible for their children and feeding them/cleaning/teaching them is a HUGE step. If children start seeing more of these situations at home, not only the number of men who will grow up to expect women to do everything at home will decrease, but also the amount of women who will put up with that bullshit after having grown up seeing how a healthy parent dinamic is supposed to look like

Delirious_Duchess · 2021-01-02T01:01:58+00:00

Men LOVE acting like they have a significant part in pregnancy and it's 'equally as hard on them', um no the fuck it isn't love. Physically you do nothing and emotionally you do nothing, and no one will ever expect you to. Add the additional three months to the mothers so they can have six months, it's not like the men need them

thetruerealog · 2021-01-01T21:13:42+00:00

[removed]

PasDeTout · 2021-01-01T23:50:06+00:00

Seeing as the recommendation is that babies are exclusively breastfed for the first six months then maternity leave naturally needs to favour the mother. Producing breast milk is work.

IsabellaGalavant · 2021-01-02T19:47:03+00:00

I agree, and I am also disgusted when men say things like "we're pregnant". No the fuck "we" are not. The woman is pregnant, all you did was cum you piece of trash.

Title	A rant about "equality" and pregnancies
Author	thetruerealog
Upvotes	215
Comments	45
Date	January 1, 2021 8:54 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/FemaleDatingStrategy
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/koivld/a_rant_about_equality_and_pregnancies/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/a-rant-about-equality-and-pregnancies.352318 https://theredarchive.com/post/352318

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