Listen, Freud would for sure have a field day with the men who bought into fascism because they wanted sex mommies, but what I am offering is a LABOR critique, not psychoanalysis. These men want a return to receipt of unpaid feminine domestic/emotional labor PAIRED with sexual labor.
Completely and totally agree. This is the white patriarchy striking back to protect their very specific “American Dream”.
Increasingly believe that this is the skeleton key that unlocks like 75% of political discourse since 2020, including the left-coded debates about the ethics of burrito taxis and AI. Much of the left ain't exempt from this because they have this giant hole in their analysis.
Unseen and unpaid labor by women is (still!) holding this country together on the daily. It’s so expected that many can’t even conceptualize it. Society has a lot of its needs met by women before it’s even conscious of having those needs.
Thank you. Parameters of the critique are important!
I think there's an additional dimension - religion. I think a lot of these men want the submissiveness of traditional Christian heteropatriatchal marriages, without having to actually be religious themselves. Basically another case of wanting the "benefits" without the corresponding duty
Yeah many of them fend off any real requirements of religion once confronted with how difficult living as a Christian (or any religion) would ask of them. It’s cultural clothing for status, not belief.
I mean I'm not necessarily even thinking "living as a true Christian" I'm thinking basic stuff like going to church
Yes a ton of them don’t even do that!
I'm not seeing the connection between religion and duty here
That is a much better way of phrasing things. I would say that due to urban sprawl the West lacks a lot of the services needed to replace unpaid women's labor.
Or…a simpler solution is that men could just step up and do more in their own homes and communities do equal half the load.
Women's oppression is not merely a result of individual choices but a result of material structures. We have to change how we organize society in order to eliminate patriarchy.
Personally, I place the root of the problem in the private ownership of land/housing which traps domestic labor in a pre-industrial state. I recommend Angela Davis for an introduction to this general style of thought. www.marxists.org/subject/wome...
I also recommend Harry Braverman "Labor and Monopoly Capital".
I'm sorry, but no. For sexist men, the appeal of patriarchy is not that they don't have to do domestic work. It's that women are doing it for them.
Well sure. What men want is the story that's been told to them. What men need is dense bachelor housing and industrialized domestic services such as laundry, food and cleaning.
Who's going to do the laundry, food, and cleaning for bachelors? Even if it's possible to provide paid housework to everyone, do you think men are signing on to maids? This doesn't solve the problem of men thinking they are entitled to free female labor. It reinforces it.
Who said anything about free? I mean stuff like greasy spoons and laundromats.
And maybe some of the men would also like to work as cleaners, cooks and so on if it's paid a decent wage with decent labor protections? I was discussing industrializing domestic labor. You're the one signing off to pre-industrial and gendered forms of labor.
I have no problem with men choosing to work in domestic services. I don't think it needs to be gendered. Observing that our culture genders that work whether paid or unpaid is not an endorsement.
No, the problem is you take absurd and bad faith interpretations. I want to industrialize domestic labor. "Industrial" implies mass proletarian labor. I would like community owned service industry but in our capitalist system privately-owned industry would be more likely.
We need dense commieblock rental units and industrial laundry and food delivery services to replace the unpaid labor previously extracted from stay at home wives.
I only recently learned even this is tied up with race in a lot of ways, as the mommy role was often played by domestic servants even in middle class households financed by the exploitative labor Jim crow provided. Its just evil all the way down.
Labor critique and psycho analysis? Derrida has entered the chat
Tell me you don't know how patriarchy works without telling me etc etc.
You don't NEED Freud to understand this. These guys thought they were entitled to a labor continuity from mother to wife: warm meals, laundry, housekeeping, emotional soothing on demand when they feel dysregulated. They also expect a sexual labor bonus on top of that as a reward for adulthood.
The evangelicals are trying to meet these guys half way by dealing the Trad Wife card into the game via youth groups.
All unpaid!
We (Gen X) were supposed to reject that. We (or at least, I) found it easy to recognise the gendered element (I can't expect someone to care for after me just because she's a woman) but still felt "I need someone to do that for me" (and that happens to be a woman) Then came the reactionary children
The ugly secret of being a man is that women will do a lot of this stuff for you if you're even vaguely decent to them. That reaction is against the *tiny* ask of being vaguely decent. The whole "crisis of masculinity" garbage comes down to an incredibly low bar that men don't want to step over.
If you read that analysis as cheap psychoanalysis rather than a read of material conditions, then YOUR analysis has an informal feminized labor-sized hole in it. Which is not a small gap.
I say this as someone AWASH in unpaid, informal feminized labor duties right now. AND as someone who spent 10 years as a labor organizer, with 8 of those years spent coordinating a coalition of both industrial and knowledge work unions.
Not sure how you even conceptualize labor analysis without power analysis but seems like a lot of leftist men manage it.
(Psst I agree in general but the poster in question in this case is a woman.)
Hmmm. Interesting. Well internalized misogyny is a thing too.
(I didn't even check bio because the screen name just screamed edgelord to me lol)
Badly. That's how. lol
> white male trade-union labor aristocracy
You got that right.
This critique could also be applied to the rise in "stepmother" porn being made these days, although that's also its own crazy field as well.
Engels continually tried to explain to Marx that the foundational exploitation of capitalism was not (male) wage labor, but unpaid (female) domestic labor.
yup, they want women seen and not heard
Sunday Funnies With 702ajf... Holiday Special #3 The spectacular economic vision of The Orange Turd Melon... American Heterogen (That's what he said)
They're also all completely convinced that the postwar middle-class US family unit was the way things worked for everyone, at all times prior. That 1950s housewife whose unpaid domestic labor was in service strictly to her own household was actually kind of a new system!
You try to point out that for several hundred years at least only the wealthy had wives who didn't have jobs, and so many of them don't believe you. When you suggest women perhaps wanted more autonomy than society provided them prior to, oh, 1970, they don't believe you! It's WILD.