Feminism Is Falling Apart

A few women are getting it. But, will they then form stable and productive families? Or, are they too far gone? Men need to form a Tribe that these women can be a part of. Women who join the Tribe, and abide by its internal rules, must gain an advantage, such as forming a stable and productive family. Women who join the Tribe, looking for advantages, but refuse to abide by the rules that make those advantages possible (or, in plain terms, pull an “I’m Not Haaaaaaappy” divorce), need to be punished or excluded.

I Regret Being A (Low Grade) Slut

Bridget Phetasy brought a little hope to everyone who is waiting for women to get tired of being sluts, with all the predictable bad consequences.

I’m one of those sluts. …

It’s a tough needle to thread. I’m grateful for the ability to control my reproductive cycle and make my own money. But that freedom has come at a price. The dark side of the sexual revolution is that even though it liberated women—unyoking sex from consequences has primarily benefited men.

I was first inspired to write this piece when a 19-year-old woman I used to wait tables with asked me: “Bridget, have you ever regretted having sex with a man?”

I laughed. “Yeah. All of them.”

She was brought up a Catholic no-sex-before-marriage girl.

Long before I ever had sex, I felt ashamed of my natural sexual urges and awkward in my blossoming female body. Growing up Catholic, all I remember about sex was feeling bad about it before I even knew what “it” was. I only knew that sex before marriage was wrong. Even the thought of a sexual act or masturbation filled me with debilitating guilt. The first time I kissed a boy, I was convinced I’d be punished. Struck down by an angry, misogynistic God.

As I got older, I was told to guard my virginity. Well-meaning mothers and aunts were clear that I needed to withhold sex in order to get a man to love and respect me. Sex was a commodity, a priceless gem I had to hang on to that increased in value the longer I held it. It made me feel like property. And although I don’t think that was the intention of the wise women who had learned their own lessons the hard way, for me, sex became inextricably linked to my self-worth.

The shame and guilt I grew up with regarding sex felt oppressive. I resented the double standard that men could be promiscuous and it would raise their status and a woman would be slut-shamed for similar behavior. My burgeoning sexuality would unfold as a reaction to these repressive religious orthodoxies, old school notions of sexual status, and trauma.

Now age 43, she is on her second husband. What happened to the first? Most women will not get any second chances going forward. It is becoming conventional wisdom among men that, whatever a woman says, it is 90% likely that she blew up the family and her husband for no good reason (“I’m not haaaaaaappy”), and you do not want to marry women who already have a track record of blowing up their families and husbands for no good reason, plus the detritus and wreckage that results (children of single moms).

At this point, you might expect a little reflection on the principles she was taught as a girl, and why they existed for centuries and even millennia. After all this experience, what would she tell her own daughter?

This is a tragedy.

I’m not suggesting we return to some Victorian era notion of sex or some 1950s era ideal about gender roles. I’m now 43-years-old and I’m in the first truly healthy, intimate relationship in my life with my (second) husband. We recently had a daughter. And in the wake of her birth I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversations I’m going to have with her and the conversations I wish I could go back in time and have with a young Bridget.

I’d tell her:

Sex can be empowering when you’re coming from a position of healthy self-esteem. If you’re coming from a place of trauma or insecurity, casual sex won’t heal that. In fact, it might set you back and undermine any progress regarding your feelings of self-worth. If you know your value, you’re less likely to sleep with someone who doesn’t value you. Cherish yourself and you will be cherished.

You shouldn’t have to withhold sex for a man to respect you; he should respect you regardless. Sexual empowerment has nothing to do with how many people you do or don’t sleep with—it has to do with how comfortable you are in your skin—no matter your decision. It’s not about waiting until you’re in love to have sex; it’s about making sure that first, you love yourself.

Don’t ignore that nagging gut instinct telling you “sexual liberation” leaves you feeling unfulfilled. You can still be sex-positive and accept that for you, sex can’t be liberated from intimacy and a meaningful relationship.

I regret being a slut. I regret it because I regret that those men can say they slept with me.

Still, that’s how I know I finally value myself.

Every woman should feel this way: Sleeping with me is a privilege. And you have to be worthy.

You gotta be kidding me. Basically, she says: “You should be a slut too, but be a higher class slut than I was.”

In other words, “I have high standards,” which is very popular these days among women age 25+.

Basically, she wants to be a slut with better-looking guys. She wants to swipe left on not only 90% of men on Tinder, but 98%. Or, you have to buy her dinner before she has sex with you. She doesn’t make the connection that, if you are one of the 2% of guys that all the women “with high standards” want to have sex with, you can treat them poorly. Actually, poor treatment is a chief indicator of high status for women, such that, if you just treat women poorly, they assume that you are high status, even if that is not the case at all. (Basically, this is a core element of “game,” which works, or men wouldn’t do it.) Cause and Effect.

This is why Matriarchy Does Not Exist. Women crash and burn, but they can’t figure out the reasons why they crashed and burned. They cannot create structures, or Frame. They can just complain about the outcomes. At the end of the day — or, I should say, at the end of about 25 years of dating and marriage — she continues to uphold the current Feminist “frame,” the Tribe that she has decided to join (mainstream Leftist), hoping that a few minor tweaks (“higher standards”) will somehow create dramatically different outcomes. They will not.

This is why I tell girls: No sex before marriage. (No kissing, actually, since kissing is basically foreplay.) Find a husband. Get married young, ideally around 18-20. Have a lot of children.

Executive Women and the Myth of Having It All

This article from 2002 describes the way things were in the 1990s. It is much worse now.

Women: Just focus on getting married. Forget about the rest.

The article ends, naturally, with a long list of demands that will supposedly make it possible to combine motherhood with a demanding career. Rather than understanding the implications of the whole content of the article — that a woman who is out of the house 13 hours a day to work cannot serve as a mother in any meaningful capacity, or indeed have the time or energy to manage to get married in the first place — instead, the whole world must change so that women can get their Feminist merit badge. Actually, even if all these requests were met, it would still be impossible; and then we would have a long list of new demands.

This is why Matriarchy Does Not Exist. For men, the problem and solution are obvious. Women can’t connect the dots — even dots as obvious as this. Even when they break down in tears after dropping off their infants at daycare each morning. Even when the title of the damn book is: Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children.

What women do is, they Do What They Are Told. They were told to be “strong, independent” careerist women, so that is what they try to do, even though it makes no sense. This is why I say: Tell the Bitches What To Do. You have to displace what they are being told by whatever authority figures they have aligned themselves with, commonly from media, schools, corporations and governments.

Instead, the article should be taken as definitive proof that women of the upper-middle classes, who have options, should opt to be a stay-at-home Wife and Mother. For the most part, the natural husbands for women of the upper-middle class are men of the upper-middle class. So, these women already will normally marry men who are completely capable of supporting a single-income household. It’s true that a man may wish to marry a better-looking or otherwise charming woman of a lower socioeconomic stratum. However, when looking for a wife, a man must consider who will be the mother of his children — and the women of the upper-middle class know how to raise their children well, in the manner to which such a man is accustomed. They have high standards, and self-discipline. This is why these men often marry the 7/10 girl from a better family. (Unfortunately, these women today are using their high standards and self-discipline to, effectively, take the jobs of their brothers, leaving them not only with no time or energy, but also, nobody to marry.)

The statistics in this article were disturbing even to me. This was 2002, when about 92% of White women eventually married. If we are coming into an environment where perhaps only 50% of women will marry at all, then what will the statistics be for careerist upper-income women? Maybe 20%.

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There is a secret out there—a painful, well-kept secret: At midlife, between a third and a half of all successful career women in the United States do not have children. In fact, 33% of such women (business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics, and the like) in the 41-to-55 age bracket are childless—and that figure rises to 42% in corporate America. These women have not chosen to remain childless. The vast majority, in fact, yearn for children. Indeed, some have gone to extraordinary lengths to bring a baby into their lives. They subject themselves to complex medical procedures, shell out tens of thousands of dollars, and derail their careers—mostly to no avail, because these efforts come too late. In the words of one senior manager, the typical high-achieving woman childless at midlife has not made a choice but a “creeping nonchoice.”

Why has the age-old business of having babies become so difficult for today’s high-achieving women? In January 2001, in partnership with the market research company Harris Interactive and the National Parenting Association, I conducted a nationwide survey designed to explore the professional and private lives of highly educated, high-earning women. The survey results are featured in my new book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children.

In this survey, I target the top 10% of women—measured in terms of earning power—and focus on two age groups: an older generation, ages 41 to 55, and their younger peers, ages 28 to 40, as defined for survey purposes. I distinguish between high achievers (those who are earning more than $55,000 in the younger group, $65,000 in the older one) and ultra-achievers (those who are earning more than $100,000). I include a sample of high-potential women—highly qualified women who have left their careers, mainly for family reasons. In addition, I include a small sample of men.

The findings are startling—and troubling. They make it clear that, for many women, the brutal demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and the difficulties of bearing children late in life conspire to crowd out the possibility of having children. In this article, I lay out the issues underlying this state of affairs, identify the heavy costs involved, and suggest some remedies, however preliminary and modest. The facts and figures I relate are bleak. But I think that they can also be liberating, if they spur action. My hope is that this information will generate workplace policies that recognize the huge costs to businesses of losing highly educated women when they start their families. I also hope that it will galvanize young women to make newly urgent demands of their partners, employers, and policy makers and thus create more generous life choices for themselves.

When it comes to career and fatherhood, high-achieving men don’t have to deal with difficult trade-offs: 79% of the men I surveyed report wanting children—and 75% have them. The research shows that, generally speaking, the more successful the man, the more likely he will find a spouse and become a father. The opposite holds true for women, and the disparity is particularly striking among corporate ultra-achievers. In fact, 49% of these women are childless. But a mere 19% of their male colleagues are. These figures underscore the depth and scope of the persisting, painful inequities between the sexes. Women face all the challenges that men do in working long hours and withstanding the up-or-out pressures of high-altitude careers. But they also face challenges all their own.

Let’s start with the fact that professional women find it challenging even to be married—for most, a necessary precondition for childbearing. Only 60% of high-achieving women in the older age group are married, and this figure falls to 57% in corporate America. By contrast, 76% of older men are married, and this figure rises to 83% among ultra-achievers.

Consider Tamara Adler, 43, a former managing director of Deutsche Bank in London. She gave her take on these disturbing realities when I interviewed her for the study. Adler was the bank’s most senior woman, and her highly successful career had left no room for family. She mentioned the obvious reasons—long hours and travel—but she also spoke eloquently about how ambitious careers discriminate against women: “In the rarified upper reaches of high-altitude careers where the air is thin…men have a much easier time finding oxygen. They find oxygen in the form of younger, less driven women who will coddle their egos.” She went on to conclude, “The hard fact is that most successful men are not interested in acquiring an ambitious peer as a partner.”

It’s a conclusion backed up by my data: Only 39% of high-achieving men are married to women who are employed full time, and 40% of these spouses earn less than $35,000 a year. Meanwhile, nine out of ten married women in the high-achieving category have husbands who are employed full time or self-employed, and a quarter are married to men who earn more than $100,000 a year. Clearly, successful women professionals have slim pickings in the marriage department—particularly as they age. Professional men seeking to marry typically reach into a large pool of younger women, while professional women are limited to a shrinking pool of eligible peers. According to U. S. Census Bureau data, at age 28 there are four college-educated, single men for every three college-educated, single women. A decade later, the situation is radically changed. At age 38, there is one man for every three women.

Maybe less than 50% of women born in the 1990s will marry.

Here’s a Twitter thread (yes I know….) with a ton of interesting information.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1557880297244459010.html

Young Mom Wears a Dress Every Day For a Month

In Evie Magazine, Alicia Bittle, married for seven years and a mother, wrote about what happened when she wore a dress every day for a month.

What started out as a little experiment with a few dresses and a handful of days, has completely transformed my approach to marriage, motherhood, and femininity. What started out as a way to make myself feel better, has improved the lives of every single member of my family, myself included. This has been such a drastic, delightful, and unexpected change, that I am never going back to the way things were before. Not in attitude or in fashion choices. I truly hope that more women try this challenge with me, as I believe there is something unique and valuable to be gained by all.