I've said many times that I'm not a feminist. I'm just a woman trying to figure out how to make my life work.
Over the years, a lot of self-described feminists have been openly hostile to me. My feeling is that feminist generally means "Woman who feels entitled to a career" and such women often seem to openly hate on homemakers, which I was for many years.
So I think feminism is failing women because if it doesn't include homemakers, it's not really about women's rights. It's really about the agenda of a fairly privileged few women who want serious careers and are in a position to pursue such.
In practice, that doesn't improve the status of women. Instead, it pits upper class women against lower class women and it pits homemakers against career women because most women with serious careers get them in part by hiring daycare providers when they have kids rather than taking long periods of time off from work to raise the kids. They sometimes even hire nannies if they are wealthy enough. Whether they have nannies or not, those daycare providers tend to be other women who aren't as privileged.
You also see a lot of hostility towards men from self-proclaimed feminists who sometimes seem to relate to men primarily as competitors for plum jobs and work assignments. I sometimes get the impression that such women hate on women like me because no man ever took care of them and they are jealous that some man did take care of me at one time.
It sometimes has that vibe where I feel like they think I was fraternizing with the enemy. I like to think of it more like building bridges because the degree to which some men have been good to me has given me patience with other men under other, more aggravating circumstances.
My life post-divorce has been extremely frustrating in ways that make me have some sympathy for why so many women are so very angry about the state of things. I certainly feel strongly that my gender is a factor in my intractable poverty and my personal challenges in trying to establish "a real career" and -- more importantly -- an adequate income.
I feel like I have spent those years trying to sort something out mentally. I think men have one track where all their self-interest aligns and women have two competing tracks and this is the crux of a lot of friction between both men and women and also between some groups of women and other groups of women.
In a nutshell, our default is to feel like a man needs a good career and good income and then he "deserves" a wife and kids. Women are essentially asked by society to choose one or the other: Pursue a serious career OR devote yourself to family.
If you do manage to be a serious career woman, the world will give you hell and judge you for missing your kid's birthday party or working long hours in a way it doesn't judge men. Men who do that are doing the right thing in the eyes of the world by being good providers.
Women who do that are bad mothers and never mind that they may be the sole or primary provider for the family. We don't care. Your kid is supposed to come first.
So I stayed home with my kids until my oldest was 19 and then I got a corporate job during my divorce. My teenaged sons took over the women's work and I have spent a lot of years trying to kind of unlearn whatever it is women learn that somehow magically seems to close a lot of doors in my face in spite of being educated and yadda.
I sometimes hypothesize that whatever it is I'm missing, I need to figure it out before I remarry or I will just never get it. It will never quite click.
And I feel like I have an unusual opportunity here because my reasons for being alone all these years have nothing to do with having career ambition or rejecting men or some other variation of what might be interpreted as angry, man-hating feminist type.
I have a serious health issue. I've been celibate for medical reasons, not because I dislike men or desperately want a career and am willing to sacrifice anything to get it.
So I seem to have been more able than a lot of women to keep trying to figure out something -- I'm not sure what -- without being super bitter towards men generally, even though it's clear to me that men routinely close doors in my face and I'm quite poor, so this is a very serious problem for me, and I certainly am bitter about some specific individual men and their behavior towards me.
I sometimes hope that if I ever figure it out -- whatever it is -- it will help raise the bar generally for women in some way because for a great many things in life, if ONE person can figure out how it's done, others can kind of copy it. The hard part is sometimes figuring it out to begin with, not necessarily doing it per se.
So at some point I looked to this historical example as inspiration for mentally modeling what I am trying to do in place of standard metaphors about glass ceilings and such:
Corning Inc. made the first 200 inch mirror blank for the Palomar Observatory.
Trying to create this large telescope for this observatory in order to raise science to a new level was quite the challenge. It's a surprisingly dramatic story for something not involving, say, war, natural disaster or a battle for human rights. Among other things, it involved cooling the glass mirror blank for 10 months after pouring it.
In 1928, the first attempt failed because it ended up with an excess of serious defects. It would be several more years before they worked things out so they could try again.
The second attempt succeeded. It still had defects, but only minor ones. While not perfect, it was good enough.
The 200-inch mirror blank was made in New York -- the only place that had the ability to do anything like that -- and transported to the other side of the continent -- presumably the only place in the US with the right conditions for Palomar Observatory to make sense.
It took years to make that telescope. It took years just to make that one piece of that one telescope.
In fact, it took decades to complete it. They began trying to make that mirror in the 1920s and didn't finish it until 1949 because after it was successfully cast and transported cross country to California, it still had to be configured from a mirror blank into a mirror.
The world is a better place for it. I'm sure no one regrets it.
I'm also sure relatively few people have any idea of the incredible logistics involved in pulling it off.
In Dungeons and Dragons gaming circles, the phrase lawful awful or lawful stupid refers to a Lawful Good character who is trying so hard to be both lawful and good that it wraps around to the other side of morality and becomes a bad thing.
By that I mean there seem to be good intentions, but they all too often seem to be paving a road to hell.
I sometimes hope that whatever thing I am still trying to figure out will in some way actually help women generally make their lives work better and not actively pit subgroups of women against each other. Or even people generally, rather than pitting men against women and so forth.
Maybe those thoughts are just ego talking and maybe no one will ever hear of me, but thinking about what it took to make the telescope for the Palomar Observatory to raise the bar on science for the world has helped me make my peace with some things in my life crawling ever so painfully slowly towards my goals over the course of decades instead of having some more immediate pay off.
Sometimes, good things just take a long time to get right. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm not trying hard enough or some such.
Over the years, a lot of self-described feminists have been openly hostile to me. My feeling is that feminist generally means "Woman who feels entitled to a career" and such women often seem to openly hate on homemakers, which I was for many years.
So I think feminism is failing women because if it doesn't include homemakers, it's not really about women's rights. It's really about the agenda of a fairly privileged few women who want serious careers and are in a position to pursue such.
In practice, that doesn't improve the status of women. Instead, it pits upper class women against lower class women and it pits homemakers against career women because most women with serious careers get them in part by hiring daycare providers when they have kids rather than taking long periods of time off from work to raise the kids. They sometimes even hire nannies if they are wealthy enough. Whether they have nannies or not, those daycare providers tend to be other women who aren't as privileged.
You also see a lot of hostility towards men from self-proclaimed feminists who sometimes seem to relate to men primarily as competitors for plum jobs and work assignments. I sometimes get the impression that such women hate on women like me because no man ever took care of them and they are jealous that some man did take care of me at one time.
It sometimes has that vibe where I feel like they think I was fraternizing with the enemy. I like to think of it more like building bridges because the degree to which some men have been good to me has given me patience with other men under other, more aggravating circumstances.
My life post-divorce has been extremely frustrating in ways that make me have some sympathy for why so many women are so very angry about the state of things. I certainly feel strongly that my gender is a factor in my intractable poverty and my personal challenges in trying to establish "a real career" and -- more importantly -- an adequate income.
I feel like I have spent those years trying to sort something out mentally. I think men have one track where all their self-interest aligns and women have two competing tracks and this is the crux of a lot of friction between both men and women and also between some groups of women and other groups of women.
In a nutshell, our default is to feel like a man needs a good career and good income and then he "deserves" a wife and kids. Women are essentially asked by society to choose one or the other: Pursue a serious career OR devote yourself to family.
If you do manage to be a serious career woman, the world will give you hell and judge you for missing your kid's birthday party or working long hours in a way it doesn't judge men. Men who do that are doing the right thing in the eyes of the world by being good providers.
Women who do that are bad mothers and never mind that they may be the sole or primary provider for the family. We don't care. Your kid is supposed to come first.
So I stayed home with my kids until my oldest was 19 and then I got a corporate job during my divorce. My teenaged sons took over the women's work and I have spent a lot of years trying to kind of unlearn whatever it is women learn that somehow magically seems to close a lot of doors in my face in spite of being educated and yadda.
I sometimes hypothesize that whatever it is I'm missing, I need to figure it out before I remarry or I will just never get it. It will never quite click.
And I feel like I have an unusual opportunity here because my reasons for being alone all these years have nothing to do with having career ambition or rejecting men or some other variation of what might be interpreted as angry, man-hating feminist type.
I have a serious health issue. I've been celibate for medical reasons, not because I dislike men or desperately want a career and am willing to sacrifice anything to get it.
So I seem to have been more able than a lot of women to keep trying to figure out something -- I'm not sure what -- without being super bitter towards men generally, even though it's clear to me that men routinely close doors in my face and I'm quite poor, so this is a very serious problem for me, and I certainly am bitter about some specific individual men and their behavior towards me.
I sometimes hope that if I ever figure it out -- whatever it is -- it will help raise the bar generally for women in some way because for a great many things in life, if ONE person can figure out how it's done, others can kind of copy it. The hard part is sometimes figuring it out to begin with, not necessarily doing it per se.
So at some point I looked to this historical example as inspiration for mentally modeling what I am trying to do in place of standard metaphors about glass ceilings and such:
Corning Inc. made the first 200 inch mirror blank for the Palomar Observatory.
Trying to create this large telescope for this observatory in order to raise science to a new level was quite the challenge. It's a surprisingly dramatic story for something not involving, say, war, natural disaster or a battle for human rights. Among other things, it involved cooling the glass mirror blank for 10 months after pouring it.
In 1928, the first attempt failed because it ended up with an excess of serious defects. It would be several more years before they worked things out so they could try again.
The second attempt succeeded. It still had defects, but only minor ones. While not perfect, it was good enough.
The 200-inch mirror blank was made in New York -- the only place that had the ability to do anything like that -- and transported to the other side of the continent -- presumably the only place in the US with the right conditions for Palomar Observatory to make sense.
It took years to make that telescope. It took years just to make that one piece of that one telescope.
In fact, it took decades to complete it. They began trying to make that mirror in the 1920s and didn't finish it until 1949 because after it was successfully cast and transported cross country to California, it still had to be configured from a mirror blank into a mirror.
The world is a better place for it. I'm sure no one regrets it.
I'm also sure relatively few people have any idea of the incredible logistics involved in pulling it off.
In Dungeons and Dragons gaming circles, the phrase lawful awful or lawful stupid refers to a Lawful Good character who is trying so hard to be both lawful and good that it wraps around to the other side of morality and becomes a bad thing.
All shall love me and despair
By that I mean there seem to be good intentions, but they all too often seem to be paving a road to hell.
I sometimes hope that whatever thing I am still trying to figure out will in some way actually help women generally make their lives work better and not actively pit subgroups of women against each other. Or even people generally, rather than pitting men against women and so forth.
Maybe those thoughts are just ego talking and maybe no one will ever hear of me, but thinking about what it took to make the telescope for the Palomar Observatory to raise the bar on science for the world has helped me make my peace with some things in my life crawling ever so painfully slowly towards my goals over the course of decades instead of having some more immediate pay off.
Sometimes, good things just take a long time to get right. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm not trying hard enough or some such.