The Red Pill Room: If women don't 'need' a man these days, how come all I hear is "Where have all the good men gone?" from feminists and single mommies?

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

If women don't 'need' a man these days, how come all I hear is "Where have all the good men gone?" from feminists and single mommies?

I was intrigued by venerable OMGBadger’s post over at the Badger Hut today, looking at the intriguing andoft-touted meme that Women Don’t Need Male Providers anymore. While I encourage you to examine his analysis yourself, I did have a few thoughts about it, vis-à-vis feminism.

The fact is, this is one of those “both yes and no” questions. Yes, women can, technically, exist in our society without a male provider assisting them – and I think that it’s only proper that they can. In a post-industrial society there is no valid reason for any adult human being with a basic education to not be able to support themselves. As a matter of fact, I’ve stated this over and over recently to my 18 year-old niece who hasn’t quite bought into the concept.

But there is a difference between being able to support yourself at a subsistence level and actually thriving in our society. As Badger points out, women tend to do better, personally, in two-income households. As a single woman in a blue or pink collar job, the cost of basic living expenses and the “feminine supplies” implicit in being a girl (cosmetics, health-and-beauty, twice as much underwear, birth control, feminine hygiene supplies, 8.2 assloads of shoes), there is precious little left with which to advance either the poor girl’s education and training or her standard of living. Call this the “Laverne and Shirley” mode. As a young single woman you have a job that pays for your basement apartment and food, and you work part time for pizza-and-beer-and-gossip-mags money. This is “subsistence living, industrial style”.

Add even a single child to this equation and suddenly you’re in poverty.

Luckily (for women) there are plenty of service jobs that pay slightly more than the blue/pink collar jobs out there. As long as a young woman pays for all of her necessities and is thoughtful and careful about her spending, she should be able not just support herself, but to gradually improve her standard of living and/or invest in her education.

Of course the number of young women who understand budgeting and saving and investment – not to mention thoughtful and careful spending – is so statistically small so that what usually happens (according to a veteran financial planner friend of mine – I got nerds) is that the young lady in question racks up a lot of debt early on and ends up using up most of her expendable income in finance charges.

Add a kid to this equation without a second income, and you’re back to the Laverne and Shirley subsistence-level, or worse.

For dudes, it’s a little easier. For one thing, our basic living costs are lower. Not only do we not have all of the expenses associated with having a vagina, listed above, but we also don’t tend to indulge in the kind of shopping that breaks a lot of our female contemporaries. A 25 year old dude will often have a quarter of the wardrobe that a woman the same age does. In addition, according to my financial planner pal, dudes are more likely to start saving earlier, and tend to hold a lower debt threshold. It helps that after their main expenses are paid their capital tends to go towards consumables, technology, and transportation (beer, videogames, cars).

This is the Puerarchy, that happy land where you work hard, come home, drink beer, and play videogames with your buds all week, and then sarge the bars on the weekends -- Valhalla, in other words. The occasional addition of a girlfriend will reduce a dude’s expendable income, of course, but thanks to hook-up culture the cost of dating without a commitment has gone down dramatically. Saving and financial planning is also more important to a dude than, say, a 70% off sale at Lane Bryan. Of course he might turn around and spend $300 on comic books, but . . . hey, some of those are worth something.

I know a dude I went to High School with who skipped college, turned his tech skills into a full-time data management job at a hospital, and by the time the rest of us were struggling to graduate and living at home, he had moved out of his shitty apartment and bought a house. At 23. By 25 he cashed in his equity and appreciation and upgraded. I don’t know of a single female peer who showed as much financial initiative. Indeed, three of my wife’s friends from HS had filed for bankruptcy by the time they were 25.

So being a woman who can make her own money is great . . . as long as she doesn’t care about her own future or want children. You go, girl!

Of course, if you do want kids . . . well, without a dude in the picture, it’s gonna get expensive. Even with a dude, it's expensive. But without one, the problems become more than just things you can throw money at. A woman in my neighborhood tired of not finding Mr. Right and ended up adopting a little girl from overseas to fulfill her maternal urges. Without additional assistance she has to pay for a housekeeper, before and after school care, yard crew, home maintenance and repair service and a part-time nanny . . . and sees her precious bundle of joy about nine hours a week, because she has to work plenty of overtime to afford her lifestyle.

Sure, it’s a personal choice. That’s fine. But a woman who has a child without a second income (much less a second parent) not only suffers economically, she also affects the development of the child. I’m not going to argue that a one-parent household can’t produce competent, capable adults, because I know that it can. But the penalty paid by these families is steep, and the kids are the ones who suffer with that legacy. I see all sorts of kids in my community, from school to scouts to my children’s friends. It doesn’t take a genius to realize, once you’ve been interacting with them for a while, that there is a definite difference between how the two-parent kids act and how the one-parent kids act. I’d even go so far as to say that socially and culturally, all other things being equal, the two-parent kids tend to perform better.

But what about the feminist dream of the strong, hyper-capable woman who can be a full-time career woman who is also a successful mother and (possibly, if she feels like it) wife? Do these women exist?

Yes. I’m married to one. And she couldn’t do half of the shit she does if it wasn’t for my support and income.

My wife makes good money, and on paper she should be able to afford to care for all three of the Ironwood kids without any help from me – she’s brilliant and very, very good at what she does. However, despite her high earning potential, she could not manage the children and the household at their current level without me. Or at least not at our present standard of living. That second income is a substantial factor in our budgeting. And that second pair of hands is vital in the rearing of high-quality, championship free-range children.

I’ve seen the Mommies who try to do it all without a man in the picture. It’s sad. Divorced or never-married, it doesn’t matter what kind of career these women have or how successful they are, even if they get Susie to soccer on time and manage to pay for camp they are often unhappy, miserable wretches who end up taking out their frustrations on their kids. They should be enjoying the rich bounty of endless horizons and personal fulfillment through their careers while effortlessly raising non-violent, non-sexist, productive little members of society untainted by the evils of patriarchy, according to feminist ideology. Take the bicycle away from the fish, and it will swim just fine, right?

Only that isn't what's happening. If I was a betting man, I'd say that in nine out of ten cases these single mommies -- divorced or never married -- would prefer to have both financial and practical assistance in raising their kids, even if it meant putting up with lackluster sex and a few annoying habits to do it. Hell, most of these women would walk over hot coals at the possibility of a reasonably decent date, let alone a marriage proposal. The gilt of feminism has worn off of the prospect of a professional career, and these women -- capable, intelligent women -- are seeing the stark reality underneath. Feminism isn't empowering anymore. In the Middle East and Africa, perhaps, it's about women's civil and human rights, but in the West? Feminism is what persuaded them that they didn't need the men who (in many cases) would have been happy to have a larger role in their kids' lives (in those cases where the father was identifiable . . . Ecstasy is, apparently, a hell of a drug).

Men were supposed to respect their career aspirations and factor their career goals into their own, equally, according to feminism. Not drop you after a second date when they realize that you have to work 70 hours a week to afford your condo and your crappy car. Feminism said that men were supposed to value you as a colleague at work (eventually) and respect you for your contributions, not see you alternately as a hateful bitch in competition with them or a potentially easy lay. Feminism told them that the sisterhood of women everywhere is a powerful force that should help propel them from languishing at the bottom of the corporate ladder to the top with their mentorship and assistance. It didn't mention the part about female subordinates using the power of their position to socially bully your entire department, claim credit for your ideas and continuously sabotage your own efforts at success. That was supposed to be what men did.

They struggle through and suffer on because they have kids who depend on them and they are good moms, despite their issues. And each, not surprisingly, will rise to defend feminism if you dare attack it as a potential source of their problems. Feminism, to them, means never having to take any shit from a man . . . while the rest of their life shits on them in giant bucketloads.

It means they never have to go back to cooking and cleaning for a man (although they do enough of it for themselves and their kids), never having to ask a man's permission to buy anything (although there's precious little money left over to buy anything) and never having to have sex with a man if they don't want to (although quite a few of them will admit that they'll have sex with a date out of sheer boredom, even if they don't like him much, because to do otherwise would imply that they aren't sexually-active adult women who can make their own choices about their bodies). It means never having to worry about their father hitting her kids (although she desperately wishes someone would straighten them out, because they sure as hell aren't listening to her). It means never having to bow to her husbands wishes about where the family goes on vacation, which neighborhood to live in, or what car to buy (although vacations are nearly non-existent, they live where they can afford to on one salary, and they drive whatever car they can afford to keep alive -- especially since NOT ONE of them to my knowledge knows anything about automotive repair, so they go to expensive mechanics for even simple repairs or routine maintenance).

They are, in other words, by-god FREE from the tyranny of male oppression! They have slipped from the surely bonds of the Patriarchy and have created loving families on their own, without a man! They are living the feminist dream of being a professional career woman AND a mother, with no good-for-nothing-but-child-support father around.

That doesn't mean they don't have complaints. Their top complaint? It’s not about the glass ceiling or how hard it is to be a woman in a male-dominated workplace, or any of the traditional feminist memes, as you would expect.

It’s “Where have all the good men gone?”

They ask me constantly, anxiously, rhetorically and practically, because I know a lot of dudes.

Unfortunately, I don't know a lot of dudes interested in a middle-aged mother of two who works 70 hours a week and pays for a gym membership but never goes. I mean, why would they be? But these single mommies keep asking me, and if I don't have a specific answer ("Oh, there's one over there! Careful . . . don't move to quickly. And be careful how you handle him. If his wife smells you on him, she'll reject him from the nest.") then they ask me in general terms. "Where have all the good men gone?" they ask, relentlessly, like I'm hiding the answer. They want to think that there's a secret cave where the good men get lured, and there are thousands of big-dicked billionaire Alphas just waiting to be freed from their underground prison, or something. They don't want to heart the truth, at all: