It is undisputed that study after study (if one’s own observations aren’t enough) tell us that women do the vast majority of child rearing and house work. However there is another sort of work that women do overwhelming more then men. Emotional work. The emotional maintenance of a relationship. Monitoring the mood of the parties, monitoring the relationships with family, smoothing over problems and preventing problems, articulating feelings and resolving problems.
Emotional maintenance is hard to quantify and there is a lot of disagreement on the subject. Is it real? Is it necessary? Do men really not do it? Do men really need it?
I think it is both real and necessary and that women are trained for it and men aren’t. A side effect or accompaniment of this is that there is in fact a certain subtle power that this gives women.
One part of emotional maintenance is being aware of when your partner or family member is angry or sad and what to do to change it. It’s logical that if a woman knows how to do this then she can also not do it, or acerbate the situation. This sounds like a lot of power and it is, but unlike any other oppressed group women always have power in a patriarchal society. A functioning society has to have paths to happiness for women, spheres of influence. Feminists often deny that women have any real power in patriarchy but that’s not necessarily accurate. What is accurate is that the power patriarchies give women are always subtle powers and when they come into conflict blunt power beats subtle power every time, sometimes literally so.
This is perfectly illustrated by an article about Jamaica, Females To Blame for Male Suicides via Feministing.
Jamaica of course isn't the United States and one article isn't proof of a culture wide trend, but it is a good example.
The basic point of the article is that men don’t know how to deal with their strong emotions and so lash out in anger and kill their partners before killing themselves. The anthropologist in the article explicitly says that it is women’s fault that men are killing them.
"Women have grown up without restrictions on expressing their emotions and so they are more emotionally developed than most men and pretty much manipulate men and make them feel incompetent and inferior," McGill said.
This is a fascinating point view, women are more emotionally developed then men and manipulate men and then men kill them so obviously the solution is to change women.
?
The point that stands out for me is that even taking for granted that women do have this power to manipulate and use it against men (which I don’t necessarily believe) men have more power, it is the woman who is dead, the man who killed her. However, this isn't pointed out. We are all so very used to men having the superior power that it is not even worth noting.
Not all power is equal. Violence and money as power will always (as a group and at least for the foreseeable future) triumph over any other type.
Men, as a group, have all the self-focused blindness of a privileged group. They see that there is a certain power wielded by women as a group and complain, often and loudly, that it isn’t fair for women to ask or demand equality while they have these powers. When analyzed this position is ridiculous. Women shouldn’t expect to have the same ability to control their own lives by having equal earning power till they pay half for all their dinners and change their own tires? How can anyone expect an oppressed group to give up the advantages that they do have when there is no guarantee and every indication that it won’t help them get anything in exchange? Privileged groups have a lousy track record of giving up their power if only the people they are oppressing are nice enough.
Today, in the real world, when it comes to power, women are fucked. So till women earn as much as men do in the same jobs, till women aren’t expected to be the primary care takers of children, till women aren’t expected to manage the household, I’m not going to be recommending that women stop batting their eyelashes and capitalizing on any manipulative advantage they might have.
Let men who are so very scandalized by gold diggers give up all of their advantages and then we’ll think of being scandalized too.
The average guy needs to realize that just because a woman made him feel like shit and as if he is powerless doesn't mean he isn't privileged by society.
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