It's highly likely that I will regret posting this, but I just find this woman annoying (and her ideas stupid -- and this is not the first piece of hers that made me feel this way). I don't view myself as a "feminist". To me, "feminist" means "women who want to pursue career/personal fulfillment at the expense of their children". I wanted a career but when push came to shove, I ended up doing the full-time mom thing for eons (my oldest child was 19 when I got my first full time paid job).
I had children younger than I intended. My kids had special needs. I could not count on their dad to help raise them (if I left the kids with him for two hours, it went disastrously, with children unfed and diapers unchanged). Their dad had a lot of fine qualities and was a dutiful provider, but, no, taking proper care of children under a certain age was just not one of his strong points. I happened to be extremely good at it. So I did it -- for the sake of my children, not for personal joy. Yes, I made a choice (like she keeps harping on). But, no, it wasn't a choice of the "gee, golly whiz, staying home and raising kids is all I have ever dreamed of my entire life and this is the fulfillment of a DREAM!!!" variety.
If I had been in a different situation with more support (or less demanding children and fewer health issues of my own), I would have preferred to have both a family and career. That option was simply not viable for me so I rose to the occasion and did right by my kids. And most of the time I am reluctant to talk about my views on the topic because I am leery of the potential to come across like this woman, who is doing all she can to set women back a few decades. The fact that women clearly make different choices from men hardly means those choices are rooted entirely in free will and the fulfillment of their dreams. A lot of it is rooted in "shit happens and then, if you are a decent, responsible person, you do right by your kids rather than indulging your personal whims, like it or not."
I don't resent my kids. I do resent the general lack of support that denied me other opportunities. And I've worked really hard to change my life. So I am not thrilled with the crap that routinely comes out of this woman's mouth.
The trouble with Penelope Trunk is that she has neuroses and disorders that make her thinking and patterns of behavior... shall we say extremely specific to her.
But then she writes and behaves as though she understands how other people can, should or do work. And it's baffling.
As a career guidance person she is a charlatan and I have been long troubled that anyone would pay attention to her advice, much less pay for it.
I'm very much an "out of the box" thinker and rarely fit in. So I don't think that explains it. To me, sheer stupidity is a likelier explanation. Combined with not understanding how fortunate she is.
I've spent quite a lot of time over the years reading books on "feminist"-related topics, etc. I fundamentally disagree with the strong emphasis put on promoting women's careers (at the expense of children -- America is doing a terrible job with regards to its children in so many ways). My general understanding is that cultures where women sought more hands-on support for helping raise kids and practical accommodation for the burden of bearing children (which is unique to women -- as far as I know the "Junior" scenario is still science fiction) have generally done better by women. The American feminist "don't tread on me"/"get the fuck out of my way and I'll show you!" approach simply fails to address reality.
My sister and I both graduated high school as STAR student and national merit scholarship winners. I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta (math honor society) and she was inducted into some other honor society. I, whoops!, was fertile Myrtle and had my first child the day after I turned 22. She went through years and years of fertility treatments and finally had a kid in her mid thirties. We have compared notes and she did a lot of reading with regards to women with fertility issues. Her conclusion: "Career women" are often the result of someone simply being unable to conceive (as was her case). Personality-wise, my sister was much more of the "I would love to stay home and raise kids variety" than I was. And, in fact, she left a very serious career to stay home for five years. The main reason she has a much more serious career than I have is that I happen to get pregnant a helluva lot easier than she does. My oldest son arrived 7 years earlier than I wanted and we skipped birth control like twice to get our second child. (I had to call my sister and tell her I was pregnant yet again while she was going through fertility. Ugh.) I was surrounded by women saying "we tried for 8 months for this one (pats belly)" or "we tried for two years for our second child, that's why they are so far apart".
I have the brains. I have the drive. I didn't have a supportive situation for doing both family and career. My husband used to joke that the kids didn't get the memo when we were "planning" when to have them (and he also used to tell people "if you don't want them, keep it zipped"). We were already married so it wasn't some tragedy that I turned up pregnant, but it also wasn't the way I had intended for my life to go. And in some ways, I am still paying for that. So I sometimes wish someone would put a muzzle on Ms. Trunk.
Anyway, thanks for your response. If I sound wrapped around the axle, rest assured any venom isn't intended to be aimed at you. Have a great evening.
> To me, sheer stupidity is a likelier explanation.
I mean, I was trying to make that point obliquely (and somewhat more charitably), but yeah, basically.
> Combined with not understanding how fortunate she is.
To be sure, Penelope seems a bit oblivious to her privilege. It's nice when you have an ex-husband who's stand-up enough to do his share of the parenting. It's extra-nice when you can hoodwink the investors of your also-ran, cash-burning social startup into paying you an absurd salary as a founder. Having both career and family, even with just those advantages, becomes way easier.
I understand the frustration. We'll come up with a secret anti-Trunk handshake or something. Seeing her held up as in any way credible makes my blood boil a little more than it should.
Any feminism I could subscribe to would include valuing childcare, teaching the skills early to everyone explicitly, and eventually re-integrating children into day-to-day life. I get incredibly frustrated with all my friends who hate ever being around children, such that I can't have over my fiends with kids and my friends without at the same time.
I was always around children growing up, and it was a part of life. It also meant that the adults who stepped up to fulfill their parental responsibilities weren't punished for it.
Both you and this woman are facing the same social problem; we could think of radical solutions such as free, high-quality child care, part-time work as an encouraged and a valid option for everyone, not just people with kids. We could stop promoting the biggest assholes, who ask the loudest and put in the most hours (breaking code, usually).
We could make it a social norm that if a man doesn't want to or is incapable of performing childcare he should not expect to have children. Individual people may come to other arrangements, but the basic social norm needs to change. If we demand that children be hidden away from the world for 15 years, and then we demand that women and only women who produce children must care for them, "choice" is an illusion. "Would you like the rack or the thumbscrews?" is a choice too. "Would you like to be childless or give up your career?" is a sucky choice, and if we are going to force women to make it I believe it is only fair that men be forced to make it to.
(when) we demand that women and only women who produce children must care for them, "choice" is an illusion. "Would you like the rack or the thumbscrews?"
Yes, I basically agree.
"Would you like to be childless or give up your career?" is a sucky choice, and if we are going to force women to make it I believe it is only fair that men be forced to make it to.
In some sense, men are asked to make this choice and men fairly often choose career over children. This doesn't necessarily mean that they do not reproduce. My grown sons have no relationship to their father. I am divorced. Our sons live with me. At some point after they became legal adults, my oldest son clearly spelled out to his father that he didn't view him in parental/affectionate terms and please don't have an delusions in that regard. Their father stopped trying to contact them after that. We are okay with that.
Their dad poured himself into his career. He thought he was doing the right thing. I have no idea how he feels about his lack of relationship to the kids but he did in some sense make a choice between the two. The fact that women (and children) are getting screwed by our societal norms/policies does not prove men really have it much better.
> The fact that women (and children) are getting screwed by our societal norms/policies does not prove men really have it much better.
But economics does.
And yes, how many men would be happier if society didn't try to tie so much of their self-worth into career advancement (just as it tries to tie so much of women's self-worth into wife/motherhood) and gave them the respect they deserve if they decide to focus on their families?
Last I heard, when a man dies, it often plunges the wife into poverty. But when a woman dies, it often leads to the death of the husband within a year. And in spite of being over-represented among the "poor" and "chronically poor", women live on average several years longer.
Me thinks you have a rather one dimensional view of quality of life which I don't happen to share. Which strikes me as a bit odd coming from someone trying to advocate for stay-at-home dads.
It is an inadequate measure, and what I meant is that in that dimension, men still have it better (I suppose in my attempt to be pithy, I opened myself up for misinterpretation). Economics is a metric that's relatively easy to measure as opposed to personal happiness and so it's a yardstick we can look at that's not unrelated (as a grad student that left a good tech job for school, I can say not having to stress about the state of your bank account is a privilege that I took for granted). And from what I've read in recent studies regarding happiness among men and women, men seem to be doing better at the expense of women (see, for instance, this 2009 overview: bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Female_Happiness.pdf)
So yes, I definitely agree with you in that quality of life is made up of so much more than your economic situation, but making enough to live on (with a strong emphasis on enough) is for a disproportionate number of women a source of unhappiness and unfulfilled aspirations. I suspect if we as a society were to attack the root causes for the gender gap in wealth and income, we'd also rectify some of the causes of unhappiness for both genders.
It's a complex topic, which I suspect cannot be done justice in a post on HN.
I am currently being evicted. My mother has informed me that due to my father's medical situation, I am not welcome to come home again. My two adult, unemployed special needs sons still live with me. I am deeply in debt and in very serious trouble. In some sense, I suppose I probably look like "the poster child" for all the financial issues your "typical" divorced homemaker can have. But it's really not that simple.
I have a deadly genetic disorder. So does my oldest son. I not only raised my sons, I also homeschooled them for many years. They both have a long list of special needs but are also incredibly intelligent. I nearly died about 11 years ago and this led to being diagnosed late in life with "atpical cystic fibrosis". All of this ultimately led to me getting divorced, in part so I would be in a position to save my life and get well. My sons were on the same page with me. My husband was on the same page with the doctors, who were all too happy to wash their hands of trying to get me well and just blame my genes.
I could not have gotten well without the ongoing dedicated care of my two sons, who were 11 and 13 when this journey began. I had their backing when most of the world was actively trying to talk me out of my crazy scheme to actually take care of myself. Getting well has destroyed me financially but had I not gotten well, I would likely be in worse straits by far, both financially and in overall quality of life. I have gotten off boatloads of drugs and the hole in my left lung has closed. I have been well enough to work a full-time paid job the past five years, which I really was never well enough to do before. The condition I and my son have is one of the more expensive, chronic medical conditions around. And though I have gotten myself basically health, there is no cure. For me, it will be a case of "management" for the rest of my life, but the answers I have come up with are vastly superior to anything else out there, both in terms of quality of life and in terms of financial impact. This miracle could not have been pulled out without the backing of my sons.
I wish there were easy answers with regards to the whole gender equality thing. I think of such things as a matter of "sexual morality" in that as long as heterosexual people have sex, children will result. Human need is a complex thing and cannot be boiled down to any one thing, not money, not length of life, not career success. Given the details of my situation, in spite of my current dire financial situation, I think I got the better deal in keeping the kids. If I get through this, a career can come later. But first I had to live. I've done that.
Perhaps it's time to go play a game. Examining my navel in public is an old habit that I like indulging but it often comes across as shocking, disturbing and problematic for other people.
eventually re-integrating children into day-to-day life
What's not to like about our current approach of factory farming children?
In my view the future (and I hate to say this on a VC's site) is in family-run micro-businesses, not startups. Both parents work from home at least part of the time (one or both may have part or even full-time jobs elsewhere), integrate child care into the realities of this life. Sure this won't work in every field but it will work in many.
The thing is by integrating everything as you put it, this tradeoff doesn't have to happen. However making that integration happen requires challenging our ideas of the role of capital and labor in our society.
Your story begs the question: why didn't the father rise to the occasion instead? You give excuses for him, but is that not free will too? Would he not also have liked both family and a career?
I was sexually abused by two relatives as a child. So I was not easy to deal with when I was younger. For one, I did not manage to be faithful to the man. He knew that and put up with my shit for two decades anyway, in part for the sake of the children. He never threw that in my face. He was very decent and compassionate about the whole thing. Plenty of men would have assaulted me for it.
His devotion to his career was not somehow all bad. He was career military and we never lived in fear of him being RIFFED at a time when a RIF was ongoing. Our marriage ended up being very traditional, a throw-back to the 50's. I would have preferred something that gave me more freedom, but I did always appreciate that he was a good provider, he was not a drug addict or alcoholic, and he never hit me. That may sound like a low standard, but it beats the molestation, rape and being slapped around by a drug addict that constituted parts of my childhood.
I have taken a class on homelessness and done volunteer work at a homeless shelter. The kind of intractable problems I have and my children have are exactly the kind of thing that leads one to homelessness. My spouse's military career, with excellent free medical benefits, was a big part of why we had a relatively stable middle-class lifestyle in spite of me and our oldest son having a life-threatening, very expensive medical condition which went undiagnosed for many years.
Feel free to talk trash about me, as I am here and choosing to air my dirty laundry. Please refrain from jumping to ugly conclusion about my ex. He is a decent man and he is not here to speak for himself. It's a rather ugly tactic.
Also, the odds are really high that Penelope Trunk's children are not half as challenging as mine. It's why I have a parenting site: For some years, my advice on how to deal humanely and effectively with extremely challenging children was valued in some circles, circles that included Harvard graduates and the like who still found themselves at wit's end. There is a lot more support for that on the web these days, but when I was actively engaged in such online communities, I was frequently the only individual in the discussion that had much in the way of meaty, substantive feedback for the most challenging situations.
I had children younger than I intended. My kids had special needs. I could not count on their dad to help raise them (if I left the kids with him for two hours, it went disastrously, with children unfed and diapers unchanged). Their dad had a lot of fine qualities and was a dutiful provider, but, no, taking proper care of children under a certain age was just not one of his strong points. I happened to be extremely good at it. So I did it -- for the sake of my children, not for personal joy. Yes, I made a choice (like she keeps harping on). But, no, it wasn't a choice of the "gee, golly whiz, staying home and raising kids is all I have ever dreamed of my entire life and this is the fulfillment of a DREAM!!!" variety.
If I had been in a different situation with more support (or less demanding children and fewer health issues of my own), I would have preferred to have both a family and career. That option was simply not viable for me so I rose to the occasion and did right by my kids. And most of the time I am reluctant to talk about my views on the topic because I am leery of the potential to come across like this woman, who is doing all she can to set women back a few decades. The fact that women clearly make different choices from men hardly means those choices are rooted entirely in free will and the fulfillment of their dreams. A lot of it is rooted in "shit happens and then, if you are a decent, responsible person, you do right by your kids rather than indulging your personal whims, like it or not."
I don't resent my kids. I do resent the general lack of support that denied me other opportunities. And I've worked really hard to change my life. So I am not thrilled with the crap that routinely comes out of this woman's mouth.