A David Johnson, of many.
It’s a rare thing for a book to conclude and your biggest complaint be that there quite wasn’t enough of it. Yet, that’s what Darnell L. Moore accomplished with his memoir No Ashes in the Fire.
It’s an impressive work of introspection, family heritage, and the intersectionality of race, sexuality, gender, and even faith, all the more so because it’s done in beautiful prose.
Fifty Million Rising by Saadia Zahidi is that rare book that does everything it sets out to do then goes beyond it.
Zahidi’s look at the cohort of “The Generation of Working Women Transforming the Muslim World” (239 pages / Hatchette) doesn’t contradict itself, but golly is it large and containing multitudes. It couldn’t be anything less and still true, spanning as it does 30 Muslim-majority countries from North Africa all the way to Southeast Asia.
Someone—I don’t remember now who—described the major difference in American politics to be that the Left fetishizes being correct where the Right reserves that obsession for power.
For that reason, Republicans have been willing to abandon all previously stated principles so long as they can expect to have a warm body capable of signing regressive tax bills into law and who will nominate judges to protect conservative orthodoxies.
And it’s why a year and a half later, Democrats still get into fights about whether they supported Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in the 2015-16 primary. It’s why many of us on the Left continue, inexorably, viewing contemporary events as a chance to re-litigate that contest and who was right.
So just to say, “Bernie Sanders: Guide to Political Revolution is for teenagers,” will invite cheap jokes along those lines, and merely by existing, it reinvigorates the conversation about who actually had the better fire extinguisher a year and a half ago, even as the grease fire continues to spread.
Masculinity is a default or orthodoxy like whiteness or straightness or, in the southern United States, evangelical Christianity. It’s a standard you’re measured against that at best can be complete but is easily made incomplete.
American orthodoxy is based on one-drop rules.
HUMAN 1
The simplest reason is when you consider the initial disruption, pay differences, and to an extent social expectations it becomes relatively more expensive. This accumulates with more children — even if you have a stay-at-home dad, the mother is still going to pay a substantial cost for each birth.Whether that happens in aggregate, I don’t know, but it certainly explains some of the effect.
I’d bet that the number of women who can support a family solely on their income is fairly small. The average woman makes about $150 less per week than the average man. Continue reading “‘Feminists: why are there so few stay at home dads?’”
A MAN SAID
I saw someone post a thing, “Feminism is not a stick for women to beat other women with.”I super like and agree.
I also wanted to comment but decided to post my own thing, so I’m not just appropriating someone’s message to women. Feminism is also not a stick to beat men with. Laughing at and demeaning (individual) men in the name of feminism is not feminism. Don’t get me wrong, I do it all the time, but it’s not feminism, it’s just mean.
To your first point: sure. To the second: Maybe? But patriarchy is a gigantic club that beats people up even when left to fall with its own weight, and in most contexts, feminism is more like a ruler.
Continue reading “‘Feminism is not a stick to beat men with’ — because it isn’t a stick”
An analysis of Silicon Valley’s 2015 economy released this week by the think tank Joint Venture found that on average, women in the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties earned far less than men even when comparing similar educational attainment.
This wasn’t a surprising result, but the extent was: men in Silicon valley are paid 61 percent, or $34,000 more per year, than women when both have bachelor’s degrees, versus San Francisco proper (men are paid 20% more), California (41% more), and the U.S. as a whole (48% more), by the index authors’ measure.
ADJ 