If Gillard chooses to play house with Tim Mathieson in the Lodge, this choice sends a strong message to the huge numbers of women who rightly admire her and seek to follow her example. A lifestyle suited to her particular needs may be riskier for many women and their children.
It is so nice to come across this from Bettina Arndt and feel wild and sinful about the whole being shacked-up-with-a-man-and-kids-and-no-wedding-ring thing. It is difficult to alarm anybody these days as a monogamous heterosexual. Sad to say, ‘my partner’ (and oh, a renewed thrill with calling him such) has a very lovely 90 year old grandmother who even approves of our relationship. But we’ll always have Arndt.
And then this; an interesting but incredibly kooky discussion about sex and the modern marriage and you won’t be surprised when you see who the author is – I somehow missed it until I got to the end of the article, by which time I was thinking ‘who on earth came up with this stuff’ and then ‘… oh’.
In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.
Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.
Now that I’m increasingly outing myself on this blog I probably won’t go into too much detail about my sex life here – you can thank me later, readers. So, I will keep this short. We share the housework and we also have sex quite a bit. And we like it. (Sometimes we don’t have sex and we can live with that too).
The bit that got me is “wasting precious breeding time” . Wow.
I know. Quite an arse isn’t she?
Oh, Paglia. I pretty much tune out anything she says and mentally replace it with Crispin Glover’s seminal “Clowny Clown Clown” rant. Makes about as much sense, and is more entertaining.
The author that you quoted hasn’t worked in a modern workplace. Today, I was thinking in my head, “Do you have to use those aggressive words?” My boss frequently uses words our big boss has been using, “kill it” “hit it hard” “get ‘er” (the most offensive). In fact, I have to hold my tongue often.
[...] fills us with hope when she says how “wildly sinful” Bettina Arndt makes her feel in Sex and the modern parent. SAHM Feminist tackled co-sleeping. In a Garden Somewhere has this to say in halfarsed feminism: A [...]
[...] panic! Some of us are not getting married” stuff. This article is actually quite reasonable* (in stark contrast to some and), in spite of the obvious digging being done by those interviewing Alan Hayes from The [...]
[...] fills us with hope when she says how “wildly sinful” Bettina Arndt makes her feel in Sex and the modern parent. SAHM Feminist tackled co-sleeping. In a Garden Somewhere has this to say in halfarsed feminism: A [...]