Another article against Androgyny: in Relationships [Sept 1999]

[Kendall]

Came across this article just today. Its old, but I have never seen it. Thought I would share the points made for us or whoever to discuss. Its good to know what people spreading anti Androgyny in relationships are saying. Once you know, you can prepare and be ready, and make your own opinions.

This is a very long article. I chopped it up into tiny pieces and even that is long. Here are some of the major points, there are lots of additional info in the article so read it to see everything http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/sexdifferences/article5.html .

The Case Against Androgynous Marriage
by Steven Rhoads, The American Enterprise, September 1999


First two quotes set up the premise that "male headship is simply a fact." The rest of the article tries to prove this and denounce Androgyny.

These traditional phrases from church weddings might remind one of the traditional Christian understanding of marriage–one where wives "submit" to the "servant" leadership of their husbands.

Most of the rest of America shrugged it off. After all, androgyny is everywhere. Women fly jets and make up 43 percent of all law school graduates. Men go to hair stylists and wear earrings. To most of us, male headship seems like something from another planet.

But social science research on intact marriages finds that in real marriages, male headship is simply a fact.

This next section tries to show high paid wives are naturally unappreciated, forced to demote, dont get housework from husbands, while still trying to be attractive, sexual, and almost pampering their husbands.

When husbands make more than wives, both say the husband's job is the more important, but when wives earn more, neither spouse says the wife's job is more important. Indeed, such wives are more likely than other married women to leave the labor force or move to a lower position. At home these high-achieving wives attempt to be especially attractive and sexual for their husbands, and they report indulging husbands' whims and salving egos. When husbands are more dependent on their wives' incomes, the husbands do very little additional housework.

This paragraph tries to say androgynes are more siblings than lovers and no longer have sex. And that women need to be dominated, not respected.

Last but not least, a number of the androgynes share some of the Tess-and-Kevin problem. Schwartz notes that their intimacy and familiarity make them feel more like siblings than lovers. They were more likely than other couples to "forget to include sex in their daily lives." "Women had fantasies of being taken or mildly dominated," and one complained of a husband who began treating her "too darn respectfully." Many of the peer couples, though, thought they had terrific sex lives, often because they adopted different personas in the bedroom. Schwartz suggested therapy for those who could not "transcend their identities in everyday life" by separating their days from their nights.

And tries to reinforce it by showing the dominance in romance novels, and lack of heroine power. Manga though I think is opposite of this with a lot of girl power.

Ordinary women show the attractions of male power by making the romance novel the most popular form of fiction in the world. About half of all mass market paperback sales in the country are romance novels. The hero in the romance novel is always a man with power; the heroine seldom has worldly power.

In real life, most women do not seem to want equal worldly power.

Says androgynous assumptions blind women.

Let's return to the marital ideal—sharing, comforting, communicating in a faithful, monogamous relationship. An unmarried 25-year-old woman is there. She is ready. From her early days she has loved intimate, comforting communication with a special friend. Blinded by the androgynous assumptions of the day, she anticipates a husband who will be a best friend in a similar way as well as a sexual companion.

But men don't talk much. When they do talk with friends, they interrupt, heckle, and put down. They help pals with troubles by downplaying or dismissing the problem. They're uncomfortable with intimacy (98 percent of wives in one study wanted their husbands to talk more about their thoughts and feelings). For men a friend with real problems needs advice or action, not talk. One man, told to show more affection for his wife, washed her car.

Tries to equate androgyny advocacy with reprogramming like robots. And somehow jumps to this causing death rate to increase. Very weird logic attempt.

The androgyny advocates believe that with different social conditioning, men can be reprogrammed to become fully intimate, communicative partners like their wives. And once reprogrammed, men will gain from the sharing of problems as women do. But the testosterone research suggests otherwise. So too does a study that followed the progress of patients dismissed from hospitals after recovery from congestive heart failure. For women the absence of emotional support in the community increased their death rates more than eightfold. For men it made no difference at all.

This is another death related connection they try to present, against women sharing their office problems with feminized husbands.

Another study—part of the world-famous Framingham research—suggests women who bring office problems home may kill off husbands before they're properly feminized. It seems husbands of white-collar wives with unsupportive bosses are more than three times more likely to die of heart disease, apparently as a result of frustration: Men do not like to talk about unresolvable problems; women do. The men wanted to protect their wives from hostile bosses but felt unable to help.

Few facts on natural women nurturing follow this area.

The existence of women's innate desire for connection and nurturing is beyond debate

This begins a summary of Prior Points made

These figures do not point to an androgynous future, and if we want strong marriages we should be delighted.

This one really caught me by surprise. They brought out the big O word with their Protestant sales pitch.

Still another large study on sexuality has found that the women most likely to achieve orgasm each and every time are conservative Protestants. So if we put it all together, it looks as if the more traditional and religious woman, far from being a serf in "domestic feudalism," is the most likely to have a mate who shares housework and satisfies her sexually

Or is it more likely to fake it?

[Keira]

This thing is plainly ***** on so many levels, not sure what to say, probably should say nothing.

[RebeccaFog]

   I looked up this rhoads and on election day 2004 (I think it was election day) he wrote that Bush/cheney would win because there were pictures of Kerry not looking manly and that cheney had a deep manly voice.

   I don't know.  At first, I was just making fun of rhoads, then I remembered that I have no concept of what drives cisgendered people.   I believe that there are many people who rise above something like this and who consider the facts, but what if there is a segment of the population that relies only on these gender signals to make serious decisions?

   It just hit me (and maybe I'm just slow) that people like us would interpret gender signals differently than the cisgendered or, we may even discard those signals. That would explain why there is such a difference in how we see the world.

   This is actually scaring me because my whole life, I have a habit of not accepting much, if anything, that comes out of the mouth of a manly man.  I might be a bigot.  i never thought of that.

[Doc]

Loopy.

The author is no doubt a conservative protestant, and has used this 'data' to support his conservative protestant viewpoint. A feminist writer could use that same data to support the idea that our social system is still working to keep women subserviant to men.

Of course the man's job is more important, he's probably got more ego wrapped up in having a job, and he has more job security, too. Even if she is making more money at the moment, he ultimately has more lifetime earning-power. My male-bodied spouse, who dropped out of university after one term, makes nearly three times what I make, and I've got a BA. I want to go for a Master's now, and that will probably enable me to make nearly twice what he makes. However, if we both had Master's degrees the discrepancy between our incomes would then be greater than the average. (On average, female-bodied people earn 76 cents for every dollar that male-bodied people in the same class of job earn.)

Nobody likes to do housework. That men do less housework is a tradition that may be hard for even the most courteous husband to overcome. The result is that working women do a lot of work at home too. And then end up feeling inferior to the conservative protestant traditional women who stay at home and pamper their husbands, so these working women work at that, too. And then are left so darn tired that they don't have as much fun in bed, or welcome sex as often.

Everybody talks about unsolvable problems. Women typically lament them and try to create a tedious dialogue about them, while men typically rage over them and produce a tedious and somewhat frightening monologue. I am sure that women married to men who are unhappy with their jobs are equally (if not more) stressed out about it, it's just that nobody's done a study to show that it kills them.

Everybody has fantasies about being taken or mildly dominated. It's silly to cite this phenomenon in women as evidence that they want it outside of fantasies. If the author saw the same data for men, he would not draw that conclusion.

If anybody said to me, 'I wish my spouse would stop being so darn respectful of me,' I would figure that person meant e was tired of playing this stupid game:

"What would you like to do tonight, honey?"
"I don't know. What would you like to do?"
"Oh, I dunno, we could go to the Soon Go Fat Oriental Food Expo."
"But isn't that clear across town?"
"Umm, we could play backgammon?"
"I'm not in the mood."

ad nauseum, until the second speaker suggests the very thing that the first speaker wanted to do in the first place. A lot of people show 'respect' for others with this thing, but really it's a sort of maddening game of twenty questions and it really does make you wish that the person would be more assertive. Not disrespectful, just more clear and decisive.

It's also just daft to call an ordinary cisgendered marriage where the woman isn't a stay-at-home housekeeper and mother 'androgynous.' Working women are not androgynous, and their marriages are not 'androgynous marriages.'

[Nero]

Came across this article just today. Its old, but I have never seen it.

How old? I'm guessing 1950s.

[Keira]

Doc, most of the difference in pay between genders can be explained by the type of jobs each gender end up doing, rather than discrimination.

Women have a lesser tendency to go into engineering and business, which can lead to high paid work and more a tendency to head for health care, social science, arts, etc. Still in 2007, there's less than a quarter of women in engineering schools, its not the men who force women not to go there.

There's also the fact that until lately, the number of working women was less and initially women were less educated than men, which means they worked on average less years and started lower. Also, women, since as you said it, value work less than men tend to choose less high stress, much overtime work, and choose more part time work (I am not counting those forced into part time). They also choose less shift work and dangerous work.

There are factors like women being single parents more often that impact work, but not sure how much you can assign this to discrimination. Even if the guy wanted the child, judges would give it to the mother in most cases. At least there is an increase in shared custody, which mitigates this.

All that put together, and some other things, explains most of the difference in pay between men and women. There's certainly X% left (certainly less than 10%) of out and out discrimination, like some female job categories similar in relations to generating value as male job categories, with no difference in qualifications needed, but still getting lower pay. Those differences can take a long time to work themselves out, but economic pressures will even them out eventually (with the constant pressure on profit margins, no company wants to pay more than they should for anything).

An woman engineer or business graduate today, still faces some entrenched resistance from dinosoars, but there's a good chance her salary at the end of her career, if they follow similar paths, will be very close.

[Doc]

Keira, I don't buy that when reports from the federal frickin' government say things like "Men with professional degrees may expect to earn almost $2 million more than their female counterparts over their work-life" and business magazines report that women with the same qualifications as men, who do not take any extra time off, who move just as often and get promoted just as many times as male counterparts are still paid less. That is not women choosing lower-paying work than men, it's women getting screwed.

Certainly yes, the jobs that women end up doing often pay less. I work in a field overwhelmingly dominated by women. I did not especially chose it, though. It is a job I was able to get.

I did once work in a male-dominated field, but I was not able to advance there and was in fact eventually harrassed out of the shop, probably because I am weird and not because I am female. BUT surrounding this chain of annoying events was the suggestion that I must be on drugs. A male co-worker of mine who was a long-hair weirdo and very obviously stoned got promoted about the same time. This was not me choosing a lower-paying job or me being stoned at work, it was me getting screwed. At that job it was possible to advance to a pay-rate that would have allowed me to own a house and support a stay-at-home wife.

At the job I have now, so profoundly a "woman's job" that professional magazines about it use female pronouns in every instance, and at an educational conference (fairly necessary to attend, because the technology advances rapidly) for workers in my field I counted one male among hundreds of females. At that job, even if you take two years of full-time school to get certified, and pay over ten grand in tuition per year, you cannot expect to earn enough to buy a house and support a wife. This job is, in fact, dangerous. People get hurt pretty often, and when it comes to wrestling a terrified 200lb mastiff, we are lucky we don't get hurt pretty darn badly. It is also physically demanding and I'm quite gratified by the improved musculature in my arms after starting it. The fact is, less than two generations ago it was a job that was considered too dangerous and physically demanding for women to do. It was done by young men who would, in a few years, probably move on to something else. When it began to be a 'profession' it became female-dominated because women are the only people who can afford to work for that kind of crap pay. Every woman-jill of them is married and supported by her husband, or divorced and left with a paid-off house, or living cheaply in a small apartment.