The Author is Ending Her Marriage. Isn't it Time You Did...

[HouseMD]

Found this one this morning. Watch out, reading this might leave you raging for a while:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... ff/307488/

Here's some highlights:

"It has been almost 10 years since I dined with adults on a weekly basis. My domestic evenings have typically revolved around five o’clock mac and cheese under bright lighting and then a slow melt into dishes and SpongeBob … because yet another of my marital failings was that I was never able to commit to a nanny. Even though my husband and I both drew full-time incomes, I, as a writer, worked at home and hence was ambivalent, because if I had daily in-house help, what was my role as a mother? Would I be emotionally displaced? Also, I secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative—recall Barbara Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d never let another woman scrub her toilets. Yea, these are the various postfeminist hurdles that stretched before me at 2:00 a.m. as I lay awake in our bed, contorted not just by cats but by two children kicking me from both sides—Exhibit A of lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting."

This paragraph basically shows how confused feminism and overworked feminism has left her, and shows the damage feminist philosophy can do to a woman's psyche.

Later on, at the weekly girl's night out with her friends:

"Since her own home fires seemed to roar so warmly, I was hesitant to hit Rachel with news of my breakup, and it is true that her first reaction was a degree of disbelief and horror even more pronounced than everyone else’s in our village of longtime marrieds. “But what about the children?â€￾ she wailed.

But it is now our second Girls’ Night dinner since my horrifying announcement, and Rachel has eschewed Ian’s customary wine-club Bordeaux and is mixing some alarmingly strong martinis.

Leaning forward heavily across the bar, she swirls her glass and huskily drops the bomb: “I have to tell you—since we talked, I too have started thinking divorce.â€￾ “No!â€￾ we girls exclaim. With a stab of nausea, I suddenly feel as though now that I’ve touched my pool of friends with my black pen, a cloud of ink is enveloping them."

This just goes to show how easily influenced women are by their female friends and Western culture in general. You get an idea in their head, and they run with it, everyone but themselves be damned.

As to why this divorce is occurring:

"“Ian won’t have sex with me,â€￾ Rachel says flatly. “He has not touched my body in two years. He says it’s because I’ve gained weight.â€￾ Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. “And he thinks I’m a bad mother—he says I’m sloppy and inattentive.â€￾

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

Rachel had even asked Ian point-blank: “Do you want a divorce?â€￾ And Ian said absolutely not—they must show discipline and work at the marriage (again with the work!), since any domestic upset could negatively affect the boys, who were now facing a particularly fraught time at their new school, where they have an extraordinarily challenging roster of extracurricular activities and a quarterly testing schedule."

Rather than try and work on their marriage and perhaps take it easy on the Dove bars for the sake of their marriage and the children, she would rather just jump ship. Perhaps the most telling bit in these paragraphs is the way the author says "(again with the work!)" as if a healthy marriage is not worth putting any work into.

The last five paragraphs I've copied in full, because I didn't want to make it seem like I was putting words in the author's mouth. Welcome to the mind of a feminist woman in her 40s, please secure yourselves in your seats, because this is going to be a bumpy and painful ride:

"That said, it’s clear that females are dissatisfied—more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it’s the apparently stable men (comfortable alone in their postfeminist den with their Cook’s Illustrated and their porn) who are Old Worlders, and the Girls’ Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders. They most embody what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,â€￾ or l’inquiétude du caractère. (Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.â€￾)

To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,â€￾ only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal. And then our women’s magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men’s magazines exhorting men to rekindle the romance.

So, herewith, some modest proposals. Clearly, research shows that what’s best for children is domestic stability and not having to bond with, and to be left by, ever new stepparent figures. Less important is whether or not their overworked parents are logging “date nightâ€￾ (or feeling the magic). So why don’t we accept marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage arrangement? As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come. (Says another friend of mine, about his wife of 23 years: “My heart doesn’t lift when she walks in the room. It sinks, slightly.â€￾) If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.

As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex.

Or best of all, after the breast-feeding and toddler years are through, let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents! Let the Type A moms obsessively work, write checks, and forget to feed the dog. Let the dads then, if they wish, kick out those sloppy working mothers and run effective households, hiring the appropriate staff, if need be. To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.

In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love."

Chew on those proposals. Have a beta provider and a boytoy on the side, but, you know, "for the children" and their stability, not for yourself, heavens no. And the end of the article just shows how disconnected feminist women are with their own femininity- she proposes that men would make better caretakers for children since we don't have "a working mother's ambivalence or emotional stickiness". And her proposal that children be raised in a "tribal" approach, with women all banding together while men slave away to provide for the children of other men and occasionally have sex... I don't even have words for.

Of course, the icing on the cake is the title of the article itself: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off: The Author is Ending Her Marriage. Isn't it Time You Did the Same? It's like spreading divorce to her friends wasn't enough, she needs to spread it to the whole world. Because, you know, if marriage isn't right for her, clearly there is something wrong with marriage, not empowered female self.

[ContraMundumRants]

It's always the same thing: men are at fault, men are not this, men are not that,
but Feminist women never stop to look at their own behavior.

She might want to look at her fat ass and go on a diet to make herself sexually
appealing to her husband, but oh no, that is "misogynistic" and he has to
accept her for the land whale that she is.

Actually, instead of giving her a boytoy, I think the husband should get a hot girl
on the side just as a reward for all the shit he has had to put up with for years.

In countries like mine (Spain), the man would just go off to get p4p women who
are usually 9s or 10s and highly skilled in bed, which renders such feminist
whales completely useless.

[Jester]

Of course, the icing on the cake is the title of the article itself: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off: The Author is Ending Her Marriage. Isn't it Time You Did the Same? It's like spreading divorce to her friends wasn't enough, she needs to spread it to the whole world. Because, you know, if marriage isn't right for her, clearly there is something wrong with marriage, not empowered female self.

Curse of The Undead.

It's always the same thing: men are at fault, men are not this, men are not that,
but Feminist women never stop to look at their own behavior.

She might want to look at her fat a** and go on a diet to make herself sexually
appealing to her husband, but oh no, that is "misogynistic" and he has to
accept her for the land whale that she is.

Actually, instead of giving her a boytoy, I think the husband should get a hot girl
on the side just as a reward for all the shit he has had to put up with for years.

In countries like mine (Spain), the man would just go off to get p4p women who
are usually 9s or 10s and highly skilled in bed, which renders such feminist
whales completely useless.

As obvious as these solutions are, today they need to be stated.

[Rayn]

As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come.

I wonder what kind of stupid crap is this author smoking.

I don't know about what the hell is going wrong out there in the USA, but at least right here It is natural for elderly husbands and wives to be continually affectionate and romantic with one another. My mom and dad did at least, even after they hit 50 and had 4 kids.

[Renata]

Marriage needs love to grow, but love doesn't need marriage to grow, said the wise grass-hopper'

[green1976]

It's always the same thing: men are at fault, men are not this, men are not that,
but Feminist women never stop to look at their own behavior.

She might want to look at her fat a** and go on a diet to make herself sexually
appealing to her husband, but oh no, that is "misogynistic" and he has to
accept her for the land whale that she is.

Actually, instead of giving her a boytoy, I think the husband should get a hot girl
on the side just as a reward for all the shit he has had to put up with for years.

In countries like mine (Spain), the man would just go off to get p4p women who
are usually 9s or 10s and highly skilled in bed, which renders such feminist
whales completely useless.

As soon as you start to discuss with a feminist,you are the loser.
There is nothing to speak with them,only suckers do that.

A wise man keeps a low profile,stay in shape,makes money and spend his real life surrounded by nice available women in a better country where feminist are almost not there.

Feminist are like cockroaches..they have zero positive value..only parasite who enjoy destroying what you are playing the victim role.

[Jester]

Marriage needs love to grow, but love doesn't need marriage to grow, said the wise grass-hopper'

good one

[Jester]

As soon as you start to discuss with a feminist,you are the loser.
There is nothing to speak with them,only suckers do that.

A wise man keeps a low profile,stay in shape,makes money and spend his real life surrounded by nice available women in a better country where feminist are almost not there.

Feminist are like cockroaches..they have zero positive value..only parasite who enjoy destroying what you are playing the victim role.

+1