Mommy blog talk
Two things going on in the blogosphere (DRINK! < -- the internet jargon drinking game) that have been making me think.
One is this post here on women’s weight gain in marriage.
I it saw via Tertia’s blog but really like Moxie’s take on, in part because she avoids the whole “how DARE he” bit to get down to talking about why, exactly, it can be hard for a mother of young kids to meet this societal expectation even if she chooses to.
I personally think the original post is depressing, mostly because of the title - “False advertising.” Advertising is what you do when you want to sell a particular product, likely one that people don’t really need specifically. (When was the last time you saw an ad for plain rice or dried beans? They don’t have huge lobby organizations (like dairy farmers) or reasons to purchase beyond being a necessity (like flavoured quick-cook rice)).
Advertising is not what you do to get married. It may be what you do to date, I suppose, but marriage is not a consumer purchasing a product or even two consumers purchasing products. It is a partnership. (Which is why I like Moxie’s response a lot, because she says “if the partnership wants this, how can it be achieved.) If someone has to advertise to get married, I think they should walk. away. Because you never know when a pan of hot grease is going to upend over you and you will forever look scarred, or any number of things.
But also, I think men need to get the fuck over themselves if they’re concerned with their partner’s weight. (Although I agree that there is, in fact, a small societal cost to men if their wives are unattractive because society is fucked up still like that, treating the wives as a status symbol on a par with a car. However. That does not mean that men cannot just shrug and say “I like my wife more than I like racking up every possible point to increase my status” and Move On.)
The other thing that’s going around is this experiment with housework, over at Half-Changed World which is one of my feminist blog site heroes. I’ll be joining in as of today, posting my and Carl’s housework hours at the end of the day and going for a week or so.
I did find the comment about FlyLady funny (the “it’s not 15 minutes a day!”) comment to that post. God knows FlyLady is a feminist nightmare in some respects except… she values the women’s work quite a bit by saying ‘okay, you’re doing this as your powerful gift to your family, here’s one way, go.’ So maybe not as nightmarish as the fluffiness seems on the surface.
BUT regardless, the whole thing with FlyLady is not that she’s got the answer to how to do hours of work in minutes, but that she reframes the work so that it’s not a source of resentment. I think everyone figures out pretty fast that it’s not really 15 minutes but… it’s not 15 hours either, and you can get it over with and move on.
Well that’s the soapboxing for now.
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