Yet here I am in a situation where my husband's work really is more important than mine right now, and he's mostly good about this with some minor exceptions (yes, once you go down this path, it's hard to climb back again, people get used to services, particularly those who like being waited on). I know that these feminist friends will advise me, have advised me, that I need to draw lines in different places. But the fact is that his job is much more important and somebody has to handle the entire running of a household with all of its complexities, and that someone is me. There are times it just gets to be too much to handle. And then I feel like a Realllly bad feminist because hearing about how I'm supposed to handle it by being a better feminist does not make me feel any better - in fact it makes me feel much worse.
Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Tue Sep 01, 2020 7:06 pm
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In a few months time, you may refer to her by her title, VP Elect, and a couple months after that, her new title as VP.
BF
Statistics: Posted by Tahlvin — Tue Aug 11, 2020 4:25 pm
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I've referred to Kamala Harris by her first name and have seen others in the media (public and social) doing the same. Should I start conditioning myself to call her by her last name? Should I encourage others? Or is a name that has never been a top 1000 baby name in the US, ok to use as it's clearer who I'm referring to than a more-familiar (24th most-familiar) surname?
Thanks a bunch. Fight the power,
- Heedful in Halifax
Statistics: Posted by poorpete — Tue Aug 11, 2020 4:17 pm
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Problem is, it's not so much white women I see using the term as white men. The same guy complaining about lib snowflakes will use Karen as a pejorative for a meddler who wants to regulate his behavior. Not really worried about radical feminists objecting to the term, or some minor white woman Hollywood star using the term, in the larger context of the usual male anger at women who want to assert any form of control. This is the most common use I see of the term today, possibly because of where I live, but that's who's using it now.
Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Sat Jul 18, 2020 12:07 pm
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Anyway, here's my bad feminist take of the week: "Karen" started off naming an important phenomenon that was contributing to racist harms against people, but now it has been so fully co-opted by the mainstream, and in particular by white male misogynists, that it is becoming merely another sexist comment against women-in-general.
I was reminded of this when I saw Tahlvin mention it in the other thread, because he was using it (Qanon Karen) in the "original" sense, so to speak. These original Karens, as I understand it, are the white women who want to control and micromanage other people, who call the police on people for trivial reasons, lie and exaggerate their own vulnerability in order to hurt others, get upset about things that merely demonstrate how few important problems they have, quickly weaponize their white privilege in a racist way, etc. This is a real phenomenon so accordingly it was given a name.
But nowadays Karen seems to have gently wafted over into "any woman who complains about anything that men find it annoying for women to complain about". Now women (especially older women) whose values and standards (including good things like courtesy, patience, consideration for others) have become dated or rarer in society are Karens for having such values. People who complain about the lack of mask wearing are now frequently being called Karens by virus-hoaxers and virus-ignorers of all sorts (this conjunction of contemporary issues might be the most common instance I'm seeing). People who post signs in the office imploring hand-washing to stop Covid spread are control-freak Karens, people who think you should vaccinate your children are meddling Karens, people who want drivers to be courteous are Karens, and so on and so forth for any issue that involves the interaction of people in contemporary society!
From the perspective of conservative white men, which is Trump's #1 voter base, Me Too advocates are now being labeled as Karens as well. The red flag should fly up at this point.
Some people have tried to establish male Karen equivalents like the Chad or the Kyle (sorry! I hate it) or whatever, but that never caught on much. Being mad about a general-purpose (as opposed to specifically-racist) Karen means being mad about Women, and particularly about women who make any demands or want power. So either Karen is a racist, a conspiracy theorist who refuses to listen to any expertise, a victim weaponizing privilege to police others, a person who tries to pointlessly micromanage others due to her desire for control, or she needs to be retired. It's way too easy for men to attack women who want a say, who want to control men's behaviors, and this has become yet another way they can dismiss even the reasonable and non-racist forms of such desires.
I'm not sure I have been actually called a Karen but I say all the above knowing I'm Karen-eligible in so many ways. That's fine with me, when we're talking about racist Karen that's long overdue. The majority of white women voted for Trump, or in Alabama voted for the abusive creep! White women have to account for their behavior and that shouldn't bother any of us who are white women - it's a good thing that we need to speak up for better values, if that's what we want. But I definitely bristle when I hear older women than me being called Karen because, in general, they want people to stop being inconsiderate of one another; that just sounds like the same old sexism.
Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Tue Jul 07, 2020 5:02 pm
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Here by contrast, from NPR, is a good story about how suddenly working from home together could be causing the reality of gender inequity in housework and caring for people to come to the surface. They talk about ways people can try to solve it together, and don't include the usual punitive language toward women who embrace or at least accept that role for important reasons.
Other goods about this story: it touches on differences in personal values that can be important factors in coming up with solutions, as well as the learned helplessness problem and the difficult feelings of anger that can accompany failure to work out a good solution.
The personal values thing is key, because most approaches to this issue assume that the proper goal is to accomplish a specific set of tasks on the domestic front. The question is then how you do them or how you divide up the labor for them. This doesn't work if one person's solution to accomplishing that labor does not fit with the values the other person holds dear. And I can tell you from long personal experience that the anger arising from having your values disrespected is much greater than the anger arising from resentment over doing more laundry or dishes or doctor appointments. It took maybe a decade to solve that values problem, and I'm not sure it ever really got solved so much as the other party capitulated to Reality (and eventually started to see that children were supposed to be a useful labor force). So when a story hints at those kinds of forces, I think it's much more in touch with real life than stories that just talk about some abstract mass of tasks to be done and whether they're being divided in a certain way, which is a fairly simple logistics problem. It may be a really hard one to solve, but struggles over logistics aren't such difficult ones.
Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Fri May 22, 2020 9:05 am
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Today's prompt is the proliferation of stories about how the pandemic situation is screwing women over. You know because they already bore a greater share of the domestic burden, and now more of them are losing their jobs, proportionally, and they are taking on even more responsibility at home what with the schools being canceled and such.
Meanwhile, men are more likely to DIE of the covid, but never mind, this imbalance is not as important as the laundry imbalance. What?! I just tire of this kind of b*******. I am generally displeased with the way that sexism influences domestic labor distribution, including in my own home, and it is difficult to fight against these tendencies because, for instance, if your husband's job is more important to your family's financial well-being, and your job is more flexible, then inevitably it's going to take a backseat and you're going to do more housework et alia. That's just how things are even if the people involved are trying not to be sexist. Also sometimes the people involved just want to be babied and taken care of all the time, but whatevs. I have the ox blood in me, I don't even care anymore, I carve out what has to be carved out.
But back to the feminists: during this pandemic situation, this is one of the first times in my life that I feel like the imbalance of childcare and healthcare and other domestic tasks actually makes sense, and can be accepted cheerfully as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of the current situation. It would be terrific if I could be the one making more money and taking all the risks to go out of the house for my job, while my husband sat at home and did dishes without exposure to other people. But that's not the way our world is organized, and I'm absolutely terrified that he is the one who's going to get sick because of it. He's the one who's vulnerable. And it's not just him, it's all the men who are put in this situation because they tend to have jobs that are more likely to be considered essential employment, or they have employers that force them to come to work anyway. There's a whole manliness thing about wearing a mask that requires its own separate essay or book, honestly, and that just makes the whole thing scarier.
It is so much better to be the one who stays at home doing the dishes, so much!!! So why are people complaining about this like it is a big feminist problem? This is one of those situations where the tools of feminism are helpful to analyze differences in how people are being affected, but it is not a situation where complaining about women's lot makes any sense. If you want to complain about that, there's one giant glaring problem: Domestic Violence. The fact that women are doing extra laundry while hoping that their husbands don't succumb to their greater risk of death is not the issue.
Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Tue May 19, 2020 2:26 pm
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https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/201 ... ient-dick/
Statistics: Posted by mimekiller — Sat Nov 09, 2019 9:40 am
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/sarahm ... ssion=true
*I'm laughing because this is such a obvious thing not to do but someone went and did it. funny!
Statistics: Posted by mimekiller — Wed Nov 06, 2019 5:53 pm
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