First off, this really has nothing to do with anything I said. It's you projecting your baggage onto me.

Which is par for the course.

I do not self identify as a feminist. The things I'm talking about having studied aren't the things you are thinking of.

I have a pretty good track record of being even-handed about gender issues in my comments in this forum. I still get a lot of flak. This discussion is a good example of that. My comment was downvoted and it currently has one reply -- yours -- which is openly hostile.

Given that I have been here eleven years and yadda, that gets frustrating. After eleven years of being reasonable, you would think that other people here would do a better job of meeting me halfway on certain topics.

Our current mode of working tends to create jobs that only work well for cis het white males with a wife at home whose primary responsibilities are taking care of the "women's work." This fact equally screws over not just people of color and women, but men like you who did the single father thing.

You have valid criticisms of how far too many women are openly hostile to men as their default position for trying to self advocate. I'm just as critical of that shit. I don't self identify as a "feminist" because my feeling is that "feminism" boils down "women are entitled to real careers, just like men have, and fuck all y'all men and to hell with the welfare of the children."

It actively disregards the very real sacrifices involved in having a career with the traditional pattern of male success, which includes often barely knowing their own children, and I was a full-time wife and mom for two decades. My adult sons still live with me. There is no way in hell anyone is going to get me to agree with a position of "Women are entitled to careers, even if that means shitting all over the children to get there from here."

I'm human. I certainly don't get everything right. But when I talk about the need to change how we work because the world has changed and our patterns of work are still largely based on this idea that "workers" are cis het white males with a wife at home doing the cooking, I'm not talking about "Fuck all y'all men." I'm talking about "This is why we default to certain patterns and those patterns aren't working for the world currently and there is no objective reason we need to continue to cleave to those patterns."

Some crappy things that happen at work are rooted in real world metrics. For example, harvest time on a farm is always crunch time because food is only ripe and fresh for a short period of time. If you don't harvest it in a timely fashion, it rots. It isn't going to keep and wait until later.

But many of the things we do today are more or less unexamined habits from the past and it's enormously difficult to have any kind of reasonable and productive discussion of that fact because you cannot talk about patterns of work without talking, to some degree, about historic patterns of gender roles and even slavery in the history of the US and people get very touchy about that and it actively interferes with trying to figure out "What piece of what we do is actually something the work, per se, imposes on us? And what piece is bad habits from a different era that are failing to die?"

We are all victims to some degree or another of the ghosts of the past in the form of cultural norms, existing built environment and so forth that keeps alive patterns from the past even well past the time that humans began actively and intentionally changing the things those were rooted in. As just one example: We outlawed slavery in the US, yet Black Americans are still quite far from having genuine equality with Whites. They see high rates of incarceration, high rates of unemployment, high rates of poverty, etc.

Trying to find patterns that are good for people in the here and now is hard and it's made harder by the inability to have a good discussion about the topic to begin with. Far too often, by the time the world agrees that X is bad and Y would be better, Y is also out of date and we should really be doing Z but we can't do Z because Z is the new thing no one trusts or understands and will not accept.

Thank you for replying to me instead of just downvoting my comment into oblivion.

Have a good day.