Yesterday I stumbled on this post by Devon Eriksen on Twittex.
For those who don't wish to follow through, he claims there were no real fat people in the fifties/sixties, when mothers cooked for their families, etc. It's one of the those things of "he's right and wrong" because he's much younger than I and I can assure him the having home cooked meals was not universal, or even close to it, food was already processed by the time people bought it to use as ingredients, and there were indeed fat people (though very rarely as abnormally fat as now, but you do see those throughout history too. And I can go into that if anyone wishes me to write on fat, and why our society is exceptionally "fat". It's a number of circumstances, including that we're as a rule older (the very fat people of the past were usually very wealthy, meaning they could live longer with serious physical issues. Like Henry VIII with a debilitating, never-healed leg wound) and that ... well, the pictures that Devon uses to illustrate the "there were no fat people" are part of the problem. Because those pictures of the sixties and seventies show people who were by and large on extreme diets due to the worship of "thin." We do know there are serious metabolic consequences to whip-saw dieting -- trust me, I'm a case study -- and to early-life anorexia, as well as to extreme dieting while pregnant, which screws up the baby.)
The post is still worth reading, and I'm very glad it can be said. It's just his being younger than I, I think, and also falling into the writer trap of "there was a master plan." This is usually true in novels, never true in reality.
Sure, there was a short of prospiracy of cult devotees of the communist manifesto in places of power in entertainment and mass communication which led to the poison of "Marxist feminism" inserting itself into the dynamic and making everything objectively worse.
Note henceforth I can refer to it as simply "feminism" because "feminism" in modern society is Marxist. But there was, before that nonsense, a sort of sensible feminism. It curbed the greatest excesses of societal oppression of women (which happened because women are the most precious resource of any society. Do I need to unpack? You don't let the people who can literally give your tribe a future wander off on their own and be captured by the enemy, for ex. This leads to curtailing the movements of women, historically) and advocated for stuff like a widow's ability to manage her own household and money, without needing to return to her parents' home or be subordinate to her inlaws. My grandmother was a feminist in that sense and at points it was opposite what is considered feminist nowadays. How opposite? Well, you see Victorian feminism was for women and children. So, it actually encouraged a woman to have children, treat her children well, stay home with the children and have no other employment, if the husband could at all manage to support her.
This was most often not possible, btw. The mid 20th century ideal of the housewife who stayed home and did nothing but watch her kids, cook for the family, decorate and maybe garden is the ideal of a very wealthy society. As such it was probably transitory and illusory, both. It was also, and Devon is absolutely right on this, aspirational and amazing. Because if you can afford to do it -- and are temperamentally suited to it -- what is better than to spend your life making the life of your family and community better?
It is particularly suited -- center mass -- to most female personalities. Women tend to be more social than males and like to perform acts of service for the community. It's not that we're saintly, it's just what evolution selected for in females probably from the time we climbed down from the trees, if not before.
While women's work tends to be indoors and non-dangerous, most women throughout history worked. And I'm going to lay down a marker here that I'm not even sure most women watched over their own children, in the sense we tend to think of it, the sense of the mid century housewife doing everything for her own kids. (And here, as with my thinking those very thin people of the sixties and seventies -- I have my own pictures and honestly it looks odd, because people a generation before and after were if not "fat" more "normal". I think that thinness and all the dieting are reflection of "listening to experts" who indulged their own fancy -- being the seed of weight problems later, that housewife having nothing to do but mind her kids seeded the boomers neuroticism.)
While people tended to raise their own kids, and certainly (as I've said many times) the societies (upper class Victorian, Roman) that outsourced the raising of kids to hirelings did NOT fare well long term, child raising was more... flexible in the past.
I still caught the edge of this, to an extent. I mean, my mother, like my grandmothers, worked from home in her own business, and minded me in the sense that mom -- and grandma -- were there and provided meals at set times. But to be honest, from the time I was four or five, I played with other kids in the neighborhood for entire days. They played at my house too, sure, but that meant mom watched us all maybe one day out of six (Sunday was for extended family.)
More importantly, going back to former times, the children were expected to help with household work at about four, and often were apprenticed/had jobs/were in serious school (how serious? Well, people often entered university in their pre-teens. And don't tell me they didn't learn as much. They didn't learn the same, but the amount was maybe more than we do as preparation) all day, etc.
It is a mistake to look at the middle years of the 20th century as "the way things ought to be." To an extent we were already seriously off course.
To the point of fat and there not being a fat gene, etc. True. But at the same time there are things that break the system and predispose people to accumulate fat.
I'm not going to defend pre-packaged food, which is a thing regulated by the government and therefore by "experts." Like, the ones who decided in the eighties that fat was bad for you but sugar just "got used up" which is a metabolic misunderstanding of epic proportions. For me and my family I always preferred to cook from scratch, because it's healthier and often cheaper. But let's face it, the diet of our ancestors wasn't particularly wonderful, between lack of refrigeration and often being limited to what grew locally. Sure, they got limited amounts of protein, which might be good in a way, but which we've also find stunts growth and perhaps brain development.
Go ahead and cook from scratch and local if you can, but the fat epidemic is probably more related to see saw dieting in an attempt to reach the standards of thinness the experts said we should have, and the fact our health care has gotten good enough people survive with serious illnesses. My metabolism has never been the same, for ex, since I was put on strict bed rest for six months with first son. It is likely at a less wealthy time I, myself, and my son would both have died of eclampsia.
However, there is one contributing factor that absolutely can be blamed on feminism and that Devon hit on, though glancingly: the fact that all of us work, and work ridiculous hours.
Someone else mentioned that Americans define themselves by their job, as if that justified our existence. They're not wrong. I figured that out in the aftermath of 2018 and being let go by the two main purchasers of my work. I realized I was suffering from middle aged unemployed man syndrome, as I'd defined myself by my jobs, even though they were in many ways crappy and stress filled.
And it's interesting that Devon pointed out corporations jumped all in on "Women should have jobs" because it expanded the workforce and therefore lowered wages for everyone, because my friend Bill Reader had tentatively told me the same a few weeks ago. As in "Was it all a ploy like importing a lot of third worlders? A way to depress wages?"
I don't think it was a "ploy" as I don't think it was calculated. I think it was partly, sure, the communist manifesto at the back of a lot of influential brains, but also the fact life had got so good. Women not only could stay home, but were under-utilized. Look at recipes from the fifties and these people weren't really cooking from scratch, but buying a series of canned things and combining them, with the result that a meal that would normally take half the day to prepare (Still does to me, if I'm doing something big from scratch, which is why nowadays it's so hard, because we don't eat that much, and it seems a waste of time.) And cleaning the house had gotten exponentially easier with machines (Seriously. I washed clothes by hand. You don't have any idea how much time it took.) Women found themselves seriously under-employed, and therefore started casting their minds to what else they could do.
Now, if that prosperity had hit fifty years later, when there was an internet, there would have been a flourishing of work-at-home jobs, and I still think that's where we'll end up. But in the sixties, seventies and eighties, what it caused instead was bored women to start ENVYING their husband who got to go out and have jobs. (The fact most men's jobs were no longer difficult and arduous helped with this. Women are still not hankering to be construction workers, truck drivers or trash pickup workers.)
Did corporations step on the accelerator and aid and abet this ethos? Yes. But corporations are served by university graduates, and the universities had already come up with the narrative of the oppressed woman freed by work.
And this in turn depressed wages, which in turn made it absolutely necessary for everyone, male and female to be "married to the job." Because there's always someone who is willing to work harder/make more sacrifices than you.
Recently we found ourselves explaining to both sons that yeah, though in very different jobs, we too worked 18 hour days in our late twenties and up through our late thirties. It's what you have to do to establish yourself. And to be honest, because of increased longevity "establishing yourself." and gaining credibility in your field, no matter what it is, takes longer and longer and longer. I mean, Dan is still working way more hours than he should be, and he might still (I haven't checked) be considered "the kid" in his office. (Even if he works from home.) I know I suddenly crossed from "Raw beginner" to "Old woman of science fiction" somewhere in my mid fifties, and I'm still working raw beginner hours.
As I tried to tell my parents at one time -- with marked lack of success -- that Americans aren't overweight because we're lazy but because we work too much. It's just most of our jobs are so all-absorbing.
So, in the essentials -- aside from quibbles on the "fat" thing -- I'm in accord with Devon that feminism has caused a break in American life, and by extension destroyed the family in our health.
It's more that feminism was not so much an intended thing as a trend that picked up after World War Two.
Part of the problem is that all reproduction is a war between men and women -- or in the animal kingdom males and females -- in that each sex tries to have the most babies with the least expenditure of energy and effort, so at the expense of the other.
If you study evolution, this is how some species ended up with things like.... well, eating your mate right after copulation, or completely atrophying and becoming a pimple on your spouse's side, but a pimple that can still impregnate her.
That kind of war is all very well, but the point of it is that it leads to more children.
This broken situation where each man and woman is an independent and competing economic unit is not leading to more children, or even a healthy and connected life.
Instead, it's led to a life of anomie where humans have value only as economic production units, and can be discarded when no longer (or not yet) functional. Where it's a shame to not be "employed" and "producing."
This type of life is obviously completely compatible with communism/Marxism, in which the individual only matters so long as he produces, and where he's a widget who is the same as everyone else.
And like all forms of Marxism, it leads to death and unhappiness. (Not necessarily in that order.)
The bitterly funny part of it (more bitter than funny) is that the entire left blames this on "capitalism" and doesn't realize their version of feminism does nothing but feed all humanity into the maw of faceless corporations.
It would be funny if we weren't living it and at risk of dying laughing.
(Pardon the lateness. This week will be weird as it's a series of medical tests and sfuff. And the stuff is weirder than the tests. - SAH)
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