NEW BLOG

Follow my continued adventures at annsterzinger.com.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Feminism could have definitely worked out less nightmarishly for the worker bees

Damn, my boyfriend's apartment is a mess. I'm not saying he's a slob; he's actually a perfectionist and usually looks wonderfully slick despite a low-ass budget. But it's Wednesday, my midweek day off, and I just washed out the same containers we ate leftover Chinese from on Sunday. I also washed the rest of his dishes that were in the sink, absent-mindedly and quite contentedly, as I waited for my coffee to get strong in the press pot. He had at that point been at work for two hours already while I gently snoozed.

It certainly didn't feel like I was being dehumanized as I cleaned those dishes. Or oppressed. I think of those words when I see him going off to his shit job or myself running around to another temp gig, leaving depressingly messy apartments behind us. Let me repeat: on a day when I don't have to accept near-starvation wages to make someone else money so I can stay alive to go on making money for other people, I find it quite satisfying to do a bit of kind tidying for someone who is perpetually kind to me in return. It's called a human, as opposed to a financial/survival, reee-laaa-tionnn-shiiiiip. You know, where it's reciprocal and not based on screwing a less lucky player in this forced-march game blue.

I'm not saying we should go back to the 1950s, although I definitely get the feeling that the division of labor that old-fashioned sexism enforced left everybody with more free time. It also halved the number of people in the work force, give or take the spinsters and widows. I'm not saying I think that the mass (dare I say very nearly forced, in the case of everyone below the upper middle classes?) entry of women into the permanent workforce was the only force involved in the falling-over-a-cliff routine that wages have been doing since roughly the year I was born (I always seem to get lucky like that). Certainly we have globalization to hate as well. But if you have the slightest grasp on the concept of supply and demand it's hard to argue against the fact that if demand for labor stays roughly the same (there are still two adult consumers per average household, and now nobody has time to do the shopping!) but its supply doubles, its price is going to drop.

And when it becomes expected for a household to have two incomes so the lady of the house doesn't feel like a throwback to corseted times, well, who needs to pay any one employee enough to support an entire family? It's practically an insult to a guy's wife to give him a living wage!

I remember a rant that one of my beloved, well-meaning, feminist male cousins went on once about somebody snarking on his wife for going back to work so soon after they had their first kid, or something of the like; I was so shocked by the final point of his rant that I'm fuzzy on the details, but it boiled down to: "Gee, so sorry she wants to go out and have a job like a real human being!" Which is a nice sentiment insofar as "job" and "real human being" go together as concepts--as far as I can see, however, they go together about as well as roofing tar on toast. This cousin has always fared better than I have in the workplace, so it probably made sense to him, but I must have looked as if he'd just suggested his wife might find personal fulfillment in being gang-raped by hyenas.

I certainly couldn't think of anything to say. Even taking the SAT was less dehumanizing than the jobs I've had. What exactly would be "not a real human being" about making a nice cozy home for yourself and your favorite person in the world... not to mention spending your down time reading or writing or whatever floats your boat, with no supervisor tapping his foot and making sure you don't overstep the bounds of your unpaid half-hour lunch break? I'd take a life of going back for a nap after sending my best friend out as well-armed as possible into the cold cruel world. Hell yeah! I can't wait till he gets back here tonight and finds me here with the dishes washed--and hell, maybe I'll sweep the floor too. Tomorrow I have to go back to the unkind world myself, and believe me, I prefer today by a long shot.

Then again, if you've got somebody at home cleaning up for you and making a nice nest, maybe working isn't so bad. Imagine: if you made enough money that your partner could do all that fucking housework and shopping while you were gone, you would both have the rest of the day for yourselves and/or each other instead of having to go to work and then come home and schlep the laundry you needed done so you could look 'respectable' back in the mines the next day. So maybe after a while the person who was staying home and cleaning up might want to switch roles. Well... go for it! What's un-feminine about coming home from the office to a warm penis and a bubble bath? What's un-masculine about pampering your own personal Jeanne d'Arc when she's done fighting her half of y'all's battle for the day? If 1970s feminists had been less mindlessly pro-work and pro-career and less about measuring people's worth by silly social/"career"-bullcrap-related measures of "success" (why they rejected society's beauty standard but not the ditch-digging standard is beyond me) and more about actual equality, fairness, practicality, and (god forbid, America!) quality of motherfucking life, who knows? It might have been perfectly respectable by this point in time for couples to share a job and each work it for six months out of the year.

Sounds fair enough to me. But no, women in the 1970s had to be all envious of the shit sandwich male employees-for-life were eating (why? WHY?!?! It never fails to absolutely stun me how pointlessly masochistic the American work ethic is, even my own at times), and now we all get half the bread for eating twice the shit. CONGRATULATIONS.

Ah well. (That stock phrase is my way of taking a deep breath so I don't set things on fire.) At least I'll have time today to give him a shoulder rub. Oh, the degradation!

12 comments:

  1. Ann, what a fantastic entry! An all-time great for the entire blogosphere. I hope it reaches the audience it deserves.

    Here's a link to my own less artful tirade against indentured slavery, better known in our Liberal tyranny as 'work'.

    http://saynotolife.blogspot.com/2011/06/work-and-i.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Karl! I'll read that after work. I mean prison.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Was there more free time in the 1950s? I don't know. Improved technology should theoretically result in less time spent on housework, but I've heard folks say we just expanded the amount of stuff to do and bought bigger houses in response.

    Maybe since work is necessary and doing it brings benefits, it is best if we delude ourselves into thinking that it is among the most fulfilling and noble of life's activities.

    Work is pretty important to me and one of the few reasons I bother to get out of the bed in the morning. At least since I graduated college I've liked my jobs. So I'm not happy about getting sort-of-fired last month (I was also fired from my previous/first programming job). I'm taking breaks in my remaining days to interview, and hopefully I won't fuck up again, but generalizing from the past there's no particular reason to be confident in that. And I seem to have a general up-fucking tendency, such as that which resulted in a friend of mine breaking my nose at another co-worker's recent party.

    On the upside, the weather seems to be getting nicer.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Aw, that sucks! (The nose and the job.) I'm glad for you that you've found a meaningfulness in work... I've only had one job that I found meaningful, and I loved it, but unfortunately no one seems to be hiring proofreaders anymore. I feel compelled to react with mild, half-joking hostility since you're a computer programmer (thanks SO much for convincing the illiterate that they could get away with hiring spell check instead of a human proofreader, guys! Book geeks and computer geeks were friends in junior high; why did you turn on us? WHY???), but don't take it personally; my boyfriend fixes computers and some of my best friends have always been computer (TRAITORS! TRAITORS!!!) geeks.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lou Rollins is apparently a proof-reader, or at least was looking for work as such. Back when he was active online though, I tended to find his typing full of errors.

    I don't know if you read "Myth", but I submitted the preface for that for a college composition requirement at the same time I sent it to Chip. An english grad student made me revise it over and over well after I had received payment for it, which I found funny. However, what actually got published is at least half Chip's writing, and I blamed him for its pretentiousness when my folks asked to see it. On the upside, that dissuaded them from continuing on to any offensive material on Rollins' part.

    I was going to say I'm sure there are available jobs from freelancing sites, but I just did a ctrl+F and didn't find proofreading (though there are a large number of non-programming jobs, despite the url). That's my published hypothesis failure of the day. Anyway, I've never used such sites so it wouldn't be much of a recommendation anyway. I simply updated my resume with Dice and get more responses from recruiters than I feel like dealing with. Of course I don't tell the people impressed by the good school I went to that I was fired, and since neither of my employers wanted disgruntled ex-employees (or they're just nice people) my version gets to be the official truth. Hence the "sort of".

    ReplyDelete
  6. Re: Rollins: Unfortunately there are a lot of "proofreaders" who don't understand the zero-tolerance policy for errors... if you aren't making something perfect why should anyone pay you to read it? I cringe when I make a typo in a Facebook post, ferchrissakes. It's not the kind of job you should assume you can do just because you got an above-average score on the verbal portion of the SAT. But since there are so many "proofreaders" who do a shitty job, people get burned and then assume they're better off without that expense... dommage pour moi. It sucks professionally and also just on the level of looking at things as I crawl around this reversed-apostrophe world...

    ReplyDelete
  7. PS Did not read Myth but will look it up.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hang on... did you mean "The Myth of Natural Rights"? I have that! Enjoyed it very much... sometimes an editor actually does you favors you aren't aware of till much later, but then again I haven't seen the original text.

    (Then again, sometimes an editor does you violence that you aren't aware of till much later...)

    ReplyDelete
  9. "this reversed-apostrophe world"
    ?

    In case Chip is reading this, I'm not complaining about the editing! It was significantly improved. I'm just glad my family didn't read further into it.

    ReplyDelete
  10. ...by which I mean, "a world in which major chain retailers will print signs with foot-high characters that include errors as ugly as a reversed apostrophe before the word 'em (as short for 'them')"...

    It's kinda hard to illustrate since Blogspot doesn't do smart quotes. (I love that name for the abundant ironies it generates; I want to do a publishing podcast called "When Dumb People Use Smart Quotes.")

    ReplyDelete
  11. "About going back to the 1950's"

    Such a statement belies a belief in "progress" as if things are always getting better. As a matter of fact the 1950's is quite the anomaly in history given that women just escaped the sweatshops and hard labour prior to that era to have a life of leisure in comparison. The fact that women got hoodwinked into: "Wage slavery" is quite foolish. They got taken in by the flattery and the creation and use of envy in order that they become "empowered" worker drones.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I am working in https://www.xplace.com XPlace . Good conditions for freelancers!It has wide variety of job offers in different specialties and hourly pay is higher than on similar sites! Also the main thing on the site is no commission!

    ReplyDelete

Anyone can post, but please, if you want to be anonymous, come up with an amusing handle so we can tell you apart. Thanks!