kimberlysteele | Women in Trouble

In a past life, I made the devastating claim that women had it easy compared to men. I was male at the time and it was one of those lifetimes that I began to become acquainted with the most common condition of our era: etheric starvation. Perhaps because I felt my wife was not able to provide the etheric bounty of the home I thought I deserved, I got snippy and made a rather universal pronouncement that I have been paying for ever since.

In this lifetime, I have had my nose ground into the sand of why women do not have it easy compared to men. For one, my period was a doozy. I began having it shortly after turning 12. It was a debacle nearly the whole time -- there were lots of almost-funny moments where I drank vodka screwdrivers at 3am while my sheets did a turn in the washing machine, which were a far better alternative to whimpering while in a fetal position in the bathtub between waves of gore and pain. Also not easy was the mystery surrounding the circumstances of my birth. I was told from a young age that I would have access to my birth records as an adoptee when I turned 18. This was a patent lie and I still do not know the name or identity of my birthfather.

Women do not have it easy, not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it is time that women stopped using our burdens as an excuse to make the world a far worse and more hideous place.

Girls Behaving Badly

If I had a dollar for every chubby, ill-kept, slovenly, high-riding, entitled single woman I have met who thinks she is owed her own Christian Grey, I would be writing this article from my country manor while my cook prepared a delicious breakfast. Just as the male equivalent of a frog should not expect supermodels to bear his children, there are a bunch of women who need a reality check. Yes, I get it that they have been told all their lives that they are princesses who deserve the best of everything, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too on this one. I am grateful for age because it gives me the ability to see that during the prime of my youth (age 21) I was at best an 8 on the 1-10 scale. As I age, this number slides ever downward, along with my jowls and my breasts. I would not have it any other way. One of the worst examples of nasty behavior I saw in my younger years was when a married woman in my circle made a rather public pass at a single man who was somewhat of an It Boy in our small pond of locals. She openly threw herself at the It Boy with her husband forced to watch. Luckily (?) for her husband, she was not much to look at and the It Boy took no interest. Perhaps that was the plan all along -- to some degree her outburst seemed like it was designed to fail. I have never understood why she dragged her husband into it by making her fantasies known.

Most people have unrealistic expectations -- that is the human condition. My argument is that it is worse in our era than in previous ones. Plenty of women are groomed to believe they can do it all; that would be me. Somewhere, doing it all gets confused with being provided for by a man, and I have battled that divide many times. I define etheric labor as any kind of work that improves the etheric plane, usually by drawing and transmuting energy from the surrounding astral and physical planes. Women do most of the indoor etheric labor in any given home and have been expected to do this form of labor since the beginning of the human race. Cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping are etheric labor. Teaching, feeding, and nurturing children is etheric labor. Traditionally male forms of etheric labor include farm work, mowing the lawn, routing out the pipes, and building. Men do etheric labor as well, but traditionally, men are expected to do the heavy lifting, often in the most literal sense.

Sigh, Go Get My Purse

The traditional marriage or co-habitation agreement tacitly states that the man will bring in the lion's share of the money and that the woman will take on most of the inside etheric labor. In Asian cultures, she usually controls the money the man brings in and is given the duty of being the house's accountant along with its maid, chef, and tutor. Nowadays, this arrangement has been thrown out with the bathwater. Women are often forced to bring in most if not all of the money, donating whatever they can make to a spendthrift man who wastes it far faster than she can make it. That is where the "Sigh, go get my purse" meme comes from: the dependent, lazy wastrel of a man who banks upon his limited sexual appeal and his woman's good nature in order to subsist a little longer as a financial parasite.

If there is an exact meme that encapsulates the female equivalent of Go Get My Purse, I have yet to find it and would appreciate your suggestions. The opposite pole of Go Get My Purse is an unemployed, spendthrift woman who does little to no etheric labor while expecting to be pampered and coddled with restaurant food, a beautiful and spacious home, and a handsome husband who is completely faithful and enslaved to her despite her own lack of effort. The advent of cheap petroleum seems to make this lifestyle possible if you don't look underneath the hood. This toxic feminine ideal is what drives so-called romance novels like 50 Shades of Grey.

Ugh, 50 Shades of Here We Go

True confessions: I have not read 50 Shades of Grey or its sequels in their entirety. I have not seen any of the films. I am going to come off as a major snob here: they were too insulting to my intelligence to read or watch. Keep in mind I will read and watch just about anything and that one of my favorite movies of all time is Spaceballs and I have read The Nanny Diaries several times. I don't hate 50 Shades of Grey because it is lowbrow or bourgeois. I hate it because it insults my intelligence.

When I wrote my own spoof of 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight, Shadeylight: Vella the Vegan Vampire in 2015, I found that I could not bear to read the source material (the third sequel to 50 Shades was published in 2012) for reasons mentioned earlier. Ditto for the Twilight sequels. Instead of reading them, I read reviews and went on bizarre flights of fancy that resulted in a very strange book indeed. In effect, the stereotypes of women and men in 50 Shades made me so angry, I decided it was easier to attempt to be funny when dealing with them.

There is a film called Book Club from 2018 that is little more than a flimsy marketing vehicle to sell the 50 Shades of Grey series. The "plot" of the film depicts four aging harridans -- a lineup of the usual actresses playing themselves: Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candace Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen -- who read the 50 Shades series on a lark and find that it transforms their lives and relationships. According to the creators of Book Club, we older women should be obsessed with straight male peen. Just as we are coming into our own, throwing off the yoke of reproduction, and entering into an era when we must forge our identities outside of being objects of desire, Book Club attempts to throw us right back into the "YOU MUST BE PRETTY AND SEXUALLY APPEALING TO MEN IN ORDER TO BE FULFILLED" cauldron. No thanks. Spoiler alert: all of the characters either end up happily paired off with an ideal dude or in hot pursuit of one. Second spoiler alert: if you are a man who has the misfortune to watch Book Club, expect some utterly ridiculous caricatures of maleness such as rich, hair-plugged men being hot to trot for old 70-something harpies for no apparent reason.

The Cliques, the God-Forsaken Cliques

We women are supposed to band together and be friendly. For me, this has always been a tall order. At age four, I distinctly remember walking to the back of the bus that took me to a fancy pre-school and being stonewalled by a pair of girls who told me I could not sit back there. I sat up in the front of the bus, alone and near the bus driver. The same women most likely became mothers themselves and would have been outraged if their children were treated the way they treated me at age 4 -- karma is funny like that, isn't it?

If it weren't for the legions of women who decided to wear masks and get experimental vaccines, we would not have had the Coronapocalypse shut downs that decimated the middle class and ushered in the era of deadly MRNA quaxxines. Women are also responsible for the sickening infiltration of public schools by outright groomers who wear badges of faux-oppression and who seek access to children for reasons far outside enlightenment. Women were the protective wall that stood between all of these forces and the sanctity of the home, and they let the demons in while spreading their legs and offering up their kids.

In order not to feel as bad about the obvious immorality of kowtowing to the Latest Thing, they threaten anyone with a spine with removal and shunning from the clique. In their world where Slavery is Freedom and Weakness is Strength, it's far easier to try to punish a dissenter than to face their own evilness and lack of character in the mirror.

Women have roles to play outside the traditional, of course, and I'm all there for the Georges Sands and the K.D. Langs. I myself am not the traditional wife with children; I have no children by choice and I am the primary breadwinner of my humble homestead. That said, many of us women need to grow hell up and figure out what we are going to do with our short lives. I suppose I had better go first.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kimberlysteele

Thank you Derpherder. I think the healthiest thing would be for Western society to destigmatize teenage pregnancy. The issue underneath all of the rest of these issues is that women are having children when they are much too old. This is the real reason boys have become so feminized and lacking in manly characteristics: literal feminization at the genetic level. Add a cocktail of other feminizers such as pollutants and plastic chemicals permeating everything we eat, drink, or breathe and you end up with cucks. And now with the addition of MRNA quaxxines, it's anybody's guess if any female human of childbearing age will be able to reliably get pregnant in the next 50 years. The antinatalists may be cheering at the prospect, but they only do so because they are stupid and have not thought things through.

From:

methylethyl

"destigmatize teenage pregnancy"

Amen.

FWIW, if we could destigmatize teen marriage while we're at it, that'd probably help, too ;)... and provide more community support for young families where a parent is still doing college or vocational training to be able to support his or her own family. But also, bring back the old Catholic family system: that family with 9 kids? The youngest kid or two are just as likely to be grandkids. I mean, after you've had seven already, it's no big deal to slot in another one, when your teenager gets knocked up. Wasn't even a huge shameful secret-- just how things were done.

At the same time, we should make it easier for consenting adults to get sterilized. Some people don't want kids, and we shouldn't put obstacles in their way. Might even be good to offer the surgery free at the public expense. Will some of them regret it? Absolutely. At the same time, The women I know who didn't want kids while young, but had second thoughts as they approached menopause still single... universally were right in their first assessment. They would not have been good parents. Hormones giving you second thoughts at forty doesn't change that, and you can still be a totally awesome auntie, uncle, foster parent, mentor, etc. without ever having kids of your own. There used to be lots more of those around, and a lot of kids with subpar bio-parents got a second shot at a good life because of them.

From: (Anonymous)

Yes, yes, this. I've been thinking about this from another angle: education. If the education system is set up like what we consider "traditional" these days (classes that happen on a fixed schedule in a fixed sequence), then teenage parenthood does derail your progress. If your education system is along the lines of, say, the Sudbury model (self directed, no curriculum) then the idea of pregnancy derailing things is almost laughable -- a student would take a break, then pick things up again wherever they wanted.

Having kids when our bodies are most primed to do so and have the most energy makes more sense. Are a pair of parents in their mid teens going to be mature enough to handle parenthood? Maybe not totally, but in a society where that's the norm the grandparents would be in their early thirties and the great-grandparents in their mid/late forties -- plenty of extra help for the new parents!

From: (Anonymous)

"Having kids when our bodies are most primed to do so and have the most energy makes more sense. Are a pair of parents in their mid teens going to be mature enough to handle parenthood? Maybe not totally, but in a society where that's the norm the grandparents would be in their early thirties and the great-grandparents in their mid/late forties -- plenty of extra help for the new parents!"

Keep in mind as well though that in many societies it's normal for men to be five years, or even more, older than their spouses. So your 15 year old, in a more normal society, might be paired off with a 20 year old man, who is going to be more mature than another 15 year old would be.

Add to this that in our society most teenagers are far more childlike than in most others, and I think you're overestimating the challenges that people in a healthier, saner society face when having children at a younger age than we think of as normal.

From:

kimberlysteele

Young women become monsters of vanity when they are not expected to marry and bear children as a normal life choice in their teens. Unfortunately, girls who become teenage mothers these days rue the day they got pregnant because all the other girls appear to have more fun, plus there is the aforementioned stigma put on having children during a biologically-appropriate age.

From: (Anonymous)

I don't think that teenage pregnancy is a great idea from a medical perspective, although there were certainly societies and cultures that practiced it. It might be a good idea to marry in your late teens and have a family in your early twenties.

From:

methylethyl

Shoot, even *with* a fairly regimented education model, it can be done... if we could just ditch the small-homes, small-families atomization of everything. If you're a single mom at 17 right now, yeah, you've just chopped of your prospects in a huge way. If you marry your 18yo boyfriend and become a married mom, *both* of you have just chopped off your prospects in a huge way. It's a disaster.

Meanwhile, among friends in VN, get knocked up, marry your 18yo boyfriend, and then what happens is... you move into your parents' or inlaws' house, they help with the kid while one or both of you gets a job, starts a business, or finishes school, and when you're financially stable and have basically completed an apprenticeship in how to run a household, you have two options: you can, with the help of extended family, move out and have your own household, OR the grandparents can step back, you take charge of the daily running of the household while they assume a less-intense support role, and you commit to taking care of them in their old age (obviously in a family with multiple children, only one of them can do the stay-and-care-for-aging-parents thing, and that usually falls to the youngest daughter).

It is also not uncommon to see a young newly-married couple move to the city for job opportunities, and when their first child or two are weaned... they are sent back to live with their grandparents in the countryside for months at a time, because it's considered healthier than the city. This frees up the parents to get careers or businesses established, and the kids come back when they're school-aged. This seems wrenching to me, but... also seems to work.

They have their own versions of dysfunction-- when a couple divorces, the father usually abandons the children right away... and then the mother abandons them to their grandparents or other relatives if and when she remarries. It is expected that a new husband will not raise another man's children. No step-parents. For a widow or divorcee with young children, an American man is a *catch*, because he assumes that the kids are part of the deal-- he can't imagine a world in which he would force a woman to ditch her kids in order to marry him.

So... lots of other ways to do things. Better ways, worse ways. Different ways. It'd be really nice if we could kill the idea that "you'll ruin your life" if you have kids before age 30, or before you've got a career, a mortgage, and a retirement fund. That's clearly one of the dysfunctional models.

From:

causticus

So many good points. In a supportive, tight-knit extended family environment, teenage pregnancy is most certainly not the end of the world.

I think the big issue today is that our society is totally batshale insane when it comes to teenagers; the insanity is especially pronounced among the denizens of the countless McMansion/McHouse pods littering America's lanscape. Suburbia + both parents working all day are the major culprits; their teenage children are an afterthought and shuffled off to day prisons for 7+ hours a day. The teens of suburbia are miserable, infantilized inmates until that day they get their drives license.

In any other age/era and civilization, the average 15 year old was probably at least 3x more mature and life-experienced than the average 30 year old today in the West. The average 14 year old boy of 400 years ago was probably already into the 1st year of a trade apprentice, or he already knew how to manage the family farm.

Most "education" today past the 8th grade is utterly useless for anyone who isn't naturally fit to go into an intellectually-demanding occupation. In the old days, teenage years was the time to start developing practical job skills or learn household/farm management.

From:

kimberlysteele

I felt thrown away as a teen. Nowhere to be, nobody to talk to. I was an annoyance to all except for the old pervert who wanted to get down my pants.

From: (Anonymous)

I've noticed that some teenagers seem to like being treated as if they were still a ten year old, others resent it, but I can't help but think the entire dynamic is incredibly unhealthy....

From:

mr_nobody1967

Also, USAmerican food is bad for the human body in the way that the food of practically every other country in the world is not. It's really no wonder that the USA is such a collection of health disaster-cases.

BTW, how do you like my new icon? It's supposed to represent my reaction to the current state of the astral plane!

Edited Date: 2023-05-20 12:46 pm (UTC)

From:

kimberlysteele

Yes, that is true. Though other countries, especially Britain, are catching up to the US where garbage food is concerned. In Cuba, supposedly there is no food labeled "organic" because it's all technically organic. Must be nice. Organic food is often better tasting and more nutritionally potent per bite -- that's the etheric plane at work.

LOL, your icon seems like an appropriate summation of the collective astral at the moment.

From:

mr_nobody1967

I would also venture a guess that Canada, by virtue of being so close to the USA culturally and geographically and having trade agreements with the USA such as NAFTA, probably gets a fair amount of its commercial food-stuffs from the USA.