Women in Trouble

[kimberlysteele]

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.

Comments

Re: Sadness

[(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.