The World We Were Supposed to Want

[kimberlysteele]

The scene: a civilized neighborhood Christmas party in an upper-middle class home in the Midwestern US. The year: 1987. I distinctly remember one of the older neighborhood kids tell me his family was moving. Since his family's home was a perfectly adequate, roomy 4 bedroom, I asked why his family was moving away. His answer was because they "needed" a bigger home. Every 5-10 years they moved into a larger home after having enlarged whatever home they occupied. Their goal was ever-increasing real estate profits from ever-larger homes in a game that (for some people) does not end until they die and ostensibly pass the game pieces and board down to their children and grandchildren.

It Takes a Narrative

I often wonder how many memes it will take to grok the materialism of Millennials, the generation that claims to have rejected Boomer capitalism. Millennials often believe they are opting out of capitalism when the harsher truth is they've been cast out of elite circles and now lurk on the outsides, looking in. There is no opting out of capitalism -- though there are plenty of self-styled wokesters who preach about it while flipping their Thai hair weaves, eating salads of mostly store-bought ingredients off of Anthropologie plates, and broadcasting on TikTok. Nevertheless, the Millennial "I am a scrappy communist because I say I am" is a better narrative than the Office of Progress narrative, which is the idea that all functioning adults should be happy rotating from home cubicle to office cubicle, watching screens that tell them how to live at every opportunity while hopped up on injectable chemical concoctions.

Had my sex drive never asserted itself, I would have liked to have kept the trajectory I designed for myself at age 9: to work in an office, come home to a book-filled condominium on the second floor of a building in the town where I grew up, and to live my childless life between books, cats, and occasional solitary dinners outside my home with friends or family. I knew the exact place where I wanted to live. It was small consolation to realize I could not have afforded that condominium as a single spinster even if I had a much more lucrative job: the price of real estate was already soaring when I was in my teens and by the time I was in my late 20s, nobody with an income south of 60K could afford to live anywhere near my hometown in any sort of single family residence. By the time I was 25, it became perfectly apparent that if I wanted a condominium in such a nice place, I would have to marry a man in order for him to buy it for me, and that would have defeated the point as the whole fantasy was a lonely and solo one.

I flirted for a while with corporate jobs straight out of college. The pay I received was barely more than the babysitting gigs I had at age 14; it was laughable and pathetic. I wasn't willing to work my way up that degrading chain by trading all of my youthful energy for something that felt like a living hell. Plus the number of people able to benefit from the living hell was shrinking in the 1990s and is a great deal more diminutive now.

I Want You to Want Me

We are all supposed to want the elite Office of Progress lifestyle. You know the one: it involves driving the latest electric car, living in ever-larger homes, posting on social media, and drinking at least one Starbucks beverage a day. We are not supposed to think about how stupid it is to drive a car that is probably using electricity that originates from coal. Despite lip service given to greenwashing holidays like Earth Day, we are not supposed to consider the wastefulness of living in a big, mostly empty McMansion. As for social media, anyone who turns it off because it is boring or (GASP) does not have any presence at all on Insta, FB, Twitter, YT, etc. is considered a freak or an unfortunate. Those who reject Starbucks out of hand are just weird -- unwillingness to shell out six or more dollars for a mediocre calorie bomb of a drink is trés 1978, and not in a good way.

School

The point of public schooling in the 21st century is to neuter boys, often literally via the trans push, and condition the girls to work outside the home in the good old Office of Progress. My childhood was unhappy for one main reason: I did not sleep properly. Why could I not sleep properly despite having stable parents with no shortage of money? I was busy being conditioned to sit quietly in a desk dictating and absorbing elaborate orders. When I did not get along with other order-followers (who I was always being pitted against in academic and popularity contests) I was punished by ostracism. To think I could have been home actually learning for all those wasted years! 95% of my adult academic knowledge came from the 5% of free time when I could think unhindered on adequate sleep, far away from school. For instance, I learned most of what I know about plants from my mom and the books I used to identify common weeds from ages 13-19 during summers in Michigan. Cooking? That was learned from my mom and library books; the single Home Ec class I took in junior high was a farce. As far as English, the best way of getting me not to read a book is to put a deadline on it and mar it with a quiz or a test. Not that I was in any mood to learn while in school: I was so starved on every plane except the physical one, I wanted to kill myself. When etheric poverty is in full sway in the form of an ugly box one must sit in with other teenagers while being lectured by older inmates, there is nothing to improve the astral shield and hence nothing standing between the seedy lower astral and the developing mental sheath.

A Woman's Place is in the Home

If today's "liberated" woman was truly happy with working outside the home as a regular thing, we would not have seen so much outright sabotage designed to prolong the Panicdemic and to continue Zoom work-from-home schemes that are still going on to this day. The reason women want to stay home, including this woman, is because it is the magical formula of the woman to secure the homestead. Men were designed to hunt, to go to war, and to defend. Women were designed to make the home into a healing place where babies can grow into healthy adults and to give men a place worth defending. Without the healing influence of the home, we all feel more raw, vulnerable, exposed, and beaten by forces that are always getting at us. School is vile because it trains women to force themselves into the role of Atlas: winning bread outside the home and then having the double and triple roles of having the babies it is fed to and making it into sandwiches so everyone can have lunch. Anyone who thinks a woman can do all of these things and do them well is either smoking the strong stuff or has access to Supermom.

The consequences we all live down are all around us. Tired women who have nothing left after having to work all day end up with feral kids being raised by social media, or their husbands leave them because marriage is hard and it's twice as hard when there is nobody competent at home who can enchant the home into a protective symphony of astral, etheric, and physical shapes. Ugly environments of convenience attempt to replace craftsmanship and care, and though I am thankful for their gifts, I am also resentful that everything has to be so ugly and ignorant of etheric ebb and flow. I myself am an example of classic bad faith, caught between worlds while laboring outside the home and always schepping to make ends meet. I'm a long, long way from Buddha, renouncing my niceties and creature comforts to contemplate trees.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

All of my grandparents were solidly middle-class and raising kids in the 50s. One grandmother worked for the sheriff's office, and the other grandmother was a homemaker... but only because she had crippling arthritis and could not work (she'd worked previously as a secretary, to support herself and my young uncle, after her first husband died). She felt lousy about it, too, because all her peers had jobs, and she felt like she should be contributing to the household. Sort of to make up for it, she wound up being the driver for the whole neighborhood's worth of kids-- she had a car and she was available and by golly she was going to make herself useful somehow. One of her sisters had a lifelong career with Bell telephone as a regional manager, having worked her way up from switchboard operator-- that job outlasted both her marriages. Another sister ran a deli with her husband for many years, and a third retired from a long career with a department store, where she made custom drapes (husband ditched her with 2 small kids to support). People now have weird ideas about what the 50s were actually like for women-- maybe it depended on where you lived, but looking at people I know, I get the impression that the two-parent nuclear family with a working husband and SAHM is more the exception than the rule.

The generation of women before that... weren't exactly slouches either. Just off the top of my head, in my great-grands' generation: two aunties who owned and ran an ice-cream parlor, one who played the organ for both the church, and for silent movies, one who ran a small hotel, one who was in charge of payroll at a military base, one career nutritionist, and one too busy running a rural homestead to have a paying job (don't ever tell a farmwife she "doesn't work"!).

So where *did* that housewife stereotype come from, exactly?

[kimberlysteele]

How odd -- my mom and my aunt both worked for Ma Bell back in the day and my mom was a very well-liked switchboard operator.

I find it interesting that women who stay home or run cottage industries (home-based businesses) are still seen as lazy because they did not much else outside of raising children. As if keeping a home and raising children into adulthood wasn't hard work...

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the idea that being at home means you're doing nothing, or picturesquely chirping around your house in lipstick and pearls while vacuuming... is a bit of a mystery. Probably a product of appliance advertising.

Trying to keep up with the household inertia and chaos, while homeschooling (or even with just little kids not at daycare)... People seriously do not realize how much harder that job is when you are never at the house *without* the kids. It's shoveling snow in a blizzard. I *wish* I could run a cottage industry, and my hat's off to ladies who manage it.

[kimberlysteele]

That's why it's so grotesque that childcare workers are paid so little, and for that matter, home nurse aides. Basically the childcare worker or home nurse aide is expected to do all the tasks that should either fall to the mother or to the adult child who looks after his elderly/disabled relative/parent. Etheric labor is taken for granted and undervalued at every turn.

[methylethyl]

It's worse than that, though. Expecting someone who has no emotional or future investment in those children, to do all the thankless work of cleaning up after them, wiping butts and noses, etc. *and* paying them poorly for it... does not attract quality labor, and frankly invites abuse. The occasional reports of ill-treatment by daycare workers are not surprising-- what's surprising is that you're not hearing about it every day. I spent a lot of time in before- and after-school care, and remember the ladies in charge of that as very brittle and grumpy... and is that any wonder? Fortunately, they were responsible and did their jobs, and nobody got hurt. But I think that was a pretty normal daycare environment: loud, chaotic, and overseen by tired women who'd had about enough of small children. Even where it isn't abusive, that's not exactly healthy for anybody involved.

Total polar opposite of when I'd go spend a month with my grandma in the summers. She was old and couldn't keep up, but she liked me, wasn't cranky, left me largely to my own devices (the gift of quiet and boredom!), and would show me how to do stuff if I asked-- she taught me to crochet, embroider, read a pattern, use a sewing machine, face a collar, hem a skirt, make paper dolls, cut snowflakes... all the cool stuff my mom didn't have time for. She was a lousy cook, but in all other respects, I think she had the "etheric work" thing nailed down. The house was always pleasant.