So I read this article recently. It was intersting, and I have to say that most of it, I found, to be a bit too conservative. However, there was one paragraph that stuck out, and it has pretty much been bothering me since:
"And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and that marriage itself is "sexist" and "patriarchal." So, to those of you women who have career success and didn't get married, we sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren't as fulfilling as we promised."
Now most of you are probably thinking I take offense at this statement. Au contraire! Quite the opposite! I believe this sums up a fear I have, even more so now, as I attempt to take on getting into a PhD program.
Just some food for thought...chew on that for a bit.
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5 comments:
Tank you, baby boomers.
I believe that beeing an active woman can be mixed with being a mother. The truth is that an active woman will want more from life that being an lovely spouse and a good mother.
I also believe that this traditional point of view, from which a respectable woman have to get married soon and start producing children ASAP is what makes the inequalities between males and females here in France (what about the US?). Of course these inequalities tend to fade away today, and active women are admired, as long as they plan to mixe work with family life and better: think about exchanging professional life for family life.
It is a difficult balance to attain, most definitely. Here in the U.S. I feel that it is even more complicated when you have cuts in programs (federal, but also at the workplace) that are aimed to help working mothers, such as maternity care or even daycare services.
To comment on other parts of the article, I really was irked at this notion that we are owed an apology, as if none of these elements in society existed before. I do believe all these things were there, the awareness that they existed just was not there.
thank you for your comment!
Let's come back to the article.
I have just read the quotation, and did not pay attention to the article itself. I was right. It is awful. So awful that I think it is a piece of sarcasme, of cliché we have got to fight. To me it is not conservative, it is anti-conservative. The writer can't be serious.
What is the most troubling is the notion of heterosexual AIDS. I knew two kinds of AIDS viruses : The one human AIDS (HIV) and the "monkey AIDS". I did not know about a special kind of virus targeting heterosexual humans only.
In order to protect young people from STD:s, you American teach them how to put a condom on a banana. Very clever, cause at least young men will surely understand the metaphor and won't put it on their head. What's wrong with it? Maybe a cucumber would be more appropriate? I don't know, my mother explained me without wasting food, we have no sexual education courses in France.
It appears the article apologies to young american Ladies, because they don't follow blindly the ways of their ancestors. Today, of course Ladies go to work, we need them there. We need them there so much that [even in American, western country believed to offer a little social protection] they have the possibility to have a child and return to work ASAP. I don't think this is only to fight against inequalities between women and men, it is an economic reality. Women are producing, and buying things with there paycheck. Here in France, it would be financely hard for me to have girl friend [let say a wife, for conservative people] who does not work.
So baby boomers don't owe us an apology. They made the world better for us to live in.
Thank you for commenting my comments
Again, thank you for your interesting comments!!
The problem here is that there is a stigma associated with all of these things in society: homosexuality, sex education, etc. Even as far as sex education goes, the "banana and the condom" thing are rarely taught (I think it's just a visual for the movies and tv). The Bush Administration has mandated that funding will go to "abstinence only" sex education (yes, let's teach our kids about SAFE sex by telling them that the only way is to NOT have sex). And of course, as you pointed out with your mom, parents teaching their kids about these things are so important. Unfortunately, there are too many parents not being mature enough to "be a parent" and tell kids the realities of the world.
Many of the things that they discussed in the article, i too felt made the world much better for our generation, rather than worse.
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