I agree that it's all about making conscious decisions.
An example: women wearing make-up and shaving their legs bugs me. It's not something I'm expected to do to look good and the painted face and hairless legs seem like such weird, arbitrary standards of attractiveness that I could never get over the absurdity of people feeling like they have to do all that before feeling presentable or, worse, normal.
The fact that Sequoia didn't do any of these things was one of the things that attracted me to her. But over the course of our relationship she decided that she actually liked to do these things because they... well, I never quite got that part; maybe it put her in touch with some cultural thing I'll never grok, or maybe it just made her happy for some other reason. Regardless, at first I gave her crap over it, but in time I realized that since she wasn't just unthinkingly going with the societal norm, but was making a thoughtful decision about what she wanted, it would be pretty hypocritical of me to argue against it with a line about how she should be being herself.
In other words, were you ever with a man who expected you to do the housewife thing, I'd suggest you worry. But if it's something that makes you thoughtfully happy, then forgoing it in the name of thoughtlessly following yet another school of "how women should be" isn't so different from Donna Reed as I see it. And that's not to mention that the lack of a stay-at-home parent is as much due to economics as social changes, I think. If the couple can afford it, it makes a lot of sense and is a role I've considered for myself in the past.
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Date: 2008-12-20 06:10 pm (UTC)An example: women wearing make-up and shaving their legs bugs me. It's not something I'm expected to do to look good and the painted face and hairless legs seem like such weird, arbitrary standards of attractiveness that I could never get over the absurdity of people feeling like they have to do all that before feeling presentable or, worse, normal.
The fact that Sequoia didn't do any of these things was one of the things that attracted me to her. But over the course of our relationship she decided that she actually liked to do these things because they... well, I never quite got that part; maybe it put her in touch with some cultural thing I'll never grok, or maybe it just made her happy for some other reason. Regardless, at first I gave her crap over it, but in time I realized that since she wasn't just unthinkingly going with the societal norm, but was making a thoughtful decision about what she wanted, it would be pretty hypocritical of me to argue against it with a line about how she should be being herself.
In other words, were you ever with a man who expected you to do the housewife thing, I'd suggest you worry. But if it's something that makes you thoughtfully happy, then forgoing it in the name of thoughtlessly following yet another school of "how women should be" isn't so different from Donna Reed as I see it. And that's not to mention that the lack of a stay-at-home parent is as much due to economics as social changes, I think. If the couple can afford it, it makes a lot of sense and is a role I've considered for myself in the past.