“Why I Left Feminism.” She recounts her erroneous thinking: “I was also under the impression that children would ‘get in my way,’ and therefore I must achieve my career goals first and foremost,” when it turns out children are the point. She “Realized Men and Women Have Different Interests,” on average.
An obsession with independence and freedom is poisonous to women… and to men. Something to be aware of, given the over-prioritization of independence among some guys I read and some readers of this work.
It’s pretty rare to read something this graceful. Much of what passes for feminist “thought” online reads like cope.
The Red Quest 
Rachel Bock wrote a wise and sad piece there.
She has the same issue in life that I’ve had. There are people who are loud, insistent, relentless, as they told her that they should be listened to. Their advice must be followed perfectly. The advice seemed to be everywhere. The advice seemed to be authoritative. The advice seemed to be in our best interest.
Why must we listen to the advice givers? Because they have The One Right Truth for how everyone should live.
So one listens to them and follows them.
Only to find that following their advice is not the perfect guide to one’s happiest most succcessful life.
Actually, it leads to unhappiness, missed opportunities, crushing regrets.
And unlike the victims of Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes, there is no recourse for the victim of the fraudulent lies. If we invest our LIVES, rather than just our Money, in the scams of liars, well that’s just our own damn fault for not getting it right.
It was a somewhat different collection of lies told to me, than the ones that sidetracked Rachel Bock from her happiest life. But they led to mistakes I regret as much as Rachel Bock does. Almost all the mistakes not from doing bad things, but from not doing what I could have done to live my best life and succeed in my own way. I can empathize with her.
Biology, not any conspiracy of men, makes women best able to have children, and to raise small children, when they are fairly young – before early 30’s.
There is nothing from biology or anywhere else that says a woman can’t do well to earn a doctorate, and succeed at a science career, in her 30’s and older.
The extremely obvious solution is for her to become a mother in her 20’s, a graduate student in late 20’s to early 30’s once her kids are a few years old. Then to have a great science career. Sure, starting a few years later. But without interruption for maternity leave or running home to take care of the kids.
And starting a few added years smarter, too.
I don’t know this for sure, but I imagine that a great biology paper can be published just as well if the author is 40 rather than 30.
Revising this after I read the additional article I posted below, it looks like perhaps women really CAN’T have it all. There is a fundamental choice to be made by women: unencumbered by children in order to climb the career ladder, or a great Mom who might not be able to climb through the ranks all the way to the top. Kind of like the choice men have to make. Steve Jobs and Phil Collins reached the very top of their careers. They were not finalists for Father of the Year.
Someone says, here is YOUR ladder of success, now climb for me! Climb for all of us, and for What’s Right, because I represent All Of Us, and I represent What’s Right!
There’s one thing more useless, they shreik, than anything else in your life choices. That one thing is your own ideas and desires, if they would keep you from climbing this ladder for me!
Just because someone says that, doesn’t mean it’s true for us. For some people, it takes decades and a lot of sadness to realize that.
The question is, who benefits from preventing very smart, focused, diligent women like Rachel Bock from becoming a mother, like she would have really enjoyed?
This is not about getting biologists into the lab a few years earlier. This is about keeping potential mothers from becoming mothers, EVER.
Qui bono?
Why did Rachel Bock get the message from seemingly everyone and everywhere, that the way to “have it all” was to give up getting to have the most important part to her?
Another thoughtful essay from a woman who bought into the entire “lean in” package deal
From the author of this essay, Katherine Goldstein:
“But not only did my Lean In devotion not prepare me for the challenges I faced in the coming years as a new mom, its rose-colored doctrine also supplied me with plenty of damaging illusions..
It became clear to me that nobody has this whole working mom thing figured out, and it wasn’t because we weren’t leaning in enough.
I now believe the greatest lie of Lean In is its underlying message that most companies and bosses are ultimately benevolent, that hard work is rewarded, that if women shed the straitjacket of self-doubt, a meritocratic world awaits us. My own life, and my research and reporting, along with interacting with hundreds of mothers in the past two years, has convinced me this is untrue.”
But then, why would the CEO of a multi billion dollar company want workers who have no family life outside of work?
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I think there are some serious, persistent ideological problems in the entire education industry, particularly around sex and feminism, and those problems are unlikely to be resolved any time soon. Some people are noticing them, and that kind of thing helped Youngkin win in Virginia, for example. If you find Marc Andreessen’s comments on education startups as x-wings flying against the Death Star that is the current system, https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-the-death-star, you’ll see other causes for hope. The existing system is set up to encourage women to take out debt for school, to work for big corporations, and to eventually become spinsters, or work like dogs to afford artificially scarce resources. Instead of abundance, we’re rationing resources, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/scarcity-crisis-college-housing-health-care/621221/
I’ve also believed some of the education system lies, like the fairy tale about how anyone who gets a college degree is set for a good paying job. “Debt for education is ‘good debt.'” Hahahaha, the baby boomers, they sure are jokers. Hahaha.
Wait, wait… who is the joke on…? Is the joke on… me?
If you want to really really know what’s going on, it’s that pretty much every one under age 50, is busy paying for the baby boomers’s retirement, https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ All those social security + medicare special taxes… they’re for boomers.
Restricting housing to pay for boomers seems like a dumb social + policy choice to me. But, they have the votes.
The guys who opt out of this whole madness are the “enjoy the decline” guys. Or the ones who make so much working for tech + finance cos that they can opt out. I’m not an “opt out” guy… but I get the appeal, at times… one must hope Atlas doesn’t shrug…
Women mostly don’t stop to ask themselves why everything costs so damn much.
For myself, I start out writing about sex + how to get laid, turns out in the process I’m also writing about the entire organization of society. The macro feeds into the micro and vice-versa. The great chain of being exists.
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Their cope: BS-ing an appearance of strength as they fail continually, then blame someone else as they wait for their ill actions to produce.
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It’s good to see more people going public with the idea that men and women inherent different imperatives. A nice set of studies that explain these differences in detail, from child development to adulthood, is presented in The Female Brain: https://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767920104
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