RE: Is Femin-ism The Downfall Of Femininity?

You really are damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damned for everything in between.

Every single meticulous choice becomes something to examine, and every single desire becomes something to justify.

Which is difficult for many women who don't understand the politics of it either, or how much of their life is genuinely their free choice. I baulk at #tradwifes, for example - how could one possibly have their personal freedoms so curtailed? To choose against education, to choose indentured slavery? I also baulk at those women who say that they hate feminists, when feminism - or whatever we're calling it - has been fighting so hard for so many years for the rights of women to be self determining. That modern women don't even understand their own goddamn priviledge.

And yes, of course, to be happy in a role that society sets for you is happiness indeed - perhaps the grandmother with six children under three was happy, but perhaps because she didn't know or realise what she could be, or even if she did have the imagination, gave up because it was pointless trying under the weight of that much oppression.

Oh how feminists despise and spite over the fact that she happier than you.

I dont think feminists despise this - in fact, I think it's quite hard a hard thing to measure. I always wonder if, given a time machine, women would lead their lives differently, against social expectation. Some would choose the same. Some would run a mile and lead very different lives indeed.

It means that the happiness of the woman who chose that life cannot simply be dismissed because her choice makes an ideology uncomfortable.

Indeed. Sometimes I've been uncomfortable about my own life - I fought hard for financial independence, to do things a man would do - to play sport, to travel, to work a good career for good money for financial indepence, to do all of this as a single mother and defy the social expectations placed upon me to find a father for my son, a good male role model, as if the absence of one would make their lives lesser somehow - and then, to marry and to have a set of circumstances lead me to the point where my husband is the primary breadwinner and I'm at home cooking dinner - ouch. But I'll never take the bins out, which suits me fine... And if I could, I would.

I still will never have as much superannuation (Australian pension, self funded, salary sacrificed) as a man my age though, which is crazy, because of taking time to be a mother. And as an older woman now, I am less employable than a man who is not older, but 'experienced' than a woman who is 'past it' or worse 'menopausal' - and much less feminine, because she is pretty much crone/hag now and lacks social legitimacy...as if she ever really had it, apart from that brief time where her breasts were perky... what is one to do?