Nowadays, the rank growth of patriarchy and misogyny springs back up cloaked in the respectability of supposed ‘outside the box’ thinking. The website Unherd describes its mission as:
‘…to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.’
I don’t know about the rest of the articles that are posted on this site, but in ‘Why Liberal Feminists don’t care’ Mary Harrington is not platforming ‘unherd’ ideas. This stuff is as old as humanity, justified inthe ancient myth that developed variously as the stories of Pandora and Eve. Humans needed to have someone to blame when things went wrong, and women have aye been one of the preferred targets. Throughout history women have been denied education; the right to own property; the right to control their fertility; and even the right to bring up their own children due to their supposed association with evil. As societal norms have changed, so myths have adapted to fit each new scenario.
Harrington describes some of the things that are wrong in today’s society and I have no argument with her expressed concerns about care of the elderly, the young and vulnerable. I have taken a considerable share in that care in spite of working full time. I did so in the teeth of the discrimination against women in the academy, the forum and the market place that was so prevalent in my early years. And I’m proud to say that I know many feminist men who have done likewise, defying their heavily gendered role - for just as gender roles are a prison for women, they can also incarcerate men.
Yes, it is a scandal that care is so often outsourced. Yes, it is shameful that those who provide outsourced care are largely women and underpaid. (Harrington ignores the other factors at play here, e.g. greater longevity leading to many more years of disability.) But the real scandal is that in spite of the long hard fight to end discrimination, men are still largely unwilling to take their share of care. To put it as crudely as Harrington does, when are all men going to take their share of wiping bottoms? Maybe when outsourced care is properly paid?
I gave up trying to eradicate couch grass by weeding years ago. I found it much more successful to outplant it, to smother it with healthy, beneficial and profitable plants. It’s rare now, but just sometimes I see it pop up, like this article, and have to get down and dirty to track it back to its source.