why are men the boss

[Sunny C.]

Hi MW!

I just want to say first that you're one of the most interesting people I've met, here or anywhere. I'm so glad you're here.

The unfortunate reality for a lot of people, myself included, is that it takes two wages earners to live. My wife and I have evolved a complicated arrangement so that we can minimize the amount of time our girls have to spend at the sitter's. I work M-F, she works Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I'm frankly a bit envious of the time she gets to spend with the kids, and she could use a little more time away from them. We make it work, though. I could take side work and make a lot more, but I don't want to miss out on being there for my family. I don't want to work myself to death, ostensibly for them, and then have them say "you were never there for us."

As far as who's the boss I don't flippin' care. I do get tired of stupid men jokes. It's hard work being a good father and husband and trying to make something for your family.

[Muslimwoman]

Originally Posted by Sunny C.

I just want to say first that you're one of the most interesting people I've met, here or anywhere. I'm so glad you're here.

Hi Sunny

What an extremely kind thing to say, thank you. I tend to just think of myself as a bit battered around the edges but well travelled, like an old suitcase. Alhamdolillah I have had a very interesting and varied life, with the usual ups and downs.

Originally Posted by Sunny C.

The unfortunate reality for a lot of people, myself included, is that it takes two wages earners to live.

May I ask you a question, I don't want to pry into your personal life but would be interested to know, if you don't mind telling me, whether you and your wife need to work to pay for the basics or to pay for the lifestyle you have chosen? I am not trying to judge either choice, just to see if my observations of western living are correct. I accept that everyone has different circumstances and so what works for one doesn't work for another. However, before I left the west I was astonished how many women said they 'had' to work in order to meet the bills. Yet, they had 2 cars, paid for a sitter, took nice holidays, etc, which, to me, was a lifestyle choice, not a necessity. It does seem to me that the west has become so materialistic, life just isn't worth living unless you have the latest model car, a flatscreen tv, a holiday every six months, etc, etc, etc. Yet I watch people every day that earn about $3 a day, their families laugh, dance, sing and yes I wish I had millions to improve their housing but it does show me that those things I simply couldn't live without in the west are in fact not necessary and indeed I would not have died without them.

Originally Posted by Sunny C.

I'm frankly a bit envious of the time she gets to spend with the kids, and she could use a little more time away from them.

I am so glad you are envious, this points to one of the fundamentals of the conversation - ie why are men the boss. In 90-95% of cases (only a guess) if one partner 'had' to give up working it would be the woman. It is a fact of life that men can't spend 9 months pregnant, even if they want to. A woman's traditional and biological role is as a mother. That does not preclude a woman from working or being just as intelligent as a man, it is just the human condition. So can we conclude that men are more suited, biologically and traditionally to being the bread winners? In my humble view, yes we can. So how are men compensated for this? You are right, it is a pain in the butt having that responsibility and having to work your ass off every day to pay for your families needs - hence why I never wanted to be a man (I have choices you don't). Traditionally you would be compensated by coming home knackered at the end of the day, have a decent cooked meal, your home is clean, your kids are fed and doing their homework and after your dinner you can relax, maybe sit in the garden and watch your kids play - to watch and see what your hard work is achieving. Now women, generally, have the choice to work but men do not, it is necessity that a man provides for his family. Yes it is lovely that as a woman I can choose to work, to feel 'fulfilled' but at what point do I sit down and ask "does my husband feel fulfilled, do I thank him for the choices his hard work provides for me and his lack of choices"? Since converting to Islam I have discovered many things, one of which is my true femininity, another is what my priorities are in life. Without my earnings we couldn't take a holiday, buy so many new clothes, etc but without his we couldn't have electricity or food. Yes my husband enjoys the fruits of my labour but I understand now that he is happier when he comes home knackered, we eat a meal together, I have bothered to do my hair and wear nice clothes. He can then relax and physically see why he bothers working so hard, this is his role in life and I hould help him to feel a success in his role.

I do hope you understand what I am saying, I do not want women to go back to the dark ages but I wish I could explain to them just how lucky we are, that we have choices that men will never have (other than exceptional cases), we can always look to hubby when times get tough and the poor man has the responsibility of just fixing everything for us. If push came to shove I would go out to work and expect my hubby to cook and clean the house, being a man does not make him incapable of this but I know he would feel a failure, whereas women that do not work do not have the same sense of failure.

Salaam

[17th Angel]

Originally Posted by Dondi

That's funny, Pathless. I like one of the customer reviews:

flowergirl2006
"I've been looking for a book which actually can help women
with sexual temptation,but there are few.I read the book from
cover to cover and couldn't find any reference to women having
any real sexual desires for men.

She ain't met me ;/

[Dondi]

Originally Posted by 17th Angel

She ain't met me ;/

You've had real sexual desires for men? Can she quote you?

[17th Angel]

What? I just stated a fact is all.... She has never met me.

[Dondi]

Nevermind. Just my poor attempt at humor. Either that or it just went over your head. Or over mine. Whatever.

[17th Angel]

lol, no bro.... It was good I was using that as my scape goat (defense) from your attack... Which was good, I'd of said something along that lines... Didn't expect it from you though, bravo.

[path_of_one]

I had to crack up at those links, Pathless. I am entirely in agreement with you and with the reviewer. I browsed those titles in my local Christian bookstore and nearly snorted out loud while skimming the book for women. My first thought is that the author(s) must be in near-total ignorance about women's sex drives, and my second thought was that I felt sorry for them. If they'd done any real research into women's lives and thoughts, maybe they would not be so quick to assume women are still primarily driven to have sex in order to have love. It happens, but nowadays, at least in the crowd of women I know, more people choose career than choose marriage and family, and they date and have sex because they want... friendship, fun, and sex. Wow. What a surprise.

MuslimWoman, I find your observations very interesting and I have to say that I agree with you. So far, I've chosen career and marriage but no children, and it's quite difficult to pull together the stuff on my plate right now. No doubt, once I have kids either my husband or I will have to drop down to at least part-time workload, because otherwise I can't really see the point in having kids at all (they'd just be at a day care all the time). That person is likely to be me, simply because I have many more opportunities to be able to work from home (consulting, writing, etc.) and I think I'd want to anyway.

I think the big lies we've been fed and continue to buy into in the States is that (1) we can have it all, and all at the same time and (2) we need a lot of stuff to raise kids. I find that I can probably have it all, but I'm going to have to do it in stages unless I get creative about working from home. Most of my friends and colleagues have given everything up for career and are now facing their thirties (and their biological clocks) without being in any sort of relationship at all. I'm grateful I was able to have a marriage, but I must say it was incredibly difficult to make it through graduate school with it intact. Second, I think it's interesting that our consumerist culture in the US has convinced everyone that you need a ton of stuff to successfully raise kids. People think every kid needs their own room, you need a mini-van (even if you only have one or two kids!), you need tons of toys and clothes, and babies need every gadget and gizmo known to man. I don't get it. People the world over manage to successfully raise children without any of that stuff, but here people look at you funny if you insist you won't need two or three different strollers to make it through baby-hood. I think there's a lot to be said for less stuff and more time given to kids. I don't think it means people have to totally give up one of the two careers, but we don't have to work ourselves to death either. For many, it is a lifestyle choice.

As an aside, however, there are many working poor in the US for which it is not a choice. With the divorce rate around 50%, there's a lot of single parents out there struggling to make it on one income. Before my mother got her first college degree (when I was 16), we were below poverty line for years and years. After she and my step-father divorced, she had to work three jobs and go to school at night to make ends meet (literally, to pay rent and food). So sometimes it just isn't a choice. But she did make the choice to spend all her available time with my sister and I, and as a result we are all very close. We knew how hard she worked, and it made us feel wonderful that what she found most fun in her limited time off was having fun with us.

[Muslimwoman]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

I think the big lies we've been fed and continue to buy into in the States is that (1) we can have it all, and all at the same time and (2) we need a lot of stuff to raise kids.

Hi path of one

I am guessing from your post that I am about 10 years older than you, so I was at the beginning of the "women can have it all" stage of westernised life. Hey, in theory it sounded brilliant. I watch a lot of tv from UK and US here and am fascinated by the "Nanny 911" type shows. In virtually all of them the resolution to the problems comes from spending quality time with your children and actually limiting the amount of 'things' we give children to keep them quiet and out of our way. Doesn't that tell a story?

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Most of my friends and colleagues have given everything up for career and are now facing their thirties (and their biological clocks) without being in any sort of relationship at all.

Oh no, big mistake. My career was everything to me and then one day you wake up in your 4 bedroom house (why does a single person need 4 bedrooms?), you get into your new BMW (wow was I going places) and as you drive to the business you own you suddenly realise that you are in your mid thirties and you have nothing truly important in your life. Honestly it hit me like a lead brick one day driving to work, I had to pull over and cry. The same day I put my house, car and business up for sale. Soon after I changed religions, moved to the middle east and met my husband. I am now poor (to my standards) but have never been happier or more fulfilled. My whole philosophy on life has changed in the past few years and I wish I could write a book to warn women on a similar path.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

People the world over manage to successfully raise children without any of that stuff, but here people look at you funny if you insist you won't need two or three different strollers to make it through baby-hood.

This is one of my real issues, having lived the consumerist life and now living in a completely different world. I am not saying everything is great here but here children remain children, they still play marbles in the street and mum calls them in at lunchtime. You don't cart your kids off to the shrink if they can't speak or read at the exact age the book says they should. You are so right, in the west we are expected to adhere to the consumerist principles.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

As an aside, however, there are many working poor in the US for which it is not a choice. With the divorce rate around 50%, there's a lot of single parents out there struggling to make it on one income.

That is an interesting statistic and I wonder how many people would struggle to make ends meet if the divorce rate was lower? The divorce rate here is less than a quarter of the USA but it is rising, largely due, it is said, to the influence of the west in the 60's and 70's. A new law in Egypt now allows women to seek no fault divorce (as long as they return their dowery) and the newspapers predicted a flood of divorces but it has yet to materialise. Most women here look at you like you have a screw loose if you ask why they don't want to work, they tend to laugh and say "why would we want to do that, that is for men". Sometimes I wonder if the women here have it right, let the guys work and bring home the money and the women stay home and look after the home and children. Now, let's be honest it takes about 2 hours a day to cook and clean so the remainder is spent watching tv, gossiping with neighbours and shopping. Sorry but I think women get the better end of the deal. That said I am just in the process of starting a new business but I shall be working from home, it is too boring for me to not work at all.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Before my mother got her first college degree (when I was 16), we were below poverty line for years and years. After she and my step-father divorced, she had to work three jobs and go to school at night to make ends meet (literally, to pay rent and food). So sometimes it just isn't a choice. But she did make the choice to spend all her available time with my sister and I, and as a result we are all very close. We knew how hard she worked, and it made us feel wonderful that what she found most fun in her limited time off was having fun with us.

Your mother sounds like a truly amazing woman and what a fabulous start in life she gave you. Perhaps this is why you are able to understand that time is more precious to children than 'things'?

I am sorry if I made it sound like it was a choice for everyone, I am fully aware it is not and my heart goes out to people who, living in such a wealthy country, have to struggle to make ends meet. There are though, many women who work through choice and yet there are many men who cannot find work at all. What would happen to unemployment rates if all the women who don't need to work (perhaps they would have to have just one car per family ) stayed at home to look after their children? This is a big issue in Egypt at the moment and quite a modern one, unemployment is at 10% and there is no welfare system at all. No work, no food. Yet as women here become more educated they want to work and it is taking jobs from men with families to feed. I can see a backlash coming here soon and of course it is the women that will suffer, it will give a legitimate platform to the extreme religious leaders to oppress women again - not a road I want to travel.

Salaam

[Pathless]

Gender roles, Muslimwoman--that is what this is boiling down to.

Hmmm, this is a tender subject for me. Is there a distinction between the Women's Liberation Movement that you've referred to and the branching, evolving paths that Feminism is taking? To me, Women's Lib as you conceptualize it really isn't much about liberation for women or men. It's about allowing women to have careers and be big men with money and possessions. That's a very capitalist, protestant work-ethic rooted concept. And as you know, not everyone wants that. Some (many?) men as well as women don't want to live materialistic, workaday, acquire-the-most-crap-and-die lives. I certainly don't want to live that way.

To illustrate, I may rip a page or two from my life for show and tell here. Raised in a very suburban and protestant work ethic-oriented environment, I was subjected to and drilled with a set of values that are very toxic to me. I'm a man, but I don't fit the man mold. I like to accessorize my wardrobe, I think hunting is not only bad but utterly boring and a waste of time, I would only go be a spectator at a sports game if someone paid me and there was plenty of good beer (not Bud Light, thank you very much), and I'd much rather sit at home, reading and doodling on the majority of my Friday nights, than go out to a bar.

What's more, I don't fancy myself a wife who will do all the cooking and the housework (okay, well maybe the laundry...) because I enjoy cooking and organizing my spaces. Although I don't clean every day (really now, who does? Don't lie now ), I do enjoy stretching my body out on a clean carpet, reaping the just rewards of a good vacuuming of the whole house, basking in the steamy balm of freshly lit aromatherpy burners.

I wouldn't enjoy the life of watching soaps and gossiping on the phone, but at the same time, I don't want to pack up a goddamned unfashionable briefcase at 8 am after eating a bowl of cereal with my nose in a newspaper and then drive off to an oversanitized office where the phone won't stop ringing and there are a bunch of numbers, orders, and tiresome meetings waiting. Naw, not for me.

Rather, let me work twenty hours a week and scrape by. I'll cook dinner for my fiance and have it ready when she gets home. We'll do some mad libs after dinner and talk in silly voices and laugh and dance, much like kids. We'll speak for our animals as we play with them and pet them. We'll dance jigs to music played from a Radio Shack grade stereo (Actual Retail Value? Five Dollar). We'll take a walk to the garden and play in the dirt.

So clearly I agree that the consumerist life is nothing but bullshit and poison. Yet...

Feminism and "gender equality" is not just about women being free to have careers (why was that worth fighting for, you ask, and rightly so!). That was a ridiculous, blinded lurch of a first step. It didn't take too long for women to sober up from that drunken stumble, though. "What? What am I doing? I want my life back!!" Muslimwoman and many other stupposedly "liberated" women found themselves ensalved to a system that was sold to them. So do some men, and I am one of them.

No less that any liberated woman, I find myself displaced among the brainless and blind power structures that have been built around convenience, commodity, and consolidation of money. I don't use the word wealth here because wealth is something entirely different and even separate from money. Sure, money may be a good and useful tool, but it ain't wealth. Too often it is actually the opposite of freedom of mobility. That's right, instead of being actually free, the market-obsessed and money-obsessed capitalist empties his or her energy into the machinery of making money. More and more time must be devoted to the securing of money, leaving little to no time for anything else, be it family or fun--or here's a revolutionary concept: having a fun family!!

I mean damn. As Muslimwoman has pointed out, it doesn't take much money to make a child laugh. All you need is a malleable mind that can go back and inhabit that five-year old mind. Here's a tip to getting there, too: be wondrous! Don't be afraid to be amazed. And guess what? If you surround yourself with kids and let them sweep you away with their questions and exclamations, it won't take long to be amazed.

Here's a sad story about a man who didn't have time to be amazed by his amazing, laughing five year old daughter. I witnessed this last week in the bookstore I work in while shelving young adult books.

Ding!!! The back door to the store opens and little feet race down some steps, turn the corner and dart into the kids room behind me. I didn't see her enter, but heard this little girl giggling like a brisk wind as she burst into the store, riding a high of five year old energy.

Her dad kind of plodded in behind her. It almost took him five minutes to catch up with her. I looked over my shoulder at him and his face was numb and dead, pudgy. This dad said not a word to his little girl. He just visually checked to see where she was, then walked on to other parts of the store.

Me, I was shelving books near this gem. Giggle, giggle, talking to herself, hahahahah, books, she loves them, oh so much fun. I am grinning and shelving books, feeling a bit radiant myself just because there's basically this little elf perusing the magical world of books in the room behind me.

Dad comes back. Clop clop. Moving slow, lethargic. The girl must have gotten mostly mom's DNA, I think. Giggle giggle goes elf girl, then, "Daddy!!!" Exuberant at seeing her zombiesque father. She loves him, sees the litte elf sparkles buried under his dulled physique and demeanor. Her vision is fresher than mine, for sure. "Daddy!!! This book has a puzzle!!" And this was a great liquid exclamation that exploded into tittering laughter so intense at the end of the sentence that it nearly blurred and drowned out the word "puzzle."

I mean, wow. Children. It was a puzzle. In a book. Not a big deal to those of us who have been in the world a while. But to this five year old, it was a frickin' tickle session. Awesome!!

That's the high point of this story. The low point is that Dad didn't find the horror books he was looking for, didn't let his daughter get even one book either. He manipulated her into leaving the store by telling her that her doll was bored and wanted to go. He negotiated not buying her one book (and these books are used, y'all, like $2-$3 for most of them) by telling her in a monotone drone that he would read her Daddy is a Doodlebug when they got home.

Of course, this wasn't a sad occasion for this girl, whom saw every moment as a fresh box of explosive surprises, never know what you'll get. Nope, it was an occasion for celebration: "Daddy is a Doodlebug!!! Yay!!! Hahaha!" Probably heard that book a thousand times, but it's still amazing to have monotoned Daddy read it to her.

Awesome.

------

Okay, so I gave the Dad a hard time in this story. Maybe he was just tired, had a bad day. Maybe he gets self-conscious about being his normal silly old self in public places. For all I know he could have a choreographed dance routine and party favors that he gives out when he reads Daddy is a Doodlebug... but hey, I'm just reporting what I witnessed. It makes a point, I think.

Gender roles need to be bent. I'm a male, but I'm not 100% masculine or feminine. I slide along a scale. My gender's malleable. Today I have a beard and may wear a tie (okay, fat chance of that), but tomorrow I might shave and accessorize with bracelets. Whatever, I just want to enjoy my life and bring joy into other people's lives. It's hard to do that when you are spending way too much time pursuing a corrupted moneyed version of the American Dream.

Peace,
P

[Paladin]

Such freedom!

[Muslimwoman]

Originally Posted by Pathless

Gender roles, Muslimwoman--that is what this is boiling down to.

Hi Pathless

Thank you so much for a fascinating post and the wonderful story of elf girl (am still grinning like a loon now), she sounds like an angel but then all small children seem like angels to me.

Correct, gender roles. I personally believe they have become too mixed up. I am not trying to suggest that men and women should have clearly defined roles and should not dare to cross over that line. When I am tired my husband cooks, he always does the grocery shopping (and in egypt we shop every day because nothing keeps in the heat) and I always clean but only because I don't like his standard of cleaning. He knows how to use the vacuum but is allergic to the washing machine. He manages our business but I do the accounts because that is where our strengths lie. We try to balance our lives but accept that we are different and have different roles in life.

Originally Posted by Pathless

Although I don't clean every day (really now, who does? Don't lie now )

Errrm I do, honest - sad old cow I know. Ok some days it's move all the furniture and sweep underneath and some just a quick flick with a duster but yes it is everyday. Maybe I need to get a life

Originally Posted by Pathless

Muslimwoman and many other stupposedly "liberated" women found themselves ensalved to a system that was sold to them. So do some men, and I am one of them.

Guilty as charged.

Originally Posted by Pathless

or here's a revolutionary concept: having a fun family!!

LOVE this concept, love it, love it, love it. I hope you and your fiance have children, you're going to be a great Dad with an attitude like that (but then of course you may have to work 25 hours a week ).

Salaam
MW