“The Unmade BED”, by Stephen Marche. Notes by Gemma Cernuda. @RethinkingFeminism

“The Unmade BED”, by Stephen Marche.

Notes by Gemma Cernuda.

  1. The average woman uses nearly three times as many words as the average man.
  2. Women talk more, and men talk more often
  3. Not explaining is always more powerful than explaining
  4. Men and women need translators
  5. The language of conflict is no longer useful
  6. The future can belong only to men and women together
  7. Women’s liberations is men’s liberation too
  8. Who will do the dishes, who will run the state
  9. Women earn but they do not as yet own
  10. We inhabit a hollow patriarchy
  11. Contradiction generates strange paradoxes
  12. Women call the shots at home
  13. Would women’s power in fact consist in making fewer decisions at home, in having less control?
  14. Modernity is irrevocably feminist
  15. The countries where women flourish are the most stable, the most technologically advanced , the most peaceful, the richest, the most powerful.
  16. Patriarchy is damn expensive
  17. Feminism as an ideology has cribbed and emerging economic reality as a triumph of professors an activists
  18. Boys receive more education than girls in more than 75 countries
  19. In global terms we are by no means post-feminist. We are very much pre-feminist
  20. Therefore, those who wish to be rich and modern, will actively promote women
  21. We require more compassion rather than force, empathy rather than outrage
  22. The contemporary marriage is teaching a lot of men that sacrifice is real.
  23. Financial independence is all of independence
  24. The feminist movement along with the rest of society has assumed that taking care of children is women´s work and a women´s political issue
  25. 54% of parents of kids under 17 believe that they should have a mother that didn’t work
  26. 59% of women millennials think that being a mother makes it harder to advance in a job or career, only 19% of millennial men do.
  27. American women return to work within two weeks of giving birth
  28. As we approach the end of the gender wars, we approach the limits of feminism as an ideology.
  29. As a man taking care of my kids, daycare saved my life.
  30. Day care is not a theoretical liberation, is the real deal for men and women.
  31. From my time in the business I saw how board members were picked; they belong to the same small circle of people
  32. The hollow patriarchy cannot be escaped until women hold legitimate power
  33. Mostly the hollow patriarchy produces silence.
  34. There is nothing less manly than talking about manliness
  35. Mothers are mammals who work
  36. Love is something into which we fall.
  37. Birth and death are public spectacles.
  38. Death generates an amazing amount of paperwork
  39. When you ask men when they became men, they will usually say it was when they became a father or lost a father.
  40. Men who don´t have children aspire to fatherhood more than they did before, more than women aspire to motherhood
  41. A kid needs a father like a fish needs other fish
  42. Fatherhood is a clearer status symbol than a car.
  43. It is impossible to overestimate the desire of the world to make mothers feel like failures. Perfection is not good enough.
  44. Working mothers required for a mother economy, have to endure the assumption that they are failing in both roles; a woman who works cannot possibly be taking care of her kids properly, and a woman with kids cannot possibly be dedicated to her job.
  45. Motherhood is a space for expected achievement rather than a biological state of being
  46. Men as men, are worth something
  47. Being there is the difference, presence is what matters
  48. Change is the only constant
  49. In a way, memory is the most intimate of interactions.
  50. A working definition of intimacy is a memory forming in the present.
  51. Acceptance of homosexuality like the promotion of a women, is a sign of modernity, plain and simple
  52. The new family is a mode of lifestyle construction
  53. We can’t accept others without accepting ourselves first
  54. You can have marriage without the bullshit of men and women
  55. Choice against duty. Engagement against obligation. Respect against traditional roles.
  56. Nothing keeps a young men out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life
  57. Women have knocked down many walls to get into many powerful places. Men knocked down the wall to the delivery room
  58. The new fatherhood is a huge gain for men, the chance for a whole new range of pleasures and agonies, a fuller version of our humanity, a deeper intimacy.
  59. The new father is an engaged father by instinct. The new father holds his babies. He bathes them. He reds to them. The new father knows that the role of the father is not merely to provide. The role of the father is to be there, physically and in spirit.
  60. I would be there until I wasn’t and that was enough.
  61. To hollow patriarchy is as much cultural as it is economic or political
  62. Feminism is humanism exactly because it refuses to limit the potential of women and men based on gender.
  63. Anything made by a human being can be described in gendered terms.
  64. The real question is how we live gender rather than how we think about it.
  65. Only 5% of films in Hollywood were directed by women
  66. Feminism has articulated a dizzying variety of positive ways to be a woman. Men remain obsessed mostly with how not to be a man.
  67. Bromance ; men who love each other are either clandestine homosexuals or homophobes or probably both
  68. In popular culture friendship between women are the source and the choices fruit of their maturity
  69. To mature as a female person is to mature into female friendship
  70. To mature as a male person is to mature out male friendships
  71. After divorce  man is ten times as likely to commit suicide as a woman
  72. Suicide is not connected to religious values or traditional family structure. It is directly related to loneliness, to social isolation. And not only are American men more likely to e lonely, but they are also more likely to deny their loneliness
  73. Men are obviously at the end of something, possibly of many things, but each ending is also a beginning
  74. Strength means weakness and weakness means strength
  75. Masculinity and feminity are growing lighter, more fluid than ever before
  76. But pornography is too big to be pollution; it is a significant proportion of the internet, and therefore a significant proportion of consciousness
  77. Pornography ,like art, is a distortioned fantasyland, but it is an instructional one
  78. The Feminist movement invested a lot in sexual education and intimate health
  79. Women in less permissive cultures are denied something life altering big when they are denied access to sexual education
  80. The  pill separated sexuality from procreation and the computer screen has separated sexuality from the flesh
  81. Pornography remains the model for the vast spectrum of choices the internet can offer people
  82. 90% of women have performed fellatio in their late 20ies and 50% of them have tried anal sex
  83. Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Still largely and silently accepted
  84. Trivializes rape through the portrayal of women as hyper promiscuous and socially irresponsible
  85. Exposure to pornography has been linked to alarming attitudes towards women, toward sexual violence, and toward rape victims. Sociologist Natalie Purcell
  86. Several studies suggest that one level of exposure to pornography is positively correlated with acceptance of rape myths and victim blaming attitudes or beliefs that trivialize rape. Sociologist Natalie Purcell
  87. This finding it itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape
  88. The rise of radical feminism was a great awakening
  89. For Christians masturbation was a mortal sin
  90. His list for side effects of masturbation included loss of memory, dementia, and anxiety, and continual anguish, dizzy spells, weakening of all senses insomnia and nightmares, coughing fits, low fevers, headaches…
  91. How can we know what the combination of sex and the internet is doing to us? And then internet pornography itself is in a state of intense flux, changing  month by month
  92. It is a truism that pornography corrodes the capacity for sexual and personal intimacy
  93. The deeper the research into internet pornography, the less confident, the more tentative the conclusions become
  94. Fear prevents us from thinking
  95. Pornography is famously indephinable which may explain why its content is so easy to ignore
  96. Nudity is only halph of pornography, the pleasure of the flesh
  97. Pornography creates an alternate universe of quasi infinite sexual plenty
  98. Consent is the real subject of our sexual obsession
  99. Internet pornography is no freak against egalitarian politics but a result of their triumph
  100. Under patriarchy women’s sexuality is men’s property.
  101. In pornography women’s sexuality is a commodity women can exchange for other items of value
  102. Porn is the avatar of the internet, its metaphoric self-expression
  103. Anywhere a screen can go, it will go. Anywhere a screen is, porn is.
  104. Modern pornography exists in worlds were women have power, exactly where they cannot be objectified in real life
  105. Every Doctor Jekyll makes his Mister Hide. The size of the monstrosity reveals the size of the repression, and the size of the virtue.
  106. Under patriarchy every woman is a victim, past present and future.
  107. We all struggle with  an irreconcilable contradiction; the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction
  108. At the very least we have to acknowledge the possibility that the two are simply incompatible. Nobody so far has solved human desire.
  109. The reality seems so much more manageable when separated, and it’s tempting to believe that only the juxtapositions produce the sense of confusion
  110. The outrage serves mainly to obviate  the contradictions that are the substance of our moment, to make its proponents look virtuous
  111. One thing I’ve learned is that we are all handicapped
  112. The personal is political
  113. Fat is a feminist issuer; the beauty Myth
  114. Speech itself is power
  115. Online feminist are making their arguments while being chased from their homes by an onslaught of direct personal attacks
  116. Feminism implies its own political agenda
  117. History has been the men’s movement
  118. Instead of furious despair, what our moment demand is humility and compassion
  119. The approach to equality is filled with turbulence
  120. In the face of what is most  precious to us , exactly at the moment we crave certainty
  121. Are boys and girls distinct in their essences or only by accident of birth? These are     questions to which the answers may be unknowable
  122. We need to rephrase the question, rather than answering it.
  123. Gender differences on average are not under dispute
  124. Male brains re optimized for intra-hemispheric and female brains for inter-hemispheric communication
  125. Equality is sameness. Sameness is fairness
  126. Nature asserts itself; Always.
  127. Boys do better in cooler rooms, girls do better in warmer rooms
  128. Boys prefer trucks, girls prefer dolls.
  129. Children toys have become more gendered and more traditional.
  130. The crisis has been caused by men removing themselves, absenting themselves, checking out, not giving a shit about anyone but themselves.
  131. Boyhood and manhood will have to be revised together.
  132. To be a parent is to be worried
  133. Boys and girls are here to be loved
  134. Sex begins in stolen spaces
  135. When a men and a woman fall into bed together they might have each other. When one of them makes the bed; they have a relationship
  136.   There are worse definitions of power than the difference between those who clean up and those who don’t.
  137. We still judge each other’s domestic spaces.
  138. Women are now 40% of bread winners in the USA.
  139. Our marriage works best when there are THREE of us.
  140. Men who do housework have less sex than men who don’t, and men who do traditional male work around the house, like yard work, have more sex than men who don’t.
  141. Women who work out of their home are more satisfied in their lives than women who work in it
  142. Caring less is the hope of the future.
  143. The split between power and intimacy defined gender for millennia; men in the realm of power women in the realm of intimacy.
  144. Power & Intimacy versus Work & Family.
  145. Hope is born in the marketplace and under covers and behind closed doors; it isn’t spearheaded by movements or twitter.
  146. Being marriageable is no longer a sign that you are ordinary. It’s a sign of elite membership.
  147. A good marriage is a transcendent miracle. Hegel said.
  148. What does it mean to be a mammal that wants to change the world?

 

©Gemma Cernuda-Canelles. Abril 2018. Barcelona

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