“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