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Meghan Bell's avatar

I agree with a lot of what you've written here. I was sucked into some aspects of feminism, but always hated the "girl boss" stuff. Sam Vaknin argued that mainstream feminism encourages women to behave like psychopathic men (not healthy ones) and I agree with him.

I was successful in my chosen career (marketing and development for arts events) in my twenties and early thirties, but burned out and quit my full time job in 2019 in large part because of a poor ability to deal with personality disordered people (in particular older women -- hell hath no fury like a narcissistic aging would-be "artist" scorned) and because I was exhausted by "Woke" culture. I had a bunch of contract gigs lined up, but they were cancelled due to Covid. But in 2020, I met and married my husband, and I was pregnant by the end of the year. I JUMPED at the opportunity to become a STAH mother, and fortunately we were able to afford for me to do so.

I love it and have no desire to return to work. I'm pissed that other women tried to convince me that the worst thing in the world was being barefoot and pregnant in a comfortable dress in a kitchen. Audiobooks and podcasts make that kind of thing awesome. I love that not working allows me to sleep in or write or read in the morning (my toddler gets up between 9am-10am) and to cook at home, and spend an entire day doing stuff like making a big batch of pasta sauce using the ancestral receipe and techniques from my Italian side. My neighbourhood has a daily parent and child hangout, which has been a social lifeline and helped me (and my daughter) make friends who live in our new neighbourhood. And then Substack and Discord are my major intellectual outlets. It would be much harder to be a STAH mother without technology, without the option to write and find other people who share my nerdy niche interests, and without the in-person community I'm very lucky to have (my husband and I both have lots of family around as well, which is rare today).

Most of the married-with-kids women who are still working have told me they wish they could afford to quit or could find part-time work instead, or wish they could have taken longer maternity leaves. Many of them are the primary breadwinners in their relationships, however, and it's not an option. A lot of women are waking up to the lies feminism sold us -- but generally speaking, these are women in relationships with good men.

There's another unfortunate aspect to the influx of women into higher education and white-collar workplaces; girls mature faster than boys. This means that girls have a significant cognitive advantage during grade school, which gives us an advantage in college admissions, and then into careers. However, over the course of our 20s, many men start to "catch up" to us. Women's grade school performance often gives a false impression of what their adult capabilities will be (obviously not in all cases, but generally speaking) and we end up in careers we aren't necessarily suited for -- while men who would have succeeded in them are not given the opportunity. Add to this the brain rewiring of motherhood -- I noticed a significant dip in my semantic memory, processing speed, and mental math abilities with motherhood, which would have absolutely affected my performance if I were still at work.

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Sharon R. Fiore's avatar

In my neighborhood, the garbage trucks take out the garbage early in the morning and unfortunately everyone’s garbage pail is still out there at night.

People don’t even get a chance to grab the garbage pail until the nighttime. Never mind getting to know their neighbors. That’s what happened when women stopped staying home. Civilization is crumbling because of this.

Women used to have coffee and get to know each other and the kids would get to know grown-ups they can trust right next-door. That’s how it was in my neighborhood and it was good for everyone.

Now nobody knows their neighbors because their neighbors are too busy . It’s very depressing.

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