cocokitty

There are so many many more options than that. Why does having a career somehow doom me to be alone and unloved and eating cold chili out of a can? I have a career and a husband and even friends and other family, too. We don't want our own children. We have pets and we dote on our nieces, and that's how we like it. My work is appreciated mainly by my coworkers and clients, so even if I were single it would still be appreciated. Neither of us is Julia Child but we both cook. It's really not that hard to learn to cook to a level where you can put a decent dinner on the table. So call that option C, I guess. Families with a stay-at-home dad option D, families where one or both parents work from home so they can be around for the kids options E, F, G. Taking off a couple years from work and then returning once the kids are at school option H. Having someone other than the parents be the primary caregiver, like a grandmother or a nanny or a day care. Arranging work schedules so that theres always a parent around when the kids are at home. Adopting children later in life (when retired or FIRE). These are not all perfect solutions but they are more realistic alternatives to homemaking than your option B.

Also if cooking and being emotionally supportive are part of the female role, does that mean that you wouldn't raise your sons to be capable of doing those things? Where are their wives getting their emotional support from, and what happens if the husband/wife unit is split up for a time because of work or family obligations? Is the husband just going to eat McDonalds and canned spam for three months because the wife is across the country caring for her dying mother? To me, cooking and being emotionally supportive are not "important skills for women", they are important skills for all adults, especially if they are at the point of settling down with a partner.

On the other hand, if there was a clear way to distinguish the guevedoces from the "permanent" girls before puberty, then they would presumably raise them as boys, not girls, because they would know that the penis is going to eventually come in. But their descriptions of discomfort with girlhood don't sound that much different than the ones I had, and so the parents can't tell them apart from any other persistent tomboy. Traditional girlhood is not a positive experience, it is designed to shape children for a subservient adult role. It is not strange or unusual to hate it and it's not evidence that someone is secretly a boy.

Yeah, we treat girls and boys drastically differently from birth, mostly without noticing, and then people say it must be hardcoded that they act so differently. It's a puzzler to me. I hated being forced to wear dresses when I was little, too. They were scratchy uncomfortable and it made it hard to run around and play because I had to worry about whether people could see my underwear. I had to sit in a ladylike way with my legs closed, for the same reason. So given that I was regularly forced to wear a dress, which also forced me to sit a certain way, involve myself less in active play, get used to wearing uncomfortable things because they looked nice, how can anyone think that the fact I lean more towards these feminine habits now, compared to someone who was not forced to do these things, is a natural outgrowth from my biology? To me that seems to have been pretty obviously trained into me. Even in cases where I wasn't explicitly forced to adopt feminine habits by my parents, there is a lot of lateral socialization that goes on between kids, who have also received gendered messages from parents, media, society and other kids. Boys often didn't want to let girls play the boy games with them, so if you wanted to make friends as a girl, you had better be up for playing the girl games.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=bEycBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT161&lpg=P...

Women in Victorian England campaigned for their own bathrooms because they wanted a safe and private place to do their business. Originally there would be a single public bathroom with no gender marking, but what that really meant was that they were men's bathrooms, and women would wait to go at home. This was a pretty big damper on their ability to participate in the public sphere because it limited how much time they could physically spend in public. Gendered bathrooms followed later in other countries for similar reasons. They exist for the same reason that trains in Japan have women-only cars, why there is a women-only rideshare app, etc.

https://www.livescience.com/54692-why-bathrooms-are-gender-s...

http://theconversation.com/how-did-public-bathrooms-get-to-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime