Page 97 – Asking The Right Questions To Stimulate Critical Thought

No One Can “Have It All”

by Clayton Craddock • June 3, 2013 • 0 Comments

I found a great article in the latest issue of Esquire Magazine called WHY MEN STILL CAN’T HAVE IT ALL written by Richard Dorment.

“Lately, the raging debate about issues of “work-life balance” has focused on whether or not women can “have it all.” Entirely lost in this debate is the growing strain of work-life balance on men, who today are feeling the competing demands of work and home as much or more than women. And the truth is as shocking as it is obvious: No one can have it all. Any questions?’

Some excerpts:

…Consider the facts: Nearly 60 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in this country today go to women. Same number for graduate degrees. There are about as many women in the workforce as men, and according to Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, The End of Men, of the fifteen professions projected to grow the fastest over the coming years, twelve are currently dominated by women. Per a 2010 study by James Chung of Reach Advisors, unmarried childless women under thirty and with full-time jobs earn 8 percent more than their male peers in 147 out of 150 of the largest U. S. cities. The accomplishments that underlie those numbers are real and world-historic, and through the grueling work of generations of women, men and women are as equal as they have ever been. Adding to that the greater male predisposition to ADHD, alcoholism, and drug abuse, women have nothing but momentum coming out of young adulthood — the big mo! — and then…

…Well, what exactly? Why don’t women hold more than 15 percent of Fortune 500 executive-officer positions in America? Why are they stalled below 20 percent of Congress? Why does the average woman earn only seventy-seven pennies for every dollar made by the average man? Childbirth plays a role, knocking ambitious women off their professional stride for months (if not years) at a time while their male peers go chug-chug-chugging along, but then why do some women still make it to the top while others fall by the wayside? Institutional sexism and pay discrimination are still ugly realities, but with the millions in annual penalties levied on offending businesses (and the attendant PR shitstorms), they have become increasingly, and thankfully, uncommon. College majors count (women still dominate education, men engineering), as do career choices, yet none of these on their own explains why the opportunity gap between the sexes has all but closed yet a stark achievement gap persists.

….Commenting on the Lean In debate in a blog for The New York Times, Gail Collins asked, “How do you give smart, accomplished, ambitious women the same opportunities as men to reach their goals? What about universal preschool and after-school programs? What about changing the corporate mind-set about the time commitment it takes to move up the ladder? What about having more husbands step up and take the major load?”

….Her questions echo a 2010 Newsweek cover story, “Men’s Lib,” which ended with an upper: “If men embraced parental leave, women would be spared the stigma of the ‘mommy track’ — and the professional penalties (like lower pay) that come along with it. If men were involved fathers, more kids might stay in school, steer clear of crime, and avoid poverty as adults. And if the country achieved gender parity in the workplace — an optimal balance of fully employed men and women — the gross domestic product would grow by as much as 9 percent…. Ultimately, [it] boils down to a simple principle: in a changing world, men should do whatever it takes to contribute their fair share at home and at work.”

….Two men wrote that, incidentally, which must make it true, and among those who traffic in gender studies, it is something of a truth universally acknowledged: Men are to blame for pretty much everything. And I freely admit, we do make for a compelling target. Men have oppressed their wives and sisters and daughters for pretty much all of recorded history, and now women are supposed to trust us to share everything 50-50?

….According to a study released in March by the Pew Research Center, household setups like ours are increasingly the norm: 60 percent of two-parent homes with kids under the age of eighteen are made up of dual-earning couples (i.e., two working parents). On any given week in such a home, women put in more time than men doing housework (sixteen hours to nine) and more time with child care (twelve to seven). These statistics provoke outrage among the “fair share” crowd, and there is a sense, even among the most privileged women, that they are getting a raw deal.

….Men in dual-income couples work outside the home eleven more hours a week than their working wives or partners do (forty-two to thirty-one), and when you look at the total weekly workload, including paid work outside the home and unpaid work inside the home, men and women are putting in roughly the same number of hours: fifty-eight hours for men and fifty-nine for women.

…..Also, according to women in the Pew study, it seems to be working out well. Working mothers in dual-earning couples are more likely to say they’re very or pretty happy with life right now than their male partners are (93 percent to 87 percent); if anything, it’s men who are twice as likely to say they’re unhappy.

….In the end, isn’t this what feminism was supposed to be about? Not equality for equality’s sake — half of all homes run by men, half of all corporations run by women — but to give each of us, men and women, access to the same array of choices and then the ability to choose for ourselves? And who’s to say, whether for reasons biological or sociological, men and women would even want that? When the Pew Research Center asked working mothers and fathers to picture their ideal working situation, 37 percent of women would opt for full time; 50 percent part time; and 11 percent wouldn’t have a job at all. (Compare this with men’s answers: 75 percent say full time, 15 percent say part time, and 10 percent wouldn’t work at all.) Assuming that women had all the flexibility in the world, one of every two working mothers would choose to work part time. Perhaps with guaranteed paid maternity leave, universal daycare, and generous after-school programs, more women would be freed from the constraints of child care and would want to work full time. Or, possibly, they’re just happy working part time, one foot in the workplace and one foot in the home. Hard to say.

Red the full article HERE

Family

Women have to pay alimony too

by Clayton Craddock • May 31, 2013 • 0 Comments

The De-Gendering of Divorce: Wives Pay Ex-Husbands Alimony Too

By Liza Mundy

Not long ago, after giving a talk about the growing number of women who are breadwinners in their marriages, I was approached by an audience member who identified herself as a lawyer. She said that she was definitely seeing this trend in her practice — nearly 40% of working wives now outearn their husbands — and that while economic power is a good thing, overall, for women, it can have one negative outcome many don’t anticipate. Among her divorce clients, she said, more and more were women who found themselves ordered by a court to pay spousal support to ex-husbands. ”And boy,” she said, “are they pissed.”

That these women are angry is to be expected: men don’t like paying alimony either, and writing a check every month has long been, for men, one of the prime impediments to postmarital bliss. But their reaction also suggests that women, while eager to benefit from progress and expanded opportunities, are not so willing to accept the more painful consequences of our success. What’s sauce for the gander is, alas, sauce for the goose. It may or may not make it easier on these check-writing ex-wives to know that they are part of a larger movement: the degendering of alimony and divorce, which is a natural outgrowth of the degendering of roles in marriage.

Once upon a time, the point of alimony was clear: it recognized the essential deal underlying marriage back in the days of “separate spheres,” when it was a husband’s role to provide, and a wife’s role to stay home, raise the children, run the household and enable the husband to be hard-working and high-earning. The economist Gary Becker famously argued that this was how couples maximized their efficiency: dividing the labor enabled both to succeed in their respective spheres. When marriages fell apart, alimony provided legal and economic recognition of the fact that a wife had sacrificed her earning power to maximize that of her husband and enhance the welfare of their family.

Now that the separate-spheres marriage has been replaced, in many cases, by the dual-earner version, there is a move to abolish permanent alimony altogether. As this TIME story documents, in some states the crusade is being supported by second wives, many of them working women, appalled that their earnings (in some cases) are going to pay the alimony of first wives who stayed at home to raise children. The animosity between those two groups is in some ways one more iteration of the mommy wars — the lingering gulf that exists between women who work outside the home and women who work within it. But it’s also a sign that the bargain of marriage has changed and splintered; there can be any number of deals now, including deals where the mom stays home; deals where both spouses work; and increasingly, deals where the woman is the primary earner. The ranks of stay-at-home dads are small, but they have doubled in the past decade. And in dual-earner marriages, there are more and more where it’s the wife whose career takes center stage and the man’s that becomes supplementary.

Family, Society

Dr. Murray Strauss

by Clayton Craddock • May 30, 2013 • 0 Comments

Dr. Murray Straus
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHxQTTg_wLE]

Murray Straus
University of New Hampshire

Women hitting men
In 1968-69 and 1970-71. I found something that I just ignored. I was so focused on the issue of wife beating, and the feminist perspective of this, which is the way I approached it, that at first I didn’t hardly recognize that I’d found about equal rates of their fathers hitting their mother and mothers hitting their father. And in my early papers I reported it. It’s there as a statistic, but I didn’t discuss it. I didn’t think about the implications. I – my focus was about how American cultural norms tolerated this, didn’t think it was a big deal. And on the use of violence by men to dominate in the family and the injuries to women. It wasn’t until the 1975 national survey that we did where I got the same results, about the same percentage of women hitting their partners as men hitting their partners, that I finally took notice of it and said gee that’s something I have to attend to. So – and over the years since then I’ve become more and more convinced that one of the many things that need to be done to end partner violence, but one of the big ones that’s not being attended to, is violence by women. Women are never going to be safe in their own homes until they stop hitting as well as their partners stop hitting.

Self defense not a factor
Most partner violence is not in self-defense. Different studies show rates between five and fifteen percent. There’s one that shows it as high as just under 50 percent, but every one of those studies it’s about five percent of the men and about five percent of women. When it’s 15 percent, in that range, it’s about the same percentage for men and women. And even that one of 50 percent, it’s a reflection of the American principle of: if hit, hit back. And both parties do it. So self-defense is not it. Of course in some cases it is, but in general that’s it.

Criminal penalties: a last resort
I think that criminal penalties should be the truly last resort for dealing with partner violence. The first resort should be getting people help for the problems that lead to partner violence. So if in a particular case, a problem is one or the other has a personality disorder, then that needs to be treated. If they’ve got a drinking problem, that needs to be treated. And we should refer people to that, refer rather than referring them to prison. Prison is not going to cure it. They’ll get out, they’ll be in a worse position than when they went in and we’ll have even more. So, while I think we need to have criminal penalties for partner violence. They should be very, very rarely used, only when nothing else works.

Excommunicated from feminism
When I finally woke up to the importance of the fact that most partner violence is symmetrical, in both who’s doing it and why they’re doing it. And also the fact that when women do it, they’re putting themselves at risk. They increase the probability. This was treated with outrage, because the predominant way of thinking about it, which was my way until then also, is that this is a problem of male dominance. And it’s part of the oppression of women. So people whose commitments are to change the oppression of women, of which this is a part, one of the mechanisms of violence against women, just were outraged, and they saw me, that I was excommunicated in effect as a feminist. I’ve never accepted that excommunication….But psychologically it hurt, especially for someone who thinks of themself as a feminist. Probably the most extreme example was when I was elected president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. When I stood up to give the presidential address, a whole bunch of people from the first two rows stood up, and walked out. As a protest. So, you know I laugh about it now, but it was pretty bad at the time.

For more about his findings read HERE

Fatherhood

The Biological Kidnapper

by Clayton Craddock • May 28, 2013 • 0 Comments

Welcome to 2013. We live in an era where everything is suspicious, even the father of his own children is a suspect. Remember, if you see something….

A Prince William County man says he was suspected by Walmart security of possibly kidnapping his three young daughters — all because they aren’t the same race.

Joseph, who doesn’t want his family’s last name revealed, and his wife Keana are an interracial couple. They have been married for nearly 10 years and have three daughters: a 4-year-old and 2-year-old twins.

On Thursday evening, Joseph took all three girls to the Walmart in Potomac Mills in Woodbridge to cash a check. He says they weren’t there long, but spent a few extra minutes in the parking lot while he buckled the girls in and then made a phone call.

Joseph says he then went to up his wife, Keana, and as they were arriving home, they were shocked to find a Prince William County police officer waiting for them.

“He asks us very sincerely, ‘Hey, I was sent here by Walmart security. I just need to make sure that the children that you have are your own,’” Joseph says.

“I was dumbfounded,” says Keana. “I sat there for a minute and I thought, ‘Did he just ask us if these were our kids knowing what we went through to have our children?’

“He took my ID and asked my 4-year-old to point out who her mother and father were.”

Joseph says the officer told them a Walmart security guard reported seeing him in the parking lot with the girls and thought it was strange.

Soon after the officer left, Keana called Walmart demanding an explanation. She says after asking to speak with a manager, she was transferred to a Walmart security officer who denied raising the alarm. The officer said it was a customer that came forward.

Keana says she was told, “Well, the customer was concerned because they saw the children with your husband and he didn’t think that they fit. And I said, ‘What do you mean by they don’t fit?’ And I was trying to get her to say it. And she says, ‘Well, they just don’t match up.’”
Read more here: http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/22286875/va-father-says-he-was-suspected-of-kidnapping-his-kids-by-walmart-security-due-to-his-children-being-mixed#axzz2UVMArIED

Family, Fatherhood

The high cost of fatherlessness

by Clayton Craddock • May 28, 2013 • 0 Comments

Juan Williams is one of the few mainstream journalists that sees the bigger picture. I see it and have been trying to tell everyone I know that there is more to the epidemic of violence in our communities of color than just guns. It is directly related to the break down of the family. There is a direct link between no father in the home and an increased chance that the child will drop out of high school, go on welfare and have a criminal record. This is particularly acute in the black community, where over 70 percent of black kids are born outside of wedlock.

I feel the federal government did to the black family what slavery never could: separate the black man from his family. By the federal government playing daddy and stepping in and taking the place of the man of the house, the family has disintegrated and the community along with it.

Juan breaks it down here:

In speaking about social breakdown in those minority communities, the president put the gun issue in the context of high rates of out-of-wedlock births that lead to high rates of childhood poverty. “I wish I had a father who was around and involved,” the president said, in words that echoed loudly through black and Latino neighborhoods nationally because he revealed a pain so common, yet so rarely confessed, among young people of color.

The shame and silence is enforced by civil-rights leaders who speak in support of gun control but never about a dysfunctional gangster-rap culture that glorifies promiscuity, drug dealers and the power of the gun.

“Loving, supporting parents . . . [are] the single most important thing,” the president told his audience of young, mostly minority children at Hyde Park Academy High School in Chicago. He made the case for parents as the key to giving children a sense of self-esteem beyond the barrel of a gun.

Almost 50 years ago, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, the national out-of-wedlock birthrate was 7%. Today it is over 40%. According to the CDC, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for white children was just 2% in the 1960s. Today it is 30%. Among black children, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has skyrocketed from 20% in the 1960s to a heartbreaking 72% today. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock rate, which has been measured for a much shorter period, was below 40% in 1990 and stands at more than 50% as of the 2010 census.

When President Obama tried to speak to this crippling dynamic in 2008, he was basically told to shut up by Rev. Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based activist said: “Barack was talking down to black people,” then he added a vulgar threat about what he wanted to do in response. The moment revealed the high cost of speaking honestly about social breakdown in black America.

I support gun control. But speaking honestly about the combustible mix of race and guns may be more important to stopping the slaughter in minority communities than any new gun-control laws.

Fatherhood

Stop Treating Dads Like Inept, Dim-Witted Parents

by Clayton Craddock • May 26, 2013 • 0 Comments

Recently, the site Flip The News decided to take an article published in the Atlantic, and do a gender flip in order to bring awareness to the constant portrayal of men as absent or less capable parents. The flipped article centers around points such as volunteering for the Boy Scouts, failed fatherhood attempts, pet rescue, and fathering through proxy, as in one circumstance in the flipped article where a man talks about his relationship with his nephews.

This is a small, but important, step towards a bigger, more involved conversation about how fathers are portrayed in the media and how we subsequently treat them in our own day to day life. The point is simple yet strong: men are capable of being a nurturing parent as much as women are. Parenthood is not a woman’s role, it is a partnership between two people.

Think about the last commercial you saw for a household product. More than likely, it featured a fumbling husband attempting to clean but, try as he might, keeps making the situation worse. Luckily, his doting wife is always within sight to offer a playful eye roll that seems to be underlined by the bitter question, “I have to do everything for you, don’t I?” In some cases, the product’s mascot is often a strong, masculine “hero” to swoop in and save that poor wife from her husband’s inability to yield a paper towel (we’re all looking at you, Brawny)

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