The road to women’s rage is lined with mediocre white men.
The women of my grandmother’s generation were meant to graduate from high school, immediately find a husband and produce as many kids as possible (Irish Catholic). She spent all day tending to the needs of her offspring all day only to tend to the needs of her husband after work.
Then their daughters were allowed to go to college with the exception they would find a husband, quit their jobs and rear children.
Men’s lives didn’t change.
Today, my generation is meant to go to college, grind at a job to earn $0.80 on a man’s dollar, get married, crank out kids and return immediately return to work where we need to be an equal earner to our spouses. We’re doing all of that while pumping breastmilk, not sleeping, trying to be promoted, raising wildly successful and enriched children, expected to live a Pinterest lifestyle, doing all the thinking and planning for the family, taking care of elderly parents and watching every calorie and staving off all signs of aging?
And still men’s lives haven’t changed? What. The. Actual. Fuck.
The guys I went to college with — my peers — have turned into their fathers. They idolized mediocre white men (in some cases, wealthy or worse, only generationally wealthy) and have grown up to fill their manchild-sized shoes.
Today, we’re forced to choose between two decrepit mediocre white men to lead the United States. Two men that came of age before JFK was assassinated, Niel Armstrong landed on the moon and Elvis Presley became famous. They grew up watching mothers abide by gender roles and dote on their husbands every whim.
I finished Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds last week. It’s a historical fiction novel set in the Great Depression and told through the flipping lenses of a mother and daughter. It’s the story of the societal oppression of women; men abandoning their families; and ultimately rich white men getting richer on the backs of people strategically kept in poverty.
I finished this book at the same time my employer declared war on women. Or more palatable to him, the end of remote work. Semantics. A 61yo man on a modern-day throne decided to fuck all the women in one fell swoop.
It was — as my colleague put it so eloquently — as if a tornado was put in a blender with a grenade and the CEO hurdled it at us.
Mediocre white men can fuck right off.
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