What I can tell you is that I personally advocate for traditional gender roles. Women excel at raising children and men excel at protecting and providing for their families, they've been doing it for millions of years. Then in the 70's, 3rd Wave Feminism comes along and turns everything on it's head and poisons the water supply.
Divorce rates skyrocket and we now have two generations (soon to become three) full of entitlement princesses who think they 'can have it all'. We have huge numbers of children being raised by strangers in baby day-zoos, because mummy wants to play 'career woman'. Children aren't an accessory, they are actual real, live human beings who need their mothers, especially in infancy.
So I bet I've raised the ire of more than a handful of people by now... Well, let me ask you this, if I am 'sexist' why is it, that when ForbesWoman surveyed working women, 84% of them preferred to be stay at home mums. You can't deny millions of years of biological instinct. Forbes try to spin it by pathetically attempting to make it into something that women have no choice but to work, which is of course nonsense. In fact, they put all the blame on men: Forbes notes that "more than one in three resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality." Naturally, the choices women make are all men's fault, as usual!
We need to advocate for women to do what they do best - be caring, nurturing, loving mothers to their children in the home. Let dad go out and do what needs to be done to maintain food, clothing and shelter for his wife and kids. When you put these two elements together, it becomes an indestructible force, able to raise confident, loving, well adjusted little people. Not perfect and doesn't work like that in every situation, but look at where we are today: Slutwalks, escalating single motherhood, 60% of first marriages ending in divorce, an ever increasing number of men wisely outright rejecting marriage, thanks to the plethora of horror stories out there in internet-land, female solipsism gone wild, with women putting their wants first, everyone else be damned, including their own children, etc.
Phew! I think I'll end it there Fifth, I have things I need to get done today.
I’m a bit of a sucker for the traditional family myself, mostly because my husband and I were both raised in single parent households and see it as having been detrimental to our upbringing. Perhaps it’s just a grass is greener thing, I’m not sure. I think in our artificially constructed society, the most ideal situation is two parents and I do think we have too flippant an approach to marriage and divorce. That said, it's not really my place to tell people what to do.
The biggest problem I have with traditional family advocates is their tendency to murk the waters with evolutionary psychology. If single mother households and career women fly in the face of millions of years of evolution, so does the traditional family.
First, we are not instinctively monogamous. It actually goes against our biological instincts. We were never intended to mate for life. That we choose do so is fine, but let’s not pretend that millions of years of evolution have lead us to do so.
Secondly, pre-agricultural societies did not abide by the ‘women care for children and men protect and provide’ mantra. The stereotype of hunter-gatherer societies – man hunting large game with brute force whilst woman picks berries with an infant attached to her teat – is fairly inaccurate. There was a lot more sexual parity in hunter-gatherer societies. Men often gathered and women often hunted. The women usually hunted small game and the men large game. In some societies women hunted large game and this was sometimes done in a group of men and women hunting as a pack. It was only with the advent of agriculture that ‘traditional’ gender roles were established and this was because agricultural work was more physically demanding and the women were often simply incapable.
Thirdly, our modern notion of the traditional family is a cheap, inauthentic and unnatural imitation of what we have been doing for millions of years. The 'traditional' family usually entails women staying home and caring for the children in near isolation. In pre-agricultural societies, child rearing was a joint exercise and the work shared between females. It was far more communal and bares little resemblance to modern stay at home parenting. From a man’s perspective, sitting at a computer in an air-conditioned office also bares little resemblance to his biological role as a protector and provider. I hate to sound 'white people problems', but these can be fairly soul crushing existences.
Fourthly, if we’re to abide by our biological instincts, does that apply to all aspects of life or only to the family unit? Where does that leave pacifism? Archaeologists estimate that approximately 25-30% of all hunter-gatherer deaths can be attributed to homicide. Should men go to war with their neighbouring suburb to feed their biological thirst for blood? Should pacifists be deemed unnatural abominations?
I could go on but I've already typed too much.
So, advocate for traditional families if you must, just don’t drag ‘millions of years’ into it.
I also think that if we’re going to advocate for a traditional family dynamic then we should probably treat women taking on traditional roles with a little more respect. In every single one of these threads the stay at home mothers have been painted as lazy freeloaders who make the choice to have children, to stay home and do all ‘fun’ stuff while they force their ‘yes, ma’am’ husbands to do the donkey work.
Sorry about the long posts.
