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Comment by danteembermage | Hacker News Reader

I don't think having children really fits well with the feminist paradigm. While tricky, it's certainly possible to change the world and raise children at the same time, I just get the sense that a personification of the women's movement might say something like "Well you certainly can do that, and more power to you if you can!". It seems like child-rearing is relegated to a hobby that distracts from the real work, like gardening or going to the symphony. I don't think there are many people actively hostile toward mothering, but it just doesn't seem all that valued in society.

For example, suppose an individual took child development and nutrition classes because it would help make them a better parent. Would that garner the same lever of respect as, say, studying for the bar or going to french club.

If parenting isn't valued, but a lot of it still has to go on, the result isn't a happy contented society.

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I learned a lot about parenting from an amazing man I met in Barcelona. His son and he were staying in the same hotel as me, they were traveling Europe together after he just graduated college.

His son met a really cute Czech girl in Spain, so Dad rightfully gave him space. But the father and I really hit it off, so we'd sit at a Spanish bar and eat tortilla sandwiches and drink coffee and we had some really interesting chats. He's a very successful real estate developer from Los Angeles, even post-crash. He converts rental properties into vacation properties, which is a lot more work but can generate 3x-7x stable rents. (Of course, you've got to rent/clean/maintain/etc - definitely more active and risky money than standard landlording).

He told me about his family. After having his second son was born about 15 years ago, his wife got depressed and wanted to get out of the marriage and family life ASAP. She was breaking down mentally, basically, and wanted to run - fast.

So the man says, "I understand, that's fine, but you can't support yourself right now, and you'll need to be able to do that before we can get divorced. Even if I take the kids, they'll still spend a lot of time with you and you need to have a clean, nice place and income so they can have a nice life with you and be proud." She got into a nursing program, and got either a certificate or a degree in nursing. By the time she finished 2-4 years later, she's cleared up. They had another child and went on to both be very happy and successful. She pulls down $80k/year now as a nurse, and they've done very well investing too. His son seems like a hell of a guy, thoughtful, mature, intelligent, cultured, poised. The Dad's a very cool guy too. A good family.

One thing he told that made a lot of sense - "Sebastian, you've got to understand, kids are the most selfish, ungrateful creatures in the world when they're young. All they do is demand, demand, demand things, and they're not grateful at all. Later they realize and appreciate what you've done for them, but a woman who just raises kids pours in so much effort for so little gratitude and appreciation and respect...." He goes on to explain how the regular praise, promotions, and the steady paycheck are instant rewards and validations from work, and help a person's self esteem. He thinks any woman would do well to have at least some part time work or project that she gets respect, appreciation, and validation from - because kids won't provide that until they're 20+, and you need to not go crazy in the meantime.

Maybe now in the West, society doesn't value parenting as much as traditionally, so women get even less respect for being a good parent now. Not sure about that myself - if that's true, then it's even harder to raise children than historically. But his points really resonated with me - I've talked about it with all the girls I've dated. I personally date two types of women - hyper-driven, top of the game, ambitious high performance girls, and quite traditional, feminine, nurturing girls - and usually not much in between. But all of them, with some talking to, come to agree about keeping a part time project to help women stay sane. If I make my life with a traditional woman who is happy to be just a good mother and keep a good household, it'll still be good for her to do a little bit of work for the validation that comes from that. Even something small like teaching a one hour class twice a week, or doing some flower arranging for a couple local small businesses. Same with driven women - they'd go crazy if they completely hung up their spurs and only raised kids.

I'm probably a bit more traditional than most American men from the international cities - I place a lot of respect and value on having a woman who is very in tune with my emotions after a long day, can cook well, can clean and mend clothing well, and has mastered the other domestic skills, which I consider quite invaluable. It's less important to have hyper-intellectual conversations with my girl or play Chess with her - I get plenty of that with my male friends anyway. But even if I take the most traditional, old world European or Japanese girl to make a life with, I still think something that provides her that instant positive feedback is very good for happiness.

This gut got lucky, specifically at this stage:

>> So the man says, "I understand, that's fine, but you can't support yourself right now, and you'll need to be able to do that before we can get divorced..."

The wife was well within her rights to say "screw you" to the guy, file for divorce with a contingency lawyer, and get a bunch in child support and income equalization from the guy - and probably custody too if she put a bit of effort in.

I'm with you on how ugly the family court system can be, but this one's a bit different. She didn't want the kids - she wanted to leave because she was going crazy. I'm pretty sure he/they weren't wealthy yet at that point either. She wanted to leave the kids with him, end the marriage, and move on. She was in a full blown panic/depression/something like that.

Most men would freak out there. Instead of taking it personally, he was practical about it and helped put her through school, saying that the kids came before both of them, and she needed to be able to support herself. He didn't make her feel trapped or beg her or insult her, he just set about practically so they could run two households effectively if they needed to. It turned out, they didn't need to, now they run one very successful household.

I really admire his stoic practicality there. In a place where a lot of men would freak out, he was calm, sympathetic, yet unfailingly practical. He was willing to have his marriage end on a practical note, but instead it wound up keeping his marriage together and building a very strong family. A very, very insightful guy, I was very lucky to cross paths from him and get the opportunity to learn some really important lessons.

He was clever. If he invested that time and money and she still wanted out, her salary would be much closer to his, which would have worked out in his favor when it came time to calculate child support or alimony. It's possible (maybe unlikely) that if she had made more than him that _he_ could have ended up receiving money in the divorce.

In fact, I can't see a down side in this case for either (adult) party -- being poor and uneducated with child support is inferior to being relatively self-wealthy with modest child support, so it was a win for her.

There's a value to raising your children yourself; a stay-at-home parent can focus on the needs of the children and spend more time on giving them a first class childhood experience. If the relationship is headed for the wall, however, it surely is superior to do this at the expense of trying to continue stay-at-home parenting.

Feminism: a paradigm that advocates equal rights for men and women.

How exactly does having children contradict the above? Which rights should I have lost last month when I gave birth to my baby?

People play endless games with the word "right" here, to the point that the word is meaningless. Do you have the "right" to be as dedicated to work as a childless 21-year-old whose primary goal in life is to climb a corporate ladder? Then, perhaps, "feminism" says "no children for you!" Or perhaps it demands free child care, then demands that your relationship to the child not suffer when you're not the primary caregiver.

Note how I scarequoted the word "feminism" since it would only be one particular variant of an itself-poorly-defined word. (That variant definitely does exist, though.) Such a variant would argue that you have lost a multitude of such "rights", which you may not agree with.

Nobody (or close enough it doesn't matter) is saying that you've lost anything like "the right to free speech" or any such "natural right" because you have a baby. (I personally would say you have a responsibility to it, but that goes equally for the father too. I say this as a father, but then, "parents have responsibility to their children" shouldn't be too controversial to most people.)

I beg to differ. Feminism is described as a poorly defined term only by people who wish it were so, probably out of the irrational fear that equal rights for men and women will somehow lead to the end of the world as we know it. Let's look at facts here:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Feminism: The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

Encarta Dictionary:

Feminism: Belief in the need to secure rights and opportunities for women equal to those of men

Encyclopedia Britannica:

Feminism: Social movement that seeks equal rights for women.

Wikipedia:

Feminism: A political discourse aimed at equal rights and legal protection for women.

Likewise, when people talk about equal rights, they usually mean equal rights under the law. What's the point of discussing silly made-up rights such as "the right to be as dedicated to work as a childless 21-year-old whose primary goal in life is to climb a corporate ladder"?

I'm sorry, I hate to break it to you, but citing dictionary definitions doesn't actually prove anything. Go out and look at real political discourse, and tell me that, well, almost any political term is actually well-defined in practice. Conservative, liberal, democrat, republican, socialist, fascist, feminist, racist, you name it, the term has been virtually stripped of meaning. People slinging the term like an insult, people wrapping themselves in the term to score political points, academics deconstructing the term for fun. See also: denotation vs. connotation

Heck, I'll even cut you a break and let you just use the discourse that appears in those gloriously-editor-mediated "major media outlets" without having to muck about with the hoi polloi that wouldn't know what the OED was if you (laboriously) hit them with it; it's still the same result.

"What's the point of discussing silly made-up rights"

Well, to take one silly made-up right that has been the topic of much recent political discourse, there's the "right to healthcare" that has been making the rounds, which certainly can't be found in the Constitution or any discussion of rights of any significant age (such as the classic discourse of the Founding Fathers or Enlightenment philosophers), unless you squint really, really hard.

And, if you feel that isn't a silly, made-up right, well, I'm sure you can manage to find someone who will say "the right to pursue a career unfettered by non-gender-fair obligations like childbirthing" isn't either. "Right" has been ill-defined for a long time; it fits right in to that list I gave above. (Which, by the way, is a heavily abridged list; as I said, you name the term it's probably been stripped of all meaning, used to signify group membership more than any original denotation it may have ever had, with only rare people using it "correctly", and they not understood by any but those other rare people who use it "correctly".)

Those definitions are quite different from each other!

Like jerf said what dictionaries say does not matter.

In practice I see that feminists are like various fonbois seen here, they go on and on about their pet topic, they are very easily provoked. It is as if they are finding an excuse to start a pissing contest of arguments.

I don't think a woman who is a happy and proud 'housewife' (and there are _many_) fits well with the definitions of those feminist fonbois. And about equality: aping men is not equality its lack of self-worth. Women are different. What their traditional role was was and is respectable too. The way they were (even now in some regions) treated by society is very deplorable. The ideal society would certainly be when women are given equal rights and respect. But they shouldn't be expected to get a full-time job to prove anything.

fonbois = fan boys?

That's a typo. Sorry. 'fanbois' == Fan Boys.

Thank you.

Men and women aren't equal. Men can't have babies. Who is going to secure the opportunity for a man to give birth?

And they don't have equal rights under the law. For example, say a man and a woman have sex and make a baby and the man says, "I can't support this child, I think you should have an abortion." Well, he can't make her do that, but she can still sue him for child support. But if he says, "I do not want you to have an abortion." She still can.

Would you argue, that with equal rights under the law, a father of a child should have equal say in whether or not a child he has conceived should be aborted? Do you think a man should have the right to force a woman to give birth to the child, take custody of it, then require her, by law, to pay child support?

If you ever want to understand the differences between men and women, read some books by women who have received testosterone to undergo sex changes to become men. They say things like "I became more interested in my career and earning money. I understood math and science better. I became more interested in technology and machines and less interested in people, etc."

It's quite fascinating stuff and makes you realise how different the sexes are.

I've never heard things like this. Do you have some sources? Something like that would be a real hit to our social system that fired Larry Summers from Harvard for saying there may be differences in aptitude in the sciences between men and women for biological reasons.

Here's a "This American Life" episode where they interview one person - it's act two - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=123...

One book I read on the topic that I can remember is "The Testosterone Files" - http://www.amazon.com/Testosterone-Files-Hormonal-Social-Tra...

The author does an excellent job of describing his experience and the differences he noticed between being a women versus being a man.

It is relatively easy to measure the outcome of studying for the bar or going to French club. Clear benefits seem like a good explanation for society's willingness to ascribe high value to these activities, compared to activities with less measurable results.

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