The Choice Myth — Judith Warner … thinking less about choice, in fact, and make us focus more on contingencies — the objective conditions that drive women’s lives.

The alternative narrative—of constricted horizons, not choice—that might have emerged from recent research has never really made it into the mainstream. It just can’t, it seems, find a foothold …

… our public policy continues to rest upon a fictitious idea, eternally recycled in the media, of mothers’ free choices, and not upon the constraints that truly drive their behavior.Judith Warner may choose not to name it, but this is open hosility. This is war, part of the war against mothers—and children—a war, really, against any segment of society made up of piss-poor wage-earners, you know? I mean, what a drain. There’s no prizes for growing a kid. Where’s the annual bonus in that.

And don’t get me started on mothers. Welfare queens, all of them, lazy bitches who can’t or won’t get a job, preferring to live off the backs of the taxpayer, you know?

You do? I’m so glad you understand. I mean, this is a cut-throat world, and if the respect goes to the Big Players, then well it might. If money is everything—if money and its power are the only things that really count, that make a man a man, one of the Big Boys … Follow my train of thought and it becomes clear who’s the parasite and who isn’t. Yeah, I know, women have been bitching for years, thirty years now, about how hard they work. Kiss my butt. All the airy-fairy arguments, like how hard is it to raise kids. When in other countries they like farm it out, and go right back to work and you don’t see them moaning and bitching, now, do you. And the people grow up just fine. Okay, the Russians are a little nutty, but in general, hell, farm it out.

Because the effort to take the Fifties’ mom-at-home model and make it work in today’s world is just nuts. As bizarre as those super-high heels in which a woman cannot actually walk. Hell-o, care for a connection? Are those fookin’ stilettos, especially now that they’ve gone beyond the can-actually-walk stage and are donned, what, for the few moments it takes Victoria Beckham to get from restaurant to car? Like the rest of you have David Beckham‘s arm to lean on, no you don’t.

We live, women live, in a largely fictional world, it has gotten all mixed up with our native sexuality—which still exsits, a miracle, beneath the layers of mythical crap. I shudder to think what history will make of our fair sex. I think history will say something like, those hideous shoes were a Cry For Help. A vivid and barely disguised symbol of the impossibile made to seem possible. Of the impossible dressed up, but honey, never really disguised. Women are in pain, and in most cases, they take it into themselves.

But those days are over. They be long gone. I think what we have collectively done, ladies, is process just about all that can be processed in the inner world. See what Warner is saying. Pay attention to her message and not your feet: the problem is in the real world. The problem of work versus stay-at-home moms. You have to be either quite well off or poor, to stay home. One extreme has a choice (if we disregard baggage) and the other stays home because they can’t afford to work.

And the real life solutions are?

Tags: a woman's life, female mind

§ One Response to “No Choice”

• nance says:

  4 December 2009 at 5:48 PM

  Damned good question. I used to think the answer was, “Earth Shoes.”

  Now, I’m beginning to admit I don’t have the right to produce answers that my generation lacks the time to see through. We never imagined, in our Women’s Lib focus groups, that our girls would ever voluntarily bind their own feet. I think they wear those impossible shoes to work because they are too tired to wear them anywhere else. It hurts me to watch.