Pastor Actually Questions, in the Year 2017, If It’s Acceptable for Mothers to Work Outside of the Home.

Pastor Actually Questions, in the Year 2017, If It’s Acceptable for Mothers to Work Outside of the Home.

I cannot believe we are in the year 2017, and Christians are still asking about this sort of thing and pontificating about it. To even ask and muse about this in 2017 is just sexist.

In regards to this story linked to below, Dee of Wartburg Watch asked on Twitter, something along the lines of, how much money does preacher Todd Wagner earn so that his wife (assuming he has a wife and kids) is able to stay at home all day to watch their kids?

How many of the women in Wagner’s church congregation (who may even be mothers themselves) have jobs outside the home, part of whose job income are paid to him in tithes, so that he can afford to have his wife stay at home and be a stay at home mother?

(Link): Does the Bible Say It’s OK for Moms to Work?

Excerpts:

July 28, 2017

by Sheryl Lynn

The pastor of a multi-site church in Texas [Watermark Community Church] recently responded to a question on whether the Bible says it’s OK for moms to work.

While it’s not forbidden, Todd Wagner questioned the motive behind a mother choosing to work over being at home with her children.

// end excerpt

“While it’s not forbidden.” – Yes, you can end it right there. Anything beyond this is Wagner’s opinion.

Why does society still view childless women like me with suspicion? by E. Day

Why does society still view childless women like me with suspicion?

(Link): Why does society still view childless women like me with suspicion? by E. Day

Excerpts:

• Remarks like Leadsom’s go far beyond the usual cut-and-thrust of the political arena and reveal how (Link): childless women are still viewed with innate suspicion. This, in spite of the fact that women in their mid-40s are now almost twice as likely to be childless as their parents’ generation. One in five women born in 1969 is childless today, compared with one in nine women born in 1942.
• But there remains a taboo, a retrograde belief that (Link): we are in some way unnatural for not fulfilling our biological destiny. How else to explain the fact that the first question many people ask when I meet them is whether I have children, followed by an uncomfortable pause when I say that I don’t. “But why?” I can see them thinking. “What’s wrong with her?”

Please Stop Asking Me When I’m Getting Married and Having My Own Kids – by E. Barnes

Please Stop Asking Me When I’m Getting Married and Having My Own Kids – by E. Barnes

I believe I first saw this link on Melanie Notkin’s Twitter:

(Link):  Please Stop Asking Me When I’m Getting Married and Having My Own Kids – by E. Barnes

Excerpts:

I’m a PANK. Yeah, you’re reading that right. I’m a PANK, a Professional Aunt No Kids.

….I recently shared something on my personal Facebook page that reads, “I’m tired of hearing, ‘When are you going to get married and have kids?’ Let me tell you, I could have done that already and chose not to.

Tokophobia – Too Afraid To Have A Baby by A. Lauretta

Tokophobia – Too Afraid To Have A Baby by A. Lauretta

(Link):  Too Afraid to Have a Baby

Tokophobia—a pathological dread of giving birth—might be causing some women to avoid pregnancy.

….Though there aren’t statistics in the United States for a pathological anxiety over pregnancy and childbirth—known as tokophobia— (Link): studies in Australia and Britain have found that 6 percent of pregnant women report a disabling fear of having babies, while 13 percent of women who are not yet pregnant are afraid enough to postpone or avoid pregnancy altogether.

….Pregnancy and childbirth do come with feelings of anxiety, of course: hopes that the mother and child will be safe and healthy, that there will be little to no complications during childbirth, that the first days and months at home will go smoothly.

So when do common pregnancy jitters cross the line into a clinical phobia? And, if the phobia is as prevalent as some research suggests, why isn’t it more widely recognized? The answer may have to do with the difficulty of being open about not looking forward to something that most people consider a miracle—especially when more than six million women in the U.S. alone have problems getting or staying pregnant and may dream of having children.

…Tokophobia is categorized in two forms: primary and secondary. The former can be understood through the lens of Mirren’s fear—often happening at a young age—when seeing disturbing images of birth or even resulting from sexual assault. The latter is often described similarly to post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting from a traumatic past birth experience.

Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing by R K Bussel

Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing by R K Bussel

(Link): Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing

Excerpts

• I used to wonder why my childfree friends were so adamant about what they didn’t want—but I get it now
• by RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
• We talk a lot about freedom of choice when it comes to reproduction, but there’s still one choice that women face an unconscionable amount of backlash over: the decision not to have kids. In an essay for (Link): Marie Claire, writer Starre Vartan details the opposition she’s faced in the dating and medical arenas over her choice to remain childfree, with a gynecologist telling her “That’s what we’re here for” and two boyfriends deliberately removing condoms during sex in a disgusting attempt to force her to change her mind:
• “I…explained how terrified I was, physically and mentally, to be pregnant, to care for needy small humans. Two different, otherwise wonderful, handsome, and brilliant men said they ‘understood’ after I opened up about my fears. And then they each promptly sabotaged the birth control that I was very strict about.”
• Assuming that all women automatically want kids is insulting—to everyone. It insults those who do plan to have kids or are parents already by diminishing the sheer amount of physical and emotional labor that goes into the undertaking. It insults those who don’t want kids, or aren’t sure, by elevating motherhood above every other option….
• …Nobody wins by coercing someone else into becoming a parent, or making someone feel guilty, damaged or ostracized for not wanting kids.

James Dobson’s Flawed Take on Population Decline (no.1: We’re Not in Decline) by T. Grant

James Dobson’s Flawed Take on Population Decline (no.1: We’re Not in Decline) by T. Grant

As this report notes (link is much farther down this blog page), more pressure is placed on WOMEN to marry and have children than is placed on MEN.

I know that culture and Christians can treat single / celibate / childless men like trash, but they are TEN TIMES worse on Christian WOMEN in these regards.

Women get far more pressured to marry and have kids than men do or ever will.

Women get more shamed and insulted by Christians (and at times, secular culture) for staying single, celibate, and childless than males ever are.

Just because most women are capable of carrying a baby inside them, society and churches think it’s their DUTY to have a baby (as though women serve no other purpose in life), and if they choose to opt out (or cannot have a kid), they are still marginalized or insulted for it.

Men don’t face nearly as much insult or pressure to have kids as women do.

I am right of center – but I agree with this left wing (liberal) guy that other right wingers such as Dobson’s real goal is to be against what he perceives as liberal threats to the church or culture. That is one very real motivator some right wingers have, in why they do things like harass women to have children.

I also want to say how utterly moronic I find this approach by Dobson.

All The Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister – Various Links to Reviews or Commentary About the Book and Its Issues

All The Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister  – Various Links to Reviews or Commentary About the Book and Its Issues

There are currently a million links about the new book “All the Single Ladies” by Rebecca Traister

Up til now, I have made individual blog posts about that book – reviews, commentaries that reference it, or interviews with its author.

I no longer feel like devoting that much effort into blogging about it, so here is a lone thread crammed with links about it.

This post may be edited in the future to add new links about this book as I find them.

Some of these links might only be tangentially related to the book. I only have one life to live, and I don’t want to spend it blogging about this one book.

It sometimes takes me a long time to put a single blog post together – especially hunting through the “Categories and Tags” area of the blog area, having to skim through a long list of tags. It’s a time consuming pain in the ass.

One thing you will notice in many of these articles is how often Traister points out that men do not usually face as MUCH social stigma or penalties as often in life -or employment- as single women do for being single. Which is true.

As I have written of before, (Link): Men are not hounded, judged, or shamed nearly as much as women are for remaining celibate, single, and/or childless.

The fact that a woman author had to write a book discussing singleness among women speaks to how much singleness is different for women than it is for men – it is far more socially acceptable (and among Christians) for a man to remain single and childless than it is for a woman.

Do some segments of culture harass men over being single or kid-free or question their manliness? Yes.

I am not saying that life or church is a cake-walk for never married or childless or childfree men. But as a matter of comparison, on a scale of one to ten, with one being “awesome and great” and ten being “terrible and hellish” single and childless men get treated to about a, I don’t know, a four on that scale, while women get a nine or a ten.

Because women have vaginas, they are expected to have babies. There is far more stigma attached for a woman to be single and without children than there is a for a man, because church and society do not expect having babies to be necessary for a man to be fully a man socially or biologically. Not near as much as it is for women.

Women get pressured for more often and more severely to marry and have babies than men ever do or ever will.

I am not saying men get ZERO pressure, only that they get a 1 or a 2 in pressure, where-as women get a 9 or 10 in pressure on the scale of marriage and natalism.

It is far easier to drift thru life as a single bachelor dude with no kids than it is for a woman to go through life with no husband or no kids – you won’t get judged as much by family, church, politicians, conservative think tanks, over this stuff as a woman does over it. And it’s sexist bullshit.

Here are the links (more might be added to this post in the future as I find them):

(Link):  The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

(Link):  Review: Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is a reassuring balm to the rhetoric that surrounds us 

• Yet in spite of these harsh truths, All the Single Ladies is celebratory, the stories of real women who are single a reassuring balm to the rhetoric that surrounds us. Traister asks, by outlining the ways women can succeed when their societies support their choices, to consider what we really mean when we tell women to marry for better or worse.
• Her argument – that our public policies are what need to change, not the rate at which we marry or the age we do it – prioritizes equal pay over joint accounts, better health-care provisions over shared plans, comprehensive child care instead of Mommy-and-Me clichés, and other tangible solutions instead of abstract platitudes.

(Link):  Rebecca Traister’s ‘All The Single Ladies’ is a singularly triumphant work

(Link):   Single Women are Quietly Remaking Our World

• By Emily Simon
• “Single women are taking up space in a world that was not designed for them.”
• That sort of statement – at once radical and obvious – is characteristic of Rebecca Traister: a happily married mother of two who is currently encouraging us to recognize the cultural and political power of single women.

Why Being a Childless Woman is Rarely a Simple Case of Choice or Infertility – Childless by Circumstance by J. Day

Please note all you are getting here is a long excerpt. I did not paste in the whole article. The author discusses how she tried IVF at one time, or she considered using IVF, if I remember correctly.

(Link): Why being a childless woman is rarely a simple case of choice or infertility – by J Day

An estimated 80% of women who don’t have children are ‘childless by circumstance’, rather than choice or medical reasons

Feb 28, 2016

Before I became a statistic, by reaching my mid-forties without having children, I thought, as many of us do, that there were two ways to become a childless woman: you either didn’t want them (“child-free”) or you were infertile.

It has been estimated that 80 per cent of women who don’t have children are “childless by circumstance”, a phrase coined by the Australian academic Dr Leslie Cannold in her 2005 book, What, No Baby?

The figure comes from the work of Dr Renske Keizer, a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, who in a 2010 meta-analysis of data from the Netherlands and the US estimated that 10 per cent of women without children are childless by choice, 10 per cent for medical reasons, and 80 per cent by circumstance.

Applied to statistics about UK women, it can be estimated that there are (or shortly will be) almost 1.5 million women in their forties and fifties here who won’t have children, with only 10 per cent of those being unambiguously by choice.

….Perhaps the most difficult-to-digest reason for childlessness is that of never having been in a suitable relationship.

Why Single Women Have Baby Fear Of Missing Out – via Daily Beast

Why Single Women Have Baby Fear Of Missing Out – by L. Crocker – via Daily Beast

Fortunately for me, I never cared much if I had any children or not, so I’m “meh” about not having kids.

(Link):  Why Single Women Have Baby FOMO by L. Crocker

Excerpts:

• Single women have more power, influence, and freedom than ever before—but that freedom is still complicated by child-bearing.
• It’s not easy for single women of a certain age to revel in their singledom. There comes a time—one that varies depending on cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds—when the single woman in America feels like an anomaly among her peers, regardless of whether she’s single by choice or not.
• In reality, the opposite is true: There are more single women now than ever.
• In 2009, the number of American women who were married fell below 50 percent, and the number of women younger than 34 who had never been married climbed to 46 percent.
• The numbers reflect a broader cultural shift that has allotted single women more power, influence, and freedom than ever before.
• We’ve seen the single woman’s rise touted in books like Kate Bolick’s (Link): Spinster (2015), about how the author has managed to live independently for 39 years, taking cues from other unconventional women. We’ve seen it in television shows about powerful single women, too, like Liz Lemon in 30 Rock.
• Now, feminist writer Rebecca Traister shows us just how far we’ve come in 50 years in her new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. (New York magazine ran a cover story adapted from the book last week, a viral essay about the (Link): value of the single woman’s vote in this election cycle.)
• All the Single Ladies argues that single women, “untethered from the energy-sucking and identity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms,” have long played crucial roles in our country’s defining social movements, from abolitionism to suffragism to feminism.

Facebook’s motherhood challenge makes me want to punch my computer screen by F. Everett

Facebook’s motherhood challenge makes me want to punch my computer screen by F. Everett

I am friends with people on Facebook who have told me in private that their mother friends – one lady is Facebook friends with a sister of hers who has three kids – are actually terrible parents in real life.

Yet, these same terrible mothers who blather on about how wonderful their children are when they are on Facebook, who post scads of posts of their smiling kids, yell and scream at the kids in real life – or neglect them.

Remember that every time you see posts by parents on Facebook, with their sweet family snaps, who are bragging about their children. They are often times selectively editing their social media to present a glossy, happy version of their life that may not be real most of the time.

(Link):  Facebook’s motherhood challenge makes me want to punch my computer screen by F. Everett

(Link): Mommy Blogger Confesses in Blog Post that Mommy Blogging is a Bunch of Fake, Happy-Clappy B.S. – Kind of Like Most Christian Adult Singleness Blogs

• Of course it’s meant to be a bit of fun, but this smug club fetishises motherhood, and creates a new way to measure women and find them wanting
• There are certain phrases that make my heart sink. After “Can I be really honest?” and “Mind if I join you, ladies?” the latest to engender a sense of creeping misery must surely be (Link):“Facebook motherhood challenge”.Of uncertain origin, this viral “challenge” demands that mothers post a series of pictures that make them “proud to be a mum” and then tag other women who they think are “great mothers”.
• Many of my friends have done this, bouncily posting shots of themselves with interchangeable babies, all of whom look like glow-worms in padded snowsuits, and tagging whole lists of other “awesome mums” inviting them to do the same.
• And while I fully understand that they have no intention of hurting anyone, that they are simply happy to have their wonderful children, #blessed, #lovinglife and so on, I still want to punch the screen of my computer in whenever a new one pops up.
•  The most offensive aspect of this is the idea that it’s a “challenge” at all.
• A challenge is coping with grief when you wish you were dead, or pushing your mind and body to the limit in a feat of superhuman endurance. It’s not posting a few snaps of your toddler and waiting for your friends to type “aw gorgeous hun xxx” underneath. And it’s unclear whether the challenge in question is to prove what a great mother you are, or merely to challenge your friends to prove that they are too.
•  This insidious idea of (Link): motherhood as a beatific vocational calling began with the Virgin Mary, and reached its peak with the Victorian notion of “the angel of the hearth”, when mothers who didn’t have to work, and had nannies and housekeepers and nursery maids rushing about looking after their children, were depicted as celestial beings radiating goodness, their sole purpose on Earth to gather little children to their rustling taffeta bosoms and gently instruct them.

GOP Consultant Rick Wilson to MSNBC: Trump Supporters ‘Childless Single Men Who Masturbate to Anime’

GOP Consultant Rick Wilson to MSNBC: Trump Supporters ‘Childless Single Men Who Masturbate to Anime’

I am right wing, and a Republican (though I am lately thinking about leaving the GOP, but not for the Democrats. Both the GOP and the Democrats are disappointing, but for different reasons).

I have said on this blog before that many Republicans (or at least a percentage) are stuck in the 1950s, and that they idolize the nuclear family. They ostracize or marginalize anyone who is not married with children (which is quite what conservative Christians do).

Some of the following links pertain to Donald Trump. I know a lot of people find Trump polarizing, but I don’t have strong opinions for or against the guy.

I don’t keep up with politics as much as I used to do, so I just happen to see the occasional blurb or Tweet about Trump. From what I’ve seen the last several months, Trump says offensive or over the top things. Every so often, he makes a point that I agree with a tiny bit.

It’s highly inappropriate for a Republican to trash un-married or childless men for any reason, but I’d also include doing so for the sake of taking Trump down a peg or two. Insulting people for being single or childless, or in the context of scoring political points, is totally uncalled for.

I suppose the GOP yea-hoo who made these disparaging remarks about single or childless people is unaware that most Americans today are single, and more and more are forgoing parenthood (Link about that and see this link).

(Link): GOP strategist slams ‘crazy’ Trump fans: ‘Childless single men who masturbate to anime’

A Woman’s Fertility is Her Own Business, not Everyone Else’s by L. Bates

A Woman’s Fertility is Her Own Business, not Everyone Else’s by L. Bates

I may have blogged on this before. I apologize if this is a repeat. I’m pretty sure I already read this, or something very similar to it, about a month ago, and I may have blogged on this before.

(Link): A Woman’s Fertility is Her Own Business, not Everyone Else’s by L. Bates

Excerpts (I have a few comments to make below this long series of excerpts):

We obsess over fertility as if women are slot machines who simply need to be primed and pumped at the optimal socially acceptable moment for a baby to shoot out like a prize

When Michigan-based writer Emily Bingham took to her Facebook page to vent her frustration at intrusive baby questions, she probably expected a few of her friends to share or “like” her post. Accompanied by an ultrasound photo she had found online, (Link): her post implored:

Before you ask the young married couple that has been together for seemingly forever when they are finally gonna start a family … before you ask the parents of an only-child toddler when a Little Brother or Little Sister will be in the works … before you ask a single thirtysomething if/when s/he plans on having children because, you know, clock’s ticking … just stop.

Please stop.

You don’t know who is struggling with infertility or grieving a miscarriage or dealing with health issues.

You don’t know who is having relationship problems or is under a lot of stress or the timing just isn’t right. You don’t know who is on the fence about having kids or having more kids.

You don’t know who has decided it’s not for them right now, or not for them ever. You don’t know how your seemingly innocent question might cause someone grief, pain, stress or frustration.

But instead of reaching a few dozen of her friends, Bingham’s post went viral, shared by more than 77,000 people and liked by more than 42,000. It’s not surprising that Bingham’s message struck such a chord.