For the mastodonts from the 60s

[Robert Roaldi]

1. Absolutely; I've come to realize over the years that everybody has their personality comfort niche, and can't really move into another with a great deal of success. I guess like wine, maybe we don't travel well in that sense. We are what we are.

2. I have had no other type in my family but strong. Being strong does not have to imply a desire to beaver away in a factory, in an office or anywhere else as a wage-slave. People get their kicks from all sorts of interests. The strength to hold together a family, year after year, coaching kids with their homework, putting meals together to suit timetables outwith family control, is no mean feat and certainly no easy option. Not that anyone here seems to be claming that it is, of course.

Strikes me that any idea that running a home is an easy way out is perhaps a certain type of feminists's credo that permits some women a kind of superiority status - in their own mind - at the expense of women with an entirely different set of needs and desires. My wife took the urge to return to laboratory work after the kids were old enough to survive school lunches and/or I was able to come home to feed them something, simply because she reached the point where she wondered whether or not she could still hack it out there. So she did find that job. She realised that she still had the mind, but that the costs of doing it was just too great for the family good. Yep, the extra bread came in useful, but on balance, and especially after we cloosed the rented studio and built our own alongside the house, it was fantastic, and we had so much quality time together. Flat days with no work were excuses for living a life. How nice no longer to have to go off to a cold studio! An extra mug of tea never tasted so good as when returning home from dropping off the kids at school.

I still have lots of mugs of tea; now it tastes like shit.

Just by accident* today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjF7SD3S-tE

Rob

*Maybe no accident: maybe Big Brother Google has us all taped, even though no self-inflicted Alexa-type babe at home to spy on me.

It was never a question of one way of life being greater or lesser than another, it was only ever about choice. Pointing out the great work of Madame Curie or talking about how women worked very hard to maintain families is all true and all utterly beside the point. It's distraction.

As of the 1950s or 1960s, women could not get bank loans without a man around. There was no good reason for that and that kind of thinking limits choice. It's dissembling to suggest that there wasn't a problem with that or that we should not criticize it because "times were different" then. Times were different then for a reason, it didn't just happen, and it was a bogus reason or we wouldn't see the need to change it.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... As of the 1950s or 1960s, women could not get bank loans without a man around. There was no good reason for that ...

Of course there was a good reason. Bank loans require a collateral or steady income stream. With most women housewives then, which collateral or income stream would they offer for a loan? Even today, as a man, I can not get a loan without employment.

... it was a bogus reason or we wouldn't see the need to change it.

Typical retarded liberal claptrap. We did not change it because the reason was "bogus," but because things evolve over time.

[Rob C]

Women getting or not getting loans or credit cards without "a man around" would, from the bank's point of view, have made perfect sense.

The lone woman would perhaps not have a job that was particularly stable; if she did have that, what happened if she owed money that she was well able to return because she was working, then suddenly found herself pregnant and eventually unable to work?

Gender makes a helluva lot of difference now, as ever. The woman can do many things, but she can't run away from her own body.

There could be all sorts of reasons for rejection, especially at a time when banks were not as greedy as they eventually grew to become, right until they screwed one another with their reckless loans to the very people who, like my poor imaginary example, found themselves unable to stump up. Strikes me as morally preferable to stay tight and not allow the vulnerable to become victims on top of that vulnerability.

I can't tell you why particular banks did as they did, but it seems highly unlikely they hadn't thought it through and weighed up the risks to their bottom line.


All that aside, the much vaunted choice to which you referred is as elusive to men as to women: we all run up against limitations either our own or imposed from without. Nobody gets it all.

[KLaban]

All that aside, the much vaunted choice to which you referred is as elusive to men as to women: we all run up against limitations either our own or imposed from without. Nobody gets it all.

Thankfully many women have far more choice now over relationships, child bearing, employment, finances, sexuality...

[KLaban]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjF7SD3S-tE

Thanks for the link,.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... far more choice now...

Google "the curse of choice" to see what psychologists and economists think of too much choice (and why more is often less).

[KLaban]

Google "the curse of choice" to see what psychologists and economists think of too much choice (and why more is often less).

Nah, thanks all the same but I'll take my chance with more choice.

[Robert Roaldi]

Typical retarded liberal claptrap. We did not change it because the reason was "bogus," but because things evolve over time.

Things evolve over time because we change them.

[Robert Roaldi]

Women getting or not getting loans or credit cards without "a man around" would, from the bank's point of view, have made perfect sense.

In that narrow context, of course it did. And it was wrong that things should have been thus. And many people got together to change it. And many people didn't like the change for all the usual reasons.

[Robert Roaldi]

Typical retarded liberal claptrap.

And by the way, are you not able to engage in a discussion without resorting to inane and irrelevant identity attacks? Did some "trigger" make you feel uneasy? Is this not a safe enough space for you?

[OmerV]

Nah, thanks all the same but I'll take my chance with more choice.

Ha! Yes, everybody here has to agree. I mean, as men, we're naturally entitled.

[KLaban]

Ha! Yes, everybody here has to agree. I mean, as men, we're naturally entitled.

It really is a great pity that everybody almost everybody here is male, but given the attitude of many of the contributors that is no great surprise.

[OmerV]

It really is a great pity that everybody almost everybody here is male, but given the attitude of many of the contributors that is no great surprise.

Agree, though the problem is pervasive(photo community.)

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

In that narrow context, of course it did. And it was wrong that things should have been thus...

Of course it did.

And of course it was not wrong. It simply was. Commonsensical even. Many things that happened had a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Was feudalism, with its serfdom, wrong? Was the Roman Empire, with its gladiator fights to death, constant conquests and enslavement, wrong? Etc.

It simply was.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

And by the way, are you not able to engage in a discussion without resorting to inane and irrelevant identity attacks?..

When you bring something original to the debate, I will be more than happy to attack you personally, rather than the larger group you identify with and regurgitate talking points from

[Rob C]

The problem is that none of us lives long enough to be able to give a proper evaluation of history, especially near-history, and so perspective is always an issue.

The only kind of reliable evidence one has to which to cling comes from personal experience, and as that is as varied as the number of people sharing Earth at the same time, the chances of a happy consensus is fairly remote.

I experienced one reality and even my kids another as they grew into adults. What was my norm was one thing, but I'm perfectly sure that it wasn't anyone else's normality. Even my job put me into singular territory as far as anybody else we knew saw normality. If my wife ever developed one stock reply in her life, it was to women friends who asked her if she was upset at my photographing delightful women: she always retorted that well, their husbands had secretaries around them at work all day, every day, didn't they?

So really, the idea of right and wrong as a sort of popular reality of how "it should be" is nothing more than compromise on all sides, the adopting of stances and the projection of one person's way onto another. It's why we have the usual problem of children rebelling agaist everything for which they think their parents stand, only eventually to come to broadly similar attitudes themselves when they age sufficiently to have been bruised a little bit and have tried to make their own way in life. It's the basis of the old one about "if you're not a Socialist at eighteen there may be something wrong with you, but if you are still one at forty, then you know there is something wrong with you" joke.

Rob

[elliot_n]

Gender makes a helluva lot of difference now, as ever. The woman can do many things, but she can't run away from her own body.

No-one can run away from their body.

[Rob C]

No-one can run away from their body.

Whhheeeew!

[John Camp]

The 50s image of a woman as a housewife was a relatively brief episode. As late as 1880, almost three-quarters of Americans lived in rural areas, and I suspect that number would be higher in most Western European countries, and *far* higher in Asia. Does anyone think that a farm wife didn't (and doesn't now) have to work like a dog? Or that her contribution wasn't widely acknowledged?

The actual push to create a "housewife" was a *liberal* impulse intended to remove cheap labor from the factory labor market to push wages higher for men, so that one man could support a family while the wife stayed home with children. This was expected to mostly benefit families with several children where it was impossible for the women to work.

[James Clark]

The 50s image of a woman as a housewife was a relatively brief episode. As late as 1880, almost three-quarters of Americans lived in rural areas, and I suspect that number would be higher in most Western European countries, and *far* higher in Asia. Does anyone think that a farm wife didn't (and doesn't now) have to work like a dog? Or that her contribution wasn't widely acknowledged?

The actual push to create a "housewife" was a *liberal* impulse intended to remove cheap labor from the factory labor market to push wages higher for men, so that one man could support a family while the wife stayed home with children. This was expected to mostly benefit families with several children where it was impossible for the women to work.

That's an interesting theory - is there any sociological scholarship built around that?

Certainly there was the "need" to reintegrate men into the workforce in the postwar era, but I'm not sure I'd label that a "liberal" or "conservative" impulse, but rather one driven by practicality, with a hedge toward deference shown to the men returning from war even if it need be at the expense of the women who were critical to the wartime economy.