The Bonfire of the Feminist Vanities

How’s that feminist life plan working out for young women today?

Apparently, not very well. Larissa Faw writes in Forbes that more and more Millennial women are burning out at work before they reach the tender age of 30.

Faw finds this puzzling. These young women, she explains, have been primed for career success. Many of them are well on the road to corporate or professional advancement.

Many of them start well. Yet, few of them make it to the finish line. Dynamic and capable women are well represented in entry level jobs. Yet, they are under-represented in higher level jobs.

Faw  believes that this means that there is something wrong. She does not even imagine that women might not have decided to follow the feminist program.  For her they are “career flameouts,” implying that they have betrayed the cause.

Seeking an explanation, Faw offers a list of reasons that sounds like a joke: “Men are 25% more likely to take breaks throughout the day for personal activities, 7% more likely to take a walk, 5% more likely to go out to lunch, and 35% more likely to take breaks ‘just to relax.’”

That explains it all. Men don’t burn out while they are ascending the corporate hierarchy because they have mastered the art of relaxation. Huh?

The real mystery is: why is this a mystery? It is only strange if you have been indoctrinated in an ideology that sees men and women as fundamentally identical.

Worse yet, this ideology will cause you, unbeknownst to yourself, to demean and disrespect women. When you say that women are burning out because they have failed at their jobs or are victims of emotional exhaustion you are saying that they have a problem. You might even consider them victims of the corporate patriarchy.

Faw implies that these women have been trained to have great careers.  The American way of bringing up girls has turned them into inveterate careerists. They are not trained in relationship skills, domestic skills, or parental skills.

The feminist mindset has denounced these latter skills, declaring them a conspiracy to make women into domestic slaves, the better to prevent them from finding true fulfillment clawing their way up the corporate hierarchy.

The results should have been entirely predictable. These women feel like drones when they want to be queen bees. They garner their share of career success but hate their lives. Most especially, they hate the fact that they do not have relationships or marriages or families. In many cases their careers are so demanding that they do not even have prospects.

Amazingly, Faw does not even consider that these women are making a rational choice about the lives they want to lead. They may well have noticed that many of the women who put career first end up single and childless. Perhaps they do not want to go down this path themselves.

Why call this burnout? Why not respect women and say that they are making a free and rational choice?

Of course, dropping out is easier said than done. Some women have incurred significant debt and cannot afford to work less for less pay. Others have been brainwashed to think that it is ignoble to be supported by a loving husband.

Worse yet, the culture that forms young women into perfect corporate drones does not teach them how to form or sustain a good relationship.

If it is true that dating and courtship have gone out of fashion in American colleges, having yielded to the hook-up culture, young women and men may not know how to develop relationships.

Today’s young people, one surmises, have acquired superior sexual skills. They know how to make love like porn stars, but they don’t know how to get to a second date. They have no idea what it is like to be courted.

Since relationships require skills that go well beyond BDSM and GGG, young women find themselves overworked and underloved. Many of them feel used and abused by the hookup culture. If they do not know how to resolve the problem, they might very well burn out.

Many of them are beginning to see that they do not want the feminist life plan. Only, they do not know how to construct a different life. Thus, they crash.

Unfortunately, Faw does not get it. She sees the question in terms of how women can “thrive in the corporate world.” She and her consultants do not consider the possibility that women do not share those aspirations because they are unwilling to sacrifice their chances for home and family. 

They ought to be calling for a bonfire of feminist vanities. Better that than burning out.