Real Women Don't Cook

Recently, I was watching television when I was awakened from my torpor by a woman who declared: “I do not cook. If my children want to eat, it’s up to them.” She has three children.

One assumes that the same rule applies to her hapless husband, though, as of now, she no longer has a husband.

I was somewhat surprised-- to the extent that anything surprises me any more-- to hear this woman announcing as a point of pride that she refuses to feed her children. 

Personally, I very rarely hear about women who refuse to feed their children. The woman in question was on a conservative channel, so I will not presume that she was a feminist.

In any event, the division of the sexes, the division of duties and responsibilities between husbands and wives is rarely practiced in today’s American family. 

As a general rule, and I think that most people accept this, a stable intact family is the best environment for bringing up children. And most people understand that traditional roles, where men protect and provide while women nurture, are the norm for intact families. Dare I mention that this has most often been the case… throughout human history.

I cannot immediately tell you how many children are brought up by single mothers-- very rarely by single fathers-- but everyone understands that broken homes are not conducive to optimal mental health and well being. If i had to guess I would say that some 40% of American children are being brought up by single mothers.

I trust you will agree with me that the feminist revolution has turned women off housework. It has told them that making dinner and doing laundry are slave labor. And so, many women either refuse to marry or fail to function within the marital structure.

If they are feminists, they blame their husbands. Like it or not when a woman gets married she becomes a wife. And feminists have taught women that “wife” is a four-letter obscenity, to be avoided at all costs.

Children need structured lives. They need routines. They need to be able to count on parents who observe the same formalities. As the eminent sociologist Emile Durkheim observed more than a century ago, marriages require a strict division of labor, a set of responsibilities that are divided between husband and wife.

Evidently, many supposedly serious thinkers think that the traditional family structure is a gauzy ideal that never existed. In truth, it had nearly always existed in one form or another. Most people have been wise enough not to mess with it.

We, however, have decided to reform and restructure it. After all, if women have careers and contribute to the family fortune, why should they not be considered to be co-providers? And if they are co-providers, they should not be burdened with all household chores. The injustice rankles.

Thus, in place of a division of labor, both husbands and wives will be responsible for peeling the carrots and dicing the onions. And both husband and wife will be responsible for feeding the children and taking them to soccer practice and dance class.

It sounds like a great idea. It sounds eminently fair. The problem is, it lends itself to disorganization and confusion. From the perspective of running a household, it is inefficient. 

You get a form of role confusion. And when roles are confused, how can children know which parent they should emulate?

Moreover, one hates to mention it, but when a couple is dealing with a neonate, most women would rather do it themselves. They do not trust beings who are suffused with toxic masculinity to deal with infants. Considering the disparity between the work a woman puts into producing the family scion and the work a man puts in, it makes a certain amount of sense. And considering the simple fact that men cannot chestfeed infants, one understands why women prefer to be in charge of small children.

Researchers have discovered that pregnancy enhances the empathy circuits in the mother’s brain. Ergo, she is more attuned to non-verbal signals from her baby. As for fathers, pregnancy does not produce the same effect.

And then there is the matter of contribution to society, to the society outside of the home. A man who has trained for a dozen years to become a physician might believe that he ought to practice his craft, and not spend more time at home doing laundry. And what happens when he is on call?

Of course, the same rule applies to female doctors, but still, since they are more likely to want to care for small children, they are more likely to choose careers that do not contain on-call schedules.

Worse yet, a man who is badgered into spending too little time on the job and too much time vacuuming floors will likely not do as well on the job. If you treat your job as part time you are indulging a hobby. The notion that you can do just as well in the office by spending half of your working hours at home is illusory.

It is so illusory that more and more men decide that they do not want it. They do not want to be hassled for not being home to do the laundry. They do not want to be dragged out of meetings in order to perform household chores.

Thus, fewer and fewer men marry. And fewer and fewer married men stay married. 

Obviously, this has an implication in dating and mating practices. More and more women and more and more men now engage in to random anonymous sexual encounters, that is, in hookups. That is, sex without commitment.

Obviously, hookups are a side effect of the feminist rejection of the role of wife. If a woman does not want to marry and does not want to be a wife, what other reason would a man have to spend time with her. Thus, either she hooks up or she is ignored.

Many women no longer want to be wives. In principle they insist that they want to be equals, but we are within our rights to ask whether they are trying to impose unrealistic conditions on a relationship. And we recognize that many men are simply unwilling to sacrifice their own career goals in order to allow their wives to outdo them. Even if their wives do not outdo them, someone in the office, someone who spends more time on the job and less time chestfeeding, is going to be getting ahead. When that happens, a man who goes home early to do laundry will blame his wife.

Obviously, the demands for bringing up children recede with time. Enhanced longevity has it that women have more options today than they did in the past. Surely, this is a good thing.

And yet, if a woman’s opening gambit, when she meets a man, is: I do not cook, she is defining herself as a courtesan, not as a wife. 

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