Women’s issues

Here’s something I read a couple of years ago, and it’s been gnawing on my brain ever since.  At Patriactionary, Will S. drew attention to a proposal in India to provide housewives with a salary extracted from their husbands’ earnings.

The Indian government is mulling over a proposal to force husbands to hand over a percentage to their wives.  (HT: TC)

From the article:

The minister said if a portion of a husband’s income is allocated as wife’s share, it is likely to be spent on better food for children, on their  education and the overall quality of standard of living of that  household.

Why did this idea anger me so much?  Consider that a major purpose of the institution of marriage is to transfer the fruits of men’s productivity to women and children.  For thousands of years, Indian men have slaved away to provide for their wives and children–the fact that the Indian race has survived so many generations is proof of that.  The idea here is that Indian men should continue to strain their backs every day for their families, but that they should no longer receive any credit or gratitude for it.  Instead, women and children are to direct their gratitude to the State.  The man who gives the majority of his waking day to their provision they will be taught to despise:  “He would just let us starve if the government didn’t see to it we got our share.”  Relationships of love replaced with entitlement and exploitation.

Note the offensive assertion that mothers are more likely to see that the children are taken care of than fathers.  These damned feminists have never met me, but they know I don’t really love my kids.

In fact, though, feminists in India are behind on the narrative.  In the enlightened West, we have decided that women’s priority is for adult sexual hedonism at the expense of children and public morals.  It isn’t me saying this–it’s the establishment:  the New York Times and the Democratic Party.  Just consider what are called “women’s issues”:  legal and subsidized abortion overriding conscientious objections by anyone involved, free contraception subsidized even by those with conscientious objections, normalization of female promiscuity (they can’t even have a movement against sexual assault without it turning into a celebration of sluthood), easy divorce despite the harm to children, and lowered labor investment in the raising of children (that is, more women in the workforce, which, unless they’re all going to work at daycare centers, means less overall labor allocated to childrearing).  The presumption always is that when a conflict arises between children and adult selfishness, women will side with the latter.  Even objecting to the outright murder of children in the interest of adult hedonism is associated with organizations run by old, celibate men.  If I were a woman, I would be offended by this, but I’d mostly be embarrassed for my sex because the Democrats have actually succeeded in getting an edge with women in this way.

And yet, for all of this, today’s politically active women are as nagging and shrewish as their prohibitionist grandmothers.  This is not how women who just want consequence-free sex act in my fantasies at all.