It's been six crazy months with the pandemic, BLM, Australian wildfire, and whatnot. What is up with this universe?
Just wanted to share these neat two paragraphs from the new yorker written by Nora Caplan-Bricker, about a brook by Kate Manne.
Women make up nearly nine in ten nurses, more than eight in ten home health aides, and more than two-thirds of grocery-store cashiers. In other words, they perform the lion’s share of the vital care that we now call “essential” work. At the same time, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been laid off at an outsized rate (a reflection of their concentration within the country’s lowest-compensated, least-secure jobs) and have been forced to reduce their paid hours to look after children at nearly twice the rate of their male partners. As the kinds of labor that sustain life have grown deadlier, women have taken on more of the risk. As paid work and the time to perform it become scarcer resources, men are retaining the better part of both.
What conclusions can we draw from the gendered dimensions of the current crisis? Kate Manne’s “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women” presents a paradigm that maps neatly onto life in lockdown. Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell, argues that women “are expected to give traditionally feminine goods”—including physical and emotional care—and “to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods,” such as power and authority. These assumptions result in a society in which men “are tacitly deemed entitled” to much of what life has to offer, while women are perpetual debtors, their very humanity “owed to others.”
For most of my life, I was not much interested in power, probably because I don't have much respect for people with authority, who, let's face it, are mostly old boring men. But this makes me wonder whether I've been systematically educated to not want power voluntarily. It's so difficult to identify what I truly want when my desires have been molded by society so subtly, so intricately. For example, I only recently realized that I probably don't care about a perfect beach body or a faultless face, while I do want a good posture that exudes confidence. Recently, I started toying with an idea of using power in a non-profit through hefty donation over time, wielding influence for the social good, defined by me, using other people's money. How would I know something is not for me until I have it?
Just wanted to share these neat two paragraphs from the new yorker written by Nora Caplan-Bricker, about a brook by Kate Manne.
Women make up nearly nine in ten nurses, more than eight in ten home health aides, and more than two-thirds of grocery-store cashiers. In other words, they perform the lion’s share of the vital care that we now call “essential” work. At the same time, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been laid off at an outsized rate (a reflection of their concentration within the country’s lowest-compensated, least-secure jobs) and have been forced to reduce their paid hours to look after children at nearly twice the rate of their male partners. As the kinds of labor that sustain life have grown deadlier, women have taken on more of the risk. As paid work and the time to perform it become scarcer resources, men are retaining the better part of both.
What conclusions can we draw from the gendered dimensions of the current crisis? Kate Manne’s “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women” presents a paradigm that maps neatly onto life in lockdown. Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell, argues that women “are expected to give traditionally feminine goods”—including physical and emotional care—and “to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods,” such as power and authority. These assumptions result in a society in which men “are tacitly deemed entitled” to much of what life has to offer, while women are perpetual debtors, their very humanity “owed to others.”
For most of my life, I was not much interested in power, probably because I don't have much respect for people with authority, who, let's face it, are mostly old boring men. But this makes me wonder whether I've been systematically educated to not want power voluntarily. It's so difficult to identify what I truly want when my desires have been molded by society so subtly, so intricately. For example, I only recently realized that I probably don't care about a perfect beach body or a faultless face, while I do want a good posture that exudes confidence. Recently, I started toying with an idea of using power in a non-profit through hefty donation over time, wielding influence for the social good, defined by me, using other people's money. How would I know something is not for me until I have it?
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