"There are signs that this is the dawn of the new masculinity."

"Some recent news about men who are chucking their own careers to support the dreams and hopes of the women they love..."

The signs are a big law firm partner who quits to become "a supportive husband and do all I can to help [his new wife] achieve her mission to improve the world through music" and a new magazine — "Kindling Quarterly" — for stay-at-home fathers.

"Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because..."

"... men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore."

Time for everyone to recognize the great gift of the women's movement:  Everyone needs to buckle down, work hard, and follow rules. 

No wonder they had to drop the word "liberation" from "women's liberation movement." Who could have imagined, circa 1970, that what we'd end up with was grim drudgery for all?

Except the guys won't play along, will they? Consider the strategies. An obvious one is to scale down, never marry, never have children, and live a circumscribed life with a not-too-challenging job, and enjoy however much sex you want via online dating services. Meanwhile, the women can work for their entire lives as hard as they worked in school, just keep going and going, shoehorn in a couple children, work harder and harder to pay for everything they need, including childcare. Work work work.

Grim!

If I were a young woman, I'd be tempted into exactly what I was tempted into when I was a young woman: a life that values beauty, love, and freedom over work. I'm thinking of the hippie movement and — a book I read in the 1970s — "Your Money Or Your Life" (which I see is "Revised and Updated for the 21st Century" — not sure what that means).

"Let’s have universal protests about the stupidity of school instead of universal pre-K."

"Let’s enable lower-income kids to have the benefit of being told their time is too precious to sit in school all day."

"Was the problem that had no name possibly the lack of Wi-Fi?"

Noreen Malone gets a grip on what Betty Friedan — on behalf of suburban women in general — was bellyaching about in "The Feminine Mystique." She's responding to a piece by Emily Bazelon, which we talked about in a long comments thread yesterday. Malone says:

I grew up with a whip-smart mom who stayed at home with us, and so I always approach discussions like these with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, alert to any slights whatsoever against the choices and life mission of someone I so love and admire — even if I don’t plan to make precisely the same ones. But more of it is probably generational. For recession-scarred twentysomethings, staying at home or taking menial jobs is involuntary, but not because social mores dictate that women can’t achieve: It’s because so few of us, regardless of gender, have gotten hired at jobs Friedan might consider fulfilling...

I’m sure Betty wouldn’t be happy to see all the expensively educated young women of Brooklyn, where I live, spending their free time taking floral-arranging classes and knitting and fussily setting up their living rooms just so....

What's so wrong about paying close attention to the details of the beauty of your environment? Fussy... there's a word. When is intense, attentive work deemed fussy? This is a word that has long been used against women and against gay men. Is a person supposed to be interested in something other than what he or she finds interesting? Why? Who says what the proper foci of interest are in this world? Some people are more sensitive to the visual specifics of their environment. It's not as if the people who aren't spend their lives plumbing the meaning of the universe. Perhaps the interior decorator is closer to the core of what truly matters than the corporate lawyer. 

Now, I've derailed onto the subject of the word "fussy." I just had a long conversation with Meade about his associations with the word. Knowing nothing of the context in which I'd encountered the word, he associated it with objects — specifically drawings and handmade pottery — that are inferior because they have been overworked. I prompted him to think of calling a person fussy, and he said "a baby." Time to check the Oxford English Dictionary (which I can't link to). The first meaning applies to "persons, their habits and actions": "Fond of fuss, moving and acting with fuss; habitually busy about trifles." Examples:

1831  T. Moore Mem. (1854) VI. 201   Lucky for him that he is so little of an irritable or fussy nature.
1850   Fraser's Mag. 41 163   She is fussy and fidgetty (if there be such words).

The third meaning relates to things: "Of dress, etc.: Full of petty details. Also, in dressmaking language, without depreciatory implication; With many flounces, puffs, pleats, etc."

1858   J. G. Holland Titcomb's Lett. i. 92   Let every garment be well fitted.. fussy in no point....
1896   Westm. Gaz. 7 May 3/1   The fussy sunshade is much beflounced with lace-edged chiffon.

Flounces, puffs... Hear the homophobic echoes. Anyway, the etymology of fussy is obvious. It's just a -y added to fuss. What's the etymology of fuss?

Perhaps echoic of the sound of something sputtering or bubbling, or expressive of the action of ‘puffing and blowing’. 

The 2 oldest examples for fuss:

1701   G. Farquhar Sir Harry Wildair iii. i. 21   Ah! I hate these Congregation-women. There's such a fuss and such a clutter about their Devotion.
c1730   Ld. Lansdowne Wild Boar's Def. in Wks. (1732) I. 140   With your Humanity you keep a Fuss; But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.

And now, I am fully off track, looking for the full text of Lord Landsdowne's very cool poem "The Wild Boar's Defense," which I'm going to type out in full, because I'm only seeing images of book pages and I want to make it more available. The wild boar wants to be free:

A boar, who had enjoy'd a happy reign
For many a year, and fed on many a man,
Call'd to account, softening his savage eyes,
Thus suppliant pleads his cause before he dies:

"For what am I condemned? My crime's no more
To eat a man than yours to eat a boar.
We seek not you, but take what chance provides,
Nature and mere necessity our guides:
You murder us in sport, then dish us up
For drunken feasts, a relish for the cup.
We lengthen not our meals: but you much feast;
Gorge till your bellies burst — pray who's the beast?
With your humanity you keep a fuss,
But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.
We prey not on our kind; but you, dear brother,
Most beastly of all beasts, devour each other:
Kings worry kings, neighbour with neighbour strives,
Fathers and sons, friends, brothers, husbands, wives,
By fraud or force, by poison, sword, or gun,
Destroy each other, every mother's son!"

My Wi-Fi took me there, in my unfussy riffing this morning. I suppose I could tie it all up somehow. Husbands, wives... destroy each other.

Who's the beast?

"My name is Emily Bazelon. I’m a feminist. I’ve never read Betty Friedan’s book—until now."

Says Emily Bazelon (on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique").

I'd never read the book myself until recently. My reason for not reading it was that I'd regarded it as something that addressed the troubles of my parents' generation. I went to college in 1969, when everyone was reading "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch." "The Feminine Mystique" seemed really old fashioned — about June Cleaver and her cohort.

Here's Bazelon:

[W]hat hit me was Betty’s howl of frustration. It’s primal, and you feel its desperate force on almost every page. God, did she feel trapped among the slipcovers of the suburbs and in the pages of the women’s magazines she wrote for, where big ideas and questions were entirely unwelcome. The only way to escape was to pulverize the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine who is the title of Chapter 2. Betty’s fiercest critique in this book is of the “mistaken choice” she thinks traditional gender roles forced middle-class women and their husbands to make....

What made me dislike the book — when I finally read it — was that Freidan was not in the role of the housewives she purported to understand so well. She was in the role of writing for women's magazines. She didn't like the limited topics that were the stuff of that kind of magazine. She makes an assumption that women who buy a magazine are only interested in the topics covered by that magazine. But that's absurd! If you bought a magazine about cooking/childcare/fashion, that wouldn't mean you aren't interested in politics or science or whatever else is supposed to be more important. You might have other magazines — or books — for that.

Why the assumption? It might be frustrating for a journalist who's interested in politics to crank out material about topics she doesn't care about, but it was wrong to project those frustrations onto the unknown women who bought the magazines for their own purposes and used the information in those magazines in their individual private lives — perhaps to make a nice dinner efficiently so there would be time to read a good book in the extra time one can make in a day when you don't have a job. The notion that A Job belongs at the center of everyone's life is a huge scam, and the blithe rejection of the 1-earner marriage was an amazing, tragic shift in American culture. The equality of women — the ambition and the fulfilment of women — did not demand that we all get a job.

The stay-at-home husband in a household with no kids.

Outrageous, pathetic, or totally sensible?

By contrast, I have self-identified as a homemaker first. Certainly, I see a need to channel my creative side into something at some point. But that feeling is pretty abstract. For the time being, I have my hands full getting better at meal-planning and mending: It actually feels the same to me as improving in my “profession.” But more than that, I find satisfaction twice over in making a good home — once for supporting my partner, and again for myself.

Are people allowed to live like this?

"Men try harder, because they know that women want men who earn more."

"Women don’t because they know that men have different priorities, and because they want to quit the rat-race at some point and have kids, making their tolerance for high debt levels rationally lower."

Says Glenn Reynolds, reacting to this Inside the Law School Scam post about how law school — with its high tuition and iffy job market — is a worse deal for women than for men.

This is getting strangely close to the argument that used to be made for discriminating against women in law school admissions (or for excluding them altogether): Since women are less likely to fully use their legal education, we shouldn't give what could be a man's seat to a woman. Women were suspected of going to law school for ulterior reasons, such as to find a good husband or — crazy ladies! — because they are interested in the topic... intellectually.

"Being Married Helps Professors Get Ahead, but Only If They're Male."

Headline at The Atlantic. The writer, Alexis Coe, begins with something the Princeton professor James McPherson wrote in the acknowledgements section of one of this books:

"The person most instrumental in helping me produce this volume has also been the most important person in my life for the past forty years, my wife Patricia. In addition to enriching my life every day, she has been a superb research assistant, having read almost as many soldiers' letters and diaries as I have."

Well, you see where this is going, but can I yell stop? It's not that he's male. It's that he is outward manifestation of a 2-person partnership. There is one name on the commercial side of the life they share, which has private arrangements that you don't get to scrutinize.

Ladies, if you are jealous of this lifestyle, ally with a man who would like to live like that, sharing a private life with you while you hold down the income-producing job.
Coe tells us about faculty wives who "explain they, too, once pursued a higher degree."

Without fail, they look at you a little sadly and say, "best of luck" or, far worse, "stick with it."

As if grad schools aren't full of males who aren't going to make it in serious academic careers! Ladies, if you really are at the top — McPherson-like in every respect but sex — and you think your disadvantage is the lack of a helpmeet spouse, why don't you marry one of those grad school males who aren't so likely to make it — someone who'd really love to take the backup role in your career and to take care of the home and the children?

"I have a theory about this," said Tara Nummedal, an associate professor of history at Brown University. "It seems pretty clear that smart women are going to find men who are engaged, but I just don't see that it works the other way." She added that a female professor with a stay-at-home spouse is quite rare, but often sees men with stay-at-home wives, allowing them to fully commit themselves to their professions.

Well, that's my theory too, except that I reject the sexism of smart women are going to find men who are engaged. Smart men want engaged women too. Engaged is a funny word here, but I take it to mean that individuals who are intellectually alive and working hard would like a partner with similar qualities. Why do women want that more than men? Is it merely the social convention that the man needs to bring in money? Is it some sexual need that corresponds to the man's desire for beauty? 

"France's Constitutional Council on Saturday rejected a 75% upper income tax rate to be introduced in 2013..."

"... in a setback to Socialist President Francois Hollande's push to make the rich contribute more to cutting the public deficit."

The Council, made up of nine judges and three former presidents, is concerned the tax would hit a married couple where one partner earned above a million euros but it would not affect a couple where each earned just under a million euros.

Why does that make it unfair? It seems as though the court is sticking up for the single-earner household — for traditional marriage. Why does fairness require that? I think this is what we here in the United States would call a policy decision, to be left to the legislature. (Yeah, a 75% tax rate is really high, but that's not the legal flaw this court found.)

"[P]eople who want to take care of people and can’t stand doing work that doesn’t relate to that should probably be parents."

"There are very few jobs that are truly just taking care of people. And most of them pay very poorly, if at all. So you may as well do it for your own family, where the pay is not so important. It’s ridiculous that we don’t think of taking care of a family as a career path. That’s a good path for some people. Just like earning a shit-load of money is a good career path for other people. In fact, those two types of people should marry each other."

Penelope Trunk writes the smartest thing I've read in a long while. The post is titled "Secrets of successful yoga studios, and tactics to examine ideas that suck."

"I expect that later this century we'll see a growing trend around the world of many couples deciding in advance to simply not have children."

"Hopefully this will occur via mutual agreement for the man to have a vasectomy early on."

Not everyone has to agonize over choosing life priorities, and I think it's likely more and more will choose to skip mom-ism altogether,... maybe for economic reasons, and maybe because we'll have more talk about women asking themselves, "Do I really want to raise kids?".  "If I love kids, would I rather free myself to work with lots of them in other settings?"  

Oh, what could go wrong?!

That's one of the early comments on an article over at The Nation, by Jessica Valenti, "I'm Not a 'Mother First,'" which begins:

Last week, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said it was better for children to have a parent at home. “To have one parent to stay closely connected and at home during those early years of education can be very very important,” he said. It’s not hard to imagine which parent he’s talking about.

Romney’s statement didn’t elicit much in the way of outrage, a sign that American women have one more hurdle to overcome on the way to equality: the sexism of mom-ism. It’s no longer enough that women love their children. To be a truly committed parent, women are expected to be mothers above all else—we’re “moms first.”

To make her point, Valenti must reject Romney's use of the sex-neutral word "parent." Why not take it seriously? What does she do when her standard template doesn't fit? Just force it on anyway. Why weren't American women outraged at the sexism of Romney's statement? Because it wasn't sexist! It was putting children first.

And let's get some respect for the men who take the role of at-home spouse in the single-earner family (or who modify their work life to be the parent spending the most time "closely connected and at home"). Valenti mentions fathers in only one paragraph:

Fathers are never expected to subsume their identity into parenthood the way that mothers are. If President Obama were to tell us that he is 'father-in-chief' first, America would balk. How could a man be an effective president if he put the needs of his children above the needs of his country?

Women aren't expected to subsume their identity into parenthood anymore either. It is a choice, and a woman who makes that choice is at least as likely to be disrespected as to be praised.

And maybe President Obama should have waited until his girls were older before he immersed himself in the overwhelming duties of running for and serving as President. For some reason he had to jump in when he did, despite his and his daughters' youth. We were just about to get the first woman President, so the time was ripe.

ADDED: Hillary Clinton would have been a better President. Where's the outrage about that?

"The new job that everyone wants is stay-at-home mom. This makes sense to me."

"It’s clear that women don’t want to bust through the glass ceiling, or they’d have done it by now. And it’s clear that men are not pulled by kids in nearly the same way women are, because women’s careers tank when they have kids and mens’ careers don’t."

That's Penelope Trunk, noting a new Forbes survey that says 84% of working women want to stay home with kids. Forbes notes that "more than one in three resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality." Resentment is a bad place to be. I like these 2 items from Trunk's advice:

Live below your means.
You know at age 23 if it’s likely that you’ll want to stay home with kids. Which means the minute  you get married you should adjust your spending for one income....

Pick your spouse carefully.
If you want to stay home with kids, don’t marry a guy who can’t earn a living. If you want to stay home with kids, make it clear that even though you earn more than the guy, the guy will be the breadwinner. If you want to stay home with kids then you put all your financial hopes in the guy’s career. Whatever his earning ability is, then that is your earning ability, because you are a team, and he is the breadwinner.

Are people of today able to do and say such things? It seems radical and dangerous. But resentment... resentment is slow-growing and corrosive. 

"Biking with kids is all the rage in Portland these days, but biking with six kids between the ages of 2 and 11?"

"That's something I never would have thought possible before I met southeast Portland resident Emily Finch." "My kids have forgotten what it's like to even be in a car."

She's also the stay at home wife of a neurologist, so she can afford the time (and perhaps more importantly, neighborhood) to make this work.

Well, yeah. It does strike me as something, perhaps counter intuitively, that she can indulge as a result of privilege. In this day and age, just intentionally having six children may be a way of utilizing one's surplus prosperity. People without often go through great lengths to avoid such a burden.

Lots more men are the stay-at-home parent in marriages these days.

"But no one really talks about what that means for their identity as men."

In fact, the linked article, doesn't really talk about it!

"For the longest time I would not date anyone who would now be called a one-percenter because money and power are such a potent combination..."

"... and if I am going to be bossed around, I don't want that to be the reason. When it's come up, I have chosen not to get married. Over and over again, I have opted for my integrity and independence over what was easy or obvious. And I am happy. I don't want everyone to live like me, but I do expect educated and able-bodied women to be holding their own in the world of work."

Says Elizabeth Wurtzel, who's blaming the "war on women" on the "one percenters" and insisting that "real feminists" earn their own living, and proclaiming that there's " only one kind of equality... and it's economic."

She's irritating for about 10 reasons, including the fact/fiction that rich men are clamoring to marry her.

"Does gender equality produce income inequality?"

Asks Instapundit linking to this article about the way women pair up with men from the same socioeconomic class.

Doctors used to marry nurses. Now doctors marry doctors.

So while husbands and wives have become more equal, inequality between families appears to be on the rise....

Women now earn about 60 percent of all graduate degrees in rich countries. Of course they are more likely to marry men of similar educational background; they meet them at college.

Is this a problem for policymakers to solve? If so, what could they do? You can't tell people whom to marry. The linked article is in the NYT, so I expected more to be said about tweaking tax policy, but instead there was discussion of parenting classes in the UK. Isn't that odd? I'm going to infer that the NYT avoided talking tax policy because it didn't like what it would have to say.

Parenting classes have something to do with getting the next generation into better careers, but to focus on educating the young is to avoid dealing with the (perceived) problem of highly accomplished and hard-working males and females marrying each other and advancing their families at a much faster pace than in the past when women had better ability to follow the success strategy of "marrying up."

So let's talk about the tax fix the NYT presumably didn't want to talk about. It would have to penalize the 2-income family, especially where both spouses have high incomes. That is, it would have to incentivize the spouse of a high earner to opt out of her (or his) career. That might seem like a throwback to a time when women went to college to find a husband — as the old joke had it: to get her MRS degree. It would irritate many feminists, especially those who remember the modern women's movement as growing out of the perception that the stay-at-home-wife role is crushing and numbing.

Quite apart from taxing, you could create social pressure on high-earning couples to cut it out. They're being selfish. Let one move out of the career arena. Give up that great job to someone who is the sole earner in a family. Why are you taking more than your share for your family and disadvantaging others? You are part of the problem of income inequality. Step back!

Additional pressure could be applied in the form of environmentalism: Estimate the carbon footprint of the second spouse going to work. Also, there's a childhood obesity link: Estimate the average extra pounds-per-kid caused by not having a stay-at-home parent assembling healthful meals. Consider all the volunteer work this non-career spouse could do, particularly in schools, where they could tutor disadvantaged kids (and thereby improve equality). There's a lot of social pressure that could be applied to guilt-trip (or otherwise entice) that second spouse to stay home.

But I don't expect to see the NYT jump into that game.

The number of women not in the labor force hits an all-time high as 324,000 women leave in the last 2 months.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor force includes people who are unemployed but actively looking for work.

This year (in both January and April), only 57.6 percent of the women in the civilian noninstitutional population were in the labor force. That is the lowest rate of labor force participation by American women since April 1993, according to historical data maintained by BLS.

The rate of female participation in the civilian workforce peaked twelve years ago--in April 2000--when hit 60.3 percent...

For both males and females combined, the rate of participation in the labor force dropped to 63.6 percent in April—the lowest rate since December 1981.

Recently, however, women have been leaving the labor force in larger numbers than men.

It would be interesting to know why this has happened. Is it a cultural trend, with families restructuring to single-earner form? Are more women going the "Julia" route, finding succor in the arms of the government? Or is this mostly the government's recategorization of the unemployed, done to keep us from seeing the real unemployment percentage?

NYT's Mark Bittman comes to Madison to talk about food and greenness... and insults Scott Walker.

Jeez. Why is it that we can't just enjoy our waffles? He comes here for some damned Green Day exposition and...

Bittman won Madison hearts, extolling the virtues of locally produced food and poking fun at corn producers in Iowa and Gov. Scott Walker.

"On a non-personal level, we have to look to the example of pink slime and Scott Walker and [ask]... how do we regain the power that's rightfully ours? What's government's role? Can corporations be made to behave?"

What exactly is "rightfully ours" here? Bittman isn't a Wisconsin voter, and Wisconsin voters elected Scott Walker (and the Republican legislature, which keeps forwarding him signable bills). But there's some governmental role he wants, to make corporations "behave"? What's the misbehavior — selling food that people choose to buy? What discipline does he have in mind?

Bittman's approach to promoting healthy eating is simple: tax junk food and subsidize nutritious, healthy food. But, thanks to the influence of large corporations, our approach to food has been the exact opposite, Bittman said.

Why not just withdraw the subsidies? Why is taxing so dear to the liberal's heart? And who will end up paying a tax on junk food? I don't think that tax is progressive. And it could be portrayed as part of the "war on women." It will hurt single working mothers. Ironically, it would benefit the single-earner family, where one adult is freed to shop for scratch ingredients and to cook nice meals.

To underscore the severity of the situation, Bittman fired off some alarming statistics. More than half of Americans are overweight or obese. On average, only 10% of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables (the rest come from junk food and industrially produced animal products)....

Fired off? Alarming? What embarrassing skittishness! Half of Americans are overweight. Thanks for coming all the way from NY to deliver that amazing statistic. And 10% of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables... well, yeah, these are low calorie foods. I've got an alarming statistic that will scare the hell out of you: 0% of our calories come from drinking water!

And could you do better math when reporting alarming statistics: "only 10% of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables (the rest come from junk food and industrially produced animal products)"? If that were an accurate statement it would mean that none of our calories come from processed fruits and vegetables, that we never eat animal products that are not industrially produced, and ordinary stuff like grains, bread, and pasta must be "junk food."

On the policy side, he suggested that the government actively discourage soda and junk food, and prevent children from purchasing them. Food stamps should not pay for them, and they should be taxed in the same way as cigarettes, Bittman said.

Here's your nutritional bit, man. No oral pleasure for you.

If we're going to pounce on everyone for the words they use, Ann Romney made herself exquisitely pounceable by saying "love."

"I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids."

Is "liberation" an outdated word?

Yesterday, I wrote "Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?"

In the comments, Leslyn said:

I don't give a flying fuck if it does. I care that it serves my individual "liberation." An outdated word. Young women (and men) are past the time of needing liberation. We have moved into empowerment.

If that also serves commercial interests (which it does), that's a nice side-effect.

I found that sad and strange for reasons that Palladian expressed a bit later:

What a bunch of grim comments. We were given our incredibly brief, beautiful lives above the soil, and what have we done with them? Worried about careers and taxes and other meaningless nonsense.

Tomorrow isn't promised to us. Death is eternal. What matters is love, and beauty, and survival.

I dream of this edifice of falsehood crashing to rubble at our happy feet.

Do what you need to survive, so that you can live in love and beauty as long as you can. Nothing else matters at all.

Let's think about liberation. What happened to that word over the years? Around 1970, everyone said "women's liberation" or "women's liberation movement," and then "liberation" was dropped. Why?

The Oxford English Dictionary has as its "1b" definition: "Freedom from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes." The history of "liberation," used this way, goes back to 1798:

1798 Analyt. Rev. July 35 The consequences from the liberation of women reasonably to be expected, are, such as seldom fail to ensue, when any individuals, or societies, or classes of mankind are restored to their natural rights.

1888 Rep. Internat. Council Women 441 You can obtain the complete liberation of women only by working for the liberation of humanity.

1911 A. G. Chater tr. E. Key Love & Marriage vi. 203 Real liberation for women is thus impossible; the only thing possible is a new division of the burdens.

1971 Black Scholar Jan. 58/1 Those in the struggle have to deal with black separatists because they stand today as a potent obstacle to full black liberation.

1976 Listener 8 Jan. 4/2 Sexual repression and totalitarianism, on one side, and sexual liberation and revolution, on the other.

1984 A. Maupin Babycakes ix. 40 It was no longer a question of butch vs. femme, liberation vs. oppression.

2001 Genre May 37/1 Gay activists in this country and around the world were using the pink triangle as a symbol of activism and liberation. 

Isn't it interesting that the quotes are all about women until 1971, when you get "black liberation"? Did women flee from the word when black people moved in? Did "liberation" begin to sound too radical? Did the OED 1b meaning, upon encountering race, merge uncomfortably with the 2a meaning — "The action of freeing a region or its people from an oppressor or enemy force; the result of this"?

Did burgeoning sexual connotations undermine the word's usefulness? This isn't liberation in the sense of sexual liberation, the women's liberation movement wanted men to know: This isn't about sex (you're not getting more); this is about money (we're getting more). Was it something about gay people moving into the feminist territory and the women needing to draw a distinction? Women's movement leaders openly fought off what they called "the lavender menace":

[Betty] Friedan, and some other straight feminists as well, worried that the association [with lesbianism] would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – including omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969. 

Get the sex out... get the left-wing revolutionary connotations out. Let's not say "liberation" anymore. If you think the word is outdated, that in itself is significant. Why don't you want to talk about whether the individual is escaping from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes? Don't be afraid. I want to talk about whether we are liberated or whether we've followed a path of enslavement — serving the interests of commerce.

As I said in yesterday's post: It was right when we were questioning devoting our lives to commerce — when "turn on, tune in, drop out" was fascinating — that a movement came along and injected women — half the population — with highly commercial ambition. That fed the gigantic engine of the economy for the next 4 decades. And now, the professional, highly organized, intensely busy woman is celebrated in our culture, and the hippie is a figure of fun.  And yet... what matters is love, and beauty, and survival. Live in love and beauty as long as you can.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

Fear of flying fuck.