Womanly virtues Friday

SAHG Rules
 There was a piece that had the feminist bar stools spinning last week about being a stay-at-home girlfriend. This is my second post on it. Short version, a woman lost her job and her boyfriend is paying the bills. She, her name is Quiana Stokes, has started living according to what she herself describes as "stereotypically Stepfordish rules to keep our relationships afloat and ourselves sane". And she has discovered that other women are doing the same thing.

Then she gives a list of her rules. Aside from bikini waxes, the list she gives sounds exactly like what an early 1960s housewife might have done. It is exactly what my mother did in the early 1960s except that she also raised four kids. Others born years after me had the same experience.

Some people are just railing. But even the defenders come off weird. They point out, for example, that the woman who wrote the rules "she doesn’t actually want to do".

I might add she isn't doing anything that a lot of college girls with and without boyfriends do. Because of where I live and work, I'm surrounded by them and if you eavesdrop on their conversations, you'll notice that they talk about doing exactly what Quiana Stokes does. Far from being some kind of throwback to an ugly pre-feminist past, Quiana Stokes represents the future.

But I'm a man writing for men, so what do we men have to learn from this? Well, there is good news.

1. The do it for yourself movement is dead. When 1970s feminism died, there was an awkward period when women collectively discovered that they really do want to wear bras and make up and nice clothes and generally, as Stokes puts it, "keep themselves up". But women's literature of the period sold these things as something a woman did for herself. They had no choice but to go along because women were doing all this stuff anyway but they insisted that you should never do this for a man. No bad idea can sustain itself for too long and this is another example of that.
2. The other thing that women seem to be collectively recognizing is that there are material advantages to being married. I know, I know, the article says stay at home girlfriend but the relationship she describes is a sort of marriage wherein two people are not mature enough to realize they are married, something I wrote about a short while ago. Yes it would be nice if there was some recognition that there is also something sacred about a couple but that too will come with time.