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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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the domestic tasks besides the ones directly involved with caring for the baby take only a handful of hours a week to maintain.

No, especially with more than one child to handle.

I'm talking specifically if you're serious about being a housewife, not a part-timer who sends the kids off 6 hours a day to be handled by radical progressives.

If breastfeeding, that baby will wake you up 3-4 times a night or maybe just one after being sleep-trained.

Think special force bootcamp but do this over and over again for a decade if you're serious about having kids.

Then you're handling that baby, changing it, breastfeeding it during the day, and your other child(ren) are doing whatever they want in some other part of the home, and you end up having to clean up the same spot several times a day.

You can be very good at instructing/training kids, but you most likely won't have them tidy all the stuff they mess with before 5 yo.

Then you probably want to have your children wear clean clothes every day, that's a lot of laundry.

There is no day off in that career, and vacations can actually be more stressful (no you cannot just stuff your kids in a separate hotel room).

I don't disagree with those who say that men do less than women in the household.

Yet, I still have to deal with lack of sleep (to a lesser extent), family-related stress but I also have to remain competitive in the workplace.

I don't disagree with the assessment but I do think that it's easier for women to deal with that kind of life.

It seems to me in general that they get more out of being around little babies (or even little animals) than men do, or even organizing/arranging the house.

Their hormonal systems allow them to adapt to rapid changes in their body from pregnancy to breastfeeding back to pregnancy.

Their psychology is more prosocial, they are better at understanding and managing others' emotions, which is essential for small children.

On the other hand, the world of business discourages emotional display, as the men who created it see it as a nuisance in the way of getting things done.

If the man’s world is said to be the State, his struggle, his readiness to devote his powers to the service of the community, then it may perhaps be said that the woman’s is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home. But what would become of the greater world if there were no one to tend and care for the smaller one? How could the greater world survive if there were no one to make the cares of the smaller world the content of their lives?

No, the greater world is built on the foundation of this smaller world. This great world cannot survive if the smaller world is not stable. Providence has entrusted to the woman the cares of that world which is her very own, and only on the basis of this smaller world can the man’s world be formed and built up. The two worlds are not antagonistic. They complement each other, they belong together just as man and woman belong together.

The issue is that the people who complain about the unfairness of the burden placed on women are also the ones that have destroyed the social systems that made that burden lighter.

If HR departments were gutted and Western corporations were more sexist like Japanese ones or Western ones 100 years ago, how many women would find that they would rather have their water cooler gossip session at home around children?

I don't think we're in all that much disagreement, I did specify the non child rearing aspects like laundry. I think a lot of the gender expectation stuff starts breaking down around the direct child care aspects which is why I'm questioning what extra exactly men are really supposed to be offering here.