Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions

[Withywindle]

58. Very well said, thank you.

We have no idea what "natural" human relationships really look like. We've never experienced it, so we have nothing to measure against. All we know is a system where women are economically disadvantaged, and have been a socially repressed class for hundreds of years, valued only for our looks when we're young, and for our fertility and housekeeping skills later on.

Yes, it's also oppressive to men to be expected to be the breadwinners. But within living memory, in my mother's generation, a man could aspire to literally *anything,* from soldier to farmer to novelist to astronaut to pilot to doctor to lawyer to professor to senator to president to researcher to salesman to engineer to electrician to truck driver to policeman to journalist to surveyor to architect to carpenter to painter to scientist to historian to firefighter to filmmaker to steelworker to tailor to accountant to photographer to sailor to animal trainer to ad infinitum....while a "nice" woman could be ONLY a secretary, housewife, teacher, or nurse. Newspaper ads outright specified this. If you weren't temperamentally suited to that *extremely* limited range? Tough. Guess you had to be a whore, then.

Now, there were always brave and smart women who found their way to express their real selves, and do it without depending on men. But they were very extraordinary. For an ordinary woman? Yes, you did look for a man who could support you and the children you were expected to have (whether you wanted to or not). Chances are, you knew women who'd wound up without that financial lifeline, and you saw how scarily constrained and tenuous their lives were.

Things WERE getting better--though with the economy the way it is, most of the gains that workers of both genders made in the 50s and 60s and 70s are long gone, and we're closer to Depression economics now than ever since WWII.

Still, though, I have a long track record of loving men who barely have a pot to piss in. I prefer equals, and that means someone who does NOT have economic power over me. I dated a guy from a rich family once...I found it extremely uncomfortable in the long term.