The upside of strict gender roles. Really. [View all]

[Syzygy321]

I am a staunch feminist.

That's one reason I was delighted by the NPR report yesterday on Alex Potter: a young woman who dreamt of being a photographer and ran off to an exotic, dangerous country to do just that. Now her beloved adopted country is at war, and she is one of very few western photographers there.

IOW, Potter has been autonomous, adventurous, successful, (and happy).

Her adopted country is Yemen. It's one of the world's worst places to be a woman. Many females are niqabis (face-veilers); females live in the clutches of fundy Islam, poor fathers make money by selling their female children as slave-brides to grown men. Nujood, of "I am Nujood, Age Ten and Divorced" is a Yemeni. Little girls have been raped to death on their wedding nights. The government shrugs. The imams encourage the practice. That's Yemen for ya.

But Alex Potter - the American photog - says this about her adopted home: That her neighbors and Yemeni friends are amazingly devoted to family. That they are warm and generous and just great, great people. Hearing her describe them, you get the feeling that she didn't have that kind of warmth during her American youth. And that she loves it.

Which tbh matches my experiences in a "traditional" (read: fundy religious with strict gender roles) family. There's a huge emphasis on The Clan, including cousins and great-aunties; there are big meals and much love and great caring. It's like living inside a warm security blanket.

It's wonderful. Of course it's all built on the sacrifices of women. Women are born and bred to both knit that security blanket and be trapped and muffled inside it. They're the rocks that anchor families. They do the cooking and the child care and the eldercare. They create the happy homes. And, like rocks, some of them get kicked or smashed and are helpless to stop it, because men rule over them. But many - the vast majority I think - are truly satisfied inside the security blanket. They don't mind that they can never leave it.

Maybe I am imagining it, but among my modern upwardly friends (male and female) and myself, there's more loneliness and angstiness. We've left our families, chased careers, ditched the security blanket or never had it. And not many of us, that I've seen, live in the same town with forty loving, annoying relatives who cluster at births and graduations and sickbeds and granny's 88th birthday.

(i see families like that among the poor farm and small-town people here. Not among the affluent and educated.)

So is that the trade-off? Big warm families (built on locking females into domestic roles and demanding they not pursue independent dreams), versus freedom for all, but loss of big warm families?

Am I broad-brushing? What does everyone think?

(Note: I originally titled this post, "The upside if misogyny.". Which was click-baity of me.

Strict gender roles and misogyny are like incestuous siblings to each other. Can you ever have one without the other? I say it's impossible.)
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