It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
I am beginning to feel like if I lived to be 900, I would still not have lived long enough to be able to safely say what seems clear in my mind. I feel it's not possible to try to describe it without being hated on by everyone, TERFs, trans individuals, men and women, you name it.
Heteronormative culture has created a world in which:
1. Children are told from birth they will be heterosexual, giving them no room to figure out for themselves what they really are and implicitly insisting that it is Verboten to even contemplate being something else.
2. The nuclear family is the presumed "basic social unit" instead of the individual.
3. Women are expected to put their children and their husband's career above their own personal aspirations.
This has created a stifling culture of fear and invisibly imprisons millions if not billions of people.
I have spoken charitably elsewhere about heteronormative culture being rooted in best practices that won out in a world of subsistence cultures. For most of human history, most people were just trying to not die out as a group and stability to protect against that was prioritized.
The problem is that now that we have 8 billion people on the planet, it's dysfunctional to keep telling everyone from birth "You will marry someone of the opposite sex and have kids." and designing housing, jobs, distribution of money, etc around that assumption.
Most "good jobs" are implicitly designed for a male breadwinner with the assumption his wife does the cooking, cleaning etc. When single people can't manage a real career and also a healthy life, we don't act like our system is broken. We act like they are losers.
Men end up trapped in unhappy marriages in part because they outsource responsibility for their diet to someone else. Not only do they often not have cooking skills, they may know less about their doctor-ordered dietary restrictions than their wife.
If you've been married 40 years, that's not knowledge that's readily replaced by simply marrying "a good cook."
Women often end up even more trapped because most or all of their income and other essential benefits, like health insurance, is routinely tied to their spouse and his job.
We still tend to mostly marry within our ethnicity, so White women tend to marry White men, Black women tend to marry Black men, etc. This means that many "married well" White women have no hope of ever replacing their current lifestyle if they divorce because White men tend to make a lot more than anyone else in the US today.
This means that many upper class women in the US are effectively chattel property with no hope of meaningfully improving their lot in life who live in terror of losing their current position. And no one wants to hear that, much less discuss it.
I used to hang on Twitter sometimes back when it was still Twitter and I somewhat often saw people of color talk about White Women and how they were handmaidens to The Patriarchy and etc.
Once in while I thought about trying to explain that most "wealthy" White women are effectively slaves and cannot afford to take a meaningful stand. I mostly didn't bother to even try. I knew I would get hatred and incredulity and accusations of trying to justify shitty behavior by privileged people.
It's also clear in my mind this is a root cause of the TERF phenomenon. From what I gather, a lot of TERFs and politically "conservative" Trump-supporting women are basically married-well White women who have no real rights and no real voice and live in terror of losing their superficially pampered lifestyle even though it's basically a gilded cage because getting cast out would be worse and they have no remedy nor even any means to begin adequately describing their situation and getting ANY sympathy.
We can start dismantling this SHIT system by establishing universal health coverage in the US that doesn't de facto tie the health coverage of women to their husband's job.
We can start dismantling this SHIT system by building more small residential spaces in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods (a la Project: SRO).
We can start dismantling this SHIT system by coming up with a new food culture, one NOT rooted in the assumption that everyone has a full-time wife and mom at home cooking for them (a la Nutrient Dense).
We aren't ever going to get there as long as career women openly hate on homemakers as I've had done to me, trans individuals act like their needs matter and no one else's concerns do and everyone keeps fighting to protect themselves as individuals within this warped system without fundamentally changing the system itself.