Nothing wrong with being too busy to debate larger questions about the economic role of women in the household.
But in the grand scheme of things, it is worthwhile to discuss these things. People need advice. They need role models. And while people's situations are different, there's also quite a bit in common.
My claim is that they're dated. They're not that germane to the questions that are actually pressing today, or that real traditional women have.
"Working woman" and "SAHM" were never properly seen as separate vocational tracks. The wedge driven between the "jobs" and "domestic roles" was always artificial, and as labor markets shifted and culture war battles moved on, that old mommy war framing became increasingly inapt, not "even" but "especially" for women trying to raise families. Women do have babies, and a particularly close bond with young children, and those realities shouldn't be denied. But they're also rational beings with (potentially) an expansive slate of rational goals and objectives. And they have the ability and desire to do a wide range of things to achieve those objectives. They don't need to be saddled with everybody else's cultural angst, drafted into being standard-bearers for tradition or feminism or anything else. Honor your commitments. Make good decisions. Cultivate virtue and pursue good ends. (The rules all humans should live by.)
The point isn't just "we're really busy" but "we don't care about this old debate, it's exciting to a certain set of online influencers but not very relevant to us."
Well, you're not obligated to care about everything all the time, of course.
But our society is doing really, really bad at family formation. How to coordinate young people's expectations so that men's and women's lives are more compatible is pretty urgent in the grand scheme of things.
If I’m right that actual, traditionally-minded women raising families mostly do not find that old mommy war debates map onto their real life concerns, then I think it’s only reasonable to consider that those debates may not help us to coordinate young people’s lives. It’s not about indifference to family formation. It’s about identifying the factors that actually help or hinder that process.
For one thing, the popularity of the online influencers who are still fighting the old mommy wars (if I'm understanding them right; I don't read them myself) suggest that there is still a lot of interest in those debates, maybe from the young people who are actually facing the decisions that will shape whether and how successfully they form families or not.
For another, if you're in the midst of raising a family, some large life choices have probably already been made in your case that are live decision points for others.
But I'm not saying that the old mommy war is necessarily frame it right. I'm just pointing out that our society is doing a terrible job coordinating men's and women's expectations so as to facilitate family formation. Meddlesome advice should not be shrugged off or scolded. People need it! They're not figuring it out on their own! We need prescription, a restoration or invention of traditions of some sort!
The question is, what should the meddlesome advice be?
Influencers are responsive to a lot of incentive structures that don’t necessarily motivate them to care about truth. My own experience building a writing career certainly confirms that there’s plenty of demand from right-leaning publications for antifeminist clickbait; in the early stages as a female writer you’ll get immense pressure to write it. But who’s reading that, and why? I suspect the intended audience skews pretty heavily male (which would make sense anyway because the right increasingly does, especially among the young). It’s grievance-stroking, not real mentorship, or at least that’s very much my impression.
But think about it like this. If popular magazines were running a lot of advice on how to build a career of a particular sort (in business or particular professions) and the people who had already done that mostly looked at this and said, “eh, no, doesn’t seem very relevant, doesn’t reflect how I think about this or what I did to get here,” the most probable conclusion is that the advice is highly questionable. It’s clickbait or grift, or at least very poorly researched; whether or not the people who already made it are actively thinking about the process of making it, the advice given should probably resonate with them in some way if it’s good. It’s possible of course that it doesn’t for some explicable reason. Labor markets change pretty fast sometimes. Maybe the way older people built their career, just doesn’t work anymore. So that’s worth considering, and yet, in a case like this it would be odd. Mommy war themes are obviously drawing on decades-old debates and tropes, but just recently finally became relevant? Why?
My view obviously is: They’re useful to the people more interested in heat than light. Not very good for helping people identify the morally salient features when they’re actually making these choices.
That's actually a great example, and very salient right now, because I think most people who have made it professionally are somewhat locked in by trust relationships from before the AI era. Now AI is both an important job skill and an important means of job search, which changes things drastically... But organizations are pretty intentional about grandfathering in non-AI-savvy legacy staff, and managing expectations with respect to them differently, because they know there's a whole lot of institutional memory that has never been well articulated but on which they rely. So right now, genuinely good job search advice probably would sound alien to most people who have made it already. They started their careers in a different world.
That kind of cross-applies, at least to the courtship stage. Online dating is up, face-to-face meeting is down, and relationships in general are a lot scarcer. "This is what worked for me" might not be very helpful advice.
Sometimes radical change makes theory more useful than practical experience.
Nothing wrong with being too busy to debate larger questions about the economic role of women in the household.
But in the grand scheme of things, it is worthwhile to discuss these things. People need advice. They need role models. And while people's situations are different, there's also quite a bit in common.
The "mommy wars" aren't a needless distraction.
My claim is that they're dated. They're not that germane to the questions that are actually pressing today, or that real traditional women have.
"Working woman" and "SAHM" were never properly seen as separate vocational tracks. The wedge driven between the "jobs" and "domestic roles" was always artificial, and as labor markets shifted and culture war battles moved on, that old mommy war framing became increasingly inapt, not "even" but "especially" for women trying to raise families. Women do have babies, and a particularly close bond with young children, and those realities shouldn't be denied. But they're also rational beings with (potentially) an expansive slate of rational goals and objectives. And they have the ability and desire to do a wide range of things to achieve those objectives. They don't need to be saddled with everybody else's cultural angst, drafted into being standard-bearers for tradition or feminism or anything else. Honor your commitments. Make good decisions. Cultivate virtue and pursue good ends. (The rules all humans should live by.)
The point isn't just "we're really busy" but "we don't care about this old debate, it's exciting to a certain set of online influencers but not very relevant to us."
Well, you're not obligated to care about everything all the time, of course.
But our society is doing really, really bad at family formation. How to coordinate young people's expectations so that men's and women's lives are more compatible is pretty urgent in the grand scheme of things.
If I’m right that actual, traditionally-minded women raising families mostly do not find that old mommy war debates map onto their real life concerns, then I think it’s only reasonable to consider that those debates may not help us to coordinate young people’s lives. It’s not about indifference to family formation. It’s about identifying the factors that actually help or hinder that process.
Hmm. I'm not sure that follows.
For one thing, the popularity of the online influencers who are still fighting the old mommy wars (if I'm understanding them right; I don't read them myself) suggest that there is still a lot of interest in those debates, maybe from the young people who are actually facing the decisions that will shape whether and how successfully they form families or not.
For another, if you're in the midst of raising a family, some large life choices have probably already been made in your case that are live decision points for others.
But I'm not saying that the old mommy war is necessarily frame it right. I'm just pointing out that our society is doing a terrible job coordinating men's and women's expectations so as to facilitate family formation. Meddlesome advice should not be shrugged off or scolded. People need it! They're not figuring it out on their own! We need prescription, a restoration or invention of traditions of some sort!
The question is, what should the meddlesome advice be?
Influencers are responsive to a lot of incentive structures that don’t necessarily motivate them to care about truth. My own experience building a writing career certainly confirms that there’s plenty of demand from right-leaning publications for antifeminist clickbait; in the early stages as a female writer you’ll get immense pressure to write it. But who’s reading that, and why? I suspect the intended audience skews pretty heavily male (which would make sense anyway because the right increasingly does, especially among the young). It’s grievance-stroking, not real mentorship, or at least that’s very much my impression.
But think about it like this. If popular magazines were running a lot of advice on how to build a career of a particular sort (in business or particular professions) and the people who had already done that mostly looked at this and said, “eh, no, doesn’t seem very relevant, doesn’t reflect how I think about this or what I did to get here,” the most probable conclusion is that the advice is highly questionable. It’s clickbait or grift, or at least very poorly researched; whether or not the people who already made it are actively thinking about the process of making it, the advice given should probably resonate with them in some way if it’s good. It’s possible of course that it doesn’t for some explicable reason. Labor markets change pretty fast sometimes. Maybe the way older people built their career, just doesn’t work anymore. So that’s worth considering, and yet, in a case like this it would be odd. Mommy war themes are obviously drawing on decades-old debates and tropes, but just recently finally became relevant? Why?
My view obviously is: They’re useful to the people more interested in heat than light. Not very good for helping people identify the morally salient features when they’re actually making these choices.
That's actually a great example, and very salient right now, because I think most people who have made it professionally are somewhat locked in by trust relationships from before the AI era. Now AI is both an important job skill and an important means of job search, which changes things drastically... But organizations are pretty intentional about grandfathering in non-AI-savvy legacy staff, and managing expectations with respect to them differently, because they know there's a whole lot of institutional memory that has never been well articulated but on which they rely. So right now, genuinely good job search advice probably would sound alien to most people who have made it already. They started their careers in a different world.
That kind of cross-applies, at least to the courtship stage. Online dating is up, face-to-face meeting is down, and relationships in general are a lot scarcer. "This is what worked for me" might not be very helpful advice.
Sometimes radical change makes theory more useful than practical experience.