the game is rigged and the prizes are tawdry

BOOKSLUT:  the feminist movement was derailed into harmlessness in the 1970s and 1980s. Before then, some of the more thoughtful feminists were asking hard questions about the broader system of which social and economic biases against women played a part. I'm sorry to say that their voices were marginalized in favor of a simplistic view that identified "what men have" as liberation, and focused on getting that without asking any questions about it. As a result, a great many American women gave up a life in which their worth was defined by husbands, children, and domestic culture, in order to embrace a life in which their worth is defined by bosses, coworkers, and corporate culture -- which is arguably not much of an improvement.

 It's not good for women; it's not good for men; it's not good for families.

Mansplaining presented without commentary

cock carousel--An idea perpetuated on manosphere blogs that women casually sleep around in their 20’s with hot, non-commital player types.

Then, supposedly, when they hit their 30’s and lose their looks, they realize they wasted their prime man-snagging years and become desperate to settle down, often with a boring, dependable flavor of guy they previously had no interest in.

“alpha fux, beta bux”

ROOSH FORUM:  The only reason so many of today’s women can ride the cock carousel is because of feminism and socialism (the welfare state), which, incidentally, is largely financed by men (and which serves directly against our own sexual interests). Without these two ideologies you would see a totally different division of labour where men went to work and women stayed in the kitchen and bed. This arrangement held for the majority of human history and consequently, the tolerance of female promiscuousness was lower since there was no way for a man to know if the children were actually biologically his. A shortage of men (due to wars) also helped the remaining and capable alpha men to form harems. Women had no choice but to accept this since they were dependent on their man for food and shelter. My point is that by nature, men are polygamous, but women are monogamous (and hypergamous). Feminism distorts nature, and that’s why you have so many of today’s women being mentally ill. YES it’s a double standard - naturally, since women and men are different - so you need double standards.

Answer: You can't have it all

GOOD THINKING: In an academic career, the decade spent rising to tenure and full professor overlaps EXACTLY with a young professional's prime reproductive years. This is true of both men and women. 

Early feminists mindlessly accepted 19th century rules of the workplace, and many older female academics are childless. But letter day feminists are chafing at having to make such a draconian choice. And so they are jumping out of the tenure stream and into contingent faculty positions so they have more time to spend with their children during their preschool years. Here is how Michelle Obama put it when describing the reasons underlying a dearth of female scientists in her 2011 speech to the National Science Foundation: "Women account for 47% of new PhDs in the sciences, but only 28% of tenured positions…Family formation, notably marriage and childbirth or adoption of children accounts for the major loss of female talent from the job pool between receipt of PhD and achievement of a tenured position in the sciences."

Once their children are older and they have more time and more desire to dive headlong into their careers, young professionals who made this choice are subjected to a rude awakening: They discover that employers treat people who have made this choice the way some men treat women they’ve deflowered: When it comes to hiring (or marrying), they want virgins—fresh-faced, untried, rising stars. They do not want to consider the “woman they’ve already had”--the worker who has done a good job for years in a temporary or part-time position

a career because I love it; a job because I must

I've benefited from feminism in my lifetime. Institutional barriers have been removed. As a woman, I can sign contracts, open a bank or credit account, start a business. Birth control options allowed me to attend college and have a career, without the responsibility of children during those years. Socially, people are more free to express themselves outside of traditional gender roles.

But I think feminism has gone off the rails. The following excerpts from Jenny Turner's essay [which is WAY too long] bring up interesting questions. Would well-to-do pale-skinned women enjoy the same range of choices if we did not have dark-skinned women to clean our houses and take care of our children? Do women in developing worlds really benefit from entering the marketplace? If I had the choice, would I stay home?

From the London Review of Books

Forty years [of feminism], and the changes are in some ways astonishing: ...– it’s quite common to see men caring for children, waged, in schools and nurseries, and, unwaged, in the home. Part-time work is common, as is flexi-time, homeworking, freelancing, multi-tasking. Equality is regulated by statute. There’s a state-funded nursery and a Sure Start children’s centre in the primary school across the road; there are two libraries in easy walking distance, four playgrounds, two parks.

Domestic work, while not recognised as work because not paid for, is as necessary to the economy as the waged sort. The workforce needs to be fed, clothed, cleaned for, comforted, as does its progeny, the workforce of the future...

any politics worth having has to start with the nuclear family: its impossibility, its wastefulness, its historical contingency. Children are the messages a family, a society, a culture, a civilisation, sends into the future, and yet every day there comes more evidence that child-rearing as currently practised among the people with all the choices doesn’t seem to be working out.

The point ... was not to reduce politics to dirty dishes, but the opposite: dirty dishes became one index of a job, a role, a domestic ballet that included ‘managing the tensions of and servicing in every other way those – women and men – who do waged work, school work, housework ... doing the volunteer stuff no one else has time to bother with, ‘from church societies to library support groups, from food co-ops to disaster appeals’ and all this going on constantly, ceaselessly, even more in peasant economies than in richer ones. ‘The major part of unseen and uncounted housework,’ she added, ‘is done in the non-industrial world.’

What options really await [poor women in poor countries] when they get a job? According to research cited by Eisenstein, there are basically four alternatives: factory work in export-zone sweatshops, migration, sex work or microcredit.

Across the world, according to UK Feminista, women perform 66 per cent of the work and earn 10 per cent of the income. In the UK two-thirds of low-paid workers are women, and women working full-time earn 16 per cent less than men. ... In a piece in Prospect in 2006 the British economist Alison Wolf showed that the 16 per cent pay-gap masks a much harsher divide, between the younger professional women – around 13 per cent of the workforce – who have ‘careers’ and earn just as much as men, and the other 87 per cent who just have ‘jobs’, organised often around the needs of their families, and earn an awful lot less. Feminism overwhelmingly was and is a movement of that 13 per cent – mostly white, mostly middle-class, speaking from, of, to themselves within a reflecting bubble.