Rebecca Traister's review of Total 180!, the magazine for opt-out mothers, is chilling stuff. And her interview with the founder only gets worse. The magazine, purportedly an instrument on behalf of gender emancipation, offers a shockingly regressive perspective, even as its founder cheerily burbles out a mixture of choice-feminism banalities and fatalistic attitudes on men. Both the publication and its founders articulate simmering resentment, absolute dissatisfaction, and real uncertainty, but then slip out of the obvious conclusions to assert that they totally made the right choice, mainly on the grounds that their children would join gangs if they weren't home to wipe their asses.
But have people who answer that they work made a bad choice?
No, but workplaces should have on-site day care and let you work flexible hours. Can you imagine? We need this reinvention. Look what's happened by not putting the family first.
What's happened?
It seems like there's a lot more weird stuff going on in society than there used to be.
Are you blaming the weird stuff on the feminist movement?
No, not really. But you've got a lot of moms who tried to have it all and you're seeing the results of that in that children were not getting as much dedicated attention as they were before when you had June Cleavers. I heard on TV recently that kids in grade school were giving oral sex to people for a dollar. I don't know if that went on in the 1950s but I sure didn't hear about it. I wasn't around in the '50s but you know what I mean. Why is that happening now?
So far as I know, that's almost totally belied by the social science data on the subject, but why let facts obscure a good dose of elitist nostalgia and a particularly disturbing episode of Dr. Phil?
