The Emancipation of Me Me

I am woman! I am invincible! I am pooped! ~Author Unknown

Would somebody please unliberate me?
The other day I was having a debate with a man at work that was disguising itself as a polite conversation. Half-way through this exhausting song and dance the guy says this to me,
“Surely you must be aware that as a Caucasian male raised in a post-modern feminist society that my deepest respect and admiration are first for your ability to rise above those invisible constraints that an anti-feminist government would seek to impose on you”
At which point I replied,
“Now you’re really ticking me off.”
I don’t want to be liberated being that I never considered myself a captive.
I don’t want a career or my own paycheck.
I never asked for the privilege of making it in a man’s world.
I certainly do not need the admiration and deepest respect of a PhD talking head because I can hold my own in a verbal sparring match.
I am sick and tired of being a modern woman in a post-modern feminist society.
I would like to poke Gloria Steinem in her liberated eye ball!
And Susan B. Anthony can kiss my fanny!
And if someone would point me in the direction of a suffragette, I’d like to tell her a thing or two!
Arrrghhhh!
Here’s what the feminist movement has done for me.
I am forced to work forty hours a week outside of my home when I would prefer, no I would love, to be a homemaker.
I can now eat in restaurants most of the time because I’m too tired to cook the healthier and less expensive meals I’d be thrilled to prepare if I hadn’t spent the last eight hours on my feet.
I live slightly below the quality of life my grandmother lived back in the days of Leave it to Beaver. Wanna know why?
Well, I’ll tell ya why.
Because we smarty pantses have gone out into the work place doubling the ratio of persons to available jobs. The real estate market and cost of living in general realizes that there are DOUBLE INCOME households out there so we are not farther ahead, we’re just paying twice as much.
By adding more bodies to the race for jobs, we have created a competition making it harder to get jobs.
We are rounding the corner on the third generation of latch-key/daycare kids whose moms have to hustle for a paycheck.
We are facing a generation of moms who have lost the desire to pursue the art of homemaking because they are too busy sparring for promotions.
We are women who don’t take seriously the choice of the men we enter into relationships with because we foolishly believe we can make it with or without said men. So we settle for losers. Then we spend the next eighteen years fighting said losers for child support and sharing custody of our babies with men we ourselves won’t live with.
And we are raising men who can live into pension age acting like little boys because they don’t have to rise to the challenge of earning a paycheck and caring for their families.
Here’s the simple truth as I see it.
I am not liberated.
I am shackled to a different sets of chains than those who went before me.
I have no more choices, they are just different ones. I have to work. I don’t want to.
Thank you so much my feminist foremothers for stripping away my right to stay at home and create a life to my own specifications.
Thank you that I’m exhausted every night. That my grandchildren will probably be in daycare from infancy. That little kids with colds have to go to school because mom can’t get a day off of work.
Thank you that the cost of living is fast surpassing my two income household.
Thank you that we can so easily walk away from marriages because we can make it on our own.
Thank you that we don’t to be careful about who we enter into relationships with because we don’t need anybody.
Thank you for taking away my choices.
Am I angry? Yeah I am.
Because there are lots of us out here hustling for a career we don’t want because somebody decided that being a homemaker was for losers.
And you know who called us losers? Our own kind. Women.
Somebody, please unliberate me.