Did you know sandwiches are a tool of patriarchal oppression? It’s true. A person can be oppressed by anything if they have an indignant outlook and a good imagination. Modern feminism possesses an abundance of both. Fortunately, plenty of women approach life more cheerfully.
There’s Maddie, for example, a wife and mother in Australia. Last week, she posted this question on a Facebook group for mothers:
I would love to hear what other mums make their hubbies for lunch and snacks throughout the work day. We are getting over sandwiches.
You can probably guess what happened. Feminists were incensed. How dare Maddie undermine the sisterhood by cooking for a man… a savage, despotic man! Here are some of their musings on the subject:
My role is childcare during working hours and that’s it.
I didn’t sign up for [packing his lunch] at the altar. But in the spirit of being helpful… pickled onion stuffed in mandarins.
I make my husband the same thing he makes me. Nothing!!
And my favorite:
I was married for twenty years and my favourite packed lunch for my husband was called a Get it Yourself with a side order of I’m Not Your Mother.
Good news, men. She’s available!
There were others in the group who defended Maddie. One woman wrote,
Wow, so much hostility here… Surely nice actions like [packing lunch] get reciprocated in happy marriages.
She’s correct that kindness begets kindness, but reciprocal generosity is more than “nice.” One study found that couples who freely give each other small acts of kindness have notably stronger marriages. They are happier, they have less conflict, and they consider divorce less frequently than their stingier counterparts (Dew and Wilcox 2013).
Happiness be damned, modern feminism has no interest in that kind of research. This new iteration of a once respectable ideology makes no allowance for good cheer between men and women. Feminism has become a spiritual home for the unhinged.
It takes a special kind of paranoia to find persecution in the simple act of feeding a loved one. Maddie, bless her soul, rejected false victimhood despite tremendous peer pressure to embrace it. Here’s how she responded to her antagonists:
He [Maddie’s husband] works in an extremely physically demanding job, he does housework, he cooks dinner every second night. He gets up in the middle of the night with our Bub. He is a champion. The least I can do is make him a bloody sandwich. I love my man, he deserves to eat lunch and we can’t afford to eat out.
There’s no righteous indignation in her answer. There’s only love, gratitude, and a team mentality. Maddie’s words are proof that an ideology has no power to infect a kind soul with its worst features.
So to answer the question at the top of this page, feminism doesn’t make women undatable. It can’t. However, undatable women seem to find comfort in feminism’s bottomless basket of silly grievances.
Marriage, and even cohabitation, has become tremendously risky for men. The right partnership can be the best thing that happens to a guy; the wrong one can ruin him. That weightiness makes it easy to fixate on qualities we don’t want in a partner, like hostility and entitlement.
I think it’s more productive to focus our attention on women like Maddie and her defenders. They possess what it takes to succeed in relationships, and they are the ones who deserve the affection of good men.
References
Dew, J., and W.B. Wilcox. 2013. “Generosity and the Maintenance of Marital Quality.” Journal of Marriage and Family 75:1218-1228.
Find Maddie’s Facebook story here and here.