Mailvox: But I LIKE my dreams

Lauren would rather dig up bones and broken pottery than breed:

What a loser! Oh yes, because my only, most important goal in life is to get married to some guy like you who’d keep me pregnant and in the kitchen and stupid until I either died in childbirth or just got too old. Because honestly, I can’t even IMAGINE a better, more fulfilling life than that. Please…

FYI, my dream is to be an archaeologist. Now tell me, would it really have been easier for me to become one 50 years ago than it is today? I don’t think so. As for marriage, if I find a nice, sweet guy who respects me (it’s a fact that you can’t really love someone unless you respect them, so I guess you better “turn” gay or prepare to be lonely for the rest of your life), then sure, I’d probably get married. However, I sure as hell wouldn’t do it just to get married. That’d be kinda pointless. As for kids, I really don’t want any. If every woman did, we’d be way more overpopulated than we already are. I don’t want to be tied down for 18+ years and it sounds too painful to be worth it.

People like you make me run from Christianity like my life depended on it. If YOU claim to follow God and Jesus, why would I, being a woman, want to be Christian? If God controls everything, then he made Eve eat that apple. He makes us have periods in order to have kids, yet the Bible repeatedly calls them dirty and women who are on them unclean. Yeah, that makes sense. Sheesh…..if I lived in a world ruled by you I’d probably kill myself.

It’s no wonder that young women are so often unhappy, given the false set of impressions under which they are operating. Contrary to popular misconception:

1. Being at home does not make you stupid. To the contrary, I’ve found that it is those who work for many years in an office environment that tend to have their minds consistently narrowed until they lose the ability to speak about anything beyond sports, their work or their family. True, there are many women who can’t seem to talk about anything but their children, but I’ve seen this habit afflict as many career women with children in day care as it does women who take care of their children at home. At least at home, you have the opportunity to develop your intellectual interests; sitting around watching TV is a choice, not a job requirement.

I might note that I’ve worked remote for twelve years now. Or, in less technocentric terms, at home. In that time I’ve written five novels and three recorded songs, designed or produced five computer games, read hundreds of books, been nationally syndicated, learned how to successfully trade the markets, started a software business, run a computer hardware company and coached a kiddie soccer club to two championships. Imagine what I could have done if I’d only been sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day!

2. There was nothing preventing women from becoming archeologists 50 years ago. This is the great myth of feminism. It is the fear of social disapprobation that makes women such fascists, because their oversensitivity to disapproval turns them into thought police who will brook no criticism. One does not need a degree, let alone a PhD, to learn about a subject and put one’s knowledge to use. Jane Goodall didn’t have a degree when she went to study the chimps of Gombe 45 years ago, based on a speech of hers to which I listened last month, she might not have had the open mind that led to her ground-breaking observations of animal behavior and emotion if she had attended Cambridge and studied etiology before going to Africa.

Consider what a small percentage of men were literate until 1800. I would think that considering global population growth and the explosion in education, there have been more literate women in the last 100 years than there were literate men in all recorded history prior to 1800. And yet, where is the female Shakespeare, Maupassant or Goethe? Even today, where is the female Tolkein, Gibson or Stephenson?* Clearly, women could write, as the first novel was written by a woman, Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Was it patriarchal oppression, then, child-rearing or mere disinclination that has robbed the world of a vast encyclopedia’s worth of literary, scientific, technological and artistic contributions from women?

3. It is not necessary to respect someone in order to love them. That is a fundamentally female concept and one of the major reasons that many women fail to understand that what men want is very different from what they want. A woman wants to respect, a man needs to be respected. A man wants to love, a woman needs to be loved. This is why men are more drawn to sweet-natured women regardless of their intellect than they are to intelligent women whose resumes are filled with diplomas and career accomplishments.

There is a word for the woman who loves a man and does not respect him. Mommy.

4. If every woman had a kid, our society would die out. If every woman had two kids, our population would not grow at all. Remember, it takes two to make one, so it takes two to replace two. For every woman who decides not to have children, another woman must have at least four in order to prevent population decline.

5. For one thing, Christianity is concerned with rather more than kitchens and self-fulfillment. But what do my opinions have to do with the existence or nonexistence of the Creator God and the Resurrection of His Son? If there is an omnipotent divinity, whose power is such that He created the Heavens and the Earth, by whom your immortal soul will be judged, worrying about my interpretation of the current demographic challenges to society ought to be among the very last of your critical criteria. Whether one is considering the truth of communism or Christianity, one should never make the mistake of judging the ism by the ist.

I do note, however, the negative effect of the omnidirigent view of God on this woman’s opinion. If God made Eve eat the apple, it seems impossible to blame her for it. If, however, God gave Eve free will and she chose to disobey, the logic hangs together rather better. I freely admit the possibility that I am a puppet who has no control over my actions, but as my decisions and actions appear to have a direct effect on the consequences I subsequently experience, I shall nevertheless assume that I have at least what is a convincing appearance of free will.

And I find myself wondering, if God’s Word is incorrect and periods aren’t unclean, then where in the name of Gaia’s green gazongas did the multimillion-dollar tampon industry come from?

Considering the subject, I find it terribly ironic that this self-centered young woman’s dreams should be filled with the thoughts of societies long dead.

*Considering present trends, she would appear to be writing either a) romance novels in space, or b) erotic romance novels about werewolves, vampires and other creepy-crawlies.