Friday Takes on Self-Time and the New Familial Order

It’s Friday! I bet I can find some takes lying around the place.

One

This weekend is daylight “savings” of course. So that’s going to be fun. Well, it’ll be fine now, but much later on in the year, we will all rue the day. Honestly, I don’t mind either way the hours are, I just dis-enjoy them changing all the time. In this new era of the Self, I feel like we should all be able to pick our own hours and declare them—like pronouns. I self-identify as Standard Time or whatever it is. I’m going to live as if we haven’t moved the clocks and everyone has to remember my Self-Time. In fact, if you don’t remember which kind of time I’m living on, I will bring about efforts to cancel you on social media. Give me a few hours, sniff, and I will be back to Declare my Hours. Call it Time Hospitality.

Two

Speaking of the autonomous and impossible to live with Modern Self, all of our children were living out their own authentic identities while we were gone, which meant that when we came back from our trip they were descending into a dystopic nightmare of recriminations, cancelations, and filth. Our very first act was to threaten them with the loss of all they hold dear, and establish a New Familial Order which includes laws like ‘You Will Never Leave Anything Lying Around,’ ‘You Will Never Throw Garbage On The Floor,’ ‘You Will Never Ever Ever Leave A Dish In The Sink So Help Me.’ In one afternoon, the whole land was transformed into a peaceable realm and I could, theoretically, do all my work except that I don’t want to. Still, I could, and that’s the main thing.

Three

It’s amazing how much free time everyone has though. Just by not leaving junk everywhere and accepting the small tasks of carrying your glass into the kitchen and putting it straight in the dishwasher, or hanging up your coat when you walk in the door instead of flinging it on a chair, or throwing your Halloween candy wrappers into the garbage instead of on the floor means that by the end of the day everyone can scream into the computer with other people playing Minecraft. Imagine. It’s like some kind of secret gnostic knowledge that only a few people have.

Four

I also made a law against anyone saying no to another person. No more “No I can’t do that” when asked for a cup of tea or a glass of water. If anyone asks anyone else for something, the response has to automatically be, “I’d love to do that for you.” I made them all say it out loud and verily, they were choking on the words until I allowed them to say it sarcastically as long as they still fulfilled the request. You can’t have everything I guess. Matt has become worried that the children will all rebel against us by being really sincere and earnest about everything. Gosh, that would be almost intolerable.

Five

This blog has been brought to you, of course, by Carl Trueman. I can’t thank him enough for rearranging the categories of this present darkness for me so that I can cope with them all without feeling crazy all the time.

Six

Oh, and also, I love this article at First Things so so so so much. If you’ve run out of articles you should probably just pay to read it anyway. This part in particular:

As an image of what ordinary women are willing and able to accomplish in their lives, today’s ­idealized career woman is as realistic as the smiling, impeccably coiffed, pearl-draped homemaker who appeared in ads in the 1950s. For it is as true today as it was in that decade that domestic life cannot be fully automated. In households in which both partners work, someone still has to mop the floor, scrub the toilet bowl, and vacuum the stairs. And someone still has to watch the baby. In theory, men were meant to take on an equal share—and some do. But in practice, the project of “liberating” women from domesticity has become a Ponzi scheme, in which well-off women enjoy the fruits and freedom of feminist “progress” by outsourcing chores to a (mostly immigrant and female) servant class. We rarely hear the voices of the nannies and housekeepers whose labor allows their wealthier sisters to “lean in.” Deafness to the possibility that many mothers don’t want to be any more liberated from our children is evident among both social (that is, left-wing) and economic (that is, right-wing) liberals. Its roots are in an anthropology that depicts humans as radically atomized and in flight from all constraint—constraints of convention, the past, each other, and our own bodies.

And this:

This does not mean wishing the genie of women’s emancipation back into the bottle. I doubt I am alone in having little desire to relinquish the franchise or become my husband’s ward. The “tradwife” movement, which valorizes a return to the clearly defined sex roles of the 1950s, overlooks the fact that these roles were tied to an industrial-era economic, technological, and social context that is on its way out. Nor does it have many suggestions concerning sex roles that are appropriate for the increasingly bleak, post-human digital age we are entering, dominated by AI, biotech, and the New Economy oligarchy. For the age we are entering, a feminism in thrall to technology and its promise of an end to all limits will deliver—is already delivering—only misery. Instead we need a movement grounded in pragmatic realities. Male and female bodies are different; humans can’t change sex; most women want to have children; ­heterosexuality is the default human condition; outsourcing domestic chores is a movement to reintroduce a servant class; children do better in stable two-parent families; and our hyperfocus on individual freedom is a central factor in the plummeting of birthrates worldwide. Against technological developments that promise to free us from love, longing, and human nature itself, restating these truths is an act of feminist resistance.

I’ve been wanting to think through this practical reality myself for the last entire decade. I have been unhappy with the idea of many that we could return, somehow, to some more “traditional” way of life, which is often what I hear from those who call themselves hard complementarians. On the other hand, I have increasingly been grateful for the complementarian world and the bravery with which they declare that men and women are not the same, and that a woman who wants to have marriage and children should not be scorned by all, or feel bad about her choices. There has to be a way to live as men and women even in this dark time that has deep resonance with reality, but also isn’t tortuously put on, or, to use that now meaningless word—inauthentic.

Seven

Well, I better go. I have to do a lot of stuff so that I can go roller-skating this afternoon. I love roller-skating so much. It’s not as fantastic as ice-skating, but it’s pretty great. Have a nice day and go check out more takes!

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash