The scolds are at it again

Double X has a brand: scold. This isn't really going to make a big impression on younger people, but they are going after the older set. The set that is past the time, for most, when they can play the game of fresh young thing. When the "political" side of feminism has become more attractive than the personal side. Partially because the personal side is settled, or is not going to be. It's easy to load this kind of post with catty comments about women who are older. But it's a bad move, in that, well we are going to get there sooner or later. However, it is really appalling that the older set does not look in the rear view mirror a bit, and remember that they too, were once young and coming up. And going down.

The problem with this is that it is a turn off for younger women for the same reason it is a turn off for old men: it's a horrible life to spend all of your life trapped with an economic hypochondriac. If watching little numbers pile up on a screen is life, then, well, guys have World of Warcraft (or whatever the game of the  moment is, forgive me for not keeping up) to do that with. 

The other big problem with scold is that it has to reduce the value of personal liberation. I am not a fan, as readers of this blog know, a fan of the cosmo sex tips and fat lips school of personal self-fulfillment. But that's because their tips are so often bad ones.

Take me to task for scolding men not to run around with cocks hanging out of their shorts and demanding instant sex from every woman they meet. Is that being a scold? Yes it is. But then, that's the nature of scolding: it is to get other people to be ashamed of doing, or not doing, something, and guilt is one of the emotional currencies that runs the world. However, my scolding is of men who are not cognizant and not getting anywhere. Their scolding is that of trying to get competitors to cave. It's maliciously self-serving scolding. They want young women to organize, in order to subsidize their health care, while not doing a thing for our own. Tax breaks help those, who are being helped themselves. Comprehensive universal care? Farthest thing from their minds.

The same is true of professional scolding: we should be supporting the organizations they are in charge of. Nothing is more frustrating than finding out how much of a clique and cluck driven world that is. Again, it seems that self-serving is the unifying thread of what they are offering. We work now to help them, they work to help themselves, and we get... ummm wait, they will think of it. You can go on about politics all you want, but all the feminist organizations in the country could not keep a tiny sliver for contraception in the stimulus bill. Clearly they had better things to do. Only it wasn't drinking. Maybe pills. You know, prescription drug abuse is rampant among older women.

All of this makes me want to stop, because every word brings me closer to becoming what the people I am complaining about already are. I feel for them, in the same way I feel for my ma, her life emptying out after a divorce. Children gone, husband on to his trophy marriage, and a larger than she needs house in a downturn. And that is what I keep seeing in Double X, an emptying sense that personal power is gone, that the open vistas are closing, and that grinding out the years is all that lies ahead. 

That and the obvious, it is very much a man's world, in that their sense of accounting is what determines who can have children and who can't, how they are to be raised, and who is to pay for it. More and more it is us. Fewer and fewer men with great career paths, more and more burdens on us. 

That's what I wish I would see from Double X more, less generational warfare, and more of an understanding that that every time they command stentorian prose in favor of failed institutions, they end up sounding like stenographers. 

Please everyone over there, stop hating lifestyle feminism, because it is a product of those of us who are still searching for ours, even as you have found yours. And it isn't our job to spend our young lives fixing up the problems in your older ones.