…because your daughter is just going to stay home and have babies anyway.
Last week, several friends were kind enough to bring to my attention this awful piece on why parents shouldn’t send their daughters to college. Go ahead and read it if you’d like some rage with your coffee this morning. In case you prefer not to, here’s the list in brief:
- Your poor daughter will end up with a–gasp–educated man. No, wait, she’s just going to end up being the hard-working, intelligent wife with a lazy loser for a husband (kinda like all those sitcoms).
- She’s going to have the opportunity to have sex. Maybe a lot of sex. Probably with lazy losers. Once that happens, she’s not going to notice that her guy is bad for her because sex hormones.
- She’s going to end up with a career, dammit. She probably won’t want to play house anymore. Maybe she won’t even want babies!
- Since she’s just going to be a good wife and mommy, she won’t enjoy having the career that would have paid for her college education. Also, it’s a total waste of money to go to college and then stay home, thus forcing your husband to pay for your loans with his money.
- There is obviously only one way to be a feminist, and that is by going to college and having a career (which is dictated by your college education, of course) and not being a wife and mommy. It’s a slippery slope, thinking she has to prove she’s a feminist by doing all this. We can’t have that.
- In order to pay for college, parents might plan ahead and not have all the babies God wants them to. They might use birth control! No worries that sending sons to college might make parents sin by preventing pregnancy, though.
- Those young women are going to regret it someday when they are stuck in a cube somewhere wishing they could just stay home and luxuriate, eating bonbons and watching daytime television like the rest of us stay-at-home moms.
- They won’t be able to go to seminary (at least, not a Catholic one) if they have debt. Fine, that one might be real, especially since no woman called to vocational ministry ever knows that before she stupidly and blindly goes off to college to get a degree in chemical engineering first.
I don’t know about you, but I’m glad that I’m informed now. It’s only about ten more years til I have to think about sending my own daughter off to college, and I sure as heck don’t want her to end up with a degree that keeps her from her duties as wife and mom. Who cares if she’s ambitious and has talked for the better part of two years about wanting a career working with animals? She should just squash those dreams right now before they get out of hand.
Meanwhile, I guess I’d better figure out a way to pay my husband back for using “his” money (that he worked super hard for!) to pay off my loans from undergraduate and graduate school. After all, I’m just playing 1950s-television-style housewife here and not contributing financially. On second though, never mind. I’m just gonna go watch some television to alleviate my regrets.
“Go ahead and read it if you’d like some rage with your coffee this morning.”
Well, I did. Boy, am I frothing at the mouth! Those nutcases are the ones that taint what having a religion is all about. I feel sick and dirty just reading that piece of garbage. And they have the audacity to proclaim that they do not oppress women and are not sexist. Yeah, right!
Time to up their medication.
“We love women! As long as they are barefoot, pregnant, and making their husbands’ dinner.”
So true.
God bless you
this is, word for word, the comment i posted on this hideous article:
…lead us not into idiocy, but deliver us from stupid
nuff said
Hahahaha! I love it. Man, that should’ve been included in the original prayer. I’m not a huge fan of Mel Gibson, but years ago his film company made a claymation Jesus story thing (I forget the name of it). There’s this awesome scene where people are annoying Jesus and he makes this sort of huffy sound, like the spoken version of an eye roll. My husband and I loved it because we could totally see Jesus rolling his eyes and huffing at some of the stupid things said in his name.
he occasionally got exasperated with his disciples and even called them dense—i’ve never seen the movie that you mentioned, but it sounds like it’s worth watching
Finally remembered the title. It’s called “The Miracle Maker.” It’s very well done.
the title just jogged my memory—i did see The Miracle Maker when my daughter was a toddler–your right, it is an excellent film
Those guys are clearly on the path to creating their own little inbred cult, that’s very scary.
The most interesting thing for me about the article was actually not the rage-inducing reasons stated (My favourite: ‘she will regret it’ – actually, I absolutely regret NOT going to college but hey) but the writer’s response to the ‘common objections’ he gets when he airs his point of view. As an introvert, I always find communication with new people tiring and tricky but things like this make me realise just how difficult communication between people is at the best of times, and even more so between people who on the surface appear to have a common language of faith. We all make assumptions that because we use the same words we mean the same thing and yet when you dig deeper you realise that you come from such different starting points in terms of beliefs that true dialogue is impossible. If your deeply held belief is that (and I quote) “the day-to-day grind of a job is below the dignity of women”, then of course you absolutely won’t be able to reconcile it with accusations of ‘oppression’ and all your interactions will be tainted by it. These two guys have clearly been brainwashed from infancy into believing these things, I feel sorry for their 16 children.
My husband says that a lot–that starting point makes a big difference. He calls it “control beliefs,” meaning the set of things we each take as given when entering a discussion. People who have similar control beliefs can have reasonable, rational discussion even if they don’t agree on the topic at hand. People with vastly different control beliefs often can’t find agreement even when they do agree on the topic at hand. I might actually agree that it can be hard to recoup loss from college expense, but not for the reasons stated by these people, and we could never agree on a solution because theirs will always be “women shouldn’t bother with college” while mine would likely be “people could choose a state or community college instead of private school.”
i’ve also heard these”control beliefs” referred to as “frame of reference”—-it explains a lot when you have a discussion that isnt getting anywhere and people seem to be talking past each other