Somebody on MGTOW Forums posted a link to the Gateway Women website, which is dedicated to single, childless women who are “coming to terms with a life without children.” He posted the link with a “LOL” notation, but as I followed the link I didn’t see much reason to laugh at it.
Whyzzat, you ask? I’m a red-blooded American Men’s Rights Extremist, am I not? And the first thing that faced me is this article, “Surviving the childless weekend blues,” that’s enough to give me my daily dose of schadenfreude? Why am I not laughing?
Because I’m living it too, in my way. I’m on the other side of the same street, Solo Street, and she is going her own way, no less than I am. The circum-stances are different; my experience is different, as my “way” is different; but our destination is the same.
How different is it for a woman to be alone? How is her experience different from mine? I can only hypothesize, or engage in projection – pasting my own feelings, or my beliefs about her feelings, into my mental-image picture of her. How did she get to this place, this state … from a past like mine, or from one very different?
Jody Day, the founder of Gateway Women, describes herself as “a writer and communications consultant; she holds a certificate in integrative counselling and is a trainee integrative psychotherapist. She spent 15 years hoping for a baby and is a Godmother and Aunt many times over but not a Mother. Now happily post-fertile….” I haven’t read anything about her childhood, or about her marriage and subsequent divorce (mentioned once in passing, in the first article I read on her site); all I know so far is that she’s a professional woman, in her late forties, and she’s not as sorry-for-herself now as she used to be.
And she makes no bones about that “sorry-for-herself” …
Right now, there’s a whole generation of women 35+ who aren’t in the right relationship and can’t afford to have a baby ‘by themselves’ (even if they could face it). Professional, educated, intelligent, capable, loving, emotionally-intelligent hard-working women. Women who’d be fantastic mothers. But it’s not looking like it’s going to happen. Where the hell are they supposed to take their bewilderment, their grief, their rage at how things have worked out? They’ve followed the script our culture set out: worked hard at school, gone to university, built a career, tried to build relationships with men based on mutual respect and decency. And where has it got them?
I see myself as standing pretty damn close to where it has got them. We’re both of us still on Solo Street. I worked hard at my profession, too; I learned from life and I’m still learning; I love my family, what’s left of it, and I would like to believe at least that I would have been, if not a “fantastic father,” a pretty-damn good one. And if I had gotten selected for marriage, back when I was young enough that there’d have been a point to it, I would have worked to be a good husband.
But I, like Jody and her “Gateway Women,” am also “child-free, by circumstance.” What sets us apart, aside from “the expectations of Society,” is that she’s concave where I’m convex. What chafes her worse is that femaleness is built for motherhood, and she didn’t.
Who am I to laugh at her discomfort? I failed at fatherhood, because I didn’t.
This is not to say that I “feel sorry for her,” or that I feel schadenfreude about her situation, or that I figure somehow that “life has thrown her a bum pitch,” or that “she’s wrong for it,” or “she’s been wronged” – or much of any roiling and inappropriate misemotion. What I do feel is compassion … because I’m single and “child-free” myself.
“Of course, it’s different for a man.” It is? I don’t know; I know how it is for me, but I don’t know how it is for you. Or her. I’m only able to experience my own experience; isn’t it really the same for you?
What’s the difference between a “Gateway Woman” and a “Man Going His Own Way”? Is there a substantive difference, other than sex? Which I believe is substantive enough.
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“The Cost Of Delaying Marriage“, on MGTOW Forums, is the thread where I found the link to Gateway Women. It also had a link-back to an article on “Boundless Webzine” …
The Cost Of Delaying Marriage, excerpted from Danielle Crittenden’s book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. Now, admittedly, “Boundless Webzine” is a website of Focus On The Family, a Christian organization devoted to getting people to marry up and raise families – and my MGTOW stance would seem to go straight up against that goal. (Ask yourself, though, why must it?)
A game not worth the candle (A Voice for Men, 24 Apr 2012) is a frank exposition of the misandry, the sexual politics, the “entitled and empowered” attitude and mentality that more and more men recognize (and find hateful) among the Modern Woman of Today.
VAWA and the war on men (A Voice for Men, 22 Apr 2012) – AVfM went from the personal (above) to the political with this article.
Good Sex, Bad Sex (The Spearhead, 2 May 2012) – The “sexual repression” from before the Sixties gave way to the “sexual expression” of the Seventies and Eighties – but now, W.F. Price argues, “we still face a great – perhaps even greater – amount of control where sex is concerned, and a lot more people are locked up for sex crimes than in the bad old days of ‘oppression.’ ” And guess what? It’s almost all blamed on men ….
Raising Breivik (In Mala Fide, 30 Apr 2012) – “Finndistan” describes a street-scene in London, wherein a young mother demonstrated to her child how “political correctness” and “multi-cultural acceptance” are more important to her than her own child’s safety … Is this what we’re coming to?
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I’ve been going through a rather “dry time” on Beyond The Sunset, for the past few weeks. There have been several factors in this; one is a certain and increasing level of acedia, of losing touch with the fire that ran through my earlier rants. The other is a growing level of apathy about whether-or-not my voice is actually adding anything worthwhile to the chorus of Men’s Rights. And, of course, it’s sailing season …
Had a surprise at the Annapolis Spring Sailboat Show, last weekend; an acquaintance from the Seven Seas Cruising Association told me that she follows Beyond The Sunset. I was pleased, yes, but also vaguely alarmed …!
(That last item is why I’ve added the SSCA to my blogroll. If you sail, or you’re interested in sailing away some day, you owe it to yourself to check ‘em out.)
Good post, Beija! ….and I learned what “acedia” means so I’ll be working that into casual conversation over the next week!
Vic Ferrari
Good post, Beija. Spot on. Women going their own way. I had the same reaction as you. At first I thought, oh please, but then after going to that site and looking around it was like wow, they are me, just female – well somewhat like me. I didn’t forget to have children. I didn’t choose to be too busy to settle down. I would have settled for a decent woman and still will.
So while these women are in the same boat, we’re here for vastly different reasons.
Having said that I still wouldn’t mind meeting a woman from over there for drinks but maybe that’s just my masochistic holding out hope that I meet a “good” woman before I die.
They’ve left themselves to become lonely and bitter, but still they are “emotionally intelligent” and “loving”. How did it happen? The “followed the script”.
Dear God, for a woman capable of recognising that she, and if not only then primarily she, is the one who screwed up her own life.
Standing in an after ski party, with a petite 28 year old grinding me, a girl dressed in a wedding dress goes up to the DJ booth and shouts that she will throw the flower.
Petite 28 goes batshit crazy, jumping up and down. There I realized,
MGOTW: Many times decision made from experience
WGOTW: Ooooops. No buyers.
I just got aroung to reading ¨A Game Not Worth the Candle¨; insightful.
It seems that so much of what is assumed about men is not really fact. Alot of what others take for granted in men will not be be borne out by reality in the coming years. For as ¨apparently¨ simple as men seem to be, they are rational human beings who will act accordingly and not as instinctively unthinking as others would like.