One hallmark of a guy who spends way too much time on Twitter is an insistence that having a career (or worse yet, enjoying it) is something that women have been “brainwashed” into, and that any woman with her head on straight would run as far as she could away from the prospect of her own paycheck. A common refrain: a photo of a mother and her baby (it’s always a baby, never a teenager) with the caption, “How could women choose spreadsheets over this?” Alternatively, a photo of a woman in the kitchen surrounded by well-behaved, adoring children: “How did they convince women that this was oppressive, but spreadsheets were liberating?”
What I find odd about this belief system is that the men in question never stop to ask themselves if they would choose spreadsheets over babies. 99% of the time, they have chosen spreadsheets. If they have wives, those wives would probably love some more help with the kids, and they (again, I’m aware I’m making assumptions but they feel like pretty safe assumptions) are not jumping at the opportunity. In fact, they appear to spend more time fantasizing about killing people to save their children than actually performing the routine tasks of childcare.
Before you say this is just wacky right-wing trolls on Twitter, I’ll admit that even I wondered about this from time to time—the idea that I had been “lied to” about work being empowering or worthwhile. I felt this way mostly because I hated my own job, and kept getting fired. Nothing about my work experience was “empowering,” especially given that one of my bosses threatened to spank me and forced me to take shots of whiskey at 10 AM—and strangely enough, that wasn’t even my worst work experience. When your work situation sucks, it’s easy to assume that you don’t want to work *at all, *and while men might just say “Wow, my boss sucks,” women have a very easy “maybe I’m just a tradwife” pipeline set up for them. Hence the wave of women in 2021 who fantasized about being homesteaders when they actually just wanted to be aristocrats.
I get it—I fantasized about ending my career long before I actually did it to become a writer. (While I refer to myself as a SAHM because that’s my day-to-day lifestyle, I very much have a career, you’re looking at it now! It’s just one that I like.) Eventually, I realized that I was in the wrong line of work and I wanted to write full-time. But I hated my job long before that revelation, and for most of that time I thought I just hated the concept of working entirely. Cue: this is the tiny baby deer you’re asking to make spreadsheets, aren’t I adorable? No, you just hate your job and should probably be doing something else.
But for many of the men who believe women have been “tricked” into working, the thought process is a bit different: they imagine women are so different from them, wired so differently, that there’s no way they could possibly have the same aspirations or desires as men, even something as simple as wanting a stimulating career outside the home with adult interaction. These men might enjoy their own careers (even if they’d prefer to be independently wealthy, because wouldn’t we all) but can’t conceive of a world where women enjoy their jobs—or more shockingly, where men actually want their wives to work too.
