Not too long ago, some know-nothing organization (read: a bunch of hurt parents from ‘depressed’ teens) tried to push the ‘think before you speak’ idea to hopefully curb e-bullying and mean texts. Naturally, it didn’t work, because e-Bullying doesn’t exist and mean texts are only mean if you read them and get offended by them. These weren’t the real reason why the push failed, even if they are correct factors in the failing whether sensitive dip-heads want to believe that they did or not. No, the real reason the push failed was because society, by and large, doesn’t care about proofing itself. I’m not sure why this is the case considering how many people have been made to look the fool thanks to not re-reading something they shoot off into the digital world, but it’s still a huge problem.

While it’s most notable on places like Facebook and Twitter which are designed around its users just firing and forgetting, or firing and censoring, it’s also a massive problem in the world of online writing. There are plenty of pieces I’ve written here where it’s very clear that they were put together strictly on emotion to appeal to emotion, which is why I revel in ripping them to shreds; appealing to a state of being which is, by definition, in constant flux is just asking for the asshole toddler to pull the rug out from under your feet. Nevertheless, people still do it, even if the it’s well known that people don’t like having egg on their face.

Case in point, our subject today.

To start, there is nothing I hate more than a terrible title. Rachel Toalson, if I’ve done my homework right, is an author of some books about magic and stuff and what appears to be a redux of the tale of Oedipus, except reworked so that it doesn’t involve patricide and incest. You’re a writer by profession, hon, so you should know what in the hell should be capitalized in a title and what shouldn’t be. Perhaps you don’t; I don’t know, but I sure as shit know that title is fucking ugly and it sets the tone for the rest of your article.

Off to a great start.

Ugh, a fucking sentence fragment to begin with. Not that I’d ever read this woman’s books, but I feel bad for the editor who had to comb through her manuscript and fix all the sentences that ended up as mangled as this one. For those not following along, those links go to an article explaining what one specific woman considers to be great qualities that make someone who is a father into a dad at the most general level, and the second link is to an article about phrases parents can use to keep their kids in line and well-behaved. The second link doesn’t mention fathers at all. The third link goes to a fantastic article that I’ve ever seen on an article graveyard site by Christy Krumm who goes into some of the nuances of how the push towards equality between the sexes has opened a veritable Pandora’s Box on the notion of chivalry. I don’t usually push y’all to read the stuff I post here because most of it is drivel, but really go and read that article because in a time where people talk in absolutes and do so with little knowledge of what they’re talking about or, worse, are simply parroting what they heard from their friend/their coworker/their professors/their magazine/etc., having an opinion that is truly in the grey area from a name and face I don’t know and haven’t seen before is fucking refreshing. Christy, if we ever meet, drinks are on me; I’d love to be able to pick your brain for your opinions on other hot button issues that are rife in modern society.

You should’ve noticed that at no point did any of those articles involve the pedestalizing of fathers; two of them didn’t even mention fathers at all. Being someone who does his best to source anything he references to, as well as having received formal education on proper sourcing techniques, I always expect other writers to be able to do the same, so it really creases me when they don’t. Even worse is when a writer links to a source and it is clear that the author hasn’t read the source they are linking to because it shows that the author completely understands how sourcing is supposed to be done, but does not care enough about the subject to be as correct as possible. If you aren’t going to brush up on your sources, then should’ve just not included them and simply lied instead; at least that would save you from looking like a total fool and, instead, you’d only look half a fool.

As for the actual content, this ‘equal pay’ rhetoric is done and dusted. My rote reply has always and will continue to be ‘I have debunked this as have better and smarter minds than I’ and I will not stop bashing this peg into the hole until it get through. Women need to stop projecting their personal financial inadequacies onto the populace at large and, instead, live with the fact that their choice of study or career path didn’t net them immediate bank  as soon as they entered the workforce. Doctors and nurses grasp this concept, so why can’t you? I also can’t stand how Rachel says ‘go figure’ like a working woman is some kind of obvious revelation that us lesser-minded peons haven’t figured out. We figured it out, Rachel, and we also figured out that an Earnings Gap is not the same thing as a Pay Gap. You would understand this, too, if you had tried to become a computer scientist or an engineer, because those jobs pay well. They are also far more important and integral to the upkeep and well-being of society in general and are a big pain in the ass to survive through during college.

Also, you’re a writer. That is the easiest goddamn job in the world. I’m doing it right now. Some teen is doing it from her iPhone 7. Some toddler just wrote his first sentence. You modern writers act like writing is some kind of fucking holy grail of a job and we should all be witnesses to your greatness. You’re not great; hell, you’re barely remotely skilled. I wrote a full fucking play at thirteen. I have lost numerous books of short stories and essays I’ve penned out and this was all well before I was a teenager. To me, you suck, big time.

Stop using quotes; you clearly don’t know how they work.

Yes, Rachel, it is indeed a new thing, no matter how many times you sarcastically put quotes around the word ‘new’. Women didn’t really start entering the workforce en masse until the late 70s, and they didn’t start making landmark successes until well into the 80s; I’m sure some folks will go back to the mid 1900s and talk about all the Cold War programmers or the ‘We Can Do It’ campaign, but the bottom line is that those women are in the vast majority historically speaking, not to mention that once the war effort ended, women generally either picked up lighter administrative jobs or went back to being homemakers. It wasn’t until the mid 90s that women across all fields became more than a rarity, and in the STEM fields it’s still a crazy sausage-fest. However, I don’t see women tripping over themselves to become physicists or refuse workers, but hey, that’s okay in your eyes because women should be ’empowered’ to choose what they want to do. I mean, it’s not like what you’re saying is code-word for ‘women should be able to choose whatever they want, except for this stuff, that’s for men only because it’s gross’. Oh, wait.

Men were also traditionally breadwinners because, if you paid attention in your ancient history courses in high school, that women were not as strong as men, which was a direct detriment to the hunting party since it was literal weak link in the chain. Thus, it made more sense based on survival to let the stronger men go out and risk their lives while the women provided care for the children; it also helps that human biology still supports this model, as women are able to make breast milk and their hips are specifically designed to carry and birth children.

These links are, again, retarded. You’d think she’d link to her own husband’s website or her own website or just leave them out, but no, she just clicks on links wherever. I would say this is the fault of the editor-in-post for just linking to arbitrary pages all over the YourTango site, but considering the ease of being a writer these days, I honestly doubt YourTango employs a person in that specific job. It also, to me, doesn’t sound like you’re that happy considering you’re writing a short essay on why dad’s who are more involved in the rearing of the child, like yours is, shouldn’t be praised, even though you can’t provide any evidence that they are being praised. It frankly sounds like you’re upset that you can’t spend your time goofing off anymore and now have to spend your time looking after six tiny hellspawn, all because you and your husband couldn’t say ‘enough is enough’. ‘But Sahltines, they’re free to do what they want!’ Yeah, and I’m free to call them morons for adding at least one definitively useless person to the gene pool. Hell, considering this article so far and what other stuff of Rachel’s I’ve skimmed, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that all of these kids have a shot of turning out useless thanks to mediocre to outright bad parent values. I’m not saying these kids will turn out bad, but if I were working for the CPS, I’d be a little hesitant to find a child for Rachel.

One last quick quip on this: six kids is too fucking many. I’m definitely not in favor of the One Child law practiced in China, but I honestly believe that once you start having what can only be properly described as a ‘litter’ of children, you need to reassess your life. This isn’t the 1600s where you need a ton of children because half of them will die of dysentery or some other Oregon Trail-sounding disease and because you own a large farm, this is the modern era with modern medicine and healthcare. Having a litter of children simply means you are really shitty at using protection, which makes you irresponsible, or are actively just filling the population pool to do it, which makes you wasteful and tangentially detrimental to society, which is also irresponsible. Do what you want because it’s your life and not mine, but the families I’ve met where there are a ton of kids I generally don’t like and one of the kids always ends up in a really horrible place. People have trouble with one child, so I can’t imagine good parenting is done with six.

This seems very carefully crafted…

Perhaps I’m reaching, but why does paragraph one here involve what appears to be so much more work than paragraph two? Seriously, in the first part Rachel is cooking and dressing little munchkins and walking and walking and reading while in part two her husband simply plays with them and then sends them outside to hang with their friends and helps with the homework. Again, I might be reaching, but if I were someone who was an advocate of modern feminism and ‘equality’-centric social movements and was also a woman, then I would probably write in such a way that made me sound like I’m doing all the leg work while my partner or husband or whatever is also helping, but not doing nearly as much as me. It frankly sounds like really covert score-keeping, which is fucking dumb because in one of the articles on YourTango, which I believe Rachel also links to in her piece, links to a study about ‘co-parenting’ or where parents work to divvy up the workload of child-rearing in an equitable manner. To save you the time of searching for it, the results of the study show that parents who try to split down the middle 50/50 have tended to do poorer jobs than parents who have splits where one person generally takes more responsibility for the children while the other takes responsibility for the whole family well-being. The study cites this idea of score-keeping and that it tends to crop up more frequently in 50/50 splits. Like I’ve said twice, I may be reaching, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that a woman who can’t read her sources or can’t stop herself from making really outlandish statements like the one this whole article is predicated on is likely subconsciously (or consciously) practicing this score-keeping behavior.

I don’t get how twelve kids would cause someone anxiety when they have six rugrats running around at given points in time during the day, but then again when I babysat, it was for one or two kids and they were very well-behaved. I also don’t get why that’s even a thing in the first place. One third of your kids isn’t even in a school setting where they would be able to make friends, and one third of your kids are old enough to play by themselves without you supervising them like a mother bear. That means you only really have four kids to look after constantly and there are two of you there, so again, that’s six per adult which is something y’all are fully capable of. More importantly, why the hell are you running a daily daycare? Your kids don’t need to have their friends over all the time and, frankly speaking, I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think there’s just a number of kids that live in your neighborhood that play your older kids hang out with and you’re just taking a guess at the revolving door of little goobers that show up in your yard. This allows you to paint the picture of you watching over a large cluster when, in reality, you’re just focused on a very small part of it and you’re using this disingenuously to make it seem like you’re doing more than you really are.

Even in the grand scheme of things, watching over kids isn’t hard at all, it’s just time-consuming and sometimes slightly dangerous. Sorry parents, but it really isn’t that hard to watch kids. My only exception would be extremely poorly behaved kids, but those are not that prevalent and, judging from Rachel’s constant tweeting, her kids seem fairly tame.

 These links, man.

Yet again the link goes to an article that’s clearly not helpful to Rachel’s point. If she’s the one doing this, I can only surmise that this article is supposed to be some sort of parody even though it doesn’t give that vibe at all.

The school papers would go in their backpacks or book-bags, I hope. You know, because that’s what people use to typically carry their educational materials to and from home. Maybe they have some sort of extraneous filing system, but that seems wasteful by all accounts since the best place to put finished homework is right back in your binder to be handed in and not in some home-built cubby only to be taken out in the morning and then put into said binder. The wording also makes me wonder if Rachel ever went to school or even did her homework because backpacks and binders should be bog-standard knowledge for everyone. My assumption is she does, but the way she’s structured this part could easily imply that she doesn’t, which paints her as some kind of imbecile, and being viewed as an imbecile makes it harder to sell your point to others.

I also don’t get the random bolding. People bold or italicize letters to either follow some sort of standard nomenclature-based formatting, such as book titles, or to emphasize a point. When you bold a whole phrase, that impact value is lost since it’s not contained to a very specific part of the sentence. She keeps using it in ways that don’t really make sense and would likely be confusing to readers.

It frankly sounds like you both share the same amount of duties. I don’t understand why you broke everything up in such a strange way and made the flow so choppy. There’s also a GIF that I edited out which makes it even less fluid, though most ‘authors’ these days seem to plant pictures and animations wherever they please in their writing, even if it kills the tone or the fluidity. It’s almost like most writers didn’t pay attention in the classes where they were taught the basics and slightly more advanced nuances of writing. Oh, wait. As for people being shocked, I would likely guess it’s because what you’re doing is against the biological norm across the board. You’re very much in the minority here, which is fine, but you’re acting like people who don’t parent like you are the weird ones. The word ‘abnormal’ exists for a reason, and the reason isn’t to be ‘hurtful’ like idiots these days believe.

 Finally, a corroborating source!

At nearly ninety percent of the way through this, there is finally a link that actually bolsters Rachel’s article. Funnily enough, it leads to an article about how mothers and fathers are judged differently as people believe that mothers and fathers fill different parenting roles, and that this is somehow a problem. I found it extremely funny that all the researchers commenting on this are women. Call me crazy, but if I want male parenting tips, I’m going to ask my dad for help and not my mom because she is clearly not male. It’s not to say my mom can’t offer solid advice, just that it’s pants-on-head retarded to expect men and women to parent the same way at the baseline when they are completely different from one another. I wanted to give the article a chance, but one of the quoted researchers used the made-up term ‘micro expectation’, which immediately put me off of giving a shit because I can’t be bothered to care about the opinion of someone who butchers the English language to fit an agenda. The last paragraph of the article also ham-fisted in ‘gender bias’, as if it’s really a societally based ‘issue’ that fathers who are seen as good parents are present and cognizant of their children, whereas women generally have to be more involved than that. No, you fucking hacks, that’s thanks to biology and what helped us survive. Instead of trying to squish the entire story into your narrative, how about you do some actual research on this and give us an answer of why women are expected to be more present in the rearing of a child then men? The article also doesn’t provide any sources yet tons of postulations by these ‘researchers’, so until Alexis Coe or those she quoted decide to pony up on this, I’m calling bullshit. I’ll probably be waiting since it was written in 2013 and doesn’t seem to have been amended to include some sources on these claims.

Back to the main topic; I cannot stand sentences that start with ‘See’ followed by a comma. To me, that is my queue to stop listening and zone out because what usually follows is someone being extremely condescending and overly cocksure about whatever you’re talking about thanks to their personal experience with it, as if one person’s experience is the single experience can be had. The ‘Damn right’ line cracks me up because I’ve never met a single man that wanted six kids, ever. I’ve also never met a woman that’s wanted six kids, either, but all of this is perhaps because I don’t let people with extremely weird goals or fetishes or dreams that deeply into my life because those are usually some kind of signal of things not being completely mentally kosher. Frankly, I think you two are just really dumb and just fuck each other without thinking of the repercussions (i.e. more mini-yous); the only other plausible answer I can come up with that I haven’t already stated is that you, Rachel, might be really bored with your life and use pregnancies as a way to fill time and give you purpose. That’s really weird and leans towards that being ‘not completely mentally kosher’ I alluded to before, but again, you do you.

 

I really do like that ‘he’s happy I get to pursue a career’ line. Really, I do. I absolutely adore the implied statement she’s making here that even when she gets her way, she’s still got it tough since she ‘gets’ to pursue a career, not ‘have’ one, as if it’s some kind of fucking privilege that men are born with. I also really love that she’s basically implying that if you want to be a good husband, you should let your wife just do whatever she dreams up because if you don’t, you’re stepping all over those dreams and that if you have kids, you should be happy when she unloads half of the work onto you, despite the likely chance that you were probably the one providing the backbone of the financial support by working tons of hours in a stressful environment, because she has dreams, too, and you not simply supporting her makes you a piece of shit. I just love it so much, even more so when it comes from someone whose entire profession is centered around sitting in a chair and putting words to paper, doing that thing that is a requisite of nearly every other goddamn job out there.

More seriously, the gall of this woman is so fucking grating. She’s a writer by profession; she has all the time in the fucking world. Even if she does host a YouTube show and have a podcast and tries to write five-thousand words per day (which is a dumb goal in and of itself; the importance in writing is the message, not the length), none of these are so demanding that you can’t do them while watching your children. If anything, being a writer is the most conducive job you could have for raising kids. My mother took a huge pay-cut and quit her high-profile job to be around to raise me through every step of my childhood (to nip it in the bud, this was a personal choice on her part). She then got a Master’s degree and became a school teacher which, while still very conducive to raising kids since you get summer off, is way harder than being a writer since it’s, you know, fucking teaching. I hate using an argument like this, but Rachel has so much fucking privilege that it’s ridiculous and here she is, lecturing us for doing something that is rooted in biology and history and is fucking normal.

Thank fucking god it’s over.

How many times is Rachel going to link to an article that does not support her argument at all? The answer: too goddamn many.

When I hear ‘book club’ anything, I already know exactly what that person is like in person and that I never want to spend time with them. I’ve been to book clubs, I’ve seen them and I’ve had friends be a part of them, and while this is anecdotal evidence, they have all been insufferable experiences filled with insufferable people. All they do is spend time gushing over whatever garbage they all decided to read together while giving the stink-eye to anyone who dare invades their sacred circle or suggest that the book was not as good as Oprah (or whomever recommended it to them) said. They are the high school equivalent of the popular girls table at lunch except, instead of it being ridiculous hot gals, most of them are whales and even dumber. I also hate book clubs because of the exact scenario Rachel described. Women use them as some shitty excuse to hang out and drink wine. I don’t hate the goal of the book club, I hate the fact that women can’t just say, ‘Honey, Becky invited me and all the girls over to hang out and bond, can you watch the kids? I haven’t seen her in forever.’ It’s like every thing, even if it’s stupidly innocuous, has to be setup like it’s secret meeting. It bothers me so much because it’s basically accepted lying, and lying is shitty behavior. Women get on men’s asses all the time about lying and cheating, so why is it that when they do it for little shit stuff, it’s okay? Answer: it’s not. Seriously, just be honest; sometimes, adults want to get buzzed with friends. That’s okay.

I’m glad that this is over, because the further on it went, the more I wanted to stick my dick in the toaster. These are my least favorite kinds of articles to rant about because I generally agree with the core message, but the way these authors take to get there is so damn circuitous and they always ham-fist in some personal dogma or agendas along the way that detract from what the message they really want to say and come out looking like a flaming retard. I’m down with the idea that parents who are really present in their children’s lives should both be praised for doing so. I’m also fully aware that there are biological and historical reasons why men get much praise for little effort and while I agree it’s silly and unnecessary since they’re just being good parents, I again understand where it comes from and that it’s going to be a hard cultural habit to shake, if it even can be shaken away.

What really grinds my gears, though, is this implied idea of Rachel’s that men who parent shouldn’t be praised for parenting. That’s bullshit. Parents who are good parents should be praised, regardless of sex. Whether or not I agree think that the axioms of parenting are hard doesn’t matter; the simple fact that you have to live with a small human that is no more useful than an empty box until eighteen years of age if that box also slowly chipped away at your very being for those years is something that that any adult should be praised for. Seriously, kids suck, and bringing them to adulthood in a sort of functioning manner is a miracle, and it takes a ton of effort. Just because you’re pissed off that the two sexes do not get equal praise doesn’t mean you have to shit all over men because you feel slighted. Stop being a score-keeping asshole and work to raise great kids.

At the very least, tell your husband to teach them how to cite sources properly and how to properly bolster their arguments with useful evidence and good counter-points they can use as further argument points, because I sure as shit know you can’t do it.