DESPITE generous state subsidies, including subsidies for dawn-to-dusk schooling that renders motherhood all but insignificant, French women are the victims of a pervasive macho culture that keeps them from rising to the heights of corporate and political leadership, according to this article in The New York Times.
Katrin Bennhold suggests that the average French man is a creature of Napoleonic arrogance who is responsible for the exhaustion of the average French woman, apparently because he does not do enough at home. (Have you ever read a single article in the mainstream press about how exhausting life is for men?) Yet, as Bennhold explains, women want to do household tasks because it is important to their feminine identity. The real oppressor then seems to be the cultural expectation, a holdover of two world wars, that women have children (France’s birth rate, at a mere two children per woman, is higher than the rest of Europe).
But, wait, French women actually seem to want children. So who is the culprit? Something or someone is to blame.
The truth is, French feminists are among the unhappiest women in the world not because they have too little but because they have too much. Feminism is absolutist in its intentions. It will not rest until every woman on earth is perfectly content and has no complaints. Since this is an impossibility, feminism will not rest. It will ceaselessly agitate, searching for sinister designs against women. This non-stop war will not end until feminism’s most basic premises are shown for what they are: lies. (Continued)