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I find it quite telling that the woman in the conversation glibly states: "In my family, my mom did everything. My dad worked, and when he came home from work....". As if paying the majority of the bills and allowing her mother the luxury (and yes, in todays society it is a luxury) of being a stay at home mom is "nothing". In todays society, we can completely devalue the role men have played in family formation, but if a male would have said the dad did "everything" and devalued the role of a stay at home mom, then this, oh yes, is an example of the patriarchy!

Or take the assumption that men being more in touch with their feelings is the truer more "masculine" baseline. Has it ever occurred to the participants that a more feeling centric focus is the female way of addressing emotions, and maybe men are more "activity" focused? Or even (gasp!) do better holding it in? It's no wonder that the counseling profession is almost all females now, and attracts very little attention from males, except of course the nerdy, feminized males that tend to create podcasts like this.

It would be like listening to a podcast run by truly sexists men, and listening to them wine about how if their female partners would just stop wanting to talk about everything and instead, when angry or frustrated or sad, would just go outside and work on the car with them to help calm their nerves. It just assumes the male baseline as the default.

This is the problem with many podcasts like this. There is no baseline. The assumed baseline is the utopian feminist vision that has never existed and experience has shown the closer we get to it, the less happy women are. What is needed in these discussions is an evolutionary baseline. What are men's general strengths? What are women's general strengths? What has evolution adapted us towards? Given this background, what is a reasonable baseline for each sex to strive towards and how far are we from that. Maybe then can we have a reasonable conversation.

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