No more political discussion, please, unless it is tied to gender issues.

Most women who are conscientious mothers are teaching their boys to be in touch with their humanity, and they encourage their male children to have positive relationships with their fathers. But the quality of those relationships cannot be dictated by women in their roles as mothers to boys when they are children, or as partners to adult men.

I think the following quote from Ane Axford, CEO of Sensitive and Thriving, is quite relevant: “By stating where you are, what you feel, what you want, you are not making anyone else ‘wrong’. You are simply making your self known. It is simply not possible for 2 people to stand in the same space at the same time, only to come together from different spaces to reach out and connect.”

“Even now, such sentiments are echoed in vile Internet comments bashing the 16-year-old Steubenville victim as a drunken slut—very much a minority view, but voiced frequently enough to be troubling.”

Nobody decent wants their internet comments to be misinterpreted as “vile”. Here, therefore, is what I will call “The Steubenville Disclaimer Clause”:

“Whereas rape is rape, and mindful that, just as one man’s terrorist may be another’s freedom fighter, so might intended assistance in discovering rape avoidance lessons to be learnt be misinterpreted as an attempt to blame a rape victim for her own rape, I make the following observation, not in an attempt, in any way whatsoever, to blame the victim for her having been raped, but merely in case this observation of mine assists others to identify correctly, possible rape avoidance lessons that might usefully be learnt.”

Got that?

OK. Paste the Steubenville Disclaimer Clause at the beginning of any comment you make on the internet, that says, for example,

“If only the victim hadn’t got blind drunk, and then taken off all her clothes in a bedroom other than her own, in which the Beavis and Butthead-like adolescents convicted of raping her also happened to be present, before apparently passing out, or pretending to do so, this appalling, iconic crime against the whole of womanhood, might never have been committed, by the said atypical representatives of manhood.”

That should do the trick!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, or, at least, not much of a lawyer.

It’s also true that in large cities like Boston and New York and Dallas and Los Angeles, college-educated women earn $1.02 for every dollar a man earns, providing they’re under 30. This is no good for me, as I’m past that age, but it’s good news for younger women, especially, as the study shows, women between the ages of 21 and 27. This is a gender issue actually, one that disadvantages men. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been hiring, and my boss (often male!) has told me, “I’d rather hire a woman. None of those men give a shit about turning in a quality product. They all live with their parents anyway.” Great, let’s judge all men by what some dumb Judd Apatow movie says. What insightful workers we are! If you ever want to know where the dumb male stereotype comes from or why young men can’t launch, that’s it, right there.

But, wait, at 30, the situation reverses, and the farther men and women climb up the ladder, the greater the salary gap becomes. So what happens in a woman’s 30s? Many women start families. Even if they don’t take time off of work, the perception is that they’ve just about hit their final level of promote-ability. But some of us, like me, don’t want kids. Ever. Doesn’t matter for us – the assumption is there, and I can’t write “My husband is clamoring for a vasectomy and pregnancy makes me puke” in a cover letter, can I? It’s not polite. The other problem is behavioral too: we’ve eliminated those “illegal” questions, like queries about your family plans. And actually, I agree with Sheryl Sandberg on the matter of “illegal interview questions”: time to bring them back. In a perfect world, I’d go brawling before I take a hit to my life savings or retirement account because I wear a wedding ring, but since that’s the system for now, my husband and I opted out of rings. (Yes, we actually opted out of rings so I could earn more money. You have to be smart.)

But I don’t much care if the mothers or aspiring mothers don’t like being asked about their plans – I’m DAMN sick of incurring lifelong financial penalties and earning less than I deserve because of what other women choose to do with their lives and bodies. The whole “Mothers who work fewer hours, and women who work in low-paying, low-skilled fields deserve as much as male techies working 80-hours a week” is one MAJOR area where feminism lost me. Fuck you, ladies. I worked my ass off for that money. When you put in the time and effort to learn a rare and difficult group of skills, like web development and UI design, you can make more money too.

I work in high-tech, I have made more money for my employers than 95% of my male competition, and I work longer hours than just under 99% of them. (I can’t top the rare person who is able to work 18-hour days and sleep for two more, and they’re 1-2 out of every 100 workers. One of my good friends in high school was one, and that guy literally could not sleep for more than four hours a night, or he felt lousy.) Despite what my headhunters claim – and that’s the other factor lowering older women’s earnings: women who negotiate lose “likability points” in their employers’ eyes, and may negotiate themselves right out of a company that would gladly give a raise to their male counterparts – it is NOT outrageous for me to demand anywhere from $100-150K for a director job. In fact, anything below $115 is lower than market for a good technology director where I live. Call it lingering ideas about how ideal women vs. “impolite” women behave left over from a less egalitarian era, call it short-sightedness, call it what you will, but the women in my network are fuming with frustration because their demands for salaries commensurate with their achievements, results, time put in, and the going market rate are met with protests, stonewalling, silence, and even retaliation.

So in sum: There’s a gap, and there’s not a gap. Some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s gender-related. Some of the gender bias hurts men (i.e. young men), and some of it hurts women (i.e. women ages 30-49, women in management). All of it works together to ensure the average middle-class income has fallen far behind inflation. And that’s really what keeps me up at night.

I lost my first job in my profession (which was my second professional job) because, after a year of listening to my boss talking dirty to me – comments included telling me that I looked sexy in my boots, that I didn’t even know how great of a trophy wife I would be, and that I should leave the field to work the phone-sex lines advertised in the newspaper classifieds because I had the “voice of a hooker” – he decided he didn’t feel like paying me anymore. However, he knew I could sue, or more accurately, that some women might sue, because of the work environment (the company’s employees also made generous use of a colorful array of racial and gay slurs) so he gave me a payout and made sure I could collect unemployment. I always dressed in a conservative fashion – still do – and do not discuss sex at work, so I suppose you could blame me, or my behaviors, but some things are very much one-sided (like false harassment lawsuits tend to be).

Later, I switched my professional focus to a much more technical sub-specialty of my field, and began to enter male-dominated offices. I avoided the big, corporate places because I do find that the work environments there are sterile and neutered. They tend to hire a lot of 30-/40-something female middle-managers (of which I am one), but their hires can be very prissy and proper, and hell-bent on turning a relaxed, creative environment into a corporate hell where everyone’s a stickler for the rules because they frown on any behavior that may even SUGGEST sex.

So anyway, I was a manager, and I was a very popular one. I earned 20K less than my male counterparts at every job I worked (I imagine for reasons similar to why your father will not hire women at all), and I had fewer options than my male colleagues when I wanted to change jobs (many companies would prefer to hire a less-qualified man because they perceive that women bring problems to the workplace – sexual harassment, maternity leave, etc. – which angers me, because I don’t want to sue anyone, and my husband and I don’t want kids). But my teams were consistently the most profitable in the history of the company.

The only problem was, I’d keep encountering ‘That Guy’ at my job. ‘That Guy” was an older man, usually in his early 50s, with a troubled marriage. It always started off innocently enough. I’d be managing him and complement him in a professional manner for a job well-done. He’d take that as an invitation, and while it would start out innocently (saying I looked nice when dressed up for a meeting), soon I’d find him touching my shoulders and letting his hand linger far too long at parties. Or asking me personal questions about my sex life with my husband. And then, I’d start getting e-mails, which would grow progressively dirtier. I would respond in a business-like tone, ignoring the implications of his comments, and he would up the ante.

The most recent guy demanded to meet with me to discuss “what was happening between us” – evidently, he’d imagined a budding courtship without my permission. I’ve been gone from that job for two years now and live halfway across the country, and this man made a point to tell me how he was thinking of dumping his new girlfriend, and sending me a dirty picture on Valentine’s Day. My only recourse is to ignore it. Women who sue for sexual harassment are all but ensuring they never work in their professions again. And I don’t care to have my personal business exposed to the world, either. I now work at a predominantly female company and it pays crap. I’d like to get back into the male-dominated companies, but I’m not sure how to proceed.

And obviously, our current system sucks. Sexual harassment goes both ways, and everyone is affected by it. Some are hurt by false accusations, others, like me, will always be on the receiving end, and we’re powerless to stop it – and rendered even more powerless when companies view us as the problem, women as a monolith, and enact a blanket policy to stop hiring women. The question in modern workplaces becomes, “How do you balance appropriate addressing of sexual harassment with elimination of false accusations?” And feminists would do well to pay attention to this one, because female bosses harassing male subordinates is becoming more and more of a problem, as women acquire more power and income in the workplace. How do you prove innocence with a false accusation, or more importantly, how do you penalize someone who has brought forth a false accusation? And if you are being harassed, or are being held back at work because you’re viewed primarily as a sex object (and this is going in both directions nowadays too, or should I say, becoming more gender-blind), how do you assert that the advances and comments are not welcome while protecting your own career and reputation.

I hesitate to post this because when I used to post on gender sites more frequently, I’d get at least 1-2 male commenters per blog telling me that I deserve to be treated as I do because I’m a woman, and I need a taste of my own medicine, as if I were part of some great, evil female monolith, out to get all the men in the world. (I got it just as bad on feminist sites, but this isn’t a feminist site, so I’ll reserve my critique of them for a more relevant post.) That makes me sad. And it’s not productive. I’m looking for concrete ideas to solve a major problem, not teasing, or assigning blame. I’m looking forward to some suggestions and some productive discussion here. I’m hopeful.

Radical feminists actually aren’t even interested in men anymore. Their true enemy now, in the second decade of the 21st century, are trans women – XY-born individuals whose brain gender is female, who take hormones and undergo gender-change operations so their physical gender matches their brain gender. Whether you like trans women or dislike them, or even if you have no opinion on the matter, I’m sure you can at least agree that there is no “diabolical plot by men to infiltrate female-only spaces,” and that trans women have not been “invented by men” for this purpose, but that’s not how these loons see it. They want to strip trans women of their human rights.

The rest of feminism, which is 99.99% of what you read about in the mainstream media, is pop-psychology pabulum and the marketing of pop-culture passed off as a movement. As The Last Psychiatrist writes (and do read his blog; it’s informative), this is not activism, and the people who produce this muck never intend it to be. No, it is a collection of upwardly mobile, privileged white women demanding to be handed power without assuming the responsibility of that power.

There are scores of people who believe in true equality for the sexes/genders, but you will not find them on the internet. I generally refrain from engaging in MRA vs. feminist debates, because they always end in a lot of finger-pointing and name-calling. The people who want true equality, and not lip-service equality, or “girl power” to consume feel-good messages from Jezebel are mostly just out there living their lives. You won’t find them in your online space, and if you encounter one elsewhere (like, say on a news website), you won’t know you’re talking to one, because they don’t advertise their views. They are young and old, male and female, black and white, gay and straight. They are what I like to call “ordinary folks.”