Practicalities.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone (hello Cosmocking), but I think there's a tendency in Feminism to go after pop culture too much and the harsh practicalities of life not enough. There's no question, culture matters, the weight of a million beer ads and Disney princesses does change us--but so do the job market and the people on our street and the way our own friends treat us.

The biggest challenge facing women today, I think, is not PUAs and it's not Cosmo and it's not evolutionary psychology. It's babies. I feel like in our current society, a woman can live almost as well as a man--as long as she never, ever has any children. The instant sperm meets egg, bang, it's like everything since 1959 never even happened. A woman can sometimes get taken seriously at work and in media and politics, but a mother? She'd better be able to afford some serious nannies and even then it's an uphill battle to make people believe you have any non-child priorities for the next eighteen years.

I don't know exactly what it's like, being barren ground myself. (Which will come to carry its own stigma if I'm still babyless in ten years, but in some ways it's a "well, here's someone who'll take a lot fewer sick days" stigma.) But it seems like all notions of equality hit a brick wall at "well, my husband makes more anyway, so it just makes sense for me to stay home" and "well, it's nothing against her, but I can't promote her when the kids are such a big priority in her life right now."

Well, kids do take a lot of work, and someone has to do it. You can't ask a family to go broke just for the sake of feminist principles, so in a world where a large majority of husbands earn more than their wives and childcare costs more than most women even earn, it really does make sense for the woman to be the one to give up some of her outside life. It just sucks. And it feeds into an ugly cycle where women earn less because we're liable to quit when we get pregnant, and we quit when we get pregnant because we earn less.

I don't have an awesome solution here. But I do have an inkling of why birth control and abortion are such key feminist issues. ...Maybe daycare co-ops? Right now organizing babysitting rings seems to me the most bra-burningly feminist step we could take.