It’s easier to understand Rand’s obsession with selfishness as a positive virtue if you consider that she included, under her umbrella of egocentrism, good deeds that make the doer happy. She wasn’t helping her husband, you see, she was helping herself have a husband who pursued his passions.
Of course, O’Connor had at that point already given up his budding acting career so that Rand could succeed as a writer. Which just goes to show—even if you believe that for civilization to survive man must reject the morality of altruism—marriage is still all about compromise.
Why I Am Not a Maker
Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women. As a teenager, I read Ayn Rand on how any work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that only creating new things was a worthwhile endeavor. My response to this was to stop making my bed every day, to the distress of my mother.
.. The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.
.. The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing—it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker—regardless of what one actually or mostly does—is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.