Walk through a museum. Look around a city. 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.
.. Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not.
.. It’s not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making (although it’s not all that clear that the world needs more stuff). 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.
.. A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable.
Can Donald Trump Take Up the Mantle of Jerry Falwell?
.. But perhaps the most surprising comparison came from Liberty University president, Jerry Falwell Jr., on Fox News Channel last week: “I think Trump reminds me so much of my father.”
.. If evangelicals held Trump to the same standard they have applied to leaders in the past, he would hardly pass muster. Russell Moore, leader of the Southern Baptist denomination’s political arm, recently described Trump as “unrepentant serial adulterer who has abandoned two wives for other women” and who has grown rich through “an industry that preys on the poor and incentivizes immoral and often criminal behavior.”
.. The fact that Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Ben Carson have also spoken at the evangelical college suggests that the Republican road to the White House passes through Lynchburg, Virginia. But if evangelical engagement with politics is driven by a politics and morality, Trump may be facing an impossible task.
.. Both Falwell and Trump have also made comments widely believed to be misogynistic. Trump has mocked the physical features of prominent women such as Rosie O’Donnell—and who can forget his comments insinuating that Fox News host Megyn Kelly was probably menstruating? Falwell often attacked feminists, once saying, “These women just need a man in the house.”
Eileen Myles Wants Men to Take a Hike
Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. It’s like the un-Trump: The poet is the charismatic loser. You’re the fool in Shakespeare; you’re the loose cannon. As things get worse, poetry gets better, because it becomes more necessary.
.. I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation. There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.
.. That horrible line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, ‘‘There are no second acts in American lives,’’ was the notion of somebody who died of alcoholism quite young. Yes, there are second acts, and there are third acts. I live in New York, where there are fifth acts and sixth acts, even.
How to Bridge That Stubborn Pay Gap
In August, the federal Office of Personnel Management said government hiring managers could no longer rely on an employee’s previous salary when setting his or her new one. The acting director, Beth Cobert, explained that the practice particularly disadvantaged women who had taken time off to raise children. Women are also more likely to have worked in the lower-paying public or nonprofit sectors.
“Don’t ask about salary history for new hires, and it really reduces the impact of previous discrimination,” Ms. Babcock said. “I think that is the most effective thing organizations can do.”
..When employers publish people’s salaries, the pay gap shrinks.
.. Ms. Goldin of Harvard has found that the pay gap is largest in occupations with the least flexibility in terms of where and when people work, like finance and medicine.