There You Go. I’m with her.

I've been watching old movies lately and am astounded at how women (especially in any kind of business setting) were treated. I was born in 61, and by the time I came to the work environment, things had improved a lot. We have a LONG way to go, as I found out as a women in the IT industry. People (mostly men), would not take me as seriously as men, even men younger and with less experience as I had.

At any rate, this video reminded me of something I saw recently, and wanted to share with this group. Not sure how well this link will work (it is a playlist of 6 short videos by this guy) Video: TEMSU: Things Every Man Should Understand:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZVJJq5An4z04CMjHLaG1P8vCgt0H1oDh&si=1ku4Tk1N3rAo23LP

If I was a younger, I might fall in love with this guy! But if I met him, I know that I could definitely be friends with him.

I wish I could have had the very good fortune to be with someone like him, 49 years ago. Sigh.

did all the child rearing, house work and cooking and I kept saying, I really need a wife. Eventually just became a single mother and still continued in my career, never had a wife to help me though.

I read it for a paper I was writing, and it opened my eyes once and for all. The roots of my feminism have only grown stronger and deeper in 22 years.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/227506.The_Price_of_Motherhood

... I'm male, if a bit shopworn with age, but I'd take her advice before I'd ever take yours.

she does not actually know....

How does she know? Because if it was the guy would be shouting it from the rooftops and collecting gushing praise for doing what women do every day.

Given what we do know, I don't think she went that far out on a limb. Or do you think pre-adult women, with children born out of wedlock, have a wonderfully easy time of it?

Since this was the early 80s -2019. Not once did a man mention anything about children and how to balance their care with his career. The woman in the video says the caveat multiple times that she doesn’t know him, but her conclusions are right on with my experience across 35 years. Same for other posters here.

and expected me, the only woman in the department, to watch her.
I had to tell him that child care was not in my job description. Luckily, I moved on from there soon after. No doubt I tanked my career at that company with that “attitude “.

And did you watch the video?

I'm guessing the video really hit a nerve. Guessing the patriarchy has been pretty good to msongs. Having privilege pointed out in no uncertain terms makes people who benefit from it VERY uncomfortable - so they dismiss the person pointing it out. Msongs' post told me EVERYTHING I need to know about msongs - enough to know that NOTHING msongs posts will every carry ANY legitimacy for me (so, on ignore msongs go - too many really good posters on this site to waste my time)

Is not woman’s work. I graduated from college in 1978 and started at a brokerage firm and worked in that industry until 2013. It enabled me to make enough money to save for a nice downpayment on my home in SF! I’m glad I didn’t listen to that guy but ironically years later I found out his wife divorced him as she was cheating on him with her tennis instructor. He was devastated and I wasn’t surprised I had met the wife several times and knew she was a gold digger.

That is sexist to it's core.

Try to judge people as individuals and not group them by sex.

P.S. This is the Feminists forum.

and that certain poster is projecting it on the TikToker.

Women's fathers are, for each woman, one male in a sea of males.

It's absurd to try to make that argument that it is either lots of men or no men at all for advice.

with that is absurd.

You should really be arguing with the supporters of the TQikTok'er..

But whatever, thanks for chiming in.

not *all men* argument.

Again, it seems that a certain poster is projecting their own issues onto the TikTok'r

It took me a while to understand that and unlearn it.

But I hope you will take some time to think through the message being conveyed. It isn't a wholesale attack on men as you seem to wish to make it. It is a call for perspective and why that matters in this context.

The vast experience of working women in high powered/corporate careers supports this video. My own across 35 years certainly does.

He advised I become a dental assistant or artist. Nothing against those careers but I chose engineering at the top university for Industrial and Systems Engineering. That decision allowed me to have an amazing career living all around the US, in Asia and Europe. Amazing life experiences and lessons. Dad apologized many times over the years saying he just didn’t realize that I could/should pursue the same level of education and career my brother could/should. Dad never missed an opportunity to tell me how proud he was of me.

You've set up a false dichotomy.

Look it up. If you think you know it, refresh your understanding.

Almost as interesting as the acrobatics that they perform afterwards to justify it.

Numerous others in this thread have already destroyed your "point," so little remains of it for me to "scoot around."

Further, you have failed--based on all of your posts in this thread--even to understand what the actual point is:

She is using a particular example to highlight a phenomenon that she's personally witnessed for her whole life, but you are (either falsely or foolishly, or both) pretending that she is using an isolated, out-of-context example to extrapolate widespread behavior.

You've got it exactly backwards, and pretty much everyone here can see it.

think what this world would be like if men would take care of the children so women could spread their wings as far as they can. They might cover the entire world for a better space for all.

He gets no revenue from me, and only costs him to serve the content, like a 3 minute video. A pittance to be sure, but all at his expense.

Also, subtitles were so good I simply left the sound off.

I have been asked on occasion, however, and I limit my advice to areas unrelated to personal relationships.

and 45 years later, I still can't.

Hell, yes!
Thank you for posting this.

Smart people listen to smart people.

Here's a true story. I was divorced and had a 3 year old when I was hired. I was the only female among 115 men with the same or similar jobs. We were on call to our customers 24/7. My customer happened to be the state government. Several times I received a callout in the middle of the night. No babysitters available at that hour, so I would take my sleeping son with me. I would find a quiet corner and build a nest with coats and put him down while I worked. I felt tremendous pressure to take every call I got so the guys couldn't point to me not keeping up with them. Anyways, one night I had my son sleeping in a corner, and one of the state's top guys came in and saw me and the kid. We talked about the problem I was there to solve and he left. The next day, my manager advised me that he had gotten a call from the state guy about me having to bring my son with me. I truly thought I would be fired, but he said he and the management team (all males) had never thought about the issue. They told me it was okay to decline a callout when I had no one to watch my child. I managed to stay with them until retirement, having 'fun' encountering several more issues as they introduced women into their workforce.

after that they became a company just like any other global 100 company, not bad but nearly as fantastic as the earlier years. Mostly males. They were committed to equality. HR jumped on any hint of mistreatment. My office mate once got turned into HR for saying something to me in jest that someone thought was inappropriate. I explained to HR we were joking and it was not misogynistic. Only once in my 34 years did anyone ever cross the line with me. They asked me how it was to be working for pin money instead of supporting a family. He didn’t know that I was my family’s primary bread winner. Not bad, only one bad experience. Maybe we worked for the same company, haha.

Ask yourself why there are so few women in CEO positions, or commercial airline pilots, or engineers. Women put in three times the work, accomplish four times as much and get half as much recognition as the blustering ego sitting next to her. The first time I busted a Captain on a check ride, because he didn’t follow the written callout & respond checklist (plus a couple other issues) he claimed I was incompetent. Never the Dude’s fault, it’s always that Bitch. One day, I just got tired of it

in edgewise.

groups, I will agree. The men are bad enough.

It's just this woman, and those like her, who can't shut up any more than the men can.

issue out there. Thank you for your helpful information.

Why would we take advice from people trying to control and kill us?

mind. I understand completely.

Is THAT what you are referring to?

I guess it's over my head, correct?

alone, devastated, and broken more times than I care to count. I really don't need to be humbled any more than I already have been.

Relationships are complicated. FWIW, we’re in social upheaval when it comes to race and gender.

Those should be the baselines of being a good person.

. . . The literal words of "Why I don't take advice from men" instead of trying to understand the broader truth of what the woman was trying to convey.

If that woman were exiting a building one wintery day just as man (yes, even her father) were entering and that man said, "There's a patch of ice just to the right of the front door; watch your step", I'm sure she would give that information its proper due.

The whole point of the video is that men often give life and career advice to women without considering the everpresent reality of their differing roles in the primal experience of reproduction. Women are the ones who conceive the babies, grow them in their bodies, push them out of their bodies at actual physical risk to their health and lives and then their bodies are primed to keep those helpless infants alive by producing its food. Add that basic biological reality to all the social conditioning and expectations on women regarding the rearing of offspring and you can see that any advice that isn't tied to that essential experiential truth is kind of pointless.

The woman is saying that all the "take risks, tough it out, buckle down, make sacrifices and you, too can succeed in business" rah rah talk that the man is offering does not even consider the near impossibilty of doing all those things while being directly-- that is, literally physically-- responsible for another human being who cannot safely (or legally) be left alone and who can't even feed themselves or take care of their bowels and bladder by themselves. The undeniable, flesh and blood truth is that reproduction itself requires women to "take risks" and "tough it out". The vast majority of women in the world also have to "buckle down" and "make sacrfices" just to get the next generation of human beings to a stage of minimal independence.

Any career advice that can just skip right over all that physically and mentally demanding activity as if it never happens is almost completely useless. That is what the video speaker is trying to share. It's like a marathon champion offering tips about breathing, form and endurance who doesn't see that the person he is talking to happens to be missing the bottom half of one leg and is using crutches. Those challenges are not insurmountable and the person dealing with them can learn to run a marathon, but one can't just ignore them.

Anyone wishing to just skip the preceeding five paragraphs above can come to similar conclusions just by looking up-- then seriously thinking about-- the definitions of the verbs, "to father" and "to mother". A man can father a child and then just walk away into a completely unchanged life. A woman-- or a man for that matter-- who takes on the role of mothering a child is in for an intense committment and a heavy work load that only begins to ease up a decade down the line.

Taking on all that responsibility while trying to make money just to live --to say nothing of trying to build a career and become enormously successful by our current cultural standards-- is an incredibly daunting task. Anyone (male or female) trying to be glib about this issue isn't worth listening to.

In the interest of nurturing important relationships, it gives men a bit of breathing room to consider the fact that they’ve been conditioned from toddlerhood to identify with a misogynistic/patriarchal system. Once they understand the system, then they can decide what to do about it’s impact on the world, and their own happiness. Misogyny appears to be more deeply ingrained than racism.

That said, the only change I’d make to the TikTok post would be, “Why I don’t take advice from men who don’t recognize/reject their indoctrination into the patriarchy.”

about the menzzzzz" group is busy today.

. . .on the side of compassion.

This doesn’t stop me from loathing the misogynistic system too many men refuse to reject. They mistake patriarchy for their actual selves. I do lose patience with individual men who should know better, for clinging to the system out of willful ignorance, selfishness, or fear of “losing their manhood” (god forbid).

If I want an opinion, I’ll ask for it.

I don’t even like to shop with people because I wind up considering what they like and not what I want.

Very little has changed. Part of the reason for America’s declining birth rate is we have so little in the way of support for mothers, especially working mothers. The numbers tell the story.

I'd wager that most of us perusing the internet have come across articles or social media posts that compare and contrast society's view of fathers versus mothers. One example is bringing home a pizza for dinner.

Dad does it and he's the Fun Dad. "Yay! Daddy brought home pizza!" Society beams with approval because he took the time to pick up a treat for the kids and gave his beloved wife a break for the night.

Mom does it and society clucks its traditionalist tongue and thinks, "Why is this woman not cooking nutritional food for her children? Yes, we know she works, but if her children aren't properly cared for then she needs to rethink her priorities." And of course, really old-fashioned traditionalists also insist that her husband worked at a "real" job all day and deserves a home-cooked meal.

And yes, what I'm representing here may seem sort of extreme, but there are people who still think that way. It's not just general societal expectations, either. People in the halls of power, both corporate and legislative, are holding back policies that could improve the lives of working women, their children, and in many cases, the men that they love.

All true imo. As a mom, wife and almost retired professional, this double standard has been the common thread throughout my adult life. Not complaining, it’s just TRUE.

Need say nothing more.

She’s not wrong at all. Every point is valid.

She’s also not really making a black and white statement either the way some responders here have assumed though the headline is a very black and white statement.

She doesn’t even make a malicious statement against men. She’s basically saying that men often take for granted the societal pressures and expectations forced on women that would block men from success if they had to also shoulder those expectations. Being blissfully unaware of those pressures renders a lot of their advice moot since it is a huge thing to be unaware of.

I have a high voice and, can be socially timid, so, men usually tend to interrupt me all the time or talk down to me.

My male boss recently has been scolding me like a child for annoying shit that he never yells at anyone else for, and, it’s annoying as hell.

Also, after watching the video - I’m annoyed how this man was celebrated for not being there for his kid. Disgusting. He was able to leave his kid behind and pursue success and his dreams because society asks absolutely nothing of fathers. It’s always the mother that gets saddled with all the responsibilities, and, if the man helps, he somehow deserves praise for it. Ugh….

and all of the blame if the kid goes off the rails while she’s working two jobs.

The absent father? All he gets is a free pass.