Some married men like to jokingly refer to their wife as “the boss,” generally in a patronizing manner that suggests she’s nominally in charge of the boring everyday stuff in the household that he doesn’t really care about anyway.
But our old nemesis Vox Day isn’t having any of it. To refer to your wife as the boss, even as a joke, is to threaten to loose the forces of anarchy and chaos and feminism upon your family. Also, women are dogs. On his Alpha Game blog, he writes,
If you let a dog think he’s the boss, he will cease to defer to you and begin objecting, violently, when you interfere with what he now believes are his prerogatives. Women are no different.
That’s right. Give in an inch to your wife, and the next thing you know she’ll be sitting on the furniture and insisting on eating “people food” at the table.
It’s a tad ironic that Vox here has decided to degrade women by comparing them to dogs, when his whole “alpha” schtick is based on misguided notions about the behavior of “alpha dogs” and wolves.
It’s one thing to turn over your social calendar to your wife due to a lack of interest in the various social obligations of the family. But checking in to see if there is scheduling conflict, or simply being courteous enough to see if your wife minds if you go to the football game does not make you an employee or a child. Therefore, it does not make her the boss. And what might have been an ironic jest in the days of Mad Men is often taken quite literally now.
Marriage: an endless power struggle in which the wife must always lose.
What a lovely vision of the world!
I should also add that you should never ever, even jokingly, refer to Bruce Springsteen as “the boss” either, because if you do he’s going to be hounding you to hand in your TPS reports and forcing you to work on Saturdays. You don’t want that.
EDITED TO ADD: In the comments on Alpha Game, cailcorishev expands a bit on the whole “women-as-dogs” thing in what he evidently thinks is a humorous way:
Since you mentioned dogs: virtually everything about disciplining a dog and being the pack leader applies to leading a woman (or children). I’m convinced that, if you took a woman on a 45-minute walk every day, as Cesar Millan recommended for dogs, it would eliminate a lot of her problems. Just make sure you lead her, having her take your arm and follow you where you want to go — or use a leash if she’s into that kind of thing.
I can only hope his wife — if there is an unfortunate woman holding this position — pees on the rug and chews up all his important paperwork.
My dad was the kind of kid who needed a leash. There’s a great pic of my grandmother hanging laundry with him hooked on to the clothesline “helping” her. If he hadn’t been, he’d have run off.
My current cat just flops down on the floor when I try to put the leash on him. No fussing just “you’re kidding, right?” My old cat could be leashed. I would take him to the park with the dogs. Yeah, two Rottweilers following a cat, that got a few side-eyes.
My parents leashed both my sister and I as toddlers. I was a rather timid child and got deeply distressed if I was misplaced even for a minute so they put a leash on me to make me feel safe. They leashed my sister because she had a habit of running off in random directions and had a very near miss with a car. I don’t think it did her and harm and I found it very reassuring.
Re cats: when I was ill I depended on mine for comfort, especially late at night and I also had a habit of wandering off in my pajamas very late the night after chemotherapy (it did terrible things to my brain) and one or other of them would go and find me and bring me home. It happened five or six times. They didn’t bother waking Mr S, they’d just go and retrieve me.
Seranvali,
That’s adorable. You have great cats :).
I think my dog (tried) to do that once. We lived fairly close to my elementary school, so Mom would walk us to/from school and bring the dog with her. Well, one day Mom picks us up, takes us out on something, and we come home a couple of hours late. Lo and behold, as we drive up to our house we see our dog trotting down the path we’d take to the school. I think she was worried about us.
Rescue kitties! That’s adorable.
My cat (who also has a Jungle Book name…he’s a big black cat named Bagheera) loves to go out on his leash. He doesn’t walk though, he just likes to flop around in the grass and chase bugs. He was a stray barn cat who showed up as a kitten but then I brought him inside when he got sick (a respiratory infection) and now he can’t be an outdoor cat because a)he was adopted by my dog during that time and now has no fear of canines, which is quite dangerous (he is basically a dog), and b)we live in a very fragile desert ecosystem and I cannot support any outdoor cats here due to their effects on the local bird, rodent and lizard populations. Seriously, we have at least one species of bird and one species of rodent that is threatened in our area primarily due to domestic cat predation. We also have a large feral cat population which is probably largely responsible, but since cats kill for fun as well as food, I just can’t condone letting a cat outside without supervision. Plus we live in the mountains and there are too many predators here…most cats disappear within a few years of someone getting them.
Our other two cats are declawed (from back before my husband knew just how bad that procedure is…he was believed one of those vets who sells it as more of a permanent nail clipping than actually cutting off a joint) and hate wearing harnesses, but we are crazy pet people so we screened in our porch area for them. So they don’t go outside proper, but they have this big more-or-less open air enclosure where they can watch the birds eat from the feeders and enjoy the sunshine.
I never find that our cats mind not going out, not as long as we play with them and give them plenty of attention otherwise. If we miss a few days Bagheera especially will be scratching at the back door to go out, but as long as they get enough play and exercise and affection they seem pretty content. 😉
I have only seen those leashes a couple of times. I admit, the idea of being on a leash makes me D:
But then, I don’t think as a wee singlet, we were that hard to keep track of. (Especially once we learned to read.)
Our earlier generations of cats were all indoor-outdoor ones; they were always indoors by dark (apart from a few instances of renegades taking their own sweet time getting home). These days Mads and Fribs are entirely indoors. Fribs is too old to care about going out – she’s older than I’d thought, she turned 18 in October – and I’ve never been convinced Mads would come when I called, so I’m not willing to take the risk. I tried taking her into the yard on a leash, but neither Mum nor I is really up to standing around while she potters about these days.
sawburst (really… compensation much? SAW Burst? I doubt it. More like a jammed “grease gun”, where was I?, oh yeah).
@ pecunium Agreed! Why do they get to claim ownership of something some other man did? Yet they don’t want to acknowledge that men are also responsible for a lot of problems, like the majority of domestic violence. (obvi not saying women have zero responsibility because some women are also abusers)
Ashley: This is David’s site. If he has a problem with my comments, then he can say something to me. But I won’t be told what to do by other commenters,
Ah… the bully’s version of “Free Speech”. So long as no one bans you, you think you are entitled to be a raging asshole and not get called on it.
Nope. You may not choose to take the advice, but we have every right to tell you that you’re being a bloody hemorrhoid: presenting stupid claims with abusive language.
Call me a troll. Call me an asshole. I don’t care. If my comment personally offends someone, I would have no problem offering an apology if that’s what they told me.
Bullshit. This is either an outright lie, or some self-delusional defensive mechanism. Someone did tell you they found it offensive, you don’t give a shit.
David, not a problem. I extend my apologies to anyone offended.
I, for one, do not accept it. You aren’t apologising for what you did, but for our taking offense. Own your words, and admit to your actions.
lana: On the whole “chemical imbalance thing” ? It doesn’t bother me so much .I’ve been known to say things such as “he needs a thorzine drip” or some “electro shock” even though I know their is not a higher instance of being a complete and utter ASS HOLE /misogynist /hater/racist let alone “stupid” with chemical imbalances.
Well aren’t you special. You know it’s not relevant, but you use it as an insult anyway. Would you do the same with skin color? Religion? Height? Some other disability?
It’s a shitty thing to do, and even worse to admit you know it’s not true.
I’ve been toying with the idea of getting leashes for my twins, but I worry that it would look like we were running the Iditarod. So far we’ve had pretty good success with one in the stroller, the other walking next to the stroller, and switching whenever the free range twin threatens to dash off into traffic. I can’t even imagine taking them loose into a store for the next 8 years or so.
Personally, if I’m not regularly led down the sidewalk by my elbow, I get uppity, move into the corner office, and start firing people. I think that’s an MRAs biggest fear – that their job can be outsourced to, say, a small group of painful skin pustules.
Since marriage is EXACTLY LIKE A WORKPLACE and they *have* to be the boss, what is their job title, anyway? Vice Taintstain?
Hi Marie! :waves:
Buttercup – train ’em to pull a sled, like huskies. More rest for you, build up those muscles for them!
@buttercup
Hi 😀 ::waves back::
My husband’s title is President Pooperscooper, because he does both the litterboxes (hey, 2 of the 3 cats are his) and occasionally cleans up after dogs as needed. Also he tells me to scoop the backyard when he needs to mow it (I refuse to mow the lawn on principle…we live in a desert, I don’t care if he grew up in the Midwest, it is WRONG to have even a small lawn but he insists so he can take care of the damn thing).
I am Vice Pooperscooper because I only clean up after the dogs, and aside from having to do a run-through before he mows I act mostly independently.
So I am not sure…do I trade in my feminist card because he can tell me to clean the yard and I do, or do I get extra Feminist Manhater points because I make him clean up after the cats all the time? So confused…it’s almost like our relationship is partnership that features equal compromises…but that cannot be!
That awkward moment when you post one of the “lovely” responses to Vox Day’s post under the wrong blog heading. Stupid iPhone…
Some wonderfully thought out and highly intellectual points from Matamoros:
Because we should defer to St. Thomas Aquinas, the man who thought sperm were tiny fetuses and women were basically baby growing receptacles, when determining if women are capable of reason. Right…
Funny, but all the men I’ve known who ditched this particular brand of Christianity for “Femianity” turned out to be much the better for having done so.
In every conceivable way.
Jeez, enough with the “women are inferior knockoffs of men” crap. It’s always presented as Immutable Truth, rather than self-serving baloney concocted by church elders to perpetuate their grip on authority. I’d believe it more if the speaker, 99% of the time, didn’t just so happen to be at the top of the pyramid they’re proposing.
The actual truth about power: people who demand it are the very people who should not have it.
kittehs – we’ve got enough snow on the ground now that they could probably pull a sled. I could put little booties on their feet and feed them Pop Tarts every 50 miles.
About cats being raised indoors, mine was. He’s fine and I occasionally let him out on porch.
*on the porch. I think the foreign exchange students are rubbing off on me.
I have a lot of really odd cat stories from that period of my life. The oddest, I think, was when I’d for some reason became obsessed with taking the bins down to the curb for the garbage truck. The following morning and gotten really confused coming back and turned off onto the footpath and headed off down the street. Mikeneko found me about ten minutes later wandering around the nature reserve at the end if the street barefoot and in my nightclothes. She stood in front of me and I tried to go around her. She moved so she was still in front of me. I stopped and she started walking around and around me so that I turned around so I could see her. Then she stopped, meowed at me and took a couple of steps towards home, then looked around to see if I was following her. I followed but she stopped every few steps and looked at me, talking to me the whole time. It took her a little while to get me home and by then Mr S was out looking for me. They seemed to know more about that was going on with me than I did and if something was wrong they made sure we knew it.
Seranvali, your stories about your caretaking cats just kind of brought a lump to my throat. So sweet.
Also, here are some emus attacking a cat toy:
I saw what you did there.
/mindingutter