[Excelsior]

Quote:

A die-hard feminist, my desire for self-sufficiency didn't stem from a movement: It was personal. A child of divorced parents who always fought about money-related issues, and with my grandmother's words etched in my mind, I told myself at a young age that I would never rely on a man or anyone to take care of me.

The bolded represents an aspect of feminist motivation that is often overlooked in the manosphere: sheer distrust of men. This distrust often stems from childhood experiences with divorces that usually left the mother in custody. Since their fathers were usually breadwinners (as is still the case today even after half a century of female empowerment), the women were generally left at something of a financial disadvantage which the kids also had to live with. They start to resent their father for this. That resentment is enhanced as they also absorb the ill will their mothers frequently have toward their father, ill-will that will be especially vitriolic if he has moved on to a (likely younger) partner and she still struggles to make a living and find romantic fulfillment on her own as an aging single mother. The father's lack of custody often means that he has limited opportunity to counter any of this.

This results in daughters who grow up convinced that their mother was wrong to trust and rely on their father, and proceed to expand that conclusion into a general premise: men are untrustworthy and unreliable. This belief is reinforced by other examples they see among peers who are also children of divorce and have come through the same rationalization via the same process. As they grow, this belief begins to govern their approach to romantic, social and professional life. They become highly career-focused, the resume becoming their armor against the inevitable misdeeds of the disloyal/untrustworthy men they may seek to have in their lives down the line. They become independent almost to a fault, and often remain highly hesitant to enter serious relationships before their age makes it absolutely necessary to do so in order to have a child (something nearly all of them still want to do).

To the young (18-30) woman with this mentality, romantic involvement with a man is a serious threat to her independence, a threat that her lessons as the child of divorce won't let her tolerate easily. She will be very hesitant to take this kind of risk: her independence comes before all else, and it will generally matter more to her than the company of any man. She can trust herself, but she can never trust a man.

In her eyes, those prime years must be used for the educational, personal and professional fulfillment that she believes will protect her against the kind of disloyalty she is convinced is inherent to the male populace. Her later years can be used to cautiously welcome a man into her life for the purpose of procreation, as she will have already established a firm foundation for her independence (the previous 13-20 years spent entirely focused on her schooling/work/etc). Of course, there's a fundamental conflict here with regard to the kind of man she is able to welcome at that point (she would have had an easier time attracting a higher quality life partner earlier on), but that is a trade-off that she will either make peace with or rationalize away in the name of her independence.

I posit that it is through this post-childhood divorce process that many (possibly a slight majority) of the most ardent feminist and/or highly careerist young women out there today are born. This is also how articles like these come to light and gain so much mainstream support:

(09-29-2014 11:05 AM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

2. It tries to rationalize away the very real desire for some women to have a man support them. In the view of Lisa Ling at CNN, a woman's career trumps all. Women should be ashamed of any hint of thinking in a traditional way.

As noted above, she gives that impression because she maintains a very strong distrust for men. She believes a young woman's career must trump all because it is her understanding that young women generally cannot and should not rely on men. She subtly shames women who think in the more traditional patterns of romantic thought because she feels that they are fundamentally compromising themselves by relying on men that she views as fundamentally unreliable and unworthy of said trust.

She may be intellectually honest enough to acknowledge the very real desire within most women to find their "Mr. Big/Mr. Right/Prince Charming" to whisk them away and support them in the happily-ever-after manner so commonly promoted in childhood movies. Even then she will insist that women fight this desire for their own good because putting that degree of trust in a man is, in her estimation, far too risky. She believes that men cannot and should not be relied upon by women to anywhere near that extent - women must look after themselves or men will, more often than not, let them down.

Beneath all of the ideology and rhetoric is a simple, fundamental and profound distrust of the male of the species, one that warrants in them an urgent and nearly singular focus on more career-oriented tracks. That is why we're seeing what we're seeing with articles like this becoming mainstream.