One thing that has always bothered me as a woman is the fact that I'm supposed to make less money than a man. It's not even the fact that I get paid less for doing the same job, it's the fact that as a woman, in a relationship, I'm supposed to make less so as not to bruise my partner's ego.
Why is it that we can preach equality until we're blue in the face, but we can't ever achieve it? Men seem to think that if you bring home more money than them that it's not equality, it's nonequivalence. My question is, how so? On average men typically make more money than their spouses, so when the occasion happens that a woman makes more money than their spouse I would think that would be a step towards equality. In reality, it seems to be a closer step towards divorce.
Netflix has a newseries, Easy, which gives you glimpses into the lives of modern relationships. In the first episode, it explores the relationship of a married couple who's relationship has reached a sexual stalemate due to the fact that the wife is the breadwinner of the family. At a party, one of their friends began to discuss a study that he had read in which it claimed that couples had better sex lives when the wife's duties were geared more towards house work. In the show, this automatically incited an argument amongst the couples, mainly women vs. men, where the women defended their right to explore a life outside the home. Long story short, the main couple eventually got their sex life back, but not until the couple tested the study's theory by having the wife role-play as a distressed house wife.
This makes me slightly disturbed. To put it bluntly, why is it that her husband "couldn't get it up" until his wife made him "feel like a man"? When did we get our gender roles so intrinsically designed?
We, as women, should not have to make our man feel like a man. They should feel no less a man if we make more money than them, just like we should feel no less a woman if they do more housework.
To those women who defend their husbands' egos by claiming that their place is solely in the home, you're not doing your gender any favors. It's not a sin to explore your right to an education, or better yet to equality. And to those men who can't see past their own egos to support their spouse's success: maybe you should've married your maid.
