Wealth, the NYTimes will have you know, especially the White Male Billionaire Filthy Lucre kind of wealth, only exists because teh womxns are shackled to household chores.

Like toadstools on the lawn after a spring rain, articles about “unpaid housework” popup to accompany media focus on the Women’s March and Davos.

the Oxfam report also called attention to the idea that wealth and poverty are gendered. While billionaires, most of them men, continue to accumulate vast amounts of wealth, women around the world spend copious amounts of time and energy on taking care of children and the elderly or managing the home — unpaid labor that is vital to the economy.

“There’s something deeply sick about the economy,” said Gawain Kripke, the policy director at Oxfam America. “The fact that women around the world are doing so much work that is uncompensated, unrecognized and unsupported is part of the problem.”

On the other hand, I find something deeply sick about people like Gawain who believe only work that produces a paycheck counts as the most valuable thing a woman can do with her life.

It should be noted that the Oxfam report is deeply and politically biased. It is explicitly anti-free market and isn’t above the usual Leftwing boilerplate of anti-liberty rhetoric.

Gender inequality in our economies is neither an accident nor is it new: our economic system was built by, and on behalf of, rich and powerful men. The dominant model of capitalism actively exploits and drives traditional beliefs and values that disempower women,105 especially women living in poverty and those from certain ethnic and religious groups. …

It is clear that a new way of thinking and a fairer economic system are urgently needed. Governments around the world must take action to build a human economy that is feminist and that will deliver for everyone, today and for future generations, rather than benefiting the richest and most powerful 1% and driving a climate crisis.

The report is replete with so many neo-Marxist buzzwords one might believe it was written by an Angry Studies undergrad at Berkeley. But let’s look at the big assertion that women’s work is “uncompensated”.

The charge is that cooking, cleaning and taking care of children is unequally distributed between the man and woman in the household. Since these chores aren’t listed on a timecard with a paycheck made out to the people doing them, VOILA, therefore it is “uncompensated”! Women are BEING OPPRESSED BY THE PATRIARCY!!

This is no accident. It is caused by a patriarchal and extractive economic model that drives a vast accumulation of wealth into the hands of the richest 1% while simultaneously driving the marginalization of women, based on a perceived lack of value and chronic underinvestment in care.

Let’s blow this sucker up … no where in the NYTimes article or in the Oxfam drivel does anyone stop to consider that household chores – e.g. cooking, cleaning – is something that even single men living alone do. How does cooking a tasty meal suddenly become unpaid care when done by a married woman but just part of life for the single woman?

All the things we do during the course of our day for ourselves cannot be defined down into little economic units to have an hourly wage attached to it. Well, unless you’re insane or a Leftist. In addition, marriage is a partnership where all things are shared. A stay-at-home mom or dad isn’t unpaid as income to the family is household income, regardless of who earned it. Married people should be allowed to structure their households the way they see fit without Leftwing busybodies standing at the threshold screaming UNFAIR if a wife makes the bed one day more than her husband.

I’m not saying housework isn’t generally done more by women than men in married households. Who am I to cast aspersions on the free choices of the adults involved? Though I do suspect the actual differences are on par with the so-called wage gap. The fact remains, those chores exist even outside of marriage. It is pernicious to try to impute income to a chore you would do for yourself regardless of marital or family status.

And if Left-feminists want to make a career about whining how unfair that their own husbands aren’t doing enough? Excuse me while I chuckle that they are unable to be a successful partner in their own relationships.

And here is where that 60 pages of Leftist dreck gets us. It really isn’t about women and girls being exploited by the Patriarchy, it’s about controlling everyone’s lives and having government make all the decisions on how you will live your life.

Such unpaid care in effect lets government and business off the hook. When women provide care services for free, it is perceived that governments do not need to make provision and that families do not need the extra income to pay for care services. Governments can reduce taxes on businesses, while businesses can profit from lower wages given to employees. …

Patriarchal social norms also mean that care is considered a woman’s natural role and a woman´s duty to provide, rather than it being the state’s responsibility to provide.

Ah! The State Shall Provide!

sotto voce The State will Control.

Leftism destroys everything it touches, including families.

featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license