Well that's the last time I try to do a table with pre-formatted text. I mean, I'm not surprised the formatting broke, I'm just surprised it broke the way it did. Artistic, almost.
Interesting perspective on actual carework, thanks!
One thing that's definitely noticeable about science in the US is the number of US-educated capable asian women who are not at all in any way interested in returning to their country of origin, even while struggling to find a good way to fit into the suboptimal US. Varies by country-- subjectively, it seems that women are happier to return to PRC than many other places, but who knows, unless there has been some sort of survey.
2.2: It could be a matter of demographics. There's a steady trickle of stories here about universities and schools having to cut courses or departments or entire institutions for lack of students. The PRC also has demographic issues, but presumably higher ed is still expanding.
Higher ed is expanding rapidly in the PRC, and I would say the gender situation is analogous to the US (maybe slightly worse?)--fairly firm glass ceiling, despite some prominent female academics/researchers. Pay for academics isn't great in the PRC, as they're locked into low civil service-type salaries. Lots of them have side hustles.* Honestly, that's not completely unlike the US, especially because there is wage discrimination against Asians and Asian-Americans in the hard sciences.
I would say a big issues might be family life. Perhaps less so in the PRC, but raising children in East Asia (as Mossy notes) is extremely time and labor intensive, and most of that falls on the woman to be in charge of. On top of that, the women is expected to live with or near her in-laws, who will take charge in daily childcare and housework. OTOH, it's labor the mom doesn't have to do, but OTOH, she has her in-laws in her house and raising her children for her, and that can lead to lots of conflict. Even if the in-laws come to the US to help out with kids (as lots of them do), the relative balance of power is shifted in favor of the more assimilated, English-speaking children. If you bought or rent your own house and sponsored your MIL to come over to a country where she is completely dependent on you, it's a completely different dynamic from living in a house she bought for you next to all her extended family.
(One of my best friends comes from two elite families in China, where her parents were doctors. Her father did his PhD in the US in the early 90s, and then she and her mom came over when she was young. Her parents are both researchers. Her parents are comfortably middle class now, but had they remained in China her father would be running a hospital (her uncles and her dad's med school classmates all run their own hospitals). Her cousins are wealthy and grew up so. We've talked a lot about it, and she said that both she and her parents are happy to be middle class Americans rather than wealthy Chinese, because the pressure to maintain a certain style of living and project a certain style of consumption is absolutely insane.)
*I've had mainland Chinese men tell me that being a professor isn't a bad career for a woman, because it's high prestige and the husband can be the main breadwinner.
4.2 I didn't want to come out and say something unflattering about average treatment of women in Korea and south India. But yes, even if life here is strange and out of tune for lots of immigrants, life back there (as they tell it) would be a predictable hell.
People have written about this, but I'm thinking about maybe writing something else. It's interesting in how in certain cultures, the primary relationship in the marriage is the MIL-DIL one. When I was doing my fieldwork, my informants never asked me what my husband thought about my choices, but it was always, "what does your MIL think?" Pleasing my MIL was miles above pleasing my husband in terms of priorities, and my MIL was seen as the key to familial harmony. I think the idea is if the MIL supports the DIL, an errant or even violent husband can be controllable, but even a happy relationship between husband and wife can be made miserable by a bad MIL.
There's a materialist anthropologist who writes about the "Mother-in-Law Belt," a large swathe going from North Africa through East Asia, encompassing the Mediterranean, parts of Subsaharan Africa, Asia Minor, India, and East Asia.There's been a puzzle as to why such diverse cultures have developed similar family organizations, including large corporate households, strict gender role segregation, and women's seclusion. Her argument is that these are places where where women's labor inside the house was economically valuable, so keeping women physically inside and her energies geared towards productive labor was economically necessary, a task that fell to the MIL. (There is a school of materialist anthropologists in China who note that the rise of footbinding correlated with the rise of silk production and women's textile production inside the home. They note that physically hobbling young girls was a way to keep them at looms, and that incidence of footbinding correlated pretty strongly with importance of women's textile production to the economy. When textile production was mechanized and moved out of the houses to factories was precisely the time when footbinding fell off as a practice. (Obviously other academics disagree with this or view it as an oversimplification, but I think it's an interesting point.))
There's also a famous anthropologist of ROC who writes about the "uterine family" as the core to traditional Chinese families, which is defined as the mother-son relationship. The mother-son relationship is one of mutual devotion, such that when sons grow up to have power, their mother can exercise her own power through her son's devotion to her, and eventually, over her DIL. While this dynamic is written about primarily in East Asia, I would argue it exists other places, like Southern Italy.
It struck me though that this is one way that the market can provide a whole bunch of carework, and some of the careworkers with reasonable pay and social standing
I think in the current political climate of the U.S. it would be more likely to result in lower pay and status for public school teachers. And public school teaching has been close to the only female-gendered (kind of) profession that pays well and doesn't involve having to put up with doctors.
My husband's mother is a Northern Italian feminist, but even so I've learned that there are no secrets between an Italian man and his mother.
Personally, I adhered to the Irish model of never telling my family anything. This really bewildered my Sicilian grandmother.
I read a book comparing Chinese culture to Southern Italian culture, and it was highly convincing. It also has helped me deal with my Italian in-laws, and made me more cautious about taking things to be uniquely "Chinese" when it's really that they're not Northern European Protestant.
10
Yeah, my husband thinks my family is pathologically frigid and uncommunicative.
I know my family is pathologically frigid and uncommunicative. But I like it.
6.3 I dimly recall the mother-son dynamic showing up quite a lot in the Mideast Islamic empires, in the form of politics surrounding concubines and empress dowagers, as also certainly happened a lot in China, in the MIL Belt.
In Egypt, they used to keep the whole empire in the family.
I'm still thinking about the shift to paid care giving. On the one hand, it would be a boon for equality and, if done right, could reduce a lot of poverty. On the other hand, it would expose more of life to the ravages of late capitalism.
6.2: Wouldn't the question be rather why cultures (or sedentary cultures, at least) don't develop the MIL form? The regions you name contain a large majority of all people.
Who is the Mrs. Bucket of the Zulu?
18
Good point. I suppose the best explanation is there's always an implicit NW European bias in academia.
8: Obviously the US as currently constituted would take any import and make it worse than it already is. I just thought this whole shitshow bears some similarities to the craziness you people sometimes talk about where Manhattanites are poisoning each other to get their kids into the right kindergartens. Also, private education, while inter-generationally regressive, is (potentially) intra-generationally redistributionist.
It would make more sense to poison the other kids, but ethics.
Are the kindergarten teachers in those super-exclusive private schools paid well? It seems like there should be bidding wars for the best teachers like for professional athletes.
23: Proof that yes, it is possible to love your mother too much.
Teachers would also have white people yell at them on Facebook if they took a knee for the national anthem.
"On the veld, nubile women were always traded away to other tribes, while the men remained so as to preserve the group's fighting power; young women therefore had always to contend with the older women, including their new mothers-in-law, responsible for managing the gathering, and thus essentially the social life of the entire group, while the men were out hunting."
28
Submit that to the NSF and I guarantee at least half a mil in funding. Using the word "nubile" bumps it up by at least $50K
Though, you have to pick the right angle for your hypothesis. Are you gonna go with female jealousy? Or everyone loves hott women? The first is, "we hypothesize that the more nubile the woman [insert quant measure here], the worse the relationship with the MIL [insert quant 'relationship index' here]." The second is the reverse correlation.
For reals, material anthropology* grant proposal: why are the barbers in Roc identical to those in SA in every respect of equipment and technique, except for being 60 year-old women instead of 60 year-old men?
*I don't actually know what that is, so I'm just gonna guess.
Also, is "barber" gendered in terms of the barber or the barbered? I've had difficulty with this in family correspondence.
A barber only cuts men's hair here. I've never seen a female who cuts hair called a barber either, but I don't think that's essential.
I thought that a barber had to be licensed to shave your face and a hair stylist did not.
The Bangladeshi barbers here give the most amazing (free but I tip well for it) massages that include this weird head-cracking component that feels like they're giving me a concussion.
31
Interesting. On the mainland they're almost exclusively 20 year old men, who present in a style that in the US would read flaming homosexual. I have a sociologist friend who is writing is dissertation on barbershops in the mainland, so maybe he knows why.
34 makes much sense. I agree with 33, but would have thought that being male was also necessary. Here, I've decided the defining factor is not the barber but the barbershop, an establishment that cuts only men's hair. Because these here are indubitably barbershops. They even have the stripey-pole symbol.
35: If you love the feel of getting concussed, I hear the NFL pays well.
The 60-year-old barbers here are men, mostly or exclusively cut men's here, with only moderate assimilation into white American culture. The ones I've been to are very Italian and moderately Syrian. (The Syrian barber employees a woman to cut women's hair, and I think she goes by stylist, not barber.)
The obviously homosexual haircutters are stylists, mostly but don't exclusively cut women's hair, and cost three or four times as much.
37
On the mainland that's a symbol for brothel.
36: The flaming homosexuals exist here too, at unisex establishments, alongside (mostly older) women at female-only places. What really struck me was the total identity of the artefacts. Chairs, razors, scissors, everything. Chinese script is literally the only difference.
The guy who does my wife's hair is kind of a butch homosexual. And he charges like 7 or 8 times what the old Italian guy I go to charges.
Is 40 for real? The Bangladeshis in SA also do the concussion thing, but I told them to stop because it freaked me out. My barber growing up was a tiny Neapolitan with a huge mustache, and my second-favorite barber since was a bald Egyptian.
I've asked why hair cutting is a man's profession when I was getting my haircut, but no one seemed to know. All the hair stylists I've talked about it with did it because their cousin/neighbor/brother was doing it, and could get them a job as well. They're almost entirely rural migrants, and the pay (and cost) is low. There are female hairstylists, but it's not the norm. IIRC, villages are more likely to have a woman barber, possibly because it's a job a woman whose come back to look after her kids can do.
In China, being a man dressed in head to toe tight light pink denim, wearing earrings, and having a femme hairstyle doesn't seem to signal gay to anyone but me. On the flip side, being a woman and wearing a men's track suit with a crewcut doesn't signal lesbian either.
There are also places like Supercuts that are staffed almost exclusively by women and serve mostly a male clientele (but not as mostly male as barber's clients). These places are barely cheaper than a barber, but the staff get paid much less than a barber because a corporation and a manager both take their cut first. Because life is going to shit, these places have been growing in number and market share for as long as I remember.
My difficulty is that the woman who cuts my hair is white and has dreadlocks and so I'm subsidizing that by paying her, but these are the best haircuts I've ever gotten. Sigh.
43
Yep. The white/red stripey pole means brothel on the mainland.
Huh. I guess some of the stripes here could be doing double duty. It would explain how some of these places stay afloat.
The best haircuts I ever got were from one of the Bangladeshis. I subsidized the Bengali soap operas he watched in the mirror while he worked.
Not in the same league as white dreads, no, but definitely broadcast more widely.
The best haircut I've ever gotten was from a Kosovar refugee who'd spent seven years cutting hair in Sweden before coming to the US. Unfortunately he was only around for a few months before going somewhere else.
The worst haircut I've gotten was from a student barber in China, closely followed by one in Prague.
The neighborhood place I go to is run by 2 southeast Asian women (Cambodian, maybe?) who also do all the hair cutting. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever seen a woman other than the owners in that shop, and I've been going there for years.
So barbers are mostly either Italian or from places that have had a genocide.
Somehow related: back in the 90's, my male, Italian-American barber went on a rant about how the barbers were unfairly discriminated against by insurance companies because they were put into the same risk pool as the hairstylists. This mattered because male hairstylists, unlike barbers, were at high risk for AIDS.
I don't argue with people holding scissors near my head.
My Egyptian barber was a Copt and liked to rant about Muslims. I wouldn't have minded, except that he couldn't rant and cut hair at the same time.
55: It's a good think twitter wasn't invented then.
There was only one massage place by my house in China that wasn't also a brothel (it was a blind massage parlor), but the guy who did the massages would go on this horrible anti-Obama rant during the whole massage. The massage itself was painful and the Obama rant was stressful, so I stopped going back. (There was a much more expensive foot massage place that also wasn't a brothel, so I went there a few times. I also went to one of the brothels and got a massage, but the woman sucked and was clearly pissed off to have me as a client.)
What was objectionable about Obama to a Chinese masseur? Was he particularly anti-China?
59
Chinese people thought he was more anti China than Bush or Clinton. He's sort of weirdly unpopular there. I think a big part is his presidency was post recession (which messed with China and they blame us for), and correlated with a general rise in anti-American messaging from the government. The government is pushing Chinese nationalism hard, and they're pushing anti Americanism as part of that. (Some of it's OTT, but there is a general "now that we're a world superpower we don't have to automatically do what America wants" attitude that I don't disagree with.)
Perhaps that masseur also just wanted to be left in peace of give handjobs?
I recall (this was back when I was still watching TV) commercials for one of those barber shop chains that gave the impression that they were the Hooters of hair cuts.
55: That risk pool makes some sense, I think, given the dangers of using razors. I don't remember all of the relevant terminology, but when I had my head shaved because chemo was making my hair fall out, I went to a barbershop. Barbers are typically licensed to do closer shaves than hair stylists (depending on the licensing authority), though the barber said he didn't feel safe giving my head an ultra-close shave because of my damaged iimmune system.
Cancer organizations warn patients who shave their heads to make sure that clippers are well sterilized.
Vasectomy clinics should make their their clippers are sterilizing.
65 is off topic. Everything before was just fine.
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On topic, but kind of off-topic at this point.
In MA, there are 2 ballot initiatives that I'm helping to collect signatures for.
(1.) one would raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2022 and then index it to inflation.
(2.) the other would create mandatory paid family leave, funded through a payroll tax. You would get 90% of your weekly check up to $1000/week.
So, Massachusetts residents, if someone asks you to sign, please consider doing it.
Also know that the coalition (once they have the signatures) is happy to work with the legislature to pass something first (as was done with healthcare), but the legislature has been slow to act. The Senate passed a bill st the end of last session, but the Housd Speaker thought that bringing in casinos was a higher priority.
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Glad to see that you found a way to get involved in politics/policy that works for you, BG.
40 I've thought of telling them to stop too, and sometimes I visibly flinch, but the rest of the massage is just so good and relaxing that I'm afraid they would stop doing it to the extent they do.
50 There is one Bangladeshi barber in that shop (next to my favorite falafel shop) that gives me the best haircuts. I think they have a system where they go in a particular order for walk in customers but one of the guys gave me a shitty haircut once and another gives me the best so I just started signaling to him when I walk in.
The worst haircut I ever got was from a barber in Granada, Spain. It was a two week vacation and I desperately needed a haircut and there were only two barber shops on the square. That's when I learned you go to the barber with the long line and not the one who's shop is empty. Took my then gf about two hours to fix it with the scissors on a Swiss army knife.
72
I got a really awful haircut in Prague from this middle aged woman I couldn't communicate with. It looked OK after she did it, but after washing it it was horrible. When I showed up in Italy, my husband's aunt took one look at me and was like, "oh hellll no." Now I have a short but decent haircut from a middle aged Italian woman.*
*I chose Prague over Italy originally because my hair is very fine and can look limp or very straight, but I have tons of cowlicks and weird body/curl to my hair, so people who aren't used to my hair type tend to cut it all wrong. I assumed Italians would have less experience with my hairtype than Czechs, but either I was wrong or I messed up by going to the closest hair dresser to my house rather than seeking out a highly rated one.
Maybe she just didn't like Aryans.
I saw the Egyptian turn away a black customer on the grounds that he didn't know how to cut the guy's hair.
72 The guy's style was really aggressive and fast too, we called him "Eduardo Scissorhands"
I go to a Turkish barbers in London. Generally very good, and there's the full range of bashing and singeing, the haircuts are good, and the cut-throat shave, etc is all good. Except when I went a couple of days ago, the guy completely ignored my instructions not too trim my beard too much, and it's a bit too fucking Noel Edmonds for my liking -- luckily it grows like kudzu, so that'll only last a week or so.
"Trim beard?"
"No."
"Trim beard?" [points scornfully at uneven sides of beard]
"OK, but please, not too much, I don't like it too short."
"OK"
"I mean it, not too short."
"No problem."
Dives in with clippers set to "twat/Tory".
"Dude, if you weren't literally armed with a straight razor ..."
Edmonds is a trustee of the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), an organisation which is strongly opposed to wind farms. He was said to have joined "because of the threat near his home in Devon". He has been quoted as saying that, "Politicians are promoting the wind industry as a green icon, but they are misleading the public into believing the propaganda of the wind industry. The reality is that wind power is too costly and can never meet our energy needs; but it will destroy the countryside". His view is that those who are promoting wind farms are energy companies with a vested financial interest and that wind turbines are not reliable enough as a source of sustainable energy.
Edmonds also opposes immigration and the BBC's Welsh Language Service.
What does he have against the Welsh?!
barbers in narnia are all 65-year-old chinese guys for chinese dudes, middle aged malay dudes for malays, and younger indian guys for indians and bangladeshis, with awesome pictures of indian film stars with spectacular mustaches pasted into the windows as suggestions. there are lots of gay-seeming, straight hairdressers for the ladies, like mine, who does a great pixie cut.
79.2: Their prince seems like kind of a tool.
78: might I ask what is the difference between "Twat/Tory" and "leader of her majesty's opposition"?
In America, it's the different between #2 and #4 clippers.
In theory, I should stop answering questions I know nothing about. However, I deliberately avoid having too neat of a hair cut because, as a 40-something middle-class white guy with a desk job, I want to avoid looking like somebody who would vote for Trump while also not looking like somebody who thinks "hipster" and "born during the Nixon administration" are a reasonable combination. It's a fine line.
Seeing the hordes in Charlottesville with khakis and white polos is making me think I should dump the khakis.
84 would be a great ATM. Why don't you help us help you?
I'm not sure this 'help' thing has much of a future.
with respect to an atm, or just as a comment upon the increasing futility of the human condition?
I'm alive and relatively uninjured btw, speaking of the help I'm getting. not to vtsoobc, but commenters have been supporting me lots in email/whatsapp. I'll check FB if people want to dm me cheering messages like, "hey, stop doing that. it probably hurts, moron." I was the speaker at an aa meeting last night and I had to say at the end I felt like a bit of a fraud since it was my job to wrap things up with how I felt happy, joyous and free, when actually I felt awful, but that nonetheless there was an improving moral, namely that you don't have to drink even when things are really awful. having doubled the Li I feel sleepy and dopey but way less anxious and hit-myself-in-the-facey.
hairwise the blue on my blue-silver is already fading; I can't decide whether to do blue again over it or to bleach it and get a bright pastel blue. I feel bangladeshi guys, no matter how satisfactory/concussive their head massages, will be no help in this regard. dying your hair silver at my age is sort of weird, but it's so obviously not my natural hair color (esp with the blue tips) that I'm not worried about it being particularly aging. husband x is actually married to a blue-haired feminist! I get dark roots really fast; it is a high-maintenance look. maybe you shoud go for it just confuse people, mobes. no one would think you were a trump voter!
89: The latter.
Also, I have a grey hair question. I see young (younger than me, but not like 21 or anything) women with grey hair that looks very natural. I see lots of fairly obviously not-natural grey, but sometimes it looks really real. Is it? Can I ask?
it's unusual to get an all-over silver grey naturally if you're under...I dunno 65? 70? even then it can be hard to maintain; the stereotype of blue-haired old ladies was women getting bluing applied to their grey hair so it would look silver and cool, not yellowish. but some women go all-grey younger naturally and it looks badass; if it's natural it will usually have highlights and lowlights, and darker strands in it, rather than being uniform.
I am salt-and-peppery and was way more gray than (almost?) all the women of my parents' generation at the most recent family funeral. I have no interest in that sort of dye, to Nia's horror and disapproval. I can barely manage to get my hair cut at plausible intervals and really don't need to increase the degree of difficulty.