>At 10:45 AM +1000 8/13/03, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>>This is the central issue. Men exploit their wives because they can, by the same token middle class women (and men) enter into equally exploitative relations with hired servants because they can. There is no difference
>
>I do see a big difference between men who expect their wives and girlfriends to do "housework" for them and men and women who hire servants to do it for them. The obvious difference is that servants are paid wages whereas wives and girlfriends aren't.
So if the men hire a prostitute, that's alright because he pays her a wage to exploit her?
>
>At 10:45 AM +1000 8/13/03, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>>If a man who can exploit his wife, refuses to do so, it changes nothing. He still can. She is still vulnerable.
>
>It's not as if a woman in this day and age in rich modern nations can't survive without living with a man. Women ought to divorce their husbands if they are unhappy with what their husbands do or don't do. An increasing number of women have and continue to do just that, alarming conservatives. Or better yet, women might stay single, become lesbians, or just go out with likable men without living with any of them, etc. rather than live with or get married to men who expect wives to do "housework" and take care of kids.
I'm not sure its quite so easy to just convert to lesbianism, nor indeed find a man who is so amenable. Although I suspect the former would be easier than the latter, trust me - all men are real bastards at heart.
But that isn't the point, you really don't seem to get what I'm saying. The problem isn't that men are bastards, its that the system gives them power to exploit women. As you say, that has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Women can often attain economic independence these days, thus removing the power of men to plumb the deepest depths of their bastardry. (We're still bastards at heart though, that hasn't changed.)
What you seem to be trying to wriggle out of is the simple comparison between men exploiting women as personal servants and women exploiting other women as personal servants. You think there is no comparison between a relationship based on formal wage slavery and old-fashioned marital slavery? Please! It is the same thing, so long as the slave is the victim of coercion.
The domestic servant is coerced by economic want, to be the personal servant of someone. The dependant wife is also precisely coerced by economic want, to be the personal servant of her husband. Same thing exactly.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas