What I used to tell conservative women is - Never forget Hugh Hefner & the Playboy lifestyle fantasy predates Betty Friedan.
Feminism picks up steam because women who had been traditional, women who had stayed home, women who mothered the baby boom generation - woke up to find their husbands were leaving them for someone in their twenties. They didn't have money for lawyers and the judges weren't too sympathetic.
Or worse, their husbands died in WWII or Korea or Vietnam and suddenly, their options are to get another husband or to get a job. A job where you're at the mercy of predatory men.
I know a lot of great men. I was raised in a house with great men. And every adult in my life told me to make sure I could support myself and my family if anything went wrong.
Feminism didn't come out of happy households. Feminism came out of "screw this shit and I will never be dependent again."
Reading this story, it clicked for me that this is the same flawed reasoning behind a lot of vaccine denialism. While it may be true that you haven't seen any Polio, Whooping Cough, or Measles outbreaks, the takeaway isn't that vaccines are unnecessary but rather that they WORK. Likewise, these trad wives are going to force themselves to rediscover 2nd wave feminism the hard way.
We grew up in the Southern US. So we tried the traditional family route. It was a nightmare, we had 3 children in the first 5 years and $250,000 in debt counting the mortgage.
We were both overwhelmed and nearly driven to the point of divorce or sùìcide.
I was a terrible housewife, I hated, hated being trapped in the house with 3 small children, my husband worked 70 hours a week and we still didn't have enough money or time.
The 1950's perfect family ideal is a myth. Wives had house keepers, husband's had affairs.
The sad fact, the traditional family concept is abusive to both women and men.
For the vast span of human history, people lived on multi-generational farms. We had dirt floors, fire places and wore the same clothes!
Our modern homes would have been a palace 200 years ago with an army of servants.
Yet modern society expects women to do the work of 4 people while treating her husband like a king.
Men are expected to shoulder the burden of survival for a wife and kids on one paycheck. Meanwhile, corporations are treating workers as if they are surfs, easily replaceable to the point that they have become disposable.
25 years ago my husband and I rented our house to a swarm of college students, and moved back home with my very liberal parents. We had help with the kids from both sets of grandparents and eased the financial burden.
Marriage is never easy especially when you get married at before your 21st birthday. You will both make mistakes.
There is no traditional relationship ideal. It does take a village to raise kids, and your spouse should be your best friend. The one person in the world who will always be there for you, not just a sex partner.
My husband and I work together, live together, we are rarely apart from one another for more than a day or two.
3 of our parents have died, many of our life long friends have died young.
Our children are adults and they are struggling in their 20's just as we did.
We don’t have to toss marriage aside, but we need to toss traditional marriage expectations.
Women are not all the same, men are not all the same. People want different things.
Yep. I grew up middle class (upper middle class for my are after the 05 crash screwed so many others while we were stable) and there's a LOT they pretend isn't required:
1) Both my parents worked. Mom didn't necessarily work full time, but she had a job where she was respected and she liked it
2) Both of them did chores. Dad was the primary cook and iron-er because he was VERY particular about his own ironing and just did everyone else's as a matter of course of doing is own to his specifications. He also did the garden because plants and my mother do not mix. For SOME reason he found both gardening and cooking "soothing" after a long day's work. My mother would find both stressful instead.
3) They had ultra high cleanliness standards they both contributed to maintaining, and as they've retired and are less physically-flexible, have hired out to maintain in certain cases.
4) Dad also watched me if something went wrong after third grade because it was easier for HIM to work from home--mom was teaching while he was a government office worker who could just bring a work laptop to our house and keep going. Tho I will NEVER forgive him for the time I had the flu and he asked if cornbread would make me feel better, I said yes...and he greased the pan with BACON as an experiment (because the time to experiment with food is when the kiddo is sick). I puked so bad and mom teased him for a week.
5) While we had no family in the area, my father's parents visited at least once a year (we also went to them at least as often) and my mother had been QUICK upon arriving to establish a support system of multiple babysitters and friends with kids of their own to share the load with. M dad's parents would also help financially if we needed it.
6) There was only one kid, me. My mom even admitted that when my autism got really hard to deal with around second grade she's suddenly been grateful to not have had multiple kids so they could focus on the issues I was having without having to ignore another's needs.
Cornbread! I loved my dad's southern Cornbread, baked in a cast iron skillet. Cornbread and ketchup was the comfort food of my childhood.
My dad was born in 1929 and served 22 years in the military. He was a retired U.S. Army Drill Sergeant and he loved to cook as well. Though his cooking was a combination of southern depression era cuisine and military creativity. Bacon grease was often the main ingredient.
The kitchen was my dad's domain, he cooked, washed dishes, did the grocery shopping, and he loved to fish. We always had a freezer full of fish from deep sea fishing trips.
And we had a small herd of goats, and chickens and a turkey that used to chase me around the yard. My mom milked the goats and tended to the animals.
My older sisters cleaned the living room and our bedrooms. I was the baby of the family and a tiny in stature, but still a giant, spoiled brat.
The modern expectations of marriage are completely false.
Gender roles upheld by conservatives are complete fiction. There is no such thing as "women's work" or "men's work," only work, actions taken to ensure the family survives another day.
So many conservatives try to blame women for the demise of the "American family."
But, they ignore the truth of the past and create a fairytale ideal
family that actually destroys the family unit with unrealistic gender roles.
A person's role in life -- how they contribute to society -- should be determined by their skills and talents, not their reproductive organs.
Our fathers and their love of cooking weren't unorthodox or unusual. They were the result of a healthy culture that didn't try to force people to contort themselves into rigid semi-modern stereotypes.
American men need to grow up and recognize that a wife isn't a second mommy. A wife shouldn't be doing everything around the house while a grown man sets on the couch playing video games.
Our current conservative cultural expectations are sick. It tells men that women should be unpaid, unappreciated laborers, literal servants to the "king of the house," instead of a partner, "a queen," with equal power and authority.
Until the 1950's ideal family is recognized as utter fiction, Americans are going to suffer unhappy, unhealthy relationships. It's not women that are destroying American families, the concept of an "ideal family" that is destroying real families.
We should feel sorry for Southern and anyone like her. Imagine how much time was wasted and pain she endured simply to find out that relationships like the one she idealized, one where a wife is submissive and subservient to a man who needs that kind of power imbalance, is unhealthy and destructive. You can be a feminist woman and still decide you want marriage and a family. You can be a man who believes in feminism and believes partners should share everything, support each other and enjoy mutual respect. Feminism is empowerment, and about equality and independence and both partners bringing gifts and tools and skills to a partnership, it’s not about destroying relationships (except perhaps rising above and escaping unhealthy ones). But often insecure people feel easily threatened, and it’s no surprise lots of men feared their own role where they no longer had leverage, power and control.
I know I’m just lucky. It seems obvious and simple to me, when in reality relationships are complicated and challenging for many people, but my wife and I support each other in every way. We both have careers, doing things we chose to do. We share duties raising our son. Our bank accounts are linked and shared. We trust each other. And we both enjoy the feeling that we are trying to do MORE than our share, to make life easier for the other. We insist on the other having hobbies and solo interests, and we often take turns attending family functions if we can’t attend them all together. I’ve changed thousands of diapers and I do most of the cooking. And we never keep score, yell or say anything unkind. I wish everyone could find their version of that. The idea of submission to a domineering partner who is needy, selfish, insecure, cruel and unloving is so incredibly sad and unhealthy.
I mean, the first modern feminists were housewives. Housewives who found themselves fucked because of the tradwife lifestyle. It's a shame it happened long enough ago that women in their 20s and 30s have to repeat it and learn it for themselves. Girl needs to read The Women's Room.
Ta, Robyn. I joined ZPG (now called Population Connection because it IS all connected) on the first Earth Day. I never wanted to have kids, and I never did. I also never judged those of my friends to chose to start families. However, some of them chose to view me as a threat because I was single. They were wrong; I had no interest in their mates, but it did mean my circle of friends shrank.
This summer, I'll join the ranks of the married. It's thrilling to have found the perfect Wonketteer with whom to share my life. We both love to cook, we're both planting a garden upstate. The only chore I'm great at (I don't regard cooking as a chore) is washing dishes. He knows that about me.
Southern was and is delusional. No feminist ever gave a shit about her life choices.
While I agreed with ZPG, I never joined the organisation, and when I got married I had a vasectomy as my then wife agreed with it. Even as we are not togther now, we both have NO childern unless you consider the cats and dogs.
The perpetual affliction of right wing ideologues... they can't ever seem to understand the likely consequences of any choice, circumstance, or unplanned crisis until it slaps them in the face personally.
And then still, after they experience it for themselves, half of them will remain convinced that *their* experience is somehow novel or unique, and they are still different or special than every other person who has ever been through the same or similar. "Those people" over there deserved the bad situation or outcome, while they, themselves, never did. It gets so fucking old.
Card carrying commie liberal here, also got married at 22. Just saying. (In the end it didn't work out, but in the "married for 37 years before he freaked that he was now old balls and traded me in for 'spark'" kinda way.)
When I was about 10 years old I looked around at all the married people I knew, including my parents, my friends' parents, my neighbors and my relatives, and it was very obvious that the wives did pretty much everything, and all the husbands did was bring home a paycheck. The wives had the babies, which is not exactly a picnic, and they did all the housework, child care, laundry, cooking, shopping, decorating, school activities, budgeting and chauffering of children here there and everywhere. They also planned all the entertainments and vacations, and I assumed they also had sex with their husbands, at least now and then. Some of these wives WORKED FULL TIME as well.
And I said to myself "HELL NO!" So I decided to never get married and have children, and to have a professional career so I could support myself comfortably and never, ever have to ask any man for anything, especially money.
But I was lucky ... I came of age after The Pill was available, which meant I could have sex without consequences, just like men. And then abortion was legalized when I was 15, so that was good too. I was also lucky that I grew up in a time when women COULD vote, and COULD go to college, and COULD get credit, and COULD get a professional job, even if they didn't get paid as much as men with the same qualifications doing the same job. My grandmother's generation wasn't so lucky. Even in my mother's generation (born 1914) the only 4 careers open to most women were wife, teacher, nurse and prostitute, and if you became a teacher or nurse you lost your job if you got married.
What these redpill/trad wives idiots don't talk about is the fact that gazillions of women throughout history who did get married and have children were left to raise those children alone because their husbands either abandoned them, or died young, or were killed in a war, or left them for a younger model. They had no education, no job training or skills, no money, and were paid less than half what men were paid for menial labor. They had NO OPTIONS. Not having options makes you a slave, as Lauren Southern discovered, and they can take that slavery and stick it where the sun don't shine.
I can get schadenfreude-y over it so you don't have to.
Because this woman wasn't raised in a box. She lived in the world and she's clearly not stupid. She could have seen the world for what it is. There are tons of people who are ill-equipped to understand, much less navigate, all of the horseshit flying around in the world. Not this one. She could have understood. She could have seen this shit for what it was. She had the tools to do that. She chose not to. She wielded her beliefs and her bigotries and her blame like weapons. I don't care how much she suffered. It doesn't clear her account. She still caused more suffering than she received.
I don't feel the schadenfreude here - but I'm not feeling sorry for her either.
I think we all know she was happily criticizing other women who felt they had to leave the tradwife life before it killed them.
Huge generalization here - but I find conservatives only understand problems if they have personally experienced it. They lack the ability to empathize with other people's situations.
And they lack the imagination to see how fast their own situation could become a bad situation.
I was raised to believe "There but for the grace of God go I."
It always feels to me as if the conservative response is "Well, what did they expect? That would never happen to me."
I agree with you. Mostly, so does this paper, above. Others say empathy is increasingly more of an in-goup thing and no one can lay claim to greater stores of it in the face of political and cultural opposition. But that doesn't pass the eye test. Put any OAC speech or policy position against any "name your republican here" speech or policy position. See what people are protesting in the streets: Broader rights and economic justice? Or the desire to expand those rights for some at the expense of everyone else?
I WANTED to stay home and raise the kids. But somebody had to keep pressure up in the money pump, and that turned out to be me with my saleable masculine tech skills. The original plan was to swap at some point but it never happened. Majorly fucked up business, just saying.
What I used to tell conservative women is - Never forget Hugh Hefner & the Playboy lifestyle fantasy predates Betty Friedan.
Feminism picks up steam because women who had been traditional, women who had stayed home, women who mothered the baby boom generation - woke up to find their husbands were leaving them for someone in their twenties. They didn't have money for lawyers and the judges weren't too sympathetic.
Or worse, their husbands died in WWII or Korea or Vietnam and suddenly, their options are to get another husband or to get a job. A job where you're at the mercy of predatory men.
I know a lot of great men. I was raised in a house with great men. And every adult in my life told me to make sure I could support myself and my family if anything went wrong.
Feminism didn't come out of happy households. Feminism came out of "screw this shit and I will never be dependent again."
If y'all radical feminists are really out to destroy capitalism ...
... could y'all pick up the pace? Thanks.
Reading this story, it clicked for me that this is the same flawed reasoning behind a lot of vaccine denialism. While it may be true that you haven't seen any Polio, Whooping Cough, or Measles outbreaks, the takeaway isn't that vaccines are unnecessary but rather that they WORK. Likewise, these trad wives are going to force themselves to rediscover 2nd wave feminism the hard way.
Well today is my 31st wedding anniversary.
We grew up in the Southern US. So we tried the traditional family route. It was a nightmare, we had 3 children in the first 5 years and $250,000 in debt counting the mortgage.
We were both overwhelmed and nearly driven to the point of divorce or sùìcide.
I was a terrible housewife, I hated, hated being trapped in the house with 3 small children, my husband worked 70 hours a week and we still didn't have enough money or time.
The 1950's perfect family ideal is a myth. Wives had house keepers, husband's had affairs.
The sad fact, the traditional family concept is abusive to both women and men.
For the vast span of human history, people lived on multi-generational farms. We had dirt floors, fire places and wore the same clothes!
Our modern homes would have been a palace 200 years ago with an army of servants.
Yet modern society expects women to do the work of 4 people while treating her husband like a king.
Men are expected to shoulder the burden of survival for a wife and kids on one paycheck. Meanwhile, corporations are treating workers as if they are surfs, easily replaceable to the point that they have become disposable.
25 years ago my husband and I rented our house to a swarm of college students, and moved back home with my very liberal parents. We had help with the kids from both sets of grandparents and eased the financial burden.
Marriage is never easy especially when you get married at before your 21st birthday. You will both make mistakes.
There is no traditional relationship ideal. It does take a village to raise kids, and your spouse should be your best friend. The one person in the world who will always be there for you, not just a sex partner.
My husband and I work together, live together, we are rarely apart from one another for more than a day or two.
3 of our parents have died, many of our life long friends have died young.
Our children are adults and they are struggling in their 20's just as we did.
We don’t have to toss marriage aside, but we need to toss traditional marriage expectations.
Women are not all the same, men are not all the same. People want different things.
Yep. I grew up middle class (upper middle class for my are after the 05 crash screwed so many others while we were stable) and there's a LOT they pretend isn't required:
1) Both my parents worked. Mom didn't necessarily work full time, but she had a job where she was respected and she liked it
2) Both of them did chores. Dad was the primary cook and iron-er because he was VERY particular about his own ironing and just did everyone else's as a matter of course of doing is own to his specifications. He also did the garden because plants and my mother do not mix. For SOME reason he found both gardening and cooking "soothing" after a long day's work. My mother would find both stressful instead.
3) They had ultra high cleanliness standards they both contributed to maintaining, and as they've retired and are less physically-flexible, have hired out to maintain in certain cases.
4) Dad also watched me if something went wrong after third grade because it was easier for HIM to work from home--mom was teaching while he was a government office worker who could just bring a work laptop to our house and keep going. Tho I will NEVER forgive him for the time I had the flu and he asked if cornbread would make me feel better, I said yes...and he greased the pan with BACON as an experiment (because the time to experiment with food is when the kiddo is sick). I puked so bad and mom teased him for a week.
5) While we had no family in the area, my father's parents visited at least once a year (we also went to them at least as often) and my mother had been QUICK upon arriving to establish a support system of multiple babysitters and friends with kids of their own to share the load with. M dad's parents would also help financially if we needed it.
6) There was only one kid, me. My mom even admitted that when my autism got really hard to deal with around second grade she's suddenly been grateful to not have had multiple kids so they could focus on the issues I was having without having to ignore another's needs.
Cornbread! I loved my dad's southern Cornbread, baked in a cast iron skillet. Cornbread and ketchup was the comfort food of my childhood.
My dad was born in 1929 and served 22 years in the military. He was a retired U.S. Army Drill Sergeant and he loved to cook as well. Though his cooking was a combination of southern depression era cuisine and military creativity. Bacon grease was often the main ingredient.
The kitchen was my dad's domain, he cooked, washed dishes, did the grocery shopping, and he loved to fish. We always had a freezer full of fish from deep sea fishing trips.
And we had a small herd of goats, and chickens and a turkey that used to chase me around the yard. My mom milked the goats and tended to the animals.
My older sisters cleaned the living room and our bedrooms. I was the baby of the family and a tiny in stature, but still a giant, spoiled brat.
The modern expectations of marriage are completely false.
Gender roles upheld by conservatives are complete fiction. There is no such thing as "women's work" or "men's work," only work, actions taken to ensure the family survives another day.
So many conservatives try to blame women for the demise of the "American family."
But, they ignore the truth of the past and create a fairytale ideal
family that actually destroys the family unit with unrealistic gender roles.
A person's role in life -- how they contribute to society -- should be determined by their skills and talents, not their reproductive organs.
Our fathers and their love of cooking weren't unorthodox or unusual. They were the result of a healthy culture that didn't try to force people to contort themselves into rigid semi-modern stereotypes.
American men need to grow up and recognize that a wife isn't a second mommy. A wife shouldn't be doing everything around the house while a grown man sets on the couch playing video games.
Our current conservative cultural expectations are sick. It tells men that women should be unpaid, unappreciated laborers, literal servants to the "king of the house," instead of a partner, "a queen," with equal power and authority.
Until the 1950's ideal family is recognized as utter fiction, Americans are going to suffer unhappy, unhealthy relationships. It's not women that are destroying American families, the concept of an "ideal family" that is destroying real families.
We should feel sorry for Southern and anyone like her. Imagine how much time was wasted and pain she endured simply to find out that relationships like the one she idealized, one where a wife is submissive and subservient to a man who needs that kind of power imbalance, is unhealthy and destructive. You can be a feminist woman and still decide you want marriage and a family. You can be a man who believes in feminism and believes partners should share everything, support each other and enjoy mutual respect. Feminism is empowerment, and about equality and independence and both partners bringing gifts and tools and skills to a partnership, it’s not about destroying relationships (except perhaps rising above and escaping unhealthy ones). But often insecure people feel easily threatened, and it’s no surprise lots of men feared their own role where they no longer had leverage, power and control.
I know I’m just lucky. It seems obvious and simple to me, when in reality relationships are complicated and challenging for many people, but my wife and I support each other in every way. We both have careers, doing things we chose to do. We share duties raising our son. Our bank accounts are linked and shared. We trust each other. And we both enjoy the feeling that we are trying to do MORE than our share, to make life easier for the other. We insist on the other having hobbies and solo interests, and we often take turns attending family functions if we can’t attend them all together. I’ve changed thousands of diapers and I do most of the cooking. And we never keep score, yell or say anything unkind. I wish everyone could find their version of that. The idea of submission to a domineering partner who is needy, selfish, insecure, cruel and unloving is so incredibly sad and unhealthy.
I mean, the first modern feminists were housewives. Housewives who found themselves fucked because of the tradwife lifestyle. It's a shame it happened long enough ago that women in their 20s and 30s have to repeat it and learn it for themselves. Girl needs to read The Women's Room.
The Feminine Mystique.
Ta, Robyn. I joined ZPG (now called Population Connection because it IS all connected) on the first Earth Day. I never wanted to have kids, and I never did. I also never judged those of my friends to chose to start families. However, some of them chose to view me as a threat because I was single. They were wrong; I had no interest in their mates, but it did mean my circle of friends shrank.
This summer, I'll join the ranks of the married. It's thrilling to have found the perfect Wonketteer with whom to share my life. We both love to cook, we're both planting a garden upstate. The only chore I'm great at (I don't regard cooking as a chore) is washing dishes. He knows that about me.
Southern was and is delusional. No feminist ever gave a shit about her life choices.
While I agreed with ZPG, I never joined the organisation, and when I got married I had a vasectomy as my then wife agreed with it. Even as we are not togther now, we both have NO childern unless you consider the cats and dogs.
Congrats on getting married!
Thank you. We're looking forward to it!
The perpetual affliction of right wing ideologues... they can't ever seem to understand the likely consequences of any choice, circumstance, or unplanned crisis until it slaps them in the face personally.
And then still, after they experience it for themselves, half of them will remain convinced that *their* experience is somehow novel or unique, and they are still different or special than every other person who has ever been through the same or similar. "Those people" over there deserved the bad situation or outcome, while they, themselves, never did. It gets so fucking old.
Card carrying commie liberal here, also got married at 22. Just saying. (In the end it didn't work out, but in the "married for 37 years before he freaked that he was now old balls and traded me in for 'spark'" kinda way.)
When I was about 10 years old I looked around at all the married people I knew, including my parents, my friends' parents, my neighbors and my relatives, and it was very obvious that the wives did pretty much everything, and all the husbands did was bring home a paycheck. The wives had the babies, which is not exactly a picnic, and they did all the housework, child care, laundry, cooking, shopping, decorating, school activities, budgeting and chauffering of children here there and everywhere. They also planned all the entertainments and vacations, and I assumed they also had sex with their husbands, at least now and then. Some of these wives WORKED FULL TIME as well.
And I said to myself "HELL NO!" So I decided to never get married and have children, and to have a professional career so I could support myself comfortably and never, ever have to ask any man for anything, especially money.
But I was lucky ... I came of age after The Pill was available, which meant I could have sex without consequences, just like men. And then abortion was legalized when I was 15, so that was good too. I was also lucky that I grew up in a time when women COULD vote, and COULD go to college, and COULD get credit, and COULD get a professional job, even if they didn't get paid as much as men with the same qualifications doing the same job. My grandmother's generation wasn't so lucky. Even in my mother's generation (born 1914) the only 4 careers open to most women were wife, teacher, nurse and prostitute, and if you became a teacher or nurse you lost your job if you got married.
What these redpill/trad wives idiots don't talk about is the fact that gazillions of women throughout history who did get married and have children were left to raise those children alone because their husbands either abandoned them, or died young, or were killed in a war, or left them for a younger model. They had no education, no job training or skills, no money, and were paid less than half what men were paid for menial labor. They had NO OPTIONS. Not having options makes you a slave, as Lauren Southern discovered, and they can take that slavery and stick it where the sun don't shine.
I guess it all boils down to her being a fuckin' idiot.
Robyn's point is that it's not only her.
Maybe not, but Matthew's still right.
Let's be honest - she stayed in a bad situation because she didn't want to look foolish on social media.
Reality will not be ignored.
how inconvenient
Boo frickin' hoo.
I feel for her situation, what a hell of a way to learn a lesson. I hope that she rebounds & finds a wonderful life.
I can get schadenfreude-y over it so you don't have to.
Because this woman wasn't raised in a box. She lived in the world and she's clearly not stupid. She could have seen the world for what it is. There are tons of people who are ill-equipped to understand, much less navigate, all of the horseshit flying around in the world. Not this one. She could have understood. She could have seen this shit for what it was. She had the tools to do that. She chose not to. She wielded her beliefs and her bigotries and her blame like weapons. I don't care how much she suffered. It doesn't clear her account. She still caused more suffering than she received.
I don't feel the schadenfreude here - but I'm not feeling sorry for her either.
I think we all know she was happily criticizing other women who felt they had to leave the tradwife life before it killed them.
Huge generalization here - but I find conservatives only understand problems if they have personally experienced it. They lack the ability to empathize with other people's situations.
And they lack the imagination to see how fast their own situation could become a bad situation.
I was raised to believe "There but for the grace of God go I."
It always feels to me as if the conservative response is "Well, what did they expect? That would never happen to me."
This has been a well-researched (and debated) topic for a while. See here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339568853_Empathy_and_the_Liberal-Conservative_Political_Divide_in_the_US
There are thousands of others just like it.
I agree with you. Mostly, so does this paper, above. Others say empathy is increasingly more of an in-goup thing and no one can lay claim to greater stores of it in the face of political and cultural opposition. But that doesn't pass the eye test. Put any OAC speech or policy position against any "name your republican here" speech or policy position. See what people are protesting in the streets: Broader rights and economic justice? Or the desire to expand those rights for some at the expense of everyone else?
Anyway, what mean is..."yeah. Absolutely."
When the Texas power grid went down, AOC raised money and supplies for Texas.
Ted Cruz and John Cornyn left their own state.
I WANTED to stay home and raise the kids. But somebody had to keep pressure up in the money pump, and that turned out to be me with my saleable masculine tech skills. The original plan was to swap at some point but it never happened. Majorly fucked up business, just saying.