Who CARES What "Elite" Women Are Going Through

when there are tens of MILLIONS of people who are suffering economically in this country? Who gives a shit about privileged people who live in a bubble utterly clueless about how the 99 percent of us live? We have to somehow feel sorry for them when they have had every advantage to get ahead, not because they are better and more "intelligent" than the rest of us.

It's just disgusting and cruel to even focus on their "plight" when the rest of us ARE having it terribly. It's a giant disconnect.

Who frankly cares if these women, who seem to have a huge entitlement mentality, have "it all" when many of us have little or NOTHING? I am just as educated and intelligent as these people, but most of them had connections to get where they were and are or are trust fund brats who think they worked hard when they actually were born on third base. They have spouses who make equally obscene amounts of money, so they also have that safety net. They are firmly in the top five percent, if not in the top one percent, of all household earners, and they whine about how hard they have it? PLEASE.

I have written many times on this blog that the "elitism" criticism of feminism was the only criticism against it that was valid because it was the truth. This argument was made mostly by women of color who felt their views were not represented, but they were correct. Too much focus was on women who were born into privilege and too much focus was put on women to crash "men's" jobs while denigrating traditional women's jobs or lifestyles in the process. The focus should have been on improving the lives of ALL women, not just catering to a tiny number of women who went to "elite" colleges (e.g., the Seven Sisters colleges, Ivy League universities).

I DO feel like I am in a time warp:

The conversation came to life in part because of a compelling face-off of issues and personalities: Ms. Slaughter, who urged workplaces to change and women to stop blaming themselves, took on Ms. Sandberg, who has somewhat unintentionally come to epitomize the higher-harder-faster school of female achievement.

Starting a year and a half ago, Ms. Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, injected new energy into the often circular work-or-home debate with videotaped talks that became Internet sensations. After bemoaning the lack of women in top business positions, she instructed them to change their lot themselves by following three rules: require your partner to do half the work at home, don’t underestimate your own abilities, and don’t cut back on ambition out of fear that you won’t be able to balance work and children.

Oh, for fuck's sake. What these dimwitted self-styled "feminists" seem to forget that companies exploited greater female participation in the labor force starting in the 1970s by gutting MEN'S pay and undermining unions so that male pay was on par with female pay, thus getting TWO workers for the price of one. This ended up being the "two-career" family, not households made up of two executives, two attorneys, two doctors, or whatever two-profession households there were. That wasn't the second wave feminists' fault; they simply didn't see it coming and trusted corporate America implicitly to do right by women. Poor fools. Women now had to "do it all," but so did their husbands, if the women were married at all. Nowadays, companies simply move the jobs overseas or bring cheap labor to this country in order to shore up their profits and undermine living standards here.

Second-wave feminists never saw any of this coming. Apparently neither have third-, fourth-, fifth-wave feminists or whatever wave they're in these days seen it.

The focus needs to be on the economy and the massive redistribution upward of wealth, not on relatively minor issues, because these matters affect EVERYBODY.