This Is the 21st Century, For Crying Out Loud

I am on a "roll" today writing a few words for the first time in many months because I have been so distracted into doing other things. This goddamned article makes my fucking blood boil.

Why? Because here we are in the second decade of the 21st century, yet the angle of this article is smack out of the 1950s with the old women's magazines and "women's pages" of newspapers until newspapers did away with them, retooled them, and now call them "lifestyle" sections. We have in this article a woman who spent her career mountaineering and enjoying her life, and what does this piece of shit of a writer do? The writer slants Lydia Bradey's story as her "struggle" to get herself sterilized in her twenties so she could pursue her athletic career. And, of course, Bradey has no regrets about doing so, now that the ship has long since sailed being 55 years old now.

Isn't this just terrible? A woman decides, like yours truly, to jettison patriarchy's belief her only purpose in life to be some man's fuck toy, incubator, and servant and pursue other things, and this author thinks this is the worst thing in the world. Bradey was going to adopt to "prove" herself she wasn't some self-centered ogre, but then, she changed her mind. The selfish witch wanted to go back to the mountains.

The fact this article was written at all just makes my blood boil. Articles about men are never given this slant.

A snip:

When I started mountaineering, I would see men who were fathers pushing themselves and taking risks,” Bradey writes in her memoir. “And it seemed to me that their wives and girlfriends back home were in the dark about what was going on. So men got away with what they were doing and it was only when women who were mothers started climbing that the spotlight fell on the subject.”

While Bradey’s trajectory is unique, the factors behind her decision are well-known to women who are big mountain professionals, including mountaineers, guides, avalanche forecasters, and pro skiers. Weighing whether or not to have children means considering how much time would be sacrificed that would be spent pursuing these endeavors, not to mention the time required to hone skills and achieve necessary physical fitness for these jobs. There are also expectations (both internal and external) of mitigating risk as a mother, which raises concerns of potentially limiting growth as an athlete. Often, it’s literally weighing career against family—a weighty decision for any woman, even more so when a profession depends on high-consequence multi-day missions that require top physical fitness.

So fucking what?

I am sick of articles condemning women who bypass their so-called feminine role. Make no mistake. This author IS condemning women for this believing as the author does women must "have it all" or they are nothing. Or, alternatively, a job or career is an optional choice, but women had better do the wife and mommy route or forever be lonely and a loser.