And automatically deduces that it's society that forces them to couple up of instead of not being retarded with her finances.
To an extent it is society's fault. Only that society is responding to women's wants to have educations, and careers. Of course, when a couple now has duel incomes, market forces are going to respond to that... And most people are in a relationship.
Also, what the fuck does decenter even mean? Just swearing off dating?
These types of women have this belief that society tells women to put men first. That your husband's career should come before yours for example. Its really just a way for them to justify being stupid with their life decisions.
Five seconds of googling led me to this post on
reddit (
archive) as an example:
It can mean different things for different women.
For me, as an older Gen X woman, decentering men means learning to put my own best interests first. All my life, I was taught to put the needs/wants of a man before my own. First, it was my father, then it was my husband. For many of my peers, they saw their brothers getting preferential treatment and were expected to just accept it.
If I had decentered men back in my youth, I would’ve resisted the pressure to get married from my fiancé and my parents. I would not have dropped out of university. I would’ve told my fiancé that if he wanted to marry me he’d have to wait 3 years until I completed my degree. Then I would’ve insisted upon waiting to have children until after I was established in my career.
The financial ramifications of the decisions I made in my youth have been HUGE. And have become even more apparent as I’m now fast approaching retirement age.
It’s a bit of a moot point for me now but I learned from it and I encouraged my daughter to do differently. She recently completed her master’s in a STEM field and I couldn’t be more proud.
The great "sacrifices" she made in life for a man amount to:
- Getting married earlier (and somehow getting married prevents a woman from getting/continuing an education for some reason)
- Working for some company instead of having children (cause who the hell wants more time with them/wants to see their grandchildren?)
- Earning less money (as if she doesn't have access to his)
I bet at no point did she suggest to her husband that he could stay home with the kids, and she could earn all the money. She, of course. ends this post with how proud she is as a mother that her daughter has completed her masters instead of prioritizing what really matters.
It really all amounts to a way for women to justify ruining/stunting their lives "to own the boys." Take that woman complaining about costs/time while living alone. She's literally forced herself into a worse life because she wants to stick it to men.
Or take this other post from that same thread.
The last one - it's about not caring about male validation. When we think about it, so much of the way women are expected to move in the world involves the acceptance and attention from men, which also often leads to women being unhealthily competitive with each other as a result. Decentering men in our lives helps us have better relationships with ourselves and with other women, but doesn't inherently mean an avoidance or hatred toward men at all.
Its a rejection of the idea that if they want a man, they have to earn him, and that earning him is somehow bad for them/women in general. The cope that doing this somehow results in better lives, and better relationships with other women. Of course, this never comes about for some strange reason...
And yet another example
I can only tell you what it looked like in my own life, as a young Gen X woman.
It was an in depth conversation with my husband about a lot of things I did for him—like managing his relationships with our kids—and how I wouldn’t do them any more, or how I would do them differently. I needed to sort out people pleasing tendencies from a genuine desire to do small acts of service for the person I love.
It was another conversation about the things I had done to protect him from his own feelings—namely, not discussing traumatic events I’ve endured—and how I needed a partner to stand with me through some shit, not someone who couldn’t bear the thought of the memories I live with every moment of every day. It was also a discussion about how I couldn’t protect myself from his feelings—so if he was angry, or sad, etc., he needed to find healthy ways to handle it and not dump it back on me.
It meant no longer deferring to men out of fear of physical or social consequences.
All of these things were roles we fell into, never something we discussed. My husband doesn’t need me managing his relationships or social calendar, he’s a grown adult…but he let me do it. The discussion about protecting him from his feelings was a bit harder because I had heavily internalized the habit of concealment and dismissal, but was having a lot of very disruptive PTSD symptoms. Basically, it all amounted to me de-centering my husband in my world and refusing to revolve around him, and working together to make that happen. He never wanted any of that. I don’t think he ever needed any of it. It was just what we knew, so we did it.
This woman literally told her husband he needed to bury his feelings because she can't deal with them, but he needs to accept her feelings even if he can't/doesn't want to deal with them. Or the part about his relationship with their kids, she's gotten tired of dominating the way he interacts with them after so many years, and now decides its his responsibility. It really boils down to being a bitch because they can get away with it, or think they can.
TLDR: Decentering is just a polite way for a woman to say she's going to be a total bitch now, or is going to change the way she is a total bitch.
