Women Must Take Ourselves Off the Back Burner

Last month, my sister-in-law sent a text to alert me to the existence of a fantastic sale on underwear at Lane Bryant.

I logged onto the website and started filling my online shopping cart. It took me a while to summon the courage to submit the order, but I hadn’t made a personal purchase like this in quite some time, and I reminded myself that decent underwear was a basic human need, not an irrational indulgence. I leaned into the living room and said, “Just a heads-up, babe. I bought some underwear. Hope that’s okay.”

My husband looked at me like I had grown a third eyeball. “Why would that not be okay, Kaeley?” he asked incredulously. “You need underwear. Buy underwear.”

And that was that.

To half the people reading this, the scenario will sound silly. But the other half will know exactly what I’m talking about, especially if they’re moms. We don’t do the martyrdom thing on purpose; it’s not like we’re setting out to deprive ourselves of necessary items in order to feel like we’re better parents or something. I don’t actively think, “Today I must suffer through thread-bare chonies and invest all funds directly into my children so they’ll know how much I love them.” It’s just really friggin’ easy to prioritize everyone else’s needs above your own when you’re busy running a household.

And I know this isn’t unique to women because my husband does the same exact thing. We just tend to put our needs on the back burner in order to tackle the things that seem more pressing in the moment, and we have to balance each other out in this capacity and remember to say, “Hey babe, buy the underwear. The time has come.”

But while this isn’t unique to women, I do think women tend to do it more often, and I do think some of this is because of the way we’re socialized. I think we are often expected to put our needs and our dignity on the proverbial back burner in order to cede the attention and focus to whatever issue the wide world has deemed more important in the moment we’re in.

An online interaction I had this morning got me to thinking about this. I had posted something about the way I see a lot of men treating Taylor Swift, and I said I thought it was lousy (no matter what you think of her politics or music) to call her misogynistic slurs or accuse her of destroying the NFL simply because she has the temerity to show up at a football game and support her boyfriend. (There’s something wonky in the matrix, by the way, when I’m taking time to defend Taylor Swift. I don’t even listen to her music, and I think her political stances are kinda garbage, but I saw enough abuse that I felt compelled to say something about it.)

One person responded by telling me that Taylor Swift was a distraction from the real issues going on in the world: the conflict in the Middle East, abortion on demand, the rapidly declining economy. It was a really diplomatic way of telling me to be quiet and direct my energy to something more important. And it rubbed me the wrong way because, if I really think about it, it’s a message I’ve heard too often in my advocacy for women. There’s ALWAYS something more important to worry about, something more worthy of our collective attention.

I wasn’t allowed to complain about Donald Trump’s “locker room talk” because it happened a long time ago, and didn’t I know that millions of babies would die if I didn’t just swallow my objections as a sexual assault survivor, plug my nose, and vote Trump? “All men talk this way, Kaeley. Focus on the bigger picture.”

It was a tough pill to swallow as a big picture thinker who actually believes that the integrity (or lack thereof) of our political candidates is pretty consequential in the greater scheme of things. But I swallowed those objections twice for the babies and resolved to revisit the broader discussion when people had deescalated enough to engage it. I’m still twiddling my thumbs waiting for that day to arrive. It hasn’t yet. I’m still not allowed to talk about it because if Biden wins again, America will collapse, so I need to stop being emotional and selfish and get back on the Trump Train while ignoring the diseased elephant in front of me. Or so I’m told.

The year I got fired for opposing men in women’s locker rooms, we filed an initiative to fight that nonsense, and we showed up at a bunch of our state’s Republican meetings and conferences to try to elicit their support for our efforts. We couldn’t seem to get them to care enough to make it an agenda item on their itineraries. “It’s a losing issue,” they told us. “We need to focus on things that matter to the voters: education, taxes, immigration policies.” Same message: “Care about something more important. Now is not the time.”

There are a number of emerging cult leaders in certain sectors of the Christian world, and they’ve got lengthy track records of publicly humiliating, degrading, and mistreating women. I’ve written about them so many times that I often feel like I’m wasting my breath when I shout “Mayday!” But even the good guys continue to turn a blind eye to the mountains of damning evidence against these leaders because, at the end of the day, these men are successful influencers who are rallying the masses to causes they all deem more important than women’s dignity—causes like overthrowing mask mandates and resisting government tyranny. I’m often told that I don’t have a right to complain about the women they hurt because, well you know, it’s worse for women in Afghanistan, and if we don’t want Afghanistan in America, we need to get on board with these guys’ leadership. The wounded women will need to suck it up for the greater good.

No one bite my head off for saying this, but women’s dignity and needs are constantly placed on the back burner in way too many Christian marriages, too. The minute a couple procreates, the default assumption is often that the wife will forfeit her career and stay home, regardless of whether or not she agreed to this particular distribution of labor prior to the baby’s birth.

Now if you’re hearing me belittle stay-at-home-moms, you’re not hearing me correctly. I AM a stay-at-home mom. But while it’s a blessing and a privilege to be able to stay home with kiddos, it’s also a sacrifice, and it’s not one that men are generally expected to make just because of their sex. Men, as a general rule, are not called selfish for wanting to foster their passion for their careers AND their families. Men aren’t, as a rule, told that their children will suffer if they don’t personally homeschool them every day instead of heading to the office. Women, on the other hand, are called a litany of names from “Jezebel” to “feminist” to “homewrecker” for daring to venture outside the home while their kids are young.

I often wonder how many times we could have cured cancer or solved hunger crises or produced the next great American novel if the women God equipped to achieve these things hadn’t been guilted out of their callings. I wonder what it cost their children to see their moms sitting on their talents.

While we are right to name the epidemic of women’s toxic empathy in the world right now, we’re generally not very good at identifying when that same empathy is exercised in ways that harm ourselves. I can think of no greater example of this than the volumes of silly women lining up to endorse female erasure via the trans lobby. Um, hello, Jessica, It’s a pretty dangerous thing to roll out a welcome mat for men in dresses to infiltrate the girls’ locker room at the YMCA. What are you thinking? Are you just so gosh darn used to swallowing your own needs in order to please men that you’ve lost your everloving mind?

We cannot continue forfeiting our protections, rights, voices, and, quite frankly, our sanity in order to make other people happy in this world.

Listen I don’t want to sit here and complain about how hard it is to be a woman. Complaining doesn’t really fix anything. What I’d rather do is encourage people to stop insisting that we have to choose between women’s dignity/needs and the other things that matter in the world. It is, in fact, quite possible to choose both. It’s surprisingly easy for me to care about ending the normalization of female pejoratives while also caring that we lost soldiers overseas last week. Every day is a good day to challenge “locker room talk.” Every day is a good day to invite men not to call women “cun*s.” Initiating discussions that invite people to treat women with honor is not a “distraction.” At this point in this pornsick world, it’s almost revolutionary. It’s almost an imperative.

As a semi-professional pot stirrer, I like to remind people that if no one stirs the pot once in awhile, that stew is gonna burn. But if that pot is perpetually left on the back burner, you won’t have stew to eat at all. You’ll starve. How does that help anyone at all?

If you have needs, prioritize them. It’s okay!

You don’t need anyone else’s permission to buy underwear.