Well-known psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow applied his professional skills to the dust-up between lesbian Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen and the wife of GOP presidential candidate and stay-at-home-mom Ann Romney, and made some fascinating observations about the hostility liberal women direct toward their conservative peers.
Writing for Fox News, Dr. Ablow weighed in on the controversy, saying that Rosen provided a “clear psychological window” on women who despise other women when she showed “gut-level contempt” for Mrs. Romney, describing her as having “never worked a day in her life” because she chose to stay home and raise her five sons rather than pursue a career outside the home.
“What Hilary Rosen has exposed is a psychological fault line that separates those women who simply oppose unfair gender-based barriers in education or employment or elsewhere from other women who actually despise and disrespect those females who choose to be full-time wives and mothers, instead of entering the workforce,” Ablow writes.
“These ‘anti-gender’ women have it in for anyone who embraces her femininity, maternal instincts and capacity to nurture as their highest priority — postponing or passing up other laudable opportunities to work at, say, a law firm or as a marketing executive. They despise the notion that some women may indeed be drawn — instinctively and happily — toward creating special and loving environments in which to raise their children, while spending all their available time sustaining and enriching those environments and those children.”
He goes on to say that they “despise the parts of themselves that may be drawn to such roles, as well.”
When women like Rosen make the kind of comments that she did, “they’re essentially talking about themselves . . . trying to reassure themselves that their own choices in life weren’t only equally as good as those of other women, but better. Far, far better,” Ablow states.
They want to believe that their choices are better because they freed themselves from the roles that were once expected of women, “leaving them not only freer than, but superior to, those women who don’t feel enslaved at home, but feel fulfilled at home,” he said.
Ablow does not believe that women who are happy raising families have much credibility with the likes of Rosen – or President Barack Obama – because both Rosen and Obama only resonate with the disenfranchised and the abused.
“Anyone who thrives in an American company or American home, while proud and happy with any element of traditional American values, must be a hopeless automaton or relic of the oppressive past,” he says.
The fact that Mitt Romney made enough money to allow his wife to stay home only makes things worse.
“See, psychologically, that only makes women like Hilary Rosen hate Ann Romney more. Not only does she seem to be enjoying herself, and not only do her children seem to be happy and successful — but she actually allowed her husband to go out and make the money to support all of them. And that’s letting a man be comfortable being a man, too. And, to Hilary Rosen, that’s a cultural crime and psychological assault.”
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It’s worth noting that most women who enter the cash-compensated workforce don’t join law firms, become marketing executives, network anchors, or nationally-syndicated pundits. Most become cashiers, accountants, secretaries, clerks, customer service reps, and a host of other sorts of jobs — not “careers”, but just jobs — that place them at the beck and call of some boss who directs their schedule and their activities for some significant portion of the week, and for some compensation that few are wholly satisfied with.
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