Getting into this box is what's best for both of us. During your time in the box, you will learn so much, and yet experience so little. It's a wild ride, my friend, one well worth the time spent...and let's face it, you don't have much to do these days anyway.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

Singapore reportedly best place in the region to be a mother, local women whine.


So recently, our local media ran a small piece on how Singapore was ranked as the best place to be a mother in Asia. This, in turn, provoked all sorts of angry protests from bitches:

Let's examine this one in detail, shall we?


1) I was suddenly dismissed after my boss found out I was in my first trimester because he felt that my pregnancy would "slow me down" and he didn't want to have to pay me my salary when I went on Maternity Leave! MOM was very unhelpful and did nothing to help me.
My heart bleeds, really. So you're going to take time off to raise your kids, pushing your work onto both the men and childless women, interrupting the flow of any projects you may be on for your own desires and as a result of your choices, being less productive if you return, and generally costing your employer money.

Fun fact: your employer doesn't pay you to self-actualise. He pays you to make money for him. If you're a net loss - well, too bad, so sad, it doesn't matter what the reason is, whether you're being replaced by a foreign worker who will make $4 less an hour, you being a genuinely lazy worker, or getting pregnant.

Is this cold? Arguably so, but hey, this is the atomised, consumerist society we demanded that reduces people to hedons and utils, the glorious worker drone society of sports cars and chanel bags. You want a genuine cordial relationship with your employer, instead of some HR bullshit, that he might see your position? Well, that's gone, so you're saying the state "has" to come in to regulate. Women worshipping Daddygov as their replacement husband, how surprising.

Next:
2) I was refused a roof over my head because HDB didn't consider me and my four kids as a "proper family nucleus" just because I was a Single Mother.. Repeated visits to the MP did nothing for us. The HDB officer who handled my case at AMK Branch had a bloody smirk on his stupid face when he told me the only way for me to buy or rent a HDB flat was to grab any man available and marry him! WTH!!
Well. I don't know if this lady is a "choice mom" or a genuine widow. If the former, though, I have absolutely no sympathy for her. As Aurini says: "you make the choice, you own the consequences." You want to Eat Pray Love your husband or have children out of wedlock and subject them to all the consequences of fatherlessness, you live with the consequences. It's about time.

And no, you do not form a proper family nucleus, thank you very much. Oh, you can howl and scream for definitions to be changed so you qualify for benefits, but hey, you can change the definition of standing pissing up to any sort of defecation and then cheer at the thought that you're finally able to piss standing up, but reality is reality and heterosexual two-parent households have consistently been shown to be the most stable and conducive for children.

So no, you are not a "proper family nucleus", no matter how much you stamp your feet and demand to be. "In the battle between 'is' and 'ought', 'is' always wins." - Vox Day.
3) Mothers have to risk the safety of their vulnerable young children when they put their kids in the hands of strangers because they have to go back into the workforce and earn money to pay the huge piles of bills.
Oh, believe me, I know this, considering the ten childcare centers within thirty minutes' walk from my home, and the scene in the bloody mornings when I choose to go out for breakfast. I think the worst ones are children who beg their parents not to leave them again, or maybe it's the ones delivered there by the maid.

Now, there are many reasons why a double income is needed. The influx of women into the workforce when 1/3 of all women already worked outside the home prior to modernity, as Vox points out. Keeping up with the Joneses, and the mad chase for the 5Cs in this damned country. I would like to have a list as to what this lady considers "bills", too - remember that little piece I did on airline hostesses a while back?

Nevertheless, you helped precipitate this situation. No sympathy from me.
4) KKHospital A&E has a rule that requires you to PAY FIRST before your child can be seen by the doctors. The same rule applies when a woman goes into labour.. We need to pay the hospital deposit before we can go onto the labour ward. Once I went into labour without having the money to pay the full deposit required. I was having frequent contractions but I was told by the admission nurse to call family or friends to borrow the money or else she cannot put me in the labour ward!

5) And the prices of the delivery packages at KKH rises with the number of children you have! The more kids you have, the more you have to pay for your hospital bills as compared to a first time mother in the very same ward! Why is that so?? 
Whatever did women do in the thousands of years before the wonders of modern medicine? Oh, right, midwives. Although admittedly, midwifery across cultures was exclusively women-dominated for thousands of years, and it wasn't until men got into the business that something as simple as the Simpson's forceps was invented -

But I digress. Maternity ward too expensive? Sure, do what Mrs. JB did.

Do what millions of women throughout history have done.

Do what your grandmother, and her grandmother, and her grandmother, and so forth have done. to quote Mrs. JB:
It was not easy.  The pain was extraordinary.  Long contractions that punched the air out of my lungs, and Mr.JB was noticeably distraught at seeing me in such agony.  But it was not unbearable.  It was manageable, mostly because I entered the process of labor and birth knowing that I AM NOT THE FIRST FUCKING WOMAN WHO HAS EVER GIVEN BIRTH.  I approached birth knowing myself to be in a millennium long line of women who have sucked it up and got it done.  Sure, some women died giving birth, and make no mistake, I was and am profoundly grateful to be living in a time where it is exceptionally unlikely that I will die giving birth, but I also knew that most women can do this, and I am NOT THAT FUCKING SPECIAL.
You know, I do remember reading a while back that midwife-assisted births were increasing in popularity (25%) in the US, due to exorbitant hospital rates. It's an interesting reversal of a trend that previously had women thinking that anything but a hospital birth with epidurals, cesareans or both was simply unthinkable.

Don't like the prices? Hire a midwife and have a homebirth (but of course, keep the ambulance on speed dial; Mrs. JB is no ditz). Now am I being cold? But of course. Yet the economic reality is that things are not going to get better, they are going to get worse, and petitioning Daddygov to confiscate money from other people to pay for your shit is only kicking the can down the road, and you'll be doing your daughters no favours when the lights go out and they have to usher in the next generation largely unaided.
6) Our education system is merit-based. Attaining good grades and a university degree is a must to have a good start in life. Stressed parents pressure their children to be the best in everything so the child will have a brighter future.. but they don't see that this rat-race for the best grades is depriving their children from having a happy carefree childhood. This leads to a lot of conflict at home, undue stress on the kids and might lead to child suicides.
So what's your point? I don't read about people bitching about this in the 70s or the 80s when the edukayshun system was being turned and the private schools coming under government regulation for their own good. I don't remember people bitching when homeschooling became largely disallowed thanks to mandatory primary schooling. I don't remember parents, especially mothers, supplementing their childrens' education while staying at home like mine did.

And it's only now, when we have to pay the piper after eating the fruits of economic growth born from consuming the future, that you are complaining?

You're only complaining now when you, along with all other Singaporeans, participated in the atomisation of society that produced this cut-throat nation we have now?

I laugh.
7) Mothers and/or Fathers in Singapore have to work long hours, weekends, Holidays plus compete with FTs just to earn enough money to buy a "Government Subsidized HDB Flat" that we have to continue paying for till we croak!

We are now worried about the stagnant wages and the constant rising prices of daily necessities, utilities and the supposedly "Heavily Subsidized HDB Public Housing" in Singapore. We can't help but wonder if our children might be able to support their families and afford to buy a tiny pigeonhole in the sky for their own kids in a decade or two down the road.
See point 3. No sympathy. Singaporeans wanted this. We encouraged this. The price is ours to pay.

In fact, there's another bitching piece which essentially covers all the same points, you can read it for yourself.

So, what now?

To quote good old Heavy:

"Waaaah! Waaaah! Cry some more!"

You wanted this. You asked for this, remember? You wanted to throw your children into prison playhouses run by strangers half the time, and let them be raised by foreigners the other half. You swallowed the government lie hook, line and sinker, and bought into the cults of meritocracy, education and the worker drone merit badge. You believed that while working for your kin in your home was slavery, but working for a boss in a cubicle or assembly line was liberation. You made it such that two incomes was necessary to run a household due to wage depression, then bitch and whine that you have to work as well and oh god hiring a maid is so expensive.

You got everything you desired. Well, your richer sisters are doing the victory lap in the kitchen while you slave your ass off in a soul-crushing cubicle. How's them apples?
In the meantime, too many women, usually those who are just a cut below the most desirable tier, are stuck living out feminism’s nightmare, chasing a career when they’d rather be taking care of their family.  They live in the pursuit of the trappings of status and power, without actually attaining either.  In so doing, they perpetuate the self-sustaining cycle of low wages that make such a pursuit necessary in the first place.
And now you want other people to pay for your decisions via tax confiscation and regulation? My heart bleeds with sympathy for you. Oh, I roll in the schadenfreude.

You think it's hard now, just wait for the coming economic crash.

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