I expect to be single for the rest of my life

I think women who are at any risk of getting pregnant hedge their bets and support his career just in case she turns up pregnant even if not intending to. But even if you're certain you're infertile, societal norms are incredibly hard to shed.

"Women generally put their husband's career ahead of their own." (In part due to) ...the weight of history, gendered "habit" and assumptions that people may not question until it's too late.

I have come to believe that a LOT of gender norms have biological roots but not in the way people imagine and the disconnect between WHY we do what we do and what we IMAGINE to be true helps keep us stuck.

Women aren't deferring to men because women are innately deferrential. I'm a loud mouthed brassy broad with a temper and I supported my husband's career.

Because I wanted children by him, had children by him and all of society is happy to support that pattern. So that WORKED for us for a lot of years even though I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and everyone -- me included -- expected me to have a career and be part of a modern two career couple.

And I think men universally are "the aggressors" or the person initiating a relationship or a sexual encounter because men get boners and don't want women randomly giving them a boner in public by asking for his phone number out of the blue while looking like a felony ready to happen.

No matter how "new man" a guy is and no matter how much he tells me he doesn't feel wanted by me because he's doing all the initiating, I have never found a way to make certain he's ready and in the right frame of mind etc. other than letting HIM initiate.

I've had men TELL me they WANT me to be doing some of the asking and the result is consistently "Don't do that. This is not a good time for me." while I grow increasingly angry at being put in an impossible double bind where nothing is ever acceptable to them.

And I am the highest ranked woman on Hacker News, an overwhelmingly male forum that was 98 percent male when I first joined. When I was on Cyburbia, another predominantly male forum with a professional focus, men routinely seemed to imagine I was some kind of extremely sexually aggressive dominatrix who did the grocery shopping in skin tight black leather with a cat-o-nine-tails hanging out my back pocket just in case I ran into a guy I wanted to make my bitch.

My first handle on Hacker News was Mz. It was supposed to be initials -- MZ -- from a handle I had elsewhere and I typoed it because I first tried signing up with Michele and that name was taken. I didn't really expect a two letter handle to go through and was still in the mindset of capitalized FIRST letter, lower case second letter because that's how NAMES are typically written and was shocked and surprised when it went through.

It was six weeks before it occurred to me people might think I meant it as a feminist handle, like Ms. magazine or something and at that time I decided it didn't matter enough to change because of my experiences on Cyburbia where I was quite open about having been a HOMEMAKER and homeschooling mom for a lot of years while men got excited at the prospect that I was some kind of domme sexually.

No matter what I say or do, me having an opinion and being willing to stand my ground and explain it seems to convince everyone I'm some incredibly strident feminist. So I didn't change it until after I made the leaderboard and felt a little bit like someone going to a Black church in the Deep South with a trench coat over a Nazi uniform and sitting in the back row with all my friends who KNOW I'm in a play that starts shortly after church ends, sort of like one of the plot points in the Vin Diesel movie The Pacifier, and THEN one day someone asks me to take off my trench coat and join the pastor at the pulpit.

At some point, I had written a blog post explaining the history of the handle but after I made the leaderboard, I felt that wasn't sufficient. I changed handles and the first two weeks was given SHIT by people acting like using my actual first and middle names was me trying to pull a fast one and FOOL people for nefarious purposes. And then things settled down and I got less flak under my real name than under the handle Mz.

So I'm not shy around men and I'm not some wallflower etc. I don't hesitate to tell men things like "If you don't belong to me, I don't belong to you." when some guy is hitting on me but in a relationship and wants some kind of guarantee before he leaves her. 

Leave her. Don't leave her. That has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Get back to me IF you ever actually leave her.

And yet I default to "Let me know when you want some time with me and attention from me." because I have no idea how to make anything else NOT a debacle. And not for lack of TRYING to figure out how that works.

I do a lot of blogging about my ideas for how to solve the problems of our heteronormative culture and do something else in part because I did the homemaker thing, then got divorced and got a corporate job and successfully got my sons to take over the women's work, a story told in part here.

Those events happened a lot of years ago. My sons are in their mid to late thirties and still live with me and we have figured out how to make sure we all eat well without treating me as their personal maid and cook nor making one of them into the household servant.

So I'm quite confident men and women CAN live together without treating someone as the little wifey or whatever.

And I have absolutely no idea how one would make that happen in a sexual relationship or marriage. Because most women get taught women's work starting at about age three or four and men typically get much less instruction in such things and what happens is a woman moves in with a guy, doesn't WANT to live in a health threatening pig sty or live on garbage microwave meals and CANNOT force him to meet her standard because he simply doesn't have those skills AND they will both tend to have a lot of heteronormative baked in assumptions about a ZILLION tiny details.

I just don't know how one overcomes the weight of history in that regard and I have a life threatening medical condition, so I CANNOT blithely step over his dirty laundry and say "Not my problem" because it is a problem for me to live with something like that.

So odds are extremely poor I will ever remarry because I cannot imagine that scenario following ANY path other than "Here, Doreen, put your shackles back on, pick up after him, accept being chained to the stove and a second class citizen while you watch your health deteriorate and listen to him blame your GENES and deny that him being a troglodyte has ANYTHING whatsoever to do with your dramatic decline in health and quality of life."

That's a NO from me.