Watch out, middle-aged men: They’re gonna getcha.

They are identifiable not by their short skirts or heavy make-up but by their unflinching devotion to their male bosses. They will work late for them, pick up their dry cleaning and even buy birthday…

Germany is “particularly hostile” to working mothers… Germany has the highest proportion of women who are intentionally childless, which also draws a great deal of hostility.

One wonders if perhaps the former is a significant cause of the latter?

In East Germany, the birth rate plummeted after the German Unification, which cost East German women: legalized abortion, 3-year paid maternity leaves, “mommy days” (one day off per month, with pay), union/Party representation, and low-cost child care. As noted, the West German regime imposed in East Germany was explicitly aimed at driving women out of the work force and “back” into the home; of course, most East German women in 1989 had spent their adult lives as workers *and* as homemakers (the Communist regime did little to question that patriarchal values that held most house work to be “women’s work, so most women had a “double shift”). The far more draconian labor regs in the New Germany essentially robbed East German women of half of their identities, and much more than half of their social and political power.

[...]

I don’t think that this article is really aimed at businessmen so much as their wives. With a few minor changes, it could be an article in Self or similar mag… “How to keep your man from straying with the Office Piranha!” After all, the man is attracted to the O.P. for her “utter devotion” to him; particularly her attention to detail in his personal life. The tasks that the O.P. perform are the “personal assistant” tasks that a full-time-wife were supposed to perform so that her husband could devote all of his energy to pursuing his career to the fullest. But if the wife works, these tasks are naturally left undone (heaven forfend someone pick up their own damn laundry), which will naturally lead a man to seek out a more suitable, laundry-fetching mate. This is the same argument about a wife’s professional achievements coming at the cost of the marriage only from a slightly different angle.

Funny, I was utterly devoted to my last male boss. I never picked up his laundry, but if he’d asked me to run a personal errand for him, I probably would have done it out of friendship. I hung out with him outside of work, even went for drinks. Of course, his partner was with him, as was mine with me. But I suppose that doesn’t count, and I’m still a vicious Office Piranha. :p

Marian:

They call me up expecting a young, single girl of that ethnicity

And everyone knows how subservient those women are, too.

zuzu: “Kindergeld” is a kind of tax credit that AFAIK doesn’t depend on the parents’ marital or working status. The main intstrument to encourage women to earn no money are tax splits for married people, which do not depend on the existence of children. (The rest of the topic disappears beyond my reckoning in the arcane abyss of tax code.)

Not arguing that the Geman binary approach to motherhood is of no use to anyone except pundits, though…

There are so many unquestioned fallacies in this piece of work that I can see how hackery like this particular quote might slip through the cracks. But I’m guessing that (a) the percentage of the population sharing memories of where they were 43 years ago has probably slowed to a trickle, and (b) any woman driven enough to be an “office piranha” would surely know who the hell Kennedy was.

I’m surprised they didn’t dig out the old “I never knew Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings” urban legend and be done with it.