Rethinking the Complementarian Wife

I had lunch with my mother and sister-in-law today. Both my dad and my brother are in the process of looking for new jobs, and both women expressed with the certainty of faith their belief that both men would soon find jobs, because, as both believed, "the husband is supposed to be the breadmaker of the family."

I was somewhat surprised to discover that I disagree with this sentiment.

I should back up. If you can't tell, I come from a pretty conservative background, and actually have inherited this position. I actually self-identify as Baptist. It's not an entirely true picture of my theology, but it's the closest picture that most people understand. And I'm a complementarian, which mostly means that, if I ever marry, I expect that certain details of husbandly and wifely roles will hold true.

Case in point: my sister-in-law is two months pregnant with her first child. As I believe that the wife is better suited to stay with the child, and that the child's physical/psychological/spiritual wellbeing is usually better off when the mother stays at home through his or her early development, I certainly expect my brother to get a more stable job than his current one. In effect, my brother will, by the grace of God, take on the role of the breadmaker of the family, a role which he and his wife currently share.

For Mom and Dad, however, this is a different matter. They're empty-nesters. Mom doesn't have to stay home to take care of her children. Dad's job hunt is for a new job so that he can take early retirement from his current one (if he doesn't find one, he just won't retire). In their circumstances, there's no reason that Mom shouldn't be the one earning the primary income (other than the fact that she may then have to give up certain leisure pursuits).

It's even scriptural. Consider the Proverbs 31 woman. She was the one who kept her family fed and clothed. She took charge of the charity contributions. She even kept up with the housework (though the litany of servants certainly helped in that). This freed her husband up to to Important Political Things of a nature that isn't entirely clear to me, other than that said work likely involved sandals. Point: the woman was the one who kept everyone fed and everything running. And if there could be such things as Active Business Women who were Not Also Harlets in those days, certainly it means that a middle-aged woman can get a job to pay the bills while her husband tries to figure out what God has planned. Or a young woman with young children can run a freelance business out of her house to at least supplement her husband's income. And you know what else? They talk about caring for the widow and the orphan, and that's certainly important, but in modern America, there are other social justice issues of more importance than taking care of women fully capable of getting jobs.

Waiting for the Next Bubble to Burst

I'll never understand Web 2.0 companies. To be honest, they've always seemed like the hipster children of the dot-com bubble--like the brains behind flooz and kibu got together over drinks and decided to have another go. Take, say, Twitter. It's hard to fit in even two full sentences, and yet somehow it's reasonably successful--or at least, "all the cool Web 2.0 kids are doing it." What's their corporate model? From whence comes their funding?

I bring this up because I just came across spinsnap, which touts itself as "channel-surfing the internet." First, this concept seems familiar--I could be wrong, but I feel as if I came across something very similar a few years back. It's an interesting concept and is clearly ad-supported, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how this website will stay afloat. The sites they include on their randomized list don't seem to be sponsored--that is, anyone can suggest any site, though I'm reasonably certain they're trying to keep porn out of it. (Or not--adult friend finder just came up.) Really, though, what is this? "Hey, I have an awesome idea! Let's get ad sponsors to help keep very bored people entertained! We'll model it after Google's 'I'm feeling lucky!' function, only without even giving it the guidance of a search word!" It just doesn't seem sustainable.

To spinsnap's credit, they have an interesting implementation--you can search by websites, by music, or by people. Music seems particularly interesting to me. Really, this tirade is against Web 2.0 corporations in general. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there's another bubble burst in the next year or two, as companies realize their services aren't really all that useful and as they discover that their costs outweigh their profits, and therefore start quietly pulling their services away. I have little doubt that this movement will be replaced by one that will ultimately prove equally unstable, of course, but one can hope.

The Continuing Decline of Memory

By now, probably everyone's seen the Miss Teen South Carolina video (if not, it's easily found on YouTube). A few weeks ago, some people I was hanging out with were watching and critiquing both her clip and some of the responses to it.

Now let me start by saying that I actually feel sorry for the girl. She made it quite far in a beauty pageant--an accomplishment worth boasting about--and she had a proverbial blonde moment. Pretty much everyone has those. She just had the misfortune of having hers on national television in the YouTube generation. (I hope she has a sense of humor about this). This isn't even about Web 2.0, the viral spread of the clip, and the netizens having their say about this.

No, my friends, this is about rhetoric.

As we were discussing the video, one of the guys pointed out that he couldn't blame Miss Teen SC for being taken aback, though certainly he would have had a marginally better response: "You've got to be kidding me! Where did that statistic come from?" After all, one can hardly expect toddlers and Alzheimer's patients to be able to identify anything on a map.

Later, it struck me that there was more to it than that. We're living in the Information Age, right? Quite simply, we don't need to be able to identify something on the world map because we have Google to do it for us.

See, this is where it gets back to the rhetorical canons. Aristotle lists one of them as Memory--i.e., the rhetor had better know what he or she is talking about, and had better know it well. Think Homer, who most likely composed his epics orally, or the African griots, the oral historians. They trained their "memory muscles" quite successfully to the extent that their oral records would be considered just as accurate as most written ones in Western culture. Even Plato complained about how books degraded the mind. The Internet's just the next iteration of memory "destroying" tools.

But really, is this a problem? According to Pew Internet and American Life, in February 2007 47% of American adults had broadband at home. For those who don't have it, Wi-Fi's available in coffee shops, libraries, schools, and even bars. Ultimately, Internet access will likely be as ubiquitous as the television set, the CD player, the telephone, ad infinitum. Sure, there will always be have-nots, but probably most Americans will either have it, have relatively easy access to it, or be under a self-imposed ban.

That's not even touching on mobile devices, like cell phones. Although such things are perhaps less easy to use for internet access than, say, a laptop, they're still useful when, say, some random person holds a gun up to your head and threatens your life if you can't identify the U.S. on the map. Google will still pull through.

So this begs the question: is memory still even useful as a rhetorical canon? I can't truly answer that question, but would vaguely argue that it isn't, or at least that its usefulness is reduced. It may be time to define the rhetorical canons of the new technology. I'm sure new definitions are out there... if I remember to look.