Context: Pandemic Makes Evident ‘Grotesque’ Gender Inequality In Household Work
No surprise, then, that undergoing traumatic paroxysms of existential stress in this pandemic has caused all those unacknowledged (and yet – hardly unknown) faultlines and inequitable socioeconomic discontinuities to percolate into awareness; cultural artefacts like some neurotic’s once poorly-masked behavioural anachronisms, endlessly and problematically oscillating and recurring beyond what, if any, value or rational purpose they may once have fulfilled or provided.
The cathartic shock of psychotherapeutic treatment and spontaneous Satori-like insights of meditative practice have similar features except in this case – it is epidemiological entropy that has held the mirror up to ourselves and found us (all) to be somewhat profoundly lacking.
Gender issues are one, if non-trivial and diverse, fracture in this mirror of ourselves (and) as afforded by pandemic-inflected insights. That we have identified this (one, among many) line of inequity is admirable and for all the horrors of the pandemic, we might assert the clarity of insight as a silver lining here. I wonder, though, what all these lines, these arcs and unmasked (or merely un-hidden) discoveries are actually tracing out here. Is this the emergence of a sustainable awareness?
More context: Stuck at Home, Men in Japan Learn to Help. Will It Last?
