Stop With The Female Breadwinning Trend

I don’t think there’s a “flip side” of being a female breadwinner because I don’t think there are exactly two ways to be a female breadwinner: a way in which everyone is happy in a world of gender roles gone tipsy-turvy, and a way in which everyone is swimming miserably upstream.
It’s as if the broad end goal of feminism was to have It All (a moving target if ever there was one) rather than “gender equality.” Couched in these terms, a mainstream culture that pays lip service to gender equality but is fundamentally uncomfortable with what that would ever actually look like gets to say that feminism fails because women don’t have It All. So keep fighting’, little ladies, but ultimately if you don’t have It All, your little movement is worthless. Ignore that man who is not having it all behind the curtain!

 As an African, middle-class woman myself, even I don’t expect “It All.” I do not live in a universe wherein my husband and I have the luxury of choosing who has the better paying job and who “gets” (?) to stay home with the cats. We both have to work. We both like to work, but if either one of us got laid off, or suddenly quit, or fired, we would soon embark upon a magical and interesting and totally crappy journey.
  I think the future of gender is far more queer than most mainstream cultural theorists are currently comfortable positing. I think the people of the future are going to look back and wonder why we were so obsessed with figuring out the “right” way to perform masculinity and femininity for so long. I think the binary itself is going to seem silly and antiquated.
To act as if there’s a magical “right” way to be male and female, a way that will secretly make everyone the happiest? A decision that’s the most in keeping with the appropriate gender performance or rejection thereof? It’s self-defeating.