Ol' Molly here wanted a career and to be financially independent. And she is! Good on her, then. |
Posted on 10/13/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Eurotwit
Women who put off getting pregnant until past their mid-thirties are ‘defying nature and risk the heartbreak of infertility, miscarriage or other complications,’ began an article in my morning paper a week or so ago. I put down my toast and read on with the grim fascination of someone who turned 30 this summer and is beginning to feel the first twinges of anxiety about the vigour of her own ovaries.
The piece quoted a woman called Susan Bewley, a consultant obstetrician and one of the authors of a report on fertility in the British Medical Journal. ‘Women want to “have it all” but biology is unchanged,’ said Bewley. ‘The best time to have a baby is up to 35. It always was and it always will be. Paradoxically, the availability of IVF may lull women into infertility.’
Bewley went on to talk about the whopping cost that older women having less healthy babies is putting on the National Health Service, and concluded that women must be persuaded to have babies younger. ‘I don’t want to blame women or make them feel anxious or frightened,’ she said. ‘The reasons for these difficulties lie not with women but with a distorted and uninformed view from society, employers and health planners.’
How nice of Dr Bewley not to blame us for what she calls ‘the epidemic of delayed pregnancy’, but I think she has the wrong end of the stick. Women of my age have not been lulled into a false sense of fertility. We aren’t yet frightened — I hear outright fear kicks in at 40 — but we are well aware of the dangers of trying to have children once we’re past our reproductive prime. We’re informed and beginning to be concerned.
We’re also pretty clued up about why our generation is delaying having children — and it has nothing to do with being failed by employers or health planners. Nor, despite endless newspaper features on the subject, does it have much to do with business women putting careers before babies. In my experience, the root cause of the epidemic lies with a collective failure of nerve among men our age.
How many young women do you know, happily married or the equivalent, who are wilfully refusing to have children now at the risk of running the gauntlet of IVF in five years time? Quite.
Dr Bewley accuses women of ‘playing Russian roulette’ with nature, but the point is we’re only interested in having babies if they are fathered by men we love and who are going to stick around and enjoy bringing the little brutes up. By the time they hit their mid-thirties even the most dedicated career women are ready to do some nesting — even if that means grudgingly accepting that our careers are more likely to suffer than our mate’s and that we’ll probably end up changing most of the nappies. The trouble is that very few of our male contemporaries are what you might call twig in beak.
There’s many a slip betwixt having an amusing, attractive boyfriend and the pair of you committing to the long haul of marriage and children. I know dozens of delightful men of my age and considerably older who say they want to get married one day. They will even go as far as talking about how comparatively young their own fathers were when they sired them, and fret about how geriatric they’ll be by the time they have a son of their own to kick a ball about with. Yet they are careful to preserve the idea of getting married and/or settling down as purely hypothetical and entirely out of their control — as though a meteorite might hit the earth one day and when they come to they’ll be at the altar. In the meantime they concentrate on having as much immediate fun as they can and dodge thinking about next month or next year for as long as possible.
And who can blame them? If our biological clocks didn’t jump-start us into wanting babies, I think many women would do the same. Ours is a generation that has grown up with the luxury of being able to pretty much please ourselves — especially when it comes to our romantic lives. The power of parental pressure and societal disapproval has all but evaporated. Nobody is made an honest woman of anymore. These days the only reason to marry or commit to anyone is because you really, really want to and you think you’re going to carry on really wanting to. Yet the whole art of pleasing oneself is remaining free to do just that — something to which the arrival of a small child could prove an obstacle.
No one ever said biology was fair. I have accepted that in real terms I am suddenly much older than my male friends. When a great friend who turned 30 within weeks of me came round to discuss our shared milestone, it emerged that I was already bracing myself for my 40th birthday. He, needless to say, still thought of himself as being in his early twenties and claimed to have never considered a future with his girlfriend of two years’ standing because he ‘wasn’t ready for all that’. Of course not every man his age is in a state of prolonged adolescence, but a critical mass of them are. I recently went to a wedding where the presiding vicar actually congratulated the groom on having enough ‘backbone’ to commit to marriage while his spineless contemporaries squirmed in their pews.
I don’t know a woman of my age whose version of living happily ever after fundamentally hinges on becoming editor, or senior partner, or surgeon, or leading counsel. But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who seem to view marriage as the last thing they’ll do before they die, we have little option but to wait, busy ourselves with making the most of our careers and hope that Mr Non-Phobic Right eventually makes himself known to us before our ovaries pack up completely.
As I finished my breakfast and contemplated my chances of a decade of heartbreak, I wondered whether women will be the only losers in this epidemic of delayed pregnancies. Isn’t it possible that, just as I have no interest in a relationship with someone significantly older than me, when the men of my generation get to the dark side of 40 they’ll tire of dating girls who are now revising for their GCSEs? They’ll still have a fighting chance of producing a few nippers, of course — but will they do it by settling for a much younger companion who falls far short of the intellectually equal but by now hopelessly barren soulmate they went out with in their thirties?
What can Dr Bewley and co. do to get them ready for fatherhood before their mid-forties? I fear that even Jane Austen wouldn’t have the answer to this one.
That he is a lucky guy. Of course, depending on the state he could still be nailed with a palimony suit.
Remember, we've seen articles on here before about Brits and how they would rather hang out with the boys in the pub than go on "dates." And since the girls are giving them the sex for free anyway, who can blame them? Add in birth control and abortion to clean up any "accidents" and is it any wonder it's difficult to find Brits who want to carry on the civilization?
But don't worry. I'm sure the Muslims in Britain are reproducing.
SD
The thing that really gets me is that feminism was supposedly created to counter the dominance of one sex over another.
Yet that's precisely what I see in these marriages: domination. Only now the shoe is on the other foot.
How ironic. And hypocritical.
When called on this, these women will explode with anger. They'll obtusely attack the messenger, and proclaim their dogma to be unquestionable, even in the face of clear contrary evidence. The answer to men running from them is to blame the men, because someone has to take the blame for their situation, and it sure as hell isn't going to be themselves.
But the world itself is not changed by their tantrum. They can't change the fact that for every action there is a reaction. They can't change the behavior of the "marriage market", for lack of a better term. They can't scream or belittle the backlash of boycott against marriage (pun intended), and they can't get a judge to make someone offer them a ring (yet).
So they get mad (hey, that's what worked up 'til now!) and write angry snarky articles, one of which being the article at the top of this thread.
The answer to the female cacophony, and all the destruction that goes with it, is for men to stop listening, put Sheila back in the box, take control back and clean up the mess.
DA740
My wife is a Democrat... Although oddly enough she is probably more right wing than I am. Which is one of the reasons why I love her. Lol she's pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military, pro-capital punishment etc. Yet she and her family is infatuated with Klinton.
You have to have her listen to RUSH to break the curse, and trance that the Clinton's have put over her.
So the "marriage market" reacts as any market would to government regulation: a boycott.
Just as minimum wage laws create unemployment,
Just as rent control creates houseing shortages,
So does inequality in marriage and relationships create spinsters and perpetual bachelors.
It doesn't matter how much control women have over the process. Just like the communists couldn't control economies with guns, women cannot control relationships with judges.
And now they're beginning to find out why.
Asian chestnuts--definitely NOT fit for human consumption. Keeps the damn squirrels out of my bird feeders, though. We picked up a couple hundred in less than 15 minutes! It is beautiful out today.
Don't forget that a man who goes into a romance fearful of losing his nest egg will likely be recognized as a weak, inferior, and fearful male. Women tend to reject them.
That's not a boycott, exactly.
Too many men will put up with any amount of verbal abuse and power trips from a woman they find physically attractive - will even marry her, knowing what kind of personality she has.
A mature man won't do that. He thinks with the big head instead of the little one. He'll hold out. He'll put his long term happiness ahead of the expediency of keeping an attractive but shrill woman who demands a ring - or else.
I would like to reiterate that I don't think all women are like this. Oh, the fine gems that defy this insanity are priceless. But too many are, and my friends have married some of them.
I recognize that they don't respect weakness. Unfortunately, a marriage license today incurs weakness no matter how the man behaves.
The moment that contract is signed, she can come home, kick him in the b_____, s___ in the sink three times a day and there won't be a damned thing he can do about it, and she knows it, and she knows he knows it.
If he cowers, she'll eventually become contempful of her newly created doormat.
If he stands up, she's assumes victim status, files for divorce and takes everything he has.
Others see this time and again. Then they stop signing marriage licenses. Today's strong sane man won't sign, he won't take s___, and he'll tell her to hit the road if she pulls these antics.
And them Molly Watson writes mean things about him.
I really don't think that's the case.
Ol' Molly here wanted a career and to be financially independent. And she is! Good on her, then. |
Hi Nick. I've been a long time fan of your posts here.
Sorry for intruding......
American women scare the life out of me.....
That's probably why I have never been succesful with them :-)
Cheers.
Haha! No intrusion. Just don't be afraid of them. They will like you more for it, not less.
| Just don't be afraid of them. They will like you more for it, not less.
|
Indeed. That scares a lot of men.
It's absolutely astounding how exactly the same thing can be written in entirely different language several millenia apart and still be true.
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Feminism is the ultimate proof that we should be careful what we wish for, because we might get it.