Posted on 10/28/2011 5:09:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
Kate Bolick stares out at the world from the cover of The Atlantic magazine. She's wearing a black lace evening dress. "What, Me Marry?" asks the headline. She isn't smiling.
In fact, she isn't smiling in any of the photos that accompany her several thousand-word essay on singleness, marriage and the changing nature of dating and mating in America today. Bolick, 38, is groping toward accepting the idea that she may never marry. She badly wants to convince herself -- and us -- that older ideas about "unhappy" spinsters are silly cultural baggage best dropped off at the curb. And yet, there are those glamour shots -- Bolick behind the wheel wearing a fetching red dress; Bolick in a gold evening gown holding a glass of champagne; Bolick in a black cocktail dress -- but her expressions range from pensive to sad -- never happy.
Bolick seems genuinely conflicted about marriage. The daughter of a committed feminist, she marched off to third grade "in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE." She recalls that when she was cuddling in the back seat of the family car with her high school boyfriend, her mother turned around and asked, "Isn't it time you two started seeing other people?" She took it for granted, she writes, "that (I) would marry, and that there would always be men (I) wanted to marry."
So sure was she of the limitless romantic opportunities available that at the age of 28, she broke up with a wonderful boyfriend. They had been together for three years. He was "an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind." Why did she discard him? "Something was missing."
Ten years later, she writes somewhat (though not entirely) ruefully "If dating and mating is in fact a marketplace . . . today we're contending with a new 'dating gap,' where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players."
There is a great deal of interesting data in this piece. According to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think marriage is becoming obsolete. As of 2010, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, compared with 26 percent in 1980. Women account for the lion's share of bachelors and masters degrees, and make up a majority of the work force. Three quarters of the jobs lost during the recession were lost by men. "One recent study found a 40 percent increase in the number of men who are shorter than their wives." Fully 50 percent of the adult population is single, compared with 33 percent in 1950.
But these trends, however interesting, shed only an oblique light on the problem of the decline in marriageable males. Bolick edges closer to the truth in her discussion of sex.
"The early 1990s," she writes, "witnessed the dawn of the '"hookup culture"' at universities, as colleges stopped acting in loco parentis (actually they relinquished that role in the 1970s) and undergraduates . . . started throwing themselves into a frenzy of one-night-stands." Some young women, she notes, felt "forced into a promiscuity they didn't ask for," whereas young men "couldn't be happier."
According to economist Robert H. Frank, "when available women significantly outnumber men . . . courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want." And vice versa. If there's a shortage of women, the females have more power to demand what they want, which tends to be (surprise!) monogamy. On college campuses, women outnumber men by 57 to 43 percent.
But economic analysis can take you only so far. Men's capacity to insist upon promiscuity rests completely on female cooperation. And women have been foolishly compliant for decades.
They've conspired in their own disempowerment, not because they love their sexual freedom (though a few may), but because people like Gloria Steinem and Ms. Bolick's mother convinced them that the old sexual mores, along with marriage and children, were oppressive to women.
The resulting decline of marriage has been a disaster for children, a deep disappointment to reluctantly single women and unhealthy for single men, who are less happy, shorter-lived and less wealthy than married men. The sexual revolution has left a trail of destruction in its wake, even when its victims don't recognize the perpetrator.
1. No one is good enough. Read: no one good enough found them attractive and gave them a tumble.
2. The modern "I can make it on my own" paradigm.
By the time some of these women figure out that both of these scenarios lead to loneliness and unfulfillment, it's too late.
I have a female friend who married after college. The guy was a philandering dolt and she divorced him. She wanted to be a career woman and worked hard eventually leaving her firm and becoming a consultant.
Now, consultancy has dried up. She is 53, has had to take an office job (bye-bye "career woman") and is past child-bearing age. Over the years, she dated lots of guys, but always was probing the upper echelons of income even though she was not a member of the gentry. These guys got what she had to give and dropped her, but she was still looking for the brass ring - Mr. Perfect with a high six-figure or even seven-figure salary, a fancy home, a vacation house, etc. She never found him even though she has finally pronounced herself ready to marry again.
So, now she is alone, childless, working to pay off debt and aging rapidly. She bought the lie of feminism: "You can have it all." No one has it all. We only get parts of it and have to make sacrifices to get those.
Watch a televised sporting event in the North and you will see a lot of grim female faces - watch one in the South and you will see loads of enchanting smiles. And it isn't just the weather!
“The narcissism that prevails today, the sense of sexual entitlement along with the me, me, me, ideation....absolutely precludes the idea of marriage, fidelity, children, sacrifice.”
And they owe it all to Ecstasy.
One day a couple of them were apparently having some of these "hey, I'm gonna die old and by myself" moments, and one of them loudly bemoaned their plight, uttering the well-used mantra "where have all the good men gone?"
I took a great deal of satisfaction in replying "Why, they're already married to all the good women"!
That one left them shocked and unable to respond...
“Maybe I’m just hard-hearted, but I find it hard to develop much pity or sympathy for someone who would dump “an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind” after three years for reasons she can’t even articulate.”
This is not surprising at all. “Niceness” is actively off-putting for women, as much as ugliness in women is to males. Women do *not*, above all other things, want a weak man. “Niceness” is just another word for “weakness”. Degrees, intelligence, etc. can never make up for weakness.
Don´t fall into the trap of believing the feminist claptrap about wanting a “nice guy”. If you want the musical version of this eternal truth, you can get it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfeys7Jfnx8
I knew boatloads of guys during my first tour in the Marines who got themselves to the Philippines for just that purpose.
Generally, it was mission accomplished.
Just as Gramsci intended, and as implemented by the Frankfurt School communists Maslow, Fromm, and Marcuse.
I was chastised by many in my youth for impulsively committing to a handsome man 6 yrs my senior. Whirlwind courtship - brief engagement before the wedding.
The babies starting coming very quickly and quite often.
I pretty much broke all the “feminist” rules.
At times I doubted my own choices - it wasn’t easy, and we were not as financially secure as our career-oriented friends.
Now that we’re in “middle age”...I’m not regretting it at all.
Sure...we could use more money and larger saving accounts - but I’m still not regretting it.
LOL...in short reality is just what it says it is. Theres no changing it to suit modern fantasies, it doesn’t bend to moral relativism.
Well, hopefully they will not end up winners in the eternal sense.
That shouldn´t make us close our eyes to the practical consequences of the liberal assault on traditional mores. The winners are cads and players, the loser the average man and fools who actually buy into feminism.
Well, that´s just the latest tactical formulation of the same underlying assault on truth. “Total equality” has been an ideal pushed by liberalism since the French Revolution.
BTTT
Top ten reasons why American men suck (I don't really think so, but I'll give it a whirl...)
1) Lousy fathering. Dads absent or unloving or too busy.
2) Obsessed with porn, or pornographic fetishes of dolls, not even women.
3) Number 2 is very important, because it shapes a boy's perception of the whole world. He sees his dad with porn, and assumes his mother must be unattractive and ugly. No real woman, no matter how attractive, can measure up to the chopped-up pieces of women's bodies he pants over on the computer.
4) Lazy. Thinks the world owes him a job that's like the video games he grows up on. Wants to grow up to make video games, but hasn't any guts to get the training.
5) Can't face working for The Man. Sits at night in his mom's basement watching reruns of the Daily Show. Wants to grow up to be Jon Stewart, and is always practicing his f-bombs and snarkiness.
6) Watches porn on the internet instead of asking a nice girl out for a coffee.
7) Watches porn instead of taking the dog for a run in the park and maybe getting some fresh air.
8) Is always complaining about American Women, so he watches porn of Brazilian women who wear topless thongs
9) watches porn and gets paunchy, but always complaining about Far American Chicks
10) Dreams of the day that he can afford a mail-order bride from the Phillipines, but is really afraid of any demands she would place on him. But she'll probably put up with the porn habit...
Marriage is of God. I bet she is not a believer.
A store that sells husbands has recently opened in New York.
The store has become very popular, but there are a few simple rules:
Women may only enter the store ONCE to make a purchase. There are 6 floors, and the attributes of the men for sale on each floor are detailed outside. Although you can choose a man from any floor, once you have entered a particular floor you must make a purchase there. You cannot go back down, except when you exit the building.
So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a lifelong partner. On the first floor the sign outside reads: ‘Floor 1 - These men have jobs and love the Lord’. She moves on up.
On the next floor the sign reads: ‘Floor 2 - These men have jobs, love the Lord and love kids’. She keeps going.
The sign outside the third floor reads: ‘Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids and are extremely good-looking’. Still she moves on up.
Next she sees the sign: ‘Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, are extremely good-looking and help with the housework’. Excited now, again she proceeds to the next floor.
The sign outside the fifth floor reads: ‘Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, are extremely good-looking, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak’. Although tempted to make her purchase from this floor, she can’t wait to see what’s available on the sixth.
Reaching for the door-handle to enter the floor area, she notices the sign outside. ‘Floor 6 - You are visitor number 4,634,289 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists simply to prove that women are impossible to please’.
Do you think they appreciate the irony of adhering to a feminist dogma that was created and promoted by a cadre of lesbians and asexual old maids?
Yes, divorce reform is badly needed in this country. But so is social reform.. In a country where we murder babies because they were conceived outside of marriage and are inconvenient for their parents, loyalty to another is dead. The attack on believers is ongoing. Divorce judges don’t care who gets hurt, they just divide up the property.
“Rule of thumb for comparing sexual market value: Beta guy = Fat chick”.
I wonder if the Beta guy/fat chick situation doesn’t mean a successful relationship? If everything is about Alpha this, Alpha that... seems like the external aesthetic qualities are emphasized rather than the internal. Perhaps the alphas are always looking for something better....
The actual factor here is one the author of this piece is quite incapable of recognizing.
Historically, women always expected to “marry up,” to marry a man higher in status, income and power. What was “missing” with the guy she dumped was that he wasn’t “up” enough.
When the status scale for women was aligned so that the male scale was higher than the female across the board, this was roughly practicable for most women.
As women, especially the women described in this article, rose in status, there were fewer and fewer men who were even higher up the scale. And since men have always been happy to marry down, many of them married gorgeous trophy wife types from farther down the social scale, bypassing these women entirely.
IOW, the real problem is not the sexual revolution as such, it’s the leveling of status for men and women. I suspect there are plenty of men for these women, if they were willing to consider equal-status or lower-status men as mates, but they aren’t.
Because they’re alpha females (or think they are) they believe they deserve an even higher-status alpha male. And there just aren’t that many of those around.
You are very fortunate. Some marry and feel the same way you do but their spouse succumbs to temptation of our sex first society.
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