Replies

Wow. Just amazing.

To Jim Noble: Hostile comments--just read through it, if you can't tell the comments are hostile, then I can't explain it to you.

To the other poster: Most of my friends married in their late 30s and had children in their late 30s and early 40s. We all had careers and we enjoyed them. We did not regard ourselves as damaged goods--what makes you call them damaged goods? In retrospect the next generation is a little smarter, in terms of time, and maybe doing so in their early 30s. But in any case, all these women are interesting women with significant careers. Why should they forego that?

The problem to me is that as the writer of the book seems to be pointing out indirectly, men gained a lot more from feminism than women did. From my perspective, women still earn less on the dollar. Meanwhile, as she points out, men have a big pool of available fascinating women to choose from. Particularly true in big cities.

As for making oneself "saleable"--there's no point to being with a man if he can't offer security. Really. If women can offer themselves security, then a man had better sell himself too. As women talk among themselves, men would be horrified perhaps to hear. We talk about men's looks and virility and how it fades with time. We talk about their money. We talk about their success in the world. All this is important to us and increasingly important to women as they judge which men they want to be with. And I think that makes men really insecure and there is the resulting hostility.

At the same time, women are really insecure too, because we're living in a hybrid time. They want male protection/security but they want freedom to express themselves too. And there are no rules in this new time. So we each forge our own path.