T is for This requires comment...

One thing that is true about humans is that they do something, and then make up the reasons for it later.

In this case we have what I am sure is a lovely woman (Hannah Seligson), explaining why she isn't getting married.

Apparently there are 'un-travelled continents and four more career paths to explore'.

And there are. Career paths and continents, which can't be explored if:

1) no one has a very high-paying career to pay for them, and
2) no one has been roped into a divorce settlement to pay for them.

Now I do think Hannah is probably a decent partner, as she tracks her purchases with an eye to dividing it up based on who paid for what, and tries to avoid the messy divorces of the previous generation, but I wonder...

I wonder if she really would, after a 12-year non-married relationship, walk away with just the things she personally bought - or if she would walk across the street to the lawyers office, and discover that palimony is just as good as marriage, and take her ex 'partner' for everything she could get. I can hear her muttering about how 'that bastard took the best years of my life', and feeling all justified as she turns him into a slave for the rest of his.

Unfair? Unrealistic? Not if you look at the statistics. No, unfortunately, financially enslaving your ex is big business, and if Hannah resists the temptation, she is the exception, not the rule.

The delay in marriage might have something to do with unexplored contients and careers, but it is, in my opinion, mostly about men avoiding slavery.

Why did this particular essay tweak me enough to post? Because it reeked so strongly of sour grapes. Rare is the man who doesn't want to find a good woman, and raise children with her. Even more rare is the PERSON (no sexism in this post) who can resist enslaving their ex and ensuring their future casual explorations of careers an continents when the state hands it to them on a silver platter, courtesy of the partner whom they now dislike.

-And the tightness of the marriage market is all about this. With a judiciary/legal system that thinks that men were built to support women, no matter WHAT they do (no fault, remember?) marriage is going to become more and more rare.

It's not about 'adulthood', or the length of 'careers' - marriages and kids were more common when we were mostly working on farms and in sweatshops, and when 'success' was something that never happened. And it isn't about exploration, although the exploration is in there, but mostly by the women, and at the man's expense.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M

W is for Why D'Ja Spoze...

There have been a number of articles on the much heavier impact of the current economic disaster on men than women. The Rights of Man directs us to a UK report that shows the impact on married/cohabiting men is twice that of women.

And why d'ja spoze that is? Why do you suppose that men are more than twice as likely to find themselves unemployed than women?

Is there any chance that it is because many of the jobs women fill are entitlement jobs, government jobs, you-can't-be-fired-from-this-one jobs, and she-has-something-on-the-boss jobs? Make-work jobs and no-show jobs? Service jobs that require just a bit less, but must be done come heck-or-high-water?

D'Ja Spoze?

But as we contemplate the reality of numbers like those in the graph here, there are others who say things like:

"In the early '70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers' circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold. But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved." Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, Sept. 19, 2009.*

and

"Many women are being charged more in health care coverage, but as we all know, women are earning less. We all know that women earn 78 cents on the dollar to every men -- to a man [sic]." Michelle Obama, First Lady (Hat tip for graph and quotes - American Thinker)


If it is so terrible to be a woman, than why d'ja spose the real numbers all seem to indicate something else? Why is it that 2/3rds of all male suicides are divorced or separated, and why is it that that number is almost exactly equal to the difference between the male and female suicide rate?

Why D'Ja Spoze?

The First Lady should know better, but perhaps in the echo chamber she lives in, she can't hear anything but the vaporings of NOW.

On the other hand Dowd is truly tone-deaf. She works in the news industry and should know that men are dying in the streets - but here she is wringing her hands about her ennui. Disgusting.

Update: Novaseeker dissects Dowd and her ennui gap here.

Brilliant line from Novaseeker: There are more widows, Maureen, in large part because men die younger than women do, and die much more often at work than women do. It's hardly a romantic advantage later in life if you are dead.

From my comment on Novaseeker's post:

Dowd is blindingly awful. How disgusting that she blathers on about her lack of happiness, her ennui, when 3x the number of men are dying of suicide as women, when men are dying earlier and in larger numbers from poor health care, when men's deaths make up 90+ percent of hazardous job deaths.
[...]
When we see black people dying in this way we attribute it to racism. I say that when men die earlier and in greater numbers, it is a result of genderism that fails to care for their needs, that drives them into dangerous jobs, and kills them off early. All while women like Dowd whine about their ennui. (spit)

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M

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* I won't link the NYT or Dowd because they live in such a world of propaganda, and I don't want to send traffic their way. Probably I shouldn't link Whitehouse.Gov for the same reasons. But you can find the Dowd link at American Thinker here if you want to go wallow in it. I think you have to register to read her swill. But Novaseeker has a lot of it.

p.s. Welcome Novaseeker to the blogroll.