Actually I don't really agree with much of anything she writes, and I guess I'll write this here for my own amusement.
Spend a little time with single women in their early to mid-30s, and you'll be grateful you're not one of them. The relationship scene is even more dismal today than when I was their age. All the women want serious relationships that lead to marriage, but many of the men they meet do not. All too often a woman moves in with some guy, hoping they're on the road to somewhere. Two years later, he tells her he's not ready for marriage and kids just yet. Splat.
That's because ideally women are supposed to be married and have children starting long before mid 30s. Also, the idea of marrying an older woman isn't as appealing as marrying a younger one, in many cases.
But wait. Hasn't online dating made the mating market easier? Yes – for men. If you really want to hear a woman rant, just utter the word Tinder.
So she is saying that men have all the cards in dating? That's what it sounds like to me. I've never known or heard that men have the upper hand in dating from much of anyone, except for from my own mouth and a couple of other men.
Single women are more equal and empowered than ever before. They have unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy. In many ways, they're doing much better than the men. (Just look at the lopsided university graduation rates, which are now around 60-40). And yet, large numbers of young women admit their private lives are a sad mess.
Now this here is where it starts to concern me. Empowered? The thing is, speech like this almost sounds as if this person believes in some kind of gender war, where it is man vs woman, and these two are in fierce competition in every arena of life. In other words, it sounds just like boasting of victory: doing better than men, and in possession of great power.
But it's not a competition, and anyone who believes it is, has already lost by turning their life into warfare.
If you're a gender studies major, stop reading here. You're going to hate what I've got to say next. I don't like it much myself.
Do you mean it's not good news for those who subscribe to feminism?
In a nutshell, over the past few decades, the traditional relationship exchange has broken down.
That's exactly what was desired though, wasn't it? Many of them wanted unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy. That's what you got! Somehow they don't see that you can't separate these two.
It used to be that men and women each had something the other really needed. Men needed access to sex. Women needed access to resources. Men couldn't get steady access to sex unless they had resources to offer, so they worked hard for them. The partnership between men and women was a grand bargain that (usually) left both sides better off.
That's the story they tell, but unless the woman is a nun, they have sexual desires too. And the whole society reinforces these myths.
For men, sex was traditionally expensive. The price tag was a long-term commitment to provide for a woman (and children). But today, sex is cheap. And that changes everything.
See, they want you to think men always had to pay for it. Nope, that wife wasn't sitting around eating bon bons. She was up milking the cows before dawn and contributing to the welfare of the household, cooking from scratch, knitting clothing, breastfeeding. Only since around 1950s or so have women really be capable of doing not much for their households and still been able to make ends meet.
In other words, in many ways women have to contribute more, because guess what? Not only are they having to get up early to work too, but they also have to bear the children.
This is the premise of a bracing new book, Cheap Sex, by American sociologist Mark Regnerus. Sex got cheap because of three technological developments: the advent of the Pill, which divorced fertility from sex; the onset of mass-produced, high-quality pornography; and the arrival of online dating sites, which make it easy for men to find willing sex partners.
Birth control should definitely be outlawed because it empowers women over men and it encourages promiscuity. Do it naturally, and the balance of power and harmony will return. Stop introducing things into the mating dance which don't belong there.
Sexual liberation is a fabulous thing – in some ways. But it can also turn men into louts, because women don't expect much in return for access. Today, most men can have all the sex they want for very little cost – no fancy dinner required. The irony, as Mr. Regnerus writes, is that today's mating market is probably more dominated by men's interests than ever before.
It depends on how you look at it. Promiscuous women win in this system. Feminist women win in this system. Traditional women tend to lose out in this current system that the feminists and promiscuous women prefer. However, if a promiscuous woman or a feminist woman wants to become a traditional woman, she may find difficulty in the conversion, and this is where the true issue is here. Because their previous lifestyle was directly opposed to the one that has long term fulfillment. Also, since these women shunned tradition in many ways, they may simply not know what they are doing, because they are of a different mindset.
When women complain that marriageable men (sober, steady good providers) are harder to find than ever, they may well be right. The marriage rate is falling steadily, especially among the lower middle class, while long-term stable marriage is increasingly a privilege reserved for the better off.
But on the other hand, women have unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy, until their mid 30s or so at least. Is this the issue?
A lot of women seem to have their act together these days. But a lot of men don't. "I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labour market screaming out 'You need more education'… and men have not," MIT economics professor Michael Greenstone says in Cheap Sex.
They don't figure that there has been a gender role reversal and that women have received preferential treatment from society which makes things harder for some men.
These feminist have gone about making life harder for men in every arena, so they can win and declare themselves victorious and better than (equal to) men. Yet on the other hand, they don't realize they've destroyed much of the masculinity and masculinity that feminine women find attractive about men, in their quest to dominate and overcome men.
What might explain this puzzling fact? Men don't have to prove themselves as providers any more. They can get all the sex they want anyway – including online porn on demand that can make the real thing feel mildly disappointing. (Ask younger women about men and porn. You'll get an earful.)
Yes, but on the other hand, women enjoy unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy. Hey, women are winning!
Like it or not, women have always been the gatekeepers for sex – not because they don't like sex, too, but because (no matter what you learned in gender studies) men's sex drive is innately higher. This means it's up to us to make the rules. "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.
Women have been trained to reserve themselves, and men have been trained to chase women. If society gives you all the power in relationships and everybody has fallen for it, you've got it made. But it's not really true. People just think it is. Men fall for it and women play the role. If men took their power back, women would be in trouble. But society has deceived men into going along with the exaltation of female status.
And if anyone disbelieves that men have more power than women, ask yourself how is it that older men routinely marry younger women and always have? And how many of those thugs have women willing to break into prison to get them out or willing to do things for them?
Since the women's cartel collapsed, women's bargaining power has seriously eroded. That's why so many single women hate Tinder, which has further commodified sex for the benefit of men. Women are just another consumer good in the shop window.
This is basically admitting that these people are just in it for power and not love. Women's cartel? Bargaining power? So now Tinder is up there with pornography as for competing with men's attention. But aren't those people on there who men are hooking up with that she's bothered by also women? What is going on here? So she's complaining that women on Tinder are hooking up with men for free? But she's blaming Tinder and not the women? And if women are benefiting, shouldn't she be happy for them? Because those women are winning through their unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy.
It may take a village to raise a child. But it takes a village to raise a husband, too. And modern society has largely abdicated from the job. "Good husband material doesn't occur naturally, but is instead the product (in part) of socialization, development, and social control," Mr. Regnerus writes. "n the domain of sex and relationships men will act as nobly as women collectively demand."
That sounds like blatant misandry to me. Could you imagine saying that it takes a society to groom women to be wives and to teach them? If a man said that aloud, imagine the backlash.
See, if you don't check things out for yourself and you believe the vocal prognosticators and self-esteemed wise men of the world, you'll be deceived away from the truth and thereby lose out on the full glory of the full experience of life.
Time to get our act together, ladies. If we don't, they won't either.
The whole time she's been boasting about women's unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy. Now she's saying that women have to come together to extract more out of men than they have already gotten. In other words, they need everything they want, without giving much of anything back, and they want MORE MORE MORE!
These people have forgotten about the soul. It's the soul which tells you this person is to be mine. It sounds like these people have reduced things down to power, control and financial figures. My goodness.