A crisis in gender: All the Single Ladies

This is a VERY LONG read from The Atlantic this month (ok very long in the sense that if you read it at work you have to keep returning to it) and lots of it annoyed the hell out of me because I guess I can't believe we're still talking so much about this. However, at some point it was honest and you can't really ignore the honesty in admitting that seeing a shift in gender norms is causing some real turbulance in romantic or sexual relationship dynamics.

But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

Basically, it's saying that because the idea of being "traditionally marriageable" has been shifted, we're going to have to rethink what the fuck that even means or why the fuck we should even care. Just kidding, that's what I got out of it. Instead the author (Kate Bolick's) tone is much more dramatic like "OMG NOOO MEN ANYWHERE!" but then it shifts into "BUT THAT IS OK!!" so it was kind of weird?

She closes with a musing on women helping women -- single-sex living arrangements and a sense of community for women that puts less emphasis on finding the right man and more emphasis on "A room of one’s own, for each of us. A place where single women can live and thrive as themselves." It sounds nice.

Anyway the article has MANY facets that, were I teaching Foucault or something, I would force my students to unpack and question and criticize and say "who is in control here? Why do people want this institution?" and perception and perception etc. I would have loved this when I was 19. But at 25 it's important to remember, too.

***+++***+++***

I had to go home for a funeral last week and dodged a lot of marriage questions. A family friend actually pulled my hand out of my blazer pocket and asked why I didn't have a ring yet. "You say it's serious -- does he know that?" he said, and I found myself DEFENDING our decision to do us. "we don't have a lot of money" "we're not stable" "we're happy how it is, we have a dog!" etc.

Really, what I wanted to say is that it's no secret that I am terrified of marriage. More, I'm terrified of divorce. I'm not terrified of being with someone forever, really. But why do we have to put it in paper work? Why does it have to be this way? Why can't I just enjoy someone and say OK I enjoy you forever? Even now, every now and then, I start to get really scared and go "HOLY SHIT YOU LIVE TOGETHER! You can't leave now!" (because apparently I always need an escape route and marriage has no escape route except divorce and that gives me hives).

This is not to say I hate marriage in general. In reality, every night before bed I ask Dan if he'll marry me, and every night he says yes. Does this make us married? Good enough for now.

Lots of questions and no answers, as usual. If you have time, print out the article and give it a read and/or comment and let me know how this all makes you feel. I need you ladies.

ETA: Edith Zimmerman interviews Kate Bolick for The Hairpin. Check that out, too. It's a great interview and it helped me understand the piece a bit better. 

On Marrying "Down"

I just realized that this could be a post about marrying a down comforter, and then I laughed in my head a little bit because -- LOL right? -- but it's not. It's about this article I just read about how "Marriage Needs a Role Reboot." The author mainly brings up the fact that it's culturally accepted for men to marry women who earn less or have less education, whereas for women, marrying down is considered taking a loss or settling:

"When we talk about women marrying men who are less wealthy or less educated than they are, something doesn’t sit right. We revert to the language of defeat, or settling, hence the question of whether women will marry down. Suddenly, the traits and criteria men naturally prioritize in wives seem like odd choices for women to value in potential husbands. Even for enlightened thinkers, these roles are deeply socialized and culturally reinforced. In fact, one of the most simultaneously challenging and liberating aspects of gay marriages (or relationships) is that there aren’t strictly prescribed gender roles to fall back on."

I don't know about the whole idea that marrying someone less educated is marrying down, but this is probably because I'm privileged enough to be surrounded by so many women with four year or  advanced degrees. The problem tends to be that even with an advanced degree, most of my female friends make less than their partners, or are "allowed" (this isn't the right word but I don't know what the right word is -- "have the choice" ? ) to take on careers where they earn less because they know their partner will support them.

I guess the reason this article was so important to me was for this:

The reality is that 22% of households already have what is often termed “breadwinner wives” (Admittedly, I don’t know about educational attainment in these households). That’s hardly an anomaly. We can go down this path kicking and screaming, bemoaning The End of Men, or hand-wringing overwhether manhood can survive the recession. Or, we can stop, take a collective deep breath, and recognize that we have the opportunity to re-imagine what it means to be a “real man” and to liberate men from what–even in 2011–is still a pretty limited view of manhood. Gender equality can no longer be only about addressing women’s subordination; it requires recognizing the restrictions this arrangement has placed on men, as well.

Because honestly? There are days when I sometimes feel like I need a support group for women who make more money than their spouses. I need a support group for women who don't have a choice in working part or full time, because the way their world ended up? That partnership needs all the money it can get and her skills/degree are going to earn that money. I know I talk about this a lot but it just doesn't seem to be the kind of thing I can find a ton of women to help me with.


I'd also like to know -- did you "marry down" (GAG at that phrase-- what is this a caste system?)  when it came to education or earnings? And if so, did any issues come up? How did you reconcile not fitting gender norms?   

How to make a woman adorable

via Anna Holmes

Well I am super lucky and my roommate gets a subscription to the New Yorker (but who can actually keep up with that, seriously?), this article by Tad Friend is paywalled for now. Marking this as a "to read" tonight, more thoughts to come.

Vegas and/or...Bust?

If and/or when you visit Vegas you may or may not notice something. Women as servers.  Now, that sounds pretty innocuos enough but, really, it's overwhelming.  Literally people, in just about every single casino I have stepped in thus far every single server has been a woman. EVERY. SINGLE. SERVER.  Not only that but the majority of the floor bartenders are women. AAAAnnnd, to top it all off, their uniforms are all low cut, short skirted numbers.  I mean, they are not particularly overly sexual simply, I don't know, something that a grade schooler should be wearing. 

I mean, seriously, why only women? I'm sure the ladies and certain gents would like attractive males walking around hollering "Cocktails" and working off tips. 

Well, my point, is that this weirdness/expected exploitation of women has me both distrubed and, well, jealous. I mean, I simultaneously think "Damn, it must suck to be a girl in Vegas where you will, no doubt, be forced to wear skimpy things just to get a job." and then, I'm like "Damn, if I was woman I could get any job simply by wearing skimpy things." 

Just thought I would share. 

How to deal with the world's biggest troll

We got trolled. I got trolled. I mean we knew it was happening -- but the one liners were just too good to pass up. The, you know, calling oneself an f-18 even during naps, for instance. I think that one got me most of all.

But the truth is, the memification of human beings sometimes makes us forget that we are, indeed, getting trolled by celebrities on the reg. Which is why when they aren't trolling us (and they're genuinely going insane -- I think now of Britney Spears), we start to rally in their defense. We look away, or we feel genuine human empathy. Or, at the very least, we stop laughing.

With trolls like Charlie Sheen, though, it's important that we have people like Anna Holmes reigning us in. He's being fucking batshit insane, and his one-liners are PERFECT to splice with cats (but what isn't!?) or with the family circus or with New Yorker cartoons or even as stand alones, for sure, but might our condoning of these things, our laughing with these things, really mean?

The privilege afforded wealthy white men like Charlie Sheen may not be a particularly new point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are endlessly derided for their extracurricular meltdowns and lack of professionalism on set; the R&B star Chris Brown was made a veritable pariah after beating up his equally, if not more, famous girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Their careers have all suffered, and understandably so.

This hasn’t been the case with Mr. Sheen, whose behavior has been repeatedly and affectionately dismissed as the antics of a “bad boy” (see: any news article in the past 20 years), a “rock star” (see: Piers Morgan, again) and a “rebel” (see: Andrea Canning’s “20/20” interview on Tuesday). He has in essence, achieved a sort of folk-hero status; on Wednesday, his just-created Twitter account hit a million followers, setting a Guinness World Record.

But there’s something else at work here: the seeming imperfection of Mr. Sheen’s numerous accusers. The women are of a type, which is to say, highly unsympathetic. Some are sex workers — pornographic film stars and escorts — whose compliance with churlish conduct is assumed to be part of the deal. (For the record: It is not.)

Holmes's NYT op ed  reminds me of one time some guy at a bar in Texas was being a complete idiot, trolling a bar, and I said a few things to him that were sharp tongued and trolly right back. I have a tendancy to do this -- to make fun of people to their faces when I don't think they are quick enough or sober enough to keep up. But this guy, he turned on me and I thought he was going to hit me, and he just goes, "you've got a smart mouth. You can't talk like that around here, yankee bitch." And I genuinely didn't know how to react. Suddenly the troll gaze was on the other foot. This guy had been trolling me all along!

Charlie Sheen is that guy -- he makes me feel like I've been laughing at a really obnoxiously drunk dude at a party -- thinking "this douchebag is KILLING IT tonight," and then all the sudden he does something that crosses the line -- he tells some girl, "shut the fuck up I wasn't talking to you who the fuck do you think you are laughing at ME you fat BITCH" and all the sudden the party collectively stops laughing and realizes, wait a minute, this guy was aware of what he was doing all along and he's a total dick (see also Mark Harris's piece in New York Magazine).

So internet, you know, the meme had its week. We all laughed when we still thought we had control over the one liners. But all we had was photoshop and some cat photos.

Let's stop laughing now.

Boys and Girls in America

Women do better in school — now all the way to graduate school where they get the majority of doctoral degrees. And young single women tend to make higher wages than young single men. The change comes at the point when many women have to consider their children. Perhaps the House of Representatives could take that up next time they get together to discuss whether they really want to eliminate federally financed child care programs.

Please read Gail Collins' latest op ed post about the Obama ordered "report on the status of women."

I was just talking to the intern today, and though he's still in college and won't graduate until next Spring, I find that he and I are on the same wavelength. I live in a state that I am sure is bringing down that median age for marriage (30), and it can be difficult because I grew up in a state/went to college with people who very much believed that marriage could wait forever. Who needs to get married, anyway? Right?

And after going on to school and having pretty lofty career goals, I am devestated by the fact that I feel -- behind so many people I know. People my age here are married, have jobs, have a mortgage, and as soon as they hit their late 20s they're having babies. I just don't know how they do it -- and I know that both my partner and I delayed gainful employment to go to graduate school, so we're going to be behind in that sense, but then I read stuff like this and wonder if we're just ever going to get there.

What's worse is that I am afraid that taking the major earner role will give me an added headache, especially when I think about the fact that I get maternity leave but my husband does not. If that isn't systematic sexism then I don't know what is, I mean come on.

And what do couples do but take their children to daycare? And how are couples supposed to afford that? (And, I REALLY don't want to turn this into a discussion about daycare but my coworkers who take their kids in are always dealing with what seems like a never-ending cycle of germs. Baby gets sick, baby gets dad sick, dad gets mom sick, both parents have to work from home -- if they're lucky -- or come into the office sick ... then baby gets them sick again. It's totally depressing, not to mention gross.)

I wish there were some more moms reading this so that they could tell me that everything would be all right and I can do it, you know, fuck the statistics and the "reports" or whateva.

Anyone?

I know what boys like

Did you guys get a change to read Molly Lambert's "In Which We Teach You How To Be  A Woman In Any Boys Club" ?? It was published on This Recording yesterday, and it's hard to choose pull quotes from such a smart piece but I will try to highlight my favorites:

Befriend The Other Woman: Always. Seriously. Even if she sucks (expansion on "if she sucks" follows below). Otherwise you will be "jokingly" put into competition with her constantly, and you will be encouraged and generally provoked by some dudes to do this for their entertainment to take focus off the fact that they are in homosocial competition with each other. Befriend her and press your boobs against the glass ceiling together (copyright Kristen Schaal). She is not the enemy. She is never your enemy. The enemy is always any guys who are creating situations that limit the number of females allowed. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down.

Some people will never want to talk about the way things are or how and why they got that way. if you end up exiled or excluded from the boys' club for not towing the party line, start your own fucking club. I'll come! I'll bring a lovely bottle of orange soda.

Most cool girls are totally fucked up because they are used to guys telling them they are "cool" or "funny" or "smart" and they assume it's a euphemism for "not hot" because they already feel like dudes with boobs. But that's okay because a hundred percent of cool guys are fucked up too and secretly feel like girls with dicks. Straight men are sooooooooo pink inside. They just can't tell you or anyone, because they have been socialized expressly not to. But I just told you you, and now everybody knows.

I think it's a great piece not only because it uses Mad Men to make lots of points, but also because it is honest and witty and you know what? I think we all need to hear it and read about it. I don't want to talk about my job specifically, because of life and the fact that I need healthcare, etc, but I do know that it is VERY hard to see men consistently making more money than women. But you know what's even weirder but that you don't hear about as much? How much it sucks to be the breadwinner when you're a woman. Acquaintances and friends and coworkers and families all have this expectation that their female friends or grand daughters or cousins are going to be with some dude who has some big time job or who will be able to make life easier for his girl, you know? And god forbid you plan that dad will be the one with more time to raise the kids. So when you're the one who says, "no, actually I'm buying our tickets to this" or "I pay the bills for now" or "I'm supporting him through a hard time" and you're a woman? There's something there -- an air of disappointment? A look like you must be some career girl hard pressed to NURTURE or some shit? Something is there, gang. And I hope that we're working on making that something a little less present.

So you know, keep befriending the other woman. Help her out. Because we're all Peggy Olsens and Joan Halloways and even Betty Drapers. We all need encouragement and reminders that we are not alone.