As Iwantjuice pointed out, look at where she was taking her sampling from. NYC. Any big city is the perfect place for "man-boys" to live. Plenty of jobs, plenty of distractions, plenty of women. As much as I want to bash the author I actually think she has somewhat of a point. If I were to make a list of my single guy, and single girl friends there's a surprising trend. The majority of the single women I know have careers, their own places, and are pursuing new hobbies/interests/whateverthefuck you call shit you do in your spare time. The majority of the single men I know have jobs they're looking to upgrade from, live with parents or a group of peers, and are doing the same shit with their free time they were 4 years ago. Now my sampling isn't perfect but most of these people come from middle-upper middle income families and are college educated.
This can't be highlighted enough. I'm 27 and most my friends from high school live in cities now, of my nine closest friends (including myself), 2 are engaged, 2 are in long term relationships, 1 is in a short term relationship and the rest are single. None of us are even considering kids right now and the weddings for engaged ones are at least a year away. My college friends live in suburban CT and most of them are married or engaged, one has kids, one is expecting and another stopped using birth control two months ago. Oh, and another one is divorced. Things seem to happen much faster when you're out of the city.
The author of this article wrote another article entitled "Marriage and Caste http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_marriage_gap.html" attacking the family structure. What we have here is an author is attacking anybody not married with children as "infantile". It's worse than "whore logic". It's "I like my life, and you should copy my every thought and action" logic. God forbid a person doesn't fit her formula for happiness. If a person is poor, they should marry to have children. If a person is "rich", they should get married and have children. What happens if children are just not wanted? What happens if you follow the formula only to realize ten years down the line that you can't stand the person across the room because you caught her fellating your brother on Christmas Eve? Do not divorce (according to her perception of the world)! It takes two to make any marriage work. If one wants out, there's nothing that the other can do.
If anything, he's in the better position than the long term ones, at least he'll still be young when the relationship is over.
I did not mean to imply anything negative about women. I hear the what makes a real man question all the time, but I can honestly say I don't usually hear what is a real woman. The implication of the question, for me, is that unless you (insert preconceived notion) you are not a man when, for the most part, whatever preconceived notion you insert basically boils down to character/personal choice/personality. I don't know why you were offended.
Because women get questioned all the time. Being too slutty isn't feminine. Being too prude isn't feminine. Be smart, but not too smart. Be graceful, but approachable. Be well-maintained but low-maintainence. Don't have small breasts or men won't care, but don't show off your breasts or you'll seem slutty. And above all, for the love of God, don't be fat.
Ah, of course. All that sucks too. My apologies to all the ladies for being dense and literal. Now back to our regularly scheduled thread.
Focus: I've got a college education, a lengthy, decent paying career, no debt, a car, I'm twenty-six and my five year plan doesn't involve being married until I'm at least thirty-three. The first worlds view on what is a socially acceptable life-script, as the author puts it, has changed drastically. Of my friends, there is only two married couples, one couple who owns a house together and a smattering of dating or single friends. Only one of the couples would be ready for kids now and I'm guessing that even they won't have any until their early thirties. In a sense, there is no reason to for people to be the classical, mature man or woman anymore. We can live well into our thirties without ever needing to get a real job, get married or have kids. The average age of a North American is well into their 70's, the prime of my life is in my twenties and thirties; why should I waste the best time of my life being tied down with a marriage, mortgage and kids? My parents didn't have the same opportunities that I have; they needed to get a job in their twenties, in their time, being married and having kids by their thirties is what you did because you needed too - they couldn't fully appreciate their youth in the same ways that we can. People in their twenties and thirties don't have to worry as much; we can take any path that we want, hell, I'm going back to school next fall and won't graduate until I'm at least thirty-one, there would be no way that most of my parents generation would be able to do that without long term fallout. I guess in the end, it is quite difficult to tell men and women how to live their lives. Social paradigms have changed beyond what would be respectable thirty years ago. We are living in an entirely new age with entirely new goals. Alt-Focus:The merit of a person isn't if he has a job, kids and a house but how they interact with society and the world at large. In this sense, a fair amount of the population wouldn't be considered mature in any sense. Most people are self-entitled dicks and would push you under a bus if it meant getting their cappuccino in the morning.
It is actually kind of interesting how you can forget about something omnipresent as that. It's like forgetting that you're swimming in water when you're a fish. I tend to forget this sometimes myself as well. What I also find surprising is the hostility of some of the posters coupled to the gender of the author and the appearance of the author in this thread. How would the reaction have been different when a masculine dressed (think Don Draper) male would have written that men are behaving like sissies (ie. not the stereotypical oldskool male) these days?
This is a load of reactionary pig crap. Financial independence is important, and running late in finding it is definitely a problem (of which I was very much a part in my late teens/early 20s). But as for a "duty" to find a mate and procreate: I have no such duty. The human population is growing wildly (exponentially, even). This woman can kiss my 35 1/2 year old, single ass.
People would have agreed with him, just like they do when they read similar quotes from Sean Connery or Paul Newman. I think all this gender discussion stuff is bullshit anyway. I'll be as "masculine" or as "feminine" as I want and fuck anyone who judges me for it. As for marriage and children, I'd like to get married and have kids one day but I won't until I a) am mature enough for it and b) meet someone else who is mature enough for it, who I also want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm 20 now and I doubt I'll meet these conditions in the next 10 years. There are lots of double standards at stake here—if you marry too young and get divorced, you weren't ready for it and should have waited. If you wait then you're being immature and unable to grow up. No thanks. In the meantime, I have lots of other ambitions I intend to fulfill.
I would agree with him wholeheartedly. Men ARE pussies nowadays, sculpting their eyebrows in spas and wearing jeans women wouldn't be caught dead in.
Isn't it possible that the men on this board are pussies? You never saw Paul fucking Newman buying wool socks on the internet. You never saw Socrates checking his email, and you sure as shootin' that man eyeballin' your woman never saw Don Draper posting on the secretary-fucking Idiot Board. Pansies.
I'll have you know I use my wool socks to choke grizzly bears, and only check my e-mail 1) to check on delivery of my Maserati 2) determine if payment has been for my latest contract killing and 3) make sure that the free world doesn't require saving this week. As for the gender of the author, let me ask you a question: How many men do you know that would write an article bemoaning how men (or women) these days aren't getting married and having kids?
Do you know what the most (often unintentionally) funny part of a woman's profile on eHarmony is to me? Looking at the bolded portion a person would get the impression that you should put one and only one thing down in this area. And I did. I put sense of humor because that is probably the most important trait, one of that is often conducive to other positive traits. What do I see when I view the same spot for women? Paragraphs. Be passionate, but not too passionate. Confident, but not too confident. Be adventurous, but not too adventurous. Be taller than me, but not too much taller. And so on. And so on. And so on. And so on. And apparently those are just their criteria for a "decent" guy. You know why there are no good men for women like this? Because they don't fucking exist. Men can apply plenty of double standards when it comes to dating, no doubt , but to say women don't do quite a bit on their own is plain silly.
Edward II refused to accept the surrender of a castle he was laying siege to because his trebuchet had just been completed. He wanted to play with his fucking awesome toy and watch something get smashed to pieces. Men haven't changed, bitches just got louder.
This goes for beyond dating. I entirely agree that many people who date online are unrealistic; furthermore, because of the unbalanced nature of messages/responses, women can afford to be more demanding. However, the pressure to conform to demanding and contradictory notions of womanhood comes from every angle. From teachers, from churches, from television, from movies; once you start looking out for it, it's nearly impossible to miss.