What’s more annoying than a feminist in her teens or 20s? One in her late 30s or 40s!
Reading the blogosphere or current magazine stories, you would think that the average women finds herself in her late thirties desperate to find a husband. Yet as I found when researching Grey Divorce, this is anything but the case. For example, most white women still marry in their early or mid twenties, and roughly 90% are married before they turn 40. So these women in their late thirties or early forties pining for a suitable husband must be a fraction of the remaining 10% (not everyone wants to marry). So why all of the noise? I think it is no coincidence that the remaining 10% is the demographic of magazine editors. If they aren’t staring down the barrel of spinsterhood themselves, they have a lot of friends who are.
I recall how irritating feminists were when I was in my teens and twenties. They were constantly bleating “I don’t need a man”, or “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”. Yes, but all I asked is if this bus goes downtown.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that this is the charming stage of feminism. The stage where they are full of youthful idealism and can-do attitude. They really believe anything boys can do they can do better. And at that age you can’t really fault them yet for not being able to prove it. So they are annoying, but in the same way as a young twentysomething who is convinced they know the secret to walking across the freeway. Sure it’s asinine, but you have to admire the sincerity of their convictions. Meanwhile, I’ll take the overpass just to be safe…
But now the feminists are back, stuck on the grill of the mack truck of life, and they want to complain to us about their misfortune!
So we get this rash of articles advising women to marry him, or hand wringing about the state of men today. Instead of “I don’t need a man!”, the new battle cry is “Where have all of the good men gone?”
These aging single career women wander into Roissy’s blogs on a fairly regular basis. He attracts them like flies because he continually points out that the clock is ticking, and for many of them the alarm has already rung.
They can’t find a man. Or “no man wants to commit”. They say old school patriarchy things like men should grow up and take responsibility. Often they will briefly revert to form, claiming all they really need from a man is sperm. But of course, if this were really true it would be the easiest problem in the world to solve. They don’t just want sperm from a man, they want him to be obligated (financially and otherwise) to be a dad. But they want his obligation to come with no obligation on themselves. Of course, no man worth his salt is anxious to sign up for that sort of bargain; so instead of going off and having babies, they continue their public gnashing of teeth.
The thing is, I do sort of feel bad for these aging feminists, at least until I read something like grep’s outstanding recent blog post or remember that they want my daughter to be a hooker. I don’t wish them ill. I just wish they would stick to one slogan. Barring that, maybe they could admit they were wrong?
Original image by Julie Patricia, who released it into the public domain.
Thanks for the shout out, dalrock. I said this on my blog but will repeat here – I agree with you that the Amanda Marcottes of the world are the lunatic fringe, however I encountered these types frequently when I was in college. They were the ones teaching “history” and “political science” and sneaking large doses of hard core feminism and white self-loathing into the course syllabi, so I don’t think their influence can be discounted. Women who do not get this in college will get it in their women’s magazines. Glamour & Cosmo are filled with leftie politics and articles encouraging women to explore their sexuality on the one hand and, if things go awry, use abortion. They give constant updates on “reproductive freedoms” and “obstacles to choice” and canonize NOW leaders and other pro-abortion movers and shakers. It’s one of the big reasons I stopped reading women’s magazines; to me sleeping with men I didn’t love and aborting any babies that resulted didn’t seem either empowering or womanly.
So while it is true that most women won’t agitate like Marcotte or make this their banner, the trickle down effect is that promiscuity and abortion are utterly normalized and that reproductivity is made into a women’s issue only. Among other things.
I’m not sure the “Fish/bicycle” chanters actually want men by the time they get to that point. What they really want is impossible – a do-over in which they get to be the popular ones. I could be wrong.
Hi grerp,
Thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughts. You are right that feminism is dangerous. It’s like a poison that has seeped into every corner of our society, even (especially?) the churches. For some reason as an Economics major in college they thought I needed to take a large number of sociology and related courses, so I experienced the same rot that you describe. Your comment on sleeping around, etc not striking you as empowering could have come verbatim from my wife’s mouth.
But I still feel very optimistic, if nothing else because feminism has taken every institution over and still not managed to fundamentally break our society as it had hoped. If this were a war, feminists would have flattened every building, blown every bridge and hold all territory. Yet they haven’t achieved their objectives and if anything the tide is turning against them.
And it isn’t just the radical or even self identifying feminists who are failing to have kids. As I see it, a middle class person’s likelihood of having children is inversely related to the degree they are susceptible to feminist teachings. Many career women still marry, but the more important their career, the fewer kids they have (if any). My wife and I know far too many couples where the woman postponed kids for the sake of her career, and are now approaching 40 without kids. Those who have kids and then divorce are (per my estimation) less likely to have kids who embrace marriage and kids themselves. And those who ride the carousel too long aren’t likely to get married at all, and having kids out of wedlock is still a status killer for the middle class. The same goes for men and their susceptibility to the feminist siren song. Roissy and friends aren’t looking to become dads, by and large. And men who drink the feminist koolaid directly are disgusting even to feminists.
Meanwhile my formerly feminist sister who used to lecture me endlessly on PC orthodoxy shortly after graduating with a liberal arts degree from UCLA now has been married for 18 years. She has 3 kids and listens to Rush and Dr. Laura. Her 11 year old daughter looks forward to getting married and having her own kids. My own daughter at age 5 periodically asks us how/when she will be able to meet her husband, and at last count wants 3 kids of her own. She’s never once played wedding, but she sees how happy we are in our marriage.
I loved this post. Brilliant. Says it perfectly.
Why they’re so annoying, … they also control the editorial boards of magazines and newspapers.
One thing about these feminists : They’ve failed to convince even a large minority of women to call themselves feminists. And then the feminists complain that these women either have false consciousness or are ungrateful for all the sacrifices the feminist movement has made for them.
Well, … a lot of the women didn’t want those sacrifices to be made in the first place.
I’ve had many women tell me: They liked the idea of chivalry and men looking after women, and they liked the idea of being able to work but not being expected to be equals.
Given the *huge number* of women who feel this way, you have to guess, it’s like the Soviet Union and Communism: Yeltsin called it when he said, you know, after 60 years, we still only have 15% of the population wanting to be members of the communist party. So I think that while we have power, we’ve effectively lost.
They control the universities and much of the media, but their reach is as shallow as a 1-inch ocean.
And radical feminists know it.
Radical feminism may be great for individual women (and it may not); but it’s an unmitigated disaster for any actual human society. No human society can continue when hobbled by these self-destructive beliefs.
And so, actual normal women ignore them. Especially in the dating/marriage world.
But with marriage – the laws are so biased against men, at some point, it’s all going to come back and bite.
Good insight Gorbachev. I think we share the same basic position on this, but your comments helped frame it more clearly.
But with marriage – the laws are so biased against men, at some point, it’s all going to come back and bite.
The economist in me is confident that eventually the new real risks will be accurately assessed and behavior will change. The way to tell if I’m right will be when we start hearing about things like men developing an aversion to marrying divorcées, carousel riders, women with kids, etc. But this doesn’t always happen overnight. As Keynes said, sometimes “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.”
Two more thoughts:
1) No comments on the “aging feminist” pic? Really?
2) I spoke about the disruption caused by feminism in our society in my reply to grerp above. One thing I meant to add is that the old saying that living well is the best revenge definitely applies here.
1) No comments on the “aging feminist” pic? Really?
I do have one. Actually, as a group, dinosaurs were spectacularly successful. They absolutely dominated life on land for a hundred million years. Mammals are great, and all, too. But painting radical feminists as dinosaurs slags a lot of very impressive dinosaurs.
2) I spoke about the disruption caused by feminism in our society in my reply to grerp above. One thing I meant to add is that the old saying that living well is the best revenge definitely applies here.
Pretty much: This is why radical feminists, with their in-vitro fertilization and denial of the existence or utility of men get so resentful and loud when screaming for power, because they have the convictions of True Believers and they know they’re grossly outnumbered. They know most women, the vast majority, won’t call themselves feminists at all, let alone radical feminists. They reserve the greatest portion of their bitterness for this majority of women who “assume” the benefits of feminism as the radicals imagine it, … but who proceed to live well. While the radical feminists spend all of their time stewing in their own pot.
Make Bitter Root Stew, eat bitter Root stew.
* I could have been really bitter after my divorce; a lot of guys are. Far better to just adapt. Living well truly is the best revenge. Feminists might eventually figure this out.
“For example, most white women still marry in their early or mid twenties, and roughly 90% are married before they turn 40. So these women in their late thirties or early forties pining for a suitable husband must be a fraction of the remaining 10% (not everyone wants to marry).”
Gee, when I tried to make the point that that there are still of women out there not looking for carousel rides but trying to find husbands, I was out of touch with the younger generation at best and a slut-sympathizer at worst, but the stats seem to bear me out.
“So why all of the noise? I think it is no coincidence that the remaining 10% is the demographic of magazine editors.”
Gosh, do you think so? Is it possible that the sort of overblown, narcisstic rap that CR and the rest of the PA-sphere so love to quote isn’t representative of most women, just stuff the Roissy cherry-picks to prove his point or that panders to the beliefs and confirms the bad experiences of his audience? Maybe there is no radical feminist conspiracy to keep the betas from being happy, just a lot of strum and drang on both sides of the argument.
Believe me, the women in their 30s are much more desperate and available to Alpha males than the ones in their 20s. And there are plenty of these older women who are single. Divorce statistics prove this.
It is really quite sad dating the older non-feminists in non-feminist countries. They openly say “I know you have the option of dating a 20 year old…but oh how I wish I could appeal to you. I wish I had met you 15 years ago”.
Meanwhile the older feminists in feminist countries are just lying through their teeth…going to the grave failing to admit they haven’t had any sexual power since they were 25.
In Eastern Europe and Russia I am seeing women recognize around age 30 that they are in deep trouble in terms of finding a good man.
In Western Europe and the USA I am seeing women this age *pretending* they are not in deep trouble.
The media, which is now dying, has helped them believe they are in a good position while too many Anglo Saxon Betas buy the false notion that it is supposedly socially unacceptable not to date women their own age…this idea artificially raises the value of older western women.
Laws like IMBRA, that were designed to shame and hamper American men who even think about making contact with younger foreign women…contribute to the artificially high market value of western women. One of the most shocking feminist tropes of all is the idea that if a man flies to Stuttgart to buy a Mercedes cannot be accused of bad driving skills, a man who flies to Moscow to date a 19 year old 9 probably somehow has bad social skills.
I dated a woman who was 10 years younger than me: she was barely 24. She wanted to spend her life with me. She had no doubts and thought the age gap was acceptable, even normal.
She was also not Western.
Enforcing same-age dating as a norm is the best way for women to be generally happy in a society…and for men to be generally miserable (they end up using pornography while chained to someone they don’t really want to have sex with).
This enforced norm might be why some of the women above report Anglo women in their 30s not having any trouble getting dates if they want.
It was no coincidence that the National Organization for Women (NOW) said of the Letterman/Palin Scandal “We believe that David Letterman was referring to the older daughter Bristol when he made the joke about Arod having sex with a Palin daughter, but we believe that the imagery of the 34 year old Rodriguez having sex with the 18 year old Palin is a form of patriarchal violence that Letterman should be ashamed of”.
The feminist-supported divorce rape industry is partly about making sure an ex-husband cannot afford to get a younger 9 or 10.
I can name 5 or 6 women of my not vast acquaintance who are all in their late 30’s and all looking. 4 of them were significantly overweight in their early thirties, and three of them still are. The one who lost the weight dates the most but has not married. Of the remaining 3, 2 of them are emotionally unstable, 1 really unstable, and the last is too shy to date but would – in theory – like to marry.
Another acquaintance is getting her fourth divorce and has moved in with another man and is not ruling out marriage. The last woman was married once in her early twenties, dumped her husband because he was boring, then hooked up with a string of exciting losers, finally having an open relationship with a man who recently dumped her. She has three children, two of whom are little, and is now looking for Mr. Right.
All of this is, of course, anecdotal.
I’ve dated many women in their 30’s who were actively looking for a man to marry and have children with. There’s more than a few. They’re all professional and urban and well-educated. Most have never been married.
I also know a good number of single mothers looking for Mr. Right, maybe 4-5. They date all over, and often have boyfriends for 3-4 months, but none will marry them. The barrier is always this: they already have children and don’t want any more.
3 of these women were never married.
I live in a big American city and mostly know white people.
The Asians I know generally don’t fall into these categories. It’s all white women, all professional, many with graduate degrees.
My ex-wife has apparently said recently that she’s amazed how well I recovered from divorce: and she met my current GF, who is a stunner (solid 9), and 9 years younger than me. She told a friend this month that she might have made a mistake when we got divorced.
6 years after the fact, it was both sweet and sad to hear it. She admitted I was a devoted husband and a decent man and very good to her, that she just didn’t love me any more.
Since the divorce, she’s had a large number of bad boys – one of them a notorious musician who just strung her along and dumped her, as he does with all of the women he beds – and now, in her late 30’s, she’s single, childless, and manless.
Looks like I’m wrong.
The Times of India just came out with the fact that scientists say women are more attractive at 31.
Facts are facts I guess:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Life/Relationships/Man-Woman/Women-are-most-attractive-at-31/articleshow/6187549.cms
The scientists were 31 year old women of course. 😉
To add a bit of anecdotal experience of my own that somewhat mirrors Gorbachev’s:
None of the single men I am friends with from my profession who are under the age of 40 would consider marrying a woman into her 30’s at this point, with maybe an exception made for a truly remarkable 30/31 year old. Similarly, even with younger women, marriage is off the table without things like a pretty strong pre-nup being negotiated beforehand. I have one friend who recently broke off his engagement and dumped his (now ex) girlfriend when she was unwilling to sign a pre-nup.
Thus, the irony of the situation is that the men at the very top of the resource ladder are changing their behavior (to reference the economic assertions of dalrock), and many are refusing to get married under the same terms, if they will get married at all. Such things were just a matter of time with the current situation in family law, but the bottom line is that I’d advise women to be smart and disciplined about finding a husband, because if you make it into your 30’s without being married, the risk-reward for a lot of men is going to go the wrong way very quickly. I do think that, as time goes on, we are going to see some major knock-on effects in the divorce time series.
This is without even mentioning divorce / children, which are even bigger issues.
Such things were just a matter of time with the current situation in family law, but the bottom line is that I’d advise women to be smart and disciplined about finding a husband, because if you make it into your 30′s without being married, the risk-reward for a lot of men is going to go the wrong way very quickly.
Good point. Waiting to marry a man in his 30s when he is realizing his greater earnings potential strikes me as the equivalent to placing your bet after the roulette wheel has stopped or scratching off the lottery ticket before you decide to buy it. From the man’s point of view, it doesn’t make sense.
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I still think the real reason aging feminists are suddently desparate for a man is because they are avaricious. Maybe their earning power isn’t as high as they expected, maybe the career life is wearing them out and they prefer to sit back on their ass and leech off some poor guy’s hard-earned paycheck.
It’s the entitlement mentality: They thought they were “entitled” to special treatment in the workplace, and now that they want out they are “entitled” to a man. In actuality, the aging feminist are entitled to die old, ugly, and alone.
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That is a male ceratopsian but othewise you are right
Single and lonely, but not looking for someone….at 58.
If a man won’t commit to you it’s because on some level he thinks you’re nuts.