It’s from a blog called Judgy Bitch, which I’ve never seen before, but I stumbled across it and had my mind blown.
It’s a piece called “Sad sluts are sad that no one wants to marry them,” and it was written on Tuesday. The image above came from the piece, and it captures much of what it says.
It’s about the fact that you have oodles of college-educated women out there who are stumped at the fact they can’t find men who are willing to marry them, and from the perspective of a married woman the author, whose name is Janet Bloomfield, says the reason for this is those women have no idea how to be a good wife and the men they want – who are college-educated – can see that.
She also says the men have dissected the situation and come to the conclusion that marriage isn’t all that much in their interest. After all, what do you get? You lose your freedom to spend your time how you want, you take on financial obligations that could very well become debilitating in the event the marriage ends in divorce and you’re then expected to live with somebody who has been indoctrinated into a feminist culture which is downright hostile to men. And you become an archetype of a figure that in the pop culture is presented as a wimp and a moron. Watch any TV commercial you can find nowadays and ask yourself if the message presented to men is that being a husband and a father makes one a respected or esteemed figure.
So with all that, “desirable” men figure they don’t have to make that commitment. They can just immerse themselves in the hookup culture, get easy sex whenever they want and spend their money on NFL season tickets or vacations in Thailand, or whatever.
This might not prevail among non-college educated men, who have skilled trades for example, among whom more traditional values might be more the norm and who might be a lot more interested in marrying and starting families.
But a man without a college degree isn’t good enough. Or not smart enough.
She breaks out this graph, which doesn’t speak particularly highly of the feminist narrative…
What does this mean? It means that a college degree is a lot less meaningful than is presented to the women in question as it relates to the level of sophistication and intelligence they believe they can demand in a husband. Bloomfield mentions the lowly HVAC technician, who is too “working-class” to merit the attention of a college-educated woman graduating in a predominantly female field, and shows a bunch of questions from a certification exam those technicians must pass – and they’re a bit tougher than one might expect on an exam in a social work class.
Bloomfield notes that the solution is for women to aspire to be a good wife if they aspire to be a wife. And that means some things which older generations might find familiar…
Does this mean that when colleges were dominated by men, it was easier for college educated women to get married and stay married? Not necessarily, because men didn’t automatically value a college education in their partners. Jon Birger, the man being interviewed discusses what The Economist calls assortative mating – the tendency to marry someone of equal social and educational status, but this trend is very recent. Here is a shortened list of what a ‘perfect housewife’ does from a Home Economics textbookpublished in the 1950s:
- Have dinner ready
- Be cheerful
- Keep the house tidy
- Take care of the children
- Keep the noise down
- Check your whining and complaining
- Let him relax when he gets home
- Listen
- Be a source of comfort, not another problem
This pretty much describes my life and what I do all day, except for the ‘keep the noise down’ part – we’re pretty noisy around here, and it’s not unusual for my husband to walk in the door to a raging Nerf war with 10 kids from the neighborhood. If he minds, he’s never said so!
All the things a good wife did in the 1950s are still all the things good wives do today, with one big exception: cooking. My husband takes zero interest in cooking, but the previous owners knocked the wall between the kitchen and dining room out, and the stove is installed in an island that faces the dining room, so he is always with me when I’m cooking, even though he doesn’t actually do any of the cooking. I would say at least half of all the men I know are actively interested in cooking, and make the evening meal. I have 9 people coming for Thanksgiving dinner, plus the five of us, and a good friend of ours will be making the mashed potatoes at his house and then donning an apron and helping me with the rest of the cooking.
And then comes this, which is a mind-blowing observation…
Obviously, being a good wife didn’t require a college education, and it still doesn’t. It’s just that few women are interested in being good wives, and men have had to change their requirements. If you’re not going to get a wife who does all those things, you’ll need a wife who can earn an income, so you can pay some other woman to do them for you. It’s ironic, that in order to avoid the terrible oppression of cooking and serving food, cleaning and taking care of a home and children, taking care of elderly or sick relatives, and keeping things organized, women flooded into the labor market, where they mostly serve food, clean up after other people, take care of children, the elderly and the sick and keep things organized for the men who do the actual work. Sorry, feminists. It’s still mostly women doing all that work, only now they’re doing it for strangers in exchange for money instead of for their own families in exchange for love.
Speaking as one of the college-educated men who are supposed to be in demand in this brave new world, and speaking as someone who absolutely wants to be a husband and a father, I can say that while the piece is a little on the acerbic side and might be a little less persuasive to the people who really need to hear the message, I’d say it very accurately describes what’s going on. I run through a ton of dates and prospects, and while I admit to being picky and perhaps a bit judgmental (but guess what? You get to be judgmental about who you’re considering spending the rest of your life with) I see a shocking lack of women who show interest in being a good wife.
The culture doesn’t encourage women to be good wives, just like it doesn’t encourage men to be good husbands.
I could do a lot off that last sentence. Over the weekend I read a terrific book by Michael Walsh, the PJ Media contributor, called The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. It’s an indictment of the cultural Marxist Left, and the Critical Theory it created in the universities to poison the culture of Western civilization, and what that’s done to art, literature and other cultural institutions. At some point I’ll get around to doing a review of the book, but for our purposes here I’ll say that one of Walsh’s points is pointing out the destruction of the family through manipulation of the culture the Social Justice crowd has accomplished, and that applies to what Bloomfield is saying.
Without the family as an anchor of civil society, the Left gets whatever it wants from the public. It can put in place every utopian governmental fantasy and it can redistribute wealth and privilege according to whatever characteristics it likes.
And with the cultural Marxist crowd in control of our entertainment media and the institutions by which we are propagandized, as in the advertising industry, is it any surprise that husbands and fathers are depicted as weak and stupid? Is it any surprise that gay characters are the smartest, kindest and most interesting? Is it surprising that the single woman beset by louts and idiots – think, as Bloomfield references, Katherine Heigl in practically every romantic comedy made in the last 10 years – is such a dominant meme?
Society is now made to reflect pop culture, and pop culture is doing everything it can to make us single.
Remember Julia, the fictional government-dependent woman the Obama 2012 campaign used to show how it could offer cradle-to-grave benefits to females? There was no man anywhere near her, though she magically had a child in tow. Our culture has been working to manufacture a nation of Julias for some time.
But what Obama didn’t tell you is Julia is miserable, and she’s afraid to live her life alone. And she can’t fix it, because she doesn’t know how to be a good wife or convince a man she can learn.
That, incidentally, applies to a lot of men nobody bothered to make a campaign issue out of. The difference is nobody wants to hear the men complain – and rightly so. And they don’t. They’ll just retreat to video games, beer and meaningless sex where they can find it and be satisfied.
You can’t run a society this way. It will come apart. This has to change somehow.
Advertisement
Advertisement