“One indicator of women’s lifestyle preferences is found in patterns of educational homogamy: whether women choose husbands with equal levels of education, or prefer a better-educated and higher-earning spouse.In other words, many women prefer better educated and higher-earning husbands, and this is how many men can attract wives so they can start families. If true, this is a natural fact of female psychology.
Women’s aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning, persists in most European countries. The Nordic countries share this pattern with all other parts of Europe. Women thereby continue to use marriage as an alternative or supplement to their employment careers. Financial dependence on a man has lost none of its attractions after the equal opportunities revolution. Symmetrical family roles are not the ideal sought by most couples, even though they are popular among the minority of highly educated professionals. It is thus not surprising that wives generally earn less than their husbands, and that most couples rationally decide that it makes sense for her to take on the larger share of childcare, and use most or all the parental leave allowance. This is just as true of the Nordic countries as elsewhere.”
Hakim, Catherine. 2011. Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine: The Flawed Thinking behind Calls for Further Equality, Centre for Policy Studies, London, p. 24.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/36488/
In essence, good education, full employment and high wages for men are not just good for men, but good for society in general, since this is how many men can attract wives.
But under neoliberalism many men have been subjected to mass unemployment and their real wages savagely attacked.
What about some sympathy for the men?
"If true, this is a natural fact of female psychology."
ReplyDeleteDo you mean that it is something innate to female psychology?
They are interesting facts about the societies those facts were drawn from (I wasn't able to read up the original sources, so not sure how big a sample it is) - but I would be skeptical/wary of generalizing to female psychology overall.
Personally, I would rather have society and economic systems shaped, so that money is minimized as an equation in relationship selection - as I don't like the effects that has on society.
So, my starting point on that path, would be to guarantee Full Employment through the Job Guarantee, so that everybody has an opportunity to earn their way.
The points you brought up are interesting though, it would be good to see further sources/research on that specific issue.
The feminist discourse around this is toxic and disgusting. It is crystal clear that men suffer economically more than women in recessions and depressions. Indeed, unemployment rates for men are generally higher.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/femalelaborforce/
This accounts, as studies have shown, for the wave of opioid addiction that is sweeping the US amongst lower middle class males. The damage that this is doing is shocking and revolting.
That 1960s Third Wave feminist crap has created a series of myths and taboos that ensure that real problems like these remain unseen. Meanwhile you vote for Mother Hillary and all will be okay... or something. Ignore the fact that she has spent her life defending a creep who harrasses (less priveleged) women by attacking these women and degrading them as trailer trash. The whole 60s movement is really about power for upper-middle class professionals to beat up on working and lower-middle class people. It's revolting and utterly transparent.
The material impact is, of course, to break up families and give rise to very high divorce rates. Again, the evidence is crystal clear:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Probability_of_First_Marriage_Dissolution_by_race_and_income_1995.png
The whole thing is absurd. Surely this ridiculous psychodrama must play itself out soon.
I don't doubt there is a lot of truth to what you're saying.
DeleteOne point:
"That 1960s Third Wave feminist crap has created a series of myths and taboos that ensure that real problems"
Don't you mean *Second* Wave Feminism? Third Wave Feminism is basically an post-early 1990s
movement and very much bound up with Postmodernism.
Second Wave Feminism was basically a New Left Marxist thing -- often highly middle class and obsessed with middle class issues.
In fact, hasn't Marxism -- when it's not come out of the trade unions -- basically been an academic middle class thing?
Sorry, yes, Second Wave. It's roots were in the early-20th century American bohemians, not the postmodernist stuff (which is more Third Wave).
DeleteAnd yes, Marxism has been a middle-class thing since post-WWII. Before that it was a genuinely working class movement.
LK, your blog is starting to sound suspiciously like the many conservative publications on the internet.
ReplyDelete"Loss of jobs is causing loss of social status for men and destroying the family structure and the birth rate"
I am not even saying what you are saying is wrong per se, but by now, you must be a complete heretic among your left wing friends.
I strongly disagree.
DeleteMany left-wing people are waking up to the errors and myths of regressive cultural leftism. And actually even big name leftists have been saying comparable things for years.
E.g., Chomsky:
“Each time labor has been attacked—and as I said, in the 1920s the labor movement was practically destroyed—popular efforts were able to reconstitute it. That can happen again. It’s not going to be easy. There are institutional barriers, ideological barriers, cultural barriers. One big problem is that the white working class has been pretty much abandoned by the political system. The Democrats don’t even try to organize them anymore. The Republicans claim to do it; they get most of the vote, but they do it on non-economic issues, on non-labor issues. They often try to mobilize them on the grounds of issues steeped in racism and sexism and so on, and here the liberal policies of the 1960s had a harmful effect because of some of the ways in which they were carried out. ....
The same has been true of women’s rights. But when you have a working class that’s under real pressure, you know, people are going to say that rights are being undermined, that jobs are being undermined. Maybe the one thing that the white working man can hang onto is that he runs his home? Now that that’s being taken away and nothing is being offered, he’s not part of the program of advancing women’s rights. That’s fine for college professors, but it has a different effect in working-class areas. It doesn’t have to be that way. It depends on how it’s done, and it was done in a way that simply undermined natural solidarity. There are a lot of factors that play into it, but by this point it’s going to be pretty hard to organize the working class on the grounds that should really concern them: common solidarity, common welfare.”
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/01/noam_chomsky_america_hates_its_poor_partner/
The key sentence from Chomsky:
Delete"Maybe the one thing that the white working man can hang onto is that he runs his home? Now that that’s being taken away and nothing is being offered, he’s not part of the program of advancing women’s rights. That’s fine for college professors, but it has a different effect in working-class areas."
-----
Despite all the hysteria about him from the right, he's not an idiot.
Well i think its bettwr higher wages for all men and women it will give greater choice for all.
DeleteAlso one smart woman told me once.
Feminism is not the duty to work and the duty to care about your career more than about your familiy life (how its presented nowdays).
Feminism is the right to choose how you would like to live your life and being a housewife is no worse option than developing career but feminism is all about the right to choose not the duty to develop career.
Well the problem i see with chomsky is that he is the opposite of neocon (which is good) but he have the same zeal az they are but instead of supporting usa intervention he oppose it but with the same zeal as neocons support it
DeletePrateek, I have pointed out the same thing. Welcome to the center right LK.
DeleteSure LK's a heretic among leftists, but so what? So am I! ;-)
Delete"instead of supporting usa intervention he oppose it but with the same zeal as neocons support it"
DeleteNot a bad thing, IMHO. And close down all those military bases that we don't need while were at it.
Everything should be moderatly otherwise you can say that american intervention in world war 2 been unjustified as well.
Deletehttp://www.weeklystandard.com/no-country-for-burly-men/article/17737
ReplyDeleteChristina Hoff Sommers, herself a Democrat has pointed out that when Obama tried to inject a Keynesian stimulus into the economy that focused on those who had been hit the hardest - namely men - the Feminists went ballistic.
At some point, do we need to understand that telling women "no" is a language to master? It's this inability to do so that's at the root, I believe, of all the gendered problems we have.
In fact, it's gotten SO bad, even Bernie Sanders has had to put up with their bullshit:
https://youtu.be/o6B-nlN9Z4k
https://youtu.be/XkHjlROk4sg