I love a good hypocrite, and Suzanne Venker is today’s winner. She’s writing in Fox News about how women have ruined marriage and men are the social underdogs. How have women ruined marriage? Probably by making the same stank-face as the chick in the article’s accompanying photo. At least chick in the photo is dating a Real Man who knows that the best response is to be like, “You believe this bitch?”
Also, Real Men wear hideous shirts.
Anyway, Suzanne is very concerned that bitches are ruining everything. She writes:
The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.
Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.
Uh… hmmm. “Women want to get married but men don’t” is not exactly the take-away from those statistics. Also? Those statistics are not exactly accurate. Here’s the actual Pew report. And look at this:
Yes, that shows that roughly equal percentages of men and women place high or very high importance on having a successful marriage (and even more men and women, but still in roughly equal numbers, place high or very high importance on being a good parent; fewer men and women, but still in roughly equal numbers, place high or very high importance on having success in a high-paying career). So yes, that is the shocking news: 84 percent of women think having a successful marriage is “very important” or “one of the most important things” in their lives. And 83 percent of men think having a successful marriage is “very important” or “one of the most important things” in their lives. A one percent difference! Clearly men hate marriage.
The real disparity (and the change from 1997) comes in when you only look at the “marriage one of the most important things” in life statistic. There, more women list marriage as “one of the most important things” than men:
So men and women both see marriage as very important. Women rank it as more important — as one of the most important things — but large majorities of men also see it as “very important.”
From that, Venker extrapolates that “Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.”
That’s not true in any universe, but if you fudge the data enough, you can pretend that it actually supports what you’re saying even when it says the exact opposite.
Facts, as we know, are for communists and liberals, so let’s go back to Vekner’s completely unsubstantiated assertions and deal with those.
The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women.
As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.
Women aren’t women anymore.
To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.
In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.
Now the men have nowhere to go.
Can you believe these feminists, thinking they have a right to things like their own money and their own property and the right to vote and a life outside of child-rearing and husband-tending? Believing that they shouldn’t be physically abused or reliant on a husband for basic stability? Horrible women. Now what are men going to do when they aren’t handed an indentured servant at the marriage altar?
Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.
“It’s in their DNA.” Really? That’s where it is? Clearly we’re dealing with a scientist here.
She’s right, though, that there are some men — many men, even — who don’t want to compete with women. That’s because when given the same tools, women are in fact just as capable as men, and more people in the workforce does men that men will have to work harder to secure the same positions that in the past were only half as competitive. For men who feel entitled to those positions, that sucks. For men who realize that this is life, and artificially holding down half of the population isn’t really a fair way to get ahead, that sucks less — because those men probably also realize that “the workforce” isn’t set at unchangeable numbers, and the more people in it the bigger it can be, and an increased pool of workers means more talent and more ideas and more growth. Which is better for everyone. But a few men have a sad because suddenly they aren’t being handed things quite as readily, and Suzanne Venker thinks that it’s women’s collective responsibility to sacrifice our own security and financial well-being — not to mention, for many women, happiness and personal fulfillment — so that the proportion of the male population who don’t see women as equals and are entitled dickheads isn’t pissed off.
Eh. Maybe I’m just hanging out with the wrong dudes, but the ones I know aren’t fleeing from marriage because they think women are uppity bitches who need to get back in the kitchen.
It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.
It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.
So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.
Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.
If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.
Ladies, drop out of school, quit your job and wait. A good man will come around and marry you if you’re just feminine enough. And don’t worry, if you marry him, you’re a gold-digging whore, so you won’t win either way.
How does Suzanne Venker know so much about marriage and natural femininity? Because she’s a stay-at-home mom and wife, of course, who lets her husband bring home the bacon and be the family’s sole provider and breadwinner. Those three books she’s written, and the magazine and newspaper articles? Not a real “job,” because she’s a WOMAN. She just happens to be a wife and mom who writes and speaks in front of thousands of people. Just normal everyday stay-at-home mom stuff!
Also, she hates fakes! Fakers and phonies, can’t stand ’em. Putting that in your professional bio on your website is important, because it shows that you’re REAL, if not particularly original, and that you don’t fake.
Suzanne Venker is also very concerned about marriage. Marriage is a dying institution, because women are ruining it. In her bio she says:
We have a serious problem in America. Marriage and the family, the most significant institution of all time, is dying. Something must be done, and this is my way of doing my part. It’s that simple.
Well, she’s doing her part to play for both teams (Team Marriage and Team Destroying Marriage): Marriage Crusader Suzanne Venker is also divorced. Which hey, I say, if that marriage was crappy, good for you for getting out. But then, I don’t write finger-wagging articles about how women as a class are ruining marriage and making men miserable. Suzanne Venker also has a busy writing and speaking career. Which hey, I say, great! Do what you love, make that money, etc etc. But then, I don’t make an entire career out of telling other women not to have careers. I also don’t lecture women about how they’re stealing jobs from more entitled men while writing on the pages of Fox News — a place where surely a man could have written instead of me.
Suzanne Venker hates fakers and phonies — hates them! I wonder how she feels about hypocrites?