Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Women, Get Your Mrs. Degrees Before It Is Too Late! A Re-Post


The post, from last February, is here.  On reading it I'd like to stress one aspect of these eternally-repeating warnings:  They are always aimed at women who are going to college or who want to have a career instead of a job.  That it's those women who are most likely to marry and stay married is immaterial, because the objective of the stories is not to address single-motherhood or childlessness or anything similar but to assert that women must choose between their brains and their uteri.

The way the message is told to women who are not planning to go to college and/or to women who come from lower income classes is slightly different:  There the problem is all those men who have given up and play computer games at home on unemployment benefits.  Those men need good jobs so that they can become worthy of marriage, but the road to the good jobs is blocked by --- guess what? --- the society (coughfeminaziworldfavoringgirlscough) pushing girls to fill up colleges etc.

I have no idea if similar stories are told to men about their chances of marriage, to ignite that terror of ending up all alone except for several cats.  But I doubt it because the social scripts differ by gender.