Book Sale

Monday, 24 April 2023

Men, You Have Done It Again

 

Image: Unsplash


What have you done? You have apparently ruined women’s lives, again. As the Guardian informs us,

Motherhood on ice: lack of suitable men drives women to freeze their eggs

Selfish career-driven women. Gullible dupes of the fertility industry. Victims of the patriarchy. When leading anthropologist Marcia C Inhorn first embarked on her decade-long study of why women freeze their eggs, the popular narrative was largely one of derision.

“There was a lot of either blaming women or saying that they’re naïve, stupid and so forth,” says the Yale professor, from a red armchair in her home in New Haven, Connecticut.

Meanwhile, in academic circles, egg freezing was – and still is – often seen as a calculated act by women to hack their fertility by prolonging it through medical intervention, “as if this was something very intentional that women were doing in this kind of planned, almost feminist, narrative”, says Inhorn.

This argument was so compelling that it formed one of her initial hypotheses: “Is it career and educational aspiration that’s driving the turn to egg freezing?”

But when she started speaking to women, it became almost immediately clear that in fact it was something – or someone – else driving the globally expanding trend, which in less than a generation has gone from unheard of to, in some circles, almost ubiquitous.

More than 150 interviews later, her research – the largest anthropological study to date into why women freeze their eggs – concluded that it was men, not women, who were the problem. The biggest driving factor for women in the US was a shortage of suitable educated men, a problem which she terms in her forthcoming book, Motherhood on Ice, the “mating gap”.”

You selfish men, how dare you? You have not focused on getting educated enough for these high-maintenance, overly qualified women. How could you be so selfish?

This is incredible isn’t it. Now that the fruits of feminism are setting in, and women are starting to realize that more education is not making them more attractive with men, they feel the need to blame the men for this situation. I agree with the author that it is not very likely to be a result of a deliberate planned out feminist approach to family planning. It is much more likely to simply be that most of these women cannot see the way they have been guided by feminism to live a certain way, and then trained by society to not see the logical conclusions of their actions. In other words, they can't see how choosing a + b inevitably leads to c. And they then blame others for the situation. 

This line is particularly funny,

“Sometimes men would joke or insult them about their jobs or say ‘you’re smarter than I am, I can’t go out with you’. I mean, just really blatant kinds of misogyny and discrimination,” she says.”[i]

Men are being so “mean” now that they are saying to say to women this horrible line: “You’re too smart”. How could they be so horrible? Some women are actually now feeling discriminated against for being too educated for the men they are dating, and in many cases are knocking back themselves. Most men don't really care how smart a woman is, but more and more are finding out how much these women care, and therefore they are not as willing to pursue them as they may have once done. 

It is probably a bit harsh to find this whole article funny, because it is a genuinely sad trend in our modern society that the most intelligent women generally have the least amount of children. But the utter inability for the woman writing this piece to come to the right conclusion just increases the hilarity.

After spending the whole article lamenting how women’s newfound education levels are getting in the way of them finding love and having children, she concludes with this gem of a couple of paragraphs,

“In her book, Inhorn writes that closing the gap between the genders will be a “critical policy challenge in the decades ahead”. But until society “fixes men”, egg freezing will remain the best reproductive option for single women in their 30s.

But in the meantime, she says, we should focus on celebrating women’s successes. “Women around the world are really doing amazing things in higher education,” she adds. “But unfortunately the downside of that is some men are not doing so well now and women are suffering for that.””[ii]

She literally ends by celebrating the problem. Women’s education is having the twin negative effect on society of making women too choosey and men less interested in spending time on women who are too choosey, but she actually says, “we should focus on celebrating women’s successes.” We should celebrate the very issue that is becoming a roadblock to these women finding marital happiness? And just before she doubles down on this, she also notes the real issue is that men need fixing.

This is funny. It is truly funny. 

But it is not just funny. Because in a sense she is right, men do need to be held responsible for a large share of this problem. Far too many fathers and grandfathers have contributed to the lie that women can have it all, that they can have the careers, travel portfolios, the string of lovers[iii] and also the family life with children. Far too many men have not told their daughters the truth, and that is that men don’t want someone who is always going to intellectually challenge them[iv], they simply want a wife. And a wife is not someone who men see as needing to go toe to toe with them in every way in some battle for equality, this is more akin to a nightmare for most men rather than marital bliss. For most men a wife is simply a beautiful woman they can do life with. Someone who is a distinct, beautiful person whom they can cherish, and look after and view as a helper and supporter. And many modern women have not been taught how to be this way. They have been taught to compete with men and are surprised when men tire of this. They want to lead in every area of their lives and then are confused that most men will not follow them. Many women have forgotten how to be agreeable to men, and refuse to acknowledge how important this is.

To most men your education level is not a factor in the relationship, he can take it or leave it. He wants to know are you attractive, of good character, loyal and can you be a devoted wife. Education level does not always factor into these qualifications and when it does it is just as likely to be a hinderance (though not always) as a help. Because more and more men are coming to realize that a woman with a vast education portfolio and a career is far less likely to make a devoted mother who is willing to give these things up to be with their children. She will have split loyalties and men are finding themselves increasingly less interested in such women. And ironically the men who are ok with this are becoming less and less interesting to women. 

So even though there is a strong comedy in what this article is saying, at the end of the day it is more like a Greek comedy, that is a tragedy, than a laugh out loud comedy. Because it is tragic that such high-quality women have been trained and propagandized to remove themselves from the gene pool of society. They have been conned into not being the mothers that society needs them to be. And they are actually right to sense that this is in some way the fault of men, they are just not right about how the men need to be challenged. Men don’t need to be fixed, men need to reminded to train their daughters to desire marriage and motherhood above all else. Otherwise, they might find their daughter ends up like the sad, lonely women this piece is talking about.

References



[i] https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/motherhood-on-ice-lack-of-suitable-men-drives-women-to-freeze-their-eggs/ar-AA1ad6mg?ocid=emmx-mmx-feeds&PC=EMMX01

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] This one is not true for Christian men and some other men, but is true for many secular men in society.

[iv] They may want this some of the time, but not all of the time.

No comments:

Post a Comment