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23 August 2006
According to Forbes, letting your wife leave the house, meet people, and have a life will mean you'll have a dirty house, become an alcholic, and die early. And yes, I do believe those are listed in order of importance. Dirty houses suck.
For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.
Damn! I just barely qualify. Oh well, perhaps the fact that I hate working for a living will keep the fellers fluttering around.
I would be a little less shocked if this article were in a mens magazine, but Forbes pretends to be directed towards business PEOPLE, not just men. This article clearly only cares about husbands.
Yeah, I'm rather fond of the part that lists all the benefits of marriage, and they all accrue to men and children. And then it talks about how unhappy marriage can make women. And then it concludes that the obvious solution is .... making sure your wife never leaves the house, so that she doesn't realize she's unhappy.
Nothing about guys doing more housework, or rethinking traditional roles in the house now that we're rethinking them outside the house. Oh no, the problem must be those silly career girls and their silly expectations. Sigh.
Individuals who make more than $30K a year are more likely to answer pointless questionnaires, the answers of which will be interpreted any way we see fit. Especially when we need to fill column space and generate a buzz about nothing.
Actually, I think the Forbes article did a remarkable job of pulling on multiple stupid studies to create this beast. I haven't seen that many cites in one of these reactionary pieces in a while.
Though it does seem that whoever added the line to the wikipedia article (which was, "He has been critized on blogs such as Gawker for sexism after writing articles that advised men not to marry women with careers and that equated matrimony with prostitution.") was a bit unfair, since the prostitution article was covering a book that compared wives with prostitutes.
The most important two lines in the story, and in fact the most important concept in understanding any of the work of social 'science':
A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation
Any one of these outcomes could be correlated to higher education and intelligence - which I suspect in a greater degree of respondents who seek to be employed outside the home, rather than to employment outside the home itself.
Wow! It became a thing! It's so heartening to see people calling bullshit on material presented so shallowly and irresponsibly.
Win one for the sane. Unbelievable! Makes me wish I'd written to Forbes today like I resolved to when I read the article. I didn't get around to it, though....I was too busy WORKING.
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