Tag Archives: Gender

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New study finds that feminism does not empower women in relationships

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Kelli)

Excerpt:

“Girl power” might have brought women and girls victories in academics and sports but, as a recent book out of the University of Texas reports, an unintended consequence of women’s success has given men a leg up in the game of love.

Based on research published in their new book,“Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, sociologists from the University of Texas at Austin, have found that with women becoming more educated and professionally successful than ever, it has become extremely difficult for them to find a committed man.

Financially secure and with less incentive to marry, more and more young women are playing the field longer and lowering the value of women in general — leaving their sisters, (usually older and hearing the tick-tock of their biological clocks) out in the cold.

If he can get to the “business” with just one or two dinners with Martha, why would he commit to 20 dates and “maybe” Mary?

Regnerus told The Daily Caller that in the sexual economy women act almost like a cartel. At one time the price of sex was extremely high, but with the demise of the shotgun wedding, the invention of “the pill” and a population of willing women, the “price” of sex has plummeted.

“People’s individual choices matter in part because they contribute to collective norms, collective possibilities,” Regnerus said. “So this is why I say there is no such thing as truly discrete sex because it becomes a data point in what you expect from women or from men in subsequent relationships.”

According to Regnerus, it is largely women who decide the going rate for sex.

“So if you think of a collective of men and a collective of women, the men come to learn what is expected of them in order to access sex, because they want it a little bit more than women …Women have to decide, more than men, how much it is worth so to speak … but she is not deciding alone,” he said.

In this model, phenomena such as the “one-night stand” act to lower the price for all and as women get older the value becomes more consequential.

“When you are say 27, 32, I assume most women wouldn’t want to give it up just for dinner,” Regnerus said. “They are at a different life phase where they want to cut the crap and say, ‘If this is going nowhere, then goodbye.’ But the problem is they are being under-bid and men are reaching further down the age range.”

The article goes on to cite Jennifer Roback Morse and Carrie Lukas, who are two of my favorite women in the whole world when it comes to this issue. I have read Dr. Morse’s “Love and Economics” and “Smart Sex” and Mrs. Lukas’ book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism”, and I highly, highly recommend them all to men and women. Carolyn Graglia’s “Domestic Tranquility” and George Gilder’s “Men and Marriage” also pretty good, with lots of insights on how feminism changes the dynamics of marriage.

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    Commentary

    What is the real issue in the push for legalized abortion?

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    I think the main cause of the desire for legalized abortion, is that women and men do not want to take responsibility for their actions.

    The sexual act always has a chance of making a baby. If people who are having sex are not ready to take care of a baby, without the government’s help, then they should not have sex. We should not take chances with other people’s lives just so we can do risky things that make us feel good. The needs of grown-ups to feel good does not trump the right to life of another (unborn) human being. We have to sometimes give up things that make us feel good in order to avoid harming others.

    I think the reason why people push abortion is because they want to believe that pre-marital recreational sex is normal. The people who push these policies are often those who had sex themselves before they were married, perhaps because it was fun (men) or perhaps because they wanted attention from the opposite sex (women). They wanted the recreational sex to feel good, but didn’t want to be saddled with the consequences of their desire for happiness.

    I think the solution is to replace recreational pre-marital sex with chastity, courting and marriage. Men need to learn to control their desires, and make good decisions to prepare for being a husband and father, and get married, before they have sex. Women need to learn to do without male attention, to prepare themselves for having a husband and children, and to have sex only after they are married. Pre-marital sex isn’t an appropriate way for a woman to get attention from a man. There are other ways. And we should be training men to respond to those other ways. We should also be encouraging fathers to stay married and model love for their children by loving their wives.

    We should not have any laws or policies that discourage men from preparing for their role of protector/provider/moral-and-spiritual-leader in a marriage. Sex education should not be subsidized or promoted by government because it makes children learn about sex outside of the context of marriage. And we should likewise not have any laws or policies that discourage women from preparing for marriage, by making husbands seem unnecessary to having and raising children. For example, we should end welfare payments for single mothers to make it clear that men are needed to provide for children, and that men should be selected by women for that role.

    Children need a stable relationship with their married biological mother and father. So government has to promote marriage. Government may have to give up promoting third-wave feminism so that we can strengthen marriage, since third-wave feminism is opposed to marriage. We may need to to roll-back to first-wave (equal opportunity) feminism and give up the misguided quest to equate men with women in every area of life.

    And we shouldn’t be pushing sex education as a way of removing the moral prohibitions on pre-marital sex. Those prohibitions were there for a reason and people who have pre-marital sex SHOULD feel bad. The solution is NOT to tell everyone that there is nothing wrong with it just because the people who do it want to feel better about themselves by making everyone agree with them. I think the left uses the public schools to beat down moral standards so that they will feel better about their own immorality. But immorality is harmful – and it’s better for young people to abide by traditional moral rules and avoid harming themselves and others than for grown-ups to avoid feeling bad for breaking those rules. Sorry grown-ups, but maybe it feels bad because it is bad – and stop trying to tell everyone that what you did was fine. It wasn’t fine. It was wrong.

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    News

    Young women now being paid more than young men

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    From the UK Daily Mail.

    Excerpt:

    Young women have reversed the gender gap and raced ahead of men in the pay stakes.

    Landmark official figures showed yesterday that a woman in her 20s working full-time will typically earn 2.1 per cent more than a man in her age group.

    The average annual salary of a person in their 20s is around £20,000, according to the Office for National Statistics.

    The turning of the tables comes after a decade in which younger women – increasingly better educated and better motivated than men – have been remorselessly narrowing the historic pay differentials between the sexes.

    The achievement appears to be a death blow to the long-standing argument of equality campaigners that women are paid worse than men because they suffer from discrimination and disadvantage on the part of employers.

    The new reckoning of the pay gap published by the ONS showed that until the age of 30, women can now expect better pay than men.

    The majority of women ease up in their careers and devote more time to their children, a choice that in most cases hits their earnings potential.

    […]A spokesman for the Government Equalities Office said: ‘The narrowing of the gender pay gap is very welcome but it still remains too large, which is why the Government is committed to promoting equal pay and taking measures to end discrimination in the workplace.’

    And finally, some sanity:

    The insistence that the Government must act to close a pay gap that, for many women, no longer exists brought a scathing response from some critics.

    Economist Ruth Lea, of the Arbuthnot Banking Group, said: ‘There is no pay gap for women who do not have children, and for women under the age of 40 the gap is now trivial.

    ‘We always knew that single women were paid just as well as men. The idea that women are discriminated against was always a fantasy. I think the equality lobby will be running out of things to say.’

    But there isn’t any discrimination against boys in school – oh no, not at all. I’m sure boys do just as well as girls when they are taught female-oriented books by female teachers, all the way through school.

    As men lose their traditional role of provider, and the authority and respect it brings, fewer men will want to marry, and women will have to settle for taxapery-funded IVF, taxpayer-funded day care and taxpayer-funded single mother welfare. The only upside to this is that it will be mostly women who will be paying those taxes.