Lauren Southern: what every girl needs to hear

In the video below, Lauren Southern points out to young women that the "liberated" path they are often encouraged to take, namely of having many sexual partners and of delaying finding a husband, often leads to unhappiness. It squanders the advantages that a young woman has in securing her future and undermines the ability of women to successfully pair bond (she has some interesting statistics on this).

Some anecdotal support for this video. I've been reading some of the newspaper columns lately of Clem Bastow, a 34-year-old Melbourne journalist. When she turned 30 she wrote:

It’s finally here: I’m finally 30 and flirty and thriving...I don't feel any dread...I mean, who knows, I may wake up tomorrow sobbing and wondering where it all went wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m feeling pretty confident...I don’t have any crushing sense of existential dread about the big 3-0.

But her more recent columns show someone who is jaded and feeling the effects of hitting the wall. In one of her pieces, she confesses that she has given up on dating and has bought a single bed for herself:

When I was younger and punishing my body into an outward representation of "hotness" (read: thinness), I let my physicality do the flirting for me; now, older and having put down the fake tan can, it's harder to move in those flirty worlds. I blush, I get nervous, and I will walk away from boring small-talk rather than find a reason to justify turning a half-baked conversation into a six-month fling. You could argue that this is a good thing, but it does tend to make the spectre of "alone forever" linger.

Consequently, I find myself in a strange purgatory, where I'm pretty good at being single (and not just by circumstance; I actively enjoy it most of the time) but I would also love a partner. This is a strange position for many to grapple with; so, wait, are you lonely or not? The honest answer is "sort of".

...there seems to be an awful lot of people out there who – like me – are trying to be super-stoked on their single status but still occasionally find themselves crying from loneliness in the darker hours.

She hasn't helped her own cause. In her earlier years she seems to have gone for men solely on the basis of physical attraction:

as I get older the idea of a lasting connection being built solely on initial physical attraction is almost laughable.

Talk about not being especially interested in casual (or committed) sex and people give you the sort of expressions that will tend to inspire you to do your best impression of Meg Ryan as Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally

I'm not suggesting physical attraction is unimportant, but if you are seriously looking for a future spouse you'll be thinking of a lot of other things as well. And note too that Clem Bastow has now reached a point of jadedness where she has lost interest in sex - hardly a promising mindset to be in if you are trying to attract a husband (pity the man who gets Clem Bastow after she has slept with so many men that she has now lost interest in a physical relationship).

She is also a feminist woman who has fallen into the "white men are the enemy" mindset. That's not exactly helpful if most of your marital prospects are white men (does she expect white men to happily "sleep with the enemy"?). Here is what she wrote when a male libertarian politician suggested that people should not be forced to participate in homosexual marriages (as photogrphers, bakers etc.):

This ongoing war against "PC culture" is little more than the slow and steady death rattle of The Age Of Straight White Men. Every bleat about "censorship" or "reverse discrimination" is another piece of macho power structure crumbling to the ground, like flakes of rust falling from a dilapidated bridge. And just as you would treat any abandoned structure as a health hazard, we must exercise caution while existing within the dying days of white male entitlement, as it's very likely to cause injury to everyone but itself.

One of the reasons that alt-right women like Lauren Southern are so refreshing is that they don't engage in this kind of white male bashing. They are promoting instead the idea that men and women have a shared interest in defending their tradition.

The problem of male superabundance

This is one of those posts for throwing around ideas. The topic under consideration is "how are women ruined for marriage?". I have been mulling over what happens in a culture when young women are given an abundance of attention and offers from men. Just 60 or so years ago, there was not such a superabundance of opportunity for young women. There was no social media for men to be constantly "liking" women. Sex before marriage was still frowned upon and marriage itself took place much earlier. Women were still more likely to live at home before marriage, making short term live-in relationships less likely.

Most young men won't ever know what it's like for young women today, i.e. to have so many options and to know that if they drop one option a new one won't be far away. I do believe that this helps to ruin women for long-term committed relationships and, for that matter, for deeper forms of committed love. Instead, it sets up women to treat relationships as "play"; to take a more casually dismissive attitude to men and relationships that over time is corrosive of love and of the ability to pair bond; and to orient women more toward serial monogamy, if not casual relationships.

I suspect that men would be similarly affected, if they had the chance. Some men who have mastered "game" and who feel confident in their ability to seduce women on their own terms report that they eventually feel a sense of loss in reaching this stage, as they are no longer able to feel the same love for women that they once did. And when the balance of relationships changes men can also be similarly spoiled for relationships, for instance, in older age groups.

The feminist inspired sexual revolution may have robbed women of one of the deeper experiences of life, namely the capacity to achieve a loving, deeply bonded marriage.

It can seem daunting, though, to envisage a way to reverse the modern trends. Technology like Tinder and even other more sedate online dating sites isn't going to go away. Nor is it easy to control access to popular music and film which encourages a sexually "liberated" culture. The opportunity for young women to enter the workforce and live independently of their families isn't likely to change either.

This can make some people give up and just hope for the best. I do think it's worth trying to be counter-cultural on this issue. Not all young women, even today, are ruined for marriage. The ones who seem to survive best grow up in a loving home and meet their future spouses early, before too much spoiling happens. Parents do still have some control over their daughters before they move out, and in theory churches might still be able to have some influence over the moral outlook of young people.

(I should point out too that it would help if marriage was understood as being based on more than just feelings, but was held to be a sacrament binding two people; and an institution in which individuals were able to fulfil lifelong purposes such as those of being a father, a mother, a husband and wife; and as an institution in which a culture of family life was upheld and transmitted from one generation to the next.)

The culture war is a bit one-sided at the moment, but it needn't forever be so.

P.S. If it's not clear already from the post, I believe that part of the solution has to be ending the "free for all" situation pushed onto Western society by the sexual revolution. It should be replaced with some kind of "intelligent restraint", i.e. a system for the pairing up of young men and women that is intended to foster successful marriage. That is what traditional societies did and I think you can see from the modern Western experiment that traditional arrangements did have a reasonable purpose to them.

White working-class women should be single mums?

There is an article at Slate titled "Just say no: for white working-class women, it makes sense to stay single mothers".

There are some good points made in the article. The gist of the argument is that employment prospects for women have risen over the past few decades, whereas those of working-class men in the US have declined. Therefore, there is a much smaller pool of potential breadwinning partners for white working-class women. Those men who actually are in a good position to marry have so much choice that they're in no hurry to settle down. Rather than marrying a man who will be, in effect, a dependent, white working-class women are making the "logical" choice to become single mothers.

I can't vouch for how accurately the article portrays the situation facing young women. What is interesting, though, are the remedies proposed.

The writers of the article are adamant that women should still have the autonomy to raise children by themselves via state aid if they so choose:

Those who would promote marriage seek to do so largely by taking away Lily’s independence...Charles Murray would cut programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, early childhood education and child care, mandatory family leave, and other policies that make it easier for women like Lily to raise a child on their own.

So what do the writers recommend? Well, this:

In our view what would make the most difference to this unfair marriage market are  policies that would increase the number and quality of jobs available to working class men, retraining and unemployment benefits that fill in the gaps between jobs, and ongoing support for women’s autonomy.

Let me say, first, that it's a step forward that white working-class men are not being portrayed as privileged oppressors but instead as a group that is losing out in significant ways in modern society. It's true, as well, that it's important that quality jobs be offered to these men to allow them to play a breadwinning role within a family.

But I doubt that you will ever have a stable culture of family life when female autonomy is made such a moral aim. If young women are told that it is their right, as an autonomous individual, to raise a child alone supported by the state rather than by a husband, then some will inevitably take that option (see here for an extreme example of this).

The idea that female autonomy is untouchable seems to run deep: KJ Dell'Antonia wrote a column criticising the Slate article, but even she asserted that,

Should working-class women (or, for that matter, all men and women) be able to raise children alone? Absolutely, and the more we tailor policies, school hours and cultural expectations to reflect the fact that many parents are both solo breadwinner and single caregiver, the better off all families will be.

But if it's OK to decide to raise a child alone, then what is wrong with the trend for white working-class women to do so? KJ Dell'Antonia reaches for the "it's not an authentic choice" option:

No parent “should” raise children alone unless it is a real choice, not a choice created by a culture that is determinedly setting so many young people adrift after high school without the wherewithal to envision, plan for or create a better life for themselves.

She then goes on to provide evidence of how outcomes for children in single mother homes are statistically worse than for other children, particularly for boys (but this then raises the question of whether a government should encourage single parenthood through its welfare policies - why do this if the outcomes for children are, on average, worse?).

It seems we've reached an interesting moment in politics. It is now being recognised on the left that white working-class men have been left behind to the point that they are now in a poor position to marry. That then means that women have to raise and support children by themselves (and with state aid). Perhaps these leftist writers recognise that autonomy for these women is not such an easy or happy path - or perhaps they are hesitating at the brink of accepting a regress to societies in which men exist unproductively on the margins.

An Indian woman in the West

Via Sunshine Mary I found an intriguing story about a single 32-year-old Indian woman living in the U.S.

Her tale goes like this. Her two siblings followed their parents' advice and married fellow Indians at a relatively early age and are now happily raising children. But she decided to follow the lifestyle of her white female friends. She admits to sleeping with 18 white men in her 20s, but now she is unhappy in her early 30s.

Why the discontent? Well, it seems that all those white men were happy to sleep with her but not marry her. So whilst her white female friends were able to marry in their late 20s she wasn't.

Furthermore, she has discovered in her early 30s that her Indian heritage and identity do matter to her. She now wants to marry an Indian man. But these men have options. They have a choice of traditional Indian women in the U.S. or they can go to India and find a young, family-oriented woman to marry.

There are several interesting aspects to her story. First, she actually believes that she's been sexually modest:

I just wanted to make things clear I didn't "sleep around." Most of my relationships have been long term I have only been with 18 guys.

How does she figure that 18 guys aren't so many? Because it is considerably less than what her friends managed:

My number is actually lower than some of my friends who were in the 30s and 40s...

What a strange culture we live in. These women are breaking the connection, and the ties of fidelity, with their future husbands even before they get married. (I'm glad to say that the young women I work with don't seem to follow this pattern; one very sweet and pretty young woman in my office got married this year - she met her husband whilst still a teen, has been with him ever since and is looking forward to having children with him. As is so often the case, she comes from a close knit, loving family herself).

Here's another aspect to this story. The narrative we are told to follow is that white men are the privileged ones, whilst non-whites are the oppressed other. But clearly Indian men living in the West have a big advantage when it comes to family formation. They have three choices: they can follow the modern Western lifestyle; they can marry a traditional Indian woman in the West; or they can go to India and choose amongst the younger and prettier women there to marry. As the Indian woman herself puts it:

I don’t know what to do, it seems like the dating pool dries up rather quickly. No guys really see me as anyone they want a future with. The few progressive Indian guys I met that I really felt like I had a future with ended up leaving me for a younger virgin bride from India. One of my exboyfriends (Indian) told me "You are great and all, but I can get a much better looking girl if I go to India, and one that will also cook for me."

So don't tell me that white men are privileged. Family formation is one of the key goods in life and clearly white men are at a disadvantage compared to Indian men.

One final angle of the story to comment on is a problem that is created by mass immigration. Our Indian woman finds herself in a no man's land when it comes to identity and culture: she can't identify as white but she is no longer part of a traditional Indian culture either:

I don't have any culture because I am not "actually white" and I am not Indian because I am "white washed."

In her case diversity did not lead to multiple cultures but to a sense of having no culture.

What's going wrong in Japan?

You might have seen the most recent reports about the aversion that many young Japanese men and women have toward each other and to sex.

Recent studies in Japan have found that about a quarter of Japanese people now have no interest in a romantic relationship and it is projected that 40% of young Japanese women will never have children. One study found that nearly half of Japanese women aged 16 to 24 were not interested in or despised sex.

The question is why. The newspaper articles I've seen mostly take the easy way out and blame men for old-fashioned attitudes toward women. It's true that if you have a society in which men are brought up to be traditional, and women to be feminist, that you're likely to have incompatible expectations between men and women. But the evidence I've seen is that Japanese men are, if anything, rejecting the masculine ethos of the past rather than clinging to it.

I'm not exactly sure from this distance why Japanese men and women have turned so much from each other, but I can throw in some possibilities.

When I lived in Japan I was struck by the lifestyle of my male colleagues. They were married men in their 20s and 30s. They would stay at work until about 7.00pm, then play mahjong, then get something to eat, then play pachinko, get home at 11.00pm, get served supper by their wives, go to bed at midnight and then get up at 6.00am the next day to start the process over. They were proud of this punishing schedule.

It's not a lifestyle that's likely to hold together a culture of family life. It seems that the younger generation of Japanese men are unenthusiastic about it, and it's hard to blame the women for not finding it fulfilling.

It's ironic that Japan is known for a corporate culture, when such a male lifestyle was likely to bring about individualisation, by which I mean a sense that men and women are to lead separate lives and to find their fulfilment separately from each other.

It doesn't help that the Japanese have apparently divorced sex from marriage to a greater degree than elsewhere. Supposedly it is more common in Japan for wives to begin to shut down marital relations some years into the marriage, and there is something of a culture of porn and paid sex in Japan.

It seems too that young Japanese women have picked up an independent career girl lifestyle that is familiar to us here as well:

I meet Eri Tomita, 32, over Saturday morning coffee in the smart Tokyo district of Ebisu. Tomita has a job she loves in the human resources department of a French-owned bank. A fluent French speaker with two university degrees, she avoids romantic attachments so she can focus on work. "A boyfriend proposed to me three years ago. I turned him down when I realised I cared more about my job. After that, I lost interest in dating. It became awkward when the question of the future came up."

Tomita sometimes has one-night stands with men she meets in bars, but she says sex is not a priority, either.

If I'm correct in this, then what are the solutions?  A society has to be careful to allow men to fulfil a masculine role not only at work but also within the family home. Competition at work to provide for a family is good, but the bar shouldn't be raised too high, to the point that men have to give everything to the breadwinning role. If there is no chance to give the best of yourself in a relationship with your wife and children, then can we be surprised if family life falls away?

The drift toward individualisation has to be combated. This means, amongst other things, creating a culture in which sexual fulfilment is found within a marriage rather than outside of it. It means finding a high value in marital love and parental love - higher than the value of shopping or travel or work routines.

The effect on relationships?

Beverley Craven had a hit song in the 90s which set her up financially for life. Unfortunately, her financially independent status doesn't seem to have helped her marriage.

For years I’d tried to pursue the dream: to be the perfect wife and mum. But I was also the main breadwinner and I grew to resent it.

I wanted him to shoulder more of the responsibility for earning, but we could live more than adequately on my earnings, so he didn’t have any impetus to do so.

It's not as if her husband lacked career success of his own. He had been a member of a successful band and he continued to write hit songs for other artists. But none of it matched the royalties earned by the one big hit his wife had in the 90s.

It ended up with Beverley Craven walking out on her marriage.

Is there not a more general problem in all this? If women need men to be the main breadwinner from a romantic point of view, but society pushes women into being the main breadwinner, then aren't we going to have more stresses and strains on marriage?

There's a similar theme in a USA Today article which claims that college women are dumping men who don't match them in levels of ambition. I can't see this ending well either. Women are increasingly dominating higher education and they are being pumped up in their 20s to believe that career is all - so how then are all these women going to find men who can match or outshine them in education credentials and ambition.

Aren't a lot of women being set up for relationship failure?

It's a new dating world for women too

Laura Wood has had several very interesting posts up lately. One of them is titled Going Mad. A young woman who was brought up to be a feminist wrote a letter to Laura Wood expressing her frustration at not being able to find a man who wants to form a family with her:

I am a young woman in my twenties. I have a Ph.D. and was raised to be extremely feminist. To make a long story very short, I am very lonely. I am attractive and pleasant enough and have never had trouble attracting men, but they (or at least the ones I meet) tend to want only one thing. Over time, I have discovered that I have very conservative …"tendencies" and have been lurking at your site and others like it for years, rather wistfully I must say. I long to be a wife and mother and to have a lifelong companion. I love art, music, and literature, and that is why I continued my studies, but while they have been rewarding, they have only made me lonelier in the end, because the students are all very liberal and even the ones who are married are not in it for the long haul. Divorce is always considered an option and many of them engage in behaviors I wouldn’t consider at all appropriate in a marriage, like flirting or even adultery.

In response I feel I have gone somewhat mad. My parents and friends have told me that I should focus only on my career and have treated my desire for marriage as a sickness, as if it should be a cherry on the top of my life instead of my life itself. So I feel that there is something wrong with me. On top of that, I have no idea where to find a community or a dependable, hard-working, masculine man who is looking for the same things I am and wants a marriage for the long haul, a true lifelong commitment.

The letter highlights a problem with the liberal concept of society. I quoted George Brandis's concept of society in a recent post of my own:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

If it's true that all of our needs and aspirations are unique, then society is going to be thought of as a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing their own ends. That works if all you want in life is casual hook-ups with the opposite sex. Atomised individuals can interact with each other on this basis. But what if you want something more than this? What if you want to form a family?

Then things become more difficult. As Laura's reader points out, matters of culture then become important. It starts to matter if there is a culture of stable commitments within a community. It matters too if men are dependable and hard-working or not. And there needs as well to be a place, a community, where those who want to form families can meet together.

So a culture and a community, formed on the basis of shared or common aspirations rather than uniquely individual ones, become important in an area of life that is highly significant to us, namely our opportunity to marry and have children.

In a strongly liberal environment, like that on a campus, the effects of atomisation and the disruption to culture and community are likely to be stronger. So my advice to Laura's PhD reader would be to make a determined effort to meet men outside of the campus scene (even if this is counterintuitive, given the usual human drive toward assortative mating).

It's a pity that the traditionalist movement isn't developed enough yet to offer the kind of community she is looking for. I would point out to readers who are feeling a bit dispirited that if we did grow a bit more, so that we were even a small community, we would become a beacon for those people, like Laura's reader, who are searching for an alternative.

Losing the waiting game

There are a lot of good-looking, well-educated Western women who are missing out on marriage and/or motherhood. The Daily Mail has yet another article on this today, featuring women who couldn't find Mr Right and so chose to become solo mothers in their late 30s or early 40s by using anonymous sperm donors (and sometimes overseas egg donors).

One of the women profiled was Jessica McCallin. Perhaps you can't tell everything from a photo, but she seems like an attractive woman, i.e. someone who ought to have been able to find a father for her children relatively easily. So what went wrong?



She doesn't attempt an explanation, but one of the other women profiled, Caroline Saddington, offered this:

‘In your teens you envisage marriage and two children,’ she says. ‘Then my 20s were career-focused and I got to my 30s and hadn’t met a man good enough to be a father. They fell far short of my expectations.

That's a losing combination of attitudes. She wants to not only defer family formation until very late in the piece but retain high expectations of men as fathers as well. The women who do manage to get out of the "defer family option" reasonably unscathed are the ones who aren't too fussy and who are willing to compromise in their very early 30s. But more on this later.

Dennis Prager has written a column which touches on the problem of deferral:

I was in college and graduate school during the heyday of modern feminism. And the central message to women was clear as daylight: You are no different from men. Therefore, among other things, you can enjoy sex just like they do -- just for the fun of it and with many partners. The notion that nearly every woman yearns for something deeper when she has sexual intercourse with a man was dismissed as patriarchal propaganda. The culture might tell her to restrict sex to a man who loves her and might even marry her, but the liberated woman knows better: Sex without any emotional ties or possibility of future commitment can be "empowering."

Feminism taught -- and professors on the New York Times op-ed page continue to write -- that there are no significant natural differences between men and women. Therefore, it is not unique to male nature to want to have sex with many partners. Rather, a "Playboy culture" "pressures" men into having frequent, uncommitted sex. And, to the extent this is a part of male nature, it is equally true of women's natures.

Another feminist message to women was that just as a woman can have sex like a man, she can also find career as fulfilling as men do. Therefore, pursuing an "M-R-S" at college is just another residue of patriarchy. Women should be as interested in a career as men are. Any hint of the notion that women want, more than anything else, to marry and make a family is sexist, demeaning, and untrue.
 

I don't entirely agree with the wording of this. But I think he is right that women have come under pressure to reject looking for love and marriage in their early 20s in favour of careers and hook-ups. And the problem is not just that this is a denial of better aspects of a woman's nature, but that it is a losing strategy for these women in the longer term.

In some ways, the very worst enemy of middle-class Anglo women right now are feminists. Why? An open-bordered country like Australia now has a lot of different ethnic groups. Amongst the women of these groups, upper middle-class Anglo men are strongly favoured and competed for.

I have met some of the women from overseas backgrounds who are successfully competing for the upper middle-class Anglo men. They are often very classily feminine (rarely brash), they dress very stylishly (think Parisienne), they are friendly, happy and non-aggressive. They are ready to meet a future husband when they are at university.

And what is being drummed into the upper middle-class Anglo women? They are raised with feminist ideas, such as that you prove yourself in career competition with men; that to be feminine is weak; that family formation is something you leave until your 30s; that it is empowering to emulate a male player lifestyle in your 20s; and that all that is owed men is a sexual relationship and even that is to be on your own terms.

It makes it very difficult for Anglo women to compete. An upper middle-class Anglo woman to have any chance with the men of her own age and peer group has to jettison the feminism that is drummed into her at school (and, even worse, sometimes reinforced by her own father). Some, I think, are beginning to attempt this and are trying to compete in dress and manners, but it may not be enough.

Finally, some women might read this and think "Well, why should we be competing for the men, they should be competing for us." And for men who aren't in as strong a position that no doubt remains true. But the most favoured men are in a position to choose and they won't choose women who don't turn up on time and who prefer to spend their 20s gloomily devoting themselves to career and counting down the years until it becomes respectable for them to try to make a go of a relationship.

Remember too that the role of a husband has been so whittled down within modern culture that it can no longer be assumed that men will be drawn to the "office" of being a husband - it has lost greatly in status and prestige. A lot of men will therefore wonder about such commitments and winning them over means making the personal side of marriage a very strongly attractive proposition. That can happen if a woman is able to live up to a romantic ideal, but to appear in such a way to a middle-class man means being classy, feminine and genuinely warmly natured.

I guess I would like Anglo women to unleash their feminine souls and to give themselves a fair chance with the men of their own peer group. That is a better option than reaching 35, finally admitting that family matters, but having no husband to be a father for a child.

Single, smart over 40

From a Perth newspaper:

THEY'RE single, smart and successful, but these over-40 Perth women can't find a decent man.

East Perth hairdresser Tanya Durham, 46, says she's been on so many dud dates she's stopped trying.

And events manager Kerryn Lambert was stood up on Monday night after waiting 45 minutes at a bar for a date to show up. To make it worse, it was the eve of her 40th birthday.

Ms Durham, who has never married, said being in her mid-40s limited the range of eligible men.

"I don't mind going out with younger guys, but they want children, so that market is out, and a lot of guys over 40 are going for girls under-30, because they don't think they're 40," she said.

Part of the problem was that men didn't want independent women.

"We're looking for guys because we want to have them in our life, not because we need to have them," she said. "But there are a lot of guys who want to feel needed. And they're the guys that we won't possibly attract."

Most men who registered for online dating websites were creeps, she said.

"One guy had a 10-year-old photo of himself on his online profile. When I met up with him, he was morbidly obese," she said. Ms Lambert said online dating had given men too much choice.

"It's just one big, easy fishing pond," she said.

Public relations professional Nicki Williams, 45, said there was definitely a shortage of eligible men in their 40s and 50s in Perth.

"If you're serious about settling down with someone, you're not looking at the 35-year-olds for long-term prospects. You're looking at somebody who is more settled and has possibly been married, so they're in the same situation as you," the twice-married mother of two said.

"If you want to settle down, it needs to be with someone over 40 and there aren't that many of them out there."

Ms Williams said that though she'd love to meet someone, she didn't need a man to provide for her because she was financially stable.

"I don't want to end up old and alone, but I'm not desperate and dateless, so to speak," she said.

Debbie Rivers, who runs Dare to Date, which organises social events for singles, said it was a challenge to get men over 40 to attend her events.They were often hurt by previous relationships and unwilling to give anything a go.
 

Lessons?

First, there's the issue pointed to by Debbie Rivers. A middle-aged woman who divorces her first husband and expects to find a large pool of available replacements is likely to be disappointed as many single men in her age category will have been similarly hurt by divorce and wary of trying again.

Second, there's the age differential issue. An attractive 40-something man can probably look to a 30-something woman for a future wife. But even if a 40-something woman is attractive enough to appeal to younger men, she's less likely to see them as husband material.

Third, these women are part of my own generation. They were brought up to believe that although it was OK to want a man, it was wrong to have the attitude that they needed one, as that would violate the idea of the independent woman. But as Tanya Durham admits, a lot of men don't want to be unnecessary to the woman they marry. Many men do, in particular, want their efforts to provide to be necessary in supporting their family - that's what gives their work much of its meaning.

All of which leads to this conclusion: it's important for women to marry in a timely way and to do what they can to make the marriage work, as trying to find love in your 40s will be very much more difficult than in your 20s.

I have to say that the women I work with don't seem to need this advice right now. There has been a wave of marriages followed by another one of babies in the past few years amongst the staff at my school. The women speak openly of their determination to start their families whilst still in their 20s. I think they're being smart in giving themselves the best chance to get the highest quality husband they can and to have time to have children. And they do seem to be very loyal to their husbands - I've never heard them put them down in conversation.

It's not a representative sample of the population, but it makes me think there are chances right now for young men here in Australia to find marriageable women - the situation seems better now than it was twenty years ago.

The splitting of young women in a liberal society

There's an article in The Atlantic (hat tip: Laura Wood) which supports an argument I've often made at this site.

It's by a psychotherapist and sociologist, Leslie Bell, who writes on the issue of young women and relationships. What she has found is that upper middle-class women in their 20s are conflicted about having relationships with men.

On the one hand, these young women have been brought up to believe that they should be "liberated" in the liberal sense to lead autonomous, independent, self-reliant lives. On the other hand, they feel a feminine desire to have a relationship with a man in which they show vulnerability and need.

The two aims conflict and therefore many upper middle-class women in their 20s feel guilty or anxious about their desire for a relationship. They feel split between what they feel they should want as liberated women and what they desire in their personal lives. They resolve this conundrum, according to Leslie Bell, by "splitting" the two aspects of their lives and by denigrating romantic relationships.

From the article:

Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong, sociologists at University of California, Merced and the University of Michigan studied relationship patterns among upper-middle-class female college students, and they discovered that these women believed relational commitments were supposed to take a backseat to self-development...Hamilton and Armstrong found that young women often sought protection from relationships that could "derail their ambition."

Like Hamilton and Armstrong's respondents, many young and aspiring women with whom I spoke felt as though it were counterproductive to their development to prioritize a relationship with a man...

Confused about freedom and desire, young women often split their social and psychological options—independence, strength, safety, control, and career versus connection, vulnerability, need, desire, and relationships—into mutually exclusive possibilities in life. Romantic relationships then often become something to be avoided and denigrated rather than embraced.

It's no wonder that splitting is often young women's preferred method to make sense of the dizzying array of freedoms before them. A group of people trying to be autonomous and successful at work, and to have love and sex lives in which they express their vulnerability, need, and desire, is groundbreaking and historically unprecedented. Splitting may serve to ease their anxiety temporarily, but only until the desire for a relationship becomes impossible to ignore.
 

I don't see a way out of this for liberals. If autonomy really is the path to liberation, then women are likely to deprioritise relationships with men. And if relationships are downgraded, then women won't seek to develop the qualities that might make relationships successful (they might not even be aware that they need to develop such qualities).

The traditional path is for both men and women to seek to develop from young adulthood onwards the qualities that will help them to marry well and then to be successful and effective husbands and wives and fathers and mothers. Because these qualities are at the heart of who we are as men and women, this is more truly a means to self-development than a more narrow focus on developing career skills.

An interesting journey

Here's a problem for feminists. The theory tells them that they should maximise their autonomy, by living independent lives in which they do not need men. But where does that leave them when it comes to relationships? If a woman is oriented to independence from men, then what role is a man supposed to play in her life?

You can see this difficulty at work in the life of 30-something American feminist Kristine Solomon. She describes herself as liberal, single and childless.

Kristine Solomon recently read a column by Suzanne Venker and was left conflicted by it. It's Suzanne Venker's belief that some modern women are turning men off marriage by being too angry, too unfeminine and too independent:

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.

This isn't easy for Kristine Solomon to accept:

I didn’t spend all this time establishing a career and a comfortable, independent life so I could be told I’m "doing it wrong."

But even so she finds in Suzanne Venker's piece "basic truths that resonate with me":

The truth is, I do believe that there are certain instincts that are hardwired in men, and others that are hardwired in women, and that many men (perhaps subconsciously) are put off by a woman who asserts her independence too severely. I'm suggesting that when Venker urges us to embrace our "femininity," she isn’t implying that we should back down like scared animals and morph into 1950s sitcom wives. It's okay for women to sometimes exhibit stereotypically gendered behaviors — like nurturing or flirtatiousness — and for men to likewise indulge theirs — chivalry or machismo, for instance. It doesn’t mean we’re compromising our values if we engage in that dance. We’re still equal. We’re just... different. And that’s okay.

She's trying to get to the point at which she can accept "equal but different" and the complementarity of masculine and feminine. Better late than never, but as she admits she took a different view in her 20s:

Trust me, I didn’t always feel this way. I can tell you there have been many times when I've practically breathed fire in the face of my old-fashioned mother for suggesting that I refrain from coming across as "too independent," because, you know, the men I date might believe me and move on to women who do need them. Can you think of anything more offensive to say to an ambitious young woman?!

But, as time passed — and my 20s became my 30s — I began to realize that when I told men I was independent and didn’t "need anyone," many eventually backed off...I was determined to be equal, and my 25-year-old self found even the most remote sign of needing a man to be a weakness; I wouldn’t let myself go there.

She finishes with this somewhat compromised argument:

In my 30s, my approach to dating has changed. I've become even stronger and more independent, in large part because I’m no longer faking it. That freedom has given way to a sense of vulnerability. Traditional, antiquated acts of chivalry like holding a door open, paying on the first date and letting him walk on the outside of the pavement (yes, this is a thing) are welcome now. I don't feel those things lower me in any way, but rather, they make me feel protected and cared for. I don’t feel weak allowing that because I only date men who I know, right off the bat, hold me in high regard and consider me their equal. So there are no sensitive implications to being treated "like a woman." I don't feel I have a chip on my shoulder, and I’m no longer defensive.

She is no longer faking things, but likes feeling protected and cared for. She no longer has such a chip on her shoulder and is willing to accept a sense of vulnerability. But it all still has to be justified in terms of being independent, as she has been brought up to see this as the higher good.

She's wrong in continuing to justify herself in terms of independence; if she were really aiming at independence she would stay single and childless. The truth is that she's beginning to accept other goods as important in her life.

I can't criticise the reforms she is making, but I do find it interesting that she was sensitive, in her 20s, to being treated like a woman. That must have confused the men who tried to make contact with her. It can be difficult enough for people to meet the right person without major stumbling blocks like that being put in their way.

What type of woman do lefty men go for?

I clicked onto Laura Wood's site this morning to find a story about yet another Englishwoman of my generation who has had to accept spinsterhood. This time it is 46-year-old journalist Claudia Connell:

I … think it’s an uncomfortable truth that the sort of high-flying alpha males we were all holding out for didn’t want women like us. All the successful men I know have married sweet, uncomplicated women who are happy to forfeit their careers to support their husbands

It's interesting that Claudia Connell should make this observation, as I was going to post today on a similar observation of my own.

As regular readers will know I work as a teacher and so I am in a position to follow the lives of about 60 other staff members. About five years ago the school hired three young male teachers. They are tall, good-looking, socially adept, intelligent and sporty. In the last year or two all three have married and two are now expecting children.

Why point this out? Well, the people I work with are mostly very politically correct left-liberal types. The three men who recently married all passionately endorse feminism and other aspects of "progressive" politics.

So these are exactly the type of men that hipster campus feminists would most likely want to partner with. They would be amongst the most desirable of companions for a left-liberal young feminist woman.

And this is where it gets interesting. I have met all three wives and they are all of a similar type. They are very classily feminine, demure and family oriented. In fact, they are the sort of women that I, as a traditionalist conservative, was attracted to as a single man.

So for all the passionate embrace of feminism, the "alpha left-liberals" are still going for the more traditionally feminine type of woman. They are still men after all.

The moral of the story is that it's unwise for young women to buy into the idea that they should be feisty, assertive, androgynous, butt-kicking, mannish, drunken, loud personalities and that they can safely wait until their 30s to partner up.

It is never going to hurt women to be beautifully feminine when it comes to attracting a man, and parents should encourage their daughters to cultivate such qualities as best they can. And timing does matter. These three men were snapped up in their mid-20s. They are now out of the market for those women who choose to deliberately delay to their 30s.

Hanna Rosin celebrates loveless youth

Confused about the state of relationships? Well, if you're not now you will be after reading Hanna Rosin's latest piece, "Boys on the side" (warning: it's crude in parts)

Rosin's essay is a clumsy attempt to reconcile the conflict between the liberal demand for an autonomous, independent, single person lifestyle based on career and casual relationships, and the normal human desires for love and family.

Rosin begins by celebrating a coarse hook up culture, which she believes is used by young women to avoid serious relationships with men so that women can dedicate themselves to career and independence:

The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike the women in earlier ages, they have more-important things on their minds, such as good grades and intern­ships and job interviews and a financial future of their own. The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relation­ships that don’t get in the way of future success.

OK, that makes it sound as if success in life is measured by career and independence. The message is repeated in this passage:

Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-­school party—are for the first time in history more success­ful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

You would think that a woman's sexual prime would be the most logical time for a woman to try to attract a serious suitor - but Hanna Rosin doesn't see it this way. It's only when a woman is past her sexual prime that a serious suitor might be considered - before then he is "a danger to be avoided at all costs" as he might "get in the way of a promising future".

Now if what really matters is career and independence then why not give up on marriage altogether? Marriage, after all, requires a commitment to others. And Hanna Rosin does at times run down the idea of marriage. She writes:

There is no retreating from the hookup culture to an earlier age, when a young man showed up at the front door with a box of chocolates for his sweetheart, and her father eyed him warily. Even the women most frustrated by the hookup culture don’t really want that. The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself.

Women want a hookup culture, she writes. It's fabulous. It represents freedom and self-reliance. She goes on to claim that,

Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions.

So it's all clear to this point. The hookup culture, whatever distress it might cause to young women, is a source of freedom and progress for women. A lack of conventions is held to be a good thing. Best not for women to have serious or lasting relationships with men. Flings with unsuitable men are the way to go.

But then the clarity fades away. All of a sudden we get this conclusion:

But that’s not how the story ends...Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.

Oh, really? So women are to spend ages 15 to 35 rejecting a deeper human connection in favour of independence and freedom, and then at the very last gasping breath of their youthful fertility, they are suddenly to change and decide that human connection matters after all.

Come on Hanna. You can't justify wasting a woman's sexual prime on independence and freedom from convention if a deeper human connection as experienced in marriage proves to be the stronger value in the long run anyway.

If independence and sexual freedom really are the higher values to live our lives by, then we shouldn't marry at any age. We should be like the Swedes and live alone. But if a deeper human connection as expressed in marriage is the higher value, as Hanna Rosin seems to believe it ultimately proves to be, then we shouldn't waste it - we should marry in a timely way that allows us to share our sexual prime with our spouse.

Hanna Rosin seems to expect otherwise intelligent people to engage in a kind of self-sabotage - deliberately rejecting serious suitors when in our prime, only to seek them out when we're past it.

P.S. Something I missed is the significance of Rosin's final words "but that hardly defines them". The implication is that women don't want to define themselves when they're married the same way they might when they're in their 20s and hooking up. Which means that even Rosin recognises that the two identities don't go together well. She seems to be trying to reassure her female readers that they can bury the younger self that doesn't fit with being a wife and mother - the self that they might potentially be ashamed to let their husbands know about.

The Church weighs in

This is a bit of an unusual experience for me - an issue that I've been writing about for some years is going mainstream.

The political point I've made is this: liberalism holds up autonomy as the highest good, but women are most autonomous when they pursue a single girl lifestyle of career, travel, partying and flings with unsuitable men. Most women don't, however, want to give up entirely on marriage and motherhood. So there is a compromise in which women are supposed to spend their 20s doing careers and single girl things before finally taking family formation seriously in their 30s.

But there are problems with this delay in family formation. The most obvious one is that it gives women little time to meet someone, date, get engaged, marry and then finally have children. By the time the process in properly underway, many women won't be far off declining fertility. Second, the women who wait too long might find that their male peers have adapted to a bachelor lifestyle, or opted out, or married women from overseas, or are interested in younger women, or haven't seen the point in committing to a career.

And so you get women like Kate Bolick, who admits she broke up with a perfectly suitable man at age 28 expecting there to be plenty of replacements later on. But, at age 39, she had to accept that there weren't. And why did she break up with Mr Right? Because she wanted to preserve her autonomy:

...the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother...

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be...You and Me...

...my future was to be one of limitless possibilities...This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place...We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

The problem of delaying family formation is now getting some attention in the mainstream Australian media. I reported recently on an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Bettina Arndt. And now the Catholic Church here in Melbourne has voiced concerns:

WOMEN should marry earlier and not be too picky if they want to avoid an Aussie man drought, the Catholic Church has warned.

Australia is experiencing a huge decline in the number of available men, with the church telling the Herald Sun women should also forget living with their partners before tying the knot.

Statistics show there are just 86,000 eligible blokes for 1.3 million females aged between 25 and 34...

But the reverend Father Tony Kerin, episcopal vicar for justice and social service in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, said women wanted the best of both worlds.

"Are women getting too choosy? I'd say yes," said Father Kerin, speaking on behalf of the archdiocese.

"I think many are setting aside their aspirations for later, but by the time they get around to it, they've missed their chance.

"In trying to have it all, they end up missing out."

Father Kerin said the rate of marriage had halved despite nearly four in five people still wanting to settle down.

"For many, it remains an unattainable dream," he said...

Demographer Bernard Salt calculated there are 1.3 million women aged 25-34.

But of the 1.343 million men in the same age bracket, only 86,000 single, heterosexual, well-off, young men were available after excluding those who were already married (485,000), in a de facto relationship (185,000), gay (7000), a single parent (12,000) or earning less than $60,000 a year.

The statistics given here are a bit misleading. There aren't 1.3 million women chasing 86,000 men as a fair proportion of those women would already be in a relationship (plus, not every woman would expect a man to earn over $60,000). Even so, it's interesting that of 1.343 million men in the 25-34 bracket only 86,000 are single and earning more than $60,000 a year. It does suggest that women who, like Kate Bolick, deliberately ditch a Mr Right are unwise to think that there are plenty more to be had later on.

And I congratulate the Catholic Church for speaking up on the issue. Inevitably there will be those who will criticise the Catholic Church for doing so, but if a culture of marriage is to be protected then delayed family formation needs to be tackled.

Don't play the waiting game

Bettina Arndt has written a column for the Sydney Morning Herald which brings into the mainstream media an argument I've made at this site for some time.

Her column looks at the problems that arise when women are encouraged to leave family formation until their 30s:

Many [professional women] thought they could put off marriage and families until their 30s, having devoted their 20s to education, establishing careers and playing the field. But was their decade of dating a strategic mistake?

Jamie, a 30-year-old Sydney barrister, thinks so: "Women labour under the impression they can have it all. They can have the career, this carefree lifestyle and then, at the snap of their fingers, because they are so fabulous, find a man. But if they wait until their 30s they're competing with women who are much younger and in various ways more attractive."

What's particularly interesting is that Bettina Arndt backs this up with some demographic information.

• one in three Australian women aged 30-34 don't have partners; even by the late 30s the figure is still very high at 25%.
• in 2006 there were only 68,000 unattached graduate men in their 30s for 88,000 single graduate women in the same age group.
  
  

And this is the paragraph that really stood out for me:

Although there are similar numbers of single men and women in their 30s overall - about 370,000 of each across Australia - half these available men had only high school education, 57 per cent earned $42,000 or less and 95,000 of them were unemployed.

There are similar numbers of single men and women in their 30s but 57% of men are on a low income of $42,000 (US$43,600) or less. To put this another way, there are 370,000 single ladies and 160,000 men earning more than $42,000.

There are two points to make here:

i) It's possible that part of the explanation for the statistics is that a large percentage of men on a high income are already married in their 20s.

ii) One consequence of preferences given to women in education and employment is that many women will not be able to find a husband on a high income.

Feminists don't mind so much about the second issue. They think it's a good thing as they hope it will force a change in relationship patterns so that the woman will go out to work whilst the husband stays home. But that won't be for everyone - note that 25% of women are still single in their late 30s.

And that's not just because of male preferences. Some of those 30-something professional women are determined to partner with professional men. The owner of one dating organisation,

finds many of his female members are determined to meet only men who are tall, attractive, wealthy and well educated. They want the alpha males. ''Most of the professional women rarely give out 'yes' votes to men who aren't similarly successful,'' reports Parfitt, who struggles to attract enough of these successful men to his speed-dating events. Sixty per cent of his members are female. Most are over 30.

The dating imbalance leads to complaints like this one from a 30-something lawyer:

She is stunned by how hard it is to meet suitable men willing to commit. ''I'm horrified by the number of gorgeous, independent and successful women my age who can't meet a decent man.''

Penny acknowledges part of the problem is her own expectations - that her generation of women was brought up wanting too much. ''We were told we were special, we could do anything and the world was our oyster.'' And having spent her 20s dating alpha males, she expected them to be still around when she finally decided to get serious.

But these men go fast, many fishing outside their pond. The most attractive, successful men can take their pick from women their own age or from the Naomis, the younger women who are happy to settle early. Almost one in three degree-educated 35-year-old men marries or lives with women aged 30 or under.

I don't write this in order to demoralise those women in their 30s looking for a husband, nor to suggest that every such woman is single in her 30s by choice.

The point is that it's not wise for women to play the waiting game - to see your 20s as a waiting room where you run down time until you finally spring into action in your 30s ready to find a husband.

Look at the numbers. For a lot of women that plan is not going to work out too well. It's better for women to take things seriously in their 20s.

Dead stream, live stream

Sorry, but this is another "symptom of decline" post.

There's a website called "Corporette" which describes itself as "a fashion and lifestyle blog for overachieving chicks". There's a post up there about how a woman can go about freezing her eggs:

Ever considered freezing your eggs, either because you wanted to postpone kids for your career or because the right partner seems to be in hiding?

So that's what "overachieving" women do? They freeze their eggs because they want to postpone kids for their careers?

Anyway, the corporette author discovered that it's considered more viable to have embryos rather than eggs frozen. So her plan is to follow up having her eggs frozen by later on freezing some embryos fertilised with donor sperm:

I’m still considering freezing embryos in a few months, because I think that would be the right decision for me. I do want to have children (ideally, one biological and one adoptive). On the whole, I am comfortable with donating unused embryos to research.

What an attitude. She has decided already that her family will consist of one child conceived with donor sperm and another child adopted presumably from overseas. Has she wondered if her future husband will be OK with this? Or that he might prefer to have a say in whose children he ends up raising? And doesn't kinship matter at all anymore? (A point made by Laura Wood in her comments on this story.)

Why has it all come to this for Ms Corporette? Why hasn't she already found a man to marry and have a family with? That's difficult to know from a distance, but she does tell us that "I pride myself on being an Independent Woman," which is not exactly likely to attract the most traditionally oriented of men. She tells us too that she is not

going to have (yet another) years-long relationship without any concrete direction; I am 34...At this age I feel better about knowing what I want...

Which makes it sound as if she is one of those women who couldn't bring herself to admit openly and definitely to wanting marriage and children and so who drifted along in relationships with unsuitable men.

Some of the comments are also noteworthy:

Anon woman: This is something I’ve always considered. I’m only 26, but my mom struggled with fertility at 24. I’m married, but I’m just starting out (I’m a 3L) and I don’t want to have children for another 10+ years. I am considering freezing embryos as soon as I begin Biglaw next year.

So this woman is married but refuses to consider motherhood until she's about 35 (i.e. until just the time when her natural fertility begins to plummet). Her priority in life is not her children but "Biglaw".

Other commenters revealed that they took the option when reaching their early 30s of becoming single mothers by choice:

Anon: I was 33 when I decided I was not going to wait any longer. I didn’t want to be in the situation where I needed to think about fertility treatments or being pregnant at an older age or being a parent at an older age. I went to fertility doctor and chose an anonymous donor.

a: I’m seriously considering doing the single-parenting thing (it’s crazy, but is it worse than never having kids when I really want them?)

Always a NYer: My point is that not having the biological father around shouldn’t deter or make you feel less as a parent.

AFT: from the time I was teenager, my mom always said that if I wanted children I should just have them and I didn’t need to be married and I shouldn’t wait around for a husband. She thought that it was important that I could have my own choices and that I did not have to bend my life around whether a man would be around.

My point is, you are definitely not crazy for wanting a child/children and considering doing it solo if the time is right for you and no guy is around.

Someone needs to tell these women that there are easier solutions, the main one of which is to be oriented to marriage and motherhood at a younger age. The current life script for this type of woman is not viable. It goes like this:

a) Deliberately push off family formation until the magical age of 30. Focus on career, travel, partying and casual relationships instead.

b) Get to 30 and find it more difficult to find the right man than you expected.

c) Get to 32 or 33 and recognise that there is only a small window of opportunity left to have children.

d) Take desperate measures that will make it even more difficult to marry, e.g. freeze some donor fertilised embryos or have a child as a single mother.

I can't help but think that society is bifurcating. Those following along the modernist path are sinking deeper into a nihilism in which kinship no longer matters as much, in which fatherhood is optional, in which a paralysing question mark is placed next to motherhood, and in which women home in on the most demoralised of men.

But there is also an ongoing, more traditional stream in society, one that is more determined to arrive at positive family outcomes. There do exist women who are part of this stream (e.g. two beautiful, kind-hearted women in my office in their mid-20s who married good men and have just recently had their first child).

Which stream will prove to be the more powerful? Time will tell.

Stealing motherhood

Sorry, I couldn't resist a post on this.

Liz Jones has written another of her confessional columns for the Daily Mail. This time it's about her attempts to become a mother by stealing the sperm of her partners. She begins by reminding us of the ridiculous modern girl life script that she and too many other Western women have bought into:

...for most of my adult life, having a child was the furthest thing from my mind.

I wanted a career, freedom, a nice house and to keep my figure. As a feminist, I looked down on mumsy types.

But when I was in my late 30s, I decided that if I didn’t get pregnant soon then it might never happen. I had also reached a point in my life where I wanted to settle down with a man, and though my boyfriend at that time was wildly unsuitable, I thought that I could change him.

Yes, it's the modern girl jackpot. She wanted to be the autonomous career girl type and she spent her fertile years looking down on motherhood and dating unsuitable men. But in her late 30s, at the very, very last moment she suddenly decided it was time to settle down.

She's not exactly alone in having pursued this life course. It's part of the cultural message being promoted to Western women. For instance, there's a hit romantic comedy film out called Bridesmaids. The "heroine" of this film is part of a player guy harem; she sticks with him because she thinks he's hot. But in her late 30s she finally sees through him and starts to consider an average joe type. That's modern "romance" for you - the heroines are ageing women who get rescued at the very last moment by a decent guy.

But there was to be no such romcom ending for Liz Jones. Her "wildly unsuitable" boyfriend didn't want children. So Liz Jones took matters into her own hands:

He refused to believe I was on the Pill, and insisted we use a condom for every moment of our intimate contact.

‘I don’t trust you,’ he said, muttering something about women claiming to want a career, but underneath wanting to start a family.

I called his bluff and told him there was no way I would want a baby with him, given he didn’t earn any money. Yet the truth was, I had hatched a plan that many will doubtless find shocking.

Because he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I decided to steal it from him. I resolved to steal his sperm from him in the middle of the night. I thought it was my right, given that he was living with me and I had bought him many, many M&S ready meals.

The ‘theft’ itself was alarmingly easy to carry out. One night, after sex, I took the used condom and, in the privacy of the bathroom, I did what I had to do. Bingo.

I don’t understand why more men aren’t wise to this risk — maybe sex addles their brain. So let me offer a warning to men wishing to avoid any chance of unwanted fatherhood: if a woman disappears to the loo immediately after sex, I suggest you find out exactly what she is up to.

As it turned out, my attempts to get pregnant by Trevor failed, and shortly afterwards he and I split up.

It would be a lot nicer, you would think, for Liz Jones to have gone about things the traditional way, i.e. learn to be attractively feminine in her early 20s, reward a family oriented man with her affections, get married and have a committed and enthusiastic husband to raise a family with together. Surely that's a better outcome than having to scheme to steal the sperm from an unwilling boyfriend.

Liz Jones did marry her next boyfriend, but again he was wildly unsuitable. He was 14 years younger and unwilling to commit to children. So she stole his sperm too but again without successfully becoming pregnant. She's now in her 50s, divorced and childless.

The moral of the story is that women should ignore the cultural messages encouraging them to endlessly delay family formation. Would you really want to end up in Liz Jones's situation? Wouldn't that be crushingly humiliating?

Men, too, need to consider the timing of family formation. Liz Jones relates in her column that,

I spoke to several men before writing this article. One, in his mid-30s, has just got engaged to a woman who is 39. He told me he is not yet thinking about starting a family, as he is self-employed and worried about the recession. They also live 45 miles apart, each in their own flat.

He told me he wants to wait until they have a house together, and for his business to become established.

I bet his fiancée will be pregnant within the year.

That man hasn't thought things through. If he really does want a family it would have been prudent to marry a younger woman. But if he is committed to marrying a 39-year-old then the time to try for a family is straight away. It's not sensible for him to say he "is not yet thinking" about family.

Kate Bolick tells us why

Kate Bolick

Kate Bolick is the latest in a spate of women to regret leaving marriage to so late in life. Her explanation of what went wrong is well worth reading.

She begins by noting that she had a terrific chance to marry in her late 20s, which she turned down:

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered.

Why would she do that? Her answer is twofold: the autonomy theory she was brought up on led her to prioritise independence over relationships, and she assumed that there would always be men for her to partner with.

Let's begin with the assumption that there would always be eligible men seeking her out. Kate Bolick is a very physically attractive woman. She describes how in her 20s she managed easily to pursue serial long-term relationships with men:

Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

...That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith.

Despite the advantage of her good looks, she now doesn't have the pick of men but feels she must settle. Where have all the "good men" gone? She observes:

...as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

Most of the men have already married, others have dropped out. And fewer suitable man are available anyway as women have pushed up the career ladder, with many of their male peers losing the motivation to do likewise. (Note the language Kate Bolick uses: "finally ready to start our lives". In her mind her 20s were just a kind of play life - a wait until her real life could finally begin in her 30s. But why delay your real life for so long?)

Bolick does recognise here the major issue that as women do increasingly better in education and careers than men that it becomes more difficult for women to marry up:

the decline of males has obviously been ... bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity ... the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

Bolick is aware, too, that as her youth and fertility decline that she is losing ground in the dating market to younger women:

I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from.

All of these are important and meaty issues which are covered very well at various sites on the net. But the other part of Kate Bolick's explanation is rarely dealt with, perhaps because it requires a more fundamental rethink of modern values.

Kate Bolick tells us very clearly that she was raised to prioritise individual autonomy. And the logic of autonomy was that she should remain independent for as long as possible.

...the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother...

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be...You and Me...

...my future was to be one of limitless possibilities...This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place...We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

Limitless possibilities. An unfettered future. No restrictions on what can be autonomously chosen. Someone brought up to believe in this isn't going to think seriously about how our choices need to be ordered and about how a workable framework to society needs to be organised and maintained.

Here again Kate Bolick writes about her prioritising of independence over love:

When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City...it wasn’t dating I was after. I was seeking something more vague and, in my mind, more noble, having to do with finding my own way, and independence.

She continues later by praising the Mosuo in China for their matrilineal culture in which there is no stable marriage commitment:

The matrilineal Mosuo are worth pausing on, as a reminder of how complex family systems can be, and how rigid ours are...For centuries, the Mosuo have lived in households that revolve around the women...

Sexual relations are kept separate from family. At night, a Mosuo woman invites her lover to visit her babahuago (flower room)...there are no expectations or rules. As Cai Hua, a Chinese anthropologist, explains, these relationships, which are known as açia, are founded on each individual’s autonomy, and last only as long as each person is in the other’s company. Every goodbye is taken to be the end of the açia relationship, even if it resumes the following night. “There is no concept of açia that applies to the future,” Hua says.

But the really important quote is this one:

In the months leading to my breakup with Allan, my problem, as I saw it, lay in wanting two incompatible states of being—autonomy and intimacy...

This is what she sees as her problem. This is why she dropped the man she might have married and had children with. And she is right - autonomy and intimacy (i.e. autonomy and committed love) are incompatible. You have to decide on how to order them: do you sacrifice a measure of your autonomy to enjoy the good of marital love? Or do you reject a stable relationship to maintain autonomy?

Most of us decide that the fulfilment of a good marriage and having children is the higher good. But Kate Bolick, having been raised from girlhood to value autonomy above all else, has never been able to come to this decision decisively.

She is still caught in a kind of limbo in wanting both things. This is clear in her writing in which she jumps from regrets about not having married and her missed opportunities to ideas about marriage being a false historical construct to be replaced by more flexible living arrangements.

Her current compromise appears to be a desire to find a community of women to find companionship with. That is probably one of the worst options she could take.

Anyway, the larger lesson is that there are losses in making autonomy the overriding good in society. We can certainly value autonomy, but it's wrong to think of it as the highest, ordering principle of society.

Wife shopping

Juliet Jeske has written another interesting column on the difficulties of dating in New York as a woman over the age of 35.

It's a cautionary tale for those women deliberately leaving family formation until their 30s. Jeske herself married in her 20s, but left childbearing quite late and then found out her husband was homosexual.

So she found herself having to start over. What problems has that involved? Well, she definitely wants kids:

I always thought I would have kids. My husband and I planned to eventually start a family, but at the age of 36 I discovered my husband was a closeted homosexual. My marriage immediately ended and I entered the dating pool past my prime reproductive years. I knew it would eventually take time to have a healthy relationship again, and I definitely felt like my biological clock wasn't just ticking but banging loudly like Quasimodo's bells throughout my entire body.

The men she has met whilst dating fall into four categories:

in my age range I tend to find hook-up artists who never want to settle down, men messed up from a break-up or divorce, extremely socially awkward men with no dating experience and the men I refer to as wife shoppers.

The "wife shoppers" are men who want to start a family:

A wife shopper is usually the following:

•Over 40
•Never Married - No children
•At the peak of their professional career
•About to buy property or has just bought property

Wife shoppers are men searching for the future mother of their children.

So why can't she get together with a "wife shopper"? First, these men understandably are looking for a woman who is likely to be fertile:

They make no bones about wanting to start a family, and many won't consider women over the age of 35. Women do lose reproductive capacity after 35, and in health terms pregnancies in older mothers are deemed higher risk.

...One of the habits I have noticed is something I call baby momma math. My date will look at me, ask me my age again, and then I watch them adding up how long we would have to date before trying to start a family, and they aren't exactly subtle about it.

Second, she finds the "wife shopper" men bluntly methodical:

Maybe it's something about the personality traits of any man who waits until they are at the peak of their career before getting married and having kids. In their mind they have a checklist and once they have done everything else they want to accomplish in life they move on to starting a family.

Third, she is worried (and understandably so) about rushing into a relationship in order to have children, without having time to make sure of a firm connection with the man:

Having my marriage end the way it did has given me major trust issues to begin with, so the idea of running down the aisle with a man hell-bent on becoming a father is terrifying. Divorce is hell on earth and the thought of having another divorce -- only the second time with children -- is especially nightmarish. Rushing into a situation in order to have children with a partner I barely know seems like a recipe for another divorce.

Keeping a healthy marriage together, especially one with children, is extremely difficult. The union between the two adult partners should be the most important thing -- communication, lifestyles, goals, and temperaments must work in harmony before the added stress and pressures of children are added to the mix.

Juliet Jeske complained about the last column I wrote on her (she identifies strongly as a liberal), seeing it as a personal attack. It wasn't meant as such and nor is this one. I think she has clearly and intelligently identified some of the difficulties of family formation for a woman of her age. It helps to confirm for me the wisdom of bringing back marriage and motherhood where it belongs - in a woman's 20s.

Juliet Jeske: Why me?

Juliet Jeske is an American comedienne. She worked most recently with a sketch comedy group Turn Left as part of a "Laughing Liberally" series. This series is described as follows:

"Laughing Liberally: This Ain't No Tea Party" mixes humor, musical numbers, video, and political satire to spread understanding of liberal ideas, advance progressive values and provoke the Tea Party ..."Laughing Liberally" proves liberals do indeed do it better.

"Laughing Liberally" is a political comedy project that entertains you while promoting progressive ideas. Comedy is something the Left does better than the Right - so let's use it!

OK, like many comedians she's a left-liberal. The problem is that liberalism has left her life in a very serious mess. Two years ago her husband left her. She became depressed, went on medication and has just recently tried dating again. But she can't cope with the new hook up dating culture. She has written a column for the Huffington Post describing the pressure to hook up when dating men (it's worth reading here).

She writes that she wants something more traditional. What she wants is the love and security of marriage and the chance to be a mother. She feels that she has been robbed of this by her divorce:

I was cheated of the chance of having children and being a mother. I know I might still have time left, but dating at age 38 is difficult as half of the eligible men already have children and don’t want more. And in my current state I couldn’t afford to raise a child on my own, as I can barely take care of myself. There are times on the subway or in the park that even the sight of a young mother with her child will send me spiraling. Suddenly tears come from nowhere and I can’t make them stop. Why is she so lucky to have the one thing that I will never get to experience? I am constantly told that I shouldn’t give up hope but I haven’t been able to sustain a relationship for any length of time and every other man who I find compatible is already a father and doesn’t want more children. I had to end therapy because literally every single session was the same conflict, the same fear, the same resentment over probably losing the chance to be a parent. When my therapist suggested I go back on medication, and then tried to get me to justify what I consider a fairly innate human desire to procreate I couldn’t take it anymore and ceased the sessions.

What's interesting, though, is that Juliet Jeske hasn't really reconsidered her politics. She writes:

My politics are liberal, but my personal life is extremely conservative ...Which is sort of why the divorce has been so difficult. My marriage gave me support, stability, a companion that I loved very deeply and most importantly a sense of calm.

I don't think she's correct to describe her personal life as extremely conservative. Still, her politics don't match up with the values that are important to her own life. She is betraying what is most important to her (marriage and motherhood) with the politics she chooses to follow.

It's a disconnect that is shared by so many in the West. There are so many Westerners earnestly preaching a liberal politics they picked up at high school and uni despite the fact that it will undermine what they hold to be good in their own lives.

I've watched a few videos of Juliet Jeske doing stand up comedy. She adopts the mocking tone of the radical leftist and she poses as a sexual radical. She wants to shock and to tear down and to dissolve standards and yet at the same time she wants the very traditional goods of a stable marriage, a hard working husband who will provide material security and motherhood. And when both don't come together she asks "Why me?"