Valentine's cheer

-Jews and anti-Semites in love. Whodathunk? OK, I'dathunk, given that one of the novels I discussed at (such) length in my dissertation was about a couple whose love is actually based on one being an anti-Semite, the other a Jew.

-If Valentine's Day wasn't already making you feel terrible, what with the consumerism and the heteronormativity and the exclusion of the not-coupled, Mark Bittman provides one more reason: underpaid waitstaff. In one sense, fair enough - the system's a mess, given that not everyone always knows (nor is it always even the case) that servers are paid extremely low hourly wages and almost fully rely on tips. And yet, why pick the day that, as Bittman points out, "is the second busiest restaurant day of the year" to inspire feelings of customer guilt? What that second-busiest business tells us is that a lot of people who don't normally eat in restaurants - likely because they can't afford it - are doing so today. The scenario Bittman evokes - the exploited waitress who has to serve you, you ungrateful rich person to whom it wouldn't have occurred to treat a waitress as human were it not for Bittman's op-ed - seems especially not relevant on this day.

-The "Princeton Mom" is at it again, with special Valentine's Day 2014 observations about cows and free milk. The wrong in the op-ed is so abundant that it drowns out the right. (By "wrong" I also mean, "You should be spending far more time planning for your husband than for your career," and yes, at least every other sentence.) Hyperbole sells, as does anything that reminds women over 25 of their objective repulsiveness to men (ahem!), which is unfortunate, because buried underneath the retro and sexist link-bait are some valid points. Both that there's nothing wrong with settling down (relatively) young if that's when you meet the right person, and that it's really difficult to meet someone when you're no longer in school. Whether you're a man, a woman, or any of the other 56 Facebook-recognized possibilities.

The taboos that govern dating among non-students are immense, so cross that with the reduced opportunities to meet people generally, and indeed, options are slim. But it's mostly the issue of taboos. You will meet people outside of school, but, as Princeton Mom says, it's complicated: "You'll no doubt meet some eligible guys in your workplace, but it's hazardous to get romantically involved with co-workers." Co-workers are generally out, as of course are bosses and employees, but so, too, are friends, because it's creepy, in the world of non-students, to hit on one's friends. It gives the impression that the friendship was all along a front for a longterm plan of seduction. Meanwhile, strangers are off-limits, because they're just trying to ride the subway/drink their beverage/walk down the street in peace. Sure, they might turn out to like you back, but if they don't, you've made them feel uncomfortable.

There are good reasons for each of these rules individually. But the net result, with so many spaces safe from romance, is that there's virtually no spontaneous way to meet someone outside of a school environment. It's not impossible to meet someone - there's online dating, there are friends-of-friends - and it's very much worth remembering that some of those who don't meet that special someone in school are actually happier single. But if you're actively avoiding settling down too young, while at the same time knowing you want to settle down on the very cusp of old-enough, then sure, maybe it makes sense to consider it un-tragic to meet your spouse in school.

Savage vs. Brooks

Dan Savage introduced his latest podcast with what was, I think, his most spot-on rant yet. But it wasn't so much a rant, nor was it all that much about sexuality. He began by recalling a particularly debauched New Years of his younger adulthood. It wasn't clear where he was going with this, but longtime listeners may have guessed, from the bar-scene he was describing, that he was retelling the story of how he met his husband. Then it becomes clear that was a different debauched night. Where's the story going then? Nowhere in particular, it seems, this far in.

Then he explains that New Years this year would involve staying in with his husband and kid, trying to stay awake till midnight. His point? Both are fun. Both are valid. But those who've reached the staying-in-with-family life stage have, he notes, a tendency to treat that as true adulthood, as the correct way to be. As versus the truth, which is that different things work for different people, at different times.

While it might be tempting to brush this aside as a middle-aged guru-to-youth attempting to stay relevant, it's actually a really important point, one I don't think I'd ever seen, other than at WWPD, where I've made versions of it on occasion. Although I may take this further than Savage - my point is that the younger you isn't acting entirely in the service of the older-you. You don't want to close off options, to do things while young that will really sabotage your life later on. But you also need to act in the best interests of the self that currently exists, and to trust that that younger self wasn't a complete fool. As in, say a woman who's 45 and single kicks herself for not marrying a doofus who asked (or might have, had she not broken things off) when they were 25. At 45, one just knows so much more about life, yet tragically can't go back and fix the mistakes of youth. Or: The 45-year-old self doesn't accurately recall what the dude from 20 years ago was like. She make long for the idea of having met a good-enough guy and settled down younger, but the specific problems with this guy, well, that's knowledge only available to the 25-year-old self actually living that relationship.

I thought of this in terms of David Brooks's column on pot. He and his friends went through a pot stage as adolescents. They enjoyed it for a time, then grew out of it because they realized it's kind of dumb. Because pot isn't the best thing ever, the government should discourage it. That means it needs to remain illegal.

Now, my first thought - and I'm shocked to see in the comments that it wasn't everybody's - was that the problem with pot being illegal is that the kids who get caught end up with this on their record. And this sort of mark on a record is going to have a bigger impact the less power someone otherwise has in society.

But then there's a separate question: Was young David Brooks wrong to enjoy pot? I ask not out of any particular interest in pot - that, specifically, was never my thing - but because it seems like he got something out of it for a time (had fun, bonded with a seemingly nice group of friends), and, like so many before and after him, emerged with his brain intact. (I've also known people who end up far too reliant on the stuff, but whether that's worse than equivalent alcohol dependence is its own question.) "[B]eing stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure," he writes, but the same could be said of "Designing Women," which was my great vice at the age when the boys I went to school with were most enthusiastic about pot. "Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive." Should we make "Designing Women" illegal, then?

Different things appeal at different life stages. The idea that once you get a bit older, you're in a position to declare the relatively innocuous choices of your youth immoral doesn't make sense to me. But then again, I'm not, I suppose, a conservative.

Heteroscriptual

A Dear Prudence-type question somehow ended up in Dan Savage's inbox, although not for the first time. This one's from a 28-year-old woman who's been with her same-age boyfriend, including living with him, for respectable lengths of time. She wants to get married, and has not made a secret of this. She's told him. She's told his mother. And he... doesn't want to marry her? Or maybe he does, but the script requires a bit of kicking and screaming from the dude, a bit of will-he-or-won't-he from the dudette, and that's where we're at. It's engagement season, I suppose, or at any rate, straight women-asking-gay-male-advice-columnists-when-dude-will-propose season.

From the limited information we get, it's not at all clear which it is. If we all mine our anecdotal evidence, we'll come up with examples of stories along these lines that culminate in by all accounts happy marriages, as well as others where there was an underlying he's-not-that-into-you, and they break up. Either we're at a particular moment in the standard-issue script that leads to marriage, or she should say, as Edina Monsoon does in a different context, "Me and my ovaries are leaving," and return to the dating pool with ample time left to have the bio kids she desires.

Savage's response is basically, oy the heterosexuals, and then he urges the letter-writer to just do the proposing herself. Which is a step in the right direction - this time around, he doesn't just agree that 20-something is too young for such decisions. Problem is - as the commenters point out, and as I mentioned here in response to the similar question there a while back - the woman kinda-sorta already has proposed. Philip Galanes, addressing a slightly different question (this would-be-affianced hasn't spoken up, it seems, but assumes her dude can read her mind), urges a female proposal that's a conversation rather than an ultimatum, although then there's Savage's letter-writer, who had that conversation, kept it open-ended, and got nowhere.

Savage is right that the heterosexual proposal is heavy on the gender roles, but if only it just came down to who generally asks the question! There are assumptions about the age at which men or women have the most options on the dating market. There's biology, but there's also the way that age enters into it even independently of any specific couple's desire to have biological children. There's the bizarre pseudo-feminist performance of independence and of indifference to all that wedding nonsense that women are urged to embrace specifically to inspire a man to propose. (And it gets confusing, because there are also the women who genuinely don't want to marry, this guy or at this moment or ever.) At the same time, even men who do want to get married need to at least resist the idea a little bit, or else they seem some combination of desperate and gender-non-conforming.

Ultimately, some of this isn't gender-specific, but just the common human desire to be with someone who could plausibly appeal to others as well. It's performed in different ways in men and women, but amounts to the same.

But the problem with the female proposal isn't simply that it switches things around at the last minute. It's that, according to the script, every woman effectively has proposed... to any man she'd refer to as a boyfriend. Even if she's never brought up marriage. Even if she's said she doesn't want to get married any time soon, because, heh heh, everyone knows that no women could possibly feel like that. (Hashtag: sarcasm.) His 'proposal' is really just a yes to the one she's already given, just by being female. Which, to repeat, is a problem, because we live in a not entirely scripted world, and sometimes women who give off every impression of not wanting to get married don't want to get married, and it's not actually a clever ruse to seem less needy or clichéd. But because the script demands female passivity, there's no way for a woman to announce she does or does not want to get married until a man has broached the subject.

The ultimatum - much-maligned for its lack of romance - is, in a sense, the female proposal. It brings a relationship to the point it would be in if a man had proposed and the woman had said no. The male proposal assumes a yes, while the female one assumes a no, because every man's answer is no until proven otherwise.

It's tempting, then, to suggest a non-ultimatum female proposal - and totally understandable that those looking at bizarre hetero courtship rituals from the outside would be like, why is this not already happening? - and granted, it's not that this has never happened. But as a rule, a woman who brings up marriage is perceived of as exerting pressure, in a way that a man doing the same is not. Until all these myriad underlying assumptions remain, equality in the kneeling arena doesn't seem imminent.

Rhoda Studies 101

So I've now watched from the second (not the first - it's unavailable) episode of the notorious "JAP" Bravo reality show, up through I'm not saying what number. Possibly too late to write about it for a thing that isn't WWPD, unless I find a timeless angle, which... I think I might, so maybe more later, elsewhere. But for now:

The first thing I noticed: the "Princesses of Long Island" - most of them, at least - retain their original noses. A definite change from earlier generations of the same milieu. Is it that they really own their Jewishness? Is it just some kind of Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide, with the former (for some obvious historical reasons I could think of) more likely to have undergone this procedure?

I point this out not to gratuitously bring up noses, but because the original-nose-retention (in the midst of a great deal of artifice otherwise) seems somehow emblematic of the show. The whole unapologetically-Jewish thing. A few seconds hardly go by before we're reminded that the women - who seem basically like reality-TV women everywhere, and who one half expects to start speaking in Essex accents - are Jewish. Did they mention recently that they're Jewish? This, despite only one of the women being a practicing Jew, or seeming at all plugged into anything culturally Jewish, for that matter. The others have evidently been instructed by producers to play up the Jewish angle, to drop various Hebrew expressions that don't make any sense in the context, and seem incredibly forced. One asks all men she meets if they're Jewish, in a way that seems beyond artificial. So basically the same relationship to Jewish-Americanness as "Jersey Shore" had/has (?) to Italian-Americanness. Or the TV-show version of this.

Maybe the show is anti-anti-Semitic. It represents Jews as big drinkers and not remotely clever or intellectual. Overanalyzing everything? Overachieving? Overrepresenting the group in graduate schools? Not so much! Oh, and if the "JAP" is frigid, well, our pal Erica clears that up.

Should I be offended that this show kinda-sorta claims to represent me, a Jewish woman about their age, living not on Long Island, fine, but in New Jersey, which might be exactly the same thing? (There was an intro shot of a tristate-area strip mall that brought me right back to my most recent supermarket trip. And I'm half thinking, 'but I just bought groceries, how am I back there?') Probably. I'm not, but only because of a likely misguided belief that no one would imagine I belonged to that subculture. I'm about 50 primping-steps away from being socially acceptable in that world. But to someone from well outside it, by virtue of being American, Jewish, female, and not a complete hippie, I may well read as a "JAP." Which is why all American Jewish women effectively have to find this stereotype offensive.

As with all minorities, we're probably all the same to outsiders, yet small internal differences seem immense to us. Growing up, I virtually never encountered this subculture for any length of time (once at summer camp, at 8, and then not again until Birthright Israel, at 23), other than to have it drilled into me from day one that I was not and should not ever be that. That princessy-ness was simultaneously anti-feminist and repulsive to men. Not sure how I came to grow up with this message - it seems to more often come from Israeli-American communities. Maybe an urban vs. suburban thing? A clash between those with more cultural capital than economic and those in the reverse situation?

There's a kind of mutual class snobbery between whatever the thing I was brought up as and whatever that is. The only instance of bullying I can remember from my childhood involves that sleepaway camp, where I was harangued for not blowdrying my hair (I was 8!), and having clothing that clashed (is that still a thing?). But the very same Jewish women who are most attuned to issues of gender-and-marginalization are probably the ones most wary of coming across as "JAPs," despite this being nothing more than a gendered stereotype, with intersectionality written all over it. It's complicated.

As Jessica Grose pointed out, this show really harps on the age of the participants, displaying their age with their name, which is not a normal thing done on reality shows. (We don't get the ages of their dates, parents...) Grose sees this as highlighting that these grown women live like children, which they do. But as Rachel Arons picks up on, the age is what brings drama to the proceedings. Time is running out. They're all on the cusp of 30. Which has tremendous significance for them, because they need to be married by that age. The moment all the women are 30, some kind of timer goes off.

Which... I don't even know. That view is hardly unique to this one subculture. But they're stuck in a frustrating middle-ground, culturally. Traditional enough that it's a tragedy if they're 29 and single (and that it would be tragic if they married out), but not enough that someone in the community has it together to find them spouses.

And then you get the show's Snooki (the very short, quirky one) getting quasi-proposed to by her father, with a diamond ring, with her mother present, to mark her 30th birthday. One of those reality-TV moments you can only hope was scripted.

What is anti-Semitic about the show, I suppose, is that it perpetuates the idea of the perpetually single-and-desperate Jewish woman, the one whose very Jewishness somehow rules out the possibility of her pairing off, yet makes her all the more keen to do so ASAP. (You'd know about this if you'd taken Rhoda Studies 101.) The single woman in American mainstream culture virtually is a Jewish woman, so thoroughly has that cliché caught on. A certain New York-area accent and 'Semitic' appearance is shorthand for 'perennially single-and-doesn't-want-to-be sidekick'.

And yet! Women in this subculture do get married. Happens every day, I'd imagine. There are, after all, men of the same subculture, who contrary to what Philip Roth might have you believe, tend to prefer their female equivalents, and not to be running off with low-maintenance WASPs (whom they'd be meeting where, exactly?). These particular women are, one gets the sense, unusual in their milieu for still being single at their age. A subset of a subculture. Yet the show's message is, look at how repulsive Jewish women are to the opposite sex! Who would want anything to do with them? When it's like, a) not all Jewish women are anything like this, and b) of the ones who are, this does not seem to be an impediment to pairing off.

"Almost universally, the women said they did not plan to marry until their late 20s or early 30s."

That's the line that jumped out at me in the latest college-coeds-doin'-it exposé. Why that line, despite so many so much racier ones?

-I wonder how these very same women (and we're going to assume, for the sake of convenience, that a real phenomenon is being described, even if it bears little overlap with our own experience of a not-so-different college not-so-long before) will feel if The Husband doesn't magically appear at The Age, and if they instead meet him at 42, or not at all.

-I wonder, of the women who do marry at The Age, but no earlier because Career, how many will readily abandon said career (or scale back substantially, never to recover) upon marriage or kids.

In other words, the window-of-opportunity problem I keep yammering on about. Prior to The Age, women (elite women? elite-women-broadly-defined?) are given this oh-so-feminist message about pursuing independence, ambition, dreams, not being held back by any man, and not wanting any casual thing with a dude to turn into anything more serious. But the old-timey expectations - marriage-panic and all that - haven't disappeared. They've merely shifted down a few years, and gotten that much more panicky.

There are two contradictory - and equally misguided - conclusions we might draw. One would be that everything is going so well for these women until The Age, and that the problem is that they're ever settling down. The other is that these women are foolish not to snag husbands while still young and nubile - the Princeton Mom argument. The former insists that a woman's true self wants a career and not a relationship; the latter, that women only ever really want relationships, and are somehow suckered into thinking otherwise by feminism.

The reality: most women and most men want both a career and a family. Men are assumed to want both of these things; more to the point, they're not assumed to have rejected one when they acquire the other. As long as this seems, to women, to be either-or, the balance of power is not so favorable. Thus, perhaps, the asymmetry of sexual pleasure, the culture of sexual violence, the sad (apparent) fact of hook-ups not being the utopia of gender-neutral sexual adventure one might imagine.

So in a way, younger women's belief (reinforced by advice from those around them) that they need to stay independent of relationships if they're going to have careers actually sets up the later sense that, once they do get married, whichever burgeoning career there was is as good as done.

Fiction is better, Part III

Kate Fridkis describes a situation at the crux of all kinds of hot-button issues: she's an upper-middle-class writer, a woman who lives in Brooklyn ("Girls" yoga organic parenting CSAs beards flannel coffee artisanal! Brooklyn!), and she married at 24 and got pregnant intentionally at 26. In other words, she dared violate the laws of the window of opportunity by not waiting until her set entered into full-on panic about marriage-and-kids, and did things according to a timeline that worked for her. Is hers a story about the latest updates from Turkey? No. But she has an interesting perspective, conveys it well, and doesn't pretend to be talking about a larger pool of people than she is. She writes about herself without dragging anyone else down in the process. A personal-essay triumph!

The commenters, though, did not see it this way. It's a veritable festival of YPIS getting hurled at the author. Fridkis, the commenters believe, thinks she's all that because she did this utterly normal thing: married and had a kid. (Did they not notice how the piece was about how this utterly normal thing has become, in her world, outrageous?) She is, the commenters will helpfully point out, privileged, and needs to get out of her bubble. Meanwhile, the point of the essay was very much self-awareness about said bubble, but why should that stop anyone?

Some commenters - and there are over a thousand comments, not all of which (shocking, I realize) I have read or will read - are really miffed that Fridkis didn't get into her husband's stance on all this. When it's like, maybe she's prepared to share about herself, but not other people? Still others fault the author for caring what her friends think. When it's like, we all care what our friends think. Less as we get older, sure, but it's far easier to claim indifference to this than to achieve it, and at any rate, it's kind of a good thing to have people you're close to, whose opinions you respect.

And then there's the contingent annoyed at the New York-centrism of all of this. When... just change the ages of marriage and first pregnancy, and the same hoopla would happen in a different milieu. There's quite often going to be an age that's not really too young to settle down, but it's younger than what your friends are doing, and it's therefore scandalous. That's the window-of-opportunity problem, and the reaction to the piece I wrote about it suggests it's not only an issue in New York. But yes, New York, so tragically overrepresented. I mean, I was slightly bitter - where I live now, there don't appear to be any wine-fueled non-fiction writing circles, waa! - but the broader point holds even for those of us who need to drive to run errands.

The reaction, then, points us back to the whole fiction-is-better issue. The only reason readers reacted as they did was the dynamic created by the author being a real person. The story gets classified as a news article in readers' brains, and readers understandably compare it, at least implicitly, to hard-news, breaking news, things of that nature. Which, alas, even the best-written personal essay about being 26 and having a baby with one's spouse is never going to be. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, to say the least. One commenter calls it a "narcissistic humble brag," which... no. There is a real problem, but it's not a Real Problem. Fiction allows for presentation of real problems that aren't Real Problems, whereas the personal essay, it seems, does not.

Anyway: to be clear, I don't think fiction is better than non-fiction. I think fiction is better at doing certain things than non-fiction is - better at telling a certain kind of human-nature story. I think we've started looking to non-fiction for the things we should be getting from fiction, while at the same time criticizing certain non-fiction for dealing with exactly the small-scale, relatively-petty concerns that we do find interesting, thus why we were reading the thing in the first place.

The plight of the not-so-recent college grad

On a recent "Fresh Air," Greta Gerwig told Terry Gross that after college,

There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting, and then I think when you hit around 27 it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck.

I was listening to this on a run earlier, and it was like, whoa, I'd better write this down. But then NPR's website saved me the trouble.

Anyway, this strikes me as not only spot-on, but also relevant to two topics familiar to WWPD's three readers. The first is the case against graduate school (defined, for our purposes, as PhD programs in non-STEM fields). When you start, assuming you go soon after college, you will feel more together than many of your peers, or certainly not less. Sure, there will be the ones who went straight into finance or consulting, but then there will be many others who are more or less floundering. And you'll be thinking, huh, I'm 24, I have health insurance and not via my parents, I'm paid to read books, dammit!

And then a year will pass. And another one. And then at a certain point you're the friend lagging behind. All of a sudden, Facebook (where, needless to say, no one is announcing unemployment or underemployment), which has become your principal source for what your cohort is up to, now that you're not actively in touch with most of your non-grad-school friends (although you will rekindle friendships with those who've also gone your route)... all of a sudden, Facebook is telling you that everyone you knew growing up now has a real job, maybe a house, and you? When exactly are you getting that degree we've been hearing about for the past 500 years?

The other reason the quote stuck with me was nothing to do with grad school in particular. Rather, it was that the moment Gerwig describes is, for women, the window of opportunity. The point at which your friends and family switch from telling you not to get distracted by boys, to asking you when you'll find yourself a man. Gerwig doesn't describe it as such - she describes it as the moment when many of your friends start settling down. But it amounts to the same.

While the Recent College Grad is very much a thing (and thanks to "Girls," all the more so), the not-so-recent college grad is also a type in its own right, and a more poignant/pathetic one. When one is still young, but only relative to those who are older. Which, sure, could also be said of 10-year-olds. But what I'm describing - what Gerwig and her colleague/director/boyfriend Noah Baumbach seem to have made a movie about - is the first point at which one has fully exited youth.

And I couldn't help but think about how Gerwig, who's evidently less than a week apart from me in age, is in a relationship with Baumbach, who's 43. Not in terms of anything about Gerwig or Baumbach in particular, but in terms of not-so-recent-college-grad-ness among women more generally. In the "Fresh Air" interview, much is made of how young Gerwig is. And, while I acknowledge that 29 is not elderly, I don't feel all that young. 29 is firmly madame territory. 30 is imminent. While 20 is young, '30 is young' is the kind of thing those who are 30 or thereabouts say to reassure themselves/one another, or that the 40-plus say when being jaded. 29 is only young if being constantly juxtaposed to 43.

So I do kind of suspect that the appeal of being the younger woman is greater at 27-plus than when one is a bit younger, but still definitely an adult. So it's not that there aren't available same-age men, or that those men are all chasing after (let alone snagging!) women who've just that evening turned 18. Nor is it that something miraculous happens to men in their 40s, that they become suddenly better-looking than in their mid-late 20s. (And indeed, I'm really not talking about Gerwig and Baumbach in particular, because he's a famous movie director, which, needless to say, most 43-year-old men are not. That, and one can never say what makes any individual couple tick.) Nor is it necessarily about women this age (alas, my age) wanting to settle down, and not finding men their own age interested in doing so. If anything, it seems more likely that a woman wanting to stay in carefree 'girlfriend' mode is going to match up well with a man who's seeking out a younger woman because the 'younger woman' represents not settling down.

"How could anybody not like you?" - Helen Seinfeld

At the intersection of parental overshare and the window-of-opportunity problem: the Princeton University mom who wrote a letter to a Princeton publication about her Princeton sons' eligibility, or something, and caused the internet to explode, or at any rate the website with her letter on it to crash. Then New York Magazine interviewed her. The internet exploded some more. I'm not sure if I've read the entire letter, because as I said, the original is unavailable, but as it was apparently quite short, it could be that the NYMag excerpt is the thing in its entirety. In any case, as a self-proclaimed expert in related areas, and a resident of the town of Princeton but not for reasons related to that university, my very important thoughts on this are below.

First, some defending-the-indefensible:

-According to the official WWPD definition, embarrassing parent-writing is not parental overshare if the child is an adult. It's always awkward to write about living family members, but if they're old enough to give consent, or to write their own tirade without fearing being grounded/getting cut off/worse, it's not quite the same. Nevertheless, the first example I ever gave of the phenomenon, before delving into its nuances, involved a mother writing about her 19-year-old son. And if the "child" is an adult as in over 18, but a financially dependent young college student...

In this case, we don't actually learn anything much about this woman's own two sons. Only that she thinks highly of them, in that very specific way the mothers of sons often do:

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless.

Are we all now cringing on behalf of these two golden boys? Yes. But the only controversial thing we've learned about them is that their mother is quite something, which is actually something about her. And parents are under no ethical obligation not to be ridiculous, lest that ridiculousness be off-putting to would-be dates, employers, etc. While the letter could be read as an attempt to get her younger son a girlfriend, I'm not sure anyone interpreted it as evidence that he needed this help.

-The Princeton mom made a bunch of outrageous assumptions, but assuming that women will one day want to marry men wasn't one of them. Yet one response I've seen to this letter has been that not everyone is straight. Which... fair enough, but most people are indeed heterosexual. Full legal and social acceptance of LGBT individuals will not bring about a time in which the bulk of men don't want to marry women, the bulk of women don't want to marry men. (Even if we call it something other than "marry" in that progressive utopia.) Along the same lines, it is harder to meet someone once you're out of school, and women's romantic options do decrease with age relative to those of men.

-The answer to a what-year-is-this? demand that female college freshmen husband-hunt so as to avoid being single, haggard 22-year-olds is not to say that college is too young to find a spouse. As came up here recently, to marry at a 'sensible' age, and after getting to know your future spouse a sensible amount, you need to have gotten together with that person while still too young to have possibly been thinking about marriage. (Or you can meet at the 'right' age and marry 'too late' - thus why these categories themselves are the problem.) That's where the window-of-opportunity issue occurs - women of 22 are told that it would be insane for them to look for husbands... but come 25, and it's a disaster they haven't already found The One. It's certainly reactionary to shift the window-of-opportunity down in age to freshman year of college, but the answer isn't to keep the window as elusive but place it at 29.

Now, I join the chorus:

-That a man has gone to a top-three Ivy most certainly does not mean his romantic options are "limitless." Some men do think this, which makes it all the more fun for the women who get to disabuse them of that notion.

-"Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated." The first, kinda-sorta, but the second two, not so much. That may have once been the case, but no more. Fancy-college (what Princeton Mom is using as a proxy for intelligence) is now a gender-neutral class signifier, and there's not much socioeconomic intermingling. A cashier at Wawa might be stunning, but a Princeton undergrad dude isn't going to even notice that (or, at least, isn't going to bring her home for Thanksgiving), because that's how it goes in class-less America.

-Do 18-year-old women have the most romantic options? On paper, it seems like they might, but in reality? If we're talking marriage, very young women probably don't have as many options as women further into their 20s, because the bulk of the romantic interest they attract (or seek out!) tends to be of a more casual variety. (Older men interested in very young women tend to have that interest in part because they're trying to avoid settling down.)

-Straight women who are college seniors do indeed have fewer options at college, unless they're prepared to date freshman, which, as a rule, they're not. And at colleges on the whole, it can be difficult to meet people who aren't fellow undergraduates. But! In this particular case! Hello! There are so many slightly-older single men in Princeton, most with a Princeton affiliation, who will happily date 21-22-year-old Princeton women. Graduate students! Postdocs! I find it hilarious that there's a man shortage down the road, given the profound woman shortage in this neck of the woods.

"Young and impulsive"

Caryatis pointed me to this (relatively tame) Savage Love letter, from a 28-year-old man with a 28-year-old husband he'd been with since they were 24. I had known Savage to make arguments like this, and had tried to dig one up to link to here, but the trouble with podcasts is searching them, and I hadn't found any in his searchable oeuvre. Anyway:

These two men, apart from being 28, have a messed-up and possibly unfixable marriage. Sad, but seemingly unrelated to their age, which is unremarkable. As in, not worth remarking on, since as per the document Savage links to, the median age for a man to marry is 28. As Caryatis notes, we don't learn when this couple got married. For all we know, they married after five minutes at age 24. But "together" from 24 and married at 28 does not mean married at 24 and together since 17. To marry at a so-called reasonable age, after a so-called reasonable amount of time, you need to have met your spouse while too young to marry. Nevertheless, Savage takes the opportunity to launch into a speech about the "young and impulsive" who enter marriages all but doomed to fail:

According to the Pew Research Center, early marriage correlates strongly with divorce. The younger a couple is when they marry, the likelier they are to divorce. There are often other factors at play, of course, and there are plenty of people out there who got married in their teens or twenties and are still with their first spouses.

Well. It's good to know that on rare occasions, people who get married in their twenties do not divorce. Their twenties! You know the NYT Weddings pages, that sea of highly-educated 27-29.5-year-old brides? Some of those couples just might make it.

I mean, gah! How is this meant to work for women, this rule by which one cannot marry or even begin dating one's future spouse until age 30? Fertility isn't everything, but it isn't nothing, either. I'm not aware of a study saying that it's better to marry at 32 than 28, but I do remember hearing somewhere (intentional understatement - this is all one hears about) that IVF is best avoided if possible.

If Savage were talking only about gay male couples, fair enough, although same-sex marriage is kind of new to start imposing window-of-opportunity restrictions on it as well. (And are gay male college sweethearts who start thinking about marriage at 25 rightly considered "impulsive"?) But he's not. He's saying that 30 is the age at which anyone, male or female, straight or LGBT, can start even thinking about settling down without that being foolish.

On writing something unlikely to infuriate mommy-bloggers

If WWPD is not enough of my ramblings, you can read more elsewhere. Whichever powers-that-be choose photos for such things happened to choose one of Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, meaning it looks like a picture of me, but a) I don't wear glasses, and b) my wedding dress looked nothing like that. (Neither did Liz Lemon's, as I recall - this was some other episode.)

Once more, in bold

Miss Self-Important responds, helps me clarify what I was trying to get at in the post below. And hello also new readers via Scott Lemieux. I'm seeing if this bold thing some other bloggers I like use helps or hurts comprehension:

-What do I mean when I say that women know what they want when it comes to reproduction? What I of course don't mean is that a given woman, tossed into a radically different place and/or time, would want the same thing. I'm not referring to any essential, inborn quality. What I mean is simply that if you are a girl/woman of reproductive age, you tend to either want a child within the next nine months or not. A 22-year-old (or a 16-year-old!) likely won't know exactly what she'll want at 32. You will then - assuming you have choices - behave in a way conducive to the outcome you want. Are there also women who kind of want a kid, kind of not, and then their birth control fails but they're kind of OK with it? Sure, although I wouldn't exaggerate how often that happens, and it at any rate doesn't fall outside the realm of women knowing what they want. Some women might be OK with having a kid. That's not not a position. By "women know," I mean that if a woman who doesn't want kids just yet finds herself forced to have one, or, conversely, if a woman who wants kids can get all the contraception she wants but no time off work, that's a problem. Women don't merely accept situations for what they are, happily living in whichever context, not questioning it (or despairing) when their options are limited. It's one thing, then, for the state to shift whichever conditions of possibility - making birth control over-the-counter, say, or providing free maternity care, which would indeed up the odds of a younger, less financially-secure woman having kids - and quite another for there to be intervention past the point a woman, within whichever context, sure, has already come to some decision.

-To be more precise than I was in the earlier post: I don't actually think it's wrong for an op-ed writer to discuss this topic. It gets iffy when the op-ed writer in question is in a position to influence policy and appears interested in doing so, as opposed to merely urging the NYT readers to spawn. My concern isn't super-suggestible women going out and spawning because Ross Douthat told them to. And - this addressing MSI - if the government wants to do this or that social-welfare-wise that might end up increasing the birthrate, so be it. The problem I have with natalist policy is that if the goal is more babies - or, for that matter, fewer babies - then there's only so much that can be accomplished by expanding women's options. We know quite well what government policy to keep a birthrate down can look like. To increase one, do we really think daycare would be enough? That restricting contraception and abortion wouldn't enter into it? Therein lies the danger of encouraging the government to weigh in on this.

-Says MSI:

Douthat commits a social sin by presuming to tell women what they want, as do feminists who insist that women must put their careers ahead of everything else (and maybe feminists who say that women should boycott procreation until their husbands give them socialism for their birthdays, which Pollitt's concluding point implies).

This is a very odd claim about Pollitt, whose concluding point is that if Douthat's so concerned with birthrates, he needs to be, on certain issues at least, more European-left and less American-right. Which seems fair. But the bigger question I have is, who are the "feminists" - of our times, that is - who say career must come first? I thought mainstream feminism had long been about making it possible for women to be in the workforce and have kids. It's true (and this is my window-of-opportunity argument) that in certain circles where many women do identify as feminists, very young women are urged by the women in their lives (mothers, friends, etc.) not to settle down, but then come 27 or so they get the opposite message.

-I wonder where Douthat and those sympathetic to his argument (MSI? Caryatis?) fall on the question of what a government should do if it turned out that we'd be better-off, socioeconomically-speaking, with a lower birthrate. Not so compatible with Catholicism or social conservatism, but if we're speaking in cold economic terms, it could clearly go in either direction, depending.

-What I mean by natalism being immoral: It's not immoral to care about the future of children you plan to have, or for the government to ask that we do tiny, no-big-deal things like recycle in the hopes of averting the planet's full-on demise. This is really not like restricting one's tuna-sushi consumption, which is admittedly (lots of decadence all around, in the expensive-food sense, at least) a sacrifice. The problem with natalism is that it asks the biggest possible decision a woman can make to come down to it being maybe slightly better for the economy or maybe not if the average woman has 2.3 rather than 1.8 kids or whatever. It's immoral to value the life of theoretical people over that of existing ones, particularly when there's hardly a consensus that more children are the answer - maybe it's fewer. It's certainly not immoral if a particular woman finds Douthat convincing, or some anti-Douthat horrified that anyone would bring more children into the world, and arranges her fertility according to whichever principles. What's immoral is stepping in and making it really difficult or altogether impossible for a woman to have a kid if she wants or not if she doesn't.

The universal and particular in "Tiny Furniture"

Every so often, some piece of entertainment comes along that so resembles my own biography that I have trouble judging how it might be received by those for whom the material won't be so incredibly familiar. I don't mean 'sitcoms set in New York.' I mean really specific situations, like being the less-appreciated brunette best friend of a universally-admired blonde at a girls' school on the Upper East Side. Or being the only woman and non (astro-) physicist in one's housing situation. ("Gossip Girl" and "The Big Bang Theory," respectively.) It's not that I can't say anything about these shows, just that they get an automatic... something from me. Not necessarily a boost. I often just end up annoyed that I'm watching something so familiar and lose interest. But questions another viewer might have about whichever technicalities are automatically filled in for me, like when you're writing something yourself.

So, "Tiny Furniture." (Spoilers, yes.) Lena Dunham's breakout movie tells the story of a young woman (Aura) who's just graduated from college in the Midwest and moves back home to a posh neighborhood in Manhattan. She doesn't have a job lined up, or a figured-out love life. She has a brief stint in hipster food service. So far, we're also talking about my immediate post-college experience. I moved out and got an office job by that September, started grad school the following year, and had my first date with my now-husband at 23, exactly six years ago today (!). I have not subsequently become a Big Deal ala Dunham (and it's hinted that Aura will do the same), nor was I ever in a position where getting a job or not was optional. My parents are not artists. It's not exactly the same. But I totally arrived back home unsure of everything, annoyed my family by my mere presence, and had that only-in-NY experience of being in this center of ambition and adventure yet living at home, the very antithesis of what the city is supposed to be about.

But I did like the movie, and do think a lot of it is applicable even if the plot doesn't closely match up with your own life. First off, the post-college moment. No matter where you grow up, if you move back home after college, even for a couple weeks, there's an inherent awkwardness to the situation, all the more so if there's no set end date. On the one hand, you're accustomed to thinking of the house/apartment as home, not your parents' home, because when you're a kid, it's not as if you have the option of your own place. On the other, you're used to living life by your own rules, coming and going as you please. (See the second letter here.) It's easy for an adult to look at this and think, how entitled, but if you're at that specific moment in life, you are, I think, genuinely confused. You're not home like you were in high school, or free as you were in the dorm. The trick is to move out, which is what virtually everyone in that situation wants to do approximately five minutes after setting down their luggage. The post-2008 economy complicates things, but that Dunham's character has a friend to move in with and opts to stay living at home is significant because it fits with the broader pattern of this character making the wrong choice at every opportunity. That "home" is a Tribeca loft only matters because you get the sense that Aura confuses her life on paper with the reality. She loves living at home, except that you've never seen anyone as miserable.

Next, the stuff with guys. It's the classic low-self-esteem scenario, made specific by Aura's presence in a very glamorous world, one least likely to be forgiving of a more-than-plain-looking appearance (and this is Aura we're talking about, not Dunham), but cringe-inducing in a more universal way. There are these painful details, like her job, which is to be the hostess at a hip restaurant in Tribeca. Except that instead of a greeter (a job once held in that neighborhood, I might add, by the girl generally recognized as best-looking in my high school class), she's a day hostess, which means answering phones and not being seen.

We're used to assuming, in movies and life, that an early-20-something woman spends much of her time fending off offers for sex. Maybe there are guys who won't commit, but there's at least a certain affirmation that these women are desirable. The problems we hear about women of this set experiencing are sexual assault and its lesser cousin, street harassment. All that these young women ask is to be able to walk down the street in a miniskirt in peace. But Aura is forever offering herself up, dolling herself up, and getting shot down in new and more humiliating ways. One guy moves in with her, even shares her bed, and they never so much as kiss. Another stands her up, and it wasn't even for a date, exactly, so much as a drug deal in which she wasn't even going to get paid. That same guy later on confesses to having cheated on his girlfriend, then quickly tells her he won't sleep with her because he still lives with his girlfriend. When he finally capitulates, further humiliation (and danger) ensues. It is so, so bleak, and a kind of bleak we rarely hear about (too much male attention is also bleak, but a more familiar bleak). It's in no way mitigated by the fact that Aura comes from privilege.

The no time for a boyfriend brigade

Hanna Rosin's Atlantic story about how the hook-up culture benefits - and is perpetuated by - young women is kind of great. Finally, someone is acknowledging that not all female-desire-for-a-man is desire for a boyfriend/husband/father-of-future-kids. Often, especially when young, girls desire boys, women men, for the very same reason as straight men lust after women, gay men men, bisexuals you-get-the-idea. It is, or long was, socially unacceptable for the ladies to express desire in these terms, so they would often profess to wanting a relationship when they really just want some dude. If young women no longer feel they have to do a whole charade of pretending they want every guy they kiss to be their husband, that's wonderful!

And what Rosin describes might be the Léon Blum idea in action: men as well as women who've seen what's out there end up in more stable marriages later on, because they have a sense of what they want, and because they don't find themselves wondering what another person - any other person - could possibly be like. Otherwise, Madame Bovary happens, which everyone but Lori Gottlieb agrees isn't ideal.

But the piece brings up some window-of-opportunity questions. One female college student interviewed, for example, is all live-and-let-live, but adds, as if it's no big deal, that she intends to be married by 30. Clearly lots of women (and men!) do manage to keep things casual until The Official Age, whatever that may be, and then conveniently enough manage to change their Facebook statuses to "engaged" in unison with the rest of their cohort. But that's a lot of pressure, to go from ugh-no-boyfriend-please to must-find-husband-now within the span of, oh, five minutes. Why not accept that some women will meet the loves of their lives at 19 (after having dated others - 19's not that young), while others will never want to settle down? As life plans go, this one's better than most, but it's still restrictive and still has its problems.

As it stands, what Rosin describes as the default for ambitious young women is certainly what women of my generation were advised to do by women of our mothers' generation back when we were in high school and college. The worst thing any of us could do would be to settle down too early and put a man before our educations/careers. Of course, the need to move for one's career doesn't magically stop at age 30, and often enough, what will happen these days is, a woman will have nobly resisted sacrificing her potential by marrying at 19, only to give up a career at 30 or 35. So I suppose it would be interesting to see if that's going to change, if college women who didn't dare have boyfriends because Career end up staying in said career even once the requisite marriage-at-30 takes place.

Which brings up one last concern, namely that there's something awfully depressing and maybe even retrograde about women embracing the "hook-up culture" in order to have time to do internships (!) and the like. It implies that these young women would prefer relationships, but fear hurting their futures by having them, a kind of junior version of the women who wait to have kids until they're 45 because they want to first be sufficiently established professionally. Depressing, then, both because it suggests that women aren't simply interested in exploration/variety/etc. while young (thereby once again casting doubt on the existence of female desire), and, more importantly, because there's no corresponding narrative about how if a guy meets the woman of his dreams at 20, staying with her will mean curtailing his ambitions.

United in studiousness and lactose intolerance

-As someone who both is intermarried and studies intermarriage (the backstory), I read with interest this account of a couple, Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt, who study the very form of intermarriage they're in - Jewish-Asian. Of the seven (mostly) well-known couples of the past half-century mentioned in the story about their marriage and subsequent research, all are Jewish men married to Asian or Asian-American women. 


While the academic paper itself addresses gender, it seems worth noting that the Styles-audience-oriented summary does not. The omission might be read as political correctness - if we don't articulate what's indicated by the data provided, we need not open that particular can of worms. Instead, we learn that Jews and Asians both value education. Leading one to wonder, if we are to accept the 'model minority' label... are Jewish women and Asian men raised in families that value waking up in the late afternoon for a day of pot, video games, and staring at a wall?


My only semi-informed hypothesis is that the somewhat higher rates of intermarriage for Jewish men (as opposed to women) and Asian women (as opposed to men) only partially explain why popular culture has deemed only one variant of Asian-Jewish (hetero) intermarriage a thing. I think it may also relate to popular (and offensive, and false, let's be clear) assumptions that when Asian women or Jewish men marry out - with each other or otherwise - they're somehow moving up in the world. That they've transcended the limitations of their backgrounds and bravely set out to make their own ways. Whereas the corresponding assumption is that when Asian men or Jewish women do so, it's only because they've failed - after trying and trying and trying some more - to snag a mate within the community. For this reason, I suspect that the visibility is not proportional to the reality. But... yeah, this isn't the era or variety of Jewish intermarriage I study, and is based mostly on impressions backed up by Googling around and finding whichever hundreds of blog-commenters have had the same impression, so for deeper analysis, look elsewhere.


-Speaking of Asian-Jewish affinity, Mark Bittman informs us that 90 percent of Asian-Americans and 75 percent of Jewish-Americans are lactose intolerant. Another estimate for Jews (not the first one mentioned) is higher still. I'm reasonably up on the Ashkenazi genetic failings, but I must say I'd ever heard of this. Still, my complete lack of anecdata for Jewish lactose intolerance doesn't mean this isn't ravaging my community, if not my stomach in particular. (I also haven't heard of adults, Jewish or otherwise, drinking several glasses of milk a day, or being encouraged to do so, but maybe this is a regional thing. I figured "Got Milk?" was the dairy industry luring kids away from soda, not adults away from water.) 


What I don't follow about the broader debate about whether we should drink cows' milk (or, by extension, the even broader one about whether any number of commonly- and long-since-eaten foods are intended for human consumption) is the argument that because milk is designed for calves, humans - adults especially - shouldn't be drinking it. Are any naturally-occurring ingredients designed for the express purpose of consumption by human adults? Isn't it all just stuff with some other purpose that we happen to be able to extract nutrients from? Doesn't the fact that cows' milk is intended for calves mean that we, unlike calves, couldn't survive on that alone?

Another 15 minutes for WWPD

I just had the somewhat surreal and entirely narcissistic experience of listening to a podcast (well, Bloggingheads) while walking Bisou that was, in part, about this WWPD post, the same one Withywindle responded to, and see also our "compromise" discussion in those comments. I mean, hearing this podcast wasn't that surreal - Conor Friedersdorf and Elizabeth Nolan Brown are both journalists I've Internet-known for a while, via the long-defunct Culture11. But it's somehow quite different to be, like, discussed, out loud. 


It seemed that Conor and Elizabeth mostly at least semi-agreed with my critique (which is basically, as I mentioned in the original post, Isabel Archer's critique) of David Brooks's (and by extension, Charles Murray's) argument that the "elites" (the college-educated, not the 1%) are traditionalist in practice and should set an example. And I do like Elizabeth's additional point, that these marriages are stable in part because of the equality within them. And Conor's, that it's hard to imagine college-educated types taking on that patronizing tone and telling The Masses how to behave. What are the logistics, precisely?

What I'm not sure I properly conveyed is that my sense is that stable marriages among the well-education result from that decade-or-so of premarital exploration. Whether this is or is not the so-called "hook-up culture" depends on one's definitions. I've never fully understood what the bounds of that are supposed to be, but in terms of how college students (and extend this to late high school and recent college grads) actually behave, there's generally a mix of casual and serious; of relationships that are and are not consummated, defining "consummated" as "someone could, in theory, end up pregnant;" and of experiences that one might reflect on later as positive and ones that shall be remembered as basically negative. Where any individual falls on this spectrum will vary according to so many factors - not everyone has an equal number of potential partners, not everyone is equally squeamish about STDs, not everyone wants sex outside of a relationship - but what these experiences have in common is, they tell you what you want and don't from a relationship, and they do a great deal to eliminate a nagging sense of "what if" once the right person does come along.

Now, as a caveat, I do think this trajectory can be enforced a bit too much in well-educated circles, where it's insisted that a person (more specifically: a woman) is far too young to settle down, until whoops, she's too old and has missed her chance. But a little bit of pressure to keep options open early on probably is what makes the marriage of two been-around-the-block 31-year-olds go more smoothly than that of two 21-year-olds who got together at 16.

*******

I'm glad to have gotten a good chuckle out of Conor and Elizabeth re: my point that a (by no means the main!) conservative argument for gay marriage is that promotors of stable opposite-sex marriage should want to yank closeted gays out of the dating pool. (I'm sure this is not the first time odd notions I've posted have been laughed at, but this isn't typically something I have access to.) One of them said they didn't think this would pose a "statistically significant" problem, and both were quite dismissive of the idea.

But hear me out, guys! Whether gays are 5% of the population, a bit less, a bit more, in societies that demand marriage and procreation (which is to say, if you can't just go and be a priest or nun - something I don't think terribly many American Catholics, even, are doing these days, and that was never an option for Protestants, Jews...), this was a big problem. And social conservatives want to return to those good ol' days. I certainly agree that practically speaking, the tide's unlikely to turn in that direction, and thus that it's not a great menace to heterosexuals that they might find themselves married off to whichever small percentage of late-20-something homosexuals are out there looking for opposite-sex marriage partners. Closeted gays are, in this day and age, almost entirely a menace to themselves. But the 'surprise, my husband/wife is gay/lesbian' scenario is a problem in religious communities, and would certainly return to being a more general societal problem if social conservatives had their way.

The talk, the walk

Says David Brooks: "People in the educated class talk like social progressives and behave like traditionalists."

One hears variations of this all the time these days, in reference to the family-arrangement divide between working-class and white-collar communities. The usual social-conservative take here is that "elites" claim that anything goes, while keeping it an open secret that they're not really making the most of everything the Sexual Revolution theoretically allows. 

And I think this has some truth to it - if one were to go by the calls and letters Dan Savage receives, one might imagine modern adulthood among the college-educated to be one giant pool of potential sexual partners shuffling, polyamorously arranging themselves, and so forth. When in fact, most (over 25, at least) are after a monogamous, married commitment with an opposite-sex partner. This also, I believe, gets at the window-of-opportunity problem - young women, at least in the "elite"-broadly-defined, genuinely believe they're supposed to embrace anything-goes-ness, only to suddenly discover, at (say) 25, that they're actually no less expected than were previous generations to find a man, and quick, before they're menopausal, a state we all know arrives at 30 on the dot. Biological fact. There's on the one hand a world of infinite possibility, on the other, not so much. It's understandable that this split makes it more difficult for "elites" to be anything but blasé about, for example, high rates of out-of-wedlock births, even while keeping their own rates way down.

But something doesn't add up. Isabel Archer, in her response to Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart, gets at what that something is:

[T]here is a long section in which Murray encourages the elites to "preach what they practice." That is, Murray notices that people in his elite groups are more likely to stay married longer, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and so on. Yet these same people are, according to him, overly shy about condemning illegitimacy and divorce as kind of bad. I'm with him, sort of. I do want elites (and everyone else) to preach why these behaviors are good. But I do want Murray to recognize that the gospel that he would like elites to preach looks very different from most contemporary varieties of social conservatism. It is common for members of Murray's Belmont class to enjoy not-particularly-risky varieties of premarital sex (e.g. within well-established relationships and with use of contraception.) It is also generally common within this class to treat gay relationships as on an equal footing with heterosexual ones. Yet both of these practices draw jeremiads from many contemporary socially conservative politicians.

Yes and yes. Why do these "elite" marriages work? First, because those entering into them - including the precious innocent lovely sweet darling straight-A-student goody-two-shoe tastefully-dressed ladies among them - are sexually active from, say, 18 until marriage at 28. Not necessarily super-active, but not, shall we say, "saving" themselves for marriage. Even if they stay "pure" in high school, they're sleeping with people in college, sleeping with people after college, sleeping with - and living with - their eventual spouses prior to getting married or engaged. Like Léon Blum said back in the day, and before the Pill even made this route plausible, the way to make marriages stable is to make sure that men and women alike have explored other options before settling down. And the person with whom one is to eventually settle down ought to be premaritally explored as well, not for the sake of libertinism, but for that marriage to succeed.

Second, because if same-sex relationships are socially-accepted and (ideally) can and are expected to culminate in marriage, this promotes stability in a variety of ways. It makes gays themselves less promiscuous/eternal bachelor-ish, this most seem to understand. But it also takes a small but significant minority of sub-optimal potential spouses out of the straight dating pool. Sub-optimal, that is, as heterosexual spouses. Perfectly fine as homosexual spouses. A man who makes a commitment to a woman and might one day prefer another woman isn't in quite the same situation as a man who commits to a woman knowing full well he can never be attracted to *any* woman. It is beneficial to "traditional" marriage to keep those whose inclinations lie elsewhere from entering opposite-sex marriages. And given that gays, like straights, tend to want the rest of what goes with marriage (stability, the possibility of raising kids), a good way to keep Elton John from marrying your daughter is to allow - no, encourage - him to marry another dude.

Thus the problem with the now-standard social-conservative line about how admirable today's "elites" are in their behavior, how decadent in their rhetoric, is that the stability in the upper- and upper-middle classes actually results from an extensive embrace of the possibilities the Sexual Revolution allows. If "elites" are to be all patronizing-like, they'd have to do things like tell Those People There not to even consider having sex outside marriage without proper contraception, and not to think of sending Junior to de-gayification camp.

The theoretical, pseudo-nostalgic alternative social conservatives embrace - where homosexuality is repressed, contraception shunned - first and foremost smacks of an attempt to return toothpaste to its proverbial tube. But if it were feasible, all it would mean is the development of a new dichotomy (or, rather, an extension of an existing one), in which conservative elites would know perfectly well amongst themselves that contraception and acceptance of same-sex relationships are actually conducive to stability and success, and would behave according to those rules themselves, but god forbid The Masses catch on.

Fertility and the window of opportunity

Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes:

We generally think it’s a good thing that women start having children a little later, and portray young moms as foolish. But then suddenly—it’s too late. It’s like there’s a magic window between—what, 26 and 34?—during which all women are supposed to have all children. Before that, you’re irresponsible or unrealistic; wait until after that period, and you’re clueless and vain. In some socioeconomic classes, the window of acceptable baby-making time is even smaller: When I got pregnant last year, at 28, a significant portion of my peers acted like I was nuts for considering having the baby at my age (I ended up miscarrying). But if I give it three or four more years, I’ll likely be hearing lectures left and right about my ticking biological clock. Realize this, Gen Y ladies: You’ve got a window of about five to 10 years (at most) during which you should be ready, financially and otherwise, to have all the children you want to have, and in a stable relationship within which to do so, or society is going to frown on you hardcore.

What she's describing is the fertility-specific angle of the Window of Opportunity problem. (See also the tag.) While the exact age varies subculture by subculture, women go from being too young to settle down to too old within a matter of minutes. I mean, the way it actually operates is, most family and friends are saying "too young," and gradually the shift tilts to "too old." What's important is that there's never a case of it being just fine to do what makes sense for you, in your life as you're leading it. A woman who's met the right person and settled into her career at 24 is still a child bride. A woman who's 44 and not even interested in marrying or having kids has missed her chance.

Still, I think the window of opportunity issue and the fertility angle shouldn't be conflated. The latter has more of a rationale than the former. Fertility really does decline; pretending that this decline is a conspiracy invented by misogynistic evolutionary-psychology popularizers gets us nowhere. (But I agree with Elizabeth that women know fertility declines, and that when women fail to reproduce by 35, it's not to be all "I'm a Carrie" but because very real factors like the need for a career/a partner got in the way.) And women who (not unwisely) wish to reproduce only once partnered have that many years on the earlier end of the available biological window to contend with.

Cultural construction only enters into it insofar as young women are discouraged from considering the men they date potential serious boyfriends until whichever key age, at which point every unattached man must be considered for husband potential. The window of opportunity thus only enters into it insofar as women who are ready to have kids in their early 20s - who've fully settled into their adult lives, or fully enough - are under social pressure, not only not to have kids, but not to make serious commitments to a partner just yet, because 22 is so young.

Meanwhile, the window of opportunity more generally is about commitment to a partner. Specifically, a male partner. Women go almost instantaneously from too young for a serious boyfriend to too old to find a husband. But where are these husbands supposed to come from, if they are not the serious boyfriends of yesterday? And biology is not as central as all that - a woman might, at 22, be 100% ready to commit to a particular man, but not ready to have kids. And, if by 45 a woman is unlikely to be able to get pregnant with ease, she does not suddenly lose her capacity to partner with a man. Not everyone wants (more) kids, and not all kid-acquiring is biological.

So, in sum, we can on the one hand not deny such factors as, fertility declines, and all things equal it's for the best to have kids only once partnered. And on the other, not conflate women with female reproductive organs.

"Let's not rush into things": The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the idea of progress

After making sure Bisou had had enough exercise to prevent her from going nuts at home, I found myself incapable of doing much last night other than curling up with the sleepy poodle in front of the computer-as-TV.  But plucky, "spunky" Mary Richards proved more compelling than expected, and it was only during the third episode that I fell asleep definitively. Today I caught up a bit more. But this is in no way a post about the entire series, let alone its many spinoffs, even if I've probably seen much (most?) of this at some point in my I promise oh so intellectual life thus far. I'm only counting the last 24 hours.

And, if I'd had to pick a term for what I expected from the show, it would have been: "dated." I expected the show to feel dated, but I wasn't sure in what capacity. The clothes and hairstyles would look early-1970s, that much I imagined and was readily confirmed. (And I want Mary's nude-colored low-but-not-kitten-heeled pumps. And most of her dresses, Rhoda's dresses...) But the gender norms, that kind of thing, I imagined would seem different. But different how? More progressive or less?

The answer is, alas, both and neither. The second-wave-feminism sense that a woman doesn't need a man is combined with the ever-present sense among the characters who, after all, did not spring to earth in 1970, but had grown up in the postwar years, and who are still under immense pressure to get married. They're also living at a time when "married" still meant (in principle, and often enough) chucking one's identity for that of one's husband, when it meant no longer having a career. This is the "married" that the women of my mother's generation and older warn the women of my generation and younger about, the one that accounts for the younger end of the window-of-opportunity, for 20-something women and teenage girls being warned against getting too serious with a guy because think of your education! your career! The idea hadn't yet caught on, and perhaps given social norms for male expectations couldn't yet have caught on, that one could be a heterosexual woman in a long-haul relationship and have that not be the only aspect of one's identity, that one could be married and also work, etc.

But enough of that. Back to the show.

The basic premise, the sob story that brought protagonist Mary Richards, 30, back to Minneapolis (from I'm not sure where? did I maybe nap more than I care to admit?), is that her boyfriend of two years had promised they'd get married when he was done with medical school, but then, upon graduation, said to her, "Why rush into things?" Imagine, an upper-middle-class couple, with one still in school, not marrying after two years! (Yes, I'm thinking of the most-recently-announced-on-my-Facebook-feed engagement - a college friend will be marrying a guy she started dating senior year. Most such announcements are along those lines.) But it's more than that. Mary wasn't simply dead set on a ring, or else. Mary was effectively dumped. But it's more than that. She was dumped not because sometimes people in relationships change their minds, but because (cue Caitlin Flanagan, Kay Hymowitz, etc., etc.) the social contract had broken down. Good men, nice men, boring men, Charles Bovary-ish doctors from Minnesota, even, no longer felt they had to marry the nice girls they were with. Cows giving away their milk for free and all that. The women, meanwhile, were screwed. Or not. Is Mary happy to be 30 and single? Pretty much! And her married but same-age friend Phyllis doesn't seem so delighted with her own situation. But Mary also feels she must lament the fact, often with her same-age and also-single friend Rhoda. (More on Rhoda later, of course.)

There are some pitch-perfect observations about gender and dating that are not dated in the least. In the second episode, Mary - feeling especially 30 and desperate, and at the behest Rhoda - goes out with a guy she'd dumped years before, because he'd been too into her, too clingy, too enthusiastic. And, after dude spends the evening going on and on about how beautiful she is, what a good cook she is (and, as is noted, she hasn't cooked anything!) and otherwise praising her incessantly, he brings up marriage. Where you are primed to think this is going is, he's the just-as-bad opposite of her commitment-phobe ex. But no! Dude then starts agonizing - as though Mary had been the one to bring up marriage, when she had in fact been trying to get rid of him before they'd even met up - about how he needs his freedom. He keeps insisting that she desperately wants to marry him, apologizing that he can't be that man for her. All the while she's assuring him that it's just fine he doesn't want to marry her. According to my anecdata, this dynamic exists to this day - men starting from the assumption that all women want marriage ASAP, and that any women willing to spend an evening with them are hoping and praying for marriage ASAP with them. Men giving entirely unsolicited monologues about how they need their independence, to women who were hardly trying to take that independence away from them, but merely trying to slip away politely from a bad date.

As with "Sex and the City" (sorry, sorry), there's a bit of fantasy going on in terms of how much male attention a 30-year-old woman receives on a day-to-day basis. While I'm not with the evo-psych crowd re: it being physically impossible for a man to be romantically interested in any woman old enough not to pose as bait on "To Catch a Predator," I think it's fair to say (and I know Britta will disagree, but that's what comments are for!) that the kind of male-gaze attention one gets from strangers walking down the street peaks at maybe 14 or 15 (and thank god), and that having a seemingly never-ending supply of available partners is something that's true (for men and women alike) only, if ever, while still in school. Part of this is because TV is TV, sitcoms are sitcoms. As was notoriously the case on "Seinfeld," new characters need to be brought in somehow, and dates, if the leads are single, are the obvious choice, even if that means ridiculously unrealistic social lives for not especially glamorous 30-somethings. And with TV as well as movies, there's always this ambiguity about how physically attractive we're meant to think the character is, as versus the actress portraying her. So if a date tells Mary she's beautiful, are we supposed to think he's saying Mary Tyler Moore the actress is attractive, in which case tell us something we don't know, or that Mary Richards, a charming everywoman, has caught this man's eye? But I don't think 1970, 1995, 2011, changes things.

Oh, Rhoda Morgenstern! I guess that after George Costanza, Liz Lemon, and (in biographical respects only) Penny from "Big Bang Theory," she's the TV character I most identify with, thus confirming my suspicions that I belong to an earlier generation of NY Jews, and was born too late. (I did have a grandfather born in the Pale of Settlement in the 19th century, which may help explain this.) But the self-deprecation about her weight is grating as all get-out, because she's thin, if not quite as thin as Mary who looks, in "Daily Mail" terms, "worryingly thin." This is a problem on "30 Rock" as well, and one I will discuss more in another, no doubt also-too-long, post. The word "Jew" has yet to come up, but even though Valerie Harper, the actress who played Rhoda is, famously and contrary to what one might imagine, not Jewish, it's there. And fundamental to her dynamic with Mary. And to be discussed in painstaking detail another time.

Evo-psych, Anonymous, and other bloggery

Someone must have linked to Freddie's post that links here, or something, but as of recently the trickle of arrivals from there has become a horde. Thank you for telling me, Sitemeter. Freddie or anyone else - where are they arriving from? Please tell me this isn't a "game" blog...

One commenter there, going by the distinctive handle, "Anonymous," has an explanation for the "window of opportunity": While we don't know whether Anonymous goes by Mr., Mrs, Miss, Ms., or something else entirely, we can rest assured that Anonymous is a dude:

Nothing is going to make men attracted to women based on their accomplishments instead of their youth, just like nothing is going to make women attracted to men based on their youth instead of their accomplishments. That's one area where evolutionary psychology seems undeniable (certainly more predictable than much we call science). The problem of women going immediately from "too young to marry" to "too old to marry" is a simple one. The "too young to marry" folks are mostly engaging in a pleasant fantasy involving a complex mix of ideology, nostalgia, and sentimentality. The "too old to marry" people have cruel reality on their side. It would make far more sense for women to marry in their early 20s and develop a career in their 30s than vice versa. Their value in the marriage market drops far more precipitously than their ability to attend graduate school, start a business, etc. When you treat a 20 percent improvement to your career prospects as a goal ahead of a 80 percent increase in your marriage prospects the outcome is, yes, predictable.

Science! No, better than science! Good use of "simple" to describe a phenomenon that's anything but. I choose to discuss this comment not, of course, because of the reputation of its author, but because it represents, alas, what a lot of men think.

Given the extent to which couples these days form between men and women of the same age, all of whom are presumably choosing among potentials also in their cohort, the appeal of 23-year-old women to 45-year-old men is largely irrelevant. Ah, but the 23-year-old men are not ready for marriage! They're man-children, and young women will see the light! Thing is, nor - contrary to popular opinion - are the 23-year-old women at that life stage, which is why the couples that form at 23 only marry at, say, 30. That Mr. 45 is all stability and let's get married next week is not interesting to 23-year-old women. Even if he's Dr. 45, JD, PhD. If he's Mick Jagger  (well, a young Jagger at this point), fine. Otherwise, not interesting.

And Anonymous has missed what the "window of opportunity" is about, if he thinks "cruel reality" or indeed any evo-psych "reality" enters into it. The "too old" end of the window is not about women wishing they'd married while they still had a chance. It's not about biological clocks, because - and this is pretty radical, I know - women whose number one concern is having a baby, but who could give or take the dude, are able, these days, to have a baby without a dude. It's about women reaching a certain age, conveniently forgetting that they're happy single, or at any rate happier than they'd have been if they'd settled for some dude they dumped ten years prior because they weren't into him, and - expectation-script buzzing in the back of their minds - thinking they should be lamenting The Man-Shortage, when in fact they still have potential dudes (because, see above, even the men their age who might prefer 20 aren't getting 20), but fundamentally when it comes down to it don't want a dude.

So that's the "window-of-opportunity" angle. But where the comment really loses me, but also where it most represents views one sees all the time, is in its insistence that men and women are looking for radically different things in a partner. The fact that couples tend to be well-matched in terms of looks and "accomplishments" would seem to be all we'd need to know. You'd think.

23 is young

Tavi Gevinson's new online mag for teen girls - or for nostalgic adult women? - has a piece by a 23-year-old "kiss virgin" named Rachael. The essay is ostensibly about how it's OK to be single, and that people shouldn't judge, which is to say, it has the same valid if uncontroversial point as the Atlantic cover story. Only here, the author's 23, and can't reflect on a series of failed relationships, because she hasn't had any. Rachael's speaking to an audience primed to see 23 as ancient, but that's still young enough that she might lead a very conventional romantic life, meeting a first partner at 24, settling down at 30, etc. I've spent enough time at geeky schools to know that it in no way dooms a person to lifelong celibacy if they made it allll the way through high school and even college without anything much going on in that area. Like Dan Savage recently advised a 23-year-old gay man in much the same boat as Rachael, 23 is not that old. Not for gay men who only came out at 22, and not for geeky sorts, regardless of gender/sexual orientation.

(Rachael, who is theoretically open to men and women - twice the fun! - is perhaps something more like interested in neither, far closer, on the calls-to-Savage spectrum, to the callers who identify asexual to those who say they're bi. For the time being, at least. Savage would probably say she's just not prepared to admit she's a lesbian. Me, I have no idea where she'll end up. 23 is young.)

That said, what struck me was the author's assessment of why young women and teen girls want boyfriends, namely, that it's about peer pressure, fitting in: "If you took your cues from pop culture, you’d think the sole purpose of high school was hooking up. If you’re not dating the coolest, hottest boy in school, you’re a loser, and if you’re not dating (or trying to date) anyone, you’re not just a loser. You don’t exist."

Perhaps this is how it looks to someone who "do[es]n’t really get crushes." But to those - again, gender is irrelevant, as is sexual orientation - who get through high school by having crushes, for whom this is a big part of being that age, it seems very off. (Not unrelated, but not directly relevant here.) One need only consider the number of crushes that form on inappropriate, uncool targets - the math teacher, the weird goth kid - crushes that, even if they may affirm heterosexuality, would in no way raise anyone's social status, and if anything quite the contrary. Even assuming we're talking straight girls only, it's not all quarterbacks and brooding James Franco look-alikes behind the bleachers. It's hardly the same thing to have embarrassing crushes on members of the opposite sex as to be gay, 15, and closeted. But it's not as though hetero crushing is one great big public celebration of normalcy, either. Some crushes, even ones on same-age, opposite-sex classmates, can't be openly admitted.

Which brings us to something I've mentioned here before: that oh-so-grating phenomenon of young straight women claiming to be gay men trapped in women's bodies actually comes from a place of reasonable. Young women are popularly assumed to be desperate for boyfriends, boyfriends who can soon enough become fiancés, husbands, fathers. (This is why window-of-opportunity-enforcers are forever warning young women not to settle down. It's assumed they want to do so, more than anything, and need to reminded of such things as "graduate school.") While this may be true of many women at 25, 30, it's not so often the case at 15, 20.


All attraction anyone female has for anyone male is assumed to be the desire for a conventional life, when sometimes - often, very often if we're talking 18-year-olds, but often enough with 30-year-olds, etc. - it's really about the desire for a dude. Lust, curiosity, etc. Not the search for a prom date, for husband material. In our society, this unfettered attraction-to-men is associated with gay men, not straight women, ergo, straight women who experience it don't think the obvious - that this is how it goes for women with their entirely typical wiring - but that they must be aberrations, "queer," etc.

Rachael probably does feel genuine frustration with a world that assumes young people want romance, but ends up misrepresenting the majority, reinforcing the idea that female attraction is about wanting to fit in with peers. "I’m not saying that it’s wrong to make dating a high priority in your life—if you’re having fun, great!," she writes, as though the goal is dinner and a movie in the company of someone who will raise one's status in the eyes of one's own girlfriends. Often enough, that's so incredibly far from what's going on when a teen girl has a crush.