Zeno's Bar & Grill
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
We Pick None of the Above
The latest Elle magazine caught my eye with the blurb plastered across Kiera Knightley’s arm: “The Case for Marrying Down: Why Younger, Less Successful Men Make the Best Husbands.” Intrigued, I put the glossy on top of my carton of cage-free eggs.
You can imagine my surprise when I flipped past the ads for overpriced handbags and “new” reality shows to come upon a picture of a bride doing dishes staring wistfully out the window above the title “To Love and Obey?” On a friend’s recommendation, the author attended a Women’s Weekend with alleged marriage expert A. Justin Sterling. His view on relationships is that men are men and need to be able to act like men and that women are bitches. Really. The first thing he had the group of women do, after his minions had them sign waivers, relinquish their cell phones, and listen to a litany of rules more often used with Kindergartners or Marine recruits, was identify what kind of bitch they were. It went downhill from there.
Irritated, I reread the cover and flipped through the magazine again looking for the article that had lured me in. Turns out I had skipped past it while reading the other. Apparently it was a two part piece called The New Marriage Exhibit A (The Sterling Model) and The New Marriage Exhibit B (The Hirshman Model). I had been hoping that they would talk to people who had actually followed the course of marrying a younger, subservient male, but it was, instead, an interview with Ms. Hirshman. She gave the now-familiar rules from her American Prospect article about going to college to get a high-paying job as an investment banker or lawyer, ”marrying down”, and having only one child. The most vexing part is that Ms. Hirshman refused to detail her own child care arrangements saying that she had a deal with her daughter and would only say that they “had a person” and that person didn’t leave at 5 P.M. She dismissed the childcare woes of women everywhere with an offhand, “…it’s only a couple of years before they go to nursery school! I never understood why people make such a big deal out of this.”
Neither of these solutions sounds like the answer that we’ve been waiting for. Maybe because they are both too simplistic and expect nothing of society. Miriam Peskowitz’s ideas can’t be summarized in a shiny format, or, certainly, this blog, because her thoughts on marriage and equality are more complex than throw yourself under the bus for your marriage and children or throw your marriage and children under the bus for your career. It would be nice if the media would focus on real solutions rather than on the extreme fringes.
--Kelly
You can imagine my surprise when I flipped past the ads for overpriced handbags and “new” reality shows to come upon a picture of a bride doing dishes staring wistfully out the window above the title “To Love and Obey?” On a friend’s recommendation, the author attended a Women’s Weekend with alleged marriage expert A. Justin Sterling. His view on relationships is that men are men and need to be able to act like men and that women are bitches. Really. The first thing he had the group of women do, after his minions had them sign waivers, relinquish their cell phones, and listen to a litany of rules more often used with Kindergartners or Marine recruits, was identify what kind of bitch they were. It went downhill from there.
Irritated, I reread the cover and flipped through the magazine again looking for the article that had lured me in. Turns out I had skipped past it while reading the other. Apparently it was a two part piece called The New Marriage Exhibit A (The Sterling Model) and The New Marriage Exhibit B (The Hirshman Model). I had been hoping that they would talk to people who had actually followed the course of marrying a younger, subservient male, but it was, instead, an interview with Ms. Hirshman. She gave the now-familiar rules from her American Prospect article about going to college to get a high-paying job as an investment banker or lawyer, ”marrying down”, and having only one child. The most vexing part is that Ms. Hirshman refused to detail her own child care arrangements saying that she had a deal with her daughter and would only say that they “had a person” and that person didn’t leave at 5 P.M. She dismissed the childcare woes of women everywhere with an offhand, “…it’s only a couple of years before they go to nursery school! I never understood why people make such a big deal out of this.”
Neither of these solutions sounds like the answer that we’ve been waiting for. Maybe because they are both too simplistic and expect nothing of society. Miriam Peskowitz’s ideas can’t be summarized in a shiny format, or, certainly, this blog, because her thoughts on marriage and equality are more complex than throw yourself under the bus for your marriage and children or throw your marriage and children under the bus for your career. It would be nice if the media would focus on real solutions rather than on the extreme fringes.
--Kelly
