College Women, Don’t Listen to Marriage Concern Trolls
Hat tip to Shawna R B Atteberry ((Link): visit her blog here), which is where I think I may have first seen this. It does seem familiar. I may have read it before but don’t recall blogging about it here.
(Link): College Women, Don’t Listen to Marriage Concern Trolls
Excerpt:
February 18, 2014 – 7:49 am
Susan Patton may be the only person in the history of the world to get a book deal by being a crank who writes nutty letters to the editor.
Back in March, Patton wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian—both her sons went to Princeton—warning college women that they best find a husband before graduating college or, well, she didn’t exactly say they’d be dried-up old hags who would only have a handful of uneducated boors left to marry, but that was the general gist of it.
by Amanda Marcotte
…. The letter went viral, feeding off widespread cultural anxieties that young, well-educated women are shirking their duty to put men and marriage before their own ambitions, and so now she’s back with a book and an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
…. The editorial covers the same ground that her original letter to the editor did: instructing college women to spend less time on their studies and fluffing their resumes and more time on husband-hunting.
“You should be spending far more time planning for your husband than for your career—and you should start doing so much sooner than you think,” she writes, though notably she doesn’t really tell you what “planning for your husband” looks like.
Maybe she gets around to that in her book, or maybe—and frankly, more likely—it’s because she doesn’t really have a good answer for that.
… But really, all this talk about wasting time on bad boys is merely to distract from the fact that Patton’s piece, like pretty much every conservative lecture to women to marry often and marry young, is based on a false premise: that women are single because they’re making an active choice to avoid committing to a relationship.
When they snootily lecture low-income women and single mothers about the value of marriage, it’s particularly obnoxious because there’s no reason to believe that these women would reject being married if they had a chance to get married to a man they loved.
… I have my suspicions about why the “go get married, ladies!” lectures always ignore this reality. That’s because these articles aren’t really meant as sincere advice for single women.
These articles are about perpetuating a nasty stereotype, trying to convince people that giving women access to financial independence and higher education has “ruined” them.
The argument embedded in a piece like Patton’s is that sexual liberation and women’s equality are failed experiments because women are too silly and stupid to use their rights responsibly. The audience for a piece like this is not college women, who are unlikely to be reading the Journal.
It’s a majority male, largely conservative audience that wants to hear that women’s precious freedoms need to be clipped for our own good. It’s a classic concern troll, and should be understood as nothing more than that.
((( click here to read the rest )))
Said one person in the comments:
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- So her sons couldn’t find anyone willing to put up with them for long and the conclusion is…all the college women are at fault? That’s some crack investigation there…or maybe investigation while on crack.
Sounds like her influence has made her sons unpleasant companions, thus warning women off before they even need to contemplate the horrible mother in-law possibilities.
More:
by cjvg L-dan • 4 months ago
That is what my conclusion would be.
However she apparently decided that the lack of interest by “quality” girls in her sons and their friends must be because of the girls unseemly focus on their education and their careers.
Despite the very apparent evidence that plenty of other males can and do have committed relationships with “quality” girls (as she calls it) her sons and their friends lack of such can not possibly be because (gasp) the girls just do not find her sons such a great catch.
I have to say it would be a small miracle if her sons did not happen to be unbelievable jacka$$es with such a mother.
Of course stranger things have happened but note that her sons have not contradicted their mothers assessment of their wonderfulness.
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lady_black in reply to Victoria Pynchon • 4 months ago
I think I would have loved your mother.
She sounds a lot like mine. Not all men want airheads in their 20s. Believe it or not, some men are looking for women who are intelligent and educated, and have goals in life.
Those are the keepers.
Those are the men who want a partner, friend and companion in a relationship of equals. The ones looking for 20 year old hot pole dancers are usually bad news, and thus they want someone who won’t know how much better they could do.
Related Posts:
Concerning the author of this piece, Marcotte, I don’t always agree with her – though I do pretty much agree with her on the topic of “Concern Trolling Marriage”.
I have critiqued some of her other editorials on other subjects, such as:
Other Related Posts, this blog:
(Link): Men with ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ Are Ruining Sex and Dating for Women
(Link): The Reason Why Men Marry Some Women And Not Others by D. Brennan
(Link): Single Adult Christian Pressured Into Marriage by Her Church – And Regrets It
(Link): Young Single Women Try to Appear Less Ambitious To Attract A Mate – via WSJ
(Link): More Anti Singleness Bias From Al Mohler – Despite the Bible Says It Is Better Not To Marry
(Link): Check your ‘cat-lady’ preconceptions about childless women
(Link): How Most Americans Meet Their Spouses – WSJ
(Link): Article: Why Are So Many Professional Millennial Women Unable To Find Dateable Men?
(Link): The Nauseating Push by Evangelicals for Early Marriage
(Link): If the Family Is Central, Christ Isn’t
(Link): (Articles) Marriage Rate At All Time Low
(Link): Is The Church Failing Childless Women? by Diane Paddison
(Link): Lies The Church Tells Single Women (by Sue Bohlin)
(Link): Do You Rate Your Family Too High? (Christians Who Idolize the Family) (article)
(Link): Asking Too Much of Marriage (Marrieds Just as Lonely as Singles)- Editorial at Christianity Today
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