Kay Hymowitz is writing about modern marriage gone wrong, again, referencing Charles Murray in her essay, “American Caste”, over at City Journal. She pulls in the findings of the Pew Economic Mobility Project, which reports that, “42 percent of American children whose parents had earnings in the bottom quintile end up there as adults, a significantly higher percentage of immobility than one finds in Canada and much of Europe.” Read the whole thing for her analysis of “lone motherhood” creating a self-perpetuating proletariat. “At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.” We are dividing into castes and the problem is single motherhood.
I teach many single mothers. They come to the college not in spite of their children, but because of them. Their dreams are of making a better life for their children than what they had. They are going to the community college precisely to adapt to today’s economy. From Hymowitz, “if you live the right way, it’s still possible to move up to the middle class, despite the factory closings of the last few decades. Ron Haskins of the Economic Mobility Project puts it this way: ‘If young people do three things—graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they’re 21 before having a baby—they have an almost 75 percent chance of making it into the middle class.’ Those are pretty impressive odds.” I know what the statistics say. I know, too, that the women I meet are ones trying to find a way out of the poverty cycle and the trap that is American poverty. The common theme of these women I encounter is one I am not seeing in statistics. Mothers who love their children more than themselves will push themselves and their children to live better lives. The driving force is love, self-sacrifice, and that might too difficult for statistics to quantify.
The single mothers I encounter are rarely, maybe never, single by choice. If they could find a good man, they would marry. A good man is hard to find, especially one who will take on another man’s child. Almost all of the single mothers in my classes thought that they were headed for marriage with the man who impregnated them. They thought they were loved, but they were not. “You know how it goes.” is what they tell me. I didn’t know, but after six years of hearing variations on the theme, I do.
Many of them are products of single mothers, but often those mothers are pushing them to do better for themselves. Maturity and life experience make a difference, as if in growing older, they get big enough to see over the caste wall to where the grass is greener. That is where they want their children to land when they launch them. They know education is the means to escape. They also know that marriage is a good way out of poverty. Many marry for security and when those marriages fail, they marry again. (America’s high divorce statistics are built on this.) They wonder what men are looking for. Hearing them speak of ex-husbands and the men that got away, I am left with the impression that those men are all misfits. Like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, they find no pleasure in life.
The statisticians tell us that women are the problem. Single mother families cause most of our poverty. I believe it, but not that women are intending to be alone in raising children. If I listen to my students who are single mothers, men are the problem. Men do not want to be husbands and fathers when they can live for themselves. What are we going to do about that?
Marriage asks men to sacrifice themselves. Material comfort makes that easier. Poverty makes self-sacrifice harder. It involves more work and less satisfaction. To do that, endure poverty and sacrifice the self, a man would have to be good or would have to love, which might call goodness out of him. The latter, love, is the good that single mothers are looking for, or so they tell me. Feminism will tell us that women are independent agents, which seems to be an idea embraced even by people who call themselves conservatives. “If women want independence….” but what if women do not want independence, but have found independence thrust upon them? We need to make better men.
June 4th, 2012 | 9:44 am
“Almost all of the single mothers in my classes thought that they were headed for marriage with the man who impregnated them. They thought they were loved, but they were not…We need to make better men.”
There are many mysterious things about the modern world, but the biggest mystery of all is how “the sexual revolution” is viewed as some sort of feminist triumph, when the objective truth is that if the most despicable, cretinous, woman-loathing men of a century ago had outlined their views for how society should work regarding male-female relations, it would look pretty much like the nightmare world we have today.
June 4th, 2012 | 10:07 am
What does it mean to say that one never intended a particular eventuality when one regularly engages in the behavior that will inevitably result in the condition one is claiming not to intend?
Perhaps they did not set out with the actual purpose of becoming single mothers as the motive for engaging in sexual activity, but are we to believe they did not understand the “facts of life”?
How was it possible that women just 2 generations ago were able to accomplish the goal of not becoming single mothers so efficiently, but that now this rather simple goal appears to be beyond the power of such a large population?
June 4th, 2012 | 10:31 am
Sally: Men have ALWAYS said “Hey, baby, how about you and me get nekkid and roll around in the hay a bit?” The difference is that “just 2 generations ago” society’s message was “Lady–do NOT do it! Dude–you’re a cad, and if she listens to you against our advice you will be cast out of polite society if you don’t marry her should the ‘inevitable’ occur.”
Now it’s more like “Lady–what are you, a prude or something? Go ahead, get nekkid! Dude–go ahead, get nekkid! It’s all good! No worries! Have fun, you crazy kids!”
But sure, let’s just go ahead and blame the woman.
June 4th, 2012 | 10:54 am
Brian – by all means, let’s blame the men as well. What a bracing thought that would be – to actually ascribe human agency to those who engage in immoral behavior that results in incalculable harm to human beings.
June 4th, 2012 | 11:56 am
“A good man is hard to find, especially one who will take on another man’s child.”
Having a hard time comprehending this last clause. So those men who keep their nose and credit score clean are obligated to clean up mistakes made by beta-men by undertaking the raising of fatherless children?
June 4th, 2012 | 12:18 pm
Mr. Landrum, no, not obligated. What that adoption of human mistakes requires is a special kind of goodness, perhaps. I am saying that it is a heck of a lot to ask. Even taking on a widow would be easier, wouldn’t it? It requires a similar addition of pity with love to marry a woman with a child, no matter her circumstances. I was saying this is what the single mother students I have are looking for. You’re right, they’ll be hard-pressed to find such a man.
June 4th, 2012 | 12:23 pm
I think men who marry women who have children are doing God’s work and are expressing an understanding of the value of human life. I have seen many friends who have step-children who love them as a father, a real father.
June 4th, 2012 | 1:01 pm
You can turn your wife’s children by a prior relationship into your own. It is called adoption, and child rearing.
Speaking of which, the option for a new single mother to find a married couple to take her child and raise him or her as their own is also a way for her to cope with the burden while benefiting her child.
June 4th, 2012 | 2:45 pm
Alternately, you could teach at a better school, or at least one with a higher caliber of single mother.
June 4th, 2012 | 4:42 pm
I see and agree with what you are saying, Kate. Yet it feels like, if single mothers require extraordinary men in their lives, then some of these women can syphon off some of these men– but if such men are “extraordinary,” then by definition, they are part of a minority. They are not part of the ordinary majority.
Should single mothers set high(er) standards for marriageable men, or should high-grade marriageable men lower their standards toward women?
June 4th, 2012 | 5:28 pm
How extraordinary you or Bob or Raymond T. Swenson or Brian would seem to these women I meet in my classes. They want what would have been an ordinarily good man when I was young. Generally, that’s what they thought they had, but they were wrong.
I read some social history of the early republic (the title will come to me sometime) wherein was a statistic about he high number of women who were pregnant when they married. Historically, the phenomenon is not that premarital sex instigated pregnancy, but that our society is out of whack in allowing those “accidental” parents not to marry.
As to the question of standards, how does anyone prescribe anything like that? I wish I had a pat answer. There might be one and I lack confidence or am too modern to see it.
June 4th, 2012 | 7:44 pm
Quite apart from the incaution of drawing conclusions from small samples, you might consider:
1. The occupants of a community college classroom might differ systematically from other women in similar economic and social circumstances;
2. That their account of themselves and their recent past might incorporate something other than unvarnished truth and thorough self-criticism;
3. And that the men who refuse to marry them might just know them better than you do.
(While we are at it, why not consult the work of a scholar or a serious autodidact? Kay Hymowitz doesn’t cut it).
June 4th, 2012 | 8:44 pm
Those women who lie with these men who will say what is necessary to obtain sexual gratification are just as de-humanized as those young men looking to ‘score.’ But, just because both biological parents may be derailed or sluts or pigs doesn’t justify turning your back on your blood kin. To reject one’s own is inhuman, less then bestial, for the beasts care for their progeny. To abandon your own is to turn your back on God’s Will and, thus, to condemn yourself to Hell.
Coital activity has meaning beyond gratification.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:56 am
“If I listen to my students who are single mothers, men are the problem. Men do not want to be husbands and fathers when they can live for themselves.”
Kate, they are going to say whatever they need to in order for them to justify the choices they have made; remember, lots of welfare money and child support are at stake here.
I would like to see a related article titled “How single mothers become single mothers.”
There are four actors in the play: men, women, children, the state.
Here are some ways women become single mothers:
1) Widowed
2) Man divorces woman
3) Man and woman never married, man leaves woman
4) Woman divorces man
5) Man and woman never married, woman leaves woman
6) Sperm donors, single mothers by choice etc.
I know from divorce statistics 4) woman divorces man happens around 85% of the time. I would bet 5) is about the same, i.e. 85% of the time the woman leaves the man. Since we are dealing in a younger demographic, 1) is irrelevant.
Between 4), 5), and 6), women and the state are the two actors mostly responsible for the number of single mothers and fatherless children.
The problem is women have too many rights and the state believes everything they say and protects them with the police and legal system and rewards them with financial incentives.
This unequal system has resulted in men being oppressed. They lose their children, their financial life, and they can be thrown into jail on false charges.
The result: divorced men have a suicide rate around 4 times the norm; men who never married have retreated into a world of porn, video games and marriage avoidance; children are fatherless victims. And men are blamed for the hellish mess.
Yet women still ask “where have all the good men gone?”
June 5th, 2012 | 1:59 am
Kate, while you are promoting single mothers as marriage material I think it is fair that you post this also:
Men, did you know that if a man steps in and acts as a father for a child that is not his, he can be held liable for child support? It does not matter if the man was married to the single mother or not.
Google “The Chartier Decision” and “Step parents child support.”
Many single mothers know all about these laws and feel entitled to get child support.
If you date a single mother, be very careful. Men, know your rights and don’t get caught in any traps.
June 5th, 2012 | 6:01 am
Great thread, kicked off by two really great comments, Brian and sally r.
Art Deco, good to see your always insightful comments here. I do think you’re presuming a bit too much in the criticism of Kate’s students, but we’ll see what she says. And I’m surprised at your dismissing Kay Hymowitz so blithely…why?
June 5th, 2012 | 9:25 am
In response to Art D. yes, my group is select. I get the occasional young harridan or harlot, but miss most of those because I don’t teach the three sub-par non-credit English courses designed to get the illiterate some semblance of college literacy. That’s to say, I don’t usually encounter the 46% of incoming students needing remediation who should never have graduated from high school. That’s not quite true; the survivors make it to the second semester course where the two levels of first semester students merge. We are a filter for employers, but that’s about the nature of community colleges, not about this subject.
I’ll say it again, I see the women who are trying to find a way out of the “caste” that Hymowitz and Murray and the Pew researchers describe. If you guys are saying that men are fine, you haven’t looked enough at the statistics on high school dropouts, or crime statistics or incarceration rates, nor considered the basement boys ( http://www.amazon.com/Men-Boys-Making-Modern-Immaturity/dp/023114430X).
Note above, the women I am expressing sympathy with are the ones who know they made mistakes and would repair the damage, mostly for love of their children. I’ll focus on the unmarried mothers for a moment. They embrace sexual independence, only to find that it leads to a dependent. They could have killed the product of insemination, but didn’t. Maybe we should deplore their scruples about abortion? They had a choice.
The divorced single moms: yes, I don’t have to live with them. I can accept the statistics about who divorces who, but can question the impetus for those divorces. Why do you think women divorce men?
June 5th, 2012 | 10:39 am
I am a single mother, I admit I was young and dumb when I got pregnant, as was the father of my children. We got married, I wanted to stay home to raise the children, but it was not financially possible on just my husband’s income. Things were stressful at home as I was expected to come home from work, cook, clean, take care of the kids, and please my husband while he did nothing. We fought a lot, he started messing around with some girl, and I divorced him. I was practically a single mother and he was another child to care for. And I was not going to risk catching an STD from him cheating on me. I’ve worked full time at the same job for seven years, my parents help with my kids, and I only receive welfare when my ex loses whatever job he has every few months and can’t pay his child support. I live in a very impoverished town with a lot of drug addicts, and am not going to marry another loser. I plan to move to a better place as soon as I am financially able.
I am not going to put up with a bunch of B.S. just because my grandmother had to in order to keep a roof over her head.
Bill, the problem is not that women have too many rights and men are blamed for a hellish mess. The problem is that many men run when things get too tough and they want to go out and have fun with no responsibility.
June 5th, 2012 | 11:15 am
Re Kay S. Hymowitz:
1. Kay Hymowitz is a lapsed English teacher. She does not have the background to do sociological research or even to read it with critical engagement. Maggie Gallagher appended herself to an academic sociologist in her work.
2. I have not looked at Hymowitz’ bibliographies to verify this. I will pass on a complaint I have seen: that her preliminary forays in publication were based on reading men’s magazine’s, full stop; she did not interview any living and breathing young men to understand their perspective.
3. She did admit that she received much correspondence of complaint from young men, raising points she had not considered (which is consistent with the complaint in point number 2).
4. Did any of that affect her finished product? As far as I can see from reviews and such, she circled back to her original thesis: ‘our social problem is that you are not doing enough for us’. That might sell books to a certain sort of audience. It does not persuade anyone not already persuaded.
5. There are many people of learning who know something about social relations and do not proceed in a manner that is stupid. Why bother with KSH?
–
“I do think you’re presuming a bit too much in the criticism of Kate’s students”
I presume nothing other than they are human beings of a feminine persuasion. Being that:
1. They are in some measure responsible for what they do;
2. How they present themselves to their English teacher is not necessarily how they present themselves generally and how they present themselves can confound the reality of their disposition and behavior and history;
3. They are biased in their own cause;
4. They have a mess of gal pals with whom they discuss what is going on in their life. The feedback they get is about ‘affirmation’ and ‘support’. Those commodities have a random relationship with moral truth.
—
“If you guys are saying that men are fine, you haven’t looked enough at the statistics on high school dropouts, ”
I said nothing of the sort (and I recognize that forensic technique. Stop it.).
–
“Why do you think women divorce men?”
Depends on the circumstances. Among my mother’s contemporaries and in her circle of friends, the husband’s alcoholism was the modal reason. My mother was born in 1930. Among women today, I would (referring to some of Gallagher’s articles) suggest that an insufficient appreciation of the limits of adult life is at the heart of it (along with the confidence that the family court judge is on your side no matter what).
—
Your very last like, Kate Pitrone is as follows:
“We need to make better men.”
That summarizes (and discredits) your perspective.
June 5th, 2012 | 12:49 pm
I absolutely agree with what Art Deco has to say above.
I will go further and say that for a lot of young ladies their future could be massively improved if there was a serious threat of fathers paddle being used on their behind. Seriously, the threat of punishment for bad behavior would be a great benefit to reducing social problems. I once again have to say that articles like this reek of liberalism and feminism.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:01 pm
But you are not saying all men in America are just fine. For a variety of reasons, I think our society is not doing a good job of raising men. Some parents make good men, even some single mothers do. With an exception who may yet shape up, I raised good men. Through them, I know many fine young men, married and carefully staying that way, doing what needs to be done for their families. I’ll honor them another time.
Right now, I am arguing with Kay Hymowitz who is, it seems to me, blaming single mothers for American poverty. I am suggesting that there is more to the problem than women choosing to parent alone. There is also a problem with men who are content to let the mothers of their children raise those children alone, or let the state pay for the raising of children; in other words are content to evade responsibility. It doesn’t so them any good.
What Bill cites up there, “divorced men have a suicide rate around 4 times the norm; men who never married have retreated into a world of porn, video games and marriage avoidance; children are fatherless victims.” This is true. Does that mean they are good men? This is what I mean when I say we need to make better men. We, as a society, need men who don’t fall apart because women somehow fail their expectations.
If I had written, “Pity men. Women are too strong for them these days.” what would the response have been? The Hymowitz essay offered that direction and statistics and I could easily have followed it that way. It crossed my mind and I didn’t like it because of the many men I know who are fully up to the task of loving commitment to wife, child, good marriage and all it demands of a man.
Conservatives complain about feminism. Heck, I complain about feminism. Much of feminism is foolish, but some of it is a response to the sometimes painful fact that men are not angels. Sometimes they are barely men.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:03 pm
Jane, thank you for your story.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:25 pm
“sometimes painful fact that men are not angels”
True. But that does not mean that good men should lower their standards. I have abstained from sexual intercourse all my life, and I expect my girlfriend to follow the same standards.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:29 pm
I would not of course, expect my wife to be abstinent.
June 5th, 2012 | 1:38 pm
To be frank, I have to align myself far more with people such as I have linked below, despite their atrocious tastes in entertainment. They understand that women are to be subordinate to and depend on their husband.
http://bbanimereview.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/why-i-am-who-i-am/
http://bbanimereview.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/vividred-operation-is-scrumptious/
June 5th, 2012 | 1:45 pm
That blog’s tendencies are overly postmodern in many respects. But it is a naive postmodernity. That is where the man of lowbrow tastes goes in the conditions of late stage capitalism. Our society is not a healthy one, and naturally lacks healthy depictions or understandings of sex. I might be going a bit off topic and I apologize, but this is what I have been thinking about lately.
June 5th, 2012 | 2:44 pm
“I am arguing with Kay Hymowitz who is, it seems to me, blaming single mothers for American poverty”
Somehow I do not think single mothers are her primary target:
http://www.amazon.com/Manning-Up-Rise-Women-Turned/dp/0465018424
(And that aside, single mothers are agents and do make choices, some of them bad for various parties).
___
“Much of feminism is foolish, but some of it is a response to the sometimes painful fact that men are not angels. Sometimes they are barely men.”
Human beings are deficient, Kate Pitrone. Men are deficient; women are deficient. The point is banal.
You can call feminist discourse a ‘response’ to the unangelic man. Some of us might come to the conclusion that the ‘response’ in question is a form of socially-sanctioned aggression.
Some of the responses above (from “Bill” and “Anymouse”) need some corrections and qualifications, but they have a core of truth to them. Men and women form a dyad and the disgusting equilibrium in which we find ourselves can be understood as the one which arises from a series of responses and counter-responses. Your take on things, “why cannot we have better men; we girls are trying so hard” does not merit much serious consideration.
You might ask yourself what satisficing young men might be expected to do when confronted with the actually existing choices they have. Ask yourself about wage-earning men, not about slum-dwellers nor about the salaried stratum. Wage earners are a majority. Invited to face these questions by her correspondents, Kay Hymowitz did so. Then, after a while, she stopped facing them.
June 5th, 2012 | 4:26 pm
I am expressing sympathy with are the ones who know they made mistakes and would repair the damage, mostly for love of their children. I’ll focus on the unmarried mothers for a moment.
‘Mistakes’ in this context can be understood as failures of prudence, which is the weaker form of self-criticism (and allows amply for transference of blame to the big He).
Bill, the problem is not that women have too many rights and men are blamed for a hellish mess. The problem is that many men run when things get too tough and they want to go out and have fun with no responsibility.
It is a poor idea to extrapolate from your personal experience in this manner. (And no, I do not take your account of yourself without a grain of salt).
Jane, thank you for your story.
Why?
June 5th, 2012 | 10:40 pm
Art D. — I am writing about women I know, who work, raise children and are trying to get an education to better themselves and their children’s lives as a consequence. Whatever deficiencies they have, they work awfully hard to overcome them. You think they don’t exist? Where do you live?
I thanked Jane because she exposed herself and her story, which supported the stories of women I know, because it is so like. Maybe I liked it because I like being backed up. Silly me.
And how did this all get to be about me? Oh, no, it’s about Kay Hymowitz, too. Thank you for the book reference. I hope everyone enjoys it.
Art, sorry you’re grouchy.
June 6th, 2012 | 5:27 am
You think they don’t exist? Where do you live?
Lots of different sorts of people ‘exist’. What of it? Our social reality is our social reality, whatever range of behaviors you might find in the individual elements thereof.
I thanked Jane because she exposed herself and her story, which supported the stories of women I know, because it is so like. Maybe I liked it because I like being backed up. Silly me.
You said that, not me. Let’s recapitulate some of what ‘Jane’ has to say:
I am a single mother, I admit I was young and dumb when I got pregnant, as was the father of my children.
Implicit in these remarks is that her culpability is vitiated by the place she occupied in the life cycle (which one cannot help), by decisions arising from failures of prudence and intelligence rather than failures of morals or character, and by the equal failure of the man to who she appended herself.
We got married, I wanted to stay home to raise the children, but it was not financially possible on just my husband’s income. Things were stressful at home as I was expected to come home from work, cook, clean, take care of the kids, and please my husband while he did nothing.
Quite possibly. You think ‘Jane’s’ former helpmate might like to respond? Kate Pitrone, you and I both are familiar with two complaints you hear from time to time from husbands: 1) that what they do around the house is defined out of the category of domestic labor by the women to whom they are married (i.e. ‘nothing’) and 2) their wife puts a great deal of time and effort into things of sharply limited utility for the household.
We fought a lot, he started messing around with some girl, and I divorced him.
Quite possibly. He might like to respond to that too.
I was practically a single mother and he was another child to care for. And I was not going to risk catching an STD from him cheating on me. I’ve worked full time at the same job for seven years, my parents help with my kids, and I only receive welfare when my ex loses whatever job he has every few months and can’t pay his child support.
Evidently her former husband has worked in low-level retail or food service all his life or he changes jobs 8x as often as anyone else with common-and-garden wage employment.
I live in a very impoverished town with a lot of drug addicts, and am not going to marry another loser. I plan to move to a better place as soon as I am financially able. I am not going to put up with a bunch of B.S. just because my grandmother had to in order to keep a roof over her head. Bill, the problem is not that women have too many rights and men are blamed for a hellish mess. The problem is that many men run when things get too tough and they want to go out and have fun with no responsibility.
What she is saying here is that her problems are everyone else’s problems and have been over three generations.
—-
Kate, if you will notice, every element of what she has to say is self-exculpatory or accusatory. You might have also noted there is not one passing reference therein to anyone’s else’s interests and perspective: not her (de-sexed) child’s, not her mother, not her father, not the child’s father. Maybe she has just had a lousy existence. Or maybe something else is going on there of which neither you nor she can conceive.
June 6th, 2012 | 8:18 am
Art, I begin to think this is all about you. What you chose of what she wrote can be read as self-exculpatory or accusatory. There’s nothing like a bit of editing to take control of what someone has written and give it a bit of spin by altering the context of the words. I suppose it’s called deconstruction.
She speaks of children, not child, which means the marriage went on for years, and divorce was no quick decision. Why would she have to get into the sex of her children? Is it pertinent?
Implicit in these remarks is that her culpability is vitiated by the place she occupied in the life cycle (which one cannot help), by decisions arising from failures of prudence and intelligence rather than failures of morals or character, and by the equal failure of the man to who she appended herself.
True, character and morals are sadly unformed in the young these days. When I speak of needing better men, those things are what’s lacking; young women need them, too. To make better men we would have to teach character and morals in a way we haven’t been doing. When I say “we”, I mean society and through culture beyond schools. A complaint of parents of my lifetime is that what morality they teach is undercut, sometimes in school by teachers, but more usually by other kids who are even more adversely influenced by a commercial culture that currently seems to thrive on encouraging the baser instincts. God and religion are ignored, cheapened or mocked and mankind has not seemed to find better sources for teaching character and morals than through faith and religion. I began writing about that in the original post, but decided to save it for another time. Jane was being practical — it is a blog comment. Not everyone can or will take the time and thought that you do on a blog comment.
As to the division of labor in a household, Jane may not be complaining that her husband did not help her iron the curtains. It is a common complaint of women who work that when they come home from work they are expected to function as a full-time, old-fashioned housewife. That it is a common complaint seems to me to strengthen Jane’s cause, not undercut it. If her husband did not want to have an over-worked wife, he could have taken a second job, acknowledging that keeping a home while raising children is a full-time job in itself, especially if money is tight. As it was, he essentially had his wife working two full-time jobs while he worked one.
As to her husband’s infidelity, here you have less to say about morals and character, actually nothing. Tell us what her husband might have to say about that, please? “My wife works all the time and is too tired for me, the bitch.” I suggest it comes to that.
Jane says her ex-husband loses his job frequently. You presume what kind of job he takes and you might be correct, but does that kind of job enable a man to support a family? It will if the man works hard enough at it to earn a managerial position. I suggest character is a problem here, too. What is it about this man that he lets his family go and cannot keep a job? But you don’t really believe Jane in this, do you? I do, because I hear the same story often. What I hear is that drinking, drugs or pure laziness cause job loss. You really could explain a little better why we should assume Jane is not being honest with us in this. How do you know? You are merely being snide.
At the last, you misread Jane. She turns elsewhere for help in desperation. She does blame her husband for that desperation. Her grandmother and women of that generation had little choice but to stay with philandering, lazy husbands. A woman has the choice of striking out on her own, but to do so means poverty and sometimes desperation. Wasn’t that Kay Hymowitz’ point? This becomes a problem for everyone. If her husband had been a better man she would not be in this position. He makes her and their children everyone’s problem.
If there is something else going on that Jane and I can’t conceive of, explain.
June 6th, 2012 | 9:18 am
KATE–thanks for a terrific post. and for the plain truth: “For a variety of reasons, I think our society is not doing a good job of raising men.”
June 6th, 2012 | 11:26 am
Art, I begin to think this is all about you.
It is not. Think more clearly.
What you chose of what she wrote can be read as self-exculpatory or accusatory. There’s nothing like a bit of editing to take control of what someone has written and give it a bit of spin by altering the context of the words. I suppose it’s called deconstruction.
What did I exclude of her original comment?
She speaks of children, not child, which means the marriage went on for years, and divorce was no quick decision. Why would she have to get into the sex of her children? Is it pertinent?
Unless I am misunderstanding her, the second ‘child’ she refers to is her erstwhile husband. (I have heard that before).
I do not take at face value ‘Jane’s’ factual assertions or her interpretation of her personal situation. That is not to say I think they are false (though they may be). I think they may very well be incomplete in ways that would alter one’s assessment of her and her quondam husband. People are like that. They spin to themselves and others.
If there is something else going on that Jane and I can’t conceive of, explain.
One of us is reading what she says and parsing the text; one is not. One of us is using his imagination; one is not. One of us is an English teacher; one is not.
June 6th, 2012 | 12:14 pm
Ah, so it is English teachers or former English teachers you have a problem with. Maybe, maybe, if you were an English teacher you could read better and parsing wouldn’t be such a problem for you. It explains the imagination problem you confess to, as well.
Read it: Jane says, I am a single mother, I admit I was young and dumb when I got pregnant, as was the father of my children. We got married, I wanted to stay home to raise the children,… Sounds like more than one child to me.
You didn’t have to leave anything out of Jane’s story. How you broke it up and the context you provided for her statements with your comments changed what she said by changing the context from one flow, hers, to an interpretation all of your own. You know that. I don’t know why you think anyone should accept your spin on what she said over hers or mine. I am as liable to be objective as you are; Jane’s experience of marriage is not mine. I admit it, we are both female and additionally, I have confessed sympathy with single mothers. I asked if your response was about you since you seem emotionally interested in overturning the idea that some men are inadequately men. Your “analysis” does not seem particularly objective to me.
June 6th, 2012 | 1:22 pm
Kate,
Thank you for bringing this up. Women’s Liberation or Feminism has not just changed women, it has also changed men. You are one of the few who are pointing this out. When the government houses your children, feeds your children and educates your children, and you are told that it is the woman’s choice to bear the children, why are you needed? When the government feeds your girlfriend, gives her a house, an education, and even a job, why are you needed? Heck, your girlfriend can even get pregnant without ever being with a man. An end to the adultarious relationship between government and women, would go a long way to restoring the poor husband to the respectable place of provider.
June 6th, 2012 | 1:25 pm
And would challenge men to be the good men who now seem so hard to find.
June 6th, 2012 | 2:17 pm
Ah, so it is English teachers or former English teachers you have a problem with.
Not in this circumstance. I merely point out the irony of an English teacher unwilling to analyze the text and use her imagination. It is not that difficult.
You didn’t have to leave anything out of Jane’s story. How you broke it up and the context you provided for her statements with your comments changed what she said
Rubbish.
I don’t know why you think anyone should accept your spin on what she said over hers or mine.
I have no spin on what she said. I merely point out that personal experience can be spun and that her account should not be taken at face value. Seems simple enough. I am more skeptical of her than I otherwise would be because of characteristics of how she presents herself and because it is my view that contemporary culture incorporates within it assumptions about accountability that confuse people’s judgment.
since you seem emotionally interested in overturning the idea that some men are inadequately men.
There are a great many inadequate people in this world. There are proportionately many more than there were in 1948, I would wager. My interest is in how inadequacies are mutually re-inforcing in domestic relations. That seems simple enough, and, in any case, I have said as much explicitly in this discussion. What I deny is that the problem is properly addressed by telling young men that they ought to be of more service to young women, full stop. The young men have interests at stake, aspirations of their own, frustrations of their own, and grievances of their own. That does not cease to be the case because you or Kay Hymowitz or anyone else elects to view them as bundles of pathology.
June 6th, 2012 | 3:33 pm
Then it is my Christianity that tells me that men have more responsibility in marriage than women do, or rather, that is a man’s responsibility to lead in a marriage. If he abdicates, it is a pity and what Hymowitz is saying without reference to Christianity is that the abdication impoverishes women and children. As Nate notes above, that readily leads to the state taking over the position of provider. No one really takes over the job of father.
It’s not service to woman that I’m talking about. It’s about service to the covenant of marriage, to family, to the children those men father and then do not father completely. It’s about doing what’s right when life is hard and you have your own interests, aspirations, frustrations, grievances, and you set them aside for a greater good. The women I referenced do that, maybe more because they must than because they have innate good character, but so what? They do it. Single mothers carry a burden meant for two, and do it while being the weaker. To say that they are equal in what would be a partnership is to concede to feminism something that is manifestly not true. Look at the Pew statistics if you don’t like Murray or Hymowitz.
I’ve said above that women fail, too. Sometimes that is cruel to the men in marriages and certainly it is cruel to the children. I know some of those men, too, whose wives walk out on the marriage, leaving them with the family. There are probably statistics readily available to back up my experience that far more women are left than leave their families. Do I need to go find them for you? It seems evident to me.
“Rubbish.” You bent Jane’s story to fit your narrative. If you don’t know that’s what you did, then I’m telling you something. It was useful to clarify what you meant, but I hope she doesn’t come back to read it since you were trying her make her sound below our consideration. I know you were doing it to score in the argument with me. She doesn’t know you like I do.
June 6th, 2012 | 4:48 pm
I did not bend Jane’s narrative. I quoted her verbatim and in full. I annotated it in ways you found uncongenial. That does not ‘distort’ what she says. It does point out elements of her remarks you did not notice (or did not care to acknowledge).
Jane is not ‘beneath notice’; neither is her former husband (or at least he is not beneath my notice). However, Jane is Jane. She has the biases people have in assessing themselves and she breathes the kultursmog of our times, as do you, as do about 85% of the people I encounter in these fora who are willing to state an opinion. I would not wager a brass farthing that it is in her best interest (or anyone’s) to view the world with the lenses she appears to, but I my acquaintanceship with her is next-to-nothing.
Of course the young men have obligations. We all do. Your problem in imparting a sense of them is, however, not merely a rhetorical one. What is there for that young man to live and strive for, not in poetry but in the mundane world in which he lives? What does he envision his future to be? I submit to you that it is these things which will influence is present conduct quite strongly. How he is rewarded in the present tense will as well.
June 6th, 2012 | 4:56 pm
What you fail to fully accept is that men and women are in an utterly degenerate period of social relations, and we should not give too much sympathy to those who willingly have relations before marriage, or willingly divorce their husband.
“An end to the adultarious relationship between government and women, would go a long way to restoring the poor husband to the respectable place of provider.”
Agree completely.
June 6th, 2012 | 5:01 pm
“is a man’s responsibility to lead in a marriage”
Yes, and when the law restricts his ability to lead that is rather difficult, isn’t it? No fault divorce, laws against marital “rape”, and family courts have all damaged male authority. It is not the fault of good husbands or fathers.
June 8th, 2012 | 6:16 pm
Having read this finally, I think that it was probably unfortunate that Mrs. Pitrone titled the article as she did, provoking some posters into turning this into a “men vs. women” thing.
Even if you think that men have gotten the short end of the stick in the current arrangement, its hard to avoid the fact that sexual liberation made men worse, more bestial, too.
I also believe that women, because they bond physically with their child,
ARE indeed forced to grow up, become less selfish, in a way that men are not. It’s much easier for a father to leave the child than for the mother, and this DOES produce advantages for moral development.
If men and women are different, then it means that in general, men are better at some things, and women are better at others. Mrs. Pitrone’s article focuses on an area where women indeed have a “moral” advantage.
There may be other areas where post-feminism women may not come out looking as good (such as why they choose the sort of men that they do), but I don’t see the point in taking the author to task for merely pointing out the obvious.
Let me put my cards on the table. I think that sexual liberation has basically allowed both sexes to follow their lowest inclinations: for men, promiscuous sex with young, attractive females, and for women, foolish attempts to tame caddish, thuggish, arrogant men (a minority of their sex) into providers. When erotic attraction is considered the most important impetus for marriage, as it has in the West, for much longer than just since the 60s, inevitably, it leads sooner or later to the law of the jungle.
It’s hard to blame one sex or the other for acting the way that comes naturally when the restraints have become so loosened.
September 23rd, 2012 | 7:14 pm
[...] more, of course. The new matriarchy is not good for women. We’ve labored that discussion here before. Most of talk about women becoming more like men, but feminism actually wants men to be [...]
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[...] this an update to earlier discussions or a segue from Carl’s latest on Damsel’s in Distress. Tweet Comments [...]
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