The Feminist Life Script Has Made Many Women Miserable, by Joy Pullman.
Our culture is so saturated with feminism that even conservatives and devoutly religious people like me think inside its wheel ruts.
This wouldn’t be a problem, except that feminism … has a false view of human nature. …
PC fantasies versus reality and the accumulated wisdom of the ages:
Refusing to learn from history and experience only hardens people against the feedback from reality they need to make their lives better through smarter decisions. Thinking that the experience and wisdom of humans across time has a claim on our present behavior allows a form of troubleshooting and decision making using billions of accumulated datapoints. Yes, it requires humility to consider whether your presuppositions and behavior are wrong, but what you may lose in feminist scorekeeping you reap a hundredfold in a richly happy life. …
Here is an example of the harm done by the feminist agenda. I saw something similar many times among women I knew in my thirties and forties in a certain PC Australian city:
A 35-year-old woman wrote The Cut’s advice columnist last month in great distress, and became one of its most-viewed stories of late. She embarked on life as a “creative,” cycling through [US] West Coast cities and boyfriends in ways that may sound glamorous, but now she sees in retrospect has wasted her potential for creating a family.
I have no family nearby, no long-term relationship built on years of mutual growth and shared experiences, no children. While I make friends easily, I’ve left most of my friends behind in each city I’ve moved from while they’ve continued to grow deep roots: marriages, homeownership, career growth, community, families, children. I have a few close girlfriends, for which I am grateful, but life keeps getting busier and our conversations are now months apart. Most of my nights are spent alone with my cat (cue the cliché)…
My apathy is coming out in weird ways. I’m drinking too much, and when I do see my friends on occasion, I end up getting drunk and angry or sad or both and pushing them away. And with men I date, I feel pressure to make something of the relationship too soon (move in, get married, ‘I have to have kids in a couple of years’; fun times!). All the while still trying to be the sexpot 25-year-old I thought I was until what seemed like a moment ago.
I used to think I was the one who had it all figured out. Adventurous life in the city! Traveling the world! Making memories! Now I feel incredibly hollow. And foolish. ..
The advice columnist offered empathy and self-esteem talk, but did not recognize and validate this woman’s genuine loss. …
Reality:
At 35, women’s fertility starts a freefall towards menopause. …
86 percent of Americans want at least two children. But delaying marriage and putting higher education and careers first causes them to not live up to their family dreams. …
A 50-year-old career woman with four college degrees recently called into Dennis Prager’s radio show with advice for young women that amounted to: Don’t do what I did. “I was programmed to get into the workforce, compete with men and make money,” she said. “Supposedly, that would be a fulfilling life. But I was told that by a feminist mother who was divorced, who hated her husband — my father.” …
The famous (or infamous) psychologist and advice guru Jordan Peterson hears this all the time from highly intelligent, driven female clients. In their 20s, they think they want the career. But in their 30s, they start to realize that they also really want a family, and that it’s in fact more important to them than abstract notches on some career totem pole. … Peterson argues our society has “lied to women” …
Women’s attractiveness peaks around age 20, not surprisingly (from a biological standpoint) in tandem with their fertility. …
Aaron Renn … draws together a lot of related information about romance and the sexes this way: “For the average woman, her overall attractiveness will likely peak by her mid-20s, then start to fall for pretty much the rest of her life. For men, their looks similarly decline. But their power, status, and money start low and go up over time, which can offset or even more than offset declining looks for a while…When young, women are at the top of their game while men are still underdeveloped. So the average woman has much more attraction power than the average man. By the time we hit our 30s, this situation starts to reverse itself.”
This means women have the most marital bargaining power in their 20s. The smartest female strategy, then, is to marry young, and lock in a husband before they have to compete against younger, hotter women. This is the exact opposite of what our society tells women to do. It tells women to do the same thing that men do. But women are not men. Our bodies are different, our fertility is different, our priorities are different. So while men can recover, and even may benefit from, later marriage, women are extremely ill-served by it overall.
