American Children-slightly off topic
I know of course that some of you gentlemen are fathers, but I have to say that I am generally not too fond of children here in the US (at least after they start to talk, they are kind of cute before that). I find that they are in most cases, spoiled, over-indulged, obnoxious, loud, etc...(disclaimer of hypocracy-I'm sure I was like this too as a child). However, I saw just the greatest thing the other day.
I'm currently paying the bills working as a waiter in a restaurant. One of my customers was a heavily accented (recent imigrant, or visitor) 40ish Polish mother, her 12-13 year old daughterh
American Children-slightly off topic (sorry for double post)
I know of course that some of you gentlemen are fathers, but I have to say that I am generally not too fond of children here in the US (at least after they start to talk, they are kind of cute before that). I find that they are in most cases, spoiled, over-indulged, obnoxious, loud, etc...(disclaimer of hypocracy-I'm sure I was like this too as a child). However, I saw just the greatest thing the other day.
I'm currently paying the bills working as a waiter in a restaurant. One of my customers was a heavily accented (recent imigrant, or visitor) 40ish Polish mother, her 12-13 year old daughter, and a maybe 7-8 year old son. As I was taking the order of the Mother and daughter, the boy very politely RAISED HIS HAND and waited patiently for me to acknowledge him. When I noticed this, I did acknowledge him, and he asked (in accented English of course) "Please may I use the restroom?". I of course sent him on his way astounded at the courtesy and politeness (more typical American behavior would be brashly interrupting his Mother or Sister, or running off on his own)
If (most) American children acted like this, I would be much less prone to refer to them as "womb sh*t".
My input on the "Runaway Bride"
The media story about the so-called Runway Bride solidified my negative feelings towards American women. Jennifer Willbanks ran away on a bus and told authorities that she was kidnapped. Her boyfriend is absolutely and completely in need of visiting the doctor to get some testosterone injections so he could be a man and not put up with absolutely psychotic and twisted behavior like this.
The future is now. Welcome to the New America.
more women are deciding that marriage is not inevitable, that they can lead a fulfilling life as a single. it's an empowering choice, but for many not an easy one
by tamala m. edwards, time magazine
jodie hannaman grew up in houston, a city as fond of formal weddings as of barbecues and rodeos. so it was saying something at duschene academy, her roman catholic girls' school, that hannaman was chosen as most likely to be married first. but her teenage fantasies of buttercream frosting and silky bridesmaids dresses first began to crack with her high school sweetheart. he dated her for more than a decade before she finally got tired of waiting for a marriage proposal that was never going to come. there were other men after that, but it was hannaman who repeatedly decided against a life built for two. marriage, it began to dawn on her, wasn't an end in itself but rather something she wanted only if she found the right guy.
now hannaman, 32, spends 60 hours a week in her job as project manager for chase bank of texas in houston, in an office decorated with art-museum magnets and cathy cartoons. she extends her business trips into the weekends for solo mini-vacations, enjoys the social whirl of the junior league volunteer circuit, and has started looking for a house. while she would love a great romance that would lead to marriage, she no longer feels she has to apologize fr being single. "i've finally matured enough to acknowledge that there's more to life than being married," she says. "i'd like to get married and have kids, but something in the past few years has changed. i'm happier being single."
hannaman might seem to have little in common with the four lead characters on tv's sex and the city, single women who live the supafly life and discard men quicker than last season's bag and shoes--and look damn good doing it. her sex life isn't nearly as colorful, for one thing. all of them, nevertheless, are part of a major societal shift: single women, once treated as virtual outcasts, have moved to the center of our social and cultural life. unattached females--wisecracking, gutsy gals, not pathetic saps--are the heroines du jour in fiction, from melissa bank's collection of stories, the girls' guide to hunting and fishing, to helen fielding's bridget jones's diary, the publishing juggernaut that has spawned one sequel and will soon be a movie. the single woman is tv's it girl as well, not just on sex and the city, the smash hbo series in the midst of its third buzz-producing season in the u.s., but also on a growing number of american network shows focused on strong, career-minded single women.
the single woman has come into her own. not too long ago, she would live a temporary existence: a rented apartment shared with a girlfriend or two and a job she could easily ditch. adult life--a house, a car, travel, children--only came with a husband. well, gone are the days. forty-three million american women are currently single--more than 40% of all adult females, up from about 30% in 1960. (the ranks of single men have grown at roughly the same rate.) if you look at women of the most marriageable age, the numbers are even more dramatic: in 1963, 83% of women 25 to 55 were married; by 1997 that figure had dropped to 65%. "are you kidding? an 18% to 20% change? "this is huge," says linda waite, a sociologist at the university of chicago.
to be sure, the rise in single women encompasses some other important trends. an estimated 4 million of these unmarried women are cohabiting with their lovers, and a growing number are being more open about gay relationships. nevertheless, single women as a group are wielding more and more clout. a young and rubicam study released earlier this year labeled single women the yuppies of this decade, the blockbuster consumer group whose tastes will matter most to retailers and dictate our trends. the report found that nearly 60% of single women own their own home, buying them faster than single men; that single women fuel the home-renovation market; and that unmarried women are giving a big boost to the travel industry, making up half the adventure travelers and 2 out of 5 business travelers.
equally important is the attitudinal change. the dictionary once defined a spinster as an unmarried woman above a certain age: 30. if you passed that milestone without a partner, your best hope was to be seen as an eccentric auntie mame; your worst fear was to grow old like miss havisham, locked in her cavernous mansion, bitter after being ditched at the altar. not any more. "we've ended the spinster era," says philadelphia psychotherapist diana adile kirschner, who has made single women a focus of her practice. "women used to tell me about isolation, living alone, low level of activity, feeling different. now there's family, lots of friends, they're less isolated and more integrated into social lives."
more confident, more self-sufficient, and more choosy than ever, women no longer see marriage as a matter of survival and acceptance. they feel free to start and end relationships at will--more like, say, men. in a yankelovich poll for time and cnn, nearly 80% of men and women said they thought they would eventually find the perfect mate. but when asked whether, if they didn't find mr. perfect, they would marry someone else, only 34% of women said yes, in contrast to 41% of men. "let's face it. you don't just want a man in your life," says author bank, 39. "you only want a great man in your life."
single by choice--it's an empowering statement for many women. yet it's not a choice that all women arrive at easily or without some angst, and it raises a multitude of questions. are women too unrealistic about marriage--so picky about men that they're denying themselves and society the benefits of marriage while they pursue an impossible ideal? does the rejection of marriage by more women reflect a widening gender gap--as daughters of the women's movement discover that men, all too often, have a far less liberated view of the wife's role in marriage? do the burgeoning ranks of single women mean an outbreak of sex and the city promiscuity? and what about children? when a woman makes the empowering decision to rear a child on her own, what are the consequences, for mother and child?
society, to be sure, is far more accepting of single women than it was even a few years ago. when barbara baldwin, the director of planned parenthood in tennessee, divorced her husband in 1981, she needed her father's help before anyone would give the then 29-year-old single mother a car loan and a credit card. beverley dejulio, a divorced chicago mother who hosts handy ma'am, a weekly home-improvement show on pbs, says she dreaded the hardware store for years, because salespeople kept asking, "where's your husband?" and the stone age year when anne elizabeth, a chicago artist, then 35, had to fight to not be listed as spinster on the mortgage application for her lakeside home? it was 1984.
in many cases, women who choose the single life have looked at those around them and vowed not to make their mistakes. "my mother married her first boyfriend. all my relatives stayed in marriages that are really tough," says pam henneberry, 31, an accountant who lives in manhattan. "when i looked at the unhappiness that was in my parents' marriage, i said, i can't do that.'" if cynthia rowe, 43, a los angeles* area store manager and divorcé, gets depressed, she thinks of her five closest girlfriends. "they are all just existing in their marriages," she says. "two of them got married when they were young. twenty years later, they had outgrown each other. one has not got over her husband's affair. two friends aren't even sleeping in the same bedroom with their husband anymore. their personal happiness is placed last, and their kids know they are miserable."
some women, of course, have learned from their own life. "at 28, i was terrified of the world," says mary lou parsons, a raleigh, n.c., professional fund raiser, recalling her 1980 divorce. "i'd been raised a southern woman, sheltered and protected by my family, then by my husband." in the ensuing 20 years she learned to raise her kids on her own--and how to start her own business, buy a town house, move to alaska and back and, most of all, relish life on her own. "i had to get beyond that thinking in a lot of women's minds that aloneness is not o.k. but now i find solitude exhilarating." marcelle clements, author of the improvised woman: single women reinventing the single life, notes that there are many women, like parsons, who were "taken by surprise. they were in relationships that broke up, hit what they thought was catastrophe, only to find that they were o.k., and [they] adopt an attitude that said, i'm fine, i don't need to be with anyone else."
not surprisingly, many conservatives are disturbed at this growing acceptance of singlehood and its implied rejection of marriage. danielle crittenden, author of what our mothers didn't tell us, argues that women have set themselves up for disappointment, putting off marriage until their 30s only to find themselves unskilled in the art of compatibility and surrounded by male peers looking over their chardonnays at women in their 20s. "modern people approach marriage like it's a bosnia-serbia negotiation. marriage is no longer as attractive to men," she says. "no one's telling college girls it's easier to have kids in your 20s than in your 30s."
women who have chosen the single life sometimes have their own qualms. singlehood does not yield itself to a simple, blithe embrace. it's complicated, messy terrain because not needing a man is not the same as not wanting one. for all the laughs on sex and the city, one can feel the ache that comes when yet another episode ends with the heart still a lonely hunter. and if you think being a single woman is all fun and games, just listen to star parker, who is married to actor matthew broderick. even as she's become a mascot for the feisty new single woman, parker says she often stands on the set in her spike jimmy choo open-toes and see-through shirts, worried that she isn't being a good traditional wife. "i know he doesn't have his laundry done, that he hasn't had a hot meal in days," she says of her husband. "that stuff weighs on my mind." parker regales single friends with tales of how boring married life is and how much luckier they are to have freedom and fun. does she really believe it? "well, no," she admits. "it's just a fun thing to say to make single people feel better."
even women who generally reflect on their choices with assurance find themselves sometimes in the valley of what-ifs: what if i made the wrong choice to walk away? what if singlehood turns out to be not a temporary choice but an enforced state? "my sister knows that i'm good for a call every couple of months just crying, what's wrong with me?'" says henneberry. "i'm not willing to accept someone who's going to make me unhappy. but there are days when i have a physical need to go to sleep and wake up with someone there." mary mayotte, 49, has a successful bicoastal career as a public-speaking coach. but she admits the occasional pang of regret. "there was a point where i had men coming out of my ears," she says. "i don't think i was so nice to some of them. every now and then i wonder if god is punishing me. sometimes i look back and say, i wish i had made a different decision there.'"
some feel women are on an impossible search for the perfect man, the one who not only makes you feel, as julia roberts said of meeting benjamin bratt, "hit in the head with a bat," but also better for it. "marriage is not what it used to be, getting stability or economic help," says the national marriage project's whitehead. "marriage has become this spiritualized thing, with labels like best friend' and soul mate'" some sociologists say these lofty standards make sense at a time when the high divorce rate hisses in the background like darth vader. but others suggest the marriage pendulum has swung from the hollowly pragmatic to an unhealthy romantic ideal.
michael broder, a philadelphia psychotherapist and author of the art of living single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and i'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "but there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. so you have people saying things like, if i can't have my soul mate, i'd rather be alone.' and after that, i say, well, you got your second choice.'"
single women are used to hearing this complaint, and most don't buy it. "some in my family think i'm not stopping till i find perfection," says henneberry. "i don't feel like that. i just want the one who makes me go, finally.'" harvard sociologist carol gilligan notes, "there's now a pressure to create relationships that both men and women want to be in, and that's great. this is revolutionary." even ellen fein, co-author of the notorious 1996 dating guide the rules, says her man-chasing disciples don't settle for just anyone. "most of my clients have jobs; they can pay the rent; they can take themselves out to dinner," says fein. "they want men to value them." many women can tell the story of a friend or relative who looked at her and said, "if you really wanted to be married, you'd be married." the comment can sometimes slap like a wet towel, in part because it is true and in part because of its implicit message: you could have compromised, perhaps settled, and been among the married. and so, the logic follows, you have no one to blame but yourself.
but these women have fought for years to be themselves--self-reliant, successful, clever, funny, willful, spirited--and for all the angst that the single life can bring, they're not willing to give it up for any arrangement that would stifle them. "it would be great if i found a relationship that allowed me to be as i am and added something to that," says documentary producer pam wolfe, 33, sitting in her one-bedroom condo in new york city. "but i'm not going to do anything to attract a person that means changing. i've worked long and hard to be myself."
--with reporting by tammerlin drummond/new york, elizabeth kaufman/nashville, anne moffett/washington, jacqueline savaiano/los angeles and maggie sieger/chicago
Long Stroker, you nailed it man!!
No doubt about anything said in the article. Some good stuff Long Stroker, thanks for sharing it man! Some scary shit too.......... I just don't know what to think of anymore, really, and far less so - what to expect of American / Americanized women. From very early ages they seem to evolve into becoming these feminazis / anti-man creatures. It's really scary. It's a good thing that I live approx. 2 hours away from TJ heaven because otherwise, I wouldn't even imagine what to do.
Idealism (women's unrealistic demands) vs Pragmatism (the world as it is)
I often hear that women are the smarter of the species, but then encounter a situation that makes me think that a WOMAN coined that phrase.
I was watching 20/20 (I think that was the show) and they featured career women who were now too old to have children naturally because they had forsaken having children during their most fertile years. Can you BELIEVE that they thought they could beat Nature and have kids NATURALLY when they reach(ed) their very late 30's or 40's?? These same women were lamenting the fact that they never had kids and some of them lamented the fact that they didn't have a life partner (spouse, if you will). In their eagerness to rub men's noses in the dirt and express their freedom, they neglected to look at the whole picture.
Their younger sisters are relishing the here and now, what with men lining up to be with them, but they feel that can go on forever. They will eventually make the same mistake the aforementioned women made. After years of having their head in the clouds and having its weight supported by their own egos, it comes crashing to earth when they realize that A] they have some SERIOUS competition from babes who are now younger than they and B] they didn't act in their best interests when time was on their side. Now they are bitter and instead of assigning the proper amount of blame to a narrow-minded view that produced less than wise choices, they lay most if not ALL the blame on men not being the picture of perfection in order to fit the bill. The Superwoman myth was busted quite a while back; when they realize this and start thinking pragmatically, maybe they won't be such abominable creatures. Then again, I'd have better luck expecting Bush to wear a thong and pasties while pole dancing in a gay nightclub.