Originally Posted by
Archronos
The woman in question in the original post is actually very accomplished and works for T. Rowe Price making almost six figures. She, and a lot of my girlfriends who all have high income careers, are not trying to hitch their wagon to any man. Even my stripper/high class hooker friends are taking care of themselves. In almost every case that I know of in my social circles, the men are running after us. I see it every time we go out and every time we get together for parties. If the girl doesn't already have a man (and sometimes even if she does ;)), there's a dude trying to get with them. Most are financially stable and some just plain are not.
This is the best time to be a woman in the world because we're getting better jobs, better educations and have greater opportunities to be everything we want to be anywhere we to be it. And some have speculated that all this is to the detriment of men, which I can somewhat see. I mean, I have several girlfriends who plan on having babies BY THEMSELVES and one who already does. I see this as at once liberating but also indicative of something else. Is it the quality of the men that has declined? I don't even pretend to know.
I do know this: 100 years ago, for the most part, we wouldn't have had any choice but to marry who could offer us the type of life we wanted for ourselves AND our children. That has changed COMPLETELY. We can now, as statistics in industrialized nations worldwide show, do everything on our own. This is both a good and bad thing, I think, sociologically. Men need women, even though you may not like us all the time, and we want you (even though we really don't need you :p).
But here again you're working on the same set of assumptions. You are assuming that these men running after these women want the same thing that women want. If a man wants to get laid, all he has to do is "run after" as many girls as he can get through in a night until he "wins" one. You might interpret this as being the result of some infatuation or true desire to be with a particular individual with a particular set of characteristics (educated, "high salary", etc), but men tend to set very short term goals with women through their 20s and 30s, and it's more likely that any particular man chatting up a party of girls is looking for one particular feature that is common to all of them. It is also kind of odd that the more educated, and better paid a woman is, the less desireable she seems to be to most men. This is something I don't really understand, but it probably has to do with the evolution of our political system, and cultural values in response changes in the structure of the economy in the last century. Salesmen use the same tactic, pitch as many people as you can, and you will eventually get a response. In this case, you only need 1 win (although 2 or 3 would be nice too), so it's best to proposition as many women as you can until you get your win, and go home. The situation resembles a very basic game theory model.
I know 100k sounds like a lot in some parts of the country, but around Washington it really isn't. Most of the people that I know (I refuse to call it a social circle) are earning nearly 100k, are in their mid 20s, work in places like the White House, the Hill, Booz, Accenture, IBM, FBR, McKinsey, AT Kearney, government agencies, Sidley Austin, lobbying, etc, and there aren't that many of us that feel that marrying somebody else that makes 100k is going to actually make any of us truly wealthy, or even wealthy enough that there would have been a significant difference had any of us married somebody that made 50k or 35k for that matter. Later on in life this might translate to a 50k to 100k per year differential for the vast majority of people, but it's much easier to move from the 35k to 150k level (all you have to do is choose the right education) than it is to move from the 150k to 300k level (which, let's not kid ourselves, is still upper middle class around here [with a salary like this you'll still have to work unless you've invested wisely]).
I also think that this is a great time for women. Women are more financially independent, educated, and better represented higher up in the career latter than they were 20 years ago. Has the quality of men declined? I don't know, but the gap between men, and women for this particular measure of "quality" has certainly gotten smaller. These issues could be related. With women entering the workplace we have qualified women displacing some previously qualified men, so let's say half of 40% of the male population is no longer quality, and 40% of the female population now is. If half of this "non-quality" male segment of the population would have been qualified 30 years ago, but no longer is, I guess there could be a genuine argument for stating that the quality of men (wrt available resources[?]) has actually declined, (and that the "quality" of the population as a whole has probably increased).
As for men needing women. I'm not really sure about this one. I certainly need my girlfriend, but anything can happen, and if we broke up, I would be fine in a week. I think that most men don't really need women for companionship, and a lot of them actually prefer purely sexual relationships through their youth and middle adulthood. Now "a lot" is an ambiguous term, and I don't have any hard numbers, only anecdotal evidence, but I see a lot of women in their mid to late 30s that are coming to terms with the fact that there is a chance that they will never find love, or have children. The more highly educated ones (excluding MBAs) also tend to have a harder time developing relationships, probably resulting from time constraints. The one thing that I do notice however, is that women never stop looking for a relationship. If they haven't developed one in their 30, they continue trying through their 40s, and so on.
I would also think that raising a child on your own would be a very lonely task, but my mother handled it reasonably well so I guess there are those people that would welcome such a challenge.
