Latest threat to marriage: “Career girls”

In case you missed it, Michael Noer of Forbes threw out a gem of sociological myth steeped in scientific fiction today. The best (worst) part is when the the author links career women to divorce to “alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide [and]….increased rates of cancer, stroke, and sexually-transmitted disease.

There could not be a more classic example of what Caryl Rivers has written and talked so persuasively about. Faux trend stories citing the most dubious data that says subverting the traditional patriarchal paradigm leads to death and misery for all involved.

I don’t have time to go through piece by piece, rending the necrotic flesh of his arguments from the brittle bones of debunked scientific data, but suffice it to say that this is not Noer’s first foray into trawling the world of sociology to inject his anemic misogyny with a little sciencey-seeming B-12.

But with the flap the article has raised, we could hope it might be his last.

Interestingly, Maureen Dowd of the NYTimes chose today to run a column , deriding men who become “Mrs. [wife’s surname]” like one Kevin Federline, or, as she snidely implies, Bill Clinton. She quotes Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, talking about avoiding the Hilary Swank syndrome. ‘’He’s got to feel like he carries the weight in the relationship somehow ,'’ she said. ‘’So if he’s not the main financial provider, he’s got to be the protector, or maybe he’s the really social one. When you have dinner parties, or get-togethers, he’s the one who’s really the dominant social force. You’ve got to let him know he has a big role and you can’t talk about ‘my money.’ It’s got to be ‘our money.’ ‘’

Letters to the Forbes editor go here: readers@forbes.com
Letter to NYTimes go here: letters@nytimes.com

Check this space for a more detailed take-down in the next couple of days.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 1:35 pm and is filed under American Culture, Feminism, Science, Outrages & Responsibilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.