By Amanda Marcotte | Posted
Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011, at 2:05 PM ET
This piece about the shifts in marriage and dating patterns by Kate Bolick at the Atlantic
has some interesting ideas in it, but she makes you pay for these ideas
by only bringing them up after forcing you to swim through a sea of
unquestioned assumptions and straight up fallacies: that evolutionary
psychology is a real science instead of 21st century phrenology, that
40-year-old men are uniformly disinterested in dating women their own
age, that singleness is mainly a product of women wanting men more
successful than themselves, that the whole nation looks like New York
City's notoriously brutal dating marketplace, that there's a meaningful
difference between a woman who terminates a long-standing cohabitation
and a divorcée, and that Susan Walsh should be treated like an expert in
dating when she's better described as a charlatan whose only credential
for giving advice is her shockingly sadistic misogyny (and who likes to
diagnose feminists from afar as mentally ill
because they question her immoveable belief that dating is really a war
between men and women in which each tries to extract what they want
from the other with as minimal contribution of love or sex as possible,
depending on the gender stereotype). Even the interesting idea at the
end of her piece, which is that women deal with the scarcity of decent
men that are marriageable by shoring up their relationships to each
other, feels weak and mealy-mouthed. It made me long for some
saber-rattling radical lesbian separatism that, while not my cup of tea
personally speaking, at least has conviction.
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