From: sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer)
Newsgroups: soc.men
Subject: Re: Feminists Growing Old Alone (was: Japanese Women's Lib)
Date: 15 Apr 92 23:58:00 GMT
Article-I.D.: netcom.mgzjkbm.sheaffer
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest)

In article <1992Apr15.002707.22374@Veritas.COM> rdh@Veritas.COM (Robert Hartman) writes:
>The cultural feminists would say that those same-sex couples that adopt
>dominant/submissive roles are simply aping the roles they see in the
>culture-at-large.  They're skeptical that such role-playing is necessary
>or healthy in either case.  They'd say that these roles derived from a
>time when marauders took women as slaves, and then institutionalized the
>form so as to placate the indiginous men whom they corrupted.
>
So, you're suggesting that militant lesbians are leading the lifestyle
they are because they've been brainwashed by Patriarchy? :)

How do they determine which one will be "on top", so to speak?
"I'll wrestle you for it, best of five!" Or: does this convention
for conflict resolution make life go more smoothly for *both* partners?


>I do agree with you about the New Age twaddle.  But with all that I've still
>found some very fun, interesting, and helpful things at some of those fairs.

Yes, I go sometimes, too. Wonderfully entertaining!

>> ... she would like to get remarried, but she's in her 40s, and
>>the odds are strongly against her. ...
>
>On what do you base this conclusion about her odds?  All of those "man
>shortage" stories have been shown to be, to borrow a word from you, twaddle.
>
Oh, not true! While Faludi quite rightly debunks those accounts saying
'you're more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married',
it is simply a FACT that the ratio of unmarried women to men rises
sharply with age. One book gives the number of unmarried men for every
100 unmarried women here in San Jose, and it's something like:

  age 25, 110, 
      30, 105
      35   90
      40   75
      45   55 ...
      65   20         (this is from memory, not exact).

Couple this with the fact that most men middle aged or older are
interested in a wife younger than themsleves, and we see that a
woman's prospects for marriage fall off drastically as she gets
older. For the unmarried, the reality is:

                     WOMEN                             MEN

  
Age 25        I'm the Queen of the World.      Can't you find time to go
               Everyone Wants me. I don't      out with me next week, maybe?
              Need a man. I'm having too       You're very beautiful. I
               much fun to settle down.        believe in marriage and kids.

Age 45        Couldn't we go to a concert      You sound like you're getting
               or something? I enjoy your      too serious. I'm having
               company, we make a good         too much fun to settle down.
               couple.

-- 
  
        Robert Sheaffer - Scepticus Maximus - sheaffer@netcom.com
  
 Past Chairman, The Bay Area Skeptics - for whom I speak only when authorized!

     "In the 1970's the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions
     of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs 
     embarked upon now ... in 1985, when it is calculated [under the most
     optimistic scenario] that the major die-back will be over, ..."
       
                       Dr. Paul Ehrlich, "The Population Bomb," 1968