February 22nd, 2010
Lori Gottlieb caused a bit of a storm back in 2007 with her article suggesting that women should settle for a man who is ‘good enough’ rather than holding out for Mr Perfect who may never show up. Not content with this she is now publishing a book which she says will back up her ideas.
Whilst I sympathise to a certain extent with her views, I do have problems with some of the statistics she quotes. She claims that “less than half of women over 40 will ever marry.” Conveniently she makes no mention of how many of these women actually want to get married, she simply uses this statistic to scare women into thinking they are a lost cause. Incidentally, The Times, commenting on figures published by the Office for National Statistics for England and Wales, makes a similar error. Proudly proclaiming that women are going to be overwhelmed by offers as there are now more single men than women in every age group except the over 75’s. Again they do not consider how many actually want to get married. The definition of single as “never married, divorced or widowed” is also a problem. How many are in happy, stable long term relationships? The old adage ‘Lies, dammed Lies and Statistics’ springs to mind. Numbers are great when trying to understand trends but you have to be very careful how you use them.
Back to Lori Gottlieb, she puts forward the view that feminism has encouraged women to think that they can have it all – the perfect man, lifestyle, family and career. In some ways she is right about this. There is not really a whole lot wrong with setting yourself high goals and aspirations. However you do need to be able to be flexible whilst trying to attain them.
Remember to give yourself a good pat on the back when you land on the moon even if you were aiming for the stars.
Posted in Find Love, Relationships, meet others | 7 Comments »
February 8th, 2010
Apparently, Harriet Harman wants to engineer a new social order with her equality bill. On the face of it this is fine in principle. After all nobody should be discriminated against on the basis of their sex, colour, creed or any other aspect of their person. However, some groups believe that the bill interferes with their freedom. The Pope in particular is up in arms. It seems to me the real problem here is that legislation is not the answer. People just don’t respond to being forced into a corner. In addition there is the problem of unforeseen outcomes.
Recently there has been a lot written in the press about women who are increasingly finding that feminist ideas and legislation are actually holding them back rather than helping them as they were intended to. Feminism was supposed to liberate women and allow them to make all the choices in their lives on their own merits. However they are now finding that sometimes this ideal itself actually has the opposite effect. It is now illegal to ask a women in a job interview if she plans to have a family. Fair enough, but employers know this so don’t ask and women who have no intention of having a family do not get the chance to say so and the employer hires the man as it is less risky for them.
All forms of equality legislation almost by definition have a flip side that encourages positive discrimination. The obvious end-point of positive discrimination is mediocrity and I for one do not want to live in a mediocre world.
What has this got to do with Classical Partners, well, we sometimes meet people with pre-concieved ideas which are getting in their way of finding what they want. These pre-concieved ideas are their prejudices and there is no way we can legislate against them. What we can try and do is educate them to find a better way.
I think it is exactly the same with the proposed equality bill. Learn from the mistakes of feminism and instead of legislating try educating.
Posted in Relationships, Society | 3 Comments »
