(Update by SB Sarah: Forbes has relaunched the article, this time with a rebuttal alongside it, advocating men live up to the responsibilities of home, family, and keeping your damn mouth shut when you have nothing of value to say. No wait, that last one is my recommendation. Sorry.)
(Update! Forbes has pulled the article and the slideshow, so I’m linking to a couple of enterprising Livejournallers who’ve copied and pasted the text in their entirety to their journals. For the pictures that accompanied the slideshows, check out the remix at Gawker. When I have a moment, I might try re-creating it because it the pictures and the text together were so deliciously stupid.)
…because professional women are cheating bitches who are impossible to please.
Be sure to check out the accompanying slideshow.
I like this particular bit:
If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy ( Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do ( Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do ( Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill ( American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier ( Institute for Social Research).
That last part just kills me. Your house will be dirtier if both you and your wife are working. Goddamn uppity women! Git back in the kitchen and git mopping! And bring me a sammich!
Look, numbnut, if both spouses are working full time, of course the house is going to be dirtier than if the wife stays at home and dedicates herself to domestic chores. Jesus fuck, am I being too Captain Obvious here? What the author also neglects to mention is how in households in which both spouses work, women often still end up doing the lion’s share of the housework.
And this bit of tricky dickery cannot go unremarked:
The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they’ll meet someone they like more than you. “The work environment provides a host of potential partners,” researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, “and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals.”
There’s more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.
Notice how the author very cunningly doesn’t mention which spouse is more likely to cheat when working outside the home. Working outside the home increases the odds of infidelity, period, and god forbid that women be as susceptible to temptation as men. We much prefer them on those nifty pedestals—well, as long as they can dust, vacuum, mop and do laundry while attached to ‘em.
Further down, the author debunks himself quite neatly, though he tries to side-step it:
A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives’ employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of “low marital quality.”
So, to sum it up: Working outside the home will make matters worse when things are kind of shitty to begin with, because it provides women with the means to meet other people with whom they may be more well-suited as well as the money to make it on their own.
OH REALLY YOU DON’T SAY HEY GET THE NEWS CREW ON THAT REVELATION, WILL YOU?
And this bit from the slideshow is just too, too precious:
A 2003 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family concluded that wealthier couples with children suffer a drop in marital satisfaction three times as great as their less affluent peers. One of the study’s co-authors publicly speculated that the reason is that wealthier women are used to “a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life.”
Lord forbid that a woman get used to having a fun, active, entertaining life. Also, I’m sure the fact that high-paying jobs are higher stress and require longer work hours than lower-paying jobs has nothing to do with the wealthier couples feeling more stress and unhappiness once babies arrive on the scene. No, it’s because professional women are SPOILED BITCHEZ.
But to tie this to romance novels: How many of you have noticed how contemporary romances oftentimes demonize the working life, specifically for women? I’ve noticed several stories about women on the verge of burnout who find fulfillment in a life filled with babies and domesticity, or who find themselves time-travelling to a simpler past, back when a man was a man and a woman was a woman and a staph infection was a staph infection and could kill your ass if you so much as looked at it cross-eyed, or other such malarkey. I also notice a preponderance of heroines who claim to love their jobs, who muse repeatedly how their jobs are their life and they’re superlative at them when in fact they turn out to be incompetent, borderline insane morons—who, more often than not, cock up the birth control and end up conveniently pregnant.
Yes, I realize romance novels are escapist fiction, but not all of us dream of escaping into a life filled with Diaper Genies. Some balance would be nice, is all I’m sayin’.
As a Smart Bitch, I subscribe on this blog and on my personal blog to what I call “the Mafia Rule.” Don’t talk about the job. Don’t talk about the family.
I will talk a little about Freebird and his latest battlewith Coxsucky virus, and about how he’s crawling at the speed of sound, but I don’t gripe about my husband, and I never, ever, ever write about my job.
But I’m a working mother, which is a term I dispise, because it implies that mothers who are at home with their kids don’t work. That’s crap.
And, as this article so admirably demonstrates, mothers who work out of the house are shat upon with alarming frequency. So I call myself an Outhouse Mom.
I am flabbergasted that in contemporary romance and in the context of this article, there isn’t room for women who are fulfilled at their jobs and also fulfilled by their home life, who love their kids and their daily jobs, and struggle each day to maintain a happy balance of each – and most often do it and do it well!
Also, I hate the Diaper Genie. Fucker stinks and the refills are craptastically expensive. I have a $3 diaper pail with essential oil paper cakes in the lid, so Freebird’s room smells like Patchouli and poop. And I couldn’t be happier.
The Diaper Genie is a worthless invention. Who wants diapers full of poo compressed into sausage links? That’s just dumb.
I always just tied mine up in plastic grocery sacks, didn’t notice a problem.
I had to slip a comment (or two) in here.
My ex couldn’t stand that I had a better, way cooler, higher paying job than he did. He sabotaged our finances, our marriage (initially by picking fights and general discontent, eventually by cheating) and was emotionally and verbally abusive to me. I know other women in my profession (an airline pilot) who’ve had similar experiences. If they can’t have the better job, the men(?) throw hissy fits and punish the wives who are supporting them. They aren’t stupid men; mine has advanced degrees and is almost a rocket scientist (really), but he has a problem finishing things and will probably never do the dissertation that would earn him the PhD he went to school for.
Now he is remarried to a weird, unattractive woman who never held much of a job for very long. He doesn’t have to work very hard to feel like he’s ‘better’ than she is in every way.
I think it takes a rare man who can honestly accept a woman who outearns him over time. Look to Hollywood, where marriages break up so often when the woman’s career is bigger than the man’s. Christie Brinkley’s marriage is a tragic example.
Forbes is doing a disservice by warning men away from successful women. They should be warning successful women away from weak men.
(Hoping those quotes work!)
Yes, but then who would marry the weak men so they can manage to pass on their defective genes to the next generation? 😉
Actually, what’s so funny about this whole thing is that these are the men who aren’t bothering to evolve blaming the women for their stumpy tails. If a woman indulged in a self-righteous whine like this, she’d be soundly laughed at by just about all and sundry. But because this dude is a guy, there will be a whole raft of men crying right alongside him. Hello? The world sucks for your Neanderthal ass nowadays? Too damn bad.
Grow up and put some big boy pants on, sonny. I ain’t got time for your dolla’ store messes!
The one that I thought was funniest:
Men who are married to career women get sick moreoften because their wives are too busy to take care of them properly and make sure they eat the right food and get plenty of rest.
Are you shitting me? I understand a certain amount of TLC is called for in a marriage, but is this man a grown-up? Where in the vows does it say, “I promise to treat you like your mom did, except with blow jobs and fucking, til death do us part.”
The irony is that I know I’ve read articles that say that women with careers are happier because it’s easier to be psychologically balanced when you play more than one role in life, and one would think this would lead to happier marriages. I know for myself I’ve very much appreciated the fact that when things were tough at the office I had a husband and children who loved me even if I missed a deadline. And when it seemed like the terrible two’s would last a decade (and with 3 children each 3 years apart, almost everything lasted a decade), it was restful to come to an office where everyone was toilet trained and spoke in complete sentences. I realize I’m lucky to have an interesting job, but frankly my husband is the one who used to throw a fit in the past when I suggested I stay at home. He found it far less stressful to have two incomes rather than feel the entire burden was on his shoulders. And while this is anecdotal rather than statistical proof, I still remember when my son’s kindergarten teacher pointed out that all of the children came from intact families, and this in northwest Washington, DC, where the number of two-career families far exceeds the national average.
ROTFLMAO!!
This is sad and outrageous, but the men are just shooting themselves in the foot here.
My hubby’s income goes to the mortgage and the bills; mine goes to the car and the groceries. If I didn’t work, we’d sit home and starve. He’d have to get a second job and his stress would kill him by 45. Duh, guys! A working wife means twice the income!
I had the same response as Ana to this quote:
“Men who are married to career women get sick more often because their wives are too busy to take care of them properly and make sure they eat the right food and get plenty of rest.”
Maybe those men just don’t wash their fucking hands. Isn’t that the #1 way of making sure you don’t catch stuff???
Maybe professional men are the ones that are more wussy and call in when they’re ill. Blue collar/unprofessional guys may just suck it up and go to work. (I am assuming they used call-in-sick-to work-days of professional men vs. blue coller men)??
I am not a professional woman. I was a SAHM and now I substitute in my kids schools. And here is the shocking thing…even though I am not a professional woman, I do NOT check that my DH has eaten the ‘right’ foods during the day. He is a big boy, he knows what he likes to eat. He also knows when he is tired. HELLO, HE’S AN ADULT.
Sam…
Oh hell…I know it is COLLAR…not COLLER…I don’t know how to go back and fix my spelling though.
Sorry.
a “career girl” has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.
Uh, this is pretty much every woman I know. I mean unless you’re in some kind of religious cult where you snap the girls up and marry them before they have pubic hair then at some point before she succumbs to your manly charm said woman is gonna have to go out and get herself a job . . . unless the problem here is really all those uppity EDUCATED women. And unless you’re trolling the aisles at your local Wal-Mart for potential mates, she’s probably going to be making AT LEAST 30K a year (sheesh, that’s not enough to even live on in my part of the country).
Some Woman—-typical Republican. Can’t take a joke. I think I need to find a forum with a sense of humor. See you girls—-well, never again.
Not sure if you’ll ever see this, but…
I think this place has a pretty awesome sense of humor, Thera. I wouldn’t take one person being cheesed off as representative of the whole. And I’ve found I can say what I want here. People may disagree, but that’s their right.
Don’t let one person run you off.
That’s easy for me to say, though. I don’t give a shit about politics. I don’t even live in the US.
Thera- You’re ditching us because of what Some Woman said? Say it isn’t so.
~Men who are married to career women get sick more often because their wives are too busy to take care of them properly and make sure they eat the right food and get plenty of rest.~
HAHAHAHAHA! Poor, poor little helpless baby boy. Have some Chicken and Stars and have a nice nappie.
There’s too much to say about all this crapola. So I really can say no more. I think I’ve sprung a rib laughing.
I’m going to take a cue from Nora, there, and breathe deeply and laugh.
‘Cause when I skimmed this blog post I think my blood pressure spiked.
So this is COMPLETELY off topic, but I clicked over to the Nora article and Nora, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE give up the Winstons (although your voice did sound tantalizingly raspy at the RWA awards ceremony)! You need to live for another 80 years so we can continue to learn from you. You are so wise. Teach me your ways…
If a woman indulged in a self-righteous whine like this, she’d be soundly laughed at by just about all and sundry.
And if said woman happens to be a TV journalist, she’ll lose her job. We had such a nutcase who preached about how bad it is for society that women make careers instead of staying at home, and how unhappy everyone really is with that sort of arrangement – all the while she was making some good money and was not at home to care and feed her husband. Can we say hypocrisy?
The owners of the TV channel made her resign. 😛
Noer and Napoli. I bet they’re great friends.
Personal to Noer: The reason career women are unhappy when married to you is the same reason *any* woman would be unhappy when married to you. You’re a knuckle-dragging blowhard. You know, just FYI.
and
::::raises hand, waves frantically::::: I make less than 30k. And I work in the GS system, meaning for the government. Maybe this means I’m only a wanna be career woman – I’m also still working on my degree.
Of course, maybe this also explains why my husband and I are also happier when I’m working. I did the sahm thing for about 1.5 years and we never came closer to a divorce than during that period.
Just so we all know how astute and accurate Forbes magazine is, I thought I’d share one of the points made in an online article about why Tom Cruise’s popularity has tanked. (Like we needed an article?)
***The power of TomKat, June 2006: Forbes magazine touts Cruise as the world’s most powerful famous person.***
http://news.yahoo.com/s/eo/20060825/en_celeb_eo/19847
Yeah, he’s powerful. Behold his power and stand in awe. Or you could yawn.
Clearly, Forbes is up with wha’s happenin’ in America. I can see why they think he’s so almighty – Tom’s telling women to suck it up after childbirth, because post-partum depression is all in our head. If we’d stay home with that baby and take care of our man, NO WAY would we be depressed!
Good grief. Well, thank goodness it’s not an issue for me since I’m single and have to work! I think that even if I did manage to find another husband I would be afraid to not work at this point. I’ve already had one run off with someone he had met on the internet a week earlier so I know how fast things can change. I would also like to point out that having a degree doesn’t automatically mean you make bunches of money. 30K a year$ I have a BA and only bring home 18K a year. I wasn’t lied to when I was warned that librarians make less than teachers!
“Journal of Marriage and Family�
Riiiight. Because that won’t be biased at all when doing a study on career women. I’ll believe the results of a study like that when I believe a Focus on the Family-sponsored study saying that gay people are responsible for cancer.
Hey now. I have to stand up for the peer-reviewed literature here. According to their site: “The Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) has been the leading research journal in the family field for over 60 years. JMF features original research and theory, research interpretation and reviews, and critical discussion concerning all aspects of marriage, other forms of close relationships, and families. The Journal also publishes book reviews.”
It’s published on behalf of the National Council on Family Relations, which doesn’t seem to be evil—in fact, observe this very apropos press release from a JMF study on Dollars, Dependency, and Divorce.
… that was completely off-topic. What I wanted to say was, thanks for completely eviscerating that stupid article, and for the links! I haven’t laughed so hard in days.
…WOW….
having digested both articles for a couple days and read most of the commentary here I think I have to finally bring down an opinion on the side of…
How dare Mike Noer make his own gender look like pathetic, drooling Momma’s boys who couldn’t wipe thier own asses let alone know how to start wiping that of thier little prodigies…my DH is a fulltime SAHD (yes acronym sounds like SAD), he has stayed home off and on (between part time jobs) for 10 years and is the BOMB at it. He is everything this Momma couldn’t be during the course of what is to both of us a 24/7 job of raising our sons. He is the one with the higher education but my job pays more so this is the decision we came to as a COUPLE….YES, Virginia there are adults out there that actually consult as couples not just spoon feed eachother and tuck one another in when one gets cranky…
This guy is embarassing to his gender not becausee of what he implies about women (although that shit is pretty stunning) but what he is implying about men…sad indeed.
Dharma
This is what happens when you stop looking at people as individuals and start putting them in pens based on gender/color/favorite flavor of ice cream. Half-assed remarks that reflect badly on people who also fit in the same group but are actual grown ups. 🙂
Me, I try not to generalize about people. I find it keeps me out of trouble, more often than not.
(and if I recall correctly, Journal of Marriage and Family mostly carries scholarly papers written by marriage and family sociologists, who, if they’re doing their jobs right, are more impartial than most. I had a prof publish a paper in there praising the way same sex couples raise their children, stating they were generally more well adjusted than their hetero raised counterparts. Granted, it was a small scale, regional study, but it struck a blow against the ‘gay people pervert our babies’ crowd.)
Quick, bring back the zenana and post a couple of burly eunuchs to guard the door!
This article just made my day (how often, after all, does one have the chance to use the word “zenana” in conversation?). I adore the notion that if we are—gasp! horror!—allowed into dangerous proximity with other men, we wee weak creatures will undoubtedly fall prey to uncontrollable fits of workplace lust. Clearly, they haven’t met any of our co-workers. More importantly, the article seems to miss the fact that if men are working outside the home, um, mightn’t they be having affairs? Or are only women subject to that fatal weakness? (Damn Satan and that apple!). Men being big, strong, noble types who are, of course, never led by their hormones the way we weak women are…. Right.
Too much fun. So many snide remarks, so little time….
ATTENTION!!
This story is being featured tonight on cnn’s (headline news) showbiz tonight.
will our bitches get a mention?
tune in to find out!!
on the blurb they mention the uproar on the internet about it.
oh.. they said 11pm eastern time
Oh, my poor snow pea, with it’s career mom AND dad. I’m so ready to cheat on my husband (I’m knocked up, so OBVIOUSLY I’m easy!) because I’m exposed to SO MANY MEN in my company!
I’d like to think Noer wrote this to incite debate, but working in a company where the Good Ol’ Boy network is well and truly alive, I know there are business partners I have who have similar views, based on the way they look at my little pregnant belly and then up at my face with that “Why aren’t you at home cooking and tending your man?”
You know, while I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the ideas expressed in the article, I do think it speaks to something broader, and that is the concern that the world is being “feminized” and men are getting “left behind” (not in the Apocalyptic sense, although maybe they’re worrying about that, too) in the process.
Have you noticed all the hoopla in the press lately about how boys are falling behind girls in school because the curriculum is being “feminized” and the poor boys just can’t keep up with the girls because, unlike girls, they can’t sit still, concentrate, and behave themselves because “it’s just not in their nature”? And the concerns that women are now attending college at a higher rate than men? The hand-wringing conveniently ignores that a) boys’ performance on standardized tests is improving, just not as fast as girls’ and b) the range of options for high-paying careers for women without college degrees is considerably lower than for men (how many auto mechanics, plumbers, master carpenters, etc. do you know who are female? Although there’s no reason that couldn’t change as well, and I think that’s yet another reason for the sense of threat.).
Gender roles are changing, my friends, and there are always going to be some people who don’t like it. Including some women, I might add. Cultural shifts are never easy.
Can the return of menstrual huts be far behind??
Ay, yi, yi. I don’t know where to start, it’s all so juicy and mockalicious! Yes, this man is an asshat with a very disturbing neck. He uses gender nonspecific terms (individuals, people) to back up his “Working women fuck anything with a dick!” point, which pretty clearly shows me that the study in question was either about both genders, or only men, because if it was about women I bet he’d have quoted the fuck out of it!
Anyway, I don’t have time for asshat fuckwits. Mr Noer, get some plastic surgery for that hideous wattle hanging under your lack-of-chin and grow the fuck up. Really, I can’t believe this shit made it past copy-edits without someone dragging Mr Fuckwit to remedial It’s-Not-1950-Anymore classes. *eyeroll*
I think Forbes is more than a little bit on crack right now. They don’t seem to know whether they want to be a reputable business magazine or People / Entertainment Weekly. Found a couple of weird ass slideshows:
America’s Drunkest Cities (huh? From Forbes? Really?)
and
How to get into the Club (say what? You’re trying to give tips on how to get into a nightclub? Are you shitting me?)
Even if any or all of these statistics are true, wouldn’t you think this says more about the power dynamics in marriage than it says about working women? If a woman is able to support herself comfortably, she doesn’t “have” to get married to move out of her parents’ home. She has less incentive to stay in an unhappy marriage. And she’s a lot less likely to think her reward for a life well-lived is her husband’s 401K and pension!
And if she’s more likely to meet new-and-interesting members of the opposite sex in the workplace, well, that certainly isn’t anything new to working men!
And as much as this guy’s arrogance annoys me, I’m equally annoyed when I hear women in my office talk about having children so they can force their husbands to let them stay home (because the child-care costs are too high). Or when I hear them pining for “the good old days” when they could stay at home and “not have to work”.
There are female Neanderthals, too.
SB is at the forefront of news, again!
ABC News is running a story about all the flack going on with the Forbes article.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2357818&page=1
Great job, Candy and Sarah!!!!
Cynthia
*points at sis in law*
Damn bitch. Not only did she catch my brother with a baby, she tells me I should look for a husband instead of making a meagre income as translator. :bug:
I hang my head in shame. I am the crap-ass professional woman who worked 80 hours a week, while my darling husband stayed home with the kids. Lasted 6 years, it was fabulous. Home cooked meals and a clean house every night. This is what the writer for Forbes wants. He should marry another guy. Oh, by the way, we’re still married—28 years, and counting. But we’re both professionals, both working a lot of hours, the house is a mess and we eat a lot of Chipotle.
My husband’s definition of success?
A man is successful when his wife makes more money than he does!
My Dh and I both work. I come home and make dinner, then clean up all week. So yeah, it’s a fact. I’m the one who picks up and drops off the kid, makes sure she has her lunch and suchlike and clean clothes.
When he remarks it’s time for that all-weekend pain in the ass spring cleaning, I’m out the door and leaving him to it, because I’ve done my time.
It’s all about compromise, ya see.