Considering how this discussion has evolved, I'm going to cross-fertilize this thread with this
comment:
This is one seriously deluded
woman:
It’s this logic that has most of my 30-something guy friends dating girls fresh out of college. Girls who, in my experience, are less impressive, less striving, less volatile, less successful, less intimidating, less questioning, less pressing, less complex, less damaged, less opinionated, less powerful, less womanly. They are less, and, to a guy not ready for anything -- like most of the guys I have dated in New York -- less is more.
A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason why Alex has been putting me on the backburner for the last two months, telling me I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.
A woman having an impressive social standing isn't that important to men. A woman who is more intimidating (?) is not important to men. A complex women is just a headache for men. Same with an opinionated broad.
Where she really goes off the rails is with her belief that men
want a more damaged woman and that men find younger women to be less womanly. Um, no sweety. Younger women are more womanly and feminine and attractive than older women. Women with less baggage and less drama are desired by men. She's right, a 30 year old woman is an undertaking. Who wants that job? Men want romance to be fun, not an undertaking.
What's really screwy here is that she expects men to put in more effort now that she's older and more damaged than they did when she was younger and a prize actually worth fighting for. Someone has been feeding this woman a line of bull - likely another embittered feminist long past her prime - and this writer bought into the agitprop, hook, line and sinker.
Time for her to settle down with her feline life partner and make the best of the road she's taken.
Feminism seems to work at creating an imaginary world for women to live in and as time progresses the imaginary world starts to crumble from the repeated onslaught of reality bashing at the gates.
Related:
FORTY may be the new 30, but try telling that to your ovaries.
With long brown hair and come-hither curves, Melissa Foss looks — and feels — fabulous at 41. “I’ve spent hours of my life and a lot of money making sure I was healthy, and that my hair was shiny, my teeth were white and my complexion clear,” said Ms. Foss, a magazine editor in New York City.
So when it came to conceiving a child with her husband, a marketing executive, Ms. Foss wasn’t at all worried. After all, she noted, those same traits of youth and beauty “are all the hallmarks of fertility.”
Fifteen unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization later, Ms. Foss now realizes that appearances can be deceiving. “I’d based a lot of my self-worth on looking young and fertile, and to have that not be the case was really depressing and shocking,” she said. The couple are now trying to have a baby with the help of a surrogate and a donor egg.
Advances in beauty products and dermatology, not to mention manic devotion to yoga, Pilates and other exercise obsessions, are making it possible for large numbers of women to look admirably younger than their years. But doctors fear that they are creating a widening disconnect between what women see in the mirror and what’s happening to their reproductive organs. . . . .
“I watch what I eat, I don’t drink, I take extremely good care of myself, and I come from a very fertile family,” said Fruzsina Keehn, 45, a designer of high-end jewelry in San Francisco and New York, who has tried to conceive with the help of in vitro fertilization eight times in the last two years. Later this month, she will try once again with a donor egg. “Everyone in my life told me how young I looked for my age,” she said. “I assumed it was the same on the inside as it was on the outside.”
The unreality is reinforced by Hollywood, much to the growing dismay of many obstetricians and gynecologists. Not only are stars in their 40s now celebrated as bona fide sex symbols (Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Salma Hayek, the list goes on), but judging from media coverage, they seem to be reproducing like rabbits.
“All women see is celebrities over 40 getting pregnant,” lamented Shari Brasner, a New York obstetrician and gynecologist.
And look at what happened when some physicians wanted to inject some reality into the
feminist bubble-universe:
But even as doctors began to try to get the word out, they ran into resistance of all kinds.
In hopes of raising women's awareness, asrm [American Society for Reproductive Medicine] launched a modest $60,000 ad campaign last fall, with posters and brochures warning that factors like smoking, weight problems and sexually transmitted infections can all harm fertility. But the furor came with the fourth warning, a picture of a baby bottle shaped like an hourglass: "Advancing age decreases your ability to have children." The physicians viewed this as a public service, given the evidence of widespread confusion about the facts, but the group has come under fire for scaring women with an oversimplified message on a complex subject. "The implication is, 'I have to hurry up and have kids now or give up on ever having them,'" says Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. "And that is not true for the vast majority of women." Gandy, 48, had her first child at 39. "It was a choice on my part, but in most ways it really wasn't. It's not like you can create out of whole cloth a partner you want to have a family with and the economic and emotional circumstances that allow you to be a good parent. So to put pressure on young women to hurry up and have kids when they don't have those other factors in place really does a disservice to them and to their kids."
To emphasize a woman's age above all other factors can be just one more piece of misleading information, Gandy suggests. "There are two people involved [in babymaking], and yet we're putting all the responsibility on women and implying that women are being selfish if they don't choose to have children early." She shares the concern that women will hear the research and see the ads and end up feeling it is so hard to strike a balance that it's futile to even try. "There is an antifeminist agenda that says we should go back to the 1950s," says Caryl Rivers, a journalism professor at Boston University. "The subliminal message is, 'Don't get too educated; don't get too successful or too ambitious.'" Allison Rosen, a clinical psychologist in New York City who has made it her mission to make sure her female patients know the fertility odds, disagrees. "This is not a case of male doctors' wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant," she says. "You lay out the facts, and any particular individual woman can then make her choices." Madsen of A.I.A. argues that the biological imperative is there whether women know it or not. "I cringe when feminists say giving women reproductive knowledge is pressuring them to have a child," she says. "That's simply not true. Reproductive freedom is not just the ability not to have a child through birth control. It's the ability to have one if and when you want one."
