Post: #1

This is the man who can save marriage, or at least believes he can.



All it takes is one look at that puppy-dog look and you know that this is going to be some bull.

This article ignores the every truth that this forum acknowledges, and celebrates the new model of marriage as a partnership of equals. It says nothing about women needing to improve themselves to make them more attractive to men or about reforming the legal system so that men don't fear marriage as an institution. No, the mainstream answer is more bitchwork for men.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...ca/283732/

Quote:American marriage is not dying. But it is undergoing a metamorphosis, prompted by a transformation in the economic and social status of women and the virtual disappearance of low-skilled male jobs. The old form of marriage, based on outdated social rules and gender roles, is fading. A new version is emerging—egalitarian, committed, and focused on children.

[...]

The glue for these marriages is not sex, nor religion, nor money. It is a joint commitment to high-investment parenting—not hippy marriages, but "HIP" marriages. And America needs more of them. Right now, these marriages are concentrated at the top of the social ladder, but they offer the best—perhaps the only—hope for saving the institution.

The writer categorizes marriage as traditional, romantic, or equal (or to use his disgusting acronym HIP). His label of high-investment parenting is misleading since what really means is equal (i.e. man and wife share responsibilities at home). A woman who stays at home while her husband works can more easily give attention to her children than a family of two executives who dump their kids off at daycare. If anything, the traditional model provides an even higher intensity of parenting since a stay-at-home mom has nothing better to do all day. Anyway, here's how he sees each of these categories:



He waves off traditional marriages as a thing of the past, but this is the only model that ever worked. The problems with the marriage rate have only started as society warmed to this equalist nonsense.

The author points to the graph below as evidence of progress (and as a confirmation of his HIP model) because now men do chores around the house too. But he doesn't even mention that there is more work overall for both spouses in the new equal model than in the division of labor model.



He also breezes over the study that more equal marriages have less sex. Here's what he writes:

Quote:Indeed, there is some evidence that there is less sex in these egalitarian, child-focused marriages. But least for this chapter of the relationship, sex is not what they’re about.

To be fair, he's probably been cooking up this pot of shit for a while, and that NY Times piece came out about a week ago, but you can't wave off something as important to marriage as sex in one sentence and expect to be credible.

Here's how he ends the article:

Quote:The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinoski once described marriage as a means of tying a man to a woman and their children. Nowadays, women don’t need to be tied to a man. Sex and money can be found outside the marital contract. But children do need parents—preferably loving, engaged parents. Indeed they may need them more than ever. In 21st century America, nobody needs to marry, although many will still choose to. Recast for the modern world, and re-founded on the virtue of committed parenting, marriage may yet have a future. That future of marriage matters most for the individuals in the house that aren't in the union: our children.

To sum up his argument, it's that men should wife sluts who spent their prime on education and career, and that, once married, men need to work to earn money, pitch in with the household drudgery, and look after any kids. The reward for this arrangement is that men can expect less sex and less leisure time than in previous generations, all of which men should agree to for the sake of the children. Sounds great!

Post: #2

Is this about Irishman or "Atlantic"?

Post: #3

Very well written take-down. Of course, we should take everything he says with a grain of salt since it is written to sell Atlantic magazines to whomever buys that.

And as usual it is completely missed that having 1 or maximum 2 kids with an aging woman is not an incentive great enough to marry for the majority of the free-thinking upper-middle class men his solution is targeting (the lower classes be damned, no solution for them). Even the guys here who do want to have kids would rather go childless than that option..

Also his idea of parenting is the helicopter model. So that's Atlantic target demo, helicopter moms?

Post: #4

I'm not a violent guy, but Richard Reeves has a face that just makes me want to uppercut the smarm out of it. And the trite, cliched pronouncements he makes about marriage are just a regurgitation of vague trends and buzzwords from pop sociology over the past four or five years.

Post: #5

How the fuck can a model that promotes such vast amounts of single motherhood (either through divorce or "I don't need a man") ever be considered "focused on children"? Gods.

Post: #6

Atlantic magazine has gone over to the dark side in the past 5 years. Used to be balanced. Now it's just the same feminist/liberal bullshit, like Harpers.

Cancelled last year.

Post: #7

Any kid growing up in the HIP environment is going to be a mess. Kids need unstructured down time away from their parents gaze. HIP is a recipe for neurotic messes who can't think for themselves 20 years from now.

Post: #8

(02-14-2014 11:04 AM)Ensam Wrote:  Any kid growing up in the HIP environment is going to be a mess. Kids need unstructured down time away from their parents gaze. HIP is a recipe for neurotic messes who can't think for themselves 20 years from now.

Perfectly said. This herb's unquestioned assumption that an ultra-supervised childhood of endless playdates and activities lead by two controlling, undersexed, androgynous parents is the recipe for happy, functional kids is absurd. Children need role models, leadership, and, most importantly, the opportunity to fuck up and figure shit out for themselves before they're adults.

We've been seeing the results of this kind of thinking for a while already. Part of the reason for all the rape culture and authoritarian feminist craziness on college campuses is that you have 18-year olds who've "grown up" entirely in the artificial world of constant adult supervision. The concept that they should be responsible for themselves really is foreign to them, because their parents never prepared them for it.

Post: #9

From the very same publication:

Quote:THE DECLINE OF PLAY

An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children's play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control.

"Since about 1955 ... children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children's activities," says the author Peter Gray, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology (emeritus) at Boston College. Gray defines "free play" as play a child undertakes him- or her-self and which is self-directed and an end in itself, rather than part of some organized activity.

Gray describes this kind of unstructured, freely-chosen play as a testing ground for life. It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults. Gray's article is meant to serve as a wake-up call regarding the effects of lost play, and he believes that lack of childhood free play time is a huge loss that must be addressed for the sake of our children and society.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archiv...ed/246422/

I can't remember the exact source but I believe there's a study which said one of the strongest predictors of intelligence and success was how much time a kid spent playing alone outside. It teaches the kids to see the world as it is and not through the lens of their parents and teachers who invariably have an agenda (even if it's just to keep the kid safe).

Post: #10

Anyone who thinks that a marriage typified by the movie This is 40 is delusional. That marriage sucks.

Post: #11

The original article also does a very poor job of "selling" marriage as a desirable thing. Why would anyone want to get involved in a "HIP" marriage? Other than the desire to engage in neurotic, micromanaged parenting, even he doesn't seem to be presenting any upsides. He even mentions a specific downside: less sex than traditional marriage. (I wonder why....maybe because sexual polarity is required for attraction. Any Twilight-reading housewife should be cognizant of the fact that there's nothing sexy about gender-neutral equals. Morons.) Add to this the fact that having kids without marriage is socially acceptable and that high-value, knowledgeable men can go abroad for traditional marriage and who, exactly, would sign up for this miserable "HIP" arrangement? I guess a few scared-of-their-own-shadows SWPLs...

Leftists seem to consistently have a problem with the basic concept of incentives.

Post: #12

Any man would be out of his mind to get married to a western woman in North America. As simple as that. You want to get married with a real woman? Only one option: go abroad and most importantly, keep her there!!!! Do not under any circumstances bring her her other than short vacations of no more than 2 weeks every other year!

Post: #13

...

Post: #14

It sounds like he is saying indirectly that in order to save marriage, we have to give everyone a college diploma.

Post: #15

The only difference between "Equal" and "HIP" is that the latter is ten years down the road. They're the same thing, one's just further down the track.

Post: #16

He looks like a soy boy version of Russell Crowe.

Post: #17

(01-21-2018 02:23 AM)TigOlBitties Wrote:  He looks like a soy boy version of Russell Crowe.

Whatever cometh out of thethe gateth, we've got a better chanthe of thurvival if we work together. You underthtand? If we thtay together, we thurvive.

Post: #18

(02-14-2014 01:03 PM)Glock Wrote:  Anyone who thinks that a marriage typified by the movie This is 40 is delusional. That marriage sucks.

Both the marriage in the movie and the movie itself sucked. Leslie Mann, who played the female lead, has the most annoying voice and/or manner of speaking of all time. She's the real-life wife of the director, Judd Apatow.

I really can't stand the flat, flinty, high-strung voices of most American women. European women and Eastern European women have deeper, richer voices.

Has anyone noticed this? Either way, it's one of the many elements that ruined "This Is 40." I'd list more but the movie is such a non-entity I forgot most of it.

Post: #19

She does a great job playing the horrible nagging American wife, who wears the pants in a marriage:

Post: #20

A few notations:

(1) If your shitty table of comparators for different forms of marriage includes an entry that says "Screen Version", you have both missed and illustrated the entire reason the West is dying. If this isn't already clear to you why, let me expand: there is no such thing as a screen version of a marriage. Every single one of these shows is a contrived fiction built to serve a particular agenda for the time. If you find yourself identifying with any "screen version" of your marriage, it's because you are wanting to be the main character in your own movie, or as sane psychiatrists label it, narcissism.

(2) One missing element in every entry on those tables: any connection with the spouse.

(3) Bonus points, missing also at any point in that table is any connection with the children. In the case of the 'traditional' marriage, it's bare avoidance of a child neglect prosecution: feed them and keep them in clothes. In the case of the 'romantic' marriage, the real intent is clearest: no children at all, wrong film genre. In the 'HIP' marriage, the children are investments. Engagement with the kid is, tellingly, put dead last on the list, and let's be clear, for most narcissistic parents, engagement is not connection.

(4) Why investments? Because it sounds a lot better than liabilities, same argument as any asshole off whom you intend to buy a midrange car. You call them investments because all you think of your children as is entries on your balance sheet. An investment is something that, if you pour enough money into it, might eventually pay off and start paying you back more than you put into it. The point of raising a kid is not to get your money back ... at least I never remember it being so. That said, given the Baby Boomers as a generation seem determined to do precisely that via skyrocketing house prices and an unwillingness to get old, maybe that's where we're headed.

All this shit is not to invest in the kids, it's to invest in the labels they want to put on the kids, and in particular, the most important label of all, the label that is keeping most of the manure-soaked balls in the air at the moment: college student. Not college graduate, mind you, college student: they haven't thought any further past that.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #21

The Atlantic succumbed to the quantity over quality problem facing journalism years ago, churning out clickbait to feed their tilt to digital. Their daily online content is almost all garbage. It's down there with Forbes in terms of creating a website that appears just substantive enough to make you waste your time.

It's sad that a classic American publication read by Union soldiers around the camp fires of the Civil War has stooped to recycling "Why We Cry On Planes" on Facebook every few months for five years.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...es/280143/

Quote:“I cried during Miss Congeniality,” my friend Connie said. “I remember the whole time thinking ‘this is so embarrassing that people can see that I’m watching Miss Congeniality and crying.’ But, there’s something about being on an airplane that makes me feel like it’s okay.”

Immediately, everyone chimed in with their own versions of Connie’s experience. We all had some story of choking up while flipping through satellite TV, catching glimpses of sitcoms and insurance advertisements and breaking down.

Have you ever seen an adult crying on a plane? I haven't. Even the guy with the ponytail who was crying in the boarding area because his mom just died held it together on the flight. If I saw somebody crying during Miss Congeniality, I'd think they had a bomb and were trying to decide whether or not to push the button.

Once in awhile, they still do something incredible in print, like "What ISIS Really Wants".

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...ts/384980/

Post: #22

Quote:American marriage is not dying. But it is undergoing a metamorphosis, prompted by a transformation in the economic and social status of women and the virtual disappearance of low-skilled male jobs.

I read a similar article the other day, I forget which publication.

Yet again, for the millionth time, these so-called experts seem to not realize that social/economic status means far less to men than it does to women. We'll take the cute, nice, fit woman over the chubby cubicle jockey any day.

And it would be such a shame if a woman had to 'settle' for a guy who makes less money than her.

Post: #23

(02-14-2014 02:31 AM)soup Wrote:  Is this about Irishman or "Atlantic"?

I clicked this thinking it was actually Atlantic.

Post: #24

So even in 2011, men were working 16 hours a week more than women (37-21).

Muh 'The wage gap'.

Post: #25

If the wage gap were a fact every manager who hired a male should be fired.

Think about it, why hire a man when you can hire a woman to do the same job at 75% of the cost?