Feminine Charm?

I read two very interesting articles about man-woman relations the other day, and I thought I would share. One view in an article called, "Where have all the men gone?" poses the idea that men have all disappeared, and in their places are all these boys-to-men characters. Men who want nothing but casual sex, and prefer nothing but getting off with as many women as possible. Should't it be possible, in the eyes of gender quality administration to have a career and be successful parents, approximately the same age? There are certainly no lack of women who want this sort of life, so why are men so uneager to accept it, and yet are so confused about what they actually do want? This leads the author to conclude that women are the solution, men are the problem; women want successful men, and can provide a certain level of happiness most of the messed-up men require. Women have all the traits that men desire, but men are simply non-commital animals, which means it's not the woman's fault she can't find a good man--they seem to have vanished into the ether. What happened to the picturesque family man?

The opposing view, written by a man, countered her argument with a very Darwinian idea. Namely, that most men that women tend to date when they are younger, are men in their 30s. Once women get older, they begin to hear the 'ticking of the clock' and try and find someone their own age to settle down with. However, all the men that women snub who are in their own age range around 20-27, have become sick of trying to fight for the attention of women their own age. It makes more sense, from a Darwinian perspective, to pick a younger bride/sex partner/LTR-BFF. Probably the most persuasive point the author makes is that men realize that as they get older, they are more sought after, rather than less. Younger men, however, often pine over women use them as floor mats. It makes sense, from this author's perspective, that men don't want to date the era of women that snubbed them.

Now, I must say, as a man, I tend to agree with the man who wrote the article, favoring his Darwinian ideals. Historically, it was very normal for women to get married to older men. People used to marry 14 year old girls to thirty-something men in the Middle Ages. In Rome, women married because they were the property of their fathers, and political marriage were the reason people got married, not for love. Therefore, marriage has a history of falling between people who are different ages, ethics of the practice aside. This seems to just be the rule of marriage; I can't think of many couples or married people I know who were born in the same year. As far as I can tell, it just doesn't happen regularly. We've been historically ingrained with the idea that women should marry/date/fall in love with older men. And people get married to people older or younger than them all the time.

Second, the real question comes as to what people believe marriage to be. The problem of today's society is that it encourages both men and women not to accept imperfections of any kind, to question authority in their life to try and denounce it's value (thanks modernism and deconstructionism, we love you and hate you), to embrace constant change, all the time. Divorce, remarry, have children, don't have children, etc. Men and women can have all the social problems they want, and there is no need to fix themselves, simply look for another person that makes for a better fitting shoe/wife/husband/etc.

Where religion fits into this makes a big difference on how people view marriage, it's hard to deny. If there is one thing that I think most religious people have, is the sense of commitment to a person, through all the things which are hard to bear, good life or bad life. People who get married who have not signed up for some kind of belief system often have few qualms about the rule of 'doing anything they want as long as nobody gets hurt.' But it seems people do get hurt.

Women who want the picturesque family man, raising kids, with the white picket fence is not an impossible dream, but it is made harder from a sadder social understanding of what is right, in terms of sexual ethics. Having sex before marriage is considered the norm. The problem with both these articles (with the first perhaps more than the second) is that they assume that there is nothing wrong with social mores as a whole, but only something wrong with man and women gender relations, in a socially neutral context of martini bars and high living. Neutral, my little black book, I say. The problem lies in morals, not in social relations of feminism versus
chauvinism. The morals of men and women are much, much different than they were even 10 years ago, and I have less fingers than I do friends with divorced parents.

The real question is not where have all the men gone; where have all the good men gone?

And that is a question worth asking.