Or it could mean that when men in their 50s are at home or working in occupations making less money than their wives, it’s more likely than for younger men that it’s because they were laid off, disabled or had to restrict or quit work for health reasons. If a man has a heart attack or a work-related injury in his 50s and has to cut back his hours, OF COURSE his wife is going to make more money.

But no, this is the NYT, so we have to imply that letting wifey bring home the bacon will KILL YOU, KILL YOU DEAD.

I sometimes wonder if a lot of the struggle in marriages where the wife earns more have to do with the perception that the breadwinner automatically has more say, particularly over money. And of course money is power.

With that quote, my mind leapt to the idea of a man whose employment and poor health are linked, and who is lucky enough to have a wife who can continue to bring in money after he has been forced to part-time or onto disability.  Even in context, and I’m not sure that stat is (how high are her highest earners?  did it say and I missed?), such a high level of discrepancy seems like the kind of thing that would require multiple factors to achieve.  I suspect the correlation is pointing to a number of other factors, but I don’t know what they are.

I wish my wife made more money than me because then we would have (wait for it)—-more money. She is certainly better educated than I am (Masters, 2 Bachelor’s degrees versus my lowly B.A.). Unfortunately, our society doesn’t always reward or value education.
I do not understand males who are intimidated by intelligent women—-frankly her intelligence is one of the things that attracted the most.
I certainly haven’t lost any sleep over her education. Hell, when we were first married we lived on my salary (sadly much lower then) so she could go back to school.
Oddly enough, my mother is the one person who brings it up, as if it’s something I should be embarrassed about or humbled by.

mythago, that article does address the more money=more power issue, and what they discover is really interesting.  The assumption has always been that if women have more power, there will be more divorce, because there will be more power struggles in marriage. In fact, what happened was that as women have more power, they have more leverage, and marriage involves compromise and communication between spouses more, and therefore there are fewer divorces.

It’s sort of counterintuitive to a lot of people that having more freedom to leave means leaving less.  But what it means is that husbands in particular realize they can’t push their luck as much—-conflicts are resolved earlier, instead of a woman having to defer to her husband until she reaches a breaking point and has no choice but to leave.

I think this matches up well with the “men leave sick women a lot more than women leave sick men” stat from a few weeks ago.  The marriages where women lose all economic power because they’re sick end up in divorce more often, so they’re not counted as “woman makes less money” any more.

Amanda:  “The assumption has always been that if women have more power, there will be more divorce, because there will be more power struggles in marriage.”

But there is some basis in that assumption.

Any time women’s economic power increases, women who are stuck in marriages they would have left earlier, or never entered, can finally leave them.  Any time women’s economic power increases, there will be an incremental slice of the population for which “put up with his shit” is now no longer necessary.

Once we reach a steady state of women having equal economic power, this will no longer be the case.  Until that happens, men who have the upper hand will fight tooth and nail to keep that advantage.

Of course now a lot of marriages based in economic need won’t happen at all, so probably the total number of divorces decreases.  But that doesn’t mean no woman leaves her husband because she’s finally got a decent job.

mythago:  “If a man has a heart attack or a work-related injury in his 50s and has to cut back his hours, OF COURSE his wife is going to make more money.”

Well, for a lot of men, leaving work to have a heart attack is not nearly the disruption of career as leaving work to have a baby is for a woman.  For some reason it’s okay for a guy to get sick of a “man’s disease,” and he’s not treated dismissively, as a weakling, defined by his heart attack status, once he gets back.

The assumption still exists that women will work until they have a baby and then quit or want to be on some kind of “mommy track” where they have fewer expectations put on them, and any time they need to leave early or come in late to deal with children is a huge imposition on everyone no matter how well that woman makes up for it by working harder, staying late, or just fucking being better.

Men in middle age are losing their jobs a lot more now, as their position as placeholding zeroes in the old boys network is finally being threatened by economic pressures that make such luxuries less affordable for publicly-traded companies. 

Not that it’s gone away entirely, but there’s a whole class of middle managers who are being made redundant.  The people who actually do the work (who are often women) sometimes get their jobs but more often just get their work and maybe a title and get by on less.

I always say, when you see an industry or company suddenly bringing in a lot of women executives, they’re running out of money and want the same work for less.

Fair enough, old, but I do think that one reason more economic power to women is leading to fewer divorces is more men know the score.  But of course, that’s still not all men or anything.

This whole thing is fucking ridiculous. All else being equal, what kind of fucking moron wouldn’t want to be married to someone richer and smarter? PhysioWife is much smarter than me and makes a fuckjillion times more money than me, and it’s fucking great.

We also can’t dismiss that in a “traditional” marriage set up women spend an inordinate amount of their time attending to the care of men by making sure they eat and that what they eat is healthy, encouraging them to exercise or quit smoking or get more sleep, etc. They are also often the ones scheduling any doctor’s appointments for their husbands. It’s already well-established that married men are healthier on average than single men.

In a marriage where women are the higher income earners, she probably spends far less time as the caretaker, treating her spouse like the adult he is and expecting him to look after his own health.  Men who are currently in their 50s may have been able to shirk off some of the cultural messages that they needed to be the breadwinner, while still internalizing the messages that men don’t worry about what they eat and don’t go to the doctors.  It doesn’t mean that marriage to a female breadwinner CAUSES their health decline, but that sexist attitudes about health can have a deleterious effect on men when women no longer act as their caretakers.  But it shouldn’t be a woman’s job to do this.

I think the study Tara Parker Pope is citing is actually Springer’s Dissertation thesis: “His and Her Marriage Today: Wives’ Income and Husbands’ Midlife Health.” But as yet I don’t believe it’s published in a peer-reviewed journal (her CV says it’s in revise and resubmit stage) ? So it would be the kind of thing someone would likely have to dig up from the library…in, the horror, paper form.

Although here is the abstract, which is probably informative enough.

And…it seems like she is specifically testing the notion that men’s health declines because they suffer from the contrast between the “male breadwinner ideology” and the reality that they are not the primary earner. 

I’m not sure how sound her methods are, from just the abstract, so I can’t judge the paper’s soundness. But in this instance it seems like Parker Pope was pretty accurately reflecting the conclusions of the paper, and the inference that men who earn less in marriages were harmed because of it, is at least what the author is implying.

I don’t really find it surprising. Generally, I would imagine a lot of older men view it as a loss of prestige, and that makes them feel shitty about themselves, which negatively impacts their health.  But that’s because the men are suffering from a stupid “ideology” IMO.  My mom has outearned my 70+ dad for around 20 years now, and he’s never been anything but super happy that there was extra money and security coming in.  But that’s because they really subscribe to a partnership/egalitarian model.  They are way better on this front than most newly married couples I meet.

Nothing better than an ambitious, well-educated, smart-talking, high-salaried cutey with a fat ass and fatter expense account. Feminism is hot as fuck.

It’s possible, Antigone, but I don’t know.  Working women still do most of the housework and husband care that non-working women do, though some research shows that women who believe in equality (especially if their husbands do, too) are more slovenly.  That is, they do less housework, but men don’t do more in those relationships.

Thanks, t-ster.  The link you provided isn’t wanting to work for me, but I trust your points.  Very helpful.

Which isn’t to say I take back the post.  I think that there needed to be more explication of the findings, so that isn’t just dangling there waiting to be thwarted for someone’s agenda.

Could it be possible that it’s semi-causal?

Well sure. Anything’s possible. Mere correlation does not ‘imply causality’; it just means there is a correlation between the two, not that there’s probably something about A causing B.

Amanda, some of it may be men ‘knowing the score’, but there are probably a lot of other variables in there that may affect the divorce rate and that the Times breezed over. There’s also the fact that as the law has changed to stop forcing women in to marriage as their primary economic option, lower-income women have more of an out.

the Times ran a story that featured a bunch of single women swearing that they can’t get a date because they’re too smart or rich.

I yearn for the day when I can’t get a date because I’m just too awesome.  It’s one thing to have my friends tell me that’s what the problem is, it’s quite another to make that claim myself in a national publication.

Has anyone asked the women the Times cites whether they would go out with anyone making less than them? I was struck by this line in the article: ” Or as my genius friend the textile designer says, she asks on first dates or meeting men in bars, ‘Do you have a passport and a library card?’ ” A passport? Considering today’s economy, it takes a good chunk of money to travel overseas; so I would think she is only looking for someone as wealthy as she is; not someone too ‘poor’ to travel overseas. That is just a miserable way to run a life; I have never asked a woman I have dated how much she made. I want a companion; not another ATM like myself.

A passport is not some codeword for a fat wallet. Just like a library card is a codeword for “is literate,” a passport is code for “knows about the world outside of the United States.” You need a passport to go to Canada and Mexico now ... hardly destination hotspots. And they hardly re-up ever year. If someone doesn’t have a passport today, it’s likely they didn’t have a passport a few years ago… back when you could get weekend trips to Spain around $100/way.

I also believe firmly that even if you don’t use it to jet off to Paris every few months, everyone should have a passport for the sake of practicality. They take a while to process and better to have one in a pinch than not.

There are just a whole lot of things which enter into the statistics, many of which were probably not controlled for.  Men who are now in their fifties and sixties were far less likely to go to the doctor for things than women in their age group; that might contribute to some of them having worse health than their wives in middle age.  Men in those age ranges probably smoked more than women, leading to greater rates of chronic diseases.

It wasn’t all that long ago that there were a bunch of articles about college educated women marrying men who were less formally educated, but were skilled or semi-skilled craftsmen, the female attorney marrying the carpenter story.  The stories struck me, at the time, as the then-current journalism fad, true enough, but still following a fad lead.

Amanda’s theory that poor health => low income seems so obvious now that she mentions it.  I had guessed it was more like low income => poor health, and randomly distributed spouses, so the less income you made, the more likely it was your spouse made more.  But that second assumption was probably crap.

I do wonder about the “smart women, rich women can’t find men” meme.  While it’s certainly true that it seems dubious there aren’t a lot of men interested, the mechanisms for pairing men and women up are mostly inherited from a “men are richer than women” society, so those might fail easily.  For instance, while it’s certainly true for me that women I’ve been attracted to women roughly my own age with the drop off towards older and younger being roughly symmetric (with a full width half maximum of 10% or something, I dunno), I’ve only ever ended up actually approaching younger women about it, because it’s been easier to convince myself it’s not inconceivable that she’d be interested. 

I could certainly believe that being richer/smarter necessitates a different set of partner-finding skills, that some women are never taught, which leaves those women out in the cold.  And those women who do figure it out (and here, being smart might help!) have no such problems.

I would guess that the health issue is influences by the fact that a lot of these “primary earner wife” partnerships involve blue-collar-ish families where the wife is a middle class professional like a teacher or a nurse while the husband works in a blue collar trade, which has seen more of a decline in wages of late and is harder on one’s physical health than more white-collar pairings where the wife is the primary earner like a husband-professor/wife-doctor partnership.

I’d guess that IF higher-income women have a harder time finding dates/spouses (and I know that’s a huge IF), then it’s because even if high-income men are jerks with bad or nonexistent relationship skills, they live in a world that says they’re entitled to a wife or mistress. High-income women, like all women, aren’t seen as being entitled to any such thing, so while being rich smooths over the jerk factor for men, it doesn’t for women.

Brian, I’m not sure how well this holds true for finding relationships that survive as marriages.  “Smart” women reads as “educated to a high standard in the public university system”, and universities have been, traditionally, really good places for young people acquiring that education to meet.  They’re also really good places to get so interested in something that you neglect social relationships.  Sometimes you do a lot of the first, and later regret it, sometimes you do a lot of the latter, and later wish you were better at the first.  My take isn’t so much that richer/smarter people need a different partner-finding skill, as that it’s really hard to find the time to meet new potential partners if you’re working/studying/doing your thing sixty-eighty hours a week, and not meeting them as part of that.

I liked the quote at the end from the stay-at-home dad:

Mothers tend to shower him with praise. “I get the same reaction from all the moms,” he said. “They say, ‘That’s great, my husband wouldn’t be able to do it.’ I think they’re selling their husbands short. All guys could do it, just like all women can be the breadwinners.”

Damn straight.

I would have liked it if they had found some families where the man earned less and wasn’t a stay-at-home dad. Not anything at all against stay-at-home dads, but it would have been nice to see some variety - guys who just chose or ended up in jobs where they make less. I think it would have made for a more well-rounded portrait of these families.

But overall, way better than the first try.

As for the health statistic, I suspect it’s a combination of all the factors mentioned in the post and by commenters. I’m also not sure it’s really clearly understood why married men tend to have better health than unmarried men. We tend to assume that it’s the all the care-taking work that women do, but do we know that’s why? Are there other differences between men who marry and men who don’t? And in what ways are men married to women who make more than them different than men married to women who make less, other than the difference in their wives’ income?

OK, so the abstract says that she’s using longitudinal data, which at least takes care of the scenario where the husband gets disabled in his 50s and so duh, he’s got a lower income. On the other hand, it’s apparently self-reported “are you in good heath?” data, which is open to all kinds of bias (as well as to the obvious correlation that Mythago pointed out). If I were a guy in my 50s whose spouse was earning more (oh, wait) and had any kind of anxiety about it, I might well report feeling less healthy than I would otherwise.

I think the big problem with drawing conclusions from any kinds of studies like this is that population studies have an underlying assumption that all other things are equal. But in a society where women regularly get paid less than men for comparable work and are pressured into less-well-paying jobs, marriages where the woman earns more are not ones where all other things are equal—they’re ones where a whole bunch of conditions are different from the typical marriage.

Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.

Actually I think this points to continued pay inequity between males and females. The subtext is that when a husband and a wife have equal skills, equal health and equal luck the husband is paid more. It is only when the husband falls on hard times through ill health, or perhaps a layoff, that the wife becomes the top wage earner.

The only way most women in older age groups CAN make more than their spouses is ONLY if that spouse is disabled!

They don’t get sick because women make more ... women make more because their spouses are sick.

DUHFUCKINGDUH!

A passport? Considering today’s economy, it takes a good chunk of money to travel overseas; so I would think she is only looking for someone as wealthy as she is; not someone too ‘poor’ to travel overseas. That is just a miserable way to run a life; I have never asked a woman I have dated how much she made. I want a companion; not another ATM like myself.

It doesn’t take much money to HAVE a passport, actually.  I’ve got one, and I’ve never gotten to travel outside the country yet, due to finances.  Anyone would excuse a lack of overseas travel for not having scraped together the money to do it yet, especially if you’re unemployed/underemployed/downgraded/flipping burgers with an engineering degree because the economy crashed right after you graduated and everyone wants two-to-five years of experience.

But a passport’s value is more than just the sum of the days spent outside the country. It is indicative of your personal world being larger, that you are a citizen of the world rather than of America or the upper midwest or Scott County, Minnesota.

I have an entire bookmark folder dedicated to researching places I want to go.  I may have never afforded any trips with my passport, but the fact that I have it says something about me. It says that about me.

Ms Kate:  “They don’t get sick because women make more ... women make more because their spouses are sick. “

Yes, exactly.  I think if we compared the wages of women whose husbands are sick to those whose husbands aren’t, we wouldn’t see much difference.  Maybe a little more because they don’t have the option of not working.

@chingona—From what I’ve read, most of the health gap between married men and single men in the U.S. can be explained by their wealth gap.  I’ve never seen a study that had controlled for the men’s wealth when it announced that married men are healthier.

Untangling causality vs. correlation is almost impossible when you consider the cohorts.  One cluster of men is mentally and physically healthy; these men have wives and plenty of money.  They are less likely to get divorced, they tend to have no (or minimal) criminal records, and they live about a full decade longer than unmarried men.  Which is cause and which is effect, researchers have almost no idea.

Straight high-earning men I know like to whine about how expensive their wives and children are.  “If I were single, I’d be driving a Lamborghini,” one said to me.  When I try to tell them that they’d be poorer, sicker, etc. if they were single, they take offense.

Straight high-earning men I know like to whine about how expensive their wives and children are.  “If I were single, I’d be driving a Lamborghini,” one said to me.  When I try to tell them that they’d be poorer, sicker, etc. if they were single, they take offense.

Except if the main difference in health is accounted for by their wealth, that isn’t true.

That is, men who are better off are more likely to marry and men who are better off are healthier. Just because that individual didn’t marry wouldn’t put him in the poor (and unhealthy) category.

chingona, that’s true in a correlation-versus-causation sense—what I mean to refute is a claim that if these guys were single, then they’d have all their health and wealth AND get to hoard the extra money, or spend it on themselves.

chingona wrote:

I’m also not sure it’s really clearly understood why married men tend to have better health than unmarried men. We tend to assume that it’s the all the care-taking work that women do, but do we know that’s why?

Maybe it’s cause a greater percentage of married than unmarried men aren’t sitting in bars after work?  The stuff that single men do, whether they are out looking for women or simply having fun with the guys, isn’t always the best thing for their health.

As for an increasing trend of women out-earning their men, Trace Adkins explains it all. 

Married men probably have better health for the same reason they get into fewer car accidents—-marriage in our culture is motivation for men to take fewer risks, live better, etc.  It’s one more way that PHMT, that in order for men to take care of themselves, they need to hide behind/depend upon a woman, because self-care for its own reasons is seen as feminine and suspicious.  I think that the stereotypes are beginning to loosen up somewhat, however—-I know a lot of single men who eat right, exercise, sleep well, and look after themselves in general because it’s the right thing to do.  Single men with nice apartments with art and furniture!  Part of it is feminism, but part of it is that marriage is being put off later and later, and so men who are waiting to get married before they stop living like pigs have to wait a long, long time.  And since women can be pickier, living like a pig reduces your chances of getting a girlfriend in the first place, so men have even more incentive to look after themselves while single.

Amanda, there is another reason that married men live longer, according to H. L. Mencken:

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he’s married.

Well, the traditional model was that men who were married lived longer than men who were unmarried, and women who were unmarried lived longer than women who were married. As one standup comedian put it, the ring from the dude was a means of compensating the life that he was about to suck out of her.

It could be that whenever a person is in a “caretaker” roll (which, while not 100% accurate, is also not an unfair assumption when you talk about salaries), that caretaking does in fact have a negative impact on a person’s health in the long-term.

MP, the relatively new research on the subject has turned up the following:

However, in this research, Lillard and Waite found that, over time, marriage had about the same effect on mortality risk for men and for women—but “over time” is the important qualification. Over a long marriage, the effects for men and women even out, but at the beginning there are significant differences. Right after the wedding, the risk of dying drops considerably for men, but not for women (relative to the risk for unmarried men and women). In contrast, the growing benefit over time is somewhat larger for women than it is for men.

The authors speculate that this immediate drop for men might be explained by premarital “lifestyle”: Unmarried men are more likely than unmarried women to engage in risky behavior (for example, poor diet, immoderate drinking, belligerent social behavior). Marriage often brings a more settled lifestyle and more moderate behavior—not to mention better nutrition. But what accounts for the greater cumulative benefit for women over many years of marriage?

The study’s results suggest that improved financial resources are a key avenue through which marriage improves well-being and life chances for both men and women—but the effect is much greater for women than for men. Men’s risk of dying decreases significantly with marriage—even at low income levels—but married women’s risk does not drop significantly until income reaches higher levels. The authors conclude that if “women benefit to an important extent from the access to higher household income that marriage gives them, then this income may be buying them access to better health care, better nutrition, better housing, a safer job, less physical and mental stress, and so on.”

Other effects on longevity are less clear from the study’s results. Married men’s chances of dying drop as their wives’ level of education rises. This may indicate that better-educated wives run more health-protective households. But it may also indicate that better-educated women tend to select healthier and more stable mates. At any rate, living arrangements, other than the married state, have no significant effect on longevity for men or for women, once other factors are held constant.

Reverting to the “Single” State

When marriage ends, the effects demonstrate, again, how potent the marriage benefit is and the central role of income for women. The figure’s dual panels provide an interesting contrast. Panel A shows the relative risk of dying for men, by marital status. Men who are widowed, divorced, separated, or never married face about the same risk of dying—and it is much higher than the risk for married men. As Panel B shows, the analogous risks for women differ in provocative ways. Currently married women face a lower risk of dying than those who are divorced or were never married and a very much lower risk than women who are separated. Most interesting is that, unlike widowed men, widowed women have about the same risk of dying as currently married women.

Link

and may even cover their health insurance

Yup, that’s my parents, married in 1977. During the ten years when my masters-degree-having mom was unemployed and we were close to, sometimes under, the poverty line, my family only had catastrophic health insurance. Now that my mom has a good job again, they could afford to get my never-finished-college dad’s back problems fixed.

Yup, I was feeling all contented with this article, in agreement with Amanda. Aaaand, then I visited the op-ed page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24tsingloh.html?hp

In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household’s natural rhythms. And in the transformation of men and women into domestic co-laborers, the Art of the Wife is fast disappearing.

The Art of the Wife? I never learn to think before I click.

I think that the stereotypes are beginning to loosen up somewhat, however—-I know a lot of single men who eat right, exercise, sleep well, and look after themselves in general because it’s the right thing to do.

I’m betting few of those young men are working jobs requiring long hours….whether they are working-class doing 2-3 jobs to maintain themselves or biglaw attorneys and medical residents expected to work 70-130 hour workweeks. 

Also, what do you mean by “eat right”? I find that can be quite subjective with many people. 

Single men with nice apartments with art and furniture!

With the exception of trust-fund kiddies, I know few single people who have apartments which fit that description, especially in major urban areas such as Boston and NYC where rents can be quite expensive for a cramped apartment that one may only live in for a year or two because of skyrocketing rent or other factors.  If one needs to move every year or two, most won’t bother adding permanent touches such as adding art on the walls or bothering with nice furniture*/any furniture….especially if their jobs require such long hours that the apartment functions more as a late night crash space. 

* I’ve seen so many frugal young professionals getting ragged on by others for continuing to use “student furniture” from college dorms because they “need to grow up” and “get something nicer”.  Heck, I’ve heard the same BS from older relatives only a few months after graduation when I started my first job.  Personally, I’d rather maintain a minimalist setting regarding art and use “student furniture” than end up like many co-workers whose conspicuous consumption was such that they ended up in a deep financial hole…..

Seriously, exholt, I know you might find it hard to believe (and hey, back when I lived in NYC I would have found it hard to believe, too), but it is actually possible, every now and then, to have disposable income EVEN WITHOUT A TRUST FUND.

It’s getting rarer, sure. But some people honestly do just have decent jobs where they make enough money to live, and live well, without being biglaw attorneys and doctors.

Shit, man, I barely make any money at all, and move every two years on average. But I have stuff on my walls. It isn’t that hard. Lots of people do it.

I think you need to get a wider circle of acquaintance, perhaps.

Sorry for the digression, all.

yeah, man. all my furniture comes from the thrift store and the curb and all my artwork comes from friends but that doesn’t mean it’s not nice. i make very little money (and support my wife on it when she’s not supporting me—we trade) but my living situation is structured around a nice home space, cats, good organic food, and occasional travel abroad. it’s just where my priorities are. i’m lucky (and benefit from some cultural privileges), sure, but not on a trust fund.

exholt, I’m really not interested in playing that game of shaming someone (!) because they scraped together a few bucks to put a framed picture on the wall.  The point is that men who have traditionally felt they could put off home maintenance and health maintenance until they marry and have a wife to take care of them have started to shoulder that responsibility for themselves, in part because people are marrying later.

Or, Dark had the science.

Well, I wear nothing but a paper sack and I sleep on the floor, which of course makes me an elitist, because some people sleep on the street.  But I’m sure that by sleeping on the floor instead of a bed, I’m helping them.  I’m not sure how, but I must be.

exholt, I’m really not interested in playing that game of shaming someone (!) because they scraped together a few bucks to put a framed picture on the wall.

Sorry for reacting when I see statements that are almost exactly like the ones older wealthier relatives and some of the trust fund kiddie set used to snipe at me and my friends for not having apartment decor acceptable to their “standards”...especially when “art” is mentioned. 

Strange how having an abandoned Mac SE/30 and a few roommate/self-made foil-wire sculptures sitting in the living room strictly as decoration wasn’t considered “artsy” enough for them….

It’s just not as bourgeois as you think to live in a clean and aesthetically pleasing environment, duder. I realize that you seem to have at some point in your life associated solely with status-mongering douchenozzles, but there really truly are other kinds of people in the world. It’s not a binary between impoverished hovel-dwellers and the snobby, elitist, asshole jet set.

Exholt, dude, anyone with a few dollars to scrape together can afford something like this from Cost Plus, or just Amazon for that matter.

Of course,  back in the olden days, art was for something more than mere appreciation and taste when young men were concerned:

How did the phrase “Want to come up and see my etchings?” become the double entendre that people use today? Was it part of some comedy routine? Who started it?

Link

Heck, here in the relative boondocks of a town in the San Joaquin Valley, I noticed that a local hamburger joint that used to be a Mexican restaurant had a couple of prints of Diego Garcia on their walls.  Judging from the subject matter, they were picked for their looks rather than an appreciation or knowledge of the artist.

Um, I have some art in my apartment and I’m not a fancy-pants, elitist snob.  Nearly every single piece of art in my apartment was a gift, or something I made myself (my 10,000+ piece Lego collection gets rearranged periodically into different sculptures).  I have a few Dali prints that were a Christmas gift from my dad a few years ago, and a painting of my deceased cat that a family friend made for me.  Oh, and I have a few of those street-artist portraits of myself that I did actually pay for, so I guess that makes me a horrible, elitist person even though I got them while I was in high-school with my saved-up allowance money.  But I do have mostly cheap furniture (including a desk chair that I scavenged for free when a neighbor was moving out), so maybe that makes up for it.

It’s just not as bourgeois as you think to live in a clean and aesthetically pleasing environment, duder. I realize that you seem to have at some point in your life associated solely with status-mongering douchenozzles, but there really truly are other kinds of people in the world. It’s not a binary between impoverished hovel-dwellers and the snobby, elitist, asshole jet set.

I didn’t “associate” with them by choice….kind of hard to when many happen to be wealthier relations, co-workers, or classmates. 

I don’t have issues with living in a clean environment. 

Just that whenever someone brings up judging someone by whether they have “art” in their apartment/house….my experiences has been such that it is shorthand for whatever is considered “art” by the pretentious art/art history set or pseudo-intellectual wannabes.  In short, pieces similar to what would be present at museums like the Met and not self-created pieces or art one can purchase from a street vendor unless s(he)‘s been publicly acclaimed by the NYT or reviews from artsy magazines.

After all, my roommates and I did have several small foil-wire sculptures we made ourselves in our living room for decoration….just wasn’t considered “art” by them. 

Once again—the fact that you know an inordinate number of total shitheads is skewing your perception of reality. Nobody on this thread is talking about buying a fucking original Monet, ‘kay?

I didn’t “associate” with them by choice….kind of hard to when many happen to be wealthier relations, co-workers, or classmates.

Then you deal with them, if they’re impolite enough to case aspersions on your taste, ask them if they’re offering to be your interior decorator or if they have someone they’d like to recommend to you.

You need to learn the American version of One-upmanship:

In that context, the term refers to a satiric course in the gambits required for the systematic and conscious practice of “creative intimidation”, making one’s associates feel inferior and thereby gaining the status of being “one-up” on them.

Link

Part of the problem, exholt, is your failure to stand up for yourself or take the responsibility for developing a knowledge of art and art history by reading, checking out library books with color plates, etc. 

You’re always coming back to the excluded middle problem,  IMHO.

I would rather that someone like you would hang “Dogs Playing Poker” on a wall if you felt comfortable with it than a Picasso from his Blue Period because you wanted to impress said family, co-workers and friends.

I know it’s late to the party for this but, um, couple in their 50s usually equals kids independent enough for the woman to have gone back to work.  Man in poor health often means man in poor health, which often includes, you know, guys with heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema, black lung, bad backs, diabetes-related kidney, retina, and circulation problems, ALS, whatever.  In which case even if the woman earns $11.75 as a supervisor at WalMart she may still be earning more than her chronically ill but not-quite-disabled husband.

Call me a rebel here but I’m guessing that, assuming otherwise equal job histories and incomes, among women in their 50s having a husband who earns more is also often associated with their poor health as well.

Call me a wild-eyed radical but I’m guessing in LGBT relationship and even those nominally platonic “Boston marriages” among 50 year olds it’s likely that poor health contributes to one partner’s lower income, rather than the other partner’s income contributing to the other’s poor health.

My real point, though, is that whatever Kristen Springer’s study really says (I’m guessing it’s less controversial-sounding than Parker-Pope’s excerpt) it adds up to one more reaons why it’s a really, really good thing when both partners in a relationship are able to back each other up earnings-wise.

figleaf

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