It’s been 19 years since Susan Faludi’s seminal tome on the anti-feminist backlash of the 80s—-titled, of course, Backlash—-was released. The book covered a lot of ground, indicting everything from the film industry to the legal system, for waging war on American women’s rights and dignity. One of her biggest coups in the book was the devastating expose of Newsweek, for an irresponsible feature story that implied that feminism has run men off of marrying in retaliation, with the notable and completely false claim that a woman over 40 was more likely to be killed by a terrorist rather than get married. Faludi not only disproved this claim, but also attacked the larger narrative about how women are desperate to marry unwilling men, pointing out that polling data shows that men are more, not less, eager to marry than women. Newsweek was so thoroughly and famously devastate by her critique that they actually had to recant the story, albeit 20 years later and with lots of defensive caveats. They even went so far to dig up 11 of the “unmarriageable” women they profiled in the original story, and found that 8 of them have married since then, and others have decided they really don’t want to marry anyway.
You would think after an embarrassment like that, journalists and other writers might think twice about trotting out thinly disguised hysterical warnings to educated, professional women that all those brains and all that independence was going to run the menfolk off. You would think that the fact—-admitted in the Newsweek recantation—-that college-educated women are more, not less likely to marry would cool the jets a little. But there is no fucking way that some folks will let little things like facts and evidence get in the way of anti-feminist backlash fun. Irina Aleksander has introduced a quirky new take on the whole genre of making shit up about how American women can’t get married (at least, college-educated, professional American women can’t)—-proposing that American men hate the idea of committing to those nasty female things so much that American women would be better off marrying foreign men, who are more eager to settle down. Or, to be fair, she’s narrowed it down to New York women, probably hoping the geographic specificity will shield her from those nasty facts and evidence.
Her argument has giant holes in it, even taken on its merits. Here’s how it begins:
It was the boozy hour of 1:30 a.m. during a recent party in Carroll Gardens, and the 30-something hostess was telling a flock of women a story about a friend who moved to Berlin last year, after a series of tragic breakups, and met a man who almost immediately wanted to marry her. There were “oohs” and “aahs” all around. The women had to contain themselves from outright applause.
The hostess looked over at her live-in boyfriend of several years, who was sitting across the room with the other boyfriends. “I guess nowadays you have to go to Europe to find a husband,” she said, looking at the fair, upturned faces around her.
For now, I’m going to set aside my skepticism about the idea that a whole roomful of women would be so impervious to the shame of bullying your boyfriend to love you—-or at least, present a realistic facsimile—-in front of company. Let’s assume this happened, and that there was indeed a roomful of people that merely lived together, and that this is evidence that no one was committed. Then what to make of this?
Jane Yager, 31, a writer, moved to Berlin four years ago and met a British man with whom she now cohabits and has a 16-month-old son (though they are not married; in Europe, American gals’ preoccupation with “getting the ring” is viewed in many quarters as hopelessly bourgeois).
By her own measure, if an American man moves in with you, it shows his lack of commitment, but if a British man does it, he’s totally committed. Perhaps these recalcitrant New York men also find marriage hopelessly bourgeois? That seems the likelier explanation to me, far likelier than assuming that all men in New York are filled with such loathing for showing that they might like a girl (which is SO GAY) that they’ll put off the wedding indefinitely. But what do I know? I’ve only lived her for a month. Maybe I’ll discover that New York men are a special breed of asshole, though I have seen exactly no evidence for this contention and have instead hung out with a lot of men who are married or otherwise happily committed to their female partners.