Fear and opportunity cost

Pretty Lady explains a signal difference between men and women:

Boys do their fabulous, unfathomable things off in their rooms, and every now and then they emerge, proudly bearing something miraculous, like an assault rifle, a web browser or an A12. We pat them on the heads and continue making dinner. Such is life.

You see, girls, the masculine mind is rather like a mining drill. It takes the bit of linear logic between its teeth, and pulverizes everything in its trajectory. Nothing along its path can be deflected or overlooked; no crucial semicolon within fourteen thousand lines of code, no millimeter of deviation on the drill press, no hairsbreadth of torque on the delta wing. The woman who gets between a man and his gadgets, or his pet theories on the nature of political systems, is headed for disaster. One does not butt logic head-on with a man–within the ten degrees or so of his line of sight.

Spacebunny has made similar observations with regards to men’s relative inability to multi-task and women’s relative inability to focus. I’ve noted before that not a single woman in my college social circle had a job at graduation, whereas every single man did. Women fear opportunity cost, which is why so many have trouble accepting the reality of a choice between children and career. Thus, they often tend to float along without making a decision until the lack of a decision becomes one by default.

This wasn’t a problem for society when the no-decision default was marriage and children. But now that the default is five or more years of college, a hefty debt and at least the trappings of a career, many women don’t even begin thinking about marriage until they are already past their prime sell-by date.

I have no problem with women who have intentionally chosen to sacrifice much, if not everything, for their vocations. I am second to no man in my appreciation for the genuine artist – as opposed to those talentless provocateurs that now infest the West – the selfless nun or the truth-seeking scientist. They all contribute to the betterment of Man in their own way, but they are only a miniscule percentage of the female population.

I am very seriously opposed, however, to those who have intentionally altered the culture and played upon female fears in order to deprive so many women of the chance to make a fully-informed choice between work and womanhood. Regardless of whether human society truly needs these neutered worker bees or not, holding up such barren individuals as a triumph of their sex is a logical, intellectual and spiritual abomination.