India Knight responds to Michael Noer:
So I would say this: Girls, a word of advice. Marry handsome men or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blonds or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a man with a complex. Marry a man who is happy for you to be you, happy whether you do or don’t work. Marry a man who loves you as you are and who doesn’t think taking the rubbish out is beneath him. Marry a man who can put the children to bed when you’re running late and make dinner too without feeling he is the victim of an emasculating conspiracy. Never marry a man who is stupid enough to use feminist as a term of abuse. Don’t marry Michael Noer.
Or to summarize: girls, marry a man who isn’t a man. Typical fogginess, (precisely what complex is to be avoided, Oedipal? Prince Charming?), culminating in the predictable ad hominem attack.
Guys, this is why it is pointless to ask women what they want or even who they are. Just try responding to a woman as Ms Knight recommends – if you say “whatever you want, honey, you know I love you no matter what you do” more than three times in a row, she’ll throw a shoe and you and she’ll be right to do it, you pussy. This is just more “women like nice guys” equine ejectus cloaked in social commentary.
It’s not that women don’t know who they are, (or how could they ever say “that is SO me”), it’s that their self-identification tends to be variable, often depending upon what television show or movie last made an impression on them. One day she wants to be Carrie from Sex in the City (the non-slutty slut), the next Julia Andrews from The Sound of Music (the perfect step-mother), and then Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman (I deserve a rich man because I’m so inherently attractive). The reason that a man has to be a leader in the house is that when left to her own devices, a woman will usually bounce around from one impractical notion to the next.
Even the successful career woman, if you look closely enough, is simply following the path of her parents’ expectations. I spoke last week with an executive at a major media company who just got promoted and moved to LA; she’s still trying to “find herself” and is thinking of becoming a dance or figure-skating instructor. Needless to say, she’s unmarried.
Very few men go from trading on Wall Street to teaching yoga, or vice-versa. Women do that sort of thing all the time; the exceptions are mostly those who know that certain options are closed off to them.
Another presumably career woman adds:
Salon.com suggested last week that the article might just as well have been called, If You Are Really Self-Loathing and Weak, Try to Find Someone Who Doesn’t Work and Will Consent to Live With You Out of Financial Desperation For the Rest of Her Life.
Of course, this flies directly in the face of Ms Knight’s advice, which is to be weak and accepting of anything if you want a career woman to marry you. I still don’t see what all the fuss is about. If educated, high-income men such as Mr. Noer, myself and my entire social circle don’t wish to marry career woman, doesn’t that leave plenty of imported Mexican janitors for these wonderful, eminently desirable women?