{"id":8677,"date":"2018-11-30T10:12:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T09:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8677"},"modified":"2018-11-30T10:12:17","modified_gmt":"2018-11-30T09:12:17","slug":"lost-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/8677\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost generations"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day David Thompson wrote a post<\/a> on an article in New York<\/em> magazine featuring<\/a> various women whose marriages have fallen apart and they’re blaming it on political differences with their spouses. But a perusal of the article and David’s commentary suggests perhaps these women are simply unsuited to long-term relationships, being as they are selfish, deluded, and insistent on making everything in their lives political. There’s also more than a hint of mental illness at work. Consider this from a woman in – you guessed it – Brooklyn:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been sexually assaulted and raped, but for a long time I didn\u2019t identify in that way. I didn\u2019t like the idea of seeing myself as a victim. It\u2019s only recently, with the amount of coverage [sexual assault has been getting] that I\u2019ve realized,\u00a0Oh, if I verbally dissented, just because I didn\u2019t fight someone off doesn\u2019t mean I wasn\u2019t assaulted and raped<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You didn’t realise you’d been sexually assaulted and raped until the definition was expanded a year ago by hardcore feminists to include any sexual encounter which is not supervised by two woke lawyers and a (female) high court judge. Now perhaps this woman was<\/em> raped and assaulted in the traditional sense of the terms, but I rather think if this were the case she’d have realised it immediately, not at the advent of a political movement. And what’s the betting she knew and admired<\/a> the guy who supposedly assaulted her? Oh, wait:<\/p>\n

My husband and I have been together 14 years and I\u2019ve mentioned it vaguely, but I\u2019ve never given him details, partly because one of the guys is still in my life, and they\u2019re kind of friends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her husband is “kind of friends” with a guy who raped her? Yeah, Trump’s really the issue here.<\/p>\n

Recently we had some friends over for dinner, and we had an argument about whether this kind of trial by mob that\u2019s happened in the press is unfair.\u00a0My friends, a man and a woman, took the position that a man shouldn\u2019t have his reputation ruined because of an allegation. I disagreed, and as the conversation kept going, I got upset.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a school of thought, held by misogynistic dinosaurs, that women cannot handle robust debate and burst into tears when pressed on a difficult topic. There’s another which says emotionally unstable women make poor dinner party guests.<\/p>\n

Finally I said that it\u2019s obvious none of them had been sexually assaulted,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah yes, the Natalia Antonova approach<\/a> to debating.<\/p>\n

Later my husband told me he thought my intellectual points were good, but he didn\u2019t respond to the emotional outburst I had.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I imagine he was deeply embarrassed.<\/p>\n

But really, I wish he would feel like,\u00a0Fuck those guys<\/em>.\u00a0I want to punch them. How dare somebody treat the woman I love like this? I hate that happened to you<\/em>. That\u2019s what I\u2019m looking for.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You want your husband to start punching dinner guests because they disagree with your view that men aren’t entitled to due process when accused of rape?<\/p>\n

I mean, I wrote to the man who assaulted me, the one who\u2019s still in our lives. He said he didn\u2019t remember, and that it turned his stomach to think I\u2019d been carrying around this thought about him, but he fell short of accepting responsibility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As with so many of these cases, this woman needs psychological help. Instead she’s got pandering journalists from New York<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n

Sticking with the topic at hand, here’s a letter<\/a> to an agony aunt:<\/p>\n

I feel like a ghost. I\u2019m a 35-year-old woman, and I have nothing to show for it. My 20s and early 30s have been a twisting crisscross of moves all over the West Coast, a couple of brief stints abroad, multiple jobs in a mediocre role with no real upward track. I was also the poster child for serial monogamy. My most hopeful and longest lasting relationship (three and a half years, whoopee) ended two years ago. We moved to a new town (my fourth new city), created a home together, and then nose-dived into a traumatic breakup that launched me to my fifth and current city and who-knows-what-number job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To be fair to this lady, she’s at least tried to settle down into a normal life. What I suspect is lacking is a serious investigation as to why her relationships have gone wrong, particularly those parts for which she’s responsible.<\/p>\n

For all these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which I once rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an \u201coriginal life,\u201d I have nothing to show for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If this describes the period in which she was in her successive relationships, it explains a lot.<\/p>\n

I have no wealth, and I\u2019m now saddled with enough debt from all of my moves, poor decisions, and lack of career drive that I may never be able to retire. I have no career milestones and don\u2019t care for my line of work all that much anyway, but now it\u2019s my lifeline, as I only have enough savings to buy a hotel room for two nights. I have no family nearby, no long-term relationship built on years of mutual growth and shared experiences, no children. While I make friends easily, I\u2019ve left most of my friends behind in each city I\u2019ve moved from while they\u2019ve continued to grow deep roots: marriages, homeownership, career growth, community, families, children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She at least understands she has a problem and, crucially, that her situation is a result of her own poor decisions. This puts her much<\/em> further down the road to recovery than most women in her position. Now the advice she gets from the agony aunt us beyond useless, which is a shame because she still seems to be living in cloud-cuckoo land:<\/p>\n

I used to consider myself creative \u2014 a good writer, poetic, passionate, curious. Now, after many years of demanding yet uninspiring\u00a0jobs, multiple heartbreaks, move after move, financial woes, I\u2019m quite frankly exhausted. I can barely remember to buy dish soap let alone contemplate humanity or be inspired by Ana\u00efs Nin\u2019s diaries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sorry, but this sounds like a middle-class whine that your dreams of becoming an artist never came to fruition, probably because of a dearth of talent and an unwillingness to knuckle down and learn a discipline. What this has to do with your relationship status isn’t clear, but my guess is living with anyone with this mindset would become tiresome very quickly.<\/p>\n

The thought that pops into my mind increasingly often is that young women have been appallingly advised, and the horrific results of this are now being laid bare. The trouble is they are still being given the same advice, and many of them are listening. I’m sometimes accused of being misogynistic or sexist for what I write on here, or what I say in the classroom. Whenever my motivations are questioned I simply say I believe the advice being dished out to young women will leave them disappointed, bitter, and desperately unhappy later on in life. I’ve got nothing against women, indeed I’m rather\u00a0 fond of them, and I’d much prefer to see them living happy, fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, they’re having their heads filled with third-wave feminist garbage by people who see them as expendable pawns in a never-ending political battle they can’t win. Even some women seem to be realising<\/a>\u00a0the damage the malign influence of modern feminism is causing:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that\u2019s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don\u2019t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.<\/p>\n

I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you\u2019re working to compete in the world, and what you\u2019re doing is competing with men. Men don\u2019t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.<\/p>\n

And by the time you have your own household with all your own bills, you can\u2019t get off that track, because now you\u2019ve got to make the money to pay your bills. It\u2019s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It\u2019s not the same as it was in your 20s. You try to do what you can to make your life fulfilling. I have cats and dogs. But it\u2019s lonely when you see your friends having children, going on vacations, planning the lives of their children, and you don\u2019t do anything at night but come home to your cats and dogs. I don\u2019t want other women to do what I have done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The crucial line?<\/p>\n

Men don\u2019t like competitors. Men want a partner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The sooner young women understand this, and learn to balance their careers with their long-term life goals, the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day David Thompson wrote a post on an article in New York magazine featuring various women whose marriages have fallen apart and they’re blaming it on political differences with their spouses. But a perusal of the article and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[111,79,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8678,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677\/revisions\/8678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}