I’m a little late to this article in The Guardian about how women ought to be content with dying alone in a flat being eaten by her cats, but here goes anyway:

Not long ago I had a discussion with a friend about why she married, and ultimately divorced, someone she knew wasn’t right for her. She said she bought into society’s deafening message that being with a man – any man – is better than being alone, and certainly better than dying alone, which is allegedly the worst fate anyone, especially any woman, can suffer.

Society’s message is not that women should be with any man, but that making the effort to be in a functioning relationship and putting up with some degree of inconvenience is better than being alone.

When I told her that I’ve never feared dying alone, and in fact have sometimes feared the opposite, she told me I was incredibly lucky.

The author is 40. I wonder what she’ll say when she’s 50?

Because this meant I wouldn’t end up settling for a life that doesn’t actually make me happy, even if society tells me it’s supposed to.

There’s always the option of shacking up with that strawman she’s built.

Apparently I’m not alone. (Pun intended!) Data confirms that more women have begun to realize that there are far worse things than dying alone, which is great news for women but bad news for the patriarchy.

Women accepting they will die alone is great news…for women? Hurrah for modern feminism!

“Broke men are hurting women’s marriage prospects,” the NY Post recently declared, citing a study from the Journal of Family and Marriage. The article claimed that “most American women hope to marry” but there is a shortage of men with stable incomes and lives, making it tough for women to do so.

Why does the modern woman need a man with a stable income? After all:

CNN reports that there “are more single working women than ever,” and by 2030, according to the CDC, “45% of working women ages 25 to 44 in the United States will be single”.

If more women are working, why the insistence on a man having a stable income? Sounds a bit old fashioned to me!

Contrary to decades of prevailing wisdom that those who marry are better off, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Women’s Health found that women who stay single or who divorce are actually healthier than those who stay married. By contrast, married men are healthier than men who are not. Why the discrepancy?

Divorced women have more time to go to gym classes (alone) and they’re able to eat lettuce every night without a man demanding meat and potatoes?

When a man divorces, he may see his physical and emotional health slide. He loses the person concerned with keeping him healthy and much of his social network.

Until he remarries, which is usually the case.

By contrast, women who divorce just see their relationships evolve from investing in a man to investing more heavily in other social or community connections.

A community of bitter divorcees who talked her into it in the first place.

For years, the feminist writer Linda Hirshman courted controversy by advising that marriage, unless to an exceptional man, is often a “bad bargain” for women. With every child a woman has, she sees her pay and long-term professional opportunities decline, particularly if she leaves the workforce for a significant period of time.

Because every woman knows that a promotion to Assistant Head of Marketing in GlobalMegaCorp’s Bristol subsidiary and the accompanying 3% pay rise (pre-tax) is worth more than having a lousy kid.

Furthermore, marriage has historically presented women with two options, neither good: marry a man and sacrifice your autonomy and career goals to become financially dependent on him. Or marry a man and maintain your own career but be prepared to have a “second shift” career taking care of him and the home.

Whereas single motherhood is just peachy.

Even among more open-minded millennial men, the female spouse still ends up doing the majority of caregiving and housekeeping.

That’s because men spend longer at work supporting their wives and families.

More women, however, are foregoing marriage and motherhood. In doing so, they trade in their “second shift” and instead begin taking care of themselves.

The sharp rise in the use of anti-depressants among the same demographic is probably just a coincidence.

To use Hirshman’s language, they are rejecting a “bad bargain”. This new status quo frustrates men who feel entitled to female companionship, such as angry male “incels”.

Women who reject men who don’t have stable incomes to support them complain those same men feel entitled?

Women have more economic power and freedom to set standards regarding the men they will be with, and what they will put up with from those men, than at any time in history.

And having set those standards, they find nobody is willing to meet them – at least with them. Apparently this is progress.

More women are deciding that being in a bad marriage, or trying to co-parent with an irresponsible man, is much worse than dying alone.

This is nothing new. It’s been the case since divorce laws gifted women the house, the kids, and half of everything the man ever owned.

Once dying alone is no longer scary to women, men lose power.

Fighting the patriarchy by dying alone.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that some incels are outraged.

Fighting the patriarchy Annoying some incels by dying alone.

It’s no different than those who mourn the days when they didn’t have to compete for jobs against women and racial minorities.

No different, and just as imaginary.

It must be frustrating to lose power you once had but didn’t necessarily deserve.

As you likely found when men stopped being interested in you.

That’s not to say women shouldn’t marry and have children. It is to say women should feel empowered to do so, only if they truly want to and with partners who are worthy of them, who champion and nurture their success, not hold them back or drag them down.

Or, apparently, can’t pay for their upkeep.

More women are embracing that message, and that could ultimately do more for women’s equality than any government policy ever will.

And the fox didn’t want the grapes anyway: they were too sour.

One of the paradoxes of modern feminism is that it’s granted certain women freedom but at the expense of their ability to function as adults. Take a look at this article in – where else? – The Guardian:

It feels very personal, the fight you have with your partner about who does the laundry or cleans the bathroom.

But the second-wave feminists were right. The personal is political. The unequal division of labour at home is a systemic issue that needs structural social change to solve it.

Yes, we must restructure society because some entitled princess doesn’t want to clean the bathroom.

Housework, writes Megan K Stack in her book Women’s Work, is “a ubiquitous physical demand that has hamstrung and silenced women for most of human history”.

Until the invention of the washing machine, dishwasher, fridge, and vacuum cleaner. Which, coincidentally, is about the time feminists found the time and energy to complain how terrible their lives were.

Like many heterosexual couples, it was the arrival of children that set my husband and me on divergent paths at home. I’ve been an avowed (and untidy) feminist since I was old enough to say the word.

Western feminists like to boast they’re untidy, hoping it signals a carefree mind occupied by loftier matters than keeping the place clean. What it actually signals is she’s a lazy slob.

We were together for 10 years before the birth of our daughter – he knew his co-parent had zero aspirations to be a homemaker. So how did we end up so easily slipping into the prescribed gender roles that we’d dodged up until then?

Well, what happened when the sink got blocked?

There are a few reasons that come to mind, such as structural issues like the lack of parental leave for fathers and the gender pay gap.

I have another theory, related to the note at the bottom of the article which says “Nicola Heath is a freelance writer”. At a guess, you decided to indulge in a poorly-paid hobby rather than get a proper job, leaving your husband as the main breadwinner. Given he’s at work all day while you knock out boilerplate rubbish for The Guardian, it’s probably only fair that you clean the toilet occasionally.

Becoming a parent is already a huge transition. Your identity is reforged in the crucible of sleep deprivation and newfound responsibility. The pre-kid lifestyle of Friday night drinks, free time and sleeping in becomes a distant memory.

Having a baby changes your life. Who knew?

In this period of chaotic readjustment, it’s easy to fall back on what we know. Even in this era of dual-income households, women take the reins at home and men … carry on pretty much as they always did, with less sleep.

The complaint seems to be that when feminists have babies they adopt behaviours which work rather than stage a political protest.

But the tired and outdated breadwinner model is just as limiting for men as it is for women. The pressure men feel to provide for their families means they work long hours and miss out on time with their children in the name of economic security.

Indeed, driven by crippling mortgages to pay for houses they might not have chosen had they been married to a Filipina called Cherry.

A report by Deloitte put the value of unpaid work in Victoria at $205bn, half the gross state product,

How much of that was performed by men?

while PwC research from 2017 found that women performed 72% of unpaid work in Australia.

I hope that study was better than the one I cited here.

Some women don’t want to work outside the home – and that’s fine. But others do, and for them pursuing a career can be an uphill battle as they try to manage paid and unpaid work.

Because men don’t mow lawns, clear gutters, paint sheds, unblock drains, change car batteries, assemble wardrobes, replace loose slates, bleed radiators, and take care of the home insurance while pursuing a career.

If women want their partners to do more domestic tasks – which would free them up to do more work outside the home – it’s not going to happen without some uncomfortable conversations.

Such as: “Tell me more about this work outside the home, and how much money will it bring in?”

Change is difficult. We’re asking someone to give up their privilege, a sticking point articulated by pioneering New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring in her 1988 book Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. “Men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing,” she wrote.

Ah yes, those 20th century miners, farmers, fishermen, labourers, warehousemen, soldiers, sailors, construction workers, all fighting tooth and nail to maintain their privilege.

For many women, this is a hard conversation to initiate. It requires saying, “my needs are important too, and what’s best for the family isn’t necessarily best for me” – something that goes against how we expect women to behave.

It goes against how we expect anyone to behave in a functioning relationship with children involved, to be honest. There’s a reason why it’s a hard conversation to initiate: you run the risk of being exposed as possibly the most selfish individual to ever progenate.

My eldest daughter is now six, and while my husband does a great deal around the house, I have never returned to working full-time. His career has forged ahead (to our collective benefit) while mine has adapted to the demands of childcare.

I can taste the oppression.

If we want women to flourish, we need to make some concessions.

Might I suggest you take this up with your husband rather than the general public?

But the result – men and women better fulfilling their potential inside and outside the home – is worth it.

If your potential outside the home was anything other than minimal, that’s where you’d already be.

A Twitter user alerts me to this article:

Unlike most everything else she did in her life, Amanda, a 41-year-old executive at a Boston-area creative agency, began her affair without much thought. It was just drinks with an old friend. When drinks turned to dinner, and dinner turned to sleepovers four months in, she didn’t stop it. It wasn’t weakness at play, she thought, but something else.

“As awful as it was to my family, and I knew it was awful, I couldn’t resist the draw,” Amanda, whose name we have changed to protect her privacy, says today. She had a thriving career (and salary to match), plenty of friends and interests, a devoted husband, a beautiful home by the beach. And yet what she liked most, she says, besides the great sex, was the ability to be someone else for a while.

So a woman, probably bored in her marriage, has an affair. It being 2019, this must be interpreted as a new dawn for women.

Once assumed to be the purview of powerful men — a notion #MeToo has done little to debunk — adultery has become something of an equal opportunity endeavor.

As I’m fond of saying, modern feminism is largely about encouraging women to adopt the worst behaviours of men.

Numbers from the National Opinion Research Center’s 2016 General Social Survey, meanwhile, show that although the percentage of men who admitted to infidelity has held steady over the past two decades, the percentage of wives who reported having affairs rose almost 40 percent — a trend that’s holding steady in 2018, says Tom Smith, director of the survey.

Or maybe just more are admitting it?

There’s also economics. The increasing number of female breadwinners means more women are not financially reliant on men.

Yeah, we’ll get back to that in a minute.

The fact is that good old-fashioned lust appeals to plenty of women, too.

…

Many experts now believe that women struggle as least as much as men and probably even more with monogamy,” Martin says, “and that they actually require variety and novelty of sexual experience more than men do.”

And as women have more agency regarding who they pair up with, they’re more willing and motivated to make a move when something’s not working.

It’s ironic the article contains this passage while also mentioning the MeToo movement. Here we’re being told that women’s sexuality is a lot like men’s in that they too enjoy lots of hot sex with strangers, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have it if they can get it. But we’re also told women are subject to an increasing volume of unwanted sexual advances from men on the street, in bars, and at work. Well, what do you expect? If you go around telling men that women are up for sex in the same way they are, i.e. right now behind the nearest dumpster, they’re going to chance their arm with every cute girl they run into.

Fewer women are marrying out of need, Fisher says; instead, they’re marrying to please themselves. But that also means when they’re dissatisfied with something, they can feel justified to go elsewhere.

That certainly seems to be the modern view of a relationship. You’re committed right up to the point that something better wanders by, then you jump ship.

That’s not to say they want to go so far as divorce — and, in fact, even as adultery is on the rise, divorce rates are falling.

Probably because women have worked out that even if they commit adultery, the man is the one who gets cleaned out in the divorce. I doubt this situation is sustainable.

Martin puts a more overtly feminist, or at least sex-positive spin on it: “Why would you get divorced just because you want to have sex with someone else? What is that equation? It makes no sense to lots of women, just like it makes no sense to lots of men.”

Everyone wants to have sex with someone else. The difference is you give up your ability to act on those impulses in return for the benefits which come with a monogamous relationship. One of the most common self-delusions among certain people is that you can have regular sex outside the marriage while keeping the benefits of a monogamous relationship. You can’t.

Amid the political spotlight on gender equality, there’s also not a little bit of earned rebellion going on, a backlash to the idea that if a woman cheats, she’s damaged and slutty, but if a man cheats, he’s, well, a man.

Oh, not this rubbish again. I dealt with this in my book (which I’m sure everyone on here has bought by now given the fact I’m writing this on my yacht). Past a certain age, somewhere between 25-30, there is nothing admirable about a man embarking on a string of one-night stands, and nobody is impressed by a man cheating on his wife especially if there are kids involved. The reaction from his friends is largely one of disappointment, concern for his long term welfare, and an outburst of “WTF are you playing at, man?” But I’ve noticed when women cheat her friends rally around and say “well, I’m sure there are good reasons why she did that” and inform her husband or boyfriend that he needs to work on the relationship.

Playing the role of the “good wife” — whether that means dutifully making dinner or, you know, not fucking the neighbor — is no longer desirable for most women.

I’m sure going to work every day and paying down a giant mortgage isn’t desirable for most men in isolation, but being a mature adult means making sacrifices for long-term goals, maintaining impulse control, and disavowing short-term gratification.

“The ‘privilege’ of infidelity has historically belonged to men. But female infidelity is the most radical but also the most basic version of female autonomy. And in that sense, it’s very much about power.”

There’s this odd idea among modern feminists that having a string of meaningless sexual encounters with men is empowering. Countering that view is one I heard from a Turkish woman who wasn’t brought up in the west, and she thought the real power of a woman comes from withholding her sexual capabilities and wielding them sparingly. I’ve gotta say, I’m with the girl from Izmir on this one.

“Men and women alike cheat when there’s no perception of ‘problems in their relationships.’ Plenty of women are in it for the sex.”

My marriage is fine honestly, I’m just sleeping with someone else.

Science confirms this, Martin says, pointing to the work of researchers Alicia Walker and Marta Meana, whose studies conclude that women’s sexual desire is no less strong than it is for men, and that, in fact, such desire could be stronger due to an evolutionary draw to increase one’s chances of healthy reproduction.

I don’t think anyone denies women’s sexual desire can be pretty damned strong. I’m just not sure this means women want to sleep around more.

The fact that Amanda is the family breadwinner didn’t factor into her affair, she says; she never considered the affair something to which she was entitled.

And this is the bit I wanted to come back to. I suspect a large part of the problem is Amanda doesn’t respect her husband because he’s not playing the role of provider, so she’s seeking fulfillment with from some “old friend” who’s probably out-earning her.

At the same time, Amanda says that she thinks her equitable marriage probably made her less satisfied in the bedroom

Exactly. Women don’t like to marry down, they like to marry up. If hubby isn’t earning what she is, she’s not going to want to sleep with him for very long.

“Wanting some heteronormalcy isn’t something people want to talk about in that bourgie Brooklyn world I live in.

Brooklyn. Who would have guessed?

Eventually, Susan says, she realized she was confusing power with novelty. She called off her affair and talked to her husband instead. “I had made something happen for myself,” she says. “It was a way of claiming independence. But once I had that, I understood: People who are truly empowered don’t need to lie or betray trust.”

Well, fancy that. These women are basically living out the lives of characters in beach-holiday romance books, all the while thinking they’re doing something new.