when the status quo frustrates.

Okay, This Is Ridiculous

Monday, April 5th, 2010

I have kept my mouth shut about this…til now. But this is really the outside of enough, folks. I mean, come ON!

Study: Lack of breastfeeding costs lives, billions of dollars

(CNN) — If most new moms would breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life, it would save nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year,

Let me note now that I breastfed both my children til each one was a year old and breastfed exclusively through the first four months, so my absolute disgust with this article is in no way some kinda guilt-fueled defensive huffiness. I was a good little Mommie! I saved nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year! (I could use some of that money right now too, thanks–drop me an email, whoever is holding onto that?)

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20 Ways ObamaCare Will Take Away Our Freedom To Screw Other People Over

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

This list is great. I’ve copied and pasted my favorites, helpfully annotated.

You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

Freedoms being lost: The freedom to have me pay for your uninsured emergency room visits and your freedom to start up a business which can’t bring in enough revenue to cover a single annual expense of $750. Jesus wept!

You are young and healthy and want to pay for insurance that reflects that status? Tough. You’ll have to pay for premiums that cover not only you, but also the guy who smokes three packs a day, drink a gallon of whiskey and eats chicken fat off the floor. That’s because insurance companies will no longer be able to underwrite on the basis of a person’s health status. (Section 2701).

Freedoms being lost: The insurance companies’ freedom to deny coverage to anyone who isn’t young and healthy.

You would like to pay less in premiums by buying insurance with lifetime or annual limits on coverage? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer such policies, even if that is what customers prefer. (Section 2711).

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to refuse to pay for you to be cured of most serious illnesses, such as cancer. You are also losing the freedom to have me pay for your uninsured emergency room visits during your downhill spiral. More Jesus tears!

Think you’d like a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t cover preventive care or requires cost-sharing for such care? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer policies that do not cover preventive services or offer them with cost-sharing, even if that’s what the customer wants. (Section 2712).

Freedoms being lost: Your freedom to drive up my insurance premiums by needing a lot more expensive medical treatment for conditions that, had you used preventive care, could have been circumvented or caught far earlier in their much less expensive phases.

If you are a physician and you don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Tough. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to use your claims data to issue you reports that measure the resources you use, provide information on the quality of care you provide, and compare the resources you use to those used by other physicians. Of course, this will all be just for informational purposes. It’s not like the government will ever use it to intervene in your practice and patients’ care. Of course not. (Section 3003 (i))

Freedoms being lost: Your physician’s freedom to hide from you the quality of the care he provides and how much it tends to cost. I personally am going to miss the current system of finding a physician, which if I’m lucky can be based on a friend’s recommendation but is more often a total crapshoot based on geographic proximity to my home or workplace, where I get to test-drive him on my precious, one-and-only body.

You are a health insurer and you want to raise premiums to meet costs? Well, if that increase is deemed “unreasonable” by the Secretary of Health and Human Services it will be subject to review and can be denied. (Section 1003)

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to jack up your rates without any explanation or justification. Jesus Tears Mark III!

The government will extract a fee of $6.7 billion annually from insurance companies. If you are an insurer, what you will pay depends on your share of net premiums plus 200% of your administrative costs. So, if your net premiums and administrative costs are equal to 10% of the total, you will pay 10% of $6.7 billion, or $670,000,000. In the reconciliation bill, the fee will start at $8 billion in 2014, $11.3 billion in 2015, $1.9 billion in 2017, and $14.3 billion in 2018 (Section 1406).Think you, as an insurance executive, know how to better spend that money? Tough.(Section 9010 (b) (1) (A and B).)

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to funnel as much of their profits as possible into “administrative costs” rather than into your medical care.

You will have to pay an additional 0.5% payroll tax on any dollar you make over $250,000 if you file a joint return and $200,000 if you file an individual return. What? You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9015).
That amount will rise to a 3.8% tax if reconciliation passes. It will also apply to investment income, estates, and trusts. You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Like you need to ask. (Section 1402).

Freedoms being lost: For 98.5% of Americans, absolutely none.

Your elitism is showing–! Here, let me tuck that back down into your collar for you. I’m shocked your valet let you out the door like that!

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

This article is so transparent it’s hard to believe we’re expected to take it seriously, but I suspect we are–much like when John Kerry, during his failed presidential bid some years ago, movingly asked, “And who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?”*

It’s pretty much a fail from the get-go; what amazes me is that anyone bothered to write this article at all.

A Recipe for Riches
by Duncan Greenberg
Friday, October 9, 2009

Want to become a tech titan or hedge fund tycoon?

Well yes, of course, who wouldn’t? And it’s really an option for all you Joe and Jane Sixpacks too—

Up your chances by dropping out of college

!!!! See?!? Most of you already got that part covered, don’tcha?

(and in a mumble)

or going to Harvard and working at Goldman Sachs.

(Oh yeah, those too! But let’s speed rapidly on past those parts—)

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Sex 2.0! Part Four: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide, Feminists!

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

(Parts One, Two and Three are linked.)

See, this is one of the biggest reasons I don’t listen to Ann Coulter.

(wtf? How did Ann Coulter get involved in this? you might ask. Well–)

Ann has made a career out of, among other things, trashing feminism. The last time I paid any attention to much of anything she had to say was one of the first times I ever paid any attention to her at all–basically I got to the point where she was saying that women needed to get out of public discourse, particularly political public discourse, because they weren’t suited to it and had been screwing everything up in it for decades. Once I heard her say that, I translated it to mean that there was no point in listening to her discourse publicly anymore, particularly politically–I mean, she’s a woman herself. And I never argue with other people who tell me not to listen to themselves, eh?

Generally I am underwhelmed by women who globally trash feminism. Not that being a self-identified feminist has a hell of a lot of meaning these days–given that Sarah Palin, Maureen Dowd, Catherine MacKinnon and Wendy McElroy all insist that they are feminists, I’m not sure exactly what assumptions about them we’re supposed to be making based on that. So, when women state that they have a problem with specific so-called feminists or specific schools of self-identified feminist thought, THAT I have no problem empathizing with. However–

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When Pity Is Warring With Disgust

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

First of all, I would like to say that I don’t read Townhall. The only reason I even knew this article existed was because Jesse at Pandagon blogged about it. I may even leave a nastygram on his Facebook page in revenge, because this is about the most pathetic, icky article disguised as a holiday concern ooze that I have read all month.

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So What Do You Get Your Wife If She’s Butt-Ugly?

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

An Assortment of Holiday Gifts for Your Lovely Wife
By Esquire

Nope, not making this up! I was visiting Yahoo.com for some other, entirely unrelated reason such as looking up old ’80s rock videos or trying to find a Chinese restaurant within twenty miles of my house, and this article popped up instead. It’s hard to resist a headline like that, though it does give rise to immediate musings like the title of this post. “A paper bag for her head” comes to mind, or maybe in that case you just use this list to shop for your lovely mistress! Fascinatingly enough, there are no holiday gift shopping recommendations that I could find entitled, “An Assortment of Gifts for Your Handsome Husband.” Apparently there is no cultural need to tack a hawwtness rating to the male spouse; you should probably just be thanking your lucky stars that you have one at all.

After reading through the, er, assortment, it becomes clear that this particular gift guide is actually only useful to those men who are married to a cliche. For the rest of you guys, I strongly suggest you simply ask her what she wants. Because it’s probably not any of the ridiculous shit on this list. The winners, in my opinion:

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Horrors. I’ve Been Going About It Wrong The WHOLE TIME!

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Well, I couldn’t resist this:

Our mission: To find out exactly what men are looking for in a good girlfriend. Impossible? Not exactly. We simply turned to Lisa Daily, syndicated relationship columnist and author of Stop Getting Dumped, who promises to help readers find and marry “the one” in three years or less. Daily followed her own advice and married her dream man, who proposed at the top of the Eiffel Tower after a six-month courtship. Now, she is determined to help other single gals do the same.

Yes, single gals, you’ve come to the right place. Her name is Lisa; my name is Lisa. (Okay, her last name’s most commonly an adjective while mine’s always a proper noun, but the congruence is still uncanny, right?) She got married to her “dream man;” hell, me too! All you jealous, bitter, cat-feeding spinsters on the wrong side of thirty, you know you all want to know–what’s our secret?

Lisa Adjective says, “about the 10 traits every man is looking for in a serious girlfriend:”

1. She has a life of her own — and it’s pretty good to boot.

That sounded reasonable to me at first. You do want somebody who isn’t massively codependent either on you or his or her parents, right? Someone’s who is interested and engaged in life, has dreams and ambitions, etc?

…er, apparently that’s not what that means.

Ladies, this means that you take care of yourself, pay attention to your personal style and find time to hang with your fabulous friends and family.

Oh, okay. A good life of your own means you need to obsess over your appearance and make the people in your life your number one priority. Looks first, service second, anything else about you or your life that you might possibly value or want a distant third!

2. She never makes the first move. …Daily says that she strongly believes women should never, ever pursue a man. Instead, she suggests waiting for the man to initiate and plan dates. Her reasoning: If the woman is always the one calling, she will never know if he is really interested in her or if it’s just convenient for him…Men simply aren’t programmed to think like that and therefore are better suited to the chase, Daily says.

I agree; shy men should be forced to lead lives of quiet and celibate desperation, because clearly their programming got botched at some point and they may not even really be men in the first place. Women who aren’t obsessing every second over whether or not the man they’re with is REALLY that into them obviously have botched programming too. I think we all need to find this programming person and set him or her straight about “quality control.”

3. She is sexy without being trampy. This means something different at the beginning of the relationship than it does down the road, Daily says. In the beginning of courtship, a woman should refrain from making any comments that are overtly sexual. She also flirts by using nonsexual touch like placing her hand on his forearm or even the knee but only briefly. When the relationship gets more serious, and presumably more intimate, sexual touch and public displays of affection are more appropriate. At this point, it’s okay to play footsie under the table.

This must be where I really blow things. I always forget to pretend I am a sweet, shy virgin who nonetheless is so overwhelmed by these strange, new feelings that I periodically cannot stop my hand from every so briefly and hesitantly fluttering towards that bronzed, muscled forearm before I snatch it away with a blush and downcast eyes. Once he’s managed to plead you into bed, though, then you can brush his foot with yours under the table where nobody can see you do it, on purpose. That is sexy! and not trampy! hear that, you sluts?!

4. She waits to have sex.

I said, did you hear that, you sluts?!

…when women have sex, they release a hormone called oxytocin (also referred to as “the cuddle hormone”), which some scientific researchers believe makes women feel extra warm and fuzzy for their sex partners. Daily warns that if women do the deed too soon, they might make too much of a relationship that barely ever existed outside of the bedroom. When you inflate the significance of a relationship, the man often bolts. Daily’s advice is to wait at least one month into the relationship before having sex with your new man.

I recommend using your pill pack to track the days–oops, I guess it’s not very virginal to have a pill pack, huh? So much for that idea!

Just a brief segue–people, if you have no science background or knowledge, please do not attempt to use impressive-sounding chemical words and/or phrases to make your bizarre bullshit sound remotely scientifically-based. Unless you can draw out the structural model for oxytocin for me right now, on demand, and demonstrate the receptor mechanism (preferably with diagrams using all standard chemistry notation and conventions) that occurs in the brain during uptake, just…please, shut up!

Relationship-wise, I’ve already botched the whole thing so badly that there probably isn’t a point in me reading any more. I hide from my family; I have routinely asked a man if he wanted to go out and called or emailed him whenever I had the urge; I have always had sex whenever it was we both felt like having it, both the first time and every subsequent time thereafter; if I have a “personal style,” that would be news to me unless “whatever I feel like wearing to whatever level of grooming I’m in the mood to engage in” is a personal style.

Nobody ever proposed to me atop the Eiffel Tower, though–if you want that experience, maybe you’d better go the Lisa Adjective route. All the Lisa Noun route’ll get you is a cheap trip to the nearest county courthouse. :)

Barack Obama: See If He Really Has YOUR Best Interests In Mind!!

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Yes, and how you find that out is definitely by taking this quiz!

Random gems:

“Some say Barack Obama’s plans to implement sweeping environmental regulations will raise the cost of gas, groceries, heating and air conditioning. Do you favor or oppose Obama’s environmental plans?”

Favor
Oppose

“Some” say..?

“Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your own view?”

Government doing too much.
Government should do more.

In the immortal words of The Daily Show, “Could you be less specific, please?”

“Some say Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes and increase trade barriers are similar to those created by President Herbert Hoover in the 1930s, which contributed to worsening America’s economy. Do you think Obama’s plans will worsen the economy as well, or do you think they will help the economy?”

Worsen the economy
Help the economy

And are you also a McCarthy-era communist, and if so, can we just hang you for treason now..?

It just gets better and better…

“Recently, Barack Obama was asked when he thought life begins, in reference to the issue of abortion. Obama responded by saying that decision was above his paygrade. Knowing that the next president may be able to appoint two or three U.S. Supreme Court Justices, who may be called to make rulings on the issue of Abortion; do you support or oppose a president who does not know when life begins?”

Support
Oppose

And of course, the crown jewel…no, I really didn’t make this up.

If you knew you had a step brother who was living in a slum and barely surviving on $300 a year, would you help them financially?

Yes
No

Would I do anything to not end up on the side of people who come up with this amazingly, ridiculously bad shit..? Pretty much!

Happy Halloween! P.S. No Fatties.

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

It’s the Halloween season again, and I for one am thrilled. Corn mazes, haunted houses, Halloween parties and guys who think they’re funny giving me an easy intro back into blogging. That’s right, it’s the return of perennial Slut-O-Ween opinion pieces.

Over the past week or so, I’ve done a lot of Halloween shopping. Bob, you gigantic nerd, you’re thinking. What are you doing shopping for Halloween stuff in September? You truly are a titan of thunderous stupidity.

Yes, “titan of thunderous stupidity.” That’s where we start. Get ready for a heartbreaking work of staggeringly hilarious slut-shaming genius. Oh, and subtlety. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but Bob’s impressive vocabulary and concern for his precocious step-daughter don’t do a great job of masking his real All-Saint’s-Day-Eve bitch. Can you guess what he’s really saying by the end of this post? Try it!

But we also noticed something else that we found a little annoying. Halloween costumes, it seems, have fallen into two general buckets. First, there are the costumes for men and boys. Second – and this is the far larger of the two buckets, from what I’ve seen – there are the costumes for hookers.

Don’t worry about it too much, Bob. For last year on my campus, boys were stripping down and slutting up for Halloween in record numbers. The end of October in Ohio isn’t great for slutty costumes, so it was a bit nipply in the streets for all genders, if you get my drift.

Shopping for Halloween costumes these days is a lot like hanging out at Dr. John’s, but with less personal lubricant. Everywhere you look, there’s a Naughty Nurse or a Slinky Vampire or a Just Trying To Pay For College Police Officer. It’s crazy.

Can I ask you something? What is the deal with Halloween costumes? /Seinfeld, -10 points for your shitty segues.

Still, though, we were surprised at the fact that this was even an issue we had to deal with at all. Since when did Halloween turn into Dracula-Meets-Caligula? Listen, don’t get me wrong. I’m a guy. As a guy, I’m a huge fan of 22-year-old girls showing up at Halloween parties dressed like they’re going to spend the evening giving lap dances. I’m a little bit upset that this trend arrived on college campuses well after I graduated, but you know, I just need to let that go.

Dracula-meets-Caligula? I’m going to assume that Dracula represents traditional Halloween and Caligula represents slutdom. There are several reasons why this is not a great analogy. First off, it’s well known to any vampire fan that the vampires represent forbidden lust, and that a proper vampire novel should be indistinguishable from erotica. Caligula is not a great example of wanton slutness, despite his sexual perversity, because he was better known for being a tyrant, and his sexual antics were way freakier than just showing too much leg once a year, you know, because he was insane. Also, Cali was a guy and we’re slut shaming women here. But, not all women. Just the fat ones.

The thing about this whole trend toward Hookerween is that, well, this isn’t a college town. There are plenty of women in this town who can pull off a I’m Sorry Did I Drop My Pencil Pirate costume and really rock it. God love ‘em; they make the world go round. But, I’ve been to the mall. I’ve been to Six Flags. I’ve eaten at Old Country Buffet. This town needs somewhat more modest Halloween costumes, and it needs lots of them. Heck, not just this town. Most towns.

Bwaa haa haa! Get it? Fat women in tight clothes make his penis limp! Oh, god, it’s hilarious. This guy is such a great writer, and it’s easy to see why his blurb at the end of the column namechecks both Amazon and Facebook.

The end of the column is only noteable for the shout-out about how attractive his wife is (“Don’t get mad, honey, when I said fat old women can’t hold a candle to hot ass 22 year olds, of course I make an exception for you”), and of course craven groveling to the spouse at the end of a lame column where you use her daughter as an excuse to tell women which ones you think should be skanking it up is the hallmark of a ballsy, excellent humor writer who will certainly be very successful someday.

OH MY god, he did NOT actually say that–

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

He did, he did!

McCain Health-Care Article Fuels New Clash Over Economy

The article, which appeared under McCain’s name, was published in Contingencies magazine, which is produced under the auspices of the American Association of Actuaries. In it, McCain touted his plans for increasing competition in health care as one way to expand coverage and reduce costs.

McCain wrote, “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

That is all.

Unreal.

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Note: In its original format, this article made no sense whatsoever. The items in bold are my annotations, which hopefully will give you an easier time figuring out what’s really going on here than I had the first time I read it. Apologizing in advance for not blockquoting all the article excerpts!

No kids, no jobs for growing number of wives

By Sarah Jio, author of articles such as “Do You Mommy Your Husband?” and “She’s Just Not That Into You–Or Is She,” an article that has such story highlights as Study: Woman better at reading facial expressions, body language and Expert: Men more likely to heed woman’s words, than her actions.

(LifeWire) — “What do you do all day?” is a question Anne Marie Davis, 34, says she gets a lot. This is an intrepid attempt to instill indignant sympathy in the reader at first go, as Sarah is aware that the next few lines are going to inspire most readers to say Well…yeah, given all that, I’m kinda not surprised she gets that question a lot.

Davis, who lives in Lewisville, Texas, isn’t a mother, nor does she telecommute. She is a stay-at-home wife, which makes her something of a pioneer in the post-feminist world. This is very much like someone living in the Bronze Age declaring a flint knapper a pioneer in the Iron Age world, but if the reader doesn’t accept this as fact, they will be unable to swallow the rest of the article at all.

Ten years ago, she was an “overwhelmed” high school English teacher. “I didn’t have time for my husband, ” she says, “and I didn’t have a life.” Given that most of us work jobs that don’t even have extended winter, spring and summer vacations built in like that one and still manage to find time for our significant others and our lives, this is clearly a personal problem. However, we are obviously being invited to empathize.

She presented the idea of staying home to her husband, a Web engineer. “I told him it was something I wanted to do, and he supported it. It was a great relief.” Now, don’t you wish you had someone in your life who when you said, “I’m tired and stressed all the time and I just don’t want to work anymore, please say you’ll take care of me if I just quit my job and sit at home all day, please please please!” just WENT for it..? Aren’t you secretly just DYING of jealousy here..? Isn’t she SO lucky? …are you following the script here yet?

Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless. Here is some background on Dr. Scott:

Sex is something that will keep men happy, Haltzman wrote in the fifth chapter of his new book, “The Secrets of Happily Married Women: How to Get More Out of Your Relationship by Doing Less,” which was released last month. The crux of Haltzman’s book can be gathered from the chapter titles alone: Chapter 1: Know Your Husband, Chapter 2: Nurture His Needs – and Yours, Chapter 4: Talk Less and, of course, Chapter 5: Have Lots of Sex.

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The Journal of Happiness Studies?

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

It’s hard to take seriously, but I’m doing my best. I couldn’t stop myself from doing a Google search on it; one of the first hits was this blog quote:

Yes, there really is a Journal of Happiness Studies — which could either be wonderful news or yet another sign of our imminent demise.”

I’ll buy that.

So anyway, apparently they have just published a study that proves that just like we all knew it would, feminism has destroyed the future happiness of all womankind!!! Naturally, I am paraphrasing–the actual abstract goes like this–

Aspirations, along with attainments, play an important role in shaping well-being. Early in adult life women are more likely than men to fulfill their material goods and family life aspirations; their satisfaction in these domains is correspondingly higher; and so too is their overall happiness. Material goods aspirations refer here to desires for a number of big-ticket consumer goods, such as a home, car, travel abroad and vacation home. In later life these gender differences turn around. Men come closer than women to fulfilling their material goods and family life aspirations, are more satisfied with their financial situation and family life, and are the happier of the two genders. An important factor underlying the turnaround in fulfillment of aspirations for material goods and family life is probably the shift over the course of the life cycle in the relative proportion of women and men in marital and non-marital unions.

Delaying childbearing til the less-fertile years. No-fault divorce. The War Against Boys! Just like all those wise folks have predicted, oh, you may be having fun NOW slutting it up, affirmative-actioning great jobs right out from under the noses of more deserving men, and failing to stick out your marriage because you want to “find yourself,” but just wait til you get old!! Then all those fine young men you screwed over will be sailing their yachts and living in McMansions with their 25-year-old mail-order brides while you sit alone in your assisted living condo bitterly feeding your cats.

Now, I do only have access to the abstract, so perhaps I’m mistaken, but it appears that the authors of this study seem to think that the only thing that changes as people age is the people; as in, the culture and society surrounding said people has been static and identical from the day they were born til the day they reached old age. If that were the case, then certainly you would have a leg to stand on if you attempted to explain all happiness imbalances in simplistic terms of who is married and who isn’t, for instance. However, I think it’s really safe to say that the world of my grandmother’s birth was excruciatingly different than the world that existed when she was a young woman in her twenties in terms of what was offered to women and men respectively, and also from the world that a young woman in her twenties today was born in, and also the world of today, this moment, when my grandmother would be in her seventies.

My grandmother was born in 1933. Actually, that was quite a year as far as world events went–Franklin Roosevelt took office, the first concentration camp was opened in Germany, and the original King Kong movie was released starring Fay Wray, among other things. However, I want to look at this from the perspective of how the world has changed for women, so:

When my grandmother was born, women had only been allowed to vote in the United States for thirteen years. There was no Planned Parenthood; birth control information was legally considered “obscenity.” Many states had laws mandating that if men were available, women couldn’t legally work, or if a woman’s husband worked, she couldn’t, which meant that she either lived at home, unemployed, or she married, period. If she did work, it was almost always at a very poorly paid job with little to no hope of advancement. Less than ten percent of women held college degrees and the vast majority of colleges, especially the most prestigious, forbade women to apply for admittance. My grandmother’s twenties were spent primarily in the 1950′s. The FDA still had not approved birth control pills for sale in the United States, to any woman, married or not. Many jobs were still restricted or outright banned for women to hold. Many colleges, especially Ivy League and other prestigious universities, still forbade women to apply for admittance.

A woman in her twenties, now, was likely born in the 1980′s. At the time of her birth, the Civil Rights Act forbidding discrimination based on sex in job hiring and pay was nearly twenty years old. Abortion had been legal and Title IX had been around for over ten years and there were no legal restrictions on birth control pills. By 1985 every state had adopted no-fault divorce. Marital rape had been legally acknowledged to exist and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act has been passed. And now, in the new millenium, when she is actually in her twenties–31% of women her age have at least a bachelor’s degree, more than the number of men with degrees. Over 60% of women are in the job force, only 13% less than the number of men. Nearly half of all women of childbearing years are childless, the majority by choice.

So–a woman near the end of her life, today, was given virtually no opportunities for higher education or a career, choice in how many children she had or when–marriage was clearly the best choice for her, rather than any particular man being presented as the best choice for her. A man her age, however, had many more options. The chances of him finding himself, at the end of his life, in the situation he wants to be in is going to be correspondingly higher; hers are going to be overwhelmingly much more a matter of chance.

But a woman in her twenties today–a woman who will have financial means and choices both now and near the end of her life, who if she married and stayed married, likely did so because of the man, not because of a lack of choice, who was able to choose how many or if any children she had–I suspect that there will be a strong shift upward in terms of the level of happiness these women display near the end of their lives. Hopefully the Journal will still be around and studying away, and maybe will have lost its rather unfortunately obvious agenda in terms of interpreting study results in the process.