On Oct 31, 10:36 pm, "Avenger"  wrote:
> > >> The New Girl Order
> > >> Kay S. Hymowitz
>
> > >> The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with
> > >> unintended consequences.
>
> No one finds Carrie and the "girls" the least bit attractive or exciting. In
> fact, Carrie was voted by Maxim magazine as the ugliest actress  lol Rene
> aka Bridget Jones was high on the list too :o)
> I've seen a few episodes of Sex in the City and all I can say is that it's
> the most boring stuff I've ever seen. Nothing exciting here and typical of
> what female writers turn out. Carrie is either smoking on the balcony,
> looking in shoe store windows, bullshitting in a cafe with the 3 other bores
> or waiting for " Mr. Big" to show up and relieve her boring life  lol
> It's only male writers who make females interesting and that's because
> they're projecting their fantasies onto them. In reality, females are dull,
> childish and boring, without their use to men as sexual partners, men
> wouldn't even bother with them.
>
>
>
> > >> After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw's
> > >> Frédéric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged
> > >> passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman-clearly her
> > >> daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab
> > >> clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with
> > >> too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based
> > >> daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed
> > >> pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff
> > >> (Yoga? Pilates? Or just a low-carb diet?), and a large, brass-studded
> > >> leather bag, into which she dropped a silver cell phone.
>
> > >> Yes: Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not
> > >> just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may
> > >> still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in
> > >> cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy
> > >> shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and
> > >> you'll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and
> > >> thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers,
> > >> sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about
> > >> relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now
> > >> flat.
>
> > >> Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or
> > >> is it the triumph of planetary feminism? Neither. The globalization of
> > >> the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts
> > >> that are pointing much of the world-with important exceptions,
> > >> including Africa and most of the Middle East-toward a New Girl Order.
> > >> It's a man's world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these
> > >> trends continue, not so much.
>
> > >> Three demographic facts are at the core of the New Girl Order. First,
> > >> women-especially, but not only, in the developed world-are getting
> > >> married and having kids considerably later than ever before. According
> > >> to the UN's World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of
> > >> marriage for women is up two years, from 21.2 in the 1970s to 23.2
> > >> today. In the developed countries, the rise has been considerably
> > >> steeper-from 22.0 to 26.1.
>
> > >> Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case
> > >> you don't get what the big deal is, consider: in 1960, 70 percent of
> > >> American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only
> > >> 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of all American 30-
> > >> to 34-year-olds were unmarried; today, the number is 22 percent. That
> > >> change took about a generation to unfold, but in Asia and Eastern
> > >> Europe the transformation has been much more abrupt. In today's
> > >> Hungary, for instance, 30 percent of women in their early thirties are
> > >> single, compared with 6 percent of their mothers' generation at the
> > >> same age. In South Korea, 40 percent of 30-year-olds are single,
> > >> compared with 14 percent only 20 years ago.
>
> > >> Nothing-new-under-the-sun skeptics point out, correctly, that marrying
> > >> at 27 or 28 was once commonplace for women, at least in the United
> > >> States and parts of northern Europe. The cultural anomaly was the
> > >> 1950s and 60s, when the average age of marriage for women dipped to
> > >> 20-probably because of post-Depression and postwar cocooning. But
> > >> today's single 27-year-old has gone global-and even in the West, she
> > >> differs from her late-marrying great-grandma in fundamental ways that
> > >> bring us to the second piece of the demographic story. Today's
> > >> aspiring middle-class women are gearing up to be part of the paid
> > >> labor market for most of their adult lives; unlike their ancestral
> > >> singles, they're looking for careers, not jobs. And that means they
> > >> need lots of schooling.
>
> > >> In the newly global economy, good jobs go to those with degrees, and
> > >> all over the world, young people, particularly women, are enrolling in
> > >> colleges and universities at unprecedented rates. Between 1960 and
> > >> 2000, the percentages of 20-, 25-, and 30-year-olds enrolled in school
> > >> more than doubled in the U.S., and enrollment in higher education
> > >> doubled throughout Europe. And the fairer sex makes up an increasing
> > >> part of the total. The majority of college students are female in the
> > >> U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Norway, and Australia, to name only a
> > >> few of many places, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more
> > >> traditional countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. In a number
> > >> of European countries, including Denmark, Finland, and France, over
> > >> half of all women between 20 and 24 are in school. The number of
> > >> countries where women constitute the majority of graduate students is
> > >> also growing rapidly.
>
> > >> That educated women are staying single is unsurprising; degreed women
> > >> have always been more likely to marry late, if they marry at all. But
> > >> what has demographers taking notice is the sheer transnational numbers
> > >> of women postponing marriage while they get diplomas and start
> > >> careers. In the U.K., close to a third of 30-year-old college-educated
> > >> women are unmarried; some demographers predict that 30 percent of
> > >> women with university degrees there will remain forever childless. In
> > >> Spain-not so long ago a culturally Catholic country where a girl's
> > >> family would jealously chaperone her until handing her over to a
> > >> husband at 21 or so-women now constitute 54 percent of college
> > >> students, up from 26 percent in 1970, and the average age of first
> > >> birth has risen to nearly 30, which appears to be a world record.
>
> > >> Adding to the contemporary SYF's novelty is the third demographic
> > >> shift: urbanization. American and northern European women in the
> > >> nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might have married at 26, but
> > >> after a long day in the dairy barn or cotton mill, they didn't hang
> > >> out at Studio 54 while looking for Mr. Right (or, as the joke has it,
> > >> Mr. Right for Now). In the past, women who delayed marriage generally
> > >> lived with their parents; they also remained part of the family
> > >> economy, laboring in their parents' shops or farms, or at the very
> > >> least, contributing to the family kitty. A lot of today's
> > >> bachelorettes, on the other hand, move from their native village or
> > >> town to Boston or Berlin or Seoul because that's where the jobs, boys,
> > >> and bars are-and they spend their earnings on themselves.
>
> > >> By the mid-1990s, in countries as diverse as Canada, France, Hungary,
> > >> Ireland, Portugal, and Russia, women were out-urbanizing men, who
> > >> still tended to hang around the home village. When they can afford to,
> > >> these women live alone or with roommates. The Netherlands, for
> > >> instance, is flush with public housing, some of it reserved for young
> > >> students and workers, including lots of women. In the United States,
> > >> the proportion of unmarried twentysomethings living with their parents
> > >> has declined steadily over the last 100 years, despite sky-high rents
> > >> and apartment prices. Even in countries where SYFs can't afford to
> > >> move out of their parents' homes, the anonymity and diversity of city
> > >> life tend to heighten their autonomy. Belgians, notes University of
> > >> Maryland professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, have coined a term-"hotel
> > >> families"-to describe the arrangement.
>
> > >> Combine these trends-delayed marriage, expanded higher education and
> > >> labor-force participation, urbanization-add a global media and some
> > >> disposable income, and voilà: an international lifestyle is born. One
> > >> of its defining characteristics is long hours of office work, often in
> > >> quasi-creative fields like media, fashion, communications, and
> > >> design-areas in which the number of careers has exploded in the global
> > >> economy over the past few decades. The lifestyle also means whole new
> > >> realms of leisure and consumption, often enjoyed with a group of close
> > >> girlfriends: trendy cafés and bars serving sweetish coffee concoctions
> > >> and cocktails; fancy boutiques, malls, and emporiums hawking
> > >> cosmetics, handbags, shoes, and $100-plus buttock-hugging jeans; gyms
> > >> for toning and male-watching; ski resorts and beach hotels; and,
> > >> everywhere, the frustrating hunt for a boyfriend and, though it's an
> > >> ever more vexing subject, a husband.
>
> > >> The SYF lifestyle first appeared in primitive form in the U.S. during
> > >> the seventies, after young women started moving into higher education,
> > >> looking for meaningful work, and delaying marriage. Think of ur-SYF
> > >> Mary Richards, the pre-Jordache career girl played by Mary Tyler
> > >> Moore, whose dates dropped her off-that same evening, of course-at her
> > >> apartment door. By the mid-nineties, such propriety was completely
> > >> passé. Mary had become the vocationally and sexually assertive Carrie
> > >> Bradshaw, and cities like New York had magically transformed into the
> > >> young person's pleasure palace evoked by the hugely popular TV show
> > >> Sex and the City. At around the same time, women in Asia and in
> > >> post-Communist Europe began to join the SYF demographic, too. Not
> > >> surprisingly, they also loved watching themselves, or at least
> > >> Hollywood versions of themselves, on television. Friends, Ally McBeal,
> > >> and Sex and the City became global favorites. In repressive places
> > >> like Singapore and China, which banned SATC, women passed around
> > >> pirated DVDs.
>
> > >> By the late 1990s, the SYF lifestyle was fully globalized. Indeed, you
> > >> might think of SYFs as a sociological Starbucks: no matter how exotic
> > >> the location, there they are, looking and behaving just like the
> > >> American prototype. They shop for shoes in Kyoto, purses in Shanghai,
> > >> jeans in Prague, and lip gloss in Singapore; they sip lattes in
> > >> Dublin, drink cocktails in Chicago, and read lifestyle magazines in
> > >> Kraków; they go to wine tastings in Boston, speed-dating events in
> > >> Amsterdam, yoga classes in Paris, and ski resorts outside Tokyo. "At
> > >> the fashionable Da Capo Café on bustling Kolonaki Square in downtown
> > >> Athens, Greek professionals in their 30s and early 40s luxuriate over
> > >> their iced cappuccinos," a Newsweek International article began last
> > >> year. "Their favorite topic of conversation is, of course,
> > >> relationships: men's reluctance to commit, women's independence, and
> > >> when to have children." Thirty-seven-year-old Eirini Perpovlov, an
> > >> administrative assistant at Associated Press, "loves her work and gets
> > >> her social sustenance from her parea, or close-knit group of
> > >> like-minded friends."
>
> > >> Sure sounds similar to this July's Time story about Vicky, "a
> > >> purposeful, 29-year-old actuary who . . . loves nothing better than a
> > >> party. She and her friends meet so regularly for dinner and at bars
> > >> that she says she never eats at home anymore. As the pictures on her
> > >> blog attest, they also throw regular theme parties to mark holidays
> > >> like Halloween and Christmas, and last year took a holiday to Egypt."
> > >> At the restaurant where the reporter interviews them, Vicky's friends
> > >> gab about snowboarding, iPods, credit-card rates, and a popular resort
> > >> off the coast of Thailand. Vicky, whose motto is "work hard, play
> > >> harder," is not from New York, London, or even Athens; she's from the
> > >> SYF delegation in Beijing, China, a country that appears to be racing
> > >> from rice paddies to sushi bars in less than a generation-at least for
> > >> a privileged minority.
>
> > >> With no children or parents to support, and with serious financial
> > >> hardship a bedtime story told by aging grandparents, SYFs have ignited
> > >> what The Economist calls the "Bridget Jones economy"-named, of course,
> > >> after the book and movie heroine who is perhaps the most famous SYF of
> > >> all. Bridget Jonesers, the magazine says, spend their disposable
> > >> income "on whatever is fashionable, frivolous, and fun," manufactured
> > >> by a bevy of new companies that cater to young women. In 2000, Marian
> > >> Salzman-then the president of the London-based Intelligence Factory,
> > >> an arm of Young & Rubicam-said that by the 1990s, "women living alone
> > >> had come to comprise the strongest consumer bloc in much the same way
> > >> that yuppies did in the 1980s."
>
> > >> SYFs drive the growth of apparel stores devoted to stylish career wear
> > >> like Ann Taylor, which now has more than 800 shops in the United
> > >> States, and the international Zara, with more than 1,000 in 54
> > >> countries. They also spend paychecks at the Paris-based Sephora,
> > >> Europe's largest retailer of perfumes and cosmetics, which targets
> > >> younger women in 14 countries, including such formerly sober redoubts
> > >> as Poland and the Czech Republic. The chain plans to expand to China
> > >> soon. According to Forbes, the Chinese cosmetics market, largely an
> > >> urban phenomenon, was up 17 percent in 2006, and experts predict a
> > >> growth rate of between 15 and 20 percent in upcoming years. Zara
> > >> already has three stores there.
>
> > >> The power of the SYF's designer purse is also at work in the
> > >> entertainment industry. By the mid-1990s, "chick lit," a contemporary
> > >> urban version of the Harlequin romance with the SYF as heroine, was
> > >> topping bestseller lists in England and the United States. Now chick
> > >> lit has spread all over the world. The books of the Irish writer
> > >> Marian Keyes, one of the first and most successful chick-litterateurs,
> > >> appear in 29 languages. The Devil Wears Prada was an international hit
> > >> as both a book (by Lauren Weisberger) and a movie (starring Meryl
> > >> Streep). Meantime, the television industry is seeking to satisfy the
> > >> SYF's appetite for single heroines with Sex and the City clones like
> > >> The Marrying Type in South Korea and The Balzac Age in Russia.
>
> > >> Bridget Jonesers are also remaking the travel industry, especially in
> > >> Asia. A 2005 report from MasterCard finds that women take four out of
> > >> every ten trips in the Asia-Pacific region-up from one in ten back in
> > >> the mid-1970s. While American women think about nature, adventure, or
> > >> culture when choosing their travel destinations, says MasterCard,
> > >> Asian women look for shopping, resorts, and, most of all, spas. Female
> > >> travelers have led to what the report calls the "spa-ification of the
> > >> Asian hotel industry." That industry is growing at a spectacular
> > >> rate-200 percent annually.
>
> > >> And now the maturing Bridget Jones economy has begun to feature
> > >> big-ticket items. In 2003, the Diamond Trading Company introduced the
> > >> "right-hand ring," a diamond for women with no marital prospects but
> > >> longing for a rock. ("Your left hand is your heart; your right hand is
> > >> your voice," one ad explains.) In some SYF capitals, women are moving
> > >> into the real-estate market. Canadian single women are buying homes at
> > >> twice the rate of single men. The National Association of Realtors
> > >> reports that in the U.S. last year, single women made up 22 percent of
> > >> the real-estate market, compared with a paltry 9 percent for single
> > >> men. The median age for first-time female buyers: 32. The real-estate
> > >> firm Coldwell Banker is making eyes at these young buyers with a new
> > >> motto, "Your perfect partner since 1906," while Lowe's, the
> > >> home-renovation giant, is offering classes especially for them. SYFs
> > >> are also looking for wheels, and manufacturers are designing autos and
> > >> accessories with them in mind. In Japan, Nissan has introduced the
> > >> Pino, which has seat covers festooned with stars and a red CD player
> > >> shaped like a pair of lips. It comes in one of two colors: "milk tea
> > >> beige" and pink.
>
> > >> Japan presents a striking example of the sudden rise of the New Girl
> > >> Order outside the U.S. and Western Europe. As recently as the nation's
> > >> boom years in the 1980s, the dominant image of the Japanese woman was
> > >> of the housewife, or sengyoshufu, who doted on her young children,
> > >> intently prepared older ones for the world economy, and waited on the
> > >> man of the house after his 16-hour day at the office. She still
> > >> exists, of course, but about a decade ago she met her nemesis: the
> > >> Japanese SYF. Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Japanese women
> > >> between 25 and 29 who were unmarried soared from 40 to 54 percent;
> > >> even more remarkable was the number of 30- to 34-year-old females who
> > >> were unmarried, which rocketed from 14 to 27 percent. Because of
> > >> Tokyo's expensive real-estate market, a good many of these young
> > >> single women have shacked up with their parents, leading a prominent
> > >> sociologist to brand them "parasite singles." The derogatory term took
> > >> off, but the girls weren't disturbed; according to USA Today, many
> > >> proudly printed up business cards bearing their new title.
>
> > >> The New Girl Order may represent a disruptive transformation for a
> > >> deeply traditional society, but Japanese women sure seem to be
> > >> enjoying the single life. Older singles who can afford it have even
> > >> been buying their own apartments. One of them, 37-year-old Junko
> > >> Sakai, wrote a best-selling plaint called The Howl of the Loser Dogs,
> > >> a title that co-opts the term makeinu-"loser"-once commonly used to
> > >> describe husbandless 30-year-olds. "Society may call us dogs," she
> > >> writes, "but we are happy and independent." Today's Japanese SYFs are
> > >> world-class shoppers, and though they must still fight workplace
> > >> discrimination and have limited career tracks-particularly if they
> > >> aren't working for Westernized companies-they're somehow managing to
> > >> earn enough yen to keep the country's many Vuitton, Burberry, and
> > >> Issey Miyake boutiques buzzing. Not so long ago, Japanese hotels
> > >> wouldn't serve women traveling alone, in part because they suspected
> > >> that the guests might be spinsters intent on hurling themselves off
> > >> balconies to end their desperate solitude. Today, the losers are
> > >> happily checking in at Japanese mountain lodges, not to mention
> > >> Australian spas, Vietnamese hotels, and Hawaiian beach resorts.
>
> > >> And unlike their foreign counterparts in the New Girl Order, Japanese
> > >> singles don't seem to be worrying much about finding Mr. Right. A
> > >> majority of Japanese single women between 25 and 54 say that they'd be
> > >> just as happy never to marry. Peggy Orenstein, writing in the New York
> > >> Times Magazine in 2001, noted that Japanese women find American-style
> > >> sentimentality about marriage puzzling. Yoko Harruka, a television
> > >> personality and author of a book called I Won't Get Married-written
> > >> after she realized that her then-fiancé expected her to quit her
> > >> career and serve him tea-says that her countrymen propose with lines
> > >> like, "I want you to cook miso soup for me for the rest of my life."
> > >> Japanese SYFs complain that men don't show affection and expect women
> > >> to cook dinner obediently while they sit on their duffs reading the
> > >> paper. Is it any wonder that the women prefer Burberry?
>
> > >> Post-Communist Europe is also going through the shock of the New Girl
> > >> Order. Under Communist rule, women tended to marry and have kids
> > >> early. In the late eighties, the mean age of first birth in East
> > >> Germany, for instance, was 24.7, far lower than the West German
> > >> average of 28.3. According to Tomás Sobotka of the Vienna Institute of
> > >> Demography, young people had plenty of reasons to schedule an early
> > >> wedding day. Tying the knot was the only way to gain independence from
> > >> parents, since married couples could get an apartment, while singles
> > >> could not. Furthermore, access to modern contraception, which the
> > >> state proved either unable or unwilling to produce at affordable
> > >> prices, was limited. Marriages frequently began as the result of
> > >> unplanned pregnancies.
>
> > >> And then the Wall came down. The free market launched shiny new job
> > >> opportunities, making higher education more valuable than under
> > >> Communist regimes, which had apportioned jobs and degrees. Suddenly, a
> > >> young Polish or Hungarian woman might imagine having a career, and
> > >> some fun at the same time. In cities like Warsaw and Budapest, young
> > >> adults can find pleasures completely unknown to previous generations
> > >> of singles. In one respect, Eastern European and Russian SYFs were
> > >> better equipped than Japanese ones for the new order. The strong
> > >> single woman, an invisible figure in Japan, has long been a prominent
> > >> character in the social landscape of Eastern Europe and Russia, a
> > >> legacy, doubtless, of the Communist-era emphasis on egalitarianism
> > >> (however inconsistently applied) and the massive male casualties of
> > >> World War II.
>
> > >> Not that the post-Communist SYF is any happier with the husband
> > >> material than her Japanese counterpart is. Eastern European gals
> > >> complain about men overindulged by widowed mothers and unable to adapt
> > >> to the new economy. According to The Economist, many towns in what
> > >> used to be East Germany now face Frauenmangel-a lack of women-as SYFs
> > >> who excelled in school have moved west for jobs, leaving the poorly
> > >> performing men behind. In some towns, the ratio is just 40 women to
> > >> 100 men. Women constitute the majority of both high school and college
> > >> graduates in Poland. Though Russian women haven't joined the new order
> > >> to the same extent, they're also grumbling about the men. In Russian
> > >> TV's The Balzac Age, which chronicles the adventures of four single
> > >> thirtysomething women, Alla, a high-achieving yuppie attorney, calls a
> > >> handyman for help in her apartment. The two-to their mutual
> > >> horror-recognize each other as former high school sweethearts, now
> > >> moving in utterly different social universes.
>
> > >> There's much to admire in the New Girl Order-and not just the
> > >> previously hidden cleavage. Consider the lives most likely led by the
> > >> mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on of the
> > >> fashionista at the Warsaw airport or of the hard-partying Beijing
> > >> actuary. Those women reached adulthood, which usually meant 18 or even
> > >> younger; married guys from their village, or, if they were
> > >> particularly daring, from the village across the river; and then had
> > >> kids-end of story, except for maybe some goat milking, rice planting,
> > >> or, in urban areas, shop tending. The New Girl Order means good-bye to
> > >> such limitations. It means the possibility of more varied lives, of
> > >> more expansively nourished aspirations. It also means a richer world.
> > >> SYFs bring ambition, energy, and innovation to the economy, both local
> > >> and global; they simultaneously promote and enjoy what author Brink
> > >> Lindsey calls "the age of abundance." The SYF, in sum, represents a
> > >> dramatic advance in personal freedom and wealth.
>
> > >> But as with any momentous social change, the New Girl Order comes with
> > >> costs-in this case, profound ones. The globalized SYF upends centuries
> > >> of cultural traditions. However limiting, those traditions shaped how
> > >> families formed and the next generation grew up. So it makes sense
> > >> that the SYF is partly to blame for a worldwide drop in fertility
> > >> rates. To keep a population stable, or at its "replacement level,"
> > >> women must have an average of at least 2.1 children. Under the New
> > >> Girl Order, though, women delay marriage and childbearing, which
> > >> itself tends to reduce the number of kids, and sometimes-because the
> > >> opportunity costs of children are much higher for educated women-they
> > >> forgo them altogether. Save Albania, no European country stood at or
> > >> above replacement levels in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live
> > >> in countries with fertility rates below 1.5, and even that number is
> > >> inflated by a disproportionately high fertility rate among Muslim
> > >> immigrants. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries-Italy, Spain,
> > >> and Poland-have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. Much of Asia
> > >> looks similar. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong,
> > >> according to the CIA's World Factbook, at 0.98 has broken the barrier
> > >> of one child per woman.
>
> > >> For many, fertility decline seems to be one more reason to celebrate
> > >> the New Girl Order. Fewer people means fewer carbon footprints, after
> > >> all, and thus potential environmental relief. But while we're waiting
> > >> for the temperature to drop a bit, economies will plunge in ways that
> > >> will be extremely difficult to manage-and that, ironically, will
> > >> likely spell the SYF lifestyle's demise. As Philip Longman explains in
> > >> his important book The Empty Cradle, dramatic declines in fertility
> > >> rates equal aging and eventually shriveling populations. Japan now has
> > >> one of the oldest populations in the world-one-third of its
> > >> population, demographers predict, will be over 60 within a decade.
> > >> True, fertility decline often spurs a temporary economic boost, as
> > >> more women enter the workforce and increase income and spending, as
> > >> was the case in 1980s Japan. In time, though, those women-and their
> > >> male peers-will get old and need pensions and more health care.
>
> > >> And who will pay for that? With fewer children, the labor force
> > >> shrinks, and so do tax receipts. Europe today has 35 pensioners for
> > >> every 100 workers, Longman points out. By 2050, those 100 will be
> > >> responsible for 75 pensioners; in Spain and Italy, the ratio of
> > >> workers to pensioners will be a disastrous one-to-one. Adding to the
> > >> economic threat, seniors with few or no children are more likely to
> > >> look to the state for support than are elderly people with more
> > >> children. The final irony is that the ambitious, hardworking SYF will
> > >> have created a world where her children, should she have them, will
> > >> need to work even harder in order to support her in her golden years.
>
> > >> Aging populations present other problems. For one thing, innovation
> > >> and technological breakthroughs tend to be a young person's game-think
> > >> of the young Turks of the information technology revolution. Fewer
> > >> young workers and higher tax burdens don't make a good recipe for
> > >> innovation and growth. Also, having fewer people leads to declining
> > >> markets, and thus less business investment and formation. Where would
> > >> you want to expand your cosmetics business: Ireland, where the
> > >> population continues to renew itself, or Japan, where it is imploding?
>
> > >> And finally, the New Girl Order has given birth to a worrying
> > >> ambivalence toward domestic life and the men who would help create it.
> > >> Many analysts argue that today's women of childbearing age would have
> > >> more kids if only their countries provided generous benefits for
> > >> working mothers, as they do in Sweden and France. And it's true that
> > >> those two countries have seen fertility rates inch up toward
> > >> replacement levels in recent years. But in countries newly entering
> > >> the New Girl Order, what SYFs complain about isn't so much a gap
> > >> between work and family life as a chasm between their own aspirations
> > >> and those of the men who'd be their husbands (remember those Japanese
> > >> women skeptical of a future cooking miso soup). Adding to the SYF's
> > >> alienation from domesticity is another glaring fact usually ignored by
> > >> demographers: the New Girl Order is fun. Why get married when you can
> > >> party on?
>
> > >> That raises an interesting question: Why are SYFs in the United
> > >> States-the Rome of the New Girl Order-still so interested in marriage?
> > >> By large margins, surveys suggest, American women want to marry and
> > >> have kids. Indeed, our fertility rates, though lower than replacement
> > >> level among college-educated women, are still healthier than those in
> > >> most SYF countries (including Sweden and France). The answer may be
> > >> that the family has always been essential ballast to the
> > >> individualism, diversity, mobility, and sheer giddiness of American
> > >> life. It helps that the U.S., like northwestern Europe, has a long
> > >> tradition of "companionate marriage"-that is, marriage based not on
> > >> strict roles but on common interests and mutual affection.
> > >> Companionate marriage always rested on the assumption of female
> > >> equality. Yet countries like Japan are joining the new order with no
> > >> history of companionate relations, and when it comes to adapting to
> > >> the new order, the cultural cupboard is bare. A number of analysts,
> > >> including demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, have also argued that it is
> > >> America's religiousness that explains our relatively robust fertility,
> > >> though the Polish fertility decline raises questions about that
> > >> explanation.
>
> > >> It's by no means certain that Americans will remain exceptional in
> > >> this regard. The most recent census data show a "sharp increase," over
> > >> just the past six years, in the percentage of Americans in their
> > >> twenties who have never married. Every year sees more books
> > >> celebrating the SYF life, boasting titles like Singular Existence and
> > >> Living Alone and Loving It. And SYFs will increasingly find themselves
> > >> in a disappointing marriage pool. The New York Times excited
> > >> considerable discussion this summer with a front-page article
> > >> announcing that young women working full-time in several cities were
> > >> now outearning their male counterparts. A historically unprecedented
> > >> trend like this is bound to have a further impact on relations between
> > >> the sexes and on marriage and childbearing rates.
>
> > >> Still, for now, women don't seem too worried about the New Girl
> > >> Order's downside. On the contrary. The order marches on, as one domino
> > >> after another falls to its pleasures and aspirations. Now, the
> > >> Singapore Times tells us, young women in Vietnam are suddenly putting
> > >> off marriage because they "want to have some fun"-and fertility rates
> > >> have plummeted from 3.8 children in 1998 to 2.1 in 2006.
>
> > >> And then there's India. "The Gen Now bachelorette brigade is in no
> > >> hurry to tie the knot," reports the India Tribune. "They're single,
> > >> independent, and happy." Young urbanites are pushing up sales of
> > >> branded apparel; Indian chick lit, along with Cosmopolitan and Vogue,
> > >> flies out of shops in Delhi and Mumbai. Amazingly enough, fertility
> > >> rates have dropped below replacement level in several of India's major
> > >> cities, thanks in part to aspirant fashionistas. If in
> > >> India-India!-the New Girl Order can reduce population growth, then
> > >> perhaps nothing is beyond its powers. At the very least, the Indian
> > >> experiment gives new meaning to the phrase "shop till you drop."
>
> > >> Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the
> > >> William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book,
> > >> Marriage and Caste in America, is a collection of her City Journal
> > >> essays.
>
> > >Shoot, Kay Hymowitz didn't have to expend so much time and energy
> > >"informing" her readership that men and boys are useless. That's not
> > >a new observation.
>
> > >Everyone "knows" that. Everyone has "known" that for years. That's
> > >all the news media -- especially the cupcake contingent -- has had to
> > >say about sex and gender for years: women are strong and good and men
> > >are weak and bad.
>
> > >So women and girls the world over just want to have fun? That's all
> > >that men and boys have ever wanted also.
>
> > >Except that when men and boys concentrate on having "fun" to the
> > >exclusion of mature pastimes such as marriage and family, women and
> > >girls accuse them of engaging in a childish flight from adult
> > >responsibility.
>
> > >But I realize that when women and girls engage in that same flight,
> > >THAT is regarded not as immaturity but as EMPOWERMENT. Everyone
> > >realizes that
>
> > >Shoot. Females are just plain EVIL! Females are evil and that's all
> > >that they are!
>
> > I don't think of myself as evil...well not most of the time,
>
> Oh, all right.
>
> > but I
> > think that was the gist of the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible so
> > you may be on to something.
>
> Yeah.  Adam and Eve.  The Bible.  What you said.
>
> > Yes, the article pretty much was a waste of time on MZ. Hymowitz's
> > part but I hoped the part about girls in Warsaw and Japan and China,
> > etc. might catch Polish Knight's attention. Perhaps his wife wasn't a
> > Carrie Bradshaw but in the future American men probably won't be so
> > lucky in their quests for foreign born brides.
>
> I  personally see no difference in a female's desire to get a man than it
> was 30 years ago. Many of those girls from the East actually go to other
> countries to meet men and they pay their own way (unlike US bitch
> princesses) Men will actually be better off from all this because by not
> marrying they will have the money to be comfortable later in life while the
> only thing females do is spent their money on junk. Females spend, men save,
> don't believe those distorted statistics you read about females buying
> homes, cars  etc Buying something and being able to keep it are two
> different things. But most of these good time girls end up living in some
> crappy place with a roomate or two and even then can't pay the rent because
> they spent so much on vacations, clothes and other useless junk.
>
>  The EVIL is spreading
>
> > around the globe and according to Hymowitz, at a fairly rapid pace.
>
> Maybe it's the Illuminati.
>
> I'm half-serious too.  I'm a little more receptive to conspiracy
> theories than I used to be.  A little more.
>
> It's just good old fashioned female stupidity and childlishness. At about
> the age of 28 when they get the first crow's foot and grey hair and notice
> that younger females are giving them competition they panic and start
> looking around for a man to grab before it's too late. Men, on the other
> hand, have plenty of time and are looking for young fresh females and are
> marrying (if at all) at old ages. Average age of men marrying in the UK is
> 36. My wife, for example, hasn't even been born yet :o)
>
> I don't really know if there's such a thing as the Illuminati or if it/
> they could have as much power as urban legend insists, but the
> disappearance of the word "shame" from everyone's lexicon -- the
> disappearance of the CONCEPT of shame is so complete and took place in
> such a short period of time that it really does seem as though someone
> just flicked a switch
>
> No switch. Females have always been shameless hussies, they just hid it
> better in the past. By men allowing them all this freedom today to behave
> like they really are like, it  is sort a man's way of weeding out the really
> worthless ones. What female's believed was freedom and liberation was really
> a man's way of making them expose their real selves. You fell for it girls,
> men have seen you as you are and will not marry  haha You're had your few
> years of fun and now you must resign yourself to spinsterism and cats  while
> men go for the next crop of young girls :o) Oh, and don't worry about your
> old age because we have that taken care of with the new euthanasia laws :o)




You amaze me, Avenger.

You just got through a very length and very rational post in which you
patiently explained that everything that seemed so sinister to me is
just real life the way it is.

You didn't even blame ANYTHING on the Jews.  Not one single thing.
You mean that this is just life the way it is and NONE of it is the
fault of the Jews?