Unhappily ever after

Noer's list went on. Rosie, your riveting bride, will be less likely to bear you children. If she does, she'll be unhappy because wealthier women are "used to 'a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life,'" and will therefore be dismayed at the un-fun and un-entertaining responsibilities of child-rearing. If you marry one of these witches, "Your house will be dirtier," since studies show that a woman who makes more than $15 an hour "will do 1.9 hours less housework a week." Perhaps the saddest result of your careerist heterosexual union is that "You're more likely to fall ill." That because according to research he's unearthed, wives who work more than 40 hours a week "do not have adequate time to monitor their husband's [sic] health and healthy behavior, to manage their husband's [sic] emotional well-being or buffer his workplace stress."

These daggers of poetic injustice were accompanied by photos of a virile bearded man looking glum, a creamy white shag carpet dusted with a squalid layer of cheez-kurls, unvacuumed thanks to those 1.9 hours of undone housework, and a working mother so tormented by her lot that a solitary, glycerine tear slurked down her cheek.

The piece was so utterly ludicrous that for some, it was hard to do much but laugh. "I'm deeply grateful to Forbes Magazine for saving many women the trouble of dealing with men who can't tolerate equal partnerships, take care of their own health, clean up after themselves or have the sexual confidence to survive, other than a double standard of sexual behavior," wrote Gloria Steinem in an e-mail. "Since a disproportionate number of such unconfident and boring guys apparently read Forbes, the magazine has performed a real service."

Steinem wasn't the only reader to raise her eyebrows and emit a pitying chuckle. Linda Hirshman, who has recently urged women to stay in the workforce and make their families work by limiting the number of children they have, "marrying down," and negotiating for truly equitable divisions of domestic work, is essentially Michael Noer's worst nightmare. Her response to the story was to drily note that "women are not natural slaves, as so many sociobiologists would like us to believe. Ergo, they get harder to bargain with as they get more resources. This is actually good news. If men want doormats, they will have to marry dummies and anticipate dependents. There's a price to acquiring someone willing to take a bad bargain."

And while many of the successful women that Forbes covers were unavailable for comment in this third week of August (on vacation, undoubtedly engaging in the kind of "fun, active, entertaining life" that makes them sulky about domestic drudgery), some were in their offices  and pissed. "It's incredibly disappointing to see them publish a piece that makes such gross generalizations about working women," said Travelocity president and CEO Michelle Peluso, who has been featured in Forbes and who said she planned to approach the magazine directly about the piece. "Especially considering how hard women have worked to balance being great wives, mothers, managers, employees and individuals. This article feels like one that would have been behind the times were it published in 1950, nevermind 2006."

If the whole debacle feels pre-historicized, there's a reason for it, said Hirshman by phone. In part, its anachronistic feel comes from the fact that it is based on backward-looking data rather than anything that might account for or anticipate changing social and sexual attitudes. In this, it resembles the famous Newsweek piece claiming that women over 35 had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married, a story that was recently recanted 20 years too late.

"Even assuming [Noer] was relying on good data, all it is is information from the past, which is that women's expectations rose while husbands' behaviors did not change," said Hirshman. "If you have to choose between acting like a jerk and marrying a bimbo on one hand and acting like a mensch and marrying a Harvard grad on the other, then I think men may change their behavior." A piece like Noer's, which assumed that men are not capable of changing, not capable, say, of taking on more "non-market" domestic work or being otherwise equal partners who enjoy robust relationships, is, Hirshman argued, "very misanthropic and anti-male."

She's right. But what's also right is that this piece -- that, yes, treated men like limp, pasty, hideous creatures who can only be happy if they feel dominant and unthreatened -- was actually dressed up as purely anti-female.

And not just dressed up -- tailored to his ideological specifications. At one point, while making his point that high-earning women aren't as motivated to marry, Noer admitted that the same statistics he was relying on showed that for black women, the opposite was true. This serious disqualifier -- that the assertion does not seem to be true for a large chunk of the female population -- did not deter him. For his purposes, black women did not seem to count. Neither did not-rich ones. As he so poetically put it, "we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a 'career girl' has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year."

At another point in his story, Noer also conceded that some of the studies cited "have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of 'low marital quality.'" To translate this into a completely common-sense observation: Women who work tend to have a better ability to get out of rotten marriages than women who do not work and have no means to support themselves. Guess what? This is great news.

But look at what all this hemming and hawing and all the misandry of Noer's argument got boiled down to. After all, it was not headlined "Don't Marry White Career Girls" or "If You Are Really Self-Loathing and Weak, Try to Find Someone Who Doesn't Work and Will Consent to Live With You Out of Financial Desperation for the Rest of Her Life."

No. Just "Don't Marry Career Women." It's a dinosaur. And what's scary is that it has walked the earth again.

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