Re: The trouble with men
- From: Jaszmin <.97531rc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:49:53 -0500
I'm right here darlin' . Why don't you send me your
picture? This is interesting even if Molly Watson wrote
it.
Mike Rice
On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 20:42:52 -0400, "GWhyte" <gwhyte3003@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>The trouble with men
>Molly Watson
>http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=6759&page=1
>
>Women who put off getting pregnant until past their mid-thirties are
>'defying nature and risk the heartbreak of infertility, miscarriage or other
>complications,' began an article in my morning paper a week or so ago. I put
>down my toast and read on with the grim fascination of someone who turned 30
>this summer and is beginning to feel the first twinges of anxiety about the
>vigour of her own ovaries.
>
>The piece quoted a woman called Susan Bewley, a consultant obstetrician and
>one of the authors of a report on fertility in the British Medical Journal.
>'Women want to "have it all" but biology is unchanged,' said Bewley. 'The
>best time to have a baby is up to 35. It always was and it always will be.
>Paradoxically, the availability of IVF may lull women into infertility.'
>
>Bewley went on to talk about the whopping cost that older women having less
>healthy babies is putting on the National Health Service, and concluded that
>women must be persuaded to have babies younger. 'I don't want to blame women
>or make them feel anxious or frightened,' she said. 'The reasons for these
>difficulties lie not with women but with a distorted and uninformed view
>from society, employers and health planners.'
>
>How nice of Dr Bewley not to blame us for what she calls 'the epidemic of
>delayed pregnancy', but I think she has the wrong end of the stick. Women of
>my age have not been lulled into a false sense of fertility. We aren't yet
>frightened - I hear outright fear kicks in at 40 - but we are well aware of
>the dangers of trying to have children once we're past our reproductive
>prime. We're informed and beginning to be concerned.
>
>We're also pretty clued up about why our generation is delaying having
>children - and it has nothing to do with being failed by employers or health
>planners. Nor, despite endless newspaper features on the subject, does it
>have much to do with business women putting careers before babies. In my
>experience, the root cause of the epidemic lies with a collective failure of
>nerve among men our age.
>
>How many young women do you know, happily married or the equivalent, who are
>wilfully refusing to have children now at the risk of running the gauntlet
>of IVF in five years time? Quite.
>
>Dr Bewley accuses women of 'playing Russian roulette' with nature, but the
>point is we're only interested in having babies if they are fathered by men
>we love and who are going to stick around and enjoy bringing the little
>brutes up. By the time they hit their mid-thirties even the most dedicated
>career women are ready to do some nesting - even if that means grudgingly
>accepting that our careers are more likely to suffer than our mate's and
>that we'll probably end up changing most of the nappies. The trouble is that
>very few of our male contemporaries are what you might call twig in beak.
>
>There's many a slip betwixt having an amusing, attractive boyfriend and the
>pair of you committing to the long haul of marriage and children. I know
>dozens of delightful men of my age and considerably older who say they want
>to get married one day. They will even go as far as talking about how
>comparatively young their own fathers were when they sired them, and fret
>about how geriatric they'll be by the time they have a son of their own to
>kick a ball about with. Yet they are careful to preserve the idea of getting
>married and/or settling down as purely hypothetical and entirely out of
>their control - as though a meteorite might hit the earth one day and when
>they come to they'll be at the altar. In the meantime they concentrate on
>having as much immediate fun as they can and dodge thinking about next month
>or next year for as long as possible.
>
>And who can blame them? If our biological clocks didn't jump-start us into
>wanting babies, I think many women would do the same. Ours is a generation
>that has grown up with the luxury of being able to pretty much please
>ourselves - especially when it comes to our romantic lives. The power of
>parental pressure and societal disapproval has all but evaporated. Nobody is
>made an honest woman of anymore. These days the only reason to marry or
>commit to anyone is because you really, really want to and you think you're
>going to carry on really wanting to. Yet the whole art of pleasing oneself
>is remaining free to do just that - something to which the arrival of a
>small child could prove an obstacle.
>
>No one ever said biology was fair. I have accepted that in real terms I am
>suddenly much older than my male friends. When a great friend who turned 30
>within weeks of me came round to discuss our shared milestone, it emerged
>that I was already bracing myself for my 40th birthday. He, needless to say,
>still thought of himself as being in his early twenties and claimed to have
>never considered a future with his girlfriend of two years' standing because
>he 'wasn't ready for all that'. Of course not every man his age is in a
>state of prolonged adolescence, but a critical mass of them are. I recently
>went to a wedding where the presiding vicar actually congratulated the groom
>on having enough 'backbone' to commit to marriage while his spineless
>contemporaries squirmed in their pews.
>
>I don't know a woman of my age whose version of living happily ever after
>fundamentally hinges on becoming editor, or senior partner, or surgeon, or
>leading counsel. But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who
>seem to view marriage as the last thing they'll do before they die, we have
>little option but to wait, busy ourselves with making the most of our
>careers and hope that Mr Non-Phobic Right eventually makes himself known to
>us before our ovaries pack up completely.
>
>As I finished my breakfast and contemplated my chances of a decade of
>heartbreak, I wondered whether women will be the only losers in this
>epidemic of delayed pregnancies. Isn't it possible that, just as I have no
>interest in a relationship with someone significantly older than me, when
>the men of my generation get to the dark side of 40 they'll tire of dating
>girls who are now revising for their GCSEs? They'll still have a fighting
>chance of producing a few nippers, of course - but will they do it by
>settling for a much younger companion who falls far short of the
>intellectually equal but by now hopelessly barren soulmate they went out
>with in their thirties?
>
>What can Dr Bewley and co. do to get them ready for fatherhood before their
>mid-forties? I fear that even Jane Austen wouldn't have the answer to this
>one.
>
.
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- From: GWhyte
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