Re: The New Girl Order

On Oct 30, 5:27 pm, Jill <perspicaci...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
City Journalhttp://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_new_girl_order.html

The New Girl Order
Kay S. Hymowitz

The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with
unintended consequences.

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 Tomáš 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!

.

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