Photo by Flickr user misocrazy. Used under a Creative Commons license.

According to Polyamory from the Inside Out in polyamory circles "A unicorn is a mythical beast with a horn. It also refers to a pretty and otherwise dateable bi female who is willing to date a couple."  Amanda Marcotte suggests, correctly, that the women conservatives claim are rejecting great guys they're in love with in favor of government assisted single motherhood are equally mythical.

Okay, so this is the theory: Single mothers have plenty of loving men they also adore who are begging for their hands in marriage, but single mothers are choosing “government dependency” (on what, I have no idea, since actual government aid is not enough to live on, if you can get any of it at all) because of their devotion to a mysterious feminist ideology that I have not actually heard any feminists propose. Got it.

Please produce these single mothers. That is all. I want to meet them. They sound like interesting people! I want to ask them about the awesome would-be husbands they rejected. I want to know what mysterious government offices they know about where they can get enough benefits to replace the salary of the great guys they rejected. (Does the government ask you to produce a pay stub from Romeo and agree to match it?) I want to hear about the feminist theorists they read that encouraged them to reject these loving relationships, and I want to know why they found these theorists so much more convincing than other feminists like myself that think that relationships that work for you are awesome. Since these women are, according to conservatives, the reason for the high rates of single motherhood in our country, they should be easy to find.

Source: Pandagon

I'd be curious to meet one of these women too. In the last maybe 50 years I've personally known single mothers -- from embittered 1950s "divorcees" collecting full alimony to desperately poor ones agonizing over whether to spend their last dollars on food or earache medicine -- I've never met one who said "Oh, my ex is such a great guy but, you know, federal assistance is just such a great deal I didn't bother to stay with him.

To be honest I think the clue to conservative outrage lies not so much in the dog-whistle racist "welfare queen" form of "government assistance" but instead in less obvious to normal people but still bitterly resented interventions like the 19th Amendment, Griswold v. Connecticut, EEOC, the Lilly Ledbetter Act and other actions governments have taken over the last century that have made it harder to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and otherwise dependent on male custodians.

Anyone out there want to raise their hand and say that like Ann Romney I'm qualified to advise the Republican Party on women's issues?

Because hey, just like Ann Romney I stayed home and raised children.

Hmm... I don't see anyone out their raising their hands.

Kind of makes me wonder if maybe there might be more to representing women's issues than being a stay-at-home parent.

Naah. Couldn't be.

Hilary Rosen must have been completely out of line to suggest Romney isn't the perfect choice to represent all women for her husband's political campaign and, for that matter, her husband's entire political party.

Gotta be.

Update:

Perhaps not surprisingly Linda Hirshman better articulates the point I was trying to make.

Although Ann Romney may be a fine spokesperson on some issues, the dirty little secret of angling for female votes is that while all women’s work, inside or outside the home, has the same worth, as Michelle Obama and Barbara Bush sweetly expressed, all women do not have the same interests. Women who work in the home do not have the same interest in the recovery of the formal job market as women who have to work for pay. Indeed, wage-earning women probably have more in common with their paycheck-dependent male co-workers on the subject of economic recovery than with household laborers such as Ann Romney.

Source: The Washington Post

That sounds about right. When I was a stay-at-home dad I really didn't spend much time thinking directly about either the delightful job markets of the Clinton years or the real-estate bubble. Nor did I think much of the Cheney/Bush-engineered job-market collapses. I instead mostly spent a lot of time stewing about how to manage our household budget while relying on someone else to provide it.

If that had been the sum of my experience of the job market it would not qualify me to say I'd worked a day in my life no matter that as a stay-at-home parent I labored mightily.

Bottom line: In America today most parents are obliged to simultaneously compete for jobs and earn money in the workforce and perform all the duties of domestic consumption at home. To say that Ann Romney's experience in the home qualifies as workforce experience is as out-of-touch as saying that Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital qualifies as parenting.

Candice Wing says

I’ve met a good many mature men looking for affairs and divorced men looking for a second wife. None of them have said – “oh dear me, my wife is old and fat and thus unattractive and therefore I feel compelled to seek a younger and therefore more attractive option”.

Source: Candidly Candice

She goes on to list real reasons men have told her for separating from their partners

• Wife does not want to have sex with me or wife does not want to have enough sex with me.
• Wife does not like me and does not have sex with me.
• We are not compatible and I am looking for more than just boring sex.
• Wife is not affectionate.
• Wife is boring in bed and generally boring.
• Wife is a cranky harpy.
• Wife is lazy and boring with poor grooming and presentation.
• I (or wife) want to divorce.

You can read the whole thing yourself, and if you do you'll get her simple one-paragraph explanation of why the vast majority of men remain perfectly attached to their partners.

Candice has been writing a lot about her own experiences sex, love, and aging. This is another great post along those lines.

While, sure, some people (not just men) really do lose interest specifically over their partner's looks, it happens at any age. And if it happens at any age then emphasizing one age over another is just stereotype reinforcement.

Meanwhile the other reasons you list are much more plausible, particularly for very long-term relationships. Although, hmm, now that I'm thinking about it even that shows up more predictably at certain points in a relationship than at certain ages. For instance I seem to recall there's a spike in divorce rates at the 21-22 year mark whether the couple marries in their late teens or mid 40s. And if you just think about it for a minute, if some people in their 40s find their flames going out while others in their 40s find themselves igniting, then age probably isn't the cut-off factor young people, hack novelists, and pop social scientists keep claiming it is.

Either way I agree with Candice that it's way more complicated than the popular but too-pat stories about husbands leaving because their partners "lose their looks" post-menopause. In fact it's so complicated it might not be happening for specific age-related reasons at all.

Jamelle Bouie hits the nail on the head when it comes to why, exactly, Apple's artificially "intelligent" voice recognition software is more adroit about finding strip joints than reproductive health services: it's got a lot to do with who provides the data-combing infrastructure, and the online data infrastructure, the Siri engine relies on.

In all likelihood, Siri was developed and optimized by a team of all dudes or mostly dudes. And while they made sure to include things that were gender-neutral (like mental health services), there was no effort to approach Siri from the perspective of a woman user. Indeed, reproductive health is a classic male blind spot — it’s women who are “supposed” carry the responsibility for contraceptives. Men, in general, get a pass. The problem with Siri isn’t that the programmers hate women, it’s that they weren’t even on the radar.

Given the extent to which women are underrepresented in the tech industry, you could almost say that this — or something like it — was bound to happen. What’s more, we can expect it to happen again. It might not be Apple, but as long as the background sexism of Silicon Valley remains undisturbed — and reinforced by the industry’s illusion of meritocracy — we can assume that some company will do something else to alienate women.

Source: TAPPED

 

All the lip service in the world, in fact all the good will in the world, won't help the gender blind. Another good example, a software company I worked for in the 1980s paid a branding company on the order of a million dollars to come up with a name for one of their flagship products, one that had been carefully selected for its positive, all-business connotations in multiple languages across multiple continents.

Minutes after they announced the result of their months-long effort the two or three women on the 30-40 person team sent email around saying something like "you realize that's almost exactly the same spelling and pronunciation as a major American tampon brand, right?" No one else on the team had noticed, probably because, being men, none of them had ever consumed those products or even likely shopped down the grocery store aisles where such products are sold. The company went with a different name.

I can't vouch for the consulting firm but whatever else you could say about my employers, neither the company nor the product team leads were malevolently misogynistic. Instead they were just desperately clueless about a thoroughly ordinary element in the lives of roughly 60% of their target demographic!

Anyway, Bouie's right -- as long as women are underrepresented in the production side of the tech industry the industry's going to continue giving itself these unforced errors, own goals, and public-relations black eyes. Fortunately there's a relatively easy way to fix the problem, and at least to some extent it's slowly fixing itself. But even with the best of intentions this is a great illustration of how in the absence of active initiatives institutional inertia will continue to weigh the industry down.