Photo by Flickr user Providence Public Library. Used under a Creative Commons license.

No.  Seriously!  If it's right and proper for men to work only 8 hours a day how can it possibly be decadent for women to prefer to work fewer than 16 hours a days serving those men?

Matthew Yglesias rightly flosses Ross Douthat's rear end with barbed wire over his claim that women choose work over marriage and babies because they're decadent:

You show up, you do your work, you get your money, and then you get your time off in which you can do what you want. In a man's voice, the basic vision here would really be exceptional bourgeois. It's not a decadent slacker fantasy, it's a basic work hard and play hard quest for individual autonomy. And it's obviously true that having children—especially a large number of children—would tend to compromise that quest, especially without a male partner willing to fully bear his share of the load. But since you don't need to find a partner as a teenager for economic support, it's easy to spend a bunch of adult years deliberately avoiding settling down (see Hannah Rosin's "Boys on the Side") and then have kids later in life but not so many kids as to be unmanageable.

Source: Slate Magazine

 That's exactly right.  You can argue, as Douthat and other gender conservatives do, that it's the natural order of things for women to become dependent on custodial males while still teenagers.  And by implication you can argue, as Douthat and other gender conservatives do, that it's the natural order of things for men to retain dependent women to watch their children while the men work and then service the men when they return home.  And by implication you can argue, as Douthat and other gender conservatives do, that it's the natural order of things for men to work only 9-5 while beginning in their teenage years women should begin laboring for her husband when she wakes and cease laboring only when she goes to sleep.

You can argue those things if you like.  And Douthat and other gender conservatives seem to really, really like to argue those things.

But you can't then turn around and say it's decadent for women to want to enjoy same work/leisure balances men already enjoy!

Don't get me wrong.  As a very prudish libertine I'm actually nearly as wary of decadence as they come.  But to say it's decadent for women to want the same work/leisure ratios men want, as Douthat and other gender conservatives do, is to imply men who already enjoy such work and leisure are also and already decadent.  Not just decadent in some equalitarian future, which, sorry, isn't terribly well-distributed yet.  But decadent now.  And decadent in the past.

Sorry Ross.  But if you want to play that game then you're going to have to explain how it makes women but not men weak to work only the eight hours men work now.  You're going to have to explain how it makes men but not women weak to have to spend after-work hours washing socks, cooking food, tending to children, and making sure their partners are sexually satisfied.

I'll ask that question again: If it's right and proper for men to work only 8 hours a day how can it possibly be decadent for women to prefer to work fewer than 16 hours a days serving those men?

I believe I've said repeatedly that no "man hating feminist" has ever hated men as bitterly as your average run-of-the-mill antifeminist. Echidne takes note of the latest entry in the parade by the degree-holding media professional Suzanne Venker.

Venkers thesis boils down to feminism pisses men off because modern women's access to education and decent pay deprives men of the ability to pay sub-market wages for sex, housework, and sometimes childcare.

Because, right, somehow when there's equal social, legal, and especially financial status men are unable to compete with women. Or even interact with them. What's up with that?

And that's why now all men never want to marry any women. Which men always did before feminism. So feminism hurts women more than it hurts men.

Echidne pithily asks misandry much?

Men only want sex, so why bother buying the cow when milk is freely available.  Men only get married if they are hooked into it because of sex or if they get free housekeeping services and sex just by paying bed-and-board.  Men can't cope with women who have any skills or talents which are not purely complementary with those men are deemed to possess.  Men can't survive competition from women at work.  Men need a submissive partner.  And so on.

If I were a man I'd be insulted by all that.  But I'm quite adequately insulted by being told that if I only succumbed to my innate femininity (I do own makeup!) there would be a line of suitors at my door.  There's a line, in any case.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

I love this line of (mainstream!) feminist argument against the antifeminist rear guard. It's the best evidence, by the way, that feminism is winning. And why, incidentally, it was probably always going to. It's not just that most men don't actually have that much trouble with non-dependent partners. It's not just that stories about "man hating feminists" persist mostly a) in the fevered imaginations of trolls like Rush Limbaugh and those who let him think for him, b) in the hormone-fevered, not-yet-gelled identity-formation stew of late-stage adolescence young women and men on college campuses. It's not even that, contrary to the no-sex-class paradigm-indoctrinated understanding of nearly all anti-feminists and small numbers of late-20th-Century-holdout "radfems," most feminists are heterosexual. Instead feminism was probably always going to win because unlike credentialled, professional, well-compensated career anti-feminists like Suzanne fucking Venker and her Aunt Phyillis Fucking Schlaffley, feminists don't actually hate men. Oh, and because once they stop charging at the patriarchal matador's red cape of "feminazis" men notice that maybe 98% of the outcomes feminism seeks are actually pretty decent outcomes for men too.

I mean, c'mon! Venker and her ilk keep insisting men not only want but out and out require that women be some combination of prostitute, domestic livestock, and parole officer! As opposed to a sex partner, a domestic partner, and life partner!

Did I already say what's up with that? I think I did!

According to Twitter the comment of the day at TheGoodMenProject was

Keith asks, “Is the casual sex marketplace heavily biased against men?” —#CommentoftheDay
[link to goodmenproject.com]

Well, there is bias but it's bias in the samples, not so much bias in the results.

Consider that the bias isn't against men, it's against whoever does the asking. By definition the odds of me getting a "yes" every time I ask is going to be lower than 100% even if I'm Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. For instance some non-zero percentage of potential asks are involved with someone else, recovering from another relationship, you're not his or her type in general, or there's something specific about you that doesn't work for them this time. Heck, they could even have just had an amazing couple of rounds with themselves and just plain not be horny at the moment you're asking no matter how hot they might find you some other time, right?

Consider even further the simple lag time in the ask/answer dynamic: I've obviously made up my mind before I ask -- any dithering, option weighing, courage summoning, and just general all-round emotional investment is water under the bridge. The person I ask, on the other hand, now has to go through everything I've been through (including the considerable emotional investment of answering) with the additional pressure of time: you're sitting in front of them with (almost literally) nothing to do but wait for the answer. Yikes! Not fun for shy people no matter how they want to answer! But I digress...

Point being, if even under the most ideal circumstances (i.e. you're Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie) you're likely to get a "no" chances are high that almost everybody's going to frequently be told "no" when he or she does the asking. So. Biased against men? I'm going to change my initial answer from a no to a qualified yes: to the extent that men do the asking then yes, the casual sex marketplace is biased against them. But only to the extent they ask.

But remember, asking bias is only one kind of bias. There's another kind that totally blew me away when it finally sank into my thick skull: there's extraordinary but invisible bias against those who are never asked.

The person who brought it home for me? A woman who's screen name was "scarred." She thought the whole idea that "women have the power" was the bitterest lie on the planet. Because the "power" to say yes or no exists only when one's opinion is asked. The power to respond to an initiative depends entirely on whether or not someone takes the initiative.

And to the extent it's women who are asked rather than doing the asking, the "casual sex market" might seem to be overwhelmingly biased against them. Although, really, it's only biased against anyone, man or woman, who might (never) be asked. No matter how much they long for a chance to say "yes."

I'd just add, by the way, that it's not just "homely" people who are never asked (if we could even meaningfully say what "homely" means, given the incredible range of qualities people are attracted to.) For some women the words "she's out of my league" are a blow to the gut, and the words "she probably has a boyfriend who could break me in half" are salt in the wounds. But again, the "bias" comes in the form of men who decide for themselves the answer will be "no," and never ask. Again, creating the hidden bias against those who wait to be asked.

Last "bias." The person who says "no" because they're waiting for that one person who, for whatever of a million reasons, never asks them.

It's super easy to see only one side, but if you do then you might be missing the bigger picture.

Update: Of course I only glancingly mention another pervasive bias in the post above: for what are mostly purely historical reasons among heterosexuals it really is men who are more likely to ask and women who are more likely to be asked. But as it happens I have just enough first, second, and third-hand experience to have noticed the same dynamics apply when the roles are reversed.  Enough to, err, well, confirm my observation that sex and relationship markets are more biased against askers and the never asked regardless of sex or gender.

This is going to sound a bit flame-y but I'm kind of stuck over an uncharacteristic, probably just off-the-cuff snippet in an overall very good post by E.J. Graff at The American Prospect. The main subject of the post, the knee-squeezing twittery by press and politicians about what appears to be a fairly routine affair between David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell.

I can easily see how that intense connection could become erotic—especially when it’s between a powerful man and an ambitious younger woman who’s trying to borrow some of that power for herself, that traditional method of exchanging power. (It may not be a feminist-approved method, but I’m writing about the real here, not the ideal.)

Source: TAPPED

Yes, Petraeus is 60, but Broadwell is 40.  At age 34, when they would have met, she was already a West Point grad, a military reservist with active duty experience, an accomplished athlete, and a Kennedy School grad student.  Meanwhile Petraeus was still just a colonel.  They had a common academic and professional interest in the then-still-under-appreciated field of counterinsurgency.

None of that overrules the possibility that Broadwell is just some older-than-usual groupie to Petraeus's Charlie Watts (the "superstar" drummer for the Rolling Stones, and yes I had to look up his name because as superstars go drummers aren't really at the top of the list.) But it does make it less attractive to leap to that assumption when other factors might make more sense.

Perhaps by working out of the D.C. based Prospect Graff has more of an inside scoop on their relationship than I do out here on the west coast.  But unless she's willing to spill I'm still more inclined to look at Broadwell and Petraeus as two mature, successful professional heterosexuals with a too-long, too-close history of common interests in situations where they were too often too far from their respective spouses. For too long at a time.

I'm sensitive to this in part because I'm really creeped out by the dominant male belief that women have no intrinsic interest in sex beyond its exchange value (Bogus Rule of Desire #1)  And so I'm creeped out by the implication that Broadwell's interest in Petraeus would have been that of a groupie or "gold digger" hoping to reflect herself in his power. (Because, see Bogus Rule #2, who ever heard of, or could stand the idea of, a man being sexually desirable?!?!?)

It's just weird coming from Graff instead of, say, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or Satoshi Kanazawa.  And her parenthetical "It may not be a feminist-approved method, but I’m writing about the real here, not the ideal?"  Seriously?  That's also something I'd expect to hear on right-wing radio before I read it on TAPPED.  I mean, eww!

Probably a typo.