Alyssa, of Welcome to Alyssa has a cute joke:

World’s Shortest Fairy Tale
Once upon a time,
a guy asked a girl “Will you marry me?”

The girl said “NO!”

And the guy lived happily ever after and went fishing played golf a lot drank beer and farted whenever he wanted.

As it happens, this isn’t entirely true. In a very nice takedown of Leon Kass and fellow middle-aged male Professor Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University, Meghan O’Rourke of Slate Magazine points out that…

In fact, the evidence is thin that a woman should be concerned that giving out a “sample” will make a man less prone to marriage—or a future husband less likely to want to stay with her. First of all, according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, “only 36% of single men agree that ‘single men have better sex lives than married men.’ “ And only 22 percent of unmarried men report feeling that marriage is “personally” not for them, even if they’re not interested in marriage in their immediate future. Second, engaging in premarital sex with the partner you eventually marry apparently does not make you more likely to get a divorce, according to a 2003 study cited by the National Marriage Project. Kass complains that “the elite, those who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage.” But is this the case? The majority of “elites” still get married, according to recent reports. And if they get married a little older—as Kass complains they do—this only seems to make their marriages more stable. The National Marriage Project reports that getting married after the age of 25 reduces the chance of divorce.

See her entire article here.

I ought to mention that O’Rourke’s piece is far more cogent than mine. “The need to tell young women how to behave often comes over middle-aged men—it’s an itch right up there with buying a flashy new car.” Yikes!

Note: I’m still hacked off that Kass chose to say that by being less chaste modern women “lower” themselves to the level of men. Screw that!