30

Dec

Single Women and the End of Men, Part 1

If you can’t tell, I have a reading habit. I haven’t read “Manning Up” yet, but I’ve certainly heard a lot about it. Earlier this month, I was intrigued by a Forbes Magazine piece by Megan Casserly called “Why We Need to Stop Bemoaning the End of Men.” What I found interesting about it, like most of the coverage of the masculinity crisis, is that it was penned by a woman who basically says that writing about economically-driven shifts in gender roles as if men are becoming women is, in itself, sexist.

So why is asking for equality, the “end of men?” Why is asking our partners to be partners emasculating?
Because despite the case-by-case expectations of equality in gender roles, culturally we haven’t let go of the paternalistic authority of men over women. And stories about the “decline” of our men-folk aren’t making things better for any of us.
How a thinking person could champion a woman’s strides towards equality in the same breath that they criticize men for becoming less than as a result is beyond me. The double-standard—that a women can and must demand her seat at the table to be a real woman but that a man giving up his to clear dishes makes him less than a real man—is just so outdated.

I appreciated Megan Casserly’s thoughts as much as I liked Hanna Rosin’s piece in The Atlantic in 2010 on the same topic. I don’t think men are ending any more than women are being created by their modest economic and educational gains. The”mancession”, the masculinity crisis and other ways of saying that men have been allowed to be boys for longer than women were allowed to delay maturity intrigue me because they have all become part of the animosity leveled at unmarried women. It’s not true that the more successful women become the less men know how to be men, but it is true that patriarchy demands that white men are breadwinners with women and children as dependents. So the idea that more and more men at the top of that hierarchy are struggling financially and falling into dependent roles (once reserved for women) demands thorough and continuous investigation. I believe in there, somewhere, is one of the reasons that people have become so fixated on single women and making them feel bad for their success.

I hope to be a voice that celebrates us, though, in the New Year and for however long the coverage of unmarried women continues to be skewed in the direction of women fixing themselves. Thanks to the readers I’ve heard from already — looking forward to more conversations in 2012. Happy New Year!

511 days ago Short URL Comments

/////

29

Dec

Where the single black woman angst began, circa 2003

I used to devour Newsweek like the latest issue was a Butterscotch Krimpet Tastykake, the addiction of my sweet-toothed childhood. At the end of February 2003, a year after I started working as a features reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, I was struck by a cover with familiar black faces like Beyoncé and Star Jones with the title: “From Schools to Jobs, Black Women are Rising Much Faster Than Black Men. What it Means for Work, Family and Race Relations.”  It included the first modern-day reporting of dismal statistics for black love and marriage for black women seeking black men. It included the sentiments of a black woman business mogul who was so desperate that she joked about finding it perfectly acceptable to go into prison to find a man, since that’s where all the black men were.

This was five years before Beyoncé’s hit song made the phrases “Single Ladies” and “Put A Ring On It” global. It’s still one of my favorite songs of all time. Beyoncé Knowles, as far as I know, didn’t say anything groundbreaking or earth-shattering. But I was worried that the educational and financial inequalities among black women and black men had made the cover of Newsweek. Dirty laundry was officially on America’s front street. In the March 2, 2003 issue of Newsweek, Ellis Cose wrote eloquently on the Black Gender Gap:

College-educated black women already earn more than the median for all black working men–or, for that matter, for all women. And as women in general move up the corporate pyramid, black women, increasingly, are part of the parade. In 1995 women held less than 9 percent of corporate-officer positions in Fortune 500 companies, according to Catalyst, a New York-based organization that promotes the interests of women in business. Last year they held close to 16 percent, a significant step up. Of those 2,140 women, 163 were black–a minuscule proportion, but one that is certain to grow…
Is this new black woman finally crashing through the double ceiling of race and gender? Or is she leaping into treacherous waters that will leave her stranded, unfulfilled, childless and alone? Can she thrive if her brother does not, if the black man succumbs, as hundreds of thousands already have, to the hopelessness of prison and the streets? Can she–dare she–thrive without the black man, finding happiness across the racial aisle? Or will she, out of compassion, loneliness or racial loyalty “settle” for men who–educationally, economically, professionally–are several steps beneath her?

Cose mentioned several books that explored this question, including Veronica Chambers’ “Having It All?” “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” and several others, some penned by the women in the article. He ends his piece with both sides of the story – the future looks like one of isolation for black women who would prefer to marry a black man who is their financial and intellectual equal, but black women have always managed to survive things in the past.

I mention these stories because they are evidence  that the topic of single black women has been positioned as a fraught conundrum now for nearly nine years, which most stories about single ladies don’t contextualize. For better or worse, these stories also follow what has become a  formula for writing about unmarried black women and single ladies in general: gather the statistics, find bodies to reflect the trend, admit that no one knows for sure how all of this will pan out and end with a bleak or rarely hopeful non-ending. Finally, these stories almost never find women who have decided not to settle for relationships just for the sake of not being single but instead infer that being successful and unmarried probably equates to loneliness instead of adventure and freedom (which are apparently the sole provinces of unmarried men.)

512 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

//////

28

Dec

Is Marriage for White People? A Review

I read Ralph Richard Banks’ short but thoughtful book, “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone” with a lot of resistance.

Part of the reason I started writing about the contented single woman’s perspective is because media coverage largely lacked the perspective of single black women who have been blamed and maligned for not doing enough to get married. Their standards are too high, they’ve got too much education, they don’t have their stuff together, they love Jesus too much — on and on. I couldn’t imagine there was anything uplifting for me to find in a book with this kind of title. I was wrong.

 


In my defense, I’ve been hearing some version of this message all my life, so I didn’t need a Stanford professor to break it down for me. I read the title and rolled my eyes. “Great,” I thought as I popped Advil and read the reviews. “Another book that will hurt my self-esteem.”

Banks set out to study marriage and found himself engaged in the stories of black women who said they had not seen the hurdles they faced in the relationship market reflected in pretty much any story being told in popular culture. As a result, in Banks’ book, all of the statistics I get sick of reading and reflecting on related to the number of black men in prison, the high percentage of black unwed mothers and high divorce rates were just briefly mentioned, not belabored.

The popular culture sentiment reflected so often by mainstream news media outlets and pretty much everything Tyler Perry has ever produced reinforces the belief that black women do themselves a disservice by being too highfalutin. Banks wisely points out the way this plays out in movies that depict women overlooking and dismissing blue collar men, for instance. Even if it’s inferred, few people just flat out say what most African Americans know: Black women are the most loyal women to black men in the world, even if more black men marry interracially far more.

Banks writes with acuity and directness about the costs of that loyalty to black women who are most negatively affected by man-sharing and its consequences. He also mentions the skewed online dating market, where white men basically exclude black women outright (through silence or an explicit preference not to date us). He also offers a more balanced, objective viewpoint of how black women basically keep themselves from finding happiness in interracial relationships. Banks’ central thesis is that by dating outside of the race and marrying outside of the race more often, black women may save black love.

 

It’s a thesis that is, again, an empowering and refreshing one. For us to find out if it’s true, a lot of black women will have to learn to accept and confront the limiting beliefs they have about who finds them attractive and why, but also to spend some time deprogramming themselves.
I include myself in that group, since I viewed the book as a sort of mirror for myself in some ways. Like the women he writes about, I have made assumptions that white guys would largely not be able to appreciate my beauty, though Banks’ data suggests that black women married to white men find that they are more accepted without weaves and straightened hair than they are with black men. Those beliefs were reinforced by a lot of drama dating losers on online dating sites. I picked up my toys and went home after a couple of years on and offline dating, in part because I realized that the “relationship market” was more exhausting than any of the three jobs I held at one time.

More important, though, was the fact that I had not gotten comfortable enough with myself to appreciate the beauty I wanted my prospective mate to appreciate. I wanted to clutch my fear of rejection, hold on to my powerlessness, because somehow keeping myself powerless felt like a way to be less intimidating. Even if I was failing at finding a partner, I reasoned, at least I could have a virtual community that shared my loneliness.That brings me back to the best and most surprising thing about Banks’ book. The tone and main point of the book is not to make black women feel responsible for their single status or to give us pointers for how to make it better.
It is an encouraging, straightforward look at where things stand, and because, as he says, “white follows black”  — which means that white women will eventually have to face the same challenges single black women are facing if they haven’t started to already. While I’m not a fan of the provocative title, one other flaw is that the book doesn’t end neatly as much as it completely stops. Nevertheless, it is well-done and an important work of up-to-date scholarship on African American relationships. If you’ve read it, I’d be interested in hearing what you thought of it.

513 days ago Short URL 7 Comments

/////////

27

Dec

Cheaper to Leave Him Alone: Why some women dread marriage

t turns out that this whole fear of commitment thing comes more from unmarried women than unmarried men. And here, this whole time, I was thinking I didn’t want to get married because I just can’t pick from all of the available black men with Ph.D.s who keep trying to holler!

Thoughts here: I’m dismayed that this qualifies as breaking news in 2011, four years after the onset of the recession that led to the silly-named-problem we all sort of secretly refer to as the mancession. But I do believe that the fact that more and more men are out of work has led to a kind of Jedi mind-trick in a lot of media geared toward blaming women for being single and opting out of the ever important rite of passage for womanhood that is supposed to be marriage.

Here’s Jezebel:

A new study has found a possible reason for the much-vaunted decline in marriage: people are afraid of having to go through a divorce. And women are more likely than men to fear getting “trapped” in a relationship they can’t easily exit.
Time reports on the study of 61 cohabiting but unmarried couples in Ohio. Sixty-seven percent of the participants said they were worried about the consequences of divorce, both for their finances and for their feelings. The study authors hypothesize that these worries are a major factor in keeping the couples from marrying.

This isn’t a totally surprising finding — Time’s Belinda Luscombe writes that avoiding marriage for fear of divorce “sounds a little bit like choosing to stick with the shrimp appetizers for fear that the main dish will give you food poisoning,” but divorce is serious enough that considering the possibility before jumping into marriage seems pretty prudent. What’s more unusual about the study is that those most likely to fear the marriage “trap” are working-class women, not men.

I get it — all women are supposed to want a ring and babies, otherwise they are unnatural. But the truth is that marriage these days sounds like a set up. If men are generally making less money and getting unemployed more often, what working woman wants to worry about the paltry earnings she makes in a lifetime (comparably) ending up as community property somewhere? It’s not impossible for men to ask for half, and in fact, a lot of them are starting to do just that. Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems.

Let me be clear, I want a partner. I want to be equally yoked and all that. But I’m not trying to pay my ex for the rest of my life because I wanted to believe that love trumps my checkbook. I said it when I was 25 and I’ll say it now: I’m happy to get a really cute dress, buy another nice ring for myself and throw a huge party in celebration of love before I walk into a situation like this because of societal pressure.

Did you see this Luscombe lady trying to make it seem completely ridiculous to fear divorce? She must be from a country where people stay together. Give it up for Al Green, ladies and gentlemen — this is what I’ll be singing when I find my boo, with hopes and prayers that I can be this convincing.

514 days ago Short URL Comments

///

26

Dec

Samhita Mudhopadhyay, author of Outdated, on Empowering Single Women in 2012

One of my favorite books of the year was written by Feministing.com editor and writer Samhita Mudhopadhyay. “Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life” is a fantastic counterbalance to a lot of the writing about what Mudhopadhyay calls the romantic-industrial complex, which includes books like The Rules, shows like The Bachelor and the Bachelorette and much more. You can read a short review of the book I did here, and in the current issue of Bitch Magazine, I’ve written a piece about Outdated and Jaclyn Friedman’s latest book, “What You Really, Really Want.”

I was really happy to see Samhita’s thoughts summarized in a Yahoo piece written by a friend and colleague Lisa Hix and published last week. Here’s an excerpt from the great list of predictions for “9 Ways Dating will be Reinvented in 2012” – I like the whole list but these are a few of my favorites:

Realize people are getting married older, and that’s OK, because half of young marriages end in divorce anyway.
“People who get married later in life are more like to stay married longer, because you’ve spent some time figuring out what you’re looking for,” she says. “Some people find love at 50. Maybe I’m being incredibly optimistic, and I’m only 33. A lot of young women on college campuses ask me, ‘Aren’t you scared you’re not going to find somebody?’ I think the much bigger tragedy is if I spend my thirties scared instead of enjoying my life. And if something comes up and I get in a relationship, that’s awesome. But if it doesn’t, I don’t want to look back and say I was scared and sad [throughout] my thirties.”

Call out your coupled friends.
“Have those difficult conversations with people, especially when they’re being ‘couple-ist,’ when they prioritize coupled activities,” Mudhopadhyay says. “I mean, people will fall over backwards and jump off bridges for your wedding, but if you say, ‘Hey, I’m having a book party,’ people just don’t prioritize in the same way. So you should call people out, instead of [letting them take] for granted that we live in a couple-centric world.”

Redefine what you consider a family.
“Find support by creating the kind of community you want to live in, where single people are genuinely accepted,” Mudhopadhyay says. “The country is changing because we’re marrying later, and that is really going to challenge how we think about families. What does family mean? And who actually makes up our family? Is it the people we are biologically related to, or that we fell in love with at that moment? Not necessarily. And everybody knows that. Everybody was raised with their stepbrother and stepsisters, or had friends that were helping raise their families. All these kind of alternative family structures, they’re the norm, not the alternative. So I think it’s a battle against rhetoric.

“People will continue to find love. People will continue to make mistakes. But I think increasingly as a culture we are going to become more and more comfortable with embracing different kinds of families.”

 Join the movement.
“This next year I think we’re going to see a new kind of vocal anti-marriage, anti-antiquated-ideas-about-relationships movement,” she says. “I don’t think it will be a unified movement. But I think if the last few months have shown us anything, between the SlutWalks and the Occupy movement, young people are thinking really critically about the future, and they’re thinking about what kind of a world they are imagining. I think given what they have to draw from now, it’s exciting, the world they could be imagining.”

 

 

515 days ago Short URL Comments

///////

23

Dec

Robin Thicke says there are only “a few good White men” for single black women

I know he’s with Paula Patton and everything, but I have a serious crush on Robin Thicke.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s adorable and I am a vocal admirer of fine men. But then he was quoted in Madame Noire advocating for black men. Here’s an excerpt:

On whether black women are better off with white men
I think that’s ridiculous. There are so many good Black men out there that are hardworking, decent, and handsome, you know? To start that rumor is as bad as starting any other negative rumor. There are great Black men out there. There are only a few good White men — trust me. (Laughs) Good luck finding a good White man who understands your journey. I only have three White friends. I’ve got 20 Black male friends, who are all good men who take good care of their wives, and good care of their children. I know amazing Black men. Maybe the women have to take better care of their men. Maybe you’re being too stubborn. Maybe you’re not saying you’re sorry. You have to take good care of him, too. You have to give love to get love.

 

He’s so fine I’m going to completely fail to critique the woman-blaming in those last four sentences and just focus on the positive. It’s the holidays, after all, and we don’t even need to go into that whole “I have a ton of black friends” thing. (I see where you were going with that, boo.) Now I have “Wanna Love U” with Skateboard P in my head.

TGIF. Merry Christmas. Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Festivus.

518 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

/////

22

Dec

Faith and the Single Woman, Part 1

A lot of the bone I have to pick with the way people try to shame black women in particular for our single status and women in general for declining marriage rates has to do with the secular perspective attached to such screeds in the blogosphere, in media and popular culture.

Despite the fact that men and women spend upwards of $500 million on dating online trying to find love (though some may be looking for less than that) and shows like “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” make it seem like there is a way to control how long a woman is single, there is no controlling when you will meet an appropriate person for you.


I had to learn this the hard way. A lot of really stupid dates and a ton of Match.com and EHarmony.com fees later, I gave it to God. I had prayed about and meditated on everything else in my life related to work, life and tragic twists in my personal life, but not love.
In November, Jennifer Marshall wrote an inspirational blog for Christianity Today about why single women shouldn’t give up on marriage. The subhead was “Frustrations with men and the institution (of Marriage) are real, but shouldn’t obscure our hope in what God is doing.” Here’s a little more of that, pegged to Kate Bolick’s cover story, “All the Single Ladies” in The Atlantic:

Bolick seems to have resolved the sense of being betwixt-and-between by demoting marriage. In her book, marriage should no longer enjoy pride of place as the basic building block of society and the relationship that harmonizes the needs of men, women, and children like no other.
In other words, if experience doesn’t match up to the ideal, toss out the ideal.
But should we give up on an ideal just because it hasn’t worked out for us personally? That might make sense if marriage were an ideal simply because the majority, the powerful, or forces such as evolution or economics made it so. The unique status of marriage, however, is timeless. God ordained it as the basic institution for ordering human relations.
To esteem that ideal is not to dismiss singleness as second rate. Kate Bolick’s hunch is right: Our current status isn’t “provisional.” We’ll gain a better perspective on our circumstances, though, not by downgrading marriage, but by taking a higher view of what God is doing both now and in the long run. Amid the tension between circumstances today and longings unfulfilled, joy can come only from the confidence that a purposeful Author has a grand design for our lives.

Whatever one’s personal belief system, it seems to me that if we apply the same faith and hope for our futures as single women to what appears to be a truism about relationships, it will help steady us against a strong current of anti-single woman rhetoric. There is nothing to do, there is nothing else to be. We are enough as we are, and everything else is nonsense.

519 days ago Short URL Comments

///////

21

Dec

Kelly Rowland answers the ever important question: When will you have babies?

I love babies, I’m just not sure I want to have my own.
It feels scary to say that because as author Ayelet Waldman knows from firsthand experience, being a woman who says anything but “I love children! I can’t wait to have them! They are so cute!” gets attacked for breaking some kind of secret rule of womanhood.
But part of what drives all of the anxiety about single women has to do with cultural scripts about women having children.
Our culture demeans single mothers, despite the fact that Barack Obama and Bill Cosby, among others, have pointed out that there’s something of a fatherhood crisis in America, to put it lightly. So you’d think it’d be good news that there are probably a growing number of women out there who aren’t rushing to get married and make babies — but not so much.
There is evidence, though, that other single women feel this way. The writers over at Clutch Magazine tend to make a note of this, which I appreciate. They wrote about Kelly Rowland’s thoughts on the matter as quoted in a January 2012 feature in Marie Claire UK.
“The interviewer asked Kelly if she feels pressured to settle down and have some babies now that her superstar bestie Beyonce is expecting her first child,” Clutch wrote. “Kelly, who’s been all about her career lately, says she’d like kids one day…just not now…while many of us do want to get married and start families, these days, most of us just want to live and build our lives before we settle down. And yet…most women — famous or not — are STILL hit with the ‘so…when are you going to get married and have babies?’ question. I don’t hear people constantly asking Kanye West or Trey Songz if they want to settle down anytime soon. No, they get to focus on their careers, but women must always contend with the question.”
This is true. I thought I was an exception to this until my 91-year-old grandmother slid it in during a holiday car ride recently. Whatever, she’s 91, she gets to ask, even if I don’t have an answer.

520 days ago Short URL Comments

//////

20

Dec

Forbes: Powerful women usually stereotyped as “Single & Lonely”

Part of the reason I take the “Single Ladies” meme so personally is that it is universally inferred & never critiqued that single women must be lonely.
This Forbes magazine piece about the worst stereotypes powerful women face sums it up perfectly with item number 2: Single and Lonely.
“Harvard lecturer Olivia Fox Cabane notes that the strong perception than powerful women are intimidating to men and will need to sacrifice their personal lives may stop women from going after power,” Jenna Goudreau writes. “Even those women who aren’t interested in marrying face harsh judgments. Men get to be ‘bachelors’ while women are reduced to ‘spinsters’ and ‘old maids.’”

I bought into this idea for a long time, so much so that it kept me after going after a dream of pursuing a doctorate for a long time. A dozen years and a lot of therapy later, I can finally let that go.
And letting go of other people’s impressions of my intellect as “intimidating” and alienating has made me simultaneously relieved that I am surrounded by an incredible network of loving friends, male and female, who build me up for being a bookworm & paranoid that if I keep reading so much, I will forever myself out of a relationship. As I get older, I struggle less with this because I know a ton of powerful and successful women who are either single and content, single and happy, or married, partnered and happy. So I don’t buy it anymore. But it’s difficult not to buy into the idea that the more powerful a woman becomes, the more likely she is to be single.

521 days ago Short URL 4 Comments

///////

19

Dec

Some jerk in Florida really made a Top 10 list of why black women suck

Maybe he didn’t get the memo that we’re awesome. I don’t know.
But I’ve been writer for two decades now. And if I wanted to illustrate some of the problematic assumptions and problems with the single black woman meme, I really couldn’t do better than my man Vince Carthane over here, making me look like a goddess with his horrific grammar and ignant construction of something that is supposed to resemble journalism at the Florida Courier.
In case you don’t make it over there (I don’t blame you and no, I didn’t add a link…Oh, FINE, here.) I have ingested the nonsense for your reading pleasure. I was torn about posting this, really, because depending on how tall he is and whether or not he’d be into dating a black woman who actually prefers to wear dresses [like that other famous single lady Madea], maybe there could have been a future for me and Vince:

There’s a popular YouTube video called, “Are 99 Percent of Black Women The Enemy?” In that video, around 90 percent of the Black women surveyed on the street said the White establishment is not the enemy of the Black man. But at the end of that video, a White man admitted Whites are still the enemy of the Black man.
I’ve observed 10 top reasons why Black men feel Black women are the reasons our Black houses remain divided and cannot stand:
1.    The average Black woman prefers the “bad boy” types who are on their way to prison – which encourages more Black men to act that way.
2.    The average Black woman will cuss like a sailor and does not have a feminine voice tone – which encourages some Black men to date outside their race.
3.    The average single Black woman ignores half the male population by requiring her potential man to be at least six feet tall – which has nothing to do with being a good man.
4.    The average Black woman is obese.
5.    The average Black woman acts like she is a “good catch” – even while carrying the baggage of some bad dude’s kids.
6.    The average successful Black female hypocrite says she does not need a man to take care of her – but requires a Black man to pay for her dates.
7.    The average Black “welfare mama” says she can be poor by herself – and deprives her kids of their father.
8.    Tyler Perry is more likely to wear a dress than the average Black woman.
9.    Dating the average Black woman is like dating a dude with a weave on.
10.    The average Black woman complains that the White media does not report missing Black babies like they do missing White babies, but she still spends billions every year to wear fake blond or red hair to look like the oppressors of her Black boys.
Vince Carthane is a Florida Courier reader who lives in St. Petersburg

522 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Blog at WordPress.com.
Theme: Esquire by Matthew Buchanan.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,294 other followers