Mouse rant blog vent mouse.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Better quit teaching girls to read, then

Fred Vincy at Stone Court takes on this extremely stupid editorial about male and female college experiences. He eviserates it nicely--the way that the the sexist writer assumes that life is a zero-sum game and if women do better than men must be paying the price. And of course, if it is a zero-sum game, then women are obliged to lose. Because they're women and....yeah.

This quote alone drove me to pull out my Tiger Balm to relieve my tension headache:

The impact could hardly be overstated. College-educated people earn twice as much as high school graduates. If boys can't get to the good-jobs starting line, which these days is a bachelor's degree, they won't get a chance to use their natural competitive skills in the marketplace.

And when fewer men earn college degrees there are fewer partners whom educated women find desirable to marry. That's a debilitating social phenomenon African-American women have struggled with for years.

The assumption, as Fred points out, is that men need money and women need husbands and this is screwing up the whole system here. As if that's not insulting enough, this argument only works if you assume that educated men are content to marry someone below their education level, but women need someone with equal or greater education to be happy.

This can hardly be overstated: What a load of horseshit.

I have a college degree. My boyfriend does not. Whew--doing my part to make sure that one more over-educated broad isn't out there taxing the pool of eligible college graduate men!

It's a good thing I'm such a rebel. If I was dating someone with a college degree, it would be awkward making sure that he is still more educated than me. Would we compare GPA's? What if he had a different major than mine? What if he had a slightly lower GPA in a harder major, like engineering?

Or you could say that my boyfriend is more educated than me in the sense that he's five years older and therefore has held a job for 9 years longer than I have. That has to be the equivalent of a four-year degree in his field, right? Gosh, this "more" educated thing is pretty difficult to figure out. Maybe instead of using that as a standard, there should be an SAT-style standardized test, and people can just reassure themselves by making sure that the man's score is higher than the woman's before any kind of commitment is made.

The irony of all this is that back when college-educated women were expected to marry and become housewives after graduation, they were told that they were getting educated so that men didn't have to marry someone less educated than themselves. Education, then, was to the benefit of their husbands. Now female education can't be defined in terms of male benefit, so its very existence is troublesome.

53 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So in high school, "girls shine, boys fade"? And the life-long consequence is supposed to be negative? I don't think so. My hs boyfriend made Cs and went on to get a graduate degree in nuclear physics. I made mostly As and was in the National Honor Society and got a bachelor's degree in psychology and have never made half of what that hs boyfriend made. I really don't see that what boys and girls do in high school is all that important or telling in the long run.

12/06/2004

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"...it would be awkward making sure that he is still more educated than me. Would we compare GPA's?"

Of course not, silly. The proper measure isn't really education; it's money. You can fill your pretty little head up with all the education it can hold, AS LONG AS YOUR MAN IS PULLING DOWN A BIGGER PAYCHECK. We all know how emasculating it is for a man to have to deal with a woman who isn't wholly dependent on him for the necessities of life, after all.

In all seriousness, this is the answer to the seeming contradiction you mention at the end of your post. Back in the MRS degree days, a woman's education wasn't much of a threat because there were any number of obstacles to her actually employing it to get a job -- everything from general social disapproval to official policies that forbid married women from being hired or admitted into professional schools. She might have a degree, but she wasn't going to be making more money than her husband. If she had kids, she probably wouldn't even be making enough to support them and herself if she had to leave a difficult or abusive marriage.

Now that the "women don't belong in the workplace" crowd have been (mostly) discredited, a new rationale is needed for keeping women under the financial control of men. This nonsense about asymmetrical levels of education does nicely, since that tends to be a pretty significant predictor of earning power.

Woman has more education than man=woman makes more money=no good. Man has more education than woman=man makes more money=The Way Things Ought to Be. Simple as that.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid?

--JS

12/06/2004

 
Blogger Amanda Marcotte said...

The irony of all this is my boyfriend pulls twice my salary.

12/06/2004

 
Blogger mythago said...

Good points, JS. And Eric, too. The problem is (again) treating education as a zero-sum game, where girls who do well are at fault for boys doing poorly.

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