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.