As usual, spending about 5 minutes watching morning “news” shows today was enough to piss me right off. Today’s “oh my god I can’t believe you people are ‘professionals’ with real, actual viewers” award goes to Good Morning America.
The geniuses at GMA were talking about a recent column published in the Careers and Marriage section of Forbes. The opinion piece by editor Michael Noer is titled “Don’t Marry Career Women“. This is straightforward. And apparently it is controversial to career women. If non-career women don’t care, or consider this to be good news, they should at reconsider their view (if positive) of GMA after reading this post.
(Side note: is it possible to use the V-Chip to filter out shitty “news” television?)
Noer cites a number of studies that emphasize his point, to wit:
If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these [career] women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research)…
There’s more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.
For an opinion piece, it sure has a lot of references. Now there may be many studies that counter the studies he uses, which is fine. So he may be right or wrong. I’m not worried about that here. This space is dedicated to hating GMA.
In typical morning news fashion, GMA formed their coverage horribly. I can only wonder what their target demographic really is. I pray to ever-loving god that career women don’t actually watch GMA unless it’s for sheer humor. Today’s performance left me wondering why non-career women would watch the show. Are angry men like me really the only viewers?
Moving along, take this quote from the column:
While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.
If memory serves, GMA quoted it as such, attributing it to Noer as if he was pulling it out of his ass:
… professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.
GMA then goes to one “expert” of some kind. She says that of course educated women are more likely to get divorced; they’re smart enough to know their options, divorce included.
With overwhelming expertise from the expert, they brought in 7 career women, some married some not. The ones I heard seemed quite defensive and hurt by the column. I didn’t hear all of them because I had to search for a pen immediately after the first career woman spoke. She was quotable.
In summary, it seems, according to GMA’s “expert” that non-career women are not smart enough to figure out how to get a divorce. Furthermore, the broad brush used by the first career woman paints all non-career women as, and I quote, “boring and shallow.”
So guys, now you know what you’re up against. It’s called lose-lose. But we already knew that. I’m kidding, of course.
I guess that when and if I do marry a career women, I’ll just have to be the one to “sacrifice” my career so that I can stay home with the kids, cook, and clean. I’m not kidding, of course. If that isn’t win-win, I don’t know what is.
