According to a recent study of undergraduates, men are more willing than women to put romantic relationships before career advancement:

While 51 percent of the women prioritized romantic relationships over achievement goals, more than 61 percent of men did the same.

The CNN piece marvels over anecdotes that back up the study's findings: one girl graduates before her boyfriend...and doesn't wait around Ohio for him to do the same! One guy blows off a quiz and test prep when his girlfriend comes to town...then gets a bad grade!

Anecdotes aside, it seems fairly obvious to me that when men prioritize romance it's not at the expense of advancement—married men and fathers make more money than their single and childless male colleagues. On the other hand, single and childless women outearn and advance quicker than their married, child-rearing counterparts because women take on disproportionate amounts of household and parenting duties. This study, then, is a good sign that young women recognize this disparity and are making efforts to establish careers early— and ideally, this strategy will lead to more equitable relationships down the road.

Focus on the Family Action thinks Americans should stop getting divorced because divorces are bad for the environment. No, seriously.

According to the jubilant email alert I just received, a study from Michigan State University found that

married households are more efficient with water, energy and land use. On the other hand, divorced couples require an extra 38 million rooms and spend 46 percent more per capita on electricity and 56 percent more on water than married couples.

Jenny Tyree, associate marriage analyst for Focus on the Family Action, was tickled pink by these findings. “The results of this study support the benefits of marriage, not just for families, but for our environment…We're pleased to see that God's design for family is consistent with good environmental stewardship.”

Indeed. Now, if we could just find the part of the Bible that guarantees that bad relationships breed happiness and domestic abuse doesn't exist—then we could all accept God's blessing and save the planet by getting hitched!

An email from the Family Research Council Action yesterday tells twentysomethings that the important thing is that we all get married. Now. Or end up alone forever.

Apparently, in reporting on recently released Census data, “Far too many reporters are overlooking the fact that only a small fraction of Americans over 30 (12.5%) never get married.” Obviously, the crazy liberal media doesn’t realize how ostracized single people over 30 are—if you’re not married by then, it’s time to stock up on kitty litter and eschew society for the rest of your miserable, cat lady existence.

FRC Action also reports that

Nearly 75% of "family households" are headed by a married couple. In fact, married-couple families are more than double the number of male-headed families, female-headed families, and unmarried-partner households--combined (49.7% to 22.5%)! So don't count out marriage!

A very sophisticated everybody’s-doing-it argument. And the picture that accompanies it is priceless: whitebread bride and groom gaze lovingly at each other, and the URL titles the scene “NORMAL.”

In the traditional sense, when women get married, they change their last name to their husband’s, or hyphenate their names (her last name-his last name). However, switch things around, and it isn’t too easy. Only six states allow men to take their wives’ last name (California is possibly the seventh state). This is posing a problem for married couples, as well as domestic partners. Under most states’ laws, the man must “must petition the court, advertise in a newspaper and pay hundreds of dollars in fees” if he wants his wife’s last name (just a little much?). All a woman has to do is sign the marriage license. Doesn’t the husband have every right to take his wife’s last name?

Though I have to interject an anecdote from my childhood here. When I was in middle school, the principle was Mr. W (I won’t use his full name here). When my youngest brother entered the same middle school, it was Mr. M. However, it was the same man. He didn’t take his wife’s last name…they had combined the two together. So when they got divorced (around the time my little brother entered middle school), he had gone back to his “maiden” name (what would be the masculine word for maiden?). It confused the current students, and the alumni, because it was something we had never seen before. And this was a conservative little town (a.k.a. Stepford).

Maybe it’s time for a change here?

~世界の革命

It's capitalism run amok. Via a moving New York Times story, in South Korea, the government has decided that the 2,000 to 3,000 marriage agencies that trade in foreign-born wives for South Korean men are so abusive toward women that they must be regulated by the Department of Health and Welfare. As is so often the case, as ambitious women in more developed countries make progress, ambitious women in less developed countries struggle to catch up by trading on traditional femininity: whether as contract wives to foreign men, sex workers catering to wealthy tourists, or childcare providers for working women abroad:

“Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards,” said Lee Eun-tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. “If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he’ll find it very difficult to marry in Korea.”

Critics say the business demeans and takes advantage of poor women. But brokers say they are merely matching the needs of Korean men and foreign women seeking better lives.

If you're interested in these issues, I highly recommend a book I just finished, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. This collection attacks head-on the issue of the unequal distribution of feminism, and the ways in which men's unwillingness to take on traditionally "feminine" tasks, such as childcare and domestic labor, create a global migration of women workers relegated to the lowest status jobs in our societies.

On Jan. 16, The New York Times reported on its front page that for the first time in history, more than half (51 percent) of American women were living without spouses. The story, supposedly based on a Times in-house analysis of U.S. census statistics, pissed me off because it was completely class-biased, billed as a good news sociological piece about middle aged divorcees liberated from nagging hubbies. The article completely ignored the staggering difficulty of being a working poor single mother. Anyhow, yesterday I happened upon the Times' public editor column, which I've been mostly ignoring since the staid Byron Calame took over last year from the feisty Daniel Okrent. But the headline--"Can a 15-Year Old Be a 'Woman Without a Spouse?'"--caught my attention. It turns out that the entire "51 percent" hook was a total misrepresentation, and relied upon including in the figure girls as young as 15 and students living in dorms, among other groups of young women who we wouldn't traditionally expect or encourage to be married. In any case, I don't know why Times editors get such hard-ons for these kinds of stretch-the-evidence trend pieces--especially when they have to do with the state of the American woman.

Did you hear that biodegradable weddings are totally in this season? Yeah, I read that in the Style section.