Customer Reviews

Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I am one of those 30something never-been-married women targeted by Whitebread. My parents divorced when I was twelve, and I was a latchkey kid. So I am very familiar with the social conditions that have created the "marriage delay" that's supposed to be so prevalent in my generation.

That said, I have to agree with some of the reviewers that the women interviewed in this book are unrealistic to only want well-to-do men that make - say - at least $100,000 per year. How many men like that really exist, especially these days when it's becoming harder and harder for anyone who's not a CEO of a Halliburton-type corporation to get wealthier each year? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a tiny shrinking percentage.

While I agree that you should only get married if you find the right person and never "settle," when it comes to financial status I have to make an exception.

There are lots of good men out there (I'm seeing one right now, he's not a well-to-do CEO type and I don't care). Most of them are just not going to be Donald Trumps.

Perhaps the real problem is not a lack of good men - or women - but too much emphasis on money and prestige.

As a single 30-something man, I bought this book out of a sense of curiosity.

Popular culture scolds men when we become too demanding. A man who will only look at women who are ten years younger, rail-thin, and blonde is quickly dismissed as superficial. However, the women that Ms. Whitehead describes are only interested in tall, handsome, alpha males who make $100,000 per year. And they want to land them at age 35.

I am 35 myself, and I would love to meet a Britney Spears lookalike who is intelligent, makes lots of money, and (very important) is also interested in me. I would also like to win the lottery, have as much hair as I had when I was twenty, and go golfing five days per week. But that's not life on earth.

Perhaps Ms. Whitehead could write a sequel: "There are Plenty of Good Men Left, but You're too Vain to Notice Them."

Most 30ish single men I know have long since realized that no woman "has it all"--and if she does, she's probably married. I suggest that Ms. Whitehead's women take a reality check, lighten up, and go talk to the short bald guy who is smiling at them from the other side of the room.

Just some additional thoughts to add to the (many thoughtful and thought-provoking) previous reviews:

1. Think about the changed role of society, in the person of "interested third-parties" (as Whitehead puts it); back in what my daughter calls "the dark ages of education", just about everyone eventually got married because of what seemed to be a vast conspiracy on the part of the rest of the world (in the person of relatives and friends) to match up unmarried people. Now, the impulse is to "mind your own business!"

2. The easy availability of both automatic household appliances and easy-to-cook prepackaged food together with the unisex education systems in place since the early 1960s have made it far too easy for men and women to live apart. Trust me on this one - a man living alone in the 1950s or earlier, if he couldn't afford a cook and maid, lived a very rough life; how would he have learned to cook, or clean house, or wash and iron clothing, in a time when these were all highly skilled jobs learned by a long apprenticeship from your mother or another older woman? And women, in those days, seldom earned enough to live alone. In these rough ways, society went out of its way to ensure that, by and large, men and women both were a lot more comfortable married than single.

3. Much of what Whitehead discusses is a direct result of the Brahmin effect, so-called because it was originally observed in high-caste Brahmin society in India: many women in this society stayed unmarried their entire lives, because no "suitable" (i.e. "good enough" == "high-enough caste") men were available for them to marry. The classic maiden aunts in Beacon Hill (Boston) society of the 1800s and earlier 1900s suffered from the same cause among the Boston Brahmins. And the present-day highly educated, career-oriented, athletic women -- are they not Brahmins in their own way, really "too good" or "too highly qualified" for most of the available men? It really is possible to price something out of the market.

Personally, I don't buy it.

The women in these book ALWAYS seem to live in New York or LA, big-city life, never in small towns. Lah-de-dah Dahling! There seems to be a whole different mentality in the big city about sex and dating which seems to favor the no-hook-up life. The one woman - she didn't know her fiance didn't do dishes and behaved in an infantile fashion UNTIL she moved in with him? How well did she even know him? Hello!

Statistically, your marriage chances are FAR greater if you don't move in together....so why are all these women jumping to
co-habitate?

This line said a lot:

"Women often have sex with their boyfriend before they get to know him well as a human being. Consequently, for them, cohabitation provides a way to observe and learn about their partner by sharing a roof as well as a bed. "

Duh! If you ARE looking for something other than casual s*x, how about getting to know the guy before you MOVE IN WITH HIM! When I was in college, I notice that the ones who had s*x day-one almost never got to know each other as well as the ones who waited - it's as if s*x STOPPED the development of intimacy, or drasticly slowed it down. The talking stopped when the h*mping began.....(makes sense, if you think about it)

And if he was perfect in all other ways - is that reason enough to dump him? Never heard of a dishwasher?? A maid? Paper plates?? Sounds like a bunch of whining by people who think that they're perfect but nobody else is good enough.

Reminds me of 'Seinfield' where the characters would fall in love, only to dump a mate because they slurped their
drinks or they used the wrong toothpaste some other extremely minor infraction. Ditto S*x in the City - it's always something
so petty. Maybe that's a big-city mindset, too.....

Perhaps these perfect people are afraid to admit that they're somewhat lacking in some sort of social skills or looking for too much perfection in others? Real relationships involve compromise.

Typical, too, is the woman who says "I can't find any nice men" and then when you drag her into a room full of nice
men, says "I'm not attracted to any of them". The dream is a bad-boy she can reform, but it's a total fantasy...and
when she dates unreliable ja*ckass after UJ and cries when her heart gets broke - well....it's hard to feel sorry after awhile.
Get some therapy.

She wants him handsome, smart, s*xy, nice, rich, witty, ready to commit AND ...what...he's been unable to find anyone ELSE by age 30? What's wrong with that picture??

Most of these women probably won't marry a man who makes less money, either - though I know at least three women who are very, very happy with their less-financially-viable husbands right now. Ditto younger men. My sister's been married 24 years to a guy 5 years her junior...my Grandmother was married 20 years to a man 17 years younger!

Also is the "Cinderella complex" where a woman expects Price Charming to solve ALL her problems! Personally, I
feel if you're not happy with your life before you meet someone, you probably won't be after, either.

I rate this book relatively high because it is true from what I've seen. As a divorced 30 somthing male whose salary is approaching six figures, who is "housebroken", not in debt, and settled down in life, I can tell you first hand that most guys in my position want nothing to do with the women talked about in this book. They want to train a man in the same manner that they would train a dog, and we are not buying into it. The women represented in this book tend to believe that because they are successful, attactive, and self sufficient there is no reason men shouldn't crawl to them. I fact, men are well aware of these women and avoid them like the plague.

There's so much the matter with this book I've only got room here to touch on a few of the main things.

First, I'm not sure whether it's good news or bad that the main part of the title has little to do with what the book's actually about. That is to say, the book isn't about men and how bad they are. Rather it's all about women (as per the sub-title). In fact, BDW's chief source of information on men, apart from her female informants, is a Gallup poll and her twenty-something son. Aside from appearing as relationship objects, men don't show up until pg 143 -- and then they're given only a couple of paragraphs to say anything. This lack of balance in perspective is symptomatic. With the title being what it is, any man reading this book is bound to feel both ignored and presumptively blamed for all those poor baby's unsatisfactory love lives.

Well, the Great American Man Shortage has been around for over twenty years, from the time when the first boomer women started getting into their low thirties, and it's been a staple of pop-feminism and female media ever since. Genevieve Wood's "No Good Men" is only one title in what would be a small library one could easily assemble on the topic. Somewhat bewilderingly, then, BDW ignores all this previous work, and even states more than once that the subject hasn't received enough attention! This is just plain bad scholarship in a field that doesn't have very high standards to begin with.

Then we get to pg 10, where the real demographic data are presented: Among those aged 30-34, there are four never-married men (30%) for every three never-married women (20%). So there's not even a man shortage, but instead there's a woman shortage! You could drop the lowest quarter of the men out of the picture (on whatever basis) and there still would be a man for every woman. (The lone exception is the media capitol of NYC, where the ratios are reversed...) But BDW blows right by this seemingly crucial datapoint. I suppose it would wreck the book's thesis and call for some other book to be written -- a book which is unthinkable and unpublishable in today's world. BDW's penchant for avoiding the obvious truth runs like a thread through the entire book and it was extremely annoying.

The figures she presents later in the book show that 85-90% of women marry at some point. The 10-15% who don't don't exactly constitute a huge social crisis based on what were given. Some of these are bound to be opposed on principle to marriage, while many of the rest cohabitate. And while BDW wants to go on and on about the evils of cohabitation, she doesn't seem to grasp the fundamental point that under today's laws marriage is little more than notorized cohabitation. If all of Christine's friends are "vanishing into marriage" (pg 23), this doesn't exactly point to a vast man shortage -- except for poor Christine.

Then there were all the little mis-statements. I think I wrote "no" or "wrong" in the margin about twenty times. For example, BDW states more girls than boys are born. This is exactly backwards -- 105 boys are born for every 100 girls (and even more boys are conceived). This seems like a basic fact of the situation which someone presenting themselves as an authority should get correct. That no editor caught this obvious mistake (or numerous others) points to a certain shoddiness.

BDW makes another error in claiming the dating/mating system has changed dramatically in the last generation or so, in favor of male interests in particular. This is preposterous. All the average man has heard the last fifteen or twenty years from women in general is how much less they're going to do for men, and how much more they're expecting from men. She compounds the error in logic by contending that since the system isn't working for women it must be working great for men. This simply doesn't follow; it makes more sense that it either works for both or neither.

And BDW misunderstands the role of financial and professional success for the two sexes. The male strives for these things in order to be attractive to a member of the opposite sex, who he is then willing to devote these resources to along with their children. One might say he uses his success to create love. A woman, on the other hand, does this only very rarely. Instead she uses her success to allow her to be independent of men and love. Therefore her mate value doesn't depend in the least on how many high-priced degrees and promotions she has. BDW somehow thinks it should and that it's unfair that it doesn't. When the UberFems decide to support males with few marketable skills (and their children), it will. As a further insult to the reader, BDW conflates the rare high-achievers with all women who go to college, again making things sound worse than they are.

To sum up, this is not by any stretch a worthwhile contribution to the literature on the subject.

I'm going to catch a lot of flak for remaining anonymous, but I want to prevent the hate mail I'm sure to receive. I can't begin to explain the level at which I disagree with the title of this book. I don't necessarily take issue with everything the book contains, but the title should have been "I can't find a man, it must be their fault, because I'm so accomplished, it can't possibly be me." I'm very sorry that the women in the book are unfulfilled in the romantic area, but the notion that there are no good men to choose from is absurd. If the men you date are all wrong, stop dating them. Learn from your mistakes. Move on. Is it possible that you are such an overachiever that men are intimidated by you? I think it is.

Secondly - men are not commitment-phobic by nature. This is a myth. If the man you're chasing won't settle down, then he's not a real man.

Lastly - I think that books, TV shows, and other publications of this type do nothing but further the divide between modern men and women. There are books for men telling them that they are right to do their own thing and it's the women who are all wrong, then books like this telling women the exact opposite. How is that supposed to help?

If you are a man, don't read this. It will only upset you.
If you are a woman, don't read this. It won't help.

Ms. Whitehead is AKA Dr. Whitehead (Ph.D) who works with David Popenoe at the Rutgers U. Marriage Project (see http://marriage.rutgers.edu/ ). Respecting the kind of inquiry these folks are doing (you would think with such a massive shift in the social model of relationahips and rearing of children, it would be getting a great deal more attention from sociologists, the press, etc., but alas, isn't), they consistently fail to examine the question from men's point of view. As long as they and others falsely assume that the matter of mate-searching and the question of mate-acceptability rests entirely or largely with women, they will continue to miss important points and come to incorrect or incomplete conclusions.

Facts are facts; some reviewers have suggested them but no one else I can see has come out with them. So I will lay it out: 50% of US marriages end in divorce; 70% of divorces are intiated by the female spouse; over 90% of child custody goes to the mother, as sole custody, amounting to the ex-husband paying child and spousal support of insane amounts for who knows how long. Doing the math, it is easy to see that a man stands a one in three chance of having the mother of his kids leave him and stick him with most of the bill. (.5 x .7 x .9 = .33). The divorce rate also continues to climb and the notion of justice for men in the matter of child custody or reporductive rights seems positively taboo for the mainstream press, and also seems to strike fear and terror into the hearts of gov't officials such as judges and certainly makes lawyers wince. Too much money is getting made off of the imbalances-- why end them, or so they figure?

The result is that between the high risks associated with becoming a husband and esp. a father, coupled with the problems associated with starting and maintaining a couplehood/marriage life with another professional working person (who probably logs at least 60 hrs. a week, as the kind fo women discussed in this book are wont to do), and you can readily see that for most men, marriage, esp. to an "Ally McBeal" type, is not a very attractive proposition.

In short, there are in fact plenty of "good men" out there. We just are not interested in marrying the "Ally McBeal" type women discussed in this book-- it's too complicated and fraught with risk. But to be fair, marrying any woman these days, given the risks, is not that appealing to most men. It just isn't worth playing roulette with your financial and emotional future with the odds so unfavorable. I am not saying that all men feel this way or that any man who does may not decide to take a chance with one very special lady. I am saying that men are rightly far more circumspect today than they have been in the past for very defensible reasons, and as such should not be blamed for wanting to stay off of Ally's radar.

Here's the subtext:

"Where have all the Alpha Males gone?"

Answer: by the time professional women have accrued educational and professional success, the men you want (tall, stunning, accomplished, well above median income) have all settled down (and taken mistresses, too, in some cases). In the real world one of the privileges that alpha male status bestows is early round draft picks.

As for the rest of the men out there - the nicer but merely mortal guys somewhere in the middle of the bell curve - they're not worthy of someone of your pedigree. Right?

I rate this book relatively high because it is true from what I've seen. As a divorced 30 somthing male whose salary is approaching six figures, who is "housebroken", not in debt, and settled down in life, I can tell you first hand that most guys in my position want nothing to do with the women talked about in this book. They want to train a man in the same manner that they would train a dog, and we are not buying into it. The women represented in this book tend to believe that because they are successful, attactive, and self sufficient there is no reason men shouldn't crawl to them. I fact, men are well aware of these women and avoid them like the plague.