Young, Rich, Single Women

After my work is done, I'm going to start a blog about young, single, rich women. I'll probably have to set up a lot of interviews to keep providing appropriate content. And what's the etiquette when interviewing someone? You can't invite yourself over, but you certainly can't invite them over to your place. They'd get the wrong idea. Obviously you have to meet in a cafe or restaurant. Is it appropriate to buy their drinks?

It's not like anything would happen, studies now show:

Young, Single Women Earn More Than Male Peers - WSJ.com: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Last night some hopeless academic named Dougherty trumpeted America's feminist gains among single people, celebrating the fact that single American women now earn more money than our single men. While this certainly represents a step toward overall wage equality, I'm not sure whether it's more disturbing that married women still earn less than married men or that lower-income, less-college-educated men are apparently not marriage-eligible. Or maybe it means that higher-income women can't overlook their patriarchal assumptions and find happiness in the economic dependence of someone kind of hopeless but kind of hopelessly good looking, like higher income men used to (and apparently still) do.

Dougherty suggests that one reason for the income discrepancy is that more women than men now attend college. It doesn't look at why that is. In my experience as a student, dropout, grad-student and teacher, students stay with school as long as they receive consistent positive reinforcement from at least one of their teachers. Is there any reason why teachers should positively reinforce young women over young men?

Well, one possibility is that there are many more female teachers than male teachers, especially in the younger grades, where students form lasting impressions of the educational apparatus and of themselves as students or, if their teachers describe them otherwise, non-students.

An elementary educator recently told me that overwhelmingly more boys are dyslexic than girls. A more experienced colleague corrected her. She said there simply aren't numbers on who has more trouble decoding visual stimuli, but that boys are overwhelmingly more often diagnosed because they aren't taught the same academic coping skills that might help dyslexic young women slide by.

I think another obvious piece is that teachers, for all of their educational theories and training, are still human. Human beings empathize most strongly with the children who remind them most strongly of themselves as children. This is why we all like babies even more than kittens. The same principle can extend to gender differences as long as we as a society view those differences as constructive elements of identity.

If our young children have mostly female teachers, and all of our teachers are still growing up in an overtly gendered society, then young women are more likely than young men to receive approval from their teachers. These young women are then more likely to stay in school, more likely to finish college and more likely to let fond memories of school guide them into careers as educators, themselves.

Should men go out and blame feminists for this discrepancy? No. Men should get over their ingrained patriarchal assumptions that teaching is women's work. Men, go back to college. Men, go get a degree in education. It can be physical education or math education if you need to still keep the world divided. Or if you want to really do something novel, go get a degree in how to teach kindergarten. Learn how to teach Spanish. Teach Home Economics. You'll be a precious resource for schools that recognize their need for diversity. You might save the next Emeril Legace from dropping out.

When a few million single American men go back to school and get teaching degrees, they won't just even out the statistics on college degrees among American singles. They won't even just even out the statistics on income among American singles. If my knee-jerk interpretation of the above data is correct, they'll actually stop being a part of that statistical category of "singles," entirely.

And maybe they'll help us reach toward a state of equality. That's not a numerical achievement like equity. Equality is a state of fairness. Equality means that instead of saying "boys need more money so they can feed girls," or "girls need more money so they don't have to depend on boys," we recognize that everybody needs money (or, really, farmland) to feed themselves. Equality means that instead of assuming that young men, whatever struggles they may face, will eventually put on a shiny suit and become successful businesspeople with horses and castles, we all will have to do our best at whatever we're best at to earn our wages.

Equality means that instead of asking teachers to tell us which of our kids are "good" and which ones are "bad," and then taking them at their word regardless of how many female educators keep telling us that our "boys are gross and they can't sit still," we'll have to start asking all teachers what our kids are good at, and developing those talents. Let the grossest among us become comedians and artists. Let the rest find love for themselves, that they may someday find it for others. We don't need everybody to learn to be good officepeople. I'm not even sure we all need offices.

If more of our young women work in offices, this should not be a surprise. Offices are designed for women. An office, in the traditional, patriarchal construction, is a place where you show up at a certain time to sit still and read and write all day long. Whether by nature or nurture, more American young women learn how to sit still than American young men. American young women get more practice reading than our young men. They also get more books written and published specifically for them, even when literary values would dictate otherwise (*twilight*). American young women get more practice being on time than young men. It is tremendously ironic that our economic patriarchy has so scrupilously maintained an arbitrary system of merits by which to ensure its own dissolution.

Of course I say maintained and not established because it was established by a woman. The Virgin Queen of England, finding herself in charge of a number of men distinguished for their feats in equitation and brutality, held contests among them in poetry. All it took was one woman in authority to change gender roles as we still think we know them in spite of four hundred years of evidence to the contrary. One woman in charge, and there was never again hope for patriarchy.

But I have trouble with the concept of a modern patriarchy. I don't think it's dissolving. I think it's so long gone it's as if it never existed. The idea belongs to a world of talking heads on the TV and other relics of an incomprehensible past. I can't even conceptualize anyone I have ever met seriously claiming to belong to such a group as a patriarchy--the men who own the world. None of us can own the world. Not singly or in any number. We can only borrow this world from our great grandchildren and try to get it ready for them, whatever gender or non-gendered futuristic identity-construct they may be.