"Marriage Market" Theories Leave Love Out of the Equation

By Amanda Marcotte  |  Posted Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011, at 2:05 PM ET

This piece about the shifts in marriage and dating patterns by Kate Bolick at the Atlantic has some interesting ideas in it, but she makes you pay for these ideas by only bringing them up after forcing you to swim through a sea of unquestioned assumptions and straight up fallacies: that evolutionary psychology is a real science instead of 21st century phrenology, that 40-year-old men are uniformly disinterested in dating women their own age, that singleness is mainly a product of women wanting men more successful than themselves, that the whole nation looks like New York City's notoriously brutal dating marketplace, that there's a meaningful difference between a woman who terminates a long-standing cohabitation and a divorcée, and that Susan Walsh should be treated like an expert in dating when she's better described as a charlatan whose only credential for giving advice is her shockingly sadistic misogyny (and who likes to diagnose feminists from afar as mentally ill because they question her immoveable belief that dating is really a war between men and women in which each tries to extract what they want from the other with as minimal contribution of love or sex as possible, depending on the gender stereotype). Even the interesting idea at the end of her piece, which is that women deal with the scarcity of decent men that are marriageable by shoring up their relationships to each other, feels weak and mealy-mouthed. It made me long for some saber-rattling radical lesbian separatism that, while not my cup of tea personally speaking, at least has conviction.