In this strangest of primary seasons, women exist primarily in terms of their relationships to the men they marry or question or critique. They can either be beauties or beasts or “the love of my life.” They can be “crazy” or “losers,” “fat pigs” or “dogs.” They can be mothers and daughters. They can be the currency with which you buy voters’ belief in your machismo and alpha-maleness, or they can be the sand you kick in the face of a “New York bully.” In every case, whether they are assets or liabilities, they are objects. In no case are they people.
The Odyssey Years
People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.
In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
.. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
.. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers.
.. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they’re working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.
.. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) ..
.. Rather, what we’re seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish — knitting circles, Teach for America — while others — churches, political parties — have trouble establishing ties.
Women Who Make First Move in Online Dating Are Rewarded, Study Finds
It found that women who sent the first message were 2.5 times more likely to receive a response than men who did the same. And the men the women contacted were more “attractive,” as determined by how other users rate the men’s profiles for both looks and content.
.. OkCupid, which said it has 1.5 men for every woman on the site, said both men and women are aspirational in whom they approach — men send messages to women 17 percentage points more “attractive” than themselves, while women send messages to men 10 percentage points higher. So a woman who simply sifts through her inbox is most likely fielding entreaties from men less attractive than she is, while she’s most likely to get a response if she contacts a more attractive man.
.. About 12 percent of first messages men send turn into a date, while 30 percent of women’s first messages end up in a date, the site said.
.. Bumble requires women to flip the presumption that men are the dating aggressors. After a man and a woman indicate mutual interest in each other’s profiles, they’re both notified that there has been a match — but only women can send the first message. That makes women more confident and empowered, while the men are more flattered and relaxed, Ms. Wolfe said.
Donald Trump, the Winning Wild Card
For a while the base of the G.O.P. has been far closer to where Trump is on the issues than their leadership. The base of the G.O.P. has never really been true “free-traders,” they’ve always been “fair traders,” the leadership of the party wants to embrace some form of amnesty for illegals, the base of the party does not.
.. Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.
.. “You could make a case that the politics of rage has gone from George Wallace, morphed into Nixon and the southern states strategy, then Gingrich and his merry band, into Fox News/Limbaugh/Tea Party Republicans,” Larry O’Brien III (a son of Lawrence Francis “Larry” O’Brien, who was John F. Kennedy’s chief political strategist) wrote me, adding
It’s not quite linear, but is Trump a sea change, a big leap, or merely the next iteration?
.. Trump is simply reflecting what poor voters already know: that they have been sold a bill of goods. They respond to his naked hatred of people of color and women because that is the language and the argument they have known their whole lives, but they also like his apparent attacks on the people who betrayed them.
.. The big question,” Baker writes,
is whether such a politics will be a dead end that tries to set the clock back by being a white people’s populism — treating African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic/racial groups as the enemy. Or whether it will be a forward thinking approach that formulates an economic policy designed to reverse the enormous upward redistribution that has been engineered by the leadership of both political parties over the last three and half decades.