The New York Times Paints Successful Women As Threats To Men

I fail to see the drama behind the fact that 22 percent of men have wives who earn more money than they do, or the statistic that -- hold on to your seats, folks -- in seven percent of households of married couples with children, only the wife works. Seven percent!

Nor do I see the jaw-dropping shock factor in the revelation that women's salaries have been rising faster than men's since the 1970s. Uh, ya think? Maybe because there was a large gap between men's and women's salaries that has been slowly closing, even though women still earn 78 cents to the dollar compared to men?

But The New York Times has published a grave piece about how women are becoming victims of their own success, where statistics like the ones above are painted as drastic and even vaguely threatening, as if women are on the verge of becoming super-educated hyper-successful beasts who will leave their meek, under-performing men with tragic complexes about their manly value. The article treats women's increased education and presence in the work force as a troubling modern development that has ironically left them vulnerable and made them threatening to men.

Let me say that first off, 22 percent of wives earning more than their husbands, even if it constitutes an 18 percent increase from 1970, is by no means a statistic demonstrative of awe-inspiring progress. Considering the fact that women now make up 50 percent of the work force, the shocking aspect of the 22 percent statistic isn't that it's so high, but rather that it's dismally low.

Secondly, I find the breathless and dismayed air of the piece deeply disturbing. The author quotes an Evergreen State College professor saying that the increased number of wives who earn more than their husbands adds up to a "sea change in gender relations in marriage." A sea change? When apparently according to the women in the article, many men are reluctant to marry a woman who is more successful than they are, just as they were decades ago? When in a quarter of marriages the wife earns more vs. three quarters in which the husband earns more? When women still have more part-time jobs, lower-paying jobs, and fewer executive positions than men?

Then we could ask why The New York Times still finds it so shocking, in 2010, that a woman would be self-sufficient, well-educated, well-traveled, and confident. The Times piece seems to see these women as part of a freakish but frighteningly expanding group, a sort of new species who -- no! -- isn't dependent on men. Hasn't this been news for, um, decades? If nothing else, couldn't you get a glimpse of this from Sex And The City? So I wonder how an article written in 2010 can end with a supposedly revelatory quote like this one: “You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?" Hasn't this whole successful woman pseudo-dilemma been worked out and debated long before?

I see a dual fail here: one painting statistics which show how far women still have to go for equal pay as enormous, paradigm-changing gains, and one implying successful, independent women are some new and strange breed who are ultimately creating their own downfall. Too bad, New York Times; the rest of us are already well aware of the fact that these women exist. In fact, we are these women. And we don't see those slight leaps in salary gains as revolutionary -- we're still fighting the uphill battle for equality. Looks like we're living in two different eras.

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