The XX Factor: What women really think.

Are We Seriously Talking About the "Market Value" of a Thirty Year Old Woman?

Jess, Dayo: Mark Regnerus may usefully point out that some women wish it were more acceptable to get married young. But the larger thrust of his article is characterized by that depressing narrow-mindedness that older male writers always bring to the task when they begin bemoaning the sad state of young women's sexual, romantic, and reproductive lives. (And somehow it's always the young women's lives they're bemoaning, as I noted here for Slate some years back.) Regnerus can't seem to make up his mind. On the one hand, he acknowledges the well-known fact that getting married young means you're more likely to get divorced than getting married when you're older. (According to the National Marriage Project,getting married after 25 significantly reduces the chance of divorce.) Yet he states confidently that "Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed." Hmm? That may be his experience, but he doesn't have many facts to back him up. After all, marriage can be a deformative institution too, as all those divorces would suggest.

The most pernicious element of the article, though, is its didactic, implicit assumption that women heading into their 30s need to pay attention to their "market value," as if we were cows with no identity or worth beyond our saleability on the sexual market. Every young woman today has had it drilled into her head that her fertility diminishes "radically" at 35; reciting all the reasons that we should be terrified about our relative decline in sexual value is just another tired old form of what Susan Faludi so rightly named a "backlash" to feminism. For some reason, these men worry even more than we do about our futures. Leaving me to wonder what I always wonder: Isn't it time for them to stop reading studies that affirm what everyone already implicitly knows, and attend to their own affairs? Life isn't fair, as my mother always used to say, but marrying the wrong guy at 25 isn't necessarily the best solution to the problem.