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The big divorce

The divide between the man and the woman is greater today than ever in history, a US state scientist claims.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Maybe it started already in the 1950s. The American film "Pleasantville" is about a boy from the 1990s who is obsessed with the TV series of the same name, where the action is added to an idyllic imaginary city in the 1950s. Together with his sister, both end up on the TV screen and become part of the imagination. The nostalgic utopia is fulfilled in black and white, but for the inhabitants of the peaceful city, the visit develops into a colorful nightmare. The modern sibling couple introduces both sex and book reading – to the great despair of the mayor. People start thinking for themselves and ask themselves: Is there a life outside of Pleasantville? The greatest transformation takes place with the newly adopted mother of modern young people. One day the man comes home from work and says as always "Honey, I'm home", he gets no answer. And the dinner is not over. The man breaks down and runs to the bowling alley. Shocked, he tells the other men in the city what has happened. The men sit back gaping and wondering who will be the next victim. The question everyone is wondering is asked by the city mayor: What are we doing now?

The woman wins – and loses

"What do we do now?" also asks the American political scientist Andrew Hacker in the recent book "Mismatch". It is a kind of sequel to the controversial book "Two Nations" from 1992 which declared that the gap between blacks and whites in America was far from gone. Now it is about the two sexes, the man and the woman. We can also consider them as two different nations, we must believe Hacker, who believes that there is "an increasing gap between the sexes" and that there are not "enough men who can satisfy the modern woman's expectations of relationships and marriage". It's like hearing Bridget Jones or Ally McBeal. The difference is that Hacker's book is full of numbers and statistics and provocative allegations. Maybe it's not coincidental: the woman uses fiction and fiction to convey her message, the man uses the professional literature. Among the claims in the book is precisely that women choose to communicate emotionally in relationships, while men go way around the head – without it necessarily guaranteeing reason. But Hacker has studies to refer to. Audio recordings from the kitchen and living room in a selection of homes show that Hacker is right. The audio recording customer survey is among the thinnest pieces of evidence in the book, according to Michiko Makutani in The New York Times. On the other hand, Hacker points out major national surveys that emphasize his basic point, namely that the differences between men and women only increase in the United States. In the United States, half of all marriages end in divorce. The woman has taken the initiative for 64 per cent of the divorces. Still, or maybe because of that, she's usually the loser. Surveys show that women reduce their standard of living by 27 percent after divorce. The man increases his standard of living by ten percent and far more men than women remarry after the divorce. This is partly due to the fact that the woman is most often left with the children. Forty percent of all American children do not live with their fathers. But after all. This may not be the worst news for men and women in the future. The bad news is that fewer and fewer people are getting married at all.

Fussy women

In 1986, American Newsweek stated that a 40-year-old woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to be married. Today, it is both a tasteless and lame comparison for the average American. Potential terrorists abound. Potential men, on the other hand, are in short supply, we must believe Hacker. He again refers to studies that state that there is a growing gap between women and men's values ​​and worldview. This is best illustrated by taking a look at the American education system. For every 100 women educated, there are only 75 men. This disparity is in addition to the fact that there are generally more women in the United States than men and that women live longer than men. In other words, the woman has good reason to make strict demands on the man in her life. And what is perhaps even worse to deal with for men, is that now in sports there are generally more women's teams than men's teams in the American college system. Not only does the woman dominate the classrooms, but now she also dominates the sports field. Soon she will take the remote control as well. "Why There Are No Good Men Left", states Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in a new book. Women can obviously also write textbooks (in 1997 she published "The Divorce Culture"). In the book, she draws a portrait of the new woman who now defines the criteria for success in the United States, and she is well-educated, goal-oriented, hard-working and competitive. The book is a serious study of a time phenomenon, but according to her the crisis is so extreme that the woman now has to resort to untraditional means to find a worthy spouse. Internet checking is among them. Then the American woman has the whole world to frolic in. In France, it is possible that there are some worthy men left. There they go on courses to learn how to court the woman.

Where's James Bond?

Since 1994, the Ecole Francaise Seduction has turned thousands of helpless men into romantic flirters. Lately, the school has also taken in women, but the school started as a pure education for men. The training lasts for nine months, and the goal is for some of Paris' 800.000 singles to find each other. France is said to be one of the most romantic peoples in the world. Possibly it was like that, but today it's just a myth, we'll believe the school. – The French lover no longer exists. French men are just talk and no action. They can talk, blah, blah, blah, but after that… nothing, states the school's leader Vèronique J. Now it's gone so far that French people are asked to think like British-American James Bond to get attention from the opposite sex . The clientele at the school is diverse, from single successful businessmen to married women who want to speed up their marriage. Several mothers are also sending their young sons to school. The teaching consists of both theory and practice, but first and foremost it is about increasing self-confidence. And style. – If a man smells of old cheese, has greasy hair and a big beer belly, he probably does not have the big ambitions, the teacher says. It sounds like the American man, described by both Hacker and Whitehead. But it is about the fall of the French romantic. According to the English-language French website expatica.com, the French School of Seduction is also opening a branch in the United States.

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