When are you going to settle down and get yourself a nice trophy wife?

Speaking of traditional gender roles, Angelos passes on this little tidbit from Gawker:

There are plenty of howlers in this Forbes piece, starting with its charmingly straightforward title: "Don't Marry Career Women." Beyond that, it's the usual host of statistics discussing how women with brains and ambition are nothing but shrieking harbingers of misery, so best steer clear of any chick who has a "university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year." After a landslide of directly implying that statistics about mental well-being and lifelong happiness correlate directly with marrying the stupid and jobless, Forbes barely sneaks in the caveat that "it's important not to confuse correlation with causation." But even all this foolishness is eclipsed by the accompanying slideshow, "In Pictures: Nine Reasons To Steer Clear Of Career Women," which is a grab-bag of more stats illustrated with tenuously related stock photography. Why does this information require illustration? Did we need a close-up of a woman's gelatinous fake tear to know what an unhappy wife looks like? That stock-photo man at [left] sure looks sad. If only he'd had the balls to send off for that Ukrainian mail-order bride.

Sadly, their summary doesn’t begin to convey how truly appalling the article actually is, misrepresenting (for example) findings about household labor issues as a problem with women entering the workplace, as opposed to women entering the workplace and still being expected to do all the household labor, too. Were this article more honest, it might be titled instead “Don’t Marry a Career Woman if You’re a Lazy, Sexist Shithead Who Doesn’t Want to Lift a Finger to Help Around the House.” The thing is, Forbes expects (probably correctly) that it’s addressing men who fit that bill, so “Don’t Marry a Career Woman” will suffice.

And if the article were totally honest, it would be titled “Let’s Shame Women About Wanting Careers,” because at its raw core, the article is not really addressing men, but women. Passages like:

While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.

…read not so much as a warning to men, but a doomsday scenario for women. The underlying sentiment is You don’t really want to be an unhappy, cuckolding divorcee with a bunch of kids you don’t like, do you, honey?

Surely not, no. Better to be a happy trophy wife. Sure, it’s a fleeting happiness that will come to a crashing halt when you’ve put in 20 good years and get traded in for a newer model, but hey—it’s better than having a career. Ick.

[UPDATE here.]