A talented journalist, playwright and activist died last weekend in a car crash shortly after graduating from Yale. Marina Keegan was 22. Before she died, she wrote an essay for the Yale Daily News urging her classmates to keep alive the sense of possibility they brought with them when they first arrived at college:
We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. …
What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. … We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.
Over on the Spearhead, W.F. Price notes her death, and quotes these words, and more, from her essay. His point? That she was wrong.
By the time you hit 25 or so – just three years out of college – your life is pretty much set, he argues, and “your future can be fairly well predicted by your life at that point.” And this apparently goes double for women. Price titles his post: “After 25, Women Are Just Wasting Time.”
And why is that? Because if they’re not married to a good earner by then, or at least with the guy they plan to settle down with, they’re fucked. While an “average girl,” as Price puts it, should have snagged her future husband by age 21, non-average college girls buy themselves only a few more years.
As Price explains it:
Four years of college buys women precious little time in the mating market. … I’d guess … about exactly as much time as it takes for them to complete it, because their pool of future mates tends to go through the same process … That’s to say that she has her best shot to land a good match up to perhaps 25.
There are a few, well, let’s just call them plot holes in Price’s story here, but let’s hear him out:
The problem with young women today is that they internalize this “anything is possible” attitude and don’t lose it until it really is too late for many of them. They think they can do better at 30 than at 22, which, in most cases, is simply wrong. Some might say that family and men are not a priority for these girls, but women for whom this is really true throughout life are an insignificant minority. In fact, most women are holding out precisely because they think they can get a better man later, perhaps when they have a better job and work with more powerful men.
But these girls are not going to change fundamentally, and in their early 20s are at the peak of their beauty while still retaining an innocent charm. Nothing about their looks or personality is going to make them more appealing at 30 than at 22, and the men available to them are not going to get any better, either….
The point is that neither men nor women change fundamentally past a certain point, and the same guys young women have available in their early 20s are generally the same guys that will be available at 30, only they will be older and, due to marriage, there will be far fewer of them.
Yep, we’re back to the hoary old story of the bad boy cock carousel once again. Better grab hold of a good hearted beta while the getting is good, ladies – because by the time you finish off your slutty dalliances with the bad boy alphas your looks will be gone and no man (alpha or beta) will want to have anything to do with you.
Price continues, cranking the melodrama up to eleven:
Time tends to accelerate past a certain age, and the 25-year old woman soon finds herself 30, and then 35, and at that point she’s got precious little of it left. Perhaps at 22 she was laughing about the “comical” notion that it could ever be too late, but after a certain point it is no longer comedy, but tragedy, and her laughter turns to tears.
Now, none of this is original, and none of it is true. What’s interesting is just how badly misogynistic manospherians want it to be true. They must, because they tell this same story to themselves over and over and over, like small children requesting their parents to read their favorite bedtime story “again!” They (the misogynists, not the children) love the idea that the women who turned them down – or who, at the very least, rejected their brand of patronizing patriarchy – will get their comeuppance in the end, the more humiliating, the better.
Price at least pretends to care about the women he’s trying to scare straight (into marriage). But some of the commenters on his site can’t be bothered to contain their glee at the notion of spurned thirtysomething women collapsing into tears.
The Contrarian Expatriate turns on the sarcasm:
But why shouldn’t women feel this way? Women “can have it all.” They are “fabulous.” Women rule. Women first. Women are 20 when they’re 30, and 30 when their 40. Women, women, women.
Screech, crash, halt! (Then comes reality when the cuteness wears off and the pounds set in….).
Eximio shares a “shit that never happened” story of a high school reunion he went to:
[M]en do age better than women. I looked around at the women and they all just looked old to me. I could not imagine myself with any of them. They had lost whatever charm they had and I found attractive the last time I had seen them. Almost all of the men that were there with their spouses were with younger women. …
As for the women specifically, while they all seemed old, I noted that the happiest of the lot talked about their family. Some of them were married, some of them divorced, but in both cases they talked about their kids. They were clearly the most fulfilled. Many of the other women than I knew had pursued consuming careers were not at the reunion. Those that were, and who did not have children, had a whiff of pain on their faces. They seemed to be looking around and suddenly forced to face the consequences of their choices.
Or maybe they noticed that a patronizing douche was giving them the once-over, and shot him a dirty look.
Ode apparently finds it all so hilarious he is unable to maintain his balance:
The problem with college today is that it teaches a woman that she has an IQ of 115 so naturally she spends her time chasing after men who she perceives to be her “equal”, the top 15% of the men within society. Or to put it another way, a college educated woman thinks she’s better than 85% of everybody else.
Sorry honey the only thing your degree in liberal arts or communications tells me is that you have IQ above 100. Which means you’re better than the bottom 50% of society. No other conclusions can be made. Of course most women will never understand this. They will spend the rest of their bitter lives believing the reason why they couldn’t get Mr. Right is because men are afraid of a strong and smart women.
Falls over laughing!
Rmaxd offers a somewhat different explanation for Marina Keegan’s optimism; I’m not quite sure I even understand it.
What Mira [sic] is expressing, her not needing a man, that precisely because she doesnt need a man she can get everything she wants, well into her 50′s …
She’s accepted her feminist brainwashed idiocy & tried to turn it into a social norm
Her fantasy entails her getting an education, & competing in cut-throat environments designed for men … which require a male intolerance for anything not rational or logic
All the while her fantasy involves a child as an accessory & strong alpha thug, who’ll rescue her instead of pumping & dumping her to kingdom come …
Her vagina also gives her magical powers to screw over sex hungry beta’s without game, as a backup plan, if the jamaican thugs from her sex tourism never get round to playing captain save-a hoe, when she hits 30 …
Beta’s, a deranged feminists insurance policy, for when her vagina no longer cashes cheques she cant write …
Our old pal JeremiahMRA (a.k.a. Things Are Bad) suggests, in a series of comments, that we should push the whole timetable up a few years, forcing girls to get married to whomever their fathers say shortly after puberty. No, really, that’s his actual argument:
Honestly women shouldn’t be going to college at all. It’s a complete waste and takes away from people who can actually get something from education: men. The only reason they do it is to inflate their egos….
[I]t’s more accurate that after puberty, women are just wasting time. Wasting time slutting around, going to school, working, when they should be getting married to whomever their fathers say and having children, which is really all women are good at.
Today women choose mates based solely on lust and greed. Women don’t love, the only thing they love is getting fucked hard and being provided for by a man or the government. This is why in any sane (patriarchal) society a girl’s father decides who she is to marry.
Lovely.
Most of these comments got dozens of upvotes, with only a handful of downvotes. Jeremiah’s comments, a bit reactionary even for The Spearhead, got more than a few downvotes, but still only a fraction as many as the upvotes they got. Only Rmaxd got more downvotes than up, perhaps because his comments made no fucking sense.
So nice that The Spearheaders have taken the time from their day to honor the memory of a promising writer whose life was cut short.
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This post contains some:
I’m also amused at the “hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime” bit. If I stay in my current job until I am eligible to retire, I will have made millions, not “hundreds of thousands.” And I’ll be eligible to retire in my early 50s! Plenty of lifetime left.
I mean, sheesh. If you’re going to accuse me of raping my resume, at least give me some credit for making a decent living at it.
Ginger: Personally I am VERY VERY HAPPY that I didn’t get married when I was sixteen. I mean, god, that means I’d probably have a three-year-old and maybe an infant right now. Yeesh. And it wouldn’t be good for the kids either: right now I am nowhere near ready to have children (and I may never be), but four years ago I couldn’t cook a basic meal, didn’t know how to communicate needs or set boundaries, and had several completely untreated mental illnesses.
So, uh, going to work and doing my job is “raping my resume”????
Which directly contradicts the notion that you have fully establish who you’re going be for the rest of your life by 25, and flat out ignores everyone who said they didn’t stop changing after 25, so I’m not quite sure what your point is here.
You do realize that objectification means not considering someone an actual person, right? What about that is not villainous?
Oh, and who’s “we”, by the way? I’m a man, and you damn well don’t speak for me.
@ozymandias: I work for an attorney (IANAL) in the South and it’s not uncommon to get court dates in Juvenile Court so a minor can be held accountable for how she treats her baby.
I won’t judge, though. One of my grandmothers had her first child when she was 17 (that child is now a great-grandmother. Wow).
So I guess I’m saying all the hugs and a big ol’ congrats for getting out of a tough situation.
@Cliff Pervocracy: Wait, hold on, didn’t this guy just make a false allegation against you for r**ing your resume? OMG YOU ARE NOW TOTALLY RUINED FOR LIFE
… and if it is r**ing your resume, wouldn’t it be r**ing my resume for me to work in the aforementioned lawyer’s office? Okay, trying to make the whole thing make sense is giving me a nosebleed. I think I’m going to go write some things down for a sci-fi RPG campaign now.
jkaupp8
Disagreeing with a dead person is not offensive. However using the tragic death of a young woman with a bright future ahead of her as an opportunity to fart out methane bubbles, aka his “thoughts,” is offensive. It’s grave dancing.
Yup.
Except that in Price’s case, his argument was less about how people change, but how women change for the worse after a certain age because it decreases their chances for finding a man and having babies so women should hurry up and settle down. He assumes that all women want this life course.
You don’t say!
It isn’t necessarily bad being attracted to good looking people. Objectifying people, however, is wrong.
It does if the only way they view women is as objects and not human beings with other dimensions apart of physical beauty. Key word here is objectify
At the end of the day, there are real people who are grieving over this woman’s death and Price, The Grand High Poobah of Shit, used it to bloviate about feminism and how women aren’t behaving the way he wants them to.
Wow, DAvid called that guy right. He is basically inventing his own argument then ascribing it to Price. I thought they only did that to feminists.
Falconer: I was in no danger of getting married when I was sixteen! (Sheesh, I couldn’t even get a date.) I just wanted to say that I’m REALLY happy I don’t live in the hypothetical Spearheader sixteen-year-olds-get-married-to-twenty-year-olds universe.
You know what? If I’ve been wasting the last 20 odd years of my time, I’ll just continue wasting time. It’s been a pretty good time, really.
He really means women are wasting HIS time, doesn’t he 🙁
One of my best friends had a baby and got married at 16. Her husband was 18. They are the pinnacle of happiness and health I tell you. Except, wait no, they are under educated, missed out on the normal teen experience of prom and graduation and odd jobs (he joined the military as his only option to make enough money for a family). They both have problems with alcohol and difficulty with communication. You know what causes huge arrested development? Being forced into roles before you have figured out what your dreams, values, expectations are. Before you’ve had the time to figure yourself out let alone figure out how you relate to other people.
She has cervical cancer (at 21!) got it removed and hopefully that will be that but she won’t have any more children. And she is glad that the kids will be old enough while she is still young enough that she can try to go to college or figure out herself and her life. But she regrets not being able to be a better example to her kids now simply because she lacks the life experience. The are both actually really good parents over all (I think the dad is too violent with discipline but I know most people spank to some degree and he doesn’t do more than that), just not good partners to eachother. And they would have known that if they had been able to grow up a bit before getting married.
Also, having kids at 16 does not help AT ALL with preserving “good looks” or body type/ strength. In fact I’d wager it does more damage at that age than at 35 or whatever is too old to possible have kids in their world. Often the hips and breasts are not fully developed at 16 and so the body is in a lot of pain and gets far more stretch marks. And I think having kids ages you regardless but my body seemed to take a lot less damage when I was 22 having a baby than when I was 20.
it actually does tho. but stop with this dumbass ‘we’ business. just because you’re too dumb to do anything more than treat women as objects doesn’t mean i am.
Posts like this almost make me feel guilty about picking on MRAs, because most of them seem to be deeply unhappy people, and their insecurities and disappointments become painfully obvious when they throw fits about the fact that other people–female people, even!–are happy, successful, and loved. I mean, who works this hard to try to convince other people that life ends at age 25? It makes me feel badly for them, because I have so much, relatively speaking, and they have so little.
But then I’m like, screw it, that scented candle rant was comedy gold.
The MRM is nothing but a smelly bag of contradiction. “Women are worthless except as babymakers and sex objects and are too stupid to work a job” vs “Women should earn their own way and stop expecting teh mens to finance their lives.” Ummm….Or try this one…”When feminism collapses, men and women will be really equal” vs “Giving women the vote was the worst mistake in history.”
I could go on and on about their contradictory views on every topic, from patriarchy, abortion, divorce law, you name it. The only view they hold with any consistency is “WOMEN ARE BAD.”
There was nuance?
Then why isn`t the article titled “After 25, people are just wasting time”? Why focus on women? Could it be that Price is a pathetic woman-hater?
And if that was his point (It wasn`t), then it was sure lost on his readers. You`ll notice that a woman named Lara (who always tries her hardest to make those misogynistic nutjobs love her and always fails wrote a comment saying that all the things Price said about women were true of men. And she was downvoted to oblivion.
Need I remind you that The Spearhead is a website where people will openly state that women shouldn`t vote?
I love this forever:
SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES
I shall shout it every time I light them forever more!
I also commented on their site:
Sorry life was full of disappointment and regret for many of you. I shall shed a single tear while playing the world’s smallest violin in your honor.
I am also sorry that you never grew past the age where you thought the world revolved around you. I can see why such stunted emotional growth would cause the kind of arrested development that makes you see people as impossible to change grow or improve after their low twenties.
I do find it amusing that people who don’t conform to your twisted expectations cause you such distress and constipated mewling. People different from yourselves are happy and that boils your blood. I don’t understand it, but it has given me a chuckle.
I don’t wish anything upon you; the existence which you currently inhabit seems the worst kind of hell anyone could hope for. I wish you many years of pissing against the wind and clanging your insignificant bell within the echo chamber of your lonely minds.
“Need I remind you that The Spearhead is a website where people will openly state that women shouldn`t vote?”
And that they get “goosebumps” thinking about rape…
And that they`ll upvote you for talking at great length about committing acts of terrorism to kill feminists and manginas
And that it`s perfectly normal on their forum to argue that we should cut the voiceboxes out of female infants to prevent them from having opinionns–oops, I meant from becoming feminists
And that no one there cares if you openly profess your belief in white nationalism
So no, fuck you jkaupp for trying to apologize for the most heinous group of people imaginable.
To be fair, I personally *did* prioritize my life to include college and an active social life but also a very clear personal goal of looking for a life partner at a younger age as more of a priority, and also a desire to have my first child before I turned 30 (this became more pressing once I was diagnosed with PCOS and told that I was likely infertile, as I have always felt that it would be awesome to grow and birth a human being as well as raise said human being through adulthood).
HOWEVER.
This does *not* mean that I think that every other woman (or even MOST other women) have the same goals as I do. In fact, you’d think that, crazy thing- ALL WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS!!
While there is *some* impetus to have children before a certain age (if you wish to have children of your own), that’s something you can prioritize as is important to you. Even men don’t have an unlimited “shelf life” because sperm breaks down and older mens’ sperm is known to have a higher chance of producing children with delays or genetic defects, even if he impregnates a younger woman. Plus the potency of his sperm does decrease with age, so there is no real guarantee that men can sow their seeds five minutes before they croak from old age and have perfectly healthy children as a result.
But breeding plans aside, it’s in particularly poor taste to take the death of a young woman and then use it as a banner to wave a “get preggo fast or you’ll be an old cat lady tomorrow” flag. Don’t these MRAs also find themselves highly incensed at women getting pregnant so early because it turns them into UGLY OLD BAGS? *rolls eyes* And 22 years old is kinda young to have a kid (and graduate college so quickly), much less have a stable FOREVAH relationship. And let’s not even forget that if she DID have children or was pregnant at the time of her death, she’d either have left an ORPHAN behind (for the father to be forced to raise and provide for like some sort of horrible anchor, amirite?) or the fetus would have died with her- either option is bad.
And let’s not forget here that a PERSON HAS DIED, ostensibly long before she would otherwise have died from age or sickness. And that’s the real tragedy.
You know the saying “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”? That’s basically what these stupid MRAs are doing. Someone dies, and it’s ALL ABOUT HOW EVIL TEH WIMMINZ R and the OPPRESHUN OF MALEZ!
Give me a break.
I just added scented candles to the sidebar.
I don’t like that on the sidebar at all.
What a tragedy. I hope her parents – and Yale University – sue The Spearhead. For further emotional distress. But that’s probably not possible.
If anyone has time…who is W.F. Price? Is his name Welmer? Is he one of the few who’s not anonymous? What’s his deal? Mail order bride?
I kind of like the “scented candles are misandry” thing but maybe it should link to the rant so that people who weren’t here for that can get it? (Or to a screenshot of the rant, at least.) Posting from a place of insomnia, so pardon if I don’t make much sense.
Welmer Price is not anonymous. He was raised Catholic, and was married, until his wife left him for another man (to whom she is now married). He has children but I guess has difficulties paying child support, or at least he did, as he was in arrears. It appears he now has a mail order wife from Cambodia. He lives in Seattle, WA. If you are curious you can just read The Spearhead. He likes to talk about himself a lot.
I approve of the scented candle.
I think the scented candles are awesome! I imagine them smelling like and desperation and loneliness.
Here’s another gem I mined from The Spearhead:
“GingerSnaps:
‘The problem is that wives and children are human beings, you don’t get to achieve them.’
Unfortunately, in modern America that’s true. Thugs, gang-bangers, dope addicts have women and children about easily as they have welfare. The productive men are cut out of the picture entirely.
It seems a strange contradiction in feminist logic that ‘no man is good enough to earn a relationship’ but slutting around with bums and knocking out kids with them is considered ‘empowering.’ But I guess that’s all supposed to prove that they ‘don’t need a man’ and that’s the important point. The real losers are the kids, and that’s the tragic part.”
THE PRODUCTIVE MEN ARE CUT OUT OF THE PICTURE ENTIRELY?
Holy shit. So now in MRA land ANY man with a job is now sentenced to a live of involuntary celibacy? Not only do these guys know nothing about women, they don’t know shit about other men either!