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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