there was an article in a recent men’s magazine i think DETAILS about a yuppie trend among men to get women to carry their embryos to term and to riase the kids as single dads, kinda like single women do.
the thrust of the article was, if you ahve the cash and you want kids, doing it with a similar professional woman was way too much fo a pain and it would be easier and probably cheaper to just do the whole thing yerself. no risk of payments, no dealing with an upset wife, you get to call the shots, you end up getting laid more, and plus you of course have the kids as a potential attractor for further women (although i dont remember the article saying that).
I think there is a lot to be said for that, that if money isn’t an issue, and you can afford NOT to have a stay-at-home wife why would you personally want potential bickering over the valuation of “wifely” (i mean that int he sense of traditioanlly wifely duties, the duties at home that are unpaid but obviously of value), just pay the market rate and be doe with it. Assuming you really want kids.
i think most guys don’t actually want kids at the time the woman wants kid. this goes back to the “front-loading” issue, where the woman has athe greater incentive to have the kdis sooner (when she can) and the guy ahs the greater incentive to pu t it off (when he’s got more money and time to dela with the little rugrats. Obviously, having a “wife” has value, int hat she raises your kids and does all that stuff, but the value is not at all objective, and if the guy didn’t want to have kids for another five years, the “wife” sevrices actualyl may have a negative value. If you don’t want it, it doesn’t have value.
in general, i thing TG is on the right track, everyone should be gay. without the gay sex, at least for me…or maybe a more realistic proposition is to ust have people reproduce solo, bear the costs, and then we wont have all this arguing about al the “sacrifices” that wer emade and how to put a dollar value on them. the problem is, we’re all really too poor to ahve all these families. if families were businesses, they’d be thee tiny marginal enterprises basically not worth runnign on the verge of bankruptcy. Luckily, they have some intangible goodwill valeu that keeps them afloat.
Why should a guy ahve to meet a women’s expectations? Why shoudln’t it be the reverse, for standards in all things? If the guy isn’t cleaning the house, it’s probably not dirty enough…plus, you know, all this cleaning is very bad for your health, you need some filth to build healthy immunity systems in children. clean houses are tantamount to child abuse. ths whole fixation with clean houses is a relatively new innovation (cheack last month’s HARPER’S MAGAZINE for book reviews on two books ont he history of cleaning…)
