Noer’s Forbes article reeks of it. All of his “advice” about marrying career women is at heart a manifestation of his fear, and the fear of men like him: that unless he keeps her in a cage, no woman will stay with him. My God, if she finds out there’s a world outside the house, there will be no keeping her at my side! If she has a job, she has contact with other men, and she might cuckold me. If she has money, she has the means to leave me. If she’s invested in her career, she might refuse to get tied down with children, and she’ll not only leave me, she’ll leave me without giving me ownership of her womb. If she works as many hours as I do, she might expect me to do my share around the house.

Now, there are several levels of fear represented here. First, there’s the insecurity that a woman with her own interests might grow tired of him. There’s the fear of losing privilege — after all, if a guy’s been raised to think that his wife should be his maid and his mommy, and she refuses to play along, that might mean he might have to consider picking up some of the slack instead of having things done for him. There’s the fear of her finding someone else — someone better. There’s the fear she might outearn him, or succeed where he has stalled out, and that’s not supposed to happen

So what’s a guy like Noer to do, now that the law so inconveniently allows women to work, to have their own money and property, and to seek divorces? His solution is to find someone who won’t outearn him, who doesn’t have as much education, who will be dependent on him and who won’t have the means to leave him should she realize that she’s stuck with an insecure, whiny loser who sees no real difference between wives and prostitutes.

But Noer — and the editorial staff of Forbes — are well aware that even though Noer and his ilk are afraid, playing to their own fears won’t get them very far. They need to play on the fears of women as well — don’t get too into that career, gals, you’ll never find a husband — the right kind of husband — that way. And we all know that you’ll be miserable if you stay single, even if you claim to be happy. You need a husband and babies to be a complete woman. They’re joined in this effort by the likes of Caitlin Flanagan, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, David Brooks and whoever the hell it is at the New York Times and the Washington Post who keep assigning these kinds of articles to reporters — not to mention Newsweek and its infamous “You have a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than finding a husband after 35? article.

While the aim is to get women to give up their ambitions so as to create more potential wives for insecure men, the side benefit for these men is that they won’t have to compete against so many women in the workplace!

The sad thing is, there are in fact women who have bought into the marriage-is-the-be-all-and-end-all myth so much that they’re quite effective targets for fearmongering articles. Take writer Liz Jones, for example — successful, attractive, and so consumed with self-loathing because she didn’t have a husband that she wound up marrying this loser, who is quite aware of her fear and quite willing to exploit it (and then tell the world about how he humiliated his more-successful wife to remind her of who wears the pants in the family): Oh well its just sheer joy as a wife and mother confidently puts on her power skirt suit, steps into her high heeled fuck me pumps, kisses her children and sends them to school, picks up her attache case and confidently strides off to work and her CEO position while telling the male chauvanist male pig Michael Noers  of the world to blow it out their goddamn asses!