When you take one life experience out of the whole prism, sure it's easy to distort the whole picture. That is, looking at the impact of feminism on someone's life and ignoring other impacts (like poverty or income situation), you risk distorting that person's whole life experience. It might be sometimes true that women with feminism, but without financial stability or mental health (one of 7UPs working class women, or Neil ), might be left behind.

However, I can't see that as discrediting the writer's point at all. Choice doesn't always lead to success, other factors can impact - but at least now women are freer to try. Had our society remained where it was, women would not have been as free to make their own choices, their own futures, their own successes, and their own mistakes. Men have had this opportunity all along (to a greater or lesser extent, depending upon their own income status, education, etc). Why should this have been denied to half the population?

I am much cheered by the optimistic account that the writer has given, and by the homage duly given to those men who have been willing to see it only fair to run relationships as a give and take.

Mark wrote:
So in Jane Caro's opinion, divorce, single-motherhood and childlessness are good things because they increase "choice" for women!

A pretty important choice, I would think, and one that is available evenly to both women and men. Have you a problem that women can now escape a bad/dangerous relationship?

ena, I particularly liked your last post.

For those arguing against choice on the grounds that it does not always turn out for the best

An animal kept in a zoo is at far less risk of external harm than one wandering in the wild but who amongst us would choose to live in a cage.

R0bert

@ Jane Caro My wife was killed in a car accident and so I gave up my full time job and concentrated on raising our daughter and doing whatever I could that fitted in with being a sole parent. I also did a university degree while surviving on austudy. My daughter finished school with 93% and as school captain before going to university to study medicine. Since then i have been battling to get back into a real job with a Mr Mum cv. I drive a delivery truck and clean offices. How do you think it feels when I have to deal with affirmative action and the women's network (nepotism) even when the women who have an institutionalised advantage over me already have a well paid husband? I don't have any problems with women being free to choose but for the last 20 or 30 years women have been treated as an homogenous 'class' regardless of their real situation and the savvy, well-connected have benefited most. A man without a job, or a low pay, low status job, is condemned to a lonely life and has no power to choose because rich men don't give a damn about him and politicians have been intimidated into doing whatever the Women's Electoral Lobby etc dictate. It must be just ducky enjoying the fruits of woman's empowerment but spare a thought for the human refuse which has been one result of it.

Citizen, thank you for your good post.

I have not had the time to respond accordingly to this pro-feminist-garbage, but rest assured I shall.

These women like Caro here, have not the first idea of the miseries that hey have spread across society. They are all "soooooooo" [to use their feminist, post-modernist vernacular] caught up in their own importance, the importance of being WOMAN, that they have failed to see the dire and disruptive influence they've had on society's values and, ultimately, the children of the Western world.

Rest assured good folks, I shall write more on this thread, in time.

But, in the mean time, I'm deeply pleased to see "ena" has been unmasked. Oh yeah, deeply pleased, but somewhat disappointed. I had expected better.

Jane, you are providing a whole lot of excuses for people to behave badly. “I am making my own life”, says the man who trades in his loyal wife for a youthful secretary. “This is my journey to discover myself,” says the woman who leaves her husband, depriving a girl of her father and another woman of her grandchildren. “My choices should not be limited”, say the increasing number of Western men supporting the idea of polygamy.

It’s not good enough to have a random exercise of choice. There has to be some encouragement for us to choose what is right, both in a moral sense and in terms of upholding the framework of a functioning civilisation.

Your idea, that men have always had a freedom of choice denied to women, is a dangerous one. It makes you unaware of what might happen if the average man really began to believe in the “choice theory” you are promoting.

It takes a great deal to produce a man who will discipline himself to be monogamous and to work steadily for his family for 30 or more years. These are not choices most men will make randomly. If we do it, it’s because we think it’s the right thing to do, and the best way to contribute to a civilisation we identify with.

If men really believed that they should instead allow themselves the maximum freedom to choose – and that this is what made them responsible adults – then I doubt if society would last a single generation.

Why wouldn’t a man then give up an arduous career in order to pursue a hobby? Why wouldn’t he indulge his instinct for sexual variety by taking a mistress? Why would he risk his safety to defend his country in time of war? Why wouldn’t he drift in and out of the life of his children according to his own preferences?

We are fortunate that a sufficient number of men continue to reject an individualistic emphasis on choice, but act stubbornly instead according to a notion of right behaviour.