As Dr. Laura will soon be leaving the airwaves, I thought I should hurry and finish jotting some reactions down to the advice she has given to young women, and her thoughts on relationships in which there is a large age disparity between the man and woman.
Dr. Laura encourages women (and, to be fair, men as well) to postpone marrying until their late 20s -- she says they still growing and in the process of becoming an adult... she also uses divorce statistics to advising women to postpone marriage until they are older, encouraging them to get an education, to learn about themselves, and so on.
She has also advised that older men should be looking for women closer in age. She has criticized older men who look for a much younger woman as being immature, need woman who are also immature so they can manipulate/control. With a big age disparity (a man in his late 30s dating a woman in her 20s), she says that the man and the woman are in different points of their life journeys. But what does that mean, really? What is more important for a marriage to be successful? Their life experiences or the relative virtues of the man and the woman and what they will do to promote the well-being of the marriage? She understands that a woman may seek an older man because she feels more of a woman, and in an older man she can find a boyfriend and a father figure. But is it so wrong that a wife should look to her husband for counsel? It seems to me that while Dr. Laura acknowledges some sex differences, she seems to be missing others and may even be promoting a false notion of female autonomy and maturity.
Might it be the case that besides greater attraction, there are good reasons for men to look for a women who is still in her 20s? Fertility is one concern, and that is a factor behind physical attraction. As she is dealing primarily with an American audience, should she not address the question of why women in their 30s might still be single? How many of them divorced or have had previous relationships involving physical intimacy? How many women in their 30s are still a maid? Why should an older man, especially one who has been a beta and rejected by women while he was in his 20s, settle for a woman who has had a lot of sexual partners and is now desperate for a long-term committed relationship? (I accept this complaint by men on various websites to be true and not unjustified.) Moreover, a younger woman is more likely to be adaptable and docile to a man than someone who is older, a feminist, or has had a lot of bad relationships. Marriages in which there was a significant age difference were very common in the past.
Dr. Laura seems to be subscribing to some notion of companionate marriage as the ideal. But is it possible that her recommendations are colored by her own life experiences, and the amount of time it took for her to mature? (The transition from being a feminist to being an "anti-feminist" may not have been the only significant psychological change.)
She often claims that a woman holds the power in the family, though she is not the nominal head of the household. How so? Because women have a great influence on family life -- their emotions can dictate the mood of the family, and she can make the family feel good or miserable. In that respect, I agree -- a wife and mother will have a great impact on the emotional state of everyone else. The role of nuturer is proper to the woman. While Dr. Laura has acknowledged that the husband should be the head, sometimes I get the impression that this is may not be complete as she has at least on one occasion advised a woman to not be petty by fighting to have her way. Maybe she was just being tactful that time.
One rarely sees women asserting their emotions in period pieces -- is the indulgence in personal drama a recent phenomenon?
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