I was just reading this article The New Victorians by Lizzy Rather. She’s describing what she apparently feels in a bizarre lifestyle - one in which men and women in their twenties are looking to get married and have children together.
I personally am in my forties and have never been married or had any children. So I’m not projecting my personal life experience when I say I always thought the lifestyle she’s describing is fairly common and unsurprising. Hardly worth identifying as some strange phenomena and writing an article about.
Or am I just missing the ironic intent of the article?
Huh. How…odd. And the illustration is really weird. As far as I know, people in their 20s have been getting married in large numbers for a long time, and they still do. The average age has gone up over the past 30 years, from early to mid-20’s, but still, it’s not exactly unusual. I can’t see why the author thinks of this as some kind of new trend. What kind of periodical is the Observer?
In reading (well, skimming) the article she seems to be saying that it is unusual for 20 somethings in NYC to want to settle down in such conventional relationships. It is slightly tongue in cheek and seems to be talking about advantaged, educated people who have more options than marriage and family, but who choose it nevertheless. These kinds of articles always annoy me because they are talking about the most privledged, often without acknowledging that they are exluding huge groups of people, as if the world is only filled with people like the author herself.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The author’s exhibiting a breathtaking ignorance of what the world is like outside of rich white Manhattanites who work in the media. I sincerely doubt that even young New Yorkers haven’t been getting married and having kids in their 20s all this time; if they hadn’t, then why did you see so many young couples with kids in New York City?
It’s worth noting that she mostly cites celebrities (some legitimate celebrities, others NYC-only famous) as her examples, deriving her thesis from the fact that celebrities are getting away from partying and into family life as proof of a general trend. It may be a trend among celebrities, but of course that doesn’t translate to the rest of the population. It’s the sort of column you often read written by people whose professional lives are dedicated to the pursuit of celebrity.
This sort of thing isn’t unusual in big city papers.
I really thought it was the other way - this was the time when more and more young people are putting off marriage until later or not finding it as important.
That’s what I thought, too. You know, because we’re so young and heedless and irresponsible, all that good stuff.
The people in the article don’t seem too “Victorian” to me, though. I’m definitely way too not together to be able to get married and have kids. I still have things to work through (and by things to work through, I mean bars and cute guys to plow through).
I think she’s using the word “Victorian” in a more pejorative than accurate sense. The whole article is suffused with a sort of contrived horror at this “new lifestyle trend,” and the V-word is a terrible one, connoting narrowness, bad taste, blind complacency, and prudery.
Next thing you know, she’ll accuse them of covering up piano legs (which, btw, was an urban legend which was supposed to illustrate the ridiculous prudery of those impossibly gauche Americans, or alternatively, those snotty Brits).
What an odd article. She seems to be presenting getting married and having children in your 20s as a mysterious phenomenon rather than the way that most of the world operates. In my neck of the woods, if you’re 27 and still partying every night, doing drugs more than occasionally, and don’t have a steady job or aren’t in grad school, you’re definitely the odd one out. I had a husband, a graduate degree, and a mortgage by the time I was 25, and that was considered very normal in my circle.
A few anecdotes do not make data, but they do build a trend piece. Most trend pieces are subjective and focused on a narrow slice of a particular society (often including the journalist’s own friends).
That being said, I do think the writer of the article has a point, and it goes beyond just getting married and having kids. As she writes, New York obviously has a reputation as a destination for ‘real’ artists, often escaping small town with more ‘traditional’ ways of life. So it’s odd for them to want to nest and look at bridal catalogues once they get there, rather than go to shows and take drugs. The few native New Yorkers I know with kids left the city as soon as possible to raise them. On the other hand, perhaps they’d now be more comfortable raising them in the new New York with its cleaned up squares and gentrified boroughs.
(Past edit window) I think she hit the nail on the head, too, with the new obsession over cookware. I’ve noticed friends going ga ga over Le Creuset whereas they used to spend everything on Comme des Garçons. I’d say it’s just an age thing, but that wouldn’t explain the influx and popularity of TV shows and magazines about interior decorating and the like.
The author has conned you.
Hack writers do this all the time.
My estimate is that 70% of articles in women’s magazines and 100% in rags are like this: They put up a phony premise to knock it down. A “straw man” or “paper tiger” to give themselves something to write about. The author is not stupid, so she does not really believe her own premise. She is just realistic - when you have nothing new to say, you pretend something new is happening.
My very unscientific impression is that it’s a cyclical cultural thing… Remember a few years ago when seemingly every new TV show was about a group of single young hipsters having adventures in the big city? For whatever reason, the bohemian lifestyle had a lot of currency. Now it seems like it’s trending in the other direction. You have reality shows about fairytale weddings, young starlets are getting married and having kids… those kinds of ‘traditional’ choices have more currency right now. In another few years it’ll swing back in the other direction.
All true. Nor is the type of people they focus in on. With occasional exceptions (mostly celebs!), the man is in a traditionally male occupation (banking, law, etc.) while the woman is in a “softer” line of work such as education or the arts.
The subtext is that, while everybody is supposedly more tracked and careerist, the pressure is on the man to have a hardass, nut-cuttin’ job, so the woman can downshift and be there for the (inevitable) sproggen without harming the couple’s status. Bleh.
My sister and her husband belong to NYC’s musical élite. My BIL in performance and my sister in the business side of it. They have long been immersed in the beaux arts life and are both equally careerist… and they finally got married in their mid-30s. Umm, and finally managed to start having kids in their 40s.
Sis: “Biological clock? What biological clock?”
A couple years ago, they moved out of the city to the suburbs to raise their kids.
I think unlimitlessly has the article writer pegged. Either find a trend to write about-- or just make shit up. It’s the sort of career that Frank Zappa called “Trend Mongers.”
I did consider the possibility that Rather was pulling an Onion and describing an everyday phenomena as if it were a newsworthy event for satirical purposes. It would help me to judge her intent if I was familiar with her past work.
Agreed. The article is mostly bullshit about a “trend” that does not exist in any statistically measurable form. It’s like they pick something their friend did last night and write about it like its the latest thing. It’s like me writing a story about how young 20-30 something professionals go to bars after work.
What trend have I personally noticed among my professional Manhattan friends? They graduate college around 22. The spend the next few years jumping from job to job every 3 years. Anywhere around 24 to 38 they get married, with the trend being around 28-32. Maybe a few years younger for women.
In places like Pennsylvania or Ohio, it seems like people do get married a bit younger.
My sample size is relatively small, but not every woman ends up like Carrie Bradshaw.
What makes this kind of writing so easy is you can describe any kind of trend and the reader will say to him/herself “yeah, I know a couple people who do that,” thus confirming the premise of the story.
Based on this thread, I have determined that there is a trend towards more people getting wooshed. Lizzy Ratner’s column is intended as a parody of lifestyle articles in upscale newspapers and magazines.
That’s very interesting to me. I got married (a couple of years ago) at age 23, and it was NOT normal for my social circle. My husband and I bought a condo, which again was very unusual. We’re both in graduate school and live in New England, and the vast majority of our friends/peers are single.
