Male Gold-diggers
This really rather amused me:
About 19% of men admitted they were potential gold-diggers and would tie the knot with someone in order to benefit from their wealth and luxury lifestyle, compared with only 11% of women.
There’s so many little things to unravel: you mean that my plans for making a huge pot of money by the time I’m 60 won’t actually be worth it? That I won’t be able to get that youthful babe?
Slightly more seriously I really don’t find this at all surprising. Men are always told that we are the less emotional gender: certainly, that we seem to be ready for sex without requiring the same levels of emotional intimacy that the distaff side claim to. So give that whole non-empathic side of the male psyche, the idea that more of us would put money ahead of love doesn’t surprise.
Further, I’ve read a few historical novels in my time. No, I don’t mean bodice rippers written now but set in the past, rather, novels that were written in the past. A standard plot device is of the man (often but not always a cad) looking for an heiress, any heiress, to marry. Good grief, Jane Austen’s work is famous enough and at least one of the novels turns that convention on its head: the girls cannot marry as they have no dowry to take into the marriage with them.
But to return to flippancy about the survey. What we’ve really found is that there’s a different attitude towards the truth between the sexes (again, something that’s not examctly news). 89% of women will lie in surveys, while only 81% of men will.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Of course the fact that either side lies at all, and especially since they lie at different rates, takes any data thus collected and makes it not all that useful. But to the money-digging point: those who completely buy into any society’s notion that you are either somebody or nobody, depending on whether you fit certain criteria, are far more likely to dig for gold under even the oldest, wrinkliest skin.
In Jane Austen’s time and place, there was a clear sense of being someone or no one. Remember insufferable Mrs. Bennett of Pride and Prejudice? Reading her in college, she drove me to the point of insanity, and I found myself siding with her belittling husband. My professor was more sympathetic to the likes of Mrs. Bennett, as being victim of her society.
Luckily, in many places, such as where I live, there is not this somebody/nobody thing. Actually, those of us “nobodies†carry terrible disdain for the money-hungry society folks. Perhaps it is wrong for us to do so. Though it hardly carries the same repercussions as in the Austen days – we can disdain to our hearts content, while they can accrue money to their hearts content. Each to her own, or better said, each can be a somebody in her chosen place.