Men vs. Women: Clothes and Fashion

Bras through the ages

Fashion, clothes, jewelry, and all its related accessories and issues are enough of a subject to fill a book, not just a single column in this blog series. But, I will endeavor to condense the incredible volume of material to fewer than 1,000 words. Writing about Men and Women is a lot of fun, especially since I don’t care if I am politically correct. It’s ironic how upside down things have become in my lifetime when simple truths – in this case, related to men and women – are not so simple given various agendas and politics that seem to attach so much contemporary public discourse!

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The State of Gender Affairs

There’s no question that technology changes faster than most of us yuppies and boomers can handle.  I don’t know what the current number of years for technology “generations” is, but I do know that if you have children five or more years apart in age, they will each use technology differently.  I’ve observed my own two boys, just three years apart, using social media/smart phones each in his own distinct way. My younger son relies almost exclusively on texting, while my older son actually occasionally talks on his cell-phone. Things may not move quite this fast with our state of gender affairs but I assert that we are now experiencing changes in our gender roles much faster than at any other time in human history.  While I’m part of the sixties generation where we believed we re-invented everything, from sex to politics, established that anyone over 30 didn’t know anything, changed college life forever, was the first generation to have the pill, and the first to topple a presidency and end a war by withdrawal, we still have our own adjustments to these gender changes.

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She Makes More Money (Than Me)!

A recent Pew Research Center study called “Women, Men and the New Economics of Marriage (Jan. 19, 2010 by Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn) revealed that women are making much more money, over the recent past, than at any other time in our history.  The study had the following opening: “The institution of marriage has undergone significant changes in recent decades as women have outpaced men in education and earnings growth.  These unequal gains have been accompanied by gender role reversals in both the spousal characteristics and the economic benefits of marriage.”

It makes total sense that women would start to make more money than men given the changing values and trends in our society and the increasing number of women attending college, now outnumbering men significantly.  But, the social impact of these changes might be troubling.  As part of the generation that is both responsible for and feeling these transformations the most, I have mixed feelings about this brave new world.

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