It seems that exporting bad food and groundless optimism to China is not our only cultural contribution to the next superpower. Now that women are beginning to be treated with some semblance of dignity in the east, two fine examples of Chinese patriarchy have come together to get around the wild new world of free-ish women by encouraging wealthy men and properly virtuous and malleable girls to marry each other.
As reported by the NYT, Women who "applied for the job" of being married to billionaires responded to the shock expressed by others around them with these gems:
"Isn't the purpose of saving our virginity to get a good price?"
No, darling, the purpose of saving your virginity is to have sex only when you want to, and with a man you're interested in fucking.
Another woman defended her application thusly:
"Things are different from before because everyone has a right to choose," said the applicant, Wang Yue, who said that in a physical relationship, feelings could always be developed later. "If Americans can be liberal, why can't Chinese?
Young lady, I think it my duty to inform you that accepting and pursuing the commodification of your hymen as that which makes you valuable is NOT liberal. Consider what happens after the first sexual encounter in your marriage. Will you only be a valuable woman for that one time? You're being played, and you don't even know it. I want to give you some advice my great-grandmother gave everyone she could get to stand still for 7 seconds: When you marry for money, you earn every last penny. Consider the implications of that before filling out any more applications. I hope you will see the size of the bullet you just dodged by not being chosen.
5 comments:
It's sort of hard to talk, though, when the US marriage for love thing works out so badly for so many people, though, isn't it?
Maybe we should just abolish the whole danged institution and start over!
... wait a sec, be right back, there's some nsa guy? at the door...
"Isn't the purpose of saving our virginity to get a good price?"
Hmm. Maybe that's why I get paid so poorly?
Seriously, damn straight about how Ms. Yue dodged the bullet, 'cause from everything I've seen, your grandmother's advice was spot on.
Bardiac,
When you come back from the gulag, you should know that you've raised a very good point. Even as I wrote this post I had some doubts about admonishing people for trafficking in virtue. We in the US still consider a certain standard of virtue, or appearance thereof, a prerequisite for marriage.
It is also still normal for a certain type of American woman to aggressively compare the value of her engagement ring to that of other women, after all. "My husband loves me 1.2 princess-cut carats of D-grade clarity, as opposed to your husband's lesser .97 emerald-cut carat of E-grade clarity!" isn't any different in my mind from a villager in a poorer nation advertising the extraordinary number of cows and chickens that made up her brideprice.
However, some dork interviewing local virgins for his life's vacant wife position pisses me off. And the fact that women anywhere are willing to dignify such baboonery with a response infuriates me.
You're absolutely RIGHT! It pisses me off, too.
On the other hand, your blog just cracks me the heck up every time I wander in and read another bit (and it takes me a while to go back through the time travel thing).
AW - LOL! Hey, that could explain why my pay-scale goes down every time I go back to college for a different degree, too. You know how college is ;-)
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