#anna louie sussman

[biglisbonnews]

A World Without Men The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely. https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html

[ravenkings]

Marriage proponents often contrast the stable relationship patterns of the college-educated with the instability of the less-educated, but a bachelor’s degree is hardly a guarantee of a ring. The Yale anthropologist Marcia Inhorn’s recent book, “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs,” argues that educated women freeze their eggs because they’re unable to find a suitable male partner: Ms. Inhorn points to a large gap in the number of college-educated women versus college-educated men during their reproductive years — on the order of several million. But Ms. Inhorn’s book goes beyond these quantitative mismatches to document the qualitative experience of women who are actively searching for partners — the frustration, hurt, and disappointment. “Almost without exception,” she writes, “women in this study were ‘trying hard’ to find a loving partner,” mostly through dating sites and apps. Women in their late 30s reported “online ageism,” others described removing their Ph.D from their profiles so as not to intimidate potential dates; still others found that men were often commitment-averse. The behaviors were ubiquitous enough that Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “Alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “Polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends. One of these friends, with whom I went to college, would like nothing more than to be married. She’s beautiful and successful, and not, as far as I can tell, overly “picky.” She has had long-term relationships in the past, and cherishes the intimacy and stability they provide. To that end, she keeps a post-it note on a bulletin board. On it, she has drawn out 10 lines of 10 circles each. Every time she goes on a date with someone new, she fills in a circle. She’s committed to going on at least a hundred dates as she searches for a male partner with whom she can have a family. In two years, she’s filled in nearly half of the circles, and she’s still single. It’s like an SAT test form where every answer is incorrect. When she asks her male friends to set her up with their friends, they consistently tell her that no one they know would be good enough for her. “It’s like, how bad are you guys?” she marvels.

–Anna Louie Sussman, "Why Aren't More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like." The New York Times, November 11, 2023

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: El matrimonio heterosexual está en declive. Para saber la razón, preguntémosles a las mujeres solteras by Anna Louie Sussman

By Anna Louie Sussman A menos que prestemos atención a las experiencias de quienes están en las trincheras de la búsqueda de pareja, limitarse a aconsejar a la gente que se case no solo es desagradable, también es inútil. Published: December 21, 2023 at 02:24PM from NYT En español https://ift.tt/z0xUqse via IFTTT

[jimbelton]

Men are Struggling, Women Most Affected

Anna Louie Sussman, writes in the Atlantic Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men. In Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale, tells this side of the story. Beginning in 2014, she conducted interviews with 150 American women who had frozen their eggs—most of them heterosexual women who wanted a partner they…

[viralnews-1]

Frozen egg transportation, and Roblox's expressive avatars

Frozen egg transportation, and Roblox’s expressive avatars

Like me, my eggs were flying economy class, writes Anna Louie Sussman. My dog Stewie and I were in seat 8D, while 12 of my cryopreserved oocytes, four straws of three eggs each, had a window seat further back. They were ensconced in a cryogenic storage flask packed into a metal suitcase next to Paolo, the courier overseeing their passage from a fertility clinic in Bologna, Italy, to the clinic in…

[ai-briefing]

The Download: frozen egg transportation, and Roblox’s expressive avatars

The Download: frozen egg transportation, and Roblox’s expressive avatars

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry Like me, my eggs were flying economy class, writes Anna Louie Sussman. My dog Stewie and I

[arcticdementor]

In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up of human sperm — inquired, “Do they swim too slow?”

The posters, part of a campaign funded by the city to remind young Danes of the quiet ticking of their biological clocks, were not universally appreciated. They drew criticism for equating women with breeding farm animals. The timing, too, was clumsy: For some, encouraging Danes to make more babies while television news programs showed Syrian refugees trudging through Europe carried an inadvertent whiff of ugly nativism.

Dr. Soren Ziebe, former chairman of the Danish Fertility Society and one of the brains behind the campaign, believes the criticism was worth weathering. As the head of Denmark’s largest public fertility clinic, Dr. Ziebe thinks these kinds of messages, fraught as they are, are sorely needed. Denmark’s fertility rate has been below replacement level — that is, the level needed to maintain a stable population — for decades. And as Dr. Ziebe points out, the decline is not solely the result of more people deliberately choosing childlessness: Many of his patients are older couples and single women who want a family, but may have waited until too late.

…

If any country should be stocked with babies, it is Denmark. The country is one of the wealthiest in Europe. New parents enjoy 12 months’ paid family leave and highly subsidized day care. Women under 40 can get state-funded in vitro fertilization. But Denmark’s fertility rate, at 1.7 births per woman, is roughly on par with that of the United States. A reproductive malaise has settled over this otherwise happy land.

It’s not just Danes. Fertility rates have been dropping precipitously around the world for decades — in middle-income countries, in some low-income countries, but perhaps most markedly, in rich ones.

…

Decades of survey data show that people’s stated preferences have shifted toward smaller families. But they also show that in country after country, actual fertility has fallen faster than notions of ideal family size. In the United States, the gap between how many children people want and how many they have has widened to a 40-year high. In a report covering 28 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, women reported an average desired family size of 2.3 children in 2016, and men wished for 2.2. But few hit their target. Something is stopping us from creating the families we claim to want. But what?

…

To worry about falling birthrates because they threaten social security systems or future work force strength is to miss the point; they are a symptom of something much more pervasive.

…

DANES DON’T FACE the horrors of American student debt, our debilitating medical bills or our lack of paid family leave. College is free. Income inequality is low. In short, many of the factors that cause young Americans to delay having families simply aren’t present.

Even so, many Danes find themselves contending with the spiritual maladies that accompany late capitalism even in wealthy, egalitarian countries. With their basic needs met and an abundance of opportunities at their fingertips, Danes instead must grapple with the promise and pressure of seemingly limitless freedom, which can combine to make children an afterthought, or an unwelcome intrusion on a life that offers rewards and satisfactions of a different kind — an engaging career, esoteric hobbies, exotic holidays.

…

There are, to be sure, many people for whom not having children is a choice, and growing societal acceptance of voluntary childlessness is undoubtedly a step forward, especially for women. But the rising use of assisted reproductive technologies in Denmark and elsewhere (in Finland, for example, the share of children born via assisted reproduction has nearly doubled in a little more than a decade; in Denmark, it accounts for an estimated one in 10 births) suggests that the same people who see children as a hindrance often come to want them.

…

Trent MacNamara, an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, has been pondering human attitudes toward fertility and family for over a decade. Economic conditions, he notes, are only part of the picture. What may matter more are “the little moral signals we send each other,” he writes in a forthcoming essay, signals that are “based on big ideas about dignity, identity, transcendence and meaning.” Today, we have found different ways to make meaning, form identities and relate to transcendence.

In this context, he said, having children may appear to be no more than a “quixotic lifestyle choice” absent other social cues reinforcing the idea that parenting connects people “to something uniquely dignified, worthwhile and transcendent.” Those cues are increasingly difficult to notice or promote in a secular world in which a capitalist ethos — extract, optimize, earn, achieve, grow — prevails. Where alternative value systems exist, however, babies can be plentiful. In the United States, for example, communities of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, Mormons and Mennonites have birthrates higher than the national average.

Lyman Stone, an economist who studies population, points to two features of modern life that correlate with low fertility: rising “workism” — a term popularized by the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson — and declining religiosity. “There is a desire for meaning-making in humans,” Mr. Stone told me. Without religion, one way people seek external validation is through work, which, when it becomes a dominant cultural value, is “inherently fertility reducing.”

…

The crisis in reproduction lurks in the shadows, but is visible if you look for it. It shows up each year that birthrates plumb a new low. It’s in the persistent flow of studies linking infertility and poor birth outcomes to nearly every feature of modern life — fast-food wrappers, air pollution, pesticides. It is the yearning in your friends’ voices as they gaze at their first child, playing in their too-small apartment, and say, “We’d love to have another, but …” It is the pain that comes from lunging toward transcendence and finding it out of reach.

Seen from this perspective, the conversation around reproduction can and should take on some of the urgency of the climate change debate. We are recognizing nature’s majesty too late, appreciating its uniqueness and irreplaceability only as we watch it burn.

…

Reproduction is the ultimate nod to interdependence. We depend on at least two people to make us possible. We gestate inside another human, and emerge with the help of doctors or doulas or kin. We grow up in environments and communities that shape our health, safety and values. We must find concrete ways to recognize this interdependence and resolve to strengthen it.

[bad-statistics]

Can only Ivy League grads with **international experience** get paid to write this?

Writing in ARTSY.net, Anna Louie Sussman (self-titled “outstanding writer” with degrees from Brown, NYU, and the LSE) asks:

Can only rich kids afford to work in the art world?

Every Brooklyn resident instinctively knows this is true, so the answer was and will be “yes” before and after the evidence, which will never be examined.

Unlike some of her peers, Guerrero wasn’t able to fall back on a crucial resource: help from Mom and Dad.

But it’s the age of Big Data so let’s ask a statistician. Or actually, the New York Times Upshot.

A recent report in the New York Times showed 22-, 23-, and 24-year-olds aspiring to work art and design are the most likely to receive financial assistance from their parents, with 53% reporting some help, compared with 40% of twenty-somethings overall. They also received the most money, an average of $3,600 a year, compared with an average of $3,000 for their peers in other fields.

First of all notice that $3600 per year is $300 per month. This is important because later Quoctrung Bui will compare $3300 to $3600, which sounds like a more meaningful difference than comparing $300 to $275.

No sampling errors are provided.

I believe the sample error will easily swamp the visual comparisons we are invited to make here.

How Much Do They Receive? Average annual amount of parental support, by desired field Art and Design Professional Services Health Computer science Education and Social Work Personal Services Blue Collar and Military $3.6k $3.5k $3.3k $3.3k $3.0k $2.2k $1.4k

Notice that

Kids who majored in computer science receive almost as much money as kids who majored in art.

We don’t have a convenient stereotype about this though. (OK, I do, but the authors might not.)

These numbers are also small in the face of NYC rents. Maybe Mom and Dad (the villains of the piece?) paid two months’ rent, a Christmas & birthday present / paid for travel home / etc.

This doesn’t demonstrate the hoped-for

urban/rural divide

spoiled art brat

spoiled millennial vis-a-vis 1970’s PSID sample (which was who, anyway?)

How big is that error bandwidth, maybe?

https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/CDS/TAS13_UserGuide.pdf

Results of Data Collection Effort The TAS-2013 sample of 2,156 individuals was released to the field for interviewing. During data collection, 34 cases were determined to be ineligible (including 3 completed interviews), bringing the total eligible sample to 2,122. Of these, 1,804 provided complete interviews, yielding a 90% response rate for the TAS-2013 fieldwork effort. Table 1 provides the final dispositions for the total sample of 2,122 cases.

Table 1: Sample Disposition Sample Count Description 2,122 Total TAS-2013 sample 1,804 Completed interview with an eligible TAS-2013 sample individual 30 Sample individual incarcerated or in a youth, group, or detention home/center: ineligible for interview contact 5 Sample individual away on military leave, in job corps, or in a non-detention facility 5 Sample individual incapacitated, had a permanent health condition, or institutionalized for health or psychological reasons 4 Sample individual deceased after PSID interview completed but before TAS interview: ineligible for interview contact 85 Refusal by the sample individual; partial/passive refusal; deliberate avoidance of interviewer (e.g., always too busy, repeated broken appointments, or failure to return calls) 56 Refusal by someone other than the sample individual 21 Sample individual lost; tracking efforts exhausted 43 Some household member contacted, but eligible respondent not available to do interview; appointment broken, but no evidence of deliberately avoiding interview 10 Sample individual resided outside of US or in a remote area and uncontactable (e.g., no telephone) 58 Sample individual was initially thought to be ineligible because of nonresponse but discovered to be a resident in a response sample family after the interviewing period had ended 1 Office error – study ended, insufficient or inappropriate calls made, no mention of refusal • Average interview length: 63.62 minutes • Completed interviews: 1,807* of 2,122 released sample cases * Three cases were found to be ineligible after completion of the interview o Sample members who still resided with core PSID family as an “other family unit member” but lived at college: 207

Completed interviews: 1,807* of 2,122 released sample cases * Three cases were found to be ineligible after completion of the interview o Sample members who still resided with core PSID family as an “other family unit member” but lived at college: 207 o Sample members who still resided with core PSID family as an “other family unit member” living with parents: 817 o Sample members who had formed independent PSID family units as Head/Wife/“Wife”: 783 • Data collection response rate: 90%

Chapter 5 – The TAS-2013 Sample Weight To account for differential probabilities of selection due to the original CDS sample design and subsequent attrition, the TAS-2013 data are provided with a sample weight. The construction of the TAS-2013 sample weight is described in this chapter.

In other words:

A statistical survey in Michigan asked 1000-2000 people some questions.

NYT Upshot wrote an article stating that this proves a stereotype.

And a self-styled "outstanding writer" with lots of degrees who has lived in Morocco wrote a long article complaining about Cooper Union†, NYC rent, ihow little Sotheby’s pays interns, and the general unfairness of it all.

†Cooper Union used to be free. They were endowed by a super rich guy a century ago. They lost their endowment in the crash of 2008. Cooper Union is no longer free. This has nothing to do with privileged art kids.

The 2013 supplement to “transition to adulthood” is here: https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/CDS/TAS13_UserGuide.pdf

user guide here: https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/CDS/TA05-UserGuide.pdf

Quoctrung does link to http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr13-801.pdf.

Like

Where do I come down on the original question? I don’t know. I certainly have the stereotype. I personally hang out with a lot of art students and art management students, as well as artists. The main thing I noticed when I first met a group of sculpture BFA friends

The usual honest answer you give as a statistician is I dunno. In fact this is why statistics was invented: people didn’t know (the default state) and wanted to know when they could stop researching because they had found out enough to draw a conclusion.

My opinion at the end of these two articles is that credentialed people get nice jobs. (Also a stereotype I held beforehand.)

[ravenkings]

For as long as people have been promoting marriage, they have also been observing that a good man is hard to find (see: William Julius Wilson, or early Nora Ephron). But what was once dismissed as the complaint of “picky” women is now supported by a raft of data. The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift” — men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health. Ms. Kearney, for example, acknowledges that improving men’s economic position, especially men without college degrees, is an important step toward making them more attractive partners. But even this nod ignores the qualitative aspect of the dating experience — the part that’s hard to cover in surveys, or address with policy. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships, found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who meets their expectations, versus one-third of men. The in-depth interviews, he said, “were even more dispiriting.” For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said. Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added. He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully. Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”

–Anna Louie Sussman, "Why Aren't More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like." The New York Times, November 11, 2023

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Vindication for Single Women by Anna Louie Sussman and Jillian Weinberger

By Anna Louie Sussman and Jillian Weinberger Why marrying in the 21st century can seem so difficult. Published: December 16, 2023 at 07:00AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/j5NJoLU via IFTTT

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Poland changed its laws regarding IVF, denying women access to their own embryos

John Struan:

IVF had been available in Poland for years, but, as Anna Louie Sussman explains for The New Yorker, it became a wedge issue:

Anti-IVF rhetoric takes a number of forms. Polish politicians and religious leaders have sometimes described IVF using nationalistic overtones that scholars have connected to a resurgent anti-Semitism. Catholic media routinely depict children conceived through IVF as unnatural and genetically suspect; in a survey of Polish articles about IVF children, Radkowska-Walkowicz found that they were often characterized as suffering from physical deformities, such as a protruding forehead or dangling tongue, or from mental illnesses, including “survivor syndrome” in relation to unused embryos. (There is no evidence for these claims.) These purported defects are said to go undetected—and so, Radkowska-Walkowicz writes, IVF children are imagined to lurk among the general population, their “biological otherness” polluting the Polish body politic.

Other IVF opponents position themselves as protectors of frozen embryos. In Poland, the political scientist Janine P. Holc writes, the embryo is sometimes seen as “the purest citizen”—an unformed innocent in need of protection by the Polish constitution. Anna Krawczak, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw and the former chairperson of the patient-advocacy group Nasz Bocian (the name means “Our Stork”), which has fought for a more inclusive IVF law, told me that IVF opponents have found inventive ways of linking the procedure to abortion. Protesters gather in front of IVF clinics holding posters that show images of human fetuses, icy blue against a black background.

...

Some of the lawyers and doctors I spoke to believe that, although most media coverage of the IVF law focussed on how single women would be affected, its restrictions were actually designed with queer people in mind. Queer couples in Poland can neither marry nor form civil unions; if they have children while abroad, they must hire lawyers to request citizenship for those children, and it is granted only on a case-by-case basis.

Rather than outlawing IVF entirely, Poland passed a "compromise" law that applied to embryos that had already been frozen:

The law was now in effect, and, as a single woman, she was blocked from accessing her own frozen embryos unless she could convince a male friend to sign with her. This would make him financially liable for her child and grant him custody rights. Moreover, another provision in the law, intended to insure that unused embryos wouldn’t be destroyed, mandated that they be donated to an infertile heterosexual couple if they weren’t used within twenty years.

There's still hope for embryo donors, however. They can try to ship the embryo to another country . . . if they can find a clinic willing to accept transfer. You can read about that challenging process at The New Yorker.

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/23/poland-changed-its-laws-regard.html

[jessicafurseth]

Reading List, Disassociation edition.

[Image: Agnes Denes: A wheat field in Manhattan (1982)] 

What I Didn't Know Before was how horses simply give birth to other horses. Not a baby by any means, not a creature of liminal spaces, but already a four-legged beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way to another horse and then suddenly there are two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you. You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two computers swinging in it unwieldily at your side. I remember we broke into laughter when we saw each other. What was between us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

Ada Limón (2018) via “Pome”

*** 

"I could have done a lot of things in that moment and in those months, but after years of doing a lot of things the only thing I hadn’t tried was to just not at all. And when I just didn’t, it was over.” This is for all the divorcees [Rachel, AutoStraddle] 

"During my past decade of singleness I’ve slept on half the bed, and I’ve filled the other half with pillows, books, and a laptop streaming TV. Always sitcoms. Never music (too much feeling) or audiobooks or podcasts (too much thinking) or movies or dramas (too much plot).” [Briallen Hopper, Curbed] 

The end of babies - this is absolutely stunning [Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times] 

"Can a woman artist — however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined — ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood? Must the politics of femininity invariably be accounted for, whether by determinedly ignoring them or by deliberately confronting them? The latter is a fateful choice that can shape an artist’s life and work; but does the former — the avoidance of oneself as a female subject — inevitably compromise the expressive act?” [Rachel Cusk, The New York Times] 

“Don’t think of yourself as lacking some inherent quality you need before you can start building the kind of life you did all those years of work to get. After all, that life will not be perfect, or uniformly good, it will simply be full of the things you choose to do.” [Brandy Jensen, The Outline] 

“It is never possible to have it all. You will, in fact, miss out on or lose some things that might have been very meaningful to you. These disappointments are a feature, not a bug, of a well-lived life.” On mid-life [Corinne Purtill, Forge at Medium] 

On the false god of disassociation [Emmeline Clein, BuzzFeed] 

"“Is it hard for you to speak to me as your dad?” I asked him. He actually took a deep breath. Oh, boy, I thought. He stepped outside. “Well, I’ve learned to prepare myself.”” [Tom Chiarella, Forge at Medium] 

From my favourite genre of tech stories: how the Hmong diaspora uses conference calling to keep their community connected [Mia Sato, The Verge] 

Yes, autism can be a superpower [Joanne Limburg, The Guardian] 

Today in “representation matters”: Keanu Reeves is dating a woman with grey hair and no one expected to feel quite this emotional about it [Ali Drucker, The New York Times] 

The Jungle Prince of Delhi - a once-in-a-lifetime story to tell [Ellen Barry, The New York Times] 

"The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was." [Katherine Miller, BuzzFeed] 

Danny and Grace: A love story

[workerandart]

【作品についての割引問題について】 10％程度ならありえる、個人や公的機関なら20％もなくはない。しかし若手に割引を求めると作家が生きていけるサポートになりにくい、というような話。