Sugar Daddies and Babies?

How many of you all saw this article in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend, about "Sugar Daddies" and "Sugar Babies"?

I'll admit, I was fascinated and couldn't put it down. But over at Salon, Rebecca Traister rips into it for perpetuating gender stereotypes and feeding into the (false) mainstream media narrative of women desperately falling back on gender roles during a recession.

I agree with Rebecca's hesitation - there do seem to be a lot of stories about increasingly (financially) desperate women in this recession. But on the other hand, I felt like this New York Times piece thoughtfully delved into a fascinating gender dynamic that still exists in many romantic (and not just heterosexual) relationships today.

Any relationship that has an unequal balance of money/age/professional success is going to be tricky to navigate. And there are still many people out there, including some of my dear friends, whose qualifications for the perfect partner include a strict analysis of financial means.

So where does the sugar relationship begin and the "normal" relationship end? The New York Times piece argues that the Sugar Daddy/Baby relationship is the extrapolation of traditional power/financial roles involved in dating. But what do you think? Would a "sugar" relationship ever be ok? Was the piece sensationalizing the issue?

All men all the time?

It's a complaint I've heard many of my single female friends make on a regular basis. "I never meet any men!" they'll say. "There are just no men anywhere!"

Well, my dears, Salon has an interesting piece about how in China, they have the opposite problem.

According to a report released on Friday, gender-specific abortion and the higher value placed on male babies have made the gender imbalance worse, with 32 million more men than women in China.

China has initiated a few campaigns to help reverse the imbalance, but so far nothing seems to be working. The idea that a country has placed such a low value on girls that it's lead to a national problem seems really sad to me. But what do you think? And what do you think a solution might be? Should they reverse their one-child-per-family policy? Or should the government push their public education campaign on the value of girls even more than they already do?