Neither a 'Cougar', Nor a 'Woman-on-the-Prowl': Just a Woman Who Chose Not to Marry or Have Children

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The term 'spinster' brings a lot of ugly images to mind, foremost among them that of a dried up old woman who works at the library and still lives at home with her elderly parents. The modern far-right equivalent to this outmoded representation is, I suppose, the ridiculous notion of a woman who lives with a house full of cats and 'stinks of cat piss' - an insult that frequently pops out of the mouths of envious alt-right housewives and misogynist gay men. I don't think I need to name names, do I?

Another conception of the unmarried woman is that she is 'on the prowl', out to steal someone else's husband, or, if she is a bit older, that she is out bag herself a young stud who would be willing to service her for free or for a fee.

Quite honestly these popular concepts are utter bullshit, and there is just no other way to describe them. It pisses me off to hear decent, highly intelligent women being disparaged so viciously simply because they have chosen to exercise their right not to marry until they are good and ready, and/or to wait until the time they find the right man - if he ever shows up at all. So I am going to bust some myths about single women and the reasons they have chosen to remain single.

First off, the term 'spinster' originally came to be used as a designation for a never-married woman because, a few hundred years ago, about the only independent source of income a woman had came through jobs such as spinning wool and making cloth. Therefore, women who were unmarried and needed to support themselves usually supported themselves doing just that. In effect, calling a woman a 'spinster' back then would have been equivalent to calling her a 'working woman' today. Certainly there were prejudices against such women back then too, however the term itself was simply a way of describing the fact that these women worked to support themselves.

Most unmarried, un-partnered up women work in similarly mundane jobs today. Most of the forever-single women that I know have jobs in call-centers, or shops, or offices. Very few of them are high-powered executives, and most of them look and act their age. The only things that differentiate them from their married counterparts is that they are not married, and usually have a lower standard of living than married women do, as well as less cash to spare at the end of the week (or month).

Yes, they have less money to spend because their expenses are higher, and their expenses are higher because they have no one to split the bills with. Hardly glamorous, is it? Sadly, this fact, sadly, only adds fuel to the delusions of paranoid housewives that every single woman on the planet (and a few of the gay men, too boot) are out to steal her husband. Why? Because, these hussies must certainly be looking for a man to nab who will provide them with all their creature comforts, and a houseful of babies, too boot!

How very, very wrong. The reason most single women are still single is because they have chosen to wait until they have found their 'Mr. Right' before taking the plunge. Most of them probably sincerely believe in the old Ann Landers maxim that it is better to be alone, than to wish you were alone. If they had wanted to get married more than they wanted to be married to the right person, they would have done so a long time ago. Most women who are willfully single had plenty of opportunity to marry; they just didn't take it because it wasn't right for them. Some of them probably even turned down very rich men - as my mother did before accepting my penniless father's proposal. So, to be quite honest, if these women were resistant to much better proposals, your husband probably isn't even on their radar.

What people so often fail to take into account is the fact that some women are hard-wired differently from their 'sisters'. Marriage just isn't as important to them as who they are married to, and sex isn't as important as who they are having sex with. Yes, unmarried women are not sex-machines looking for their next lay. Many of them are actually the opposite, and actually suffer from low libidos. They also have more pressing issues in their lives to concern themselves with, such as paying the bills.

So why do they insist on going it alone, when it would be so much easier to just give in and get married? Simple. Because they don't want to. As I said above, the thought of being stuck with the wrong man makes their skin crawl, and many of them would rather be a 'spinster' than a divorcee. Some single women also just enjoy being alone, and are willing to take on whatever hardship being that it entails in order to remain that way.

But what about children? Don't they want babies?

No. Not every woman wants children, and if you want me to get even angrier, then go ahead and call people who choose not to have children 'selfish'. The truth is, there are a number of extremely valid and highly unselfish reasons why a person might choose not to reproduce. In addition, it is not a criminal offence if one of those reasons is that a woman lacks maternal instincts. In fact, such a women do their unborn off-spring a favor in not bringing them into the world. Abuse, abandonment, neglect - all of these spring from a woman (or man) having children that they lack the emotional capacity to raise. Poverty and social disadvantage comes from having kids you can't afford to raise, while illness and a lifetime of struggle with health issues comes from going ahead with having kids despite the knowledge of a family history of various medical complaints.

I will give you a couple of examples:

When I went to high school, a yearly clinic was held where female students of Jewish ancestry could be screened for Tay-Sachs disease. Almost every year at least one teenage girl ended up finding out that she was a carrier of this awful hereditary illness. On more than one occasion, as we sat our classrooms we heard the sounds of despondent wailing coming from the halls, and we all knew that some poor girl had just been told her test results had come back positive. Even if we didn't know the girl personally, we all felt sympathy for her. What a horrendous thing it must be for a young woman so young to discover that all the dreams she had for her future were just a pile of ashes. Carriers of Tay-Sachs face one of two choices: to not have children, or to risk having children with the disease (if they are boys), or who are carriers of the disease (if they are girls). What mother would want to inflict such a thing on her own children? Most of the girls who learned they were carriers chose not to have children of their own.

As far as I am concerned, that is the only responsible choice people with known familial illnesses can make - and women (and men, too) who make that choice are brave individuals. Instead of trying to blame the environment, vaccines, or whatnot for the illnesses that they have passed on to their children, they stand up and take the responsibility themselves. It is the ultimate act of unselfishness. Anyone who isn't willfully blind should be able to see that.

My next example is that of women who have had hysterectomies and oophorectomies. I know of at least one woman who has had to field the "don't worry, you'll have children one day" comment from well-meaning, but hopelessly clueless people. She bore it with far more grace than I would have. In her place I would have straight out said, "I don't think so, I've had a complete hysterectomy", and then enjoyed watching their embarrassment. Why do people still think it is appropriate to comment on someone else's childless state in this day and age, when we have so much knowledge about these things at our fingertips?

Oh well, on to example number three, which is a combination of why some people don't marry, and some don't have children... .

"I saw my parents' marriage." Have you ever heard someone say that in response to the question of why they have chosen not to marry? I have, many times, and I see it as one of the most important, but most overlooked, reasons to avoid marriage and/or having children. The way are raised has a strong influence on how we will raise our own children. The same goes for how we see our parents interacting. A lot of people - and I mean a HUGE number of people - don't recognize this simple fact, and go on to reenact their parents' marriages, generation after generation. A few - and I mean a VERY few - individuals see the dysfunction they grew up with, and choose to stop it, once and for all. I know that it is wonderfully popular to believe that these individuals can simply go into therapy and 'presto' live normal lives. Sadly, it isn't that easy, and they know and accept it.

The decision not to have children, for whatever reason, has direct impact on a person's marital prospects. Did you know that in the Catholic church failure to advise your partner of your infertility, should you be aware of it prior to the actual marriage, is grounds for an annulment? Or that the intention to have children is considered to be the basis for any marriage? A marriage without the intention to have children brings the whole act into question - which explains the resistance to gay marriage a lot better than the "it's supposed to be between a man and a woman" argument, for those who are interested. The act of procreation is central to marriage in all cultures.

I won't even bother to get into the whole 'you have to reproduce for the sake of you ethnic group' thinking that is now so popular with the alt-right. My parents grew up in Hitler's Germany, where there were actual breeding programs going on. A German friend of mine, who is also a tall, blue-eyed blonde, once stated that we were both lucky that the Third Reich was defeated. If it hadn't been, we'd have ended up as breeders. Sorry, but I'm not into that.

However, did you know that in the wake of WWII, the Soviet Union undertook population-increasing strategies that included encouraging extra-marital affairs in an attempt to rebuild their war-ravaged population? Even though it had been the only participant in the war to have women soldiers actively serving on the front lines, its male population was dangerously depleted at the end of it. Despite that, it did not resort to reducing women to mandatory brood-mares. Instead, it simply encouraged the creation of out-of-wedlock off-spring on a voluntary basis. I'm not really sure where I am going with this, except to maybe point out that when it comes to implementing measures aimed at increasing a population that is on the verge of disappearing, it usually falls on the male population to spread itself around as much as possible. This means having children outside of their happily-ever-after wife and family, and I don't really think that this is something alt-right women have seriously thought through before jumping on the bandwagon.

It's a creepy scenario, made creepier by the fact that it's always the single woman who get screwed in the end - sometimes, quite literally.

Sorry, bad joke. Couldn't resist.

I think Falco expressed it best in the song 'Emotional':

Ich weiß die Frau die mich erträgt
Noch nicht geboren ist
Aber ich bitte Dich, komm' zur Welt

"I know that the woman who can stand me is not born yet, but I beg of you come into the world."

Sometimes that is exactly what how a single woman feels... . Except it's the man who can stand her that she is waiting for.