Suzanne Venker
Author and Relationship Coach
My daughter, who’s in college, plans on mapping out her life similar to the way I mapped out mine: by putting marriage and family at the forefront. She’s studying to become a teacher, and she’d like to marry earlier rather than later if she can swing it. Oh, and she wants four kids and plans to stay home with them until they’re all …
This article was originally published at Washington Examiner. On Oct. 28, 1973, Henry Kissinger was quoted in The New York Times as saying power is “the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Kissinger’s observation about sex and power was well known and accepted in his day. Americans understood that some men use their financial power to get what they …
* Note: I’ve had the comment section on my blog turned off, but it has since been re-enabled.In my last post, entitled “How to Be a Man,” I wrote about women “testing” men. Here’s a paragraph from that post:Let’s look, for example, at the parable of Adam and Eve, where God commands them not to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Eve disobeys God and eats the apple anyway, and then commands Adam to do the same. What does Adam do? He obeys Eve instead of God. He eats the apple. The moral of
At face value, it may seem odd that a woman would advise a man on how to be, well, a man. In fact, for a long time I resisted writing this at all for exactly that reason. Shouldn’t men, not women, tell men how to be men?Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, it isn’t happening—for two reasons. One, we have a record number of boys growing up fatherless; and Dad has always been a boy’s go-to source for learning what it means to be a man. Second, America is embroiled in a gender war, one in which the sexes
This article was originally published at Fox News. In a recent article in GQ headlined “Are Kids the Enemy of Writing?” the novelist Michael Chabon describes a conversation he had many years ago with a writer he admired. At the time, Chabon was engaged to his now ex-wife, and his first novel was about to be …
* Note to Readers: I do not post everything I’ve written elsewhere here on my blog. For example, here’s a recent article I wrote for USA Today, and here’s another at Washington Examiner. If you want to keep up with everything I write, regardless of where it’s published, your best bet is to follow me on Facebook. I post everything there. If I were to reprint everything I write here, you’d get way too much email! :)American women are the most fortunate human beings who’ve ever lived. No one has it
* The following article was published at Fox News yesterday. I will be on Fox & Friends tomorrow morning (Wed.) to discuss… A friend of mine whose mother died recently was going through her parents’ memorabilia and unearthed a Western Union telegram from 1954 that her father sent her mother just before they married. Here’s what it …
This article was originally published at Fox News.The shock of reading Laura Sessions Stepp’s 2007 book, “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both,” hadn’t worn off when I was offered the opportunity to view an advanced screening of “The Dating Project,” a film about modern relationships that will be released nationwide—for one night only—on April 17. Both are a wake-up call for Americans, many of whom are in the dark about how dramatically dating has changed.So
I read two articles last week that, when juxtaposed, were rather ironic. The first is called “How to Increase Participation in Marriage and Relationship Education,” and the second was the announcement that Donald Jr. and Vanessa Trump, who have five children together, are getting divorced.Today, when we hear news about yet another divorce it’s nothing but a yawn. “That’s too bad,” we think. And then we move on with our day. If we do have other thoughts, such as, “This divorce business is getting
Tucker Carlson is my new favorite person. And I liked him plenty before! Here he is being his reasonable self in an interview with me in 2013 about an article I wrote that caused controversy, all because I said women who want children need husbands upon which they can depend if they want to find balance in their lives.”I’m confused as to why this is controversial,” said Carlson, truly perplexed. “If I got up and said, and it would be true if I did, that I rely completely on my wife, I would
I sincerely hope you have five minutes. I promise it will be worth your time (in fact, the music alone is worth it) to watch this shockingly beautiful clip of Olympic Gold Medalists Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Masso.Go ahead—I’ll wait while you watch.Are you back? If so, tell me this: In what universe would it be possible for these two individuals to reverse roles, where Savchenko acts as Masso’s rock, raising him up over her head while he falls into her embrace?Exactly. There is no such
“How bizarre it is to have to argue the obvious, to have to prove over and over again what is self-evident, so let me be as offensive as I possibly can: Men are men and women are women. They are essentially different and designed for a natural division of labor. Period.”So begins the interview with Mallory Millett at Front Page Magazine, which essentially amounts to a scathing indictment of her sister Kate Millett’s influence, as well as feminism’s influence in general, on American
Last week the writer Cathy Young asked men on Twitter if they agreed with Jordan Peterson’s observation in his conversation with Camille Paglia that “in any intellectual confrontation between men there’s an implicit option of settling things with fists, and since it’s not an option when arguing with a woman, men are at a disadvantage.”The choices the men on Twitter could choose from were: absolutely true, a bit exaggerated, interesting idea, and totally nuts.Forty-eight percent said Peterson’s
Feminism is crumbling before our very eyes. I think the Women’s March and the #Metoo movement, and the overall response to President Trump from Democrats, did it. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s Jordan Peteron’s infamous takedown of UK’s feminist journalist, Cathy Newman. People have officially awakened from their slumber. Because of this, the topic won’t go away—and …
A similar version of this article was published at Washington Examiner.When I was in college, I met a young man who, five years later, would become my husband. (Four years and no children later, he became my ex-husband.) When we were dating—this was all the way back in the 1980s, when people still dated—I would needle him about his sexual past after we kept running into women from his high school days. The way they’d say hello to each other made me think they’d been more than friends.After each
This article was originally published at The Federalist. In 2012 I wrote an article at Fox News entitled “The War on Men” in response to a Pew Research finding that showed women ages 18-34 believe having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things in their lives”— and that fewer men were voicing this same opinion. The takeaway? Women want to marry as much as ever, but men increasingly do not.And yet, that isn’t the end of the conversation.The same month that finding released, a
Each and every day for the past several months, after my almost 15-year old son showers and dresses for school, he walks into our kitchen to hear NPR talking about yet another man who’s been accused of sexual harassment.About 20 minutes later, he and I get into our car, turn on Fox radio (Did you hear that, Obama? Some of us listen to Fox and NPR—you should try it!) and land on the same topic. Later that day, when I pick my son up from school, he gets in the car and what do you know: more of the
In my last post, I offered 6 reasons why gender role reversal—in which the wife makes the money while the husband stays home—typically doesn’t work. As I was working on the article, I received an email from a woman who asked this question:What practical advice vis a vis finding a suitable mate do you have for women who have already completed a high degree of education and command large salaries? I sometimes feel (perhaps inaccurately) that there is a dearth of educated successful men relative to
Personally, I’ve never been more proud of having made my family, my relationships, the focus of my life instead of my career. It wasn’t easy going against the grain all those years, but it has made all the difference.That’s what I thought of when I heard the news of Matt Lauer’s firing. I didn’t think, “Oh, that scumbag.” Or, “There goes another sexual predator.” No, what I thought was that “inappropriate sexual behavior” can mean anything. Literally, anything.I’m not suggesting Lauer is
Last week I wrote an article for Fox News entitled entitled “Women Marrying ‘Down’ Is Nothing to Celebrate.” It’s essentially an explanation of hypergamy, or the desire of most women to marry a man who’s either more educated or successful than they.This phenomenon is still very much alive and is grounded is evolutionary biology, for two reasons. One, respect is the underpinning of any good marriage; and women who rise above their husbands tend to lose respect for them—which then rears its ugly
Have you ever made your husband a sandwich? If so, you should be ashamed of yourself. Don’t you realize such behavior sets women back decades?That’s the message of a new article in The Daily Telegraph, entitled “When making a sandwich is a crime against feminism,” about an Australian woman named Maddie who asked a Facebook group of 26,186 mothers whether anyone had some yummy alternatives for her husband’s lunches, which she said she makes for him every day.Now that’s what anyone I know would
Whenever the media compare the lives of women today with the lives of women ‘back in the day,’ it’s almost always framed as net gain for us. But as Ivanka Trump’s explanation for why she suffered from postpartum depression demonstrates, the losses modern women have incurred are huge. According to BabyCenter.com, postpartum depression “results from a combination of hormonal, environmental, emotional, and genetic factors that are beyond your control. Other factors include the physical exhaustion
Over the years I’ve spoken out against feminism, I’ve had to explain ad nauseam that feminism is not what it claims to be. I’ve said from the beginning that its ultimate goal is the destruction of the family. Or more specifically, the destruction of motherhood. Here’s a perfect example. I’m in the middle of reading a memoir called At Home in the World, by Joyce Maynard, who coincidentally came of age in the heyday of feminism. In one of the letters Maynard wrote in the 1960s to the writer J.D.
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