"Lost Boys" Follow-Up

I saw this interesting letter today in the Letters to the Editor section of The Wall Street Journal: Society Will Pay a Big Price for All of Our 'Lost Boys' To anyone who has presided over a college classroom, Richard Whitmire's "The Lost Boys" (Taste, Nov. 6) is all too real. A politically correct society and "helicopter" parents have stripped opportunities for all of life's potential failures out of the lives of young boys. Only the athletes truly compete, and young boys need competition. They reach college age so fearful of any type of failure that their only answer is to sit in the back of the room and adopt the "cool pose" we are so familiar with from high school. Young women are the first to notice this lack of ambition. The marriage rate in this country per 1,000 people is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Single women are the fastest growing segment of the home-buying industry. Women are simply not going to wait to build a life—wait until males decide to put down the Xbox controller, the cold beer and exit their parents' basement. What we are all seeing is a movement much larger and more important than the ratio of men to women in higher education. The U.S. is in the middle of the largest socioeconomic change since World War II—the creation of a matriarchal economy. Women now purchase or influence the purchase of 80% of all goods and services. Astute marketers have been chronicling this change for years. Satisfy the female market and you will more than satisfy the male market. It is that simple. Prof. James W. Bovinet University of Phoenix Online Monmouth, Ill. I added the emphasis on what I think is the punch line in this letter - and the reason The WSJ chose to highlight the letter with SOCIETY WILL PAY A BIG PRICE. Hmmmm... Is The WSJ scared to death of the idea that women are headed toward control of their own financial futures entirely independent of men (i.e., not just making most of the buying decisions in two-income households), or is it frightened by the actual implemention of that concept in society? What, exactly, is the big price and why will it be "society" that pays it? What about Professor Bovinet, the author of the letter? What does he feel about his vision of the future (women controlling most of the finances in the USA - that matriarchal economy, which de facto may be here already)? The use of the loaded term "matriarchal" must send shivers down the spines of plenty of those good ol' patriarchy-attuned dudes out there -- the guys who crashed Wall Street, for instance, and every single military officer in the entire world, most religious "leaders" and "authorities" in Christendom, Islam, and Hinduism and other religious belief systems (but maybe not the Buddhists), probably 99.9% of the male politicians in the world, the Taliban, the so-called "Christian" Right in this country and other religious Nazis of their ilk, etc. Imagine if women actually started using their economic power to impel real, meaningful changes in the way things work in this country and elsewhere instead of "going along to get along." Hmmmm, now that must truly be a frightening thought to a lot of folks.