To marry well is an art; to throw down the gauntlet to marry-up culture is ideological war. Certainly the longest global recession in 80 years caused by men too risky at the helm has been a game-changer, not only in corporate culture but also in mating dynamics. Given the subsequent rise of female power in a revamped corporate world recognizing female talent, more men are now recognizing the economic benefit to marriage boosts their fatherhood – and intimacy – wellbeing.
The lipstick breadwinner, liberated from gender baggage, engages a rising generation of men who want it all - career AND the kids a la work-family balance - deemed affair-proof! This is history turning full circle as marriage for economic benefit harks back to the Jane Austen era, albeit with a modern twist.
But with bolder feminine wiles vamping-up romantic benefit to an exciting new level, can man’s primal weakness ignore the explosion in cosmetic X-factor sashaying past the world’s water-cooler - the modern workplace today’s marry-up central? For non-elitists, erotic capital’s all-empowering seduction package is a faster mobility track than any glass-ceiling manifesto. In a unique slant on ‘having it all’, the erotic housewife is the melding of history’s most polarizing female figures: the good public wife and private exciting mistress – deemed affair-proof!
Globetrotting social-historian Noel Terry shows we are on the cusp of the most profound upheaval in sexual relations since Jane Austen when marriage morphed from economic to romantic benefit. Given marriage failure ever since, he writes of an optimum sweet spot in the apparent back-flip. Terry’s research into global marriage markets found today’s confusion would not be unlike in JA’s time but with vastly liberated socio-sexual parameters. His book explores those parameters, the constant updating of the “sexual sell”, and impact of women’s economic rise on parenting, work, sex, monogamy, and partner choice. Like all wars, Marriage War is fought over territory – in this case the ideological and romantic high ground.
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