Even assuming these statistical tidbits are accurately measured (and since they include things like "happiness" I'm already skeptical), and even assuming that they aren't entirely misrepresented in the coverage (lying with statistics is still remarkably easy) I fail to envision a world in which the information is of any use to anyone.

Honestly, just imagine it. Your male friend has met and fallen in love with a woman. They are in love and start planning to get married. And one night you are talking about it over beers, and he confesses that, although she is beautiful, intelligent, a great companion, and he's in love with her, he's calling off the wedding because she has a career and he just read in Forbes that their marriage will be unhappy because of that.

Would you congratulate him on making a sound personal decision?

No, you'd tell him that he's the biggest idiot in the entire history of the human race.

You might go on to add that maybe he really should call off the wedding because clearly he doesn't deserve to marry this woman.

And maybe you'd go on to inquire about whether he would be offended if you started courting his soon to be ex fiance, because your last girlfriend was an unemployed waitress named Debbie who lived in a trailer with her three kids and managed to con you into cosigning on one of those payday loans, and frankly a financially solvent career girl sounds like blissful heaven.

I am not the first feminist to notice how there is a definite cycle to this propaganda -- it goes away, and then it always comes back, and it's always the same. Maybe it's an article about how women over a certain age can't find a man to marry, or about how women with careers are less likely to have children, or about how marriages where the woman makes more than the man are less happy.

And they always have the same mood of restrained hysteria, the same vaguely admonishing tone, the same sweeping conclusions based on sloppy evidence, and the same extreme "so what?" factor.

Since I find it nearly impossible to imagine any sensible course of action based on these articles -- yeah, like any sane woman is going to quit a good job because she thinks it's cutting down on her chances of getting married -- I can only conclude that their purpose is to fill us with vague anxieties we have no way to resolve. Except, perhaps, to go shopping.

Mission accomplished.

Apparently there used to be a slide show about this, which Slate magazine dissects even though the link has since disappeared.

And if you want the other side, here is an interview with Linda Hirshman author of "Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World." Although I think I am equally disgusted by the same articles about elite, educated women "opting out" to raise children, I do not particularly like what she has to say in this interview.

For one thing, she perpetuates what I see as the most absurd aspect of those articles -- their exclusive focus on women with high education levels and professional connections, as if they constitute some sort of significant random sampling. You know, women for whom "opting out" means opting out of a place at the boardroom table. I don't know anyone like that, male or female. You probably don't either.

I do know people who run small businesses that are pretty cool. But when their businesses fail (as businesses are wont to do), if the entrepeneur in question is female, and her partner has a steady job, if she wants to stay home and tend the garden for a while and not instantly try to get another job as a peon in someone else's organization, I refuse to believe she is doing feminism a disservice.

This exchange in particular stuck in my craw:

FARABEE: What about those who say raising children is the most important job a person can do?

HIRSHMAN: I have no idea what they mean by that. If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it? They'd rather make war, make foreign policy, invent nuclear weapons, decode DNA, paint The Last Supper, put the dome on St. Peter's Cathedral; they'd prefer to do all those things that are much less important than raising babies?

Now, I have no particular interest in raising babies myself, but I do believe that successfully perpetuating the species is one of the most important things that most people will do. Most people will never do anything even remotely as significant as decoding DNA or painting The Last Supper, and it's completely disingenuous to pretend they will. But, you know, somebody had to raise the babies who eventually did that. And if nobody ever raised any babies ever again, that would be pretty important, let me tell you.

As to her question -- if raising babies is important, why aren't men doing it? Because men are bloody useless, that's why.

No, I don't mean that really. But, from a sort of fundamental evolutionary psychology standpoint, we all recognize that men are the frosting on the species cupcake. Our basic social model as humans is the small hunter-gatherer tribe, where women gather and men hunt. You know why? Hunting gets them out of your hair. Yes, dear, you go kill that mammoth. The hunting party might be gone for days! And yeah, you get mammoth meat and new leather if they return. But if they never return, you can still feed the babies with the gathering. And thus the human race continues. Go team!

And another thing. Leaving aside the evolutionarily obvious fact that raising babies is important, many women who have done that -- raised babies -- also had other accomplishments of the discovering DNA variety. A lot of notable women artists (writers, painters etc.) raised kids. A lot of them didn't. Oddly, when I think of great female artists, I can't find a reliable pattern relating whether they had kids or not to how great they were as artists.

Maybe it's just my own bias, but I tend to think that -- aside from the obvious biological imperative to keep the species alive -- creating art is the most important thing that humans do. Hirshman implies that she thinks so too. Of the three things she cites as presumably more important "masculine" accomplishments, two of them are art.

But artistic accomplishments are often -- maybe even usually -- made outside of the working world. So it leads me to wonder, what important accomplishments does she imagine "opted out" women are depriving the world of? Participating in the board meeting where the company decides exactly how many people to lay off, and how to break it to them?

Anyway, we certainly need to work on making sure that neither women nor men are punished by the professional world for being human -- for having and raising other humans -- and so on. But I think Hirshman is completely off the mark. To me, she sounds like just another professional scold making a career out of lecturing women on what they should do with their lives.