ELIZABETH GILBERT’S book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage has been on the bestseller lists for weeks and is now listed at No. 10 by the New York Times.

Contrary to its title, this book is not at all about making peace with marriage, at least not marriage to a man. It’s a misty-eyed paean to feminine independence and an ignorant and misleading appraisal of the institution of marriage. It is shockingly anti-male, so much so that if the word ‘man’ was replaced with woman throughout, there would be crowds lined up outside bookstores demanding its removal. How is it that a woman who is divorced once, childless, and now married to a divorced man 17 years her senior becomes an acclaimed authority on marriage? Only within the philistine confines of the contemporary women’s book club, where female superiority is constantly assumed, would such a book rise to the top of the charts.

According to Gilbert, marriage is a raw deal for women and highly beneficial for men. She writes:

The women who have been most influential to me (mothers, grandmothers, aunties) have all been married women in the most traditional sense, and all of them, I would have to submit, gave up a good deal of themselves in that exchange. I don’t need to be told by any sociologist about something called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance; I have witnessed it firsthand since childhood.

Moreover, I don’t have to look very far to explain why that imbalance exists. In my family, at least, the great lack of parity between husband and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

In the eyes of Gilbert, working all one’s life to support one’s family is apparently selfish.

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative has further thoughts on Gilbert’s book here.

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