The Wife is the Boss
• Gender Studies
One of the odder aspects of American popular culture is how men are depicted as typically henpecked and as the dominant partner in relationships. A sort of weakling patriarch.
Well grab yourself a respondent population of seventy-two couples, ask them some questions and you have a headline making study to publish in the Journal of Counseling Psychology:
Wives were more demanding—asking for changes in the relationship or in their partner—and were more likely to get their way than the husbands. This held regardless of who had chosen the issue.
This is doubtlessly causing spasms of delight in the BDSM light world that goes under the moniker loving female authority (or female led relationships).
Myself, I can’t help but smile or grimace at research based on such a tiny group of people. No sensible market researcher would do it: but their studies have to make money for their clients. Academics typically don’t have much money but if they make the papers they’ll get more.
One hopes that despite John Gray, Elise Sutton and Barbara Abernathy that more and more couples are establishing truly equalitarian conversations about their shared lives.
But you know how emotionally lazy and fixed in their ways most people are.