The Least Eligible Bachelor in New York

This douchebag:

Ladies, his name is Michael Noer (though I think this is him in an early film role). His bizarrely misogynist August 22 Forbes Magazine article garnered so much backlash that his editors pulled it from the site around dinnertime in an attempt at damage control (as my friend at one of Forbes' main competitors wrote, "lol all the reporters in my office are yelling. UNPRECEDENTED! UN-FREAKING-PRECEDENTED").

The message boards on Forbes.com and elsewhere went crazy over the whole thing. As a commenter suggested, his piece should basically have been titled "Why Michael Noer Never Got Laid Again, Except By That One Girl Who Works at The Piggly-Wiggly and Cain't Read so Good." Or as another commenter wrote, "the 1950s called and it wants its valium back." Yet another is creating a site "where you could warn other women to keep away from men like Michael Noer."

I won't get into the substance of the article, except to note that the pop economics is very, very poorly done (by his absurd take on labor specialization, for example, the economically optimal scenario for men would be to forget about getting married and just buy a blowup doll, a housekeeper, and some grown children from an orphanage).

I mean, what a stupid article.

The only other interesting aspect of the phenomenon was that a lot of the commenters on the Forbes message board indulged in some pretty ugly and unprovoked race-baiting, talking a lot of shit about how career men should just find "Asian mail-order brides." I had not previously encountered this particular anxiety, but friends have confirmed it's pretty common, one of racism's final frontiers. As one conservative guy remarked when I brought this up, "Asian women are to college educated white feminists what undocumented Mexican day laborers are to blue collar white (and black) men: unwanted foreign competition." Er, or something.

Anyhow, here's a little more taste of where Michael Noer is coming from, ladies.

Wife or whore?
The choice is that simple....

...Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and streetwalkers aren't exactly alike. Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises--like fine wine. ... [T]he implication remains that wives and whores are--if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi--something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.

..."[W]e assume that the only downside of marriage for a woman is the forgone opportunity for prostitution."

Classic. Wife or whore? For Michael Noer for the next few years, I think it's pretty much just gonna be "cheap whore or upscale whore, or maybe tranny whore for variety this week?'

UPDATE:

A friend emailed me:

forbes was behind the curve. meghan o'rourke wrote this article in march. and in her version, correlation is so totally causation.