Ok. Judge me if you must, but I was watching Keeping up with the Kardashians today and had a deep thought (who would have thunk it). It was the episode where the family is in the Dominican Republic (I think, wherever they went on their most recent family vacation episode) and Scott got mad after everyone was harping on him and left to go to another hotel. Later he tells Kourtney that the only reason he agreed to have another baby with her is because she promised that they could get married after the baby. Then we see Kourtney doing that talking to the audience piece and she explains that she knows she is indecisive but she feels that she and Scott are in a committed relationship akin to marriage and that's all she can offer right now. So here comes my deep thought:
In this situation, Scott is practically begging Kourtney to marry him, and we have seen him doing this before--he's bought the ring and then chickened out, asked her a bazillion times to make a stronger commitment, etc. She has made it clear that she can't do that for him right now because of her issues with her parents' divorce. While Scott's perseverance is really sweet (to me, at least, it seems that he really loves her), he is pretty much pressuring Kourtney to marry him. On the episode he even says, "I won't keep trying forever." (And I agree that he shouldn't keep trying forever.) If the tables were turned and Kourtney was pressuring Scott to marry her, I feel that as a society we would accept any anger/frustration that he might spew because "he is feeling pressured." But when it's a man begging a woman, we (and by we I really mean I) find it sweet and endearing and loving, and why won't she just marry him??! Does anyone feel me on this?!
CN: Using Keeping up with the Kardashians as a lens for my analysis (I am such a dork...), how do you feel about the gender roles we assign to the marriage seeker and the marriage accepter? Women propose to men these days and I think that's awesome, but why do we accept a man pressuring a woman into marriage as sweet (a la Kardashians) and then think of a women pressuring a man as controlling?