On August 22, Forbes.com (www.forbes.com) published an opinion piece from editor Michael Noer titled Don’t Marry Career Women (http://www.forbes.com/home/2006/08/23/Marriage-Careers-Divorce_cx_mn_land.html), the argument of which was…exactly what the title suggests.  One can’t help suspecting that the actual purpose of this article was to spark "debate" in the helpfully linked reader discussion area (http://forums.forbes.com/forbes/board?board.id=respond_marry_career_woman); the name for this kind of behavior elsewhere on the Internet is trolling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll) and usually is responded to with the injunction “don’t feed the troll." 

Certainly, at any rate, Forbes.com got a lot of free attention out of it all.   Wrath and mockery unsurprisingly rained down for the next several days, with BoingBoing (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/22/dont_marry_career_me.html) and Gawker (http://www.gawker.com/news/forbes/shocker-forbes-recommends-trophy-wives-196091.php) connecting many to the piece.  The latter created a parody (http://www.gawker.com/news/forbes/gawker-cliffsnotes-dont-marry-career-women-196165.php) of the story’s attached slideshow, which seems to have been taken down at the original site.  So many others around the internet have followed suit that Kevin Heller at Tech Law Advisor (http://techlawadvisor.com/2006/08/24/dont_marry_career_women_if.html) suggests Forbes put the article under a CC license (http://www.darknet.com/2006/08/creative_common.html) so they can gather even more publicity. 

Meanwhile, the original article has been placed side by side with a companion piece by fellow Forbes writer Elizabeth Corcoran, due, says the page’s new introduction, to the “heated response."   This is titled "Don’t Marry Lazy Men," and in accordance with that title falls at about the same level of subtlety as the story it claims to be refuting.  I am left, in consequence, wondering whether my suspicion that it was all done from the beginning as a ploy for publicity means I’m too cynical, or not cynical enough.  Possibly I just don’t want to believe that prominent writers in major media sources can be that ingenuously dumb.  No, I don’t know where I’ve been for the last twenty years either.