Oh, now this is fun.  Last night I noticed that BoingBoing had posted the following:

Don't Marry Career Men: Forbes hankers for the '50s
Hey, this would be a funny way to start an article in Forbes, wouldn't it?

Girls: A word of advice. Marry handsome men or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Bald or hairy. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a man with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional men are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that men -- even those with a "feminist" outlook -- are happier when their wife is the primary breadwinner.

Right. Now, reverse each gender reference above, and you're reading a real Forbes article: Don't Marry Career Women. 2006, meet 1956. Pathetic.

Check out the the full post for the near-immediate pile-on by readers that followed.  Gawker got in the game, too.  And then suddenly, poof goes the article in question, disappearing from the Forbes.com site - an entirely fruitless exercise in the age of screengrabs and Google cache, as BoingBoing pointed out.  It reappeared a few hours later reframed as half of a point/counterpoint exchange.  Notably missing from the republished article was the slideshow that accompanied the original article, which highlighted some of the more ridiculous and offensive 'points' of the article with incredibly stupid pictures.  The text of the slideshow can be found here; the pathetic pictures live on in Gawker's CliffNotes to the article.  Apparently, the flap got another article by author Michael Noer pulled from Forbes's website as well: a sterling little gem on the economics of prostitution that started with the words 'Wife or whore?'.

The speed with which all of this happened amuses me.  In the print-only days, this exchange would have taken probably a week, right?  Maybe two, if next week's magazine was being printed when the response to the article hit.  Of course, if Forbes was still limited to a print edition, it's just possible that someone on the editorial board might have put more than 5 seconds worth of thought into wasting print and paper on a piece of crap guaranteed to annoy a fair-sized chunk of the magazine's readership.  Unfortunately, the speed of the response means that the counterpoint respondent, Elizabeth Corcoran, can only refute Noer's pseudoscientific claims with personal anecdotes.  It likely would have been more effective to also incorporate studies demonstrating different effects to those that Noer draws on, or scholarly critiques of those studies, since Noer couldn't be bothered to do that bit of homework himself (don't read past the first post on that link, or the rest of the Forbes.com forum on the article if you'd prefer to avoid the self-propelled excrement that crawls out from under very slimy rocks in response to debates like this, because it is stinking up the joint).  Corcoran's response, especially considering the speed at which it must have been produced, is commendable for it's politely assertive tone and sensible recommendations for those who have the misplaced energy to be concerned about this manufactured issue.  Noer and the jackasses who gave his article the go-ahead really don't deserve to have someone like her around to help pull their sorry behinds out of the fire.  

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