They know nothing, I have a fetish for smart (and powerful) women. :-)
Dave
On Nov 2, 2005, at 5:41 PM, Daniel Reeves wrote:
> GACK! I'm simultaneously shuddering, cringing, wretching, and fuming!
>
> I'll sum up my disgust with this excerpt:
> It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were
> doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their
> chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.
>
> There is some very discussion-worthy stuff in here though. In
> particular a study concluding that:
> "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and
> evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the
> University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that
> men
> going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in
> subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women
> with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them.
>
> My conclusion is that we have a lot of work to do in changing basic
> attitudes of both males and females.
>
> But I'm flabbergasted by how Dowd repeatedly makes the unquestioned
> assumption that intelligence and career success make females unable to
> find husbands. (I'm not exaggerating.)
>
> Disgusted,
> Danny
>
> --- \/ FROM Daniel Reeves AT 05.11.02 11:48 (Today) \/ ---
>
>> I never forward things wholly unread but this appears so germane...
>> (I'll read it asap! Thanks Monica!)
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 10:11:45 -0500
>> From: Monica Stephens
>> Subject: What's a Modern Girl to Do?
>>
>> This article by Maureen Dowd, appeared in this Sunday's Times
>> Magazine. It is so true!!! It comments on the facade of feminism in
>> the dynamics of modern courtship. I would love to hear anybodies
>> comments about this (especially if you disagree)...
>>
>> -Monica
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> What's a Modern Girl to Do?
>> By MAUREEN DOWD
>> Published: October 30, 2005
>>
>>
>> When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting out of their 50's
>> chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age
>> spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating
>> men
>> and acting all independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money
>> and
>> thinking they had the right to be sexual, this time protected by the
>> pill. I
>> didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I
>> was
>> more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to
>> life
>> in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex
>> jeans
>> and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't
>> understand
>> the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the
>> universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco
>> glamour
>> of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and
>> Ginger in
>> white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell;
>> live
>> the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a
>> gold lamé
>> gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth
>> Avenue with my pet leopard.
>>
>> My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my idea of the 30's
>> was
>> wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We didn't dance
>> around in
>> white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for
>> granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with
>> men, a
>> utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she
>> cautioned
>> me about the chimera of equality.
>>
>> On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg
>> she had
>> saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family should get a
>> little
>> more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote in a
>> letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand
>> on the
>> Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal
>> to men
>> and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's
>> more
>> of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited
>> bakeries."
>>
>> I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy
>> Parker, when she wrote:
>>
>>
>> By the time you swear you're his,
>> Shivering and sighing,
>> And he vows his passion is
>> Infinite, undying -
>> Lady, make a note of this:
>> One of you is lying.
>>
>> I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could
>> leave it
>> to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I
>> figured there
>> was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would
>> always be
>> full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff -
>> social
>> issues, sexual equality, civil rights. Little did I realize that the
>> feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of
>> intensifying
>> the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of
>> dependence and
>> independence as they entered the 21st century.
>>
>> Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would
>> be more
>> of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would
>> last a
>> nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.
>>
>> Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians,
>> novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and
>> facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom,
>> the
>> bedroom and the Situation Room.
>>
>> Courtship
>>
>> My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The
>> first, when
>> I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I was 21, was
>> "365
>> Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was "How to Catch
>> and
>> Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of yourself as a soft,
>> mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by
>> lots of
>> curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and
>> bright
>> colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.")
>>
>> Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a Man" at a time when we
>> were
>> entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an anachronism. After
>> all,
>> sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing
>> boards,
>> makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The
>> way to
>> approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games,
>> artifice or
>> frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided
>> notion.
>>
>> I knew it even before the 1995 publication of "The Rules," a dating
>> bible
>> that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind games by playing
>> hard to
>> get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes.. . .Even if
>> you are
>> the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be
>> quiet
>> and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear
>> black
>> sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!")
>>
>> I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines,
>> bows,
>> ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other sartorial
>> equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to
>> Get."
>> ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of
>> feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer
>> lectured
>> in Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.")
>>
>> I knew things were changing because a succession of my single
>> girlfriends
>> had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my
>> out-of-print
>> copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Man."
>>
>> Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was
>> becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up
>> on the
>> venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a
>> pert
>> toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full
>> knowledge of
>> music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once
>> more be
>> considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy
>> handkerchief
>> across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.
>>
>> Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in
>> cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded
>> creatures
>> to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't
>> deprive
>> them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my
>> 26-year-old
>> friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom
>> says, Men
>> don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets
>> captured by the game."
>>
>> These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B. &
>> I.,
>> girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that
>> little
>> envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old
>> publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do
>> anyway."
>> If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can
>> ratchet
>> up from B. & I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much
>> Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological
>> foreplay.
>>
>> Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist, concurs with Julie: "What our
>> grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole
>> point of
>> the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men
>> and
>> women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can
>> win.
>> Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And
>> both
>> sexes brag."
>>
>> Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend hours finding a
>> hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear
>> a fancy
>> suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world,
>> a woman
>> must play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm.
>> Altogether.
>>
>> Money
>>
>> In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about
>> equal pay
>> for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."
>>
>> A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she hears bandied
>> about the
>> New York dating scene. She also notes a shift in the type of gifts
>> given at
>> wedding showers around town, a reversion to 50's-style offerings: soup
>> ladles and those frilly little aprons from Anthropologie and vintage
>> stores
>> are being unwrapped along with see-through nighties and push-up bras.
>>
>> "What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and
>> retrogression of
>> women's lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social
>> culture,
>> where it can do real damage," she complains. "Otherwise intelligent
>> men, who
>> know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll
>> get
>> the check. You only have girl money."'
>>
>> Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women
>> connived to
>> trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of
>> feminism, women offered to pay half the check with "woman money" as a
>> way to
>> show that these crass calculations - that a woman's worth in society
>> was
>> determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the
>> highest
>> bidder - no longer applied.
>>
>> Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about
>> using
>> the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to
>> assess their
>> sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk
>> about
>> it with disbelief and disdain. "It's a scuzzy 70's thing, like
>> platform
>> shoes on men," one told me.
>>
>> "Feminists in the 70's went overboard," Anne Schroeder, a 26-year-old
>> magazine editor in Washington, agrees. "Paying is like opening a car
>> door.
>> It's nice. I appreciate it. But he doesn't have to."
>>
>> Unless he wants another date.
>>
>> Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in
>> all
>> the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women
>> should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused
>> only on
>> big economic issues.
>>
>> After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a first dinner date, a
>> modern
>> girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid to help
>> pay
>> the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a
>> meal, but
>> it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The
>> Times,
>> says. "They know you will stop them before a credit card can be
>> drawn. If
>> you don't, they hold it against you."
>>
>> One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the
>> same
>> thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."
>>
>> Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid
>> profiterole.
>> But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the
>> man, or
>> more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a
>> way of
>> signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating
>> culture rife
>> with casual hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial
>> testing
>> phase and settled in a relationship, of course, she can pony up more.)
>>
>> "There are plenty of ways for me to find out if he's going to see me
>> as an
>> equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young woman says.
>> "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that."
>>
>> When I asked a young man at my gym how he and his lawyer girlfriend
>> were
>> going to divide the costs on a California vacation, he looked
>> askance. "She
>> never offers," he replied. "And I like paying for her." It is, as one
>> guy
>> said, "one of the few remaining ways we can demonstrate our manhood."
>>
>> Power Dynamics
>>
>> At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a
>> top New
>> York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that
>> was
>> anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on
>> a date
>> when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a
>> Times
>> columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women
>> who seem
>> malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate
>> because if
>> there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical
>> faculties.
>> Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?
>>
>> He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the
>> aroma of
>> male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female
>> power is a
>> turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that
>> everything they
>> were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging
>> their
>> chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.
>>
>> A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very
>> beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I
>> can't
>> believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal
>> assistants or P.R. women."
>>
>> I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful
>> men took
>> up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture
>> them
>> in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight
>> attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.
>>
>> John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend official in 2004
>> when he
>> reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their
>> bosses, and
>> evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the
>> University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that
>> men
>> going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in
>> subordinate
>> jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with
>> important
>> jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA:
>> women
>> get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.
>>
>> "The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study,
>> theorized, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take
>> steps
>> to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own."
>> Women, by
>> contrast, did not show a marked difference between their attraction
>> to men
>> who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work
>> below
>> them.
>>
>> So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get
>> less
>> desirable as they get more successful?
>>
>> After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis
>> e-mailed
>> me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally
>> accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis
>> put it,
>> that smart women were "draining at times."
>>
>> Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig
>> Ferguson on
>> the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they
>> want
>> somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."
>>
>> Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to
>> marry
>> down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an
>> epidemic of
>> professional women missing out on husbands and kids.
>>
>> Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life:
>> Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in
>> 2002,
>> conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career
>> women
>> were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or
>> more,
>> she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared
>> with only
>> 19 percent of the men.
>>
>> Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage.
>> "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more
>> successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband
>> or bear
>> a child. For men, the reverse is true."
>>
>> A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated
>> that a
>> high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for
>> men. The
>> prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each
>> 16-point
>> increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each
>> 16-point
>> rise.
>>
>> On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett book, Lesley Stahl talked to
>> two
>> young women who went to Harvard Business School. They agreed that
>> while they
>> were the perfect age to start families, they didn't find it easy to
>> meet the
>> right mates.
>>
>> Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from
>> high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went
>> to
>> Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The
>> H-bomb,"
>> they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . .
>> that's the
>> end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys
>> say, 'Oh,
>> I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into
>> them."
>>
>> Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than
>> ever.
>> "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to have a
>> career
>> and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that
>> highly
>> educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this
>> creeping
>> nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and
>> delaying
>> childbearing. Whether you're looking at Italy, Russia or the U.S.,
>> all of
>> that is true." Many women continue to fear that the more they
>> accomplish,
>> the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer
>> away
>> from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the
>> superior force in a relationship.
>>
>> "With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?"
>> says a
>> guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce.
>>
>> Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of
>> Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down,
>> beneath the
>> bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're
>> truly
>> looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable
>> partner
>> in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until
>> she's 40."
>>
>> Ms. Versus Mrs.
>>
>> "Ms." was supposed to neutralize the stature of women, so they weren't
>> publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times finally
>> agreed to
>> switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by
>> feminists,
>> Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal.
>> But
>> nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and
>> brag on
>> the moniker Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts
>> with
>> "MRS." emblazoned in sequins or sparkly beads are popular
>> wedding-shower
>> gifts.
>>
>> A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year
>> that
>> found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who
>> married
>> within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the
>> class of
>> '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of
>> college-educated women
>> kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number
>> had
>> fallen to 17 percent.
>>
>> Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the spring of 2005 by
>> the
>> Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of
>> respondents
>> took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000.
>> The
>> number of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8
>> percent.
>>
>> "It's a return to romance, a desire to make marriage work," Goldin
>> told one
>> interviewer, adding that young women might feel that by keeping their
>> own
>> names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned
>> feminists,
>> and this might be a turnoff to them.
>>
>> The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her name, undertook the
>> study
>> after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her
>> generation of
>> women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we
>> had
>> already achieved," Goldin told Time.
>>
>> Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable
>> concentration
>> camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they
>> are
>> losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots
>> in a
>> docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a
>> Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay
>> home
>> and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching
>> shoes and
>> ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses
>> featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying
>> for
>> Wisteria Lane waistlines.
>>
>> The Times recently ran a front-page article about young women
>> attending Ivy
>> League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their places in
>> the
>> professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers
>> in
>> favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children.
>>
>> "My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the
>> best
>> mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia Liu told
>> Louise
>> Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years
>> after
>> she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the
>> other."
>>
>> Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that she sees a
>> distinct
>> shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want to
>> be in
>> the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem
>> unappealing."
>>
>> Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at Yale, told Story
>> that
>> women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the dashed
>> utopia of
>> those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work
>> and child
>> rearing.
>>
>> To the extent that young women are rejecting the old idea of copying
>> men and
>> reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating progress.
>> But to
>> the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the
>> problem
>> and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a
>> narrow
>> world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new
>> ethos is
>> "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be
>> healthy.
>>
>> Movies
>>
>> In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it
>> was the
>> snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting.
>> You still
>> see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt
>> and
>> Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured
>> orgasms
>> and destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was
>> described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two
>> peppery
>> lovers. Moviemakers these days are more interested in exploring what
>> Steve
>> Martin, in his novel "Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances
>> between unequals.
>>
>> In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, playing a
>> sensitive Los
>> Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid, just as in "Maid in
>> Manhattan," Ralph Fiennes, playing a sensitive New York pol, falls
>> for the
>> hot Latino maid at his hotel, played by Jennifer Lopez. Sandler's
>> maid, who
>> cleans up for him without being able to speak English, is presented
>> as the
>> ideal woman, in looks and character. His wife, played by Téa Leoni, is
>> repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised,
>> unfaithful,
>> shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial
>> design firm
>> and fears she has lost her identity.
>>
>> In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which Colin Firth's
>> Vermeer
>> erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch maid, and Richard
>> Curtis's
>> "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals. The witty and
>> sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for
>> the
>> chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A
>> businessman
>> married to the substantial Emma Thompson, the sister of the prime
>> minister,
>> falls for his sultry secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth
>> falls for
>> his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
>>
>> Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish
>> narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection.
>>
>> It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics - statuesque,
>> 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted as nannies for
>> some of
>> America's first families. I was always so proud of achieving more -
>> succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my
>> great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would
>> have
>> enhanced my chances with men.
>>
>> An upstairs maid, of course.
>>
>> Women's Magazines
>>
>> Cosmo is still the best-selling magazine on college campuses, as it
>> was when
>> I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the
>> newsstand.
>> The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage
>> spilling out of an orange crocheted halter dress, could have been
>> June 1970.
>> The headlines are familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less,"
>> "Do
>> You Make Men M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud
>> search
>> and "Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have
>> Brought
>> Countless Guys to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut
>> around your man's member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the
>> icing .
>> . . as well as his manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell
>> out
>> during sex which of your girlfriends thinks your man is hot.)
>>
>> At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo girl's man-crazy,
>> sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the
>> teen set.
>> On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot."
>>
>> "There has been lots of copying - look at Glamour," Helen Gurley
>> Brown,
>> Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I used to have all the
>> sex to
>> myself."
>>
>> Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had
>> fleetingly
>> held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life
>> that
>> were not all about men. But it never quite materialized.
>>
>> It took only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the
>> highest
>> ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip.
>> Instead
>> of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society
>> where
>> women of all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens.
>> Hollywood actresses now work out by taking pole-dancing classes.
>>
>> Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew path, not a serene
>> progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were
>> not
>> supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters,
>> when
>> women were supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then
>> it was
>> discovered - shock, horror! - that men and women are not alike in
>> their
>> desires. But zipless morphed into hookups, and the more one-night
>> stands the
>> girls on "Sex and the City" had, the grumpier they got.
>>
>> Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said
>> he stole
>> his "us against the world" lad-magazine attitude from women's
>> magazines like
>> Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's prestigious fiction
>> as the
>> magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary
>> pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded
>> gender
>> stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see
>> you in
>> the morning and night, why call us at work?"
>>
>> Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their
>> curves
>> on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson
>> "America's
>> favorite ball and chain!" In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and
>> FHM
>> featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. ("I think of my
>> breasts as props," she told FHM.)
>>
>> A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim
>> babes.
>> So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I
>> have
>> been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to
>> find that
>> a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl
>> type, that
>> they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends
>> to take
>> pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim
>> representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That,
>> to me,
>> is kind of extraordinary."
>>
>> The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men's
>> fantasy
>> guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming
>> girlfriends.
>>
>> Beauty
>>
>> While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and
>> I
>> tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels,
>> I
>> always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement
>> would be a
>> more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from
>> the
>> tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.
>>
>> I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of
>> feminine
>> beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.
>>
>> When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not
>> mean it
>> as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's
>> just an
>> aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and
>> stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires.
>> Now
>> that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls.
>> It's
>> clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.
>>
>> It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously
>> demonize
>> Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as
>> shopping,
>> applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to
>> prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked
>> alike in
>> navy suits and were equal in every way.
>>
>> But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter
>> away
>> all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging
>> about guys
>> while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts
>> on the
>> Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.
>>
>> What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that
>> young
>> women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were
>> supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.
>>
>> What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist
>> movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The
>> plumage
>> is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more
>> plastic, the
>> message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex
>> object; now
>> it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.
>>
>> And the Future . . .
>>
>> Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of
>> decades? If
>> we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who
>> thought
>> trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and
>> stranded in
>> suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers,
>> deserted by
>> husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they
>> never
>> tried to be part of?
>>
>> It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize
>> they
>> bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or
>> independence,
>> they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their
>> floors
>> - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.
>>
>>
>> Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times. This essay is
>> adapted
>> from "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," to be published next
>> month by
>> G.P. Putnam's Sons.
>
> --
> http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves - - google://"Daniel Reeves"
>
> "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
>
David P. Morris, PhD
aka thecat Æ umich.edu, aka KB8PWY
home: 734-995-5525 UofM (2104 SPRL): 734-763-5357 fax: 734-763-5567
ElectroDynamic Applications Inc.
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