Maureen Dowd will never learn; she’s dedicating part of her column to the same whine that drove her book Are Men Necessary?—feminism ruined it for women because it didn’t make men change overnight into more acceptable mates for the smart, sassy and successful women out there.
In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy.
“Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”
Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed.
But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”
Fisman ran a study on speed dating and found that the men who indulged in the practice tended to down rate women who they perceived as smarter or more ambitious than them. Yes, this is the same researcher who found that these men didn’t have racial preferences, and yes, the same obvious caveat that I mentioned yesterday seems to apply. I drew an illustration this time, to make clearer.
Generalizing what men want from what men-who-speed-date want is a bad idea, it seems to me. There’s an urgency and shopper’s mentality to speed dating that seems like it would only be attractive to a subset of people, and it’s quite possible that subset is especially likely to have a checklist of attributes that would include, “Smart, but not too smart.”* Still, a moment’s sympathy for Dowd’s problem from Katha Pollitt, who wisely observes that Dowd probably isn’t talking completely out of her ass about her boy problems.
As for playing the woman-as-victim card, can this be the same Maureen Dowd who wrote in her last book, Are Men Necessary?, that men don’t ask her out because she’s too smart and successful and will never see 35 again? How’s that for painting yourself as a victim of sexism– which, I hasten to add, Dowd probably is!
You don’t need to be Simone de Beauvoir to recognize that lots of middle-aged men would find Dowd too challenging and too old — i.e., their own age.
What I don’t get is the advice to dumb it down, or hide yourself. There’s an implicit assumption there that women are always more eager, and more desperate, which is what I really don’t buy. If there’s a conflict between a woman’s success and a man’s frail ego, the assumption that she’s naturally going to take the compromise position to make it work out, i.e. play stewardess. As Dowd writes:
Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.
Not sure why she thinks going up in years would be going down in sexism, except that if you go up in years, then he might be making more money, but that means the “Oh my god, I make more money!” problem is non-existent, so what’s the issue here? But setting aside the logic issues, I’m fascinated by the unspoken assumption that women are the ones more eager, more desperate, more afraid of being alone. They’d have to be, if they’re the ones hiding shopping bags. If men care about compromise, they could, you know, hide the shopping bags of ego hurt if they’re big enough babies to flip out over dating women that make more. And then they’d have a chance to grow as human beings, which is not an opportunity afforded by hiding shopping bags.**
This is where I draw the line. There’s not really a scrap of evidence that women are more eager to give up their freedom to get married than men are. There’s a good reason to think that once women get into relationships, they have less power to get out than men as a general rule (internalized sexism, family obligations, social pressures, financial concerns, etc.), but at the beginning, especially with financially independent women of the sort Dowd describes, why assume this extra dose of desperation? A guy who starts to throw a hissy fit at the sign of shopping bags when you’re first dating each other is probably a guy who gets his phone calls returned not very often, because he fits cleanly into the category of “better to be alone than with that dipshit”. Sure, some nimrod will pick a guy like that up—there’s never an end to human stupidity in these matters—but to generalize to most women, to make a trend out of this implies that women are more desperate as a rule than men. And I see no reason to believe that.
*I don’t know why Dowd’s whining, anyway, since that description seems to fit her to a T. If this study is right, she should be raking ‘em in left and right.
**Who leaves tons of shopping bags around anyway? Aren’t the hyper-competent women of the stereotype Dowd is painting competent enough to unpack their goods, put them away and fold up the bags in the recycling before their dates come over? Her entire story has seams tearing and spilling bullshit everywhere.
71 Responses to “Not. Your. Dating. Service.”
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At the risk of setting myself up as a target (alligator mouth? Meet hummingbird a**), I would most likely find MoDo a very attractive woman in a lot of ways except for one. When I see her on TV playing talking head, there is zero movement of the facial muscles. It is almost a caricature of the old cartoons where a moving mouth has been superimposed on a still picture. Not a pleasant sight. YMMV.
I just clicked back to the original slate article. These “studies” are all based on economists using rational choice theories?!?!?!? Buh bye.
Next studies, please.
If I didn’t have principles, I’d say it was high time that Maureen Dowd got laid. Why, other than desperation and a complete inability to operate a vibrator, would anyone want a man too insecure to feel pleased at attracting someone smarter and more ambitious than him? If men are like that, forget ‘em. (They’re not all, of course. Which is how I ended up in a 15 year and counting relationship with a man who likes my ambition.)
I really don’t understand this nonsense. My wife makes a lot more money than me, and it gives me freedom to pursue my vision without worrying about finances. What kind of dumb fucking asshole wouldn’t want that?
Haha! Whenever you meet a hot feminist, just say “You are so damn hot! Damn!”
And just walk away.
They love that.
I should do that to straight guys on dates with their wives…”What a waste.”
If she’d chill out a little, she might learn that she could really like not being paired off with whatever yahoo wanders by.
Being okay with being alone makes it a lot easier to find a grown man, so you don’t have to waste time with whiny babies who are askeered of shopping bags.
Seems to me that marriage is a MUCH worse deal for women. Aren’t single women the happiest and married women the most miserable? I seem to recall that married men are only slightly less happy then single women. I can see getting married if you want kids, but eh.. otherwise? Why bother?
Also seems to me- being your smart, opinionated, creative, higher salaried, whatever self would be an *excellent* way to screen out the losers. What’s so great about being married to a guy that demands a woman be ‘less’ then him somehow? You’ve gotta *live* with this guy, after all.
So, yeah.. I agree. I don’t understand why Dowd, who’s intelligent (if not always someone I agree with entirely) is so desperate to hitch herself to some guy who can’t stand the fact that she might be smarter then him.
Here’s the thing that advice givers never seem to grasp about dating - it’s NOT mass marketing. You’re not looking to meet the largest possible pool so there’s reason to play to the lowest common denominator.
In fact, it’s good to shrink the pool and screen out the bad fits as early as possible. It saves *everyone* so much time and aggravation. So women should never play down their brains or ambitions or creativity or independence or whatever other quality is supposed to be the kiss of death du jour for dating. Rather, everyone should play up their genuine selves and scare away the wimps. The men and women who are still standing are bound to be much better potential fits for a relationship.
Given my chosen (for the time being) profession:
1. It is highly likely that any woman I pair up with in any fashion will make more money than me. In fact, every woman I have dated since college has in fact made more money than me. So, were I inclined to resent this, I would be essentially dateless for the rest of my life.
2. My profession entails pretty much as a requirement a Ph.D. for you to be taken seriously within it. This means that I’m highly likely to run into women who are in fact smarter than me (however one measures this) on a daily basis. As is the case in item #1, if I resented this, dating would be very, very hard because such women are the ones I have the most contact with, and are therefore the most likely candidates for dating.
If Dowd needs a date or even just a fling, I’m available. I won’t even complain about the bags from Barney’s, Saks, or Bergdorf’s she may have lying around.
I would not want to date Maureen Dowd (were I single) for the simple fact that putting the details of your love life into the pages of almost the largest circulation newspaper is just plain tacky. I don’t want to read from Paul Krugman about how his love life is rolling along or why he hypothetically can’t get a date, either.
Frankly, Maureen Dowd is a XX Chromosome “Nice Guy” in my book: self-pitying in her flagellating explanations of her social failures and screaming at Mount Olympus for Aphrodite to fix things. Reminds me of myself in reversed gender, replete with 20-sided dice, age 14.
In the working class world in which I live, I have yet to find any men seriously damaged, deranged or in any other way coming unhinged at the prospect of their wife earning more. In fact, many men seem to respect me highly, if not for my leading business role, also for my independent stature. They kind of seem at awe with my determination to remain unmarried.
Men are actually the ones conditioned to need women, they are taught that they cannot function well without a housemaid and will work forever to find one. That she earns more most often means little to them as long as she is willing to continue with the majority of household chores.
As for Dowd’s remark about older men, this only applies to men who never had power issues to begin with. Asshats who get older just become old asshats. Which of course really begs the question, are men so similar as to be predictable by age alone? How about hair color or shoe preference?
This stereotyping of male behavior by women certainly shouldn’t be coming out of the mouth of any woman who wants to paint herself a feminist. As soon as a strawman is made of whole cloth, a straw-woman is manufactured from his left sleeve; always.
I’ve heard that Dowd’s exes include Donald Trump, Michael Douglas, and Aaron Sorkin. That would suggest that she’s NOT looking for the same things in a mate that the average fortysomething single professional woman is looking for. And may possibly be making the mistake of assuming her preferences equal the preferences of every single woman on earth.
You can’t have it both ways. The set of men who are enormously rich, successful, famous, and Hollywood glamourous is likely to include a very, very, VERY small subset of men who aren’t also cocaine addicts, fantastically self-absorbed blowhards, or liable to dump their intelligent, age-appropriate girlfriend for some starlet young enough to be their daughter. And of that small subset of ridiculously wealthy, famous guys who aren’t tools, I’d bet a lot of them are already married or in longterm relationships.
I normally cringe at the kind of dating advice that involves the idea of “don’t be so picky,” but perhaps it’s applicable to Dowd. Or maybe she should be encouraged to be MORE picky, to the point where she starts caring about a potential boyfriend’s actual personality more than if paparazzi want to photograph him on a date. I mean, MoDo might discover that the subset of available men who WON’T dump her when a better offer comes along is larger if she expands her pool to include journalists, lawyers, professors, and other such fellows who may not make tons of money, nor be as famous as she is, but actually have pleasant personalities.
I am so pleased you wrote about MoDo’s column today because it pissed me off so bad, in that “Goddamn it I am in such a bad mood that I want to scream inarticulate bullshit,” way, I had to have a nap.
I am married to the hottest man and have been for the last 23 years. He told me on our first date, over Chinese food that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. We were discussing some political topic and he just up and said that to me.
He has always thought that I am pretty, smart, sexy, and funny and was never, ever, threatened or intimidated by me.
Mo is either in love with some man that is more ego than man or she keeps making the same mistake over and over and over.
It is the man she is trying to catch that is the problem, not men. I found him and I wasn’t even looking. He was committed to me when he told me we were perfect together. He is handsome and was/is considered the perfect catch. I mean, this is a man who the waitresses where we regularly eat together whine to me that he is fabulous when he isn’t with me at the restaurant. He is adorable and was a date magnet when we met and he falls all over me.
I was insecure about my mind, my looks, and my desirability until my husband once told me–”It isn’t you but the idiotic men who you are interested in.” Essentially I was too good for the men I had wanted and that was the whole problem.
Mo needs to ask herself why she keeps hurting herself that way. It isn’t men in general but the idiots she wants.
Why doesn’t she take her own advice, quit her column and work at a job for less pay. Sure she’s still unlikely to find that “one true” prince charming but at least the rest of the world is better off for not having to listen about it.
i cant stand Dowd. i dont know how i mistakenly got the message that she was feminist, but that was before i actually read her. I flummoxed at the idea that this person is touted as highly as she seems to be, in the general media.
Im not desperate. I dont even begin to overanalyze myself like all of these ‘advice-givers’do as their stock in trade… but sometimes it does feel like they are trying to engender panic, on behalf of all women, by insisting that if they dont listen tothem, they will die bitter & alooooone(!) There’s always an avalanche of this type of shit advice coming down on the heads of women.
A lot of good points. I especially liked kate’s comment, because I think that it gets to the heart of the problem with Dowd’s work generally. For Dowd, the world beyond the Manhattan crowd doesn’t exist. The fact that there are women all over the country settling into happy relationships is irrelevant, because she and the women she talks to at cocktail parties can’t seem to find what they want.
But as some have pointed out, women don’t really need to be the ones to change. There are plenty of desperate men out there, if that’s what you’re into. And believe me, most men outside of Dowd’s circle would jump at the chance to date a woman who makes plenty of money.
Why should accept that the idea that men and women both have essential natures is part of the religious mindset of a by-gone era. Mytho-poetical thinking does not belong in an enlightened secular society.
Jennifer Armstrong
Secular Party of Australia
Kate, I completely agree that men are conditioned by the patriarchy to assume that they need a house servant, but I’d add that women are also conditioned by the patriarchy to feel as if we’ve failed if we don’t bag a man, any man.
I’d even go so far to say that the societal pressure on women to find a mate and get married is stronger than that on men. Single women are objects of pity and scorn (and increasingly so as they age), whereas men are just jolly old “confirmed bachelors.” You can’t grow up hearing the same message pounded into you day after day without internalizing some of it. Men aren’t encouraged from day one to fantasize about their dream wedding, what they’re going to wear as they walk down the aisle, what kind of diamond ring they want.
So I agree that some women may not have a conditioned desire to get married, and those are women who have seen through the bullshit in one way or another. I’d say that a lot of women in our society are trained to think that marriage is the default, and that if they don’t achieve it, they’ve failed in some major way.
In the original piece, there is something that I don’t understand at all.
The article starts with quotes and comments about women who seem, or are, smarter than their potential partners. Blah. And suddenly it jumps to this:
“Hillary Clinton . . . may hope that we’re evolving into a kingdom of queen bees and their male slaves.”
What? Is Hillary Clinton courting voters as a woman might look for a date? And, most importantly, how does Dowd assume that a relationship where the woman is smarter than her partner equals “queen bee-male slave”?
I know a few couples where the woman either earns more than the man or where both of them assume that she is more intelligent. These women would be totally appalled at the suggestion that their partners are “male slaves” and so would the men themselves. There is a profound respect going in both directions.
I’ve never tried speed dating and probably never will. If I ever took the time to rehearse a two- or five-minute presentation of myself, it would likely help me out in the non-formalized dating world. But I have some resistance to the idea of selling myself, a strong desire to just be myself, and other things that would make speed dating just seem wrong for me. I’d much rather team up with the announcer from the Dating Game: “And now let’s meet Jon, he’s a bachelor librarian who likes dark beer and procrastinating on his backyard building projects. Let’s give him a great big welcome!” That wouldn’t be a bad way to enter a bar.
As for money, I don’t care how much someone makes as long as they are attractive, fun, and honest (in no particular order, since they are all necessary.) If I was to be held back by a fragile ego, even strangers and porn would eventually be mocking me. Whenever justifiable personal pride starts to develop into an ego, that’s when the stupid starts.
What is often forgotten on these threads is that it goes both ways: Some men don’t want to date high achieving women, but plenty of women don’t want to date lower achieving men either.
This problem is far deeper than insecure men and shallow women. It all goes back to patriarchal ideas about what is a man’s role and what a woman’s role in a relationship. Women are taught that they need a man to take care of them, even if they are fully capable of taking care of themselves. Men are taught that they are supposed to be the one who takes care of their woman, even if their woman is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
Not everyone adapts well to the changes in this paradigm that occur when the woman makes more. A lot of people are simply too indoctrinated to properly adapt.
I couldn’t wait to read the whole entry to comment, so there might be more later.
My Mom told me once that the woman should never be smarther than the man in any relationship. When I asked her if that was the secret to her long-lasting marriage, she actually had the temerity to be offended because I was calling her dumb. Which I was, but only because of that comment.
wayward, I have a solution to the patriarchy problem you are touching on.
I let the guys I date traipse around my apartment with a screwdriver looking for stuff to fix when they start getting uppity. Keeps them busy, and I can nurture a good fantasy because I usually have them in some kind of uniform while doing it. I was dating an Air Force pilot once and I had him travel around my place in his flight suit fixing faucets. Best 15 minutes of my life!
So, even apart from the non-representive nature of speed daters, what she’s basically saying is that not hiding intelligence allows you to filter out men who are less smart and more insecure without making any effort?
Can someone explain why that’s a bad thing?
It was much, much more important to have a man in my life when I still had children at home.
So, of course they were difficult to find.
Now that it’s not that big a deal, they are all over the place.
What the…? In what universe has Hillary Clinton been more successful and more intelligent than her husband?
Raincitygirl is right. The fault here seems to lie not with men, but with MoDo herself. As for me, I refuse to take dating advice from any woman who ever dated Donald Trump. And that is all.
Rumble, I think it’s true that women might be more eager for the wedding, but I don’t think that makes women more desperate at the beginning of relationships. In fact, as a rule, I think women tend to perceive that they have more power during the courtship phase than the commitment phase, and thus have all the more reason to be picky then. On the flip, men’s power increases once the woman is committed, which just increases his motivation to get past the courtship phase. In highly gendered dating rituals, she calls the shots at first, when he’s trying to please her enough to get her committed, but once she’s in, he gets to use her need to please her family and society by being made an “honest woman” against her.
Now, I don’t think all heterosexual relationships are like this, but if you buy into the set of motivations laid out about how men seek companionship but women seek companionship + the social approval of being a bride, then there’s very little doubt that this results in a situation where men are more desperate up front and women are more desperate a year in when the marriage jones start kicking in.
I borrowed Are Men Necessary from my sister, and breezed through it in a few hours. Giving credit where due, it is entertaining, and Dowd herself, on the back cover no less, admits flat out that she really doesn’t know jack about men. Unfortunately, the type of man she seems to want (and laments not being able to get) is basically the sort of guy who made partner at a major law firm before age 30, owns his own Learjet and a yacht or two, and has, as an old joke once put it, a five car garage but still has to park the Porsche on the street. Then she wonders why these type of men seem to much prefer dating (and marrying) their secretaries as opposed to people like, well, herself.
Well, isn’t it obvious? A hard charging, Uber-Type A Alpha male is hardly likely to want to seek someone just like himself for a partner! And that’s Dowd’s problem. A highly successful man (apparently the only sort someone like Dowd would consider an acceptable mate) is likely to either be:
1. Far too busy in his career to have the energy to give to a demanding and ambitious spouse; or
2. so shallow and materialistic as to not give a damn about anything other than pure looks.
One wonders - could Maureen Dowd actually envision herself being happily married to an Average Joe, say, a fireman or a cop, a person with little social prestige but who makes an honest living and who might actually appreciate her for who she is, as opposed to what she does? Somehow, I don’t think so.
So basically Dowd is saying that she can’t get a man so it must be because she is too smart and makes too much money. It just couldn’t be that she is a narcissistic asshat who drives away every decent man she meets, now could it?
Could Maureen Dowd’s problems possibly stem, not from her alleged “intelligence”, but from the fact that she’s a shallow fool who writes inane newspaper columns?
Meh. Based on my own experiences, I’d prefer not having a partner who I feel I’m thinking rings around, but as for the amount of money made…?
Heck, if any guy is scared off by my brains or my income generating abilities, good. Gets the nitwits out of the way early.
Dowd is a very attractive woman. Unfortunately she’s also a starfucking social climber who would never think to look for a man outside the upscale Manhattan cocktail party scene, because it would be beneath her. There are a lot of men who would scramble over burning furniture for the chance to date her, salary and all, but they will never, ever show up on her radar because they’re from the wrong social class. She reminds me of that ‘I can’t get a man because I’m so awesome’ woman you occasionally see on daytime talk, begging Dr. Phil for dating advice while he fumbles about for something big and sharp enough to puncture her inflated ego.
Dumbing down for the sake of landing a man has never been an option for me- and I wouldn’t want to be with a guy who used that sort of artificial ploy, either. I find intelligence incredibly captivating and sexy; why wouldn’t a man see it the same way?
I don’t know that I would scramble over burning furniture to date her, but I am cursed by bio/psycho/sociology to find MD way smoking hot. So I read her column regularly mostly so I have an excuse to look at her picture. But man, she’s dumb as a box of rocks. I almost never make it more than halfway through the column before scrolling back up to the picture in mixed desire and disgust.*
Like a lot of really unhappy people, she projects wildly, and so any woman who doesn’t seem to be going mad trying to bag a powerful man becomes a target. And no wonder she hates Hillary, because Hillary got the powerful man and keeps him, not by sex or neediness, but by cleverness and ambition.
On a side note, I think things have changed a little w/r/t patriarchy and singleness, in that while it’s still a tragedy for a woman over 35 to be unmarried, uncoupled men much over that age aren’t really seen anymore as happy bachelors, but rather unreliable losers, or closeted gay men, or both. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.
“Some men don’t want to date high achieving women, but plenty of women don’t want to date lower achieving men either.”
I’d be willing to bet this is what is actually happening. It’s not men rejecting high acheiving women so much as those women rejecting lower acheiving men.
But we can’t ever admit it’s women voting with their feet, so we pretend it’s men making the choice. Rather like how MRA’s like to pretend they invented the “marriage strike”. It’s not that no woman will have them, it’s that they’ve rejected all women! Yeah! That’s it!
On another note: I got a kick out of the (at least) several male posters decided to tell us whether or not they would fuck Dowd. Because that’s *so* the point of Amanda’s piece.
Totall OT. Just want to compliment the many posters here for their clever names. I think a lot of creativity is displayed. Thank you all!
Back in the way dark ages, when I was having romantic relationship, well anyway, when I was having romantic relationships with an eye to permanence, I noticed that all around me people were getting married, and the anxious, insistent ones were the men. Women were saying, Well, I thought I’d work/study/travel a while before I settled down, and the guys were saying No! Marry me Now! Now! Really, right now!!!
And I only knew smart, well-educated people. At the time.
Back in the way dark ages, when I was having romantic relationship, well anyway, when I was having romantic relationships with an eye to permanence, I noticed that all around me people were getting married, and the anxious, insistent ones were the men. Women were saying, Well, I thought I’d work/study/travel a while before I settled down, and the guys were saying No! Marry me Now! Now! Really, right now!!!
And I only knew smart, well-educated people. At the time.
Mrs Nice Guy
Forgot to add: So, really, men are the speed-dating prospects. I wonder where they get the women.
I refuse to take dating advice from any woman who ever dated Donald Trump.
That SO needs to be a t-shirt.
Dowd is a special case. I don’t think even most female neurosurgeons, let alone your “average” Barney’s shopper, can identify with her more than superficially. Because many of those women do ultimately date and marry men who don’t make the kind of money they do — take my SIL, for example, a psychiatrist who married my brother, a midlevel editor — and don’t have a problem with it at all, and neither do the men (who, especially in a big expensive city, are more than happy to have a partner who rakes it in, regardless of whether they themselves do or not). Sure, these women want someone they can talk to without having to provide footnotes, and someone who does something with his life besides pick his navel lint, but they know job title doesn’t tell you squat about someone’s brainpower.
But Dowd? Like others here have said, I don’t know if Dowd could be happy with someone who worked as a cop or a janitor (or even a midlevel editor) even if his intelligence level was well above average. Her eyes are on the flashbulbs. Remember Cher when she dated the “bagel baker” (actually an aspiring actor) back in the ’80s? Remember how the likes of Joan Rivers made endless hay from it? Dowd probably has that memory permanently tattooed on her eyelids. But gah, she makes enough money, she could tell them all to go to hell forever if it turns out her dream guy paints houses. It would not cost her anything except ego. Too bad that’s one bit of smarts she doesn’t have.
Could men be preemptively rejecting smart, ambitious women on the theory that they are probably going to find somebody better eventually? O_O
My mother told me the exact same thing about “boys” not liking girls who were smarter than they were. I think I told her that the boys were just going to have to get over it.
My boyfriend does think I’m smarter than he is. He’s not necessarily right, not necessarily wrong; it more or less depends on how you reckon “smarter.” I have a broader range of proficiencies, and I’m way more educated, but he’s better at the culturally-conventional signifiers of “smart” than I am (e.g. computer programming, math, chess, electronics, physics). On the whole, though, I’d say we’re quite compatible — he writes the programs, I document them. It all works out.
Speaking from personal experience, MoDo should stop trying to date CEOs and start dating other writers. Some of us do, in fact, have faces made for radio (which I note MoDo doesn’t, woah!), but she might find someone nice and, as a bonus, they could talk shop in bed. (The joys of talking shop in bed are underrated in this culture. I blame the patriarchy.)
Oh, and here’s a footnote to the story of my brother and SIL. They actually met for the first time at a speed-dating event, and neither of them was much interested in the other at the time. But they met up again later and got to talking about how stupid speed-dating was, and that’s when they got together.
Which is consistent with what Nita Tucker wrote in her how-to-find-a-man book Beyond Cinderella 20 years ago
(I used to devour such things in my 20s, what can I say?). She said that when she ran workshops for singles, one of her assignments was to interview happily married couples about their initial encounter. Her results, from over 1,000 different couples, indicated that 80% of those surveyed said they were not attracted to their partner when they first met. Eighty percent! Yeah, that was 20 years ago, but I doubt things have changed that much since then.
@ Amanda, I see your point, if we’re talking about the timing with which the desire for marriage to a particular person peaks for men and for women.
However, I do still think that on the whole, women are under much more whithering societal pressure to toe the line and get married, and are therefore more pressured/motivated overall to get that rock and become Mrs. Someone. Mrs. Anyone. (That is, of course, unless they’ve figured out that it’s all a function of the patriarchy and reject that pressure, or avoid feeling pressured by not giving a shit about what people think of them.) I don’t think our arguments are mutually exclusive.
Felagund, I do think you’re right too that societal attitudes are shifting slowly about single men, but I reiterate, I still think the harsher societal judgments fall on women. I mean, how often do you hear someone nastily joking about a long-single man becoming a crazy cat guy?
A Chicago newscast had some special on Successful Women in Relationships with Men who Make Less (or some pithier, but equally stupid title). One of the amusing teaser lines was some woman saying, “He said since you make more than I do, what do you need me for?”
My wife and I would roll our eyes every time that came up with the frequent response, “Well, you DO have a really small dick…”
Why is the media going out of its way to have women internalize the insecurities of pathetically insecure men? And why does the country need to waste valuable news time on such a question of elite interest?(Rhetorical questions, don’t bother to answer) Sigh…
your venn diagram seriously needs to be updated to an even smaller circle
“Columbia University grad and professional-school students who speed-date.”
THAT WAS THE SAMPLE…
yeeeesh
Speed-dating while still in graduate school indicates some serious social maladjustment, if you ask me.
Think about it for a second: You’re a graduate (or law, or medical, or business, whatever) student. You spend a great percentage of each day at a University. Universities are where large groups of people your own age who share your interests live, study, and hang out. The time spent at a university is considered the best years of a young person’s life, precisely because students are insulated from the harsh business world, surrounded by people who have been selected by the administration to match them in terms of social class and background. That’s why the friendships made during university are considered to be some of the most valuable and long-lasting. It’s no accident, and it doesn’t just happen that way. It’s part of the system.
Anybody who has trouble making friends and finding people to date while in school must have something fairly serious going on with their social skills, be that social anxiety disorder or whatever.
It’s sorta like taking a group of inmates from the psychiatric hospital and testing them for psychological conditions. Of course everyone’s going to score high and turn up with some psychological conditions because the sample consists of inmates from a psychiatric hospital.
Extrapolating the findings from a group of social defectives and then blaming healthy people for their conditions is bad science, and bad journalism. I would have thought MoDo would have been held to higher standards.
If I ever took the time to rehearse a two- or five-minute presentation of myself, everyone I gave it to would think I was mentally ill at best, more likely a complete moron. It takes several days for anyone to think that I know anything about anything.
My girlfriend is so much smarter than me I can’t believe it. She insists she isn’t, but she totally is. I’ve never figured out what the problem is - I learn stuff from her all the time.
An 8th grade teacher told one of my sisters to “not be so smart because the boys won’t like you.” IN 1965!
I think I’ve found the cure for Maureen Dowd’s love life. Anyone ever read Scruples 2? Move to some foreign country and pretend to be “Honey Winthrop, broke schoolteacher.” She can play dumb all she wants to get some furriner who won’t know she has a few brain cells. Everyone wins!
er…it worked so well for Billy, anyway….
I would like to see a little bit of respect and/or sympathy towards this woman.
Being alone and not finding anyone to love who will love you back HURTS. IT HURTS AN AWFUL LOT.
All I know is that
1) Women beyond 30 are “past their peak” and they are not precisely men’s most recurrent fantasy. And this woman is 40-ish.
2) As Rumblelizard has said, the pressure on women to be with someone is HUGE. And it doesn’t matter if you reject it because you know it to be bullshit. It still affects you, because you have been raised on it already. A single woman might as well wear a label on her forehead saying “NO ONE WANTS YOU, YOU SUCK, YOU WILL END UP A CAT LADY”, because that’s what everyone is thinking anyway.
In short, have sympathy. This goes specifically to those happily married or “with someone” people.
Being alone can be VERY PAINFUL. Putting the blame on MEN helps you avoid putting the blame on yourself and saying “no one loves me because I suck”.
Mary Tracy, I have all the sympathy in the world for women who aren’t horrible high-maintenance snobs and do everything they’re “supposed” to do and still aren’t coupled the way they want to be. There are plenty of real live victims out there of ageism, sizism, ableism, and just plain garden-variety lookism, that’s for damn sure, as well as women with just plain lousy luck.
But Dowd? Could have a boyfriend in two seconds if she’d get over herself. It’s not like nobody’s interested, capisce?
I think one factor that may be in play here is that sadly, a not insignificant fraction of women (not a majority by any means, but a fair number) don’t want to have children, or perhaps only to have one, and that seems to be more common as one goes up the ’scale’ of academic achievement, wealth, ambition, etc. among my female friends it’s not uncommon for them to say they don’t want to have kids, so while i’m happy to have them as friends i wouldn’t want to go out with them. this is perhaps one reason why some men steer away from women of their academic acheivement/social class/level of ‘ambition’, etc. because it’s hard for them to find a partner who wants three or four children or whatever.
of course, the real fault isn’t with the women, it’s with the late-capitalist society that makes it increasingly difficult to have children until you are already fairly advanced in age.
Hector, you’re functioning under the ridiculous assumption that women should be eager for the affection of men who see us as ambulatory uteruses. In my mind, if a man sees me and thinks, “Fuck her for being too proud to see herself as my brood mare,” then yeah for me! I don’t have to suffer that horrible asshole.
Of course, add to that your assumption that men are shopping and women are purchases, and dating is all about men sizing up women and the other way around is not part of the equation.
Sigh. yes, blame feminism for uppity bitches not cow-towing to insecure men instead of blaming patriarchy for creating men who believe their sole strength is in money and power.
greaaaaat.
Jesus, Amanda. Hector’s talking from a male point of view because he’s a guy, and that’s the perspective he’s offering. Yeah, if you’re the guy, you’re “shopping” and the women are “purchases.” If you’re the woman, you’re “shopping” and the guys are the goods. (Assuming heterosexuality, obviously.) So what? We’re all sizing each other up.
And since when is “I want 3-4 kids, so clearly it would behoove me to find a partner who does as well” translate to “be my brood mare”? I don’t want kids, and I for damn sure looked for romantic partners who didn’t as well. Does that mean I would look at a man who did want kids and think, “Fuck him for being too proud to neuter himself”? Uh, no.
Point taken. Though I think the intent was to say, tongue-in-cheek, that there are men who don’t fit into the “I can’t handle a smart/high-achieving woman” mold that Dowd seems to think predominates and don’t buy into Dowd’s apparent blaming of feminism for women’s (read: her) dating troubles.
Hector, you’re functioning under the ridiculous assumption that women should be eager for the affection of men who see us as ambulatory uteruses. In my mind, if a man sees me and thinks, “Fuck her for being too proud to see herself as my brood mare,” then yeah for me! I don’t have to suffer that horrible asshole.
You don’t think expectations about children should form part of assessing potential partners for longterm relationships, regardless of gender?
Hector’s comment contained one rather dubious assumption, but seemed fairly reasonable.
Mezosub writes:
Apologies for going OT, but I had to comment on this. Socializing while in graduate school is, in my view, not as seamless and easy as you may think. I don’t know if you’ve been in grad school or what your experience was if you were, but I know I did/do not have a huge pool of potential friends and mates just hanging around.
For starters, I first met other grad students in my department in grad seminars, so there’s not much socializing going on there. When I wasn’t in seminar, I was busy preparing for teaching, reading like mad, or writing, all of which are mostly solitary activities. Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I’m even more holed up with books, manuscripts, etc.
Most of the social opportunities I have with other grad students tend to be with those in my own department, and dating someone in the department can be tricky. My colleagues who have pretty rich social lives have them due to activities they do away from school.
Not necessarily. People come to school with varying levels of sociability, social skills, etc. and even those who are pretty adept socially can find college difficult; none of that is prima facie evidence of a disorder. I think this statement is a bit too sweeping.
Okay, back to the discussion…
MaryTracy said:
All I know is that
1) Women beyond 30 are “past their peak” and they are not precisely men’s most recurrent fantasy. And this woman is 40-ish.
My reply:
Have you never heard of the “cougar” phenomenon? Women in their 30s and 40s are sought after big-time, by younger men. And women are AT their peak in their 30s and 40s, from a sexual standpoint. So it only makes sense! (It seems to work from the history in my family…mom’s 8 years older that dad, and they’ve been married over 50 years).
Oh come on, Mary. Plenty of women past 30 find dates, even get married. Sheesh. I thought Susan Faludi debunked the “man shortage” myth once and for all. It’s true that SOME men only go for the younglings, but they’re a) fewer than you might think and b) not at all prizes (see Trump, Donald).
I suspect women who say “I can’t get dates because I’m OLD! Boo-hoo-hoo!” or “I can’t get dates because I’m FAT! Boo-hoo-hoo!” are the female equivalent of the Nice Guy ™. It’s not your age, or your weight, it’s your personality and incurable “I-can’t-itis.”
And what is wrong with being a cat lady? Isn’t it better to be happily single than miserably married? Because you can bet that so many “perfect couples” have one or both who is miserable.
Regarding Hector’s comment : I don’t know about Amanda, but
certainly rubbed me the wrong way.
My experience has been quite different from Hector’s; the women I’ve dated have either already had children or they wanted them at some time in the future. In fact, the main reason my last relationship ended was because she wanted children and I didn’t.
And that was just fine; sure the break up was sad, but we both had made perfectly legitimate decisions regarding our futures, and those goals were not compatible.
I don’t know where all these women and men are who don’t want children. I realize the same of people I know is too small, but in my experience, people of either sex who don’t want children are rather hard to find.
make that “…sample of people I know…”
Chalk it up to Murphy’s Law–you want kids, all you’re going to find are people who don’t; you don’t, all you’re going to find are people who do.
Radalan,
I think it is sad. I can understand couples who would like to have children but decide, against the wishes of their heart, that they shouldn’t for health reasons, poverty, a desire not to overpopulate the planet, etc. those are all good reasons. I don’t really understand the thinking of people who actively don’t like or don’t want to have children, it’s a way of thinking that is foreign to me. And I think such people are missing out on an immensely rewarding aspect of life.
The Orthodox church has a teaching that a relationship as a whole should be open to children (at least one) even if each individual sex act is not, which I find compelling even if I think that there are circumstances where it might not apply.
Women who don’t want children are probably more common in the 18-25 demographic which I’ve been in (and most of my friends, women i’ve been attracted to, etc.) for the last few years. Sometimes people change as they get older. My mother didn’t want children before she had me. Of course I think that marrying someone in the hope that you can ‘change’ their views about children is more than a bit sexist and domineering. Better to be agreed about it from the beginning.
Ms. Marcotte, I don’t know what I said to get you so annoyed. Yes, I look for certain things when I’m thinking about asking out a girl, no doubt she is looking for certain things too. A sign that a woman is as you put it ‘too proud’ to have children is probably a sign that we would be incompatible in other ways too. Pride, ambition, and the desire for wealth and self-aggrandizement are not values that I cherish nor are they values I’m looking for in a partner.
I think it’s probably true that a slight majority of men (like me) are looking for a partner somewhat younger than they are, but certainly not true of all, and women in their 30s or 40s should certainly be able to find someone to be with.
Linnaeus, I think I’ve found the answer to your problem with not being able to meet people while in graduate school. It’s in your following post:
You’re trying to date below your SES (socioeconomic status). Women who already have children or want a great many of them in the future are probably of a lower average SES than you find among graduate students. When I was doing my graduate seminars, over fifty percent of each class was female, but there were very few female students who had children or wanted more than two in the future. The desire for fewer children has an inverse relationship with SES; the higher one’s education, occupation and income, the fewer children they wish to have. You’re welcome to debate that point, but the GSS (general social survey) has backed that up for the last twenty years or so. You can check with MAJeff if you doubt my research abilities, given that I have a uterus and all.
Hector seems to be experiencing the opposite problem from you, in as much as he feels that he is entitled to have three or four children (regardless of his potential partner’s wishes on the matter), and is disappointed that his dating prospects so far only want one child at the most. He needs to try dating someone from a lower SES, and he’ll have better luck finding someone who wants lots of kids because she’ll be less likely to be invested in further education and a prestigious career. It’s much more difficult to give up a professional career for childrearing if you’re $100K in debt from graduate (or law, or medical, or business, whatever) school than if you’re not.
Hector goes on with the following:
You say potato, I say potahto. Do you feel the same way about athiests? How about gays and lesbians? It’s important to understand that a key element of the social compact is that there are always going to be people whose views differ from one’s own, and keeping with the compact means allowing those people their views despite how you might feel about them personally, without either side trying to cram those views down the other side’s throats. Let me worry about finding my own fulfillment and rewards in life, and I’ll let you worry about finding yours, and we’ll both be happier if never the twain shall meet. Anything less borders on intolerance.
Women who don’t want children when they are 18-25 are common because that age range is too young to have children in terms of optimal social outcomes. Women of that age range are less likely to experience upward social mobility than women who have their first child when they are in the 26-34 demographic. Later childbearing allows them more time to get established economically, which is also in the GSS. I completely agree, however, about discussing the number of potential children one ways before entering into a committed relationship. I think this applies not only to hetero couples, but to gays and lesbians as well, since children is not a subject that a couple can compromise on, especially when one party doesn’t want any.
This could be a source of your dating troubles as well. You claim you don’t want a partner who is proud, ambitious, and expects to be credited for her achievements, yet you keep finding these women who don’t want to have children. I’d say you’re casting your nets in a league that is greatly above you, socioeconomically speaking, and that you’d have much better luck finding a woman who is complacent and mousy with low self-esteem (since that seems to be a fond desire of yours) if you looked for someone with a background more similar to your own.
I defended you before, Hector B., but now you think my life is sad, so go to hell.
I would think Dowd would be enough of a grownup at this point to ignore the committee of “they.” They don’t have to live with the guy. So when people actually say in their outside voice that I married ‘beneath’ me because I’m a lawyer and my husband is a nurse, I can easily laugh it off. I had to live with my x-husband who was a real estate developer, and going back to that is not worth the ‘joy?” of impressing other people with your mate.