Last Sunday, the New York Times magazine published an article by their Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd, an essay adapted from new book “Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide”.
Ms. Dowd, an accomplished woman in her early 50’s who wears her age extremely well, has written off and on for the past year about the personal lifestyle challenges of women who achieve success in their careers.
These direct quotes need no additional embellishment to illustrate her point: in the world of dating and marriage, there is no percentage in being Maureen Dowd. A woman is better off as a chambermaid.
Men, (a top New York producer) 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?
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.”
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.”
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.
(Author Sylvia Ann) Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than ever.
To the extent that young women are rejecting the old (feminist) 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.
Art (films like “Spanglish”, “Maid in Manhattan” and “Love Actually”) 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.
Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.
And finally:
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?
Count on it.