Posted on 01/13/2005 4:53:28 AM PST by Jim Noble
A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, 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 the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.
Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.
In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.
In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The 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. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.
The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. 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 falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)
Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.
As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame."
A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.
As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them.
"The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "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 in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.
A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, 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.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.
I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.
"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
Agreed on all your points. I'm a bachelorette too, likely for life but I'm not at all bitter about it... you have to learn to make lemons out of lemonade, or you'll never be happy in life. Being single, you can pursue your dreams to the fullest extent... move around, start a business, etc. without having to worry about providing for a family. And if you get a little sad... just brush up on the Pauline epistles. :o)
Good try, but not quite.
Yeah, I supply the funding and my wife will make Maureen Dowd look like CZJ.
Well, I didn't castigate you did I? Isn't that what you were hoping for?
ROFL.............
Oh.........I love your post!!! I have a lot in common with you.
Also, hopefully, some admin moderator won't pull the post so they can use it for themselves. If they do you can use me as a witness.
;)
Shalom.
You've obviously spent some time thinking about the problem.
Something I found out from an HR seminar once: the HR consultant got us all to rank certain "satisfiers" (TT). All the biggies were there: prestige, job security, duty, wealth, expertness, et cetera. Afterwards, we compared and discussed.
Then the HR consultant, a serious guy with a long resume both consulting and on staff at Fortune 500 companies, tossed out the composite ranking settled on by our own company's senior executive group. The top three values were all leadership values: leadership, independence, and self-realization. The fourth value was affection -- family, wife, children, friends and lovers. (It was second on my list, third on my peer group's.) That was the fourth value among the top men -- and these guys were spending 84 hours a week in the office!
That was something of an eye-opener, and I think it made the same point you just did in a slightly different way.
#1 may get tossed out, but #4, which you forgot, never gets tossed out: A home-cooked (but gourmet) meal.
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"The late Walker Percy's mordant contribution to the self-help book craze of the 1980s deals with the heavy abstraction of the Western mind and speculates about why writers may be the most abstracted and least grounded of all."
Maureen, if you need a heavy intellectual conversation piece, this is definitely for you. If you can't find a handsome guy (who is more than your "equal" intellectually) to have a stimulating conversation with, send us an email. This has gone on long enough. Time to blow your neural circuits out along with the Manhattan power liberal ontological catgeories.
I probly post it too often but the responces I get from it totally kill me. That blast from the past will never get old!
Happily married for 23 years now. (FYI)
bump for truth
NOTE: the following two points assume even a half-decent man, which I fully realize is not always the case.
That man will then kill himself in seeking to live up to your praise.
True. Not hoping, but expecting.
It's the cosseting part I have a hard time with. *snicker*
Just kidding. I totally agree with your post.
I am a little surprised that nobody, so far, has made the comment "Yeah, but not everyone is so lucky." I was really expecting that. I guess I can put my flamethrower back in the closet!
That's a FREEDOM maid.
Shalom.
There can never be enough sweet and smart women. The problem is too many have been ruined by the feminist culture of hatred. It's tragic.
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