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
I like your words of wisdom.
Not everyone is as lucky as we are...............but apparently we are more the norm, and not the exception, and that is why you haven't heard that particular lament.
bump for later
Thanks very much.
Dan
I totally agree with you, and I'm a woman.
I never bothered completing my degree, and have put up with the lookingdownthenose arrogance of these type women..............I so enjoyed running circles around them on subjects and issues that supposedly were where their expertise was.........
Yeah, like at my kid's swim meet!!!
>men want real women who want real men. Both should be on the endangered species list.<
I'll second that!
"...Her husband is known in the gates, When he sits among the elders of the land. (Question: What else does he do?)..."
Eph 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her,
Eph 5:28 So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself;
Eph 5:29 for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also {does} the church,
Eph 5:30 because we are members of His body.
Eph 5:31 FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND SHALL BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH. (OB1 - Sadly, this is the part lacking in so many marriages today. No one wants to give up their "individuality"; that would be considered as weakness today.)
Eph 5:33 Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must {see to it} that she respects her husband.
1Tim 5:8 But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
So, "What else does he do?)..."
I believe that Ephesians 5:25,28 best sums up in answer to your question.
"Maidens" can refer to either daughters at home (helping mom out with the family business), or young women servants.
Jewish men of the time were expected to have a way of making a living by the middle of their teen years. So the virtuous wife's husband could have done anything - farming, carpentry, pottery making, goldworking, stone masonry - you name it. But he was also expected to be part of the community of scholarly men, reading and discussing the Torah. The point here is that the wife's diligence, thrift, and work all reflect positively on her husband.
I agree with you that in several of her columns that Dowd seems to be hurting. A good psychoanalyst would do wonders for her. I think that there are other issues at play here than the story she has written. Sounds to me like some childhood demons are nipping at her heels and she is refusing to look at them.
Your explanation is acceptable, but remember the article was posted as an example of "man/woman" relationships, then it began to tell what women should be like, while her husband sits with the elders.
That was my point also. If you want to complain that the Bible gives so little space to a woman's role and so much to a man's, I'd agree with you. But you can read in all the other chapters of Proverbs and all the other 65 books about what a MAN should be like, and it's not about spending all his time sitting with the elders.
He will do that some, and that will be work as well (it's called a meeting in case you've never been to one) but he won't rest on her laurels.
Shalom.
NYT discovers FR covering a british study?
This was covered here on FR soooo last week.
So a NYT reporterette discovers men don't want to marry nags or female dogs.
They may not knwo why no man wants them, but we certainly do.
Very fine - now you have expanded from your original post.
You're quite welcome, I always find much insight in your comments.....on various subjects.
I do occassionally miss daily interaction with other adults, and the ability to not hesitate if I see a pair of shoes, or the latest quirky kitchen gadget in the store.......but that pales in comparison to knowing that I am here when our daughter gets home from school every day, and except when we run to the store, I'm always here when my husband gets home from work. That is the focus of my life.
So often it is money that causes the most grief in marriages, and my husband does occassionally get a bit perturbed with me about money. Not because I'm a spendthrift, rather because when he gives me money specifically to do something fun for myself, like lunch with a friend or a new book or pair of shoes.......I have a tendency to go to the grocery store or buy him a book or our daughter a pair of shoes.
She won't stay little that long before she'll be involved in afterschool activities and such, until then, I don't worry about it. A happy husband, child and home are more important to me.
I had the high profile caeeer, what I do now is far more reqarding and important. If that makes me the antithesis of the MoDo's of the world, that's their problem, not mine.
The original post was limited to what a woman should be like in a "man/woman" relationship. In a later post, he expanded things to include what a man should be like. Kinda sensitive aren't you?
You bet! Smart, sexy and energetic.
>>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.<<
If this is true, multiculturalism is going to be unstoppable.
"There are plenty of women who are sweet AND smart. Most men are too shallow to choose properly, valuing the packaging above the contents."
Thank you! Someone definitely needed to stress this.
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