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'm 28, and I'm into MILFs. Catherine is a perfect example of a MILF.
Wow, is Mo Dowd actually 53???
Thanks for the link. It actually contains quite a bit of wisdom for women and men.
Particularly the part about comming home and not being hit with complaints. Home should be an oasis of sanity from the world at least for a few minuts upon comming home. If we ditch the hype PC sensitivity, some of them involve some common sense.
What were the over the top stuff? seemed fairly tame.
Pray for W and Our Troops
perhaps Mzzzzz. Dowd is seeking to counter the pop slogan"Whose your Daddy?" uttered during moments of passion.
Opinions?
I think hardworking men who toil at work all day don't want some firebreathing feminist witch meeting them at the door. If you ask me, I think this is a lot of noisemaking by career broads like Dowd who foresook real men for careers and vibrators.
When I was single, I avoided "accomplished professional women" because in my experience they're more likely to be 1) liberal 2) Democrats 3) pro-abortion. Women in less prestigious occupations, in my experience, are more likely to have common sense and family values (generalizations, I know, but on average that's what I found).
It is a well known fact that women only want to "marry up" that is, to men who earn more than they do. This is why professional women (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) often "can't find" a "proper" mate.
It is men who are willing to marry down (marry women who earn less than they do or are in a "lower" social class)like the Rockefeller who married a family maid.
Your logic makes sense if you are playing a numbers "game", however it is equally surprising women have not picked up on the characteristics that make your observation effective.
There are career women who have characteristics for marriage, but chance meeting them is far less likely because not only are they surround by unqualified women, they may have to camoflage their opinions to blend with their environment. (ie conservative women laweyers)
ouch!
true but still, ouch.
She also had a supporting role in When Harry Met Sally -- she was the woman in the Other Couple.
Also in Hannah and Her Sisters, Soapdish, and Garbo Talks. She wrote the script for Soapdish and has a side career as a script doctor for movies in trouble.
Daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Half-sister to TV/movie actress Joely Fisher (Joely's mom: Connie Stevens). Brother Todd directs TV commercials, did one small film. Had a crush on Harrison Ford. Married and divorced Paul Simon. Longtime buds with Miguel Ferrer. Daughter (illegit) Billie Katherine born 1993, by Hollywood floater Bryan Lourde.
Best quotes: "I was street smart, but unfortunately the street was Rodeo Drive."
When her dad wrote his autobiography in 1999, she cracked,
"I'm going to have my DNA fumigated."
Other quotes:
"My father was a short Jewish man. My husband was a short Jewish man. Go figure."
"You can't find true affection in Hollywood because everyone does the fake affection so well."
"I always wanted to do what my mother did - get all dressed up, shoot people, fall in the mud. I never considered anything else."
George Lucas owns the rights to her image: "I signed my likeness away. Every time I look in the mirror, I have to send Lucas a couple of bucks."
She's 48.
From my social and professional experience with members of the legal profession, the term "conservative women lawyers" is almost as oxymoronic as "dry ice." You find few if any of them -- especially if by conservatism you include cultural conservatism (pro-life, etc)
too too tooo few.(and I don't include RINOs)
Irwin Allen brought the show out on CBS in 1965, and it ran for 3-1/2 years (83 episodes) in B&W and then color. Starred Guy Williams and June Lockhart. "Will Robinson" was played by trivia-question actor Bill Mumy (Papillon, Captain America, TV series Babylon 5), who became a kind of cliche' for the child actor whose later career gets "lost in Hollywood".
The show's original title was "Space Family Robinson", which I remember from somewhere, but CBS changed it to avoid legal conflicts with Disney, which had produced Swiss Family Robinson (featuring Sessue Hayakawa as the pirate leader -- I remember him for some reason -- opposite John Mills and Dorothy McGuire) in 1960.
The show shared props with the TV show Batman and the movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and the rubber-mask simian face later used in Planet of the Apes was first used in a late episode.
Data from IMDB. Opinions and cheap shots from me.
I finally remembered what a MILF is. CZJ is a MILF? Gosh -- just saw her in Ocean's 12 last weekend, a woman seated behind me commented on CZJ's massive overhang. CZJ must have been about three-four months pregnant when they made it. She looked damn good. And I suppose Michael Douglas would agree!
Woman's road to power and glory: marry up, wait him out, inherit the earth.
A variant on this theme, among black women, is "where are all the good black men?" Memorialized in Waiting to Exhale (Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Gregory Hines, Mykelti Williamson, Lela Rochon), 1995, dir. by Forest Whitaker).
Betty Ball-Breaker....most excellent ;)
Stifler's Mom, now that's what I'm talkin' about.
Hmmmm... Well, how do you like this... Seems to be a bit of "projection" from little Mo towards someone she was hot and horney for, who dumped her for someone younger???? And rather than Mexican, could her object of derision be Welsh?
Mark
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