Why is it that women in NYC seem to have so many problems with men?
REPLY:
Is this a rhetorical question or do you really want a several page answer.
[Why is it that women in NYC seem to have so many problems with men?]
The short answer?
1) The women who were in their twenties during the media-fueled anti-heterosexual-male AIDS paranoia (1986 until whenever) are now watching all the men they rejected (as even friends) out of neurotic fear...date a new generation. Maureen Dowd would have been a cute 34 when the "you don't know where he's been - become a lesbian to be safe" propaganda ruined New York City social life until Gen X or (or Y?) popped in during the mid-nineties and made New Yorkers value at least socializing with each other again.
2) As prices went up in the 90s, most of the best looking young women never actually moved to Manhattan but chose to live with Mommy and Daddy in the suburbs and only come in to the city on weekend nights in order to be properly paranoid of men as rapists and serial killers. The paranoia was very bad. I remember one such young woman who worked at the World Trade Center telling me that I could call her a few times and maybe she would get over her abject fear of serial killers. Back in the 90s it was very rare for a young woman to actually verbalize her fears of serial killers. I remember my Mom telling me "never mention the name of Ted Bundy to any woman, because the use of the name alone will freak them out and make you suspect." So what I did turned out to be a huge mistake: I sent a nice letter to her at her investment bank listing five or six important people at New York City companies, the UN or charitable organizations whom she could call as a reference to see that she need not be afraid of me.
When I called her again she told me that what I did was the most frightening that had ever happened to her and that I should never contact her again, ever. I've realized the mistake had been in identifying where she worked (to send a letter) even though she had told me.
And then there was the famous way in which males could not talk about the Monika Lewinsky scandal with any New York City single woman: no matter what position a man held on the subject, he was scum...regardless of whether a woman was liberal or conservative. I remember cuddling with a girlfriend in March 1998 when the scandal came on the TV. I indicated only that I thought he did something with Monika. She was a hard-core liberal who was furious that I was falling for the Republican hatchet job (I didn't know the difference between liberal and conservative until 911). We broke up when a stock market crash wiped me out and I had to leave a luxury building with the swimming pool this liberal had loved so much. :-)
3) After 9-11, too many women remained liberals. They didn't get the memo. This, more than anything else, will doom tens of thousands to spinsterhood.
By the way, here is an interesting story that will also help explain why so many single women like Maureen Dowd will die in 30 years lonely in Manhattan:
I knew a guy and gal who worked at a major bank that had offices in Midtown and Wall Street and everywhere else. He worked downtown, she worked midtown. They had had two dates and they were getting along quite well.
One day the man ended up having a meeting in the Midtown skyscraper, that was called in a hurry. When the meeting got out, he decided to go to her floor to say hi to her before heading back downtown. He found out where she worked but she was away at lunch when he got there. He grabbed a postit note and left a friendly hello.
You can all predict what happened because of his doing that.
And the sad thing is...the man, who was my friend, understood that he was the one who had apparently done something wrong.