I liked Gene Healy‘s latest “Reflection” in Liberty, and reprint it below in full (with Gene’s permission), since the Liberty site is not up to speed yet. I especially like the part about Beverly Jones’s method of finding time to exercise. –SK
DOWDY AND DEPRESSED?
[by Gene Healy]
In her New York Times column April 9, Maureen Dowd joins Pat “Death of the West” Buchanan in lamenting the birth dearth among successful Americans. But where Pat blames feminism and other ideological culprits, Mo blames men. Fragile and insecure, the modern male flees from career-minded alpha females. “Men,” she notes, “apparently learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women.”
She has at least half a point; but first, let’s talk about where she’s wrong.
For one thing, it’s not so much that men are intimidated by high-status, career-minded women as it is that men could not care less about how successful a woman is. In seeking a mate, women are drawn to men with power and status; men, to women with beauty and charm. That’s a generalization, sure. Generalizations are generally true–that’s why we make them. Thousands of generations of human evolution have hard-wired these differences into our brains.
When Henry Kissinger said, “power is the greatest aphrodisiac,” he meant that it had that effect on women. Henry the K is said to have been a very successful womanizer in his day. In contrast, all the power in the world isn’t going to make Madeline Albright look any better in a pair of leather pants.
It’s not just a matter of brains: successful high-status men of limited intellectual gifts have no trouble getting girls. If Kid Rock was behind a deli counter smearing mustard on a sandwich, Pam Anderson wouldn’t look at him twice. Put Pam behind the counter, though, and suddenly every yob in the neighborhood is buying lunch there. Some of the ugliest men in show business–Steven Tyler, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger–had groupies lining up by the dozens while the willing and lonely Janis Joplin often drank herself to a solitary sleep.
It’s a cruel world, and both genders are pretty shallow as far as what we’re attracted to. But we’re shallow in different ways.
Second, Maureen is wrong to suggest, via an unnamed male friend, that “if there’s one thing men fear, it’s a woman who uses her critical faculties,” and “men prefer women who seem malleable and overawed.” “Malleable and overawed”: how exciting. If so, she’d better be pretty damned attractive, because the woman Maureen is describing doesn’t sound like she could hold up her end of the conversation past the appetizer.
But Maureen is correct to suggest that men may be avoiding career-minded women. The statistics she quotes make her case: 55 percent of 35-year-old career women are childless. Between a third and half of 40-year-old professional women are childless. The number of childless women age 40 to 44 has doubled in the past 20 years.
I have a theory about why this may be so: women who focus maniacally on their careers are insufferably annoying. I can best illustrate this with following passage from December 2000’s Washington Lawyer magazine. In an article about how big-firm lawyers find the time to exercise, we’re introduced to one “Beverly Jones”:
“As a junior partner in a growing law firm several years ago, Beverly Jones devised a legal strategy for rethinking her priorities and for retaining exercise as a regular habit. ‘There always seemed to be a deadline or problem or issue that got in the way,’ she recalls, ‘until I decided to treat exercise like a client and to make a contract with myself stipulating the steps I was required to execute and the penalties for noncompliance.'”
Now I don’t know Ms. Jones, and I probably shouldn’t judge her. For all I know, she’s happily married, and has several children with whom she schedules quality time, providing strict penalties for noncompliance. But if she isn’t married, I’m not going to ask her out.
Moreover, I would not be surprised if, like the Holly Hunter character in the film Broadcast News, Ms. Jones also schedules a daily morning session in which she unplugs the phone, then cries and gasps hysterically for thirty seconds before composing herself and returning to the day’s business. Would you date her?
I’m not setting up a double standard here or making some troglodyte argument that a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle. What goes for Ms. Jones would go for Mr. Jones as well. A person that has to work an entry for “fun” into his or her day planner, is a person no one should want to spend their life with. And yet women seem far more willing to put up with this sort of bargain than men. Why? See discussion re: status and power, above.
I don’t know how much of all this applies to Maureen Dowd. I don’t know why she’s fiftyish, single, and can’t get a date. But I do know that reasoning from one’s own hard luck to a general social theory about gender relations is fraught with peril Most people who are unlucky in love cry in their beer and grumble to a friend on the next barstool–they don’t do it on the New York Times op-ed page.
Gene Healy is a writer living in Washington, D.C., and the publisher of www.genehealy.com.
