http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/r/reed/2005/reed021405.htm

It is becoming a constant, like gravity: Maureen Dowd opens her mouth, and I
get email from guys saying, "Fred! Geez, man, how much do apartments go for
in Guadalajara?"
Maureen is the resentment columnist for the New York Times. She serves as
newsprint megaphone for the angry, selfish, wretchedly unhappy career woman
who can't understand why she is living alone in an apartment with two cats.
(I understand the alone part. I question the judgement of the cats.)

Maybe I can explain.

In a recent column, headed "Men Just Want Mommy," Maureen tells
us, "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.'"

The bastards.

Here we have the eternal cry (at least it's beginning to feel eternal) of
the unhappy feminist: "The whole world can't stand me. What's wrong with the
whole world?" If men don't want to marry a self-absorbed menopausing ocelot,
there is something wrong with men. I listen to this stuff and I want to
marry someone's personal assistant, just to be sure I don't get drunk and
marry a very beautiful actress.

But more of Maureen and the personal assistants. She continues observantly,
"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." Men want to marry Mommy, she
implies, with forty-weight passive-aggressiveness you could lube a diesel
with.

Actually, what men very much do not want is to marry Mommy. The problem for
Maureen is that she is Mommy: censorious, moralizing, self-pitying,
endlessly instructive, and so achingly tedious that men find themselves
thinking of moldy bath sponges. I have never seen her and don't know how old
she is. She may be twenty-three, radiantly gorgeous, and have seven
husbands. She writes as if she were fifty, a tad overweight and, having
grossly overestimated her value in the meat market, missed the train. (I
have a federal license to mix metaphors like that.) Since nothing can be her
fault, that leaves men.

Now, why might a man want to date his secretary instead of some virile
pit-viperess of a lawyer, forever coiled to strike? To start with,
twenty-five is more appealing than fifty. Sorry, but there it is. Second,
secretaries usually lack the misandry, vanity, and abrasiveness of the
viperess. (Think Alan Dershowitz in drag, but hostile.) Which leads to,
Third, the secretary is likely to be lots more fun. You don't have to spend
time comparing penises with her. She won't always be looking for
discrimination, like a chicken clucking after bugs in a barnyard. You won't
get the throwaway snotty remarks about men.

I can't imagine doing a fast double-step jitterbug in a dirt bar in Austin
with a warlike partner from Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe-you know, Little
Richard shrieking Long Tall Sally, skirts flying in the twirls. A secretary
is likely to think it is a hell of a good idea.

Maureen pretty much answers the question of why these creatures stay single.
In another column she says, "When I asked a 28-year-old friend how he and
his lawyer-girlfriend were going to divide the costs on a California
vacation, he looked askance. 'She never offers,' he replied. 'And I like
paying for her.'"

Maureen knows lots of these. "Carrie, a publicist in her late 20's from Long
Island, is not unwilling to dig into her Kate Spade bag. 'He can get the
jewelry, the dinners, the shoes and the vacations,' she says. 'I'll get the
cab.'"

Who would marry that? Carrie is a parasite, like a screw-fly larva. You
could find better leaning against a lamppost. Honest prostitution is
preferable to dissimulated. (Incidentally, Stanford did a genetic study in
which they found that a New York career woman shares ninety-five percent of
her genes with the common tape worm. The remaining five percent, speculated
the scientists, explains why tapeworms, though parasitic, are not uncivil.)

Maureen's women are forever nattering about sexual equality. Maureen,
speaking of some movie: "Art is imitating life, turning women who seek
equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than
affection." Actually art isn't doing anything. A woman who wants a man to
pay her bills is already a selfish narcissist.

I find myself wondering what parallel universe Maureen inhabits, and how she
found the door. In fairness to at least some career women, maybe most of
them, I dated mostly such for a decade or two in Washington, and expected
them as a matter of course to split the bill. They did. It didn't seem to
bother them. And-surprise-I thought of them as equals. They acted that way.

So little of what Maureen says tracks with the world I know. She thinks men
don't like smart women. I know a lot of bright guys, and they all look for
bright women. They just want agreeable bright women.

Further-am I alone in this?-I don't think of women I date in terms of
superiority and inferiority. Sally is my date, not my competitor. Does it
run through Maureen's tiny little mind that I walk along with a secretary
thinking, "Hah! Mere secretary. My inferior. Hah!"? Actually I
think, "How'd
I get so lucky? Hope she doesn't think of that."

This erosion of pecking order by mating explains why the military doesn't
want officers to date enlisted women: A cute corporal is on equal terms with
an admiral by virtue of seeing him. Hierarchy doesn't survive romance. But,
as Maureen's status-obsessed women discover, neither does romance survive a
relentless concern with hierarchy.

Thing is, the times have changed. The age-old bargain was that women
exchanged sex for whatever they wanted, and men exchanged whatever they had
for sex. Part of the deal was that the woman would be reasonably agreeable.
A career woman today, being independent, no longer has to be agreeable, and
frequently isn't. On the other hand, a man doesn't have to commit himself to
anything to get sex. So the man dates his secretary, and the career woman
sits in her apartment with the cats.

I'm going to move to Mexico. (Though come to think of it, I already have.)

Fred Reed


--
Men are everywhere that matters!





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