Spotlight
What's a
Modern Girl to Do? By
MAUREEN DOWD When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting
out of their 50's chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age
spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating men and acting all
independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to
be sexual, this time protected by the pill. I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of
hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades
later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex
jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the
appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the universe of Eros, I
longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance
the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy
and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a
gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my
idea of the 30's was wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We
didn't dance around in white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the
60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a
utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the
chimera of equality. On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a
modest nest egg she had saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family
should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote
in a letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can
stand on the I thought she was just being By the time you swear
you're his, I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a
cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I
figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later,
that Maybe we should have known that the story of women's
progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would
last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years. Despite the best efforts of philosophers,
politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists
and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and
the Situation Room. Courtship My mom gave me three essential books on the subject
of men. The first, when I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I
was 21, was "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was
"How to Catch and Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of
yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by
lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright
colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.") Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a
Man" at a time when we were entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an
anachronism. After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did
ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or
"landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without
games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.
I knew it even before the 1995 publication of
"The Rules," a dating bible that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind
games by playing hard to get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes....Even if you
are the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be
quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear black sheer
pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!") I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded
with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other
sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to
Get." ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of
feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer lectured in
Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.") I knew things were changing because a succession of
my single girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my
out-of-print copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Decades after the feminist movement promised
equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to
brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert
toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music,
drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating
to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a
case of springtime giddiness. Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry
- in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded
creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive
them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend
Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be
chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the
game." These days the key to staying cool in the courtship
rituals is B. & I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting
for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old
publicist in Helen Fisher, a Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend
hours finding a hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear a
fancy suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world, a woman must
play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm. Altogether. Money In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there
was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money." A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she
hears bandied about the "What I find most disturbing about the
1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into the
corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she complains.
"Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say
things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money."' Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed
patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first
flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with "woman money" as a
way to show that these crass calculations - that a woman's worth in society was determined
by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder - no longer
applied. Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no
longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to
assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about
it with disbelief and disdain. "It's a scuzzy 70's thing, like platform shoes on
men," one told me. "Feminists in the 70's went overboard,"
Anne Schroeder, a 26-year-old magazine editor in Unless he wants another date. Women in their 20's think old-school feminists
looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about
whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on
big economic issues. After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a
first dinner date, a modern girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid
to help pay the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a meal,
but it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times, says.
"They know you will stop them before a credit card can be drawn. If you don't, they
hold it against you." One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication
of a quid profiterole. But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the
man, or more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a way of
signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating culture rife with casual
hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial testing phase and settled in a
relationship, of course, she can pony up more.) "There are plenty of ways for me to find out if
he's going to see me as an equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young
woman says. "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that." When I asked a young man at my gym 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." It is, as one guy said, "one of the few remaining ways we can
demonstrate our manhood." Power Dynamics At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet
Smell of Success," a top He had hit on a primal fear of single successful
women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female
power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they
were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the
bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality. A few years ago at a White House correspondents'
dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, 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 young women whose job it was was to care for them and
nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight
attendants, researchers and fact-checkers. John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend
official in 2004 when he reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than
their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at
the "The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the
lead author of the study, theorized, "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 between their attraction
to men who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work below them. So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel
hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful? After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader
named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more
professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put
it, that smart women were "draining at times." Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it
up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in
relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up." Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving
up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an
epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of
"Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book
published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career
women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said,
49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men. Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an
unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that
the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a
child. For men, the reverse is true." A 2005 report by researchers at four British
universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, 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. On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett
book, Lesley Stahl talked to two young women who went to Men, apparently, learn early to protect their
eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went
to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The H-bomb,"
they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is
more macho than ever. "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to
have a career and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that
highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping
nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing.
Whether you're looking at
Italy,
Russia
or the "With men and women, it's always all about
control issues, isn't it?" says a guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce. Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor
who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep
down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're
truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life
whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40." Ms. Versus Mrs. "Ms." was supposed to neutralize the
stature of women, so they weren't publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times
finally agreed to switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by
feminists, Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. But
nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and brag on the moniker
Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts with "MRS." emblazoned
in sequins or sparkly beads are popular wedding-shower gifts. A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a
study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who
married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it
was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names
after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent. Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the
spring of 2005 by the Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of
respondents took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000. The number
of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8 percent. "It's a return to romance, a desire to make
marriage work," Goldin told one interviewer, adding that young women might feel that
by keeping their own names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned
feminists, and this might be a turnoff to them. The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her
name, undertook the study after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her
generation of women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we had
already achieved," Goldin told Time. Many women now do not think of domestic life as a
"comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine
Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous
biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological
Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and
be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and
ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle
layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for The Times recently ran a front-page article about
young women attending Ivy League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their
places in the professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers in
favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children. "My mother always told me you can't be the best
career woman and the best mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia
Liu told Louise Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years after
she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the other." Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that
she sees a distinct shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want
to be in the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem
unappealing." Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at
Yale, told Story that women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the
dashed utopia of those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work and
child rearing. To the extent that young women are rejecting the old
idea of copying men and reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating
progress. But to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the
problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of
dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a
career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy. Movies In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a
half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so
exciting. You still see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured orgasms and
destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was described as
retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers. Moviemakers these
days are more interested in exploring what Steve Martin, in his novel
"Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances between unequals. In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam
Sandler, playing a sensitive In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl
Earring," in which Colin Firth's Vermeer erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch
maid, and Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals.
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, the sister of the prime minister, falls for his sultry
secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth falls for his maid, who speaks only
Portuguese. Art is imitating life, turning women who seek
equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection. It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics
- statuesque, 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted
as nannies for some of An upstairs maid, of course. Women's Magazines Cosmo is still the best-selling magazine on college
campuses, as it was when I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the
newsstand. The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage spilling
out of an orange croqueted halter dress, could have been June 1970. The headlines are
familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less," "Do You Make Men
M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud search and
"Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have Brought Countless Guys
to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut around your man's
member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the icing . . . as well as his
manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell out during sex which of your
girlfriends thinks your man is hot.) At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo
girl's man-crazy, sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the teen
set. On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot." "There has been lots of copying - look at
Glamour," Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I
used to have all the sex to myself." Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes,
feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly
life that were not all about men. But it never quite materialized. It took only a few decades to create a brazen new
world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip.
Instead of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society where women of
all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens. Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew
path, not a serene progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were
not supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters, when women were
supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then it was discovered - shock,
horror! - that men and women are not alike in their desires. But zipless morphed into
hookups, and the more one-night stands the girls on "Sex and the City" had, the
grumpier they got. Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the
top-selling Maxim, said he stole his "us against the world" lad-magazine
attitude from women's magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's
prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the
literary pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded gender
stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see you in the
morning and night, why call us at work?" Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly
from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed
Simpson " A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as
men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it.
"I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to
find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that
they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of
them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the
Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary." The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were
supposed to be men's fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming
girlfriends. Beauty While I never related to the unstyled look of the
early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and
heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more
flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled,
primped ideal of the 50's. I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism,
the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever. When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are
Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms.
Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and
implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that
technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American
narcissism has trumped American feminism. It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists
to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as
shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to
prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and
were equal in every way. But it is equally naïve and misguided for young
women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and
text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic
shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation. What I didn't like at the start of the feminist
movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They
were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity. What I don't like now is that the young women
rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The
plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message
is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object
- but the conformity is just as stifling. And the Future . . . Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a
couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who
thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in
suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for
younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of? It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when
women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or
independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors
- or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan. Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times.
This essay is adapted from "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," to be
published next month by G.P. Putnam's Sons. |