Maureen Dowd laments the unwanted woman:
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….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 wonder if she’ll get all the hystrionic hate mail that I got from feminists after writing almost exactly the same thing two years ago. And what a classist bitch Dowd is. Does anyone here think that I can’t talk to Space Bunny? Speaking as a man who is far more intelligent than Dowd, I can assure her that you can have interesting conversations with almost anyone. Everyone is an expert on something. I highly doubt that the beautiful actress she mentioned is likely to be inclined to discuss Elliott Wave patterns on the currency markets or the military tactics of the Reconquista.
The problem successful women have is that for the most part, they don’t want to marry down. But the higher you go, the smaller the pool. Even worse, intelligent, educated and successful men are smart enough to avoid these over-indoctrinated professional pains in the posterior like the plague.
So, in answer to your question, Maureen, yes. Men don’t give a damn about female achievement. They never have.
PS – I read this to Space Bunny – a former nanny, you may recall – and her only comment was that if I thought I’d seen some hate mail recently, well, Maureen had better dig out her flame-retardant skirt.