I thought I’d taken care of this already, but Fred Reed bitchslaps Maureen Dowd again, just for good measure:
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 PR 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.
There is a reason, after all, why most young men leave home with such alacrity that one might be excused for thinking that it is on fire. Marrying a nanny doesn’t mean that you want someone to nanny you, it means you want someone who will do an excellent job of raising your children. And I daresay I know rather better than MS Dowd whereof I speak, since I married a nanny myself.
I’ve said this before and I’m sure I’ll have to say it again, but here it is anyhow: if someone – anyone – doesn’t want to be around you, the problem is not with them. The problem is with you.