By Bernard Chapin
web posted January 24, 2005
Since October, I've basically discontinued writing regular columns in the hopes of finishing my book. In such circumstances, the last thing I want to do is to waste any precious non-Gangsta time on Maureen Dowd. Yet, after my friend Robert sent me a recent column I knew I had to address it.
She titled her ramble, "Men Just Want Mommy", and it is essentially the wretched rationalization of one who fought on the losing side of a war. Maureen, like so many other mindless, ungrateful feminists, thought she could have it all. She could be famously successful at work and then find a man later. Instead, like the characters in the movie Casino, she had everything going for her but screwed it all up. Now she is beaten and withered, and, rather than reflect on her own shortcomings, she blames men. Sound familiar? If the reader is too tired to scroll this, I suggest that you turn on an Oprah rerun as the gist will be the same.
The misconceptions begin quickly:
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 act-checkers.
Her initial observation is unquestionably correct as men prefer to marry young women, but then she misinterprets the reasons as to why. Perhaps as a means to placate herself for her own stupidity in supposing that she would be as attractive at 50 as at 20, she attributes male preference to our need to be cared for. Not only does this have nothing to do with our attraction to young women, it intentionally clouds the real reason for our preferences. Men are attracted to woman who can reproduce. It's that simple. Dowd and her kind are many years past their viability. If reproduction is not possible there's no reason to put up with a self-centered and pre-retirement princess. Males don't pursue women to fulfill the fantasies of Hallmark Card artists. We pursue them due to biological imperative. The young ones can give us everything we dream of (and unfortunately, a lot of things we haven't dreamed of) while those past their reproductive prime can only offer us their company. When faced with some of the inquisitor dispositions and personalities found in the average member of the over-the-hill gang, most men will wisely choose a beagle or a golden retriever instead. What's the point of spending your days with a deposed and bitter queen?
The great intellectual heavyweight, Miss Dowd, then turns to a review popular film, the most authoritative works she knows, as a mechanism to batter male preference.
In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she- monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.
Well, of course these are movies and Hollywood has provided us with five gazillion examples of men being drunken, debaucherous, bastards over the years so I suppose we should be content that Spanglish brings a bit of realism to the ledger. Regardless, I've known men who did exactly what Sandler did by marrying women with simpler backgrounds than themselves and it makes perfect sense to me. Most men are similar to this commentator and lack the funds necessary to court a spoiled princess. A woman of high socio-economic status could well have needs that we cannot meet which indicates that the middle class fool who marries her will have to put up with criticisms about his failings for an eternity. Women who are content with what God has given them are the ones worthy of marriage. The ones who consider Tiffany boxes to be religious icons are the ones to be avoided. Of course, Dowd disagrees with such observations:
Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection. As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. "The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "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 in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.
This is merely another example of the utopian despairing over the fact that they cannot change human nature. You can almost hearing hear their despair through your internet connection. Clearly, there are many things that can stated about her positions. First, woman already do not have equality with men. They have state sponsored superiority via to affirmative action. Second, her supposition is that all men have high powered jobs. Well, I personally, and neither every man I am friends with does not. I guess that Maureen does not consider the cabbies, vendors, policemen, and firemen that she sees everyday to be fully human. That is to be expected from a feminist elitist. Their benchmarks are the top one percent and the rest of us are unworthy of examination. Third, I agree that who she and The New York Times define as "powerful women" are at a disadvantage but it is due to their advanced age as opposed to vocational status. Economically successful men and women are, for the most part, getting up there in years as considerable time is required in order to get ahead. That's why they are undesirable. It is not due to their occupations.
Independently, I can fathom no reason why they would be more likely to cheat than women with a lower socioeconomic status. I would regard those with important jobs as having less time for strumpetry but that's just my perspective. If some men are moved to avoid these females for this reason then I respect their choice. Four here, is the hilarious belief that women without highly paid jobs are not powerful. The average female college student has more power in one breast than women in their forties have in their entire bodies. They rule the world and can get any man (or nowadays: woman, transvestite, or androgynous walking tattoo and piercing exhibit) that they want. To pretend that a woman's "power" is judged by their salary is absurd, but no one has ever confused politically correct views as being accurate–or sane for that matter. You'd have to have a pretty concrete mind not to notice that you're average 22 year old waitress can get just about anything she wants out of anybody.
A man's insecurities are then cited:
A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, 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. 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.
Allow me to pose a question so obvious it's stunning that even NYT staff would not process it. Why on earth would anybody want to marry a woman who was not old-fashioned? Marriage is an old-fashioned arrangement. If a woman is non-traditional there is no reason to marry her. What do you get out of marrying a radical? When I pointed this out in a piece I wrote over the summer, a female reader called me selfish. I asked her why I wouldn't be selfish regarding my own interests. She did not respond. If a woman brags that she does not want your name and has slept with a borough of men, then you should emulate those before you and forget her once the getting is done. To marry her is to commit yourself to a life of masochism and suffering.
I think that the confounding variable not analyzed regarding IQ is "how much more likely is a woman with a high IQ to have been indoctrinated by radical feminist complaint theology?" Radical feminist thought is available in its purest form at your local university and those women with the highest IQs are the ones most likely to have attended college. They were advised to ignore genetic commandments and wait until its too late to forge bonds with the opposite sex. These are the women who told Sylvia Hewitt a few years ago that the average age of fertility decline is 40 when it is in fact 27. At my last job, I knew of two women in their early thirties who were undergoing scandalously expensive fertility treatments because they could not get pregnant. Women should learn from their example and select a man while in their twenties when they rule the earth.
Maureen is neither mommy nor concubine. She is a bitter and jaded person who should not blame men for her self-absorption and faulty powers of perception. Had she actually listened to the men she knew or divorced herself from feminista dogma, she could have led a fulfilled life. 
Bernard Chapin is a writer living in Chicago. He can be reached at bchapafl@hotmail.com.
Other related essays: (open in a new window)
- Who are you calling mommy? by Kimberley Jane Wilson (January 24, 2005)
Kimberley Jane Wilson isn't any bigger of a fan of Maureen Dowd's essay. She argues Dowd did a disservice to both men and women
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