BlogWatch: Sex And The Single Cynic

The combination of Dowd and dating is irresistible to the blogosphere and her column that could be called Why I Can’t Get A Date, Part 42 was like yellow jackets to a open soda can. Everybody had to swarm around and get a taste.

The key is to figure out what the column was really about. Half Sigma stumbles on the “dog bites man” part of the breathtaking revelations in the column.

Maureen Dowd’s is complaining about something, but I can’t figure out quite what.

Makes me kind of wish that the NY Times never made her column free.

We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.
Stop the presses! Scientists discover that men prefer women who are good looking!

Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire (and coiner of the phrase Ariel, the Idiot Princess™) has a great personal anecdote about Cynthia Nixon, the actress that plays Miranda the Stewardess Impersonating Speed Dater. She then questions the validity of the dating metaphor for the campaign.

MoDo accepts, on its face, speed dating as a metaphor for the political process. I do not. If it has been reduced to sound bites and images, that's her problem. If there's any benefit at all to the Never-Ending Campaign, it's the long time frame. Some of us actually take the time to read the candidates' positions on the issues and think about what effect they might have on us, our families, our nation, our planet. But if campaigning is speed-dating, then for MoDo the notion that Hillary comes off as "too smart" is a genuine problem.

Men who are confident and smart don't need women to pretend to be stewardesses or mommies or naughty nurses. What the Althouses and the Dowds and the Flanagans of the world don't see, for whatever reason, is that people liked Bill Clinton because he had a smart wife, because he gave her a policy-making role, because he was not intimidated by her intellect. This isn't about evolution, it's about being a fucking adult.

Echidnae Of The Snakes digs down to the core of the column:

It is such an odd column in many ways. On one level it's all about the impossibility of a woman ever being happy if she is smart and earns too much. On another level it's all about what horrible creatures men are, but women can't do anything but go along with that.

Sometimes I think she writes to herself. A lot of her arguments appear to center on her own experiences. If I wrote a similar column on my own experiences in the dating scene I'd argue that my smartness always served me very well, and I'd probably dig in the available studies for those which support that opinion.

And d at Lawyers Guns and Money suggests a follow-up:

MoDo's next column, waiting to be written: how so-called feminist op-ed columnists reinforce the crap they purport to critique.

I think we’ll be waiting a long time for that column.