BlogWatch: Dating Tips For Dowd

The reaction to Maureen Dowd discussing the disturbing strategy of men and women dating keep rolling in.

Amanda Marcotte chimes in:

Generalizing what men want from what men-who-speed-date want is a bad idea, it seems to me. There’s an urgency and shopper’s mentality to speed dating that seems like it would only be attractive to a subset of people, and it’s quite possible that subset is especially likely to have a checklist of attributes that would include, “Smart, but not too smart.”*

*I don’t know why Dowd’s whining, anyway, since that description seems to fit her to a T. If this study is right, she should be raking ‘em in left and right.

Zing! Good one, Amanda.

Tracy Clark-Flory left a video response on Broadsheet that you can find here. The Broadsheet readers left three pages of comments on Dowd and dating. Their verdict:

Equal opportunity sexism is alive and kicking!

Christine Whelan shows up again, this time on National Review Online. She delivers some bad news:

Maureen Dowd is full of bad news for smart, successful women looking for love.

She’s not the only one who predicts grim love prospects smart women: Forbes.com published an article titled “Don't Marry a Career Woman,” warning that women who make more than $30,000 per year, work 35 hours a week or more outside the home or have a university-level (or higher) education are less likely to ever marry more likely to get divorced.

But, surprise! Reading her book will help you out.

I created an acronym for these smart, single young women: SWANS: Strong Women Achievers, No Spouse. SWANS are powerful, driven professionals who flock to urban areas and high-status jobs.

All my research led to a recent book, Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, and because of my research, I became increasingly confident in my good fortune as one of the SWANS.

She then talks about meeting the dream of her life, which leads to her triumph:

This very smart man and I were married on June 16, just a few weeks shy of my 30th birthday. I’m living proof of my good-news message: Smart men do marry smart women, a little bit later in life. And gentlemen do prefer brains.

So there, Maureen. Just go back in time to your late twenties, read Whelan's book, and snag a man.

HuffPo Huffing and Puffing

Not one, but two Huffington Post bloggers took on Maureen Dowd's dating lament.

Christine Whelan observes:

Single women are quaking in their trendy boots today -- all because of yet another screed by Maureen Dowd. According to today's New York Times column, men are intimidated by smart women. To win the American male vote, Hillary Clinton should dumb herself down. Oh, and successful women won't ever find love.

Her advice:

Stop reading Maureen Dowd's column. Smart young women must reject the myth that men are intimidated by them. There's a high cost to this conventional wisdom -- and it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy for you if you have a bad attitude toward dating.

Of course, it helps that she has a book to plug that you should read instead.

Melissa Kirsch doesn't so much disagree with the content of the column as with the delivery:

I've been complaining about Maureen for a long time because she has a powerful pulpit whose potential impact she often squanders. She asks to be taken seriously as a feminist (Or does she? I can never tell) and then publishes some infuriated screed in which she complains that young women have squandered the wages of feminism, tarring all women of my generation with the same (unfair) brush. Then she retreats into her cutesy pun-laden columns whose point is typically obscured by the need to hit a nonsensical punchline at the kicker.

Her usual slapsticky style detracts from the moments (like today) when her columns are actually interesting and insightful. She doesn't need to incarnate some distaff version Krugman or Kristof, but regardless of gender, she should strive for relevance over performance.

And here is where we at Dowd Report have to agree to disagree. The bad puns, silly nicknames and non-sequitor punchlines are the best part of a Dowd column. Without them, she would just be another bitter post-feminist that goes on tiresome tirades, and who would want to read that?

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.

"Why Am I Single?"

Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?
MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 14, 2007

Maureen Dowd is single. This may come as a shock to you. After all, she is smart, beautiful and powerful. Who wouldn’t fall for this triple threat? Dowd asks herself that a lot. She turned the topic into a book, Are Men Necessary? In today’s column she comes up with a full set of answers. And then, through the power of her rolodex, Google and the Times archives, she finds an expert to rationalize each excuse.

I’m Too Smart
Expert: Ray Fisman, PhD – Columbia University, Dating Data: Economic Theory and the Search for a Mate

With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus.

The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.

Dr Fisman is also familiar with Episode 42 of that seminal scholarly work on inter-gender relationships, Sex and The City.

“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”

She then quotes an article in Slate about the study:

“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”

I’m Not Hot Enough
Experts: Steven Gaulin of the University of California at Santa Barbara and William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh, members of Human Behavior and Evolution Society

Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they’re built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.

I’m Too Old and Make Too Much Money
Expert: Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College as reported by Alex Williams of the New York Times

The new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter “forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet,” leaving them “trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.”

Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.

I’m Too Powerful
Expert: Ilene H. Lang, the president of Catalyst as quoted by Lisa Belkin, also of the Times

Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”

Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.
Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.

Something tells me it might be contract renegotiation time at the Gray Lady.

I’m Too Angry
Expert: Victoria Brescoll, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University

Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.

I Can’t Cook
Expert: Hillary Clinton, Presidential Candidate

That may be why Obama is trying to get “fired up,” in the words of his fall slogan, while Hillary calmly observes that she can take the heat and stereotypically adds that she likes the kitchen.

There you have it, the master checklist of MoDo’s dating excuses. If only she would date younger, less affluent, married bloggers, she could solve her loneliness issues.