One of the most emailed stories on NYtimes.com today was "Should Hilary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?" Now, the plight of smart, witty women is not a new topic for Maureen Dowd (I actually think it might be her personal favorite), but the article did strike a familiar cord for me. She highlights a recent Columbia study on dating that found that we all like to hold on to traditional stereotypes when picking out our potential mates. According the author of the study:
"It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.In my personal experience, this is not a newsflash. I am guilty as charged when it comes to the female side of the stereotype. Above anything else, I am looking for a man with a wit at least as sharp as mine (but preferably, he should be a smidge smarter). I won't make apologies for this requirement, or for my outspoken intelligence. As a consequence, I am sure I have smashed a few fragile egos and ended relationships before they even began. So what is a girl to do?“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."
My empty dance card aside, the feminist in me can't help but focus on what the study has to say about gender roles 45 years after the Feminine Mystique sparked the 2nd wave of feminism. Sure, feminist backlash is not a new concept (see Ann Coulter, Paris Hilton and Halloween costumes), but it appears it moves past the pop culture level and into how we mate. Women encouraged by parents and teachers to think and set career goals but who still want love and marriage and babies might find it better to forget about the clever comments and climbing the corporate ladder and instead coddle the fragile egos of their modern men. One of the failures of feminism is that in many ways, the measures of success for women are tougher to meet: one should be smart (but not too smart), successful in their career (but not so successful that they become the main breadwinner), raise adorable baby Einsteins, bake winning pies for the soccer team bake sale, all while staying young and attractive. Sigh. Overwhelming, no?
I could go on about this (including my thoughts on why men feel so threatened by smart and ambitious women and my thoughts on Hilary), but this is more than enough for the first post.
b.
