Dowdy in pink — n her New York
Times column April 9, Maureen Dowd joins Pat "Death of the West" Buchanan
in lamenting the birth dearth among successful Americans. But where Pat
blames feminism and other ideological culprits, Mo blames men. Fragile and
insecure, the modern male flees from career-minded alpha females. "Men,"
she notes, "apparently learn early to protect their eggshell egos from
high-achieving women."
She has at least half a point; but first, let's
talk about where she's wrong.
For one thing, it's not so much that
men are intimidated by high-status, career-minded women as it is that men
could not care less about how successful a woman is. In seeking a mate,
women are drawn to men with power and status; men, to women with
beauty and charm. That's a generalization, sure. Generalizations are
generally true — that's why we make them. Thousands of generations of
human evolution have hard-wired these differences into our brains.
When Henry Kissinger said, "power is the greatest aphrodisiac," he meant
that it had that effect on women. Henry the K is said to have been a very
successful womanizer in his day. In contrast, all the power in the world isn't
going to make Madeleine Albright look any better in a pair of leather
pants.
It's not just a matter of brains: Successful high-status men of
limited intellectual gifts have no trouble getting girls. If Kid Rock was behind
a deli counter smearing mustard on a sandwich, Pam Anderson wouldn't
look at him twice. Put Pam behind the counter, though, and suddenly every
yob in the neighborhood is buying lunch there. Some of the ugliest men in
show business — Steven Tyler, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger — had
groupies lining up by the dozens while the willing and lonely Janis Joplin
often drank herself to a solitary sleep.
It's a cruel world, and both
sexes are pretty shallow as far as what we're attracted to. But we're
shallow in different ways. And Maureen is wrong to suggest, via an unnamed
male friend, that "if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her
critical faculties," and "men prefer women who seem malleable and
overawed." "Malleable and overawed": how exciting. If so, she'd better be
pretty damned attractive, because the woman Maureen is describing
doesn't sound like she could hold up her end of the conversation past the
appetizer.
But Maureen is correct to suggest that men may be
avoiding career-minded women. The statistics she cites make her case: 55%
of 35-year-old career women are childless. Between a third and half of
40-year-old professional women are childless. The number of childless
women age 40 to 44 has doubled in the past 20 years.
I have a theory
about why this may be so: Women who focus maniacally on their careers are
insufferably annoying. Consider the following case, described in Dec. 2000's
Washington Lawyer magazine. In an article about how big-firm lawyers find
the time to exercise, we're introduced to one "Beverly Jones":
"As a
junior partner in a growing law firm several years ago, Beverly Jones
devised a legal strategy for rethinking her priorities and for retaining
exercise as a regular habit. 'There always seemed to be a deadline or
problem or issue that got in the way,' she recalls, 'until I decided to treat
exercise like a client and to make a contract with myself stipulating the
steps I was required to execute and the penalties for
noncompliance.'"
Now I don't know Ms. Jones, and I probably
shouldn't judge her. For all I know, she's happily married, and has several
children with whom she schedules quality time, providing strict penalties
for noncompliance. But if she isn't married, I'm not going to ask her
out.
I'm not setting up a double standard here or making some
troglodyte argument that a woman needs a career like a fish needs a
bicycle. What goes for Ms. Jones would go for Mr. Jones as well. A person
that has to work an entry for "fun" into his or her day planner is a person no
one should want to spend their life with. And yet women seem far more
willing to put up with this sort of bargain than men. Why? See discussion re:
status and power, above.
I don't know how much of all this applies to
Maureen Dowd. I don't know why she's fiftyish, single, and can't get a date.
But I do know that reasoning from one's own hard luck to a general social
theory about gender relations is fraught with peril. Most people who are
unlucky in love cry in their beer and grumble to a friend on the next barstool
— they don't do it on the New York Times Op-Ed page. — Gene
Healy
| Victor
Niederhoffer is the author of "The Education of a Speculator."
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Taking stocks — Every time I
read another cockamamie reason why the stock market is overvalued. I
recall that in "Triumph of the Optimists," Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike
Staunton provide definitive figures with all biases removed for all major
stock markets around the world for the last 100 years. They show real
returns very close to six percent a year in almost all countries with a range
of two and a half to eight percent. Anyone who thinks that selling short or
avoiding stocks is a good idea after reading "Triumph of the Optimists" or
other studies like those authored by Siegel or Engel has to be out of touch
with reality. That stock investing is a bad idea is one thing that
libertarians and liberals seems to agree on. We know why the liberals
believe this. It's because they want government to take a bigger share of
people's assets and the decisions of how to spend them. Related to this is
the tendency to keep all people small by making sure that most property is
controlled by the government. But why do libertarians distrust the
stock market, when it has a long record of strong positive yields? If I
had to guess, I'd say it's because many libertarians are still part of the
Howard Ruff school of economics, believing that collapse is imminent. They
fail to recognize the dynamic nature of enterprise economies across the
world, their ability to adjust, and the ability of the major property-owning
groups to maintain a reasonably constant slice of the total pie. But I'm no
psychologist. Cautious bears like to bolster their harmful case by
pointing to the fact that after stock market peaks — like those in 1929,
1906, or 1969 — it takes ten or 20 years to recover to the old highs. But
this is also true of any set of random numbers similar to stock market
changes. If you know that a peak has occurred, let's say that the market is
higher than it's been in five subsequent years, then on average it will be five
or 15 years before it is at that level again. A simulation with a
random-number generator would quickly prove this. — Victor
Niederhoffer
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