Don't Believe The Hype
Jan. 13th, 2005 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
semiotic_pirateThe following articles are being read by me after just having started reading a book titled: The Mommy Myth. Let me tell you, between the government itself and media images and the news - we are being retrained to see being subservient little housewives an mommies as what our lives should be, what we should want them to be. I am appalled to say the least. Over 800 books published in the last twenty years telling us how to be better mothers, that we can't be satisfied without children, that children need to be our number one priority in life, that we should sacrifice ALL to them... I like kids and all, but.... And then the crap that they are feeding men, that they should want someone who they can boss around, someone who will view them as godlike. ::shudders:: No thank you, I don't want a man who needs that. This is all such utter bullshit. I wonder how long it will take us to get past these cultural idiocies - or if women (please NO) decide that it isn't worth the hassle and just go back to the status quo that we've been railing against all this time?? I wonder if we all realize how LONG it is going to take to effectively make changes? Not decades people, generations...
Men Just Want Mommy
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
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 fact-checkers.
Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.
In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.
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.
The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)
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."
A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.
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.
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.
I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.
"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."
* The article referred to in this article:
December 14, 2004
Glass Ceilings at Altar as Well as Boardroom
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame, psychology researchers at the University of Michigan reported last week.
The study, in which college undergraduates were asked to make hypothetical choices, suggests that men in search of long-term relationships prefer to marry women in subordinate jobs rather than women who are supervisors, said Dr. Stephanie Brown, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and the report's lead author.
Dr. Brown said the findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, could have far-reaching implications. "These findings provide empirical support for the widespread belief that powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less accomplished women," she said.
The researchers asked 120 men and 208 women, all undergraduates, to rate their hypothetical attraction to people they might know from work. The men, for example, were shown pictures and asked, "Imagine that you have just taken a job and that Jennifer is your immediate supervisor," or peer, or assistant. The participants were then asked to rate, on one-to-nine scale, how much they would like to go to a party, date or marry the person.
Women in the study, which was financed in part by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them on the corporate ladder. And men did not show a preference when it came to the possibility of a one-night stand.
But when asked about long-term relationships, the men showed a marked preference for the subordinates as opposed to the bosses.
The findings, which seem to confirm an uncomfortable number of male stereotypes and many mothers' admonitions to their daughters, reflect more than male vanity and insecurity, the researchers argue. Dr. Brown and her co-author, Brian Lewis of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote that "pressures associated with the threat of paternal uncertainty" shaped the men's decisions.
In other words, a subordinate woman might be less likely to fool around, and "female infidelity is a severe reproductive threat to males" in long-term relationships, the researchers wrote.
In fact, the evolutionary interpretation of human mating behavior is controversial. In an e-mail interview, Dr. Ellen Berscheid, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, took a slight jab at "these florid psychoevolutionary interpretations of human behavior that wholly ignore the influence of contemporary, mundane social institutional forces."
Relational dominance, she said, could mean different things in a different study - like one that created hypothetical mates who were richer or poorer than the research subjects. With a money comparison, she said, "the results may well have been quite different."
So, Dr. Berscheid wrote, while "the results may be interesting in terms of assessing probability of workplace romantic relationships" under some circumstances, "I think they probably say little about evolution and human behavior."
In an interview, Dr. Brown acknowledged that the work was likely to stir dispute.
"It bothers people to think about this in terms of evolution that males could be programmed in any way, or have a predisposition to control another person or member of the opposite sex," she said. "I think it's something we wouldn't like to say about males; it's something males wouldn't like to say about themselves."
In fact, she said, "I lost a lot of collaborators on this piece."
She conceded that evolutionary causes could not always be teased out of behavior, saying, "I don't think it's ever possible to really separate out what proportion of a behavior is shaped by evolutionary history and which parts are shaped by our environment or culture." emphasis added
Men Just Want Mommy
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
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 fact-checkers.
Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.
In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.
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.
The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)
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."
A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.
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.
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.
I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.
"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."
* The article referred to in this article:
December 14, 2004
Glass Ceilings at Altar as Well as Boardroom
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame, psychology researchers at the University of Michigan reported last week.
The study, in which college undergraduates were asked to make hypothetical choices, suggests that men in search of long-term relationships prefer to marry women in subordinate jobs rather than women who are supervisors, said Dr. Stephanie Brown, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and the report's lead author.
Dr. Brown said the findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, could have far-reaching implications. "These findings provide empirical support for the widespread belief that powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less accomplished women," she said.
The researchers asked 120 men and 208 women, all undergraduates, to rate their hypothetical attraction to people they might know from work. The men, for example, were shown pictures and asked, "Imagine that you have just taken a job and that Jennifer is your immediate supervisor," or peer, or assistant. The participants were then asked to rate, on one-to-nine scale, how much they would like to go to a party, date or marry the person.
Women in the study, which was financed in part by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them on the corporate ladder. And men did not show a preference when it came to the possibility of a one-night stand.
But when asked about long-term relationships, the men showed a marked preference for the subordinates as opposed to the bosses.
The findings, which seem to confirm an uncomfortable number of male stereotypes and many mothers' admonitions to their daughters, reflect more than male vanity and insecurity, the researchers argue. Dr. Brown and her co-author, Brian Lewis of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote that "pressures associated with the threat of paternal uncertainty" shaped the men's decisions.
In other words, a subordinate woman might be less likely to fool around, and "female infidelity is a severe reproductive threat to males" in long-term relationships, the researchers wrote.
In fact, the evolutionary interpretation of human mating behavior is controversial. In an e-mail interview, Dr. Ellen Berscheid, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, took a slight jab at "these florid psychoevolutionary interpretations of human behavior that wholly ignore the influence of contemporary, mundane social institutional forces."
Relational dominance, she said, could mean different things in a different study - like one that created hypothetical mates who were richer or poorer than the research subjects. With a money comparison, she said, "the results may well have been quite different."
So, Dr. Berscheid wrote, while "the results may be interesting in terms of assessing probability of workplace romantic relationships" under some circumstances, "I think they probably say little about evolution and human behavior."
In an interview, Dr. Brown acknowledged that the work was likely to stir dispute.
"It bothers people to think about this in terms of evolution that males could be programmed in any way, or have a predisposition to control another person or member of the opposite sex," she said. "I think it's something we wouldn't like to say about males; it's something males wouldn't like to say about themselves."
In fact, she said, "I lost a lot of collaborators on this piece."
She conceded that evolutionary causes could not always be teased out of behavior, saying, "I don't think it's ever possible to really separate out what proportion of a behavior is shaped by evolutionary history and which parts are shaped by our environment or culture." emphasis added
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Date: 2005-01-14 09:36 am (UTC)*raaaarrrrr!*
;)