In an article published in The New York Times recently, columnist Maureen Dowd has written the definitive precis of new-wave misogyny. The piece, taken from her new book Are Men Necessary?, appears to be addressing the fact that we’re all in ”a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the situation room”. Actually, it posits that feminism has failed because of something innate in ourselves: we have an inbuilt desire for traditional courting rituals; men have an inherent chase function, women are natural coquettes; we understand one another better when the man pays for dinner and, by extension, sex; dating rituals have ”reverted”; and we function better as units when the man is not challenged by the woman.
There are three strands to her argument — courtship, money and power dynamics. Courtship was refashioned by feminists — men, being of no greater material worth now than women, no longer had to be entrapped; women, ergo, didn’t have to be subtle, or conniving. Chastity, coquettery, femininity went out of the window, for the simple reason that they were never integral to the human condition, merely adjuncts to an economic circumstance. Where one party has the financial muscle, the other must bring something of equal value. Pre-feminism, female sexuality could not be given out freely, since its only value was in its rarity.
At the risk of being repetitive, it is worth being absolutely clear on this: every single knee-jerk gender iniquity on the matter of sex, from despising female promiscuity, to thinking women just don’t ”like” sex as much as men do, to thinking of women as sullied by sex, to characterising every inter-female relationship, even professional, as riven with sexual competition — I could go on, but this sentence is already too long — every one of these notions proceeds from an economic, not universal, truth.
Where sex was a woman’s only nest egg, she had to save it; she became ludicrous and pitiable when time had spent it. When that situation passed, the absurd conventions that had built up around it crumbled.
Yet, they didn’t quite crumble — Dowd cites The Rules (that 1990s book about how you could never put out until the 17th date); she writes ”fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 1950s party dresses and other sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like The Return of Hard to Get”; she says ”a succession of my girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my How to Catch and Hold a Man”.
This kind of talk gets on my tits, though for the purposes of fitting in with retrogressive society, I shall now pretend I don’t have tits. What sheepish friends? Are they like the ”friends of Kate Moss”, who tell tabloids how troubled she is? Anyway, here’s the thing — Dowd is right. Some women do still play this game; some men still like women with ”a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph”.
As the arguments of feminism recede, failing as they do to comprehend the charms of a pretty lacy bra, these paradigms gain ground. But they are not innate characteristics of either gender. They are the cultural hangover from 10 000 years of one economic model. They boil down to this — do you want your vagina to be your only muscle? Some men might enjoy a return to those days; some women might even enjoy it, for reasons of perversity. But such retrogression will never be viable, because at its heart, it means the abnegation of our economic independence.
Dowd’s money argument is more observational than discursive, merely noting that a lot of women now like men to pay for them on dates, and a lot of men think this ”one of the last ways we can assert our masculinity”. We’ve dealt with the outdated view of sex underpinning this, and can file these people under ”tight” and ”dumb”, respectively.
The power dynamic is interesting — Dowd asserts ”that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men”. The argument runs that, because successful women are not sexually attractive, we have a choice between economic power and emotional fulfilment. She quotes studies of women with a high IQ being less likely to marry, men reporting that they found their subordinates more attractive than their supervisors.
In the past, because men were a prize, they had to be held on to. This triggered a number of other behavioural patterns, which included settling for less than one should rightfully be happy with, investing more time in maintaining a relationship and generally making it the focus of an entire life. Maybe that is the only way a monogamous relationship will work; if at least one of its parties puts it at the centre of his or her life and makes it unthinkable that it should be cleaved.
But all these women who claim they are too ”intelligent” for men, that their success is too ”intimidating”, are failing to accommodate the possibility that maybe, if they are that intelligent, they just got bored.
That is the kind of thing that people with good jobs, and independent lives, might do.
I remain partly convinced that Dowd’s points are not worth debating, since their endpoint will always be the cessation of female financial independence, and there is no argument, no magazine, no movement, no book, nothing, that could achieve that. But on the other hand, it is worth arguing for the same reason anything is — it is worth arguing because she is wrong. — Â