What Women Want

Well, it isn't what the feminists say women want, that's for sure.

Yesterday, Maureen Dowd penned in my opinion her finest work to date on the dilemmas of feminism, when it is women themselves that are increasingly disgruntled with the paradigm.

Normally I find Dowd as shrill as 50 car pile-up on the Belt Parkway, but in this essay she's articulate and I'd say counterintuitive from what I normally expect of her. For today's women it seems, the feminist revolution went a wee bit too far. It seems they like the door opened for them as well as the man to pay for dinner -- everytime I might add. As Dowd reports:

Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with "woman money" as a way to show that these crass calculations - that a woman's worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder - no longer applied.

Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. "It's a scuzzy 70's thing, like platform shoes on men," one told me.

"Feminists in the 70's went overboard," Anne Schroeder, a 26-year-old magazine editor in Washington, agrees. "Paying is like opening a car door. It's nice. I appreciate it. But he doesn't have to."

Unless he wants another date.

Ah, how very true! Being in bars as much as I am, you also run into a creature I term, the pretty parasite. This is a girl that will fall all over you to get free drinks all night. I remember talking to many girls who went out almost every night it seemed and I'd ask, "How do you have all this money for drinking?" They'd giggle, smile, and say, "Well, silly, we don't have to pay for our drinks. You guys will buy them for us." And so feminism comes crashing down wiping away a considerable degree of advancement since the 60s, because if the girls aren't going to preserve it, we guys most assuredly will not either. And for those women that say, "I can have my cake and eat it too." I'd reply you can't because all that makes you is an opportunist -- not a feminist. To truly be a feminist is to assert your autonomous self and show that you don't need a man to survive and that doesn't mean you can't be sexy and seductive, but it does mean you should reach over the table sometime and say, "Honey, this one's on me."

But if you don't believe that we've reached the twilight of feminism, read Dowd on this one -- really good stuff.