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I liked Gene Healy‘s latest “Reflection” in Liberty, and reprint it below in full (with Gene’s permission), since the Liberty site is not up to speed yet. I especially like the part about Beverly Jones’s method of finding time to exercise. –SK

DOWDY AND DEPRESSED?

[by Gene Healy]

In 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 Madeline 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 genders are pretty shallow as far as what we’re attracted to. But we’re shallow in different ways.

Second, 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 quotes make her case: 55 percent 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. I can best illustrate this with following passage from December 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.

Moreover, I would not be surprised if, like the Holly Hunter character in the film Broadcast News, Ms. Jones also schedules a daily morning session in which she unplugs the phone, then cries and gasps hysterically for thirty seconds before composing herself and returning to the day’s business. Would you date her?

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 is a writer living in Washington, D.C., and the publisher of www.genehealy.com.

Added more links and sites to my Blog resources, including libertarian blogs Libertarian Rant, GeneHealy.com, and Capitalist Chicks Dot Com: The New Face of Capitalism.

Excellent article by law professor Butler Shaffer in today’s LewRockwell.com on The Delusion of Limited Government.

More Election Poll Results: Results of the Dallas Bar Association 2002 General Election Poll are in. I only got 4.7%, but hey, that’s more than a third of what the Democrat received.

A New Direction for Intellectual Property, Amy Harmon, New York Times,

May 13, 2002.

Check out The Obscure Store & Reading Room.

The new Spider-Man movie is superb, the best superhero movie to-date, by far. Far better than Batman and Superman I and II, and their unwatchable sequels. I have been a Spider-Man fan for over twenty years, and thoroughly enjoyed this adaptation. James Lileks has written an excellent review (except for his reasons about why Spider-Man is the movie of the year–“because it sums up who we wanted to be. ” I think that’s a bit much–but judge for yourself). The swinging and action scenes were great. I loved the way Spider-Man moved–the way he would squat low to the floor when he landed, alert for danger, just as the comic illustrations always suggested. The organic webshooters were an inspired idea, in fact it probably should have been that way from the beginning, in the comic.

Other reviews have been generally positive, but way off base in the criticisms they apparently felt compelled to come up with. Roger Ebert, for example, inexplicably criticizes the action sequences: “‘[the] action sequences […] zip along like perfunctory cartoons. Not even during Spidey’s first experimental outings do we feel that flesh and blood are contending with gravity. Spidey soars too quickly through the skies of Manhattan; he’s as convincing as Mighty Mouse.” This is absurd; the web-swinging and related action sequences are very well-done, and impressively visualized what comics the fluid and tumultuous action that still comic panels can only suggest. Ebert also implies that the Batman and Superman moviews are superior to Spider-Man: “The appeal of the best sequences in the Superman and Batman movies is that they lend weight and importance to comic-book images.” This is ridiculous. Batman was almost painful to watch (Michael Keaton?!), and took itself way, WAY too seriously; Superman, even the first two, was hokey and campy (remember the fumbling Ned Beatty?).

Charles Taylor’s otherwise largely excellent review in Salon goes off-course in trying to analogize Spider-Man’s web-shooting with teenage ejaculation: “Koepp and Raimi do some sly comedy of their own in the scenes where Peter tries to get his web-spinning abilities under control. The gummy white fluid that shoots out of his wrists becomes a metaphor for the other thing that teenage boys often can’t control.” Beware of any high-falutin’ critic who uses the term “metaphor” (Taylor does it twice–the second time, he claims that the scene in which “Spidey’s mask is half torn off” is “an elegant little visual metaphor for the divisions in the character”. Spare me.). The link between Spidey’s web and semen is perverse and unwarranted; and Taylor is wrong about this scene, when he writes: “Peter invokes every superhero slogan he can remember (‘Sha-zam!’ and so on) to take charge of the webs as they fire wide of their target.” No; Peter invokes these slogans to try to get his webs to fire, not to get them under control. A. O. Scott of the NY Times bizarrley refers to Willem Dafoe’s amazing performance as the Green Gobling “uninspired and secondhand”; it is not, Taylor rightly calls it “perhaps the single best piece of screen work Dafoe has ever done” and even the somewhat critical Ebert admits, “there’s an effective scene where Osborn [Dafoe] has a conversation with his invisible dark side”.

Forget the critics. Listen to Lileks. The movie is great.

While listening to National People’s Radio this morning, some state or federal law enforcement official was being interviewed about the recent pipe bombings. When asked whether the pipe bombings constituted “terrorism,” a difficult-to-define concept, the official said something like, “Well … I’m not sure if it was terrorism … I mean, it bothered a lot of people.” My spasms of laughter made it difficult for me to hear the rest.

Several interesting articles on the growing influence and popularity of blogs. Google Blogs: How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches A Week points out that frequently-updated and link-rich blogs have increasing influence on Google search results: “how else would blogger Dave Winer outrank humorist Dave Barry in a Google search for Dave? Or journalist Deborah Branscum outrank Debbie Gibson in a Google search for Deborah?” So I tried it out myself: A Google search for “kinsella” found StephanKinsella.com at #3; searching by “stephan” found it at #5. I also tried it out on my favorite site, the very popular, paleolibertarian news site LewRockwell.com: a Google search for “lew” turns up this site as the #1 hit! LewRockwell.com is #6 in a search for “rockwell”.

Other interesting pieces: A blog’s bark has bite, by John Leo; The Power of the Blogosphere, by InstaPundit Über-blogger Glenn Reynolds (and post2); Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad?, NY Times; Law Meets Blog: Electronic Publishing Comes Of Age, by Denise Howell (LLRX); and

Let’s Blog! (May 2002 Texas Bar Journal).

A fascinating use of blogs is googlebombing. For example, Google Time Bomb: Will Weblogs blow up the world’s favorite search engine? discusses the googlebombing of a telemarketer called Critical IP who made the mistake of getting a googlebomber’s telephone number off of WhoIs and calling him during dinner. A campaign to googlebomb Verisign is discussed here.

Further info at my blog links and resources.

Nice blog by libertarian Gene Healy, who says: “One of the most disappointing aspects of blogworld’s response to the Francis Fukuyama attack on libertarians is that virtually every big-name blogger has conceded that Fukuyama is basically right about foreign policy.” Hey Gene, this big-name blogger didn’t concede it! 🙂

KinsellaLaw.com was featured in an article in the May 2002 issue of the Texas Bar Journal.