Anarchy in Eros

...But no one bothered to clue young women in to the tradeoffs...

...It worked...

...Only this time the terms are sexual and social rather than economic and institutional...

...Scarcity is only part of the reason why "there are no good men left"—the quality of today's single men is also part of the problem...

...As heiress to the sexual revolution, today's single gal is supposed to be screwing her brains out—not crying her eyes out...

...It's understandable that such grievances might seem trivial to the generation that fought for equal access to higher learning and equal pay for equal work...

...And many men now believe that they have no reciprocal responsibility to her beyond her orgasm, if that...

...But the liberation of sexual instinct from social obligation has also bred a new kind of single man: the bed-hopping, bet-hedging, freeloading Mr...

...It's no surprise why single men would sign up for such a high-yield opportunity with low investment, limited financial exposure, zero penalty for early withdrawal...

...One hopes that her diplomacy will be rewarded by a broader audience than brutal honesty might invite...

...Or the resonant feelings of failure that besiege Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones at a dinner party of "Smug Marrieds...

...Post-sixties mating, marriage, and divorce are hardly virgin territory—James Q. Wilson's The Marriage Problem has just been reissued in paperback, and Andrew Hacker's Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women joined the field this spring...

...The rise of cohabitation is just one of the social changes Whitehead examines in trying to sort through why so many modern women feel as if there are no good men left...

...The arrangement offers a man "the benefits of a wife without shouldering the reciprocal obligations of a husband...

...Those aims aren't at odds with women's self-realization, in whatever roles they choose...

...And thus it's unsurprising that in the modern romantic jungle, power devolves to the alpha males and females: wealthy, powerful men and young, beautiful women...

...The result is a chasm between professional confidence and romantic confusion...

...Inspired by ideals of equality, promoted by feminists, and sobered by soaring divorce rates, the idea was "to prepare young women for adult lives of economic self-sufficiency, social independence, and sexual liberation...

...That she bears more battle scars than her male counterpart evinces a sensibility that once earned women the distinction "the fairer sex...

...Whitehead is at pains to reassure readers that her book "is not an attack on men as a gender...

...This may not end the age-old battle of the sexes, but it could restore the balance between them...

...Whether as books, TV, or film, they are less notable for their "literary artistry or documentary accuracy" than for the fact that they "capture an emotional truth about women's dissatisfactions with men and the contemporary dating scene...

...That figure was striking, even for sex-kittenish Cosmo girls...

...The "sexual princess," for her part, "can dictate terms to the world" until, "after giving up her twenties to an obsessive drive for career advancement," she finds that "the sexual power she wielded so confidently before is rapidly vanishing...

...By empowering rather than undermining women's matrimonial aspirations, we expand rather than limit the scope of women's freedom...

...But what she gains in ideological temperance, she risks losing in clarity...

...Sexual competition has set women against each other, blinding them to their collective interest and intergenerational trust...

...Whitehead describes the rise of "Chick Lit"—popular fiction "obsessively devoted to one theme: smart young women's frustrations with men and datingrelationships...

...In particular, she traces two dramatic trends: the emergence of a new kind of single woman with an aggressively careerist timetable for her early adult Jennifer Grossman is a writer living in Malibu, California...

...Female students now outnumber males on the average college campus, where they fuel up for takeoff into high-powered careers...

...She starts to notice that her birthdays are no longer happy—they're jarring speed bumps in a joyride that has begun to lose its joy...

...In short, they live the liberated dream their mothers dreamed for them...

...I've been dating since I was fifteen...

...What she shies from is the obvious point: that a "system" so "chaotic and unintelligible" is not a system at all: it's anarchy...

...Whitehead neither refutes nor endorses the idea of mating behavior being determined by biology: i.e., he is hard-wired to seek sex with many partners...

...But Whitehead narrows the focus to the premarital experience of today's highly educated young women...

...Today's young single woman is the product of what Whitehead calls the "Girl Project...

...Today's single men "can count on a pool of attractive peer women who are willing to sleep with them, compete over them, take care of them, spend money onthem, and make no big demands of them...

...The young women she interviews aren't so squeamish...

...True enough...

...George Gilder anticipated this "sexual aristocracy" of hard-bodied women and hard-hearted men thirty years ago in Sexual Suicide...

...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 years...

...But this hankering for hearth and home might be forgiven were it not for the single girl's real heresy: her broken heart...

...Take her vaguely named "relationship system": No one knows what the rules, conventions, or accepted practices are...

...Monica and Chandler did it on Friends," the editors added helpfully...

...rather, a mate "can hold any one of several possible statuses: sex buddy, boyfriend, live-in lover, fiancé, or husband...

...Rather, she argues that genetic programming cannot alone account for so recent a phenomenon...

...The distinction is more than semantic...

...Romantic prerogatives are no longer defined by progressive levels of public commitment...

...she wantsbabies with one...

...The Girl Project inverted the life pattern our mothers and grandmothers followed: marry first, raise a family, then find satisfying work later on...

...Bridget begs off to meet her make-believe date, retreats into a taxi, and bursts into tears...

...Refusing to tackle these taboos prevents her from fully grasping the social and sexual inequities that confront single women today...

...Indeed, Whitehead recoils almost aesthetically from the "bleak" portraits drawn "heavily and crudely" from evolutionary psychology, representing "love as a battlefield...

...Daphne and Niles did it on Frasier...

...We can be relieved that nowadays "the personal isn't political...

...the weaker get out of their way...

...But while sex-based theories inattentive to history may fall short, historical analyses inattentive to sex are equally inadequate...

...Graduates of the Girl Project soon learn that while naked professional ambitions are greeted with applause, matrimonial motivations meet with scowls...

...Contrast the PC world's chilly reception for real-life confessions of romantic angst with the runaway book sales and box office bonanzas when those same themes are presented as farce...

...The real issue is the qualities—or lack thereof—that an environment of sexual anarchy encourages in the single-male population at large...

...What's more puzzling is why young women, particularly those thinking about marriage and children, are overwhelmingly willing to risk an irreplaceable asset—their time—on a venture that statistically has as much chance of converting to matrimony as of making it superfluous...

...In this case, Whitehead's reluctance to acknowledge the power of hormonal drives—and to examine how they play out in a new social context—limits her ability to answer her own question about women's vanishing choices...

...To be sure, there's nothing sanguine or civilized in thinking of ourselves as romantic predators or prey...

...Female college students routinely identify "finding and keeping a loving partner" as "the greatest obstacle to women today" ahead of job JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 discrimination, sexual harassment, and domestic violence...

...My only disappointment is that by failing to question some of the tenets of feminist orthodoxy, she perpetuates the de facto denial of women's singular nature and needs—what George Gilder called "the long-term horizons of female sexuality...

...Yet even as they rack up professional achievements, one dream dies hard: the dream of being married and having a family...

...The few dissenters—Phyllis Schlafly, most notably—were dismissed as cranks and purveyors of false, male-dominated consciousness...

...Thus the manifest unhappiness Whitehead reports constitutes a betrayal: it calls into question the premise of sexual equality itself My hunch is that Whitehead's decision to skirt the biologic aspects of sexual politics was less artistic than strategic...

...After enduring patronizing concern—"You really ought to get sprogged up, you know, old girl—time's running out...

...As Whitehead points out, "Critics have been harshly dismissive of much of this literature," deriding its readers as "women still emotionally stuck in junior high...

...And I for one hope she succeeds...

...58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003...

...For baby-boom women, Whitehead observes, "the challenge came in the world of work...

...For today's young women, the challenge comes in the world of love...

...The only undeniable winners in the sexual revolution are powerful men," he warned...

...As Whitehead observes: "There is something in the new single woman's professed desire for marriage that runs against the official story of women's social progress...

...In specific: preserving those attitudes and institutions that subordinate men's short-term sexual impulses in favor of women's—and society's—long-term interests in marriage and family...

...To meet it, women must reclaim their authority as arbiters of social order...

...Not that the twenty-somethings are immune...

...They know a lot about the realities of other high-stake selection processes—how to choose a college or a career path, for example—but they aren't well versed in how to go about finding the person they will spend their lives with...

...Presumably—or maybe not—they had read the survey's warning: "Research shows that the rate of divorce is actually higher for those who live together before marriage compared to those who keep separate pads...

...No consensus exists on crucial matters of romantic conduct such as who should take the initiative in dating, when to have sex, when to live together, what it means to be a couple, who proposes marriage, what constitutes commitment, how to go about finding a worthy marriage partner, and what it takes to make love last...

...To wit, while today's dating scene leaves women with "a residue of hurt and mistrust," Whitehead notes that it is "nicely adapted to men's sexual and romantic self-interests...

...Yet it was yesterday's politicized attitudes—about sex, marriage, and family—that set the stage for the difficulties that define the single woman's "personal" life today...

...Whitehead acknowledges the advantages of the new system: its diversity and freedom of choice...

...Moreover, what both feminists—and Whitehead—fail to recognize (or perhaps, acknowledge) is that like inequities protested by previous generations, the modern single woman's malaise is also rooted in an imbalance of power...

...Or the sense of insecurity and competition summed up by the same series' Samantha: "Be damn sure before you get off the Ferris wheel, because there are twenty-two perky and ruthless women waiting to get on...

...She will have to marry whoever is available as her thirties pass by...

...Whitehead links this bewilderment to the second factor fueling contemporary women's romantic funk: the replacement oftraditional courtship by what she calls a "relationship system," comprising "a series of relationships that form and break up" with no necessary momentum toward marriage...

...As cultural historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead confirms in her new book, Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, cohabitation is the "signature relationship" of modern romance...

...Yet, as ever, art manages to express what ideology would otherwise suppress...

...Of course, this is an intimate, rather than official privileging of the male prerogative, which is why men are viewed, Whitehead points out, "less as the target for political outrage than as the source of chronic romantic disappointment...

...The changes in work and education that Whitehead observes may indeed have bred a "new kind of single woman...

...Anarchy in eros has robbed women of self-dignity and self-determination...

...Years of romantic wrong turns have left her running on emotional empty Worse, it isn't until she begins to think seriously about marriage and children that the price of her procrastination is revealed: choices grown fewer, time grown short...

...I'm exhausted...

...Yet Chick Lit's guilty pleasure is in measure due to the fact that it gives voice and validation to feelings of alienation, fear, and frustration that otherwise wouldn't warrant mention on the official register of "Issues Facing Women Today...

...and the destruction of the old-fashioned courtship system...

...Women in their twenties and thirties build impressive résumés, open their own stock portfolios, choose their lovers and their living arrangements...

...Not Ready, who dominates modern dating's Darwinian wilds...

...What is this "something," and why does it so offend...

...And so, without worry or warning, today's single girl gives away her youth to demanding jobs and dawdling boyfriends...

...But the unpleasant truth is that the attributes which mark men as "good" marriage material—fidelity, commitment, dependability—are precisely those least likely to flourish in an atmosphere of open sexual competition...

...thirty-somethings," complains one weary veteran, wary of the "younger, sexually exhibitionist women" entering the fray...

...Take, for example, Whitehead's idea of "relationship fatigue which is perfectly captured by the character Charlotte on the HBO hit series Sex in the City...

...This goes beyond the age-old issue of lesser men being left over after their more eager, able, or attractive fellows have paired off ("the odds are good, but the goods are odd" phenomenon...

...In part, the desire for marriage contradicts the early feminist equation of domesticity with oppression—what Erica Jong famously dubbed "the slavery of Home...

...We're in a war of twenty-somethings vs...

...It's personal...

...What's more: "Unlike other forms of live-in help, she is sexually available and works for free...

...Systems are subject to broader social, economic, and cultural influence...

...on the other hand, the state of nature imposes a law all its own: the strongest hold sway...

...Yet the pervasive sense of powerlessness experienced by this generation of single women is no less real for residing in the personal rather than public sphere...

...By tiptoeing around politically incorrect land-mines, she presumably hopes to avoid triggering reflexive reactions that would drown out reasoned discussion...

...In most campus women's studies departments, such confessions would be deemed nothing less than apostasy...

...Whitehead relates being struck during her research by "how so many smart young women had so little useful knowledge" about the new landscape...

...So, apparently, would 84 percent of the magazine's readers, according to the accompanying poll...