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Dowd is outraged.

In the past 2 days, I've had probably 5 different people forward me Maureen Dowd's Sunday piece from the NYT.

I think she's partly doing the thing that the NYT is wont to do in their social commentary--they see a few instances of something and take it as a broader trend. Did you read the piece she refers to about Ivy League women wanting to be mothers? The reporter interviewed three Yale roommates for that one. I question whether it's really a trend... I talked about it with several friends from college, and we don't think it was at Wellesley. We are certainly concerned about how we're going to balance work and family, but I didn't know many who outright wanted to get married to a rich man and stay home with the kids all day. Maybe Wellesley's not the norm on that one, though.

That said, I think the stuff she says about dating is interesting... she's written a lot in the last year about how men only want passive, unaccomplished women, and she's right that this is a great fear of a lot of my single friends and I.

I was talking to my boss about the article, and she (a very strong, independent woman), assures me that there are a few brave men out there, cause she and her friends are married to some. I guess I haven't been dating the right ones, and I'll have to plod on until find one of these rare creatures.

One paragraph of the essay was scarily spot-on, at least for me, regarding the whole courtship scene. I didn't even realize that I do this until I read it... which I take as some indication that it actually may be a new norm:
These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B.& I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do anyway." If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can ratchet up from B.& I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological foreplay.
It's not that I'm saying that I'm super-busy when I'm not to play games... I actually *am* busy. But maybe my uber-scheduled nature is a defense mechanism that makes possible rejection easier to handle?

Anyway, I hope it's not as bad as Dowd makes it out to be. Her political commentary always kind of annoys me because she's so hyperbolic, but for once I'm hoping that she's exaggerating to make a point!

As a semi-topical aside, my favorite dating advice is on DC Nites. The goal of the rules is to allow people to do potentially embarrassing things in the least embarrassing way possible. If everyone would just follow them, life could be a lot easier!

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