Edmond et Jules, ces deux frangins littéreux nationaux qu´on évoque avec rondeur tous les ans à l´époque des remises de prix, ces demi-mondains du jacassement bourgeois de fin de 19ème, ceux au nom duquel on fait ou défait "une oeuvre", voila ce qu´ils laissent aussi dans leur oeuvre, évoquant dans le journal le manque de couverture médiatique sur leurs illustres publications de l´anné 1879: "...pas une ligne, pas un mot, pas un bout d´extrait de ces journeaux, qui feraient six colonnes sur un rot de Sarah Bernhardt ou sur un pet de Zola."
Tant d´aigreur, de rancoeur et de petitesse, c´est minable. C´est cela le visage des Goncourt!?!
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12/26/2005
12/24/2005
Você fala português
Même à Paris, de 10 minutes à 2 heures par jour, j’ouvre mon livre d’écolière, répète mes listes de portugais, seule ou avec ma prof - inlassablement, laborieusement … chaque jour un fil tendu au-dessus des 9000 kilomètres, le sentiment que tout n’est pas interrompu, que la vie se construit au Brésil malgré tout, petit à petit.
Première exercice de style en portugais, comme lorsqu’on avait 15 ans…
Viver ou sonhar
Com esta duvida
Você passa a vida sonhando
Viver e sonhar
Com esta decisao
Você começa a viver seus sonhos
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Première exercice de style en portugais, comme lorsqu’on avait 15 ans…
Viver ou sonhar
Com esta duvida
Você passa a vida sonhando
Viver e sonhar
Com esta decisao
Você começa a viver seus sonhos
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12/20/2005
Marquise rêve. Thomas jubile
Tel quel, le mail reçu ce matin de ma Marquise: "amour que j'aime sais-tu que cette nuit j'ai rêvé que j'étais enceinte de toi, ronde et heureuse comme une toupie(...)" Voilà un mail qui me fait oublier combien Anne me manque et me semble loin, occupés que nous sommes à vivre notre train-train envahissant a 10.000 kms l´un de l´autre.
Il est difficile pour un mec de parler de son désir d´enfant. Elle est là, à côté de moi, la femme avec laquelle cette promesse prend tout son sens. Je la sens, je la touche, nous nous parlons. Et pourtant lui dire combien ce moment là est déjà inscrit dans mes tripes est impossible. Comme si cela ne m´appartenait pas vraiment. Mais la grossesse appartient-elle aussi a l´homme? Peut-être qu´elle le sait intimement, qu´elle le sent et que seul cela compte pour elle. C´est à Marquise de répondre, de m´aider à élucider cette question.
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Il est difficile pour un mec de parler de son désir d´enfant. Elle est là, à côté de moi, la femme avec laquelle cette promesse prend tout son sens. Je la sens, je la touche, nous nous parlons. Et pourtant lui dire combien ce moment là est déjà inscrit dans mes tripes est impossible. Comme si cela ne m´appartenait pas vraiment. Mais la grossesse appartient-elle aussi a l´homme? Peut-être qu´elle le sait intimement, qu´elle le sent et que seul cela compte pour elle. C´est à Marquise de répondre, de m´aider à élucider cette question.
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12/16/2005
Rue des Lombards
Jusqu’ici c’était pour moi une rue de frippes et de cafés sans prétention, le Duc veillant du coin de sa clarinette (sur le Club de Jazz portant son nom)
J’y passais à l’occasion pour reluquer la vitrine de la boutique Kookai qui fait l’angle, je ne m’y suis jamais arrêtée… et loin de moi la pensée que j’allais y demeurer avec Clara. Squatt, squatteuse – Deluxe. Je profite du pied-à-terre Wavelet, cosy à souhait. Un peu comme dans la pub « vous entrez dans les terres du clan… », la froideur et les nuages en moins. Bien au contraire, que du soleil, c’est généreux, ouvert, rassurant. Je m’y sens bien, plus proche de Thomas, et clara se met au tempo.
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J’y passais à l’occasion pour reluquer la vitrine de la boutique Kookai qui fait l’angle, je ne m’y suis jamais arrêtée… et loin de moi la pensée que j’allais y demeurer avec Clara. Squatt, squatteuse – Deluxe. Je profite du pied-à-terre Wavelet, cosy à souhait. Un peu comme dans la pub « vous entrez dans les terres du clan… », la froideur et les nuages en moins. Bien au contraire, que du soleil, c’est généreux, ouvert, rassurant. Je m’y sens bien, plus proche de Thomas, et clara se met au tempo.
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12/15/2005
Embrassez qui vous voudrez
Le film. Pas une invitation, Marquise!
Une excellente comédie de moeurs, d´émois des "moi", et contrairement a ce que le titre pourrait annoncer, il ne s´agit en rien de libertinage. Qu´est ce d´ailleurs que le libertinage en ce début de siècle, époque où finalement tout se permettre reviendrait peut-être à renoncer à tout? Ce film de Michel Blanc nous en parle. Honnête, curieux, tendre, drôle (dans la veine du bon théâtre de boulevard), sans concessions mais aussi sans cynisme. Le pari de tenir un propos intéressant et bien emmené avec une telle brochete (Rampling, Dutronc, Bouquet, Doillon, Blanc, etc.) est ambitieux et réussi.
Au travers de 2 couples qui cadrent la trame, une série de portraits en version polaroids racontent les entrelacs complêxes de l´amour, du désir, du couple, du cul, de l´amitié... de jeunes, vieux, homos, hétéros, monogames, polygames, paumés, branchés, bourgeois, beurs... Sans se vouloir exhaustif le film soulève beaucoup de coins de voile. Avec justesse. Charitablement.
De l´amitié au plans cul, avec tout ce qu´il peut y avoir entre les deux... Thème fécond, surtout il me semble à une époque où finalement tout est permis, tout est possible, tout est admis et presque tout est dit... Ce film est un mirroir posé en face du spectateur plus qu´une chronique-écran. J´aime ce cinéma là.
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Une excellente comédie de moeurs, d´émois des "moi", et contrairement a ce que le titre pourrait annoncer, il ne s´agit en rien de libertinage. Qu´est ce d´ailleurs que le libertinage en ce début de siècle, époque où finalement tout se permettre reviendrait peut-être à renoncer à tout? Ce film de Michel Blanc nous en parle. Honnête, curieux, tendre, drôle (dans la veine du bon théâtre de boulevard), sans concessions mais aussi sans cynisme. Le pari de tenir un propos intéressant et bien emmené avec une telle brochete (Rampling, Dutronc, Bouquet, Doillon, Blanc, etc.) est ambitieux et réussi.
Au travers de 2 couples qui cadrent la trame, une série de portraits en version polaroids racontent les entrelacs complêxes de l´amour, du désir, du couple, du cul, de l´amitié... de jeunes, vieux, homos, hétéros, monogames, polygames, paumés, branchés, bourgeois, beurs... Sans se vouloir exhaustif le film soulève beaucoup de coins de voile. Avec justesse. Charitablement.
De l´amitié au plans cul, avec tout ce qu´il peut y avoir entre les deux... Thème fécond, surtout il me semble à une époque où finalement tout est permis, tout est possible, tout est admis et presque tout est dit... Ce film est un mirroir posé en face du spectateur plus qu´une chronique-écran. J´aime ce cinéma là.
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12/13/2005
Solitude a Sampa
Marquise est repartie vers la ville-lumière, les parents Wavelet sont à Rio... L´apartement ne résonne plus du caquetage des uns et des aboiements des autres. Temps de la réflexion pour moi.
Le séjour des parents s´est passé à merveille en ce qui concerne la relation triangulaire Anne-Dad-Mum. Ils sont comme des petits poissons dans l´eau, et ça, ça rassure son homme! Je continue à avoir du mal a établir des relations riches avec plusieurs "acteurs" à la fois... Limite mongol. Horripilant.
Clara, la grande absente du blog ces derniers temps, n´est pas absente de nos pensées. La chérie a eu du mal à être séparée de sa maman ces derniers jours. Bien entendu Anne le vit assez mal, et je me retrouve comme un dadet, incapable de faire grand chose pour désaliéner Marquise... Anne semble forte malgré tout, même s´il faut essuyer des plâtres. Il n´en reste pas moins que nous sommes dans l´expectative d´une résolution (finale ?) à cette situation de séparation d´1 coté ou de l´autre. Ô mores. :-)
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Le séjour des parents s´est passé à merveille en ce qui concerne la relation triangulaire Anne-Dad-Mum. Ils sont comme des petits poissons dans l´eau, et ça, ça rassure son homme! Je continue à avoir du mal a établir des relations riches avec plusieurs "acteurs" à la fois... Limite mongol. Horripilant.
Clara, la grande absente du blog ces derniers temps, n´est pas absente de nos pensées. La chérie a eu du mal à être séparée de sa maman ces derniers jours. Bien entendu Anne le vit assez mal, et je me retrouve comme un dadet, incapable de faire grand chose pour désaliéner Marquise... Anne semble forte malgré tout, même s´il faut essuyer des plâtres. Il n´en reste pas moins que nous sommes dans l´expectative d´une résolution (finale ?) à cette situation de séparation d´1 coté ou de l´autre. Ô mores. :-)
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12/07/2005
Bom Dia Wavelet!
Premier réveil avec les parents de Thomas. Grasse mat pour nous tandis que le fiston chéri, le petit Prince est déjà parti au boulot. Chá, cafezinho baguette et beurre francais, ces dames en chemise de nuit et aux cheveux ébouriffés. On a tous faim, on mange bien. Ca discute de tout de rien, c´est complètement décousu, tranquille et affectueux - comme une famille. I am a lucky girl
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12/06/2005
Os pais
Chegaram a noite e vam a quedar nom nos uns dias na R(u)a Tatui... Mais informação sob esa visita no futuro proximo!
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12/05/2005
Manderlay
Lars Von Trier revient à la charge avec le deuxième volet de sa trilogie à la plastique épurée. Dans la droite ligne de Dogville, Manderlay rédige, avec une plume assassine, un nouveau chapitre de l’American History. Celui de l´esclavagisme et du conflit racial. Mêmes décors minimalistes tracés à la craie, même tournage mené caméra au poing, à la fois chaotique et drastique car focalisé sur le jeu des acteurs, l’effet de surprise en moins..
Grace, l´héroïne blanche comme cygne ( ? - ), et qui se rêvait en libératrice pacifiste, se résout à battre ceux qu‘elle voulait traiter d‘égal à égal. La force devient l’amie du bien. Elle qui pensait améliorer la condition de ces êtres injustement opprimés, s’aperçoit qu’elle n’a agi que pour pouvoir se targuer égoïstement de ses bonnes actions. Elle qui croyait réaliser les vœux les plus chers de ces esclaves, se rend compte qu’ils préfèrent encore l´assujettissement. C´est manichéen et en-deca d´un véritable débat sur la liberté. A la limite bourbeux et ennuyeux, avouons-le certains d´entre nous ont dormi pendant la moitié du film.
Question pour ceux qui restent éveillés : quel sera le dernier pan de la trilogie ? L´offensive américaine en Irak ?
Grace, l´héroïne blanche comme cygne ( ? - ), et qui se rêvait en libératrice pacifiste, se résout à battre ceux qu‘elle voulait traiter d‘égal à égal. La force devient l’amie du bien. Elle qui pensait améliorer la condition de ces êtres injustement opprimés, s’aperçoit qu’elle n’a agi que pour pouvoir se targuer égoïstement de ses bonnes actions. Elle qui croyait réaliser les vœux les plus chers de ces esclaves, se rend compte qu’ils préfèrent encore l´assujettissement. C´est manichéen et en-deca d´un véritable débat sur la liberté. A la limite bourbeux et ennuyeux, avouons-le certains d´entre nous ont dormi pendant la moitié du film.
Question pour ceux qui restent éveillés : quel sera le dernier pan de la trilogie ? L´offensive américaine en Irak ?
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Le deuxième volet de la trilogie américaine de Lars von Trier, Manderley, nous laisse sur notre faim... d´innovation cinématographique, de dialectique sensible sur le thème des relations raciales et des racismes, de pistes ouvertes mais jamais suffisament tracées sur la question de la liberté et de son prix.
Il reprend le procédé scénique de Dogville (unité de lieu, éclairage de théâtre qui vient souligner la trame narrative et appuyer les rôles, interactions et sentiments des acteurs). Même si cette approche reste innovante, je me suis trouvé déçu de ne pas avoir été transporté par le même radicalisme minimal une seconde fois...
Des dialogues serrés et bien emmenés, englués dans un parti-pris de refuser de répondre aux questions posées ci-dessus. Et c´est là que ce film pêche à mon sens. L´affrontement entre blancs et noirs, entre liberté et esclavagisme ne saurait se contenter d´une Verónica comme on dirait dans les arènes. Puisqu´il fait entrer le toro dans la place, Lars doit le tuer. Ce qu´il se refuse à faire.
Finalement un film décevant et en deçà de ce que ce metteur en scène promettait. Dommage, jusque là il faisait un sans faute.
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Maman Noël
Clara a pleuré ce matin au réveil, réclamant sa maman. Déjà, hier au soir, elle m´adressait un e-mail bourré de tendresse. En décorant, avec sa nounou, le sapin qui trône dans l´appartement de son père, clara a demandé solennement au Père Noël de lui rendre sa maman, tous les jours. Car du haut de se sept ans, c´est la seule chose qu´elle peut faire, croire en la magie.
So this is Christm-ass
It´s that time of the year... Hard cash-preserved harmony, the "I love you $1, 2, 3, 400...-worth" festive season. Yiiihaaaaaaaa! Buckle-up baby, we´re in for another joy ride
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11/30/2005
French lover, oui
C´est un mythe, une énigme en tout cas pour une Francaise. Cette saveur toute particulière dont bénéficient nos compatriotes mâles à l´etranger, dans les yeux et le coeur des femmes. Pas franchement French Fries mais un je-ne-sais quoi, un petit rien qui fait tout, mais enfin qu´est-ce ? Il m´a fallu 35 années et beaucoup moins d´expériences amoureuses pour le comprendre un jour de décembre à Sao Paulo. Thomas est revenu de voyage un flacon de parfum dans ses bagages, du champagne à gogo ... et avec une brassée d´orchidées dorés le lendemain. French lover, ou l´intime et délicate compréhension du plaisir féminin, dans tous les sens du terme, fut-il parfois futile.
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Mitterand, par Attali
Mitterand, par Attali
(Dans la bio de Tonton que nous livre la fédé du Nord du PS, lien ci-dessus, on ne parle pas de la “francisque” reçue par Mitterand du régime vichyssois... Hmmm, hmmm)
J´ai dévoré dans l´avion le dernier bouquin d´Attali sur Mitterand. Disons tout de go que ce livre ne vaut pas grand chose de par son style ou son fond. Il me laisse néanmoins un arrière goût amer tant parce que l´auteur biaise sur le sujet même qu´il pretant traiter, que sur l´analyse que l´on se fait du personage de Mitterand.
Attali se révèle bien peu critique de l´action et des motivations du Prince. Dans son choix de ne pas critiquer dans le premier sens du mot, il nous montre que son attachement fût et reste un attachment à l´homme, et non a ses fonctions ou ses idées. C´est décevant, biaisé et profondément cynique. Quand Mitterand lui dit au début du premier septennat de ce méfier des femmes, qui “sont attirées par le pouvoir”, il se trompe de message et d´auditoire. Mitterand se sert d´Attali, Attali est le consigliere dévoué jusqu´au bout, jusqu´au-boutiste. Pour dire franc: c´est un livre qui passe à côté du sujet: celui d´une critique balancée de l´homme, son action et son impact sur la France.
Mais ça on s´en fout un peu. Qu´ Attali soit cynique ou lèche-botte, “ça va pas changer le monde” comme disait Joe Dassin (PAF! Prends ça, Jacquot). Le plus terrifiant reste Mitterand, vu de l´intérieur. Voici quelques points qui m´ont marqué:
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(Dans la bio de Tonton que nous livre la fédé du Nord du PS, lien ci-dessus, on ne parle pas de la “francisque” reçue par Mitterand du régime vichyssois... Hmmm, hmmm)
J´ai dévoré dans l´avion le dernier bouquin d´Attali sur Mitterand. Disons tout de go que ce livre ne vaut pas grand chose de par son style ou son fond. Il me laisse néanmoins un arrière goût amer tant parce que l´auteur biaise sur le sujet même qu´il pretant traiter, que sur l´analyse que l´on se fait du personage de Mitterand.
Attali se révèle bien peu critique de l´action et des motivations du Prince. Dans son choix de ne pas critiquer dans le premier sens du mot, il nous montre que son attachement fût et reste un attachment à l´homme, et non a ses fonctions ou ses idées. C´est décevant, biaisé et profondément cynique. Quand Mitterand lui dit au début du premier septennat de ce méfier des femmes, qui “sont attirées par le pouvoir”, il se trompe de message et d´auditoire. Mitterand se sert d´Attali, Attali est le consigliere dévoué jusqu´au bout, jusqu´au-boutiste. Pour dire franc: c´est un livre qui passe à côté du sujet: celui d´une critique balancée de l´homme, son action et son impact sur la France.
Mais ça on s´en fout un peu. Qu´ Attali soit cynique ou lèche-botte, “ça va pas changer le monde” comme disait Joe Dassin (PAF! Prends ça, Jacquot). Le plus terrifiant reste Mitterand, vu de l´intérieur. Voici quelques points qui m´ont marqué:
- L´obsession de de Gaulle. François justifie toutes les bassesses, manquement, magouilles et autres couillonades par celles du général putschiste. Beaucoup de bile face a cet home, mort et refroidi depuis longtemps. Et l´idée de l´obssession et d´une rancune sans fin. Petitesse humaine et morale, qund tu nous tient!
- Mitterand se présente une deuxième fois a la candidature supreme sans projet! Sans aucune idée de ce qu´il veut faire, d´une idée de projet pour la France, si ce n´est barrer la route a Chirac et ses sbires. Là on est dans l´effroi total. L´utilisation du pouvoir pour le pouvoir, comme signe de réflexe de monarque. Il foule aux pieds l´idée même de res politica, la vie de la cité il s´en torche. On jete Tonton aux orties, on a même envie d´aller un peu pisser sur sa tombe.
- Jouer les hommes les uns contre les autres, toujours. Mauroy est le seul qui en réchappe. Après c´est Fafa contre Delors contre Béré contre Rocard contre Cresson contre Jospin, etc. Il pousse le cynisme jusqu´à exhorter les socialistes à éviter les divisions internes et les luttes intestines. Le salaud. Bien entendu, Jacquot le déroutant soit-disant homme brillant, n´a aucune opinion là-dessus non plus.
- A son crédit il faut mettre une grande connaissance des dossiers et une acuité de vues quand il s´agit de questions de défense nationale et du nécéssaire équilibre à maintenir entre OTAN et force de frappe nucléaire indépendante, entre ancrage dans le bloc Ouest sans tomber sous l´influence démesurée ou l´alignement aveugle avec Washington
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11/28/2005
Ombres et brouillards
Vu à Paris Match Point, dernier film de Woody Allen. Comédie, tragédie, suspens hitchcockien, d´une acuité redoutable et cinglante. Abordant tant de thèmes qu´au sortir du film on peut se demander un instant : mais de quoi parle-t-il en fait.... et babooschka (la belle mère ukrainienne de ma soeur, ma compagne de squatte à Paris) de venir frapper à ma porte pour la énième fois et de me dire : “de la vie enfin, la vie qui ne tient qu´ à un fil, il faut savoir pousser la balle du bon côté - au bon moment.
Woody Allen dans ses explications se révéle plus cruel : « On me dit cynique. Pas du tout. Mais pessimiste, oui. Je l'ai toujours été, même dans mes premières comédies, où mon pessimisme s'avançait masqué. Je ne crois pas, comme William Faulkner, que l'être humain endure et progresse. Pour moi, notre destin est dominé par le hasard. La chance. Nul ne veut l'admettre, parce que c'est une idée cauchemardesque. On veut nous faire croire, au contraire, que nous pouvons tout contrôler. Alors on exerce son esprit et on sculpte son corps. Et puis, l'esprit exercé, le corps sculpté, on sort de chez soi et on se fait bêtement écraser par une voiture. Et voilà, c'est fini... Le personnage de jeune arriviste interprété par Jonathan Rhys-Meyers n'est pas un "héros de notre temps", pour paraphraser Lermontov, mais le reflet de ce que notre temps exige de lui. A savoir sacrifier l'humain. Privilégier le matériel plutôt que le spirituel. Et saisir sa chance à n'importe quel prix. »
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Woody Allen dans ses explications se révéle plus cruel : « On me dit cynique. Pas du tout. Mais pessimiste, oui. Je l'ai toujours été, même dans mes premières comédies, où mon pessimisme s'avançait masqué. Je ne crois pas, comme William Faulkner, que l'être humain endure et progresse. Pour moi, notre destin est dominé par le hasard. La chance. Nul ne veut l'admettre, parce que c'est une idée cauchemardesque. On veut nous faire croire, au contraire, que nous pouvons tout contrôler. Alors on exerce son esprit et on sculpte son corps. Et puis, l'esprit exercé, le corps sculpté, on sort de chez soi et on se fait bêtement écraser par une voiture. Et voilà, c'est fini... Le personnage de jeune arriviste interprété par Jonathan Rhys-Meyers n'est pas un "héros de notre temps", pour paraphraser Lermontov, mais le reflet de ce que notre temps exige de lui. A savoir sacrifier l'humain. Privilégier le matériel plutôt que le spirituel. Et saisir sa chance à n'importe quel prix. »
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11/23/2005
St Germain
Top glamour
Un bistrot sur Germain des Près, évidemment j’ai rendez-vous avec une attachée de presse, obligatoirement en retard. Installée avec devant un café verre d’eau j’attends.. En face, une fille les yeux rivés sur son téléphone portable qui ne sonne pas, se gargarise de carottes rapées. Elle laisse le persil en tas sur le bord de l’assiette, sauce son pain, croque la croûte, et ébulle son coca light, tout en recoiffant sa frange courte toutes les deux minutes. Ses cheveux sont tirés en une queue de cheval hyper haute et hyper serrée, ça lui remonte tous les traits du visage, impossible de voir si elle est tirée ou pas. Elle a un truc coincé dans la dent, côté droit, mais personne ne va lui dire.
Flore, habillée tout en noir, arrive enfin minaudant devant moi. Elle vient me parler d’une styliste Française de renom et me remet un document ultra confidentiel et de la plus haute importance, dont je divulgue, ici, en avant-première dans ce blog, les premiers éléments*….
My 10 Rules of life :
Un bistrot sur Germain des Près, évidemment j’ai rendez-vous avec une attachée de presse, obligatoirement en retard. Installée avec devant un café verre d’eau j’attends.. En face, une fille les yeux rivés sur son téléphone portable qui ne sonne pas, se gargarise de carottes rapées. Elle laisse le persil en tas sur le bord de l’assiette, sauce son pain, croque la croûte, et ébulle son coca light, tout en recoiffant sa frange courte toutes les deux minutes. Ses cheveux sont tirés en une queue de cheval hyper haute et hyper serrée, ça lui remonte tous les traits du visage, impossible de voir si elle est tirée ou pas. Elle a un truc coincé dans la dent, côté droit, mais personne ne va lui dire.
Flore, habillée tout en noir, arrive enfin minaudant devant moi. Elle vient me parler d’une styliste Française de renom et me remet un document ultra confidentiel et de la plus haute importance, dont je divulgue, ici, en avant-première dans ce blog, les premiers éléments*….
My 10 Rules of life :
- Always be available for my daughters and my mother.
- Have at least a laugh per day.
- Have breakfast in bed, on a tray, every morning.
- Never be seen without high heels.
- Light candles everywhere and all the time.
- Go on holidays with tons of books.
- Mix styles: antique with modern, jeans with Rykiel, real with fake, strass and diamonds.
- Drive a very little car or be driven in a very big car.
- See at least one movie per week.
- Love, love, love.
* la suite figurera dans un livre à paraître printemps 2006.
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11/19/2005
L' Amérique déroutante
Le débat fait rage entre les créationistes (qui se cachent derrière ce fallacieux concept du "désign intelligent") et, comment dire?, l' idéee de l' évolution des espèces defendue par la communautée scientique. Dommage dans ce cas précis l' idéee nouvelle soit déefendue par les fous de Dieu améericains, cela tente a la discréditer tout de go.
Pour en rire plutot que d'en pleurer, ne pas manquer ce superbe site a l' humour caustique qui ridiculise de facon hilarante l' idée du "intelligent design": www.venganza.org
VIVE l' eglise du Montre Spaguetti Volant.
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Pour en rire plutot que d'en pleurer, ne pas manquer ce superbe site a l' humour caustique qui ridiculise de facon hilarante l' idée du "intelligent design": www.venganza.org
VIVE l' eglise du Montre Spaguetti Volant.
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11/17/2005
Sleepless in São Paulo
Sampa-Dallas-Sampa-Lausanne-Sampa. Executive/Platinum/Preferred Customer with too many airlines is not the only end-result of this constant traveling. Is is worth it? What would be worth it? Is there a feasible alternative today? These are some of the questions that Anne and I are debating. And we´re making some progress...
My much better half has already been spending one of the alloted 2 weeks/month in Paris. On-off physically, but never on-off emotionally. Her mails and calls are more than a mean to keeping in touch. "Full Feeling Disclosure " is the operative and operatic name of this duet... Indeed, I am a lucky man.
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My much better half has already been spending one of the alloted 2 weeks/month in Paris. On-off physically, but never on-off emotionally. Her mails and calls are more than a mean to keeping in touch. "Full Feeling Disclosure " is the operative and operatic name of this duet... Indeed, I am a lucky man.
T-
11/15/2005
Übersexuel
Même pas peur
Même pas peur de clamer ses sentiments haut et fort, de se coller devant un match de rugby avec une flûte de Laurent Perrier, de danser la samba et d’écouter Daniel Balavoine…
Même pas peur de s’engager tout de go et tout entier : enfin un homme, un vrai. C’est le nouvel homme années 2005 que la socio pepeologie* nomme übersexuel. L’ère des métrosexuels est terminée, vive Hubert… Hubert qui ? Le parangon serait plutôt Georges Clooney et son sourire charmeur. Pour moi, il n’a qu’un nom, ou plutôt deux prénoms, Thomas Gabriel… Je ne peux pas en dire plus.
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* Pour creuser le sujet on peut toujours lire : « The Future of Man » de Marian Salzman, publicitaire et trendspotter inventeur de concepts.
Même pas peur de clamer ses sentiments haut et fort, de se coller devant un match de rugby avec une flûte de Laurent Perrier, de danser la samba et d’écouter Daniel Balavoine…
Même pas peur de s’engager tout de go et tout entier : enfin un homme, un vrai. C’est le nouvel homme années 2005 que la socio pepeologie* nomme übersexuel. L’ère des métrosexuels est terminée, vive Hubert… Hubert qui ? Le parangon serait plutôt Georges Clooney et son sourire charmeur. Pour moi, il n’a qu’un nom, ou plutôt deux prénoms, Thomas Gabriel… Je ne peux pas en dire plus.
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* Pour creuser le sujet on peut toujours lire : « The Future of Man » de Marian Salzman, publicitaire et trendspotter inventeur de concepts.
11/13/2005
Marquise d´amour vos yeux mourir me font
Comme tu es belle Marquise. En regardant les photos de notre album l´autre jour je me faisais cette reflexion. Ta générosité, ta douceur, ton enthousiasme, ta sensibilité et ta joie de vivre transparaissent sur ses photos où tu es prise sur le vif. Je t´aime fort tu sais chérie, et il me tarde de te serrer dans mes bras.
Ce mois passé ensemble a Sampa a été empreint de beaucoup de tendresse et d´amour, d´écoute de l´autre, d´honêteté et de franchise dans la communication et l´écoute de l´autre. Nos conversations sur notre vie en devenir et à construire ont été empreintes de confiance et de transparence, nous ne trichons pas avec nous-même et avec l´autre ma chérie. Je crois que nous en sommes fiers et heureux, et que nous tenons là, dans cette approche et ce souci commun de partager, comprendre, un outil qui nous rassure et nous sert bien.
Tu te donnes sans réserve et tu me donnes la joie et la paix. Tu es mon trésor Anne, et je veux te dire combien je t´aime Marquise. Tu me manques ma chérie, mais tu restes avec moi et en moi.
T-
11/10/2005
CNN qui informe!
CNN m´a pour la première fois positivement impressioné l´autre soir avec deux reportages bien emmenés et riches en analyse et point de vue, le premier sur les émeutes dans les banlieues et le soncd sur le manque d´aide aux victimes du seisme catastrophiques au Pakistan.
Sur le premier point: la “caillera” de Sarko lui lançe des pétards au cul, la République se réveille fort tard et a la gueule de bois de sa succession de politiques véleitaires et foireuse de l´iimigration et de la déliquence de son système éducatif. Sarko m´apparait de plus en plus comme une petite frappe demago, son sourire forçé, faussement volontaire, devant les caméras est effrayant.
Sur le deuxième: plus de 3 millions de SDF qui vivent dans les montagnes, cela signifie que près de 1m d´entre eux mourront des conséquences des rigueurs climatiques. L´horreur.
T-
Sur le premier point: la “caillera” de Sarko lui lançe des pétards au cul, la République se réveille fort tard et a la gueule de bois de sa succession de politiques véleitaires et foireuse de l´iimigration et de la déliquence de son système éducatif. Sarko m´apparait de plus en plus comme une petite frappe demago, son sourire forçé, faussement volontaire, devant les caméras est effrayant.
Sur le deuxième: plus de 3 millions de SDF qui vivent dans les montagnes, cela signifie que près de 1m d´entre eux mourront des conséquences des rigueurs climatiques. L´horreur.
T-
11/09/2005
Sampa
Un mois au Brésil, tudo bêm, c´est mon plus long séjour dans cette année claudiquante, cadencée entre Thomas et Clara, Sampa et Paname. Si ce n´étaient mon enfant et mes amis chers, je n´ai aucune envie de “rentrer au pays”. Le Elle, édition francaise offert par Thomas a l´aéroport de Congonhas, m´a appris que j´ai râté le pâle merengue d´Arielle Dombasle â l´Olympia, les pavanes de BHL, l´explosion a Clichy , la gabegie des discours politiques, la chute de Houellebecq...
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Private joke...
Où que nous allions il se met à pleuvoir. C´est notre aura, telle une mama Chuva…
Où que nous allions, les hotels sont pleins… Nous sommes au coeur de l´événement : avec Salman Rushdie à Paraty, et en même temps que Bush à Brasilia. Mais personne dans les édifices d´Oscar Niemeyer. De courbes en lignes, d´autel en cathédrale, de puissance en légéreté... Le creux et le plein de Brasilia nous ont entrainés dans leur spirale. Songe, utopie ? Les longues marches dans la ville, les avenues monumentales, les zones d´habitation et de loisirs, les gens qui attendent le bus éternellement, les restaurants bondés et animés…. Les courbes et la géométrie d´Oscar Niemeyer sont absolument fascinantes, froides et voluptueuses.
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Où que nous allions, les hotels sont pleins… Nous sommes au coeur de l´événement : avec Salman Rushdie à Paraty, et en même temps que Bush à Brasilia. Mais personne dans les édifices d´Oscar Niemeyer. De courbes en lignes, d´autel en cathédrale, de puissance en légéreté... Le creux et le plein de Brasilia nous ont entrainés dans leur spirale. Songe, utopie ? Les longues marches dans la ville, les avenues monumentales, les zones d´habitation et de loisirs, les gens qui attendent le bus éternellement, les restaurants bondés et animés…. Les courbes et la géométrie d´Oscar Niemeyer sont absolument fascinantes, froides et voluptueuses.
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11/07/2005
From Mar del Plata to Brasilia
When a slimmed-down Maradona does his “popcorn” (“pipoca” in portuguese) dance with Chavez in Mar del Plata at the Summit of the Americas to denounce a trade agreement and Bush , and when Mexico´s Fox says he wants to wed Mercosur and NAFTA, you wonder when Latin America will be able to articulate a coherent approach to defining its trade position and relationship with the US.
When Bush lands in Brasilia to convince Lula into giving him a hand to control Chavez while ignoring any other bilateral issue, you wonder when the US will stop looking at the hemisphere as its fief and start a dialogue of equals with Latinos.
When Bush´s presence in Brasilia disrupts the lovely w/end we were enjoying, I say ENOUGH! Leave us alone George, for chrissake!
T-
When Bush lands in Brasilia to convince Lula into giving him a hand to control Chavez while ignoring any other bilateral issue, you wonder when the US will stop looking at the hemisphere as its fief and start a dialogue of equals with Latinos.
When Bush´s presence in Brasilia disrupts the lovely w/end we were enjoying, I say ENOUGH! Leave us alone George, for chrissake!
T-
11/01/2005
Are Men Necessary?
Maureen est plutot pas mal sur la photo ou elle pose en vamp chic… de jolies jambes en bas résille au bout d´un visage un peu fermé et amère. Maureen a du courage, dans son article paru le we dernier, elle s´expose, sans pose cette fois, en première ligne devant toutes ces femmes des années 70 déterminées à changer le rôle de la femme – mais en changent-elles l´image et les questions ? Elle avoue l´ impasse de cette génération qui a choisi le pouvoir, la carrière, l´argent et donc l´indépendance au sacrifice d´une famille et de l´amour. Mot qu´elle ne cite jamais d´ailleurs. Troisième sexe, Orlando, amazone, mante religieuse... effrayant de penser que ce sont souvent des femmes qui rêvent de se passer des mecs...
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10/30/2005
La découverte du Brésil...
...pour Clara passe aussi par l´expérience de la samba. Nous l´avons emmené samedi soir au "Traco de Uniao", le trait d´union bien nommé dans ce cas. Dans un hangar sommairement décoré, un estrade où officie un groupe ad-hoc qui délivre le son exhubérant à une audience plutôt jeune et branchouille. Reste que ce club était assez possible pour elle, du moins plus que le "Voce vai se quiser", ce boui-boui du centre qu´Anne et moi affectionons pour son ambiance plus "dans le jus". Bon, reste qu´avec Beth Carvalho et Luiz Carlos da Vila comme parains, le Traco a quand meme ses lettres de noblesse et d´authenticité...
Anne a eu l´excellente idée de présenter Clara a Fernanda, la "Miss Traco", qui égaye le spectacle musical en dansant sur la scène. Clara était absolument ravie d´être adoptée par Fernanda et son bonheur fut complet quand elle eu droit a une sérénade improvisée du chanteur ainsi que le privilège d´être invitée a danser elle aussi sur la scène. Quelle petite fille n´en rêverait pas?!? Les photos de son bonheur sont sur notre album en ligne...
T-
Anne a eu l´excellente idée de présenter Clara a Fernanda, la "Miss Traco", qui égaye le spectacle musical en dansant sur la scène. Clara était absolument ravie d´être adoptée par Fernanda et son bonheur fut complet quand elle eu droit a une sérénade improvisée du chanteur ainsi que le privilège d´être invitée a danser elle aussi sur la scène. Quelle petite fille n´en rêverait pas?!? Les photos de son bonheur sont sur notre album en ligne...
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10/27/2005
From the corner of irrelevance
Seen this title today through the login page of my hotmail account: “Is cheerleading safe?”
Thank you very much Newsweek, there are times when a magazine needs to have the courage to confront real problems and ask tough questions…
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Thank you very much Newsweek, there are times when a magazine needs to have the courage to confront real problems and ask tough questions…
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10/26/2005
L´ équilibre du triangle
Où se trouve le point d´équilibre du triangle? Sans le repère de l´angle droit, existe- t´il? Et puis de quel angle droit pourrait-on parler quand il s´afit de relations humaines?
Entrée en bouche pour la note la plus intime jusqu´ à ce jour sur Echos...
Deux soirées difficiles avec Clara nous rappèlent à notre réalité banale de couple "recomposé". (Je déteste ce mot, qui sent la mort, celle de l´autre qu´on a mieux fait d´ ignorer... sauf que la présence est là quand même!). Ce qui suit n´est qu´une version, la mienne. Sans rentrer dans des détails somme toute anodins, notre situation semble plus angoissante et difficile a gérer par moments pour nous tous. C´est tristement classique et banal. Bien entendu Anne se trouve déchirée entre la création d´un équilibre qu´elle souhaite là, maintenant, et la vraie dureté de ces pulsions fondamentales.
Chacun s´assoit à la table avec sa musette de vie, et la mienne me renvoit à une situation somme toute assez similaire qui s´est terminé en fiasco douloureux et désarmant... J´ai peur. Je voudrais qu´ Anne soit forte, pour elle, pour nous, mais aussi qu´elle comprenne, intègre et gère mes attentes. Car il faut bien me l´avouer c´est de notre couple que je me préocupe avant tout.
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Entrée en bouche pour la note la plus intime jusqu´ à ce jour sur Echos...
Deux soirées difficiles avec Clara nous rappèlent à notre réalité banale de couple "recomposé". (Je déteste ce mot, qui sent la mort, celle de l´autre qu´on a mieux fait d´ ignorer... sauf que la présence est là quand même!). Ce qui suit n´est qu´une version, la mienne. Sans rentrer dans des détails somme toute anodins, notre situation semble plus angoissante et difficile a gérer par moments pour nous tous. C´est tristement classique et banal. Bien entendu Anne se trouve déchirée entre la création d´un équilibre qu´elle souhaite là, maintenant, et la vraie dureté de ces pulsions fondamentales.
Chacun s´assoit à la table avec sa musette de vie, et la mienne me renvoit à une situation somme toute assez similaire qui s´est terminé en fiasco douloureux et désarmant... J´ai peur. Je voudrais qu´ Anne soit forte, pour elle, pour nous, mais aussi qu´elle comprenne, intègre et gère mes attentes. Car il faut bien me l´avouer c´est de notre couple que je me préocupe avant tout.
T-
Victimes de l´administration Bush
News just in: US soldiers death toll in Iraq passes the 2,000 mark. Meanwhile, Iraq Body Count estimates Iraqi civilian casualties at between 26,000 and 30,000.
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Sacrément kitsch
Le long des faubourgs bruyants de Tiradentes, le couvent da Luz, ancien monastere construit au XVIIIe siecle, abrite en ses murs épais le plus important musée d´art religieux du Brésil - dixit Guide du Routard. Doux Jésus il faut aimer les vierges au regard tendre et éperdu dans la pénombre des pieces, l´or et l´encens chatoyants, la splendeur des processions, la profusion des artifices, les amulettes – du grand rituel ou du grand guignol ??? Clara la premiere du haut de ses 7 ans contemple, a la fois sérieuse et amusée, ces trésors d´histoire et de kitsch pour s´arreter devant l´etale de la petite marchande de bon dieuseries et s´exclamer : ils ont les memes bracelets en Roumanie...
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10/25/2005
Week-end à Ilhabela
Rencontre avec une créature de rêve a Ilhabela...Arrivée vendredi midi après avoir récupéré Clara aux aurores a l´aéroport (elle a dormi pendant tout le vol - RAS pour son premier transatlantique en solo). Sieste, piscine-plage, gastronomie ("um peixe espectacular"). Samedi de pluie, on en profite pour faire l´île du nord au sud et visiter pousadas et autres villas a louer. Pour Noël, au cas où... Dimanche le soleil revient, re-plage, baignades et lectures. Rencontre gastronomique avec le "lula a provencal", qui n´en a que le nom, mais tant d´ail ne saurait être mauvais!
Le soir, j´attaque enfin Houellebecq. Plaisir sado-voyeuriste, meme s´il a le mérite de ne pas me bassiner avec les thèmes people et d ´analyse pseudo-freudiennes...
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Rosa Parks s´est éteinte.
Rosa Parks est morte. Elle avait 92 ans. Elle qui inspira Martin Luther King et la lutte pour les droits civiques. "There is a great day ahead. The future is on its side. It's going now through the wilderness, but the promised land is ahead." On a encore besoin d´y croire...
R.I.P.
-T
R.I.P.
-T
10/20/2005
Consternation...
Quoi, Houellebecq monopoliserait notre blog? On contrecare, on rebalance avec la nouvelle choc du jour: les Rouges Gorges de St Louis éliminés par les Astres de Houston. Regardez la photo: c´est beau l´Amérique…
T-
La voix de Stéphane Paoli
Certes sans doute pas a la hauteur de la plume de Maureen, mais je pourrais dire pourtant qu´elle me manque, le matin de 7 a 9. Deux heures d´antenne. Intelligent et ouvert, tolérant meme ce qui est une qualité pour celui qui distribue le temps de parole sur les ondes. C´était ma petite fenetre ouverte sur le monde et son actualité, bien la seule a vrai dire... maintenant, depuis Sao Paulo, j´ai toutes les possibilités du câble !
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Comment joindre M Houellebecq... pour lui dire que son poème ne vaut pas tripette ?
Poèmes - Août 2005 par Michel Houellebecq
Exister, percevoir
Exister, percevoir,
Être une sorte de résidu perceptif (si l’on peut dire)
Dans la salle d’embarquement du terminal Roissy 2D,
Attendant le vol à destination d’Alicante
Où ma vie se poursuivra
Pendant quelques années encore
En compagnie de mon petit chien
Et des joies (de plus en plus brèves)
Et de l’augmentation régulière des souffrances
En ces années qui précèdent immédiatement la mort.
01.06.2005 (6 h 09)
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Exister, percevoir
Exister, percevoir,
Être une sorte de résidu perceptif (si l’on peut dire)
Dans la salle d’embarquement du terminal Roissy 2D,
Attendant le vol à destination d’Alicante
Où ma vie se poursuivra
Pendant quelques années encore
En compagnie de mon petit chien
Et des joies (de plus en plus brèves)
Et de l’augmentation régulière des souffrances
En ces années qui précèdent immédiatement la mort.
01.06.2005 (6 h 09)
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10/19/2005
Houellebecq, modernité, etc.
Je viens de lire un article du fameux inconnu Frédéric worms définissant, sans le talent de Houellebecq, la postmodernité par "un temps de rupture et de relation. non pas d´une rupture qui aurait eu lieu et que suivrait une relation, mais bien de rupture et de relation ensemble. un présent double en lui-même, brisé et ouvert. sans se prendre autant le choux, c´était un peu le fil tendu de notre conversation avec notre invité colombien - la difficulté de réunir deux cultures, deux individus dans un même temps et un meme désir
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What? No more Maureen Dowd?
Terribly disappointing to see that the NY Times wants us to pay to read the incisive, derisive witt of Ms. Dowd. Wrong move people! Something to remember her by: her appearance on the Daily Show. ...
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Premier dîner paulistano...
Premiere dîner organisé a deux, avec Camilo hier soir. Anne me fait justement remarquer la veille que symboliquement cela participe à son enracinement dans notre vie commune au Brésil... On à évoqué la question de la parentalité dans le contexte du divorce, mais aussi des suédois et de leur culture, de politique colombienne... Cette salade de betteraves, arugula et fromage de chèvre était très réussie chérie!
10/18/2005
10/05/2005
Excellent article de Maureen D
I kinda want to keep this for my records, so I put in in the blog. Good reading, frightening state of relationship between the sexes in the US...
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What's a Modern Girl to Do?
By MAUREEN DOWD. Published: October 30, 2005
When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting out of theirs 50's chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating men and acting all independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to be sexual, this time protected by the pill. I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard.
My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my idea of the 30's was wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We didn't dance around in white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.
On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote in a letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."
I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:
By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying - Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would always be full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff - social issues, sexual equality, civil rights. Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.
Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.
Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the Situation Room.
Courtship
My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The first, when I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I was 21, was "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was "How to Catch and Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.")
Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a Man" at a time when we were entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an anachronism. After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.
I knew it even before the 1995 publication of "The Rules," a dating bible that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind games by playing hard to get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes.. . .Even if you are the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!")
I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to Get." ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer lectured in Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.")
I knew things were changing because a succession of my single girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my out-of-print copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Man."
Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.
Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the game."
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.
Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist, concurs with Julie: "What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag."
Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend hours finding a hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear a fancy suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world, a woman must play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm. Altogether.
Money
In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."
A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she hears bandied about the New York dating scene. She also notes a shift in the type of gifts given at wedding showers around town, a reversion to 50's-style offerings: soup ladles and those frilly little aprons from Anthropologie and vintage stores are being unwrapped along with see-through nighties and push-up bras.
"What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she complains. "Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money."'
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.
Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.
After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a first dinner date, a modern girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid to help pay the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a meal, but it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times, says. "They know you will stop them before a credit card can be drawn. If you don't, they hold it against you."
One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the same thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."
Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole. But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the man, or more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a way of signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating culture rife with casual hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial testing phase and settled in a relationship, of course, she can pony up more.)
"There are plenty of ways for me to find out if he's going to see me as an equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young woman says. "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that."
When I asked a young man at my gym how he and his lawyer girlfriend were going to divide the costs on a California vacation, he looked askance. "She never offers," he replied. "And I like paying for her." It is, as one guy said, "one of the few remaining ways we can demonstrate our manhood."
Power Dynamics
At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?
He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.
A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."
I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.
John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend official in 2004 when he reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.
"The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, theorized, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference between their attraction to men who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work below them.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?
After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."
Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."
Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.
Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true."
A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.
On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett book, Lesley Stahl talked to two young women who went to Harvard Business School. They agreed that while they were the perfect age to start families, they didn't find it easy to meet the right mates.
Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The H-bomb," they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."
Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than ever. "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to have a career and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing. Whether you're looking at Italy, Russia or the U.S., all of that is true." Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship.
"With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?" says a guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce.
Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."
Ms. Versus Mrs.
"Ms." was supposed to neutralize the stature of women, so they weren't publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times finally agreed to switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by feminists, Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. But nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and brag on the moniker Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts with "MRS." emblazoned in sequins or sparkly beads are popular wedding-shower gifts.
A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent.
Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the spring of 2005 by the Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of respondents took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000. The number of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8 percent.
"It's a return to romance, a desire to make marriage work," Goldin told one interviewer, adding that young women might feel that by keeping their own names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned feminists, and this might be a turnoff to them.
The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her name, undertook the study after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her generation of women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we had already achieved," Goldin told Time.
Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.
The Times recently ran a front-page article about young women attending Ivy League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their places in the professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers in favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children.
"My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia Liu told Louise Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years after she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the other."
Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that she sees a distinct shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want to be in the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem unappealing."
Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at Yale, told Story that women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the dashed utopia of those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work and child rearing.
To the extent that young women are rejecting the old idea of copying men and reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating progress. But to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.
Movies
In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. You still see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured orgasms and destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers. Moviemakers these days are more interested in exploring what Steve Martin, in his novel "Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances between unequals.
In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, playing a sensitive Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid, just as in "Maid in Manhattan," Ralph Fiennes, playing a sensitive New York pol, falls for the hot Latino maid at his hotel, played by Jennifer Lopez. Sandler's maid, who cleans up for him without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman, in looks and character. His wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm and fears she has lost her identity.
In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which Colin Firth's Vermeer erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch maid, and Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson, the sister of the prime minister, falls for his sultry secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection.
It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics - statuesque, 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted as nannies for some of America's first families. I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men. An upstairs maid, of course.
Women's Magazines
osmo is still the best-selling magazine on college campuses, as it was when I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the newsstand. The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage spilling out of an orange croqueted halter dress, could have been June 1970. The headlines are familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less," "Do You Make Men M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud search and "Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have Brought Countless Guys to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut around your man's member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the icing . . . as well as his manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell out during sex which of your girlfriends thinks your man is hot.)
At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo girl's man-crazy, sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the teen set. On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot."
"There has been lots of copying - look at Glamour," Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I used to have all the sex to myself."
Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life that were not all about men. But it never quite materialized.
It took only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip. Instead of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society where women of all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens. Hollywood actresses now work out by taking pole-dancing classes.
Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew path, not a serene progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were not supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters, when women were supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then it was discovered - shock, horror! - that men and women are not alike in their desires. But zipless morphed into hookups, and the more one-night stands the girls on "Sex and the City" had, the grumpier they got.
Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his "us against the world" lad-magazine attitude from women's magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?"
Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson "America's favorite ball and chain!" In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. ("I think of my breasts as props," she told FHM.)
A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."
The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men's fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.
Beauty
While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.
I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.
When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.
It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way.
But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.
What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.
What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.
And the Future . . .
Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of?
It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.
Maureen Dowd is my favorite columnist for The New York Times
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What's a Modern Girl to Do?
By MAUREEN DOWD. Published: October 30, 2005
When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting out of theirs 50's chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating men and acting all independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to be sexual, this time protected by the pill. I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard.
My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my idea of the 30's was wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We didn't dance around in white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.
On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote in a letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."
I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:
By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying - Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would always be full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff - social issues, sexual equality, civil rights. Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.
Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.
Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the Situation Room.
Courtship
My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The first, when I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I was 21, was "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was "How to Catch and Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.")
Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a Man" at a time when we were entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an anachronism. After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.
I knew it even before the 1995 publication of "The Rules," a dating bible that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind games by playing hard to get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes.. . .Even if you are the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!")
I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to Get." ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer lectured in Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.")
I knew things were changing because a succession of my single girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my out-of-print copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Man."
Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.
Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the game."
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.
Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist, concurs with Julie: "What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag."
Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend hours finding a hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear a fancy suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world, a woman must play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm. Altogether.
Money
In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."
A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she hears bandied about the New York dating scene. She also notes a shift in the type of gifts given at wedding showers around town, a reversion to 50's-style offerings: soup ladles and those frilly little aprons from Anthropologie and vintage stores are being unwrapped along with see-through nighties and push-up bras.
"What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she complains. "Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money."'
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.
Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.
After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a first dinner date, a modern girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid to help pay the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a meal, but it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times, says. "They know you will stop them before a credit card can be drawn. If you don't, they hold it against you."
One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the same thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."
Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole. But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the man, or more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a way of signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating culture rife with casual hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial testing phase and settled in a relationship, of course, she can pony up more.)
"There are plenty of ways for me to find out if he's going to see me as an equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young woman says. "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that."
When I asked a young man at my gym how he and his lawyer girlfriend were going to divide the costs on a California vacation, he looked askance. "She never offers," he replied. "And I like paying for her." It is, as one guy said, "one of the few remaining ways we can demonstrate our manhood."
Power Dynamics
At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?
He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.
A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."
I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.
John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend official in 2004 when he reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.
"The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, theorized, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference between their attraction to men who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work below them.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?
After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."
Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."
Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.
Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true."
A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.
On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett book, Lesley Stahl talked to two young women who went to Harvard Business School. They agreed that while they were the perfect age to start families, they didn't find it easy to meet the right mates.
Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The H-bomb," they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."
Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than ever. "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to have a career and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing. Whether you're looking at Italy, Russia or the U.S., all of that is true." Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship.
"With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?" says a guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce.
Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."
Ms. Versus Mrs.
"Ms." was supposed to neutralize the stature of women, so they weren't publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times finally agreed to switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by feminists, Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. But nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and brag on the moniker Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts with "MRS." emblazoned in sequins or sparkly beads are popular wedding-shower gifts.
A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent.
Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the spring of 2005 by the Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of respondents took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000. The number of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8 percent.
"It's a return to romance, a desire to make marriage work," Goldin told one interviewer, adding that young women might feel that by keeping their own names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned feminists, and this might be a turnoff to them.
The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her name, undertook the study after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her generation of women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we had already achieved," Goldin told Time.
Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.
The Times recently ran a front-page article about young women attending Ivy League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their places in the professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers in favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children.
"My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia Liu told Louise Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years after she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the other."
Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that she sees a distinct shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want to be in the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem unappealing."
Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at Yale, told Story that women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the dashed utopia of those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work and child rearing.
To the extent that young women are rejecting the old idea of copying men and reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating progress. But to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.
Movies
In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. You still see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured orgasms and destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers. Moviemakers these days are more interested in exploring what Steve Martin, in his novel "Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances between unequals.
In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, playing a sensitive Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid, just as in "Maid in Manhattan," Ralph Fiennes, playing a sensitive New York pol, falls for the hot Latino maid at his hotel, played by Jennifer Lopez. Sandler's maid, who cleans up for him without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman, in looks and character. His wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm and fears she has lost her identity.
In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which Colin Firth's Vermeer erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch maid, and Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson, the sister of the prime minister, falls for his sultry secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection.
It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics - statuesque, 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted as nannies for some of America's first families. I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men. An upstairs maid, of course.
Women's Magazines
osmo is still the best-selling magazine on college campuses, as it was when I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the newsstand. The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage spilling out of an orange croqueted halter dress, could have been June 1970. The headlines are familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less," "Do You Make Men M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud search and "Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have Brought Countless Guys to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut around your man's member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the icing . . . as well as his manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell out during sex which of your girlfriends thinks your man is hot.)
At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo girl's man-crazy, sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the teen set. On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot."
"There has been lots of copying - look at Glamour," Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I used to have all the sex to myself."
Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life that were not all about men. But it never quite materialized.
It took only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip. Instead of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society where women of all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens. Hollywood actresses now work out by taking pole-dancing classes.
Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew path, not a serene progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were not supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters, when women were supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then it was discovered - shock, horror! - that men and women are not alike in their desires. But zipless morphed into hookups, and the more one-night stands the girls on "Sex and the City" had, the grumpier they got.
Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his "us against the world" lad-magazine attitude from women's magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?"
Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson "America's favorite ball and chain!" In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. ("I think of my breasts as props," she told FHM.)
A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."
The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men's fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.
Beauty
While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.
I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.
When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.
It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way.
But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.
What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.
What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.
And the Future . . .
Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of?
It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.
Maureen Dowd is my favorite columnist for The New York Times
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