Why do
I, and my cadre of intelligent, sympathetic, well-educated, 20-something
male friends, have such great difficulty finding significant others?
Why do I have friends and acquaintances with degrees from Ivy League
schools—decent-looking fellows, with good personal hygiene
and even moderately respectable incomes, who can converse equally
well on the works of Cicero
and the works of Kevin
Smith—who still can't find love? Isn't half the
population supposed to be female? Isn't
a flat 10% of both sexes, according to Kinsey, supposed to be gay?
And hasn't God or Mother Nature or Dame Evolution—or whatever
makes the birds and the bees and the orangutans
screw like bunny rabbits—invested the female of the species
with similar urges to the male?
I'm not
the first one to notice that nice guys finish last. Countless
books have been written about the subject. Steve
Martin made a fine movie about it. But a bigger mystery,
I feel, is what has happened to all the eligible bachelorettes.
Last I checked, convents were not a booming business.
Being
the sort of person I am, I set out to try to analyze the problem
in a scientific fashion. Now, I'm fully aware that wise American,
Mark Twain, once said, "There are three types of lies: lies,
damned lies, and statistics." However, since we're dealing
with science here, we're going to need a starting point. And, so,
with an eye towards science, I opened that paragon of journalistic
excellence, the New
York Times, and turned to the personal ads in search
of the answer to my question. I am sorry to inform my readership,
but what I found there has led me to believe that feminism has been
an utter failure.
On the
particular week I conducted my survey, the Times featured
54 women, with an average given age of 48. For the women who specified
an age for the partner they were seeking, the average was 52. Conversely,
there were 24 men—less than half the number of women—who
gave their ages as an average of 54.5. The men sought partners with
an average age of 50. So far, everything seems copasetic: The Times
caters to a slightly older crowd, with more disposable income. Plus,
you'd have to be pretty desperate to put an ad in the Times.
But those
numbers are deceptive. I also discovered that men were far more
likely to give their age than the women were. In fact, only about
two-thirds of the women gave their age; almost all the men did.
And, it should be said, men were not ashamed to seek women decades
their junior. Women were more likely to specify a general age range
for a potential partner.
But the
real mystery is what happened to all the men of a certain age. Why
were there 24 lonely men set against 54 women? Are our Vietnam casualty
figures all skewed, or was there a war that the history books neglected
to mention? And, to return to our original question, what happened
to all the young, eligible women? Was there a female infanticide
fad in the '70s, somewhere between fondue and punk rock, that the
current nostalgia chroniclers have missed?
Perhaps
the answer lies in personal ads in a very different paper from the
Times. If you open the Village
Voice, you'll find ads like these:
Exotic
22 y/o wants older, attractive very successful man to spoil her,
Loves fine dining, theatre & the pursuit of beauty. Very curvy,
sensuous, & an interesting conversationalist
DADDY'S
LITTLE GIRL
Extremely feminine & helpless 21yo, blonde/blue eyes, 5'6",
95lbs, looking for a much older extremely successful man.
Very
Attractive brunette seeks mutually beneficial arrangement with
generous executive. No D/D. Me: 31, 5'11", w/model looks.
U: know how to offer a woman "the finer things in life."
Looks
like the old double standard's alive and well, doesn't it?
The mystery
seemed solved: The vast pool of male testosterone building up in
New York can be explained by evolutionary psychology. The most eligible
women, with the most to offer-youth and beauty—are seeking
out those men with the most desirable traits—money and security.
We are living, boys and girls, in a material world. Why would the
women trade down to some punk kid who can only offer her sincerity
and exquisite taste in indie bands, when she can eat at Bobby
Flay's shitty restaurant every night?
Oddly
enough, similar injustices were being perpetrated in Renaissance
Italy, when men generally didn't come into property until their
mid-to-late 30s, whereupon they would marry 14-year-old girls (and
the girls without dowries were locked up in convents). The
solution the horny young men of Florence found was casual homosexuality,
visiting whores, and, occasionally, raiding convents.
These days of course, those solutions only work in San Francisco.
My findings
were confirmed, albeit in a hardly scientific manner, by every single
woman I know older than 35: Men are looking for fresh produce. Being
unprotected as they are by the powerful sunblock of Generation X
cynicism from the glare of the media, they have been completely
brainwashed into thinking a young chick on their arms equals success.
Meanwhile, there is a large pool of perfectly eligible older single
women languishing in frustration. Sorry, ladies: Feminism is a lie.
It's still about T&A.
Of course,
it isn't our style here at CORPORATE MOFO to complain about a problem.
Oh, no. We look for answers. The solution to this great injustice
is fairly simple, really: If all those silverbacks want to bogart
our females, well, then, there's no reason we can't go after theirs
(otherwise known as the "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce
me?" strategy). Face it: Women in the 35-to-45-year-old age
range are pretty darn attractive to a horny 25-year-old. Subversive
sexual terrorism is the way to go.
There
are several strategies you can take on this. MILFs (that is, "Moms
I'd Like to Fuck" for those who haven't seen American
Pie) are in abundance all throughout the nation:
One need only volunteer to coach a kiddie soccer team, and you're
hooked up. Or, better yet: While your boss is working late (i.e.,
bonking his "personal assistant" at the Hyatt), take a
commuter train out to Suburbia and bonk Mrs. Boss. Or, place a personal
ad aimed towards for divorcées or soon-to-be divorcées
who want that sweet taste of revenge.
After all, it's their pool of eligible men who're taking all of
our demographic.
Of course
it's a particularly offensive thing to suggest that every young
woman in this country is whoring herself. Nor is it a bright idea
to fuck your boss' wife: It can get your ass fired.
The real
deal is that there is no shortage of young, bright, creative single
women in the big city. The thing is, young, bright, creative single
people tend to move to the city for one purpose: Their careers.
If we would have been content as housewives and assembly-line workers,
we would have stayed in Buffalo or Brooklyn or Shermer,
Illinois or wherever the hell we came from. Our self-images
are intimately tied up with our jobs—too intimately, so much
so that we clock in hour upon hour at the office in excess of what
we have to, and then take on freelance work or private projects
on nights and weekends. And then after work, so that we can live
the illusion of a rich and fulfilling life, we run to the gym or
dance class or grad school or the theater or tai chi class like
so many hamsters on one big wheel.
We labor
like computerized slaves, afraid to slow down our productivity or
be seen to be slack in our post-industrial make-work, because to
do so would mean we would be euphemistically "let go,"
and the loss of income, in the overpriced Big City, would mean that
we would have to move back to Mommy's couch in Buffalo or Brooklyn
or Shermer. If they would have us, that is: I seem to have noticed
that couch-squatters are also an appreciable demographic.
This,
plus the daily maintenance of modern life, and who has the time
or energy to pursue the relationship? My feeble attempts at courtship
have been rebuffed, not because of my own hideousness or lack of
personality, but simply because my potential love interests were
too busy. It's sad, really: the women I'm interested in re unavailable
precisely because of the qualities that make me interested in them
in the first place. And, meanwhile, we all live in a state of perpetual
sexual frustration.
Things
haven't been this way for too long. When my father was my age, he
had already been married to my mother for two years. My friends
and acquaintances, for the most part, have similar stories. The
average age of marriage a generation ago seems to have been in the
early 20s; today, I work in an office filled with unmarried 30-
and 40-year-olds. For the sake of our careers, we put intimate relationships
and having children off to a previously unheard-of age. As a result,
the best and the brightest in our society, the ones who are arguably
the most qualified to become parents, are also the least likely
to do so. What this will mean for future generations, I hesitate
to speculate.
Perhaps
what we have to blame, then, is the sexual revolution itself. Back
in the '50s, you knew what the rules were. Sure, you usually wound
up transgressing against them, the schools weren't integrated, you
couldn't get a decent burrito, and Old Man Johnson was building
a bomb shelter in the back yard, but you knew what the rules were.
We all know the scenario from Meatloaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard
Light": Men were men, women were women, and a little bit of
hooch stolen from Dad's liquor cabinet got you a long way. Today,
though, nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Maybe all this nostalgia
with the Buddy
Holly glasses and is a cry for help: We want rules again.
What
we are imploring all of you is not to let life pass you by while
you do someone else's work in a cubicle, plugged into a machine
like one of the Borg. We are not machines. We are human beings.
We need to sit in tapas bars and drink sangria and laugh about how
we thought we'd never lose our virginity in high school. As the
dead white male Horace said, "While
we live, let us live."
And,
for Chrissake, would one of you come out to dinner with me?
About
the writer: Ken Mondschein is the
most eligible bachelor outside of a Jane Austen novel.
Posted
January 1, 2002 4:19 AM