Maureen Dowd: Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 14, 2007

In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy. “Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”

Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed. But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”

Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on dating. With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus. The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.

“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”

As he recapped the experiment in Slate last week:

“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.” He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14dowd.html?hp

[BOSSHOG]

1. Not wanting a woman who is more ambitious then the man?

I don't understand that line of thought. I recall a conversation some of my old farts and me had a couple of years ago. Our number one wish, a wife who made a whole bunch more money then we did. And upon retirement, I became so blessed. And there is no doubt that when it comes to common sense, if not raw "smarts" my wife is way above my head and I like that just fine. I guess I'm just a worthless scum liberal hippie.

[underpants]

2. I read this earlier-she clearly seems to think that Hillary needs a man's approval

OR evenmore trivially a man's vote. Well I see where this is going-the "Men don't like her" excuse for sudden strange vote irregularities (if we get to that point but clearly Dowd and the DC crowd think we are) pop up.

Some interesting facts that I have access to even though I don't write for the NY Times


First nonSouthern white males vote Democrat in the same rate now that they did in 1952 (40%) so that set of votes is almost a lock. Southern White Males aren't ever going to vote for Hillary just like they haven't voted for a Dem since Carter so that set of votes is a lock.

Basically Dowd has no idea what to put into her column so she pastes together this tripe. Still it is a head above a Coulter bar-napkin work, barely.