Girls Gone Wild

National Review, May 5, 2003 by Pia De Solenni

Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (Broadway, 210 pp., $22.95)

The plight of the modern accomplished woman: She tries to have it all, and too often ends up both alone and unhappy. This book examines the rise of the new single woman who fails in one relationship after another, whose ring finger remains conspicuously bare despite her obvious attempts to win a diamond.

Author Barbara Dafoe Whitehead recounts the stories of various women and their particular difficulties finding Mr. Right. Story after story features a less than desirable specimen of the male human being, but the accounts tend to look outward and not inward. The book never really addresses the underlying practical issue: What are women doing that puts them in the situation they face now? Most of our grandmothers found romance, and were more satisfied as women than the "new single women" -- they had the husbands and families that the women in this book can't seem to acquire. Today's young women can become masters of the universe, but they apparently can't figure out how to meet and marry a good man, something women have been able to do since time immemorial.

Women have changed, in some ways for the worse. (I should mention that I am a member of the cohort Whitehead is examining -- young, educated, single, and with a somewhat successful career -- so I have standing to weigh in on this question.) The problem is not that more women go to university or have careers; in the past, plenty of women managed to do these things -- and also get married and have families. Now, however, being educated and accomplished carries a feminist stigma. Radical feminists didn't understand that there's a way to be educated, intelligent, and accomplished without compromising their identity as women. So they decided to act like men. To be precise, they advocated that women act like men behaving badly.

In the pre-feminist era, relationships had a way of happening and working. Men took the initiative (even if some women skillfully choreographed them into doing it). This was part of the way a man showed that he was willing and able to protect, provide for, and cherish his woman. Not incidentally, these are all things that women still want. For their part, women were "empowered with choice" -- able to select among the men who offered, and even sometimes to exercise a strong influence over who could make an offer. Being the object of a man's desire meant that he wanted her for more than just the night. He was willing to prove that he was worthy of spending the rest of his life with her. A woman was someone worth sacrificing for; starting with sex, she had something that a man had to work for. In short: She was in control. At age twelve, a friend of mine was told by her father, "Women don't know it, but they control their relationships with men."

Despite what one might be led to believe by popular Chick-Lit and feminist social commentary, men are not stupid. The old line, "Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?" bespeaks a wisdom born of experience. Women hold the power, but these days they relinquish it as if they didn't know their own worth. They acquiesce in men's desire for instant gratification, and see their own chances for long-term happiness fade. It is this acquiescence that has changed male-female relationships. All of Whitehead's commentary and statistics on cohabitation confirm this; unfortunately, the author herself doesn't articulate it.

What is needed is a realistic appreciation of women's unique power. In the realm of physical fitness, we understand this perfectly. We spend hours in the gym because that time and discipline yield the sculpted body we desire. We diet and stay away from certain foods because we want a particular result, a particular level of health. We don't give in to everything that feels good and we even do some things we don't much enjoy. But the sacrifices get us the results we want.

The same is true in love and relationships. They take time; very often pleasure in the present has to be sacrificed for a better future. Everything that we do or desire affects who we are. If the object of a man's love is only a woman acting badly, how strong can his love be for her, especially when she's just like so many others?

Whitehead's data confirm a change in behavior witnessed at all levels of society. Consider the success of Girls Gone Wild, a video series that is the brainchild of millionaire Joe Francis. Francis has produced more than 80 versions of these films, in which women voluntarily bare their breasts for crowds of drunken men and a few movie cameras. These women are mostly college students, our educated elite; my peasant grandmother, who never went to school, would have run circles around them intellectually. Meanwhile, Joe Francis gets the last laugh and all the profits. Last year Girls Gone Wild earned him $90 million. Some of the women, as if to prove their stupidity even further, have sued him; none has prevailed.