WOMEN LIKE THE MEN OF THE "MAD MEN" ERA BETTER THAN THE SLOBS AND METROS OF TODAY
For those who aren’t regular watchers (of Mad Men): A lot of the show’s male characters spent their time chasing young women around the office and a lot of the female characters spent their time trying to land or keep a husband. Critics have consistently lauded the series, not just for its entertainment value but also for exposing the dark underbelly of a prosperous, conservative era.
Yet I can’t help but wonder if in some ways life wasn’t easier back then — especially for single, marriage-minded women. New York City career women in their 30s and 40s told me this week that in some ways life seemed easier back then for single women, and love was easier to find during our mothers’ day than it is now.
Melanie Notkin, cultural anthropologist and author of “Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness,” said the women she interviewed, “no matter their race, ethnicity or cultural background, had similar concerns with dating — men didn’t plan dates, dressed down for dates, were no longer chivalrous.” Although she faced other problems, surely Joan, the voluptuous office manager on “Mad Men,” didn’t date anyone who failed to put on a suit, plan an evening and pay the check.
The proliferation of online dating sites and “hookup culture” — or decreased stigma around no-strings-attached sex between strangers — means that immature men’s playground is no longer just the halls of their office buildings. It’s the entire city. “It’s like we’ve become this commodity where men can pick out what they want whenever they want,” said Alicia, 37, who works in advertising and lives downtown.
Says Ellie, 42, a student on Manhattan’s East Side who used to work in publishing, “Technology is supposed to bring people closer, but especially in the context of dating it pushes people further apart. It used to be a guy had to call and leave a message and you called him back and you made a date.”
Now, says Ellie, it’s just “texting that leads nowhere.” “I think there was more respect for marriage and family life during” the 1950s and early 1960s, Ellie added. “I wish I could travel backward to a simpler time.”POOR LITTLE RICH WOMEN, From the New York Times:
WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign.
Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture shock was immediate and comprehensive. In a country where women now outpace men in college completion, continue to increase their participation in the labor force and make gains toward equal pay, it was a shock to discover that the most elite stratum of all is a glittering, moneyed backwater.
A social researcher works where she lands and resists the notion that any group is inherently more or less worthy of study than another. I stuck to the facts. The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play groups and the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly 30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools.
They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or private equity funds; they often had three or four children under the age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home.
Instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.
Their self-care was no less zealous or competitive. No ponytails or mom jeans here: they exercised themselves to a razor’s edge, wore expensive and exquisite outfits to school drop-off and looked a decade younger than they were. Many ran their homes (plural) like C.E.O.s. It didn’t take long for me to realize that my background in anthropology might help me figure it all out, and that this elite tribe and its practices made for a fascinating story.
I was never undercover; I told the women I spent time with that I was writing a book about being a mother on the Upper East Side, and many of them were eager to share their perspectives on what one described as “our in many ways very weird world.”
It was easy for me to fall into the belief, as I lived and lunched and mothered with more than 100 of them for the better part of six years, that all these wealthy, competent and beautiful women, many with irony, intelligence and a sense of humor about their tribalism (“We are freaks for Flywheel,” one told me, referring to the indoor cycling gym), were powerful as well. But as my inner anthropologist quickly realized, there was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men.
There were alcohol-fueled girls’ nights out, and women-only luncheons and trunk shows and “shopping for a cause” events. There were mommy coffees, and women-only dinners in lavish homes. There were even some girlfriend-only flyaway parties on private planes, where everyone packed and wore outfits the same color.
“It’s easier and more fun,” the women insisted when I asked about the sex segregation that defined their lives.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
MEANWHILE, I KNOW IT WILL BE HARD FOR YOU TO BELIEVE, BUT:
1 comment:
Poor,poor Millennium women. Their men are wussies. They have more college degrees. They have girly men who cry.
What choice these poor ladies have as mates.
That's the normal ones. Don't get me started on Liberals.
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