Are Men Necessary by Maureen Dowd

I was given an excerpts of the above book from Bzz Agent. The introductory chapter cites how the author had to relearn how to get a man and point out work of required reading - "Zsa Zsa Gabor’s groundbreaking work, How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man (“The best way to attack a man immediately is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of them show”)"


Elsewhere in the book she quotes another author: "Natalie Angier’s mythic description of mating in her book Woman: An Intimate Geography. “It is ancient, prehominid news,” Angier wrote. “Sex is dangerous. It always has been, for every species that engages init. Courting and copulating animals are exposed animals, subject to greater risk of predation than animals who are chastely asleep in their burrow; not only do mating animals usually perform their rituals out in the open, but their attention is so focused on the particulars of fornication that they fail to notice the glint of a gaping jaw or the flap of a raptor’s wings. Momentum is chancy, and sex is nothing if not momentous. Let us not forget that. Let us not be so intimidated by overwork or
familiarity or trimethylamines that we forget the exquisite momentum of sexual hunger.”

and then:

"Julie agrees it’s all about momentum. “The way I see dating is an interplay between two clever, charming, smart people, and that interplay should be quick and deft and funny,” she philosophizes. “It has nothing to do with who’s being masculine or feminine. It’s about the push and the pull and chasing each other around trees. It’s not about women just waiting
for something to happen. Courting rituals are about our best selves, our most funny, charming intelligent selves, with all our nerves on end.”
For women, she contends, it means staying tantalizingly out of reach, but knowing when to dash back in and stay out of reach again.
“You appreciate something more that is slightly out of your grasp, that is alluring and mysterious,” she said. (Just as, when Oscar Wilde first tasted ice cream, he was reputed to have remarked, “What a pity this isn’t a sin.”)"

...

"Julie calls her approach the best way of selecting out the narcissists and jerks. If your suitors are not willing to put in the time to play the courting game, she reasons, then they don’t care
enough to be good long-term prospects. (According to a 2005 study from the University College of London, men have their own way to filter out the narcissists and gold diggers. Researchers,
using amathematical formula,[ED. Removed equation 'cause it wouldn't translate in paste.] The Beak of the Finch, a book on natural and sexual selection among the finches of Galápagos, from the chapter on Trinidadian guppies:
“A male guppy has more to do in life than merely survive. He also has to mate. To survive it has to hide among the colored gravel at the bottom of its stream and among the other guppies of its school. But to mate it has to stand out from the gravel and stand out from the school. It has to elude the eyes of the cichlid or the prawn while catching the eyes of the female guppy . . . the quieter colors of a male, the less luck he has in courting females. On the other hand he is likely to have more time to try, because the less he stands out among his own kind, the less he stands out among his enemies.”"

...
"“Men are kind of instant gratification animals,” he said. “We’re like animals, really, much more instinctual than women,less thoughtful. I see such similarity in allmy friends, the smart ones, the dumb ones. They want what they want. I think women think there are a lot more complexities going on.”
Men are driven, he says, by “the hunter-gatherer thing. Every guy I know here goes out and tries to find a woman, and holds off as long as possible without being captured, as sad as that sounds. And the successful women are the ones who act like they don’t want to be captured—at first.
“Women have to know when to apply pressure, maybe after the guys hit thirty-five and start thinking about mortality andwake up horrified at being alone and hunting down twentyone-
year-olds in bars. The guys I know who are married were all pressured into it. It doesn’t mean they don’t love the woman, or are not happy now. It’s just that they had to be told by the
woman, ‘It’s time.’ A good woman does help guide you to a place of security and comfort.”
A girlfriend of mine agrees: “It’s like fishing. You only begin to reel it in when you’re sure you have a bite, not just a nibble. You have to make sure the fish is on the hook.”"

That's amusing because when I first met my wife - she was actually interested in some other guy and I kinda snuck in there. I was kinda seeing someone else at the time as well and when she finally noticed me I played hard to get!

...

"When, in 2005, neuroscientists produced brain scan images of new love for the first time, the images backed the idea that you have to delve into the primitive, precognitive area to be
successful in romance.
“New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior—compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops—that could almost be mistaken for psychosis,” wrote Benedict Carey in The New York Times’s Science section.
Of course, everyone since Plato has written that love is related to frenzy, but I guess it’s not official until some neurologists with a grant say it.
An analysis in The Journal of Neurophysiology confirmed what has been known through the ages—that Elvis’s “hunkahunka burnin’ love” was literal, that passionate love scorches areas deep in the primitive brain affecting long-term attachment and spurs neural activity in the “reward and aversion system” of the brain, along with cravings for food, warmth
and drugs.
“When you’re in the throes of this romantic love, it’s overwhelming, you’re out of control, you’re irrational, you’re going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day—why? Because she’s there,” said
Dr. Fisher of Rutgers, who helped write the analysis. “And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the
will to live.”
The passion-related region of the brain is on the opposite side from the region that registers physical attractiveness, Carey wrote, “and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.”
Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, a co-author of the study, maintains that this distinction between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, “is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don’t think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized.”"

...

"One of the most intriguing discoveries in the study had to do with what causes each sex to fall in love. Men’s brains lit up based on what they saw; women’s brains lit up based on what they remembered. (As men know too well, women never forget.)
“Men needed to pick out signs of youth and health and vitality, the things that indicated she could bear him healthy babies,”
Dr. Fisher said. “Women spend hours on the phone with their girlfriends, talking about what he did and didn’t do, or if he remembered an anniversary or birthday—signs he’d be a dependable, loving husband and father.”
Men still look for the same cues on health and vitality, she said, even if they’re not consciously planning to have babies, noting: “One doesn’t change one’s taste as one ages.”"

...

"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,” said Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, “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. And men did not show a preference when it came to mere one-night stands.
So men will sleep with a woman on top once; they just don’t want to live with her. It may be either because they find bossyboots female supervisors where they work irritating, or, if you take the Darwinian explanation, they fear that upwardly mobile women will be more savvy about sneaking around and being unfaithful."

...

"A 2005 report from four British universities, using research spanning more than three decades, found that women with high IQs were less likely to get married, while a high IQ was a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 15-point increase in IQ; for women, there is a 58 percent drop for each 15-point rise. The researchers found that new data from the 2001 Scottish census matched the old data, showing that “fewer women with a high social class were ever married whereas the opposite was found for men.”
The problem is, a man either wants a woman’s IQ to exceed her body temperature or her body temperature to exceed her IQ. What they can’t seem to bear is the combination of brains and fever.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to—unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don’t have to talk to."

More later...