"Feminism Isn't a Fucking Dating Service"

Or so claims one very pissed Feminister at Feministing in response to this excerpt from the excruciatingly unnecessary Are Men Necessary?, a long Maureen-Dowd-powered discussion of why intelligent women will end up childless and alone. It's hard to hate Dowd properly when she simultaneously invites disapproval from feminists who cite "patriarchal norms" and the feminism-killed-motherhood crowd at the Independent Women's Forum, but let's try:

A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

From this anecdote and a conversation Dowd has at the gym, we are to conclude that powerful men will always seek women less successful than they are. Taking this seriously for a very misguided moment, every man who married "down" (as she puts it) apparently found a woman looking to marry "up." In Dowd-world, the dating market is completely determined by men. But unless life really is just an extended episode of Joe Millionaire, it's probably safe to assume the women in question had some say in their choice of spouse, and with that choice they chose to marry someone "famous and powerful." The "beautiful and successful actress" wasn't going to marry her personal assistant; women always marry "up." Which seems, in the end, at least as "superficial" as marrying a Jessica Simpson clone to feel better about yourself.

What we're supposed to glean from 10 pages of Dowd's educated, successful friends commenting on how little action they're getting is: Men are too intimidated to have them. But if there is any truth at all in Dowd's claims that "Women moving up still strive to marry up" and "Men moving up still tend to marry down," it's hard to see how men are more to blame than women for a state of affairs that (supposedly) locks out both successful women and unsuccessful men.