This will make you happy.

Meet Lori Gottlieb. She’s a 40-year-old single mother—she got artificially inseminated because she wanted to have a baby but didn’t have a boyfriend—who has discovered the secret to why more women aren’t married: their standards aren’t low enough.

No, seriously. Gottlieb recently expanded this 2008 article from the Atlantic into a full-length book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Her basic premise? Modern women all have “checklists” for their potential life partners, and we’re too quick to dismiss guys who don’t necessarily satisfy all of those requirements. So in order to avoid being single and, therefore, miserable in our 40s, women in their 20s like you and me should forget searching for Mr. Right and, instead, make do with Mr. Good Enough.

Don’t worry if this advice sounds ridiculously retro—Gottlieb freely admits that she’s telling women to ignore modern ideas about male/female relations because, as she says at the beginning of her book’s third chapter, “feminism has completely f*cked up my love life.” All that talk about “freedom” and “choice”—yes, she actually puts those words in quotation marks—is a bunch of hooey because, as opposed to what Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan would have you believe, women really do need to get married and have lots of babies in order to be fulfilled: “The truth was, every one of my single friends wanted to be married, but none of us would admit how badly we craved it for fear of sounding weak or needy or, God forbid, antifeminist,” Gottlieb writes.

Excuse me for just a minute—AAAARRRRGGGGG!!! This crap is so ludicrous that I can only express my anger in capital letters and multiple exclamation points. I can immediately think of about fifty things that are totally wrong with Gottlieb’s thought process, but I’ll spare all of you and just mention what I think are her most glaring errors: Read More »

As I wandered near the site of New York City’s Sex and the City premiere yesterday, dodging small bands of women united by a common interest in over-accessorizing for daytime (and being in my way), I found myself compiling a list of people and things that owe much of their current popularity to said show:

Manolo Blahnik

The concept of brunch

Cosmopolitans

Clubs Bungalow 8 and Bed

Cupcakes

The Rabbit

The word fabulous

Retardedly over-thought outfits

Next on my list was “bitching about men”, and I stopped myself short. SATC, I’ll give you credit for the context (brunch, obvs) but you don’t get credit for this one. I should know, I’m a woman, and I’ve been gabbing about men since long before Sex was a twinkle in HBO’s eye.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon more recently, as romantic relationships take a more prominent and permanent place in the lives of my friends. Casual dating, serious dating, sleeping around, moving in together, some crazy folks getting married, yadda yadda yadda. Whatever the situation, women have a need (which sometimes borders on the obsessive and pathological) to compare notes and share war stories. Read More »