Magazines Look at Love in a Post-Feminist World

Only a century or so ago, Victorian women’s magazines advised readers to dedicate their lives to husband and hearth.

Peterson’s magazine, one of several 19th century publications devoted to the fairer sex, published a poem whose lines include: “She sits a queen upon her throne / And beautifies her quiet home--For woman lives for love alone!”

A few things have changed, to put it mildly. In the last month of 1999, it’s time to take stock of what magazines are saying about women, men and relationships. It isn’t pretty.

One of the most disquieting observations comes from Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, writing in the Atlantic Monthly.

In “The Plight of the High-Status Woman,” Whitehead finds that a harsh trend has developed in recent fiction, essays and self-help books for educated women in their 20s and 30s. For these women, who spend a long time in the dating and mating scene and concentrate their energies on careers, the predominant theme in literature is getting dumped, in love and in labor.

As examples, Whitehead cites such self-help manuals as “Dumped!” and “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.” In fiction, the theme is played out in such books as “Run Catch Kiss” by Amy Sohn, in which the female protagonist gets even with ex-lovers by shredding them to bits in her popular sex column.

This “dump” literature, often darkly humorous, is nothing like the “one and only love” romances of yore. It finds that all men are the same--self-centered and thoughtless--and one is as likely to dump you as the next.

Young, high-status women compete not only among themselves for men, but with younger women with less ambitious career goals, Whitehead observes. Many professional women who postpone marriage until their 30s are left wondering where the eligible men have gone.

In the etiquette department, Details magazine tackles men’s troublesome question of how to deal with a girlfriend when attending a holiday party. Inevitably, writes Nancy Miller, the squeeze will feel neglected if her partner slips off to talk Packer stats.

The solution: a few key gestures (taking her coat, introducing her, acknowledging her every so often. Also, “just get her a drink and she’ll quit dogging you”). These sweet nothings amount to about 15 minutes of time and may prevent a blowup, according to Miller.

“Think of the following solutions as equivalent to feeding a parking meter,” Miller writes. “Sure, it’s inconvenient to get up every half-hour, but it’s a hell of a lot better than getting towed.”

Right. And Sir Walter Raleigh has definitely left the building.

Considering the relationship burdens borne by today’s young men, why do they stay (beyond great sex)? Mademoiselle has a list. They like women who are competitive, surprising, “un-clingy,” stimulating, good listeners and friends, and tolerant of his virility (read, letting him “lap dance with a paid professional when he’s out with his buddies”).

The two worst reasons men stay, according to Mademoiselle: inertia and kismet (as in being “meant” for each other).

Glamour lets gals in on what most have suspected all along: that underneath a date’s repartee, there are ulterior motives. For example, you know he’s up to something if he takes you to a bar rather than brunch.

In what might be, in male minds, the most discouraging view, the men’s magazine GQ offers a post-feminist view in “I Want You . . . but I Don’t Need You.”

Writer Jancee Dunn looks at the 30ish women around her, and sees success and confidence, both at work and in the sack. Women, she writes, just don’t need men the way they used to. “Don’t get me wrong,” she writes. “We still want men, and we still want relationships with them, but we don’t necessarily need them in order to be validated--nor do we depend on them financially. Let me tell you, it is liberating.”

Men have become as vain as the women they used to ridicule, with spa appointments and plastic surgery. Women, on the other side of the sexual coin, are more in tune with their physical needs.

“A startling number of my friends need to [have sex] the way they need to go to the gym or take their vitamin B pills,” Dunn writes. She mentions a woman she knows who routinely calls on a male, platonic-variety, friend for trysts during “dry spells.”

“Throughout history, women have used sex for recreational and head-clearing purposes,” she says, “but until recently our needs had to be couched in an elaborate, false dance of sexual courtship. With Nancy, her bud understands she wants nothing from him except sex, because she feels sexually free to be abundantly clear about it.”

So much for the “quiet home” and the woman who “lives for love alone.”