So, let's recap. Women in their 20s and 30s have grown up beating the boys in math class, knowing that combat is an option for them, celebrating "Girl Power" and in general watching all traditional male-female roles go out the window. And yet they positively drool over the character Don Draper in "Mad Men," who, though he's a cad and a cheat and a boozer, "is a throwback to the time when men were men" and "looks like he would know how to throw me to the wall and do me right."
Phew. Not that these women actually want to marry such a man, of course:
So we've been raised to marry different men. Men like our president, Barack Obama: supportive, mature, levelheaded, equal partners. A bit sexless, OK, but who these days still thinks that a gal can have it all? Better a sexless Obama than a philandering Bill Clinton. . .
[. . .]
They're a dying, if not dead, breed: these men who came back from the battlefields and settled down in whitewashed houses and were somehow expected to find the same visceral rush in office jobs and country clubs and nice, sweet wives that they gained from far-off adventures and wars. Men who couldn't be satiated by these staid substitutions; men who were made caged animals by domesticity; men who unleashed their restlessness in ways both erotic and destructive. These types of men are not the men we marry anymore. But, apparently, they're still the ones we love.
Women want to fool around with the bad boys but marry the boring, stable ones? I am shocked -- shocked and amazed! I tell you -- at such goings on.
It certainly wasn't like that in my day, I can tell you. Women weren't so psychotic and unpredictable. There were two kinds of women, and it was the men who fooled around with one kind and married the other afterwards. Well, not the afterwards so much as at the same time, but you get the point.
"Retro" doesn't make any more sense than the first time around, does it?
