WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FISH WANTS A BICYCLE? Maureen Dowd of the alleged newspaper of record discovers she's been had.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? 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.

Villainous Company is, shall we say, unimpressed.

Ms. Dowd might also contemplate the difference between masculine fantasies and what they decide in real life. I think we can all agree that, if asked by an 'unbiased researcher', most men would say they "prefer" to hook up with [insert mindless, sex-starved starlet with surgically enhanced breasts and serious dependency issues here].

Um, not necessarily. Mark Kleiman (via Unfogged, where a lively discussion of the Dowd column is in progress) has gone public with his objective function. (Reword it to include "ability to re-rig your own sailboat is a plus" and it could be mine.)

But there's more serious stuff in the Villainous Company post, including a link to something resembling real research. Money quote:

Mary Balfour, director of Drawing Down the Moon, an executive dating agency based in London, says that college-educated and professional men in their 20s and 30s now want women who match their intellect and earning abilities. "It is only those in their 50s and 60s who tend to take a deep breath when introduced to powerful women," she says.

No surprise. The older cohort came of age as the times they were a-changin', and those changes were disruptive to everybody, as the men had to confront at the time and the women are now discovering. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I recall in the early 1970s a number of policy changes that the activist types had long advocated taking effect in rapid succession, without observing much of an increase in the happiness of the activist types.) There is also a quote about money.

Most couples require two paychecks to stay in the middle class, a math lesson that is not lost on men.

Just can't get away from that Say Aggregation Principle, can we? There's more.

A 1999 nationally representative sample--meaning it mirrors the population as a whole--of 4,405 couples found that divorce was more likely when a woman has no earnings than when she brings home a paycheck. In particular, the marriage of a woman with no earnings was more than twice as likely to dissolve as that of a woman who had a paycheck.

Having no income can be risky for a woman, and not just in the stability of her marriage. A wife who drops out of the work force and stays out for a long time will never make up that lost economic ground, even if she returns to the work force. Worse, if her husband's income starts to slip--an all too common event these days--the couple can be in trouble, both financially and emotionally.

Here we go again, what is the effect of no-fault divorce on the labor force participation rates of married women? Villainous Company summarizes the lesson.

And so once again, we're back to economics and tradeoffs and maximizing utility after all. Men and women don't behave all that differently - it's just a question of what we value. And the answers (at least in the real world) are more easily divined by looking at the decisions we make than about what we say we value.

Actions speak louder than words.

Laura at 11-D (if you want to keep busy, go to the top and start reading; she's been doing a lot of thinking and linking) is hosting a discussion based on this observation.

Whenever Maureen Dowd goes after the flaws in the male character, I get a little uncomfortable, which is odd, because I really have no problem with male bashing. But when Maureen does it, I start shifting around in my seat and tapping my feet. I feel like she's showing too much of her cards. Maureen has a full set of Samsonite baggage. ...

Maureen's baggage aside, does she make a good point? Do men really want to jump a non-English speaking maid in a uniform over an award winning columnist?

An award winning columnist who has made repeated disclosure of her baggage? (Don't you just love the words people use to speak of human interaction. Issues. Baggage. Co-dependency. Bleah.) And what do all of her references to nannies and maids say about the men she's observing?