How Can Powerful Women Attract Men

No one has ever called Bill Clinton “uxorious”… until last night. Maureen Dowd, not a great Clinton fan, applied it to the Big Dog, himself.

Unsubtly, she added that the Big Dog was using up all his reserves of estrogen and perhaps even empathy, to pay his wife back for all of the insults and injuries he inflicted on her.

A man who feels a woman’s pain can be the world’s greatest seducer… if he wants above all to bed as many women as possible.

As one would expect, Big Dog’s story of picking up the unattractive girl in law school offended feminist heroine Rachel Maddow. But, Maddow might be right. The effort to normalize the Bill/Hillary relationship is transparently false. For all we know, the Big Dog might have thought of Hillary Rodham as a great challenge. Surely, he did not see her as a hot chick. A great seducer is always looking out for challenges. In Hillary Bill found one.

But that assumes that we know who was seducing whom? A minimum understanding of human nature tells us that we cannot be very sure about that.

Last night, Big Dog tried to humanize, but also to feminize Hillary. He was not quite up to that task, but he did give it the old college try.

And yet, it brings Marissa Mayer to mind. And it allows me to raise a point that I failed to mention in yesterday’s post about MM.

Why did Mayer make such a point about being feminine, even decadently so? To be Shakespearean, we can ask whether she had a darker purpose or whether there was method in the madness.

At the least, the Mayer example shows why more men exercise power and authority in the world. More importantly, it shows why more women do not want to do so. They are afraid that if they become more powerful men will lose interest in them. 

The reason is: given the choice, most women do not aspire to be the CEO. They have other priorities and other things in mind. It is basic to any Darwinian study of sexual attraction… any study that goes beyond hormones and looks at the influence of status.

The higher a man rises on a status hierarchy the more attractive he is to women. But, the higher a woman rises on a status hierarchy, especially on a male status hierarchy, the less attractive she is to men.

Yes, I know, the feminist indoctrination squad has told you that the only reason why the board room and the executive suite is not divided evenly between men and women is that we have not seen enough sit-coms where the genders share power. And that we have not seen enough women in charge—like Angela Merkel.

If feminists think that men and women will ever reach parity in the executive suite they are tilting at windmills. Or better, they are denying human nature, to the point where the only way they will be able to achieve their absurd goal will be legislation.

Without trying to embarrass anyone, how many women were lusting after the Big Dog? How many offered to perform all manner sexual services for the leader of the free world?

Then, ask yourself this: how many men are lusting after Hillary? How many men want to marry a woman just like Hillary? You might even ask how many mothers want their sons to marry a woman like Hillary?

See the point? See why so many young women, women for whom attracting a man is an important issue, are turned off by Hillary.

Which brings us to Marissa Mayer, not as CEO, but as culture warrior, as a woman making a statement about leadership.

Wasn’t Mayer, with her over-the-top Gatsbyesque party, with her Aphrodite on a throne image, trying to overcome the notion that powerful women are not attractive to men? Wasn’t she saying that a woman could exercise power and still be in touch with her inner vamp?

And yet, considering how hard she was trying, Mayer seems also to have been demonstrating that powerful women have to try harder, a lot harder to attract men, no matter how beautiful they are.