so, i can't be a feminist and date at the same time?

The New York Time's Maureen Dowd has written a rather controversial piece about modern dating. Essentially, smart and professionally successful women are far less likely to find husbands/long-term relationships or have children. Success = sexual/familial kryptonite.

"At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?

He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality."

Um. Ok. I always knew that it would take a special sort of guy, I just had hoped he actually existed. Just kidding. I know there are enlightened men out there who seek strong, successful women instead of unpaid glorified domestic help. In fact, had a date with one last night.

We're going out again on Tuesday, but now I'm confused about if I should let him pay for dinner. Dating rituals tend to conflict with the tenets of feminism. (Also, does it mean that I'm a bad feminist if I like it when the guy pays for dinner? Oy!)