Reader Sidewinder writes to the Chateau:
While some degree of the female fascination/obsession with credentials can be explained as projecting onto themselves what they find desirable in men, I think there’s more to it than that. Not all, but a sizeable percentage of intelligent women become obsessed with their school or work. Maybe its just self-centeredness, but many women place their “career” to such a high level of importance that it almost becomes the primary component of their identity. Having read a good deal of marriage therapy literature the past year, some therapists have classified this female career obsession as a form of infidelity to the family and marrage. And its no coincidence that the vast majority of female infidelity takes place in connection with her workplace.
I wonder if in addition to projection, this obsession stems from an unconscious recognition of their declining attractiveness. Its like the 40 year old women at the gym: while they know that men aren’t especially attracted to muscular, hard-bodied women, its really the best option for them considering the alternative of sagging cellulite. Maybe girls latch on to school and work in their 20s because they feel its the only thing they can do to try to mitigate their inevitable declining looks as they approach their 30s and 40s.
Chateau: Women who place their careers front and center are committing a kind of betrayal of their sex’s biological and psychological imperatives. It’s like a big middle finger to everything that distinguishes the feminine from the masculine, the yin from the yang. It’s quite possible that the worst offenders — the 14 hour day lawyercunts and the graduate school hermits — embrace the male-oriented rat race and achievement spectacle because it offers a welcome distraction from either spinsterly loneliness or boring beta male partners who, while intellectually are rationalized as good matches, do not viscerally excite them.
Maybe, too, these careerist chicks see their jobs as a way to enter the world of the alpha male, to have a taste of what it would be like to be part of his life.
