Quote:
Originally posted by IvySpice
The advice may be good advice from a practical perspective and still be a frustrating reminder that the advice is necessary because some men just do not have it together in the self-esteem department and need to feel smarter/richer/more prestigious than their date.
I think the advice is likely to help the writer. I also think it's a crying shame that women should have to minimize their achievements so as not to scare men away. And they do get scared away. When I was in law school, I met plenty of men in clubs who seemed very interested, danced with me, asked for my number, etc., and then vanished into thin air after they asked where I was in school. The word "Harvard" messes with a lot of men's minds. Maybe the smart "advice" would have been for me to lie or refuse to answer the question, but I just wouldn't do it.
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And congratulations for not doing it, because you've identified the gender politics involved in this sort of 'transaction' but not acting on it would make it all for nothing. That said, I think it's absurd to deride the author as somehow subversive to some sort of larger sense of feminine self, as some seem to want to do. The advice is a 'coping' strategy for working around an endemic problem - whether for better or worse, that's her solution. You and I seem to desire not to bow to gender imaging, but then again when I'm 45 I may have changed perspectives . . .