My last column on what makes people desirable mates pissed off a lot of women. While trying to explain the idea of social capital and how it affects the dating market, I apparently implied that physical beauty is all women have going for them.

That ain't so, of course. Some studies suggest a woman's physical attractiveness is the most important factor for many men, but as Benjamin Disraeli said, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. The truth is a little harder to tease out. While beauty is a form of social capital, what's beautiful is also culturally determined. For instance, as I explained in an earlier column, we think thin is beautiful is because we've been programmed since the days of Cimabue's medieval madonnas to associate a long, thin figure with transcendent spirituality, while tits and ass equal earthy sex appeal. Accordingly, Audrey Hepburn comes off looking classy in Breakfast at Tiffany's, while Jenna Jameson comes off looking like a sexpot in, well, anything.

promotion

Judging by the many ads that portray a woman's sex appeal as her greatest attribute, you'd think not much has changed since Betty Friedan helped launch the feminist movement in 1963 with The Feminine Mystique, which criticized women's magazines for running articles like "Do Women Have to Talk So Much?" and "Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young."

Yet for the past few decades we've told girls that to be fully realized people, they must do well in school, get into the right college, get the right job and have the right books on their living-room tables. No wonder women are irritated by all the social "scientists" (not to mention the commercials and advertisements) that tell them that a pretty face is all that they have going for them. What we have here is a bad case of cognitive dissonance.

If we look at the history of middle-class American women in the twentieth century, Friedan's ripple effect was nothing compared to the waves made by Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 Sex and the Single Girl.

Friedan's ripple effect was nothing compared to the waves made by Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 Sex and the Single Girl.

Upon first glancing at the hot-pink cover, you knew immediately what Single Girl was selling:

I married for the first time at thirty-seven. I got the man I wanted. It could be construed as something of a miracle considering how old I was and how eligible he was.

David is a motion picture producer, forty-four, brainy, charming, and sexy. He was sought after by many a Hollywood starlet as well as some less flamboyant but more deadly types. And I got him! We have two Mercedes-Benzes, a Mediterranean house overlooking the Pacific, a full-time maid and a good life . . .

But I don't think it's a miracle. I think I deserved him! For seventeen years I worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him. And when he finally walked into my life I was just worldly enough, relaxed enough, financially secure enough (for I also worked hard at my job) and adorned with enough glitter to attract him. He wouldn't have looked at me when I was twenty, and I wouldn't have known what to do with him.