As Tim Worstall notes, Maureen Dowd is whining again. This time, apparently, men want to be mothered before they will marry. She writes:

“I’d been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.”

Well I never. Famous and powerful men want to be looked after. Have you noticed how when they interview those fellas who pay to be dressed in nappies they never seem to be construction workers? It’s simple Maureen. Women are the gatekeepers. For you it’s a seller’s market. That’s why prostitutes are mostly female (and certainly aren’t all young). If you want a man, go looking for a man. If you want a sugar daddy, you’ll get a mummy’s boy.

Jackie D, on the other hand, gets it—that is she understands what the real problem is and she has a boyfriend. Her post about the partner-looking-for-parent problem is sassy, non-sexist, and generous.

“The article is based on an interview with a therapist who says that most people who think and say that they’re after a romantic partnership are really after a parent. They haven’t given up the desire to be parented the way they wish they had been as a child, and they look to their partners to do the things they wish their parents had done: praise them, love them, and meet their needs. As the therapist quoted in the article says, adults meet their own needs, they don’t look for someone else to do it. And when these people break up with their partners because they don’t meet all their needs and read their minds, they end up feeling like abandoned children.

These strike me as very valid, if not totally original, insights. I know so many people whose greatest fear is being alone, so much so that they’ll stay with someone who beats the crap out of them or belittles them constantly, just because they think being alone with themselves would be even worse.”

As far as this sample of one is concerned, the moment a woman starts to resemble my mother—lovely as she is—I’m out of there. (Were I ever foolish enough to try, I’m also sure I couldn’t keep Maureen Dowd in the style to which she would like to become accustomed while she wrote pieces for the New York Times about how devastatingly traumatic giving birth is.)