The XX Factor: What women really think.

Don't Pour Some Sugar on Me

I’m with Hanna, June, and E.J.: I prefer my sugar self-administered and have never entertained the fantasy of being kept by a sucrose parent of either sex. (Having money and nice things, without having to work hard to pay for them … that’s a whole 'nother fantasy.) Before going on (unpaid) maternity leave, I freelanced like a mofo to sock away money, embarrassed by the prospect of going to my partner hat in hand—though I’m sure he would have been both willing and able to spot me on living expenses had I run short at the end. Maybe this is a result of growing up with a Jill Clayburgh-ian '70s working mother (though my parents stayed married and were well enough off). Honestly, I’ve never even understood what still seems to be an acceptable default assumption that a man should pick up the tab in restaurants on dates. Why, because I have a physiognomy that’s potentially capable of childbearing, should I not be responsible for providing my own nutrition? And doesn’t that moment when the guy gets out his wallet and you don’t do jack make the whole dinner feel like a sordid transaction?

Of course, there’s a world of difference between “someday my prince will come” and a couple with a child making a life that makes sense for them: You work while I take care of the kid for a few years. Then later, when the kid is in school, I go back to work, or maybe we take turns. For people doing it, this arrangement, which often makes more financial and emotional sense than “let’s both work like dogs to pay the baby-sitter,” is often experienced as the furthest thing from a luxury.

I remember thinking about this stuff when Meryl Streep’s character sang “Money, Money, Money” in Mamma Mia!, as a fantasy sequence showed her being kept in style by a zillionaire. The character Streep played, an independent ex-hippie single mother running an inn in Greece, seemed an odd candidate to entertain such a reverie. But, you know, they had to work all those great ABBA songs in somehow.