The XX Factor: What women really think.

What Do Writers Really Do?

Author J. Robert Lennon has a very amusing and delightfully honest story in the Los Angeles Times, "The Truth About Writers," that answers any gnawing questions you may have had regarding exactly what writers are doing with all that time in which they claim to be writing. Writing? Mmmm. Not exactly. In fact, most of their writing time is spent... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Women, Writing, and Work

... surveying this history, it seems that before the 1970s there was nothing more conducive to a[n American] woman's literary success than the failure of the men in her life. More often than not, what prompted these writers to sit down at their desks and send out their manuscripts to magazines and book publishers was the bankruptcy, desertion, idleness or death of her husband or father. When the touted sanctuary of the nuclear family let them down, and they needed the money to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads, their talents were finally loosed.

Sweet Apartment, But I'm Bitter

Dana, I had a similar response to Nina's post about that amazing living situation for Roselyn Leibowitz and Catherine Redmond, the two friends profiled in Sunday's New York Times. Given all the moaning and fantasizing we all did recently about how to achieve financial contentment without trading in our less than lucrative professions, I can't imagine how these two artists could pull off $3 million in renovations. Do I smell a sugar daddy lurking behind that newly installed kitchen counter?


The whole thing was especially depressing to me after going this weekend to look at apartments with my own platonic, best friend roommate. Our tiny tiny apartment has become a little too tiny tiny for us, but even a place with one extra notch of breathing room (while staying within our price range) is so horribly far from what Leibowitz and Redmond get to call home. Ninety yards of book shelves?? We'd be happy just to have our beds not be pushed up against opposite sides of the same wall.

Um, that said...anyone know of some spacious yet affordable-for-journalists-without-sugar-daddies apartment in Brooklyn? Let me know! We are wonderfully responsible tenants!

Sugar Friendies?

Nina, so funny you posted on that Times Homes & Garden piece about the two older women sharing connected lofts -- I had the link all clipped and ready to send to my best friend in Texas, proposing an arrangement just like this if we ever find ourselves widowed, divorced or otherwise single. (For the moment, I'm very fond of both my roommates, one of whom, as you put it, I gave birth to myself.) But then I got to thinking about the implications of one woman paying for the entire ($3 million dollar!) loft and all the renovations, and never did send my friend the link. Whether or not the two parties are romantically involved -- and I did love the fact that these two women were just buddies -- the power imbalance there just felt too creepy.

Little McMansion on the Prairie

I'm admittedly coming very late to the lengthy, sugar-daddy exchange, but maybe for that reason, after reading all the posts at once, I think it's worth acknowledging what a privileged, upper-middle-class discussion this is. After all, these days, most people scarcely dare dream of keeping their lousy, $7-an-hour job, much less of self-actualization. The desire for nannies, private schools (and for the record, my daughter, to date, has benefited from both, so I’m not casting stones)—such accoutrements are beyond the reach of 90 percent, maybe even 95 percent, of all Americans. And I wonder if this normalization of luxury desires, which Paul Krugman has lamented as one aspect of the new (now surely passed) "Gilded Age," isn’t part of what’s gone wrong in our country over the last 30 to 40 years.

When I was growing up in Dallas, even the wealthiest families in town often drove average, American-made cars. Yes, teenagers were as fashion-conscious as today, but keeping up with the Joneses didn't cost an arm or an iPod. (I still remember when you could buy clothes on layaway at Casual Corner.) Even affluent families often saved up for years for major home purchases, such as a new sofa or dining-room table. By contrast, as the real-estate bubble expanded, shelter magazines exhorted us to change our entire look—from, say, shabby chic to ultra-cool modern—every few years, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Furniture from Ikea is almost disposable. As a kid, I don’t recall a single family (including my own) that replaced its kitchen or bathroom counters. And there were plenty of fine home cooks who somehow managed without a Viking stove or All-Clad cookware.

Yet, in recent years, many average, middle-class families often seemed to want it all—and by “all” I don’t mean work-life balance—but the German (or at least Swedish) car, the multi-thousand-square-foot home, the remodeled kitchen or bath, the beautiful Eames furnishings, the designer shoes and handbags, every foodie kitchen appliance (whether anyone in the home actually cooked or not), in addition to the scheduled kids, the nanny and "best" schools. Even for those on a budget, high design has trickled down to the masses and can now be purchased at Target. Some of that, no doubt, is all for the good: I have no problem with everyone getting to enjoy a Michael Graves teapot.

But in my own life, I yearn to be satisfied with less and struggle with how to hold on to what really matters (which typically costs surprisingly little) in the distracting, expensive clutter of American life. Recently, I was reading the Little House books to my daughter, who is now 5, and kept having this pang for a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor swept clean by a straw broom, no more clothes or furnishings than one could carry in a covered wagon and instead of the usual Christmas bonanza of plastic toys, a tin cup, a piece of candy, and a shiny new penny. That’s a fantasy, too, of course—and equally out of reach. But nowadays when I dream, that’s what I often think of, not Sugar Pa.

Sugar Mommy Seeks Bigger ... Kitchen

Sugar Daddies, an XY Perspective

A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:

Nina's excellent post inspired me to volley back from the male side of the Slate court. I'm also twentysomething, also living off an unlavish editorial paycheck, and parts of this discussion leave me quaking in my holey boots. If the brilliant and accomplished women of my peer group secretly hope to snag men who are filthy rich—or who happen to be filthy rich (and the distinction there seems so thin you could make shadow puppets behind it)—then I might as well tonsure my head and hone my bocce skills now. Noreen's brilliantly described vertiginous landscape is eerily close to mine.

Which is why I suspect that Nina, June, and others are right: This is definitely a complexly gendered issue, but it's a vocational issue, too. What sort of writer—or filmmaker or songwriter—wouldn't go weak-kneed at the prospect of a benefactor? I've certainly shared June's Pookie fantasy. (In fact, sugar daddies themselves are hardly relegated to one gender: The dowager-with-stud trope has been immortalized from Laura to Alfie to just about everything in which the phrase pool boy has ever been uttered.) Many of us tell ourselves that a chance to do good, meaningful work is worth some sacrifice. From there, it's easy for both men and women to fall into the trap of thinking that a less-than-scintillating partnership is worth the opportunities it affords. Hence the tendency that alarmed Hanna: the place where self-possessed ambition and domestic prostitution cross.

Of course, the idea that one's work would sparkle under the influence of a clear schedule and a seaside cottage—equally the fantasy of men in the profession, I'd offer—is probably a canard. As Jessica suggests, people with a windfall of time and money tend to end up mushy as an apple in a steam bath, even if they started with sharp minds and orderly ambitions. There is a chance to catch up (at last!) on your reading or home improvement. There is the endless rewriting of sentences. There is the all-devouring black hole of the Brookstone catalog. Meanwhile: Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children while working full-time at an ad agency, Joan Didion did her best work in a partnership of two young freelancers with a small kid, and J.K. Rowling—well, everyone knows about J.K. Rowling. I'm baldly naive, but I'd like to think that learning how to do good creative work among these pressures—the process of making it work—helped those writers hit their strides on more than the electric bill.

"All I Think About Is Money"

I keep meaning to try to enter the Sugar Daddy/Cinderella Complex discussion, and then somebody keeps posting and saying what I was going to say, only better, so at the risk of being repetitive, I agree with (most recently) Nina. The way I read it, Abby Ellin's quote and subsequent confessions of similar fantasies are more an expression of the ancient writer's wish—for a financial bailout—than a scary new anti-feminist expression of wanting and expecting a man to support you. (I mean, having freelance writers contribute a bunch of the essays in a book on women and money is bound to skew the sample in favor of acute need, and hardly seems representative.)

And it is an ancient writer's wish: Worthwhile writing is notoriously nonremunerative, as evidenced (in the unlikely event any of us need evidence) by the fact that Edmund Wilson wrote one bit of his prose on the back of an eviction notice. And I do think that historically, male writers have been perfectly willing to accept venture capital from wives and girlfriends, not to mention parents, patrons, friends, ski resorts (Hemingway was lured to Ketchum, Idaho, because the Sun Valley Lodge offered him a room of his own there, hoping his outdoorsman persona would lure summer tourists) and anybody else willing to bankroll their genius. Virginia Woolf notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that historically, the sort of person who believes in a writer's potential unconditionally, and is willing to work to support it, often tends to be somebody like ... a wife. The late Studs Terkel relied on his wife's income when he was getting started in broadcasting: "I borrowed 20 bucks from her for our first date," he happily recalled, "I never paid her back." More recently, in Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece about late bloomers, he discusses writer Ben Fountain, who quit practicing law to write fiction, and for many years was supported by his attorney wife, Sharon, to whom he is appealingly grateful. (I think one experience modern male writers may be enjoying is that the wives who support them now have more lucrative jobs than they once could have.) My own favorite, albeit fictional, example is the playwright-actor played by the playwright-actor Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre. Back when he was a rich kid living on the Upper East Side, the Wally character marvels, "all I thought about was art and music," and in this he was strikingly like Ellin and her cohort, or really any writer who grew up in upper-middle-class comfort. But now that he's a middle-aged writer and knows how hard it is to keep the lifestyle to which he'd become accustomed, "all I think about is money." In the movie, Wally's girlfriend has taken a waitressing job to support the household.  "After all, somebody had to bring in a little money." (These quotes are based on a transcript I found on the Internet and hopefully are reliable—they exactly tally with my 20-year-old memory of the movie.)

Back when I was on book leave and had run through my advance, all I could think about was Wally's insight.

Really, there's nothing new, for a writer, in feeling desperate about money and wishing somebody would go out and earn some for you. There's nothing new about wanting and needing a patron. The dream of being supported, literally, may be a fantasy, sometimes, but sometimes it is a real need and results in, for example, a major piece of work. I don't worry that Abby Ellin's secret fantasy is representative of her generation; I do think it's representative of her profession. But it's interesting how hard it can be to determine whether the idea of a woman wanting a man to support her, in today's world, represents a retrograde arrangement or a bold new paradigm, and how much anxiety we feel about making that determination.

What's So Wrong With Dreaming?

I don't know that I've ever had the sugar-daddy fantasy, but I suppose I had expectations, because after I got married I remember having the revelation that my husband was never going to care about money or know anything about managing money, so I was going to have to learn all that stuff.

But, I guess my question is, what's so wrong with having a fantasy?

I may not have had the sugar-daddy fantasy, but I have certainly had the winning-the-lottery fantasy-many times. And I think they are comparable in a lot of ways-they are really about hoping that you will be taken care of and let off the hook, at least for a short while. Fantasizing about these things is a little vacation from the stresses of life.

Now I know there is a difference, too. You can't really do anything to make the winning-the-lottery fantasy come true-at most you'll lose a couple of bucks-while you can decide that you really do want to marry a rich guy and do whatever it takes to make it happen and might end up losing your identity. Maybe.

And, believe me, some days I kick myself because frankly, it never ever in a million years occurred to me to marry for money or even to look for a guy with money or even to think about money. In fact, I was turned off by business-types. In high school, a friend of my sister's had an incredibly thorough checklist for what she wanted in a husband, down to a specific height range. No, me, I had a different kind of fantasy. I was always attracted to artists: actors, musicians, filmmakers, writers.

More than being poor, I was terrified of being ordinary, normal, middle-class, like everyone else. Yes, you can call me April Wheeler. This is no doubt why I fell in love with the book Revolutionary Road when I first read it in grad school many years ago (aside from the brilliant writing by the extremely under-appreciated Richard Yates). Yes, I was terrified of being Frank and April Wheeler. (Now that I'm older, and I've revisited the Wheelers in the book and the movie, my opinion of them has changed quite a bit.)

I remember saying to my punk high school boyfriend (yes, I am Gen X, not Y-as is Abby Ellin, whom I went to graduate school with) that I was worried that someday I'd end up living in the suburbs married to a fat doctor. Would that I was married to a fat doctor now! Preferably one in private practice!

But no, all I wanted in life was to marry my high school boyfriend, move to New York, and live la vie boheme.

That didn't happen. Because there is a difference between our fantasy lives and our real lives.

But I digress. My point, ladies, is that fantasies are thoughts, and thoughts are free and should have free range. They are a way of trying things on for size, of working things out. I've fantasized about having sex with people I'd never really have sex with, killing people who have slighted me when of course I would never really kill anyone (I hope), relatives dying (God forbid) and leaving me a lot of money, but that doesn't mean I go out and hire a hit man. These are fantasies, not life plans. And there is a big difference.

Is It Really Just A Woman Thing?

Juliet, I also think we're talking about at least two different kinds of fantasies in this sugar-daddy conversation. On one hand, there's the writer's desire for a magical windfall that allows her to pursue her pure-hearted literary dreams unfettered by dirty money business. (And on that point, Virginia Woolf has us all beat by a few decades with her sugar-auntie scenario in A Room of One's Own.) I'm not convinced that that fantasy is particularly gendered, or even generational, though I'm sure it has a lot to do with one's class upbringing.

The other fantasy is about wanting someone to swoop in and take responsibility for all the big, scary, money-related issues that loom in grown-up land: mortgages, tuition payments, health insurance, 401(k)s. And that, to me, has more to do with Americans' seeming inability/unwillingness to face their own economic realities and make responsible financial choices than a failing in American women, specifically. (My mother, a financial consultant who is always trying to convince me that America's days as a superpower are numbered, likes to point out that people in Asia put something ridiculous like 25 percent of their paychecks into savings. The mind boggles.)

On both points, I direct you all to Meghan Daum's excellent essay, "My Misspent Youth," which I think is an excellent cautionary tale for young, creative urbanites, female or otherwise. Daum was a very successful New York-based freelancer who realized, at some point, that she was way over her head in debt and decided to move to Lincoln, Neb., and she's particularly good at illuminating the kind of double-speak and self-justifications creative types make in the face of impending financial doom (and this was written almost 10 years ago).

Whatever Will Be, Will Be

Oh, Bonnie, thanks for that inspiring and wise post. With a job I love, a child that is a serious contender for the title of world's greatest kid (I know every parent thinks that, but hey, one of us has to be right, right?), not to mention a partner so devoted, hardworking, and cute that I recently compared him to Wall-E, I know I have precious little to bitch about. (Not that that's ever stopped me before.) The story of your years as a single-mom private investigator in D.C. is riveting (have you pitched this to Showtime yet?), and that vision of happily-ever-after—you and your honey pursuing your writing on separate floors, with occasional YMCA breaks—is something to aspire to. (Oh, and thanks for calling me "thirtysomething." Heh.)

And Samantha, because you solicited our thoughts on what to say to a daughter daydreaming about a financial Prince Charming: Though I'm sure it is likely happen at some point, I would be horrified. This is why I plan to keep her away as long as possible from Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid—pretty much any Disney movie or other heterosexual rescue fantasy. Can't she have a few years of imagining her life in some way unbound by those narratives?

My grandmother used to sing my siblings and me a song, "Que Sera Sera" (it's the song sung by Doris Day to her son at the creepy climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much.) The lyrics of the first verse go like this: "When I was just a little girl/ I asked my mother, what will I be?/ Will I be pretty, will I be rich?/ Here's what she said to me ..." Now, since I'm put off by the the values espoused in those lines, I sing it to my daughter like this: "Will I be happy/Will I be strong?" I know my doctored version won't keep the princess fantasies at bay forever, but whatever will be will be.

On Happily Ever After

Not to be overly clichéd here but, Dahlia, Hanna, Emily, and Dana, you are right now having the best and most exciting moments in your crowded, demanding, and conflict-filled lives and are incidentally superb role models for Jessica, Samantha (welcome to both!) and Noreen's Gen Y cohort. You awe-inspiring thirtysomething mommies can enjoy who you became for the next couple decades while only having to work like dogs to keep the inconsistencies and chaos (brunch and a birthday party?) at a tolerable level. When I was in the throes of work-life balancing, long before Queen made it a lyric, I used to whisper to myself during especially hectic periods, "These are the days of our lives." Not much time to appreciate them, but deeply exhaustingly satisfying. (Speaking of role models, Dana, Pearl sees that her mommy loves her work. One day your little boss lady will thrive in her own professional glory.)  

As the most chronologically advanced of the women in this discussion (though the least experienced writer), my career and education opportunities were measured by an entirely different rubric than either of you post-feminist generations of women. In the late '70s, I was a high-school educated, comparatively underprivileged, unwed mother raising a first-grader in Washington, D.C.'s pre-gentrified Adams Morgan neighborhood. I was not expecting Prince Charming to rescue us. I cobbled together day care, latchkeys and a series of live-in babysitters for my little girl while I used my investigative talents to earn our keep. I earnestly tried freelance writing but the reality of 10 cents a word, even counting in 1978 dimes, was unworkable.

As it was, my long hours on client matters spilled over to homework hastily completed in the McDonald's booth after bedtime. When my daughter was 12, I married a guy who wrote books for a living. He poured the proceeds from five novels into shoring up our collapsing kitchen. He adopted my daughter, and we adopted him. Since he and I were in our mid-30s and each owned a mortgaged D.C. row house, we wondered if we needed a prenup. This was it: We each declared soberly, "Everything I have is yours."  

Who supports whom in a marriage is always a matter of perspective. Either way, we pooled our resources. Two incomes are better than one. My steady investigative work and his sometimes lucrative flights of imagination paid for "private schools for future children." My daughter grew up a steadfast professional who loves her demanding work as a documentary maker, pays her own mortgage, and looks forward to having children to complain about. My Prince Charming and I are now child-free, both at-home writers' with offices on separate floors. Some days we leave the house only to work out at the YMCA. Samantha, you and your generational cohorts may not build the same cozy lifestyle as your parents but you may be thrilled to discover you build something more exciting and enriching when you work harder for it. In the end, the fantasy is whatever you make of it.

2 Types of Sugar Daddies

Richard Gere Need Not Apply

The more I read these posts about the struggle of the work-life balance, the more I realize that I should refine my initial definition of the sugar daddy that I at some level, coldly practical though it may be, want. To have a true sugar-daddy/daughter relationship (wow, it sounds a whole lot grosser when you add the "daughter" half), the woman is supposed to be sort of indebted, right? Even if he tells her she isn't? I'm picturing a Pretty Woman scenario: No matter how much you've changed his life in that sexy red dress of yours, as long as he's still the sole provider, you're still the whore.

That's not what I want. That's humorously far from what I want, and I'd imagine the same is true for many women my age. But Melinda, I've had those co-workers you mention, the ones who pull me and other twentysomething women aside and tell us that they're making less money now than they did before they left to raise their kids. It doesn't make me resent them; it makes me terrified.

So the fantasy, as June calls it, of the rich white knight who takes all your money worries away is just my flippant answer to the troubling questions that bubble up when that co-worker spouts the truth about salaries after a lengthy maternity leave, or when I read those doomsday articles. I don't really think a man will take all my troubles away, nor do I let that vague hope prevent me from the sort of aggressive self-promotion you advise, E.J. (Believe me, it took a painful amount of that to get hired at Slate!) But instead of tackling how I'm actually going to make the whole thing work—which at this point seems more an exercise in self-induced anxiety than practicality—I just pencil in the easiest solution, the fantasy solution: a rich husband. (For the record, in that fantasy, he's someone I love and respect, and part of that means he's someone who wants me to keep up my job and be successful. He just wants to pay our bills while doing it.)

The part that troubles me is that I think males probably pencil in something different when they're confronting problems, and it's probably more along the lines of "work harder." So as much as I believe I'm doing my damnedest to get ahead despite my deep-pocketed-dream-man backup plan, I wonder if I'd be going at it differently if I hadn't grown up thinking "maybe my financial situation will someday be solved by marriage," and instead had spent those years expecting that I'd have to fix it myself.

A question for the mothers of the group: If your daughter ever said "When I marry my rich husband ..." as I started doing from a frighteningly young age, would your stomach drop? Would you think you had failed somehow as a role model?

How Work-Life Balance Is Like the George Bush Center for Intelligence (Oxymorons R Us)

On Not Sugarcoating the Future

That's a good question, Dahlia, and the answer for me is definitely wanting that economic security later. I don't claim to speak for all of twentysomething ladies, but when I fantasize about my work-life balance, I want what my parents had. They're both doctors who met in med school. My mother is a psychiatrist, my father, a cardiologist. From the time my brother was born, we had a housekeeper who did not live with us, but was with the family from 9 to 5 on weekdays. When I was 8 or so, my mom went into her private practice full time, and so worked from home, though was largely not available during the day. We always had dinner as a family and when we were little, my dad did the majority of the playing with my brother and me. Also, we went to a good suburban public school, if that's relevant. My parents both still work more or less full time.

Do I expect the full time housekeeper on a writer/editor salary?  Of course not. Does it sound nice in my fantasy world? Dear God, yes. As both Dahlia and Dana expressed, I have no idea what the reality of working motherhood is like. As Noreen points out, this is all still theoretical. I agree that the scars of this financial downturn will change the way Gen-Y thinks about money, Noreen. However, I also think we're more resilient and technologically adaptable than some of the generations before us. Even before this meltdown, we didn't expect company loyalty or consistency, so beyond the cosmetic (less conspicuous consumption, botox, and $400 strollers) I don't think there will be a major restructuring of romantico-fiscal relationships (and yes, I just made that word up).

And even though I aspire to my mother's example, she still likes to tell the story about how my brother burst into tears at his kindergarten class picnic because she had to leave and go to work. "You can't leave me!" he cried. The story is told jokingly, but you can tell that 25 years later, she still feels vaguely guilty. Maybe, as Dana suggested, Obama can help move policy toward helping working women, but I'm not holding my breath. Nor am I expecting to not feel conflicted about my work-life balance. Jeez, this conversation is making me really glad that I'm living in child-free, economically unencumbered sin with my boyfriend.

Mama, Can I Come to Your Lifehacking Seminar?

Dahlia, now I'm cracking up at the image of you racing off to give talks on work-life balance while two midgets yank at your coat begging you not to go. "Hands off! I have to go talk about work-life balance!"

The Economic Terror Dream

For most of us, the 20s aren't the most financially stable decade of our lives. But it doesn't seem that bad, since we've been instilled with the sense that there is a way to practice what E.J preaches, to "figure out how to dive in and turn your education and talents into your own income." Eventually the instability will be a charming memory, and you'll be nostalgic for a simpler era when you ate scrambled eggs for dinner multiple times a week.

Except if you're in your 20s right now, you're likely to toggle your browser from your slim checking account to front page headlines not just about staggeringly high unemployment rates and the collapse of the financial system as we know it, but also the slow death of various industries, perhaps including your own. Building a sustainable career in certain industries starts to seem less achievable, even one that's not the sparkling husband-supported freelance romp we're all debating. So, on the one hand, the Samantha scenario seems coldly practical. But, as June aptly pointed out, it's also a delightful fantasy, one that seems tailor-made to counteract the scary front-page news these days. If, as Susan Faludi has written, that after 9/11 we collectively fantasized about cowboys and supermen, retreating to old-fashioned gender roles to comfort our terror, what fantasy are we going to cook up in this depression, when we're confronted not with death but with financial ruin? Maybe it's just that stable guy or girl who is just as much checkbook-affirming as life-affirming.

And of course, these fantasies aren't just coming from our isolated brains, as my sister pointed out in an e-mail to me this morning, "In romantic comedies that the heroine is always somewhat artsy or in publishing and 'independent' and powerful, but then the guy comes in and typically one of the plotlines involves her professionally and personally dissolving." There will probably be lots more film moments like the odd Mama Mia! one Dana noticed coming up, since naturally we love to see comfort fare when we're down. But what will be really interesting will be to look in ten years or so, when the Gen Y-ers have made more of our choices. Dahlia's right that it all seems a little theoretical now for most women my age (the Mr. Howell fantasy is at least in part a way of buying mental space and allowing yourself time to work on your career without making money your main motivation) but philosophy shapes practice. So how will the scars of this scary financial moment affect the way we structure our careers and marriages? Or will they—am I overblowing this?

Now or Later?

Here’s the only quibble I have with your smart (if depressing) post, Dana. I wrote yesterday assuming that younger unmarried women are fretting about such things as work-life balance when constructing their fantasy lives. But on second thought, I wonder if that’s really what’s driving Sam and some of Jessica’s young writers into the arms of Daddy Warbucks. I'm reconsidering because I’m sometimes asked to speak to students about work-life balance, and two things always strike me: 1) Men never show up to these talks;  and 2) women can’t really imagine what its like to have a toddler yelling “mommy don’t work” as they struggle into their Spanx, because until you’ve actually experienced the sheer lunacy of working motherhood, it seems like it might be sort of manageable. So I guess I am asking the younger women in the group to clarify whether they want Mr. Howell for now or for later?

Sugar Pie in the Sky

Jessica, I want to know: What are these fabulous, creative, part-time jobs that we would all be enjoying if only our putative sugar parents would subsidize us? Is there a job, freelance or no, that offers "lucrative assignments and continued relevance" (not to mention a dental plan) and that doesn't entail longer hours of work than anyone with a child (or anyone who wants a rich personal life outside of work) can possibly spare? I fear that Dahlia's stark assessment of the reality of working motherhood is soberingly true: If you dedicate yourself to excelling in your field, you will daily find yourself enacting scenarios from the Harry Chapin ballad "Cat's in the Cradle," that AM-radio classic in which a busy father misses out on his son's childhood because ... oh, don't make me describe that song, I'll start weeping. I talked about this a bit in Slate's Movie Club yesterday when I described my daughter yelling "Don't work!" as I hustle off to yet another movie screening at 6 p.m. To be a working mother is to be told daily by everyone, including an authority as irrefutable as your own 2-year-old, that you're doing it all wrong. And they're all, in some way, right—but what's the alternative? Is there any middle ground between "Cat's in the Cradle" and sitting home smoking Djarums on someone else's dime?

It seems to me that what Jessica's asking for—and it's a completely legitimate thing for the next generation of women to want—isn't so much a wealthy suitor as a restructuring of the American workplace, not to mention the American educational system. Why marry Thurston Howell III to ensure your kid a spot in private school when there's a good public school down the block? Maybe Barack Obama will be our Prince Charming. But with the economy in the shape it's in, he ain't gonna be anybody's sugar daddy.