The XX Factor: What women really think.

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.

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?