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After I graduated from college I went to work in the
Sacramento, California office of a large accounting firm, where I
had a supervisor who made no secret of his disdain for the city.
“When people in San Francisco say ‘the Journal,’” he
told me, “they mean the Wall Street Journal. In Sacramento they
mean Ladies’ Home Journal.”
This same cynic was also a disciple of John T. Molloy,
the author of “Dress for Success” and an almost cultish figure among
the yuppies of the day. So how my old boss would react to a recent
article in Ladies’ Home Journal based largely on Molloy’s latest
book is anyone’s guess, but it might be fun to look him up and find
out.
Which I just might do. While I’m at it, I might try to
figure out how Molloy made the jump from wingtips and Windsor knots
to women and wedlock, but he has done exactly that in “Why Men Marry
Some Women and Not Others” (Warner Books).
It turns out to have little to do with clothes, other
than not dressing like a hooker. Molloy was always more of a
statistician than a fashion critic, basing his clothing cues on
extensive surveys rather than style sense. He has taken the same
tack with marriage, polling over 2,500 women and their fiancés as
they left marriage license bureaus, plus about 1,000 singles.
Molloy and his team made the remarkable discovery that
men tend to classify women as either “beddable” or “weddable.” It’s
absolutely Neanderthal, right out of the Stone Age, an atrocious
double standard, blah, blah, blah. It’s also the way a lot of guys
think: There are women you take home to Mom and those you don’t.
Men think it because they get away with it, courtesy of
legions of women who’ve been convinced that the way to a man’s heart
is through his fly. To the contrary, Molloy found women who marry
are less likely to rush into sexual relationships and don’t wait
forever for their dreamboat to pop the question. They insist on
marriage, forcing the wishy-washy to fish, cut bait, or be left at
the dock.
“Take home to Mom” types and commitment threats may be
too much for some to swallow, but not all stereotypes survived
Molloy’s poll taking. Women who marry tend to be accomplished,
self-confident, and talented. For their part, men who marry are
often drawn to successful women, don’t want a Britney Spears
dress-alike, and prefer women to whom they feel equal, not superior.
In fact most men in their 20s listed accomplishment,
talent, or virtue as the characteristic that most drew them to their
fiancées. Men over 40, on the other hand, were more attracted to
women who are easy to get along with. One might read, “Stepford
Wife” into that, but being north of 40 myself I can say without
shame that smoothing over my little quirks isn’t high on my to do
list. My guess is that men over 40 are simply set in their habits
and like it that way. I base this on my own research, which
consists largely of looking in a mirror.
Ladies’ Home Journal did a little polling of its own and
found women aren’t much different than men in what they want in a
spouse. They want nice guys, men who are emotionally and
financially stable, and yes, whom they can take home to Mom.
It would be tempting to file the Ladies’ Home Journal
article under D for “duh” if it weren’t for the fact that Americans
have spent 40 years trying to talk themselves out of the realities
of human nature. If that means John Molloy can make a living
telling people to dress nice and behave so be it, but most
grandmothers could do the same for free.
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