Is female empowerment killing romance?

That’s the question posed in Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Female Empowerment, Katrin Bennhold’s article that’s part of a series of reports by The International Herald Tribune that examines where women stand in the early 21st century. The article, which  ran in the New York Times earlier this week, argues that the more successful a woman is, the harder it will be for her to find a man. Why? Because “success isn’t sexy.” 


Ladies, those degrees and dollars you’re earning are apparently terrifying and quite damaging to the male ego, which Sasha Havlicek — a 35-year-old chief executive of a London research group who was interviewed for the article — says is “more fragile thing than the female ego, which is used to a regular battering and has hence developed a sense of humor!”


My question is this: Why are we still having this conversation? 


Is there some rule that media outlets must declare, at least once a year, that career-oriented women are emasculating their men?


The article mentions one 38-year-old Italian manager who complained that her boyfriend suggested she change jobs because he no longer felt able to “seduce her” after her salary rose above his and a French management consultant whose husband, an educator, stopped accompanying her to parties because he felt inadequate every time anyone asked him what he did for a living. 


Yet the the story concludes by offering this advice to ambitious women: 

Ms. Domscheit-Berg, who is also active in the European Women’s Management Development International Network, has three bits of advice for well-paid women: Leave the snazzy company car at home on the first date; find your life partner in your 20s, rather than your 30s, before you’ve become too successful. And go after men who draw their confidence from sources other than money, like academics and artists.

Where are the articles telling these insecure men to suck it up?! Where are the stories reminding these men that how much you earn doesn’t determine how much of a man you are? Where are the reports conveying to these guys that the fact that they make less than their women doesn’t make them less of a man, but the fact that they’re whining about it does? 


Why are successful women always the villains? Sure, there may be some women out there who out earn their men and treat their mates with less respect because of this, but those women are jerks and would be with or without a large paycheck. 


Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon.com seemed to find this article just as annoying as I did and decided to get some men to weigh in on the matter.


It was refreshing to see that men interviewed for the Salon piece agreed that “the male need to lord economic or occupational power over their mates is already fading.”


The best quote, however, was from Simon, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student, who wrote to Clark-Flory in an e-mail, “I’m sure successful women pose a threat to some guys’ egos, but that’s just to say that some guys are dicks.”


Exactly. 


Georgia Mae readers, what do you think?