"So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax?"

Asks Maureen Dowd in an essay (not buried behind TimesSelect!) that agonizes over the dating and marriage prospects of powerful women:

[T]he aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.

A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

Ah, who needs to get married if you can go to the White House correspondents' dinner and hang out with a beautiful actress!

After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."

Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."

Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.

So I've heard. Doesn't this make the men sound so unappealing that you wouldn't even want to marry them?

(Much more in the article, if you're interested in this sort of thing. It does include a sex tip involving a doughnut... if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

UPDATE: Don't miss the caption contest Drudge is running for the photograph of Dowd that appears with the essay. I'm sure the Althouse commenters can come up with better!