(Since Dowd's experience figures so prominently throughout her book, allow me a personal aside here: Why are women so often drawn to grand, totalizing theories to make sense of their individual regrets? I'm roughly Dowd's age and have never been married — a fact I account for not with an anthropological hypothesis but with the rather narrow observation that I've yet to find a supermodel PhD whose standards were low enough to have me.)

The problem with devoting a chapter to the notion that male power attracts women but female power repels men is twofold: In the first place, it's mind-numbingly trite. How many sitcoms through the years, from The Honeymooners to The Simpsons, have run episodes in which the male lead feels threatened by the prospect of his girlfriend or wife outdoing him? And in the second place, it's a grotesque oversimplification. How many straight single men in America would turn down a date with Angelina Jolie because she earns more than they do? Same question for Anna Kournikova, Amanda Peet, and Aisha Tyler.