Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Some argue that the convention of men paying for women is a harmless gallantry, like holding a door open. I beg to differ.
May 4, 2002 | Lately, when I'm asked what I think a feminist is, I say, "someone who believes she should pay for her own dinner." Some people think this is such a tiny matter that it cannot be a way of answering the question; others laugh and ask what is so awful about having one's dinner paid for. To explain, I have to go back a couple of decades, to when I was 23 years old.
We were in a small Greenwich Village restaurant, my boyfriend Scott and I, and our conversation lagged as we waited for the check. You could get pasta and a salad here for under $10, and the room was pleasant enough, so the place was packed with people in their 20s. As we waited, I calculated my share of the bill, reassured that I'd still have enough for lunch tomorrow, the subway, the Wall Street Journal. Payday, I could not forget, was the day after that.
Every workday I bought the Journal because I couldn't take enough from any one paycheck to buy a subscription. I lived very modestly and close to the financial edge. I found this poverty as surprising as my friends did, for as a financial analyst at an investment bank, I made more money than most 23-year-olds. But even in those days 20 grand did not go far in New York.
The waiter, about our age, tall, thin and actorly, smiled over our table and presented the bill squarely to Scott.
This casual gesture stung like a slap in the face. I wanted to object that the bill belonged in the middle. How could this young, hip-looking waiter, my contemporary, assume I wasn't paying for my own dinner? No, no, I wanted to tell him: I make more than Scott, I'm on Wall Street.
My good mood had dissolved. I knew I wasn't supposed to get upset over trivialities like where the bill was placed; I knew that feminism was about equal pay for equal work, abortion rights and legal issues. Waiters who gave the man the bill were doomed to go the way of ladies' menus without prices. It was just a matter of time.
Twenty years later, as I research a book on money and gender, the young people I interview do not even know that there were menus without prices, but waiters still often place the bill in front of the man in a couple. None of the women I've spoken with seem to mind this, especially if the man pays the bill; and many men still expect to pay the bill if they are dining with a woman. Young women will tell you that they won't see a man a second time if he doesn't pay for the first date; they say it's a matter of respect.
There's an argument that the convention of men paying for women is a harmless gallantry, like holding a door open. I beg to differ. Gallantry is not identical with financial prowess, and I am not trying to ban it. Nor am I trying to collapse the difference between the genders, or to eliminate the small fetishes we use to render them more erotic. Unfortunately many of these have dissolved over the years, some under pressure from misguided feminists, so that we are left with the crudest and least imaginative: those based on money transfers. Vive la difference -- but let it not be parsed in financial terms.
I was angry with that waiter long ago because I was a competent economic actor and he treated me as if I were not. The waiter denied my competence because I was a woman out with a man. His gender stereotyping was especially annoying because Scott, who worked for an NGO, made less money than I did.
My interest in money, and my pride in making it, were very new. I'd gone through Harvard planning to become a philosophy professor, and entered the Ph.D. program in classical philosophy the fall after graduation. To my surprise and dismay, I was bored silly. I also felt trapped financially as never before.
Grad school meant not just the classes, but the ugly wallpaper and furniture from the street I could not afford to replace in the cheap apartment my boyfriend and I shared in a working-class neighborhood of dismal, aging triple-deckers. It was years before I could eat squid ($3 for a 5-pound frozen block) or liver (60 cents a pound) again.
By the end of the spring semester, I'd lost interest in teaching philosophy: I knew I'd go mad if I had to spend the next five years like this. The only ambition that made sense to me any longer was to become rich. Then, I thought, I could turn my attention again to Plato.
I had little idea what being rich meant, having grown up middle class. Wealth really meant the absence of the gray poverty of grad school. Yet I did not tell myself that I wanted to be middle class; I wanted to be rich. The difference for me was symbolic, connected with self-respect and ego more than possessions or experiences. I passionately wanted to be able to say that I was successful, even if it was just to myself that I said it. Money was a good thing, I knew with the unshakable conviction of one for whom it had been short. But the status that money provided was an even better thing.
The reality of my entry-level job on Wall Street wasn't much better, in terms of material conditions, than grad school had been. My apartment, which I shared with a friend, was the world's tiniest two-bedroom, and my room had no window. One cold night I walked three miles home from work because I could not afford the bus, which then cost 75 cents.
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