Still, I didn't feel sorry for myself or exploited. To the contrary: I had a new sort of pride. For the first time in my life I was earning my own keep. Then there was the symbolic value of the money I was earning. It was considered a high entry-level salary, and even if I could hardly live on it, the fact that other people thought it a good income comforted me. Money is an important part of the stories we tell ourselves to keep going, and for me at that time, "making good money" was key to my self-respect. That's why the waiter's placement of the bill in front of my boyfriend hurt so keenly.

Today, when I speak with young women, very few find anything wrong with the premise that men ought to pay for women on dates. Paying is not linked for them with responsibility and self-respect, and this strongly suggests to me that earning isn't linked with responsibility and self-respect either. But male tribute is -- preferably expressed in tangible terms.

Some women say that when a man pays for them, he shows that he values their company. If it were spontaneous, as sometimes happens between friends, there wouldn't be anything dubious about this. But as a convention, this is about subscribing to the values of a commercial society that reckons the value of a thing or experience to be its price. (On this logic, we should all pass out small tips to people who make witty remarks at parties or give gracious compliments.)

They will even admit that a man who spends more money entertaining them rates higher in their esteem than one who doesn't. In their language, he respects them more. If you press one of these women on this issue, she may protest that after all, the men insist on paying, the men very badly want to pay for her dinner.

I wonder. They may offer to pay, but what do they have in mind? Men do not use the language of respect when they talk about treating women to dinner. For some it is a convention they honor, for others one they begrudge. Some men will admit that they won't ask a woman out to dinner unless they can foot the bill for both of them, and that if they are going through a bad financial period they accept that they can't date. Others say that they are always prepared to pay, but that they admire women who offer to pay their share and take them up on it. And some insist on paying all the time, perhaps for reasons that wouldn't make most women happy.

One of these men compared his footing the bill to the territorial marking achieved by a dog peeing on a fire hydrant; for him it was about control. (He also noted that if the woman he was dining with knew more about wine than he did, he would expect her to have sufficient "charm" to let him believe otherwise.) Others claimed they don't mind paying but when they recounted stories of dates gone by, it was clear they have passed many moments over many years watching resentfully over every addition to the bill.

One man was able to recount the price of an errant high-priced entree from 15 years back. How much "respect" did these men really have for the women they dated? And how much of what I couldn't help hearing as disrespect stemmed from resentment at a financial imposition?

Few high-level jobs depend on being able to hold heavy doors open. But most high-level jobs involve making lots of money, and as long as being paid for (being bought) is associated with being feminine, there are powerful unconscious barriers to female success. Transfers of money are more powerfully charged in our culture, and as long as we construe gender as being about the flow of funds from men to women, in some deep but inescapable way all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.

This is not something we should blame on men or the evil patriarchy. Whoever started it, women now bear the lion's share of responsibility for keeping it going. How to stop it? Well, it's amazing how you can just say no. Just put that credit card on the table with the man's. You can even treat him to a meal -- imagine.

Who pays for dinner may be a small and inconsequential matter, but the assumptions underlying these arrangements are not small and inconsequential. It is because women are raised to think of selling themselves -- however metaphorically -- that they choose the jobs and careers they do. Some of the reason for women's stalled progress toward the upper reaches of money and power in the business world has to do with the beliefs about money and self-respect that we all bring, literally, to the table.

Recent Stories