Bachelor Girl

remember, rooftop daiquiri parties and go-go coed Laundromats.) The singular Web sites and e-zines (“Leather spinsters on the Web—the e-zine for the Happily Unmarried Woman”; “Young Spinster—No Marriage Prospects, No Apologies”) seemed more promising. Here was a new forum for the sardonic, faux-masochistic single sensibility— the self-deprecating jokiness of female stand-up comics—but mixed with fairly serious tables of contents.

Unfortunately, these sites are infested, as are the personals and chat rooms, with intrusive pop-up windows, the first and highest form of Internet graffiti. Some of these ads are for personal services (“alluring” hair braids; all-over body waxing; phone sex to aid in masturbation), while some hype “reconstruct-your-entire-self” kinds of books accompanied by inspirational CDs. A subcategory of these single books—a specimen rampant on Amazon.com—is the wiseass advice manual or what I think of as the clever novelette. The tone is sarcastic and funny, and each comes with lots of reassuring space between the paragraphs and a shiny “cool-girl” cover. (Cool- girl covers are all alike: They feature a skinny, dark-haired, red-nailed cartoon girl wearing a little black dress. Either her arms are folded, or she is smoking. The titles, in retro fifties-era fonts, announce the Go-Girls Guide or Grrrrrl’s Rules for Love and Life, although some titles are long and have a kind of Borscht Belt cuteness, recalling Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York. My favorite in this category: Even God Is Single, So Why Are You Giving Me a Hard Time?)

After touring the cyber singles world, I happily returned to the land of live subjects. But this last round of interviewing mirrored my experience playing around on the Web: Conversations were so digressive that in the span of minutes the person, talking about workplace dynamics, was very, very angry at some man she had not seen for several years and also, it seemed, if you asked her, that her nieces were the only sane or attractive thing about her sister. A number of women in their twenties talked for a very long time about the fun of writing and posting personals on various agreed-upon “cool” Internet sites. Many of them did it for the “hits,” the number of responses they got to the descriptions they’d written of themselves. Often they did not actually go on these dates. But the hits were a way of “moving self-esteem” and “keeping up.” Other women just stared at me and after checking messages and retracing lipstick wondered what I could possibly have to ask them. In fact, some women over thirty-five seemed to suffer a kind of celebritylike ennui, as if they had heard all the questions before and didn’t really need to hear them again before answering.

Here, a random sampling from my notes:

1) Dates with men are more annoying than ever because many men are either divorced or widowed or just too young and believe it is the “point” of the evening to sit down and talk at length—often “through the entrees”— about themselves. On the other hand, dates are great for just this reason because they’re over quickly and do not require any chancy emotional interest, nor even that one pay attention. Then, from other points of view, that’s not the way it is at all; it’s reverse sexism by horny disappointed women to say that men hog conversation. There is also the view that this is an inaccurate scenario because no one has a date of such length without a less risky meeting for drinks or lunch or on an airplane first.

2) “Older” single women are, in the span of one afternoon and three conversations, first cool pioneers figuring out how to live singly, or make communities, and have children, or else they are unbelievably pathetic losers. People who waited. People who were deluded by feminism. People who will have nasty experiences with Pergonal and Clomid. And depending on the circumstance—the speaker—“old” can occur at 30 or 35 or 40, 50 or 27.

I tried to find a clear passage, a defining subject line, through my notes. Margaret, forty-two, a talk-show booker who’s twice divorced, said, “Forget it…. the single world is teeming.” She did not view it as a continent or a refugee camp. As she saw it, “What you have here is a swamp.”

If distinct single archetypes seem for the moment to have blurred, the conviction that single women are social outcasts—odd women who require constant translation—remains intact. Wherever she is, perhaps in a waiting room or on an airplane or lost in the morass of the Internet, she’ll eventually find a story about her uncertain future and her inevitable regret. As always, the story will include picture of a lone single woman holding a ginger-colored or Siamese Pywacket cat. I’ve got a picture in front of me now as I write, part of a recent Daily News special on women who insist (again and again) that they don’t want to have children. The caption beneath a photo of a long-haired woman with her stretching cat: “Her cats are enough, says busy filmmaker Donna Gilardi, 35, about her decision not, ever, to have children.”

But if one stays with it, ignores all the ads and distractions and contradictions, there are discernible single icons for the new century. To bring them more fully into focus it’s necessary to look at those immediately preceding—the single types that were introduced and viciously attacked during the 1980s and ’90s.

THE BIG CHILL: THE ANTISINGLE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES

During the 1980s bookshelves were crammed with punishing tirades: Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women; A Lesser Life; Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and many tomes that featured the words “biological clock,” a phrase repeated so often I began to think of it as a body part, perhaps a moody colon or a giant cyst. I include as an adjunct to this sad single genre the Cathy cartoon books, which seem innocuous enough until, on the fourth or fifth volume, the self-deprecation starts to seem like a pathological tic. In retrospect, I also think the most popular cat book of the era—and at the time “cat” was its own publishing category—played on stereotypes associated with single women. Garfield was a male cat, but his primary characteristics were borrowed from traits commonly ascribed to single females: he was fat, eccentric, sneaky, and lived in constant anticipation of food because there was nothing else in his life.

These books had various points to make, but the primary conclusions were always, however expressed or disguised, that women had paid an enormous personal price for the successes of feminism, in particular the demands and sacrifices required by their jobs. Married women with children, those said to “juggle”—the euphemism for impossible trade-offs between work and family—were well known to confront physical breakdown if they did not ultimately choose the part-time “mommy track,” meaning the relinquishing of their career goals to work a nontenured, nonpartner three-day week that allowed them to leave at five.

The single woman confronted different kinds of possible and likely breakdowns. One of these, as described by a USA Today reporter in 1989, was “an O.D. of Machisma.” The other can be summarized as a kind of all new quiet spinsterly death by pathos.

This last was best described in a 1991 story, “What About Alice?,” that appeared in The Washington Post. The piece, written by a man, began, “I shall invent a woman.” And he did. A prototypical lawyer, good salary, fairly attractive, and, at thirty, still unwed. As the story begins, it was “dawning on Alice that she [might] never get married. And the same thing seemed to be occurring to many others she knew.” Nobody understood why, but that’s how “things were working out” and it was becoming frustrating. And expensive. Her creator explained:

Alice is tired of celebrating the milestones of others. Sometimes her life is a wearying round of parties and weddings, showers and more parties. She is asked to celebrate what she is coming to see as reminders of her own failure: The engagements, weddings and babies of others. Each invitation is like a flunking report card. These events are not only emotionally draining. They are costly as well.

“Alice,” he wrote, as if addressing all the unmarried law-school grads and unattached MBAs of the universe, “my heart goes out to you. You are the grim smile of every Academy Award loser.” And he concluded by reminding us that Alice did not exist. Had she been real, she’d have “broken your heart.” For all those like her—those contending with their non-chance of marriage, all those still forced to argue (years later!) about Fatal Attraction—it sounded grim. The San Francisco Chronicle summarized the dating climate, circa 1990, as an anti–greeting card: “Modern romance is a mess. To enter this magic land, one must maneuver through a gantlet of expectations, confusing miscommunications, desperate avoidance of intimacy