Bachelor Girl

was beautiful, successful, she could sing, but there were also the basic and unglamorous facts of her life.

She worked horrible hours, during which she tried, without great success, to be one of the guys. She worked, knowing that she also had to share the bathroom, aka “the unisex,” with these guys. Some of whom she had slept with. While they’d been involved with her colleagues. Of course she met men elsewhere—in court (one of them accused her, loudly, right there, of treating him as a sex object), while out buying coffee (one of these, much later, told her he was bisexual), or at the car wash, where she dreamily followed a cute guy inside… the car wash itself, where he happened to work. She arrived at her own office soaking wet. Once she arrived in court with a bowling ball stuck on her finger. Once she was arrested for tripping a woman in a supermarket. And on and on.

As much as she looked like an L.A. Law alumnas, she had distinct elements of Lucille Ball, or Lucille Ball on LSD. As part of almost every script, Ally hallucinated. For a while she saw singer Al Green in many peculiar situations; of course there was the dancing baby, the diapered metaphor of female failure that appeared in her living room. (She was a good sport and danced with it.) Her sex fantasies took up most of her mental life—a much more realistic approach than the Sex and the City model, in which professional single urban women have sex at least four times a day.

Women loved Ally because she tried yet couldn’t pull all of this together, couldn’t make herself any emotionally or intellectually neater, resolved. She was always in flux—as if flux were a physical condition—and she couldn’t imagine, like most women, what personal earthquake might occur to make it better.

Her British counterpart, Bridget Jones, is less professionally accomplished; in fact, she hasn’t done much to speak of at all, but she has the ability to see and understand every nuance of single social life, and to record her observations in the now notorious diary. Women love her slangy comments on “smug marrieds” and “fuckwit” men. And they love that she can’t do anything more to change the social order than can Ally McBeal. And Ally McBeal is cute. Bridget Jones is overweight. But unlike previous chubby single icons, for example, Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Tyler’s Moore’s old housemate, she doesn’t work the obvious fact into every sentence (the Phyllis Diller school of self-appraisal). Bridget simply records it, along with her cigarette and alcohol intake, and gets on with her life, which often consists of sorting dirty clothes in order to find clean ones. Like Ally, she is self-possessed and funny about her singleton status (an eighteenth-century term updated). She also defends it. One of my favorite scenes in the recent movie adaptation occurs when after a wretched workday Bridget has to attend a dinner party with a horrifying posse of “smug marrieds.” That means a long table full of couples pressed up next to each other in units of two. She’s placed at the head—the evening’s sociological specimen. A man points to his wife’s pregnant belly and makes a tick-tock sound; another man asks why so many career women in their thirties are still not married. She says (I paraphrase), “Maybe it’s because of the fact that their bodies are covered in hideous scales.” No one laughs.

I use the term “slacker spinsters” because these two, like so many women I know in their thirties, seem to be kind of hanging out in the lives that have evolved around them, making sporadic efforts to connect with men, then retreating back to the couch, the TV, or the phone or into an elaborate fantasy. They believe in the possibilities of love, though it’s not clear they fully believe in the beautiful possibilities of marriage. They’ve lived through the same kind of chaos that baby brides list on their resumes. But they’ve come to different conclusions. Primarily, getting married will never guarantee a feeling of safety.

Not that they won’t try. Try hard. Christ, in a desperate situation, they might even read The Rules, or its sort-of sequel, the new “Surrendered Single,” conduct guides for the twenty-first century, as if interpreted by Helen Gurley Brown. But chances are they’d just crack up and throw those books across the room. Where they would land either on the dry cleaning or on a pile of unsorted clothes.

A SINGULAR FURY

Many real-life single women have read The Rules, and now The Surrendered Single, if only from an “anthropological” point of view, or else as a kind of joke. Because how could any intelligent life-form take this best-selling advice as less than hilarious?

Act as if you were born happy!… don’t leave the house without wearing make-up. Put lipstick on even if you’re jogging! If you have a bad nose, get a nose job! Grow your hair long. Men prefer long hair…. Men like women. Don’t act like a man, even if you are the head of your own company…. Don’t tell sarcastic jokes. Don’t be a loud knee-slapping girl.

The Rules and Rules mentality—manipulate, grovel, and lie to get a man—or the Surrendered Single stance—no control, give in, just lie there—does not strike everyone as hilarious or even mildly funny. It makes some women angry. And this angry woman—a New Mad Woman for the Modern Age—gives us a final, more decisive if less adorable archetype than the bemused Ally/Bridget slacker spinster.

“The concept of a person who is out to land men in a deliberately manipulative manner, suggests a frightening dream world,” says Marjorie, twenty-five, unwed, and “seriously not sorry. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I travel all the time. And as a woman I couldn’t take the time out to plot ‘Getting Men.’ This isn’t junior high. Wear lipstick when you are jogging? If this is to be the basis for a relationship, then you might as well not bother…. At least you’d better stop reading. It is so sickening and unfair.”

For these women—the documentary filmmakers, med students, marketing executives, serious artists— dodging the media has become a task as basic to everyday life as recycling plastic seltzer bottles.

For example, there is nothing on the single calendar more irritating than holidays, with all their attendant advice about what it is the single person should do to “survive” them. At least as far as other people are concerned. One particularly annoying festival is the national day of single dread, Valentine’s Day. How many times can a grown woman be expected to read (and I quote from last year, a major newspaper): “Single in New York and Looking for Love: A Special Report on Dating in the New Century,” which here sounds remarkably like the old. A small excerpt:

Looking for love in New York City is harder than finding a seat on an F train to Queens at rush hour. You can get swamped on the platform. Somebody can cut in front of you. The train can go out of service. When it comes to finding that special person—and we’re talking about relationships here, not just sex—a lot of New Yorkers never leave the station…. [these] are a complicated time for singles, between crushing work obligations and confused notions of how men and women should relate to each other.

“It really makes me want to puke,” says Helen, twenty-six, a currently unemployed copywriter who has lived through many Valentine’s Days and found them “more oppressive than Christmas.” She continues:

There is always the huge Valentine story—about how the creative guy proposed to his girlfriend by glueing letters to a Scrabble board. And they are as a couple so urban chic. They are only twenty-three, and yet they live in some amazing loft in TriBeCa and the skinny-girl delicate little bride-to-be is called Amelie or Chantal and she designs, oh, laced gloves or petite evening bags for dogs. And He, the man, wears those nerd glasses and has on a tie for some reason…. You think, these aren’t real people, or these people are models. And of course they have been styled. To get your attention. And to get your goat. TO PISS YOU OFF. I shouldn’t let it happen, have that response, but it’s just very effective advertising.

There’s a kind of story, a series of images, even more bothersome than the corny all-alone holiday story. That is the thousands of stories, in every known form of media—“the relentless hailstorm,” as one former colleague put it—all about having babies and raising kids.

“I think it started with thirtysomething, in the eighties,” says Gail, thirty-nine, a nature photographer.