Word: mates
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This is the progress of romance in the past 40 years: one starts out loving an idealized image of a mate (see Vertigo) and winds up loving oneself (see Seinfeld...
...search for the perfect mate isn't seen much these days, yet the image of the ideal wife or husband was, not that long ago, a standard and frequently resurrected cultural myth. Vertigo came out in 1956--the same time that My Fair Lady was opening on Broadway. That story too was of a man who shaped a woman to fit his notion of an ideal, or highly improved, form. But over the years the impulse to idealize lovers pretty much disappeared...
...vestige of the ideal-mate image that still goes strong is the Miss America pageant. To be sure, this too adjusted to modern sensibilities last year when it took a national plebiscite on whether the bathing-suit competition should be continued. (Regis Philbin was the host and arbiter; one assumes that Justice Scalia was unavailable.) No matter; the bathing suits stayed, and the pageant remains a context for the exhibition of perfection--that is, if one's view of perfection includes a woman who, upon one's return home, is pounding the piano and belting out an aria from Carmen...
Several explanations are possible for the disappearance of the idealized mate. Divorce statistics have undoubtedly helped. The main cause is probably the women's movement, which began in modern force not long after Vertigo originally came out and which, like all politically driven events, contained both smart and stupid moves. The basic thrust for equality, however, was impeccable, and it followed as the night the night, that if women were to be the equal of men they would be seen as equally flawed...
Your article about Ross Perot's choosing me as his running mate [NATION, Sept. 23] distorted the description of my prior work. You wrote that after I left my position as Tennessee's commissioner of economic and community development, a state audit found that my "office had spent extravagantly (on staff trips and entertainment) and had 'completely violated' laws regarding competitive bidding." You go on to say I was never formally charged. To clarify the record, it was I who fired two employees--one for filing a false travel-expense report and the other for a false entertainment report...