by MARIANA ZEPEDA ’14 and KRISTEN GREEN ’14
Online Editor and Features Editor
Hold up! Of all the knowledge bombs Susan Patton dropped in her “Little Valentine’s Day Straight Talk,” there’s one piece of information that has strangely been glossed over by the press. Apparently, ladies, apart from being misled by ‘the feminists’ for all these years (Women are equal to men? Please!), we also have to deal with the nasty repercussions of a selectively Benjamin Button-esque world. Yep, the truth is out. Smart, ambitious women:
“You’re not getting any younger, but the competition for the men you’d be interested in marrying most definitely is.”
Is it just us, or is Patton actually saying that people out there (specifically the bimbos who are covertly Snapchatting your potential mate) are getting younger? Gulp!
For those of you who haven’t read the best social commentary published in years (Modern Love, you are seriously lagging), Patton, our favorite Princeton mom, the mom every girl wishes she had, is back—because we don’t need a mother to inspire us to follow our dreams or tell us we’re every bit as smart and capable as the men in our lives, or even suggest we can have it all. We just need someone to tell us the cold, hard truth. Thankfully, Patton published another bastion of wisdom in the form of an anti-sushi for one Wall Street Journal blog post. Her message, again: Smarten up, ladies! Forget professional advancement and focus on finding a husband—or at least keep in touch with the guys you meet at your elite college, because, let’s face it, it’s slim-pickings out there.
Patton has already been parodied by several media outlets. In Slate, Katy Waldman dissected the article, writing up a tally to calculate whether the piece is more offensive to men or to women (spoiler: Patton’s remarks are equally offensive to all genders). The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri reiterated Patton’s reality check without all the Princeton mom’s pesky sugar-coating—and thankfully, underscored the disastrous consequences of marrying a man who does not read Noam Chomsky. But none of these posts confront the most unfortunate of truths: our aging problem.
You may want to head to CVS, or better yet, Bloomingdale’s, and buy some eye cream, ladies. While you’re at it, you might as well book your Botox appointments for the next 60 years of your life. It’s the only thing that’s going to keep you anywhere near in the competition for the Ibsen-loving men you need to snag (à la Tentacle creature from the deep). You see, while all you ambitious, career-driven silly women are aging up, your competition’s only getting younger by the minute. You may not have wrinkles yet, but you’re squinting at your computer screen to read this, aren’t you? Your competition, however, is not wasting their time reading. They’re out there in the man-ridden bars of Boston, the frat parties of MIT, the hallowed halls of Harvard dorms, finding and entrancing your men with their youthful (and only getting youthfuller) beauty!
Wait, who are these girls? Who cares—just know that you’re 20 now, but you won’t be 20 for long. The years will start adding up, but trust Susan Patton—the competition’s just getting younger.
After reading this article, ladies, we should all be done mooning over “Downton Abbey” (or let’s be real, “Sherlock”). We’ve already cancelled our Netflix subscription. It’s time to head over to Harvard. Hopefully, we can find a few potential husbands on whom to conduct the Noam Chomsky litmus test.
Kristen Green is a senior studying political science and Spanish. Follow her on Twitter @greengreen_kris.
Mariana Zepeda is a Mexico City-born English and History major. Follow her on Twitter @zepedamariana.
