The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin Read Free Book Online

that acting like a girl—even when we’re grown up—isn’t such a bad thing. Girls get taken care of in ways boys don’t. Girls aren’t expected to fend for or take care of themselves—others do that for them. Sugar and spice and everything nice—that’s what little girls are made of. Who doesn’t want to be everything nice?
    This is the diagnosis Lois Frankel makes in
Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
, one of Sabrina’s favorite books. The cautionary examples in Frankel’s book—the Susans and Rebeccas and Jills—are polite and accommodating. They work hard and they don’t play the office politics game. Mostly they wait around at work to be
given
what they want, just as Anna waits around for her phone to ring.
Nice Girls
is a business advice book, but Sabrina uses it as a dating guide, too, a primer on how to play in the big-city dating scene and never lose.
    Sabrina was twenty-three and just finishing college when she met a guy who looked like Justin Timberlake and “I totally lost my head. I was obsessed.” After less than a year they got engaged, and then he cheated on her. She was “miserable. Totally out of control, and I hated feeling totally out of control.” She vowed that she would never be “that sad miserable crawling thing again.” How did she do it? She put some distance between herself and sex. Sex was something apart from her, something “I could step back from and put in a box so I would never be overwhelmed again. It’s like, ‘I can’t be obsessing, I have shit to get done.’”
    From then on, Sabrina has scrutinized herself for any vulnerability and rooted it out. “We have sex, there’s that oxytocin floating around, we get attached, blah blah blah.” Or maybe it’s the way she was raised, by a Japanese mother who convinced her that she was supposed to make herself “easy to be around” and not talk too much around men. “There is always this little voice in your head saying, ‘This is not ladylike. This is not normal. Nice girls don’t do that. Nice girls don’t ask for raises.’ But then it’s like BAM! Smash it! ‘Nice girls don’t ask guys out on dates.’ BAM. Clear that! And then it’s gone.”
    After her disastrous college engagement to the Timberlake look-alike, Sabrina took a safer route. She picked someone with whom she had less sexual chemistry but who was her friend, and within a year they got engaged. One day, at twenty-eight, she found herself sitting next to her fiancé, on a plane that was experiencing massive turbulence. As the plane shook she thought to herself, “I am not living thelife I want to live. I am not dating the guy I want to date. I am engaged to a guy I don’t want to be engaged to.” She had by that time been working at banks for several years and had traveled all over the world and experienced turbulence dozens of times. But this time the plane was shaking so hard, she had imminent death on her mind. And she wasn’t thinking about the nice life she and her fiancé could have enjoyed together. She was thinking about herself in a house in Darien, Connecticut, cooking in the kitchen with kids at her feet, and feeling like a plane crash might be preferable. The plane landed safely, and shortly thereafter Sabrina broke off an engagement for the second time in her life. In the marriage market, twice fleeing the altar makes you the equivalent of the person who’s had a near-death experience and seen the white light. In other words, it makes you free, to text cute guys at eleven P.M. yourself and tell them to fuck off if you want to and forget about
The One
.
    Or does it? When I met her a few days later, Sabrina was in a different mood and thinking more about what she wanted from life. That business school boyfriend—the one I’d met at the party—had inspired a breakthrough for her. Before business school he’d lived in Thailand for almost a decade, and this part of his sexual history had become a source of anguish for her