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By Root 1491 0

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 résumés. 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