whaddaya mean, my syntax don' send ya?

Of course it's always been the dream that fame will bring adulation. How many times have you heard musicians say they started playing in a band because they perceived rock stars to be babe magnets? Not without justification, apparently.

And men with great minds do turn many women on, decrepit looks or lousy economic status notwithstanding. Brilliant writers definitely have the power to make smart women swoon.

But it would seem that the phenomenon doesn't swing both ways. In strange synchronicity, two women writers have this week published rueful pieces on the subject. As Curtis Sittenfeld (female, despite the name) says in the NYT article You Can't Get a Man With a Pen, "writing a book as a means of finding either love or sex seems to me about as efficient as the also-popular idea of writing a book to get rich." (Thanks to Allison for the link.) Sittenfeld laments that women authors have to be either gorgeous or sex writers to attract groupies, but all I can think of is: groupies are girls; men are called stalkers. Which she certainly reminds us of by bringing up the crazed Charlie Kaufman character, the "real" screenwriter played by Nicolas Cage in Adaptation (not "The Orchid Thief," as she says, which is the book on which the movie was based).

Pretty much the same point is made by Sarah, half defiant, half doleful in her bitingly clever version of "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun," a tune by Irving Berlin not familiar to me. She brings the dilemma home with a big finish: "A man won't propose on the merits of your prose/And you won't get a spouse or a house with your mouse/Oh, you can't get a man with a blog." The brains vs. romance situation is, I suppose, especially tough for this very smart journalist who also happens to be religious and probably would make a lie of any of your preconceptions of what that means. Or so I imagine from following her life-on-blog.

Funny, I'm pretty sure my mother made the same point decades ago when I asked her, with a 15-year-old's despair, "What do boys want?"

Her answer, I have suspiciously decided in retrospect over the years, came out awfully quick, as if she'd long memorized it herself. In that pre-feminist era, it resonated deeply with a ring of Truth, and it has stayed with me forever. It's the mantra I repeated to myself endlessly, for all the good it's done me: "pretty, sweet, smart -- in that order."