Mr. and Mrs. Clooney: So who really won?
The 53-year-old actor George Clooney is now engaged to 36-year-old human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin. So should the “taming” of the famous bachelor be heralded as a triumph of the modern woman?
The New York Post published one of the wittiest reactions, Mackenzie Dawson’s “An open letter to the future Mrs. Clooney: Congrats on proving Princeton Mom wrong.” Susan Patton, “Princeton Mom” and author of the book “Marry Smart,” advised female Princeton students to spend 75 percent of their time looking for a husband in the large male pool they will never again have access to. If they get distracted by a career, she warns, they might find themselves in their 30s and competing against younger women with less attractiveness and a ticking biological clock.
Mackenzie praised Amal as “a direct, fantastic rebuke” to Princeton Mom, citing her as an advisor to then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who speaks French and Arabic. Clooney could probably date any woman in the world, but he chose an ambitious, accomplished woman in her 30s. Indeed, it is refreshing to see the entertainment media citing excerpts from Amal’s lengthy resumé instead of talking about her clothes.
Time carried another of the wittiest reactions, Charlotte Alter’s “Why would anyone marry George Clooney?” She thinks people should be congratulating Clooney instead, and opens: “Amal Alamuddin is an Oxford-educated human-rights lawyer, he’s a flaky actor with lots of baggage. She can do better.” Another op-ed praises Slate.com, which ran the headline “London Human Rights Lawyer Amal Alamuddin Is Engaged” and referred to the groom with only this casual final sentence: “Her husband-to-be is an American actor and director who played ‘Kip Howard’ on the television mystery program ‘Murder, She Wrote.’” A gushing law student wrote in Pakistan’s Express Tribune: “She is engaged to you, the ‘world’s sexiest man’ … She has set the standard so high that if we had to let go of generations of infatuation, we would be glad that we’ve lost you to her.”
And then there is one of my anonymous Facebook friends, who sarcastically quipped that it must be some triumph that career-driven single women in their 30s should aspire to date men in their 50s.
Amal offers a relief of a contrast to the usual half-joke aimed at female freshmen that if they enter a Philippine law school without an understanding boyfriend, they will never, ever get married given how old they will be after they graduate and get past the years of junior-lawyer late nights buried in paper. Heck, it is a relief of a contrast to stereotypes in a region where a second coming of age is the point when even total strangers pester one about getting married.
But move over, Philippine family reunions. The Chinese government stigmatizes women unmarried after age 27 as “leftover women (shèngn?)” and criticizes “overly high expectations for marriage partners” (such as not becoming a housewife after marriage) as a key factor. The Chinese rent-a-boyfriend industry booms during Chinese New Year, catering to educated urban professionals desperate to appease parents looking for signs of grandchildren at family reunions.
Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew wrote in his biography that in his 1983 National Day speech, “I said it was stupid for our graduate men to choose less-educated and less-intelligent wives.” In 1983, he said, only 38 percent of university-educated men in Singapore had university-educated spouses. Desperate mothers of “graduate daughters” apparently “lamented” to his wife, in part because the “practice of arranged marriages was no longer acceptable to educated women.” He offered incentives to these (insulted) “graduate daughters” and formed the Social Development Unit, the government agency that continues to organize dating events among graduates to this day.
Many of my friends have not yet found their George. Organizing expat cocktails in Singapore, I would sometimes be asked to help set up the few single women in our circle. The pitch would end up thus: “She only has two problems. A Harvard degree and an MIT degree.” Another friend confided that when she returned to Manila, her mother’s friends would ask to set her up with their sons but withdraw the offer when they learned she had studied in London.
When I asked these female friends what they thought of Amal, they all said it proves that one should never settle. Strangely, my male friends likewise say they would rather date someone like Amal than others on Clooney’s long list of exes. We have become progressive enough to recognize that one’s identity after school need not be tied to marriage and children, and that many of us have other equally important life goals to explore. Since we are not labeling leftover women in the Philippines, I wonder if there is simply no ready mechanism to find the Amals in a city life where people increasingly no longer go to church and do not know their neighbors. Last Valentine’s Day, quite a few female friends made exaggerated Facebook posts about flowers from their best friends and the girls’ night out. Quite a few of my male friends whined about being dateless. I posted the following day that I should really have locked the two groups in a room and thrown away the key.
So there is nothing wrong with the much more interesting modern woman. But maybe Lee Kuan Yew had the right idea after all about how to meet them in a big city. Or perhaps we should hold more charity events, which is where George met Amal.
By the way, does anyone know if Amal has a kid sister?
Oscar Franklin Tan (@oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan) cochairs the Philippine Bar Association Committee on Constitutional Law and teaches at the University of the East.
