All over New York this week, newsstands are plastered with issues of Time Out featuring a campy cover that looks like an old movie poster for "Swamp Thing."
Next to the headline "Attack of the Single Women!" there is an image of a ginormous Godzilla-style chick pounding through the streets of Manhattan in a short red dress, scarlet fingernails and black heels (with which she's crushing a taxicab); in her hand she wields a BlackBerry (because, as we all know, the weapon of choice for single female monsters is a personal digital assistant) while normal-size men on the ground point and quail in fright, and a person of indeterminate gender holds a teensy sign reading "Wanna date?"
Broadzilla is gracing the magazine to illustrate a cover story on how New York feels as if it is populated and run by single ladies. And it's not just that weird "Backlash"-y can't-find-a-man refrain; apparently, it's really true. According to a recent National Geographic study, there are 185,000 more single women than single men in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. (Apparently, there's also an overabundance of single men on the West Coast, making the whole country seem like a gym at a sixth-grade dance.)
Time Out sets out to penetrate the mysterious Amazonian climes of the city "to find out how single women think and feel" (hint: It's a lot like how married women think and feel, except with fewer husbands!) and asked 50 of them about issues like dating, social life, work and sexual harassment.
"What we discovered," writes Alison Rosen, "is that despite ridiculous media portrayals of New York's single women as ambitious man-hungry climbers who put on a brave face while secretly fretting over their status ... the women we talked to were remarkably okay with being single."
Of course, they do eat babies and excrete professional ambition in their Pilates-induced sweat.
In other news, today also brings an excellent issue of the New York Post's Pulse section, in which women recount their favorite and least favorite moments in being subject to catcalls. The highlight? A drugstore checkout guy who tells a woman looking through her purse for her discount card, "Oh yeah. I'll give you a Duane Reade Club Card. I'll give it to you all night long."
Happy summer!
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