Patti Stanger looks like a feminist hero. She’s single, she’s rich, and she, as they say, has it all. The host of Bravo TV’s The Millionaire Matchmaker is herself a self-made millionaire whose empire includes her hit television show as well as an off-air matchmaking business, a podcast, books, DVDs, and, most recently, a line of California wines in “aphrodisiac flavors.” She’s an independent woman at the height of her powers.
It’s in her work as a matchmaker that things get tricky. The laws of love, she has found, have not bent to the arc of the feminist movement. She has observed that men still like feminine women, and women still like masculine men. Men still prefer to chase, and women still prefer to be chased. Stanger is tough and outspoken, and her views have sent self-proclaimed feminists reeling. Here’s the journalist Jodi Walker writing in the women’s magazine Bustle: “I don’t like the premise that one side of a relationship needs to have money. I don’t like that the other side needs to have looks. I don’t like Patti Stanger — she’s mean.”
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