PRINCESS LEIA HASN'T DATED SINCE THE CLONE WARS...

(That should attract just the kind of Star Wars-motivated traffic I've been needing for JDaters Anonymous...and thanks to those people who wrote with suggestions and corrections.) In yesterday's New York Times, Maureen Dowd ponders the attraction of powerful men to the women secretaries, assistants, PR consultants, etc who take care of them and determines that they're all just looking for their mommies. In the article, she quotes several studies, including the one about intelligence and likelihood to marry. But we've covered that here already. More interesting to me was the random celeb she asked for an opinion: I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble. "I haven't dated in 12 million years," [EDK note: this is the approximate era of the Clone Wars, which means she hasn't dated since before Anakin and Amidala met and mated] she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too." With princesses commenting on the behavior of kings and consorts, no wonder dating's such a royal pain. But seriously, taking Star Wars as an analogy for dating, you'll note that Jedis, the most powerful spiritual forces in the galaxy, tend not to surround themselves with women (I think there were a few women Jedi in Episodes I and II, in what I like to call the Mace Windu Circle of Jedi). But do you remember what they looked like? Not really. Perhaps having many women inside the circle would divert their focus, or perhaps the women are all out chasing the clones, who look all shiny on the outside, but whose innards are robotic and unemotional. (Sarah notes that the clones were actually human on the inside, which shows you that I haven't fully grasped the lore of the first two movies. Perhaps my understanding was derailed by the shrill presence of the twice-named after a cookie receptacle Mr. Binks. She'll have to forgive me.) There's only two couples in the Star Wars story who get any lovin' (in chronological order): Amidala and Anakin, and Han and Leia. In the next (final?) movie in the Star Wars saga, we'll find out what consequences there are for the sexual union between Natalie--oops, I meant Amidala--and Later Vader, how soon Anakin abandons his beloved when she's pregnant, forcing her to use Naboo's food stamps program to pay for food and daycare for her twin tykes until she sends Leia off to Alderaan and Luke off to Tatooine. Luke has designs on his sister during the so-called "Whiner period," before he's aware of the blood tie that makes their love impossible, but gives up romance to focus on a career in the Light Saber Arts. The closest he ever gets to romance is when Han shoves him inside the guts of a Tauntaun on Hoth, and that can't be very romantic ("...and I thought these things smelled bad on the outside..."). It is precisely this scoundrel quality that draws Leia to Han: he's the master of his domain, and by that, I mean he's manually guiding the rudder of his ship, and by that, I mean the Millennium Falcon. He's the equivalent of the blue-collar trucker that all princesses want, the man so totally other that it stokes a fire. Worth noting that she herself is an activist princess, with the intelligence and poise to threaten Daddy Vader while she herself is a prisoner, the strength to usurp command of her own rescue mission ("into the garbage chute, flyboy"), and yet lacks the basic smarts to invest in a sensible wardrobe involving basic black activewear. What's my point? We don't know how the Amidalanakin storyline ends up, although given the age difference and the situations that have been established in SW, ESB and RoftheJ, it does not look good. Han and Leia might make it--I guess we'll have to find George Lucas's treatment for movies 7, 8, and 9. Maybe Luke finds love. Maybe Mace Windu becomes a Yoda of sorts for a new generation. Maybe the scoundrel/princess union, which has its literary roots in the fire of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler's Southern romance, is something that burns eternal but is, on a day-to-day level, unlivable. Whatever the conclusion, it has nothing to do with Maureen Dowd's article. OK, I'm off to Los Angeles to join the queue for Revenge of the Sith.* (Hat tip to Steve Silver for linking to the O'Dowd article.) *No, I'm not. I'm not that insane.