The 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll: The Perfect Woman

To answer the questions yourself, visit the 60 Minutes homepage at

This month: mother issues. Unless, instead, the issues are actually with women—or possibly with car mechanics?

Look, an overwhelming number of Americans think women can avoid turning into their mothers. And, it says here, we definitely don’t want women to fix our cars, smoke, or love Fatal Attraction, and, according to two other poll questions, we value bold and smart over sweet and pretty.

So far, so good. Men also say they wouldn’t trade their mothers for a “perfect woman”;—this woman presumably being the sort who is bold, smart, doesn’t like Fatal Attraction, and is a non-smoking non-car-mechanic. (Unasked was the question of whether men would trade Mom for a good mechanic.)

But the most important quality Americans are looking for in a woman is that she should be a “good mother.”; Which must mean that, for a woman, becoming just like her mom might in fact turn out to be a good thing. If that were to happen, would men consider trading their moms for one of those other moms—the ones we presumably don’t want women to turn into?

But, even if we can navigate all that, where does it leave us when there’s car trouble?