So I guess biology really is destiny

That seems to be James Pinkerton's point in this article about Maureen Dowd and Hugh Hefner.

the Playboy Mogul publicly exults in his singleness, bragging about all his many conquests, even as he nears 80 -- while for her part, Dowd publicly laments her aloneness. OK, but that's changeable, one might say. Hefner is almost dead, while there's plenty of time for Dowd to get married.

But the second difference between Hugh and Maureen can't be changed. And that is this: Hefner, by his two ex-wives, has four children -- two of them he fathered when he was in his 60s -- while Dowd, who will turn 54 in January, has none. She can get married, she can even adopt -- but absent some miraculous medicine, she can't have children of her own.

Thus we come to the fundamental asymmetry of the sexes: Thanks in no small part to Hefner's philosophizing, men can fool around and then have kids pretty much whenever they want -- as such late-December fathers as Norman Lear and the late Tony Randall have demonstrated.

And yet while men changed the laws, and the customs, to suit their specific needs such as virility enhancement, women have made no similarly powerful change in areas that affect them specifically, such as fertility enhancement. That is, if women had gotten together and decided that it was as important to extend the age of female fertility as it was for men to have access to Viagra, one can only assume that medical science would have made that change -- science is like that. But women, who outnumber men, both in terms of population and at the ballot box, never organized themselves to demand such a fertility breakthrough. Yes, such a breakthrough is coming, but only slowly. It will get here long after Hefner, Lear, Randall & Co. have enjoyed a wide choice of erectile dysfunction pills.

This was no accident. A half century ago, Hefner created the world he would want to live in. So after he created his system, the rest of us, including Maureen Dowd, have been living in it. And in that system, Hefnerians can have their cake and eat it, too. They can play in the "bakery," for practically as long as they want, and still take home some permanent goodies, if they wish to. Women such as Maureen Dowd -- or, from a much different perspective, Linda Hirshman -- can rail against this system, but they do seem to be trapped within it.

Surely there's a middle ground?