Posted on 12/08/2005 9:03:30 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Maureen Dowd begins her book Are Men Necessary? with a confession: "I don't understand men." If only she'd left it at that, we could simply add "men" to the long list of subjects into which she has no particular insight: history, psychology, philosophy, religion, economics, literature, art, constitutional law, international diplomacy, and several other topics upon she comments in her twice weekly column for the New York Times. But Dowd had to go and write a book about men and women, and Putnam had to go and publish it, and now it's sitting on my desk, waiting to be reviewed, and I feel like Bugs Bunny, holding a freshly baked cherry pie, about to smash it into the face of the haughty but hapless magician Ala Bahma, thinking to myself: "If I dood it, I get a whippin' . . . I dood it!"
Dowd claims her book "is not a systematic inquiry of any kind, or a handy little volume of sterling solutions to the American woman's problems." She insists she has "no special wisdom about redemption in matters of sex and love," nor is she "peddling a theory or a slogan or a policy." She concedes that she's "as baffled as the next woman" and that her book "offers only the diligent notes . . . of a fascinated observer of our gender perplexities." As is the custom with intellectual cowards, Dowd wants her ideas taken seriously; she just doesn't want them judged according to traditional evidentiary and logical standards.
So be it.
If we read the book on Dowd's own terms, the critical question therefore becomes whether her "diligent notes" add up to anything worthwhile. She argues in her first chapter, for example, that successful career women are having trouble finding suitable romantic partners because "the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men." Much of Dowd's support consists of direct quotes from her often-anonymous friends . . . friends who, by a remarkable coincidence, say precisely what Dowd needs them to say in order to keep her argument going, and who, by an even more remarkable coincidence, say it in precisely the diction and cadences of Dowd's own prose. (Since Dowd's experience figures so prominently throughout her book, allow me a personal aside here: Why are women so often drawn to grand, totalizing theories to make sense of their individual regrets? I'm roughly Dowd's age and have never been married — a fact I account for not with an anthropological hypothesis but with the rather narrow observation that I've yet to find a supermodel PhD whose standards were low enough to have me.)
The problem with devoting a chapter to the notion that male power attracts women but female power repels men is twofold: In the first place, it's mind-numbingly trite. How many sitcoms through the years, from The Honeymooners to The Simpsons, have run episodes in which the male lead feels threatened by the prospect of his girlfriend or wife outdoing him? And in the second place, it's a grotesque oversimplification. How many straight single men in America would turn down a date with Angelina Jolie because she earns more than they do? Same question for Anna Kournikova, Amanda Peet, and Aisha Tyler. (And that's just the A's.) Clearly, a woman's looks factor heavily into the equation of whether men are attracted to her. It's not admirable. It's not fair. It's just the way things are. So what's left of Dowd's initial observation? Perhaps the more modest truth that while a woman's power isn't necessarily a turn-off for men, it's not especially a turn on. Is this a newsflash to any sentient adult?
But now the overriding silliness of Are Men Necessary? emerges. The minimal coherence of the first half of the book depends on Dowd reiterating, every 50 pages or so, her grand theme that men are intimidated and ultimately repelled by powerful women: "Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women" (p.53); "Many women are already afraid that, as they get more powerful, they get more scary, and this will repel men. Women are attracted to male power. Men are threatened by female power" (p.117). Along the way, she makes other breathless discoveries: "Women don't want to be men — except in the way men often grow more attractive and powerful as they age. . . . And we'd like to be like men in the way they can look good in many different ways, whereas women are expected to endlessly replicate themselves at twenty-five. . . . "
Well, yes. Men have been hardwired by evolution to prize the appearance of youth in women because it connotes childbearing potential; women, by contrast, have been hardwired by evolution to prize the appearance of power because it connotes the ability to provide security for her offspring. Since there are more ways to appear powerful than to appear youthful, women tend to be more forgiving of men's looks than men are of women's looks. You read a passage like Dowd's, and you wonder where she's going with it. But then you realize, several pages later, that she wasn't going anywhere. She'd already gotten there: That was her insight. The problem is not that it's wrong; the problem is that it's the kind of pronouncement a thirteen-year-old doing a book report finds eye opening. For whom, exactly, does Dowd think she's writing?
This is the pattern of the book. Banality follows banality follows banality — after which Dowd steps back and declares her conclusions merely tentative. It's as though she's so desperate not to go out on a limb, she winds up hugging the trunk of the tree. Imagine Christopher Hitchens saying, Well, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that certain aspects of Western Culture seem to be upsetting certain segments of the Muslim population.
Ya think?
According to Dowd, men's fear of powerful, independent women has led to the eclipse of iconic feminist characters like Mary Richards and Murphy Brown — who've been replaced in prime time by "postfeminist fictional heroines," like Carrie Bradshaw, Ally McBeal, and the desperate housewives of Wisteria Lane, "a gaggle of neurotic, insecure, man-crazy women indulging, variously, in too many cocktails, cigarettes, pills, shoes, kinky sex and bad affairs." The retrograde message is ironic, Dowd argues, because in real life it's "male temperament and illogic that are causing alarm." She cites the "world class catfights" between Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld's "hot flashes over 'Old Europe,'" Cheney's "hormonal mood swings" and Paul Wolfowitz's "feline grooming practices"; she calls Karl Rove "a devious little gossip."
Is it possible Dowd actually believes that stretching a metaphor constitutes a logical analysis — that by labeling the Cabinet-level wrangling, temper tantrums, and classified leaking of Bush-administration officials "mud wrestling," "diva fits," and "gossipmongering," she has fastened onto a sea change in male politicians' behavior? Couldn't the feminizing tropes be as easily applied to the generation of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison? Wasn't Hamilton-Burr the ultimate catfight?
The second half of Dowd's book consists of a series of rambling, over-generalized, hyper-familiar meditations on the causes and consequences of men being threatened by women's power. Because men fear powerful women, they're drawn to women who appear brainless and submissive; because powerful women fear they're losing their sex appeal, they're abandoning the ideals of feminism and downplaying their accomplishments; because female politicians seek power, male-dominated institutions are lining up against them; because religion is patriarchal, it continues to be an instrument to deprive women of power. Each of these ideas contains an element of truth, ranging from a smidgeon to a dollop, but haven't de Beauvoir, Friedan, and Steinem already bled this vein pretty dry?
Perhaps the most intriguing section of the entire book comes in a chapter summarizing the latest biological evidence that the Y chromosome, the seat of male-pattern behavior and masculinity itself, is evaporating from the evolutionary picture, that the human race might be hurtling towards a future in which men go the way of dodo birds. But even here Dowd's attempt to lasso this information into her larger theme forces her into the ludicrous suggestion that men somehow sense the inevitability of their collective decline and are individually reacting to the prospect even now. With advances in cloning technology, the "Y populace" is terrified "that science would cause nature to return to its original, feminine state and men would fade from view."
Yep, she's put her finger right on the pulse of the male psyche.
Most disappointing of all, from the standpoint of Dowd's legions of fans, is that the book is littered with excruciatingly bad sentences. On a mentor of hers: "It was a truth universally acknowledged, as her idol Jane Austen wrote, that nobody could write with the sense and sensibility, the luminous prose and legendary reporting, of [Mary] McGrory." On the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith: "Interestingly, that movie was described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers."
Such passages remind us that Dowd has never been more than an inside-the-Beltway version of Erma Bombeck — a comparison I make with reluctance only because it doesn't do justice to Bombeck's sanity and good humor. Dowd, after all, was at the top of her game during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Why? Because for those fleeting months, which resulted in her 1999 Pulitzer Prize, Dowd was no longer holding forth on politics per se — a conceptual realm in which she's so out of her depth she should be wearing a snorkel at the keyboard. Rather, she was writing about naughty boys and naughty girls, about pee pees and hoo hoos.
In the final analysis, Are Men Necessary? is an important book not for what it actually says but for what it inadvertently reveals about the caliber of mind currently occupying the prime intellectual real estate of the op-ed page of the Times.
2) Goldblatt is rather funny, but it's not nice to pick on the Wetahds.
Any questions about just how bad Dowd's book is should have been dispelled when her own employer -- the New York Times -- panned it in their book review.
Somehow I feel confident that, in all those pages, she doesn't manage to answer the obvious question: "Is Maureen Dowd necessary?"
...reading.
Dowd is a female chauvinist, and can't figure out why men don't want to be around her. As Aretha Franklin said, it's called R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and she has none for men, so men go elsewhere. IMHO
An accomplished woman, even if physically attractive, has never been taught to use her feminine wiles, and I daresay has been brainwashed into being ashamed of the thought of even using them.
The ultimate feminist wants it to be true that they can be accomplished and be sexually promiscuous and that it will make them happy.
When they find out it doesn't, then they start to long for a permanent guy.
By then, they are older, unpracticed in what it takes to be really attractive to a guy, and don't really have much to give. Because she's bitter.
I know this, because I was once one of those women. I'm no less accomplished, but I did learn how to use my other gifts, and attracted the married a really wonderful guy.
This would really upset Maureen to know that my husband leans to the left, and yet he was really attracted to a very conservative woman.
| With advances in cloning technology, the "Y populace" is terrified "that science would cause nature to return to its original, feminine state and men would fade from view." Gee and I was thinking with these same technological advances, women would no longer be needed. (although desired) MoDo says men are in power and have been since the beginning of time. Does anyone with a working brain think that the people in power would use technology to cause their decline? It just isn't logical. |
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BFLR.
You've summed it up nicely.
Also, it a man happens to be familiar with Dowd's columns, wouldn't he worry about what she will say about him when he's not around?
Want to get a man? You've got two choices. You can either learn how to be one of the boys (and that means not being offended and not whining when things don't go your way) or appeal to the man's spousal and paternal instincts. Don't be mommy. Men don't need another mommy. In fact, an English professor I had in college told me that the reason he divorced his first wife was that he married a woman just like his mother and couldn't stand it. And if you do find a man who is looking for mommy, then expect to be his mommy forever and expect him to act just like your child. There seems to be no shortage of men like that these days.
Heh heh.
Oh I dont know, maybe the reason she and her friends can't get a man is because they are self-importanat beyotches obsessed with themselves and their needs?
And even if what she says is true that men don't want a powerful successful women wouldnt that be because most women (like men) become successful and powerful after they been working for awhile and thus late in or past their child bearing years and never really got around to finding a husband because they were busy?
Currently I am 23 and have always been a going places kind of girl with any kind of future I want ahead of me. Everybody has inferiority complexes with regards to their signifigant other (men and women). I've run across men who've worshipped the ground I've walked on because of my intelligence and where I go to school and what I want to do and I've dated men who couldnt stand it when I knew the answer to a physics problem when they he and would get upset when I would overshadow him. Currently, my future husband doesnt care if I make more money or have a killer career, he's just proud and happy for me.
Maybe she needs to get out of the beltway and the Northeast where she'll have a chance of finding a man who doesnt know her name and isn't a self-important liberal like herself.
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