Maureen Dowd and Are Men Necessary?

Maureen Dowd is one author who doesn't live up to her name. After all a "dowdy" person is "shabbily dull in color or appearance; without brightness, smartness, or freshness." It doesn't take long for one to read this book for her brightness, smartness and freshness to emerge. Though her original claim to fame (a Pulitzer Prize) resulted from her clear-eyed NY Times commentary in 1998 and 1999 of President Clinton's peccadilloes and the subsequent impeachment hearings, in this book she uses her rapier wit and searing pen to probe the area of gender relations, feminism and our culture's contradictory attitudes toward beauty and sex. Though there is seemingly no rhyme or reason as to why one chapter follows another in this book (as she follows the evolution of Barbie, a talk with Helen Gurley Brown, her reactions to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing, the Mondale/Ferraro fiasco of 1984, the Starr Report of 1998, etc.), you don't really need a chronological or systematic treatment to catch her style and aplomb. Her writing is lithe and sprightly, her words delicious, her ability to land the intimate quotation or describe the offensive behavior in question with unerringly precise detail all make this book an engaging read. In the end, however, the reader recognizes that she partakes of the same confusion regarding gender relationships as the people she portrays. We are all caught in the midst of the most delicious ironies and hypocrisies with respect to gender and sex. We are all iminently "skewerable" on that score as we try to score.

Before telling a few of her stories, however, I need to say a word about the "context" of a writer like Dowd.

Being Catholic, Talented and a Baby-Boomer in America

Maureen Dowd and I share the same birth year, even though she is older than me by four months. I grew up in a prosperous, and mostly Protestant, suburb of NYC; she is a product of Catholic schools in and around Washington, DC. Catholics in the 1960s and 1970s were doing something new in the history of Catholicism in America--in large numbers they were shaking their "immigrant consciousness" and "blue collar, lunch pail" status and aspiring to become full members of the American society shaped and largely owned by wealthy Protestants. They would enter into leadership in American culture the same way that every immigrant group has "made it"--buckling down and getting the best education they could. And, there was nothing so strict as a Catholic parent born in the 1910s or 1920s when it came to educating their upwardly-mobile children. The teachers were to be respected as next to God; the lessons were to be learned uncomplainingly; if there was any "problem" with the teacher, it was the student's (their child's) fault. The desire to achieve, the passion to excel, was so deeply ingrained into many Catholic kids of my generation that their desire made the Protestant kids, many of whom really had the way already paved for them, seem lethargic by comparison.

And, this was not only the case with Catholic boys. Catholic girls were funneled in huge numbers into education and literature so that they could have the skills, in the first instance, to be charming hostesses for their soon-to-be-successful husbands as he climbed corporate ladders and endured lingering Anti-Catholic prejudice in American life. I can almost say without fear of contradiction that the most ambitious, capable, insightful and hard-working women of exactly my age I have meet are Catholics. Some have left the fold; most have an ambivalent relationship to the Catholic Church; but all were infused with that burning ambition to leave a mark in American society.

Maureen Dowd is that kind of woman, except that she is single. Even if she were married she might have written a book like this, but the combined facts of her singleness, that she probably regularly intimidates men, that she probably wonders why she, a person of obvious attractiveness and huge success, should remain unattached while her "lesser" sisters have husbands and families, no doubt make her wonder a little bit longer about issues that her married friends might not notice. And so, she gives us insight into everything from Barbie to sexual harassment to the politics of sex in this book.

The Basic Contradiction

The issue that runs like Rachel's red thread through this book is that women crave independence but they seek attention from men. They want to be able to define their own lives, but they somehow can't take their eyes off the guys. They know that men are the way they are (incorrigibly "visual," sexist, wanting to relegate women to lower positions), but they continue to seek out men, often to their detriment. Are men necessary? Why are men so alluring to women, when they are, at the same time, so dumb, hypocritical, simple-minded and fearful of women? Why do women continue to fall for men when men ritually mistreat, embarrass, abuse and ignore them? Why are women so captive to the siren calls of beauty, Botox, thinness, plasticity, put out there by our cultures when there are tons of ways to develop inner beauty? Which of the contradictory message should women heed? She hasn't a clue, but she certainly tells some wonderful stories to show that none of us really has answered the question.

I really wasn't planning two essays on this book, but I have to do one more to illustrate her style and wit.

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