Dowd's Lament...Who Cares, You Old Bat?

Sex & the Single Stiletto
N.Y. Times Columnist Maureen Dowd Cuts to the Chase in 'Are Men Necessary?'

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 5, 2005

She skewers public figures in the most personal terms, calling Bill Clinton "the Animal House president," Al Gore "a teacher's pet from hell" and George W. Bush the "Boy Emperor."

But while Maureen Dowd would seem to have a well-developed taste for combat, appearances can be deceiving. Even after a decade of writing a New York Times column, she admits to being "very thin-skinned" about criticism.

"I'm just not temperamentally suited to it," Dowd says. "The first couple of years I spent curled up on the floor and crying." If someone starts talking about her on television, she lunges to switch off the set.

Now Dowd, who zealously guards the details of her personal life, is inviting a different kind of scrutiny with a book about love and war between the sexes. And she knows full well that the kind of questions she raises in "Are Men Necessary?" -- say, whether successful men are put off by high-powered women -- could easily boomerang on her.

"I have no complaints about my personal life," she says in her stately Georgetown home, where the decor ranges from a pink jukebox to an expensively restored Hungarian portrait of a partially disrobed woman. "I get asked out. I don't know how much more I'd get asked out if guys weren't scared of me.

"Any woman who criticizes men for a living -- which I do because politics is still male-dominated -- may have a harder time getting dates. I get plenty."

The book is a rumination about the inscrutability of men, the perils of dating, male anchor clones, makeup, shopping and the demise of feminism in a sex-drenched society -- all while showing a little leg, in a personal sense.

The author is acutely aware of the slashing MoDo image and resigned to hearing that she has some kind of castration complex. When a photographer for Elle magazine showed up for a shoot, he brought a Ken-type doll and a pair of scissors -- and asked Dowd to pose either cutting off its head or stabbing the figurine in the groin. She declined.

* * *

The sense of being a smart, ambitious, alluring woman in a crazy, often infuriating man's world is at the heart of Dowd's take on life.

"I got a column entirely because I was a woman," she says bluntly. But being the only regular female voice on the Times op-ed page has, in her view, been a hazardous endeavor.

"Political aides have been lethally nasty with me and tried to smear me," Dowd says. "For me there's been a price for being no-holds-barred."

Poor little Mo, she can dish it out but she can't take it. Most women on the Left can't. Like Hillary, she loves to bask in the glow of being the intimidating (mostly to Liberal men, I guess) woman of power, slicing and dicing her political targets with her acid tongue and rusty rapier wit. She takes great pleasure in lacerating her male counterparts, but when the table turns she, again like Hillary (remember the Rick Lazio incident?) takes umbrage at being attacked. That's the problem with these old line feminists, they have demanded, all their lives, to be treated like equals, but the minute a man actually does then he suddenly becomes brutish and ape-like and immediately accused of not behaving like a gentleman. Like (I hate to keep repeating myself, but) Hillary, this Harridan of Hate has all the charm of a pit-viper. This Darling of the Denigraters' writing is sophomoric at best and not very witty. It is not because she is an intimidating figure that men don't like her, it's because of what she does with her supposed talent. It is easy to destroy people, to sit back and smugly snipe at them in a sad effort to make yourself feel "more than." It takes real talent and effort to build someone up, to be a positive influence in life. It is better to give than to take, and this dowdy seems to be a taker.

Full Story: Dowd the Slayer

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