On this Maureen Dowd thing

First of all, Maureen Dowd and Joan Didion must share a publicist who specializes in getting book excerpts published as cover articles in the New York Times Magazine with simultaneous profiles in New York magazine and other mediagasm landmarks. Note to NYT Magazine: Next time you use your cover as a marketing tool for yet another book that you hack to pieces to fit inside nine pages we are going to have a SERIOUS talk about integrity and exploitation.

To catch everyone up to speed, Maureen Dowd published an excerpt from her book “Are Men Necessary” as the cover article for the NYT Magazine 2 weeks ago. The piece came off as a fluffy, elitist dismissal of feminist gains, saying that men are intimidated by smart women and younger chicks are regressing to become old-school flirts or housewives. It inspired a flurry of irate blog posts and exasperated articles ranging from “post-feminist” Katie Roiphe to Eileen McNamara, along with being in the top five Most Emailed every day since being published. I figured I would let the first-round contenders fight it out over the obvious criticisms and defenses, and wait to see where the more substantive critiques developed.

Well, Rebecca Traister, who is typically a good feminist compass, has published her article, in which she tries her hardest to defend Dowd even while acknowledging the tiring too-clever-by-lots-more-than-a-half nature of Dowd’s writing:

“What she has to say in this book is sometimes crass, often recycled from old columns, intermittently sloppy, consistently over-generalized and rooted too firmly in her own rarefied D.C.-N.Y. corridor of power.”

Yet for Traister, Dowd is asking important questions about singlehood and womanhood and whether a highly successful life full of family, friends, career and passions can be complete without men. I say, you cannot give poor analysis credit for effort, especially when the presentation is so self-destructive.

Sloppy on social research? Check (Barnett and Rivers rock my world). Writing so self-referential it practically preens itself? Check. I couldn’t agree more with the quote “One wishes that, instead of devoting herself to zinginess, to ripostes and one-liners, she would use her threatening intelligence to unearth the deeper complexities of her subject.” And therein lies my ultimate frustration with MoDo.

Maureen. Please. If your writing were sharper, clearer, less inclined to hyperbole and caricature, I would be thrilled to hear your thoughts on upper-class educated white women’s dating practices (hell, I’d take plenty of notes). I would be proud that you were the sole bearer of a double X chromosome on the NYT op-ed page, pathetic as that statistic may be.

If you’re asking if men are necessary, then ASK it, give some thesis, say “this is my life and it is satisfying in such and such way” or “this is my life- as rich as it is, I still need love or a partner” Don’t dance around the question the way your columns dance around everything from saying “President Bush is a liar” to “I fantasize about George Stephanapoulous.”

Dowd defends her playful-like-a-fox style and emphasis on personality over policy in her New York Magazine profile: “I didn’t want to do women’s issues per se, but I did want to look at things through a woman’s eyes.I always thought that criticism was just silly . . . as if it was a girlish thing to be focused on the person.” Michael Kinsley from the Washington Post backs her up, saying “I thought that she would get pegged as a girl and not taken seriously, but she in fact sort of reinvented the column as a form…

(P.S., Ariel Levy, author of said profile? Why is it OK for Maureen Dowd to be sex-positive while the rest of us are Female Chauvinist Pigs? Oh, that’s right, your book is sensationalistic, poorly researched crap.)

Where was I? It’s not enough to bring “a woman’s eyes”, since, for one thing, you cannot essentialize women so casually, but more importantly, why label a woman’s perspective as anti-logic or substance, focusing on what is pejoratively called the “fluff”? Dowd’s whole coquettish “am I or aren’t I?”, “Do I think this? Or not?” schtick makes her a bad spokesperson for the relevance of feminism, since her meta message that we extrapolate from her persona and her writing places women back into the stereotype of imprecise, hyperemotional rambling. You know those women, can’t argue a point, just go on emotion and intuition.

Now if you want to argue to me that Maureen Dowd is the successor to Helene Cixous, pioneering some new epistemological frontier, some new woman’s way of knowing or speaking in a non-linear, non phallogocentric way then bring it, but for now, I call foul: you have no credibility on feminism if you insist on representing women’s work and thought in a prominent public forum as no more than flamboyant pageantry.