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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
For too long women have felt uneasy about girl-on-girl conflicts. We are supposed to love and support each other; sisters who question sisters are no sisters at all. If women disagree, it gets fetishized as a hair-pull, something that Dowd knows all too well. (See Miller, Judith.) But some of the questions she dares to ask -- in her caricatured way -- are some of the most unpleasant on our plates: Is feminism dead? Do men have trouble with powerful women? Why, decades after a feminist movement that was supposed to liberate us from constrictive physical ideals, are women hacking up their faces and inflating their breasts?
Dowd writes that she never fit in with her second-wave feminist contemporaries. Now she's critiquing the generation that came after hers, and the effects, if not the impulse behind, more recent sex-positive feminism.
When Dowd quotes an Ivy League professor on the mysteries of undergraduate women who outperform their male peers every day in the classroom and then capitulate their power at night, not "even getting orgasms ... just servicing boys in dark corners," it's an observation that is surely unquantifiable and alarmist. But if it's true for some young women -- and if we're honest, we have to admit that it doesn't sound that implausible -- then we must find a way to address the contradictions of sex-positivity and sexual objectification. Feminism may not be dead, as the furious reaction to her words surely proves, but who can deny that there is truth to her ancillary assertion that it's been trumped by narcissism and materialism? We can kick and scream that she's generalizing about the return of conformist beauty standards, but we cannot deny that Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson sell magazines.
Dowd notices that "pre-feminist" former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and "post-feminist" Bust editor Debbie Stoller both refer to women as "girls," though in the L.A. Times interview that Dowd quotes, Stoller calls Cosmo "stuck in the Valley of the Dolls," and Brown tells Dowd that "to be a sex object is a wonderful thing, and you're to be pitied if you aren't one." Is the language of "girliness" liberating or regressive? Is it a matter of reclamation or subjugation? I don't know. Let's talk about it.
"Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide"
By Maureen Dowd
Putnam Publishing Group
338 pages
Nonfiction
Dowd is a woman who is clearly curious about other women, from her late 97-year-old mother to tween and twentysomething friends. Worrying about all the people whom Dowd fails to represent will lead only to madness, as will focusing on the narrowness of her elite sphere. It's worth remembering that Dowd is the daughter of an Irish cop and the granddaughter of a maid. She's a card-carrying member of the cultural elite now, sure, as are her girlfriends, powerful colleagues like Michiko Kakutani and Alessandra Stanley. If anything, Dowd and the heady company she keeps offer a valuable window onto one story of American feminism: Here are a clutch of the most successful women in the country, and they, or at least their redheaded interlocutor, are telling us how gender looks to them. We shouldn't spend so much time poking easy holes in Dowd's generalizations that we fail to stop and think: "That's interesting. What does it tell us about the state of things?"
The New York profile, written by Ariel Levy, offers photos of Dowd with her mother -- who died this summer and who Levy writes was "the love of [Dowd's] life to date" -- with her Times colleagues, with presidents and their wives; there are two pictures of her exes, and four of her best female friends; there is Dowd in the lovely Georgetown house she occupies alone. It's a vision of what a modern female life can look like: defined as much by other women, work and real estate as it is by husbands or boyfriends.
Dowd's singleness weighs heavily on "Are Men Necessary," though she never offers an explicit rundown of her romantic history. The text is dotted with ex-boyfriends, fragmented memories of come-ons and rejections. She recounts brushes with sexual harassment -- a married editor who propositioned her upon offering her a job, some grody calls from Bob Packwood after he saw her in Esquire's "Women We Love" issue. She recalls her youthful movie-star fantasies of being Katharine Hepburn with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, Myrna Loy with William Powell. Her recollections make clear that as a young woman, Dowd never pictured herself a solo madcap diva absent a male foil. And yet here she is, at 53, never, as New York reports, having lived with a partner.
The most-attacked anecdote in her book is about a Broadway producer who predicted her eternal solitude because "if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Would she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?"
Why would Dowd even want such a fop? Does she think men are all this spineless? Is she saying that married women have chucked their critical faculties? I hope not, and I don't believe so. Dowd is just describing how her own experiences feed her worst fears. The fact that those fears are shared by her peers, such as the girlfriend who upon winning a Pulitzer cried that she'd never get a date again, suggests that they are not pulled from thin air.
