In one passage, she considers sending a guy a package of books from A-Z that will teach him more about her. Dithering about the messages that texts like "The Taming of the Shrew," "The House of Mirth" and "Be Honest -- You're Just Not That Into Him Either" might transmit, she concludes that it would be "the height of presumption to expect someone to devote that many hours to fathoming someone else's psyche." Dowd's self-defeating decision that no man could be that interested in her is followed immediately by defensive humor: "What guy would drag himself away from ESPN's 'SportsCenter' to read 'Sense and Sensibility'?" It's in moments like this that her bravado betrays her vulnerability and it becomes clear -- for anyone who hasn't heard that she's dated successful guys like "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin, actor Michael Douglas, office mate John Tierney, and (as she half-acknowledged in New York) former Times chief Howell Raines -- that Maureen Dowd doesn't hate men at all. Shes just flummoxed by them.

One of the book's most telling through-lines is the series of fictional pronouncements about singleness that have lodged in Dowd's brain: Kristin Davis' "Sex and the City" wail "I've been dating since I was 15! I'm exhausted. Where is he?" and Holly Hunter's lament in "Broadcast News," "I'm beginning to repel the people I'm trying to attract." Then there's Bette Davis' disquieting disquisition as Margo Channing in "All About Eve," the one that begins, "Funny thing about a woman's career -- the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster," and ends, "Nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman."

In her syndicated column, Kathleen Parker blamed Dowd for her man trouble, claiming, "Men haven't turned away from smart, successful women because they're smart and successful. More likely they've turned away because the feminist movement that encouraged women to be smart and successful also encouraged them to be hostile and demeaning to men." In Slate, Katie Roiphe joined Parker in pathologizing Dowd's status, insinuating that her singleness has nothing to do with men being threatened by her but with some unspeakable internal flaw. "Could there possibly be another reason that the attractive, successful Dowd has not settled down?" she asked. (I'm not sure what particular ailment Roiphe is suggesting Dowd suffers from -- Frigidity? Lesbianism? Narcissism? -- but it's probably not very nice.) Roiphe's criticism is a fair, if tautological one: The problem in not finding a mate is that ... you don't find a mate. Two parties fail to mesh; you're one of them.

But critics like Roiphe and Parker doth protest a bit too much. Against what? Maureen Dowd's single status? Her claim (backed up by Sorkin, who tells New York that Dowd was "more independent than [he] would like") that men are intimidated by her and that that may be one reason why she has not settled with a partner? If so, they are confusing critical observation with hostility in a way that suggests they are leery about any woman who does not subscribe to the notion that men are the central and governing force of women's lives. There is something terrifying in the realization that Dowd appears not to agree with Margo Channing that without a bed-mate she is "not a woman."

"Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide"

By Maureen Dowd

Putnam Publishing Group

338 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

For thousands of years, heterosexual mating has been rooted in the fact that women have needed men: for reproduction, for financial support, and, Dowd quotes her mom as proclaiming, for "heavy lifting." Now, even as Dowd jokes that feminism's success lasted a nanosecond and frets about women who "no longer want to become the men they wanted to marry," the life that she's living is a veritable revolution, one so profound and nerve-jangling that Dowd skirts it with humor. We point out her flaws so that her situation cannot, must not, exemplify a new norm: Women really don't need men anymore.

That doesn't mean that many of us don't want them. But we don't need them, and to absorb that -- not just as a slogan but as a reality that shakes up all our assumptions -- is uncharted territory for both sexes. All of Dowd's bawdy satirizing pads this book; her tongue is so firmly in her cheek that it's hard to tell what she's saying. It reads like a symptom of ambivalence and confusion: Am I really saying men aren't necessary? Do I really think that's true? It suggests that she is wrestling with her own unease about conditions for which she has no solid models. According to her friend Leon Wieseltier, Dowd has "never found a man she loves enough to marry," a luxury that previous generations of women have not enjoyed. She tells Levy that when her dying mother wondered aloud whether her daughter would ever settle down, her response was: "Not everybody gets everything." It's a powerful assessment, both in its admission of desire and in its sparse, unemotional truth. It says that a husband might be a perk, but not a baseline requirement for fulfillment.

But look at what Dowd has gotten. Look at this life: the house, the friends, the exes, the job, the Pulitzer, her siblings and nieces and her relationship with her mother. It's such a full, rich life. And that's OK, right? Well? Is it? I don't know, and what "Are Men Necessary?" tells me is that Dowd doesn't either.

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