November 02, 2005

HORSEFEATHERS TAKES A LOOK INTO MAUREEN DOWD

Don’t be fooled by the title of Maureen Dowd’s essay in the October 30th edition of “The New York Times Magazine.” The piece, entitled “What’s a Modern Girl to Do,” is not really about the modern girl, it is about Maureen Dowd. You can tell this from the fact that the Times’ Magazine doesn’t usually have pictures of the authors of its articles, but of the article’s subjects. And there on the page facing the opening is a full-page photo of Maureen Dowd in unrestrained fantasy mode.

It is a dramatic representation, obviously envisioned by her. There she is in a darkened bar, sitting with her shapely legs showing, wearing fishnet stockings and brazen red shoes with four-inch heels. She is sitting on a barstool that is covered in faux tigerskin, with a drink in front of her and staring past the camera into space with a look that could be contempt mixed with yearning. Daylight is pouring in from a window behind her through a thin bluish tobacco haze, highlighting the tough-looking bartender sprawled over the bar and staring intently at her.

The picture, of course, is a little joke Ms. Dowd is having with us. The caption of the picture is “Looks should be deceiving.” (This technique of avowing and disavowing with a little joke is a trademark of Ms. Dowd’s style.) What are the picture and the joke telling us about her? Ms. Dowd tells us in the essay, adapted from her forthcoming book “Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide,” that early in life she was enthralled by glamorous movies, seeing herself as Ginger dancing with Fred or Myrna Loy sharing cocktails with William Powell, or Hepburn doing zany turns with Cary Grant. All very stylish, witty, urbane, and asexual. But the scenario she creates for the Times’ Magazine photo is a scene full of sexual innuendo: the woman sitting alone in the smoke-filled bar, her attractive legs in fishnet stockings, the insolent high-heeled, red shoes, the leering bartender, all suggesting a noirish Rita Hayworth movie in which Glen Ford rescues this good-bad girl from her unchaste man-hating past. Naturally, this sharp-tongued woman with her virtuous Irish Catholic girlhood, has to disavow the darker, vamp-like side of her nature by her jokey caption.

The picture informs much of the essay and although she strives to make her thesis a general one she gets her “data,” her social observations, from clones of herself. Her journalist colleagues, the folks she meets at her gym, the people of her urbane, upper- middle-class, intellectual, sophisticated, bicoastal world. No mention of Tilly the toiler, Harriet the hairdresser, Sally the secretary, Miriam the schoolteacher. No mention of the waitresses in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the salesgirls of Nashville, the librarians of Allentown, Pa. She knows and speaks for the metrosexual world only.

The book her mother gave Ms. Dowd when she was 25, “How to Catch and Hold a Man,” had advice in it that she chose not to hear in the red hot glow of 60s feminism: “Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat….Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head…by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors….Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.” Now at 53 or 54 she has bittersweet thoughts about what has happened since the heydays of Women’s Lib and brassiere burning. She notes with chagrin that modern young women have regressive tendencies: they like being dependent, having doors opened for them, not going dutch on a date, flirting; they don’t mind the idea of hunting their quarry, playing hard to get, and pleasuring their men.

When she left home, in 1969, women were busting out all over—becoming sexual, earning their own money, acting like men. “I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her [mother] when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.” Despite her Mother’s warning that “…Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

She has come, in the last 36 years, to understand with chagrin the feminist values that she had so intensely idealized were written in sand. “Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.”

Ms. Dowd’s words appear to accept the regressive realities of the new generation of women but deep down she has nothing but contempt and scorn for them and their values.

“Many women now do not think of domestic life as a ‘comfortable concentration camp,’ as Betty Friedan wrote in ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ where they are losing their identities and turning into ‘anonymous biological robots in a docile mass.’ Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of….to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.”

These contemptible young women “…fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics …”

Her great fear is that twenty years from now history will repeat itself and “…we will see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of….

“It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.”

Because she is so clever and urbane it is easy for her to rationalize her Weltanschauung as it regards men so that all aspects of the relationship between men and women are seen through the prism of power, dependence/independence, competition, master/slave, who’s top dog, submission/control. She looks for and finds this network of values everywhere. “…There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent….Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women….Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship. ‘With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?’ says a guy I know….I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career…How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.”

Actually Dowd is not interested in the Modern Girl; that’s a little myth that she has created for herself. Her world is the Alpha world—the world of Alpha males and their female counterparts who bestride the peaks inside the Beltway, Manhattan, and Hollywood. Although she likes to think of herself as coming from the world of the Irish working class, her fascination is with powerful men—presidents, movie stars, gatekeepers of the cultural and political world—because these are the people who have power—her love potion.

And she is richly endowed with great charm and a powerfully surgical wit. With the former she bewitches her Alpha males—George H. W. Bush, Michael Douglas, Howell Raines, and a long list of other powerful men—and with the latter, her sarcastic wit, she diminishes them. Those she has known and used describe her as “bewitching” or as a “sorceress,” a modern Circe whose sexual pleasure is not in the act of intercourse but in the act of seduction—a pattern which reassures such needy females that they have greater power than the male. But with such women, unfortunately, one seduction is never enough. Perhaps that is why Dowd has never lived with any of her boyfriends. If only Ms. Dowd could hold her tongue and remember her good Mother’s proxy’s advice—“Sarcasm is dangerous—avoid it altogether”—she might find a man who would stay.

Ordinary men she disdains as more or less worthless—Mr. Cellophanes. She cannot see herself as a non-Alpha female because she sees ordinary women as contemptible and living contemptible lives in the suburbs as soulless robots.

The question “Are Men Necessary?” for her is like asking are flies necessary for spiders.