Ah, Maureen

I've been thinking, on and off all week about that Maureen Dowd piece in the NYTimes mag, an excerpt from her new book, in which she bemoans...something. What? The failure of feminism? Other women's choices? Her own solitude? I'm not sure.  There's been some ink (some bytes?) spilled on it, but I just couldn't get interested in taking the time to comment. It's an old discussion, and Dowd's piece was just too...personal in a creepy, almost pitiful kind of way. Good coment threads at Althouse and Roger Simon.  But I just couldn't plug into the template, myself. I don't think like Dowd does. It strikes me even her question - Why am I not married? is decidedly un-feminist, a betrayal of the sensibilites she claims to be defending. I mean, I don't even think of the world or my life in it as "Here I am, a woman in the world, being a woman, balancing the power I have with the men around me." I think, "Here I am, a person who's been given a few years on earth. What am I supposed to do? How can I serve?" The answer takes different forms - I serve by being a mother, by being a wife and a daughter, by writing, speaking, by holding my tongue when I want to snap at the grocery store clerk, by trying to be aware of the suffering in this world and doing something about it...

Perhaps my views would be different if I operated in a different world in which I wasn't working at home, and did have to negotiate the corridors of corporate power.

Actually, I hope they wouldn't be.

I find it hard to sympathize with Dowd. But then, you already knew that.

Her central thesis - that feminism has failed because men don't like smart, ambitious women and want to marry the maid instead is just stupid. What's missing from Dowd's analysis is simple, and takes one word to say: family. She just doesn't get, even as her writing is full of allusions to her own (recently deceased) mother, whom she obviously admires, that the heart of this male-female dance is, in the end, family. To get to that place, we endure much and we sacrifice much, and we wonder how much of ourselves we lose in the process, as we seek to gain something greater than what can be ours, sitting alone in a room - or at a bar. But that just does not seem to figure in Dowd's thinking.

Katie Roiphe helps me out a bit by her aptly named piece "Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?" Her stance is different than mine in some respects, but she essentially nails Dowd for not being a serious political thinker and wasting our time.  I think that about covers it.

One of Dowd's many admirers extravagantly compared her to Edith Wharton. But Wharton was among the first female writers to write about the single woman's ambivalence toward marriage. What is maddening about Dowd's book—and the excerpt in the Times Magazine—is that she does not develop her ideas, that she does not push beneath the surface. 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. Is there something about the generation of women who came of age in the late 1960s—in male-dominated universities and workplaces—that finds its own power problematic? Why is it that so many women are taking refuge in outdated visions of femininity?

I don't mean to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with using one's own life in political writing. But one should use it honestly, rigorously, complicatedly, like critics such as Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, or Andrew Sullivan. Because the issues surrounding sexual politics are so emotionally charged, so laden with contradiction, so racked with ambivalence and irrationality, it is especially important not to neglect nuance. One of the failures of the feminist movement in the first place was a reliance on easy aphorisms, and the schematic worldview that such aphorisms implied. The famous line, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" did not prove to be a constructive or realistic contribution to the feminist cause. Replacing one set of rigid gender stereotypes with another did not allow women the full range of their desires and ended up sabotaging the movement. Dowd herself criticizes the feminists of the 1970s for imagining a sea of identical, sexless women in navy blazers descending on the workplace. Though she appears to be arguing for a new, more rigorous feminism, she is guilty of precisely the same intellectual fault—starting with the catchy, meaningless title of her book, Are Men Necessary?, Dowd's aphorisms, amusing and pithy in the morning paper along with a cup of coffee, are precisely what the conversation about sexual politics does not need.

  Ross Douhat comments as well.