Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary?

Let me illustrate Dowd's literary wit from the second half of the book. I will say in passing that this is the quickest 335-page read I think I have ever had. It is pure fun, but not in the same way that John Grisham is fun. She has a point to make, even if you aren't quite sure what the point is. Is she lamenting the fact that feminism seems to have disappeared? Is she criticizing the new "beauty" movement, which tries to make the external woman eternally young? Is she upbraiding the United States for continuing its chummy-chummy relationship with Saudi Arabia, for example, when women there still have to wear the abaya and are not permitted to drive cars much less participate in the political process? Or, is she just interested in showing us our hypocrisies and the ironies of our lives, where, for example, feminists recruit a woman to trump up sexual harassment stories at one end of the decade (Anita Hill, in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991) while, later in the decade, try to clobber the woman who comes forward (Paula Jones) to argue that President Clinton sexually harassed her? Well, let's show her sparkling style.

Literary Litheness

She spends several pages on the liposuction madness gripping (sucking?) America today. Not only has the procedure exploded in popularity, but there are examples of liposuction death that have been documented. The latter occasioned the creation of a "liposuction task force" to look into ways to make the procedure safer. Dowd's final comment? "Liposuction task force? In the '50s, women vacuumed. Now women are vacuumed. Our Hoovers have turned on us!" (219).

She spends time exploring the concept of beauty today. What is most interesting is that taking care of yourself, for a modern urban woman (her world is New York) is seemingly a full-time job. She quotes a NY Times reporter: "Looks are the new feminism...In order to have power, you've got to look as if you care about yourself. It is a banner way of advertisting your competency" (234). But what exactly does the final product look like? Well, all the beautiful people look alike. They (the women) are slender, with nips and tucks here and there, with insertions of various substances here and removals of things there,with shining faces that often don't look as if they are faces of a real human. Careful observation of the waist to hip ratio is a sine qua non. She muses: "There's nothing wrong with self-improvement, of course, except when it literally becomes self-effacement" (235). She wryly notes that the "antiaging industry" has gone from a billion a year in 1990 to $15 billion in 2005. Plastic surgeons and dermatologists are now the ones sidled up to at parties, as people long for that perfect appearance. Dermatologists, she says, are the "demiurges of the millennium."

She tells facts of stories in ways that illumine the pathetic human condition, facts which somehow eluded me as I casually read the stories in the news. That is, for many stories on the news I just catch "the drift." One sense that Maureen Dowd not only wants to know precisely what happened, but wants to have pictures of events. For example, I knew that Bill O'Reilly, the darling of the right wing, had to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit a few years ago with a co-worker, but Dowd tells us what happened. In illustrating the point of how women, too, can be opportunistic with respect to sex, she tells about Andrea Mackris who "took Bill O'Reilly to the cleaners for millions after taping his sex fantasies about loofahs and outdoor showers in the Caribbean" (295). A loofah, for those who were curious, is a "fibrous substance of the pod of the plant Luffa aegyptiaca, used as a a sponge or flesh-brush." As in, "He was rubbing himself with a well-soaped loofah." Or, that Hillary Clinton paid more than $380,000 out of her personal trust account to help settle the Paula Jones lawsuit. Or, how Bill Clinton probably could have avoided a lawsuit with Jones had he just bought her a moderately expensive bottle of wine before unceremoniously exposing himself to her.

Or the icy story of Gary Hart's wife, Lee Ludwig Hart, baiting him while he was trying to return to politics in 1988 by running for President. He had no Secret Service entourage now, and he found himself in the unenviable position of just being another exhausted middle-aged guy at Logan Airport looking for his luggage. His wife, humiliated by the Donna Rice affair of the year before, said, while he was obviously waiting in frustration for his luggage, "Ga-a-a-ry, you're not showing your leadership. Ga-a-a-ry, what about your leadership?" (299).

Words

She has read widely. You can tell. She is part of the last generation of English majors (if, indeed, she majored in English), who deeply imbibed English writers from Chaucer through the 19th century. So, she will use choice words and phrases (my favorite is the maladroit du seignoir, playing off the medieval notion, probably apocryphal, of the droit du seignoir, which enabled the "lord" of the manor to spend the first marital night with any bride in his jurisdiction), and fills us with vocabulary words that aren't in use by most people. She breezily uses terms like loofah, batrachian, vindaloo, boite, bris, Shar-pei and "quid profiterole," many of which she uses in a humorous way, but all of which testify to her curiousity with respect to life and words. She is always on the lookout for a knockout quotation and an arresting phrase.

In the end, however, I think she is just too cute as a book author for me. Well, another way of putting this is to say that I think I need to immerse myself much deeper into the "celeb" culture of today before I can do what she does with the pen in describing our contemporaries. But, I have a sabbatical coming up. A long one. Celebdom beckons.

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