Love her or hate her, Maureen Dowd never ceases to elicit strong emotion. Whether she’s depicting Bill Clinton as a sex-starved hound dog, or George W. Bush as a clueless incompetent, Dowd sees herself as the caricaturist.
A world of gray is to her, well, too gray. Better to draw the big nose a little bigger, sketch the beady eyes even smaller. By most accounts, this modus operandi has worked for her stunningly well when she sets her sights on the world of politics. As a recent love letter masquerading as a profile in New York magazine put it, “As in all caricatures, some traits are minimized, others are amplified and possibly distorted, but the fundamental essence is usually captured so precisely that Dowd’s images often win a permanent place in the culture. She’s retold the last three presidencies as long-running sitcoms, where the joke is always on the man in charge. In a way, she’s created her own reality — Dowdworld — and we just live in it.”
But for Dowd’s new book, Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide, she has turned away from the political realm to focus on the state of feminism today. She comes to the depressing conclusion that though women like herself might have achieved some measure of professional equality, and even acclaim, now their success means they can’t get a date — much less a marriage. Men, she concludes, don’t want to go home with a woman who is capable, talented and competitive in the workplace. Most of all, they don’t want a woman like Dowd — arch, witty and bright. Especially bright. Bright might be the biggest no-no of all.
An excerpt appeared in the Times’ magazine this past Sunday and it has caused quite a stir. (It has also stayed in the top five of the Times‘ list of most e-mailed articles for six days now.) Maybe it has to do with sentiments like these:
“Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise lounge, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.”
But it seems Dowd might have taken that caricaturist instinct a little too far for some of the successful women whom she is trying to describe, painting a world they don’t really recognize, maybe another “Dowdworld.”
In a long column at Womensenews.org, Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University and Rosalind C. Barnett, a senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, take Dowd to task for basing her provocative conclusions on flimsy data, and they make a pretty good case.
For example, one of the studies Dowd leans on heavily was carried out in 2004 by psychology researchers who found that, according to Dowd, “men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.” What Dowd failed to emphasize was that the study was based on the answers of 120 male and 208 female undergraduates, who were asked questions about a hypothetical future partner. The findings were not surprising, Rivers and Barnett write, simply because they were “no barometer of adult male preferences. Rather, [they] reflected teen boys’ ambivalence about strong women.”
Rivers and Barnett then quote a UC Berkeley report, based on “an analysis of 80 peer-reviewed studies,” that found the opposite result: the “more education a woman has, the more likely she is to marry.”
Another of the jaw-dropping surveys Dowd refers to was one conducted at four British universities, where it was found that for every 15-point increase in IQ score above the average, a woman’s likelihood of marrying fell by almost 60 percent. What Dowd totally ignored, though, is that, according to Rivers and Barnett, this data was “gathered from men and women born in 1921; the women are all now in their 80s.” They ask the obvious: “Should a study of octogenarian women be taken as a guide for today’s young people?” Good point; Is Dowd guilty of capturing nothing more than the dilemmas of British coeds 84 years ago?
What caught our eye was Dowd’s reliance on a recent front-page Times piece about young women at Ivy League colleges who plan on turning their backs on a career for the sake of raising a family. This article, written by a J-school student, has since been widely discredited (trashed, in fact), most notably by Jack Shafer of Slate, who wrote that the writer “deserves a week in the stockades. And her editor deserves a month.”
As Rivers and Barnett conclude, “When Dowd bases her views of men and women on such poor research, it’s no wonder that Dowd looks into the crystal ball of feminism and finds the picture so disconcerting.”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.