DDC Note: Pultitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd can't fool the foolish much longer. She has proven herself to be a bitter feminist and a social-political snob. As if she hasn't contributed enough to the erosion of society, politics, men, women, families and relationships, her new book seems poised to do even more damage. Maybe she will open up and tell us why she is so angry...
FROM THE PUBLISHER Fresh from her success with the bestselling Bushworld, Maureen Dowd turns her lapidary prose and wicked wit to a topic even more incendiary than presidential politics: sexual politics. Four decades after the sexual revolution, nothing has worked out the way it was supposed to. The sexes are circling each other as uneasily and comically as ever, from the bedroom to the boardroom to the Situation Room, and now the New York Times columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for saucy and incisive commentary about the roundelay of Bill, Monica, Hillary, and Ken Starr digs into the Y and X files, exploring the mysteries and muddles of sexual combat in America.
In a new book filled with chapters that sparkle, startle, and amuse, Dowd explains why getting ready for a date went from glossing and gargling to Paxiling and Googling; why men are in an evolutionary and romantic shame spiral; why women have reeled backward in many ways; why men may be biologically unsuited to hold higher office, given their diva fits and catfights, teary confessions and fashion obsessions; why women are fixated on their looks more than ever, freezing their faces and emotions in an orgy of plasticity that makes the Stepford Wives look authentic; why male politicians and male institutions get tripped up in so much monkey business; why many alpha women from Martha to Hillary can have a successful second act only after becoming humiliated victims; and why the new definition of Having It All is less about empowerment and equality than about flirting and getting rescued, downshifting from "You go, girl!" to "You go lie down, girl!"
In addition, Dowd, who has reported on historic moments on the sexual battlefield from Geraldine Ferraro's vice-presidential run to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings to Hillary Rodham Clinton's reign as co-president, explores not only how many of these shining feminist triumphs soured, backfiring on women, but also how Hillary, a feminist icon busy plotting her campaign to be the first woman president, delivered the final blow to female solidarity herself.
Women's liberation has been less a steady trajectory than a confusing zigzag. Feminism lasted for a nanosecond and generated a gender tangle that has bewitched, bothered, and bewildered men and women for forty years. Now comes a woman to cut through the tangle and tickle Adam's rib. The battle of the sexes will never be the same.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Dowd's Bushworld, collecting her amped New York Times op-eds, hit big during
the 2004 presidential campaign. This follow-up is as slapdash as the earlier
book was slash-and-burn. What Dowd seems really to want to do is dish up
anecdotes of gender bias in the media, which she does with her usual
aplomb-everything from how Elizabeth Vargas was booted out of Peter
Jennings's vacant chair at ABC during his illness ("I'm not sure if she has
the gravitas," opines an exec) to the guys who won't date Dowd because she's
got more Beltway juice (and money) than they. The rest is padding: endless
secondary source and pundit quotes ("In Time, Andrew Sullivan wondered: `So
a woman is less a woman if she is a scientist or journalist or Prime
Minister?' "); examples of gender relations gone wrong in books, film and
TV; random interview blips ("Carrie, a publicist in her late twenties from
Long Island, told me...."); little musings from girlhood that are rarely
revealing enough; endless career rehashes of everyone from Anita Hill to
Helen Gurley Brown. A chapter on dating is a mishmash of everything from The
Rules to He's Just Not That into You; one on reproductive science (that asks
the title question for real) ends up referring a lot to orgasm. It's
intermittently entertaining, but neither sharp enough nor sustained enough
to work as a book.
Library Journal
Dowd (Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk), a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist
for the New York Times, here presents her funny, biting, and incisive take
on women's place in American society today. In the style of her columns,
Dowd's writing races along as she presents academic studies on the Y
chromosome and on the relationship between a woman's IQ and the odds she
will marry alongside essays on popular culture in which she considers, for
example, how society moved from Gloria Steinem and "no-makeup" feminism to
Desperate Housewives and Botox injections today. Dowd ponders why girls
dominate in high school but women fail to dominate in the adult world, why
the three network news anchor jobs were again filled by white men, and why
Hillary had to be a victim to become a senator. Her long journalism career
and her Washington connections allow Dowd to give the reader an inside
glimpse of influential publishing figures such as Katharine Graham and Helen
Gurley Brown, as well as an insider's view of Washington politics. Readable,
provocative, and entertaining; recommended for public libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
After sticking it to the administration in Bushworld (2004),
New York Times Pulitzer-winner Dowd takes on the battle of the sexes. Like
most columnists, the author is easier to take in small daily doses.
Full-length exposure to the rarified world she moves in prompts the uneasy
feeling that Dowd doesn't know much about ordinary folks. Joking that
nowadays women check out their prospective partners on the Internet, she
seems not to realize that most people are unlikely to find mentions of their
blind date on Google. "Whence the Wince?" and "How Green Is My Valley of the
Dolls," which extensively anatomize the cult of bodily perfection and
chemical-induced placidity, will certainly be of interest to those whose
peers can afford plastic surgery, frequent Botox injections and abundant
prescriptions of Paxil, perhaps not so much to women holding down jobs and
raising their kids without the benefit of full-time nannies or CEO husbands.
Dowd's habit of quoting friends and colleagues-who all seem to be media
executives, political operatives or other Times writers-reinforces the
perception of her blinkered perspective. Granted, she delivers her basic
message strongly: "Feminism lasted for a nanosecond, but the backlash has
lasted forty years." And she's often very funny to a serious purpose, as in
her skewering of "Saturday Morning Bill" Clinton who "would mess around with
women with big-cut hair and low-cut dresses," while "Sunday Morning Bill
would run and hide behind the sedate skirts of the high-toned feminists he
surrounded himself with." (Her most stinging passages skewer the hypocrisy
of feminists who decried the smear tactics used against Anita Hill, then
used the sametactics against Monica Lewinsky.) Still, a staunch liberal and
feminist like Dowd, who proudly declares that she comes "from a family of
Irish maids," could profitably spend more time writing about the impact of
the antifeminist backlash on people who are still cleaning houses. Her
heart's in the right place, but she really should get out more.