Are Men Necessary?

January 13, 2006
Payback
A review of Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd
by Jennifer Heyne
Private Papers

Maureen Dowd’s latest book at least enjoys one distinction — that of the worst imagined titles ever. Are Men Necessary? does, however, raise an existential question: are males ultimately expendable? Perhaps the question at hand deserves some serious philosophical inquiry from such an experienced observer; after all, the multifaceted Dowd is resident liberal columnist of the nation’s leading newspaper, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a steadfast war-critic, and a “rags-to-riches” story of middle-class Catholic girl making it in cutthroat sex and power world of Washington. Dowd then will lead us into an inquiry about maleness, spiced with her own ample data of first-hand experience with plenty of alpha- and not so-alpha men.

Ultimately, we are to be disappointed. Historically, Dowd’s book might have been an assessment of the careers of generals Washington, Greene, or Gates, or presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt, or even World War II heroes such General Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. A contemporary Bill Gates or Steve Jobs might deserve some commendation for the advent of the personal computer age. Or even if we go to the therapeutic side, Dr. Phil seems to bring consolation to many women and their problems in his teatime discussions. Entertainment greats like directors Hitchcock, Truffaut and Kurosawa, and even Spielberg and Lucas have brought hours of escapism to fish-eyed publics. Certainly all these men helped to build democracy, create affluence, and increase the pleasure the masses derive from it. In truth, it is hard to find comparable female achievement to that of Plato, Shakespeare, and Einstein. Could Dowd tell us why?

Barring such appreciation, in our leisure we now have time to entertain post-modern questions like “could a world exist without men?” In this vein of thought, Dowd’s book might pursue the lives of some unnecessary men: Benedict Arnold, Idi Amin, Stalin, Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman, and a host of other traitors, murderers, rapists, assassins and thugs and thereby imply male testosterone has brought us a world of violence as well as great art and political achievement.

But an honest appraisal of the value of man, historical or philosophical, empirical or speculative, was not to be had in Dowd’s chatty work. In this neglect lies Dowd’s revered post-modern humor: write a book about women, but say it is about men. Offer scatter-shot observations that derive from emotion, but rarely quantified or enriched with serious thinking or analysis — and do it in such a chic, cool manner that no one would dare whisper ‘there’s nothing here.’

The beginning of the book, at least starts in more interesting fashion than the rest — in fact in one segment Dowd attacks the old boogeyman, as we all remember, recounting how Monica Lewinsky stalked Bill Clinton — scary, but apparently well received by the man himself. There are also some enlightening segments on old-fashioned, gold-digger techniques straight from books like How to Catch and Hold a Man (by Yvonne Antell): don’t make “abrupt gestures,” “sarcasm is dangerous,” avoid the “direct no,” and “keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.” Those prescriptions — though Dowd clearly intends us to be appalled by the banality once called womanly — would nevertheless require the sagacity and spunk of an intelligent woman. No mere ditz could master it all and yet distinguish herself from wallpaper.

To Dowd’s credit, it is hard to imagine women of such specifications in Jericho when the walls came tumbling down, in 1666 London as it burned, in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, in Louisiana with a category-5 hurricane bearing down, or in any job of much consequence, which is essentially Dowd’s point. All these old-fashioned manuals, however effective — and we can’t discount that they worked to snare, at least for a temporary tryst, a president — might help with programming androids and so create a class of finely tuned secretaries. But you won’t find a woman of talent, skill or integrity in these Machiavellian help guides.

The truth is that the 40s and 50s gave us much more interesting and skilled women than the modern generation of Paris Hilton’s — a woman who complains that people don’t understand how hard she works. Dowd’s most interesting women in this book of men are the journalistic illustri Katharine Graham and Mary McGrory. Their stories — one of a publisher, the other a columnist — boil down to women who got the job done and could care less about what men said or thought of them. If Dowd had taken a lesson from them (and she didn’t), she might have judiciously edited out of her book of men her own fears that a “raging-bull chief of staff also epically cursed [her]” for stories written. She might not have worried about “vituperation coming back at [her].” Graham and McGrory seemed more interested in truth, integrity and accomplishment, less about explaining away the stress of the job by evil male double-standard and petty subterfuge. They obviously faced tough odds, but overcame them with hard work rather than whines of sexual discrimination or harassment. Somehow Dowd’s own impressions invalidate the thesis of her own book — and have the unintended effect of proving that male disapproval, though no fault of their gender, really gets to women, who, perhaps overly punctilious and under medicated, make it impossible for themselves, in this age of supposed gender equity, to carve out an autonomous identity.

The famous Dowdian humor does lighten the narrative. Some of the more hilarious aspects of the book, in fact, are Dowd’s quotes. Oscar Wilde once proclaimed “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” The dry-witted Carrie Fisher stated “I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions.” A former NBC vice president confessed “Cloning is a proud television tradition.” And, of course, those male-catching manuels provide ceaseless entertainment: “If he has a girlfriend, try to become a good friend of hers.” Mary McGrory advised her nephew at a swanky Washington party “Always approach the shrimp bowl like you own it.” In fact, Dowd has a knack for finding the funny quip, which she quite judiciously allows to outshine her own prose.

However, for all the humorous aphorisms, Dowd can’t seem to shake the contemporary obsession with wealthy men choosing to marry their secretaries and public relations agents, instead of professional equals such as herself. The truth is who cares what sort of spouse the marrying metrosexual chooses? He’s hardly a catch, effused as he is with tastes which more often than not are at the expense of testosterone levels. For most women the sort of “men” Dowd worries over are, to be candid, hardly men at all, and better lost than found.

Meanwhile the ax is always ground, and so Dowd spends an inordinately long time discussing what men might “fear” in the professional woman. It is a long litany of just what one would expect by the brilliant, beautiful, witty, independent Dowd. The male feels threatened by skilled, educated women. He fears criticism from women. He avoids high achievers (because men don’t want to compete with women). The diabolical male “might be engaged,” according to some women Dowd communicated with, “in a sinister Stepford plot” — a throw-away line which took this book from hysteria to the level of paranoia.

In spite of humorous quotes and outtakes of the life of President Clinton — whose greatest accomplishments seem to be making the career of Hillary and making a love of sorts to Lewinsky — Dowd’s book is about payback, not truth. Her current pet-peeve is the sitting administration; after flaying the Clintonesque sensitive metrosexuals, she now can turn her venom on the old fashioned alpha-males to show how they mix it up — like catty women of all people. So Dowd can use sharp-elbow politics to reveal all those qualities in men often said to be reserved for women. “Politics, after all, is rife with male diva fits.” There “men are engaging in shrewish, scolding, clawing, vengeful, sneaky vain behavior.” “Why Pandora’s Box Is No Tender Trap,” offers a short chapter that is actually about men — our current wartime leadership. “Rummy” has “hot flashes” and “diva fits.” Cheney has “hormonal mood swings” and “hissy fits all the time.” The Bushes have been choked up in public. Dubya himself wears “tight, hottie jeans at the ranch” that are “over-the-top sexy.” This last oddity can only be explained by Dowd’s lean years mixing with metrosexuals, which clearly have ruined her taste if she pants over poor W’s work pants. Needless to say, the entire chapter seems shrewish, scolding, clawing, vengeful, sneaky, as if the book is itself a joke on the reader — the charge that men dismiss women as hormonal and catty will be disproved by hormonal cattiness.

The most comic part of this otherwise sad book — though clearly unintended — was the account of the scientists who speculate on a world where men have disappeared or have been reduced to sex slaves and sperm donors. Here Dowd discusses theories that the Y chromosome is headed for extinction. If this is true, she wonders, will women save the last few as sex slaves or develop new methods through hermaphroditic reproduction? Apparently there is really a proverbial Dr. Jones out there who envisions a Dowd future with male extinction. According to Dowd, scientists say that the male Y chromosome is shedding genes, becoming “a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome” and “Y chromosomes are in relative decline.” Anyone who understands the problem with Down Syndrome knows more is not necessarily better. Less may herald greater refinement.

Dowd seems most outraged with that audacious modern woman who openly pursues men for their money, wears skimpy-tight-sexy-Bebe outfits, and adopts the old rules of catching a man with little of the subtlety of Dowd’s older generation. Can’t these stupid metrosexuals see what all these bimbos are up to, cutting in front of the Mary McCarthys and Simone de Beauvoirs like Dowd to the front of the line in their halter-tops and banal “ya knows” and “whatevers”? She laments the 60s and 70s when the vogue was to be career-proud and to go Dutch, then catch a man who will provide for you while you become Earth mother and have babies. The truth is that, for all the change of sets, little has really changed and Dowd might have ended the book much earlier where she claims “Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status.”

Dowd also laments that women suddenly seem to be choosing to stay at home rather than work — women, it seems, don’t want to “climb the corporate ladder.” The choice is clear when we consider the desirability of becoming part of the corporazzi — who in their right mind would want to pick up the net and trident and enter the arena unless forced to? Few, even among men, are going to choose an arena of hyenas and ankle-bitters if they can be their own boss at home — and be paid to boot. Maybe her next book (Are Women Necessary?) will be about all those hoodwinked males who stupidly slave all day at the foot of the boss to prove they are really “providers” and “he-men,” bring-in-the-dough guys for their judgmental and never satisfied women at home?

There are those, men and women, who seem to lust after the competitive corporate world, but they are an unpleasant lot in our materialistic age. Pregnancy, then, is the perfect excuse to avoid the fray and perpetuate the species in the process. More bizarre is Dowd’s view that the choice for an average woman is either corporate or home. Frankly, I don’t know many people who have that choice, unless waitresses, stewardesses, and cleaning-ladies don’t exist. For most middle class families, it is a matter of how long can the woman stay at home as caretaker before she must return to the lower rungs of some work-a-day world — a world that lacks the glamour and opportunity that corporate-yes-or-corporate-no evokes. So, Dowd is writing from the upper middle class world where bourgeois Emmas and their metro-men seem to languish
In fact, Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? explores little of the existential notion of necessity and even less of men. Her tired rant instead is about the troubles of a modern career woman, outdone at every turn by the cone-breasted secretary, and in frustration prodded and goaded by modern media likewise to become a plastic, sexed-up doll, albeit less successfully so. So I would actually fear a book by a Dowdi-man called Are Women Necessary? which would be about how terrible it is for a metro-sexual whose only choices are his secretary, for whom he mortgages his life to buy some trinket on Sax Fifth Avenue, and a disgruntled, type-A, neurotic career woman, who later might menacingly dedicate a book “For men. Friends and more, past, present, and future. You know who you are.”