Jerome Weeks

01:36 PM CST on Sunday, December 18, 2005

JEROME WEEKS

Let's take a moment – in the spirit of Christmas – for a brief defense of Maureen Dowd.

Not that she really needs help defending herself. But the tart-tongued New York Times columnist has a new book, Are Men Necessary? (G.P. Putnam's, $25.95), which has received not one, but two vengeful poundings in our pages and the lowest-rated book on metacritic.com. It's a site that helpfully compiles reviews and then in all seriousness calibrates their numerical weight.

Some of the reviews of Ms. Dowd's book about the failures of feminism have been akin to: "Waddaya expect, ya nagging, leftist hag?" Really. James Pinkerton of Newsday even managed to jeer at her childlessness. A class act.

Offering fewer insults, columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that women like Ms. Dowd are single and childless not because of their brains or success. Feminism turned them "hostile" to men.

That's odd. I've known women – older, pre-feminist sorts – who bought the husband-providing, mom-sacrificing-career tradition. Then they got dumped for a young babe. No feminist was ever as ballistically hostile toward men.

The fact is that Necessary is far from shrill. It's sardonic, but it's wistful: Feminists sought an ideal of sexual, paycheck and child-care equality. But what we got were women like Pamela Anderson and men like Donald Trump. And the smart women are still dateless.

But the fact is that Necessary isn't great, either. It's a glib, cut-and-paste-and-quip book. It's funny and sharply observed but repetitive and scattered, mixing real issues with Cosmo claptrap.

But times sure have changed. In 1983, Cynthia Heimel made much the same dateless-feminist wail in her amusing Sex Tips for Girls. She didn't get jeered; she got hired to write TV sitcoms.

Ms. Heimel was a columnist for the Village Voice, though, not the Times. And she didn't cover politics in a man's world like D.C. Ms. Dowd does, often mocking the tender psyches of big-dog, alpha males.

Now, full disclosure requires I note that Ms. Dowd and I have met. Last year, we sat together, covering the launch of Bill Clinton's never-ending push for My Life, his never-ending memoir.

During the wait for his Book Expo speech to start, Ms. Dowd's pen died. Bravely ignoring any possible charges of media collusion, I gave her one of mine. Thanks, she said.

That was it. But as Ms. Dowd makes clear in her book, men are actually good for some things. Heavy lifting. And being a pen caddy, I suppose.

In light of this Grand Symbolic Pen Loan, though, consider that Ms. Dowd's columns and her best-selling Bushworld have her pegged as a snarky liberal (although conservatives ignore her years of baiting the Clintons). As a result, many people would expect someone like me to defend someone like her.

Well, the truth is that when Gail Collins wrote for the Times, I preferred her humor. And as Katha Pollitt notes in The Nation, for a (supposed) leftist smarty, Ms. Dowd sure buys the Kathleen Parker worldview: Feminism failed. To get ahead (or get wed) nowadays, gals should shut up and be nice.

This is nonsense, as Ms. Dowd's own career proves. She's a leading pundit – and in high heels. As for her dateless state – and all the women she sees shedding hard-won freedoms for fame or cash today – well, who said feminism would be a cure for male cravenness or female calculation?

No, my simple point is that Ms. Dowd was panned more than her book was. Which is further proof of her success, actually. Somewhat like Hillary Clinton, she has become a marker of boomer women's progress. Or the lack of it.

Totem or target. Is it any surprise, then, that the knives came out?

E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com