By Sara Catania
Urgent message to readers from Maureen Dowd in “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” via The New York Times Magazine, Oct 30:
Some men are intimidated by accomplished and successful women; Maureen Dowd is an accomplished and successful woman who intimidates men; Some women like to dress up in frilly, retro outfits and play hard to get; Maureen Dowd likes to dress up in fishnet stockings and snakeskin pumps and say sarcastic things; Some men don’t marry women who say sarcastic things; Maureen Dowd is not married; Some men like it when a very rich and successful actress/singer/superstar dresses up in a maid costume; Some of Maureen Dowd’s relatives have worked as maids; Some men marry significantly younger women who aren’t very bright; Maureen Dowd is very bright and not young and has been noticing a trend in which famous and powerful men seek out partners whose job it is to take care of them; It is not Maureen Dowd’s job to take care of men; Some actresses exercise by practicing pole dancing; Feminists are earnest and tedious and wear Birkenstocks; Some reporters at the New York Times agree with Maureen Dowd; Fish may not need bicycles, but fishnets complement a zebra-print bar stool nicely.
Urgent message number one to Maureen Dowd, via The New York Times Sunday Styles, Weddings/Celebrations, Oct. 30:
Some men are getting married to age-appropriate women who are educationally and professionally accomplished.
Examples: David Nathanson, 36, MBA Stanford, investment manager married Anne Pincus, 33, magna cum laude Amherst College, cum laude, Harvard Law School, chief counsel for the Asia-Pacific region for AC Neilson; Robert Carter, 43, design manager and master’s degree candidate in construction management married Elizabeth Bauza, 41, magna cum laude Georgetown University Law Center, senior associate at a New York-based law firm; Lee Akst, 32, summa cum laude Yale Medical School, fellow in otolaryngology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston married Jodi Wilkoff, 30, magna cum laude Northwestern University, partner in an educational consultancy in New York; Jeffrey Gettleman, 34, master of philosophy Oxford University, New York Times reporter, married Courtenay Morris, 32, University of Michigan Law School, assistant deputy public defender; Ronald Wilcox, 37, doctorate in business administration, Washington University in St. Louis, associate professor of business administration married Shannon Indoe, 32, doctorate in veterinary medicine, Cornell, biosafety specialist; Dejean Pantic, 40, M.B.A. University of Baltimore, senior accountant and financial analyst, married Kyle Bartlett, 33, Ph.D., music composition, University of Pennsylvania, composer and founder of a new-music ensemble. Adam Dixon, 28, cum laude Georgetown, vice president J.P. Morgan, to Rebecca Brock, 28, cum laude Vanderbilt, media buyer for media communications company.
Urgent message number two to Maureen Dowd, via The New York Times Sunday Styles, Oct. 30, page one below the fold:
Mary Gaitskill, a finalist for the National Book Award, writes stories and novels that, according to the article, explore “sexual abjection in squalid worlds from which there are few exits”; As a young woman she ran away from home and worked various jobs, including as a stripper; Gaitskill got deep into her writing and had looked forward to living out her days in solitude; At age 44 Gaitskill met a man (neither famous nor rich nor as accomplished as she) who liked her; After a brief while she decided she liked him too; They are together still; Mary Gaitskill seems content; Call Mary Gaitskill!
5 Comments
Oh my god that was brilliant. Thanks for posting.
Love this! Thanks.
I’m not sure I understand what urgent message you are trying to relay to Maureen Dowd. That, really, women have everything great and nothing to worry about? That Dowd is some kind of a loser because she can’t manage to get married to man who is her age while tons of other women can? That her article is just a bunch of sour grapes?
I hope not. That’s a pretty narrow and ungenerous reading of her piece. Does Maureen Dowd’s personal experience typify the experience of all women, or even all women of her social class and age? No, of course not. Does she have a point that our culture is experiencing a pointed backlash against feminism and women? Yes, I think so. Are there women out there who are successful, career-wise, and also married? Are there some women whose lives are very different from Ms. Dowd’s? Yes, of course. Is Maureen Dowd still justified in using social observations and personal insight in making a point about broader cultural trends? Yes, of course.
one of the things I found obnoxious about her logic is how superficial her treatment of people’s worth is. The fact is men on average do not rank a womans value or worth in the same way a woman ranks a man. this is well documented, over and over again. SHe is basically taking a woman’s typicial view and uses those metrics to view how men choose women.
Hey, Im sorry it just does not work. It may be a SHOCK to her and others but the size of paycheck and social prestige are to many people not hte most important qualities in the world when choosing a mate. Personally they are not on my list of things I value in a mate at all.
It is sad that our society has become so materialistic and crass, I say even pathetic, that people accept her ranking system or premise unquestioningly.
I do agree with the view that Dowd is complaining about female inequality, but the problem is that she is unable to address the problem in an appropriate idiom. Symptomatic of her cluelessness is her habitual (not just in this piece but general) resort to “insights” from evolutionary psychology. While I am rather skeptical about much of the “science” involved here (much of it appears to be a set of unfalsifiable hypotheses that resemble dogma more than science, with the pre-historic environment replacing the Creation myth), the double standard is truly horrendous: no-one argues that the fact that primates can be biologically aggressive is a reason against taking measures against violent crime, yet the same sort of argument is used to de-legitimize feminism. Sadly, where I will agree with Dowd is that the right’s demonization of the term has been so successful that (at least from my vantage point in NYC) it is easier to find the Holy Grail than someone admitting to being one. If Dowd wants to start looking for cuplrits, perhaps she should start with her own employer’s weekly “Styles” section…