Tag: Maureen Dowd

Feb 10 2010

Mainstream Female Columnists Fail Men and Women Equally

Many bloggers, including me, have expressed frequent consternation at the lack of substantive female voices in the mainstream media.  On that note, there are times when I wonder what both Kathleen Parker and Maureen Dowd are both smoking and inhaling.  Tweedledum and Tweedledee routinely write columns crafted with such a flagrant disregard for coherence or original analysis that I wonder how they even ended up with a job.  Both of these writers are supposed to be the apex of serious journalism and with it the mouthpiece of womanhood and womens’ concerns.  It seems as though both conservative and liberal women are getting the short end of the stick, though I’m hardly surprised at the revelation.  And it isn’t just women who are suffering from such inadequacy.      

Martin Austermuhle, writing today at dcist, points out the sloppy logic of Parker’s latest column in The Washington Post.


Parker asserts that shoveling is something men just need to do, like it’s hard-wired into our genetic code. “What do men want?” she asks. “Shovels. Men want shovels, the bigger the better,” she responds.

“Women can’t be blamed for wanting to be independent and self-sufficient, but smart ones have done so without diminishing the males whose shoulders they might prefer on imperfect days. Add to the cultural shifts our recent economic woes, which have left more men than women without jobs, and men are all the more riveted by opportunities to be useful,” she observes.

According to her profound analysis on the matter, the minute we simple-minded men see a flake of snow, we go running to the nearest shovel. “Man is never happier than when he is called to action, in other words. That is to say, when he is needed,” she posits. Of course, she does add that women will shovel, but she only admits as much to avoid “sexist stereotyping.” Yeah. That’s like prefacing a homophobic joke by saying, “But some of my best friends are gay!”

I frequently use personal examples in my posts and diary entries, but I am always careful to try to use facts and other sources to bolster my claims.  There is great power in the personal, but Parker proves that the personal can be used very wrongly to stand in for objective truth.  Ignoring societal conditioning in favor of innate biological programming is a tactic frequently employed by the Right, particularly as a means of keeping gender distinctions frozen in time.  Even so, there are a few undeniable elements of our behavior that must be chalked up to the undeniable fact that some of us have two X chromosomes and some of us only have one.  Yet, relying too heavily on that fact fails to take into account that we are distinct from other animals in that we have highly advanced brains and reasoning abilities.  Since the beginning of time, humankind has been imposing its own version of reality beyond purely biological imperative and survival instinct.        

The feud between Parker and Dowd is well-documented and I don’t need to add much more to it.  Unsurprisingly, both columnists manage to miss the point altogether when they cobble together a collection of stale arguments and pseudoscience to make their case.  They end up on opposite ends of a great existential divide, managing to be equally wrong in the process.  Contrary to what Dowd says, men are necessary, but it should be added that they are necessary in ways beyond shoveling driveways or providing emergency manual labor.  Contrary to what Parker says, it’s not biologically determined that men are born snow shovelers and ditch diggers.  

Later in the column, Parker at least makes an effort to try to state that she isn’t homophobic or dismissive of the fact that gay men are equally capable of being “masculine”, but the conclusion she draws is bizarre, at best.  If it wasn’t so strangely rendered, I might take more offense to what it implies.


As for Craig, he’s been happy the past 25 years with Jack, who, though he pleads a bad back, cooks a mean stroganoff, from which I have benefited twice since the snows began.

Doubtless, such displays of manliness — which in my view include feeding the hungry — are, like the weather, passing divertissements. And these jottings are but a wee contribution to the annals of gender study. But if one should ever stop pondering the malaise of modern woman long enough to consider what men might want, the answer is obvious to any except, perhaps, the U.S. Congress.

Give a man a job, and he’ll clear a path to your door.  

Her convoluted conclusion seems to be that women have focused too selfishly on their own empowerment that they’ve failed to understand or appreciate the contributions of men.  With it comes an underlying assumption that men feel confused these days because their time-honored roles in society have been somehow denigrated or tarnished since women started demanding equal rights, equal pay, and basic equality.  If only things were this simple.  If only women had anything remotely close to the same degree of parity with men.  If only, for example, there was some set standard of what all men wanted or what all women wanted, for that matter.

One can’t just make a blanket statement based on absolutes.  Men are not some monolithic entity any more than women are.  Surveying the women and men with whom we work, live, and interact will reveal that gender distinctions are not distributed exactly the same for everyone.  In that spirit, it is equally wrong-headed to reduce men to violent brutes or women to flighty fashionistas.  A major problem everyone faces is that we are forced to conform to gender roles that are designed for one-size-fits-all settings when we are all different sizes, shapes, and proportions.  If gender were a set of clothes, we’d be tugging on it constantly, hoping that with enough effort it eventually would cover us properly.  And so long as we impose simplistic identity upon complex humanity, it never will quite work.        

The major problem at play here is that Feminist groups and women’s rights groups tend to often to couch their analysis in overly-academic terms.  I can vouch for this personally.  This means that pop-feminist analysis like Parker and Dowd ends up shaping the perception of most people, as though these sorts of stilted descriptions are some objective picture of the way things really are.  But these two aren’t even the worst offenders.  At least these columnists usually mean well and usually at least aim high.  Meanwhile, aside from “serious” analysis, a perversion of Feminism leads women to believe that there is something empowering in being publicly sexual or in adopting the same pose of their chauvinistic brethren.  Objectification by any other name, this is an attitude reflected ever more frequently in popular culture.  But instead of focusing on whether or not it’s a good thing that now Tween aged girls are dressing provocatively rather than like the children that they are, or whether we’re including people of color into our depictions of feminine identity, or whether transgender citizens are treated with the respect they deserve, instead we get into the eternal back and forth about whether the cause of women’s rights has done more harm than good and whether men are suffering as a result.          

This degree of navel-gazing does no one any good.  Periodically, it might be helpful if we engaged in a respectable dialogue about how far the rights of women have come, where the movement is headed, and what we all might take from it.  However, if this territory is mined constantly without anything especially novel or even interesting to report from it, then we forget that there’s much more to Feminism and gender equality than the tit-for-tat that never ends.  Gender is a construct of the human mind and it is so pervasive that its impact effects us in ways that are both exceptionally glaring and maddeningly minute.  The complexities of civilization and the human mind have given rise to a huge amount of interrelated information to be combed through, but if we fail to survey it in totality, then it does us no good.  The mysteries of men and women will remain so forever.  We might not solve them all, but we’d be a damn sight closer to a greater understanding than we are now, instead of focusing so narrowly on one particularly yawn-inducing issue.

Jan 11 2010

The dots are flying at us like 3-D asteroids!

Maureen Dowd wants you to know that she’s frightened.  Muslims are massing on our borders, and these prowling hordes are coming to kill us.

Maureen Dowd wants you to know there’s no father figure in her life.

Maureen Dowd wants you to know (again) that Obama reminds her of Mr. Spock.  Or a professor.  But not a lord or hero to come to her defense.

Maureen Dowd wants you to know that the dots are flying at her like 3-D asteroids.  This is not some random speck, a fleck, a pinpoint, a daub, a stipple.  It’s not just some freckle looking at me funny.

I’m not alone here, right?

Let’s have a show of hands!

Oct 07 2009

Humans Behaving Humanly

Maureen Dowd’s recent column takes on the David Letterman controversy and the power dynamics that shape romances between superiors and subordinates, particularly on the job.  She stakes claim to a middle ground between those eviscerating the long-time late night comic and those who find nothing much objectionable about his behavior.  To me, Dowd’s columns are often hit or miss, but this one does hit on some interesting and pertinent points.  Still, what I find most off-putting is her reliance on a different school of feminist critique that is, in my humble opinion, several decades out of date.  Our own generational mindset forms our opinions and may still be relevant to those of our age range, but staying resolutely within these parameters does not often allow one to remain current or even pertinent.

Dowd writes,

In an ideal world, bosses would refrain from sleeping with subordinates, so as not to cause jealousy and tension in the office. But we’re not in an ideal world. Otherwise, we’d already have health care for everyone and Glenn Beck wouldn’t have any influence over the White House.

Some have been quick to criticize Letterman for his dalliances.  I am not among them.  In truth, I myself have broken the unwritten rule of office politics and engaged in a relationship with a co-worker.  It should be noted that I was not in an subordinate position either time and once even dated a “superior”, though the lines separating chain of command at that workplace were rather fluid.  It has been my experience that while such behavior might not necessarily be problematic in and of itself, in stable work environments, it need not be a major issue.  In dysfunctional work environments, however, it is courting disaster.    

The most contentious assertion to be lifted out of Dowd’s entire column is this one.

A few years ago, I wrote that 40 years of feminism had done nothing to alter the fact that older men often see young women in staff support as sirens. For some men, it’s the very inequality of the relationship that’s alluring, the way these women revolve around them and make life easier, the way they treat Himself like the sunrise and sunset of their universe.

Temptation lies inside of each of our hearts and whether we merely lust in them or actively engage is a decision purely ours.  What I object to in Dowd’s line of logic is what it implies.  As she posits it, young women have no defenses and no say against the sinister designs of an older man in a position of authority.  This is a tad insulting to women, because it implies that men pull the strings and that a woman’s individual intentions are somehow predestined to be superseded and overruled by the men in charge.  Women certainly have every right and capability to object and decline an offer of sexual intimacy if it is made.  They are not powerless to guard off the insatiable carnal lust of any man, nor somehow obligated to fall into bed with him, whether or not he is their boss.  There is often something attractive about authority figures for all of us, regardless of gender, and this is when power dynamics enter the picture and influence our decision-making process.    

Part of the argument advanced by Dowd is rooted in a paternalistic belief that the young are too immature and too childish to know how to make correct decisions for themselves.  While I know that I made foolish choices in my past out of a combination of youth and inexperience, I do recognize now that age has brought things into focus that were once blurry and uncertain.  It would seem that the matter we are discussing now is not consent, rather it is judgment.  Even so, I never saw instances where some magnetic, voodoo force compelled my female friends to engage in sexual relationships with their professors or bosses.  If I was even aware of such things, what I saw was highly consensual and if immaturity was present, it was frequently present within both parties, age notwithstanding.  Still, the ancient motif of the vampire older man with sinister intentions preying on the innocent, virginal young girl/woman still persists to the current day and it’s a caricature as deeply insulting to men as it is as women.      

Dowd continues,

But it’s absurd to compare a jester (unmarried at the time) to Bill Clinton and other philandering pols. Officeholders run as devoted family men upholding old-fashioned values. They have ambitious public agendas and loyal acolytes whose futures depend on whether these leaders succumb to reckless dalliances.

As Craig Ferguson, whose show is produced by Letterman, joked: “If we are now holding late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen, I’m out.”

This arises from a hypocrisy we all carry.  Though we rarely hold ourselves to a standard of perfection, because we recognize all too well how exhausting and impossible it is, we certainly hold others to this same unfeasible expectation.  This isn’t just illogical, it’s also completely nonsensical.  In my real life as well as my online existence, I have seen this sort of matter destroy whole communities or severely compromise unity.  In a Feminist internet community I regularly frequent, a mini-drama has recently broken out over matters of semantics.  A member has taken much time, energy, and effort to file a protest, accusing the moderators of not adequately monitoring and refuting numerous instances of offensive, and anti-feminist language.  While I can tell that the protest is motivated out of good intentions, I also am aware that within any movement which feels a compulsion to bring to light to a multitude of enemies lurking insidiously in the in the shadows, sometimes aiming to find every instance of genuine injustice can be taken a bit too far.  

This is itself a kind of Sisyphean struggle for perfection, a kind of wack-a-mole activism that will only create frustration, hair-splitting, and nitpicking in the end.  One could conceivably devote full-time hours specifically to highlight inflammatory, objectionable instances of societal evils—the sort found in every corner of this big, broad world and even broader internet, but still be no farther towards resolution.  There is no sin in admitting that we ourselves are imperfect people and that we ourselves are limited in our scope of influence.  If identifying a problem were sufficient in and of itself, we would have put behind many stubborn problems long before today.  Admitting our limitations does not mean that we are impotent or incapable, but it does insist that we recognize that we have the capacity to accomplish a few things very well before it comes our time to pass away to the next life.  Life is short and I myself would rather devise a way to do a few things exceptionally well than spread myself so thinly that I unintentionally dilute my efforts to making improvements and pushing badly needed reforms.