Plenty of bile still stirred up online over Dowd's retro column on feminism. Try Kathie Roiphe in Slate, her column entitled "Is Maureen Dowd Really Necessary?" a play on the title of Dowd's new book. And good for Roiphe for boldly asking the obvious, politically incorrect question:
Could there possibly be another reason that the attractive, successful Dowd has not settled down? Something that is not in the zeitgeist, or the political climate, but some ineffable quality of her own psychology? It would seem wrong to raise this question about a woman writer, and in fact about any writer, but Dowd uses her experience with men as template for her theories so often, and marshals her failure to marry as evidence so frequently, that she herself raises the question in her reader's mind."
Lakshmi Chaudry has a satirical column, "Maureen Needs a Date" on Alternet. And then there's listserv friend Suzie Siegal from Tampa, Fla., a former journalist with a Master's in Women's Studies, who has submitted this arch letter to The New York Times:
Can't you get a token woman who knows more about feminism than Maureen Dowd?
She thinks feminism started in the '60s, when the term actually dates to the 1800s. She apparently has never heard about third-wave feminism or the many ways that young women are fighting for their rights.
She probably missed that march on Washington last year that attracted more than a million women and men from across the country.
Perhaps she doesn't know that thousands of women (and some men) enroll in women's studies classes.
Dowd let other women fight for rights, including those at the New York Times who paved the way for her. Perhaps she thinks all feminists thought alike and dressed alike because she never spent any time with them.
I was a feminist at 13 with blue eyeshadow and flowers painted on my fingernails in rural Texas. We came in all styles, with different views. Unlike Dowd, most of us knew that the struggle for equality would last a long time and require sacrifices.
She seems to put all the blame on women, instead of looking to the men who control so much of our culture.
At the top, men control the media, including publishing and marketing. Is it any surprise that they market retro junk to women or publish articles like Dowd's?
Hers is just one more in a long line of articles insinuating feminism is dead. According to mainstream media, feminism has died more often than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, by the way, was created as a feminist hero.
I've never heard the term "girl money." Maybe it's a New York thing. Or, maybe it's because I read Ms. and Bitch magazines, not Cosmo.
Dowd writes in sweeping generalizations about women, even though she interviews only a handful in her world. It's especially insulting to women from other cultures and income levels.
Where does Dowd get the idea that feminists in the past (or the present) didn't care about economic issues?
She uses terms such as "primal" and quotes sociobiologists to make it seem that men and women have always acted in certain ways and that we always will. She talks to no one who disputes her.
Why didn't Dowd interview more feminists? Were your editors all out buying Maxim when this column came in?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Had enough criticism of Dowd? Try a critique of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's opinion on how women seeking abortions should be made to notify their husbands, even when they fear them, or else be barred from the procedure. The critic is William Saletan, also in Slate.
-RH
9:18:04 PM 
|
