Second Time Around

...BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN What amazed me after I finished this book (it didn't take long) is how many reviewers actually took it seriously...

...isn't a treatise about "uncomfortable questions" or "nuance" or even "sexual confusion...

...And this recollection of sighting Monica Lewinsky at a Washington restaurant, where Dowd was dining with Time editor Michael Duffy, displays both genuinely funny, self-deprecating humor and a novelist's flair for dialogue and detail: The strong jawline and wide smile turning down at the edges were familiar...

...This is all too bad, because Maureen Dowd can be a sharp, entertaining, and even devastating writer when she wants to be—as in a reminiscence of the insufferably self-righteous Mary McGrory's habit of using the younger guests at her soirees as free hired help, or her skewering of the professional feminists who announced to a woman that they would be happy to service Bill Clinton on their knees because of his track record on abortion rights...

...I had to ask: Did these people read the same book that I did...

...Dowd herself criticizes the feminists of the 1970s for imagining a sea of identical, sexless women in navy blazers descending on the workplace...

...Some of the apparently recycled columns are musty indeed, dating all the way back to 1995, when Dowd was promoted from the Times's Washington bureau to the op-ed page, and promptly wrote columns on such subjects as why there weren't more women news anchors, or pregnant women news anchors, on the Big Three networks...

...I am, after all, a trained observer...

...Judith Miller, call your office...

...They thought it was a genuine piece of social commentary on the topic Why Feminism Failed, along the lines of Susan Faludi's Backlash or Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels's The Mommy Myth...

...Here's Katie Roiphe, sounding like one of her own term papers at Princeton as she writes this mouthful in Slate: "Because the issues surrounding sexual politics are so emotionally charged, so laden with contradiction, so racked with ambivalence and irrationality, it is especially important not to neglect nuance...

...Of course, Sheehan's 15 minutes of fame expired abruptly after she complained on HuffingtonPost.com that people were paying more attention to Hurricane Rita than they were to her...

...Her examples are Martha Stewart, who, having been convicted of a felony, arguably deserved a little humiliation, and Hillary Clinton, who may well be the next president of the United States...

...Don't even try to parse that sentence, much less figure out what it means...

...I guess you could call such antics a blistering critique of modern gender relations, but my first thought was: Who watches Big Three network news anymore...

...She's asking some very uncomfortable questions of her male and female readers, and presenting some startling answers, including the winked-at impliCharlotte Allen is the author, most recently, of The Human Christ...

...Sorry, but I read that one in the Times last year, when the movie Spanglish came out...

...Nonetheless, fast-moving events have a way of rendering obsolete even Dowd's most determined effort to show she's on top of them...

...Couldn't one of those creative and giving souls— Leon or Michael or Michi or Nora— have sat down with Dowd and edited the darned thing for her...

...Here's Rebecca Traister in Salon: "Dowd's 338-page cultural analysis and memoir of sexual politics is a blistering critique of modern gender relations...

...It is Monica, stupid," he replied...

...On the other hand, as if to show us that she actually does keep up, Dowd peppers her book with aperçus—or at least attempted witticisms—about events that happened only yesterday: the Larry Summers flap (the Harvard president "said women were not good at math"), the election of Pope Benedict ("the Vatican thought that what it needed to bring it into modernity was the oldest pontiff since the 18 th century"), and her favorite target, George W. Bush's nomination of John Roberts, first as associate justice of the Supreme Court, and then as chief justice ("Only a man gets promoted before he gets the job...

...Even the conservative Ross Douthat, reviewing for this magazine's online sister, felt constrained to pull his chin: "[Ijt's worth at least suggesting, by way of counterpoint, that the world we inhabit isn't one in which the feminists have been backlashed into retreat for the last 40 years—it's a world where feminism won, at least insofar as it could, and the sexual confusion that so dismays Dowd is the unexpected consequence of its victory...

...I assumed that catfights would fade as women progressed...

...What are we to make of a sentence such as this one: "Americans like to see women who wear the pants beaten up and humiliated...

...If you read Dowd regularly, or even only now and then (as I do—or did, before the Times electronically quarantined her in TimesSelect, which you have to pay for, and I'm too cheap), your overwhelming sense won't be that of a "blistering critique of modern gender relations," but of déjà vu all over again...

...So she interviewed NBC's Brian Williams and asked him, "Are you an android...

...That girl looks a little like Monica," I told Duffy...

...Maureen Dowd might be a silly social theorist and a downright dud at putting a book together, but she has a genuine future as a writer of chick-lit...

...I'm in no position to ruminate about the love life of Maureen Dowd, age 52 and single (although astonishingly good-looking), but there is something disconcerting about a book that alternately harangues men to "snap out" of their "bollixed up" attitudes toward dating "high-achieving women" and titles one of its chapters "Why the Well-Hung Y Is Wilting Even As the X Is Excelling...

...And shouldn't it be When the Sexes Collide...

...Conspicuously missing from this roster of up-to-the-minuteness is Dowd's most famous quotation of 2005: her assertion that the "moral authority" of Crawford-camping photo-op mom Cindy Sheehan was "absolute...

...Dowd says that men spurn smart, independent women like her because they prefer the company of housemaids and other subservient types to whom they can feel superior...

...They seemed so retro...

...Even the book's subtitle, When Sexes Collide, is a non sequitur...

...This is strange, because Dowd's acknowledgments contain a name-dropper's wish list of "infinitely creative and giving friends"—Leon Wieseltier, "Tom" Friedman, Michael Kinsley, Alec Baldwin, Chris Matthews, George Stephanopoulos, "Michi" Kakutani, Nora Ephron, Sally Quinn— without whom, she says, the book couldn't have been written...

...I can't quite swear on the Bible that there isn't a word in Are Men Necessary...

...I had to chuckle when I read this paragraph on page 310: "There was a time when I would get furious and fire off an angry note if someone cast me in a catfight with a colleague...

...I suggest Frank Rich...

...Sometimes she uses the device of the truly awkward transition, as in this segue between male news anchors and the election of the pope: "It's interesting that media big shots are moving away from patriarchal, authoritarian voice-of-God figures, even as voice-of-God figures, such as the Catholic Church and elected officials, are building up their authoritarian patriarchies...

...Elsewhere Dowd simply relies on typography—three centered asterisks followed by a fancily-set incipit to the next paragraph—to signal to her readers that she couldn't think of any logical way to link, for example, bonobo sex and male nipples, two topics that fall hard upon each other in Are Men Necessary?, giving the reader the impression that its author suffers from adult ADD...

...One of the failures of the feminist movement in the first place was a reliance on easy aphorisms, and the schematic worldview that such aphorisms implied...

...Is this just another lame Dowd witticism...

...See, Frank, you and Maureen already have something in common— so get on your cell phone now...

...Yes, he's a little grim, but he's on the Times staff, and he can't stand George W. Bush, either...

...Or rather, your former office...

...There are all those references in the book to the men who are "scared" of Dowd, who are "threatened by female power," who insinuate that she is "bitter about men...

...cation that, as the title suggests, men may not be necessary anymore...

...It's a collection of Maureen Dowd's old columns for the New York Times...

...And won't someone please take the hint and find a date for this lovely and stylish redhead who never has a bad hair day...

...that hasn't already seen print previously, but I think I'd be pretty close to the truth if I did...

...The book's most disturbing aspect is its unsettling undertone of unspecified resentment at the male sex...

...Furthermore, the task of stitching together dozens of 750-word Times columns into a cohesive book-length manuscript clearly proved too daunting for Dowd...

...So the reviewers typically launched into social commentary of their own, writing solemn mini-essays on various issues that they were certain Dowd had raised...

...Are Men Necessary...