Columnist is too cute in hardcover

COLUMNISTS are vulnerable. They do go on sometimes. They make mistakes.

Since going to the New York Times in 1983, Maureen Dowd has covered four presidential campaigns, at least two wars and one impeachment. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her columns on the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal. Yet Dowd, who has perfected the art of the provocative overstatement, is often criticized for preferring voice over research: The term “dowdification,” a favorite of media bloggers, refers to her surgical use of ellipses in quotes. She has received flak as well for her fondness for the first person and for the tendency to digress about her personal life.

Columns are one thing. But books are different. And with “Are Men Necessary?” Dowd has made a book-length mistake. In books, you really can’t just think out loud. Books go on shelves. They stay there.

“Are Men Necessary?” is a coy, excruciating book. It highlights the fact that Dowd has been too cute for too long. It highlights the possibility that Dowd has become so famous (the kiss of death for a columnist) that no one dares to hint she really ought to tone it down a bit.

The book has been at the center of a flurry of outrage since an excerpt ran in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. Much of the criticism argues that Dowd has squandered her platform. She is one of a handful of women, past and present, who have written nationally syndicated columns for major newspapers. These columns exist at a kind of nuclear nexus, where sex and politics and gender and money and work collide, fuse and split. Energy is created. Reputations are destroyed.

Were she more willing to engage, Dowd could use “Are Men Necessary?” to get at some important questions, like: Does feminism represent a wrong turn for women? Instead, she settles for the glib. “[W]as the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?” she asks early in the book, after going on at length about why men should pay for dinner and the value of being able to trap a man. “With a serious male shortage developing,” she writes, referring to the late 1980s and the decline in civility between the sexes, “[w]omen were going to have to start being nice to men again.” But that’s OK, she adds, because “[m]any high-powered career women were secretly thrilled to return to the era of artful minxes.” Women have moved, Dowd concludes, in her cutesy, buzz-wordy way, “from playing with Barbie to denouncing Barbie to remaking themselves as Barbie.”

The trouble with books is that you can’t come to such pat conclusions without throwing in a bit of research. Dowd relies on a 2004 study by psychologists Stephanie Brown of the University of Michigan and Brian Lewis of UCLA to prove her point that despite all the gains women have made, men still prefer women who are less ambitious, less successful and even less intelligent than they are. This study, though, was done on 120 male and 208 female undergraduates, many of them still teenagers. It was, notes Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University, and Rosalind C. Barnett, a senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, “no barometer of adult male preferences. Rather, it reflected teen boys’ ambivalence about strong women.” Dowd also relies on a 2005 British study, which found that for every 15-point increase in IQ above the average, a woman’s likelihood of marriage fell by 60%. She fails to mention, point out Rivers and Barnett, that the data came from men and women born in 1921, now well into their 80s.

Dowd relies more heavily on the anecdotal experience of her friends. The references come hot and heavy: “My pal Arthur Gelb” (New York Times cultural affairs writer), “my brilliant friend Michael Kinsley,” “[m]y witty friend Frank Bruni” (New York Times restaurant critic), “my friend Kate White” (editor of Cosmopolitan), “my late friend Art Cooper” (editor of GQ), “my friend Michael Duffy” (an editor at Time). Does Dowd have any friends who do not work for the media? Her acknowledgments read like a who’s who of American journalism. Yet what does this have to do with the subject at hand? There is no place in a book that purports to consider the question “Are Men Necessary?” for Dowd’s take on little media vendettas like the recent Kinsley-Susan Estrich flap. The book-buying public does not care. The people who might care, frankly, can get the book free.

Dowd takes a sort of Comedy Central-Take-My-Wife-Please approach to her writing, always going for the easy laugh. “And our president,” she writes at one point. “Have you noticed that, like a Cosmo girl, he’s always trying to wear clothes that are over-the-top-sexy to work?” She skips from Oprah to Uma to Enron to Martha to Ferraro to Condi, relying on a dangerous combination of movie quotes, TV references and media-speak. (“Liz Smith dubbed [Carl] Rove the ‘foremost fishwife’ and Samantha Bee noted on ‘The Daily Show’ that Rove and Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby were like Chatty Kathy sorority girls on a ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ party line.”) Sooner or later, though, it all winds down to the same trite “conclusion”: “Once women were pleased when men whistled at them. Now men are displeased when women blow whistles on them.”

It doesn’t hold together. Even after having read the book twice, I’m hard-pressed to say what much of it’s about. Chapter 7 has something to do with Botox, and Chapter 8, which deals with pills (“dolls”), contains the invaluable advice: “Boys don’t make passes at girls who pass out.” Chapter 4 -- in many ways the meat of the book -- contains some tantalizing cocktail bits about the weakening of the Y chromosome, although Dowd eventually abandons this to chatter about male nipples and evolution. The chapter ends on the idea that women who choose good lovers are actually helping to produce smarter progeny. Oh dear.

“Newsstands and airwaves may have been awash with frightening misinformation on spinster booms, birth dearth and deadly day care,” wrote Susan Faludi in her 1991 book, “Backlash,” “yet women continued to postpone their wedding dates, limit their family size, and combine work with having children.”

A famously thorough researcher, Faludi debunked the very notion of a backlash by creating space for “what factory worker Jan King had called ‘this little voice in the back of my mind,’ the whisper of self-determination that spurred on so many nearly defeated women.” Dowd, with her off-the-cuff references to “Jurassic feminists” and the “fizzy triumph of feminism,” would not be sitting where she is without all those nasty feminists who treated their men so badly.

“It is all very muddled,” she admits in a rare moment of clarity. “Bill Clinton never seemed to understand that it was way too late to be a JFK swinger in the Oval Office.”

It is a very big leap indeed from executives, chief or otherwise, feeling that they have the right to demand sexual favors to the more “muddled” situations we read about today.

What is Dowd thinking when she accuses Teresa Heinz Kerry and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (who she believes has a good shot at the presidency) of trying to sweep their mistakes “under the rug of sexism”? Does she really believe that nothing has changed? That the same rules of seduction and chase and unaccountable abuse of power still exist between men and women in private as well as public life?

She really ought to get out more.