Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide by Maureen Dowd

From the Publisher

Fresh from her success with the bestselling Bushworld, Maureen Dowd turns her lapidary prose and wicked wit to a topic even more incendiary than presidential politics: sexual politics.

Four decades after the sexual revolution, nothing has worked out the way it was supposed to. The sexes are circling each other as uneasily and comically as ever, from the bedroom to the boardroom to the Situation Room, and now the New York Times columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for saucy and incisive commentary about the roundelay of Bill, Monica, Hillary, and Ken Starr digs into the Y and X files, exploring the mysteries and muddles of sexual combat in America.

In a new book filled with chapters that sparkle, startle, and amuse, Dowd explains why getting ready for a date went from glossing and gargling to Paxiling and Googling; why men are in an evolutionary and romantic shame spiral; why women have reeled backward in many ways; why men may be biologically unsuited to hold higher office, given their diva fits and catfights, teary confessions and fashion obsessions; why women are fixated on their looks more than ever, freezing their faces and emotions in an orgy of plasticity that makes the Stepford Wives look authentic; why male politicians and male institutions get tripped up in so much monkey business; why many alpha women from Martha to Hillary can have a successful second act only after becoming humiliated victims; and why the new definition of Having It All is less about empowerment and equality than about flirting and getting rescued, downshifting from "You go, girl!" to "You go lie down, girl!"

In addition, Dowd, who has reported on historic moments on the sexual battlefield from Geraldine Ferraro's vice-presidential run to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings to Hillary Rodham Clinton's reign as co-president, explores not only how many of these shining feminist triumphs soured, backfiring on women, but also how Hillary, a feminist icon busy plotting her campaign to be the first woman president, delivered the final blow to female solidarity herself.

Women's liberation has been less a steady trajectory than a confusing zigzag. Feminism lasted for a nanosecond and generated a gender tangle that has bewitched, bothered, and bewildered men and women for forty years. Now comes a woman to cut through the tangle and tickle Adam's rib. The battle of the sexes will never be the same.

Publishers Weekly

Dowd's Bushworld, collecting her amped New York Times op-eds, hit big during the 2004 presidential campaign. This follow-up is as slapdash as the earlier book was slash-and-burn. What Dowd seems really to want to do is dish up anecdotes of gender bias in the media, which she does with her usual aplomb-everything from how Elizabeth Vargas was booted out of Peter Jennings's vacant chair at ABC during his illness ("I'm not sure if she has the gravitas," opines an exec) to the guys who won't date Dowd because she's got more Beltway juice (and money) than they. The rest is padding: endless secondary source and pundit quotes ("In Time, Andrew Sullivan wondered: `So a woman is less a woman if she is a scientist or journalist or Prime Minister?' "); examples of gender relations gone wrong in books, film and TV; random interview blips ("Carrie, a publicist in her late twenties from Long Island, told me...."); little musings from girlhood that are rarely revealing enough; endless career rehashes of everyone from Anita Hill to Helen Gurley Brown. A chapter on dating is a mishmash of everything from The Rules to He's Just Not That into You; one on reproductive science (that asks the title question for real) ends up referring a lot to orgasm. It's intermittently entertaining, but neither sharp enough nor sustained enough to work as a book. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Nov. 8) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dowd (Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk) presents her funny, biting, and incisive take on women's place in American society today. In the style of her columns, Dowd's writing races along as she presents academic studies on the Y chromosome and on the relationship between a woman's IQ and the odds she will marry, alongside essays on popular culture where she considers, for example, how society moved from Gloria Steinem and "no-makeup" feminism to Desperate Housewives and Botox injections. Dowd ponders why girls dominate in high school but women fail to dominate in the adult world; why the three network news anchor jobs were again filled by white men; and why Hillary Rodham Clinton had to be a victim to become a senator. Her long journalism career and her Washington connections allow Dowd to give the reader an inside glimpse of influential figures. Readable, provocative, and entertaining, this is recommended for public libraries.-Debra Moore, Cerritos Coll., Norwalk, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

CD 0-143-05828-2After sticking it to the administration in Bushworld (2004), New York Times Pulitzer-winner Dowd takes on the battle of the sexes. Like most columnists, the author is easier to take in small daily doses. Full-length exposure to the rarified world she moves in prompts the uneasy feeling that Dowd doesn't know much about ordinary folks. Joking that nowadays women check out their prospective partners on the Internet, she seems not to realize that most people are unlikely to find mentions of their blind date on Google. "Whence the Wince?" and "How Green Is My Valley of the Dolls," which extensively anatomize the cult of bodily perfection and chemical-induced placidity, will certainly be of interest to those whose peers can afford plastic surgery, frequent Botox injections and abundant prescriptions of Paxil, perhaps not so much to women holding down jobs and raising their kids without the benefit of full-time nannies or CEO husbands. Dowd's habit of quoting friends and colleagues-who all seem to be media executives, political operatives or other Times writers-reinforces the perception of her blinkered perspective. Granted, she delivers her basic message strongly: "Feminism lasted for a nanosecond, but the backlash has lasted forty years." And she's often very funny to a serious purpose, as in her skewering of "Saturday Morning Bill" Clinton who "would mess around with women with big-cut hair and low-cut dresses," while "Sunday Morning Bill would run and hide behind the sedate skirts of the high-toned feminists he surrounded himself with." (Her most stinging passages skewer the hypocrisy of feminists who decried the smear tactics used against Anita Hill, then used the sametactics against Monica Lewinsky.) Still, a staunch liberal and feminist like Dowd, who proudly declares that she comes "from a family of Irish maids," could profitably spend more time writing about the impact of the antifeminist backlash on people who are still cleaning houses. Her heart's in the right place, but she really should get out more. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM

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Product Details

• ISBN: 0399153322
  
• ISBN-13: 9780399153327
• Format: Hardcover, 1pp
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Pub. Date: November 2005
• Sales Rank: 594,166

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents