Lots of people (including, rumor has it, her bosses) have poignant things to say in criticizing Maureen Dowd’s latest, to be honest just plain embarassing, publicity stunts, some of them reasonable but most of them spending a bit too much time on something witty and influential but ultimately not so substantive. Us reasonable people don’t need to go much farther than: Maureen Dowd does not care about women. People who don’t care about women cannot legitimately call themselves feminists.

Sure, she can critique, with dubious degrees of evidence, sexism in men. But that doesn’t make you a feminist, and certainly doesn’t qualify you to expound on what direction feminism now ought to take. Being a woman and self-interested? also doesn’t quite cut it.

And then there’s the talking about how men always go for weak women (a category into which she, remarkably, classes service workers) and not for someone as strong and tough and single-minded as her. And, in doing this, expressing disdain for those women and the part of men that likes them.

Now, this is actually anti-feminist. Not that one can always find solace in sisterhood, and I’m certainly well aware that self-infantilization in women is pernicious and offensive in the extreme, and that being left for women who do that to themselves is pretty unbearable. But really now: what’s infuriating about the scenario she lays out is how complicated and frustrating it is, and how difficult but necessary real feminism is. What’s infuriating about Dowd is that she isn’t interested in those frustrations and problems any more than the men she criticizes are.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Reasonable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.