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| Will Someone For God's Sake Marry Maureen? |
| 2005-11-22 |
| Maybe She'll Shut Up I read with ashen resignation that Maureen Dowd, the professional spinster of the New York Times, will soon birth a book, no doubt parthenogenetically, called Are Men Necessary? The problem apparently is that men have not found Maureen necessary. Hell hathâŠ. Clearly there is something wrong with men. I weary of the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry. Why is Maureen hermetically single? For starters, she is not just now your classic hot ticket. Sheâs not just over the hill, but into the mountains, to Grandmotherâs house we go. She probably gets more daily maintenance than a 747, but she still looks as though a vocational school held an injection-molding contest and everyone lost. That leaves her with only her personality as bait. The prognosis is grim. Was that ungentlemanly? She makes a career of being disagreeable about men. Whatâs sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, say I. Reading her unending plaints, one concludes that she is deeply in loveâwith herself, and too loyal ever to cheat with a man. Behind her writing you always hear the little voice, âIâm so wonderful, so eliteâŠwhy doesnât somebody marry me?â (Well, Maureen, I can give you a few ideas. Youâre a pain in the assâŠ.) âIâm so smart, Iâm so powerful, Iâm so, sooo elite, so talented, soâŠspecial.â As, in their way, are ingrown toenails. âIâm successful, shriek. Men hate me because Iâm smart. They feel threatened because Iâm so wonderful.â Actually, Maureen, you are no more threatening, or appealing, than somebody elseâs gym socks. I suspect that men donât like you because you arenât likeable. Now, precisely why are you so wonderful? Clearly you arenât stupid. You are a competent if sophomoric writer. Dummies canât do that. But Iâll tell you what, Sweet Potato: I donât think I know anyone who would want to go out with you. As best I can tell, should you have an original thought, it would need counseling, for depression and loneliness. Smart women are an attraction of Washington, at least the parts off the cocktail circuit. They made fifteen years in that wretched city bearable for me. I knew women with serious brains, golden-girl biochemists at NIH, a gal who ran a federal positron-emission tomography lab, weirded-out computer techs, startlingly good writers and chicks who had popped scores you wouldnât believe on tests at NSA that arenât supposed to exist. Theyâd eat you for lunch, Maureen. Now, I know that people at the New York Times have ample self-esteem, and indeed come coated with it to a depth of inches. How about we have a little understanding here. In journalism as in politics, advancement has little to do with merit. Have you checked the contents of the White House lately? Dan Rather and Connie Chung are pinnacles of anything at all? Iâve been around this game as long as you have and I know how the scam works. Getting to the upper ranks of journalism is a matter of luck, sexual sharing, brown-nosing, and staying carefully within the bounds of the regnant politics of the newsroom. You are journalistic glitter, MaureenâReporter Barbie, a literary Streisand. While working for the Times is perhaps nothing to be ashamed of, Iâd keep quiet about it. Maureenâs agonizing does however provide exegesis of the American female mind at a curious moment. Again and again their question seems to be, what form of pretense is needed to achieve marriage? Must I feign sex-kittenhood? Be a calculated suck-up who always laughs at his jokes? Hide my brains? The underlying idea is that they must commit some fraud to attract a man. This of course implies that they arenât attractive without committing fraud. Iâll give them that. Those of us who have wives from Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, or China view Maureen as being a very strange creature indeed, perhaps expelled from a geothermal vent. (âHi! Iâm Fred. Whatâs your phylum?â) Like Maureen, so many gringas donât seem to know who they are, what they are, what they want to be, or how to get there. I think of a tinkertoy construction made by an insane two-year-old: a lot of protruding parts that donât fit together. By contrast foreign women are psychologically coherent. They are sexy because they are women and like being sexy, not as a Vaudeville act or marketing tool. Resentment is not their primary emotion. They love their children and regard raising them as a pleasure, not an imposition of which they are ashamed. If you read Maureen and her littermates, you realize that they are those most uncomfortable of women, heterosexual man-haters. For example, Maureen, from her new book: âMen, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death.â Who would marry that? Yet it is classic Maureen, snotty, catty, hostile. As for her own Kevlar ego, thereâs this, from her interview with Howard Kurtz: âEven after a decade of writing a New York Times column, she admits to being âvery thin-skinnedâ about criticism. âI'm just not temperamentally suited to it,â Dowd says. âThe first couple of years I spent curled up on the floor and crying.ââ Oh. The drumbeat of animosity is never missing from her hetero-anguished feminism. Men are vain, frightened, immature, unreliable, treacherous, fascinated by gewgaws, obsessed with sex, and unfaithful. Several questions arise. If men are so bad, why does Maureen want one? What kind of men has she been running around with? Those closely resembling herself, it sounds as if. Most to the point, why would any man want anything to do with such a woman? This confusion and hostility has made the American woman into an internationally acclaimed shrew. Yes, there are degrees, and perhaps more exceptions than examples, but talk to white men from Washington to Hong Kong and you see the same shudder. These gals are wound too tight. Recently I was aboard a highway bus in an American enclave in Mexico. A gringa wanted to get off where there was no stop. The driver didnât understand her. In Mexico they speak Spanish, a point which apparently had eluded her. She began yelling at him abusively. (Verbatim quote: âYouâre the worst! You suck! Youâre the worst!â) They do this. People notice. A friend somehow found himself talking with a gringa who had one of those puffy little white dogs you could buff a truck with. He said, âCute little thing. Iâve got a real dog.â This mild witticism set her into yelling. A follow-up by Fred Reed from a post last February. I like Fred. I thought some of other Rantburgers would enjoy this. |
| Posted by:Deacon Blues |
| #18 Men are vain, frightened, immature, unreliable, treacherous, fascinated by gewgaws, obsessed with sex, and unfaithful. Wait, and women aren't? Am I missing something? The only possibly debatable point is gewgaws,and having worked at Hallmark before, I can assure you that Hell hath no fury like a woman who cannot buy that figurine in a different color. |
| Posted by: SJB 2005-11-22 20:25 |
| #17 Well Maureen, I guess oral sex is completely out of the question? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2005-11-22 19:18 |
| #16 I wouldn't do her with yours. Bitchy, high-school-girl-cliquish, angry, and forever pissed that she has no man in her life with all the God's gifts she has to offer? Sounds like something Bill Clinton should be sentenced to...oh wait, he is... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-11-22 19:12 |
| #15 Wonder what she thinks of Hillary. |
| Posted by: Ebbeling Pholuns6985 2005-11-22 18:22 |
| #14 LOL. Um. No. Frank? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-11-22 18:21 |
| #13 A woman who was a masochist asked her sadist male friend to give it to her and make it hurt. He said "NOPE." |
| Posted by: Wimply6355 2005-11-22 16:14 |
| #12 Is her Father still alive? |
| Posted by: .com 2005-11-22 15:58 |
| #11 "Will Someone For God's Sake Marry Maureen?" Actually, there are many viable candidates that would suit Ms. Dowdy. However, as a Christian, Jesus commands me to be charitable to the poor, the lame, the blind, and the deaf. I pray that you excuse me, for I cannot participate in good conscience. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-11-22 15:35 |
| #10 but she still looks as though a vocational school held an injection-molding contest and everyone lost. That leaves her with only her personality as bait. The prognosis is grim. I love Fred's writing style. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2005-11-22 15:26 |
| #9 Thanks Hyper, I needed that. But drop the flannel. A tucked in shirttail makes my balls itch. BTW, David Gest is available to walk down the aisle. |
| Posted by: ed 2005-11-22 13:26 |
| #8 You are a competent if sophomoric writer. That is by far the cruelest cut. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2005-11-22 13:03 |
| #7 ... she can remember the rest of her life what she can't have. I think that would be Michael Douglas. She'll carry that to her grave. |
| Posted by: Raj 2005-11-22 12:13 |
| #6 "Men are vain, frightened, immature, unreliable, treacherous, fascinated by gewgaws, obsessed with sex, and unfaithful." Forgot to mention that we're also "beer-swillin', sports-watchin', gun-totin', cheer-leader-gawkin', flannel shirt-wearin', big-hairy-ball-scratchin' Neanderthals"... Mmmm beer-swillin'... |
| Posted by: Hyper 2005-11-22 11:40 |
| #5 Jonathan - better yet buy her the worlds best gigilo for one night so she can remember the rest of her life what she can't have. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-11-22 10:58 |
| #4 Maybe if we took up a collection from every male in the USA we could come up with enough dough to pay somebody to marry Mo. Although I doubt it. |
| Posted by: Jonathan 2005-11-22 10:09 |
| #3 Poor Mo. Must suck being the Oldest Broad In The Club every friggin night. But I'm glad she's around. If she wasn't, we'd have to make her up and that would take some work. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2005-11-22 09:48 |
| #2 Not it. |
| Posted by: Doolittle 2005-11-22 09:17 |
| #1 I weary of the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry. Oh I've simply gotta steal that line, thank you. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2005-11-22 08:14 |