Maureen Dowd, a wasted opportunity for women

October 7, 2009 Written by Current Events , Women

These days, there’s a great deal of energy in the women’s advocacy world in Washington, DC because — haven’t you heard? — Obama is a feminist. Though things aren’t moving as fast as women’s advocates would like (the inevitable result of impossibly high expectations), they are certainly moving in the right direction as women are finally being courted and their concerns getting the attention they deserve. The city is bubbling over with campaigns and initiatives on behalf of women and families in such areas as workplace policies, women and healthcare, violence against women, etc. In such an environment, one can’t help but be swept up by the sense of possibility and progress.

So here I am, going about my work and performing my own small part in women’s advocacy, when Maureen Dowd stops me short. I stumble upon, "Men Behaving Madly," and think, Why the hell is she wasting her time on that? I take a look, and yes, it starts off with a few paragraphs about the hit show Mad Men, but the meat of the piece is a defense of David Letterman.

David Letterman!? Even worse than my initial impressions.

There are only a handful of women columnists in this country, and of that select group, only two, Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, have space behind the most prestigious and coveted bully pulpit in American journalism today, the editorial page of the New York Times. Maureen Dowd chose to comment on the sexual scandal of a late-night comedian rather than use her precious column inches to, if not advance women, then at the very least broadcast and illuminate on topics relevant to the great issues of the day.

Well, maybe it’s an anomaly, I think. Perhaps Maureen experienced a singular moment of self-indulgence. So I go to take a quick look at her recent body of work, and end up tracking it back to before the 2008 Elections (I stop at October 15, 2008) before I have to stop myself. I was getting totally sucked in by morbid fascination over her utter lack of interest in and empathy for everyday women.

Over the last year, as far as I could tell (I went through 80 articles fairly quickly), the number of times Dowd has written about anything that would support the women’s policy agenda is a big fat goose egg. The number of times she’s written about anything at all that could be representative of a woman’s perspective on anything substantive can be counted on one hand.

In September, she did devote a column to women’s happiness, inspired by the hubbub around the ridiculous attention Arianna Huffington gave to a recent happiness study and the self-help guru Marcus Buckingham, who was commissioned to cover the topic for the HuffPo. Others have ably explained what’s wrong with that study and Marcus Buckingham here and here. Dowd did little more than accept such studies at face value and echo Huffington and Buckingham.

In contrast to one article explicitly about women, Dowd has written about Sarah Palin eight times (she doesn’t like Palin). She has written about sex scandals three times, showing a fascination with the plight of the political wife, going so far as to produce "Rules of the Wronged," described as a "Practical Guide to Help Spurned Political Wives Survive Old Problems in the Era of New Technology." One column on Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, and another on Michelle Obama’s sculpted arms reveal her interest in fashion and women’s allure. Beyond these demonstrations of her robust intellect (not), she has written about the Meryl Streep movie, Julie and Julia, driving and cel phones, a visit with George Lucas, and (Good Lord) Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars, among other fluffy things.

Oh, okay. I must grudgingly add that  Dowd did manage to crank out a few items on topics like Dick Cheney, the financial bailout, race, the Internet and the decline of newspapers, but those items were completely gender neutral. In other words, they could have been written by men. The proportion of soft to somewhat serious commentary (although it can be hard to find the line between the two since categorizing is always a subjective art) is distressingly high, and Dowd’s body of commentary itself is distressingly absent of an everyday woman’s viewpoint and concerns. Of the White House Council on Women and Girls, Lily Ledbetter, the murder of Dr. Tiller, or any other event that rocked the world of women, Dowd has not gone near with a ten-foot pole.

The one item that came closest to reflecting what women across the country were feeling on an important issue was "White Man’s Last Stand," about Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. In it, Dowd writes:

President Obama wants Sotomayor, naturally, to bring a fresh perspective to the court. It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men. And Sotomayor made it clear that she provides some spicy seasoning to a bench when she said in a speech: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging, but I accept there will be some based on gender and my Latina heritage.”

Ironic, huh? Dowd is all for gender diversity on the highest court in the land, but does so very little with her own gender in her own seat on arguably the world’s loftiest media platform. Instead, she has left the responsibility to the one other woman on the editorial page, Gail Collins, but more notably to a dude, Nick Kristof, who has become in many people’s eyes the greatest women’s champion of all. Dowd is a charismatic communicator and has no shortage of intelligence and, I believe, good intentions. It’s such a shame that none of those good intentions are directed at helping her own.

 

 

 

 

 

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  • Burnsey

    Child, please. For two decades, Maureen Dowd has been one of the — if not *the* — most prolific and widely read misogynists working in the mainstream press. She’s not just a “wasted opportunity” – she’s pure poison. I don’t think any other woman – including Ann Coulter – has done more to belittle and damage women leaders, lie to women voters, and use gender-based slurs and insinuations to attack those who support feminist policies. A glance at Dowd’s work over the past year barely scratches the surface and this item, I’m afraid, downplays just how malicious and anti-woman Dowd is.

    If you want to understand Maureen Dowd, please go to The Daily Howler, which has tracked her work for years. You can find it at http://dailyhowler.com . Enter “Dowd” into the search box and let it all sink in. Then maybe a follow-up post is in order.

    Also – stop with the “Obama is a feminist.” We all know that is BS.

  • http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/FeministAdvisoryBoardforObama Madama Ambi

    Hell yeah, Gloria! Great post! I was also appalled by her column re Letterman, not to mention finding many women defending what they think is women’s sexual power or some idealized version of consensual sex in the workplace. Commenters on blogs, while recognizing there are times the power imbalance could ruin a woman’s career or poison the workplace, report they’ve seen instances of it handled well.

    We should start to compile a list of influential women in media who are women’s worst friends, like Olbermann’s Worst Persons of the World. On my list so far is Whoopi Goldberg and Maureen Dowd. I have some insight into Whoopi, though, and sympathy/empathy, too, because I researched her background and I think her unconscious denial of rape is there to protect HERSELF from her own rape at age 13. She says she “had sex” at age 13 and has famously talked about the coathanger abortion she gave herself. Her daughter became pregnant at age 14 and, according to Whoopi, announced to her mother that she “wanted to have a baby,” which is why she had unprotected sex.

    Can you say abandonment? Displacement? Compensation? Dysfunction? In a book titled “The Choices We Made,” Whoopi bemoans her daughter having a baby at that age, but, impressed that her daughter had “thought it through,” Whoopi decides her daughter must be mature enough to have that kid. Who thinks this way? I’ll tell you one very large group of women who think this way: women who had babies when they were teenagers. They defend it as a choice and they defend the parenting skills of teen moms.

    It’s easy to get holier-than-thou on this issue, and I understand that Whoopi has been the Holy Pointer-Outer of Blameworthy Mothers, outing such irresponsible mothers as Britney Spears’ mom, Jamie Lynn. It’s projection, folks. Whoopi is displacing her unacknowledged guilt about her own daughter onto mothers who remind her of herself, getting angry at HERSELF in other mothers who turned a blind eye and didn’t parent their daughter when it was sorely needed. Also pertinent to my analysis is the fact that Whoopi had a drug problem as a teenager, and wound up seeing a drug counselor. Yes, reader, she married him–they got married in 1973 and she had her first child, her daughter, in 1973. She was 18.

    Tell me what messed up, lonely kid whose father left home when she was young, is not going to fall in love with a man who is listening to her, caring about her, and giving her what is probably her first experience of fatherly attention from a man. See what I’m saying here, folks? This is exactly why it’s illegal for counselors or therapists to date, have sex with, or otherwise socialize with their clients. It’s a power imbalance, period, no matter if the client is 35 and the therapist is 35! When you are a client, you are vulnerable and you become dependent on your therapist in a way that is helpful to the working through. Your therapist is responsible for maintaining professional boundaries so as not to exploit the vulnerability of the client.

    But here’s what I’m saying: we are failing girls. Lack of sex education is part of the problem. The apologists for Polanski and Letterman and the Swiss philosopher who mused that Polanski had “perhaps committed a youthful error” are glaring proof that we’ve failed to make a dent in patriarchal power as it plays out in the mainstream media. This is why I’ve been asking feminists to join with me in an action to get The View to undo the damage done by Whoopi. The View has a responsibility to it’s VIEWERS to get it right. They have a huge audience not only in the U.S., but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Phillipines and South Africa. The View is the biggest platform in the world (other than Oprah, perhaps), for doing responsible rape education, and they blew it. They seriously blew it. People who don’t watch the show tell me “nobody pays attention to those women.” One male friend on Twitter spent a good while defending Whoopi’s right to make an ass of herself, free speech kind of argument and all that…why not put that much energy into defending children?

    I’ve seen the Whoopi videos a few times, including when she asserts it’s her job to get the facts straight. Yea verily, I tell you that Whoopi sees herself as a pundity personality who’s there to set her other panelists and her audience straight. It’s sad. It’s very sad. I’d like to talk with her about her unconscious denial of rape. I’d like her to schedule an entire show around rape education, with guests who really know rape, trauma, why we have statutory rape laws, the neuroscience involved in consensual sex, and the power imbalance that makes it impossible for a child to consent to sex with an adult.

  • http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-g-yerman Marcia G. Yerman

    Gloria, I think you nailed it in the last paragraph.

    Nicholas Kristof and Bob Herbert are the consistent advocates for women on the Times Editorial page.

    Maureen Dowd is more about being an “attitude” writer. When I agree with her, she’s funny. When I don’t,
    I ignore her.

    What the women’s community needs to cultivate are more submissions to the op-ed page and letters to the editor. When I spoke with Gail Collins at an event, she confirmed that submissions from women lag way behind those made by men.

  • Gloria Pan

    Thanks, all, for the comments. Yes, it seems that Dowd’s impact on women is negative rather than just neutral. I had a lot more to say about it, actually, but just didn’t have the time to write such a long post. Perhaps in a future post.

  • http://www.GloriaFeldt.com Gloria Feldt

    Brilliant piece, Gloria. Maureen is a performer, not a pundit, and her performance is pitched to get attention, like the class clown in elementary school, not to illuminate anything or help anyone other than herself. I agree with Marcia, and 99 % of the time, I ignore her.

    Unfortunately, too many people don’t ignore her.

    Beyond all the excellent points made in others’ comments, Maureen also hates any progressive politician who stands a chance of advancing women. She decimated Al Gore, pounding him mercilessly, while giving W. a total pass. Until he was elected, with the help of the New York times (and I hold Nick Kristof accountable for that too–remember his puff pieces of Bush–when Nick was a reporter not a columnist–that made him look like a warm and fuzzy good old boy from where the real American values reside?). Only then did she start lampooning Bush on occasion. When my husband confronted her about that once after meeting her at an event, she basically replied that she was there to entertain and bore no responsibility for the consequences of her words.

    And I don’t think there is any columnist, male or female, who has used the term “catfight” more frequently to describe how women interact with one another. That alone would make a good study for your next post. I look forward to it.

  • Keejay

    Girlfriend, you done got that bidge down to a tea and ready for her cream and sugar!

    You just know that Murine Dowd was thinking of gettin hers and aint nobody gonna be happy UNTIL SHE GET SOME! You KNOW her man gonna be good in bed cause girlfriend give men so much props! IF you ladies want to keep your man and keep him right with Jesus you got to think of him as a high wind and you just like a pair of drawers on the cloths lines! He blow and you flow! Men dont respect nothin more that a women who give him her just self respects.

    A lots of the women here all up in Murine’s face just cause she pretty, but she aint THAT pretty let me tell you!!! She got to work for it to! She aint got no back door man! She know she got to pertect her man and they love, and she just tryin to teach you girls to do the same and yall be hatin her for the TRUTH! MEN want a women what loves them and keep they mouths SHUT!

    Luv always,
    Keejay

  • Ramanda Johnson

    I, like Marcia, read Maureen on occasion finding her mildly amusing at best and mildly irritating at worst. As much as may understand the frustration being expressed, I think it is fallacious to presume that MoDo, or for that matter any woman, has a responsibility to represent a CERTAIN perspective. That is the equivalent of saying that all African Americans have a duty to represent the African American perspective (as if there were only one!). Throwing around terms like “anti-women” is such a facile and futile tactic that ultimately alienates far more than it attracts. Interesting how the sabotage continues — women disparaging other womein who they consider to be “anti-woman.” La plus que ca change, la plus que c’est la meme chose. Vive la femme.

  • http://groups.to/FAB MadamaAmbi

    Keejay–I sincerely hope you are a brilliant satirist, because if not, I’ll have to slit my wrists. Please tell me you are having fun here, gurlfriend…pulleeeeeze…

  • Jill Elswick

    Burnsey: Very curious about your statement: “stop with the ‘Obama is a feminist.’ We all know that is BS.” What do you mean?

  • http://http//feministadvisoryboard.blogspot.com MadamaAmbi

    Ramanda–I don’t think Gloria is suggesting that “MoDo” represents all women, but that on the whole, Dowd really doesn’t get it. I rarely read Dowd; I find her privilege screamingly loud and I can’t take it. A point I’ve been trying to get across in general, wherever I have the opportunity, is that it’s a good thing for women to criticize other women and to use those opportunities to have contentious dialogue. In my opinion, women need to have MORE contentious dialogue and to keep pushing one another to think together rather than to get defensive, get their feelings hurt and bow out of a good argument. It’s healthy and productive for women to argue their ideas. Gloria is fostering a real exchange of ideas here, that much I know.

  • Catie

    As much as I don’t like Maureen Dowd, and don’t like that she uses her platform to write mostly about fluff (as you say, Gloria), I don’t think there is anything wrong with gender-neutral writing in general. Dowd does a bad job with this because she mixes the gender-neutral with the misogynistic and the fluffy – but I think gender-neutral writing has its place. It is important for women with the nation’s attention to give time to the issues – but I would also argue that it is important for men with the nation’s attention to do the same. Also, woman shouldn’t just write solely about woman’s issues. First of all, I don’t know any women who are only concerned with “woman’s issues” – who don’t think about “gender-neutral” topics. Second, the self-segregation of women only talking about woman’s issues is doing something to hurt the cause as it does something to help. Women should always address woman’s issues, but if they do only that, they are emphasizing some false idea of an inherent “difference” between woman and men.

  • Gloria Pan

    Ramanda, putting aside whether or not MoDo has any responsibility for the women’s perspective, the New York Times certainly has a responsibility to aspire to diversity on its editorial page. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t believe the Supreme Court, corporate boards and any other influential platform should have more women, and we’d find ourselves where we were 100 years ago. So if there should be diversity among NYTimes columnists, then the fact that they’ve given that incredible privilege to someone like Maureen – a decision I find hard to believe was completely based on merit – completely undermines the spirit of diversity, because on weighty issues, her perspective is no different from a man’s, and she has no interest in introducing issues of weight to women.

    Catie, I completely agree that gender-neutral writing has it’s place and that women shouldn’t just write about women’s issues, but I do feel it’s important to have a few people at the most important editorial platform in the country to be counted on to represent women at least once in a while if not 50% of the time (in an ideal world). In Dowd, we have a woman who NEVER writes about women’s issues. And let’s pause a second and think about what women’s issues are. They would include healthcare, employment practices, the economy, etc. Rather yet another piece on how Wall Street fat cats should not be getting any fatter because they don’t deserve it, how about contrasting the ridiculous size of their bonuses with how much an average American family has to make do with? That, in my opinion, is a woman’s perspective.

  • http://groups.to/FAB MadamaAmbi

    While we’re on the subject of who gets column space at the NY Times, I have to say that column writers, even at the old gray lady, are starting to sound irrelevant to me, a person who lived in NYC and who pays through the nose to get home delivery of this shrinking newspaper.

    Though I frequently find the cacophony of the blogosphere/femisphere just too much stimuli, too loud, too much blather, too much yapping without having anything thoughtful to say, I also think one can get a better sense of the range of public opinion by surfing the femisphere/blogosphere than by reading Dowd or Collins or Brooks or Herbert or Rich or Friedman or Blow or any other regular commentator in the New York Times.

    The tide has already turned. I don’t consider myself an expert in these issues, but the explosion of voices online via blogs, vlogs, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter or other online watering hole has drowned out the sole pundits like Dowd. This is a good thing. The same old heads talking to each other is a waste of my time. I’m hungry for the voices that never get heard.

    Just to give you an idea of how topsy-turvy the world is now, and how not all of us get the new bottom-up energy bubbling everywhere you look, I give you Exhibit #1, an email inviting me to attend an expensive workshop training women to write better op-ed pieces. The analysis included is that unless women get their voices into the major newspapers, we have only ourselves to blame for our invisibility. I could critique this from many perspectives, but all I’m saying right now is that my jaw dropped and I blurted out “Huh?”

    A blogger I’ve come to appreciate is Blackamazon, who translates herself onto the page with an intensity I GET BIGTIME. Sometimes her spelling, her grammar and her syntax confuse me–I don’t know if she intentionally mangled my expectations or if she’s just typing so fast it came out that way and, like an artist painting furiously, she leaves in her mistakes. Mistakes are raw energy. I love mistakes in my work and in other people’s work. Blackamazon would have to murder her true self in order to get published in the NY Times, and that would be a tragedy. She has important things to say, especially important things she’s saying to white women feminists. I’m listening to her and to other women of color who get that I’m really listening. Dowd? Collins? Feh. Those voices are SO over…and they should be.

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