Maureen needs a date

Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry at 11:12 AM on November 2, 2005.

Maureen Dowd's now infamous essay (based on her new book) in the New York Times magazine -- "What's a Modern Girl to Do" -- left this modern girl with an intractable dilemma: so much to ridicule, so little time. But really, like I have better things to do. For those who were wise enough to give this staggering display of self-absorption a miss, let me recap.

Dowd was a lipstick-wearing renegade in college, where she bravely resisted the efforts of hairy-lipped feminists determined to part her from her "gold lamé gown cut on the bias." But she kinda liked the whole equality thang and assumed that "her earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks" would do their job just so Dowd would be free to shimmy her way into a fabulous career without giving up her feminine right to have an adoring man by her side.

Sadly, those bitches dropped the ball and we ended up with "The Backlash." But Dowd has not given up the struggle -- though to achieve what exactly remains unclear -- despite being foiled repeatedly by excruciatingly shallow women (usually young) and men (mostly middle-aged). Here's a select but representative -- only of Dowd's rolodex -- sampling of the fools this poor woman has to suffer. First the gals:

"Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter.

"(Going dutch on a date is) a scuzzy 70's thing, like platform shoes on men," (a suitably anonymous and nondescript young woman) told me.

One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the same thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."

After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."

Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."

Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."

At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?

Lakshmi Chaudhry is a senior editor at In These Times, and the former senior editor of AlterNet. You can write to her at lakshmi@alternet.org.