Maureen Dowd, Feminist Websites, and More

So I've started posting shorter, timelier blog entries (or "diaries") at RH Reality Check in addition to my column. The first two are on topics fairly near and dear to this blog's EBC heart. Feel free, as always, to click through or not :)

Gender Cop Dowd's Plagiarism Kerfluffle

May 18, 2009 - This revelation of Dowd's thoughtless use of words is far from new. She's been a perennial thorn in the side of feminists and everyone who would like to move beyond Mad Men-era perceptions of gender.

. . . . .

Double X-asperation?

May 14, 2009 - Slate's new website by/for women has launched a thousand debates.

Maureen Dowd hath problems, part ???

From her column today. Not only is she racist in a really appallingly obtuse way, but she misquoted EBC favorite author, Toni Morrison.

(H/t)

I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president. If you don't count what Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton, that is.

But should we count it? Was Barack Obama the first or the second black president, or alternatively, the first half-white, half-black president?

I eagerly swung my front door open and joined the mailman's conversation.

"Are you talking about the election?" I said brightly. "How do you feel?"
He shot me a look of bemused disdain as he walked away. I suddenly realized, with embarrassment, that he was on his Bluetooth, deep in a personal conversation that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.

Clooney vs. Pitt in My Fair Lady

Romancing the Tome has a very important question to ask you about who should play Henry Higgins in a new My Fair Lady adaptation. Go answer it!

I'd like to add that my mom, upon seeing this amazing painting of Pygmalion and Deucalia at the Met, said "McCain and Palin?" weeks before MoDowd compared them for a full column's length to their literary descendants (via Shaw) Henry and Eliza.

No, Maureen, No!!!

You are not even allowed to utter the words "Mr Darcy." It's so wrong on so many levels, akin to listening to Chris Matthews quote the bard. This column, to use the parlance of our internet age, is made of fail.

I imagine Maureen Dowd thinks of herself as a modern-day Austen. But she would need far subtler, more clever and more compassionate prose to reach the heights of Jane's pinkie toe when it comes to measuring great female satirists.

Although MoDo's column does prove the point that some of Austen's biggest fans are people whom she would mock most joyfully. Mo's seriously lady-Catherine-esque in terms of haughty judgmental attitudes, with a strong dash of Marianne Dashwood's bad taste in dudes.

Can you imagine a character named "Ms. Dowd" in an Austen novel, snapping at all the men to be more manly, the women to be more reserved, even while she herself, by being so outpoken, transgresses the boundaries she assiduously patrols?

Furthermore, when it comes to her own romantic prospects, I can just picture imagine Ms. Dowd bemoaning "It is a pity that there are no men suitable enough for me. It seems that every eligible bachelor whom I admire, the sort with good property in the neighborhood and a fine figure on horseback, has seduced a young women of not-yet-fifteen. I cannot for the life of me fathom it."

Meanwhile, the real Mr. Darcy sits nearby, too feminine, too sensitive, for Ms. Dowd's tastes.

Maureen Dowd is SO BITTER (and other stuff too)

From Kathy at the G-Spot, there's a long and excellent post about Mo'Do's elitism/bitterness and general psychological problems.

The salient little gossipy tidbit follows below (ellipses, emphases mine):

Now we come, at last, to my little Modo story. Eight or nine or ten years ago, someone fixed up Modo with a friend of mine (whom I'll call "X.").

...

So how did it go? X. told me that, the whole night, all Maureen could talk about was which women Bill Clinton was sleeping with. Literally. "Do you think he's having an affair with B.? I think he is. But maybe they did and it's over now and he's moved onto someone else. Ya think? Maybe he's messing around with C. -- she seems more his type. I'd bet he'd love to have an affair with D., but I'm not sure she'd fool around with a married man." And on and on and on and on and ON in this vein. The whole night long. X tried to engage her on other topics. The world, after all, is full of a number of things: Books. Movies. Theater. Travel. Music. Food. And how about, not what Bill Clinton was doing with his penis, but what he was doing with his policies?

But alas, in spite of my friend's ministrations, he could not get the lady off Topic A.

Suffice it to say, it was a long night.

....

Please go read the rest. I did, and loved it. She compares MoDo to Miss Havisham, which is a wonderfully egalitarian bookwormy thing to do.

Two Quick Notes on Subjects Near and Dear to EBC Hearts

1-The BBC's Andrew-Davies=penned three-parter adaptation of Austen's Sense and Sensibility premiered overseas today... the folks at Austenblog are giving it their snarky best analysis.

Personally, and I know I've blogged this opinion a thousand times, but I'm a huuuge fan of the Emma Thomspon/Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility (S&S 05) as a standalone film, because while it has obvious flaws and departures as an adaptation there are too many amazing performances and moments--I've seen it upwards of ten times and it still makes me laugh, cry, shout "Mairanne, you idiot!' etc etc.

So far, this adaptation sounds like an unfunny Soap-Opera-ish 'do, but without any major transgressions. Andrew Davies, why hast thou jumped the shark?

2- Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, my favorite liberal/feminist blogger, nails Maureen Dowd for her column treating the Democrats as "uppity" gatecrashers with gabby wives. Maureen really is a piece of work who should be fired, pronto. But that's a rant for another day.

Also, Shakespeare's Sister tells MoDo to "shut up." True, she should.

Stay warm, bookworms!

Okay, we get it, Times. You think Michelle Obama is uppity.

There's something about the way our paper of record covers race and gender issues that makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time. But when they cover both in tandem with their third most uncomfortably-approached category of folks--Democrats-- it gets kind of ugly.

First of all, as all good readers of this blog know, Maureen Dowd recently eviscerated Michelle Obama for not staying home and baking cookies and for being too loud and poking fun at her husband. Maureen topped it off by calling Michelle a "princess"--all of which are pretty durn unacceptable things to say so flippantly about a woman of color (or any ethnicity). It also reeked of self-loathing, not to mention quite a few unpleasant "isms."

I thought I had heard the last of that subject until last night, when a woman I know, who is, politically anyway, your typical left-of-center Manhattanite, said something vaguely about how "aren't people sort of sick of Obama, his wife saying 'oh he's not so great' and putting him down? Isn't that shtick getting a little tired?" I shuddered. Because as far as I'm aware, (and maybe I'm wrong) no one but Maureen has perpetuated this stereotype about Michelle. But Dowdy's throwaway, jokey categorizations are powerful, and have a long ripple effect.

Especially when she's assisted by her buddies at the paper, who ran this supposedly thoughtful piece about Michelle today, which incidentally, linked to Maureen's nasty column on the front page (!!!) There was nothing in the feature, that exactly demonized the woman per se, but the authors made some interesting choices in terms of placement and what quotations to use. The piece starts off with a taste of Michelle Obama's sarcasm, the kind MoDo hates so much:

Rolling her eyes as she pulled a reporter aside, Michelle Obama said [of Barack], “Maybe one day, he will do something to warrant all this attention."

To feminist-leftist-badasses such as m'self, this is not a negative image. It shows that Obama has a strong-minded wife who keeps him real and has a good sense of perspective and humor. But come on, Times, you's playing right in to the conventional wisdom of Barack Obama as inexperienced, and it makes Michelle look as shrewish as Maureen says she is. Futhermore, why are we putting an oft-repeated joke-y anecdote on the first graf of what's supposed to be a serious profile?

If you go back and do a close reading of the first paragraph, it's amazing how the authors use a few words to paint a pretty unoriginal picture: Barack as the naive boy wonder followed by throngs of oohers and ahhers, Michelle as the disgruntled, sardonic wife who longs to wear the pants. You know, it begins to sound a bit like the crap that dogged Hillary back in '92. Isn't the Times supposed to do original reporting, not stuff that parrots what's already being said?

But hold up. What makes the placement even more interesting, is that piece ends with this (ellipses are mine):

At campaign appearances, Mrs. Obama gets approving reviews....When Mrs. Obama mentioned her daughters at an event in New Hampshire, one woman cooed about “bringing laughter back to the White House,” while two retirees whispered that she was the picture of “everyday elegance” in her red sweater set and smooth flip of a hairstyle.

It was the same perfectly calibrated look reflected in a recent cover of Ebony magazine. Seeking to make the couple look as presidential as possible, Harriette Cole, the magazine’s creative director, said stylists at the photo shoot offered Mrs. Obama a strand of West Wing-appropriate pearls.

She had already brought her own.

I repeat: this is at the bottom of a very long profile. Along the way, we've learned that everyone in Michelle's family is scared of her, that she fits in with black audiences (don't get me started on the way the Times talks about the Blacks, 'cause I won't stop), oh and at the verrry end, we learn this small thing about how PEOPLE REALLY LIKE HER AND SHE'S GOOD AT THIS STUFF. Ohhh. I dig that. But by now, half of readers have peeled away, left with that lede burned into their brain. I repeat: interesting.

And incidentally, the first anecdote is the impression Michelle left on a newspaper reporter, that noblest of professions. The last bit is an impression she left on, let's see, normal people. Who vote. Now it all begins to make a bit more sense.

That's the thing about the WP, NYT and LAT. If you read the newsy pieces, you can never quite pinpoint the source of the unpleasantness with which you're left. But it's always about choice--which quotations to use when. Which quotations might have gotten left out. Who gets the passive voice, and so on. Very insidious. You also have to wonder about the ratio of pieces like this one and the one about candidates skeletons-in-closets that are pumped out compared with substantive analysis of their positions on stuff like education. Labor. Health care. You know what, that shit's much less interesting than marital drama and playing up gender and race anxiety. Forget I mentioned it, Bill Keller.

UPDATE: of course, Debra Dickerson of Salon says it even better than I. I guess it's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for wives of politicians--which of course reflects how it is for all women. The Times sort of said this of course--sort of, in a way which reinforces the paradigm rather than subverting it.

Maureen's At It Again

Thus wrote Egalitarian Bookworm Chick's numero uno persona non grata, Maureen Dowd yesterday in her column:

Usually, I love the dynamics of a cheeky woman puncturing the ego of a cocky guy.

I liked it in ’40s movies, and I liked it with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, and Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in “Moonlighting.”

So why don’t I like it with Michelle and Barack?

I find it incumbent on myself to provide a variety of answers to MoDo's rhetorical question:

1. Barack and Michelle are real people, not characters, and actually have implications for society. You hate serious stuff like that, I know.
   
2. In the movies and media settings you describe, the woman still remains second potato, and thus the "cheekiness" is a mere conceit designed to flatter the man.
3. The Obamas are black people who act like they're actually entitled to this, like they're people or something. God, how rude of them. Good thing you slammed them with such hard-hitting rhetoric, Maureen.
   
4. They have the kind of equal marriage you bemoan you will never have, thereby eliminating your master theory that all smart men date down (actually, Mo', only smart assholes date down).
   
5. Unlike the cheeky vixens in 40s movies whom you so admire, they don't conform to 40s definition of gender roles. But then again, it's not the 40s. Hasn't been for a long time.
   

The entire column is a blot on the face of womankind, but this gem takes the cake:

She throws in nice stuff, too, about how he’s “the real deal” and a trustworthy “brother.” But this princess of South Chicago, a formidable Princeton and Harvard Law School grad, wants us to know that she’s not polishing the pedestal.

And why the hell should she? Also, as swvl pointed out, putting "brother" in scare quotes isn't just racist-ish. It's racist. And calling Michelle a princess in such a dismissive way implies that only the WASPy belle dames of the Hollywood golden age deserve to be princesses. Certainly not African American women, or Jewesses for that matter. They're just bitches. There might be a princess-loophole for a particular brand of flame-haired Irish Catholic broads though-- in Dowd's self-hating fantasies.

Maureen, I'm watching you. I've insitituted Maureen Dowd Patrol on my blog, and am going to try to catch you at your misogynist bullshit twice a week, every week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, schedule permitting. So watch your back, girl. I'm sticking to you like you stick to your vapid credo.

UPDATE: and here's a Salon piece dissing the Edwards haircut fracas.

Dowdy and the Patriarchy: A Match Made in Heaven

[A Parody...of sorts]

Poor Dowdy. Despite her "pink Burberry trench coat" and her "distressed denim skirt and very tight high-heeled, knee-high black boots," she can't seem to get herself a man. She likes to bemoan that "famous and powerful men [are taking] up with ...their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers, " (fact checkers? FACT checkers? Methinks she's referring to the not-so-egalitarian Times here--for shame, Times!). She worries that her castrating tongue has sent all the really smart men out there packing--if uber-misognyists like Aaron "fetish for blonde Christian chicks and crack-cocaine" Sorkin (or the Sork) and Michael "fetish for Catherine Zeta Jones" Douglass (or Dougly) count as really smart men.

But Dowdy's problems just start there. Not only do men totally suck, but feminism has kind of let her down too! Why you gotta do that, feminism?

"Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life that were not all about men," she says.

Like, wouldn't it be awesome if everyone could emulate her utopian life surrounded with her girlfriends "Alessandera" and "Michi" who also like cleverly phrased put-downs and also enjoy bemoaning the lack of men in their lives---oops. I guess that man-free paradise hasn't quite arrived yet. But seriously, if only feminism had lived up to its promise --then every woman could get together with her girls and come up with new, nasty invective that may gloss over facts the way Bobbi Brown glosses over their lips! That'd be so groovy. And none of those bra-burning stereotypes are invited, for heaven's sakes. Dowdy loves bras. And shoes. And Bobbi Brown makeup too I'll wager.

Yes, she cultivates her image. And why shouldn't she? That shock of red hair helps her flirt with famous people and then quote them in her columns, which is super-awesome and important. That's why when male politicians start worrying about their own images, like a snarling dog, Dowdy's out defending her territory. Fortunately, her column about (arguably) the most femme-friendly candidate, John Edwards, really focused hard on the issues, like his progressive stance on health insurance, reproductive rights, gay rights and poverty. See, here's what she said: "Americans aren't ready for a metrosexual-in-chief." Oh, she was talking about his haircut. Never mind.

"Following his star turn primping his hair for two minutes on a YouTube video to the tune of “I Feel Pretty,” Mr. Edwards... seems intent on proving that he is a Breck Girl — and a Material Boy."

Therein lies the main problem with Dowdy. Here's John Edwards, a "smart" man who isn't afraid of smart women. You know, the kind of guy that Dowdy says are extinct. His wife is in charge of his campaign, he's got Kate Michelmann on board, and if elected he would make the lives of women in our country really better, unlike her ex The Sork, who plasters stereotypes across the screens of millions each night. I don't know if Dowdy can handle the reality that such men exist.

But guess what? The guy Dowdy has referred to as "The Breck Girl" five-plus times got a pricey haircut because image matters now. It matters a whole lot--thanks to none other than, you guessed it, Dowdy and her ilk. You see, Dowdy was more into in Kerry's windsurfing than Bush's windbagging. She cared more about Al Gore's Earth tones than his Earth-friendly strategy, was more interested Hillary's shrewish image than her shrewd understanding of policy. Yup, it's true. Hil's a wonk. She certainly wouldn't know what to talk about with Michi and Alessandera around Cosmos and a rerun of Sex and the City. But would Hil know how to run the country? Let's not be ridiculous. Dowdy doesn't really care! She's a "color" columnist, remember?

Thanks to Dowdy's fun with shameful gender-based character assassination, the nebulous border between the Male and the Female in our political world will remain guarded for a long time. But you know, I think it sucks for her in the end, because every time she attacks a liberal man for being too feminine and a strong woman in politics for not "throwing like a girl" the chances that she'll ever meet a gender-hang-up free guy, the type of real man who doesn't give a shit that she's smart and likes her anyway, are diminished. Let's hope The Sork gets over his drug problem real soon and takes her back.

sources/credits:
Modo on JE
NYM on Modo
Modo on Women
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip--every episode.
A whole bunch of liberal bloggers who attack the Maureen Dowd/Edwards phenomenon from a more political stance. (Yglesias, Greenwald, the American Prospect etc. Go you!)

Why Maureen Dowd Is Dead To Me

Maureen, you may be tough, but you ain't no feminist role model for me. I used to admire you, now I disown you.

Mo Do has managed to cleerly insert herself into the public discourse again by baiting mogul and Obama-maniac David Geffen into launching an attack on the Clintons, Mo's favorite target of old. While the Clinton camp reaction was overblown and Obama is doing the right thing by firing back and otherwise ignoring the fray, I'd like to call my small but loyal readership's attention to the person I believe the culprit in the middle of all this.

What business does Dowd, a political commentator, have airing what amounts to an essentially personal dispute between DG and the Clinton's? It's because Dowd is never content to just discuss news, she has to constantly thrust herself in the center of it. Her nasty nicknames ("poppy"-- that's hilarious! not) and unceasing puns are a diversion from the facts that she rarely has anything of real journalistic merit to say, and also a way to cannibalize whatever she is reporting on and make it her own.

Despite her obsession with her barrier-breaking career, Dowd allows herself to fit snugly into, nay, define the stereotype of the female as snarky, substance-less, gossipy and self-obsessed. And some of her biggest fans are men; I question whether they like her because she's a "Strong woman" or because she's really not that strong at all, but rather an "hilariously biting gossip who could use a good screw." Just look at the picture she willingly posed for in her own magazine!

Yes the way Dowd writes about, and discusses men, also shows me that even at her age, she's still looking for a real power-broker type to take her out on the town, not an equal partnership. She audaciously opened her Rolling Stone story on Stewart and Colbert by wondering whether they'd be intimidated by her.

Dowd claims to be greatly interested in the advancement of the fairer sex. But her 2005 column about how more women should be columnists seemed to me to be a "why can't more women be like me? Gosh, isn't it too bad!" kind of statement. And her great feminist pretensions are undermined by the fact that her number one persona non grata is Hilary Clinton, one of the strongest (if admittedly extremely flawed) women in politics. Is Dowd that insecure (yes, she is, another reason men like her. I think her insecurity is patently obvious)?

As an aspiring columnist (someday, fingers crossed) myself, I hope that I can emulate some of the more positive aspects of her column, her sense of humor and wit. But I also hope I can avoid some of the pitfalls that she's fallen into.

If she wants to be a diva, she needs another stage. And I need another strong female role model, cause Paul Krugman doesn't quite cut it in that sense.