... Dowd is extremely fond of clever stereotyping. But this strategy is better-suited to satirizing a real person (say, President Bush) than it is to offering insights into the already cartoonish "war" between the sexes. In Are Men Necessary? she gravitates toward quotes like this: "Deep down all men want the same thing: a virgin in a gingham dress," or "if there's one thing men fear it's a woman who uses her critical faculties..."Her shallow insights are sometimes amusing in the context of 250 word op-ed, but a whole book, press junket and PR tour? The woman who suggests that oedipal conflict is at the root of current US foreign policy speaks out on feminism and culture, and we're supposed to care? Strangely enough, I do. I must be hypnotized by the red hair.
Sociologist Valerie Oppenheimer of University of California, Berkeley reports that today men are choosing as mates women who have completed their education. The more education a woman has, the more likely she is to marry. Unlike the single University of California, Los Angeles study, this finding comes from an analysis of 80 peer-reviewed studies.As for Dowd's repeated invocation of the famous study showing the higher a woman's IQ, the less likely her eventual marriage, well:
Neither Dowd nor the Atlantic bothered to mention--apparently they did not know--that the data were gathered from men and women born in 1921; the women are all now in their 80s.And it doesn't stop there, Dowd cherrypicked statistics, used bad data, and ignored reams of contrary evidence. In other words, her opus was the dating equivalent of the Iraq War -- an embarassing disaster sold on the basis of manipulated data and ignored evidence. She's the Judy Miller of cultural reporting, the only question is how long it'll be before Keller offers yet another mea culpa.
Should a study of octogenarian women be taken as a guide for today's young people? No.[...]
From 36 to 40, high achievers are more likely to be married and have kids than other female workers, but they marry later than other women.
Boushey found that women between the ages of 28 and 35 who work full time and earn more than $55,000 a year or have a graduate or professional degree are just as likely to be successfully married as
other working women.
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I want to know how picky Dowd is being. My sister, who voiced similar complaints to Dowd's and is in her 20s, finally got asked out by a boy -- a nice, cool kid who genuinely cared about her. They got along well, had great conversations, and things seemed to click -- except for the fact my sister thought she could do better looks-wise. So, he got dumped. I really wonder if Dowd ever explored that side of the equation. Perhaps she WANTS good looking men who love gingham dresses and have high powered corporate jobs to love women like her. Well, if that's so, she's fighting a lost fight. That world and that type of guy will never change as long as a supply of women exist to feed them -- and, that supply has been consistent for, well, forever.
So, yes, Dowd is really exposing her shallowness both in terms of personal preference and her ability to engage this difficult subject with any real, mature thought by her constant stereotyping and, I believe, her lack of true introspection.
This book, I take it, will be of solace to some women I guess but good feminist thought is rarely something akin to comfort food.
posted by narebuc at 5:24 AM on November 4, 2005