The always astute Christina Hoff Sommers on Maureen Dowd:
“In the opening pages of Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, Maureen Dowd says that when it comes to sex and love she has “no answers,” “no special wisdom,” and that her book is “not a systematic inquiry of any kind.” There is no index; nothing is footnoted. It is even hard to discern a theme, an argument, or a fact. So why read the book? Well, as Dowd, a celebrated New York Times columnist, explained to one interviewer, “It is supposed to be fun and it is supposed to create all these sexy conversations.”
According to Sommers: The book is bereft of research; Modo’s quips are mostly inane, though she does quote witty friends. However:
“Dowd’s book has hidden virtue. Hard-line feminists despise it. Why? Because Dowd firmly believes that men and women are basically different. She disdains feminist efforts to deny or diminish the difference and she has no patience for the new feminized male eager to share his feelings. ‘Any minute, I’m afraid guys might start asking me for Midol.’ Such comments do not endear her to those she refers to as ‘earnest sisters in turtlenecks and Birkenstocks;’ nor does she win points with the sisterhood when she refers to Clarence Thomas’s accusers as ‘a feminist lynch mob.’
“Conservatives forget that Dowd can be amusing when she is on your side. Yes, it is tedious to read her columns when she carries on about Rummy, Wolfie, and the Bushies. But here is what she says about Hillary Clinton in the last chapter of the book: ‘The onetime frizzy-haired hippie chick is now channeling her inner Midwest Goldwater Girl. She knows a female candidate would never get away with having love beads in her jewelry box… The jangly Hillary Rodham Clinton rebranded herself into the more clubbable HILLARY!… She has a talent for morphing that puts Madonna to shame.'”