How Do You Spell Sycophant?
Try A-R-I-E-L L-E-V-Y, that’s Ariel Levy, the writer of this unintentionally quite hilarious profile of Maureen Dowd for the normally excellent New York magazine. Join me on a fisking expedition, well you?…
We don’t have long to wait for the laughs to begin: the subhead is, “How Maureen Dowd became the most dangerous columnist in America—on her own, very female terms.” Well, that’s a real rib-tickler, all right – the most dangerous columnist in America? I suppose she could hospitalize you by making you so numb with disgust that you fall and hit your head on something – and her own, very female terms? Oh, dear, not a good sign at all…
Dowd is, of course, the only female op-ed columnist [at the New York Times]. It’s a post she says she is “not temperamentally suited to,” despite the fact she’s been doing it for ten years and has won a Pulitzer and a passionate army of fans in the process, because Dowd doesn’t like “a lot of angst in my life,” and it is specifically her job to provoke. Her natural inclination—her fundamental drive—is, rather, to seduce. But then those two things are not entirely unrelated.
It isn’t easy being the lone female on “murderers’ row,” as the columnists’ offices in the Washington bureau are called. (And Dowd’s office just happens to be next door to her ex-boyfriend John Tierney’s. “It’s like, ‘Out of all the gin joints in all the world . . . ’ It is weird,” she says. “We share a bathroom, which I guess could have ended up happening if we’d gotten married.”) Dowd says she doesn’t mind that W. has nicknamed her “The Cobra,” and she probably kind of likes being called “the flame-haired flamethrower,” but she hates all monikers that involve knives or other sharp objects. “I have a fear of castration,” she explains, perching herself with catlike precision on the striped settee in her lacquer-red sitting room. “Not fear of being castrated but fear of castrating.”
Did an editor by any chance glance at this piece? A woman whose natural inclination is to seduce, but who has an admitted fear of ‘castrating’? Yes, well, the black widow seduces, I suppose…and how tired is the MoDo routine of “I don’t like this job, but I’m just so darn good at it”?
Brains versus sex. The serious and the superficial. The battle of the sexes. This has long been the terrain of Dowd’s journalism, and it’s the explicit focus of her new book, Are Men Necessary?, 338 pages of ruminations and witticisms on matters ranging from the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings to the vestigiality of male nipples.
Though Dowd’s importance as an antagonist of the White House has never been greater, the book throws open the door to her critics’ favorite complaint: frivolousness.
Dowd’s importance as an antagonist of the White House has never been greater? What, since TimesSelect? And why, do you suppose, would a woman of Dowd’s great intellect be considered frivolous? Was it the 400th mention of ‘Rummy’, perhaps?
Dowd’s femininity is dramatized by the relentless maleness of the worlds she inhabits. She appears that much more redheaded surrounded by the blue-suited stoniness of Washington, the arid fustiness of the New York Times. When Dowd started out as a political correspondent, she had a term for women in her position: color girls. “I always liked the sort of funnier, weirder thing to write about as opposed to the official thing that would be officially more prestigious but, to me, not as interesting,” Dowd says. “So I liked being a color girl. You can deliver something unique.” The light in which she’s bathed herself is low and gray but flattering.
“The light in which she’s bathed herself is low and gray but flattering”? What the hell does that mean? Wow, this really….stinks…
in her book, Dowd asserts, “If there’s one thing men fear, it’s a woman who uses her critical faculties.”But Dowd is more than the sum of her critical faculties; she’s an utter and unreconstructed fox. Something that nearly every person I spoke to about her mentioned, unprompted, is that men can’t resist her. I tell her this, and she pauses long enough to give her rejoinder a forties-movie-star snap: “Where are they?”
Yes, indeed, where are they? What is with all this nonsense about flattering lights, utter fox, etc., etc.? Levy wants to have her cake and eat it too…Dowd is so smart, and succeeds on her own, very female terms…but she’s great looking! Gag…
If Judith Miller represents the bad witch of the New York Times in the public imagination—self-important, suffering, wrong—then Maureen Dowd is Glenda: Technicolor, spreading mirth among the munchkins, floating around in a protective pink bubble. Obviously, Miller— “Miss Run Amok,” as she’s called herself, according to the Times—was allowed to run rampant over the rules. But the Dowd crowd enjoys its own particular brand of latitude at the paper. When Geraldo Rivera demanded a correction after Stanley asserted that he had “nudged” a rescue worker aside to make room for his camera crew after Hurricane Katrina, for instance, the Times ran an “Editors’ Note” defending her “figurative reference” only after public editor Byron Calame wrote a whole column in Rivera’s defense.
Dowd, Kakutani, and Stanley are the cool girls of the New York Times—think Heathers, but nice. Whereas Miller famously elbows away the competition, Dowd employs a different tactic. “She’s the opposite of the woman who pulls the ladder up behind her,” says Dowd’s good friend Leon Wieseltier, in an observation that was echoed by colleague after colleague. “She keeps pushing it lower.”
Still, a common newsroom perception is that Dowd’s clique gets special treatment because its members use their charm instrumentally—an occupational hazard for successful women that runs roughly proportional to their level of physical attractiveness. And then there is their extremely close proximity to Jill Abramson. “When I became managing editor, I gave a short speech: My mother told me when I was going off to summer camp, ‘You just need one friend and you’ll be okay,” says Abramson. “At work, Maureen is that one friend.”
Abramson, responsible for managing the paper’s Judith Miller coverage, is also, of course, at the center of it. “I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long,” she said when she returned my call. “I’ve just been buried under all this Judy Miller crap.”
Well, that’s a quite remarkable passage, first of all, in the hostility it shows towards Judy Miller by her co-workers, secondly, in the assertion that MoDo is Glenda, the good witch (Dowd is one of the most famous cheap-shot artists of our time), and third, in the relationship it shows between Dowd, the columnist, and Jill Abramson, the Managing Editor. What is the New York Times doing mixing opinion and hard news? (Don’t answer that – rhetorical question). Here are a couple of more remarkable examples of the privileged world of MoDo:
Dowd thought hard before writing the column (a hatchet job on her co-worker Miller – such a nice girl, that Maureen!), delaying it from Wednesday to Saturday. “As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight,” she says. She also worried that she would seem to be carrying others’ water. Dowd says she never talked to editorial-page editor Gail Collins or publisher Arthur Sulzberger. Jill Abramson, Dowd says, advised her not to write it, fearing that it would be seen as piling on…Wasn’t Howell Raines, at one point, Dowd’s boyfriend?
“He was my boss,” she says very firmly. Then she cracks up.
Ahem…sleeping with the boss, well, there’s a word for that – slips my mind at the moment…if you can read that, and feel that the New York Times is anything more than a joke, then you have a remarkable sense of humor.
…Dowd’s images often win a permanent place in the culture. She’s retold the last three presidencies as long-running sitcoms, where the joke is always on the man in charge. In a way, she’s created her own reality—Dowdworld—and we just live in it.
Oh, puke…that’s just really, really wildly, laughably ridiculous…but then there’s this:
Dowd is assumed by most people to be a Democrat.
Whooo…ohhh….sorry, I have to wipe the tears from my eyes…
Really, though, upon consideration, this is the best possible profile of Dowd – faux-serious, but drenched in frivolity; posing as feminist, while revealing the vanity of both author and profiler, and ultimately as devoid of content as the entire Dowd ouvre. Birds of a feather, as they say…
UPDATE 11/07/05 6:46 a.m.: Many thanks to the great Tim Blair for the link…
I was accosted by a colleague at a reception this week–and this colleague is a highly respected scholar in a very challenging area of our field and a dear friend who I in general enjoy–who started the conversation by announcing “Maureen Dowd got it absolutely right.” I was startled–how could she buy this line? Then it occurred to me that this tripe gives Dowd and other women (like Levy as well) who have not for whatever reason enjoyed relationship success the “out” that they’re too sexy and too smart for today’s pitiful males. So it is the fault of the pitiful males that they are too timid to take on a firebreathing intellectual giant of a sex kitten like Maureen Dowd. Please. If she really were either an intellectual giant or a sex kitten–let alone both–she would have no problem finding and keeping a partner. But I don’t think anyone of either gender is going to seek out someone who has so publically demonstrated that she is a neurotic, bitter, narcissictic fraud.
And her living room sounds like a bordello.
I love this:
Well, dear, one seems to be sitting right in front of you. It’s nice of the starstruck Mr. Levy to not pointed out how she just abolished his masculinity.
Aw Crap Update: it’s best when one is making up a witty rejoinder to first fact-check the bio of the person one is aiming one’s witticisms at. Auugghh!! :blush:
Well, I have figured out through logic and reason that there is no “Maureen Dowd;” it’s an elaborate practical joke the Times is playing on its readers. But just for the sake of argument–
It’s worth digging out the column she did a few years ago just before she went on book leave. It dealt with the way she’s been critcized, how unfair everything is–this from the woman who has the most valuable op-ed space in the English-speaking world. But boiled down, her response to tough criticism was, “I’m a girl and they shouldn’t hit me.”
But I don’t doubt she’s right about why she can’t get dates. She’s just too charming, intelligent, beautiful, and accomplished for any man…and I don’t doubt she damn well lets them know it, and lets them know that few, if any, men could deserve her.
Watch, though. If she ever gets married or has the sort of relationship that makes the papers…it won’t be with a high school teacher or small businessman.
Tierney? Pre-Michael Douglas or post?
Talk about an incestuous group…
Wonder if Tierney cringes everytime Maureen goes on a diatribe about what men want in her space.
It explains his stong pro-legalization stance. One would have to be on drugs to date MoDo. Can you imagine John coming into the office on Monday, Friedman getting a rundown of their weekend, and running off to Pinch’s bathroom with fresh spank material as soon as Tierney leaves?
This is like getting editorials about the world from the cast of survivor, while they are still on location in borneo.
Or maybe Gilligan’s Island…
Andrea, the gender my be wrong, but you got the starstruck part right…
Ariel Levy has a book and a need for publicity:
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?sid=33&pid=510941
The book.
http://www.ariellevy.net/author.html
The bio. Almost as expansive as Dowd’s.
Does her week working at Planned Parenthood grant her ‘veteran’ status to the left?
Worth reading her press for her book:
http://www.ariellevy.net/
How does an unknown get a job at the NYT, and have her first book reviewed by NYT, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, NY Observer, Seattle Times, and the Toronto Star?
Because she’s that good?
(any book that advocates starring in “girls gone wild” certainly could have had the subtitle-”Sprinting towards Gommorah”.)
I smell a literary Tommy Mottola…
Hilarious…but I think that her stand on the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ thing is largely negative…she seems to think women who degrade themselves in this way think they are being clever and empowered, but the joke is one them, according to the book blurb that you provided…in any event, thanks for the info…
“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful (and smart, and clever, and witty, and, well, everything that is positive in a woman).”
There is a certain humor to all of it.
Dowd follows Raines and gets a ‘primo’ job in print media. (This is so much like Miers/Bush…)
She has no resume.
Along comes Ariel, also without resume, with her first book that is critical of girls ‘fooling themselves’ and she sings the praises of Dowd…who for all intents and puposes, slept her way to the top. The moral of her book should be, don’t give it away for free, use it to build your career.
You can’t create this level of ignorance,only marvel at it.
The essay got it half-right; Maureen does create her own reality – Dowdworld. But I’d like to think most people are smart enough not to live in it.
I don’t know if she’s a Democrat per se. She certainly ripped into Bill Clinton at times, so at the very least, she’s not a partisan Democrat. My biggest problem with her is her ideology seems pretty much based on whatever she heard at a cocktail party the night before. It’s all snark and very little substance.
“It’s all snark and very little substance.”
Yeah. Now that Wonkette’s around, really, who needs Dowd? If I want that type of shtick I’d rather have it uncensored.
Is it just me, or does Levy’s website make your head hurt? How much more girly could it be?
As for MoDo, I used to think some guys had enormous egos for no particular reason, but she’s shown me girls can be that way, too.
I am beginning to suspect that her major talent is one that pretty routinely attracts men who hit-and-run. Maybe she should use her giant, throbbing intellect to consider this.
[...] One thing we’ve learned for certain about Maureen Dowd – she is the center of her universe. And like a good narcissist, she loves to pretend that she’s just oblivious to all the fuss. Another case in point comes from Howard Kurtz’s review of her new book, “Why All Men Suck”: “I have no complaints about my personal life,” she says in her stately Georgetown home, where the decor ranges from a pink jukebox to an expensively restored Hungarian portrait of a partially disrobed woman. “I get asked out. I don’t know how much more I’d get asked out if guys weren’t scared of me. [...]
“I get asked out. I don’t know how much more I’d get asked out if guys weren’t scared of me. [...]“
O_o
It wouldn’t be that scalpel in her fist, would it? Dowd is the way she is because she feels she got cheated out of a “Y” chromosome. And by God, someone’s gonna pay. That part of her psyche transcends all politics.
Eight pages? Eight pages? I haven’t seen such a load of self-aggrandizing clap-trap in, well, three or four hours.
Something else bugs me about Maureen Dowd.
She’s 50+.
Why does she still speak, write and think (and act, and dress, and whine) like a precocious high-school student?
This also applies to Lawrence “Fists of Rage” O’Donnell.
Again: older than 50. Old enough to be a grandfather. Zero dignity.
Have you caught the jeans, sneakers, hair-pulled back and chewing gum bit?
This woman is unreal.
I don’t know if Dowd is a democrat but I’m pretty sure she’s a b**ch. NO! It’s an American joke!
I’ve never understood the psychology of people who publicly announce the reasons (external always) for their failure in romance. I’ve known several people who have explained that their great intellect or power has kept romance at bay when everyone around them knew the real reason was that they were egotistical jerks.
There is a lot of sh**ting where you eat at the Times. Judith Miller had a long-time affair with Arthur Sulzberger Jr.