PrintOctober 18, 2010
Maureen Dowd and Revenge of the Homely Redhead
Maureen Dowd's pen strikes again. The woman who has made a fortune out of cocktail-party cattiness has decided, this week, to aim her eternally adolescent barbs at attractive Republican women -- the ones making mincemeat out of their feminized Democrat-male opponents.
Reading her latest self-revealing scream, I couldn't help feeling sorry for little Maureen, still tormented after all these decades.
Likening "mean girl" Republican women -- "Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine" -- to those who picked on her in high school as "grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant," one can just hear Maureen's high-pitched wails to Mama as she poured out her adolescent troubles.
Poor little Maureen. For decades now, she has indulged her screaming pen in revenge-of-the-homely-redhead diatribes aimed at her own tormenters from childhood. Whether targeting the boys who scorned her for the blonde, curvaceous cheerleader or the girls who always seemed to get the better of her, Maureen Dowd's whole career is a caricature of scorned females of the hellacious variety.
In between her bed-hopping adventures in Washington, Maureen has skewered powerful men while clinging to the empty claim that they are "intimidated" by her. Intimidated or turned off? It's a precarious line. And you can bet the farm that Ms. Dowd spends restless nights wondering where it all went wrong for her. Continually beating the drum that she is still attractive and a real intellectual heavyweight, even while her personal life is absent husband, children, and anything more permanent and fulfilling than a perennially wadded cocktail napkin, Dowd's screeds are becoming more pitiful by the hour now.
When her book, Are Men Necessary?, came out six years ago, Howard Kurtz reported in the Washington Post that when "a photographer for Elle magazine showed up for a shoot, he brought a Ken-type doll and a pair of scissors -- and asked Dowd to pose either cutting off its head or stabbing the figurine in the groin. She declined." Why waste a perfectly good pair of scissors when a sharp, pointy pen serves just as well?
Ms. Dowd has gotten filthy rich off this shtick, as she stuck like glue to the scorning-men, leftist feminist clique she joined in her college years. Selling out every vestige of her warm-nurturer side to her female-dog side, Maureen cast her lot with those feminazis who would make the popular all-girl girls pay, pay, pay, and pay unto eternity. Only now, she's wound up a bitter, old hag without husband or kids and just a barking column in the dying NYT. It's enough to break a good woman's heart.
As Dowd counts her life's marbles, all cast with the feminazi brigade of the early '70s, real women have marched right past her, getting it all.
Sarah Palin, with her hunk husband and five gorgeous kids, a sensationally successful political and writing career, who makes it all come off like she hasn't broken a nail in eons, must be eating out the insides of pitiful Maureen Dowd. While it's pure child's play to come up with attractive, descriptive nouns for Sarah Palin -- "Mama Grizzly" is my personal favorite -- the only one that comes close to describing Dowd is "crone."
All these Republican women, who are giving the powerful Democrat incumbents ample runs for their money, must be pure torture for the woman who gave up all things real-womanly in exchange for barking space in the dead-tree media and a slutty life with nothing more substantial than a series of split-the-check dates and one-night stands, in which the men felt lucky to walk away with their manhood still attached. Yes, seeing these real women wage real fights over real issues must be painful beyond endurance for the eternally adolescent Dowd, whose resentfulness just oozes from her catty screeds.
Dowd has sacrificed her own womanhood on the devil's altar of the right of mothers to murder their own offspring and now stares horrified as traditional women, who dare to love their femininity and the children who go with it, have charged at the leftist feminist fortress with superlative success. Hating their womanhood has petered out for the embittered, we'll-get-even '70s crowd just as the rise of genuine feminism is latching onto a whole new generation of anything-but-misogynist women. While Dowd spurned marriage and opted instead for serial nothing-in-it-for-me affairs, traditional women proved beyond doubt that a truly competent female could have it all -- without using hubby's clout to get a Senate seat (Clinton) or leveraging hubby's millions to buy a house or Senate seat (Pelosi and Boxer) or sleeping one's way to a "respectable" column (Sally Quinn).
While Dowd's haggard crowd pushed policy after policy aimed at scoring the get-even points on a nonexistent gender scoreboard, real women have seen those policies make life invariably worse for them, not better. And as real women face off with the Dowd-crowd's feminized version of males (i.e., Democrats), they prove beyond doubt that character and brains bring self-esteem far more than a single body part found between their legs. The vagina-worshiping, fetus-murdering, marriage-spurning '70s feminist is as yesterday as tie-dyed shirts and unwashed hair.
Dowd is the piqued adolescent who recently compared the plight of Catholic women barred from the priesthood to that of barely-out-of-slavery Saudi women. Dowd is the scorned-by-real-men female who dubbed George W. Bush the "boy emperor," even as she cowered at candidate Obama's scolding for picking on his "big ears." In short, Dowd is no huge intellect. Her character-disordered rants prove just the opposite, in fact.
She's just pitifully growing very old, very quickly, a scorned, homely redhead who has never found a welcoming place in this world -- other than between cheap sheets. And as much as I would like to rhetorically skewer her for all the real damage she's done to reputations, to society, to traditional men and women, all I can really do is feel sorry for her.
In the end of it all, Maureen Dowd and her whole washed-up, faux-feminist crowd are just too pitiable for words.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Big Government, and Big Journalism. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
