Fields Of Dreams (Nightmares?)

I probably shouldn’t get into this, but I will anyway. I may get dumped from a blogroll or two, though that certainly isn’t my goal. I’ll try my best not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

The column appearing below from Suzanne Fields appeared in today’s Bucks County Courier Times (obtained online from the Jewish World Review), and ostensibly, it has to do with the new book written by Maureen Dowd titled, “Are Men Necessary?” Having read Dowd’s work, I respect her as a wit and an intellect. The fact that she beats up on Bush wins points for me, but she also took Clinton to task over Monica Whatsername, to be fair (she also didn’t back down when that zany traitor Zell Miller challenged her to a duel).

Maybe she really doesn’t like men generally. Maybe she’s just writing this piffle to stir things up because that’s the type of book her publisher is paying her to write (men will be “as ornamental as ice cream” one day, huh?). Also, since this must be a compilation of a lot of her prior columns with some new material, most of what she says shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I don’t think Dowd should have to apologize for her life (sounds a bit like the whole “Sex And The City” milieu where the women don some clingy, revealing, spaghetti-strapped evening number or drop $800 on a pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos without so much as a bat of the eye.) On the other hand, I don’t think that gives her the right to pout and feel offended that Mr. And Mrs. Boring Whitebread America may actually have it better off than she does.

Anyway, in search of more information and opinion on this (I had a few minutes to kill recently), I made the mistake of finding and then actually reading Fields’ column, which follows:

Every generation confronts the poses and attitudes that define the era, and supplies the ammunition required to keep the war between the sexes going.

OK, here is rule number one if you’re going to be a conservative propagandist; if a battle or disagreement doesn’t actually exist, you must create one. It is impossible to try and communicate your message unless you are doing so in a state of conflict.

Flappers learned to drink and smoke in public, just like men. This was liberation that lasted, but nevertheless requires constant reinvention. The Charleston, with swinging arms and crazy legs, morphed into cozy cheek-to-cheek slow dancing to Sinatra, strings and brass.

Sure, there was “The Tender Trap” and the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies about conflict – or so I hear; I was too young then, you see :-) – but there was also style. You know, Cole Porter, Grace Kelly, "Ring A Ding Ding"…all that.

The Sexual Revolution, abetted by the Pill and feminism, brought rage to sex; men and women remained opposites while attracting each other. They learned to overcome hostilities to take advantage of new possibilities. They worked out some of the kinks through rock and roll. Burning bras was both angry gesture and sexy signal. Women felt freer, and men felt freer with them. But that had a downside, too.

I love the way conservatives in general like to give their revisionist history lessons, implying that everything that came before was somehow attributed to excesses of liberal decadence. Also, I should point out that nothing turns me on regarding women more than a flirtatious smile, a hint of cleavage, and the smell of burning latex.

In the postfeminist world of today, buttons and bows are back, but more women have careers, leaving aggressive posture at the office to indulge laid-back behavior when the sun goes down. Not always an easy transformation.

Don’t worry…she gets to Dowd’s book, eventually.

No matter where a woman finds herself on the timeline of gender politics, the key word, as any social Darwinian could tell you, is "adaptation."

Hey, I thought you guys favored "intelligent design"! Oh sorry, I forgot...that's "science".

We're not exactly hard-wired for the social changes. So men and women trapped in transition, looking for a mate to survive among the fittest, take casualties. The political implications of all this can be enormous, too, as any pol trying to figure out ways to exploit the gender gap could tell you.

That actually may be the truest passage of this entire screed.

Maureen Dowd, the tart tart of The New York Times op-ed page, reveals herself to be one of the walking wounded in her new book, "Are Men Necessary?" Hers is an Ideology of One. Beneath the wit, the intelligence, the brittle one-liners, the insights, you can hear the voice of a little girl crying in the night. She's a lot like the character Margo Channing in "All About Eve," played by Bette Davis, whom Mo loves to hate and quote.

And you aren’t “a little girl crying in the night” also at times, Ms. Fields? Also, I should note that “All About Eve” is a terrific movie.

"Funny thing about a woman's career — the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster," muses Margo Channing. "Nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman." In spite of herself, Maureen bears witness to the truism even as she pins the blame on men. She believes, devoutly, that she has been rejected because men won't marry a powerful woman.

As photographed for The New York Times Sunday magazine, Ms. Dowd wears red shoes as a badge of courage, but she's tormented when she looks around at the terrible aimlessness and arbitrariness of the bodies strewn on the field of sexual warfare. She draws on pithy allusions from movies and poetry, which she shoots like scattershot. But it's the peek into her personal life, from interviews and publicity as well as several choice anecdotes, that suggests she's really writing a postmodern lament of love.

Maybe, but some specifics would be nice at this point. Can I have some actual analysis of the author’s work here instead of the author?

She could have called her book "The Love Song of Maureen Dowd." Like T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, she can't understand how she got to this "tedious argument of insidious intent," which boils down to why, at 53, she's a childless spinster. Instead of asking, "Do I dare?" she asks, "Why didn't I?" Instead of measuring her life in coffee spoons, she pays it out in cold column inches. She counts the most sophisticated men and women of stage, screen and video as her friends, who "come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." But they can't answer exactly what went wrong with her love life, either.

Like so many authors, Ms. Dowd suggests that universal experiences grow from the acorns of her life and from those she has interviewed. But no great oaks here. The scientific research that answers the central question that men will eventually be irrelevant, or at the very least demoted to a nice but not really necessary second sex, is cleverly engaged but runs aground deep into the shallows. She's especially retro quoting Norman Mailer's jape that women have never needed a lot of men to perpetuate the species: " . . . all women needed were about a hundred semen slaves that they could milk every day . . . and they could keep the race going. So they don't need us."

Somehow I have a feeling that there’s more insight into Dowd’s work than this, but I don’t suppose I’ll discover that here.

She concludes that she has no conclusions. She has no answers for women (or men, either), only questions. She asks for no sympathy, but in the end remains a middle-aged female Prufrock, who could have written: "I am no prophet — and here's no great matter."

Isn’t that true of columnists generally, including (and especially) you?

To say that Fields has trouble separating her opinion from her subject matter anyway is definitely an understatement. I can certainly vouch for that in the political arena. When Trent Lott made those infamous remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, describing the Civil Rights movement as “all these problems,” Fields attributed the controversy to “patronizing white liberal guilt.” She considered Elia Kazan, one of our great filmmakers who gave names to the McCarthy Committee in the 1950s Communist witch hunts, as a hero because he ratted out some members of “the left,” and thereby supported Bush’s war on terrorism (don’t ask).

I take all of this concerning Maureen Dowd with a grain of salt, to say the least. There are things men and women do well, and there are things men and women do badly. I stink at multitasking – I do it for my job because I have to, but I’m terrible at it around the house, especially with the young one running rampant. However, if I told my wife that her life was at stake if she didn’t reassemble the Sunday newspaper properly, then I might as well get the firing squad ready now. The point is that we work together in spite of our differences. We do the best we can, we make choices and we live with them. And I didn’t even have to write an entire book to tell you that.

As for Fields, she should return to doing what she does best, and that is grinding out her political journalistic sludge in a manner befitting her abilities. Besides, I get all the social commentary I need from watching “South Park.”