MoDo and the goddess that failed

The best thing I can say about this article by Maureen Dowd is that I didn't hate it from the very first line. The tipping point came here: "Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women." This was in a middle of a passage where Dowd tries to convince us that men don't like to marry women who are too darn smart and successful. (Like her: fifty-three years old, a columnist at the most powerful newspaper in the world, and as single as an ace of spades.)

This opinion is backed up by a bunch of pseudo-scientific claptrap:

"A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent."

There probably is an evolutionary explanation for that phenomenon, assuming it's true, but it isn't what Dowd thinks. If evolution is all about perpetuating your genes, then men will naturally tend to avoid many high-achieving women, because they presume that these women will want to spend more time on their career and less time caring for their offspring.

For women, the reverse isn't true, because primarily they want men to contribute two things to families: moral leadership and physical sustenance. If Dowd thinks that will ever change, she's fooling herself. Women will only behave differently if they are under the sway of false ideologies such as radical feminism, or if they aren't thinking of marriage at all.

Long-time Catholic Light readers will recall that I've asked whether Dowd is "the dumbest prominent columnist in America, or the most prominent dumb columnist in America." This piece has all of Dowd's hallmarks, from the embarrassingly unreadable sentences ("Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole") to the lengthy passages where she assumes everybody agrees with her already:

Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.

I wonder if "many women" hated Betty Friedan and her ilk because back then, there were many recent survivors of real concentration camps, who probably didn't appreciate the equasion of Buchenwald and the suburbs.

Be that as it may, Dowd's article, excerpted from a forthcoming book, is not a screed, and for her that's saying quite a lot. When she writes, "...the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century," it's a startling admission.

In the '90s, feminists argued that feminism hadn't succeeded in making women happy because feminism wasn't yet fully implemented. (Just as Marxists said that no state had ever implemented communism correctly, so you couldn't say it had ever failed.) Feminism originally appealed to many women (and not a few men) because of the spiritual emptiness of postwar American consumerism, as well as the undeniable injustices that men often perpetrate upon women. At its best, feminism affirmed that women needed lives with dignity and self-worth, and should not be treated as means to an end.

As a living intellectual movement, feminism ran out of ideas a long time ago, and as a political movement it committed suicide by defending Bill Clinton's disordered sexuality. Its fundamental mistake was to seek material solutions for spiritual problems. For example, feminists demanded that women should be able to work outside the home and thus gain their own status; the American tendency to value money too highly was left unchallenged.

What began as a ringing challenge to treat human beings as uniquely valuable has shriveled into an increasingly strident, narrow demand that unborn children should be treated as worthless blobs of cells, which (if you'll pardon the phrase) seems to be their sole remaining viable political issue. Had they rooted their movement in an authentic anthropology such as the late Pope John Paul II's, or at least left the door open for an understanding of what humans truly are, they might have survived. Instead, feminism still wanders the world, doing much damage but having forgotten why it began in the first place.