Stop whining, Maureen!

Maureen Dowd has been pissing me off recently. I think I've just noticed this -- I used to accept everything on the Times's Op-Ed page as gospel liberal truth, until reading enough of David Brooks's column critically opened my eyes; to Krugman, on the other hand, I've always been an adherent.

Dowd is the latest to fall in my affections. I have an enumerated list of gripes about her, most of which I'll save for another post (her seeming inability to write a coherent column about one theme, for example; how she harps on the wrong themes for a liberal columnsit, further problematizing an issue that Republicans demonized to begin with, for another). But the latest, and currently highest on my list, is her whininess about the differences between women and men.

Let me begin by stating that I'm as much of a feminist as the next woman of my generation -- that is, brought up with a sense of entitlement about my gender's rights, and dismissive of any claim that there are more than skin-deep differences between boys and girls (fuck you, Larry Summers). I'll spare you the history of how these views have deepened (CS major; yadda yadda), but it boils down to this: Women and men are equal intellectually, and therefore need to stop carping about differences that aren't going to get them anywhere.

Take, for example, Dowd's statement in paragraph 4 of today's column:

Men enjoy verbal dueling. As a woman, I told Howell, I wanted to be liked - not attacked.

Dude. Man. Saying that is not going to help your case.

The rest of the article goes on to enumerate the other reasons why there aren't more prominent female opinion writers (the harpy perception; the fact that we're so easily undermined by kitchen-paraphernalia metaphors ("'Does she,' The L.A. Times's Patt Morrison wondered, 'write on a computer or a Ronco Slicer and Dicer?'"). While it's true that women't aren't yet always perceived on an equal footing with men in many intellectual domains -- opinion writing not the least of them, I'm sure -- taking as a premise that women are loath to engage in verbal dueling is defeatist, Summerian, and is going to piss off as many opinionated women as you're hoping to encourage.

Another example of the same kind of whining:

Gail Collins, the first woman to run The Times's editorial page and the author of a history of American women, told The Post's Howard Kurtz: "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."

(Emphasis added.)

Yes, the world is not yet an equal place. Yes, more women need to step up to the plate / be hired by major news publications. But averring that this imparity is due to innate diffences is counterproductive.

As an addendum, the following is a list of minor gripes about today's column:

• 'kerfuffle' -- Come on, Maureen. WordNet thinks it's a word, so I suppose I have to give it to you, but this is exactly the type of ten-dollar word you throw out all the time as garnish. It just distracts, I promise.


• The haridan/haridelle etymology -- Did it really add anything to give the French there? It's a cognate, and therefore by itself tells us nothing about the origins of the word. Sheesh.