Are Men Necessary?
When Sexes Collide
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Outspoken, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd tackles the hot-button topic of gender politics in this “funny, biting, and incisive take on women's place in American society today” (Library Journal).
Are men afraid of smart, successful women? Why did feminism fizzle? Why are so many of today’s women freezing their faces and emotions in an orgy of plasticity? Is “having it all” just a cruel hoax?
In this witty and wide-ranging book, Maureen Dowd looks at the state of the sexual union, raising bold questions and examining everything from economics and presidential politics to pop culture and the “why?” of the Y chromosome.
In our ever-changing culture where locker room talk has become the talk of the town, Are Men Necessary? will intrigue Dowd's devoted readers—and anyone trying to sort out the chaos that occurs when sexes collide.
THE INSPIRATION FOR WHITNEY CUMMINGS' FORTHCOMING HBO® COMEDY PILOT “A LOT”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dowd's Bushworld, collecting her amped New York Times op-eds, hit big during the 2004 presidential campaign. This follow-up is as slapdash as the earlier book was slash-and-burn. What Dowd seems really to want to do is dish up anecdotes of gender bias in the media, which she does with her usual aplomb everything from how Elizabeth Vargas was booted out of Peter Jennings's vacant chair at ABC during his illness ("I'm not sure if she has the gravitas," opines an exec) to the guys who won't date Dowd because she's got more Beltway juice (and money) than they. The rest is padding: endless secondary source and pundit quotes ("In Time, Andrew Sullivan wondered: 'So a woman is less a woman if she is a scientist or journalist or Prime Minister?' "); examples of gender relations gone wrong in books, film and TV; random interview blips ("Carrie, a publicist in her late twenties from Long Island, told me...."); little musings from girlhood that are rarely revealing enough; endless career rehashes of everyone from Anita Hill to Helen Gurley Brown. A chapter on dating is a mishmash of everything from The Rules to He's Just Not That into You; one on reproductive science (that asks the title question for real) ends up referring a lot to orgasm. It's intermittently entertaining, but neither sharp enough nor sustained enough to work as a book.
