Pig Herder

As if Susan Estrich hadn’t done enough to set back the cause of women journalists, now Maureen Dowd has weighed in with a column about the dearth of female pundits that will keep closet sexists thinking “I knew it!” until at least the next millennium. Cutely titled “Dish it Out, Ladies,” the column is an illuminating window into the Dowdian confusion between genuine insight and clever sarcasm, between tough criticism and Mean Girl attitude.

Dowd tries to explain why there are so few female columnists. Her reasoning is characteristically befuddled. Reason one: girls aren’t comfortable voicing strong opinions because it makes people mad at them.... Reason two: “Guys don’t appreciate being lectured by a woman.” It makes them nervous. It makes their testosterone boil. In sum, there aren’t more female columnists because women don’t like being columnists. Or because men don’t like women being columnists. Or both. Or neither. Whatever.

Confused yes, but Dowd wasn’t hired to think. She was hired to snark. And man, does she deliver! Dowd is the Mean Girl of the chattering class, the alpha female whose power comes from her shrewd sense of her classmates’ social limitations. No one outside a high school cafeteria has a better eye for 11th grade types: the sex-obsessed outsider-nerd (Ken Starr), the spoiled daddy’s boy (George W.)....

Now, everyone loves a good snark now and again, but what makes Dowd so successful is that she taps into people’s visceral longing to belong to the in-crowd, a longing that not only outlives 12th grade, but evidently survives well into the middle years that much of her New York Times readership is now enduring. One of her favorite tactics is inviting her audience to sneer along with her at the social outcast. “Just how much did Karl Rove hate not being one of the cool guys in the 60’s?” Dowd wrote in November. “Enough to hatch schemes to marshal the forces of darkness to take over the country?”

The problem for Dowd is one that Mean Girls have faced since Cleopatra. Much as people are desperate for an invite to sit at her table, they also fear and hate her for her power over them. Dowd has never been especially friendly to feminists—they’re too Birkenstock geeky, I guess—but she’s not averse to playing the victim card when facing the inevitable blowback from her withering stares. “I’m often asked how I can be so ‘mean’—a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn’t get,” she complains. Well, here’s Friedman being tough on Bush: “By exploiting the emotions around 9/11, Mr. Bush took a far-right agenda on taxes, the environment and social issues—for which he had no electoral mandate—and drove it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush made himself the most divisive and polarizing president in modern history.” Now here’s Dowd: “The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached.” Why is Dowd, and not Friedman, accused of being mean? Question asked—and answered.