Last One, I Swear

Ezra provides a valuable service in two ways. First, he accurately summarizes the thesis of Maureen Dowd’s new book (along with her other columns on the subject): “she and her friends are unmarried because their beauty, glamour, accomplishments, poise, wit, interests, intellectual acuity, and overwhelming beauty scare men.” (As Matt correctly pointed out in comments, this seems to be a variant of the “Nice guys don’t get laid” line, and as Coldplay reminds us manipulative self-pity in all its forms gets tiresome real quickly.) More importantly, while it’s not surprising that her random anecdotes from the New York upper class turn out to be distinctly unrepresentative (and, in fact, educated women are more likely to be married, adult men generally like smart, ambitious women, etc.) even I’m surprised how jaw-droppingly shoddy her small amount of evidence is. The study about men rejecting ambitious women was based on a small sample …of college freshmen. The study showing that men dislike women with high IQs was based…on women born in 1921. Jeebus, Tech Central Station would be embarrassed to publish this shit. (Well, not really, but you can see what I’m driving at.)

OK, here’s why I think I’m so bitter after seeing that article; it’s the substitute columnists that appeared in the Times when Dowd was off writing this book. I’m resigned to the fact that the Times will have two conservatives, and it has its two IR people, and Krugman is great and Herbert good. But the fact that Dowd is taking up valuable space that could be used by Dahlia Lithwick or Barbara Ehrenreich is just infuriating. I’ve sort of learned to ignore Dowd’s political columns, the way you skip over Marmaduke and Rex Morgan M.D. when you read the comics, but seeing this article reminds me how upset I was that the Times had great columnists under its nose at let them go so we can get more substance-free columns about Rummy and the Clenis.