Incessant navel-gazing

In response to Maureen Dowd's new book Are Men Necessary?, which is excerpted in this week's New York Times Magazine, Katie Roiphe asks in Slate "Is Maureen Dowd Necessary? The Times op-ed columnist adds nothing to the debate between the sexes." What a surprise.

In fact, Dowd's most compelling example of this rarefied, lonely demographic of woman too successful for love is herself. As Dowd would have it, men simply find her intelligence, her status, her wit too daunting. (A friend called her up to complain that her Pulitzer Prize would make it impossible for her to get a date.)

Naturally I think this is a load of hooey, though she does manage to write even more ridiculous things, for instance:

In Are Men Necessary? she gravitates toward quotes like this: "Deep down all men want the same thing: a virgin in a gingham dress," or "if there's one thing men fear it's a woman who uses her critical faculties."

At any rate, if she really does need help finding men that are not daunted by her, ahem, intelligence, I do have a suggestion. She should start dating more conservatives: they certainly don't think she is too intelligent (it's not hard to see why) and they don't sound at all daunted: for instance, this photo-caption contest is priceless.