Dowdification

It's high time that Maureen Dowd got slammed for her juvenile approach to politics, and her response was priceless:

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective [...]

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

Of course, there is no such man, and I do not think another one could have used Dowd’s language. Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

It's simply not true that "nobody" had objected. Here's conscientious objector number one. And excusing your own ridiculous behavior by saying that "why, I also feminized and degraded Democratic MEN for a long time too!" is barely even worth a response. Dowd, who ought to be writing Harlequin romances and summer paperbacks instead of having any impact on the American political scene, is absolutely toxic to intelligent thought in this country. She's very useful to those who seek to divide every election, who want a relentless focus on psychobabble and stereotypes instead of solutions and answers. To anyone with a brain she is a cancer.

It took putting an actual female in the race to make anyone notice just how offensive her sexist caricatures really were. But they've always been offensive --- and they've always been right in lock step with that stupid "mommy party/daddy party" crapola the wingnuts put to good use whenever they want to make Democrats look weak [...]

Again, the question isn't whether she should have treated Clinton any differently. It's that her entire worldview is toxic, both culturally and politically. She uses explicitly sexist and homophobic imagery that favors traditional authoritarian leadership to explain politics. She gets away with it because she has a rapier wit and is a physically beautiful person, thus insulating herself from the kind of criticism others would receive for writing this crud. But in truth she's a walking anachronism, more like a character in Mad Men than a modern sophisticate.

She is considered by many to be the top political columnist in the country (and her columns are often the most emailed articles in the Times.) Certainly she is Village Royalty. And that is undoubtedly one reason why people like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson felt that it was perfectly acceptable to say the things they said during this campaign. She's their misogymuse.

I'm not sure that Dowd has the same cachet among the public anymore, but entering the D.C. Village is like going to that small town where you flip on the radio and they're playing "new music from a band called The Who." Their antiquated worldview and anachronistic sense of who's important and vital is crippling democracy at the knees. And of course in many ways that's the goal.