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Maureen Dowd asks: "So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax?"

Me, I’m asking the same thing about the New York Times’ reputation for quality journalism. Apparently feminists have been letting Dowd down her entire life. For example, Dowd says a bunch of stuff I've put in italics below, to which I respond in plain old feminist-style type:

“I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner.”

Those horrid "hard-charging" feminists were grubby, ugly, druggy people who danced without touching their partners, so of course Dowd didn't want to hang out with them. But she still expected to benefit from any progess they made.

“In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."”

In the unlikely event that feminists are talking about "girl money" they probably are refering to gender equity in wages, or the concept of comparable worth. Men who vocally impute insubstantial earnings, or "girl money," to individual women without knowing their true circumstances are clods, not feminists. They are, however, evidencing accurate knowledge of a social phenomenon. If "girl money" talk is drowning out discussions about pay equity and comparable worth, maybe Dowd could look for clues about why this might be happening in the very pages of the New York Times.

“Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.”

Right, the Padded Bra Battles completely distracted feminists from the Big Economic Issues, which is the main reason women still earn less than men. If the feminists had only let men pay for dinner and worn those padded bras without complaint, we would surely have true equality by now, wearing our padded bras to boardrooms, courtrooms, elite medical practices, and banks.

“While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.”

“When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.”

Damn those ugly early feminists who did such an inadequate job of broadening the notion of female beauty. And then to get trumped by narcissism! Wrinkled losers!

"It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way."

So per Dowd the early feminists were naive and misguided because they didn't value or recognize the importance of shopping and make-up and sexy shoes and cute boyfriends. They were too busy ignoring the Big Economic Issues, trying to pay for dinner, and stupidly "demonizing" dolls and magazines that emphasize the cultivation of an unattainable standard of beauty using expensive and at times unhealthy clothing and beauty products. Encouraging women to feel comfortable and confident with their bodies is apparently just not a goal she can support. If only those feminsts had called her to find out how to more productively use their time and energy. Not that she would have actually taken their calls, of course. Early in the piece Dowd says:

"Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years."

Dowd takes no responsibility for the present status of women; it's so much easier for her to blame the feminists, whom she can only ever criticize, never support. Those feminists are not doing their jobs, depite the lofty salaries they receive, their high profiles with the mainstream press, and the ways they get elected to political offices and promoted to powerful corporate positions in such overwhelming numbers, and generally control the world. She may reject their methods, their goals, and their very looks, but dammit they owed it to her to make sure that she could have it all, but failed to deliver.

See also: Echidne, Rox Populi, Brutal Women (twice), Pandagon, Sisyphus Shrugged, Jonquil, Majikthise and My Amusement Park.

Update: And here is a quick note from Siva, who is having trouble staying fully on blog hiatus:

"To this: "... it's so much easier for her to blame the feminists, whom she can only ever criticize, never support."
I would add:"or quote." Who, exactly, is she talking about? What books are she quoting? What studies is she citing? Who are these mysterious feminists? None that I know. I hate it when anyone sets up a bogeywoman by saying "feminists believe ..." or "liberals want ..."