Maureen Dowd Calls Out the "Mean Girls," But Shouldn't She Be Celebrating?

Note: Last week was rough, with travel, sickness, and a funeral, but this week I will resume daily posts.  Many thanks to those readers who have dropped me a note!

Maureen Dowd’s column yesterday, with a substantial assist from the Drudge Report, has aroused interest and blogospheric commentary.  She shares her observations from a speech from Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, and transitions into some grand insults toward the various Republican women who are creating such a sensation this election cycle:

As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state.

We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

These women — “Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine” — are guilty of such atrocities as “mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show.”  Stoking the same anti-incument fires that brought Obama to power two years ago, these women are, Dowd writes, “the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.”

There are several points to be made here.

FIRST, it goes without saying that a complaint about mean girls who gossip and demean and traffic in rumors, coming from Maureen Dowd, is about as rich as it gets.  Warren Buffett rich.  Insult, mockery and gossip is Dowd’s entire stock in trade.  She is a sharp writer, and periodically offers an interesting perspective, but unfortunately she has chosen to use her talents to become a cross between a political gossip columnist and an insult comic.  She may have a point, but her message is so undermined by the messenger that she would have been better leaving it alone.

SECOND, I know it’s common for conservative commentators to note how liberal feminist women, even those at the helm of organizations that are theoretically devoted to the advancement of women, fail to celebrate the advancement of women when they are conservative women.  There is a double-standard here, to be sure, but double-standards have lost their power to shock.  It does irk to see extremely accomplished women such as Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina called “whores” or, as in this case, likened to bullying teenage girls.

Yet I cannot blame liberal feminists who are not pleased when candidates — be they male or female — achieve success who will not support the policies those liberal feminists believe are in the best interest of women.  Conservatives rightly say that a conservative African-American man (for instance) should not be expected to support an African-American candidate, if he believes that the candidates policies will not serve the interests of African-Americans, or Americans in general.  So I confess I don’t quite get the logic from my fellow conservatives here.  Are we saying that feminists should support all female candidates? – Isn’t that the kind of identity-based support we do not want to see?  In other words, liberal feminists (at their best) seek not merely to get women elected, but to pass legislation that serves the interests of all women.  If they believe that a male candidate is more likely to pass such legislation, it is entirely reasonable for them to support the male and oppose the female.

THIRD, Christians who care about honesty and civility in politics should take these issues seriously.  Is it fair game to challenge Obama and Reid to “man up”?  Presumably this (when used in the debate against Reid) was Angle’s way of establishing her own toughness, and counteracting the stereotype that the woman will be weaker or more timid.  (Dowd makes a ridiculous attempt to slide from “insult” to “threat” in this sentence: “That’s not an idle insult, coming from a woman who campaigns at times with a .44 Magnum revolver in her 1989 GMC pickup.”)  I don’t find this particular bit of rhetoric (“man up”) out-of-bounds, but we should hold our politicians accountable — and we should not support columnists — when their language descends into insults and mockery.

FOURTH and finally, it does seem that feminists should find something to celebrate in the phenomenal successes of these women.  They could celebrate that more and more women are coming to the fore and taking meaningful leadership positions on the conservative side of the spectrum (something that has been lacking for far too long); they could celebrate that more and more candidates for top office are female; and they could celebrate that we are now seeing multiple options of what it might mean in today’s society to be a woman of intelligence and power.

This is meaningful.  Girls approaching maturity today can look beyond Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi for multiple examples of what a flourishing, accomplished, influential woman looks like.  And women like Whitman, Fiorina and even Palin are even more compelling examples, in some ways, because they did not build upon the wealth or fame of their husbands, but raised themselves up by their own bootstraps.  I’m sure that liberal feminists find this threatening — they want little girls to dream of being Hillary or Nancy, to equate female empowerment with the liberal agenda — but there is real cause for celebration that there are so many examples of powerful women across the political spectrum today.