What I found rather unstaisfactory about this book was that she didn't seem to be making any point really. she described in detail a lot of things that have already been chewed over at length by many other journalists, high-powered women having difficutly finding relationships, sexism at work, women's obsession with their looks etc, but she had nothing very interesting or insightful to say about any of these subjects. Only one line in the whole book actually amused me, the one about women who had been vacuuming now being vacuumed themselves.
I think that men are necessary for a lot more things than just propogating the species, and I am not at all convinced that there wouldn't be wars etc if there were no men. I think of all the things that men have achieved that have made the world a better place. All the technological inventions and medical discoveries that have been made by men that have made life less unpleasant. I think particularly of my own personal hero, Ignaz Semmelweiss, the Hungarian physician who discovered that if doctors washed their hands before delivering babies, the mothers were much less likely to develop the dreaded childbed fever that made childbirth such a hazardous business for women. Millions and millions of women since then must have lived who would not have died without Semmelweiss.
I think of my own husband's usefulness as being about much more than simply getting me pregnant. Who else can control our horrible children as well as he? Not me, I can tell you. Who can fix things like him? Again, not me. Who can keep the burglars away at night? He can, but not me (all right, we've never actually had a burglarly, but nevertheless, every night my husband is away I am convinced that they're in the house). Who can handle a boat like he can? Not me (I couldn't even get it in the water). And there's a lot of other things he can do for me that I couldn't do for myself (I don't need to go into details about that again). His usefulness goes far beyond impregnation.
Whatever Maureen Dowd was trying to say in this book, she didn't manage to make her point, if she had one, at all clear to me. I kept thinking, like Cyrano de Bergerac: "Oh, what you might have said" as I tried to imagine how Florence King, for instance, would have handled the same material. How incisive, witty, and ironic she would have been, while Ms. Dowd rambles on, as far as I could judge, to no purpose at all.