Are Men Necessary? examines perceptions and portrayals of women, from pop culture to politics. Some of the topics disturbed or frustrated me (and the section on the prevalence of cosmetic surgery really squicked me), but it's definitely a worthy read. Intelligent without being tedious.

This book was my introduction to Dowd (the NYT op-ed columnist who also authored Bushworld). She seems to be a person of true integrity...who's taken a lot of flak...for being a person of true integrity. I think what really proves this integrity is that she's not so partisan as to deny the failings of Democrats...while sniping at the Republicans. ;P ( )

Sometimes you just have to admit defeat. I gave up with this at page 157. It's been on my bedside table since 16th May (I am reliably informed by Revish) and it took being ill in bed over the long weekend to finally pick it up again, and realise that I just couldn't carry on reading it. It was a liberating decision.

Why did I pick it up in the first place? The author did well to pick a controversial title for starters, which I imagine lured in the sales. I'm not sure what I was really expecting from the book. Not the intellectual rigour of Simone de Beauvoir for sure - it's not presented as an academic study - more a light-hearted look at the battle of the sexes - but certainly not this. The blurb on the book assures us that Maureen Dowd is a "Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times". How silly of me to think that that speaks of any kind of academic pedigree or ability to conduct serious research. When I think of the Pulitzer, I think of Woodward and Bernstein and meaningful journalism. A quick Google tells me that she won for her commentary on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair - fair enough, I guess. I didn't ever read any of it so I came to Are Men Necessary? fresh as a daisy and oblivious to the author's previous work.

I have a few reasons for being unable to finish the book. Firstly, I found it rambling and incoherent. Every chapter seemed to be the same, and progressive reading didn't reward me with any development of an argument for or against the book's title. The author uses films and anecdotes as evidence to back up her statements (calling them arguments would be a step too far) and relies too much on namedropping many of her "good friends" as though they are somehow an authority on the subject because they have a degree of fame or celebrity. Where she does refer to academic studies, she fails to analyse them in any meaningful way and skips over them quickly to get back to Bette Davis quotes and the like.

The writing was my second stumbling block. I got the impression that Dowd imagined herself as an older Carrie Bradshaw, but it really wasn't working for me. Carrie's mum, maybe. There was a lot of valley girl speak and some truly appalling puns and plays on words - like "hair apparent" on p.92. Absolutely awful, and suffocatingly American in the worst sense. Plenty of American authors are capable of writing in coherent English, and I'd have expected that from an NYT journalist.

Forgive me for sounding po-faced. I don't think for one minute that the author intended this book to be The Second Sex for the 21st Century, but at the same time I expected a little more. Can you really build an argument out of cutting and pasting your friends' opinions and quotes from old films and squashing it all together? Yes, there is some research in there, but you get the impression that it's been wedged in just to prove that it was carried out, rather than because it supported any argument (evidence of which I was unable to find in the first 157 pages). I'm sure what she does works in a 200 word column, but not so much in a book of this length. Elizabeth Wurtzl did this so much better. ( )

Interesting in some places, but for the most part, this book is a jumbled mess. The author jumps from topic to topic without so much as a segue at times. What exactly is her thesis here? Does she ever answer the question that the title poses? Not really. ( )

Cliched and repetitive - yes we know women are portrayed as the inferior sex and no nothing is going to change that opinion. Heavily rooted in American politics, which makes it hard for an English reader to fully grasp. ( )

This was all right. It is so dismaying how many terrible things men can do to women, in so many different cultures. Some of the anecdotes from this book were so arresting and so well told that I have re-told them many times. I can’t see Christiane Amanpour’s name anymore, for instance, without thinking about the time a waiter in a Muslim country tried to send Amanpour and Dowd to a segregated room for women and children, and Dowd started to meekly head that way, but Amanpour told him to bugger off and bring them their coffee, and he did. And don’t even get me started on the disgusting concepts of slump busting or road beef from professional baseball players. But as a whole, this book…well, it didn’t seem like a whole. Men treat women badly is not really a unifying theme for a book. And if she made an effort to answer the titular question, it was only a passing one. Still, it was a quick, easy read. ( )