Filed by Chelsea at 11:58 am under Gender Identity, Pop Culture, The Media

I’m currently reading Maureen Dowd’s terrific 2005 best-seller Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide.

Dowd is a gender/political columnist for the New York Times, and her book is witty, engrossing, and very well-researched. I may have a crush.

In addition to the evolutionary/biological tidbits I am picking up (some scientists believe that all men will be sterile within 125,000 years!) (within my lifetime, a lesbian couple will be able to conceive a child by implanting DNA from one egg into the other egg–no sperm needed!), Dowd has a lot to say about dating, sex, and post-feminism gender games. Fascinating stuff.

I shall here quote from Chapter Four: Why the Well-Hung Y is Wilting, Even as the X is Excelling. In this part of the chapter, Dowd confronts the oft-lamented double standard whereby men who sleep around are seen as studs, and women who do the same are labled sluts. It’s been talked to death, of course, but I particularly like this quote from Natalie Angier’s book Woman, which I guess I’ll have to pick up next (as soon as I finish reading that book I lifted from Lucas’s NYC apt without his knowledge):

“Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary — if they disobey their “natural” inclination toward a stifled libido. Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do, yet it is not low enough. There is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse that cultures everywhere have had to gird against it by articulating a rigid dichotomy with menacing implications for those who fall on the wrong side of it. There is still enough lingering female infidelity to justify infibulation, purdah, claustration. Men have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature, the female libido. “
…
“Would a man find the prospect of a string of partners so appealing if the following rules were applied: that no matter how much he may like a particular woman and be pleased by her performance and want to sleep with her again, he will have no say in the matter and will be dependent on her mood and good graces for all future contact; that each act of casual sex will cheapen his status and make him increasingly less attractive to other women; and that society will not wink at his randiness but rather sneer at him and think him pathetic, sullied, smaller than life? Until men are subjected to the same severe standards and threat of censure as women are, and until they are given the lower hand in a so-called casual encounter from the start, it is hard to insist with such self-satisfaction that, hey, it’s natural, men like a lot of sex with a lot of people and women don’t.”

Heady stuff. Smart, too. I’ve always said there’s no such thing as “casual sex,” but these ladies say it better. You can link to Angier’s article, Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin here and you can get Dowd’s superb book here. If you’re so inclined. By which I mean female. Because, let’s face it, I don’t think many of you (hetero) guys are clamoring to see yourselves painted with her brush. Though, in one of my favorite quotes in all literature, Dowd admits, “I don’t understand men. I don’t even understand what I don’t understand about men. They’re a most inscrutable bunch, really.”