According to an e-mail I got this afternoon from the NY Times, the most-read article for October at Times.com was Maureen Dowd's "What's A Modern Girl To Do?. Like all of Maureen's stuff, it is full of amusing one-liners and over-the-top charicatures, and, no doubt, it's "most-read" status was helped by the fact that many on-line readers have been deprived for the last month of Maureen "fixes" becuase she and the other Times op-ed columnists are now confined to the paid-subscription-only "Times Select" site. But, if I am representative, most of these readers came away from the read feeling a trifle embarrased by the transparently personal complaint that seems to underlie Maureen's Lament: (a) Dowd wants to be married; (b) she has failed to achieve this becuase men are scared of strong, intelligent women and want relationships only with dependent serving girls; and (c) she feels abandoned by today's young women who (she believes) are willing, even eager, to sacrifice their own ambitions in order to catch a man.
I would go on. But the critique has already been done for me by Katie Rophie's piece in Slate entitled Is Maureen Dowd Necessary? If you are one of the (apparently many) who read Dowd's lament, you owe it to yourself to read Rophie's response as well.
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