printIt is bad enough having to hear Maureen Dowd touted as a gift from God. Fittingly, Camille Paglia described Dowd as “that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She’s such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading The New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.” To hear the same reverence reserved for Tina Brown, whom I’ve always thought of as no more than an editor of glossies—and the author of a gossipy, somewhat obese book about the anorexic dolt, Diana—is startling.
On “Tina’s emergence in England during the 1970s,” a friend writes: “In those days she was regarded as nothing more than a mildly attractive literary moll. The notion that she would one day be considered a serious biographer or an arbiter of cultural standards would’ve struck people back then as insane. I don’t imagine that THE NEW YORKER will ever recover from her despotism.”
Update I (March 14): Before she married a bigwig, she bedded a couple. Auberon Waugh and Martin Amis are examples. “Her relationship with Waugh,” writes Wikipedia, “served as a great boost to her writing career, as he used his influence to get attention drawn to her.”
Update II: From George’s excerpt we learn that Brown fears castrating others. Only males can lose their appendages. She’s outed herself as a castrater. Is this something to be proud of?
Update III: Here’s Fred Reed (via The Other Robert) in praise of Mexican women and against the Anglo-American Woman. The toxicity of the second class explains why younger American men are “Manly No More”:
“It is not easy to explain to an American readership under forty what is meant by being a woman. We are accustomed to androgynous, litigious, Prozac-sucking shrews who would inspire erectile dysfunction in an iron bar. Yes, there are exceptions and degrees, but here is the main current. (If there is anyone with less respect for women than the average squalling dyke feminist, I haven’t met it.)”
“Feminists of course say that femininity cannot be distinguished from subservience. But it ain’t so. The Mexicanas I know are not subservient. They work harder and bitch less than we do. They are not weak. They do not need support groups, Depacote, Paxil, Welbutrin, or classes in self-esteem (which idea they find puzzling or ridiculous). They are self-sufficient adults.”
Camille Paglia described Dowd as “that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She’s such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading The New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.”
I will bet MoDo got a big smile out off that assessment of her work…. I sure did LOLLL !!!!!
Ilana,
Tina Brown broke into journalism the old fashioned way, she married the Sunday Times editor, Harold Evans. As for Marine Dowd her picture alone, worth a thousand words, explains everything —somebody must have felt sorry for her.
From New York mag profile, MoDo:
“I have a fear of castration,” she explains, perching herself with catlike precision on the striped settee in her lacquer-red sitting room. “Not fear of being castrated but fear of castrating.”
So she found sanctuary among the eunuchs at the New York Times.
Ilana,
The Ancients (folks like you and I)once believed that those kind of friends were never worth what one had to pay for them. I still believe it holds true for the quality one receives in such arrangements. But from the success of her career in jounalism, maybe quantity really does makes up for what was lacking in the beginning!!
I was unaware until reading this website that Tina Brown had been erotically associated with Martin Amis and Auberon Waugh. But I can’t say I’m surprised.
Amis The Lesser is surely the second-worst living Anglophone novelist (Rushdie continues to take the premier prix). As for the late unlamented Waugh The Lesser, he was a spiteful Jew-baiting lowlife who referred to Solzhenitsyn in Private Eye as “that nasty old fleabag”; who hypocritically championed contraception while pretending to be a traditional Catholic; and who was already obnoxious enough at the age of seven (!) to have been described by his father Evelyn (Waugh The Greater) as “clumsy and dispirited, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual interest.”
Moreover, while one does not wish to suggest that only those authors whose appearance can match Ilana Mercer’s in pulchritude should be allowed to write, the visage of Waugh The Lesser does remind me of Arthur Koestler’s great remark that Communism’s horribleness reveals itself in the sheer ugliness of its women (see this article’s pic of Auberon W, two-thirds of the way down):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1104508/Go-enjoy-Forget-gloom-mongers-author-says-theres-plenty-happiness-.html
I get the point of Fred’s link. He certainly makes good points about the weaknesses (and they are many)of American women. However, I wonder if his sample is skewed? From what I’ve seen of Mexicans- legal and otherwise- they could care less about reading Borges or anyone else. As Cheech and Chong put it “Mexican Americans/love education/so they take Spanish/and get a B…” I’ve also known them to be avaricious as well, not the paragons of virtue described. PS- Ilana, any tips for us women who came of age in the Age of the Cow(s)?
[Young, smart ladies such as yourself don’t need my advice. But I imagine it’s as tough for the more traditional young woman to find friends and companions than it is for good men.]
Spam for penis extenders? Erectile dysfunction in an iron bar? Mercer, you’re outdoing even your usual eloquence today. I want to be just like you when I grow up. Well, nearly just like you.
[Those were quotes from Paglia and Reed]