Are Men Necessary?

Dear Friends,

Pardon my dust while I try to figure out what I want my blog to be. (Blog-to-be: is that sort of like I may marry it, after we set the date? It's my blogicee?)

While I originally thought I’d share my errant but brilliant, pithy thoughts (on a daily basis!) many of them are unbloggable. Not x-rated—ok, maybe some of them—but not of the sort I want to place in this forum.

Instead, I’ll share with you that I dream of being a sort of Maureen Dowd, and saying wildly funny and insightful things about my daily surroundings, an archaeologist of the present, sending letters from today, without being so strident and as self-consciously clever as I find some of her writing.

By the way, Maureen, I’m sorry, that’s the way it is here, in the hinterlands, today, although your writing makes me smile, and sometimes it exposes actions I haven’t known about, a marvelous combination. But I’m bothered a bit about the strident nature of some of your comments, which come across as, well, sort of self-righteous. Still, I like your NYT column. This leads me to your book, Are Men Necessary.

As a single 50-something who raised two sons alone and who is managing her own brilliant career, I find the title a little off-putting and not ironic. I guess I’d wonder a little if I saw the title, Are Women Necessary? There’s a he-man on the cover, a cartoon spidey man replete with bulging muscles and saviourism shining is his bright blue eyes.

Excuse me while I run right out to the kitchen and throw a roast in the crock pot and be sure to take my hair out of curlers at 5 pm, comb my hair, and surround myself in saran wrap. I’m busy being swept back to some earlier, black-and-white, slightly-post Leave It To Beaver time where my role is defined, and I am necessary. Please keep me, Walter. The severance pay is lousy.

Then again, perhaps I’d just find Are Women Necessary a buzzing annoyance and swing at it with my fly swatter, a mere trifle to be put out of its misery. Are Women Necessary? And I care what the writer thinks because why? I seek engagement, not estrangement.

But, Maureen, I know you will write back, and tell me things like I’m taking all of this too seriously, and how, since I haven’t even read the book, I have missed the boat. In fact, I fell off the dock and nearly drowned.

All that’s going to change, though, because you’ll convince me to read it, and I’ll share what I learned from your book as a potentially sympatico 50 year old single woman. Perhaps we’ll be friends for life. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Beth