Girl Problems in Op-Ed Land

When the New York Times anointed Maureen Dowd as a columnist nine years ago, I gave her some terrible advice. I said, "You've got to write boy stuff. The future of NATO. Campaign spending reform. Throw weights. Otherwise, they won't take you seriously." The term "throw weights" had been made famous by a Reagan-era official who said that women can't understand them -- whatever they are, or were. But clearly the term had bubbled into the man's mind for reasons that many women understood better than he did himself.

Dowd wisely ignored me, and proceeded to reinvent the political column as a comedy of manners and a running commentary on the psychopathologies of power. It is the first real innovation in this tired literary form since Walter Lippmann. Eighty years ago, Lippmann developed the self-important style in which lunch with a VIP proceeds down the digestive track and emerges as a judicious expression of concern about developments in danger of being overlooked. Most of today's columns are still variations and corruptions of this formula. But Dowd is different, and better.

So the question is: Did it have to be a girl? Or could a boy have built an Op-Ed career out of feelings and motives and all that ick? The question is pressing because of the current controversy over the number of women's bylines on newspaper opinion pages. (Only one in five or so at the Los Angeles Times, even fewer at the Other Times and the Washington Post.) As the guy in charge of opinion at the L.A. Times, I have endured some horrendous insults, such as being compared to the president of Harvard.

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers is in trouble for suggesting that inherent differences between men and women might be part of the reason there are so few women at the scholarly peaks of math and science. To be a university president, you are supposed to reject any such notion out of hand.

In the Op-Ed controversy, by contrast, talk of innate differences between men and women is not merely permissible: It is the very justification offered by some women (and deeply resented by others) for demanding more women's bylines. Dowd declares a girlish reluctance to be mean, which she says she overcame, and she urges her sisters to play the boys' game with the boys. The linguist Deborah Tannen pretty much shares Dowd's analysis, but wants the mountain to come to Muhammad: Women shouldn't have to adapt to the peacocky political culture created by men; the culture should learn from and adapt to women.