'Look at me - now back off'

Maureen Dowd, a sexy, controversial hard hitting New York Times columnist, describes herself as a paid contrarian. Her latest book on the battle of the sexes reads 'like a Cosmopolitan article that has been stretched way beyond its elastic limit'. It is badly reserached, unsubstantial and based on select anecdotes, desrcibed by the Wall Steet Journal as a 'stinker'. Marion McKeone writes from New York on Dowd – the media phenomenon and her book.

For more than a decade, Maureen Dowd has been the only female columnist at the world's most influential newspaper. Her New York Times column dominates the newspaper's top ten list of most e-mailed articles. Around water coolers and in blue state bars Dowd is paraphrased with glee. Her bon mots are borrowed, quoted and misquoted on subways and in cinema lines. "Did you read what Maureen said about Cheney?" New York straphangers and White House staffers ask each other in the casual, quasi-proprietorial tones that family members might use when discussing a mildly outrageous sibling.

Dowd is a media phenomenon, a ticklish thorn in the side of the Bush administration, one of the few Washington journalists who is willing to go several rounds with the neo-cons on a twice-weekly basis, infuriating and occasionally stunning them with her jabs and cuts.

Her razor sharp wit and rapier like ripostes have punctured many a White House ego. But Dowd is no partisan puppet – her attacks on Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal were prompted him to attribute a faux headline to Dowd during the 1999 White House Press Correspondent's Dinner. "Buddy Got What He Deserved" he quipped, a reference to his dog's castration.

Dowd has always been the smartest girl in the class; from her early Catholic school days through her apprenticeship at the now defunct Washington Star, through her name making stint as a New York Times reporter covering the first Bush administration to the Holy Grail of Hacks; a twice weekly column that pays a high six figure sum and ensures she is perennially in demand as a television talking head and a guest speaker at national and international political and media events.

An Irish-American who trumpets her Irish roots as loudly as her opinions, Dowd is the youngest of five children born in a lower-middle class Washington DC suburb to an Irish cop. Her father brought home the bacon and her mother ran the home; it was a traditional Irish Catholic household that valued hard word and family ties. She came from a line of staunch Republicans, a trait that was passed from her father to her three brothers and sister. Her mother, "the real news junkie of the family" kept an open mind on political matters but had very definite ideas when it came to gender issues.

Since her early days as a beat reporter in testosterone-charged world of Woodward and Bernstein, Dowd has nudged her way to the top of the pile. She pushed a stiletto through the doors of men only club and staked her claim to a cell on 'Murderer's Row' as the all male columnists office at the Washington bureau is known, with a mixture of charm, smarts and audacity.

Men are unable to resist her and it seems, she them. She is by her own admission an outrageous flirt – but she insists, more Katherine Hepburn than Marilyn Monroe.

At fifty-three, she remains single and her allure undiluted. She is the sort of glamorous, seductive creature that could have come from a nineteen thirties film noir – Mae West's mischief cold filtered through Dorothy Parker's wit and wrapped in a Rita Hayworth package of over the top glamour. She is part vixen, part kitten, and still the smartest girl in the class. Her publicity photos are highly stylised glamour era shot, doe eyes peering out from her trademark mane of red hair. In person her aloofness is punctuated by wry remarks delivered in a breathy little girl voice. She sees herself very much as a woman's woman, notwithstanding her popularity with men, and regards her relationships with close female friends at the New York Times as the most important in her life.

Male colleagues cite her audacity and a wit that can be as self-depreciating as it is lacerating. She acquired the nickname 'Maureen enDowd' a reference to her physical rather than intellectual attributes when she was still a cub reporter. She was more amused than offended, one colleague recalls.

George Bush Senior adored her, even when the White House found her analysis of his presidency less than amusing. He loved to flirt with her and invited her to White House parties, while admonishing her 'not to tell Barbara'.

Her work allows her access to Washington's smartest parties, a permanent access all areas pass to the corridors of power. Her personal life, about which she is disarmingly candid, reads like something her former lover and West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin might have created. She was fusing Hollywood and Washington long before the Clintons came to the White House. She had a relationship with the actor Michael Douglas and is rumoured to have had dalliances with several other Hollywood A listers. She also dated her former boss at the Times Howell Raines, fellow columnist John Tierney and arrives at glitzy events with Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times and scion of the wealthy Sulzberger family.

All in all, it seems that Dowd who describes herself as a paid contrarian, would seem to have precious few axes to grind. A poster girl for the feminists who waged war for equal rights and alternatives to suburbia and the grind of domesticity; the living embodiment of their ideals.

Of late, it seems that Dowd's hitherto charmed life has hit a few bumps since her former boss and boyfriend Howell Raines was forced out as editor of the Times. His replacement Bill Keller, who is said to be less enamoured of style than substance, has downgraded her Op-Ed column from the prestigious Sunday Review section to a less prominent slot in the Saturday newspaper.

Several weeks ago, Dowd published a scathing attack on her former colleague, Judy Miller, in a column entitled Woman Of Mass Destruction. Her reference to Miller's "tropism towards powerful men" struck many as hypocritical, given Dowd's personal and professional associates and an ancient tale about how Miller demanded her seat at a White house briefing, seemed petty and narcissistic given the bigger issues concerning Miller's use of the New York Times as a vehicle for her cheerleading of the Bush administration's war in Iraq.

The column caused a furore. If Dowd seems like a latter day Mae West, Miller makes for a convincing Vivien Leigh – a wispy bundle of neuroses, semi-unhinged by her disgrace. She claimed Dowd was acting at the behest of her best friend Jill Abramson and portrayed Dowd and her coterie of female friends as a bitchy, school girlish clique who had pushed her out.

Now Dowd has sparked the tinderbox that is male and female relations with her latest book, "Are Men Necessary? ?? When Sexes Collide." A 388-page pop feminist thesis has outraged many of her male and female admirers. It has been dismissed as a cynical money-spinner by a narcissist who fears the flattering spotlight of success may be flitting elsewhere.

The retro pulp fiction cover of Dowd's book doubles as a tongue in cheek self-portrait and a clue as to why she has become the catalyst for the latest gender tangle. It features a solitary woman on a subway car. She is wearing a clingy red dress and high red heels. She stands defiantly, ignoring the glances of the seated males, strap hanging atop precarious heels while reading a book. She appears oblivious to, and encouraging of their stares, of the lust oozing from every pore.

Two conflicting messages are being transmitted by the image; the woman is demanding male attention and appreciation while simultaneously repelling it . "Look at me" she commands "but back off."

Ah the eternal conundrum. Come here. Go away. The mixed messages, the semaphores that have fuelled the engine of sexual pursuit, that continue to confound both sexes.

When a writer with Dowd's gift for laser -like penetration takes on a subject as weighty as the battle of the sexes, you sit up and take notice. You expect an answer that will be both insightful and amusing.

As Dowd no doubt learned on her first day in journalism school, you have to ask the right question. Are Men Necessary? is the wrong question. So the answer is redundant and reductive.

The book is a clutter of cautionary tales from a mind that is faster than it is deep. Are Men Necessary? reads like a Cosmopolitan article that has been stretched way beyond its elastic limit. Not even a triumph of style over substance, it reveals little other than the talents of a witty and perceptive columnist are unequal to the task she has set herself.

Ironically, Dowd's reliance on bad research and anecdotal tales from a small, select group of close friends and advisers group of women invites parallels with the neo cons she loves to skewer. She cites research and surveys ?? many of which have since been disputed or disproved to support her theory that feminism lasted for a nanosecond and women are still suffering the backlash 40 years later. She lifts data from a 1986 Harvard-Yale study comparing women's chances of marrying after 40 to the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist. She uncritically cites Lisa Belken, Louise Story and Sylvia Ann Hewitt's theories that women can have a career or children but not both. Her wealthy, successful, single friends are furiously thumbing through The Rules.

Like Bush and Cheney in their determination to go to war in Iraq, Dowd discredits her own argument with her selective use of evidence that supports her call to arms and her omission of any arguments to the contrary. And like Bush she appears to have only sought the views of similarly well heeled, successful friends whose experiences in the rarified confines of the New York Times bear little resemblance to those of millions of ordinary working women.

Nowadays young women "want to be Mrs Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass", she claims. "They dream of being rescued; to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for 'Stepford Fashions' [a reference to the influence of the movie remake The Stepford Wives] and spend their days in the gym trying for 'Wisteria Lane waistlines'."

Dowd had assumed feminism would deliver a more "flexible and capacious notion of beauty". Instead, the ideal of feminine beauty has become even more rigid and unnatural, "as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires".

Feminism's message was don't be a sex object. Today's message is diametrically opposite: "Be a sex object."

The fur was already flying when Are Men Necessary? hit US shelves. The Wall Street Journal's "A stinker" verdict set the tone for a tsunami of scorn ad derision. "Is Maureen Dowd necessary?" writer Sophie Roiphe pondered in Salon. The letters pages of the New York Times took a pasting.

"Would someone please mary Maureen? Using her bully pulpit at The Times, she has managed to spin her inability to find a suitable mate into a national crisis," one reader wrote.

Feminism was never meant as a dating service for over-privileged middle aged women who spend more time bemoaning what feminism hasn't done for them (lowered the price of botox, delivered a never ending supply of adoring trophy husbands, and by the way where's the female Viagra?

She is scathing of Hillary Clinton and her willingness to join the stampede to crush women who threatened her husband's career and her marriage. Clinton has frequently jettisoned political principle for political expedience but Dowd's one dimensional J'accuse neatly overlooks the fact that Clinton throughout her professional career has done plenty to further the cause of economically deprived women and children.

Listening to Dowd's whining about not having a husband because of feminism is a bit like listening Republican Senator Trent Lott complain that he lost his second holiday home because of Hurricane Katrina. You can't help but think that, given the bigger canvas of struggle and suffering, neither one is too badly off.