Thank G.O.D. (the Original Gangsta Herself) I'm not necessary-- takes a lot of pressure off. Now I can revel in my irrelevance and let Maureen Dowd (the honorable, the beneficent) and her lot take over.

So when you take away the traditional reasons why women have needed men men really have very little leverage and they know it(although most can't/won't consciously admit it). Men, unlike women, become unnattractive to the other gender as soon as they start making trouble, so the influence that would be expected to flow from women's alleged "wanting" doesn't amount to much: if men make any attempt to use it, it disappears. Men's behavior would make a lot more sense to women if women were willing to face up to this fact.

When I was about sixteen, I remember walking up the hill to my house late in the day, at dusk. My family lived in a home built into a hill, so the back porch, on the second story, extended out into the treetops. It was summar, so it was a warm, quiet evening, and I walked around the back of the house, and up the flight of stairs to the porch. My mother and father, who had been married for twenty-five years, sat there together, not saying a word. This has always been my image of love -- no drama, no Tracy/Hepburn cleverness (it's a MOVIE, folks), no cues from popular culture. Just a man and a woman, who have lived together for a long, long time, raised children, taken care of one another, and who are secure, content and grateful to sit quietly together on a nice summer evening. Words aren't necessary. In fact, they get in the way.

And underneath all the words, words, words, the money, the prizes, the references to an idiotic TV show written to help sell deodorant and soda, and the constant, corrosive hatred, lies the simple fact that Ms. Dowd doesn't have any idea what a scene like the one I saw is like, or why it matters. She kind of obviously desperately wishes she did -- the opposite of love is, after all, indifference, and she's not that. She seems to have constructed this pathetic world for herself full of symbols -- everything stands for something else, or has a mediator, or a theory to support it -- but it sounds like there's not much in her world that's real, that's authentic, that can stand for nothing but itself. Nothing exists unless you can tell someone about it.

Love between a man and a woman is, ultimately and finally, always a secret. It takes decades to build. It's not glamorous, or pretty, or easy, and nobody else will ever really know about it or care about it. And anyone, like Ms. Dowd, or some of the other letter-writers here, who is dumb enough to claim that the men who are a necessary part of this are "optional" or "unneccesary" or by definition, some kind of vicious slavemaster because they are male are missing the point so badly that it's kind of painful to think about. In particular, I am referring to the reference to men wanting women on their knees to suck them off, or clean their toilets, etc. The amount of sheer hatred in that sentence is astounding.

That mentality, and Ms. Dowd's, isn't simply hateful, it's unspeakably ignorant about one of the most basic parts of life. A man and a woman loving one another has been a foundational element of every society that's ever existed. This is deeper than common sense -- it's part of being human. If this isn't happening for you, that's unfortunate -- REALLY unfortunate -- but writing about it as if you have discovered the gears and pulleys of the machine that animates it, and you're going to analyze it and explain it and thus subordinate it to your cleverness and achievement, is not just hopeless, but pointless, and pathetic. The pointlessness of Ms. Dowd's writing about this is what ultimately remains. She really, truly, isn't equipped to know what she's talking about. If you're 53, and have never even been able to live with someone, then what right do you have to presume you know anything meaningful about relationships or men at all? You don't. Win all the Pulitzers you want -- you're unspeakably ignorant, and transparently bitter.

It's the end of a long day. I'm going to drive hom, make the coffee, check on my three daughters, get undressed, and get into bed beside my wife, as I have done every day for a decade, and hope to do as long as I live. Goodnight, Maureen, and I'm sorry. Truly.

Why bother? A new book is one of the easiest things in the world to ignore. A columnist in pay-per-view is even easier to ignore.

Maureen Dowd is a person that i feel a deep pity for. Why would I not, considering that, emancipated woman and all that she is supposed to be, she is still falling willingly prey to the old myth that a woman needs a man to be complete.

The poor little thing, instead of vconfronting her own fears and prejudices, she decided to use highly disputable data and bit of information in a sad attempt to invest the rest of the womankind with her own weakness, thus making it somehow more acceptable.

Like most people, not necessarily wonmen, maureen is investing someone else with the horrendous task of her own happiness. She expects someone to come out of the blue and invest himself as the responsible person of her happiness, and is disappointed that no one is wiling to take on this task. the obviousness of her desperation is something that would proably keep everyone away from her, because there is nothing sadder than a 50 something year old successful woman that is desperate.

Of course, maureen could learn to do something worthwile, like understanding that we are all responsible for our own happiness. However, that is ot her way, since she cannot possibly fathom that her problem is not that of the whole womankind, and that maybe she is just a pathetic sad 50 something year old woman who knows nothing about life to begin with.

If you expect someone else to make you happy, then you are doomed for it, dear maureen. You are abandonign the control over your own lie for the sake of the centuries old painful clichee (happy family and all that).

Maureen is part of the establishment that is forcing the women to thing into these centuries old patterns. The problems is that she had fallen for them, and now is a victim of the system she has been a part to create. She has no one to blame for that but herself, and does not deserve any compassion for her own stupidity.

The idiotic example that she has given about the woman who, upon winning a Pulitzer prize, was afraid that she would never have a date, tells me that stupidity is alive and well.

It does not answer the question as to "Why would a woman, any woman, want a woman that is afraid of her intelelctual capacity??" Instead of putting the blame where it belongs, on the women's insecurities and buying into the myths, She is trying to attribute the weakness of her own stance to all the women in an attempt to make it justifiable.

No maureen, you have dug your own hole and you deserve to stay in it until you consciously accept your own part in the system taht forces SOME women ( not all so please do not invest all of us with your own weaknesses) to think like you and share your desperation.