Is Maureen Dowd obsessed with Hillary Clinton or what? Last week, she complained that Hillary spoke “girlfriend to girlfriend” to women voters while refusing to share the pain of being married to a sexually exploitative monster who had made her violate all her beliefs and principles, as Caitlin Flanagan opined in the Atlantic. This week, Dowd accused Hillary of “playing the woman-as-victim card” because her campaign put out a humorous video portraying the last debate as a masculine pile-on (never mind that Hillary herself said she was the focus of tough questioning because she was the front-runner): “If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn’t it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now.”

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who quotes Caitlin Flanagan approvingly has lost their bona fides on gender issues. Flanagan, after all, is the woman who calls herself a homemaker while acknowledging that she’s never changed her own sheets, who insists that children don’t love working mothers as much as they do stayhomes, and who says women have a duty to have sex with their husbands at least twice a week. As for playing the woman-as-victim card, can this be the same Maureen Dowd who wrote in her last book, Are Men Necessary?, that men don’t ask her out because she’s too smart and successful and will never see 35 again? How’s that for painting yourself as a victim  of sexism–which, I hasten to add, Dowd probably is!

You don’t need to be Simone de Beauvoir to recognize that lots of middle-aged men would find Dowd too challenging and too old — i.e., their own age. For applying this rather obvious sociological observation to herself–for permitting herself one unguarded moment and writing what women say to each other all the time–she was publicly taken to task all over the media. Unlike Hillary, Dowd backed down. I turned on the TV late one night and there was Dowd, all sultry red hair and fishnet stockings, gaily insisting to some male interviewer that her social life was terrific, no problems in that department at all.

The more people insist that sexism plays no part in the primary campaign or its media coverage, the more likely I am to vote for Hillary Clinton and I’ll bet I’m not the only one. Her poll numbers with women are rising, after all. I think a lot of women are just fed up to here with the sexism they see around them every day at their own workplaces and that their male colleagues just don’t notice as they ride the testosterone escalator upwards. Six male politicians salivating to score points, two super-self-satisfied male journalists asking the questions (and what questions!), one woman who has got to know the world is just waiting for her to set a foot wrong–it makes a picture. If you’ve ever been the only woman at the meeting, on the panel, with your job, at your level, you see that picture all the time, and it’s a self-portrait.

While on the subject of Dowd, let me add that I am sick of Hillary being tagged with the adventures of Bill’s genitals. What’s it to Dowd or Flanagan that Hillary ran for the Senate instead of filing for divorce? At least Hillary isn’t a sad doormat like Wendy Vitter and countless other political wives. As long as we are looking at candidates’ spouses, what about Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards, smart lawyers who quit work to promote their husbands’ ambitions? Nobody criticizes those choices, or says nasty things about those relationships. In fact, we are constantly being told how warm and wonderful these marriages are. Fact is, none of us knows a thing about what really goes on with the Obamas, the Edwardses, or any of the other candidates and their wives. And if it weren’t for Kenneth Starr, we wouldn’t know about the Clintons, either.