IT’S A TESTAMENT to feminism’s success that so many people, over so many years, have been so eager to write its obituary. From the 1970s onward, the public has been treated to regular bulletins announcing that feminism has failed, is finished, has expired of natural causes or been slain in a gangland-style hit involving, in no particular order, Ally McBeal, Phyllis Schlafly, the editors of Maxim, Martha Stewart and the Republican party.

Last summer, feminism’s failure was proclaimed by Judith Warner, whose charmingly solipsistic Perfect Madness trumpeted the difficulties that well-off women in the Greater Washington, D.C. area endure while trying to balance their careers and the demands of motherhood–or as she put it, the “choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret poisoning motherhood for American women today.” (A moment’s pity, if you will, for the travails of the Mid-Atlantic upper middle class.) But her tone was mild and reasonable compared to this winter’s entrant in the “after-feminism” sweepstakes, Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide–which, if the excerpt in this Sunday’s Times Magazine is any guide, will be a lot less entertaining than its title might suggest.