Is she that good?

Maureen Dowd thinks men are simple, which makes it hard to explain why women spend so much time deconstructing them (He's just not that into you, anyone?). Her column discusses the/ less genetically interesting nature/ of men. There are way too many obvious jokes here, but I'm starting to wonder whether she's really got an axe to grind. Although apparently the (male) scientist in charge agrees with her:

"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."
Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.
"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."

Ouch. Of course, Dowd points out:

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.

It's a twisted, stereotype-reinforcing scientific argument that helps eliminate the distinction that, gender notwithstanding, we're all individuals. I'm not sure we need this kind of help in the battle between the sexes, especially from Dowd, and I have a hard time imagining that she couldn't come up with anything else to write about this week.