LET'S, for a moment, judge a book by its cover. One need not read Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?" to answer the question. The retro pulp-fiction jacket features a bombshell in a clingy red dress strap-hanging under the leering gaze of her fellow subway riders, all male. For the use of this illustration, Dowd enthusiastically thanks the artist, Owen Smith, adding, "The girl in the red dress will always be my red badge of courage." Below such an image, the subtitle, "When Sexes Collide," seems both wish and prediction.

Crack open "Are Men Necessary?" and the author's first words are flirtatious: "For men. Friends and more, past, present and future. You know who you are." Those of us left out of the innuendo can assume that, beyond her dedicatees, men make up a hefty portion of her readership. Dowd, whose dead-clever aim and feisty delight in skewering politicians juiced up her reporting from The New York Times's Washington bureau, has produced a twice-weekly column for The Times's Op-Ed page for the last 10 years. Having published those pertaining to G. W. and company as "Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk," she has now collected and expanded on her opinions about a topic that would appear to interest her at least as much as presidential shenanigans: the never-to-be-resolved sexual contest between men and women.

The title, "Are Men Necessary?," refers nominally to scientific speculation that the Y chromosome, which has been shedding genes over evolutionary time, may disappear entirely within the next ten million years, a hypothesis countered by newer studies showing that the Y of the human species has been stable for the past six million years. Neither development, of course, has any bearing on the coupling opportunities for humankind as we know it. But it is exactly this kind of "news" that offers Dowd a provocative snag, tweaked to advantage in her columns. Her Cuisinart style of info processing and her embrace of popular culture invite all manner of unexpected applications, allowing, for example, a "Seinfeld" character to help us understand the relative simplicity of males, whose sex is determined by only one Y, as opposed to the female's two X's. "Maybe that 'Seinfeld' episode is right," she muses, "where George Costanza tries to prove that man's passions can all be fulfilled at the same time if he can watch a hand-held TV while 'pleasuring' a woman while eating a pastrami on rye with spicy mustard."

Beyond science, "Are Men Necessary?" addresses the confusion of postfeminist dating, gender conflicts in the workplace, the media's disparate treatment of men and women, American culture's saturation with sexual imagery, our collective obsession with youth and appearances, the objectification of women by men and, finally, sex as "a tripwire in American history." For Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her commentary on Monica-gate and who has covered the fate of women politicians from Geraldine Ferraro to Hillary Clinton , this last topic has been more high wire than tripwire - one on which she's cartwheeled through many a career, fashioning herself an attention-grabbing costume of sparkling jabs.

Producing one of her trademark staccato repetitions - for example, on cosmetic surgery: "We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest. Biology used to be destiny. Now biology's a masquerade party" - Dowd effectively dismisses a subject by virtue of proclamation. Does she let loose three arrows instead of one because she can't choose the cleverest among them? Typically, her formula is to articulate a thesis, punch it up with humor and then follow with anecdotal support or examples taken from TV shows, advertisements, overheard conversations - all cultural detritus is fair game. Often she quotes from reputable sources, CNN or The Times or a professional journal like Science; more often she applies witty asides, snippy comparisons ("Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks") and tabloid-style alliteration (e.g., "dazzling dames" and "He mused that men are in a muddle").

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