She said I was to buy you a proper meal to make up for what I wrote about your book a couple of months back. What did you say? Dowd asked, her soup, pommes frites and Chardonnay on the way.

Well, it wasn't just me. It was Gloria Steinem, too. She called your book, "Are Men Necessary?"... well, she called it "the Olympics of silly."

Dowd took the phrase in. She's been dishing it out and taking it for 11 years as The New York Times' lone female Op-Ed columnist. Steinem's sting didn't last long.

"Feminists achieved a lot economically," Dowd said. "But culturally, they wasted a lot of time demonizing the Playboy bunny and the Cosmo girl. Gloria knows it went too far."

Now women have gone too far in the other direction, Dowd said. Have you seen girls wearing those T-shirts that say, "Why do I need brains when I have these?"

No, but I've seen "The Girls Next Door," starring Hugh Hefner's three blondes. Cried for days.

Feminists fought for women's rights to dress or undress as they like, Dowd said, just as they fought for equal rights in colleges and courtrooms, corporate offices and clinics.

"Women can do anything they want," Dowd said. "As long as women are there to make sure they can."

But that's a tricky business, as Dowd lays out in her book, which she has described as "The diligent notes ... of a fascinated observer of our gender perplexities."

She intended for it to be "fun and breezy." Instead, the book pressed buttons people didn't even know they had. Women called Dowd an elitist, a traitor. Men called her bitter.

But if that's the cost of getting men and women to talk, Dowd said, so be it.

"I can't complain," she said. "I'm paid to be a polemicist. I've been congratulating myself in having revived feminism."

Though her platform is powerful, Dowd is tiny in person. One magazine writer was spot on when she compared Dowd's voice to actress Carol Kane's. It is slightly pinched, while her laugh is loose, open.

She wore a chocolate-colored pinstriped suit, chosen for a speech at Starbucks headquarters earlier in the day.

("I wanted to look like a Venti macchiato," she said.)

Meeting Chairman Howard Schultz "was like meeting my drug dealer. He's better dressed and more well-meaning. But he's still my supplier."

She loves Seattle, not only for friends like Slate founder Michael Kinsley, but for the weather. The Irish in her loves "never seeing the sun."

"You can't really tell what decade you're in with all the fantastic neon signs you see in the mist. It looks so film noir."

At the Times, she is notorious for pushing deadlines.

Holding out for an original viewpoint, though, is worth it: When Dowd's new assistant figured out how to download her e-mails after two weeks, there were 20,000 waiting.

Not all were complimentary.

But like me, Dowd obeys her mother, who passed away last July.

"Put out a saucer of milk," Margaret Meenehan Dowd used to tell her. "And forget it."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.

Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

She will do the very same.

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