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The killing of George Tiller on Sunday is a reminder, as if we needed one, of why so few doctors dare to become abortion providers outside big cities, why even fewer perform late-term abortions, and of the bravery it takes to be a member of these small bands. Tiller, 67, performed late-term abortions in the rare cases in which his state, Kansas, allows it. (Two doctors have to say independently that a woman would be irreparably harmed by giving birth.) For his willingness, Tiller was hounded throughout his career... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back,
are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech
sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the
value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench.
Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next
question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said today that the president would say that Sotomayor's word choice in her suddenly-infamous Berkeley speech
was "poor." It's maddening that the White House is now taking this
line. Maybe they mean to take the air out of it, but I bet it will
accomplish the opposite, and give everyone license to talk about it
again all weekend. This was a published speech, after all, not an off-the-cuff remark, and presumably the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal allows authors to edit copy, like everyone else.
It wasn't the best choice of words, but I would downgrade that to
"poor" only because it is likely to be taken out of context when, eight
years later, she is nominated for the Supreme Court. As we have hashed
out here... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Anyone notice that the New York Times story by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak about
Sotomayor raising "questions about her judicial temperament and
willingness to listen" was subject to a headline makeover this morning? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
If the Daily Telegraph is right that the unreleased detainee-abuse photos include graphic images of rape, Obama must have been lying when he said
the photos are “not particularly sensational, especially when compared
to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” For all the
pain of those earlier images, what they depicted were not generally
criminal acts in the same way that rape is. They showed violation,
humiliation, the horrific power differential between prisoners and
their jailors—war crimes, to be sure—but they tended to document the
effects and aftermath of violence more than its... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I’ve been reading a lot of headlines to the effect that “Identity
politics are condescending,” and I’ve come to the conclusion that I
have no idea what identity politics are. To me, the phrase has always
referred to the dated assumption that the interests of any particular
subgroup are best represented by other members of that subgroup. So the
expectation is that Sotomayor will... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There's a fascinating piece in The Star about a manuscript discovered by a Canadian researcher that appears to be ... a medieval women's magazine. It contains content about "cinnamon," an excerpt from Chaucer, recipes for making sealing wax, and more. As the Star puts it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Last night's 10-round National Spelling Bee final was a nail-biter, and
an awesome one at that. There were redonkulously hard, beautifully
arcane words (schizaffin, palatschinken, Neufchâtel).
There was heartbreak (heavily-favored Sidharth Chand, last year's
runner-up, crumpled before our eyes in the second round, when he
realized... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who
clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the
Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:
As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant
that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve
judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise
white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and,
more importantly, almost certainly true.
Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Guest post from The Big Money reporter Chadwick Matlin:
Sarah,
your clarion warning to men everywhere is too late. The cougar invasion
has already begun. I found myself mingling amongst the mythical women a
month ago, when, in the interest of journalism, I served as cub bait
for a Slate piece on the cougar phenomenon. That piece, written by the estimable Troy Patterson... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ann, the Spelling Bee makes me squirm too,
sometimes. But it also makes me want to jump up and down—kind of like
those hyperactive contestants—and squeal, because I love spelling bees
so much.
Maybe I'm culturally wired for it: As the Washington Post noted on Tuesday, spelling bees have a special place in Indian-American nerd culture. ("In the same way that Hakeem Olajuwon's success in the NBA inspired a generation of Nigerians to take up basketball... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Tonight you can see the finals of the National Spelling Bee on television
and watch as the kids contort under the mounting pressure. They “tug at
their hair and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to
manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates, let alone... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Jason Linkins
has a great piece up at Huffington Post quoting Justice Samuel Alito on
the virtues of judicial empathy. (“When I get a case about
discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who
suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because
of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.")
And also quoting Antonin Scalia on the power of courts to “make law.”
To which I add... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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One of America’s longest-running love triangles is about to come to an end: According to the official Archie Comics blog, Archie Andrews—hapless ginger kid and proto-Zack Morris—is getting married... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Last week, Michael Kinsley wrote a brutal takedown of the redesigned Newsweek,
attacking it page by page and graph by graph for failing to be readers'
"guide through the chaos of the Information Age." It's something that
editor Jon Meacham wrote in the editor's note that the new Newsweek
would not "pretend" to be, and that Kinsley thinks newsmagazines
totally need to be in order to survive. The assessment was shrewd, but
perhaps needlessly vicious, as noted in New York's Jessica Pressler's response, titled: "Michael Kinsley Attacks the New Newsweek, and We Feel Bad About It." (Full disclosure: I'm particularly sympathetic to Newsweek, since I used to work there. Plus it's owned by the same company that owns Double X.)
But if the new Newsweek's inaugural issue falls short of making sense of the week's chaos, I wonder what Kinsley makes of the New York Times today, which ran an article—ON THE FRONT PAGE, and with a jump to the highly coveted A3 page—about teenagers hugging... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There is some brewing international trade drama between the E.U. and
Inuits about seal meat which is deeply, incredibly fascinating, and I
will fill you in later, but the main takeaway is: This fine lady,
Governor general Michaelle Jean, who is Queen Elizabeth's
representative in the Canadian government, butchered and ate RAW SEAL HEART... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here's a guest post from Current TV's Sarah Haskins, whose videos will air weekly on Double X.
Each week she addresses a theme in marketing, advertising, or
entertainment aimed at women that she finds silly, such as the idea
that yogurt
is an unbelievably indulgent, wholly beloved miracle food for women.
She's giving XXers a sneak peak of tonight's video subject:
Young American Men, this is your warning. For so many years, you've
been safe: ensconced in fraternities, apartments with other dudes,
sports bars, and post-college intramural leagues.
Yet the natural order cannot long survive without balance. And thus
your herds, like deer in the backyards of New Jersey, must be thinned... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Bloomberg has a story proposing the health of global trade can be judged by extramarital affairs, and Latvian hookers. Why Latvian?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Between the recession and feminism, we have reached the inevitable
moment when the stay-at-home dad becomes a real, quantifiable
phenomenon. Journalist Jeremy Adam Smith just published the Daddy Shift tracing this "startling evolutionary advance in the American family," and Lisa Belkin interviews him.
Smith argues that our maternal lens causes us to miss the things dads
do differently and well—encourage risk taking and independence, for
example... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Yale law professor Heather Gerken:
Over the last day, I’ve been fielding calls from
reporters, members of your tribe, many of whom have asked some
variation on the following questions: “What role does identity politics
play on the Supreme Court, and should those who support civil-rights
causes be happy about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination?” (This, for what
it’s worth, is almost a direct quote).
placeAd2(commercialNode,'midarticleflex',false,'')
There is only one sensible answer to such questions. Please stop.
Honestly. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this, but let me spell
it out... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Daily Telegraph reports unreleased Abu Ghraib photographs
include sexual torture and "rape." Does that have any bearing on the
debate over whether we should be allowed to see the photographs?
According to the story, the pictures include an American soldier raping
a female prisoner and a "male translator raping a male detainee." Other
photos include prisoners being sexually violated with a "truncheon,
wire and a phosphorescent tube"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In The Supremes Edition of our XX Gabfest this week, Hanna and Meghan
and I talk about (of course) Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, Judge
Sonia Sotomayor. Also a new study showing that women are more unhappy,
not less, 30 years after the sexual revolution, and why Terminator
Salvation has such lame female action stars... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Alongside all the finger pointing about bank failures and the collapse
of the US housing bubble has come the slow puncturing of the legend of
consequence-free 1990s economic growth. Peter Baker's fantastic New York Times Magazine piece takes a good, hard look at the maker of that world: Bill Clinton. Like Hanna,
I find the portrait both honest and poignant. The meat of the
article—which follows Clinton on various travels, speeches, meetings,
and duties related to the Clinton foundation—is naturally the
substantive, frank, and reflective conversation between Bill and Baker
with respect to the Clintonian economy. David Leonhardt, also of the Times, parses the back and forth, wherein Bill admits that he "should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California.
Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist,
but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday
so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be
forced to comment on the gay marriage ban... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action
may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think,
is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential
primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity
politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama)
v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much
racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic
of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or
skin color than with their respective ages... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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We spend so much time dissecting First Ladies living in the shadow of their husbands that this portrait of Bill Clinton as First Man is startling, and so poignant. New York Times
reporter Peter Baker addresses how little access Clinton has in the
Obama administration, but the story succeeds mainly as a character
sketch. Clinton is a Philip Roth character somewhat restrained, trying
to explain his outbursts during the campaign, coming to terms with the
indignities of aging, and of being eclipsed by a younger, more vibrant
man... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh just called
Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor "reverse racists." He is referring to
the controversy over Sotomayor's line, from a speech given in 2002,
that she believed a Latina woman would make a better decision than a
white man. Limbaugh might have ground to stand on had Sotomayor been
making a blanket reference to the inherent superiority of Latina women
to white men. But she wasn't. As Hanna pointed out yesterday,
Sotomayor was talking about sex discrimination cases, about which there
is evidence that having female judges leads to outcomes that appear to
be fairer for women. She was not being a reverse racist; she was being
a pragmatist, and perhaps, a wee bit of an activist in that moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I agree with Dahlia that humility is rare in Sonia Sotomayor's professional circle, but I do hope this self-effacing quality helps her in the very humbling confirmation hearings coming up. In the context of introducing herself to the American public, however, I doubt, as Samantha wonders, that the judge was downplaying her achievements
to counter critics who consider powerful women "bitchy." (But as an
aside, I'd add a little self-deprecation in the face of such dazzling
glory is certainly not "harmful to the rest.") Although modesty is
encouraged in immigrant families, in fact, in the nominee's
biographical statement, "ordinary" was an apt comparison to the
odds-overcoming determination of her extraordinary mother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dahlia, I agree—the more I digest Sotomayor's Berkeley speech, the more I also appreciate it.
Where Sandra Day O'Connor was too macho to admit that being a woman on
the high court made her different, and where Ruth Bader Ginsburg is
still hesitant to step too far from that party line, Sotomayor is frank
and full-throated... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers
to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of
night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of
the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions
of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire
as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this
ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence
of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When it opens this weekend, I hope a lot of XXers will go see Drag Me to Hell,
the new Sam Raimi horror movie, so we can discuss it here. In addition
to being (I thought) a satisfying two hours' worth of alternating
laughs and screams, it's a very rich text about female power. So rich,
in fact, that I'm not sure yet exactly how to read it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sam, I had the exact opposite reaction to Sotomayor’s claims of ordinariness
yesterday. My thought was, “How refreshing. Instead of making multiple
earnest claims about her vast personal humility, here we finally have a
nominee who actually is humble.” Or at least appreciates that she
didn’t make it this far on her own steam... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Back in January, a bunch of copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight arrived
in the Philippines, and a customs official demanded an import duty.
It’s illegal to tax books in the Philippines—no such duty had been
levied in 50 years—but the Twilight importer paid up. The Bureau of
Customs, apparently facing a budget shortfall, began to demand the
impromptu tax for every new air shipment of books. Importers refused to
pay, so huge numbers of textbooks and novels waited in warehouses. For
months, virtually no imported books got past the blockade... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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f Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, six out of nine Supreme Court justices will be Catholic.
Barbara Perry, a professor of government at Sweetbriar College who is
writing a book about Catholic justices went on CNN radio to discuss
Sotomayor's nomination. She was joined by Catholic League President
Bill Donohue.
Perry claims that "in our politics, religion doesn't matter
anymore," but then she added, "I don't think our politics are ready for
an Islamic justice at this point"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A friend of mine just directed my attention to the cover of the most recent J. Crew catalog... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Accepting Obama's nomination to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor said:
I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me,
they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with
extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
Set aside the choice to describe her childhood—growing up with diabetes
in a poor, single-family household—as having been "blessed with
extraordinary opportunities." What troubles me is the plea from a woman
just nominated to fill one of the most powerful, demanding,
intellectually challenging positions in the nation to be viewed as
"ordinary"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, Hanna: To me, Sotomayor's speech
is most interesting for its embrace of a way of thinking about identity
politics that seems almost mystical in nature: She stresses the
experiential over the rational. In beginning the speech with
descriptions of the Puerto Rican food she loves, she emphasizes the
ways in which we're the products of hundreds of years of culture and
genetics; she lavishes attention on a particular "Puerto Rican" way of
loving and living to suggest how old and deep our identities are. This
is identity politics, yes, but it's bound up with a sensual, visceral
sense of the texture of life that I don't usually hear in the language
of judges... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, you pull out the critical quote from Sotomayor's speech:
"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn't lived that life."
This quote does not go down easy. As Stuart Taylor pointed out last week, what if Samuel Alito
had said: "I would hope that a white male with the richness of his
traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a
Latina woman who hasn't lived that life." We would chuck him over to
some Idaho compound, no?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Can this marriage be saved? Yes, it can—through letters. Check out yesterday’s Op Ed in the Times by a military wife facing marital strains, who turned to an old-fashioned remedy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here in XX-ville, we've long been fascinated by American Girl,
the upscale doll company—excuse me, "premiere lifestyle brand"—that
sells morals and history lessons alongside its hundred-dollar dolls
(and their similarly expensive pinafores, trestle tables, chifferobes,
and other painstakingly detailed accouterments). The New York Times ran an article this weekend about Rebecca Rubin, the newest American Girl,
which (who?) goes on sale this Sunday. The piece describes the years of
work and research that went into creating Rebecca—not just so that
she'd be historically accurate, but also so that she'd be culturally
sensitive. For example: Since "Jewish" is a religious category and not
a racial one, what should a Jewish doll look like?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It's rare for a prominent public official to confront identity politics head on, as Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor did in this 2002 speech at the University of California, Berkeley. She says, "Who am I? I am a "Newyorkrican." For those of you on the West Coast who do not know what that term means: I am a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II." She talks about what that means in terms of her upbringing—eating "mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir—rice, beans and pork," singing merengue, watching Spanish comedy films, playing with her cousins at her grandmother's house. She mentions that she speaks Spanish while carefully noting that her brother does not, and that this is not a necessary ingredient of Latino identity.
Then Sotomayor grapples with how being a Latina makes a difference in her judging... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan wasn't the only person who missed Sarah Connor. Terminator Salvation lost the weekend's box office war to another sequel, Night at The Museum.
There's surely some "in this economy" fauxrgument to be made explaining
this outcome (ITE people want family friendly fare, not dark tales
about the world's end), but I think Terminator's problem is more basic, a structural flaw, a storytelling 101 screw-up.
Apocalypse narratives—movies, books, TV about the end of the
world—can be divided into two groups: stopping the apocalypse
narratives and surviving the apocalypse narratives... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The eternally awesomely grouchy Copyranter points to a provocative ad campaign
from the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The pair of
arresting images features a "woman" as a) a punching bag and b) a slab
of meathook-hung carrion. The accompanying copy reads: "IT'S NOT
ACCEPTABLE TO TREAT A WOMAN LIKE ONE." Copyranter wonders: "Like what?
A woman?"
The ads are akin to PETA's shock-happy petsploitation ads... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times,
my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it
implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a
voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled.
"People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media
(television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the
telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned
onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as
if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television
network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and
television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience,
individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement
of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
Philip Gourevitch’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times adds
another compelling argument to the ones I’ve been making recently about
why releasing more photos of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan is
a bad idea. Obama first supported the release of the latest batch of
photos but subsequently changed his mind, saying
that the pictures in question are associated with “closed
investigations” in which the perpetrators have already been identified
and sanctioned, and that they “would not add any additional benefit” to
our understanding of detainee treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gourevitch, who has written a book about the soldiers who took many of the photos at Abu Ghraib, rightly notes that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Good news for boomer celebrities, People magazine wants you on its cover. The New York Times Generation B column, in which Michael Winerip tracks life trends of 78 million middle-aged people,
struck an encouraging note Sunday reporting that relics of the
counterculture still appeal as commercial sex symbols, at least from a
marketing standpoint. Since magazine readers between 45 and 59 make up
28 percent of People's circulation, over the last 11 years, its editors chose five annual "sexiest man alive"
covers from the aging hipster demographic. Famous senior-ish ladies
have also called out from checkout lanes for various newsworthy
achievements, especially losing or gaining an enormous amount of
weight. When Valerie Bertinelli, dropped 50 pounds, she posed in a bikini. Kirstie Alley's extra 83 pounds got her a People
cover wearing a hot pink sundress. Some prominent prehistoric persons,
especially longtime favorites of the 35-year-old celebrity glossy, such
as Farrah Fawcett and Cher, have appeared on People covers multiple times... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Terminator
movie franchise is notable for its creation of one of the earliest
tough female action-hero characters: Sarah Connor, mother of John
Connor. In the later movies, her son becomes the leader of the
resistance to Skynet, the computer system that launched the war against
humans, but in the first two she plays a crucial role. In a sense,
she’s a Mary figure, the mother of the savior, but rather than cast a
vulnerable softie, James Cameron cast Linda Hamilton, tough girl. Who
can forget her biceps, or her famous chin-up scene? So I went to see Terminator: Salvation hoping to find more of the same gender complexity. Instead, this movie, directed by McG is as conventional as can be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In an effort to answer why so many "lady lawyers, doctors, and MBAs" at their class reunions "were still slaving after forty," authors Elizabeth Ford and Daniela Drake (a lady doctor, herself) have explored "why do bimbos fare better than the smart chicks" in their new sociological study from Perseus publishing: Smart Girls Marry Money. Sadly, the pink-covered book is not a comic novel by Anita Loos, but a... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Every day the media attention paid President Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist
gets a little more bogged down in reviving cheesy literary archetypes. Articles
like this one unerringly paint Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the tempestuous
“Fiery Latina” to Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s tender “Den Mother,” and then
contrast both to Diane Wood’s brainy “Bench Balancer.” Why do these three types
seem so eerily familiar?? Hmm. Might it be because... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I’ve been mulling the responses I got, via email and comments,
to my question about
why a recent Gallup poll might show a seven point jump in the percentage of
people who define themselves as prolife (from 44 percent last year to 51 percent
this year). Several theories from readers:
The Election.
I think this past year forced me to think about how I really felt. The election
has something to do with it . . . Obama’s mother also set me on a course of
reflection. As an intelligent, curious single mom who struggled to give her son the best, I could relate.
I really want to be liberal, but in my life the most tangible support as a
poor, single mother came from people who looked, acted, and talked just like
Sarah Palin. Other high-status women didn’t give me chances; they were the first
to complain when I needed time off for a sick child. Academics can write about
women’s issues but the evangelicals made sure I could afford to go to work. In
contrast, my university still doesn’t offer onsite child-care.
The Aging Population.
Perhaps when folks pass the age at which their daughters may be faced with
this decision they can more easily be moved...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On Wednesday, Hanna asked "Is it
normal to be transgender?" On Thursday, Adam Reilly at the
Boston Phoenix asked whether being transgender is newsworthy.
Reilly analyzes the coverage of Aiden Quinn, the 24-year-old subway driver who
crashed a Boston train earlier this month, injuring 50, moments after texting
his girlfriend. And hey, by the way, he used to be a woman. Reilly writes:
Given Quinn's admission that he was, in fact, texting prior to the accident,
there's a general consensus that he's a dumbass. But there's no such agreement
among the Boston media as to whether his switch from identifying as a woman to a
man was...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Linda Hirshman:
In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman
writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they
may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts."
Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize,
reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words
used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On May 12, the New York Times ran a photograph featuring a
soldier in his underpants. The photo was eye-catching—I know it caught my
eye—and appeared above the fold on the front page. The photo was taken by David
Guttenfelder for the Associated Press, and its subject was Spc. Zachary
Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas. But what made it a standout was that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here's a really interesting study showing that proximity to women appears to
shape male views on policy. I recently wrote about a study showing the influence of female judges on their male
counterparts in gender discrimination cases. Courtesy of FiveThirtyEight,
here's a bunch of fascinating studies showing that fathers
of daughters tend to support more liberal programs, ranging from... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Palin family's message machine seems to have gone haywire of late. Governor
Sarah has plastered on her serious face, forswearing this month's White House
Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington to concentrate on the recession
in Alaska. She sent her husband to D.C. instead to hang with Greta Van Susteren
but say nothing to the cameras. At one WHCA post-party, former Palin
running-mate-in-law Meghan McCain seemed confused about how to deal with... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Over at Seed, Josh Rosenau describes his organization's long,
failed attempt to get the Texas School Board to adopt evolution-friendly
standards for the state's textbooks. Much as I'd like to, I cannot get
exercised over this issue; my own public, and later parochial, elementary
education was full of so much misinformation (America will run out of landfills
by the year 1990! Marijuana kills! New York City is the capital of New York!)
that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Irish government has released a report
detailing the vicious beatings, rape, and emotional abuse inflicted on tens
of thousands children entrusted to the care of Catholic orphanages for 60 years,
until the 1990s. The Times pulls out this description:
“Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks ... burning, scalding, stabbing,
severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed
positions for lengthy periods ..." (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It turns out Adam Lambert was too weird to win American Idol. Possibly gay, possibly Jewish (here's a video of him singing in Hebrew!), definitely wearing nail polish, Lambert was too much of a challenge, as they say politely, to American notions of masculinity. There was no way... (To read the rest of this post... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This week, Hanna, Meghan, and I inaugurated the Double
X weekly podcast, called the "XX Gabfest" in tribute to some of
our Slate offerings, the "Political Gabfest" and
the "Culture
Gabfest." We hashed out our thoughts about Obama's speech on abortion at
Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi's troubles, and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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You know, it's funny, Hanna: I listened to Adam Davidson duking it out with Elizabeth Warren on Planet Money (love that podcast) and came away filled with satisfaction. That's partly because I like a good argument. But it was also because Davidson and Warren were having a substantive, heated disagreement about economic policy, and they trusted each other enough to argue both rationally and with real... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Recently on Planet Money, host Adam Davidson got into a tiff with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who oversees the Treasury's bank bailout. In the days since, their argument—which lasted all of two minutes—has ballooned into a comment war that taps into lefty passions about the economy, the future of the American family, and latent sexism.
Davidson is disappointed because he was hoping the Congressional Oversight Panel, which Warren chairs, would be something like the 9/11 Commission, a respected nonpartisan advisory board of "senior statesmen" that would sagely guide the administration on how to save the economy. "Senior statesmen" is a phrase he repeats a few times. In the clip, he raises his voice and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Judy Berman writes a great story today in Salon's Broadsheet about transgender activists
fighting to remove "gender identity disorder" as a category in the DSM,
the Bible of psychiatric diseases. The activists argue that they are
making the same case gay activists made in the 1970s, when they fought
successfully to get "homosexuality" removed as a mental illness. Only,
as I wrote in a story earlier this year in the Atlantic, it's not quite so simple.
For adults, the activists' case seems fairly straightforward. Strong
feelings of identification with the opposite gender recur throughout... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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If you're interested in adding another woman-authored blog to your list, I recommend Sarah Scott's Mayday Productions. A former Martha Stewart employee, Scott ended up "tits-up in a ditch," as she put it to me once in a line borrowed from the title of an Annie Proulx short story,
when she was in a cycling race accident in 2005. "I don't remember if
the EMT woke me up, or I just came too on my own, but I remember
looking down at my thighs and thinking... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com)
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When the focus of an economy changes from making stuff to helping
people—that is, manufacturing to services—low-skilled men drop out of
the labor market in droves. A new study of unemployed men in Manchester, England,
suggests that "idealized embodied masculinity" is partly to blame.
Manual labor, claims Sociologist Darren Nixon, imbues working class men
with a sense of pride that helps compensate for the very fact of being
working class. They may not be financially dominant, but they feel
relatively masculine compared to their white, middle class counterparts.
The kind of low-skill jobs that service economies
create—receptionists, sales clerks, retail cashiers—offer no such
compensation. And the men Nixon interviews find the "emotional labor"
required to perform such jobs well incredibly... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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As Slate columnist John Dickerson pointed out late last week,
by saying that the CIA "misleads us all the time," Nancy Pelosi "put
the spotlight on herself and has given weakened Republicans a fight
they can enjoy, engage in, and possibly win." Newt Gingrich took to the
Daily Show last night to promote his new book, 5 Principles for a Successful Life, but before getting into the heart of his shill, he called for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I really, really wanted to love Glee, the new Fox comedy about show choir—that strange, unholy amalgam of drama club, choir, and dance team. After all, I have already made my love of such dorky performance activities rather public. And before the first commercial break, it seemed like Glee was really gunning for my affections in particular, showcasing all of the following... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It is not easy to stop being somebody's mommy, but there comes a time
when your kids are done. The five-year-old gets on that damn carousel
and only two or three horses go up and down before she has a tattoo and
a boyfriend. Mimi Swartz in her Double X Empty Nest column wonders how she will restart her life as her son Sam transitions away to his own adult life. Over the next few months... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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The joyful, saccharine, karaoke-inspring Glee, which premiered last night on Fox, got me wondering: What did we do before Tracy Flick? She first appeared, embodied by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's Election,
a previously unidentified personality type, the driven, ruthless,
terrifyingly ambitious striver who micromanages her inevitable rise to
power in relentlessly cheerful tones. In the decade since Election, Flick has been transformed from a fresh, new character into an archetype, found frequently in... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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I'm not really sure why I keep watching American Idol contestant Adam Lambert's take on the creepy Tears for Fears song, "Mad World," which he sang again last night. He doesn't have any of the authenticity of unadorned British wonder Susan Boyle or even of the other finalist from last night: sweet, baby-faced Kris Allen. They call him "Glambert" because... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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No longer the home of hits like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire,
HBO is looking to replace its sex-and-violence lineup of yesteryear
with ... more sex. Last spring, the network issued a somewhat
mysterious announcement about Hung, a dramatic comedy that debuts this summer... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In seven seasons of 24, I've never given much thought to
its gender politics. For one, I've mostly tuned in for the escapism of
watching Jack Bauer save the world. For another, it's always had enough
strong female characters—villains, heads of CTU, and the
ass-kicking-yet-socially-awkward Chloe—to make up for the damsels in
distress. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Kim Bauer.)
But two sequences at the end of last night's finale jumped out at me
for their portrayal of the women. (Warning, if you have the finale
waiting on your TiVO: Spoilers ahead.) To wrap one storyline, President
Allison Taylor has to decide... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Like Slate's Jack Shafer, I'm curious to see whether Maureen Dowd uses her next Times column to address the mini-plagiarism scandal surrounding her last one (Dowd admitted to unintentionally lifting a paragraph
from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall, blaming the confusion
on a conversation with a friend who quoted the passage to her without
attribution.) But I can't agree with Shafer that Dowd's explanation
sounds "plausible—if a tad incomplete." Her account of how Marshall's observation found its way into her column is patently absurd. Unless the friends in question are... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews wrote a doozy of a story
in a recent issue of the paper’s magazine, about how he went from a
beaming homeowner and newlywed to an anxious debtor who owed hundreds
of thousands of dollars on his mortgage. He described the trials and
headaches of borrowing, and throughout the story, a basic disbelief
that he, a reporter *who covers economics,* could have been caught up
in the same overzealous swindling and poor decision-making that he
wrote about for the Times.
His story may have been cause for a lot of rubbernecking and tsk-ing
among readers, but Dana Goldstein and Megan McArdle have perhaps hit on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Jaclyn Friedman:
Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if
they’re going to insist on being such public sluts (I'm paraphrasing
here, but not as much as I wish I were). Latoya Peterson responded by
rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All To Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.
Missing from this entire kerfuffle is one crucial point. Women aren't... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan McCain was on The Colbert Report last night and despite some giggles and a hideous, huge, Bedazzled ring,
she acquitted herself admirably. When is someone going to give this
self-identified "24-year-old, pro-sex woman" and Republican her own
television show? Young and Republican In America, hosted by Meghan McCain, running on one of the cable news networks twice a week? I'd watch.
Colbert tries his best to throw his guests off their talking points, but McCain could recite hers in a coma. She was not to be derailed. While defending her core position... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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My husband has been in love with Bruce Springsteen longer than he's
been in love with me. Bruce's lyrics were the soundtrack for our
courtship (I came for you, for you, I came for you), our long-overdue wedding (So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore), the many years of our marriage (This life, this life and then the next, with you I have been blessed), and his own work (sick of sitting round here trying to write this book).
He rarely misses a Springsteen concert and can recite tracks, covers,
and lyrics for any occasion. It was no surprise to me then that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa Gezari:
The Preakness Stakes is
not a particularly gender-neutral event. The second leg of the Triple
Crown is, in fact, one of the last places where men dress like men of a
certain era (waistcoats, wingtips, fedoras), and women dress like women
as we grew up imagining them: in crisp yet feminine suits, low-cut,
brightly colored dresses and high, high heels. I’ve been to the
Preakness three years running, and I gave up on the dress-and-heels
approach long ago. (Unless you book a limo to and from your box seat,
the amount of walking and stair climbing required by Pimlico’s layout
demands comfortable footwear.) On Saturday, I noted with empathy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Agreed, Dahlia, that Justice Ginsburg is carefully applying the law as she sees it in her dissent in AT&T v. Hulteen. Her problem is a bad old ruling that haunts this case and that all but one of her male colleagues refused to banish. In General Electric Co. v. Gilbert
in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on pregnancy
is not discrimination based on sex, because some women (the nonpregnant
ones) won't be discriminated against. By ignoring how... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In his review of the new Warren Buffet biography, Michael Lewis
has a great description of how writer Alice Schroeder won over the
billionaire by turning his need to be mothered by lovely brainiacs
against him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Supreme Court ruled, 7-2 yesterday in AT&T v. Hulteen,
that women denied credits toward their pension for their pregnancies in
the 1960s and '70s—before it became illegal—were not the victims of
gender discrimination. The question came down to whether AT&T could
rely on past discriminatory practices—before 1978 pregnant women were
denied disability leave granted to men—to calculate pensions. Writing
for the majority, David Souter found that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Surely it’s auspicious that the weekend after Double X launched, a filly won the second leg of the Triple Crown—the Preakness Stakes—for the first time since 1924. That’s right: a girl by the name of Rachel Alexandra—a girl’s name if there ever was one—held off all the boys, including... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote
about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his
campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues.
I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m
right with the president on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The striking jump in the new Gallup poll of people defining themselves
as pro-life—7 percentage points in one year, for a total of 51
percent—doesn't explain itself. You may be right, Hanna, that scientific advances or a truly deep shift in attitude aren't the rationale,
given that the breakdown didn't change when Gallup pinned people down
further by asking them if they think abortion should always, sometimes,
or never be legal. But the words "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have long
been... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Did anyone catch Anna Wintour's interview with Morley Safer on last night? (Side note: I like the way this YouTube teaser's headline makes it sound like Anna Wintour is, in fact, the Secretary of Defense. This seems like a sensible foreign policy move to me.) Despite the frisson of excitement that came with actually seeing and
hearing Wintour speak—she lives! she lives!—the interview was mostly a
puff piece. However, there was one moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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More and more frequently, movie trailers
are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become
increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and
increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot,
they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and
emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you
hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.
David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Caryn James:
With stylish women flaunting recessionista chic and Michelle Obama
embracing her modest roots—“my parents were working class people,” she
repeats in speeches—it may seem like a timely advance that a flurry of
independent films (in theaters and on DVD) are depicting those
forgotten heroines, working-class women. In Wendy and Lucy, a deglamorized Michelle Williams lives out of her car while driving to Alaska in search of a job. There’s Frozen River, with Melissa Leo in her Oscar-nominated role as a trailer-park single mom, and Julia, with Tilda Swinton playing a downwardly spiraling alcoholic.
These movies are unsentimental and wonderfully realistic on the
surface, but take a closer look: why is every one of these heroines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse.
She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise
to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope
that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd
say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.
How is Obama going to close Guantanamo in eight months when his lawyers just asked... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In case you haven't heard, magazines are dying right and left. Who
knows which one will be next? One day, that may be the sound of Anna
Wintour's head rolling across the floor. Not unlike the adult movie
industry, which thought it was so ahead of the curve,
technologically-speaking, that it neglected to jump on the Internet
bandwagon until its product had gotten away from them and it was far,
far too late, magazines and newspapers have failed to exploit the Web
to their advantage. Now, they're suffering for it.
No one will ever say so of Nick Knight, the British fashion photographer who created SHOWStudio.com, a website dedicated to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Does the idea of a candy bar with pink girlie wrapping, a sexualized
name, and a marketing promo urging women to "pleasure yourself" by
eating said candy bar seem annoying as hell to anyone else?
When I heard this piece on NPR yesterday about the new Fling candy bar,
also known as a chocolate finger, I thought it was a joke. When I
realized it was a real news story, it made me so mad that the only
finger I thought about was the middle finger I'd like to give to the person who came up with the idea. I so hope... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Just when you thought the right was dead or dormant, and it was safe
to say the word "abortion" on the campus of a Catholic university,
reality hit back hard. In his commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame
yesterday, President Obama said all the right things (clips of the
speech are below). He acknowledged "admirable" convictions on all
sides. He said abortion had heavy moral and spiritual consequences. He
did not stop at the old tepid "safe, legal, and rare" but took it one
step further, saying he wanted to work to reduce unintended
pregnancies, and make adoption easier. Still, a woman outside called
him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the spirit of Meghan's stated desire that the XX Factor blog remain a site of amicable cacophony, I'm feeling the need to stand up for my girl Dooce.
Well, the blogger who goes by that name, Heather Armstrong, is "my
girl" only in the sense that, like millions of her readers, I've been
following her life online for more than five years now on an almost
daily basis. But after reading Susannah Breslin's recent takedown of the "bad mommy" phenomenon, Ann Hulbert's review of a spate of recent confessional parenting memoirs, and a terrific discussion of those same books between our beloved Double X editors and the redoubtable Stephen Metcalf, it strikes me that something obvious is going unsaid... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Men, skip this post. A new study revives a very old method of birth control, and it's not happy news for you. Withdrawal, says the Guttmacher Institute, is not a bad way to go... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Our first week at Double X is drawing to a close. And we’ve heard all sorts of responses. We’re not feminist enough. We’re too feminist. We say we’re not feminist but then we talk a lot about feminism. We (and Slate) are ghettoizing women. First, I want to second my co-editors Hanna and Emily in what they wrote yesterday and today about why we wanted to create Double X and its relationship to Slate. Second, I want to take this moment to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I know that Sonia Sotomayor is a crazy, overemotional, hysterical, aggressive bitch because some anonymous lawyers told me so. On the other hand, she sounds quite rational in this 2002 speech on whether the gender or race of a judge should affect judicial decisions. The New York Times has... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I had a sense of déjà vu watching the Grey's Anatomy denouement
of the Katherine Heigl character Izzie's season-long cancer diagnosis,
juxtaposed with the surprise hit-by-a-bus plot twist killing off T.R.
Knight's George O'Malley in the last scene. Until I read Willa Paskin's
post, I wrote the feeling off to general season finale redundancy.
After all, just this week... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Science reporter Joshua Wolf Shenk describes his visit to the famous Grant Study archives (named for the dime store magnate who originally funded the experiment) in the new issue of the Atlantic and includes a video interview of George Vaillant,
the longitudinal assessment project's director for the last 42 years.
Vaillant's perspective on the 268 "well-adjusted" sophomore male
participants' much-examined lives boils down to.... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Like Hanna, I accept Ann Friedman's welcome challenge. Yes, please! We want to influence the national conversation,
and send our writers and editors out to go forth and prosper in plenty
of other pastures. We're not interested in roping ourselves off into a
pink ghetto. I understand the fear that other people will do the roping
off for us. When we first started talking about the idea of a separate
site early last summer, several of the veteran women of Slate
said, hey, we've spent years getting strong women's voices into the
magazine. We've succeeded. Now you're taking us out and putting us
somewhere else? The answer we all settled on, in the end, was... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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There's a sort of covenant, an unspoken contract, entered into when a
person commits to a television series. Something like, "I, the viewer,
agree to watch this program, to care about these characters, to invest
in this world week after week, because you, the TV creator, agree to
make it fun." Last night, Grey's Anatomy
creator Shonda Rhimes broke this "we watch, she entertains" contract by
engaging in reckless character assassination—by which I mean... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Last night's season finale of 30 Rock wasn't the best episode
of the season—the A and B plots didn't hang together especially
well—but the episode provided some of the best lines of the year. The
Liz Lemon plot revolved around... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Sara, I agree with your defense—in response to Katie Roiphe's piece about women hiding behind their children on Facebook—of a woman's right to put her kids first. I'm 25 and enjoying my selfish years now, because, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out
in her piece about the seasons of a woman's life, I fully expect them
to end when I have kids. And I think that's natural. Just as natural,
in fact, for fathers as it is for moms.
My mother once relayed to my sister and me a hypothetical question... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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As a woman who has declined to put her picture on Facebook—my profile
photo is a drawing of me by my daughter—I respectfully disagree with Katie Roiphe's assumption
that this somehow represents some reprehensible self-effacement on my
part as a working woman. I'm admittedly a little late to social
networking, and not exactly a devotee. A friend of mine jokes that my
status line should read... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Today in the American Prospect, Ann Friedman asks a question we've heard from many feminists since we launched Double X
on Tuesday: Why do we need a women's web site? Did we kill the "ladies"
page in the newspaper only to recreate it online? This is an excellent
question, and one we wrestled with ourselves... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, you posted yesterday on those Gallup numbers
suggesting that Americans are less worked-up over the gender of the
next Supreme Court justice than the media has been led to believe. I
wonder whether Obama read the same polls, because his very short
shortlist was evidently expanded yesterday... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I remember being taught in art history that the Venus of Willendorf,
the Paleolithic sculputure of a gloriously zaftig female, was probably carved by
a man as a shamanistic fertility figure. Now the New York Times has an
article
about a stunning discovery of one of the oldest figurative sculptures ever
found, another “Venus,” this one dating from 35,000 years ago. She has pendulous
breasts, a capacious stomach, and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Vanessa, I share your concern that women have limited workplace stereotypes
from which to choose: We’re either the nurturing pushover or the
demanding bitch. We’re not the only group, though, struggling with how
to present ourselves in the workplace. A study out last week found that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ever wonder where S&M bondage gear—whips, straps, masks, assless pants—is made? No? Well, you should have. The Times has a fascinating video piece about a company in Karachi, Pakistan that manufactures fetish wear and exports it to the West. (None of it looks quite as fanciful as the colorful, strange lingerie coming out of Syria). "Most of our customers are from... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Aung San Suu Kyi's home sits beside Inya Lake, beyond a guarded
checkpoint where an armed military officer screens cars, essentially,
for the presence of white people. Burmese are allowed to drive on past
the house where Suu Kyi has spent 13 of the past 19 years under house
arrest. Caucasions are stopped and questioned. It's a line, literally
and figuratively, most expats would not even think of trying to cross.
But as with most of Myanmar's control apparatus, enforcement relies on
fear. A determined person could just swim across the lake and show up,
dripping wet, at her back door, which is exactly... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Vanessa, I agree that we don't gain much by adding the office bitch stereotype to the working woman's repertoire. And like you and lawyer-mom, one of our first commenters, who writes astutely
about her bullying female boss, I also have a story of an older and
more experienced woman who put me down rather than pulled me up. I
wonder, though... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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For most of us, sitting down with our Sunday New York Times is a relaxing experience. But for an unlucky few, it can suddenly turn into a choke-on-my-scone nightmare.
Flipping idly through Sunday Styles, the hapless reader comes to the famous "Modern Love" column, soon to be turned into a TV series. There she reads about "Nick," whose girlfriend broke up with him using a PowerPoint, or Husband X, whose wife no longer wants to sleep with him, or "Froky," the ex-girlfriend who... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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It's been a little over three months since Rihanna missed the Grammys after being allegedly assaulted by her boyfriend Chris Brown. As she more or less announced last week, when she appeared at the Costume Institute Gala in a feisty tux, she's back—and now she has the single to prove it. "Silly Boy," her new song, is a... (To read the rest of this post, please visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
I get what you say,
Meghan, about the benefits of broadening the range of publicly-noted
female roles beyond those old standbys, “nurturer” and “supporter.” But
I can’t share your pleasure in the finding that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at doublex.com!)
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This week, is there a tabloid that doesn't feature Jon and Kate Gosselin of TLC's mega-spawn reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" fame? Today, Kate vomited her guts to People, revealing that her marriage to the man with whom she fathered a pair of twins and a set of sextuplets may be deeply...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Forget your budding little artists’ portraits of Obama, and check out Michelangelo’s “Torment of St. Anthony.” There’s a fascinating—and somewhat frustrating—article in the New York Times today
about the debate over whether he did, as a 12- or 13-year-old, in fact
paint the portrait, based on an engraving. The controversy has been
raging for 400 years or so, so I was expecting some decisive new
evidence... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Latoya Peterson:
You know, screeds like Linda Hirshman's in Double X are why I waffle so much about identifying with the feminist label.
It isn't even that Linda Hirshman is using every ounce of her online persona to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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The Real Housewives of New Jersey premiered last night on Bravo and it was just as gaudy, Mystic-tanned, and big "bubbied" as any trash-television lover could have hoped. The series, part of a growing Housewives
franchise that also includes New York, Atlanta, and the original Orange
County branches, depicts "real-life versions of Carmela Soprano, loud,
nasal, nouveau-riche wives who raise spoiled children and spend their
husbands’ money in vast marble and onyx starter palaces in Franklin
Lakes, N.J.," according to Alessandra Stanley at the New York Times.
Though Slate television critic Troy Patterson finds RHNJ
the most "synthetic" of the franchise because "the drama queening in
these parts is much too blatantly contrived," Stanley thinks that this
is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Though I was not qualified to be a secretary when I was 25 (nor am I
now, 35 years later, based on the super organized executive assistants
I've run into since then), I would certainly have been affronted to be
mistaken for one as Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote she was when she shared an elevator with a veteran newswoman at the New York Times three years ago. The younger woman was quitting a great job, with nothing lined up, to move to Boston with her fiancé... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at doublex.com!)
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"The World of Womenomics has arrived," announce Claire Shipman and Katy Kay in a breathless piece over at the Huffington Post.
Shipman and Kay insist that as the recession tips the gender
composition of the workforce in favor of women, companies will be
forced to accommodate womanly demands. What follows is some extremely
promiscuous... (To read the rest of this post, please visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Over at The Root, Lisa Crooms has penned something of a takedown of the recent, very Lysistratan Kenyan sex strike, wherein women, organized by the Nairobi-based Women’s Development Organization, went on an, ahem, handshake-only basis for one week. Their aim, as yet unresolved, was to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.
The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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There’s an interesting Gallup poll out today
about whether Americans feel the next Supreme Court nominee should be a
woman. The media has reported on expectations that Obama will nominate
a woman to fill Souter’s seat; but according to Gallup, 64 percent of
Americans “say it doesn't matter to them whether Obama appoints a
woman”... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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Forgive me for injecting this note of sadness, but I'm mourning the
death today of my friend Eden Ross Lipson. Eden was for a long while
the children's book editor of the New York Times. I knew her after she retired. She e-mailed me one day a few years ago about a piece I wrote on reading books to boys that are usually given to girls, like Little House in the Big Woods.
I'd just started writing about kids and motherhood, and I felt the
opposite of confident about whether I had much to say worth hearing.
Eden's brisk e-mail made smarter points than mine. But she didn't point
that out. She offered suggestions for the next piece, the best kind of
deft encouragement. From then on, she wrote when she wanted to tell me
I'd gotten a children's book right, or when I'd gotten it wrong. She
suggested topics. She became my literary fairy godmother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
The announcement that Gen. David McKiernan is being removed from command of NATO forces in Afghanistan—apparently the first firing of a U.S. commander in a theater of war since Korea—is
a very big deal. But what does it actually mean? One thing it means is
that the dust has yet to settle in the transition to a new U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan, which suggests that any fruits of that
strategy remain distant. Laid out in a white paper this spring,
the new strategy stems from a wholesale rethinking of our approach that
has been underway at least since Gen. David Petraeus took the helm at
CentCom last fall. It includes, but isn’t limited to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most
important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's
what you'd think, judging by today's launch of DoubleX.com. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?
At best, it seems odd to judge a 21st century production by the politics of a decades-old movement, the relevance of which... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I was perversely pleased to read this story in the New York Times
about women bullying other women at work. A new study by the Workplace
Bullying Institute—who knew such a thing existed!—reveals that men
aren't the only elbow-throwers in the workplace... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, you masterfully parse Elizabeth Edwards' public persona, but you don't really touch on the other people who might be affected by her ill-fated tale. No, I'm not talking about John. I'm talking about her children: Catharine, Emma, and Jack. When Edwards was on the Today show earlier this week, she said she wrote the revealing Resilience explicitly for her children. This morning, Tina Brown and Gloria Allred argued in front of Today's Meredith Vieira about whether or not Elizabeth's choice to speak out about her husband's affair was a good one.
Gloria was staunchly pro-Edwards. She said that Elizabeth was revealing herself "with dignity," as she had done everything else in her life. Tina was anti-Edwards. She upheld Hillary Clinton as the model of how to weather a cheating husband in public, because she barely acknowledged Bill's wandering eye. Tina described the situation as "squalid" and added "I regret that [Elizabeth] used her book to drag everyone into this."
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Are you with Tina, thinking Elizabeth's young children must be damaged by their mother's public discussion of their father's philandering? Or do you side with Gloria, who believes that Elizabeth is being a good role model for her offspring by showing them that life is "complicated"?
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In a column
today on the famous Harvard Study of Adult
Development, which has followed the paths of a group of graduates from
college to old age, David Brooks quotes lead researcher George Vaillant's
conclusion about what matters in life: “Happiness is love. Full Stop." It's a
somewhat odd conclusion since... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Today's New York Times hosts a bloggingheads debate on
breast-feeding between me and Dr. Ruth Lawrence, a researcher from from
the University of Rochester and a major breast-feeding advocate. The
occasion was my recent Atlantic story taking issue with the science behind some breast-feeding research. When bloggingheads found my opponent I swallowed hard... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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It's May, the month of nice weather, pretty flowers, weddings,
declarations of love, pregnancies, hallucinations, fatalities,
cliffhangers and shocking twists. It's the month of TV finales, wherein
shows wrap up the season that came before, while providing incentives
to watch the season that comes next, manipulating you into thinking
"Finally!" and then "Really?!" in quick succession. House did exactly that last night... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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If you're reading this you already know that Double X, the new magazine from Slate Group, about "what women really think" launched today. Double X inherits a legacy of women's content that spanned decades of comfort food factories such as Ladies' Home Journal ("Can this marriage be saved?"), McCall's, and Redbook, then spawned junior versions Seventeen, Glamour, and Mademoiselle (featuring David Newman and Robert Benton's advice column, "Man Talk"), before blossoming... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Calling all XX Factor readers: Today is the launch of Double X, the new women's site that this blog has given birth to. Come take a look! The blog will continue to live in Slate, so you can still access it the same way you always have. The one change is that to read posts and conversations in their entirety, you'll click over to the new site. We also hope of course that you'll find much more to interest you there. To kick things off today, we have:
A thought-provoking piece by a mom who is giving pot to her son. He is 9, and he has autism and a medical marijuana license.
Celebs including Amanda Peet, Margaret Cho, and Sandra Day O'Connor on who they wanted to be when they were little girls.
Hanna on the passive aggression of Elizabeth Edwards.
What's the Problem Now? A discussion about the ongoing dilemmas of feminism. Includes Linda Hirshman taking down Jezebel.
To make Double X succeed, we need you. Much of the site's vibrancy will depend on your comments about blog posts,
articles, and everything else. The comments on Double X will be
directly beneath the blog posts and the stories. And the homepage will regularly
showcase excellent quotes from commenters. Our goal is to generate dynamic
conversation. That's what has made XX Factor thrive, and now we hope your
feedback on Double X will add depth and new view points to the discussion. We're
especially eager to seed the site in its first weeks with smart, thoughtful
comments. And so we are turning to you for your help. If you post early and
well, you'll set the tone for the site right from the start.
We'd also love your suggestions about how to make your reading
and commenting experience a good one. Post a comment or send mail to
doublexletters@slate.com. We already consider you part of the
Double X community, and to that end
we're going to start having cocktail meetups and other fun events for our core
commenters in New York and D.C. Again, any suggestions for meeting places or
event ideas are welcome!
Thank you,
Emily, Hanna, and Meghan
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Like every other former sci-fi geek in NYC, I (sorry) trekked out to see the Star Trek
movie on Friday night. My assessment? J. J. Abrams has turned out a
well-made B movie: The film moves along at a crisp pace, hits all the
key retro-nostalgia moments, and is designed to be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Washington Post is calling attention to the friendship
between U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Georgia Supreme
Court Justice Leah Ward Sears, who is on some short lists for the open
Supreme Court seat. It's an odd-couple alliance that seems to cast
doubt on Sears by bringing up old bitterness over Thomas' appointment.
As the Post piece puts it, "The old lions of the civil rights
movement in Georgia and elsewhere have never accepted Thomas as heir to
the late Justice Thurgood Marshall's seat and legacy." But it seems to
me that Sears' friendship with Thomas would be an asset on the court... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, www.DoubleX.com!)
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Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake, the duo responsible for Saturday Night Live's viral video "Dick in A Box," were at it again this weekend, pasting on absurd facial hair and recording "Motherlover," a spoof song in honor of Mother's Day about two friends who really want to love each other's mothers (played, in the video, by Susan Sarandon and Patricia Clarkson). Like really, really. (To see the video and read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, I so feel your pain about being motherless on Mother's Day. I lost my mother last October and have felt unmoored ever since. Losing my mother was like losing my sense of place in the world; the sense that I belonged to this one person in way that I could never belong to anyone else.
Still, instead of trying to avoid everything Mother's Day-related, I planned to embrace the day and comfort myself with good memories of good times with my mother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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Bonnie, Jess, I confess I haven't been able to read Jess's piece about talking to her mom yet; I started to, and it brought tears to my eyes. Like Jess, I used to talk to my mom all the time, about matters large and small. (Should I refrigerate peanut butter? Should I take that job? Who are you voting for?) But my mother passed away on Christmas Day of 2008. And so I can't talk to her. I didn't think that Mother's Day was going to hit home at all, because my mother, a wry pragmatist, considered it a fake holiday... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)