The XX Factor: What women really think.

You Can't Adopt a Child From Syria—But Angelina Jolie Can

A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:

Who knows what to believe when it comes to celebrity "journalism," but it's apparently been confirmed that Angelina Jolie will adopt a child from Syria—something described on the website of the U.S. embassy in Damascus as "a difficult process and often an impossible one." In many countries, celebrity status probably has little affect on adoption matters, but in a country where adoption is "essentially illegal," the perverse effect is that anything pretty much goes—if you've got the required currency ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Angelina Jolie, Breast-feeding in Bronze

Daniel Edwards—the celebrity-obsessed sculptor who has already blessed the world with Britney Spears giving birth on a bearskin rug and Suri Cruise’s bronzed poop—has just announced his latest work: A statue of Angelina Jolie, enthroned, majestically nude, and suckling a baby at each breast like it ain’t no thang. Weird? Sick? Magnificent? I can’t really tell ... (Read more in Double X.)

A Man's Life Is Still Complete Without Children

Faint Praise Indeed

I'll take the bait, Willa. I found the Oscars as predictable and smarmily self-congratulatory as usual. Unlike Slate's Troy Patterson, who called the presentation of the acting awards by the five previous winners "a welcome development," I found it awkward and forced. The worst was Nicole Kidman, whose love of botox has rendered her face nearly immobile, thus making her tribute to Angelina Jolie in The Changeling seem insincere. The effort Kidman was exerting just to smile was gargantuan. I will admit, though, that I don't really have much of a stomach for this sort of thing. The Oscars comes at the end of awards season, and I don't find Hollywood giving themselves a new set of prizes every weekend especially inspiring. Am I hopelessly cynical, Slate women? Have I lost my sense of wonder? Check out the video of Kidman and Jolie below and see if you agree.

Kill the Best Actress Category

The Washington Post's Monica Hesse makes a good case here for killing the best actress and best supporting actress categories, because, after all, an actor is an actor:

Yes, it might seem screwy to compare Angelina Jolie's emotional "Changeling" performance to Richard Jenkins's in "The Visitor." But is it any more sensical to judge Jenkins's minimalist turn as a college professor against Brad Pitt's wide-eyed romp through "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? Or really, to compare anything about the low-budget "Visitor" with the star-powered, animatronic "Benjamin"? Film is a vast and disparate medium; true apples-to-apples comparisons are almost impossible in any category.

Child Labor

Although it seems to be having a few technical problems, Nadya Suleman, ad hoc CEO of the octuplets+6 media corporation, recently set up a tasteful portal to capture a revenue stream (accepts credit cards!) during the launch of her new family business. As Dahlia mentioned last week, the newly delivered mother of eight slightly resembles Angelina Jolie. In addition to their age and some physical similarities, both women also seem very comfortable with far more notoriety than a truly rational individual would ever want. (Is it a coincidence that Jolie's 1999 breakthrough performance as a mental institution patient in Girl, Interrupted was the same year as Suleman's injury at her California mental hospital job? The worker compensation settlements provided development capital for her new venture.) Giving a whole new meaning to the notion of sweat equity, to provide manpower for the company, the fecund executive also ovulated enough viable IVF embryos to incubate 14 of them to delivery from six pregnancies.

Speaking of compensation, NBC insists it paid "not a dime" to air the first post-birth Ann Curry interview with "Octomom," nor for any of the access and personal materials used in the network's "special Dateline" featuring her other six children. Nevertheless, I'd love to read the contract between NBC's legal department and Ms. Suleman's business managers, spelling out what everyone did agree to. 

Anyway, I applaud the fledgling media dynamo's entrepreneurship and resourcefulness and hope for Suleman that she gets that cable reality show. Who knows? Maybe it will even get network interest from, say, NBC. As for Suleman's 14 fatherless offspring, they will, it seems, be joining the growing ranks of working realty actors that includes ratings magnet and 3-year-old son of the current Bachelor star Jason Mesnick. While the Pitt children, though perhaps too often pressed into service as accessories, are so far still unemployed.

She Wants a Famous Face

After the First Dozen Mouths To Feed, the Cost Starts Adding Up

David Edelstein on Hedda Gabler

Last year, Broadway got Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull and Katie Holmes in All My Sons. In this month's lady-from-Hollywood-takes-on-an-English-class-classic, we have Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, Boys on the Side) as Henrik Ibsen's notoriously difficult (in every way that phrase can possible be meant) Hedda Gabler. Hedda is one of the most iconic female roles in Western theater--Cate Blanchett came to New York with her own version just two years ago. Former Slate movie critic David Edelstein has a great essay in New York this week that asks, "Why, in spite of everything, is Hedda still the most popular girl in her class—and can anyone manage to get her right?"

"They all want to play Hedda, the female stars of stage and screen unjustly deprived of characters in the canon with real stature—despite the fact that she is a borderline psycho who resists our sympathy, and that Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is an obstacle course over a minefield: creaky, exposition-laden, rife with the potential for unintentional laughs, bound by conventions of drawing-room realism. Beside Hedda, Hamlet is a walk in the park: At least he can talk to the audience, establish a rapport—help us to, you know, relate to his predicament. Chill Hedda is forever out of reach."

Edelstein is rather kinder to Parker than Ben Brantley was in the New York Times ("her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who's given up cheerleading to be a goth because it's way cooler and it matches the place her mind's at now"). His ideal Hollywood Hedda, though, might surprise you:

"The only living English-speaking star who seems a perfect match is—laugh all you like—Angelina Jolie. I have no idea if she has the theatrical chops (movie stars who rule in close-up—like Julia Roberts—have a way of shrinking onstage), but Jolie has the size, the unyielding self-containment, the take-no-prisoners craziness, the will of a temperamental Greek goddess .... She could demonstrate, definitively, just as Ibsen did, why Hedda is the most alive anti-heroine in modern drama: It's what happens when you put a very large spirit in a very small box."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or, Do People Really Steal Babies for International Adoption?

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the signing of the gorgeous U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, worked on by Eleanor Roosevelt (among many others). Like so many statements of high-minded ideals, it has been honored, alas, more in the breach than in the reality. But at least the world has these beautiful paragraphs as a goal at which to aim, a kind of Holy Book or Ten (OK, 30) Commandments of how governments should treat people.

The particular human rights violation that has preoccupied my attention for the past year has been corruption in international adoption—in particular, the way that Western adoption agencies’ disproportionately large payments for “adoptable” babies have induced unscrupulous locals in poor and corrupt countries to buy, coerce, defraud, and kidnap babies. The stories of families (in Nepal, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere) that have unwittingly lost their children forever to foreign countries have broken my heart. So have the stories of adoptive families who learned that their older children—adopted purely to save a child from terrifying want!—were sold or stolen, traumatized, and desperately missed their first families.

Foreign Policy published my central investigation into the supply-and-demand cycle of international adoption, titled “The Lie We Love” and now free online. We’ve loaded a lot of the background research and documentation (and are still adding more!) on the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism Web site. Today the Boston Globe published my short essay warning families to be wary of pulling an Angelina Jolie and adopting for humanitarian reasons—lest, instead of saving an orphan, they inadvertently create one. Did any XX’ers know that international adoption could be this ugly?