The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is Trashing Your Wedding Dress a Radical Form of Self-Expression?

By DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:

Yesterday, the Today show featured a segment on a new trend for the modern day radical bride: trashing the dress. According to the clip, the cooler brides among us are destroying their wedding dresses post-ceremony, whether through a paintball fight or a four-wheeler ride across swampy grounds, as a form of creative self-expression.

One bride, still donning her untouched white satiny number, tells the camera that weddings are so “formal and traditional,” so not her, right before she and her husband dirty up their matrimonial garb in the desert dust. The photographer shooting them points out that it’s "a more creative way to express yourself ... in a way you can’t on your wedding day." And that’s when I got really irritated.

If being a prim, dressed-to-the-nines bride isn’t your “thing,” so to speak, why even have a formal wedding and spend gajillions of dollars on some silky fluff you’re just going to turn around and destroy? If there's anything worse in my mind than rampant wedding consumerism, it's intentionally wasteful wedding consumerism  ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Tina Brown to Elizabeth Edwards: Think of the Children!

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."

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"?

For Love or Money

Hilary Black, the editor of an anthology called The Secret Currency of Love: The Unabashed Truth About Women, Money, and Relationships, was on the Today show this morning, gabbing with Ann Curry about—what else?—love and money. I read a good chunk of the anthology earlier this week and was struck by a thread running through several of the essays, most of which were written by women who supported themselves as freelance writers. Many of these women came from upper-middle-class backgrounds, and while it took them a while to admit to themselves, they all secretly expected that some wealthyish dude would ultimately rescue them from their quasi-bohemian, small trust-funded existences. Abby Ellin described it best in her essay, "Tool Belts, Not Tuxes":

And okay, there's this: I've always been taken care of. My family never had great wealth, but my parents managed to send me to camp and college and graduate school—an extraordinary gift for which I'm eternally grateful. And they even bought me an apartment. ... And so this leads to a mortifying admission—especially for a feminist who was taught that every woman should possess both her own bank account and the ability to be self-sufficient. On some level, I always believed that eventually someone else would take care of the big stuff. That someone, of course, would be my husband.