The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is There Gender Bias on Broadway?

It’s a catchy, catty angle, that’s for sure: An article in today’s New York Times about a recent study of potential gender bias in Broadway theater opens by suggesting that women playwrights do indeed have more trouble getting their work produced than men do—and that female artistic directors, producers, and literary managers “are the ones to blame.” That’s the conclusion purportedly arrived at by a precocious female Princeton undergrad, who undertook the study for her senior thesis in economics, and who recently gave a presentation to a mostly-female audience of playwrights and producers.

If you read further, and check out the thesis itself, it’s clear Emily Glassberg Sands says no such thing ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

Transgender Mysteries

Said It. Meant It.

On another front, the racial overtones of some of Clinton's comments overall are further eroding relations between black women who support Obama and white women who support her. The extent to which these two groups will now see themselves as having shared political agendas is highly in doubt. Judging by the strong reactions of diehard Clinton and Obama supporters to a piece I wrote on this subject in Newsweek this week, it will be a very long time before we see strong black/white feminist coalitions being formed. My feeling is that by criticizing black women's support for a black male candidate over a white female candidate, white Clinton supporters are ignoring the duality of black women's identity and alienating them by expecting them to choose between their gender and their race. This is a luxury that black women just don't have.

So What Are the Secret Lives of Married Men?

Has anyone sat down yet with New York's cover story, a long essay entitled "The Affairs of Men: The Trouble with Sex and Marriage," pegged to the Eliot Spitzer scandal? Inside, however, is not an outré confession but a fiftysomething baby boomer's long-winded attempt to rationalize his desire to screw a variety of women despite being married. Though it presents itself as provocative and edgy, the piece is inflected with the naïve, wishful rhetoric of 1970s thinking about sex.

Philip Weiss, the author, explains that men "hunger for sexual variety" and determines that this hunger is "a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse." He comments on Ashley Dupre's "luscious body." He reports that men are using more porn than ever and quotes Mark Penn wondering what will happen when women "realize it." He notes that sexless marriages among power couples are endemic. He harps on his own desire for "some strange." Yet when his exasperated wife proposes an open marriage in response to all his bellyaching, he flinches at the thought that she might avail herself of the new rules, too: "No thanks." Throughout, he presents a view of men as virile, prowling predators and of women as gentle, jealous keepers of social calendars who simply don't feel monogamy to be as much of a challenge as men do. (His wife tells him that the women she knows aren't that interested in sex.) And thus he frets over a "never-ending battle of the sexes," which might be boiled down to: "Men Like To Spread Seed, Women Get Jealous." My god, the man has put his finger on it! And only how many decades after Charles Darwin did it better?

The piece has myriad problems. But the main problem is that it offers nothing new. Weiss is deeply enamored of what he takes to be his own willingness to challenge cultural mores about sex, yet the piece could have as easily been written in 1978 as today. Weiss' cultural references are antiquated—Yoko and John, Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife—and so are his attitudes. (Prime example: He fantasizes about persuading waitresses in New York that it would be "cool" to have an affair.) There's certainly plenty still to be said about the complexities of monogamy in married life, but at this point the starting point for the conversation should be a lot more advanced than Weiss'. It certainly would have to include the fact that women may well find monogamy to be almost as difficult as men do. One 2007 study found that among married couples with children, some 37 percent of women and 40 percent of men cheated. That's not a huge discrepancy. I pressed to the end hoping for some, any, fresh insight (For example: Has feminism changed women's relationship to sex and marriage? Do couples raised in the post-feminist age deal with their sexual appetites with more clarity than boomer couples do?)—but I kept finding only the same "truth" you find in Philip Roth novels of late: a rather fuzzy picture of the darkness of sexual desire.

To put it plainly, it's tiresome to read men dilate at length on their own hemmed-in libidos while refusing to seriously examine three things: 1) the possibility that unfettered sexual freedom might not actually solve all their emotional problems or satisfy their fantasies, 2) the possibility that their wives might feel the same complicated desire for sexual novelty, and 3) that one consequence of sexual freedom is jealousy. Weiss coyly refers to his desire to have a threesome with a blogger named Debauchette and waxes enthusiastic about breaking down sexual taboos and setting up free-loving polyamorous compounds. (Been there, done that, circa 1971, no?) He goes on and on about sexual variety but doesn't characterize just what it is about variety that's appealing to him and his anonymous peers: the possibility of a brutal, depersonalized sexual encounter? The sheer bounty of potential partners? Novelty itself? All of the above? I'd love to read some, well, probing writing about this.

Basically, the piece lost me as soon as it became clear that Weiss wanted to have zipless fucks while his wife was home planning his social calendar. (Talk about presenting yourself in an anti-erotic light.) It lost me again when I reached the end and found that he never paused to complicate his assumption that having sex with more women would make him happier—and be as mysterious and thrilling as his fantasies. Sex is rarely frictionless. Let's assume that—and then ask what it might be like to be more honest about it.

Read more XX Factor reaction to Philip Weiss' New York magazine article.

The Limits of the Eight Belles Metaphor

Obvious though it may be, the metaphor didn't strike me until others pointed it out. The first thought I had when I saw the news was, "How awful." I was a horseback rider as a kid and obsessively read any horse-related tale I could find—from Black Beauty to truly awful YA series like Thoroughbred. Thoroughbred starred a young girl named Ashleigh with dreams of being a jockey and her horse, an underdog filly named Wonder. Ashleigh was the only one to see Wonder's spirit and potential (natch) and the only one with the sensitivity to ride Wonder to victory (natch.) Together, they became a winning machine (natch), competing with and regularly defeating the boys, equine and human alike. A wonderful, schlocky story that gave me a completely distorted view of the horseracing world—and gender relations.

That sort of childhood reading material and the "Girls can do anything!" message that was reinforced by my parents, my teachers, and television (the "girl joins and dominates the boys' sports team" was a standard story line in many a Saturday morning TV show, including Saved by the Bell) shaped my early views on gender. One of the hardest life lessons for me to learn is that females, both in the animal and human worlds, can't do everything males can. Eight Belles' name is now up there with Ruffian, a great female horse who ran herself to death in a race against the boys. There are limits to the usefulness of this new angle to the old politics-as-horse-race metaphor, though. Humans don't have to be put down when their legs break. They can race again.

Gender and Experience, Again

Like you, Emily, I've been trying to figure out how Hillary pulled off the feat of becoming the candidate of the non-elite. How did she conquer the social condescension that, as Jeff Greenfield's smart piece points out, Orwell diagnosed as an occupational hazard of high-minded liberals? Much as I hesitate to play the gender card again, I think maybe the secret lies in sex—and age. Yes, Clinton went to Wellesley and to Yale Law School, and people in Arkansas felt she put on airs. Back in the '90s, people in D.C.—and across the country—joined in finding her a snooty and patronizing reformer, and what efforts she made to tone it down convinced nobody. Here's what has changed. She was younger then—her White House years began when she was Obama's current age. She's a postmenopausal woman now. As a credential for membership in (or at least solidarity with) the non-elite, hormonal shifts fit the bill—certainly when the candidate in question is up against a vigorous, handsome young guy whose upward trajectory shows no signs of slowing. I could riff some more about how the post-fertile identity alters a woman's social status, how menopause is about coping with change that isn't chosen—is beyond one's control—and how that might speak to those who feel unprivileged, as though perks have passed them by. Or is this ridiculous?

McCain's Blindness on Equal Pay

I want to say amen to your excellent post about McCain and equal pay, Emily. The only thing I'd add is this: I found McCain's comments about the bill particularly dismaying because he invoked an old canard—that women are less qualified than their male peers, and that (by implication) is mainly what keeps their pay low—instead of dealing with the possiblity that discrimination exists.  While campaigning in Kentucky, the AP reported, McCain expressed his oppposition to the equal pay bill by noting that what women need is more training:

"They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else," McCain said. "And it's hard for them to leave their families when they don't have somebody to take care of them.

"It's a vicious cycle that's affecting women, particularly in a part of the country like this, where mining is the mainstay; traditionally, women have not gone into that line of work, to say the least," he said.

Now, to be fair, this quote is taken out of context and I don't know what he said before it. But as a sentiment, this simply doesn't deal with the reality of gender discrimination in our country. Nor will more training help any woman who is being paid less than she should be because of it. McCain's proposal is not a viable alternative, in other words; it's a form of putting one's head in the sand and redirecting voters away from the real, if vexed, issue: that sexism still exists, and we need to find a thoughtful legal way of dealing with it.

 Read the rest of the equal-pay conversation on XX Factor.

That's What She Said ...

Here’s a thoughtful piece from Courtney E. Martin at the American Prospect responding to Linda Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece from last Friday about the ways in which young feminists resent Hillary Clinton out of a semi-Freudian need to destroy their mothers. For those scoring along at home, Debra Dickerson fires off a round for Hirshman’s team here at Mother Jones.

Anyone but me find it hilarious that every feminist writer of every generation evidently comes to this battle with claims that they are interested in pursuing a deeper, more nuanced conversation about gender, just before they let loose with the scattershot accusations about the other side? Martin accuses some “older women” of dismissing women’s body issues, for instance, as “frivolous.” While Dickerson takes aim at “young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty.” I get it that Martin’s criticism is couched in a larger discussing about the need to learn from one another and that Dickerson’s going for comedic effect. But their continued talking past each other raises the question about what a “nuanced” conversation about our differences can possibly look like, if every assertion about those differences—be it from Hirshman, Martin, or your mamma—is instantly disparaged as peddling in reductive stereotypes.

Black Widow Freed Because Oops, No Murder

After we toast Danica, let's raise a glass (of milk, in case anyone's watching) to welcome Cynthia Sommer home from jail. As far as I can tell, Sommer spent 2½ years in lockup for getting breast implants and hanging out in bars. A San Diego jury heard a lot about what a tramp she supposedly was; Sommer even started dating again after her husband died! Then, they found her guilty of murdering him. According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors presented 34-year-old Sommer as an older woman (OK, it's Southern California, but still) who offed the 23-year-old Marine "to collect on his $250,000 life insurance policy and begin a new, fun-filled life'' in Florida, with new boobs and multiple boyfriends. Only—their bad—it turns out Sommer "was jailed 876 days for an arsenic-poisoning murder that prosecutors now say didn't occur.''

If only she'd been thinking ahead, she would have saved her pennies for a better attorney, because the first knucklehead she hired opened the door to a description of her "lifestyle'' that was so inflammatory the judge ruled she'd been deprived of a fair trial. He overturned her conviction for murder with special circumstances, which carries a mandatory life sentence. "The evidence about her breasts, drinking and sexual activity 'became like an overwhelming cloud that covered everything,' " her new defense attorney, Allen Bloom, told the Times. Yet Sommer was kept in jail—and separated from her four children, ages 8, 12, 13, and 16—while waiting for a retrial. Until last week, when new tests showed no evidence of arsenic in her husband's tissue samples. Bloom had already lined up experts who were going to testify that Todd Sommer's death could have been caused by the diet pills he'd been taking. And prosecutors were still interviewing the neighbors, hoping to find some additional dirt on Sommer. Maybe, while she's deciding whether to sue them, each prosecutor should be made to wear a big A pinned to his or her chest, like Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter. Except in that case, of course, the A stood for adulterer.

Not Taking a Shine to Yahoo

I admit, I read the occasional InStyle, if only to look at what clothes I'd buy if still in possession of my pre-childbearing waistline (slimmer) and budget (fatter). And I am, after all, writing from Slate's very own no-boys-allowed blog. But the problem with women's-only content is not the concept. It's the execution. And Shine comes off looking like all women care about is sex, shoes, and "surprisingly cute wall decals."

I don't come to women-focused media outlets necessarily looking for the latest on Iraq. And sure, I like sex, and I like shoes. But there's an enormous middle ground that sites like Shine don't make use of. Rising food prices affect every trip I make to the grocery store. The housing crisis has me worried about my home's value. How the hell did no one notice that hundreds of women and children were being treated like chattel in Texas? You can take almost any front-page story and cast it in a way that's meaningful to women.

But at least the site doesn't totally ignore the news of the world. There is a tiny area that links to news headlines, and it's called the "Cheat Sheet." In essence, "We know you are too dumb to care what's going on in the world, so here's some news to help you carry on a conversation with your husband when he tires of hearing you talk about Rob Lowe's nanny."

The Bad-Boy Image

Speaking of overshadowed men, and going back Hanna’s interest in pols who don’t cheat, I’d been wondering today whether Obama was perhaps squirming a little, and his staffers might be casting about for a way to cultivate at least a bit of a bad boy image. I mean, McCain’s out there boasting about his demerits at the Naval Academy, even as Maureen Dowd makes Barack sound like a sissy compared to Hillary. It’s not just that he abstains from chocolate (shades of Harvard’s head virgin, who forgoes dessert, too, as Melinda noted). He can’t bowl, and “genteely” sips beer from a bottle. On top of that, he’s got that Times article—the one speculating that he was actually a much tamer teenager than his memoir suggests—to live down. The obvious tough-guy image enhancer is out of bounds: Obama can’t come out swinging at the former goody-goody girl who lately seems more macho than he does, without appearing a hypocrite. But hey, a real alpha male sticks to his gentlemanly guns, right? A drawn-out primary can at least prove his endurance.

It's About Families, Not Females

More on the Terrible Horrible No Good Billable Hour

Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)

One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.

Whatever You Say, Senator

So Maybe Sexism Is More of an Obstacle Than Racism

More on That Hypothetical Gender Speech

Judith,

I think you make a great point that we can get a little too caught up talking about politicians' sexual peccadilloes when there are larger issues at stake. But I can't see even an imaginary speech by Hillary tackling some of the topics you address. And I think that illustrates some of the differences between race and gender that we've been talking about—I'm particularly reminded of Melinda's post, about the black woman who said she didn't have much in common with white women. There's a lack of shared experience. Most if not all blacks, regardless of their education or socioeconomic class, have felt the sting of racism at some point. And most if not all whites, for better or worse, right or wrong, have felt threatened by blacks, be it from ignorance, or angry rhetoric like that of Jeremiah Wright, or affirmative action.

In his speech, Barack Obama was trying to help each side understand where the other was coming from and get us past it. He called out the Rev. Wright and his own white grandmother. But some of the topics you suggest in a hypothetical speech on gender are still white-hot among women, and whatever Clinton could say would only be divisive. Abortion? Her long-established philosophy of "safe, legal, and rare" is something that I can accept, even as I disagree with her. She should leave it at that. Roughly half of all American women are anti-abortion, and we're not changing our minds. Subsidized day care? That's sure to stir up another battle in the Mommy Wars: Women who choose to stay at home aren't going to be pleased to see their husband's paycheck shrink (in the form of higher taxes) so that two-income families don't have to pay for child care. A shorter workweek? Well, OK, I could live with that. Let's at least make hiring a housekeeper tax-deductible.

To the Black Woman Who Says We Aren't Sisters

Now, that does make me feel sort of rejected—I feel like her sister and she doesn't feel like mine -- but it's interesting, too: Why is it that I'm imagining I'd feel kinship with women from Jupiter, and she doesn't see the female experience as all that formative? Donna Brazile told me the answer once, I think. This was when I was just starting to work on my book on how women make electoral decisions. (Short answer: Other-than-rationally, just like men do. Not unlike decisions in dating, really. Which is why our dutiful, "Oh, my top issue is health care,' answers to pollsters don't always mean that much.) Anyway, what Donna said was, you know, women don't vote as a block because we never had to go through something like the slave experience together. So the biological and cultural deal that I consider such a sealing bond just doesn't compare. (Does it?) My son who is mad for movies had us watch Sixth Sense for I think it was the 234^th time this last weekend, and you know how the ghosts go away after the little boy finally listens to them? Cheesy, OK. But on race and gender, I do think there's a lot more we have to hear from one another. 

The Illusion of Catharsis

I thought I was onboard with Emily about all the benefits of openly airing this buried anger and rage about race and gender. I’d been arguing for months that it was past time to lance this boil and just have it out in the streets about how mad everyone in the Democratic Party feels.

Perhaps I’ve read one too many livid blogs today or listened in on a few too many enraged racially charged debates this weekend, but I am starting to go a little wobbly at the ankles. Can someone remind me what’s truly served by a “conversation” about race and gender for its own sake? Are we progressing toward something better here? Is all this dialoguing fostering some new paradigm for talking about personal identity and politics? Or is this just the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end? The kind that starts when some guy in a bar says, “Wanna hear what your real problem is?”

Obama's Sexist Dog Whistle

Barack Obama brought up Hillary Clinton's period! "I understand that Senator Clinton periodically,'' (See? He said it!) "when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal." Clearly, he was saying his rival ought to look into hormone replacement therapy.

What, this sexism is too subtle for you? Not for pro-Clinton blogger Taylor Marsh, who accused Obama of "demeaning women,'' or even straight-down-the-middle Andrea Mitchell, who said on MSNBC, "When you start describing a female candidate as being 'down' and 'striking back,' I don't know, that's a little edgy, don't you think?" Karen Stabiner, the author of well-received books about single-sex education and breast cancer, wrote that when she heard what Obama had said, "That was the moment when I, and other women of a certain age, all over the country, winced. The change candidate had embraced one of the oldest clichés in the book—that women are held hostage by emotion, that we can't be trusted with the big decisions because, depending on our age, we're either on the rag or having a hot flash.''

Beyond this accusation itself—so ludicrous my eyes might twirl right out of their sockets—what makes me wince is how such claims undermine actual affronts to women: One in six American women has been raped or endured an attempted rape, and stories about pregnant women killed by their boyfriends are commonplace. Female employees in this country made 77 cents for every $1 a man earned—in 2007, for heaven's sake—and the workplace has not, alas, been utterly transformed since as a college kid, three male supervisors at my summer job in a Texas bank called me in to say I should be wearing a real bra instead of camisoles. Then there was the boss who guessed my weight every time I walked by his office—with such accuracy that, had the whole newspaper thing not worked out, he could always have joined the circus. So far be it from me to say women should declare victory in the war on stuff that shouldn't happen but does, still, all the time. Yet I'm not sure that Clinton supporters who read sexism into Obama's recent remarks are helping her candidacy. And wouldn't we hate to look back on this presidential race as the moment feminists themselves undid some of the progress that has been made—by reviving the defunct stereotype of the hysterical female, strategically overreacting to imagined offense?

Hillary Is Losing Women

I don't think the point is that women are not responding to her the way African-American voters are responding to Obama—though that is true—but that no demographic is responding to her as it is to him. The guy won every income group, the Catholic swing-voters everybody said he'd have trouble with, independents by a mile, and Latinos. Which is a blow to identity politics but not, as I see it, to women; on the contrary, isn't it a testament to how far we've come that just because she is a woman doesn't mean she's automatically our woman? Yesterday, when a friend of mine said she didn't understand how any woman could decide not to support Hillary, all I could think was that that made no more sense to me than if she'd said she didn't understand not voting for the white person.