The XX Factor: What women really think.

Getting in on the Friday Night Lights Game

At the risk of an overdose of Friday Night Lights fandom here at Slate, I'd like to link up to the great FNL "TV Club." And what could be more fitting here on XX than leaping to a defense of Tami in her dealing with the JumboTron drama. I don't see the humiliation that made Hanna cringe, or real wrong-headedness, either. Yes, as Meghan and Emily have emphasized, it was clear from the start that Tami would lose her fight to put academics above football. It was also clear that Eric knew she would lose, and I agree that her opponents are (alas) on pretty solid ground: Donors should be able to expect to get what they thought they paid for.

What wasn't so clear was 1) whether Eric was setting Tami up for a fall by not telling her what he thought, and 2) how blind she really was about her uphill battle. The answers, which I thought emerged in this latest episode, are that both of them—he more consciously than she—felt that making a very public point about Dillon's pigskin-skewed values was worth Tami blowing her honeymoon as principal. (In fact, she surely won points with her teachers by lobbying on behalf of supplies and staff!) The coach wasn't about to talk her though her position as she agonized and vented to him, because he knew Tami had to proceed in her own inimitably passionate way. Nor did she really need to be told by her husband—teary though she was—that, despite the loss, it had been worth it. On some level, she knew it. And it's what Dillon (and we and Tami herself) expect from her.

It's interesting that Eric did need to talk through his quarterback dilemma with Tami. These aren't quite the gender stereotypes we're used to, especially in the red-state realm: husbands who ask for directions (but hold back from giving them) and wives ready to trust their own guts and plow ahead. Here, too, I think Eric is totally (and rightly) prepared to lose, while knowing that he, like Tami, has the priorities straight. In Dillon, the Taylors are the rare couple with the luxury, and security, not to have to cling quite so hard to the football ethos of winning at any cost.

Virgins: Not as Dumb as You Think (Or Are They?)

Anybody else read the NYT Magazine piece on Harvard's intentional virgins? It was in many ways right off-the-rack: Not all young people who are virgins on purpose are dum-dum religious nuts. Some of them—brace yourselves—have even infiltrated Harvard. And have complicated philosophical reasons for this lifestyle choice. Too complicated, in fact, even to take a stab at explaining. But don't sweat it, because underneath—who would have guessed?—they're religious nuts, too! With hilarious hang-ups, as you'll note when I torture Harvard's Head Virgin with completely disrespectful questions about just how far she'll go. So ciao for now and see you next time, when I pull the wings off butterflies. ...

OK, so it infuriated me, but it did sound one hopeful note. When the head virgin (who doesn't even order dessert after lunch, poor sensually starved child) debated a campus sex blogger (who voraciously gobbles every crumb of her ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote, get it?) the two women showed mutual respect. They declined to supply the crowd with a catfight and refused to live up to their billing: Harvard's Jezebel Takes On Campus Virgin Mary. "The women themselves saw their encounter as a meeting of two feminist positions,'' the story says, and good for them. Afterwards, they probably headed out for a glass of water and a chocolate martini. Oh, and according to their chronicler, the men of Harvard indicated that after some serious reflection, they would indeed rather marry Mary Ann than Ginger—though I'm not sure either of them would say yes.

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?

Who Was Hillary Kidding on Meet the Press?

Back to Hillaryland (because who can stay out for long?): Who is she kidding when she said to Tim Russert yesterday, about herself and Obama, "I don't think either of one of us want to inject race and gender in this campaign"? I'm pretty much in favor of giving Clinton the benefit of the doubt on her recent statement about the comparative roles of MLK and LBJ, as Josh Marshall does in this post. I'd like to think she was being boneheaded rather than deliberately challenging King's legacy (which would constitute temporary political insanity). And I think it's over the top to say that pointing out that the Republicans will use Obama's drug use against him is akin to painting him as a "stereotypical black drug dealer." Obama is about as far removed from that stereotype as you can get. And a realistic assessment of his weak points in the general election is just as important as assessing his strengths. But I worry that Clinton and her people are tiptoeing up to the line of injecting race into the campaign--I hope at their peril. And they have certainly crossed it in injecting gender. They did that a long time ago, when they started preparing "handmade signs that read, 'I can be president' to hand to young girls, as John Dickerson reported. 

 I know that part of politics is calling the sky green when it's blue. But this disingenuity plays right into the case against Clinton that Christopher Hitchens sketches here, and this fact check today belying the Clintons' claims that Sen. Chuck Hagel drafted the 2002 Iraq war resolution that Hillary voted for, and that Hagel "said it was not a vote for war,” as she said in another problematic Meet the Press moment. Also, as my dad points out to me, Hillary was aggressive and confrontational with Russert, at exactly the moment when she's supposed to be warmer and more likeable. Is that the first female candidate conundrum that she's stuck with, or a playing out of her particular weaknesses? Both, I suppose, but today it feels like more the latter.

Can We Build It?

Courtesy of Feminist Law Professors, a grain-of-salt study that suggests something pretty interesting: Little girls may want to play with boy toys more than Bratz or Barbies. Yeah, yeah the focus group was funded by Bob the Builder and his bosses. But I’m not all that surprised to see little girls wanting to play with things that do stuff. I saw the same thing in action last week over Thanksgiving: My sons and nieces happily kicking it with the boy toys, while the Hello Kitty paraphernalia slid between the sofa cushions.

Unlike Ann Bartow, I myself was an inveterate hair-brusher. And if they ever build a Sandra Day O’Barbie, I will style her ‘til the cows come home. But this is something that bears watching, I think.

Power and Empathy

I'm a fan of Shankar Vedantam's "Department of Human Behavior" column in the Washington Post, which reported yesterday on some recent social psychology research that perhaps sheds new light on tough Hillary, and the spectacle of the candidates in general. The experience of being powerful erodes empathy, a study published in Psychological Science (which I haven't actually seen) seems to suggest. Volunteers who were made to feel like top dogs, in contrast to those who were primed to recall situations of powerlessness, very quickly lost the capacity to see things from other people's perspectives. The experiment (which involves drawing the letter E on foreheads) sounds rather ridiculous, but has a certain explanatory, well, power. Here may be another reason that the same candidates who are so exquisitely attuned to the views of others while they're desperately chasing votes become more blinkered once they're in office-and a reason that toughness can eclipse sensitivity in the front-runner in the race, regardless of gender. (So much for femaleness as a vaunted incubator of empathy; here's grist for the notion that the experience of subordinate status, not two X chromosomes, may be a key influence.) The result, as the researchers observe, is a paradox: The very quality that often draws us to support leaders-their ability to see beyond themselves-is all too likely to fade once we've anointed them.

What Are You Laughing At?

The fact that our current president's cowboy ways have been so thoroughly discredited is still another reason I can't see Clinton's biggest obstacle as her womanly lack of a little more snap in the old towel. Wouldn't the stereotypically female virtue of prudence, and maybe even a little well-placed aversion to risk, be a welcome relief right about now? Even in full riled-up feminist mode, I can't see that when she has her first bad week of the campaign, it's because some would-be supporters just woke up and smelled the Black Orchid. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made plenty of people crazy with hatred, too. And I guess the bottom line for me is the many women I meet who genuinely seem to feel guilty about not liking Hillary better; does sisterhood require that we support the woman in the race? Or put another way, are those who say they'd like a woman - just not this woman -- necessarily bitchy phonies?

Daring Girls, Derivative Toys

More frivolously occupied than Dahlia or Emily have been, I spent a bit of my weekend flipping through The Daring Book for Girls. I picked it up after my daughter had written about it for her high-school newspaper—and after The New York Times had mocked it as yet more helicopter parenting for our technology-dependent indoor kids, not a manifesto in favor of daredeviltry at all. My daughter's take was different. She pointed out that the book, billed as "the no-boys-allowed guide to adventure," is actually boy-based and imitative at its core (tips for building scooters, etc), with girl frills around the edges. And it's not very new, she noted: Tomboyishness has always been derivative, taking cues from the guys.

I buy both views of the book, which looks old-fashioned but taps right into the current micromanagement of youth culture. Once upon a time—or so I recall—the tomboy impulse was also defiant, a girl's way of flouting peer and parental expectations. But when adults get into the act, packaging boy stuff specially for girls, the result all too often gets cloyingly tame, to nobody's obvious benefit-except the manufacturer's (or publisher's). An article in today's Times reports on another example. Trading cards, a boy craze for decades, are suddenly being marketed to heretofore generally uninterested girls. The new girl-targeted card game, called Bella Sara, sounds tedious as well as sexist. Featuring pastel-colored ponies, unicorns, and "caring" messages ("use your love to bring peace to the world"), Bella Sara evidently skirts the competition and trading that define boy card games like Magic; it's about cleaning and feeding horses (on a special website, using secret codes on the cards). And it's about buying ever more cards (because the codes can only be used once). Here's where The Daring Book perhaps has advice the whole family could find liberating: "Forget asking your parents for a horse; ask for a ping-pong table instead."

Hillary Clinton: Tough, Stoic, or Scary?

If we need any reminder that it's not easy to be the first popular female candidate for the American presidency, it arrived Monday in the form of an announcement by the AP that Hillary Clinton was leading in yet another poll. This one? The candidate likely to make the "scariest" Halloween costume. Some 37% of the respondents to the survey chose Hillary as their front-runner. (Giuliani was second, with 14%. More key details here.)

The fright-mask news arrives roughly a month after it was announced that Clinton had led in a Pew poll asking respondents about the relative "toughness" of the various candidates: In it, some 67% of Democratic-leaning voters said that Hillary was the first candidate who came to mind when they heard the word "tough." By comparison, only 39% of Republican-leaning voters thought of Giuliani when they heard the word "tough." (Yet he was considered the "toughest" Republican candidate.) All this might seem to be good news for Clinton: after all, over the past year, she has labored hard to burnish her "tough" persona, so as to stave off the perception that a woman--and a Democrat, to boot!--would prove soft on matters of foreign policy. It'd be easy to think that it had finally paid off.

But I've been wondering all this time whether a "tough" backlash was on its way (maybe just because I've been reading Susan Faludi's flawed but sometimes piercingly insightful The Terror Dream). And just last Friday a crucial American institution paved the way for said backlash. In a segment entitled, "Is it OK for women to cry" -- pegged to Ellen DeGeneres' on-air breakdown--the Today Show broadcast images of Clinton giving a speech and shaking hands and confidently pronounced that many people think "that she is too stoic, that she doesn't reveal enough of herself"--on its way to elaborating on the communicative benefits of crying in public. If media coverage of the last election was filled with accusations about girlie-men, will this one be full of talk about manly-girls? Let's hope not. In the meantime, here's an article that briefly discusses the latter group (scroll down); apparently we see them as "pretenders." Sound like a familiar critique of Clinton?