The XX Factor: What women really think.

When a Man Loves a Virtual Woman

A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:

A few months back, the New York Times ran an alternately fascinating and creepy story about Japanese men who were in love with their life-size anime plush dolls, and shamelessly took them everywhere—to the beach, to karaoke (perhaps singing Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll”?), to the all-you-can-eat salad bar. Today, Boing Boing touches on another bizarre Japanese dating trend, this one two-dimensional: a video game girlfriend ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Cougars: Show Some Thanks to Barely-There Science!

A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:

Breaking news ladies: Cougars are oh-so-real. Yep, science has proved it. In fact, the word “cougar” is basically a scientific term now. Thanks, science! ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Between-Diaper Spenders

Samantha, Rachael, yes: Women over 40 are, if not yet terminal, terminally uncool. That seems to be the sole reason that More magazine has not been able to attract the kind of advertisers you would think would sign up for a magazine with 1.3 million readers whose average income is $93,000. Ironically, More's advertising staple of processed food manufacturers has helped insulate them from the ad page drop-off suffered by magazines that rely on luxury brands. But the notions behind this de facto ad boycott are themselves antiquated and based on decades-old thinking about consumers ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)

Rich Older Women Want More Than Pringles

I can’t quite get my head around the piece about More magazine in today’s New York Times. Apparently the fact that a magazine aimed at women over 40 is pulling readers who are women over 40—and rich ones, at that—is off-putting to advertisers. Silly me, I thought all advertisers cared about was money! But even though “the average More reader makes about $93,000, around $30,000 more than the average for Vogue, Allure or Harper’s Bazaar, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence,” the ads it runs are notably low end: “The July/August issue’s ads included Crystal Light, Pringles, Coffee-Mate, packaged meals from Oscar Mayer, Bertolli, Tyson and Marie Callender’s, and two liquor ads—for wines under $10. Oh, and Friskies.” (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)

India and China's Missing Girls

The New York Times Magazine published a special issue yesterday devoted to women in developing countries. The entire issue is extremely well done, but I was particularly intrigued by an article about the "daughter deficit" in India. The gender imbalance in China and India—due to cultural preferences for sons that caused parents to abort daughters and even resort to infanticide—is something that's been written about for several years. But contrary to popular assumptions, the "daughter deficit" is more the fault of the rich than of the poor. What's more, when women are given more power, they sometimes use it to favor boys ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Sugar Is Probably Not Crack

A post from Double X writer Julia Feisenthal:

Jessica, what I found so odd about the Mister Softee article was the language used to describe the allure of the ice cream man .... (Read more in Double X.)

Mister Softee: The Latest Menace to Society

Kudos to the New York Times for providing an endless supply of parenting trend stories to irritate and delight. There's a doozy in today's paper, about moms and dads who are trying to oust ice cream trucks from their local parks .... (Read more in Double X.)

Why Can't Doctors Admit it When They Don't Have an Answer?

How sad that Summer Stiers, the young woman suffering from an as-yet uncategorized illness who was profiled so heart-breakingly by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine, has died. At least she ended up at the National Institutes of Health where the doctors tried—unsuccessfully—to puzzle out the reason for her many medical maladies.

Why Did Summer Stiers Die?

A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig, a contributor for the New York Times Magazine (and Sam's mom!):

The death two weeks ago of Summer Stiers, a young woman I met last year and wrote about at length for the New York Times Magazine, made me think about how hard it was for her to get anyone to take her perplexing illness seriously. Whatever ailed Summer seemed to cause a wide range of symptoms, which is why nobody could quite figure out what was wrong with her. She bled from her intestines; her kidneys failed; she had chronic pain in her legs and back; she developed severe toxemia while pregnant and lost her baby; her bones were damaged; she had frequent mental blackouts attributed to seizures; she had lost one eye, and the retina in the other was damaged; she was profoundly fatigued; her hair was completely gray, even though she was only 31 ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

Girl-on-Girl Theatrical Action

Ann, I think you're right that the Times article on gender bias in the theater may have leaned a bit hard on the women-keeping-their-sisters-down aspect of the original study. (I also think you're right that the best thing we can do, as audience members, is actually get out there and support quality work by buying tickets.)

But I also think there are elements of this study that should give us pause. When Sands sent those scripts out to producers, directors, and literary managers, she found that both female and male respondents were likely to rate a play with a female writer's name attached to be of lower quality—not just less economically viable, but actually of lower artistic merit—than the same script with a man's name attached ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

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.)

Girls, Guns 'n' Ethics

The Taming of the Times

The NYT Publishes What Could Be An Onion Parody, and I Feel Bad About It

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.)

The Mystery of the Soldier in the Pink Boxers

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!)

Keep It Simple, MoDo

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!)

Did Women Cause Edmund Andrews' Mortgage Mess?

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!)

Letters to Cleo

Nina, I hadn't heard that archaeologists may be on the verge of discovering Cleopatra's tomb until I read your post this morning. By coincidence, last night I was reading a chapter about Cleopatra in Christina Nehring's forthcoming book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. Nehring's contrarian argument complements Schiff's essay nicely. She argues that in domesticating love into egalitarian marriages, by emphasizing equality and intimacy rather than power-differentials and erotic distance, we've lost that special sizzle. Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Antony constitute one of her prime examples of a love match that really works, a love match filled with games and drama:

Convinced that docility in the life of the affections is the road to dreariness, Cleopatra offers Antony a smorgasbord of strategic contradictions. When Antony wishes to ignore a messenger, she orders him to pay attention; when he wishes to lounge in her arms, she reports herself missing; when he desires to go to sea-battle against his enemy Octavius Caesar, she accompanies him, only to flee at the worst moment possible, prompting him to withdraw his ships after her own, and humiliating him before the military world.

As he acknowledges to her after, "My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,/ and thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit/Thy full supremacy thou knew'st."

It's The Rules, the Nile Edition. Except that somehow in Cleopatra's case, the game-playing does seem like a form of strength rather than passivity scripted to look like authority. As you point out, Nina, we see Cleopatra as powerful, sexual, and forward. I can't think of all that many contemporary cultural figures who share her traits. I'm curious: Do you, like Nehring, think that her capriciousness is a crucial part of her appeal?

Going Dutch (on Bikes)?

Reading this much-e-mailed New York Times story on the joys of traveling through the five boroughs on a stylish, yet inertial Dutch bicycle, I was struck by how gender-specific all of the counsel seemed to be. To wit:

Can the bicycle, the urban answer to the wild mustang, slow down and put fenders on? Can the urban cyclist, he of the ragtag renegade clothes or shiny spandex, grow up and put on a tie?

Good question—but “Yes, she can” was clearly not the answer that was intended. And later:

How should you dress to bike to work? Which bike has an acceptable level of manliness? These are tricky questions. As the parade of 10-speeds, mountain bikes and, more recently, fixed-gear designs knocked the upright, old-school bicycle off the road, accouterments like fenders and chain guards came to be seen—by men, at least—as eccentric. If a guy is going to get on a bike, he wants to imagine he’s Lance Armstrong, not Pee-wee Herman.

No doubt. But, in the forward-thinking Netherlands, where 27 percent of the public rides a bike (it’s only one percent of all trips made in the U.S. annually), surely women ride, too? And as someone who has personally struggled with finding outfits to wear that won’t billow and bunch and flash passersby as I two-wheel it to work (save pencil skirt and rainy days), I know I could have used some tips, too.

Guns and Roses, and David Brooks

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you’re not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

I think that’s pretty accurate, despite Dowd’s typically scattershot treatment. But later, from the mouth of Dowd’s Times bedfellow David Brooks:

She should put away Thunder and Lightning. ... Washington is sensually avoidant. The wonks here like brains. She should not be known for her physical presence, for one body part.

Part of why I like Washington so much is its nonrunway atmosphere, the slightly schlubby khaki culture that puts a premium on policy rather than couture aesthetics. Yet its conservatism does translate to gender roles, especially in fields as dominated by men as politics and journalism, or—where I sit—political journalism. Brooks, et al., provide the anti-peer pressure, the incentive to flatten hipness or personality, or treat each as the opposite of smarts. In D.C., just wearing a colored blazer makes one feel a bit flamboyant. (A group of motivated, high-octane girlfriends and I just finished debating my recent moratorium on purchasing clothing that is “not appropriate for work”—more on that later.)

In the end, Dowd counseled Obama to be herself, assuming that her fluency on the intricacies of climate legislation (a facile proxy for things wonkish) will make its own impression, and noting, “the only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps." This was comforting news to one who feared that the hardnosed lawyer and hospital executive was being forgotten in all of the risotto-scooping and playhouse constructing (by choice!) that has peppered her schedule of late.

But it still irks me that Brooks seems more cowed by the FLOTUS’ guns than he has any right to be. Who’s dividing whom into constituent parts? Oh, right—"Washington."... Obama’s toned arms look great, but are probably the most androgynous, least sexual part of a woman’s anatomy. So his complaint is not really about inappropriate sexuality; there’s nothing shameful (in America’s puritan sense) about being known for that “one body part.” His beef is in fact about power, of the incredibly banal corporeal variety. So Obama's "physical presence" threatens him. Yawn—we covered this with the Williams sisters. As euphemistic as he attempts to come across, I think Brooks is just being sexist. He should be more afraid of her pillow talk on Medicaid. Thoughts?