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A guest post from Linda Hirshman:
With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time Magazine takes the occasion of South Carolina
Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that
“Marriage Matters.”
Why does marriage matter? Not of course because of the harm to the
deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That
would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.
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Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the
only people who count ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica,
my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from
Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote
a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking
to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties,sure
we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually
being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that
marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox
scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Speaking of being bummed out, I felt oddly blue after reading Mimi Swartz’s excellent
piece in The Daily Beast about empty-nesters in the Obama administration.
Swartz, who also writes
for Double X about being
an empty nester herself, talks about (and to) White House senior adviser
Valerie Jarrett, and also offers up WH Social Secretary Desiree Rogers and First
Lady Chief of Staff Susan Sher, among others, as collective proof that
professional life isn't over for women—in some ways it's just beginning—when
their kids leave for college. This may well be true, and it's striking to see so
many redoubtable women in positions of power. I admit to a keen fascination with
Jarrett and Rogers, who live in the same apartment building on the Georgetown
canalfront and who I like to think of as popping into each other's apartments,
like the cast of Seinfeld, or Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, borrowing
clothes and gossiping ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Yes, I understand that Internet surveys are hopeless, and yes, I understand that
448,000 lonely hearts do not a random sample make, but still I ask: What is the
deal with this
OK Cupid map of debauchery by state?... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) Read More... -->
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It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out
swinging against the
institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad
nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and
John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the
nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in
an essay called "Why
Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The
reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Carte Noire, a British coffee brand, has a new online video campaign directed
smack at cubicle-dwelling, former English majors (i.e., me). Every week, a
hottie actor of the Anglo persuasion reads a love scene from a new or classic
novel. Here's Dominic West—Jimmy McNulty of The Wire—reading the scene from Pride
and Prejudice in which Mr. Darcy declares his love for Elizabeth
Bennet ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Good news to wake up to: New Delhi's highest court has decriminalized
homosexuality—for New Delhians, at least.
The law overturns Section 377 of India's penal code, a colonial-era statute
that prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man,
woman or animal" ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Sara, you said that childhood stardom
was such a destructive force for Michael Jackson, and you were right. But
the current issue of Vanity Fair has a cover
story on Heath Ledger that shows for a sensitive adult, stardom ain't all
its cracked up to be, either. This isn't a new idea: That's why "the price of
fame" is such a cliched phrase. But Peter Biskind's story of the Ledger demise
is particularly heart-stomping, since Heath was so young, so talented, and being
a movie star really did ruin every aspect of his life ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Palin is back among us not only as a God-loving runner (is that a strange shot with the flag, or what?) but also as a
hard-charging mama bear. In Todd Purdham's Vanity Fair profile, which
Dayo and Jess
dissected earlier this week, are new tidbits about Troopergate, Palin's
corrupt-seeming axing of Walt Monegan, who was Alaska's head of the Department
of Public Safety. My favorite: Twelve days before he was fired, Monegan sent
Palin an e-mail telling her that a state legislator had reported that she'd been
seen driving with her baby Trig not in an "approved car seat" ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Emily,
I agree with you that Jenny Sanford should stop talking to the media. When a
husband describes his affair with another woman not as a regrettable
indiscretion but as “a love story” and refers to said woman as his “soul mate” and to his wife as someone he’s trying to fall back
in love with, does it not beg the question: Why is Jenny Sanford trying to save
her marriage?... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I too got a huge kick out of the Sarah Palin interview in Runner’s World, Jess. I’ll
give her a break on the cheeseball factor, since I’ve found that it really is
hard to talk about running without sounding totally boring and preachy. But
you’re right, she was preaching more than the gospel of endurance. In addition
to the “faith in God” line you called out, there was also her weird
aside about calling on your rock ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Anyone who still thinks Sarah Palin isn't trying to use her enviable physique to her political advantage should read this Runner's World profile in which Palin says, "I knew my thighs were going to just throb."... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The moment when the political wife stands (or doesn’t stand) on stage
while her husband soberly confesses that he could not, try as he might,
keep it in his pants, has proven time and time again to be a moment of
high drama. This fall, it will also be the basis for a television show.
Jezebel points to the trailer for CBS’s forthcoming The Good Wife, a drama starring Julianna Margulies (aka ER’s
Nurse Hathaway) as a mother whose politician husband (played by Chris
Noth aka Mr. Big) has up and pulled a Spitzer, but landed in jail for
it ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Hanna,
perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Mark Sanford unraveling is that
when your marriage falls apart, don't call in the AP reporters. I
generally side with Ruth Marcus and
have been pro-Jenny Sanford. But the danger in claiming the moral high
ground is that the air starts to get thin, and the lack of oxygen makes
you say stupid things ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Op-Ed Divas have a showdown today about Jenny Sanford ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I don’t know that it gives me any special insight into the situation,
but I was in Copan, Honduras, the night one head of state was replaced
with another. The military had apparently cut the power and water
supply, and walking to breakfast, a friend and I saw some armed
soldiers jogging in the distance. But waking up in a Central American
country and finding that the lights don’t work, the shower won’t turn
on, and some armed men are lining up outside isn’t really cause for
surprise. I thought nothing of it ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Like Jessica, I devoured Todd Purdum's blistering report in the current issue of Vanity Fair
about Sarah Palin that draws on sniping from former John McCain aides,
shrugging statements of disownment from acquaintances in Wasilla, and
sorrowful head-shaking from the Republican intelligentsia. The
wide-ranging “profile” of the woman who almost stood second in line to
the presidency pre-empts the forthcoming book that netted the Alaskan
governor seven figures. And, having undergone the saga of the 2008
presidential campaign—particularly the post-Labor Day sprint that made
up Palin’s first months in the public spotlight—it’s astonishing to
think that there could POSSIBLY be more to the story.
And yet, writes Purdum ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Over at Slate, Johann Hari has a fascinating essay on The East, the West, and Sex, the "strange new book"—Hari's words—by journalist Richard Bernstein, which details the centuries-old history of Western men seeking out a little strange in the East ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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There are many things that I find deeply upsetting about Sarah Palin. But in the new Vanity Fair assessment of Palin's
current place in the political universe, the most disturbing thing Todd
Purdum reveals is her inability to discern or care about the truth:
At one point, trying out a debating point that she
believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin
told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their
marriage had been unable to ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From On High.
At every public appearance I make, someone raises his hand and says
something like, “It’s much harder to be a tall woman than a tall man,
right?” This point of view was echoed in the current issue of The New Yorker:
A story about the director Nora Ephron opens with a quote about being
tall from Meryl Streep, who is playing 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the
forthcoming movie Julie & Julia. "I mean, it's like having club foot ... it was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born," Streep says.
Yes, being tall has its challenges. I know, I'm 6-foot-3. But at its
heart, the constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be
public, the constant sense of walking around with a spotlight on you.
There's no place to hide, and that's genderless. Tall men are every bit
as self-conscious as tall women.
Tall women’s struggles are more subtle. You’re not aware of this
unless you’re tall, but there’s a vortex of silence around tall female
public figures, and a total dearth of tall female role models. Sure,
there are lots of very successful tall women out there. But you
probably don’t know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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