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As news of actress Brittany Murphy's death spread throughout the
blogosphere last night, her name—both spelled correctly and with a
misplaced "e"—was a trending topic on Twitter. Her 32 years were summed
up by strangers in less than 140 characters, often peppered with RIPs
and copious frowny faces. I know that this is the way people
communicate now. I'm not going to go on some sort of Andy Rooney-style
rant, or insist that their grief or upset, however brief, wasn't real.
But there's certainly a lack of gravitas when a person's death is
sandwiched between raves for Avatar and shout-outs to your girl Snooki from Jersey Shore ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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As the health care bill moves through the Senate pockmarked but alive,
my inbox includes a message from the National Women's Law Center
calling Senator Ben Nelson's abortion provision "unwise, unworkable,
and unfair." But the main part of the concession Nelson won doesn't
seem so bad to me. Under the Senate bill, states can choose to bar
abortion coverage in the new insurance exchanges. Or they can choose to
allow it. This makes abortion a state by state decision, often the best
way to prevent the issue from detonating politically ... (Read the rest of this article on DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
In response to a reality TV show about sex addiction starring Dr. Drew, Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon investigates the question
of whether or not there is such a thing as sex addiction. She comes to
no definite conclusions, but I'm going to side with skeptics like Susie
Bright and Dan Savage and say that I highly doubt that people are
"addicted" to sex. The entire enterprise has more than a whiff of woo to it, starting with the fact that the definition of "addiction" is entirely subjective ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A review from DoubleX guest writer Adrienne M. Davich:
Kent Meyers’ Twisted Tree
must be one of the most beautiful and unsettling novels of 2009.
Meyers’ novel, set in and around the small town of Twisted Tree, S.D.,
opens with a horrifying drive: I-90 killer Alexander Stoughton has
Hayley Jo Zimmerman in his passenger seat. He has chosen Hayley Jo,
like girls before her, because of her anorexia, and now he’s racing
down the highway making conversation and delighting at the drive before
the murder. His “Anas” are all the same; they all have blind faith when
they step into his car, but then, “It’s never joy and welcome when the
Anas realize who he is, never happiness that here at last is their
friend.” Anyone could mistakenly trust the wrong person, but anorexics,
to Stoughton’s mind, are predictably gullible, the most easily ensnared ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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We judge men as hypocrites all the time, so why shouldn’t women have
to live by that standard? We skewered John Edwards for talking about
the poor while getting a $400 hair cut (in retrospect, the least of his
transgressions). We condemned Mark Sanford for touting family values
and having an affair. So it matters what Jenny Sanford and Elin
Nordegren choose to do in response to this public humiliation. It
doesn’t matter absolutely. It shouldn’t be, as you say, Jessica, a feminist litmus test. But it does mean something.
There is a disturbing trend in feminism lately to turn women into passive beings. We saw it during the Botax debate, in which Gloria Steinem and other feminist leaders were arguing
that the tax on cosmetic surgery discriminated against middle-aged
women. The problem, argued Terry O’Neill, president of the National
Organization of Women, was that many women take time off to raise
children and then try to re-enter the workforce in their forties and
fifties and are deemed too old ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A New York magazine blog post calls Jenny Sanford and Elin Nordegren's choices
to leave their philandering husbands "practically groundbreaking" and
adds that "their decisions could begin to repair the damage done to
women over these past couple of years." The theory behind this
assertion (though writer Sheela Kohlatkar is careful to say they're
"not exactly" feminist heroes) is at base problematic, because it opens
up the door for judgement of women's romantic choices to be a feminist
litmus test.
Even established feminists have always been criticized for their
choice in lovers: Simone de Beauvior's relationship with Sartre, though
ostensibly an "open marriage," was deeply uneven.
"It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on
only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own," Lisa
Appignanesi notes in the Guardian. Does it make her any less of a foremother to the movement because she was dependent upon a cad?
These days it seems impossible to pass every feminist test when it
comes to love. Gloria Steinem and Jessica Valenti have been criticized
for getting married at all. Instead of applauding Nordegren and
Sanford, whose choices are dubiously feminist at best, let's not bring
the f-word into romantic choices to begin with.
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A post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck:
While the question of whether kids today are sexting up a storm or reaching new heights of prudery may never be satisfactorily answered,
the window for such wireless waggery might be closing. On Monday, the
Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case of a police
sergeant who sued his department for reading the lewd text messages he
sent on a company pager. As Emily Bazelon reported in Slate
on Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the
sexting cop and held that users have “a reasonable expectation of
privacy in their text messages” regardless of whether an employer
supplies the equipment or pays for the service.
Unfortunately, the lower court's attempts to forge progressive
digital policy may turn out to be the ambitious opening sallies in a
battle that cannot be won. If there is one common thread among the
current justices of the Supreme Court, it is a strong bias in favor of
government plaintiffs. Given the Court’s equally powerful penchant for minimalism,
electronic privacy advocates are hoping for a narrow ruling that
applies exclusively to public employers. Even so, with the arrival of
America's favorite wise Latina to the bench, right-leaning privacy foes
will likely enjoy a wider margin of victory than the usual Roberts Court 5-4 split ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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DoubleX has a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine.
Each week our contributors argue over a certain question, and we
invite you to join in. This week: At what point do catcalls, wolf
whistles. and flirtatious street comments go from compliments to
harassment? (Read our contributors' responses in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX contributor Erika Kawalek:
Today’s New York Times has an article about women who are busting their butts selling their homemade stuff on Etsy, but I want to draw your attention to Monday’s column by Michelle Slatalla, “Altered by a Sewing Machine.” It’s about her psychic battle with her brand new, fancy-schmancy sewing machine ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Given the sad failure of a No. 12 to emerge, Tiger-watchers have turned, inevitably, to meta-analysis ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Oh, what a difference a TV show can make! A couple of years ago, trend
pieces discussing the men in their 20s and 30s who like to cut a nice,
fashionable figure dismissed these men as emasculated "metrosexuals."
But the popularity and influence of the aesthetic of Mad Men intervened and now the very same "metrosexuals" are being used to shame older men who are still wed to their worn out T-shirts and Birkenstocks. If it took Jon Hamm in Brylcreem to get us here, so be it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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It’s been 10 years since Time changed its “Man of the Year” (or “woman” or “planet” of the year) award to the grating-to-my-ears "Person of the Year." Time purportedly made the switch to be “more inclusive,” as the Wikipedia entry on the topic states,
but it just serves to whitewash the fact that the recipient is usually
a guy. Why not just call it what it is? If it’s a man, he’s the Man of
the Year. If it’s a woman, then Woman of the Year.
From 1927 to 1999, women were chosen by Time four times (not counting group awards that went to “scientists” and “Middle Americans"). Since then, and with today’s announcement that the 2009 honoree is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, women haven't made much more of a dent in Time's
list. Melinda Gates was honored in 2005, but only along with husband
Bill Gates and Bono, when the award went to “Good Samaritans” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Daphne Merkin's great profile of writer/director Nancy Meyers in the upcoming issue of the New York Times Magazine
is online, and it dances around the question that everyone's been
buzzing about this week: Why aren't there more female directors in
Hollywood? (Click here for a compelling Jezebel interview with Manohla Dargis,
who attempts to tackle this one, too). Merkin tries to explain why
Meyers has succeeded where so many other women directors have failed: at
the box office. She spends a lot of time talking about how Meyers
softens all the rough edges—emotionally and aesthetically—of her films:
Whether her insistence on “softening the message”
through plush surroundings ultimately weakens the films—renders them
more glossy and insular than they need be, even for a genre that is
inherently fizzy—is a question I have debated with myself and others.
Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of the film-studies department at Wesleyan
University, says that unlike Frank Capra, who believed that victory
over something significant was essential for a comedy to be memorable,
Meyers’s movies don’t require that you think about them again. “She
makes it easy for the actors and the audience,” Basinger says. “They
can slip into their parts and be happy, and we can slip into our seats
and be happy."
This, to me, is why Meyer's films are so successful, and it's why movies like Twilight and G.I. Joe and The Bourne Identity
and pretty much any box-office blockbuster of the past 25 years has
worked. People—both men and women—go to the movies to forget themselves
and their troubles ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer K.J. Dell'Antonia:
Last fall, law firm graduates with offers to start work at
high-profile firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore (where I worked after my
own law school graduation) were offered the option of accepting
$80,000, with benefits, to defer their start date at the firm by a
year. Why? The most obvious reason is that law firms make their offers
in the fall of the preceding year, which means that these students were
made offers in the fall of 2008, well before the full impact of the
recession was felt. In casual conversation, Cravath people will tell
you that they simply had—again, thanks to the recession—far more
acceptances than they'd expected. A number of other firms found
themselves in the same position, and made similar offers, all meant to
prevent the arrival of far too many young associates at a moment when
there was less work to be done than anyone had anticipated. At first
blush, how tempting does that sound? $80,000 for, as Elizabeth Wurtzel
put it in the WSJ, "bubkes."
Except that it's not bubkes. For a student who expects to make a
career in the law, that year off could easily have an eventual cost far
greater than $80,000. The only student that $80,000 offer makes sense
for is one who (like Wurtzel, who remains primarily a writer and has a
part-time job in the law) doesn't really want the job—and that's
exactly why it's not safe to take it, and why anyone looking at a
career opportunity that seems too good to be true should look twice.
It's very difficult to succeed in a top law firm for many reasons.
Statistically, it seems to be even more difficult for women, as, even
in recent years when more women partners might have been expected since
classes with increasingly large numbers of women have competed for the
title, the percentage of female partners hovers at around 19 percent.
In a law firm culture where the ability to withstand long hours is
paramount, where Saturday night phone calls are run-of-the-mill and the
best first-year associates are on a first-name basis with the all-night
cleaning crew, taking an optional year off could brand you permanently
as a dilettante, uncommited, or worse ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
In a lighthearted piece in the New York Observer,
Simon Doonan makes the case the past decade was defined by a bunch of
appearance-obsessed cool-chasers constantly trying to outdo one
another. In a word: hipsters.
It was—drumroll—the INDIE decade. It was the decade of
desperately-trying-to-be-the-edgiest-person-on-the-planet. It was the
decade of
I-don’t-care-if-these-skinny-jeans-are-going-to-induce-a-thrombosis-
I-am-hip-therefore-I-am.
Sure, hipsterism became a thing sometime over the last few years.
But it seems like every decade has had its own alternative culture. The
'80s had punk. The '90s, grunge. Are the indie twee passengers of the L
train really so representative of the decade as a whole? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
The kids are more boring than you might think. Or that's the conclusion one is forced to reach after reading a Pew Research Center study about sexting and a University of Minnesota study about casual sex among college students.
The latter got some play in the blogs and in the mainstream media for
the headline-grabbing finding that screwing around doesn't mean you're
screwed up, but researchers also found that there isn't as much
screwing around as breathless stories about the "hook-up culture" would
have you believe. Between these two studies, it was found that only 4
precent of teenagers have sent a sexually provocative photo through
text message and 80 percent of college students' most recent sexual
encounter occurred in the context of a committed relationship.
Don't expect these studies demonstrating that kids are boring to
have much influence on the mainstream media coverage of youthful
sexuality to budge one bit from the breathless hysteria we've all come
to know and feel queasy over. As well we should. There is a line
between titillating ourselves by disingenuously judging young people
for having sex and expressing genuine concern for young people's
well-being, but the day time talk shows that cover the "hook-up
culture" not only cross that line, but they can't even see it anymore
in their rearview mirror ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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In an essay about Tiger Woods on Salon,
Mary Elizabeth Williams writes, "Congratulations, 2000s—has there been
a sleazier era since Caligula's?" and goes on to list all the sex
scandals of the aughts along with the the resulting 15 minutes of fame
for the sundry "skanks" who participated in them. She particularly
notes "the stark contrast between his demure Scandinavian wife and the
parade of Hooters girls, porn stars and possible professional escorts who've come out of the woodwork."
Williams might need to buff up on her history, as the sexual
appetite of JFK and the "stark contrast" between his wife, Jackie, and
his parade of '60s-era side dishes was just as—if not more—epic than
Tiger's "apparently bottomless sexual appetite." JFK's mistresses also
cashed in on their liasons with the president, just as Tiger's girls
are trying to get theirs: Judith Exner wrote a book about her relationship with Kennedy in 1977.
What has changed in the past 50 years is not that powerful men sleep
around as much as they want or that some women will try to capitalize
off that power. It's that the cycle happens within days, rather than
within decades, of the scandals breaking ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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So, the Octomom is giving out parenting advice. (And banal advice at that. You’d think after 14 kids you could come up with something more insightful than “good manners, good role models and a good education.”) Doing something to excess doesn’t automatically translate into doing it well. What’s next? Dating advice from Tiger Woods?
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
Vanessa at Feministing.com today draws attention to a recent Lady Gaga interview in the L.A. Times
that does an incredible job of articulating the larger meaning behind
Gaga’s shape-shifting, MTV award-winning performances. It’s easy to
dismiss Lady Gaga as a one-dimensional pop sensation solely because of
her mainstream popularity—we’re not so much in the habit of looking at
pop stars as performance artists. And it’s always slightly obnoxious
when stars anoint themselves with icon status, which Gaga essentially
does in this interview ("I don't see myself as ever being like anybody
else.") But there’s something very sound about writer Ann Power’s
parallel between Gaga’s stunning physical transformations and the work of photographer Cindy Sherman,
a woman who has had plastic surgery for the sake of her ever-evolving
self-portraits (and whom Gaga admires). Both women are in some ways
committing a deliberate bastardization of the feminine ideal. Lady
Gaga’s lyrics reveal the same motivation: an upfront,
no-apologies-necessary command of her rampant sexuality. She’s a freak
bitch, baby ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from writer Mimi Swartz:
There’s one thing I can say for sure about Annise Parker’s election
as Houston's and the nation’s first gay mayor: As my colleague and
fellow Texan Sara Mosle noted,
the news means a lot more outside my adopted home town than inside.
Once again, I’ve had to endure the national media’s shock and awe that
we backward Houstonians have done something that would have been
considered (almost) the norm in New York or Los Angeles. As Sara noted,
we are the fourth-largest city in the United States. Surprise! Houston
also has the second-largest gay population in the nation. If you live
here, you aren’t so shocked about Parker’s victory—after all, she’s
been in public office here for 12 years and never once during that time
was in the closet.
I have to say, the race did restore my faith. Or rather, reaffirmed
my faith in my adopted hometown. There are a lot of reasons why Parker
won, and they have very little to do with her sexual orientation ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)