The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is Trashing Your Wedding Dress a Radical Form of Self-Expression?

By DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:

Yesterday, the Today show featured a segment on a new trend for the modern day radical bride: trashing the dress. According to the clip, the cooler brides among us are destroying their wedding dresses post-ceremony, whether through a paintball fight or a four-wheeler ride across swampy grounds, as a form of creative self-expression.

One bride, still donning her untouched white satiny number, tells the camera that weddings are so “formal and traditional,” so not her, right before she and her husband dirty up their matrimonial garb in the desert dust. The photographer shooting them points out that it’s "a more creative way to express yourself ... in a way you can’t on your wedding day." And that’s when I got really irritated.

If being a prim, dressed-to-the-nines bride isn’t your “thing,” so to speak, why even have a formal wedding and spend gajillions of dollars on some silky fluff you’re just going to turn around and destroy? If there's anything worse in my mind than rampant wedding consumerism, it's intentionally wasteful wedding consumerism  ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Linda Hirshman: I Didn't Call Anyone at Jezebel a Slut

A guest post from Double X writer Linda Hirshman:

In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts." 

Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Blame Rapists for Rape, Not Women

A guest post from Double X writer Jaclyn Friedman:

Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts (I'm paraphrasing here, but not as much as I wish I were). Latoya Peterson responded by rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All To Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.

With Feminists Like This, Who Needs the Patriarchy?

A guest post from Double X writer Latoya Peterson:

You know, screeds like Linda Hirshman's in Double X are why I waffle so much about identifying with the feminist label.

Yes, Virginia, Feminism Really Is Dead.

Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's what you'd think, judging by today's launch of DoubleX.com. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?

At best, it seems odd to judge a 21st century production by the politics of a decades-old movement, the relevance of which... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Motherhood Sucks—Cigarettes, That Is

Jezebel has a delightful layout from French Vogue's April issue in which motherhood gets a grand sendup. Ah, ze French. So naughty. Lovely lithe, model-of-the-moment Lily Donaldson stomps about smoking cigarettes and ostensibly caring for her "baby." Clad in pink hot pants and skyscraper heels, the model tosses the tot into the air without a care, blows toxic smoke into its cherubic face, and tests the bottle milk on her arm with a stance that suggests she's fondly reminiscing upon her pre-baby heroin addiction. Not to mention, she's got another bun in her designer-dud-clad oven. Shot by Patrick Demarchelier but born from the dangerous mind of French Vogue editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld, the pictures are a hilarious poke at one of the world's last sacred cows—motherhood. Perhaps if American magazines weren't so whimpy about getting provocative, they wouldn't be dying in droves.

Alcoholics Synonymous

Moe,

We came away from that piece yesterday with entirely different thoughts. You reacted to the condemnatory tone and the assertion that hard-drinking women are drinking to be like men (which I thought was a shaky point, too). I reacted to the fact that, from what Morris said, these self-proclaimed feminists seem to be drinking their way to self-fulfillment.

Today, I have a somewhat different reaction. I don't think it's about gender, feminism, or equality. More than ever, both women and men are looking for a way to tune out the drone of their daily lives and just have a little fun—looking for a place where they feel free and soothed and courageous and everything else Morris said. 

But self-fulfillment doesn't come from a bottle. When the buzz wears off, life and all of its pressures are still there, waiting. Another drink or two or 20 won't ever erase that fact. (Not to mention that, as you might have heard once or twice, heavy drinking destroys your liver and kidneys and lends you all the professionalism of a college frat boy.) The only "equality" here is that, male and female, we've got the same problem, and we need to find another way to deal.

Condom Controversy

Young Women Acting Unbecomingly

Emily wonders whether what would once be seen as merely "youthful error" is far more perilous to a girl’s reputation in the Internet age than it was a decade ago when Emily was in her 20s.

Lizz Winstead’s video interview with Jezebel's two founders, Tracy and Moe, showcasing the edgy young bloggers' drunk appearance on Winstead's oxymoronically named stage program "Thinking and Drinking,” turned into a full-out public trainwreck after Winstead ungenerously uploaded the conversation over at HuffPost.

The raw nature of the self-exposure displayed by the two inebriated women reminded me of a young exhibitionist woman in Emily’s age cohort, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the talented but personally undisciplined author of three memoirs. Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, subtitled “Young and Depressed in America,” was a self-indulgent best-seller published when she was 26. She went on to write two more confessional books, Bitch in 1998 (which featured the naked author on the cover), and, perhaps predictably, by 2002, a sad chronicle of Wurtzel’s struggles with addiction.

Fortunately for Wurtzel, now 40, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.  There are second acts in American life.  Wurtzel, who complained to a Canadian reporter that the outpouring of grief following 9/11 was misplaced (“I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting”), was favorably profiled in the New York Times last year. She had re-invented herself and was attending Yale Law School. In March, in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Wurtzel counseled college coeds that spending “spring break in a shower with your roommate in Daytona Beach” for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild is a bad idea. So, Emily, though your concern for Tracy and Moe is well-founded, we can be optimistic they will withstand public approbation and recover nicely. Apparently even overexposed divas eventually grow up.

Rubbernecking at Jezebel

While we're in Jezebel land, who can resist a little rubbernecking? Tracie and Moe of the site recently made a spectacle of themselves onstage in Manhattan at the Thinking and Drinking series put together by Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show, all captured on video, alas for them. Winstead is furious (clips there and everywhere), and the whole thing already has been raked over the blogosphere coals.(Best and raunchiest post title: Jezebels Gone Wild: In Which Feminism Finally Bends Over and Eats Itself From the Ass Up.) On Jezebel itself, damage control includes calling the whole thing a "fucking shame." But on her own blog, Tracie prefers blurry denial:

Anyway, I thought this thing was supposed to be a comedy show, but to be honest, I didn't really do my research on how the interview was really gonna go. I tried to make some jokes, but they fell super flat. ("I don't get raped because I live in Williamsburg, and all the guys there are pussies.") It all seemed really horrible at the time, but now, looking back, I sort of have to laugh. I mean, to our friends, it was just Moe and Tracie being Moe and Tracie—drunk, irreverent, drunk.

Wow, yes, a shame. And another lesson, if we needed one, in the perils of overexposure, oversharing, over-the-top Internet/video self-indulgence. But isn't that the whole story, really, as opposed to a broader of indictment of feminism and a prediction of its ever-impending doom, as some of the commentary seems to have it? What I wish for these women are the days when a bad small stage appearance or college newspaper column was quickly mothballed, never to be viewed again. Maybe the Web is creating a scary new boundary-free generation, and for sure talking smack about sex has gone way beyond what I remember from my decade—ago 20s (see Emily Gould). But maybe also it's just gotten way too easy to rubberneck, and so youthful errors become train wrecks. Thoughts?