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In The Supremes Edition of our XX Gabfest this week, Hanna and Meghan
and I talk about (of course) Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, Judge
Sonia Sotomayor. Also a new study showing that women are more unhappy,
not less, 30 years after the sexual revolution, and why Terminator
Salvation has such lame female action stars... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This week, is there a tabloid that doesn't feature Jon and Kate Gosselin of TLC's mega-spawn reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" fame? Today, Kate vomited her guts to People, revealing that her marriage to the man with whom she fathered a pair of twins and a set of sextuplets may be deeply...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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What was she thinking, Bonnie? Maybe she was thinking that she'd get a reality TV show. While there's always been some interest in massively fertile women, it seems that in the past few years, more and more of these moms-of-multiples have been getting media attention. First there's Kate Gosselin, who has a set of sextuplets and a set of twins, as well as her own TLC show, Jon & Kate Plus 8. Then there's her network-mate Michelle Duggar (pictured at left), who has given birth to 18 children and even allowed TLC to film her giving birth to number 18.
I've seen a few episodes of both Jon & Kate and the Duggars' show, and they're outrageously banal. Entire episodes are constructed around a single task: Jon makes dinner! Jinger Duggar gets her driver's license! (Side note: All 18 of the Dugger children have names that begin with J). And it makes me wonder why these families are getting more than their 15 minutes of fame. Is it merely the freak show aspect of having so many babies? Or is it something else, something that reinforces the idea that fertility is a woman's greatest virtue? Considering the fact that the Duggars are part of an evangelical movement called Quiverfull, which eschews birth control and promotes the idea that a woman's primary function is to be a mother, I'd say it's the latter.
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