The XX Factor: What women really think.

Americans Ambivalent About Motherhood and Marriage

Hanna, you call out the false dichotomy between the miserable married and passionate single, and in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Ginia Bellafante discusses Jodi Picoult's novels, and the false dichotomy between good parent and bad. Substitute marriage for parenting—"the difference between marriage that assumes the shape of performed concern and marriage that takes the form of active tending"—and you've hit on what we've been discussing all week with Tsing Loh's piece... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton, America's Court Jester

Bill Clinton, Revealed

We spend so much time dissecting First Ladies living in the shadow of their husbands that this portrait of Bill Clinton as First Man is startling, and so poignant. New York Times reporter Peter Baker addresses how little access Clinton has in the Obama administration, but the story succeeds mainly as a character sketch. Clinton is a Philip Roth character somewhat restrained, trying to explain his outbursts during the campaign, coming to terms with the indignities of aging, and of being eclipsed by a younger, more vibrant man... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Tarantino in Heels

There's a Q&A with Quentin Tarantino in this weekend's New York Times Style Magazine. (It's online here.) The occasion is the upcoming debut screening of Tarantino's latest movie, "Inglourious Basterds," a war-'n'-gore flick starring Diane Kruger and Brad Pitt in which a band of Jewish American soldiers attempt to kill a hell of a lot of Nazis. (I read the script before it was sold, and it is bloody.) "This was the hardest movie I've ever made," Tarantino admits, before not-so-humbly deeming it a "masterpiece." Interestingly, the photo accompanying the interview features Quentin in a black suit and black patent leather high-heels. In one hand, he holds his drink. In the other hand, he holds a bra. Not sure what's going on there, but while some may say he's a hack, few can ever say he's boring.

Car Sharing

Taking Will's Bait

Will, we invite you to join the party and you show up and ask hard questions. Ok, I'll bite. You ask whether the women-as-reactive pattern extends "to other realms of life," since "it certainly resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression, responsiveness, and social editing." So tell us more about the research you're referencing. I'm often driven mildly crazy by the exaggeration of findings about brain-based sex difference. It's just sexier to say that women are different from men than to say they're mostly similar. (See this great series by Amanda Schaffer for a take down about sex-based differences on language and types of intelligence.) On the other hand, when the research is solid, it's of course worth grappling with. My recollection is that you're right about aggression, but remind us why, and fill us in on the other fronts you raised.
 

Who Knows What Women Want?

Like many others here, I read Daniel Bergner's "What Do Women Want?" with interest. While I tend to shy away from reports from the frontlines written by those who do their research talking to the scientists and not the monkeys, I was intrigued by the essay's truthtelling: "All was different with the women." (Is not one among us going to confess to being turned on by bonobo porn?) The piece reminded me of a parallel story I've seen played out on the adult movie sets that I've visited, where you can never believe your eyes, especially when it comes to women. 

Over the years, porn has taken a beating at the hands of those who deem it misogynist garbage. In fact, I'd argue, pornography is obsessed primarily with female desire. That the product its industry produces is less socially acceptable than the polysyllabic studies of Bergner's "postfeminist" desire hunters in lab coats doesn't make it any less revealing of how complicated it gets for all of us when it comes to sex, and how little any of us know about our own desires. 

Porn stars toil daily in the shadowy world of desire. In Porn Valley, the sex acts are real, but is the desire manufactured? As Susan Faludi so vividly illuminated in her 1996 New Yorker essay, "The Money Shot," there is no greater pressure on a porn set than the burden placed upon the male performer and his erection, or "wood," in the parlance of the business. The woodsman must prove his desire to convince the audience that this is the "real" deal, that this scene of sexual desire is no masquerade. Hence, the "money" shot. Without it, all is lost.

For porn starlets, the act is trickier. On the one hand, the female performers have it easier. Sometimes they're turned on. Sometimes they're not. They don't have to physically "deliver" on desire in the same way their male counterparts do. Yet, for the vast majority of the male viewing audience, porn "fails" without at least the pantomime of female sexual pleasure. Without it, no scopophilia. If porn is to be believed, most men are as preoccupied with female desire as we are unaware of what it is we really want.

I wonder why the term "postfeminist" is used in the context of Bergner's essay? Understanding female desire seems more like a universal quest. Either way, I suspect it may be an impossible one. 

Real Estate Porn

Ah, Nina, Sam, Bonnie—real estate porn is very dangerous. I try not to look.

Sugar Friendies?

Nina, so funny you posted on that Times Homes & Garden piece about the two older women sharing connected lofts -- I had the link all clipped and ready to send to my best friend in Texas, proposing an arrangement just like this if we ever find ourselves widowed, divorced or otherwise single. (For the moment, I'm very fond of both my roommates, one of whom, as you put it, I gave birth to myself.) But then I got to thinking about the implications of one woman paying for the entire ($3 million dollar!) loft and all the renovations, and never did send my friend the link. Whether or not the two parties are romantically involved -- and I did love the fact that these two women were just buddies -- the power imbalance there just felt too creepy.

Women's Sexuality: A Guest Post

Will writes:

May I join the conversation? I was struck in Bergner's article by the same idea Meghan flagged: that perhaps "there's something reactive about female sexuality." (I have another take on the idea here.)

To me, what's really provocative about this theory is that its logic doesn't seem confined to sexuality. Bergner quotes Meredith Chivers as speculating:

[O]ne possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary.

If the dyad theory is correct, why wouldn't it extend to other realms of life, with one sex initiating and the other reacting? It certainly resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression, responsiveness, and social editing.

Heteroflexible

Ann, your reading of Bergner's article seemed spot on for me, particularly the part about women not wanting to find clear-cut answers in order to keep the door open for sexual possibility. The part of "What Do Women Want?" that stood out to me most was the discussion of sexologist Lisa Diamond's research:

Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book [Ann Heche, Julie Cypher] and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden.

While I believed they were being honest, I never understood my bisexual female friends who would say similar things to Diamond's statement -- that they were attracted to the person, not the gender (or maybe, as Meghan mentioned, they were attracted to the person's desire, not their gender). Anyone who's attended a liberal arts college in the past 20 odd years knows at least one women who earns the not-so-kind epithet "LUG," or lesbian until graduation, and those women are not taken especially seriously.

Research like Diamond and Chivers' is valuable, not just for getting women to understand themselves, but to potentially foster more understanding of non-normative orientations. To answer your question Meghan, no, like Nina, I don't believe that women are divided between the divergent systems of sexuality,  the physiological and the subjective. It seems from the research being done, we're fairly far from coming up with any definitive commentary about women's sexuality. I think we're probably not even asking the right questions yet.

Women's Problems

Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: they said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women's minds and bodies are subconsciously at war, or that the women were conscious of their less "normative" desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.

What Do We Want To Know About What We Want?

Meghan, not to evade your questions, but I found myself focusing on the subtexts of Daniel Bergner's article: He is particularly fascinated by the difficulty of doing scientific research on female sexuality and by the jarring multiplicity of theories and by the tenacity of the postfeminist sexologists like Meredith Chivers in the face of the morass—more fascinated, almost, than he is by their findings about female sexuality itself. From the start, the emphasis is not just on how their data don't add up in any expected way, but also on the ways their thinking about their data doesn't add up predictably or neatly, either.

I don't mean at all to suggest that Bergner (a distant acquaintance) disparages the endeavor. But his article prompted me to wonder—in the rather ungrounded, speculative spirit the field seems to encourage—whether Freud's famous question invites a sort of Freudian reading: Maybe the last thing men really want to know is what, exactly, women want. As for women, what do they want to know? Well, to apply some crude evolutionary logic, it might seem advantageous if they were eager to probe the mysteries of their own desire not in order to come up with clear-cut answers, but to keep the door open to an array of possibilities. Could be a promising recipe, at any rate, for achieving the goal that brought Chivers to the field in the first place: "I wanted everybody to have great sex."

The Sexual Fluidity of Women

Ever since Margaret Atwood—a feminist novelist in the most important sense—wrote her famous story “Rape Fantasies,” people have understood that sometimes women’s sexual fantasies are anything but politically correct. Now there’s an interesting story in the New York Times Magazine that implicitly asks: Are contemporary women doomed to experience a schism between what their bodies lust for and their minds tell them they want? (Full disclosure: Dan Bergner, the author, is an old acquaintance.) The story offers up a road map of female desire as charted by postfeminist scientists, who have been exploring female desire with gusto. Guess what? What women want in bed is far more complex and, well, polymorphously perverse than some had formerly thought. In fact, no one understands any of it yet.

Yet one interesting idea emerges from the piece: the notion that female desire is based less on intimacy (the old truism) than on the perception of being desired—a notion that, it would seem, complicates feminist notions of owning your sexuality. To take just a few bits of  research from the piece: As Bergner reports, scientists have long wondered why women sometimes describe feeling arousal (even orgasm) during nonconsensual sex; some scientists now theorize that it stems from an evolutionary adaptation to early human sex. (Women whose genitals remained unlubricated were more susceptible to injury, infection, and, consequently, death.) Bergner connects this to the fact that women seem to be more  responsive—on a physiological level—to a breadth of visual stimuli than men are. One recent study, conducted by psychologist Meredith Chivers, found that heterosexual women responded sexually to a wider array of videos than men did; while the men in the study mostly responded to images involving women (and the gay men mostly responded to images involving men), the straight women in the study were turned on by everything from heterosexual sex to a nude woman doing calisthenics to bonobos mating. 

Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: They said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women’s minds and bodies are subconsciously at war or that the women were conscious of their less “normative” desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.

So does the complicated notion that there's something reactive about female sexuality. (After all, we've all had the experience, I'm sure, of not desiring a man who desired us.) Be that as it may, there's something worth mulling about the (mostly female) scientists' new thinking on the matter. As Bergner puts it, scientists like Chivers believe that “female sexuality [may be] divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems: the physiological and the subjective.” So I’m curious: Did any of you buy any of this? What was your reaction?

Is Renting a Womb Worse (or Better) Than Adopting?

Nina, I agree with you that the worst thing about Alex K’s New York Times Magazine article this past Sunday—about her surrogate pregnancy and motherhood—were the slyly critical pictures and Alex’s class-cluelessness. Moe suggests (as do many others) that adoption might have been less genetically vain than surrogacy. But that suggestion presumes adoption isn't exploitive—and, after a year spent investigating problems in international adoption, I can tell you that's not always so. 

Sometimes adoption is good for all concerned, especially if the child is older, sick, or has special needs. But not everyone is prepared to take on those needy children. Far more people are lined up for healthy infant adoption—which isn't easy, it turns out.

News flash: Worldwide, there are more families seeking healthy infants than there are healthy infants in need of new families. Some of the international adoption programs are arguably surrogacy in disguise—but without real payment or protections for the birth families. In some countries, a significant portion of women appeared to have been getting pregnant to sell the babies; in others, babies were being coercively purchased or defrauded or even kidnapped away from the birth families. (The big exception is China, where the adoption program is carefully overseen, but China has become more restrictive.) And that doesn't count the birth families whose children were defrauded, coerced, or flatly kidnapped away from them. (For detailed and heartbreaking stories about this, check my institute's Web site, where we've been posting our adoption documentation and research.)

Adoption depends on tragedy and loss of some kind—like organ donation, except with less oversight or regulation and with much more money to be made for the brokers. As with organ donation, in adoption there are more people on the list than there are children available. I haven't looked as deeply into domestic adoption but have heard enough to know there ARE coercive practices and serious regulatory failures; birth mothers DO get coerced, and adoptive parents get less consumer protection than if they joined a gym.

In surrogacy at least everyone goes into it with eyes open; the surrogates are screened for their emotional stability and are more or less fairly compensated. I’m guessing it’s less exploitive than renting out the body parts that Meghan and Hanna are discussing below. But maybe that’s just me.

So 25 Grand Gets You Nine Months in an All-American Womb These Days and That's OK?

I'm with you, Susannah, on Alex Kuczynski and her (college-educated!) rent-a-womb. There are worse villains to vilify at a time like this, Internet haters! Right? Why does it continue to be so profitable for self-respecting media institutions to incite reader rage over harmless rich socialites who are not asking for as much as a penny of TARP funds? (I mean, imagine if wealthy men got pregnant! Imagine what impoverished, uneducated communities they'd be outsourcing the job to. Oh wait, there's a thriving surrogate industry in India as it is.)  Which is to say, um, was there not something off-putting about the economics of it? In vitro, while certainly not covered by most health care plans, is covered by some—and in any case, it's certainly a tax-free expenditure of a hundred grand. And for a quarter of that, Kuczynski finds a whole woman—a college-educated woman!—willing to carry around Kuczynski's child in her own goddamn womb for nine months? Hey, and now she's written a story about it; she can write off that money, too! (Plus, she probably made about exactly $25,000 writing the piece anyway.)

God, so what does it mean? Well, on one hand, that's the free market at work, folks! And yet, on the other hand, Kuczynski—who wrote a book about cosmetic surgery and a regular Times column critiquing fancy retail "experiences"—has this way of positioning herself smack in the middle of industries that thrive off the most loathsome markets! Take in vitro and cosmetic surgery: Both draw in some of the nation's most talented doctors by freeing them from the migraine that is haggling with insurance companies, the same insurance companies that have helped make basic health care costs so expensive that regular college-educated ladies like Kuczynski's surrogate are willing to be implanted with alien zygotes and carry them around inside her for the better part of a year. (Oh yeah, and did I mention, quit drinking? While Kuczynski gets to … not quit drinking? ) It's just no faiiiirr, not to mention creepy, and while I'll gladly admit it's a bit of both to the anonymous cow whose teat to which I fully intend on outsourcing my milk production if and when I ever have kids, it's a little different when you're talking about people, right? And I guess I'd just feel better if it seemed like Kuczynski had thought about it this way. Because there are a lot of people in this country who are wealthy enough to spend 25 grand outsourcing their pregnancies, and there are hordes more who are desperate enough to rent out their wombs, but once upon a time we lived in a country where the former camp would have been more inclined to adopt from the latter half. At least, that's what I've always been told.

She Rented a Woman's Womb and Then Was Rude to the Landlady

Here's a post from Slate contributor Nina Shen Rastogi, who's having technical difficulties:

Susannah,

I think the galling thing about Kuczynski's Times piece wasn't her decision to have a child via gestational surrogacy—I think lots of people can relate to the intense desire to have a baby that's genetically related to you. (As Shakespeare noted ominously: "Die single"—i.e., childless—"and thine image dies with thee.") What was upsetting about the piece was her sheer tone-deafness. Take the following passage, for example:

When we came across Cathy's application, we saw that she was by far the most coherent and intelligent of the group. She wrote that she was happily married with three children. Her answers were not handwritten in the tiny allotted spaces; she had downloaded the original questionnaire and typed her responses at thoughtful length. Her attention to detail was heartening. And her computer-generated essay indicated, among other things, a certain level of competence. This gleaned morsel of information made me glad: she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it.

A lower-income person who's "coherent" and knows how to type—gee, that's just like finding a mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy! Kuczynski just ends up seeming patronizingly elitist and sort of oblivious throughout the piece. I found myself wanting something deeper, more insightful—some real, felt evidence that the experience had actually taught her something. I would have also been happy with a nice middle-finger retort to anyone who would question her choices—but her faux-genteel, halfway-apologetic stance didn't fly with me. (Though I will say, I did really like this line on Page 8: "She could be seen as the fertile, glowing mother-to-be as well as the hemorrhoidal, flatulent, lumpen pregnant woman. I could be the erotic, perennially sensual nullipara, the childbirth virgin, and yet I was also the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.")

But honestly, Kuczynski didn't have a chance in hell of winning my sympathy once I saw the accompanying photos. There's Cathy, the birth mother, literally barefoot and pregnant on a dirty porch. And then there's Kuczynski, looking regal in her neat separates, on the lawn of her sprawling Southampton home, while a black "baby nurse"—seriously, that's what the caption says—stands smartly at attention (but without pulling focus). Even the cover is a doozy—couldn't someone have ironed Cathy's khakis? Or at least told her to close her mouth?

Alex Kuczynski Rented Another Woman's Womb. So What?

In last weekend's New York Times Magazine, beauty writer, Botox fan, and Beauty Junkies author Alex Kuczynski writes about how, after she'd spent more than $100,000 on in vitro fertilization and suffered multiple miscarriages, she hired another woman to carry her baby for her. So far, there are more than 400 comments on the article, many written by women, most blasting Kuczynski for having the gall to rent a womb. You should have adopted! You're a spoiled brat! You're a kept woman who sees a baby as one more purchase! I say: Give her a break. She was infertile. She'd lost multiple babies in utero. She had the means—thanks to her writing career and her wealthy husband—to have her egg and her husband's sperm implanted into the womb of a woman who was willing to carry her baby for $25,000. I'm not sure what Kuczynski's bashers expected her to do. Follow their directions? Suffer silently so as not to offend anybody with her money? Do ... nothing? Something about this outpouring of female vitriol reminds me of the tarring and feathering of Sarah Palin. Maybe you don't agree with this woman's choices or that woman's beliefs, but who are you to deny her the choices that she has the right, power, or money to make? Sounds like envy to me.