The XX Factor: What women really think.

Heath Ledger Profile Shows How Fame Can Destroy the Psyche

Celebrity Is Dead, Long Live Uncelebrities

For the sixth consecutive week, Kate Gosselin’s on the cover of Us Weekly. “Mommy You Are Mean” screams the headline, while her husband Jon declares, “Enough is Enough” on the cover of People. In Touch and Star are selling the Gosselins as well. Only the Enquirer has chosen an old standard for its cover, Brangelina, and even the most famous couple in the world had to share the front page, with, you guessed it, Jon Gosselin.

Up until a few months ago, chances were good-to-great that if you picked up a tabloid one of the following subjects would appear on the cover: Brangelina, Jennifer Aniston, TomKat or Britney Spears. But recently, the attractive, famous folk who have dominated gossip for years and years (even when, as with Aniston, the relevant story happened eons ago), have suddenly, ignominiously been shoved to the side by a rag-tag crew whose members include the Gosselins, Octomom, Susan Boyle and, to a certain extent, Michelle Obama... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!) 

The Spinsterhood of the Traveling Pants

I'm glad E.J. mentioned the outdated and offensive label "spinster" (evoking the hag cartoon on an "old maid" playing card deck), because recently in news stories describing talent show contestant Susan Boyle, I've noticed the insulting characterization making a comeback. But what is the correct term for unmarried women in the post-feminist world? As Kerry noted recently about sociologist Andrew Cherlin's research, in a culture where "marriage matters more here than elsewhere," in the United States, "only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship."

Meantime, though the term spinster is rude, the condition it describes, unmarried women over 40, is common. I'm very glad Dayo brought up the Mark Regnerus essay on the appallingly short shelf life of women. Like Emily, I married relatively late in life. I was 35 when I got engaged, 25 years ago, and had life experience, a career, and a child. But, as a baby boomer, even at my mid-career age, there were comparatively plenty of single available men. Although I agree with Meghan's assessment that Regernus presents a narrow-minded and patronizing sociological premise, he was not wrong when he wrote, "Marriage will be there for men when they're ready. And most do get there. Eventually." Distressingly, however, somewhere along the line, many single ladies with career and education priorities find they have entered a no man's land. Awkwardly, as Jess facetiously (I think) supports, the geezerish single men my age prefer to date women 10 to 20 years younger. 

In the sixth season of Sex And The City, the inestimable Candice Bergen, as Carrie Bradshaw's powerful, glamorous, Vogue editor, scolds the younger woman for dating Aleksandr Petrovsky (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov), one of the infinitesimally few age-appropriate men available. As Enid, Bergen tells Carrie, "There are no men, anywhere. I am a 50-something woman and there's a very small pool, it's very small, it's a wading pool, really." She tells the advice columnist, "so what I want to know, is why are you swimming in my wading pool?" 

The answer is that a man shortage also affects women in Carrie's cohort. The character Mia played by Hope Davis in the new season of another HBO series, In Treatment, despairs of ever meeting a "smart, interesting, available man who's over 40." She tells the single, attractive therapist played by Gabriel Byrne, "they're either married or there's a very good reason why they're not...and if they're divorced, they want them young."  

It sounds grim, but it's not necessarily so. A close friend much younger than I, who treats my husband and me so nicely that our daughter wrote on her Facebook page "thanks for taking care of bonnie and jim" is a former lawyer in her early 40s, stunningly attractive and funny, who has a gardening and flowers business. Though not lacking in male friends who "shoulda put a ring on it," my friend has never married. Wondering if, as an old married lady, I was poorly attuned to the word's connotations, I asked what she thought of the word spinster. "Sure, I'd like a partner and children" she answered the more general question, "but right now I have neither and I'm still pretty happy." In fact, she told me, "I'm into spinster power."

Weekend Update, the Women's Edition

Sometimes I am amazed at the sheer amount of news that concerns itself with women's sex lives. Imagine the opposite were true, and these stories were about men: First, it's been announced that an L.A. film company (Kickass Productions) has offered Susan Boyle $1 million dollars if she chooses to "lose her v-card" on film. Second, the morning-after pill is now available 17-year-olds, despite the protests of many on the right. They argue that the drug hasn't been sufficiently tested on young women. Across the ocean in Britain, they're arguing over the effect on young girls of a new ad for the morning-after pill, which shows a woman waking up in bed next to her partner, then, later, asking for the medication at a pharmacy. Click here for more.

When you imagine waking to a paper full of stories about, say, a Samuel Boyle being paid for sex on film, and hand-wringing over young men's sex lives, you realize how jarringly different it is to be a young woman and a young man growing up in America today.

The Susan Boyle Experience

The Contrarian Take on Susan Boyle

I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.

But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.

If Looks Could Kill

In Dave Cullen’s recent Slate piece about what we learned from Columbine, he writes that “the first lesson is really one that we have unlearned, which is that there actually isn't a distinct psychological profile of the school killer.” Nor, I imagine, is there one for a Craigslist killer, but that hasn’t stopped the CNN morning news anchors from expressing repeated shock that the man who was charged on Monday with the murder of a woman he met on Craigslist is a 22-year-old medical student. An article in the Boston Globe today has the headline “Charges conflict with portrait of clean-cut student,” and the attached photo gallery highlights the issue. It’s not just that he’s a med student. It’s that he’s an attractive, broad-shouldered med student with a big white smile and a well-pressed polo shirt. Just as last week’s Susan Boyle clip drew attention to just how strongly we (especially those girls in the audience!) expect our pop stars to be hyper-groomed, thin and beautiful, the circulating photos of Philip Markoff remind us that, as Cullen mentioned, we still expect killers to be greasy-haired, scrawny, and perhaps trench coat-clad. Well, ugly chicks can sing. And preppy hunks can kill.

The Susan Show

As much as I need to carefully read the Bybee and other Justice Department memos to discover whether "dictated but not read" appears anywhere in the lawyerly text documenting the banality of evil, I can't resist one more comment on the Susan Boyle phenomenon, still reverberating in the Scottish village of Blackburn. 

I'm afraid, Kerry, that the ham-handed and patronizing season seasoning you despair of, from Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden, who won't let Simon's dentist go near the "unspoiled" singer, is just the beginning of a giant social experiment and successful series akin to the Truman Show.  (The twist here is the Jim Carrey role is played by a matronly Scottish lady who accidentally plucked herself from obscurity.)  Susan Boyle and her neighbors may enjoy the media invasion of their small village now teeming with TV bookers and satellite trucks chasing 20 million hits on YouTube. Maybe the West Lothian community is comfortable with the lone Simon Cowell-dispatched handler, guarding the new celebrity at her cottage door, while everybody else in town shares tankards and talk, in fantastic accents, with the sophisticated cellphoned entertainment reporters in their midst.  I personally tend to agree, however, with Fray commentator ScrewJack2008 who posted "My advice would be to return to anonymity as soon as possible before these people all chew you up and spit you out to serve their own agendas. Just run for your fucking life." 

Spoiling Susan Boyle

"I won't let Simon Cowell take her to his dentist and I certainly won't let her near his hairdresser," judge Amanda Holden tells the U.K. Mirror.

The frumpy 48-year-old "needs to stay exactly as she is because that's the reason we love her," Holden insists. "She just looks like anybody who could live on your street."

"The minute we turn her into a glamour-puss is when it's spoiled," she says.

A makeover "can perhaps come later when she has signed the album deal and conquered America," Holden adds. "For now we'll keep her exactly as she is because that's why we've all fallen in love with her. I think it's the underdog thing."  

Pretty Amanda Holden won't "let" Susan Boyle near Simon's makeup crew, lest she be "spoiled." In other words, the singer's frumped-up appearance is the most important thing about her; remove it, and we cease to care.

I don't know that turning Ms. Boyle into some kind of statement about physical beauty is any more respectful of her autonomy than forcing her into a makeover. She hasn't volunteered to be a feminist icon or morality personified or anything else we want to force upon her squinty visage. She is a person, not a placard, and her life is changing. Now that her audience consists of more than just Pebbles, she might well want to glam it up a little. There is nothing particularly authentic about preserving her appearance in amber while everything around her transforms dramatically. 

The First Tweeze is the Hardest

Tweezers, Please

A post from Slate's Emily Yoffe:

Like Dahlia and Bonnie and E.J. I am enchanted by Susan Boyle and her angelic voice. However, I have seen enough makeover shows to know that after "they" get a hold of her and do her hair, pluck her eyebrows, put lipstick and mascara on her, and get her some flattering clothes, when she sees herself in the mirror she'll cry at how pretty she looks and how much she likes looking pretty. As she said in the Mirror story E.J. mentions, "I had my hair curled especially for the show and wore a dress I'd bought a few months back for my nephew's wedding." In other words, like just about everyone else, she'd like to look her best. This doesn't mean she had to submit herself to knives and injections. But now that she seems on the verge of what could be a big performing career, not plucking those eyebrows would eventually just be an affectation.  

Will the real 47 year old please stand up?

Yes, Dahlia, you're right; I misread you. Perhaps Susan Boyle does look like a "real" 47 year old, pre-media-consciousness. But I wasn't talking about Westchester- or Alexandria-based suburban "babes"; I was talking about the women I see in the gritty working town of Worcester, Mass., or in train stations or at bus stops in various parts of the country: The plucking, colorizing, and gym-going isn't necessarily done in a sophisticated manner. (I really do mean over-plucking; skinny and abruptly abbreviated eyebrows of the Jennifer Garner variety are among my perhaps, um, excessively long list of pet peeves, right up there with the misuse of "reticent" to mean "reluctant.") These women don't necessarily look great. They certainly don't look like Madonna or Sheryl Crow. But they do look as if they've been watching too much TV and idling too long in the drugstore cosmetics aisle—as Susan Boyle doesn't.

As for Susan Boyle herself, our heroine of the day: The Mirror says here that she was oxygen-deprived at birth, learning-disabled as a result, and sang to escape her childhood bullies. I don't think she'll be looking polished any time soon—and thank goodness for that. Susan, fight off those tweezers at all costs!

47 is the new 47?

E.J., I think the only disagreement between us was that you thought I said Susan Boyle looks like an ordinary suburban women, where I in fact said she looks like a normal 47-year-old. At least where I live, a lot of 47-year-olds look more like Susan Boyle than the plucked, processed, creamed and lacquered suburban babes you describe. But when I wrote “normal 47-year-old” I was also thinking more about the natural aging process that has upended itself in recent years. I suspect that until a few decades ago most 47-year-olds looked more like Ms. Boyle than Paula Abdul, Marcia Cross and Sheryl Crow and the rest of the cohort of ’62-ers that—as you note—look closer to 29. I just can’t tell whether Susan Boyle doesn’t notice or care about her appearance. Even if she didn’t she probably does now.

I imagine if we see her at next year's Golden Globes in a sleek blonde blowout and a size 2 Reem Acra dress, we will have our answer.

Innocents on Stage

Well, Dahlia, I disagree: Susan Boyle doesn't look at all like an ordinary suburban woman. I'm as in love with her video as everyone else, and yes, appalled by the condescension with which she's being treated. But I think I understand it. In our era, ordinary suburban women overpluck their eyebrows, overdose their with hair with coloring and cream conditioner, and worry about when they can get to the gym. They don't confess to being 47-year-old virgins on international television. Susan Boyle looks like a throwback to a pre-modern era, a WWI Scottish villager, before 24-hour television, before self-improvement magazines, before the onslaught of the cosmetics and body improvement industries. She's astonishingly innocent of all that hyper-self-consciousness that a generation of para-feminists have been discussing, Naomi Wolf, Susie Orbach, and all the rest who wring their hands publicly about Barbie and absurdly slim models and adolescent bulimia in the Marshall Islands, about the vaunted pressure on girls to be perfect—gorgeous, brilliant, athletic, charming, and sexy all at once. Most human beings are sensitive to how we are perceived—and for many, that has become hypersensitivity in our media-tized world.

Susan Boyle seems like a kind of miracle: immune to, even innocent of, all that—and yet with a extraordinarily developed and sophisticated voice hidden in her extraordinarily unsophisticated package. It's that contradiction, I think, that has made her a huge hit. Most people would have been afraid and ashamed to appear on stage with an appearance that's so in conflict with how contemporary women are expected to present themselves. How refreshing to see someone who doesn't appear even to notice her appearance—and yet who is proud to carry that fabulous gift!

The Anti-Cougar

Now here’s the team from CBS’s Early Show this morning (clip below), insulting her again: Maggie Rodriguez’s patronizing “you look lovely, Susan” starts the interview—the way you might talk to a small child in clown shoes, and she then repeats the question about how Boyle managed to perform “even though everyone was laughing at you?” Co-host Harry Smith, fearing perhaps that Boyle is too provincial to have any cognitive abilities at all, presses her, “Do you understand that? Do you understand what a big deal this is?”

The reason everyone seems to feel the need to insult Susan Boyle to her face all the time is that she looks like a normal 47-year-old woman, and not like Stacey Anderson from The Cougar. That it’s OK to laugh at her for that, and to assume that she should be laughing along with us, makes me want to cry too.

Revenge of the Dowdy

I love this video of 47-year-old Susan Boyle in her audition for the new season of Britain's Got Talent, the U.K. version of America's Got Talent. Boyle, an unemployed village lady from West Lothian, was saucy but awkward in her short pre-audition interview with the panelists, and came off as a provincial, drab, stylishly frumpy, biddy with an unrealistic fantasy to be a professional singer on the scale of "Elaine Paige." As with the U.S. version, reality impresario judge Simon Cowell typically says insulting things to untalented contestants. Susan, seemingly selected for her comic value, was a sure target for Cowell's opprobrium until the decidedly unglam ma'am brought the mic to her mouth and rocked the room to standing ovations. Boyle had apparently never performed outside of her church choir before the televised audition, but her interpretation of "I Dream the Dream" from Les Misérable impressed the unanimous panel to put her in the season's competition. Unfortunately, the panel members couldn't help insulting Boyle a little bit, anyway. After the wild applause, Piers Morgan told her "everyone was laughing at you" before, and Amanda Holden delivered the heartfelt bulletin, "everybody was against you."