The XX Factor: What women really think.

Real Talk for Real Housewives

 Torie, I agree that last night's Housewives trainwreck was difficult to watch.However, I object to your characterization of Gretchen as so very helpless. Yes, she's going through a rough time with her fiance in the hospital, but you're not allowing her any agency in this situation. While Tamra et al. were certainly encouraging Gretchen's drunkenness, as you point out, Gretchen is a grown-ass woman. She's ultimately responsible for her own intake, and while Tamra's behavior was completely deplorable, Gretchen doesn't need our hand-wringing because she was three sheets to the wind on camera.

I am sympathetic to Gretchen's current situation, as it's crap to see a loved one sick. However, she could have dropped out of the filming at any time, and yet has chosen not to. But yeah—it's definitely trash TV, and I'm probably losing multiple brain cells every time I tune in to watch their orange-hued antics. While Bravo's editors are masters at getting their viewers to empathize with these frivolous ladies, we need to remember that they're not being shoved in our faces against their will. Gretchen, Tamra, and the entire bleached-blond crew is getting well-compensated for their televised trials.

Do Women Drink To Replace What Was Lost When We Got The Pill?

Jennifer,

I don't think my reaction to 'Gender Bender' was so different from yours. Ultimately I just found it unsatisfying. Because you're right: it's a problem both genders share. So why? What does it signify? And what can be done?

About 10 years ago I took a class with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who was in the process of publishing a book called The Great Disruption about the breakdown in social capital or "trust" in the Western World that resulted from the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies. "Trust" -- the mystical ingredient that prompts people to shovel their driveways and pick up litter and correct inaccurate Wikipedia entries, join bowling leagues and not cheat on their taxes -- is also, in Fukuyama's view, what made Toyota the undisputed leader of the auto sector and much of East Asia such a manufacturing powerhouse. And I would argue that "trust" is largely what many members of my generation --"Kate" the bitchy I-banker who drinks to  seem more "fun" around her male colleagues included -- is trying to replace when we get bombed.

And that is where feminism becomes relevant. Fukuyama famously blamed the Pill, among other innovations, for destroying social capital in the process of emancipating women from the confines of monogamous, procreative relationships. (You might call it "procreative destruction"!) In hindsight Fukuyama's singling out of the Pill seems somewhat packaged to appeal to his then-neoconservative "base," because I do remember thinking it was secretly subversive. Because the political right had long since replaced America's belief in "trust" with a crippling fear of the "moral hazard" that might accompany it. Right now we mostly equate moral hazard, which describes the shift in behavior that accompanies the removal of risk from a certain activity, with the reckless financial institutions in which the Fed is now "injecting" funds. Those financial institutions now seem equally bent on convincing us that renegotiating mortgages for people facing foreclosure would create a similar "moral hazard" just as welfare creates the moral hazard that people will be lazy, the Pill perpetuated the moral "hazard" that women who took advantage of it would have more sex earlier and fewer children later in life and being thrust from suburban automobile-reliant upringings into a city with a bar downstairs that's open till '4 might disincentivize abstemiousness.

And yes, all that has happened. But life without "social capital" is no life, and we must take it as part of a virtuous overall phenomenon that our generation devised a few ways to replace it during those years during which we put off having kids. We repopulated cities, we found "virtual" friends through blogs and grassroots political movements. Where real estate was too costly -- and it has generally been so for my peers in the ever-downsizing industries -- we figured out how to meet regularly with one another in public spaces. And it so happened that bars were a natural, not generally being managed by corporations bent solely on increasing turnover times or transaction size. They're open late. They're everywhere. And many of them -- and many of their regulars -- have been around for generations, connecting us with our pasts and a less complicated period in history in a way that is comforting.

And sure, drinking five nights a week is a less-than-ideal way to achieve all this. But it can't be denied that to patronize a bar regularly, tip forty percent or whatever you can afford, catch up with a regular group of friends, spend nine dollars at the jukebox playing songs you just heard on your iPod because they sound better in the presence of other people and escort home anyone who overindulges all in the confidence that the phone you forgot will be there in the morning -- all that generates and sustains trust. Hazards also: every densely-taverned town invariably houses an equally-fertile network of AA meeting places, halfway houses, and rehab centers, staffed in large part on a trust basis by people who invariably spent a big chunk of their lives being highly un-trustworthy. Maybe a larger percentage of my generation will wind up patronizing the latter category of venues in our imperfect quest to fulfill this basic human need, but in the meantime behind the slips and slurs and self-mockery exists an earnest effort to prevent that from happening to the people we care about. If anything, Alex Morris's story is merely evidence of that.

Do Women Really Aspire To Drink Men "Under The Table"?

If there is a cultural phenomenon about which I can really do without the expertise contained within the average weekly magazine feature on the subject, it is the one about women who live in New York and drink more than they ought. Still, I am a female contributor to a female-centric blog, and women have savored women-getting-wasted stories at least since Anne of Green Gables got Diana sloshed on that raspberry cordial, so I dutifully began to read it this afternoon for possible posting purposes and indeed found myself snickering in recognition over this passage:

FEMINIST ONE: You would be proud of me. I drank alone last night!

FEMINIST TWO: I am proud! I should have called you. I was too drunk.

FEMINIST ONE: I opened a bottle of wine—a good bottle that I had been saving—poured some into a juice glass, and watched The Age of Love. My dad called, and he was like, “You know that drinking doesn’t solve things long-term?” And I was like, um, that’s a lie.

FEMINIST TWO: Hahahaha!

FEMINIST ONE: I know. I was so serious too.

FEMINIST TWO: Yeah, it solves things long-term, as long as you commit to drinking.

FEMINIST ONE: I told him booze was no different from Klonopin and it’s cheaper!

That's so funny! I thought upon reading the first few lines. I have had IMs exaclty like…

Oh ha, indeed, the IM had originally appeared in a July 2007 post on Jezebel, a women's site I co-founded which the New York story dubs "very pro-alcohol." (I am "Feminist Two," and for the record I have never tried Klonopin.) But more importantly I really don't think of myself, or anyone else on the site, as "pro-alcohol." Pro-pleasure, sure, pro-"honesty" or "candid examination of the human condition as experienced by women at this particular cultural moment," maybe. And insofar as our treatment of women and alcohol ab/use during my tenure was concerned, I think the site was probably best described "very pro-jokes," as one might glean from, say, my posts chronicling my adventures with alcohol-cessation drugs.

But no: the author illustrates me and certain of my former colleagues as "misguided" budding alcoholics drinking to reach some warped form of boozer parity with the men in our life men by a rationale "akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated."

I think this is unfair. Women make mistakes. Women do embarrassing stuff. Women regret that stuff sometimes. Women cope with it by joking about it, growing out of it, getting pregnant, getting help, or in lieu of all that, drinking more. That is the problem with alcohol: it can be a vicious cycle -- the way you drink too much, stay out too late, get too little sleep, wear yourself out the next day working late, blow off steam getting drunk all over again. But that's how it is for guys too. Sure, our bodies are different, and while drinking certainly has an added appeal to anyone who is experiencing menstrual cramps, what woman with a drinking problem would lay the blame on all the societal pressure to match the ounce-per-ounce consumption of our male drinking buddies? (Because that woman probably has bigger problems than her drinking problem, just saying.) Because I personally drink a lot -- less than I used to, more than I'd like -- and I can't even approach what my male companions can regularly put down, and I'm not trying to pretend that is good news. In other words, yes, New York, we have a drinking problem, but just like so many other problems it seems to be affecting all of us.

Rule Britannia

According to an article published in the London Times today, we Brits are now the most promiscuous nation in the world (of the western industrial nations, that is). In terms of one-night stands, total number of partners, and our "relaxed" attitude to casual sex, we beat Australia, the United States, Italy, and France. France! Where having extra-marital affairs is a favorite national pastime! If nothing else, at least now we might lose our reputation for being frigid and repressed.

In all seriousness though, Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the highest teen STD infection rate in Europe (although both are significantly lower than here in the United States, where abstinence-only sex education doesn't seem to be helping much). Premature sex education in British schools (it can be taught to children as young as 4) has long been blamed for the epidemic, along with the inappropriate sexualization of children by toy manufacturers and the media. But here's a thought. In Britain, we also drink more than any other country in Europe (apart from Ireland and Finland, bizarrely), and our alcohol-related death rate has doubled since 1991. We've also, according to this reasonably insulting story in the New York Times, been causing havoc on summer vacations with our abhorrent, booze-soaked behavior. Could there be a correlation somewhere between the beer goggles and the newfound sluttiness?