The XX Factor: What women really think.

Women More Likely to Follow Men on Twitter

When The Joke's On Women

Yesterday, Playboy.com posted a provocative story: "So Right It's Wrong." The piece was written by Guy Cimbalo, and its premise was to target those conservative women that he would like to, as he put it, "hate fuck." But if you click on that Playboy.com link, you'll find the piece is no longer there. And that's because the blogosphere went crazy after Playboy published it, going so far as to call for a boycott, and Playboy pulled it.

If you want to read the piece in full, conservative blogger Caleb Howe has reproduced it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

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.

What Makes a Man

Esquire is running a series of pieces that revolve around the idea of what it means to be a man. While others here took issue with another feature in the magazine, the cover story, "What Is a Man?," a rather ham-fisted take on what supposedly makes the 21st century man that comes across as more cartoonish than reality-based, I'm of the camp that while there's plenty of talk these days about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man remains one of the great under-discussed subjects of our time. Tom Chiarella may come across as Norman Mailer redux, but, heck, at least he's trying to sort it all out, right?

For what it's worth, another piece in this issue, "Interviews with Regular Guys," is a worth a look. The magazine asked a dozen so-called "regular guys" what they've learned thus far in life. My favorite comes from Gil Duran, a 32-year-old, D.C.-based communication director for Senator Dianne Feinstein.

My mother was the most important man in my life. I remember her being six months pregnant with my sister, crawling around under trucks with a rivet gun in a Grumman Olson factory in Tulare, California. With a mother like that, you don't need a father.

It bears keeping in mind that what makes being a 21st century male so complicated has a hell of a lot to do with women.

From the Culture Files...

Here's my culture question of the week: Is it possible to put on a good production of Hedda Gabler in an era when women have so many choices available to them? Hedda, after all, is one of Ibsen's great female characters, a restless housewife with an existential streak; she roams the rooms of her villa wondering how to achieve freedom. (A much more interesting version of the Betty character on Mad Men.)

I ask because on Saturday I saw the Roundabout Theater Company's new production of Hedda Gabler, starring Mary-Louise Parker. And I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since, because Parker's interpretation of Hedda is at once incoherent and fascinating. She plays Hedda with a detached, ironic anomie that illuminates the play's dry humor but makes it hard to understand the character's motivations (particularly her choice at the very end of the play). Afterward, I was reading about the play on the Web and saw that David Edelstein asks a version of this question is his sharp New York review of the Parker production. He's on to something interesting: Today, I think, contemporary movies, plays, and art are much more likely to depict trapped women in one of two distinct ways: Either they are trapped by social circumstances, trapped in a non-progressive society (think Betty in Mad Men) or they suffer from some existential ennui. (Think, I don't know, something like 4.48 Psychose.) But you rarely see a female character in which these two issues are blended together... Or do you? In any case, I think it gets to part of what makes Hedda so difficult to produce today.

A Fond Farewell to the Lovely Lez Girls, Indeed

Margaret, like you, I will miss the gal pals of The L Word and loved spending Sunday nights with them. Although I've read about the show's straight male fans (no surprise there; we all know that watching beautiful women make out is the ultimate cliché guy fantasy), I wondered how many straight women like me watched the show and found the characters entirely relatable despite our differences in sexual orientation. Not that a world of only beautiful, perfectly coiffed, no-body-fat-having, lipstick lesbians actually exists anywhere outside of Hollywood, but their heartbreak over relationships gone wrong, their struggles to find respect and equality in male-dominated workplaces, and their quest to find love and meaning in their lives are things that most women understand.

I admit, though, that I never got into Max's transition from female to male, and unlike you, I found the baby shower scene entirely unbelievable. No strongly self-identified man as the bearded Max, who was clearly distressed about his pregnancy and abandonment by his scared-off lover, could stomach such a silly, girly, frilly baby-shower. And it seemed out of character, and a bit insensitive, for the highly sensitive lez girls to subject Max to an event so closely linked to female identity—birth and motherhood. Still, I wished the finale might have had Max giving birth and turning the baby over to Tina and Bette.

I, too, was happy to see the infuriating but sometimes sympathetic Jenny get her comeuppance, but I'm not sure she was killed off. (Alice seemed too genuinely upset to be the murderer.) I wondered if Jenny offed herself as the ultimate expression of her narcissism. The way she signed off on the video she made for Tina and Bette was very ominous, don't you think? And her character had always been self-destructive and sometimes highly emotionally unbalanced. (Wasn't she a suicidal self-cutter early on?)

The L Word, like Queer as Folk before it, was a pleasant antidote to the stereotypical one-dimensional depiction of gay people we sometimes see on the small screen. I liked and accepted the girls and I want to believe that they would have felt and done the same for me.    

So what's a committed cable-watcher like me to do now that my favorite lez girls have gone the way of Sex and the City's Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte? Wait for the movie?

In Which I Do Not Yawn as I Humbly Declare That Alice Munro Is a Writer Much Superior to John Updike or Saul Bellow

Meghan, Sam, how embarrassing to be caught mixing up Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden! Clearly, it's time to revoke my poetic license. But Meghan, I did understand perfectly well that "making nothing happen" was intended as a declaration of importance; the Buddha declares nothing to be of supreme importance. And it is, in the inner world—but not necessarily in the outer world. I used to have, over my poetry-writing desk, Shelley's declaration that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. It took me years to recognize how utterly silly that was. I'm not saying literature is worthless, by any means. I'm saying its worth is, quite naturally, overstated by the literarily inclined who believe that everyone is affected by their discipline and passion as much as they are. It's just not so.

Still, all of you have beaten me into a slight retreat from my tongue-in-cheek stance that I just don't care anymore about the "great women writers" debates. Of course, it does matter that men acknowledge female writers. Yes, of course, money, prizes, jobs, opportunities to write, and other kinds of influence (influence on the literary-minded, if no one else) are distributed based on such recognition. I guess I'm suggesting that we knock the men down to size by pointing out that they're not as all-important as some of them like to think and that it's ridiculous to declare that men and women will necessarily appreciate imaginative renderings of one another's worlds in equal measure. For instance, I would pick Alice Munro as a greater writer than John Updike, hands down. And David Foster Wallace never did anything to me that even came close to what Jhumpa Lahiri can do (although I would drop just about anything else to read Dave Eggers). The Orange Prize has helped knock the importance of the (Man) Booker Prize down to size. If women and men had two equal sets of writing awards, wouldn't it help us all acknowledge that men's writing is necessarily limited by their maleness?

Why I Don't Yawn When I Talk About Women Writers

E.J., it was actually W.H. Auden who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen," and the line you cite is perhaps one of the misinterpreted and misquoted lines of our time. Auden, I believe, meant the opposite of what you imply in your post; he was, in fact, arguing that literature (including poetry) is crucial to our self-conception as humans, as cultures. That is, it is influential, even if few of us can say that reading a novel has, say, gotten us a job or stopped a country from going to war. The line you quoted is from his elegy for W.B. Yeats, and the rest of the stanza is quite relevant to our discussion:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

That is, a poem is a "way of happening," something that survives by being read and absorbed by the culture.

Another poetic quote came to my mind while reading your post: Marianne Moore, who famously wrote "I, too, dislike it." She was talking about poetry, but I thought of it in relationship to our discussion. Yes, like you, I'm not crazy about the discussion of Why Aren't There as Many Great Female Novelists, etc. But I don't think I can just yawn either. "Best-of" lists may be the province of geeks, but I think it's important to keep asking whether women writers get short shrift. Because even if prize-giving and list-making is highly subjective, prizes and honors help give you the financial freedom to write (either directly, by handing out $$$ or, indirectly, by helping you get a good job with a low teaching load). Call me selfish, but I'll be pissed if in my poetic career I have to do twice the work as my male peers to get half the salary and concurrent freedom.

I guess that means I should be all for your idea of a special prize for female writers—except that it bugs me that women might still need to be considered separate but equal. Why not just equal?

Women and the Quest to Write the Great American Novel

Noreen, Nina, and Bonnie were discussing the vexed question of why so few women have produced what might be called “the great American novel,” and I want to jump in belatedly. Maybe the problem is, as Laura Miller suggested, that that few (white) women take on "big novels." But the reasons behind this are complicated. First, until recently, most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers; read the big new Elaine Showalter history of American women's writing, A Jury of Her Peers, and you’ll be struck by how many of what Nathaniel Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women" were writing to support themselves and their families—which is different from writing to fulfill ambition. Second, Noreen, I think you’re right to suggest that the way we define "ambition" in the novel skews toward a, well, masculinist project—a bias toward the big and sprawling novel, an adventurous quest novel, rather than anything that can be defined as "domestic." (I touched on this indirectly on a piece praising the “small novel.”) Third, it’s been hard for female novelists to persuade critics of the seriousness of their endeavor.

But I think we do have some great American novels by women. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, in my mind, is not just a good novel, but one of the most important novels of the latter half of the 20th century. It's the first female quest novel of any real stature. And, paradoxically, it is also a domestic novel. It's just that the heroine chooses to break free of the routinized monotony of "housekeeping" in order to be a itinerant, a traveler. The novel is profound on its own terms. But it's also a powerful critique about how we think about the novel in America. By no means is Housekeeping an explicitly "feminist novel," and yet on a certainly level it's the most feminist novel I can think of: one that decisively complicates some very tired gender categories.

I'm Just Not That Into You

OK: So I caved in and saw He's Just Not That Into You. Which was actually better than I expected. But what's most notable about it is how the film tries to negotiate its requisite happy ending while continuing to position itself as a somehow "authentic" vision of dating culture today. This is a romantic comedy, after all. So it has to find a way to fulfill the usual girls-meets-boy, girl-hates-boy, girl-marries-boy structure. In this regard, it might be instructive to compare HJNTIY to Bride Wars, which faces a similar problem: It both wants to puncture the bubble of bridal fantasies and blow that bubble up even bigger. Two isn't a trend, of course, but what both He's Just Not That Into You and Bride Wars do is invent a "realistic" twist that isn't expected—in the first case, it's that boys/men are going to be mean and indifferent to girls/women over and over, and women better stop sugar-coating the real truth. (E.g.,"You're just too mature and pretty for him.") In the second, it's that even a fairy-tale couple can come unraveled in the midst of wedding planning. Spoiler alert, but Anne Hathaway doesn't end up marrying the seemingly sweet guy she gets engaged to.

We all know romantic comedies can't stand much realism. But rom-coms are often the best window onto the subterranean gender issues in the culture. (Think about all those screwball comedies.) And both these films are strangely pernicious, I think, because after patting themselves on the back for giving the viewer a dose of bitter medicine, they turn around and get ... super-conventional, in a super-fantastical way. First, both main characters end up happily in love with the right guy. Just a few short months after Anne Hathaway dumps her fiance, she gets together with her best friend's brother; they're married (and pregnant!) a year later. Second, and worse, they end up with the right guy in the most joyless fashion; there's hardly a lot of fun along the way—as there is in, say, His Girl Friday. Third, everyday gender relations seem awfully screwy, too—in ways that would mess with my head if I were a guy. In He's Just Not That Into You, there aren't any guys who call a girl wanting her to go out with him only to find she doesn't want to. In the film's gender lexicon, this isn't even a plausible scenario—which must be leaving some real-life men feeling they fall short of the male Lothario standard set here. In Bride Wars, neither Kate Hudson nor Anne Hathaway do much of anything but catfight and micromanage their weddings, but by the same token, the men in the film seem largely checked-out. They're neither witty nor deeply insightful, though Kate Hudson's beau seems ... adequate, I suppose.

Who would want to be the kind of arrogant, emotionally deaf doofus that all these people seem to be? Maybe what's really bothering me is that these films seem spiritually bereft. While pretending to be about the joy of love, they are peddling a kind of weird fear and self-loathing. If a third comes along, we'll have a trend. Call it the year of the romantic tragi-comedy.

Who's Doing the Second Shift in Recession Land?

Men, Women, and Layoffs

On Sunday, the NYT business section ran a piece called "Why the Sting of Layoffs Can Be Sharper for Men." It's got some not particularly evidence-based generalizations about how men are harder hit because their self-esteem is based on professional success more than women's. Also more interesting, if anecdotal, reports from psychiatrists that increasing numbers of men are coming in to talk about anxiety and depression related to the economic crisis. I'm skeptical about the broad claim that men feel the pain of layoffs more than women do. But I'm curious about how the downturn is playing out along gender lines. Are male egos collapsing because of the crisis? Are female ones? How are women supporting their laid-off or unemployed male partners, and how are men supporting the jobless women in their lives? If any of you readers have a story along these lines that you're up for sharing, please send it to doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise.

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.

Only Nicolle Knows for Sure ...

Do you mean, Maureen, that women in politics may have to be nine times nuttier and more narcissistic than even your average hey-look-at-me male of the species, just to get elected? Not sure I'm with you on that, having known some really menschy women officeholders. (And I know you're not saying there aren't any.) But maybe I would be with you if I'd had the job you had and seen all you have, right? What your post did make me think: We have no idea whether these stories about Sarah Palin throwing fits and clueless about whole continents are true; we weren't there. I've had two batshit bananas bosses in my life, one a he and one a she, and I almost never talk about either one of them—not because I am so nice, but because it's such crazyola stuff I don't think anyone would believe it. (Plus, even I don't want to hear it.) So maybe that's what Palin's aide Nicolle Wallace, or whoever the source was for this stuff, is learning, too: Sometimes, even the truth can splash back quite nastily. But if that were the case, it would certainly be an ironic coda to a deeply dishonest campaign.

Update: Sarah speaks, denies divadom. "I never asked for anything more than maybe a Diet Dr Pepper once in a while," she told reporters. She also disputed tales that she didn't know Africa was a continent and couldn't name the signatories of NAFTA: "That's cruel. It's mean-spirited. It's immature. It's unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away with it, taking things out of context [from debate prep], and then tried to spread something on national news. It's not fair and it's not right."

Palin and Cable TV

Slate's Jim Ledbetter sends in the following guest post:

The irony struck me while watching cable television from my Denver hotel room on Friday morning: A kind of token feminism had finally hit the Republican Party, and was immediately being questioned by—of all people—cable television commentators. Does anyone believe that the blowdried blonds (male and female, but for purposes of this argument, female) who read newscasts from teleprompters are chosen strictly for their journalistic skills? Putting women in front of the camera—like putting women on the covers of magazines—is a proven way of attracting the attention of media consumers both male and female. It should come as little surprise that the McCain campaign—which has never come anywhere near 50 percent support in any credible national poll—sought to apply this same media logic to politics. Don’t get me wrong: I share completely the view that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be the vice president of the United States, and that McCain’s choice is a world-class act of cynical political calculation, rather than any attempt to put “Country First.” At the same time, neither liberals nor conservatives have figured out the right balance between rewarding “qualified” women and sheer representation of women in places where it is deemed to matter. The logic of affirmative action is that given equal or near-equal conditions, preference should be given to members of historically underrepresented groups. The current contortions through which Republicans are trying to argue that Palin is qualified can be read as an argument that gender representation trumps experience, an argument not unfamiliar on the democratic left, and certainly not on cable television. And anyway, if McCain and Palin end up losing, who doubts that CNN and Fox will be competing to offer her a show?

Men Are From Mars, Women From Venus, and We're All on Pluto

Emily, you asked why self-identified feminists like Susan Pinker and LouAnn Brizendine publish books that focus on the differences between men and women. The cynic in me says: The marketplace finds it sexier than more talk about feminist goals that haven't been met yet. (As you pointed out, Brizendine's book was a best-seller.) But to be less simplistic about it: It seems to me that we are at a crux where we think we know more about the brain than ever before. Whether we do or not is perhaps subject to debate—and I really look forward to reading Amanda's series. But all this scientific novelty has resulted in a frenzy of really old activity: the use of new technologies to reaffirm traditional canards about "how women are." (We don't like to take risks, etc.) Whatever the realities of "hard-wired differences," it's kind of astonishing to watch so many columnists and authors use "brain science" to embrace the idea that things are the way they are for a reason. 

So in response to your fascinating question, I have to conclude that even for women it's sometimes a relief to imagine that we don't need to set ourselves the task of reinventing the world. That, combined with the fact that there are some studies that show "real" differences, makes for a tempting menu option. Not to mention that sometimes relationships can make everything seem completely oppositional. Hence, the paradigm that men are from Mars; women are from Venus. It's easier than thinking we're all on Pluto and need to do the hard work of getting back to Earth.

 A wonderful book that debunks a lot of gender myths is Carol Tavris' The Mismeasure of Women. I read it a few summers back, and parts of it are a bit outdated now. But I still recommend it to anyone interested in these questions. Among many other useful exercises, she invites the reader to try to perform a useful thought experiment: Imagine there were a third gender. Men, women, and, say, it. Would we be so focused all the time on construing "difference" as "oppositional"? As she points out, differences between the genders may indeed exist; but as more than one scientist has noted, the differences may pale in comparison to the similiarities.