The XX Factor: What women really think.

Women More Likely to Follow Men on Twitter

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.

Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream

Reading "Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm," I had to laugh. Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske used an MRI to scan the brains of men as they were shown a variety of images: clothed and unclothed women and men. Upon eyeballing the images featuring scantily clad women, the portion of the male brain dedicated to "tool use" lit up like a Christmas tree. Meanwhile, the portion of the brain devoted to recognizing the subject as human didn't react at all in some subjects. Fiske notes: "The only other time we have seen this is when people look at pictures of the homeless or of drug addicts. ... "

Men objectify women! Color me shocked. Apparently, Fiske was "shocked" at the results. It sounds like she didn't enter into the study entirely objectively either. When the idea for the study was suggested to Fiske by Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who predicted the "tool use" effect: “I said, ‘Oh, Jennifer, that’s disgusting. I can’t believe you’re predicting that.' ” I am fascinated to know what bubble it is these people live in. Or maybe they just never leave the lab.

Of course, feminist bloggers are having a field day with the results, although they can't quite seem to decide if it's male biology that's the culprit here or that infernal patriarchal society they're always talking about overthrowing. Feministing: "I think this argument proves that despite some pre-historic desire for men to get horny over scantily clad women and for women to want rich husbands that provide security and ability to nest (this is what evolutionary psychologists would argue), most of this desire comes from cultural conditioning." Thank you for clearing that up for me. (See Tracy Clark-Flory for a more rational response.)

What's being overlooked here is twofold. One: Fiske et al. studied a whopping 21 men. Who were all college students. To leap to grand generalizations based on such a limited pool seems foolish, at best. Two: Why do the results of this limited study have to lead to the conclusion that men are somehow "bad"? Can't they just be, well, men?

And everyone seems to be happy to overlook the fact that when asked if women view scantily clad men the same way, Fiske responded that women tend to privilege the bank balance and age of a man over his looks. How's that for objectification?

Are YOU Having an Affair?

Well, if you're not, go to the playground and look around. One of the three married mommies innocently trailing their little tyke is cheating, according to a new "Sex and the American Mom" survey conducted by Cookie magazine and AOL Body and apparently filled in by 30,000 women. When faced with this statistic, my own (perhaps nervous) husband pointed out that this was a self-selecting survey, answered by people probably attracted by a survey with "affair" in the title. But, then, our own Emily Bazelon says this matches evidence gathered from other scientific surveys and paternity tests. So I guess I have to believe it.

But I, too, would be much more likely to believe that 30 percent of all Cookie-reading moms are having affairs. (And now prepare for a long festering rant about Cookie.) It's not merely that the hot moms of Cookie attend picnics in Italian gowns that cost as much as my laptop or have skinny jeans for every occasion. It's their sense that they deserve to preserve their "lifestyle" exactly as it should be, and God help any chocolate-smeared infant or rumpled husband who stands in their way!

When I first read about Cookie I thought I was the perfect demographic. Those mommy magazines in the ob waiting room always seemed a little sad and frumpy to me, with their tenty maternity clothes and perennial lists of "10 tips" for everything. I was even willing to overlook the fact that Cookie was founded by two hipster New Yorker roommates who didn't even have kids.

Then I picked up an early issue a couple of years ago, and Oh My God. One feature I recall was called something like "You Can Decorate White!" Some poor kid lived in a house with white couches and white side tables and fluffy white rugs. His room was all white, and there was a white model airplane on his bedstand. (Cranberry juice, anyone?) The ads were a marvel and gave the demographic away. Anyone remember that New York magazine feature about the little demon shopper girl—a 6-year-old who seemed to know everything about Marc Jacobs' latest line? Well, every ad was tailor made for her: back to school wear that ranged from $400 shoes to $1,000 plaid miniskirts and made a normal person yearn for JC Penney.

Well, a mom who sends her 6-year-old to school looking like an expensive hooker could certainly not be expected to put up with a little middle-aged husband paunch or to resist the come-on from the hot new Israeli gym teacher.

Back to the main point: Take the survey. If you don't have time, we'll excerpt what we XXers have decided is our favorite question, a decidedly normal one:

Would you rather:

1. Have more sex

2. Make more money

3. Lose ten pounds

4. Get more sleep     

The Bad-Boy Image

Speaking of overshadowed men, and going back Hanna’s interest in pols who don’t cheat, I’d been wondering today whether Obama was perhaps squirming a little, and his staffers might be casting about for a way to cultivate at least a bit of a bad boy image. I mean, McCain’s out there boasting about his demerits at the Naval Academy, even as Maureen Dowd makes Barack sound like a sissy compared to Hillary. It’s not just that he abstains from chocolate (shades of Harvard’s head virgin, who forgoes dessert, too, as Melinda noted). He can’t bowl, and “genteely” sips beer from a bottle. On top of that, he’s got that Times article—the one speculating that he was actually a much tamer teenager than his memoir suggests—to live down. The obvious tough-guy image enhancer is out of bounds: Obama can’t come out swinging at the former goody-goody girl who lately seems more macho than he does, without appearing a hypocrite. But hey, a real alpha male sticks to his gentlemanly guns, right? A drawn-out primary can at least prove his endurance.

The Great White Divide

After Super Tuesday, Slate's William Saletan pointed out that Obama had made serious inroads with white voters, passing the 40 percent mark in eight Super Tuesday states. From last week's elections, add Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Obama tied Clinton with white voters in Connecticut and beat her among them in Virginia, California, Illinois, and Utah. Obama did this even though, until tonight, he has lost to Hillary among white women in every state except Illinois and Iowa. If you crunch the exit poll data for race and gender in 20 states, you come up with the following two-part rule:

1) When Hillary wins white women by 20 points or fewer, she loses white men. States this has been true for: Maryland, Georgia, Connecticut, Virginia, New Mexico, and California. Plus tonight in Wisconsin, where more than nine in 10 voters are white, Hillary won women by a slim margin and Obama walked away with men. (Exception to the first part of the rule, sort of: South Carolina, where she lost white men by one point with John Edwards still on the ballot.) 2) When Hillary wins white women by more than 20 points, she wins white men. States true for: New York, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, Missouri, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, along with an even split of white men in Delaware. Exception to the second part of the rule: Massachusetts, where Hillary won white women by 31 points, according to the exit polls, and lost white men by one point.

The 20-point fulcrum suggests that to win white men in a state, Hillary has to do really really well there. Which since Super Tuesday of course hasn't happened, and is getting harder and harder to imagine. Without white men, she has only won over all a couple of times, most notably in California. Hillary still has the solid support of Latinos: They broke for her strongly—especially women, but men too—in the four states I checked, which have sizeable Hispanic populations: Arizona, California, New Mexico, and New Jersey. But even in Texas, how can that be enough?

The Snip Series: Reprised for Valentine's Day

A couple of years ago, for reasons that I can't remember, if they ever existed, I decided to do an unscientific research project on circumcision. I asked men who'd been circumcised as adults and experienced sex both ways, to write in about which they liked better. My findings, two Valentine's Days ago: 

Of the 79 men who'd experienced sex snipped and unsnipped, 43 said sex improved (55 percent) after their circumcisions, 23 said it went downhill (29 percent), and 13 said there was no change or a mix of pros and cons (16 percent). My numbers don't differ much from the latest research: Based on a sample of 84 men who'd been circumcised as adults for medical reasons, a 2005 article in Urologia Internationalis found a 61 percent satisfaction rate, with 38 percent saying that penile sensation improved after the procedure, 18 percent saying it got worse, and the rest reporting no change. (Read more if you really want to.)

In the meantime, to my surprise the topic has become unfrivolous. Studies have shown that circumcision helps prevent the transmission of HIV and AIDS. In the absence of a vaccine, it looks like the next best thing. (Though apparently only for men--no evidence that it decreases the risk for women.) A South African study found that men who thought that circumcised men enjoy sex more than uncircumcised one were seven times more likely to have the procedure. And so a research team in Uganda conducted a large-scale study: 2,210 men were randomly chosen for the snip; 2,246 served as a control group. They were followed for two years. Results: A sexual satisfaction rate of more than 98 percent for both groups.This is so high that it seems incredible. But Ronald Grey, one of the lead researchers and a Johns Hopkins professor, defends it. He pointed out to me that in know-nothing studies like mine, people who feel strongly are inevitably over-represented, and that could bring the anti-snip folk out in droves. The Urologia study has a different problem: The men in it were circumcised for medical reasons, which means their experiences may not reflect other men's. The Uganda research, Grey thinks, is the first and only effort to track thousands of men who were perfectly healthy etc, before and after. So for the moment, at least, the question seems to be settled: circumcised men shouldn't worry about what their missing. Except there's just one thing: The researchers didn't ask them the relative question--whether sex got better or worse after the snip. Next study. Or maybe there are some things we're better off being left to wonder.