The XX Factor: What women really think.

"Couples Retreat" Peddles a Strange Vision of Fear-Induced Monogamy

A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:

I disregarded the bad reviews and saw Couples Retreat this weekend, mostly because I have a sort of inexplicable faith in the comedy prowess of Vince Vaughn. As expected, it didn’t offer much beyond the Hollywood-happy obvious for the coupled characters who take to a relationship-building resort for a week of joint therapy, yoga, and quasi-illogical trust-building activities (you’ve seen the stripping-down scene on the beach in the preview, right?) to work on their endangered marriages. In fact, the only thing that did prove surprising about Couples Retreat was the terribly boring, compulsory brand of monogamy the movie offered up at the end ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Edwards Confesses!

OK, so John Edwards cops to the affair but says he's not the baby daddy to Rielle Hunter's infant. A few problems with all of this. First, is he trying to help himself by saying "he did not love her"? Is that supposed to make Elizabeth feel better, that not only did he jeopardize their personal relationship but also his candidacy--the one that she insisted he continue despite her diagnosis of a terminal disease, the one that she worked so hard on--for some action on the side?

And, I may be proved wrong, but I don't buy that he's not the father. He and Andrew Young, the "admitted" father, both had an affair with Hunter? Possible, but yuck. And if Young is not the father, and Edwards is not the father, then who the heck is Young covering for? And why was Edwards visiting Hunter and the baby at 2:45 in the morning?

I guess it's time for Edwards to go campaign with Bill Clinton touting the benefits of monogamy!

Gettin' Some Strange

That's funny, Meghan—when you just posted asking if any of us had seen Philip Weiss' cover piece for this week's New York, I was debating whether it was worth gathering my own thoughts about it. Poor Weiss is already being eaten alive, entertainingly, in the comments section, and really, his piece is such a feverish blend of anecdotal evidence, confessional sexual fantasy, and ev-psych chestnuts (there are enough "hard-wiring" arguments in there to power a mainframe) that it kind of critiques itself. But if nothing else, you have to marvel at the guy's self-immolating candor, his willingness to expose his fantasy life to public scrutiny in his quest for what the old Kris Kristofferson song called "some strange." I'm all for dismantling our culture's understanding of marriage as a state-sanctioned commitment to lifetime heterosexual monogamy. But what about prioritizing the "heterosexual" part—and granting all Americans the civil rights that come with marriage—before we start rejiggering the "monogamy" part so straight guys can collect all the women they want?

As you point out, what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional "mistresses"? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of "empowered" courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we're living in that world already.