The XX Factor: What women really think.

Broadsheet Weighs In on Katie Roiphe’s Essay

Katie Roiphe’s recent essay for DoubleX, on the narcotic effects of new motherhood, has generated quite a bit of heat in the blogosphere. Yesterday afternoon, Salon’s Broadsheet published a roundtable on Roiphe’s piece. If you can stand to hear a little more on the subject, I highly recommend it.

"We're All Intersex"

We learned today that Rita Wilson is prepping an HBO series based on Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winner about a girl named Callie who grows up to become a man named Cal. In a bit of fortuitous timing, Salon has posted an interview with professor Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, a new book about intersex people.

Intersex people are born neither male nor female; the descriptor is "an umbrella term that includes people with a tremendous number of genetic conditions, from those born with an extra X chromosome to those with overdeveloped adrenal glands."

There are lots of interesting nuggets here—for example, Callahan's description of biological sex as a spectrum, not a binary system. (Hence the piece's title, "We're all intersex.") That's a concept that many of us are comfortable with vis-a-vis gender identity, but applying that framework ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

Her Great American Novel

"Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" Others here have weighed in already on why the literary canon seems to be lacking when it comes to Great American Novels written by women. What struck me about Laura Miller's essay was the same line Noreen pulled out:

Prose is right that many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.

Male authors also fetishize writing the Great American Novel. Somehow, I get the sense Miller finds all this male ambition problematic. Is it? Or is there a serious lack of female writers who aspire to write the Great American Novel? That, I find, would be problematic.

Color Me Puzzled

Eve, I wish Portfolio had been a little more specific in their recession belt-tightening survey. "Stop coloring hair" is a pretty limiting response that doesn't factor in some other options to save money on maintaining that hair hue. Women (and men) who want to save money might come to terms with their roots and go longer between touch-ups. They could downgrade to a cheaper colorist or even buy a DIY hair-dye kit from the drug store. And if you're selling your home, chances are that your financial problems are too critical to be solved by forgoing lattes and trips to the salon for a few months.

I was initially struck by the claim that only 4.1 percent plan to donate less in 2009, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that a study foresees just a 3 percent to 5 percent drop in corporate giving this year. No word on how much individuals plan to reduce or increase their personal donations, but hopefully Portfolio readers tend to give a little bit of that money saved on lattes and vacations.

Writing While Female

Meghan, I, too, felt Rebecca Traister's "The Great Girl Gross-Out" raises more questions than it answers. Moe Tkacik's tampon-gone-missing tale, Tracie Egan's female ejaculation chronicles, Miranda Purves' post-childbirth sex life—they're all a strange mix of the need to confess, the desire to shock, and the want of page-views. I don't think any of this "gross-out girl" writing is particularly feminist, postfeminist, or whatever else kind of feminist, nor do I think it is without import or solely designed to garner attention. It strikes me as copycat fratire—the boneheaded hijinks of Tucker Max meets the Farrelly brothers. How about: chicktire. Boys can sleep around? We can too! Boys can do gross-out stuff! We can too! Freud: "The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology." Taking the metaphor literally, they've located the dark continent between their legs and, scrutinizing it in public, presume themselves investigators of female sexuality by way of taking a trip up the river of their vaginal canals.

I'm more interested in Meghan's question: "Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting [the] female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect?" Perhaps "modest" isn't exactly what we're looking for here; maybe not "neutral" either. Can writing about the female body go beyond the literal, transcend the body itself, make a point that exposes something more than the fact that bad things happen when you leave your tampon in for 10 days?

Looking around, it's hard to come up with examples of writing that does so, frankly. Marguerite Duras? Hélène Cixous? Molly Bloom? Addie Bundren has a great line in As I Lay Dying: "I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a ----- and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse." The place where Faulkner "writes" what Addie "is" is a blank space on the page. Écriture féminine it ain't (or is it?), but the place where the words aren't may speak more to the totality of womanhood than any gross-out girl's words could ever hope to reveal about their writer's darkest places.

Gross-out Girls

Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation.

Trend stories usually seem fake to me, but I think Traister’s right about this one—though we’ve seen waves of similar self-revelation in the past. (Do you all agree? Disagree?) As for me, I confess I’m both repelled by and attracted to all these bloody confessions—at times amused and impressed by the frankness of these women, at other half-put off by it. Perhaps that’s because I come from conflicted Catholic stock. But I think it’s also that the phenomenon Traister is describing is more multi- than single-faceted, in ways I wish she'd teased out more.

Which is to say: I have different reactions to different parts of Traister’s piece. Miranda Purves’ graphic description of her pregnancy in Elle seems to have a purpose that goes very beyond exhibitionism. You have to be graphic to write that piece in the first person, because the piece has to enact Purves’ own shock at what happened to her body and to convey her sense of feeling gypped that few people had spoken explicitly about this to her beforehand. She's onto something. In an age of disclosure, it’s (paradoxically) shocking how many women are surprised by what can happen to their bodies during delivery. (I remember reading a brutally honest description of birth in, of all places, Sylvia Plath’s diaries when I was 24, and thinking: Why on earth has no one ever told me this stuff? )

But I’m not sure I feel the same way about Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, where, I’d say from my brief perusal of it to date, the reader finds a lot of youthful narcissistic exhibitionism on display. So far I don’t get the value of that exhibitionism; the writing seems bland, and the “rawness” is designed to shock—a stance I find increasingly tedious in our bare-our-souls-and-bodies culture.

Which brings me to a question for all of you: Is being relentlessly in-your-face the only way to write about the secret reality of the female body? Is this mode of brazen oversharing a kind of feminist reclaiming? Or is it mostly a canny method of self-packaging? Of course, as Traister herself notes, those two questions may not necessarily have mutually exclusive answers. The either/or approach is used far too much when it comes to women who write (or speak) provocatively about themselves.

So I’d like to ask the inverse question: Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect? I’m trying to think of examples. … Sontag’s journals actually come to mind. She writes at times about female genitalia with a coolness in tone about that's eerie yet revelatory. What else?