The XX Factor

Earlier this week, the White House announced a project called the Equal Pay Phone App Challenge. The competition’s goal: create an app that uses labor data and negotiation resources to raise awareness about the wage gap and aid women in pay negotiations.  According to senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the challenge is an invitation to “software developers to help women ensure that they’re being paid fairly—which in turn will help restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.”

When I first found out about the “App Challenge,” I reacted much like a Politco reader who bluntly asked in the comments section: “is this a joke? A satire piece?” The administration’s suggestion that an application could help address pay inequity seemed ridiculous and, to some extent, it seemed to trivialize the issue.

However, after reviewing the goals of the competition, one of which is to provide greater access to pay data, I realized even if this app does not have a huge impact, it’s not an altogether terrible idea.

In late August, I was coming up on a year at my current job. I knew that employees generally receive a raise at the end of a year and that I was getting promoted. However, I had no idea what other people at my level were making, and when the director of HR invited me into her office to talk about the promotion, I was a blushing, head-nodding, mess. The only question I managed to ask was if the salary I was offered was in the normal range for program associates. I was assured that it was, but I did not have the data to verify this, nor did I press for more.

I am far from the only woman who has found herself ready to negotiate but unsure of how much to ask for. And, while I have since discovered that there is some salary information available on sites like Glassdoor.com and Guidestar.org, an app that made this data easy to access and made it better known that such data exists could arm women with the information they need to successfully negotiate raises.

Hannah Riley Bowles, an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has done several studies on compensation negotiations. She found that in "industries in which salary standards were ambiguous, women accepted salaries that were ten percent lower on average than did the men.” When women do not know what to ask for, they set less ambitious negotiation goals and, as a result, make less money.

Will this application close the wage gap? Absolutely not. But it could be useful next time I find myself in the hot seat. And, at the very least, it shows that though the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to pass in Congress in 2010, the administration has not forgotten about the issue; it is a creative way to reach out to private industry developers; and it raises awareness about the ongoing efforts to achieve equal pay for equal work.

On CNN last night, John King asked GOP-nominee contender Rick Santorum to opine about the Pentagon’s recent announcement that it would open more combat-oriented service roles to women—and predictably, he toed an archaically conservative line:

"I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat."

To be fair, Santorum did note that he wanted to provide “every opportunity for women to be able to serve this country,” but he just couldn’t get over these mysterious “other types of emotions” that the presence of women might conjure up. Then, on the Today Show this morning, he offered a clarification: “Men have emotions when [they] see a woman in harm's way. It's natural. It's very much in our culture to be protective. That was my concern.”

The idea of men so caring that they’re driven to distraction by concern for their female comrades would almost seem sweet if it weren’t so blatantly offensive to the brave and perfectly capable women it’s meant to flatter. The truth is that these new rules merely formalize what military leaders have known for some time: Women are just as capable of dealing with the stresses of war as their male counterparts are.

Before the change, women had been barred from serving in direct-engagement areas like infantry and special operations forces; and while the new rules still won’t allow women to serve at the front of the front-lines, they will be able to work, for example, as field medics and communications officers. Of course, as the Associated Press points out, women have been unofficially fulfilling some of these functions for years, despite opponents “questioning whether they have the necessary strength and stamina, or whether their presence might hurt unit cohesion.” The contingences of war simply made those kinds of shaky arguments seem less important.

Still, the vague notion of “unit cohesion” looms large in these debates. I wrote a piece a number of years ago on the issue of DADT and found that even liberal-minded service people worried about the instability open gays and women would introduce into the apparently delicate ecosystem of the combat unit. My opinion now is the same as it was then: If the presence of people different from you (but otherwise capable of performing the same quality of work) disrupts your ability to do your job, that’s your problem, not theirs. Santorum’s imagined soldier needs to get over his hang-ups—no matter how chivalrous they seem—and get on with it. High-stress situations and appeals to the "good of the group” can no longer be a cover for personal prejudice.

Controversial statement: The most compelling television series of 2011 was not The Walking Dead or some other high-concept drama, but the British reality series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Not just another frothy wedding show, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding explored—albeit imperfectly—many issues of import, particularly gender relations and societal expectations of women in traveling communities. I can’t wait for the U.S. edition, which TLC promises is coming soon.

Which is why I was so taken with The Invisible Ones, by Stef Penney. A mystery set in 1980s England, The Invisible Ones follows a half-Roma private detective—his father was Roma but married an outsider and settled down in a house—who is hired to find a missing Gypsy woman. Her father has not seen her in many years, since her arranged marriage to into a family close-mouthed even by Roma standards. Rumor has it she ran away after it became clear that her only child suffered from a devastating genetic disease, leaving the baby behind with her strange husband and his clan. The detective, Ray, must rely on his Roma background to conduct the case, though it is a world he is not entirely comfortable in.

Like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, The Invisible Ones delves into some of the thorny issues faced by travelers of both Roma and Irish extraction in England and elsewhere: the conflict between Irish travelers, Roma, and the rest of the British Isles; the strict, troubling gender roles that require girls to marry young, have many children, and tolerate controlling husbands; the lack of education among many Gypsies; how their way of life is changing in modern times. Penney demonstrates sensitivity by alternating narrators: In addition to PI Ray, who is at best ambivalent about and sometimes disgusted by the Roma, the story is also told from the perspective of the missing woman’s young nephew. J.J. is on the cusp of adolescence and just beginning to realize that some things he has taken for granted, like the cramped trailer he calls home, will leave him disconnected from society at large.

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there's very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they're eligible.

That's the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

My guess is that they'll take their knocks and go home, but a lot of the damage has already been done. Romney was provoked repeatedly to go on the record saying negative things about contraception. Sure, it was in the frame of concern about religious liberty, but as this incident fades into memory, what most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department. I expect to see some ads in the fall showing Romney saying hostile things about contraception and health care reform, with the message that free birth control is going away if he's elected. It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along. 

I posted last night on my quite accidental discovery that Pamela Druckerman, author of the newly published  Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting had written an article for Marie Claire in 2010 about taking part in a threesome with her husband and another woman to mark his 40^th birthday. The article was available as a PDF uploaded by someone else, but it was unavailable from the Marie Claire site itself.

I wondered if the magazine had pulled the article at Druckerman’s request or if it was a technical glitch, and I promised to report back if I heard anything. And today, I received a call from Joanna Coles, the editor of Marie Claire, who kindly explained why the article was down and said that it will be available online again soon.

“Pamela asked us to take down the piece because she felt it would distract from the book, and we agreed to take it down for about a month,” Coles said. “She’s a good writer and a valuable contributor to Marie Claire.”

As I wrote in my initial post, I could understand why Druckerman would want the article to disappear for a little while. The article was daring, in the way she put herself out there knowing it would most definitely generate negative feedback, but it wasn’t salacious. Still, it’s bound to scare off some potential readers of a parenting book. (Personally, I wouldn’t be brave enough to write such an article in the first place, because I have kids, and someday they will be clever enough to Google me.)

Should a publication take down an article like this? I think there’s a difference between, say, hiding an old political scandal or a public figure’s embarrassing DUI, and a personal essay on the author’s sex life. And even if you take it down, you’re really just making it harder to find, as was the case with this article. I asked Coles about her thoughts on the way the Internet keeps old pieces, which might otherwise be forgotten, bouncing around.

“Today I read that Facebook photos that you delete have a life of up to three years. In this digital age you cannot keep anything secret.” She added that Druckerman’s article received more reader feedback than any other that year: “I suspect that even if she had written the pages only for the magazine that people would have remembered. Readers were fascinated and outraged in equal measure.”

Given the potential pitfalls of her subject matter, reporter Emily Weinstein did an admirable job with her piece in yesterday’s New York Times, titled “In Dire Need of Design: For Recently Divorced Men, A New Breed of Decorators.” Weinstein’s article does its due diligence (more than two examples, larger economic contextualization, divorce stats, etc.) in plausibly making the case that a certain group of recently-single men, despite being “alpha-male” types, can’t seem to figure out how to hang a picture on their new pad’s barren walls. These men are so helpless, in fact, that interior decorators have found it lucrative to shift their respective firms’ entire focus toward coddling them; and we’re not just talking about the taxing task of choosing upholstery—these intrepid designers will even feng shui your pantry with handpicked canned goods:

The designer’s team began by installing the man in a SoHo rental with nothing but a box spring, a chair and a TV. In short order, they had fully outfitted the apartment down to the books, dishes, sheets, towels and toys for his son. “We even found him a housekeeper,” [one decorator] said.

Everyone knows that divorce can be extremely disruptive, especially to the tempo of day-to-day life and doubly so when kids are involved. Dads understandably want to return their home lives to some semblance of normalcy as soon as possible for everyone’s sake. But the assumptions at play in this paradigm of expedited home installation are at least as troubling as some mismatched furniture.

I’m reminded of the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire in which Robin Williams’ kids visit his new apartment for the first time; it’s unfinished and a little rough around the edges, but perfectly safe. Yet, when Sally Field comes to pick up the children, she acts as if Williams is living in a trash heap, as if the kids couldn’t help but be gravely scarred by spending time outside of a Crate and Barrel photo spread. That’s the attitude at play here, too—paper over the real and profound rupture that has happened as quickly as possible so that we can pretend that it doesn't exist.

Far more healthy, in my view, would be to let children gently confront the fact that dad is having to make a new life, part of which is the process of creating a new home. Now, I have nothing against decorators, but a willingness to have one’s books, dry goods, and toy curation outsourced says something disconcerting about one’s engagement with parenting. If dad really can’t get it together to make such basic choices about his new life, he probably needs more help than a decorator is qualified to provide (and may also have an answer as to why his marriage failed).

In any case, a home is not something you can order from Amazon. The sense in Weinstein’s piece is that mom has kept the old house, a space that was presumably built over time with input from (hopefully) everyone who lived there. The movie sets described here can’t hope to capture that kind of cozy energy, and there’s nothing worse for divorced kids than to have one parent’s house be home and the other’s a hotel. Building something unique together, over time, seems like the best way to prevent this dynamic—and it’s probably not a bad way to renew a sense of family, either.

On the heels of Madonna’s glitter-nuke of a Super Bowl performance, Naomi Wolf wrote in The Guardian on Monday that Madonna-hate—which Wolf defines as “the reliable media theme [that emerges] whenever she steps out of her pretty-girl-pop-music bandwidth”—is based on a sexist rejection of an ambitious woman daring to consider herself a “serious artist.” Wolf identifies this disdain within the decidedly negative critical reaction to Madonna’s new film W.E. (which she directed and co-wrote), leading Wolf to question why such ad hominem hateration seems to be reserved especially for Madge. The answer?

Because she must be punished, for the same reason that every woman who steps out of line must be punished. Madonna is infuriating to the mainstream commentariat when she dares to extend her range because she is acting in the same way a serious, important male artist acts.

Wolf strains to portray Madonna as something she calls the “Nietzschian creative woman,” presumably an allusion to the philosopher’s sense that a “genius” should not allow his “will to power” to be constrained by the limiting morality or social expectations of the larger culture. In Wolf’s view, we gladly afford male artists the latitude to explore work (often with mediocre results) beyond their home-medium, but hold contempt for women who do the same.

While I agree with Wolf that Madonna-hate is a real and strange thing, I have to dispute her eager jump to sexism as the explanation. Not because women aren’t often judged by different rules than men in certain areas—double standards are our culture’s bread and butter; it’s just that Madonna, at least in the way that Wolf appraises her, is not a genuis in any medium.

I’m not saying anything new by pointing out that Madonna isn’t a particularly talented singer or dancer (and though I haven’t yet seen W.E., based on previous efforts I’d say that she doesn’t really shine around a camera either). But who ever said being a pop icon required actual talent? To be a superstar, all one needs—and these Madonna has in spades—is a cultural prescience and the lucrative gift of self-promotion. We don’t hate (or, for that matter, love) Madonna for her artistic genius; we’re just jealous of the fact that she’s been so successful without it.

Speaking less glowingly of artists at another point in his writing, Nietzsche contended that they are no more than the “pre-condition, the womb, the soil…from which [art] grows.” External influences use the vessel of the artist as a way of manifesting themselves in the world. To my mind, this characterization is far more accurate a description of Madonna than Wolf’s overdriven “Nietzschian creative woman.” Like Andy Warhol and others before her, Madonna is a master curator and synthesizer (a less generous word might be thief). She adapted voguing from a relatively unknown gay African-American subculture in New York and packaged it to sell, just as she has more recently channeled the latest trends in pop music into her own work via producers like Timbaland and cameos from new artists like Nicki Minaj. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear assimilated dubstep infusions on the forthcoming album MDNA.

The fact is, Madonna plays the fame game better than anyone; it’s just that her longevity has caused the internal machinations to become increasingly exposed. Certain people (including myself) get a thrill out of peeking behind the curtain—we’re riveted by the ambrosial combination of camp and connivance—while others are turned off by the lack of something romantically called authenticity. I revel in the audacity of Madonna’s ability to make millions from derivative and/or middling art, while "haters" find her gall and enduring popularity offensive.

Anyway, there’s no accounting for taste; the point is that neither perspective has much to do with gender. The underlying motivation of Madonna-hate could just as easily be directed at a man (the artist Damien Hirst comes to mind) or really anyone who refuses to let pesky little things like genuine talent or originality get in their way. As Madonna says in the song, “Every record sounds the same / gotta step into my world.” Like it or not, it’s a command, not an invitation.  

Pamela Druckerman is getting plenty of attention for her book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.  Telling anxious American parents not only that their parenting techniques are all wrong but that the French—the haughty French—should be our role models is a sure way to get yourself booked on the Today Show.

Bringing Up Bébé is based on Druckerman’s own experience raising Anglo-American children in Paris (she is American; her husband is British), and her willingness to reveal details from her family life helps ground the book.  But Druckerman might be regretting having been so open about her personal life a few years ago.

I am reading Bringing Up Bébé for a Slate book club discussion (look for it next week!), and today in the course of looking up something about Druckerman, I came across an article in which  she writes about how her husband asked her to engage in a threesome with him and another woman for his 40^th birthday. “Weird,” I thought. Not what you expect to see from someone trying to sell a a parenting book. The version of the article I’d clicked on was an undated PDF, and it offered a link to the article on the Marie Claire website, which I clicked on to find out when, exactly, the article had been published.

But clicking on the link (http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/articles/threesome-sex-menage-a-trois-planning) redirects readers to the home page of the magazine’s current lifestyle features section.  Was the original, which appeared in Marie Claire in 2010, legit? There’s no reason not to think so. Jezebel blogged about it at the time (and their link redirects to the lifestyles home page as well), as did Vanessa Raphaely, who is  editor of South African Cosmo, which is published by the same company as Marie Claire. A photograph of accompanying the article sure looks a lot like the photographs of Druckerman that appeared in reviews of her book Lust in Translation,.

Did Marie Claire pull down the article at Druckerman’s request? I am trying to contact them to find out, and I will report back. (UPDATE, Feb. 9: I did get a call from Marie Claire's editor in chief, Joanna Coles, and I wrote a new post about our conversation.)  There could be a number of legitimate reasons the link doesn’t work—it’s the Internet, it happens. But, it’s easy to access other articles from 2009 and 2010 in Marie Claire’s archives. It’s understandable why Druckerman might not want that article floating around while she’s trying to sell a book about parenting. I’m personally no prude, so finding out that she took part in a threesome isn’t going to hurt her credibility in my eyes, however, that’s not likely true of her entire target demographic. But it’s almost impossible to make anything truly disappear from the Internet.

And there’s another, less obvious reason that I think the threesome article isn’t beneficial to Druckerman. In Bringing Up Bébé, she posits that American parents are overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenthood from the moment they get that positive pregnancy test, that American-style parenting requires you to plow through stacks of books and pick a parenting style and write a birthing plan and then carry on similarly throughout your parenting years.  If you read Druckerman’s article about her threesome, though, you see that it’s largely about the planning of the threesome. She and her husband rule out their friends, reject the idea of a sex club, ponder the ideal candidate. She scours the Internet, goes on lunch dates with women, primps, stresses about her clothes, and asks her husband how to talk to women.

It leaves one wondering: Regarding the overzealous reading and plotting and planning and the stress of overparenting that inspires Druckerman to write the book, is it indicative of an American style of parenting, or just the Druckmerman style of parenting?

KJ Dell’Antonia, formerly of this blog, has an interesting post up at the New York Times Motherlode, which she now helms. She’s discovered that the U.S. Census Bureau considers moms who care for their children to be the standard, whereas men who care for their children are, in essence, baby-sitting. The bureau's view of what constitutes normal family life is revealed in a report called “Who’s Minding the Kids?” When moms take care of the kids the government considers it standard, the language of the report reveals; when  dads do it, that’s called a “child care arrangement.” Which is weird because, as Dell’Antonia points out, the number of children cared for by their fathers is growing.

I stopped working for almost a year after our daughter was born, and during that time there was a sizable number of stay-at-home dads in our Bronx neighborhood. For some reason, they tended to congregate at one playground, which was my favorite. The dads were doing all the same stuff as the moms – pulling out Ziploc bags of cheerios, brokering arguments over doll strollers, filling up tiny water balloons at the fountain so their kids could throw them, leaving the ground littered with tiny bits of wet rubber. (It’s as annoying and satisfying as it sounds.) Like the moms, they weren't being paid, and like the moms, they came every day and considered this their work. Their presence there constituted parenting, not an “arrangement.” It may well be that in most American families, the mom is the “designated parent,” as the Census Bureau puts it, but in the face of demographic change, it seems time to reconsider what we label deviation from the norm.

With all the fussing going on over the Obama administration's sensible refusal to carve out huge exceptions in their new contraception rules for religious-affiliated institutions that serve the public, I fear that there are a lot of misperceptions floating about regarding what it is that Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities are really like, or how actual Catholics feel about this situation. Some numbers are helpful. Twenty-eight states already require religious-affiliated institutions that serve the public to offer equal insurance coverage as non-religious institutions offering the same services.The tragic results predicted by anti-choice hysterics have not come to pass because of this. The notion that Catholics as a group are offended by these regulations is also false; a poll run by Public Policy Polling found that 53 percent of Catholics support the administration on this, which isn't substantively different than the population at large.The group who actually opposes the ruling are evangelical Christians, as a poll from the Public Research Institute found. Only 38 percent of evangelical Christians want the coverage.

So the divide here isn't between Catholics and non-Catholics, but religious fanatics and non-fanatics. You might not realize it from all the wailing about how Obama offended the Catholics, but most Catholics aren't actually sex-phobic religious fanatics. They use contraception and have abortions at the same rate as everyone else, in fact. The hyper-conservative representatives of the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops cannot be equated with American Catholics, any more than the Branch Davidians can be considered representative of Texans as a group.

The notion that the culture of Catholic-affiliated universities and hospitals is substantively different than secular or Protestant ones, and thus deserves some kind of special dispensation from having to obey the law, is something that direct experience with these institutions should immediately disprove. I personally went to a Catholic-affiliated university, and the reason that it was a fine fit for my atheist self was that "Catholic-affiliated" is basically meaningless when it comes to the daily business of a university. Culturally, there was no real difference between my school and a secular school. We had a LGBT group, co-ed dorms, no curfews, and while I was there our school theater did a performance of The Rocky Horror Show. Half the students and staff weren't even Catholic, and of those who were, most were like self-identified Catholics everywhere, which is to say not particularly interested in the church's extremist doctrines. The cafeteria served meat on Fridays during Lent. Campus entertainment, such as free movies and parties, was exactly like at secular universites. I remember sitting on a blanket on a warm summer night watching Pulp Fiction as it was projected on a wall on campus. My friends who went to private Catholic school in high school would often joke that they had better sex ed than you get in public schools. The only thing from the secular world that the USCCB cares to take a stand on is contraception, which suggests that this isn't about religion at all, but just about controlling women.