The XX Factor

For the June issue of DuJour, the journalist Lauren Waterman sat down to profile the actress Julianne Moore. They ate zucchini fries and talked about celebrity profiles. First, Moore pushed back against the typical mommy narrative journalists impose on actresses of a certain age: “Men aren’t asked about age,” Moore said. “Men aren’t asked about their children.” Then, Moore pushed back against all narratives layered onto celebrity life: "We try to impose a narrative on everything where it doesn't exist, because we like narrative. … Like, in magazines, they'll say, 'This next chapter of her life.' Chapter? … The fact of the matter is, you can't impose a narrative until someone's dead, because you don't know what's going to happen.”

So Waterman did the only thing she could do: She built a narrative around that. “Moore resists the easy and the neat in favor of the true,” Waterman writes, then leans into the tested celebrity profile segue: “It's an impulse that's served the actress well over the course of her nearly three-decade career.” The story is headlined “The Most Honest Actress in Hollywood.”

“Celebrity resists narrative” is the new celebrity narrative. That angle looks good for the subject, who avoids indulging in her own cult of celebrity even as she builds it up in the pages of a magazine. As for the journalist, who often has access to the celeb only until the zucchini fries are gone—she doesn’t have much of a choice. Moore is right that profiles about women zero in on age, beauty, and parenthood in a way that profiles of men do not (and in the “celebrity resists narrative” narrative, the journalist can still hit the lady mag buzzwords by quoting the celeb speaking out against the line of questioning; they also work well for a Slate headline). But it’s not really clear why a person needs to die before we can glean any wider meaning from her life—if that were true, Moore should have passed on playing Sarah Palin in last year’s Game Change. It’s just that in order to tell a real story about a person (and not their skincare regimen), you need a little bit more access to your subject than watching them have a snack in a café. At one point, Moore avoids commenting on parenthood, saying, “It's an extremely profound experience, something that's difficult to encapsulate in a single interview.” Most interesting things are.

The real problem hanging over this interview is the wider market force that commits both actress and journalist to this silly exercise. Waterman touches on it briefly: Moore lends her face to a line of skincare for “women over 50” for L’Oreal, and Waterman fishes out a quote on the beauty endorsement. "They're great because they have a range of women representing their brand," Moore says, "from very young women all the way up to Jane Fonda, who's 75. It's not about being beautiful for your age. It's about being beautiful at your age." Julianne Moore for L’Oreal: It’s not your typical lucrative skincare endorsement! But beauty companies like L’Oreal don’t just pad the incomes of actresses like Moore. They also buy ad space in magazines targeted at women, and those advertisers flock to content that leads to splashy coverlines about age, moms, beauty, and boyfriends. It doesn't hurt for actresses like Moore to continue to resist that trend in interviews they give (and for journalists like Waterman to explore that problem in the stories that result from them). But as long as beauty products are funding journalism for women, we're probably going to keep getting superficial reporting about them.

In her recent Slate article, “I Should Have Frozen My Eggs,” Amy Klein, who is currently in her early 40s and undergoing IVF treatments, writes: “Freezing your eggs is worse than PMS but better than a trip to the dentist and can be done in less than a season.”

 I beg to differ with Amy’s upbeat assessment. The fact is, with assisted reproductive technologies (ART), women and their partners never know what to expect. When I first signed up for IVF treatments in my forties, I never thought the science would fail, and it never, ever occurred to me that the “reputable” donor egg agency our clinic referred us to would promote egg donors who were infertile. The resulting trauma was far worse than anything I had previously experienced in my life­­—including my worst trip the dentist.

 Amy goes on to describe how simple the egg freezing procedure is: “Before you ovulate, a doctor retrieves your eggs with a syringe from your ovaries via your vagina. Then he puts the good ones in the freezer.” My first question for Amy is this: Why are you so confident that any of the eggs doctors may extract will even be “good” to begin with, or that after five or 10 years in deep freeze they will produce a healthy child?

The only thing we really know about vitrification––flash freezing women’s eggs—is that an estimated 1000 babies have been born to women younger than thirty years of age who were facing life-threatening illnesses. There is no evidence-based research to support the notion that women who are older than thirty will have any success with the technology. We don’t know if these live births were the result of 3,000 or 10,000 trials. We have no information about how many miscarriages or stillbirths may have ensued, and we have no idea how flash freezing might affect offspring’s health later in life. In short, there is little, if any, evidence to back up Amy’s enthusiastic endorsement of this still-young technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why Amy is so hopeful about egg freezing, and I salute her desire to help women avoid the painful predicament of age-related infertility. But sadly for Amy––and millions of other women around the world, including me––even after thirty-five years, ARTs continue to fail far more often than is reported or discussed. The European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology reports that of the 1.5 million ART cycles performed around the world in 2012, 1.1 million failed––that is a 77 percent failure rate. In the United States in 2010 (the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control) there was a 68 percent overall failure rate, and for women older than 42, failures were as high as 88 to 95 percent.

Until we see more evidence-based research, I suggest we approach egg freezing and other ARTs with caution.

When I heard the news about Hustler’s inevitable porn parody of Girls, I found myself mildly irritated. Generally, I find porn parodies cute, even though they don't really parody anything or anybody so much as steal existing characters for goofy sexual displays. If nothing else, porn parodies don't tend to take themselves very seriously, which is a welcome contrast to so much porn out there. For instance, the porn parody of 30 Rock looks like a hoot, a sexualized tribute to the beloved NBC sitcom. What makes porn parodies like that one work is that they inject sexual situations into shows that aren't actually very sexy, and the absurdity of it all is amusing. 

Problem is, Girls is already a show that has a lot of graphic sex in it. Not only that, but it's a show that takes a long, hard look at the emotional complexities that define most people's sex lives. No wonder Lena Dunham feels like her show isn't being lovingly sent up, but blatantly violated. On Twitter, she explained why she couldn’t “just laugh off a porn parody of Girls.”

Even setting aside some of the more complex feminist objections to the treatment of women in mainstream porn, one thing is undeniable: The central fantasy of most porn is of context-free sex. Characters screw for no other reason than because this is porn, and screwing is what you do. Girls presents a more challenging view of sex, looking at the various ways people use sex to relieve boredom, shore up their self-esteem, and strive for emotional connection. In other words, Girls parodies and subverts the pornographic fantasy of context-free sex. The show’s most uncomfortable scene to date, in which Adam coerces Natalia into playacting a porn-ready daydream of female degradation, asked hard questions about how a harmless power fantasy on your computer screen can swiftly turn into real-life emotional abuse. 

Flattening out these complex portrayals of human sexuality into the usual bump-and-grind of mainstream porn doesn't feel like a tribute or a gentle tweaking. It feels like an attack. Hustler might as well market its film by saying, "Are you upset that Lena Dunham made you think too hard about women's complex sexual realities? Don't worry, we got our revenge by reducing her characters to chipper sex bunnies who don't worry their pretty little heads about anything but the next orgasm they can cause!" People look to the genre of porn parodies because they want to have their hardcore sex mixed in with silly, light-hearted fun. This, by contrast, feels hostile. 

And all this time we were worried that gay marriage was destroying heterosexual marriage, that the reason marriage rates were plummeting in the U.S. was because gay people wanted to steal it from us! Turns out it’s just the opposite. A new Atlantic cover story by Liza Mundy suggests that gay marriage is in fact causing a general marriage-is-cool moment, because gay couples are teaching us how to reinvent marriage so that it’s durable through the next century.

Yes, marriage has changed a lot from the Father Knows Best days, Mundy writes, but it is still burdened with old notions and habits about how men and women should behave—habits that are largely at odds with economic and practical realities. But the great gay marriage experiment gets to wipe that slate clean, for the obvious reason that there is no one man and one woman in the arrangement.  

Same-sex spouses, who cannot divide their labor based on preexisting gender norms, must approach marriage differently than their heterosexual peers. From sex to fighting, from child-rearing to chores, they must hammer out every last detail of domestic life without falling back on assumptions about who will do what. In this regard, they provide an example that can be enlightening to all couples.

Without those assumptions, gay couples tend to make more logical choices. The one who is the better cook more often makes dinner, without worrying that this might violate some principles of either feminism or masculinity. The one who earns more money works more, etc. In economics this is called “specialization,” and it tends to make households —much like industries—run more efficiently. One great surprise: Gay dads, studies show, are slightly more likely to have a full time stay at home parent than straight couples. Why? Because much as we hate to hear it, that arrangement is probably more efficient and makes everyone less stressed. But the important lesson here is, the one who stays at home doesn’t need to be the mom.

The one tricky part of the great gay marriage experiment is, of course, sex. An old study from the '80s found that gay couples were extremely likely to have had sex outside their relationship—82 percent did. That was before AIDS and the great matrimony craze in the gay community. But still, this is likely to remain a source of some tension. Mundy tells the story of Dan Savage, who started out wanting to be monogamous until he and his partner had kids, and then they loosened up on that, in order to make their union last. “Monogamish” is what he calls his new model. “Loyalish,” “faithfulish,” anyone out there want to try it?

Since its beginnings, when it was called "sociobiology," evolutionary psychology has been wed to the theory that women are monogamous and men are promiscuous—that men have a compunction to spread their seed while women instinctually want to lock some guy down to raise her children. Feminist attempts to create sexual equality between men and women were doomed to fail, because they went against biology. Shrugging was encouraged, and the term "hard-wired" was mandatory.

But now the evidence is beginning to trickle in, and one sticky fact has thrown this entire theory into jeopardy: It's women and not men who get bored with monogamy faster. As Daniel Bergner writes in the New York Times, women are far more likely to lose interest in sex with their partners. This doesn’t necessarily translate into infidelity—a choice many reject because it’s so hurtful—but, Bergner reports, spouse-weary women often just avoid sex altogether.

Add to that the study Bergner cites showing women respond to novelty in pornographic fantasies, and another showing that women are much more turned on by fantasies of sex with strangers than friends. You’d be forgiven for concluding that the gender most interested in mixing it up might be…women. 

What's really fascinating is that with this shift in understanding comes a profound shift in how we as a society are deciding to respond. There will be no shrugging of the shoulders and tossing around the word "hard-wired" to rationalize women disappointing male expectations of passionate monogamous sex. Instead, as Bergner writes, a ton of money is being spent on developing a drug women can take to restore their desire for their husbands. The drug, called Lybrido, is in clinical trials now with the hope of writing an FDA application by the end of the year. 

Bergner also implies that women’s declining interest in monogamous sex is socially, not biologically, inflected. Since women receive messages “that sexual desire and expression are not necessarily positive,” he suggests, they tend to require additional stimuli—such as novelty—to get them in the mood. The implication? If we can normalize female desire in society at large, we can presumably encourage women to continue lusting after their partners.

Notice that identifying a lack of sexual excitement as a societal ailment, not a biological one, reduces the sense of fatedness around the issue. When people believed that boredom with monogamy was a male trait for women to endure, interest in fixing it was pretty low. Now that we understand boredom with monogamy to be a female trait for men to endure, it’s suddenly a Problem—with possible solutions. Though frustrating, this is ultimately probably a good thing. Since most of us want to be monogamous, it's about time we took seriously the need to keep it interesting. 

There's a lot to chew over in Esquire's forthcoming profile of Brad Pitt, including his admission that his drug use during his marriage to Jennifer Aniston got out of control. But one of the most striking revelations in the profile comes from Frank Pollaro, a friend of Pitt's who collaborated with him on a furniture line. Since he began his relationship with fellow mega-star Angelina Jolie, Pollaro explains, Pitt's done something unusual. As the New York Daily News reports, Pollaro told Esquire, "This is a guy who has tried not to do any sexy scenes with other women since he's met Angelina. He's crazy about her, and she's the same way about him."

It's not exactly unusual for Hollywood couples to get jealous of their partners' on-screen love scenes. Lisa Rinna has tweeted about getting jealous when her husband, Harry Hamlin, is shooting sex scenes. Patricia Arquette wouldn't watch then-husband Thomas Jane in Hung, the show in which he played a gym-teacher-turned prostitute. Eve McGregor has said that being pregnant while her husband Ewan was filming sex scenes with Kelly Macdonald for Trainspotting was exceptionally difficult. Of course, many actors have learned to manage the painful emotions brought on by watching a loved one love someone else on screen. Rarer are the actors who have decided to spare their significant other that misery entirely.

Though Pitt's been known more for action roles in recent years, early in his career he was famous for sex scenes in movies like Thelma and Louise (which he later called "discombobulating"), Meet Joe Black, Fight Club, and of course, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in which he starred with Jolie. Hollywood math dictates that Pitt could have kept playing romantic roles pretty much forever—and kept playing them opposite actresses in their 20s. But Pitt also has action roles and, increasingly, comedic chops to fall back on. Not to mention that he’s dabbled in Serious Acting roles for films like Tree of Life and Moneyball.

Has Jolie reciprocated her partner’s vow? It’s hard to say: The actress has appeared nude in a number of movies since she began seeing Pitt in 2005, including Wanted and Beowulf. Yet she hasn't done a sex scene since Mr. and Mrs. Smith (on whose set the relationship supposedly began). A shower sex scene was originally included in the script for 2010’s The Tourist, but it was reportedly cut at the request of co-star Johnny Depp's then-partner, Vanessa Paradis. 

Good for Pitt for being so sensitive to the needs of his relationship (although the gesture seems oddly fussy for a pair of professional thespians). That said, as an A-list actor, he can better afford the luxury of turning down roles than most older actresses. The majority of roles for women in the top 100 grossing movies released in the United States in 2012 were for characters 39 or younger. Even actresses with similar profiles to Pitt's—mega-stars in presumably high demand—have continued to do sex scenes. Kate Winslet shot sex scenes for both Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Julia Roberts got in bed with Bryan Cranston in Larry Crowne. And Charlize Theron has done sex scenes in a significant number of her movies, from serial killer drama Monster to Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman's Young Adult. Maybe substantive, juicy roles for women are simply more likely to include sex, whether it’s because audiences enjoy seeing attractive actresses naked or because great female parts usually revolve around domestic life and relationships. In any case, it’s hard to completely divorce Pitt’s promise from the privilege that makes such a move possible.  

Pitt's gesture of respect for Jolie may be good for their family. And it might be good for him creatively, too, helping him leave behind his early status as man-candy, without going the overly dour route that Leonardo DiCaprio chose to walk. But it's also a reminder that, compared to many actresses in his position, he's got the option to turn down certain kinds of work, in full confidence that there will be other parts out there for him.

Earlier this week, Slate’s "Dear Prudence," Emily Yoffe, featured a letter from a young attorney who was seething with resentment because many co-workers in her law firm regularly left the office early. Their explanation? They had children and needed to tend to them. “These co-workers often acknowledge that they're being unfair,” the attorney writes, “but state that ‘when’ I have kids I'll get to leave early, too.”

I get annoyed when the kid card is played. As a working parent who for years struggled to juggle my professional obligations with my parental ones, I’ve paid baby sitters to stay late (and forgone other things to do that), used vacation time to attend grade-school graduations, and traded off early departures with other co-workers (not all of them parents) so my husband and I could go to awards ceremonies, etc.

Of course, as Prudie’s answer noted, parents may well return to work via their laptops after dinner is over and the kids are tucked in. Still, I empathize with the young attorney who regularly looks up to see them leaving because “I have kids.”

Not everyone does. Not everyone wants to. Not everyone can or should. But they may have other people they need to look after or projects they need to complete. Perhaps they share the care of an elderly parent or grandparent. Or maybe they’re taking graduate courses to better position themselves in a competitive market. Or swing dancing, for God’s sake, just because they want to.

The point is that children, like a lot of other delightful things in life, are usually a choice. And the decision to have them implies that you’re willing to make adjustments and that the world doesn’t adapt to your needs all the time. Cutting back on your social life, for example, is an option. Cutting back on obligations that allow you to support a child you chose to have is not.

I’ve worked on holidays and over weekends so parents can spend time with their children, in the interest of equity and to be a good co-worker. But I’ve also had colleagues argue that they should get every Christmas off “because I have children.”

People without children have lives that are as legitimate and that they cherish as much as people who have children. This unwavering entitlement—I need time off; I have to have this holiday; I need to leave a half-hour before everyone else does, every day—kills office morale. (And obviously this doesn’t apply to emergencies.)

A family-friendly workplace can be a wonderful thing, but there is more than one way to have or to be family. And the quality of life for people without children shouldn’t be affected because someone is pulling the kid card.

If it’s a day that ends in y, there must be a horrible and obnoxious trend in child-rearing for which we must scold parents mercilessly. (Let me check my calendar. Yup.) The latest “outrage,” courtesy of the New York Post and Lindy West at Jezebel, is that rich parents at fancy New York private schools are—quelle horreur—sending their nannies to school events in their stead.

Now, I enjoy hammering obnoxious rich people as much as the rest of the middle class. I was horrified to learn about the thriving business of renting out handicapped people to be personal FastPasses at Disney World. But sending the nanny to the bake sale? That’s inspired.

I don’t have a nanny (I have my mom), and my kids are in a (fabulous) suburban public school, not Horace Mann or the Birch Wathen Lenox School. But, aside from our widely disparate tax brackets, I can totally relate to these parents. The entire month of May for parents of school-age children is a scheduling obstacle course. There are field trips and fun days and field days (yes, those are all different things). There are carnivals and class plays and preschool graduations. Just when you’ve run through the figurative tires and climbed the wall and swung across the monkey bars—Bam! Out of nowhere comes the swinging punching bag of a late-announced class presentation or assembly to broadside you.

May is the most extreme example, at least on my family’s calendar, but the school year is filled with such events. It’s getting to be too much. I love chaperoning the preschool field trip to the zoo, and the quality time I get spending one morning in class with my kindergartener is far more memorable than the 50 emails I miss at work while I’m there. But parents—especially working parents—can’t possibly be at every event.

The Post quotes a woman named Amanda Uhry of Manhattan Private School Advisors as saying, “They’re sending nannies for bake sales, book clubs, for the ice-skating group. Parents can’t be bothered two days a year for an hour.”

Hahahahahahahah. Uhry’s own examples give lie to her claim that parents are needed “two days a year for an hour.” Bake sales? Book clubs? The ice-skating group? The article adds that paid employees are also “working fund-raisers, designing sets for school plays and taking seats at graduations and public performances.” Why are parents designing sets for school plays? Isn’t that what the art teacher does?

There are disturbing examples of parents sending in the help for entrance interviews and parent-teacher conferences. One might ask why parents can’t see a difference between an entrance interview and a bake sale. An equally good question: Why can’t the school itself see that difference?

In her Jezebel post, West extrapolates that parents who send the nanny to the occasional fundraiser are “outsourcing absolutely all parental duties” and asks, “Why bother having children if you never want to see or speak to them?” It’s almost not worth addressing, but … really? In this day and age, parents spend half their time worried that they’re underparenting (thanks Jezebel!), and half their time worried that they’re overparenting (usually in the car on the way to schlep someone to a practice or game or recital). I can’t speak for the 1 percenters who send their kids to Horace Mann, but among my parenting cohort, I can say that our evenings and weekends are pretty full to the brim with kid time. We play in the yard or go to the zoo/museum/rec center, at least when there are no baseball games/basketball games/swim meets. We get a sitter, if we’re lucky, once a month. And when those nights roll around, the kids are usually pretty excited to be rid of us. Something tells me they wouldn’t even notice if we skipped the bake sale.

Feminist concern with representations of women in comic books and video games is hardly a new thing, nor is it always greeted with support—just ask Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes Vs Women has inspired intense backlash from territorial gamers. But as more and more women enter these previously male-dominated fields, the possibility of feminists effecting change from within the industry has, logically, skyrocketed. Take the case of Meteor Entertainment/Adhesive Games, where a female employee recently punked her boss, and with outstanding results.

Meteor Entertainment is the creator of the free-to-play mech game Hawken, in which users build their own virtual robots and use them to fight other users’ robots. But the tale of the master prank actually begins with a tumblr called The Hawkeye Initiative.

Founded on December 2, 2012, this project creates and solicits original art that addresses the over-sexualization of women in comics by replacing them with a male hero—Marvel's master archer Hawkeye—standing in the same pose. (Moviegoers may know Hawkeye from Jeremy Renner's hotsy-totsy portrayal in The Avengers.) A manly man with super strength and agility, Hawkeye posed as, say, Black Cat from The Amazing Spiderman makes a powerful visual point: that comic book women's costumes, body shapes, and poses undercut their superpowers by overemphasizing their sexuality.

A Meteor employee and fan of the Initiative, who goes by the handle K2, was disgruntled by prominently displayed office art of a scantily-clad woman. (K2 dubbed the woman "Ruby Underboob.") She conspired with co-worker and artist Sam Kirk to change out the poster with one of a man, equally sexualized and equally naked. And thus was born "Brosie the Riveter."

Luckily for our merry mischief makers, Meteor CEO Mark Long loved it. In fact, he copped not just to having sexual art around the office, but also to contributing to the creation of that art. He wrote in an email: "I didn't just hang the picture on the wall. I collaborated on the design with the artist. He and I came up with the Rosie idea. The underboob is pretty much all my fault. Since then, I've learned about The Hawkeye Initiative and the larger gender-flip meme going on in comics and games, which is righteous and transgressive. I'm a dumbass, but at least now I know I'm a dumbass!" He and his employees are now in an "open dialogue about gender in comics and gaming."

K2 told XX Factor, “I'm glad to see awareness of the gender-flipping meme spreading. I hope and expect to see a lot more of it, and other innovations on the theme, too. There's more than one right way to do this. The Hawkeye Initiative has put out a call to action for more real-world plays in the gender equality space. The more—and the more real-world—the better.”

K2 is also collecting stories of action on the tumblr GenderShenanigans.

All too often, Internet feminism of the kind practiced by The Hawkeye Initiative preaches to the choir, rarely resulting in or even aiming for concrete outcomes. In the case of Meteor Entertainment and their intrepid employees, though, the idea behind The Hawkeye Initiative produced tangible results. That’s my kind of feminism.

On Monday, 184 couples got hitched in a mass marriage ceremony in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. But what made the day special wasn't the collective pledge to love, honor and respect. To obtain a license to wed, the local government had asked prospective grooms to submit photos of themselves posing with their indoor latrine.

This unusual move was the latest push in a national drive to improve sanitation; past efforts had included subsidies, public shaming, rewards for those who reported public defecators, and even fining town drunks to raise money for a communal toilet. But despite the government's grandiose claims to have installed 87 million commodes in villages within the past decade, India's 2011 census told a different story. According to the results, fewer than half of Indian households had a toilet in their home; of those, a much smaller percent were connected to a working sewage system. By way of comparison, nearly two of every three Indians, or roughly 800 million people, owned a mobile phone.

The lack of lavatories is particularly troublesome for women and girls. A 2011 report by SHARE, a sanitation and hygiene research project funded by the UK Department for International Development, drew a link between a lack of sanitation facilities and sexual violence against women. According to the report, girls younger than 10 had been raped on their way to use the public toilet. In one Delhi slum, boys hid inside the stalls at night, waiting to rape anyone who entered. Earlier this month in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, where only 15 percent of rural families have access to toilets, a senior police officer spoke to the BBC of a "worrisome trend": young girls and women being raped as they relieved themselves in the fields. The officer went on to estimate that 400 women might not have been raped last year had they had access to a toilet in their homes.

Given this context, we can only hope that the government's latest campaign, "No Toilet, No Bride," succeeds where others have not. Last year, India's minister for rural development urged parents not only to consult with astrologers when considering marriage for their daughters, per local custom, but also to ask whether their new husbands’ homes would have the proper facilities. In response, several states rolled out local initiatives to up toilet usage in their districts.

In the state of Madhya Pradesh, where Monday's wedding took place, the local government has developed a scheme to marry off women and tackle sanitation in one go. As part of a program called Mukhyamantri Kanyadan Yojana (MKY), the state will pay for the mass ceremony and provide qualifying couples with housewarming gifts totaling 15,000 rupees (about $270). But to qualify, a groom must provide evidence of the toilet, specifically a signed affidavit and pictures of himself with the family crown. (If one doesn't yet exist, he must prove his intent to install one within 30 days of the wedding.) Not only is MKY a hit, but officials say that, this year alone, almost 1,800 couples have already wed under the program, according to the Wall Street Journal. Local photo shops are reporting a similar uptick in business as husbands-to-be rush to print the pictures taken from, not surprisingly, their mobile phones.