The XX Factor

When the Sundance Film Festival announced in late November the 16 dramatic features that would compete for its top award in 2013, it quietly did something that few other companies or festivals in its industry manage to achieve: It managed to reach gender parity, with eight of those films directed by women. This was particularly notable given that in 2012, only three of the 16 entries were directed by women. Sundance seemed to have figured out that not only was a diversity of perspectives something its attendees wanted, but—contrary to the claims that are constantly made in the entertainment industry that it's hard to find women to staff television writing rooms or to direct features—it was relatively easy to find those new perspectives if you decided to go looking for them.

But it isn't just the number of women in competition who matter: It's who's sitting at the judges' table. And in 2013, Sundance has fewer women at the judges' table than it did in 2012. In 2012, women were the majority of the judges in the documentary category, outnumbering men three to two. The 2012 U.S. dramatic competition had three men and two women on the panel, but in 2013, when many movies by and about women will be competing, the jury assessing them will be made up of four men and just one woman. The only category in 2013 in which more women will be judging the entries than men is in the World Cinema Dramatic Jury.

This is not to say that women will automatically favor work by other women, or about other women, or that explores domestic stories rather than movies about policy dilemmas or conflicts—nor should they. I can easily see Kathryn Bigelow or Angelina Jolie, who is set to direct her second war film, throwing their ballots behind hard-nosed combat pictures. But when juries select movies, they're signaling not just which movies are good but what kind of stories are important. These are signals that can affect what kinds of movies are deemed viable—or even canonical—in the future. Wanting a diversity of perspectives participating in that decision is important not just because it affects the outcome of one competition or one year's worth of movies.

This week, the National Film Registry inducted 25 new films, but just three of them—A League of Their Own, Samsara, and The Matrix—were directed by women, and the latter was co-directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski. Of the members of the National Film Preservation Board, which oversees the National Film Registry, 17 are men and just four are women. (There is one vacancy, and a number of the men are backed up by female alternates.) It's an important reminder that if we want parity at the movies and in our sense of which movies are considered important, we can't just champion a small number of female auteurs for their work behind the camera—we have to fight for the importance what women in the seats like to watch, too.

The release of Quentin Tarantino's spaghetti Western slavery revenge drama Django Unchained on the heels of Steven Spielberg's rather more sober biopic Lincoln has given moviegoers a holiday season full of questions about one of the darkest periods in American history. Are we capable of reckoning with the racism of one of our most beloved presidents? Was vengefulness or reconciliation the more useful emotion in governing the reintegration of the seceded states—and individual slaveholders—into the Union? Did slaveholders really pit slaves against each other in fights to the death?

But one question raised unintentionally by both movies is why they ignore so much of the work that black women did to fight for their own freedom. In Lincoln, which portrays the machinations of an all-male legislature and Cabinet, with interjections by the president's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, that makes at least some historical sense. But both Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the enslaved wife of Django (Jamie Foxx) in Tarantino's movie, and Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben), the free black woman who is presented in Lincoln as Mary Todd Lincoln's maid, are curiously blank, important only in how they motivate the black and white men around them.

In real life, Keckley bought her freedom and that of her son, and after petitioning for a license to work in Washington, D.C., began a career as a dressmaker, one that took off when she got as a client Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of eventual Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Keckley made dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln and dressed her for events, but she was not a servant. And three years after the president's assassination, Keckley published a memoir called Behind The Scenes that, in its descriptions of the Lincolns, as well as the publication of letters from Mary, broke with previous norms of privacy, not to mention race and class.

That's a fascinating story, and none of it, except an acknowledgement that Keckley was once enslaved, makes it into Lincoln. Instead of being the agent of her own freedom and an independent businesswoman, Keckley is a companion to Mrs. Lincoln, and an opportunity for the movie to have some mild discussion of the president's less-than-perfectly-liberal racial views. “I don’t know you, Mrs. Keckley. Any of you," the president tells her, explaining his perspective on black Americans. "I expect I’ll get used to you.” Keckley wants to know why she has to be an even more perfect role model than any other mother with a son fighting on the Union side. Lincoln doesn't have an answer for her, and  Lincoln doesn't have any praise or attention for the work Keckley did to liberate herself long before her president committed himself to the same project.

At least Keckley gets to talk to the president, and to be a witness to the vote in the House of Representatives that passes the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery. In Django Unchained, Broomhilda barely gets to be a person at all. Much of the time we see her only as her husband Django imagines her, naked and radiant in a hot spring in winter, beguiling in a yellow silk dress. In more realistic scenes, she's whipped, branded, and pulled out of a sweat box—looking gorgeous the entire time—providing a different kind of motivation for her rescue.

The movie lets us know that, even as Django's been mounting an epic quest to save Broomhilda, she's tried to run away again of her own accord. But Django Unchained is more interested in her as an object of other people's desires than in the courage that leads her to keep reaching for own freedom. The movie ends with her fingers stuck pertly in her ears as her husband dynamites the plantation house where she was last owned.

It's true, as A.O. Scott wrote in his review of the movie that "The idea that regenerative violence could be visited by black against white instead of the reverse—that a man like Django could fill out the contours of the hunter—has been almost literally unthinkable." But what's unthinkable in the movies can be less ambitious than what actually happened in real life. It's not as if there aren't true and more ambitious stories to tell about women and the fight against slavery. If your taste runs to action, the story of Harriet Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad and then as a scout and tactical planner for the Union Army might be a good place to start.

Who can best explain the workings of the female body? Medical professionals? Sex educators? Or geriatric Tea Party billionaires? This year, developments in women’s health care were disseminated via a national game of political telephone, with information about our menstrual cycles, contraceptive options, and pregnancies filtered through the fuzzy interpretation of conservative talk show hosts, religious officials, and candidates for public office. Here’s what we learned:

A lady votes for president based on how horny she gets in her period time. According to CNN, women vote in national presidential elections depending on how “sexy” they feel, with those sexy feelings shifting over the course of the menstrual cycle. CNN reported on a study in Psychological Science showing that “hormones may influence female voting choices” and that “during the fertile time of the month, when levels of the hormone estrogen are high, single women appeared more likely to vote for Obama and committed women appeared more likely to vote for Romney.” That’s because when single women are ovulating, they “feel sexier” and “therefore lean more toward liberal attitudes on abortion and marriage equality.” But when married women “feel sexy,” they overcompensate for “the increase of the hormones motivating them to have sex with other men” and vote Republican as “a way of convincing themselves that they’re not the type to give in to such sexual urges.” CNN later retracted the story, but the question remains: Can campaign strategists game future elections by gathering undecided female voters in the same dorm room and administering them absentee ballots at their horniest?

Rape victims’ bodies “have ways” of preventing impregnation by rapist sperm. This election season, failed Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin taught us that allowing victims of rape to secure abortions is unnecessary, as “if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Women who do become pregnant as a result of rape can rest easy—according to Akin, they were not really raped, not “legitimately” anyway, and are free to be forced to raise the child with the baby’s daddy, who is, at worst, an illegitimate rapist. Failed Indiana Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock advanced the theory, noting during his own senatorial campaign that on the rare occasion that rape does result in pregnancy, it is a beautiful miracle that “God intended to happen.”* Previously, Akin contributed these insights to the field of gynecology and obstetrics: People make babies by taking an embryo and adding “food and climate control, and some time”; abortion providers provide abortions to “women who are not actually pregnant.”

Rape is a method of baby-making. In a competing conservative theory of reproductive health, failed vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan insisted this year that rape is, in fact, a “method of conception.” According to Ryan, raping is such a sound technique of producing new humans that pregnancies resulting from rape should be treated like all others—the government ought to require women to carry them through to birth (or else horrible medical emergency). Once the baby is safely delivered from the womb, many states honor practitioners of the rape method with the same parental rights that nonrapist fathers enjoy.

Sluts may ward off pregnancy by guzzling large numbers of contraceptives. After 30-year-old Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke testified in front of a group of House Democrats in support of mandated insurance coverage for contraceptives, noted women’s health expert Rush Limbaugh countered that Fluke—a “feminazi,” a “slut,” and a “prostitute"—is “having so much sex she can't afford her own birth-control pills and she wants President Obama to provide them, or the Pope.” The more sex that women have, the more birth control they must consume, according to Rush Limbaugh. Should insurance companies be forced to subsidize women’s insatiable slut hunger for progesterone? Or should prostitute law students be forced to rely on over-the-counter solutions, such as Foster Friess-approved knee aspirins?

Single ladies and gays are not fully developed humans. This Christmas, Pope Benedict XVI gave unmarried straights and married gays the gift of damnation, commenting that outside the union of man, woman, and child, these sinners are engaging in a “faulty conception of human nature” that is destroying the “essence of the human creature,” inhibiting “the full development of the human person.” These underdeveloped humans—along with women who choose abortion—pose a “serious harm to justice and peace." Confirmation of the Pope’s evolutionary theory will be provided in Heaven, where it will be proved that his view is “not at all backward-looking but prophetic.” 

*Correction, Dec. 27, 2012: This post originally misspelled Richard Mourdock's last name.

For those suffering creeping concerns that the model love and romance in our culture has become increasingly one of commodification, a Christmas Day New York Times article about the relationship of credit scores and dating will turn up the volume on your anxieties. Credit scores, which are generated by private companies and often misrepresent a person's financial responsibility, were created to help banks decide how to lend money, but, in recent years, are increasingly used to determine if someone can get a job or rent an apartment. And now, according to this trend piece, more people are pushing dates to reveal the number, presumably so they can decide to continue the process toward creating a merged household economic unit that some of still quaintly refer to as marriage.

The story starts off with a handy villain, a man who asks women for their credit scores on a first date to determine if he should bother calling them for a second one. As the story wears on, however, it becomes harder to sit in judgment of people who fear hooking up with someone with a low credit score, as having one increasingly means being permanently relegated to a lower caste, denied housing and employment opportunities that someone who managed never to pay a cable bill late does not have to endure. Just as we can't blame a Jane Austen character for worrying more about marrying well than marrying for love, it's hard to blame people for acting like the economic units our capitalist society has reduced us to instead of acting like people. 

After all, we live in an era when presidential candidate Mitt Romney frames marriage not as a union of people in love, but an anti-poverty program that only requires "getting married to someone" in order to complete the economic task of raising the next generation of laborers and consumers. The big holiday comedy out now is Judd Apatow's This Is 40, which presents marriage much like the workplace is portrayed in the early years of NBC's sitcom The Office: As an institution you're shoved into with people you don't like very much but have to endure to fulfill your economic and social responsibilities. The movie inspired Alexis Coe to write a piece for the Atlantic looking at whether or not it's common for people to fantasize about their spouses dying, instead of fantasizing about a break-up that leaves both parties physically intact. She found that it is, which makes sense in a society where marriage is treated like a job, and getting a divorce reads like getting fired.

This grim, mercenary view of love and marriage may feel appealingly "realistic," but it's not. Take, for instance, this silly quote from the New York Times story: 

“Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”

All an STD test can tell you about a person's sexual past is whether they have one. Having an STD is not a reliable indicator that one is irresponsible, but simply a measure of whether you trusted someone enough to have sex with them without a condom, something that people in socially approved monogamous relationships do every day. In that sense, the analogy is correct. A low credit score doesn't tell you much about a person other than they've had difficulties in the past. It doesn't tell you if those difficulties are a result of irresponsibility or misfortune.

Of course, a trend story that relies heavily on interviews with a mere 50 online daters does not an actual trend make. While there does seem to be an uptick in Americans piously telling each other to focus on the pragmatic and financial when dating, most people—including Mitt Romney—reserve the right to priortize love when it comes to their own living rooms and bedrooms. Even if the credit industry manages to get your credit score tattooed on your chest, I imagine that won't do much to change people's stubborn insistence on picking their mates for love instead of money.

In our age of neurotic parenting, it should come as no surprise that irreligious parents might succumb some to the evidence-free claims of many that children must be raised in a faith tradition in order to achieve some ill-defined "values". Andrew Park at Salon has a piece up about his attempts to inject a little religion into the holiday festivities. (By "religion", he of course means "Christianity", because as concerned as he is about exposing his children to faith traditions, he isn't concerned enough to start fasting for Ramadan and teaching his children about the prophet Mohammed.) After many years of wholesome secular family Christmases, Park decides to start reading Bible stories to his kids, in hopes of giving them "context" for the holiday.

The result? Utter confusion. 

A few sentences in, they began interrupting me with questions. “Where’s Galilee? Who’s Herod? What’s Myrrh?” I deferred the questions to my wife. She made a beeline for Wikipedia. When my children asked why Jesus appeared to have two fathers – God and Joseph – I couldn’t help thinking of the old controversy over school libraries carrying books about kids with gay parents. By the time I had finished trying to explain the visit from the Magi, I was seriously regretting this. Far from providing context, I had confused them.

What the context-free kids grasp that we adults may not understand is this: The myths and legends of a desert-dwelling people from 2,000 ago don't have much symbolic or cultural relationship to the Christmas of our imagining, with its snow-laden landscapes punctuated with mistletoe and jolly, gift-bearing elves. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge evokes Christmas more readily than the tale of the Christ child born in Bethlehem, which most Americans probably can't find on a map. Frankly, if you want to instill more relevant modern values into your children, you'd be better off sticking with the Dickens tale, which emphasizes the importance of love and generosity. The story of Christ's birth, on the other hand, is about how virgins are better than non-virgins, with a side dose of arguing that babies who haven't done anything yet can still be superior to everyone else by accident of birth.

Sadly, Park doesn't walk away with this lesson, insisting despite this debacle that somehow Christianity must be a part of Christmas: 

Besides, the main byproduct of these holidays’ religious roots – an emphasis on expressing our love and caring for others once a year – is a good thing. In the current state of our world, we should take it where we can get it, and make sure our kids do, too. If you’re a secular parent and you’re worried about being hypocritical, think of Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and uber-atheist, who admitted a few years ago that he still likes to sing carols at Christmastime.

Dawkins does celebrate Christmas, but that's not because religion has something special to offer so much as further evidence that Christmas is a secular holiday now. That's why so many non-Christians feel entitled to celebrate it. No need to guiltily inject Jesus into the festivities if you don't really want to. One in five Americans identify as non-religious now, but Christmas just keeps getting bigger every year. If you don't want to bother raising your kids with religion, look at that number and know that you're in good company.

Every particle of me wants to disagree with the Iowa court that today protected a male boss’s right to fire an employee simply because he finds her “irresistible.” The court (all men) ruled 7-0 in favor of a dentist, James Knight, who terminated Melissa Nelson, a ten-year member of his staff, in the interests of saving his marriage. Things Nelson had not done: flirt, behave inappropriately. Things she had: exchanged personal but Platonic text messages with the 53-year-old Knight (whom she says she regarded as a “father figure”), worn clothing that “distracted” him.

After Knight’s wife found out about the texts, the couple asked their pastor for advice, and the pastor approved the decision to axe Nelson. This seems like the wrong moral outcome for reasons that Nelson’s attorney articulated: It suggests that “men [can’t] be held responsible for their sexual desires and that Iowa women are the ones who have to monitor and control their bosses'” libidos. How fundamentally unfair that, when guys prove incapable of regulating their urges, women get fired. If I had anything to do with James Knight’s church, I would start looking for a new pastor.

On a legal level, though, Knight’s defense appears pretty airtight. His lawyers bat away the charge of gender discrimination by claiming that their client let Nelson go not because she was a woman, but because her ineffable attractiveness threatened his marriage. This is lame, but valid in the eyes of the law: Bosses are allowed to fire workers for stupid emotional/family reasons, such as to mollify one’s wife or eliminate nest-wrecking temptations. In his decision, Justice Edward Mansfield observes that Knight replaced Nelson with another female staff member, which would imply his motives were not purely sexist. And if Knight were bisexual and Nelson an alluring young man, presumably the dentist would have resorted to the same infuriating—but legal—tactics. (On the other hand, might Nelson have a case against Knight for sexual harassment? According to an AP report, he once told her that “if his pants were bulging,” she should take it as a “sign her clothes were too revealing.” Also that her “infrequent sex life” was “like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it.” Ick.)

Clearly, Nelson has fallen prey to the whims of a horndog boss. I’m not unsympathetic to my colleague Hanna Rosin’s argument that such subjectivity opens up “a backdoor to sexism,” that “there should be some employee protection against you’re fired because I think you’re hot.” But yielding to an employer’s irrational preferences—so long as they aren’t explicitly rooted in race, color, religion, sex or national origin—comes with the territory of office work. You can get canned because your laugh grates on your boss’s nerves. Or because he or she misinterpreted something you said. Or, yes, because he or she finds you attractive and would rather not deal.  

Another reminder, on this almost-snowy, almost-holiday evening, that just because something’s lawful doesn’t make it right.  

Standing out front of my girls’ public school at pick-up on a warm spring day last year, just before the furor of kids erupted out of the building, a mother came up to my little gaggle of parents and said something that, though I couldn’t have known it at the time, changed my life: “Your daughter was so well-behaved during the lockdown drill yesterday.” At first I smiled and thanked her for the compliment. Then it hit me. “Lockdown drill?  What the hell is that?” 

This mom was happy to explain that she just happened to be helping out in the kindergarten classrooms when representatives from the Department of Education unexpectedly showed up and announced that they would be conducting a special drill to prepare students in the event of a gunman in the building. My heart drooped. She went on: “All the kids were corralled in the block area out of sight, the classroom doors were locked, blinds drawn, and they all had to be quiet. They were so quiet. I couldn't believe it. Obviously they had done it before. Then, the DOE guys came and jiggled the door, kind of pretending to get in, and the kids had to stay quiet through that as well. You would have been really proud.”

I wasn’t proud; in fact, I felt like I might throw up. This was not something I wanted my then 5-year-old (or my 7-year-old) involved in. That much I was certain.

Even before I learned about the lockdown drills, my husband and I were already having misgivings about our kids’ daily existence in public school—from the overcrowding to the testing. Was there time or space for them to just, you know, frolic? Wither mirth? But it was the thought of my youngest daughter, innocent and already spooked by everything from small dogs to imaginary robbers, being hunted in her own school that finally galvanized us to act. Since we couldn’t afford tuition for even one of the kids at any of the Brooklyn private schools, we decided to go off the grid.

Our kids have spent the first four months of this school year at a “homeschooling collective” with five other kids and a teacher we hired. Instead of test-prep, the students roam the park with a choreographer who finds mushrooms through dance. (Really.) They do more meditating than arithmetic. (Also really. In January, our older daughter will have four one-on-one sessions with a math tutor to help her keep up.) Now as we are almost to the school year’s halfway point, my husband and I have started thinking seriously about what we will do next year, and public school is back on the table. After Sandy Hook, lockdowns are no longer a real factor in my decision-making process. 

I can’t imagine ever teaching my kids to “play dead”—as that mother had gleefully told me she had on that spring afternoon—or buy them bulletproof backpacks (apparently all the rage at the moment), but my position on lockdown drills has softened. I see them now as a necessary evil. (Though if the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre has his way, school, with armed guards and lockdowns, will be depressingly like prison. If this happens, we are definitely remaining rogue.)

I don’t think the drills really traumatized my kids, as I had once imagined. Believe me: I conducted covert inquiries to see if their pint-sized psyches had been warped. But the school hadn’t used the word “gunman” with my youngest, and she seemed to feel similarly about lockdown as I had about earthquakes drills growing up in California. According to my 7-year old, it all felt like a game and was kind of “exhilarating”—her word, which even though I’ve come around on the lockdown drill, I’ll never forget.

Catherine Crawford is a writer living in Brooklyn.  Her book, French Twist: An American Mom's Experiment in Parisian Parenting, will be published by Ballantine in March.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is fond of repeating this business world double standard among groups of women: “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.” So as men gain power, we like them more. As women rise in the ranks, we like them less. Jessica Valenti has proposed that women respond by ditching their “desire to be liked and accepted” altogether. “Women adjust their behavior to be likable and as a result have less power in the world,” she writes. “But the trade-off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it.”

If only bitches had it so easy. People may dislike powerful women, but being unlikable won’t necessarily help women get that power in the first place. One 2011 study found that while acting rude and disagreeable helps increase men’s earning potential in the office, the same is not true of women. When it comes to salary negotiation, even nice guys don’t finish last—they, too, are better situated than disagreeable women. So women are counseled to act like ladies when asking for a raise.

Sandberg counsels successful young women to adopt the typically male justification for their rise to the top: “What a dumb question. I’m awesome.” But at Facebook, she modeled a passive style. When Mark Zuckerberg introduced Sandberg to the company by saying that she “had really good skin,” the new COO smiled, and “didn’t flinch.”

What’s a disagreeable woman to do? This year brought a new crop of openly hostile women, real and semireal, to help us navigate society’s intolerance of rude ladies. Here’s how the female jerks of 2012 fared:

“Maya,” the CIA agent on the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty; also known as “Jen” in an account by a former member of Navy SEAL Team Six. In Bigelow’s film, Jessica Chastain’s Maya is dismissed as “not Miss Congeniality” and “out of her mind” as she badgers the agency into following her lead to Al Qaeda’s No. 1. After she won the fight, the real-life agent received the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal for her work—and hit “reply all” to complain about the other agents who had won lesser awards. An anonymous tipster said her email related, "You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.” Colleagues have attributed her surly attitude to frustration at not receiving an expected $16,000 salary bump after her banner year. “Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” one former official said. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”

Anne Hathaway, actress. In 2012, Hathaway put an impressive stamp on two iconic roles: She filled out the catsuit as film’s most conniving Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises and starved herself nearly to death to play Les Miz’s Fantine. But she saved her greatest performances for her promotional tours, where she’s expertly navigated sexist interview questions with sassy retorts made for celebratory GIF walls. When asked to describe her “feline fitness regime,” she condescended to her male interviewer, “What do you want? Are you trying to fit into a catsuit?” And when Matt Lauer creepily grilled Hathaway about paparazzi shots of her vagina, she told him that she was “sorry that we live in a society that commodifies the sexuality of unwilling participants.” To make her disagreeable retorts Hollywood-ready, Hathaway handles it all with a smile.

Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia. Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, made international news after opposition leader Tony Abbott attempted to out the speaker of the House’s “sexism” and “misogyny” to score political points. Gillard responded by aggressively shaming Abbott for his own history of misogyny. “The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office,” she said in a speech to Parliament in October. “Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.” Gillard ranked 27^th on Forbes’ women in power ranking this year. The leaders of France, Holland, and the United States praised her speech.

Taylor Swift, singer-songwriter. Swift built her songwriting career by detailing how she’s been scorned by her big, bad high-profile boyfriends. Her tales of romantic persecution have made her one of the most powerful pop stars in the business, but she hasn’t ceded the right to be wronged. (In 2010’s “Mean,” she accused a music critic who gave her a bad review of “picking on the weaker man”—superstar Taylor Swift.) Of course, a powerful person with an underdog complex is just a jerk. And Swift really leaned into her jerkiness this year, crashing a Kennedy wedding with still-in-high-school boyfriend Conor (Taylor Swift does not crash parties; everyone is expected to be excited when she unexpectedly arrives) and collaborating with other boyfriend Harry Styles to recreate the famous “Dirty Dancing” lift at a private party (nobody puts Taylor in a corner).

Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. When Rice’s name was floated for nomination to succeed Hillary Clinton as the next secretary of state, haters called her “prickly,” “hard-headed,” “temperamentally unfit,” and “always right on the edge of a screech.” The personality police eventually moved Rice to withdraw her name from the running. Ruth Marcus wrote, “The controversy over Rice stems in part from the fact that she does not fit comfortably into this model of collegial, nurturing, division-healing woman.” But the idea that Susan Rice could have netted the job had she shown the softer side of the secretary is yet another double standard keeping lady jerks down. Previous Madame Secretaries Hillary and Condi weren’t soft and fuzzy, either. 

Before there was the Wayne LaPierre presser, there was Charlotte Allen. Allen's recent breathtakingly misogynist contribution to the decline of American discourse received a great deal of deserved criticism. In case you missed it: For her turn in National Review Online's symposium on Sandy Hook, informally known as the "Blame Anything But Guns Roundtable," Allen decided to blame the "feminized" culture of elementary schools, what with all the ladies teaching in them and all, where "helpless passivity is the norm." She was roundly mocked for her ignorance of history (most shootings involve plenty of grown male victims and bystanders), her poor grasp of the facts, and for substituting action movie tropes for reality. In classic right wing fashion, however, Allen has reacted to being impressively panned by doubling down. Now we have a new object to blame in the anything-but-guns panoply: Easy Bake ovens. 

I am, however, blaming our culture that denies, dismisses, and denigrates the masculine traits—including size, strength, male aggression and a male facility for strategic thinking—that until recently have been viewed as essential for building a society and protecting its weaker members. We now have Hanna Rosin at Slate urging parents to buy their little boys Easy Bake ovens so they’ll be more like little girls.  

Yes! She mentioned us! This new argument is even more incoherent than Allen's usual nonsensical spray of woman-hate she calls "writing." Allen's original line, which she's sticking by, is that we need to get more men into traditionally feminine occupations so that, if some violence goes down, the Man Switch inside is flipped and all the guys run up the walls and tumble through the spray of bullets so they can take the shooter's gun and kill him with it. This is obviously ludicrous, but let's pretend we buy it. Then comes the obvious next question? How do we get more men to teach elementary school? I have an idea! Start giving young boys baby dolls and Easy Bake ovens so that they can learn about caregiving and perhaps grow up to be men whose dream in life is leading a room of 5-year-olds in songs about animals and snack time.

Allen seems to believe a lot of contradictory things at once: She believes female passivity and male aggression are inborn and instinctual, but also that giving a little boy an Easy Bake oven is enough to derail him from his action hero future. She worships a hyper-stereotypical form of masculinity, but then wants men to take on jobs that aren't coded as masculine in our culture. Allen thinks that cooking—which Hanna correctly points out has already become a very male-friendly, even dominated domain—is too girly for men, but then she demands that men take over what many consider the girliest of professions.

Obviously, it would be great if more men wanted to become elementary school teachers, but not because men have unique abilities to face down semiautomatic assault rifles. It would be welcome for the same reason that gender-neutral Easy Bake ovens are welcome: because it would mean we're making more progress toward ending the stifling gender roles that Allen typically celebrates. 

This post is about a holiday conundrum, which is: How do you buy gifts for twins (like me)?

First of all, a disclaimer: With twins, as with regular people, it truly is the thought that counts. You can completely botch our gifts and we still won’t turn our evil supernatural twin powers against you (probably). That said, I can offer a few guidelines to help you singletons spread cheer (exactly equal amounts of cheer!) among the Mary Kates and Ashleys in your life without inflicting long term psychological damage.

Number one—and this may sound obvious—but do not get twins two of the exact same thing. We borrow each other’s stuff, so will feel cheated. Plus, it would be a shame for you to splurge on identical purchases, only to have one pronounced “better” for irrational reasons. Case in point: A grandmother once bequeathed my twin sister and me duplicate copies of Mad Magazine for our birthday. Though we didn’t understand any of the jokes or references—we were 7—my sister’s issue had a tiny crease on the cover, which, according to mystical twin cryptography, exposed me as the favorite. (Ironically, our interpretation in this case proved incorrect: Years after her death, my parents confirmed that Emmy was definitely that grandmother’s favorite. But I’ll save the details of that story for a different advice column.) Far better to go with one installment of Mad and one of, say, National Lampoon. That way, you don’t waste your money, and we at least have an incentive to read both journals in our search to suss out your preferred grandchild.

On the other hand, do not get us one gift to share! Unless it is very big or accommodates two people at once, we will fight over it. For instance, my sister and I loved the plastic jungle gym our parents installed in the basement the year we entered kindergarten. We did not love the endless rock-paper-scissors tournaments, dad-mediated negotiations and hair-pulling bar brawls that accompanied the single Talking Little Mermaid Doll another relative shipped us in the mail. Twins, also, are like bloodhounds. They are extraordinarily sensitive to the faintest whiff of a suggestion that someone may regard them as a unit. If you send one present for the both of us, you call our individuality into question. We may fuss over the gift out of principle—but we will also secretly hate ourselves for being Ariel-worshipping drones.

The practice of buying twins equivalent items—articles of clothing, say—in different colors opens up a gray area. While it works like a charm for elementary school kids, conveying a “separate but equal” vibe, siblings older than 12 may feel condescended to. Plus, the variant hues will spark a storm of speculation about the meaning of turquoise versus pink, especially if the association between color and twin persists for more than one year. (I was always turquoise, my sister always pink. Discuss.)

So you can’t get us each the same gift, you can’t get us one gift to share, and you can’t get us equivalent items with color or other minor variations. Which means that your only option is to get us each a similarly-valued but totally different gift. Mary Kate gets a balance bike and Ashley gets a scooter. Of course, we will rank those too, and tears will flow, but what else are you to do? I suppose you could just get one of us a gift and the other will make do. Email me for my address.