The XX Factor

In the long run-up to Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, one of the buzzier bits of news to trickle out of the production was that Jackson had decided to include Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), the powerful Elvish queen of Lord of the Rings, in this new movie for the sake of gender parity. Seems that move wasn't enough for everyone. Writing in Time earlier this week, Ruth Davis Konigsberg says that she found herself turned off by The Hobbit movie:

Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters—although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.

Bringing it back to Jackson, she goes on to say:

Jackson, the director of The Hobbit, has said, “To me, fantasy should be as real as possible. I don’t subscribe to the notion that because it’s fantastical it should be unrealistic. I think you have to have a sense of belief in the world that you’re going into, and the levels of detail are very important.” I should think that would include—especially in an intergenerational saga—something as important as the perpetuation of species, whether furry-footed or not.

But watching the movie, I found myself, a constant advocate for the inclusion of more female characters in fantasy, thinking it might have been better had Jackson not dragged Galadriel into The Hobbit simply for the sake of having someone with two X-chromosomes get a speaking part. In his Lord of the Rings adaptations, the enhanced roles for women like the elf princess Arwen or human noblewoman Éowyn served as reminders that strength could come from unexpected places. You could be pretty and passionately in love and still call down powerful magic against your enemies, and being a niece didn't preclude you from defending your uncle in battle.

But Galadriel's appearance in The Hobbit mostly feels like a checking of the box. And it reminded me that a lot of what I want in popular culture is not mandatory rainbow coalitions and gender balance in every single movie and television show, but more movies and shows that are about women and people of color—and a sense that those movies and shows aren't only for the women and people of color depicted in them.

All-male spaces and social circles existed in the kind of medieval settings Tolkien was commenting on, they exist today, and stories that are set in those environments aren't uninteresting to me because I'm a woman—in fact, just the reverse. My hope isn't that they go away, but that intellectually curious men should be able to find stories about femininity, and female spaces, whether they're fantastical or not, just as fascinating, even if there aren't male characters in the mix.

In a country where women’s representation in Congress hovers below 20 percent, how did New Hampshire come to be ruled by women? Once its new representatives are sworn in tomorrow, the state will be led by two female congresswomen, two female senators, one female governor, a female speaker of the State House, and a female chief justice. Yesterday, the New York Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye dropped a New Hampshire state civics lesson that hints at why female politicians may have advanced so impressively there: New Hampshire has more state legislators than any other state, and they’re all paid next to nothing.

Though New Hampshire is small, its political pipeline is wide. Four hundred representatives serve in its State House—it’s bigger than any other state legislature, and rivals the U.S. House of Representatives in size. That means that the barrier for entry is lower, and women have a better chance of snagging a seat. Once they are elected to office, they’re barely compensated. State legislators in New Hampshire are paid $100 a year flat. (Meanwhile, Pennsylvania reps are living well at a salary of $82,026 a year.) Other states offer lowly salaries for their legislators, too, but few rival New Hampshire’s paltry sum. Most at least forgive expenses (Alabama, for example, pays its legislators just $10 a day, but allows them $4,308 per month in expenses). New Hampshire doesn’t.

What does it mean that the first state ruled by women is also the state where local politicians are valued the least? Seelye notes that the state “has a long history of volunteerism,” and serving as a local rep is so low-paying that it “amounts to an act of volunteerism.” Maybe nonwealthy men were unable or unwilling to seek office. Maybe women were more easily accepted into a version of public office that was seen as a public service as opposed to a high-status, high-paid political gig. After all, volunteering is a historically feminine realm, where women have been able to find meaningful unpaid work while their husbands followed a traditional career track. For whatever reason, women were well-represented in the New Hampshire state legislature as early as 1975—since that year, the number of women in the House hasn’t dipped below 100.

Maggie Hassan, who will be sworn in as the state’s new governor tomorrow, is one woman who came up through the state’s legislative system. “There are lots of opportunities for women to pitch in, prove their competence and learn a lot about governing and the political process,” she told the Times of her state. “We’ve had a very deep bench of women.” Not all of Hassan’s peers originated in the State House, but the body’s early acceptance of women may have helped build a formidable female network statewide—one that’s finally paying off.

The new year always brings new hope, but I'm even more hopeful than normal this Jan. 2 about the 2013 television landscape. Could this finally be the year that, after more than a decade of prestige cable television dedicated to the anxieties of amoral, middle-aged men, women finally get their shot at star billing, both in front of the camera and behind it?

Women have always done well on cable comedies. Showtime built its brand on Weeds' drug dealer Nancy Botwin and The Big C's cancer patient Cathy Jamison. And this month, HBO is pairing up the Brooklyn twentysomethings of Girls with the midlife crisis of Enlightened's Amy Jellicoe. But female leads have always lagged behind in dramas. Homeland was a breakout in part because of its novel decision to make its main character a woman with a full sexual, mental, and professional life, rather than hitching female stars and stories to male main characters like Mad Men's Don Draper.

Now, it seems like the balance is about to shift. On Jan. 30, FX will premiere its drama The Americans, which features Keri Russell as a steely Soviet spy living and working deep undercover in suburban Washington, D.C. in 1981 under the alias Elizabeth Jennings. FX is also remaking The Bridge, originally a Danish and Swedish collaboration about the police forces of those two countries investigating the death of a woman whose body is found on the border between them: Diane Kruger will play the American detective, paired with Demian Bichir as Mexico's investigator. And then there's Showtime's upcoming Masters of Sex, a dramatization of the collaboration between sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson that's at least being billed as a star-making moment for Lizzy Caplan. These are all unusual opportunities for women to step into territory that's traditionally been dominated by men—for Kruger to take the role of top cop defined in this era of television by the men of The Wire or The Shield, for Caplan to be a visionary on a new frontier, like Al Swearengen was in Deadwood, or Walter White is in his meth kingdom on Breaking Bad.

It's no mistake that some of these roles were created by women. Michelle Ashford, who worked on the miniseries The Pacific and John Adams, is the creator of Masters of Sex. Meredith Stiehm, who created Cold Case and has been one of the lead writers on Homeland, is heading up The Bridge. And they're not only giving good roles to women. It's Ann Biderman, the creator of Southland, who cooked up Ray Donovan, the story of a Los Angeles fixer, that's actually part of Showtime's attempt to move away from a slate of shows dominated by female characters. (Imagine that!) Giving more women a chance to create their own shows isn't just about getting parity in roles. It's a chance to bring in new perspectives that can revitalize the tropes of the Golden Age of TV for men and women alike.

In a bid to demonstrate extreme irrelevance, the New York Times "Room for Debate" section took on the question of women wearing makeup, specifically asking: "If makeup has indeed become the status quo in the public realm, does it ultimately damage a woman’s self-esteem, or elevate it?"

Since no one actually cares about this question, the "debate" positions range from "wear makeup if you like it" to "wear makeup or don't, depending on what you prefer." Too bad none of the contributors made things interesting by asking the only real question, which is why men don't get to have any makeup fun. Instead, the male perspective (outside of that of a male makeup artist), came from Thomas Matlack of the Good Men Project, who must have taken a course in "how to talk about your wife's grooming habits": 

I just turned 48. So did my wife. We celebrated ten years of marriage on December 28th. She is the most beautiful woman on this planet. That sounds cliché but in my case it's the truth. I love to sneak a glimpse of her first thing in the morning, before she puts on makeup or clothes. She has slate blue eyes that sparkle in a particular way. My stomach turns inside out every time she looks at me. It’s as if the whole sun has been transported into those two orbs of light.

He wants you to know his wife restricts herself to a "tasteful" makeup regime and maintains a "rockin' body" before concluding with this: 

So when it comes to makeup and self-esteem I plead ignorance other than to say women should do whatever they want. That includes my wife, by the way. As long as she knows that I love her most when she has nothing on.

Scintillating stuff, but sadly for Matlack, preening teenage boys on Tumblr beat him to the punch months ago with the trend of telling women through handwritten signs that boners are best served by presenting a look that men can believe is "natural" beauty. 

While some might see this as a positive development on the "just be yourself" front, I do not. It's not liberating to hear a man who has never had to live a day as a woman tell us that we're silly bunnies who don't know what we're doing with that powder brush. And what's more empowering than the pressure to look, without any effort at all, like the media-driven fantasy of "natural" beauty? After all, we all wake up in the morning with dewy perfect skin and naturally dramatic eyes, just like Zooey Deschanel (who wears fake eyelashes to get that natural look) or Kate Winslet (who I've never seen without mascara or her eyebrows drawn on).

So, in closing: You'll pry my black eyeliner and red lipstick—makeup that undeniably looks like makeup—out of my cold, dead hands. I don't always wear it, but regardless, I refuse to embrace the fantasy that women just roll out of bed looking this way. 

Facebook hit my college campus in 2005, when the social network decided to expand from its Ivy League roots and deign to serve my second-tier university. My friends and I quickly pushed the new technology to its absurd limits—we staged sham Facebook marriages, posted obscene photo albums, and flooded our walls with penis jokes. One day, a boy I had met at school “poked” me. My roommates and I giddily deconstructed the implications of this new digital flirting strategy. I poked back.

This month, Facebook unveiled the next stage of its flirtatious poking function: Facebook Poke is a mobile app that allows users to send in-the-moment videos, photos, and messages, each of which are automatically deleted a few seconds after they hit the recipient’s phone. Facebook Poke is a blatant rip-off of Snapchat, an app that debuted in 2011 and has quickly grown into a mobile giant thanks to its largely teenage audience: Snapchat is currently trafficking in 30 million photographs a day, with up to 1,000 messages firing every second. Snapchat’s self-destruct feature has earned it a reputation as the “sexting” app—a place where teens can trade naked photos with no digital footprint.

Facebook Poke has so far failed to capture Snapchat’s mojo. Interest in the Facebook app is already waning. Meanwhile, Snapchat downloads are stronger than ever. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has argued that Facebook’s failure stems from the fact that it “didn’t think of building something like Snapchat long ago, all by itself.” But Facebook’s problems aren’t technological—they’re cultural.

Mark Zuckerberg initially developed his social network as a way to check out hot girls at Harvard; last year, he updated his status to announce his marriage to longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan. The site’s sexual values have aged with him. In the seven years since my college crush sent me that poke, Facebook has emerged as a sexless online community. Facebook’s terms of service prohibit posting content that is “pornographic” or “contains nudity.” Instagram, the more-permanent photo sharing community Facebook recently acquired, also bans “nude, partially nude, or sexually suggestive photos.” Facebook’s terms of service have led to the suspension of 17-year-old bride Courtney Stodden for wearing a bikini, a new mom for breast-feeding her baby, and The New Yorker for posting a cartoon of a topless Adam and Eve.

In the place of these sexy displays, Facebook offers a more traditional romantic landscape. Users are invited to select their relationship status by navigating a drop-down menu. Relationship terms escalate predictably: Single. In a relationship. Engaged. Married. (In this set-up, the "It’s Complicated" option plays like a sad joke.) Every status change is instantly telegraphed to the wider community. Then, it’s archived for months and years, only to reappear again in one of Facebook’s nostalgic displays, like its Timeline profile or Year in Review feature, which cast users’ minute-by-minute Facebook activities as key events in the public scrapbooks of their lives. Until Zuckerberg released Facebook Poke this month, Facebook’s flirty poking feature had all been forgotten in the shadow of these grandiose public gestures.

Snapchat places no similar restrictions on its sexual content. It doesn’t want to know if you’re married. Photos of old flames don’t come back to haunt you at year's end. And yet, the app isn’t just facilitating the delivery of millions of porny photos per day. Young users also find Snapchat useful for trading chaste self-shots, personal cat videos, and everyday sights annotated with scribbled inside jokes. This is Snapchat’s cultural triumph over Facebook: It is a social network where sex is comfortably integrated into a user's wider digital life. On Snapchat, sexual identity isn’t cemented through a series of boxes and menus. User profiles are nearly nonexistent, and even private messages are fleeting (though the app has some loopholes yet to close). That’s a winning formula for teenagers, who are highly invested in exploring their sexualities, but face strong cultural shaming from both peers and adults for doing so. Snapchat allows users to behave sexually without that behavior defining them—not for more than a few seconds, anyway.

Snapchat is unlikely to move teens to abandon Facebook en masse—Facebook currently hosts 20 million minors, many of whom have proven adept at navigating several online identities at a time. But Zuckerberg's site is gaining a reputation as your grandfather's social network (perhaps gramps has friended you?), and that can only limit true, spontaneous, and incessant engagement among teens. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg—who boasted about his developers copying Snapchat in just 12 days— technological innovations like Facebook Poke aren't enough to turn the cultural tide. Last week, Internet-famous tween Lohanthony tweeted a link to a Facebook chat, with this annotation: "i'm so bored i went on facebook."

If there's anything that anti-choice activists hate more than unchaperoned college mixers, it's got to be the Affordable Care Act. It's little wonder that the anti-choice press constantly attacks, even though abortion care is explicitly excluded: The new law's extensive reproductive health care provisions will likely reduce the STD transmission and unintended pregnancy rates, leaving even larger groups of fornicating Americans going without their holy punishments. Interesting irony, then, that it may have just been the fanatical devotion to making life hell for abortion providers that led to Romney's defeat and the closing off of the possibility of repealing the ACA.

David Corn of Mother Jones has a new e-book out about his uncovering of the infamous "47 percent" video and the chain of events that led James Carter and the still-anonymous man who filmed the video to giving it to Mother Jones. In an excerpt published Monday, Corn notes that it all goes back to his research into a conflict between anti-choice militants and Bain Capital: 

But the path to the scoop began months earlier, with a story about aborted fetuses.

Early on in the election season, Mother Jones had made a decision to look closely at Mitt Romney's record as a businessman—a record the campaign was promoting as a key reason why voters should choose him. As I dug into the history of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney had founded and managed, I found out about an investment it had made in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that in more recent years had been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing of aborted fetuses from family planning clinics. I obtained an electronic pile of documents related to the deal, including filings Bain had made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Romney was listed as an active participant in the Stericycle investment, which occurred in November 1999. This fact was significant; it undercut the claim that Romney had departed Bain in early 1999 to run the Winter Olympics, and had nothing to do with the firm's actions after that point, including investments that relocated American jobs.

Exposing the discrepancies between Romney's claims about his time at Bain and the actual documentation led James Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, to contact Corn. This relationship proved the critical one that allowed Mother Jones to get their hands on a video where Romney made the nonsensical claim that 47 percent of Americans are non-contributing parasites that live off government largess.

It's possible this all could have happened in some other way. Still, what did happen was that anti-choicers drew attention to Stericycle with their devotion to threatening tactics and harassment aimed not just at abortion providers and patients, but anyone who does business with abortion providers. Not only did they inadvertently save health care reform, they helped save the Supreme Court from four years of anti-chocie appointments. That's the problem when you embrace the "guilt by association" mentality: Eventually, the rings of guilt for sexytimes health care expand out far enough to include you. 

2012 may have been an up-and-down year for women behind the scenes in entertainment, from a small rise in the number of television shows created by women, to the harassment of video blogger Anita Sarkeesian after she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a project examining the depiction of women in video games. But on film and television screens, and in the pages of popular novels, it's been a rich and fascinating year for women in culture across races and generations. And for once, the best of them didn't have to be virgins, whores, or even particularly nice people. Here are six of my favorites.

1. M, Skyfall: Sure, it's James Bond's origin story. But in Skyfall, Judi Dench stole the movie as M, Bond's long-time handler, in the twilight of her career. As she faces the consquences of the difficult decisions she's made in the field over the years as she's represented Britain's interests, M confronts bureaucratic challenges in the form of a parliamentary inquiry and heads back into action to defend her best employee and surrogate son.

2. Olivia Pope, Scandal: ABC's political drama can be one of the most frustrating and preposterous shows on television. But as Olivia Pope, Kerry Washington is a fascinating paradox: a Washington power woman who hasn't forfeited her sexuality, and who doesn't follow the maxim that big girls don't cry. Her affair with the Commander in Chief may seem risible, but it's also delectably human, a reminder that politicians are as hopelessly human as the rest of us.

3. Amy Dunne, Gone Girl: Initially, it seems like Amy, the disappeared wife of Not-So-Nice-Guy Nick, might be the victim of her husband's desire to start his life over with his new girlfriend. But as Gillian Flynn's twisty novel unravels, it turns out Amy's a sociopath. She may not be the great female anti-heroine we've been waiting for in an age full of bad men we can't help rooting for. But as a villainess who decides that all she wants is to start a family with her own flawed husband, there's something fascinating about watching Amy get away with being a terrible person.

4. Suzy Bishop, Moonrise Kingdom: It's no mistake that Wes Anderson's best movie since The Royal Tenenbaums is about a girl who's a lot like a young Margot Tenenbaum. Suzy's angry at the world, and angry at her parents for worrying about her. When she runs away from home with a collection of science fiction novels and a record collection, Suzy chooses sweet, orphaned Sam, who sees beyond her rage, and the fact that she set out for a wilderness expedition wearing saddle shoes, as her companion. Young love has never been so spiky or electric.

5. Hushpuppy, Beasts Of the Southern Wild and Chazz Morningstar, Red Hook Summer: Hushpuppy lives beyond the Louisiana levees, where she confronts aurochs and her father's death, and Chazz draws her initials into the cement of Brooklyn sidewalks and comes face to face with the frailty of the adults around her. But these two exuberant little girls are the queens of their domains, be they Southern wildneresses or storefront churches.

On Christmas Eve, an American teenager exchanged gifts with her family. Then, she took to Twitter. "I HAVE AN IPAD BUT I'M GOING TO THREATEN TO KILL MY MOM BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T GET ME A NEW ONE,” she wrote. Then: “Mom got me a black iPhone 5 and I told her I wanted a white one. Being an upper-middle class suburban kid is so rough.” Then: “Only got $800 for Christmas this year ): my parents suck!!!!!1.”

A few minutes later, the teenager revealed the joke. “Just kidding you guys, I know how to fucking appreciate what I already have,” she tweeted. Then, she filed a sincere assessment of her Christmas haul: “I got so much more than I was expecting. Honestly this blanket that my aunt got me is the softest shit ever and I love it.”

But when BuzzFeed compiled its list of “22 of the Most Ungrateful Teens This Christmas,” it placed this teenager’s sarcastic iPad tweet at the top of its list. It followed it up with 21 more bratty meditations on Apple products from other teens (many of them curated by the Twitter user @fart). Nearly 44,000 people viewed the post. Commenters have reacted by threatening violence against minors (“I would personally just like to slap them all”) and instructing them to commit suicide (“For every teen who threatened to kill themselves, just do it. The world is better off without you”). Others took directly to the teenager’s feed, calling her a “bratty child,” an “attention whore,” and an “ungrateful slut.” She’s been forced to publicly clarify that she has neither an iPad nor a mother in her life: “GUYS I DON'T EVEN HAVE A MOM HOW DO YOU THINK IM GONNA THREATEN TO KILL HER,” she tweeted.

BuzzFeed’s list is the latest entry in a new online journalism tradition: Scour social media for offensive commentators, then list the worst offenders on a major website—full names and all—to give them a round public shaming. Previous iterations have deployed the tactic to out racist teens—in one instance, Jezebel even reported those teenagers to their school administrators—and to ridicule young people who don’t know who Osama Bin Laden is or are unaware that the Titanic sank IRL.

Plenty of adults say racist things, revert into ungrateful brats during the holidays, and demonstrate a tenuous grasp on world history. And yet these public shaming exercises tend to focus exclusively on teenagers. That’s partly because we see teenagers as redeemable, and adults as beyond help—Jezebel undertook its expose in the hopes that school administrators would “teach” the teens “about racial sensitivity.” But we also criticize teens because we feel that we can control them, either by sending them to the principal’s office or just asserting our generational superiority over them. As one BuzzFeed commenter wrote, “Thank you Generation Y for making me grateful I have dogs and not an ungrateful brat!” When adults shame teenagers on the Internet, we feel like we can separate ourselves from American racism and consumerism by pinning the problem on this new, amoral generation. We all got out fine, but these kids? Worse than dogs.

This impulse to mock and distrust teenagers is so strong that some journalists don’t even bother to investigate whether their assumptions are correct before forever branding teens as spoiled jerks. And so adults have reflexively shamed an “ungrateful brat” who actually shares our distaste for ungrateful brats. A couple of days ago, I alerted BuzzFeed to the full context of their “ungrateful” teen’s comments, but her joke still tops the list. Meanwhile, adults are still using the story as a roadmap for locating teenagers' social media accounts, then calling them whores and sluts who deserve to die. Who should really be ashamed?

The New Republic's cover headline this month is a topic that pro-choice activists speak about occasionally amongst themselves, but rarely address in public: "The Rise of DIY Abortions." The reason that it's not much discussed in public forums is that reproductive health advocates are data-driven people, and one thing that's nearly impossible to get data on is the prevalence of women quietly buying an ulcer medication named Cytotec from sleazy online dealers and using that to terminate pregnacies at home, far out of the reach of doctors and agencies like the CDC or the Guttmacher Institute that compile statistics on abortions. The writer of the piece, Ada Calhoun, admits that there's no way to know how common these black-market abortions are, but points out that the rise in websites peddling Cytotec specifically to terminate pregnancy (instead for its on-label use to treat ulcers) makes it hard to deny that this is a growing trend: 

Online, however, these drugs are readily available, often via suspicious-sounding sites that make claims like: “The Affordable Abortion Pill Will Safely, Quickly Terminate Your Undeveloped Fetus In The Privacy Of Your Home, Save You Time And Hundreds Of Dollars. It Is 100% Clinically Safe, Very Effective And The Most Affordable Abortion Pill You Will Get Your Hands On For Now!!!” 

Determining how many American women have had home abortions is exceedingly difficult: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not track illegal abortions. There is no blood test for drugs like Cytotec, and so such an abortion is indistinguishable from a natural miscarriage, even to a doctor. However, the proliferation of online dispensers suggests a rising demand. There are thousands of websites selling Cytotec for as little as $45 to $75 (compared with $300 to $800 for a legal medicated abortion in a clinic). Some claim to offer the harder-to-come-by Mifeprex, but may in fact be peddling Cytotec, or aspirin, or nothing at all. (Possible sources for the drugs include Mexico, where Cytotec is available over the counter, or even the United States, since it’s also prescribed here as an ulcer medication.)

Calhoun tracks the unfortunate story of Jennie McCormack, an impoverished Idaho woman whose inability to afford the expense of paying for an abortion and the travel/hotel costs to endure their mandatory 72-hour wait caused her to spend two months getting her hands on black-market abortion pills. Unfortunately, the time lapse meant she was quite far along in her pregnancy—her fifth, with the previous four resulting in three children and one abortion—which meant that she ended up aborting a pregnancy that was between 18 and 21 weeks along. She was charged with the crime of illegal abortion, but managed to evade jail because of some impressive legal wrangling from her attorney Rick Hearn.

Obviously, McCormack's entire ordeal could have been avoided if she'd had easy access to the abortion care she needed earlier in her pregnancy. Not that this will change the minds of any anti-choicers, who routinely claim that women should endure pain, misery, and public shunning as the due consequences of their choice to be sexually active in the first place. But for people who foolishly believe that heavily restricting abortion without banning it is some kind of "moderate" compromise, the rise in black-market abortions should be a firm reminder that the basic human right to control your body is not a compromise issue. The result of abortion restrictions is not, contrary to anti-choice propaganda, more glowing mothers who were stalled into changing their minds and having the baby. It simply means more desperate women turning to iffy websites peddling abortion-inducing drugs, and more Jennie McCormacks that turn to that option later in their pregnancies after exhausting their lean options at acquiring legal abortions under medical supervision.