DoubleX.com Full Articles

We're Talking About: Christine O'Donnell's Memoir, Murder in Disney Town, and Naming Your Child Bristol

Double X Staff — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:09:21 -0400

— Christine O'Donnell has announced that she will be writing a memoir. Is this the first candidate's memoir by someone who has never actually been in office? [Gawker]

— Angelina Jolie has been criticized for her Bosnian directorial debut, but Jolie defends her decision. [Reuters]

— A man was found murdered in Celebration, Fla.—a town that is owned and operated by Disney. It is the town's first ever murder and people are worried that it's not the picture perfect place it was anymore. [New York Times]

— Female lawmakers don't have a bathroom on the House floor, but building one could cost $200,000. [Politico]

— NPR aired a story this morning about a man who watched his gay parents and many of their best friends, some of the men who helped raise him, suffer throught the AIDS epidemic. [NPR]

— Are good-looking women really more likely to be turned down from a job because of jealous women in HR? [Daily Mail]

— The names Bristol, Willow, and Piper have had a surge in popularity recently, all thanks to the Palin girls. [Politico]

Girl Wins Award

Allison Silverman — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:48:00 -0400

Earlier this month, Allison Silverman, former executive producer of The Colbert Report, received the Muse Award from New York Women in Film & Television. This is the speech she gave.

I’m so happy to be here with you in 2009, and not in 18th century Scotland where we would all be decried as witches.

I am humbled by the Muse Award. As many of you know, until now I was deemed a muse only by Nashville superstar Billy Currington, who used me as the model for his hit song “That’s How Country Boys Roll.”

But it feels very natural being honored by New York Women in Film & Television.

To begin with, I live in New York. In gritty Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where the grit actually comes from the unwashed organic kale we pick up once a week to braise with pancetta and caramelized onions.

I am a woman. I know that primarily because of how strongly I relate to commercials for yogurt.

I am not technically in film, but I am often coated in a thin film of scented moisturizer to hide my revolting natural odor.

And I am in television. I have written and produced late night shows for the last 10 years, and thanks to this award, I think I may finally be able to say, “Well, Allison, you really showed them.”

Who are them?

I don’t know. But them don’t want to believe in me. Them have made that pretty clear over the years.

I am thrilled to be alongside such gifted women as America Ferrera, Andrea Wong, the team at Chicken & Egg Pictures, and perhaps especially Julianna Margulies.

You see, I grew up with curly hair in Gainesville, Fla., the second-most humid city in the United States. It’s not easy having curly hair in a town with an average of 91 percent humidity. I figure if there’s a bigger fan of Julianna Margulies as Carol Hathaway out there, she would have to have hair curlier than mine and live in the No. 1 most humid city, Quillayute, Wash., but I’ve done the research and there are no synagogues there, so I think I’m in the clear.

There are so many things I was planning to talk to you about today. How it’s the male bowerbird who spends hours tending his ornamental garden to impress his mate; why the Russian space dogs were all female; whether letting friends stay at your place over Christmas is a holiday don’t.

But something happened last week. I had a pitch on Friday, and the day before, I went into my agency to rehearse it. It was my first time attempting this; I’d been up late working; I was exhausted; we had a lot of material and very little time to perfect it. When I finished my presentation and got a blustery response, something horrible happened in front of five men in suits: I cried.

It was a disaster. With those tears, I knew I’d personally let down Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Cleopatra, Grandma Moses, Sojourner Truth, Betty Friedan, and everyone in Josie and the Pussycats. Now that five men had seen me lose it, there would never be a female president.

Humiliated, using my iPhone as a tissue (and sadly there is no app for that), I remembered something that happened when I was 19.

I was in a college comedy improv group, and we’d spend winter breaks going on tour. The 10 of us rented a van and headed to high schools, churches, rotary clubs—anywhere we could get a few hundred dollars to put on a show.

The men outnumbered the women by more than two to one, and wherever we managed to find housing, fights broke out. Not necessarily real fights. I mean, there wasn’t always a reason why people were punching each other in the head other than to film it.

One time, we slept in a school’s administration building, and late in the night, a drunk senior slammed a freshman, Austin, into the corner of a file cabinet. Austin was more upset than hurt, so I took him outside into the hall where we sat and talked. After a few minutes, Austin told me “You’re the most human of all of them.”

And I thought, “Fuck. Does that mean I’m not funny?”

Somehow, I’d been convinced that humor didn’t come from people with humanity.

In his 2007 article “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens argued that “[w]omen, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.”

Well, to begin with, you know you’re reading something groundbreaking when a white man educated at Oxford explains to you that life isn’t fair. And, of course, Hitchens has a point. Men are hilarious. After all, reading that article, I heartily laughed at his impression of an old geezer completely out of touch with the times. But he’s wrong. It’s the preference that life be fair that makes the sordid mess so funny in the first place. Comedy writers, male and female, know that.

Still, people tell women in all kinds of professions that humanity is a weakness. Earlier this year, the Senate judiciary committee gave the word empathy a beating when senators made the argument that identifying with the lives of others made Sonia Sotomayor a danger to the Constitution.

So when I sat in the hall comforting Austin, and suddenly he called me “human,” well, it really knocked the wind out of me. And in my comedy career since, I always felt it was a real personal liability.

I’ve cried in front of Jon Stewart. I’ve blubbered in front of Conan. Across the city, I’ve left a trail of snot and tears, interrupted only by the moments when I found protection under a fallen log or man-made planter.

Then for four years, I had the honor of working for Stephen Colbert, who is one of the most hilarious and truly kind people walking this earth. When he interviewed me recently, Stephen kindly said:

I think one unusual thing about you is that you’ve maintained your humanity, which I maintain is your clubfoot. In Native American society—and please don’t write me, Native Americans, if I’m getting this wrong—a shaman has something wrong with him. He’s maimed. In this world, strangely enough, your deformity is that you still have emotions. As my executive producer, you provide a level of humanity and decency in the writing, which I think is easy to toss out in comedy because we try to top each other in terms of how outrageous we can be.

In response to that, first I’d like to say “Boobie, penis, vagina, diarrhea.”

But secondly, I’d like to thank Stephen for so many things, but especially for helping me realize that I’m better at my job because I’m human.

Snot and tears are humorous. Literally. Merriam-Webster’s first definition of humor is “a normal functioning bodily semi-fluid or fluid.” They don’t get to “something designed to be comical” until definition 3c.

Maybe some of you out there worry that you’re too human, too. If you do, I hope you begin to see it as a strength. If you don’t, please keep it to yourself. Because if it turns out I’m the only one, I’ll be bawling all night.

Thanks again.

The DoubleX Gabfest: The Spouses and 'Staches Edition

Double X Staff — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:56:00 -0400

In the latest edition of the DoubleX Gabfest, editors Jessica Grose and Hanna Rosin and The New Yorker's Margaret Talbot discuss a Pew report called "The Rise of Wives," the gay marriage trial in California, and whether Tina Fey can bring back the female mustache.

Listen to the podcast here or through iTunes. You can also become a fan of the DoubleX Gabfest on Facebook to discuss the show, or subscribe to the DoubleX Gabfest RSS feed. Emily suggests that you visit our sponsor, Audible.com, where you get a free book download when you sign up.

Got questions or suggestions? E-mail us at podcasts@doublex.com.

The Earthquake Killed Haiti's Feminist Movement

ConnieMay Fowler — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:01:00 -0400

Among the many dead after the earthquake in Haiti are the three women who basically constituted the fledgling women’s movement in Haiti. Myriam Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan, and Magalie Marcelin had just begun the work of reforming a judiciary that never took rape seriously and creating an infrastructure to protect girls and women against domestic violence and trafficking. They were killed at a time when they were most needed, since post-earthquake chaos tends to leave women especially vulnerable.

As heartbreaking as every lost life is, theirs seems particularly tragic in a country where, until recently, there was no notion of women’s rights and what did exist was tenuous and fragile. Before 2005, rape was rarely prosecuted and convictions were virtually nonexistent. Marital rape was legal. Judges treated sexual violence as a purely civil matter, sometimes ordering meager monetary restitution or ruling that the rapist marry the victim. They judged the severity of the crime based on whether the woman or girl was a virgin.

The three women started by lobbying the United Nations to pressure Haiti to pass sexual-assault laws that created a new area of criminal law. To ensure the courts abided by them, the women in 2008 led a kind of legal-flash-mob movement, getting women to flood Haitian courtrooms during rape trials so that judges would feel accountable. They began organizations that provided safe houses and microloans to domestic-violence victims. In 2001, in the midst of violent political unrest, Merlet contacted playwright and activist Eve Ensler and convinced her to bring, improbably, The Vagina Monologues to Haiti. Using the momentum from that event, the women successfully built the V-Day Haiti Sorority Safe House in Port-au-Prince.

“The fact that they existed at all, that they were doing the kind of work they did, was totally innovative. Until they came along, women’s rights were totally ignored,” says Sabrina Solomon, director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami, who also lost friends and family in the earthquake.

In 2000, the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights issued a scathing report about Haiti’s treatment of women. “The lack of adequate legislation … results in a culture of non-reporting and of acceptance of violence against women,” the report noted. Sixty-six percent of female victims never reported acts of violence, the report concluded, “for fear of reprisals and societal prejudice.” It gave this as a common example: “If a girl is raped by her teacher it is generally expected that the rapist marry the victim and no criminal case is brought against the perpetrator.”

In 2007, when 108 U.N. peacekeeping forces from Sri Lanka were discovered to have serially raped Haitian women and girls as young as 7, Marcelin told the Los Angeles Times, “That a soldier can do this to a girl he’s supposed to be protecting comes from the same mentality that allows a professor to do it to his student or a father to his daughter. In this society, women’s bodies are regarded as meat.”

Merlet fled Haiti in the 1970s. She moved to Canada, where she studied feminist theory and was active in the Haitian diaspora movement. In 1986, she returned to Haiti to advocate for women and children. Eventually she led the newly created Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, which collected the data that became the basis for the 2000 U.N. report.

Coriolan concentrated on education. In Haiti, education is not free, and families—especially in rural areas—often elect to educate only their male children while putting female children to work, primarily as domestics, factory workers, or field hands.

Marcelin, a lawyer and actress, founded Kay Fanm, a women’s rights group that offered safe haven and microloans to domestic violence victims. The three of them founded Haiti’s first domestic violence shelters.

When the country stabilizes, there is no guarantee that the work they did will pick up where they left it. From what we know about post-disaster environments, the day-to-day reality for women and girls looks grim. Because of Haiti’s instability, human trafficking was always “very bad,” says Robin Thompson, the Senior Program Manager at Florida State University’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, and she believes it is likely to get worse. “Trafficking (and other forms of violence against women and children) almost always flourishes, as it did after the tsunami, during this kind of instability.”

On Jan. 22, UNICEF documented 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals. Their families have no idea where the children might be, and there is growing concern that human traffickers are already at work.

After the Sri Lankan U.N. peacekeepers rape scandal, women’s organizations asked that the U.N. make a concerted effort to recruit more female troops. Two years later, the U.N. launched its “Power to Empower” campaign, with the aim of increasing the current 8 percent female troop level to 20 percent by 2014. But of the approximately 2,000 U.N. police in Haiti, about 90 are women. “If you’re going into a disaster area to help, women’s safety is primary. But I don’t think it’s high on anyone’s list right now,” says Rita Smith, director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Salomon, for one, is not optimistic. “What they were doing was in its infancy. No one is sure what will happen next, because no one knows who or what is left. We don’t even know if the shelter is still standing. I suspect it’s not.”

Why Are Girl Journalists in Movies So Lame?

Sara Libby — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:34:00 -0400

In the press rounds for her new movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal has been calling Crazy Heart “a real love story about the way people actually love each other.” Her character, Joan, plays a small-town journalist who falls for a washed-up country star named Bad Blake. She meets him when she is writing a profile of him for her local paper, making Joan the latest in a long series of silver-screen female reporters who can't help but fall for their subjects.

Injecting journalists into movies makes for a convenient plot device. It throws the reporter into a situation he or she wouldn't ordinarily be in and forces interaction between people who have no other reason to speak. It’s often used in romantic comedies, like His Girl Friday, to signal that a woman is independent and adventurous and hard to tame. But in the end, of course, she does get tamed, at the expense of her journalistic ethics.

As a young girl, I fancied myself a Harriet the Spy or a Nancy Drew and wore a pen on a makeshift necklace around my neck so I'd have it at the ready in case I needed to chronicle something at the drop of a hat (you know, a canceled recess or a cute substitute teacher sighting). While all my friends were picking their favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I preferred the show's girl reporter, April O'Neil—she was capable, headstrong, and often wore a kicky jumpsuit. I always found it irritating when she would get kidnapped or otherwise find herself in trouble and the Turtles would have to rescue her. At least, though, she didn’t fall in love with one.

Seemingly every leading actress of the 1930s and '40s at one point played a reporter who was romanced by the leading man—it was the basic plot of films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Back in Circulation (1937), and Meet John Doe (1941). The girl aces in these stories all rely on their wiles to charm information out of subjects or to subdue demanding editors. And then the stories typically—and tellingly—end when the girls finally land the man, not the scoop.

It was around this time that the derogatory term “sob sisters” was coined to describe women reporters in film and real life, referring to their often emotional and sympathetic coverage of stories involving other women, according to Joe Saltzman, director of the Norman Lear Center's Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Their work supposedly revealed them to be big-hearted but intellectually feeble and all too vulnerable to love.

Through the years, women reporters in film did get smarter and more capable, but not really any more ethical. Kate Hudson's unfortunately named Andie Anderson in 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is sophisticated and overeducated yet inexplicably falls for the subject of her article despite an assignment that required her to do exactly the opposite.

Then there are superhero story aces like Lois Lane, and Vicki Vale, who fall for Superman and Bruce Wayne, respectively. There's Katie Holmes' Heather Holloway in the satirical Thank You for Smoking, who is painfully over-the-top in her overt attempts at seduction. (“I'd love to see where the devil sleeps,” she coos to her interview subject, played by Aaron Eckhart.)

It even befalls the most serious, fully realized characters, like Adriana Cruz (played by Nora Dunn) in the Desert Storm tale Three Kings, who, despite possessing supposedly male traits like being shrewd and fearless, still manages to sleep with more than one of the soldiers she's chronicling—but hey, it's the desert!

The worst, though, has to be Sally Field's character Megan Carter in the 1987 film Absence of Malice. Fields plays a reporter who not only allows herself to be taken in by a prosecutor peddling information about a classified investigation to her and prints a spotty story about it, but then falls for the subject of that investigation. She is, unequivocally, a professional disgrace. Despite her transgressions, Roger Ebert praised Field's character in is review of the film for her “woman's spunk” and for being so “likable”—and even goes so far as to suggest that if many of his own female colleagues were presented with a source as hunky as Paul Newman, they wouldn't be able to control themselves, either.

And what of male reporters on the big screen? They're often personal wrecks: sloppy, bitter, self-centered alcoholics; unenviable traits to be sure, but it's very rare that those failings ever cloud their judgment professionally or prevent them from getting the story at the end of the day. The quintessential male reporters portrayed in All the President's Men obtain key information by convincing a female colleague—against her will—to use her relationship with a committee person to obtain a list of election committee workers. All that people remember, however, is that they brought down the president—and were canonized as heroes in the process.

Even on the rare occasion when the male reporter himself allows a personal relationship to overtake his ethical obligations, things work out. Russell Crowe's character in State of Play lets his bromance with Ben Affleck's politician character interfere with an ongoing investigation, but he comes through unscathed—and with the story. The film's two supporting female journalists, Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams, remain marginalized and dependent on Crowe to save the day.

Of course, real female reporters sometimes do cross the line with a source or a superior. The most notable recent example is perhaps Mirthala Salinas, a Telemundo political reporter who had an affair with a then-married Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Salinas was even the anchorwoman who announced on air that Villaraigosa was separating from his wife. When Salinas' and Villaraigosa's relationship ended, he began dating another local broadcast reporter who had also covered his office. But such cases are the exceptions.

Gyllenhaal herself brushed off the suggestion that her character perpetuates the stereotype of the morally bankrupt female reporter. She told the New York Times that her character was “green” professionally, and “a really big fan” of Bad Blake. “This is not a rational choice that she makes, at any level, at any point.” And that's precisely what makes it infuriating.

Presented By:

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:34:00 -0400

Is Bristol Palin a Good Spokeswoman for Abstinence?

Jessica Grose — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:22:00 -0400

Last February, Bristol Palin told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that abstinence was “not realistic at all” for teens. Then this month in an interview with the tabloid In Touch, Bristol said that although she is obviously no longer a virgin, since she has a baby and all, she is now going to be abstinent until she is married. “I can guarantee it,” she said. When Oprah questioned Bristol’s commitment to a second virginity last week, Bristol responded, “I just think it’s a goal to have and that other young women should have that goal.”

Of this Oprah appearance, Jezebel’s Tracie Egan Morrissey wrote, “Bristol seems like she … hates her own message.” And it’s true: There’s a dissonance between Bristol’s real life and her public persona. In reality she’s suing her baby’s daddy for child support and is in the middle of a messy custody fight. On Oprah, she’s a cleanly scrubbed role model for America’s girls who says she’s going to be celibate until she gets a ring. It seems like a big gap, but there’s sociological research to support the notion that Bristol really believes that she will wait to have sex until she’s married this time around. That is, if her motives are genuine.

If the statistics are anything to go on, Bristol is unlikely to meet her goal of remaining celibate. According to Mark Regnerus, the author of the forthcoming Premarital Sex in America, among women who made virginity pledges and are now married, only 13. 9 percent waited until their wedding night to have sex. There aren’t good data on women who make virginity pledges after they are sexually active—who try to become “secondary virgins,” as researchers put it. What we do know is that some young women—often born-again Christians, like Bristol—believe that repledging virginity can erase their sexual histories. These teens “typically reconcile their memories with their present beliefs,” according to a study called Reborn a Virgin: Adolescents’ Retracting of Virginity Pledges and Sexual Histories, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2006. This mind set would mean that Bristol could think of herself as pure again, despite her sexual relationship with Levi.

If anyone would want to spin a new narrative and forget her past, it would be Bristol. Every story about her is marred by the taint of professional ne’er-do-well Levi. Who wouldn’t want to start fresh? Regnerus also notes that Bristol’s choice makes some sense emotionally. “It’s not unusual, especially for women, to have a failed sexual relationship and feel really badly about it. [They think] I don’t want another failed sexual relationship, I want some security.” What if Bristol truly learned from her relationship with Levi, and her experience, rather than making her an absurd spokesperson for abstinence, actually makes her a credible one. She can say to young women: Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Don’t have sex, because it’s hard to be me and raise a baby.

That’s the generous interpretation of Bristol’s behavior. However, there are two interested parties who suggest an alternative, more self-interested explanation for her renewed commitment to abstinence: the Candie’s Foundation and her mother. Bristol is the teen ambassador for the foundation, the nonprofit arm of the trashy shoe purveyor. Its mission is “to educate America's youth about the devastating consequences of teen pregnancy.” The message relies heavily on abstinence as the best way to prevent teen pregnancy. The foundation hawks tight wife beaters that say, “I’m sexy enough … to keep you waiting” and includes “tips for teens” on its website like “Over half of all teens are not having sex, and of the half that are, most regret it and wish they had waited.” I couldn’t find any information about safe or nonpenetrative sex anywhere on the site. Bristol’s earlier statements about abstinence not being realistic don’t gibe with Candie’s call to purity.

And maybe Candie’s isn’t the only company Bristol hopes to become a professional spokeswoman for. She has created a company called BSMP LLC. The most plausible reason for this company’s creation, according to Rachel Maddow, is that Bristol has set herself up to be paid as an incorporated entity—this is a move that many freelancers make for tax purposes when they’re getting money from different sources. A publicist from the Candie’s Foundation says that Bristol is not paid for her role as spokesperson but is compensated for travel and other expenses. Maybe she’s hoping for more. With a great initial platform, replete with appearances on Oprah and the Today Show, who’s to say that a different pro-abstinence organization wouldn’t pay mucho dinero to have pretty Bristol appear at its fundraiser?

And then there’s the more cynical read of Bristol’s recent abstinence promotion: It’s all orchestrated by Sarah Palin, who wants a new spin on her daughter’s unfortunate teen pregnancy and failed romance. If Sarah Palin decides to run for president in 2012—which the former governor refuses to affirm or deny—she will be questioned about her daughter’s missteps. If Bristol can pull off a second virginity and an image resurrection, Sarah can point to her daughter’s triumph over adolescent misfortune. When reporters ask her about Levi and his Playgirl spread, she’ll say the relationship was a one-time gaffe her daughter made—one that Bristol learned from. Americans are extremely forgiving of teenage indiscretions. Just ask former pot smokers Presidents Obama and Clinton and ex-alcoholic George W. Bush.

Friend or Foe: Help, I'm a Serial Dumper!

Lucinda Rosenfeld — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:25:00 -0400

Welcome to "Friend or Foe," a regular Double X advice column for your queries about the trickiest of all love affairs: friendships. Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of I'm So Happy for You, a novel about best friends, is now taking questions at lucinda@imsohappyforyou.com.

Dear Friend or Foe,

I've had a life-changing year that included a new marriage, the unemployment of family members, housing-crisis woes, an annoying injury, and a promotion at my job that has me traveling and working long hours. As my life has gotten more complicated, I've found that my tolerance of fair-weather friends (FWFs) has diminished completely. These days, a few canceled plans, missed call-backs, or insensitive comments, and I delete said FWFs from my social repertoire.

For example: I have a "friend"—“Jenny”—who, while very sweet and well-meaning, invites me to too many religious events, even after I’ve told her "thanks, but no thanks” when it comes to Bible-thumping. If we do have regular plans, she tends to cancel either right before or stands me up. She apologizes with a variety of eyebrow-raising excuses. She is one of five FWFs I've recently dumped. Others have been jettisoned for reasons ranging from: "I'm too old to get drunk every night" to "uses people for money" to "one shared interest is not enough."

To be fair to myself, I do see my good friends on a regular basis. Throughout a year of ups and downs, they’ve been supportive and spectacular. Meanwhile, I feel very guilty about my serial-dumping, but I can't seem to have the same open-minded acceptance that I once had. My question is: Is it OK to dump those friends who don't fit 100 percent in your life? Or is it a selfish act?

Sincerely,
Help, I’m a Serial Dumper!

Dear HIASD!,

If you told me that, after a year spent losing your patience and temper with Sally, Ann, Mary, Suzy, and Kate, you found yourself completely friendless—and with not a single pal in your rolodex with whom to see It’s Complicated, I’d suggest you review your approach. But since you say you have a core group of great, supportive girlfriends, I’m not sure why you feel so bad about spring-cleaning the riff-raff. We all go through periods during which we realize who our real pals are, and move away from those with whom we lack any meaningful connection.

Regarding “Jenny,” I received a letter a while back from a hard-core secularist whose born-again friend wouldn’t leave her alone on the subject—and I suggested that the friendship was doomed. I don’t know enough about you and Jenny to know if this is the case. But the facts that she’s been bailing on your plans and that she only invites you to religious events suggest to me that she’s keen to end the friendship as well. You might as well hold the guilt.

Perpetual money borrowers are best crossed off the list for the good of your bank account. Ditto—on behalf of your liver—for those boozy buddies. But I do think there is such a thing as a one-activity friend, which is to say that not all your friends in life have to be the closest and mostest. You could have, say, a jogging friend. Or a knitting friend. Or even a friend with whom you exclusively compare notes on dumping your other friends.

Sincerely,
Friend or Foe

Dear Friend or Foe,

“Shelly” and I have been friends for almost 20 years. But she and her husband don't learn from their mistakes. Three years after they married, they declared bankruptcy. Today they're on the verge of doing so a second time. Their debt load boggles my mind. Although they both asked for my advice, that advice was ignored. But the phone calls—in which they whined for two hours about the financial strain—continued. Another example: Shelly insisted her husband needed therapy for depression. Since we have the same insurance coverage, I researched and sent her a list of half a dozen therapists in their area. She never called any of the names. But almost every call since then included her complaining about his behavior.

Three months ago, I took a break from the relationship. When we did eventually talk, I tried to be gentle. But there's no kind way to tell someone, "You take advantage of my willingness to help. You ask for input and seem to laugh as you do the opposite." I’m far from perfect myself. The difference is that I take responsibility for my actions. People call me the “research queen,” knowing that I'll spend days examining the pros and cons and weighing long-term benefits vs. immediate gratification.

The problem is that even though Shelly gave me headaches, I miss her terribly. Part of me worries I was being judgmental, ignoring the stark truth that she's an adult and can do as she pleases. I grew up with a viciously judgmental mother, and I strive to be the opposite. I need to know if it's just guilt that haunts me each day, or if I was an unsympathetic, finger-pointing quasi-friend.

Sincerely,
Confused and Lonely in the Midwest

Dear CALITM,

Have you ever heard the phrase “You can’t solve other people’s problems”? If not, it’s a cliché you should take to heart. Bitching and moaning—at least in my circle—is practically the definition of female friendship. Your mistake is in thinking that the moaners expect you to do anything about their moans—except maybe listen, mutter “that sucks,” and agree that you would be annoyed by what their husband/mother/boyfriend/partner/boss/other friend did, too.

You’re clearly a very empathetic person, which is a lovely quality. But if you have this talent—and also one for research—what about volunteering at some kind of shelter or social welfare office where the inhabitants have clearly come looking for help?

Meanwhile, if you miss Shelly—and assuming she’s still willing to talk to you—why not give her a call and suggest the two of you do something fun and nonwhiny. (Though I wouldn’t phrase it that way.) Invite her to the movies. If she can’t afford to go, maybe you could pick up two tickets. Or go get a drink somewhere and dance. If Shelly asks you for advice again, tell her you’ve hung up your Dear Abby hat—and that you don’t believe she really wants your counsel. If you guys are good friends, you’ll find something else to talk about.

Sincerely,
Friend or Foe

Dear Friend or Foe,

On a few recent occasions, my close friend “Jane” has made irritating comments to me. While at dinner, I was sharing my concerns that my boyfriend “Clark” doesn’t want to get married. Jane disdainfully said, “Yeah, but do you really wanna marry Clark?” with a facial expression as if she’d just smelled a fart. Another time I was shopping with Jane and made a joke about seeing unkempt, large women with very attractive men. I then joked that people probably make the same comment about Clark and me, as he is very thin and I am definitely not. Jane, who is 25 pounds lighter than I, said, “But you’re cute in the face.”

Then this past month at dinner with another friend, I was asked how my new job was going. I was very excited to say that I was expecting a substantial raise this year, then another the next. Jane is a teacher and mentioned that she and her colleagues would not be getting raises due to the budget shortfall. I told her that, despite the salary, she will always have something that I don’t yet have. I meant that she absolutely loves her job. Jane, however, looked me dead in the eye and said, “A degree?”

My boyfriend chalks up Jane’s behavior to her being comfortable in the friendship. But I would never say things like that to friends, or anyone else for that matter! My own theory is that Jane may be a smidge jealous—that she sees herself as the more attractive and better-educated one, and can’t believe that I’m the one with the better paying job and great guy. In recent years, she has been through a string of unavailable men (read: are cheating on wives/girlfriends with her) and sex buddies. Should I say something? Ninety-nine percent of the time, Jane is caring and fun-loving.

Sincerely,
We’re Both Equally Awesome, So Shut the Hell Up!

Dear WBEASSTHU!,

From her comments, Jane sounds like a classic underminer. (The “degree” comment was so quintessentially bitchy it was almost funny!—sorry.) But I also wonder if you’re being sensitive enough to her situation. Here you are, complaining about how Clark isn’t ready to marry you—knowing that she’s single (and clearly has capital "I" Issues with men and relationships). You’re also rejoicing about your raise while she’s dealing with a pay freeze. It’s quite likely that Jane is jealous. Who wouldn’t be jealous of your recent good fortune? But it’s also possible that she’s getting you back for insensitive perorating about your own fabulosity.

If you still think Jane is awesome, I’d let the comments go and instead make an extra effort next time you see her to ask about a) her dating prospects and b) how teaching is going. You could even propose setting her up with a friend of Clark’s. If you take this approach, I guarantee the bitchfest will soon die down.

A final note: When exciting things happen, there’s nothing wrong with gushing to your good friends. Just make sure it doesn’t become a pattern. You never know when you’ll be the one on the other side of the table, feeling like all the luck belongs to the other ladies.

Sincerely,
Friend or Foe

Plastic Surgery, iPhone Style

Marisa Meltzer — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:20:00 -0400

The applications I already have on my iPhone instantly meet so many of my baser desires. I use DirectTV to add a season pass of Jersey Shore to my TiVo, Facebook to view my friends’ Jersey Shore nicknames, and the Tumblr app to chronicle my every deep thought about Jersey Shore. And now a new breed of app will allow me to easily indulge in a long-held fascination with something else mildly embarrassing: plastic surgery.

Let me be clear, as a feminist, plastic surgery horrifies me, and the only thing approaching a surgical cosmetic procedure I’ve ever had is orthodontia. But these new apps—NewBeauty and iSurgeon—allow you to upload your photo and experiment with different noses, lips, eyebrows, and breasts without spending tens of thousands of dollars or having to live with an unfortunate rhinoplasty (or the shame of betraying your feminist beliefs for a set of perkier breasts).

Since I have always secretly wanted to know what I’d look like with, say, an eyebrow lift, I decided to give these face-shifting apps a test-drive. Even though I recoil at the thought of plastic surgery, I feel mildly concerned that these apps will adversely affect my self-image. I’m hoping I don’t actually prefer the results of my body “perfected.”

I started with the $4.99 makeover tool NewBeauty. Toronto-based Modiface Inc. (“a leading technology provider for anti-aging, weight-loss, color cosmetics, and hairstyle virtual makeover technologies”) launched the app last spring. The app’s icon says it all: a cartoon of a face divided in half, with one side looking like a dried apple and the other wrinkle-free. Users can upload photos of themselves and then opt to see potential results for injectables for forehead lines, eyebrow lifts, blepharoplasty (eye surgery), rhinoplasty, injectables for nasolabial folds, and lip augmentation.

I uploaded a headshot of myself and checked every available procedure—I wanted to go for the full plastic-surgery smorgasbord. The result was almost undetectable. I wondered whether the app even worked. I tried with another photo and noticed a thinner nose, fuller lips, and slightly more prominent cheekbones. It looked like me, but with softer lighting. However, I detected a slight blurriness and asymmetry to my features that suggested that in the harsh light of day, I might look like an extra from Nip/Tuck.

Click here to see photos of the author before and after using NewBeauty.

Anyway, when you’re in the virtual world, subtlety is unnecessary: I wanted the full Real Housewives treatment. So I next downloaded iSurgeon ($2.99 for the pro version, which allows you to save photos without the app’s watermark on them). The app, which touts itself as being created “just for women!” was developed by Miami-based plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer. “iSurgeon serves a dual purpose, providing those interested in cosmetic surgery treatments with a clear visual of what they would look like post-surgery, while also providing a fun entertaining game tool,” says Dr. Salzhauer in a press release for the app, which debuted last month.

In iSurgeon’s Advanced Surgery Mode, you can take or upload an existing photo and manipulate it. “You can either make her look prettier by making her nose smaller, let’s say, or you can make her look worse by making her nose bigger,” Dr. Salzhauer notes in the demo video as a model giggles in the background. Early reviews on iTunes were both enthusiastic and depressing: “So addictive! Couldn’t stop making myself prettier and prettier!” wrote user jayday5. “Now I know exactly what I want to change in my appearance. Think of turning to a real doctor ;),” said mrsimon2, another iSurgeon devotee.

The app can simulate a variety of surgeries that Dr. Salzhauer also offers in his practice: breast augmentations, tummy tucks, liposuctions, face lifts, and ear reshaping. I uploaded a close-up of my profile and got to work. I noticed immediately that the sound effects seemed wildly inappropriate; the constant beeping of a heart monitor punctuated with screams, chain-saw noises, and the occasional orgasmic moan seemed more suitable to a slasher film than a woman-friendly game.

And then there is the small problem of my face. After giving myself a rhinoplasty, chin implants, an eyebrow lift, and cheek implants, I looked like a cross between a cat and an elf. I e-mailed the photo to several friends—I was not so brave as to post it on Facebook, as the app suggests—and reactions ranged from concern to horror. “Whoa,” said one friend, who then compared me to a carnival freak show. “Sweet Jesus. You must promise me you’re never going to consider this,” said another. One former co-worker who holds a degree in women’s studies said that the only positive thing she could say was that “hopefully it will allow people to see how freakish they will look if they actually have plastic surgery performed.”

I send everyone my assurances that this experiment was purely journalistic in purpose. And I mean it—my iSurgeoned face looks like something from the Twilight Zone, and as a result, my antipathy toward plastic surgery remains intact. I was mildly traumatized from using myself as a guinea pig, so I decided to try out iSurgeon’s Game Mode, which allows the user to become the surgeon. Though Game Mode was the most fun part of the app for me, it was also the most disturbing, because it downplays the permanence and seriousness of invasive plastic surgery.

The mode offers four pre-programmed images to test out your skills on nose jobs, tummy tucks, Brazilian butt lifts, and breast augmentation. A hint button gives an image of the “ideal” results you’re going after. It turns out I have a profound lack of talent as a cosmetic surgeon, rating “not bad for a sushi chef but not ready for human beings” and “not bad for a chop shop but not good enough for actual people.” My high score was on a breast augmentation, but I was still ranked as “not ready to operate on supermodels yet.”

Thanks to the instant gratification of these apps, I have satiated any latent curiosity I might have held in bobbing my nose or lifting my bottom, and I can only hope it will have the same effect on fellow users. Now that I’ve moved on from experiments in face-shifting, I think I’m ready to entertain more high-minded virtual desires. Today I downloaded the Personal Om mediation app. I feel more centered already, or at least that’s what my iGuru told me.

Feeling Unattractive? Maybe You’re Ovulating.

Sarah Elizabeth Richards — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:01:00 -0400

If you’ve read any dating advice over the last several decades, you’ve likely been hit over the head with this bit of wisdom: Men love women who feel good about themselves. In fact, high self-esteem is believed to be so critical to women’s desirability that countless books have counseled women to project confidence by throwing back their shoulders and showing dates how happy and fabulous they are. So it should follow that during the few days a month when we can become pregnant, evolution would make sure we were bursting with personal pride.

And yet nature doesn’t seem to be cooperating. New research shows that women’s self-esteem drops during ovulation, when our ovaries release an egg into the fallopian tubes to be fertilized. The news that our hormones wreak havoc on our emotions twice in one month—exactly two weeks after PMS—may sound especially cruel, but one study suggests there’s a point to the suffering. It’s part of a sophisticated evolutionary mating strategy to help us perpetuate the species.

The study, published last month in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggests that feeling bad about yourself motivates you to pay more attention to your appearance. It seems natural selection is betting that our looks—rather than our self-assured personalities—will attract men and hence baby daddies. Sarah E. Hill, study coauthor and psychologist at Texas Christian University, hopes that knowing this can help women anticipate the self-esteem dip and keep perspective when they find themselves suddenly dwelling on their physical flaws. “Be easy on yourself,” she says. “It’s not that you look any worse than you did yesterday. It’s all about the waxing and waning of your reproductive hormones.”

Hill and her partner tracked the self-esteem of about 50 college-aged women and found that it sank lower during ovulation than at any other time of the month. The women were told to imagine a hypothetical situation in which they were getting ready to attend a party filled with desirable single people. Then they were asked to rate their willingness to buy expensive things they thought would make them more attractive, such as clothing, shoes, tanning sessions, makeup, or pedicures. In one example, the women had no cash but could use a credit card to buy shoes for the party. They had to choose between a $45 pair or a $150 designer brand that would make their legs look longer and leaner. The women with the lowest self-esteem—often those seeking long-term relationships—were more likely to buy the pricier shoes. Hill speculates that the women interested in short-term affairs reasoned they didn’t have to try as hard since men aren’t so choosy about hookup partners.

The study has some limitations. Hypothetical situations often don’t tell us much about people’s spending behavior, since it’s far easier to pretend you’re shopping than it is to make real credit card payments. And since the women couldn’t choose a nonbeautifying purchase, such as a movie ticket or massage, it’s unclear whether the women specifically wanted to look prettier or figured any retail therapy would make them feel better. However, the research does show how a woman’s self-esteem fluctuates throughout her menstrual cycle, whereas previous research has focused on how the relationship between fertility and self-worth plays out over one’s lifetime. Over that longer trajectory, here’s the basic pattern: Our self-esteem is high when we are children, starts to fall during adolescence, bottoms out when our fertility is best in our 20s, and doesn’t improve until our 50s. Men experience a similar curve, but it’s more pronounced for women.

Despite the micro and macro double-whammy of self-esteem dips, humans still manage to reproduce. Men are more attracted to women when they’re most fertile, and it makes sense that a little insecure lurch in a woman’s gut could fuel the process by spurring her to trade in yoga pants for hot pants. But what prevents her from thinking so little of herself that she pairs up with any cretin with an extra drink coupon—and potentially reproducing his bad genes, which is the exact thing that evolution is trying to avoid?

Hill thinks the answer involves a key distinction between the types of self-esteem that she and her partner measured. While they found that ovulation reduced women’s overall sense of self-worth, it did not significantly affect one key factor, known as “self-perceived mate value.” In other words, no matter how low the subjects felt, they still maintained a sense of their own hotness. “During ovulation you may feel worse, but if you’re a seven, you still see yourself as a seven,” Hill explains. “It saves us from bad choices.” In cold, hard evolutionary terms, this “mate value” self-esteem serves an important function by guiding one’s choices and determining one’s chances in the mating market, says psychologist Lee Kirkpatrick from the College of William & Mary. If it’s too high, you’ll waste time and effort trying to date up in vain. If it’s too low, you might settle.

It’s reassuring to know that the ovulation doldrums won’t push us to get knocked up by the wrong guy. Even if it may prompt us to buy $100 hair highlights. And maybe that bit of self-love (or better yet, yoga) helps restore confidence. Then we can throw back our shoulders again.

Cooking Made Manly

Kris Wilton — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:40:00 -0400

Right now, three different male Facebook friends of mine are showing off their recent culinary achievements. Ron embarked on a two-day chicken project involving a “refrigerator bath” and a “hot sauna.” My high school buddy Brian “brined a whole chicken for eight hours in Sam Adams cranberry lambic, brown sugar, and spices, then roasted [it] crispy golden brown.” And Garin, an acquaintance in Los Angeles, updated his “ ‘Cook This’ nights archive” album, which shows carefully plated and garnished meals or neat piles of ingredients positioned alongside his prized, expensive Japanese knives.

The scale, the endurance, the adjectives! The specialized ingredients and gear! Now that men are starting to take over the kitchen, cooking has become a kind of extreme sport, involving wild game and feats of endurance. And like every other specialized hobby, “manly cooking” now has its own magazine. Last fall, as the recession decimated the New York publishing world and American cooks of varying commitment levels mourned the loss of Gourmet, the German publisher Grüner + Jahr dished up a new magazine, called BEEF!, with a tag line that translates: “for men with taste.”

The first issue serves as a manifesto for a men’s cooking movement—in which fish are grilled with their heads on, espresso is brewed at exactly the right temperature, animals are self-butchered, and women have no place in the kitchen. The magazine provides thorough bylaws for starting your own men’s cooking club that include the line, “If a woman is invited to a meeting of a men’s cooking club, either a couple of guys chipped in to get another member a stripper for his birthday, or the evening’s shot ...” The tone is something like Cooks Illustrated meets Thrillist, and the attitude is just short of sexist. Not only are the women not allowed in the kitchen but their presence is an affront as much as if they’d walked into the post-game locker room.

The cover displays a juicy cut of expensive-looking steak. The first article, “Off With the Hide,” is accompanied by a full-page shot of a rabbit hanging from its hind legs and step-by-step photo-illustrated instructions on how to skin, butcher, and prepare the furry critter. There’s a feature called “Knives To Die For” that plants knives priced up into four figures in noirish art-directed crime scenes, a bloody look at the global fish market, and a science-heavy handbook to wine.

The only place women have in the magazine are in the meditation “Can You Cook a Woman Into Bed?” which features sexy pictures of a naked woman adorned with the Latin names of ingredients. A “He Cooks, She Cooks” column imagines how a man and a woman would prepare something differently—in this issue, espresso. (She absentmindedly fixes an instant, caffeine-free coffee while gabbing on her cell phone. He performs a ritual: hand-selecting perfect coffee beans out of a specially prepared blend, manually [ha, ha: man-ually] grinding them, laying out his cup and saucer just so, and so on.)

The idea of the men’s cooking club started 12 years ago, when some buddies were sitting around in a living room, lamenting the lack on any good sports on TV. They were listening to the women in the kitchen, when one of the men suggested they could cook sometime. The others looked at him in disbelief, as if he’d suggested they all start to wax the hair off their arms or some such “ominous lady stuff,” writer Jen Clasen recalls. The guys eventually made their way into the kitchen, where they took up some aprons and knives and found themselves discussing whether you use parsley leaves or the more rugged stems. They “had a blast,” Clasen recalls, and their cooking club was born.

BEEF! is careful to differentiate men’s cooking from what their wives and girlfriends do. Jan Spielhagen writes in his editor’s letter that the magazine “goes into detail and offers more than ‘easy pasta recipes your kids will love.’ Because we don’t want it to be easy; we want it to be hard. Because pasta is boring, unless you’re making it yourself. Because children have nothing to do with men’s cooking. We want to know more about the pressure in the espresso machine, how bisons are fed, the sharpness of Japanese knives, the global fish market … the new Porsche-design kitchen and and and.”

In, BEEF! cooking has nothing to do with domesticity. Instead it’s an activity that men should do among men, like game hunting or tackle football, and that women should stay the hell away from. This repositioning recalls the rebranding, in recent years, of traditionally “female” products, usually with lots of muscular graphics and words like “sport” or “extreme” or “performance” or “ultimate,” so that they appeal to a male audience. Think Pepsi Max and Coca-Cola Zero, with their black-and-silver labels and eschewing of the word “diet.” It’s still Diet Coke, more or less. But extreme! Tough! Based in science!

In her 1983 book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about Playboy’s debut issue in 1953, in which Hugh Hefner “announced his intention to reclaim the indoors for men.” She quotes his first editorial, in which he writes, “Most of today’s ‘magazines for men’ spend all their time out-of-doors—thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast flowing streams. … But we don’t mind telling you in advance—we plan spending most of our time inside. WE like our apartment. … We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

Ehrenreich posits Playboy as a weapon in men’s “losing battle against ‘female domination,’ ” which had driven men out of the house entirely, leaving their “gold-digging,” stay-at-home wives to seize the man’s paycheck and control the home to boot. Playboy suggested men resist conformity and matrimonial indebtedness, and rise above the battle, by creating a new kind of indoors that was better and more fun than what women had invented—with men at their rightful place at the head of it.

The Playboy competitor True tried to fight the same battle from within the confines of marriage, with the editor saying at the time that his magazine “stimulates the masculine ego at a time when man wants to fight back against women’s efforts to usurp his traditional role as head of the family.”

One could argue that man’s role as head of the family has never been more endangered than it is today. Where in the Playboy era men had been forced out of the home, now they’ve been forced back in, thanks in no small part to the “mancession” that’s left them disproportionately out of work, with women poised to outnumber them in the workforce.

By masculinizing cooking, those men who make a hobby of it are not diminished by having to do it. It gives them an arena to practice it with other men. And maybe it gives them a way to beat women at their own game.

Presented By:

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:40:00 -0400