The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Cult of Death

In 1979 Samir Kuntar entered Israel on a boat from Lebanon and kidnapped a young father and his 4-year-old daughter. He shot the father, Danny Haran, to death in front of his daughter, Einat, then killed her by smashing her skull against a rock with a rifle-butt. Israel has just released him and others of his ilk, in exchange for the bodies of two of their soldiers. His return to Lebanon is a national holiday. The streets are filled with cheering. What a triumph for the terror organization Hezbollah, which all but controls Lebanon and has long been demanding Kuntar's return. In an excellent column on this, Mona Charen asks, "What can you say about a people who welcome a child murderer as a hero?"

What's So Funny About Pretty Panties?

Nayeli, I'm with you in favor of adorable underthings. Definitely worth the money for the personal confidence and the occasional zing in the eyes of one's date. (Someone I dated briefly liked to call me a "smartypanties.")

And yet at the same time, like Lucy and Amaka, I feel sickened by the culturewide commodification of sexuality—of intimate life and personal worth, really—especially when it's aimed at children (by which I mean anyone under 20! I'm old) who are still developing a sense of self.

As the Rolling Stones knew well, all consumer advertising peddles one basic thing: dissatisfaction. We're constantly being sold the idea that we could be happy if ... if we just fixed X problem by buying Y product. Soft-porn merchant Victoria's Secret, like Abercrombie & Fitch, is in the business of selling the belief that you should be sexier. Sure, they have a right to do it, and I even sometimes wear their underthings. But it is especially disgusting to peddle to young girls—and here I'm not targeting VS alone, but also MTV, Girls Gone Wild!, and the soft-core underage porn culture et al.—the feeling that she's really a ho in training, that her personal worth depends on arousing others' lust. That's selling the idea of being an object, not a subject—-a big difference, although sometimes hard to define.

There's a subtle line between liking to wear fancy panties ... and needing to see others drool over your bottom before you can feel worthwhile. One is powerful; the other's an eating disorder in waiting. One is finding power in enjoying yourself and your body in a mature and confident way ... and the other is a degraded manipulation of self by instincts out of whack and in thrall to others. Sometimes, of course, both are at work at once. Which is why we're having this discussion: figuring out which is which isn't so easy in the consumerized world in which we live.

There's a very odd overlap here between feminism, on the one hand, which wants women to take power without being pornified, and on the other, Christian activists who also want to resist the consumer culture's attempt to drag us around by our gonads and insecurities. At their best, both groups want to respect the individual as being more than just her body, as having a meaningful inner life. This resistance against personal degradation is also why feminists and Christian activists have a similarly uneasy alliance against sex trafficking.

I'll take any and all allies in standing up against personal commodification, whether "chosen" or forced. Christians talk about maintaining a meaningful inner life as having a relationship with God. The God-language can make some feminists gag, but I respect it—even though I don't necessarily agree with each and every one of God's self-appointed personal emissaries. Especially not when they think they know exactly what I should and shouldn't be doing with my smartypanties.

More on Sisters, Panties

I once tried to rationalize spending more than $40 on a set of unmentionables to my mother and less-fashion-inclined little sister.

"Look, if I don't have quality underwear, what else do I have?" I recall saying.

My sister told me I was being ridiculous, and that I was wasting my money. My mother suggested in no uncertain tones that the only thing my purchase would accomplish would be to secure my role as an eager-to-please trollop. "That underwear is only made to be seen," she said.

These women, whom I love dearly and who routinely purchase their undergarments in packs of 10, successfully shamed the pants off me.

I understand the source of complaints against lifestyle advertising like Victoria's Secret's, which perpetuates the idea that "sexiness" is mostly about showing off for someone else. Making purchases purely for the sake of seduction seems tacky and compliant. Futile, too, when, as my family was eager to remind me, I'm usually the only one who notices.

But that's just the point.

I'm well aware that buying into the whole "I can't live without this bra" line is completely offensive in a few very obvious ways. But honestly, I do enjoy spending money on and wearing underwear that I find appealing. And I don't think I'm being duped by advertisers. I'm a smart, successful, and informed woman who has managed to secure a disposable income, which I'll spend as I choose. I happen to enjoy knowing, privately, that beneath my day-old jeans and college sweatshirt are garments about which I'm more enthusiastic.

I suppose that if I were to press the issue with own my high-school-age sister, who is only now beginning to form opinions on the subject, I think she would agree with you, Lucy and Amaka, that sexiness is best characterized by confidence and good health. But confidence includes standing behind the consumer choices that make you happy.

As I read it, the Very Sexy campaign's demarcated punctuation speaks less to a lower standard for feminism than a greater appreciation for women who'd rather not feel sorry about dressing up for themselves.

I do agree, however, that the "Behind every very sexy woman is a Very Sexy ® Bra" catchphrase is a little off. Behind my very sexy bra is a very sexy woman. And that's not something for which I'm going to apologize. Period.

Growing Up Victoria

The Advertising You Can't Live Without. Period.

I'm struck by how resoundingly the death toll sounds, illustrated by the boldness of these lame advertising campaigns.

It's the "Period" addendum that gives the tagline its je ne sais quoi. Not that I am surprised, coming as it does from the same company that brought us such inventive names for their different bra lines as "Very Sexy". If the lingerie-seller's home page is any indication, in the world of VS, young college-bound girls hop off to campus wearing thigh-high rugby socks, a pair of underwear, a belly shirt ... and a cute pink hoodie. You know, because it is autumn after all, and it gets cold. So while your exposed buttocks and navel chill in the fall wind, you can be sure that you're covered from head to midstomach-ish; from toe to lower thigh. A VS girl is sexy and sensible, it seems.

I really wonder about Victoria Secret's vaguely dire world view. Take for example another VS subject line from February: "What is Sexy? ^TM ... New! Very Sexy ® Low-cut Push-up." Oh! I had been wondering what sexy was ... I thought it had something to do with confidence or being healthy. Thank you for clearing up my confusion. Question: What is sexy? Answer: You Spending Money on This Bra.^TM

If they are going to shamelessly push their wares upon my person, I'd appreciate a little more creativity. Where are the days of subversive advertising? Is it me, or is Victoria's Secret doing a really sloppy job when it comes to fooling me into thinking a $40 bra will turn me into an impossibly hot Brazilian, accent not included?

Read more "XX Factor" entries on Victoria's Secret.

The Right Not To Do Your Job?

Most of the time, the Constitution doesn't let employers refuse to hire people on the basis of religious conviction. This has the comforting ring of a bedrock American freedom. But lately, it's being manipulated. First by pharmacists who say they refuse to dispense emergency contraception on the basis of their religous beliefs. And now  by the Bush administration, which this week ordered family-planning clinics who receive federal grants not to refuse to hire nurses and other medical staff who object to abortion "based on religious beliefs or moral convictions." And not just surgical abortion, but “any of the various procedures—including the prescription, dispensing, and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action—that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

There's some serious accordionlike expansion of categories going on here—from objecting to abortion based not only on a religious belief but on a presumably secular moral one. And from D and Cs to emergency contraception. Worse, however, is the way in which the administration's directive feeds into the conflation of religious freedom with the idea that people have a right to a job even if their religious beliefs mean they can't do it. What does a nurse who objects to abortion do in a family-planning clinic? Sit out the procedures she was hired to help with? Hang protesting posters in the waiting room? I don't get it.

There have always been exceptions to the idea that employers can't discriminate. If you need to be Christian or Jewish or Muslim to fill out the four corners of a job description, then you can be denied the position if you're not. Example: An evangelical college can interview only Christians for the post of president. A synagogue can hire only Jewish Hebrew-school teachers. This isn't discrimination, in any legally recognizable sense of the word. Here's the family-planning parallel: If you are a nurse who feels she can't assist at an abortion or give a patient the emergency contraception the doctor prescribed, it doesn't matter whether your refusal is for religious or moral reasons or because you're not in the mood. You can't do the job. Maybe the Bush directive allows for this, in the sense that it's only protecting job candidates who could object to abortion and do the work that's required anyway. They also presumably wouldn't hang graphic posters of fetuses in the waiting room. I hope that's the right interpretation, anyway.

OK, I Can Recycle It Now

Young Women Acting Unbecomingly

Emily wonders whether what would once be seen as merely "youthful error" is far more perilous to a girl’s reputation in the Internet age than it was a decade ago when Emily was in her 20s.

Lizz Winstead’s video interview with Jezebel's two founders, Tracy and Moe, showcasing the edgy young bloggers' drunk appearance on Winstead's oxymoronically named stage program "Thinking and Drinking,” turned into a full-out public trainwreck after Winstead ungenerously uploaded the conversation over at HuffPost.

The raw nature of the self-exposure displayed by the two inebriated women reminded me of a young exhibitionist woman in Emily’s age cohort, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the talented but personally undisciplined author of three memoirs. Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, subtitled “Young and Depressed in America,” was a self-indulgent best-seller published when she was 26. She went on to write two more confessional books, Bitch in 1998 (which featured the naked author on the cover), and, perhaps predictably, by 2002, a sad chronicle of Wurtzel’s struggles with addiction.

Fortunately for Wurtzel, now 40, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.  There are second acts in American life.  Wurtzel, who complained to a Canadian reporter that the outpouring of grief following 9/11 was misplaced (“I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting”), was favorably profiled in the New York Times last year. She had re-invented herself and was attending Yale Law School. In March, in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Wurtzel counseled college coeds that spending “spring break in a shower with your roommate in Daytona Beach” for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild is a bad idea. So, Emily, though your concern for Tracy and Moe is well-founded, we can be optimistic they will withstand public approbation and recover nicely. Apparently even overexposed divas eventually grow up.

Sex, Race, and Stereotypes

I can't help myself: I have to weigh in on the the New Yorker cover in which the Obamas are drawn as terrorists (one homegrown, one international). Yes, the cover was a veeeery feeble attempt to satire the right-wing response to the Obama's televised fist bump. Yes, they have the right to run a cover like that. But it makes me feel a little sick.

I appreciate, Kim, your big yawn about the controversy. But the cover does matter, and no one seems to understand why. Not because the cover is Good or Bad for the Obama Campaign, which is none of my business. Rather, in displaying these images, The New Yorker reinscribes ugly stereotypes that are already etched deeply into our mind. It doesn't matter that the magazine's or cartoonist's intent was satirical. The cover "activates" certain points of view and thereby strengthens them.

That's just how stereotypes work, as social psychologists have been discovering in amazing depth and detail for the past 20 years. Our minds are always, below our awareness, automatically slotting perceptions of the world around us into categories. Just as your growing brain learned that (say) birds have wings but lizards don't—which is why pterodactyls are so thrillingly boundary-breaking—so it also soaked up all sorts of ugly categories that you may consciously reject. Go take one of these short online tests if you think you don't have any unconscious beliefs about one group or another: If you're human, you can't help it. Our busily categorizing brains more easily gather up any information that reinforces unacknowledged categories and rejects information that doesn't fit.

And those powerful, pre-installed concepts really do affect how we behave. Consider Claude Steele's well-documented concept of "stereotype threat," in which activated stereotypes lead some groups to underperform. For instance, in one experiment, when one group of students were told that women and men did equally well on a particular math test, they did score equally well; when a matched group of students were subtly reminded of the belief that men are better at math ("I'm sure you girls will do fine"), the women scored lower on that test.

So what? So when The New Yorker runs a cartoon showing Barack Obama (with his suspect name) as a Muslim terrorist and Michelle Obama as the classic angry black woman, as Angela Davis/Jackie Brown, it reinforces both those neural pathways in our brains—no matter how sophisticated and satirical we readers may be. Arabic name = Muslim terrorist. Black woman = gun-toting rage. Like that horrifying New Republic cover (which I refuse to link to) of Hillary Clinton as shriekingly hysterical, it tosses dirt into our minds, making the world a little uglier. It works the way a catchy song does, a song that worms into your head and unexpectedly becomes your soundtrack for a week: You can't help it; it's just there, whispering to you in the background. That New Yorker cover, sitting on newsstands in airports across the country, is doing the dirty work of the tribal mind.

(Note for nerds: Click here for a famous and influential Law Review article about how the fact of these unacknowledged mental categories should be dealt with in the law. The social science has gotten more sophisticated since, but the concepts are the same.)

Rubbernecking at Jezebel

While we're in Jezebel land, who can resist a little rubbernecking? Tracie and Moe of the site recently made a spectacle of themselves onstage in Manhattan at the Thinking and Drinking series put together by Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show, all captured on video, alas for them. Winstead is furious (clips there and everywhere), and the whole thing already has been raked over the blogosphere coals.(Best and raunchiest post title: Jezebels Gone Wild: In Which Feminism Finally Bends Over and Eats Itself From the Ass Up.) On Jezebel itself, damage control includes calling the whole thing a "fucking shame." But on her own blog, Tracie prefers blurry denial:

Anyway, I thought this thing was supposed to be a comedy show, but to be honest, I didn't really do my research on how the interview was really gonna go. I tried to make some jokes, but they fell super flat. ("I don't get raped because I live in Williamsburg, and all the guys there are pussies.") It all seemed really horrible at the time, but now, looking back, I sort of have to laugh. I mean, to our friends, it was just Moe and Tracie being Moe and Tracie—drunk, irreverent, drunk.

Wow, yes, a shame. And another lesson, if we needed one, in the perils of overexposure, oversharing, over-the-top Internet/video self-indulgence. But isn't that the whole story, really, as opposed to a broader of indictment of feminism and a prediction of its ever-impending doom, as some of the commentary seems to have it? What I wish for these women are the days when a bad small stage appearance or college newspaper column was quickly mothballed, never to be viewed again. Maybe the Web is creating a scary new boundary-free generation, and for sure talking smack about sex has gone way beyond what I remember from my decade—ago 20s (see Emily Gould). But maybe also it's just gotten way too easy to rubberneck, and so youthful errors become train wrecks. Thoughts?

What IS the Age of Consent?

Juliet, you're right that what's most offensive about the Jezebels' discussion of Polanski's rape of a 13-year-old is its glibness; the very title of their post, suggesting that exploiting a child might not be as bad as making a movie about that exploitation, is just galling. Sorry, a 44-year-old having sex with a drugged 13-year-old is never consensual. I'm too steeped lately in research into serious child sexual exploitation to make jokes about it. I've been at conferences where law enforcement folks are being trained in how to respond when they find, say, sex with a 13-year-old being sold on Craigslist (see John R. Miller's excellent op-ed in the NYT today). And in researching sexual harassment of teens on the job, I've seen statutory rape laws used to excellent effect in stopping predatory men from going back to work with underage girls.

But here's the other thing that offended me about the Jezzies' post: They get the facts completely wrong. Eighteen-year-olds can legally choose to have sex, everywhere in the country. In at least 44 states, 16-year-olds can say yes. (My main source is this 2004 study, but I had a friend with a Westlaw account do a spotcheck to see if its table on Pages 6 and 7 is still accurate. Nope, the ages have dropped. For instance, Wisconsin's age of consent is now 16; so is Delaware's, with a Romeo-and-Juliet clause for 12-to-15-year-olds.)

Here are some more of the complicated details, for nerds like me: Idaho is the only state where you have to be 18 to consent, with no Romeo-and-Juliet exception. Which means that even in Idaho, you would have been free to choose sex with your older boyfriend; he broke no laws. (And yes, I am forcibly restraining myself from making any jokes about the relevance of your name.) California puts it at 18 with a very, very carefully graded and complicated set of exceptions: At 17 or under, someone can have a lover within three years of his/her age; but the state only really aims its heavy guns at you only if you're over 21 and have sex with someone 15 or under. Many states get especially punitive when there's a larger age gap and the child is 14 or 13 or 12 or under—because the bigger the gap and the younger the child, the more coercive it is on its face.

Your argument about how patronizing stat rape laws seem, in other words, is precisely the argument feminists have been making for decades—and because of that feminist effort, the age of consent is lower than it used to be. So why would the Jezzies go joking about it? As far as I'm concerned, they just deflect attention from Polanski's crime in coercing this child into sex. Check out the documents about his actions. Disgusting.

Polanski, Jezebel, and the Age of Consent

The Jezebel team posted a conversation recently about the new HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. I haven't seen the doc, but I know the bare bones of the Polanski story—the director sodomized a 13-year-old girl, was charged with statutory rape, and then fled the country. While the Jezebels don't exactly excuse Polanski's behavior, they have a fairly glib conversation about the whole affair. They posit that age-of-consent laws are "a gray area"; they seem to agree that the victim's mom should have taken some of the heat for leaving her nubile daughter alone with an older man of questionable morals; and they wonder if what Polanski did is worse than the fact that Hollywood doesn't care about what he did.

Unsurprisingly, lots of Jezebel readers have found the conversation offensive. "I think being the actual pervert instead of exploiting the pervert for his talent is worse," writes one commenter. "[S]he was a 13 [year] old child it's wrong and illegal," writes another.

Part of me agrees with the commenter outrage, but I think the Jezebels have something here. This particular case is likely just plain wrong and out of the gray area (I just don't know enough about it), but in general I find myself saying, "Yeah, but ..." when it comes to the age of consent. Thirteen is young. No doubt about it. But 18 strikes me as a little old if we're talking about the youngest age at which someone can say yes and mean yes. Isn't it just a little condescending?

Full disclosure (or is it oversharing?): I entered into a relationship with an older man when I was 18. I knew what I was doing, and frankly, I would have known what I was doing at 17 or at 16. But since this wasn't a Romeo-and-Juliet situation (i.e., we weren't just a couple of years apart in age), it would've been criminal to get together any earlier. To which I say, get off my back, government!

These laws are very culture- and century-specific. What we call May-December now would have been called June-September not too long ago. Not everyone's sexual desires fit neatly into the particular mores of the time they live in.

Go Jesse!

The Gray Area

Dahlia, you ask, "Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes?" I think the gray area—where a marriage is neither deliriously euphoric for years on end, nor a bastion of bitterness, infighting, and "divorce dreams"—may not be written about partly because those extremes sell better but also partly because they're easier for the writer. It's a lot harder to be realistic about the gray area. Because that gray area lets on that, heaven forbid, your marriage might not be perfect. It's as though if you acknowledge that a gray area exists, you come off looking like you're trashing marriage—your own.

The closest analogy I can think of, I hate to say, is the various plot endings of the recent Sex and the City movie (note: major spoiler alert), which focused a lot on fairy-tale endings of deliriously happy marriages (or one in particular). As much as it pained me to see Carrie marry Big in the end—not only because he'd consistently screwed her over throughout the series, but also because, after leaving her at the altar, it didn't make any sense (why not live together happily ever after if he's that freaked out by marriage?)—I was heartened to see the ending written for Miranda and Steve. Contrary to the foolish, the-bad-guy-will-change-for-you message sent by the valentine that is Carrie's marriage, Miranda and Steve seem to really struggle and really try to work it out (at the very end) after Steve's affair. Granted, the circumstances of one party cheating are much more dire than the vanilla-esque gray area items I'm mulling over (like leaving the cap off the toothpaste), but it's not too often, especially on the big screen, that you see the struggle and mediocrity of a marriage—along with the moments that endear the betrothed to each other, by the way—getting equal airing. It was a refreshing antidote to the overblown central story line, yet it hardly got any attention.

Perhaps the reality of it is just too banal and maybe, as Dahlia again pointed out, we might need to stake out outrageously simple positions to get published. But I think there could be more to it than that. (I also add that my own marriage is a bed of roses every single day. Seriously.)

He’s Good at Apologies

Jesse Jackson says he wanted to "cut off" Barack Obama's "nuts" because the presidential contender has been saying black men have to take more responsibility for their behavior, stop acting "like boys," and not father and abandon children. Jackson said that Obama was "talking down to black people" with these remarks. In a turgid apology, he explained, "My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.'' So we are to understand that it was "government and the public policy" and a "lack of good choices" that led in 2001 to Jackson, who was then a famous, wealthy, 59-year-old, issuing another apology and withdrawing temporarily from public life when he had to reveal—because the tabloids got hold of the story—that he had fathered a toddler out of wedlock. This is in addition to his apology in 1984 for calling New York "Hymietown." At least this time Jackson didn't have to be forced to apologize.

Competitive Complaining, and Other Strategies for a Happy Life

Like Emily Y., I did not exactly grow up planning my wedding—or picking out baby names, for that matter. In fact, the whole time I was single, I had this recurring nightmare that it was my wedding day and there was nothing I could do about it. Even as the actual day approached, I was completely terrified, and vividly remember a conversation I had with a photographer I worked with at the time, about how scary it was to think I’d never have another relationship with anyone else, ever. “Statistically unlikely,’’ she said, and somehow, that made me feel a lot better. And it still does—and that’s no reflection on my marriage. Which I guess is why I take these pieces about moron husbands no more seriously than I take the opposite kind. (Have you ever noticed how super-mushy book dedications seem to be a pretty good predictor of divorce within the year?) The impulse to make our marriages out to be worse than they are, rather than better, also just seems to be a part of this culture of competitive griping we've got going; even after I wrote about a love affair that ended badly, in an assisted living facility, for heaven's sake, between an 82-year-old woman and a 95-year-old man, I can’t tell you how many (apparently happily married) people in their 40s said wow, hubba hubba, they just couldn’t wait. … And none of them meant it, I'm pretty sure.

Only in My Dreams

My Funny Valentine

It seems we are having two discussions here: writing about a rotten marriage, and having one. I agree with Hanna, I don’t know how you write a piece that begins, “I contemplate divorce every day” and not end up writing the sequel, “How I Chose My Divorce Lawyer.” Hanna, you quote Ellen Tien’s assertion, “Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce," and wonder if those of us whose running chyron is saying “I am so lucky I am married to this man” are deluded. I agree with you, Hanna, that Tien is deluded to think there are no happy marriages, and that it demonstrates a rather narrow worldview not to understand there are many couples, who even in their worst moments, have never contemplated divorce. On the other hand, how (and why) do you write about your happy marriage? It would feel like one of those gloating Christmas letters. I grew up with a terror of marriage. My parents’ was comprehensively awful. The only thing that seemed to keep them together for 20 years was that it took them that long to finish shredding each other. I didn’t get married until I was 38, and the miracle of my life is that we have been happy for the 14 years since. But maybe this is due to the fact that early on, while watching A Few Good Men, we decided we needed a motto for our marriage and took Jack Nicholson’s line: “You can’t handle the truth!”

The Mommy Wars, Repurposed?

Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.

But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!

Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?

Better Than the Train Tracks