The XX Factor: What women really think.

Marriage: Bad for Women?

From Australia comes yet more proof of why women should never get married. Apparently, marriage makes you chunky, finds one important study. Add that to the list of ills catalogued in Ariel Levy’s New Yorker review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book on marriage this week. Married women are more likely to get depressed, fail in their careers, and even die violent deaths at the hands of their husbands. “Marriage is an anachronism,” Levy writes, a relic from the time when people had to “establish kinships for purposes of defense.”

There is, of course, a part of me that wants to connect to my freshman self, sitting on someone’s bed and going on about marriage as a pointless institution and a stupid piece of paper, etc. But life experience has taught me better. For one thing, the statistics are slippery. Unmarried women, for example, are also unhappier than unmarried men. Evangelical women married in the hidebound, pre-feminist mode are the happiest of all ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Palin: The Ever Lovin' Mother

Stupak Amendment Reveals Fault Lines in Feminist Movement

In reading all the accounts from fellow pro-choice women—like Emily's from earlier this week—bemoaning the Stupak abortion restrictions, I noticed that many of the women who were outraged by the concessions of the health care bill used the terms feminist and pro-choice almost interchangably. Over at Salon, Kate Harding writes, "Feminists have been up in arms about the latest assault on access to abortion," but if you take one look at the website for the group Feminists for Life, one of the first things you see is the banner proclaiming "Women the Winners in U.S. House Amendment Vote" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Teen Sexual Reality Much More Complicated Than Purity Mythology

Your question is a good one, Emily. The flip side of the purity pressures are well-drawn in Ariel Levy's excellent Female Chauvinist Pigs. I remember one girl Levy spoke to in particular—a pretty, leggy California high schooler who had sex utterly without pleasure. She did it to keep up with her fellow popular Janeses; she did it because she felt it gave her a measure of power over the men in her life. Sex didn't make her feel good, not one bit.

For me, one of the biggest problems with Valenti's book is that she makes the personal political to an outrageous degree with vignettes about her adolescent sexcapades. Her attitude is essentially, I had sex in high school by choice and it worked out, so having sex in high school is a positive thing. For many, many women this is not the case. From what I observed when I was a teen, most of my cohorts were happier when they waited until 17 or 18 to become sexually active; it is a rare 14 or 15-year-old who is secure enough in herself to have sex without regret. I think we should encourage teens to wait until college, but supply them with the proper contraception if they choose not to. As we all know, encouraging people to wait until marriage is completely unrealistic.

However, teens are so woefully undereducated about sex in this country that the first step should be to get them proper information from the get-go. The next step after that is more difficult because we cannot remove teenagers from their own social ecosystems. While a teenager in rural Alabama may be pressured by the so-called purity myth, a teenager in San Francisco may be pressured by her sexually active friends. The best bet is to encourage internal traits—like self-confidence—that help teens make the right choice for themselves. Again, I will return to Margaret Talbot's point in the New Yorker article Red Sex, Blue Sex: teens who feel they have a lot at stake will delay sexual intercourse and when they do have sex, have it responsibly. If I knew how to make all teen girls feel like they have a future worth waiting for, I would be a trillionairess.

Where Have All the Rads Gone?

It's pretty difficult to argue that gays should not be allowed to see their ailing partners in the hospital, E.J., but your post reminded me of Ariel Levy's article in this week's New Yorker about radical lesbian feminists of the '70s. The feature focuses on Lamar Van Dyke, née Heather Elizabeth, a woman who help found the feminist separatist movement the Van Dykes, "a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men, and lived on the highways of North America for several years."

At the end of the article, with an "almost incredulous maternal disappointment," Van Dyke tells Levy, "Your generation wants to fit in. ... Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?" Van Dyke's disappointment in the lack of radicalism in the feminist and lesbian movements is something I've thought about. I'm no radical myself, and the idea of "making the National Organization for Women look like an appeasement policy," as Levy says the Van Dykes did, holds no personal appeal. But I wonder if part of the reason the feminist movement is currently so disparate and fragmented is partially due to a lack of radical thought and action.

Van Dyke also says of my generation, "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. ... We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted." Which reminds me of the study Emily Y. wrote about yesterday, the study that claims technology is permanently infantilizing us, ruining our attention spans and ability to communicate. But Van Dyke's fear, that my generation is narcotized by all the screens, is potentially more troubling than accusations of mass ADD.

Cindy McCain's Beast-ly Spin