The XX Factor: What women really think.

Out With The Vampires, In With The Wolves

By Lauren Bans

Oh, MTV. The meaningless acronym channel that killed Daria in favor of Date My Mom has latched onto the 1985 Michael Fox classic Teen Wolf. The film that taught us all about the joys and compromises of male puberty is in the hands of the network that made "Speidi" a household name. Happy Wednesday!

Yeah, I know, it makes sense. Just not to my heart. Mythological creatures are in, particularly the blood-sucking variety. ... (Read more in DoubleX)

Does "16 and Pregnant" Discourage Viewers from Becoming Teen Moms?

MTV's Golden Cage

Willa, to quote Cher from Clueless (which I seem to be referencing daily now)—trying to find responsible messages about eating in The City is like looking for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. Which is to say, ultimately fruitless. But the flippant handling of anorexia in The City is definitely worth mentioning because it seems that in the three decades that the disease has been in the zeitgeist (basically since the 1978 publication of Hilde Bruch's seminal anorexia text, The Golden Cage) the media has still portrayed it in a completely unproductive way.

Women's magazines are particularly ham-handed in the way they deal with eating disorders, and I was reminded of this when perusing the February issue of Elle earlier this week. They have a personal essay by recovered anorexic Abby Sher, which reads like a pro-ana handbook:

I had new rules: No eating before the show. No eating in public. No less than an hour and a half at the gym every day. I started drinking diuretic teas and devouring magazine articles about how to feel full from your daily intake of water. ... I’d have high-fiber cereal covered with chicken broth and melted fat-free cheddar cheese on top, sometimes hummus and carrots, washed down with watery cocoa. Whenever I didn’t think I could make it another mile on the stationary bike or felt light-headed on the treadmill, I imagined this banquet awaiting me and tried to pedal faster, harder, stronger.

For those without eating disorders, Sher's chronicle of her not-eating is terminally boring. It is exactly like every other personal account of anorexia that's been in every women's magazine since the days of Karen Carpenter. For those with eating disorders, or perhaps those perilously on the brink, this sort of story is a blueprint, a possible enticement. There seems to be very little literature and media devoted to addressing the causes of anorexia, only these train-wreckish essays for others to gawk at.

So, Willa, I agree—MTV should treat discussions of potential anorexia with more gravity than they treat a shoe purchase, but that would require them to cast a critical eye on the extreme thinness that's the current beauty ideal. I'd bet you some hummus and carrots that they're never going to be willing to do that.

Free Britney

Poor Britney

Because my taste in entertainment can tend toward the awful, last night I spent 90 minutes watching "For the Record," a faux documentary starring Britney Spears as the fallen pop starlet trying to stage a wobbly comeback. In sum total, it was pretty sad. The tired-looking, droopy-eyed, beweaved Britney comes across like a horse that's been ridden to the brink of exhaustion, and yet her minders continue to drive her onward, regardless of the fact that she's a barely functioning zombie on the verge of collapse. (All in service of a new album, fittingly called Circus.) In a nice deconstruction of the spectacle, Choire Sicha deems Spears "sick," and she sure looks it. Shots of the girl in action reveal her staring dully out car windows as the paparazzi bum-rush her ride, spacing out in chairs as she gets dolled up by makeup artists and hairstylists again and again, seemingly grinding through one more day to score a comeback that she denies she needs to make to regain her Princess of Pop title. The only time she lights up is when she's looking in the mirror.

While Britney's personal "revelations" range from the mundane to the strange—"What was I thinking?" and "Everyone shaves their head" among them—what's really mind-boggling is the constant swarming of the cameras around her as she attempts to live her life. This time, we see the view from inside the feeding frenzy—and it's pretty tragic. As her caravan emerges from a subterranean parking lot, the mechanical door rolls up to reveal a crowd of onlookers that resemble the Earthlings encountering the space aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Without a doubt, what we're watching is a 21st-century freak show, and Britney is its star. Since the show aired, some bloggers have denounced Spears for courting the cameras that she claims she wishes would leave her alone, but the fact of the matter is that the slobbering media hounds work for us, the American public, and if Britney Spears is a monster, we're the Dr. Frankenstein who made her.