The XX Factor: What women really think.

Recession Woes Incline Women To Have Fewer Babies

By Amanda Marcotte

In today's utterly-unsurprising-but-still-necessary news, the Guttmacher Institute has released a report detailing how women living in households making less than $75,000 a year are responding to the recession by losing the desire to have a baby anytime in the near future. (PDF of the report here.) To be specific, 44 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce or delay their childbearing in response to the recession. Unfortunately, the lowered desire to get pregnant doesn't necessarily translate to better contraception use for women. In many cases, in fact, economic hard times make it all the much easier to get pregnant on accident ... (Read more in DoubleX)

The Recession Has Really Screwed Recent College Grads

Elizabeth Warren Put Up Her Dukes

You know, it's funny, Hanna: I listened to Adam Davidson duking it out with Elizabeth Warren on Planet Money (love that podcast) and came away filled with satisfaction. That's partly because I like a good argument. But it was also because Davidson and Warren were having a substantive, heated disagreement about economic policy, and they trusted each other enough to argue both rationally and with real... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Elizabeth Warren, Accused Softie

Recently on Planet Money, host Adam Davidson got into a tiff with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who oversees the Treasury's bank bailout. In the days since, their argument—which lasted all of two minutes—has ballooned into a comment war that taps into lefty passions about the economy, the future of the American family, and latent sexism.

Davidson is disappointed because he was hoping the Congressional Oversight Panel, which Warren chairs, would be something like the 9/11 Commission, a respected nonpartisan advisory board of "senior statesmen" that would sagely guide the administration on how to save the economy. "Senior statesmen" is a phrase he repeats a few times. In the clip, he raises his voice and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

The Department of Do Not Despair

In response to my piece about grad school grads who who are suffering in the recession, I heard from Sam Eifling, who works at ESPN.com's outdoor web site. He said, "Today I read your piece about the value of advanced educations in a piss-poor hiring climate. The bit about the Mizzou j-school grad working at Applebee's sent a cold wind up my back. Do you still have that kid Sam's e-mail address? I'm thinking I might be able to throw him some freelance work."

And so, of course, I connected Sam to the j-school grad, whose name is also Sam, and who wrote back to say he'd already emailed Sam the editor. Then from that Sam, this morning, "the lad seems eager: 'Any kind of work that doesn't involve bringing people extra vats of ranch is fairly appealing to me.' I hope I can get him freelancing for me. I mean, if you can't throw a raft to a writer who's basically living your nightmare, what's the point in being an editor?"

Indeed. My hero. 

Bogus Trends Trend

I posted earlier this week on a bogus trend piece in the New York Times linking buoyant romance-novel sales to the recession. The piece offered no evidence beyond bland generalities, like "In a recession, what people want is a happy ending." But that was nothing in comparison to the whopper in today's Times: "Uptick in Vasectomies Seen as Sign of Recession."

I could list all the reasons the article doesn't hold up under scrutiny, but why bother? Just get a load of this hedge, placed conveniently right after the lede, so you know you can stop reading: "It is too early to proclaim a bona fide trend in elective sterilization, because no organization regularly tracks the number of vasectomies performed on an annual or even a monthly basis."

It's true the birth rate fell sharply during the Great Depression, but at least as of yet, there's no proof we're heading towards a vasectomy-induced population decline.

The Recession and Romance Novels: Bogus Trend?

The problem with Rich's column, which argues that sales of romance novels are up due to the recession, isn't a deficit of hard numbers: Harlequin Enterprises' fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier; while sales of adult fiction overall were flat last year, the romance category was up 7 percent. Rather, I take issue with her assumption that sales are up because of the recession—an assumption for which she has no proof.

"In a recession, what people want is a happy ending," she writes, as if people wanted sad endings during boom times. And then there's this rather deceptive line: "Like the Depression-era readers who fueled blockbuster sales of Margaret Michell's "Gone With the Wind," today's readers are looking for an escape from the grim realities of layoffs, foreclosures and shrinking 401(k) balances." It's true that readers, during the Depression, turned "Gone With the Wind" into a bestseller. But did the Depression itself contribute to the book's success? Would it have been a flop if it had been released 10 years earlier?

What we have here is an observation in search of a thesis. Why are romance novel sales up? Must be the recession! All we know for sure, of course, is that the recession is fueling trend stories like these.

Magical Thinking, the Recession, and You

The New York Times published an interesting story on Monday about the role of pride in the recession. One psychologist said he has a laid-off patient who nonetheless “commutes” to Starbucks. This may sound foolish (anyone see the film Human Resources?), but apparently it's pragmatic. Studies show that acting proud has a palpable effect on how people around you see you. There are certain cross-cultural signals of pride (hands on hips, head tilted) and when you display them, people “read” you as being more likeable than others. They also ascribe higher status to you. So there’s something to the Starbucks commuter's magical thinking; the prouder you allow yourself to feel, the better you may do in that next job interview. (I do wonder whether the effects the psychologists described are maintained over time.)

The piece got me thinking about the psychology of the recession—how far beyond economics the recession begins to go. For one thing, I realized that my way of dealing with the recession is riddled with magical thinking—irrational behaviors I follow in the superstitious hope that somehow they will ward off disaster. To take one small example: I am hopeless at budgets, and bad at letting go of anything. So rather than ditch cable, say, which I barely ever watch and don’t really need (I can always watch news clips on the internet), I have become fixated with keeping the heat in my apartment at a bare minimum. (I pay for my heat.) It will save me some money, sure, but choosing this way of "saving" has more to do with my conflicted relationship to asceticism than with good financial planning. I bet a lot of us are like this. How we think about money is tied to our childhoods, our biases, neuroses that have nothing to do with money itself. So join me in the confessional: Tell me about your magical recession thinking, or send me news of any studies that seem to reflect this kind of thinking, at morourkexx@gmail.com. I’ll be writing about the subject in a few weeks. (Emails quotable unless you state otherwise.)

Markets Low, Sugar High?

Speaking of the silly, I think the fact that this story from today—about the popularity of candy shops during a recession—is the most e-mailed article at the New York Times Web site says more about public appetites for absurdist, sometimes funny, mostly groan-inducing trend stories during a recession than it does about candy’s allure in times of trouble. I, recessionista, myself bought some sweets recently—but not because pink Peeps make me remember the days when the Dow topped 11,000, but because it’s almost Easter, and man is that stuff on sale. (Also, just as a nod to an actual policy discussion: Corn syrup, subsidized, even/especially in a recession, is still cheap.) Back to the media criticism: Perhaps consumers are trying to escape by eating more junk food—but they're certainly reading more of the equivalent, too.

The White House Vegetable Garden

Hanna: I was at a "cowgirl" bachelorette party in Texas this weekend, and everyone was talking about Michelle's gardening look. "Heels????" one asked, incredulously. "To hoe?" (Texas is the capital of stylish outdoor clothing: Cowboy boots and hats look good on everyone, but they're also practical.) She looked silly, I agree, but I'm with Dahlia: Let's give Michelle a break. She's gotta wear something.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure you're right the White House garden is just another instance of bourgeois locavorism. Apparently, many Americans hit by the recession are planning vegetable gardens, or so this piece reported. It noted "double-digit" growth in the number of vegetable gardens and reported that many seed catalogs "have run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers." Who knows, of course, whether those seeds will ever be planted.

I like the White House garden. And, in my eyes, it's not just another way of touting the so-called superiority of organic food you can buy at places like Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. Yuppie fetishizaton of organic food, by the by, has led to real, and dangerous, confusion of "healthy" food with "organic"—or expensive—food, according to this New York Times piece. By contrast, the garden underscores the fact that vegetables and fruit are healthy, wholesome, and available (in season) to many. Democracy at work!

Emily Bazelon And Rebecca Traister Discuss Recession And Gender Roles

Our own Emily Bazelon discusses the Dating a Banker Anonymous fracas, shifting gender roles during the recession, and the pay gap with Salon's Rebecca Traister on Bloggingheads.tv. See video below.

Does "Two and A Half Men" Alleviate Recession Depression?

Kerry just noted the problems with the "poverty-as-familial-bonding-mechanism narrative"; I've got issues with another recession story line, the Americans-want-to-be-comforted-by-crappy-entertainment-now-that-we're-poor meme. It's in full effect in Alessandra Stanley's piece about CBS's Rules of Engagement, a supremely middling sitcom that, after a long hiatus, begins airing on CBS tonight. In the piece, Stanley contrasts "new economy shows" like 30 Rock, which continue to bomb in the ratings, with successful "Old-economy hits" like Two and a Half Men. She says our preference for the latter "suggests that nowadays network viewers prefer comforting comedy to high-wire satire." (Successful satire The Office does not figure into her formulation.)

My problem with this assertion has to do with that nowadays. 30 Rock has been bombing in the ratings since 2006, when most Americans still thought the value of their house could only go up, up, up. Meanwhile, the admittedly execrable Two and Half Men has been the most popular sitcom in America since 2005. In other words, it's not just nowadays that Americans have preferred the "comforting comedy" of Two and a Half to the "high-wire satire" of 30 Rock—it's most days. So has the recession really pushed Americans to rediscover lame sitcoms? Or has it just given journalists a specious way to explain our bad taste?

Another Times piece, about the resurgent movie business (ticket sales are up 17.5 percent this year—it's not that we aren't consuming more entertainment in this recession, it's that what we're consuming is just as crappy, or just as quality, as always), argues, "Helping feed the surge [in box office] is the mix of movies. [They] have been more audience-friendly in recent months as the studios have tried to adjust after the lackluster sales of more somber and serious films."  

In other words, more people are going to the movies because the films are not somber and serious. Well, it's January and February, historically the season for Hollywood's least promising projects—people willing to take in a thoughtful movie couldn't find one at the multiplex. If they could, can the Times really be sure they wouldn't go? Last year's biggest film, The Dark Knight, was hardly light and peppy. Next weekend's Watchmen is expected to do huge business, but given that it deals with an enormous weapon going off in New York City*, "somber and serious" sounds just about right. If it succeeds, I wonder how many articles will suggest we "embraced" it because it "speaks to our troubled times."

*Correction, March 3, 2009: The original version of this post incorrectly described the weapon that goes off in Watchmen as a nuclear bomb.

Do Family-Owned Businesses Do Better on the Recession-o-Meter?

Jessica, it doesn't surprise me that tailors are getting rich these days. Last weekend, I was perusing the Bureau of Economic Analysis' quarterly data on Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Product (don't judge, it's a more amusing pastime than Sudoku in these apocalypse days) and noticed that it's the repair industries, like auto or jewelry repair, that held steady or did well in the gloomy fourth quarter of 2008. And among retailers, it's "health and personal care" stores (body repair!) that have experienced the biggest recession boom. (I do have to say, though, that the spend-money-on-repair phenomenon seems to have skipped over my household, whose Saturn lost the use of its horn last month in its slow, untreated process of multi-organ failure.)

I wonder, too, whether family-owned businesses aren't seeing a boost compared with chains. The article on tailors you linked to suggests that the "bright smile and homespun advice" customers receive at Andy's Secrets tailor are a big part of the store's recent success. That anecdote jibed with a shopping experience I'm having. The last time I bought glasses, a few years ago, I went to an outlet of the hippest, most pretentious Washington chain and felt as though I was being fleeced of all my money by unctuous hipsters, for whom fashion was all about the price tag—but hey, those were flush times. Now I need new ones, and while I swung by the Pretentious Chain, I ended up at the slightly dowdy little glasses shop next to my office, whose rather bootleg Web site boasts that its staff "hasn't changed in 15 years." I walk by the Dowdy Little Shop every day and know and like the guys inside. In the end, I'm going to pay nearly as much for what I'm ordering as I did at the Pretentious Chain. But the purchase feels less like a commodity-for-cash trade and more like an exchange of gifts. Giving the Dowdy Little Shop a substantial gift in thanks for their earnest, friendly work to find just the right frame to fit my narrow nose-bridge establishes a bond between us, a sense of integration and community in an unsettling moment.

Introducing the Lipstick Level: A Recession-o-Meter

At the early end of the current economic downturn, the New York Times published an article about how lipstick is a potential economic indicator. The theory is that in times of fiscal woe, women won't be able to afford that $200 frock, but they'll splurge on a $10 lipstick, a cheapo manicure, or some other kind of small luxury. And lately we've heard reporting not on just the lipstick effect," but also on how the credit crunch is killing boob-job loans, how Nordstrom's profits have tanked since the ladies who lunch are brown-bagging it, and how moms are cutting back on their kids' birthday parties, causing a seismic blow to the clown community.  

It seems that every day now there's a trend piece on the way women are spending—or not spending—our increasingly meager earnings. That's why we're introducing the Lipstick Level, an occasional Recession-o-Meter in the mold of Slate's Change-o-Meter rating how the economic downturn is shaping the way women make purchases. A low Lipstick Level score indicates spending as if you still believed those returns from Uncle Bernie were for real, like the article on Bloomberg.com today about how Shiseido is still profiting from a face cream costing $1,350 for a 1.4-ounce jar. “High-priced cosmetics are resisting the economic downturn,” says Shiseido president Shinzo Maeda.

A high Lipstick Level score says we're fast approaching diets of ramen and Target-brand pants held together with twine. An article in Women's Wear Daily by Rosemary Feitelberg on the notoriously spendthrift fashion crowd cutting back is an example of this. According to Feitelberg, "Constance White, eBay’s style director, said she has been trying to explain to her husband what Wal-Mart is." Even those who are aware of Wal-Mart are finding new ways to save: Tailors are doing better business as people try to revive old clothes rather than buying new ones.

So what's today's LL? I'm going to give it a 40 on a scale of 1 to 100. If people are still blowing rent money on cold cream, it could get much, much worse.

Addendum: The Big Money's Hans Eisenbeis wrote brilliantly on the lipstick index theory late last year. His take? "For this recession, lipstick has been upscaled right out of its own economic index. Hello, Hosiery Index!" Sigh. TBM also wrote on Uggs as an economic indicator here.

Who's Doing the Second Shift in Recession Land?

Color Me Puzzled

Eve, I wish Portfolio had been a little more specific in their recession belt-tightening survey. "Stop coloring hair" is a pretty limiting response that doesn't factor in some other options to save money on maintaining that hair hue. Women (and men) who want to save money might come to terms with their roots and go longer between touch-ups. They could downgrade to a cheaper colorist or even buy a DIY hair-dye kit from the drug store. And if you're selling your home, chances are that your financial problems are too critical to be solved by forgoing lattes and trips to the salon for a few months.

I was initially struck by the claim that only 4.1 percent plan to donate less in 2009, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that a study foresees just a 3 percent to 5 percent drop in corporate giving this year. No word on how much individuals plan to reduce or increase their personal donations, but hopefully Portfolio readers tend to give a little bit of that money saved on lattes and vacations.

High-End Girlfriends: A Conspicuous Luxury

Commenter jack_cerf posted a follow up to our Dating a Banker Anonymous discussion in the Fray, that perhaps sheds light on the modern urban tragedy of banker-boyfriend breakups:

"Last September Michael Daly of the NY Daily News did a piece on the economic indicator he called the High End Girlfriend Index ("HEGI"). Premise was that one of the conspicuous luxuries of life on Wall Street was to be able to afford the kind of woman who had ignored you in high school. Conversely, the crash led to their being -- very, very reluctantly -- let go. Daly quotes a New York lawyer as follows:

They Ain't Messin With No Broke Bankers

My old compatriots at Jezebel mocked the tone-deaf women behind the blog Dating a Banker Anonymous earlier today.This gaggle of entitled broads (known as DABAs) was featured in a New York Times article. In a nutshell, these women have seen their relationships become difficult because their banker-lovers have fallen on hard times and are no longer the carefree captains of industry they were in the halcyon days of 2006.

Anyway! Their hubris is easy to make fun of, but what struck me was the final two paragraphs in the Times article:

Despite the seemingly endless stream of disparaging remarks and shaking heads, some of the appeal of dating a banker remains.

"It's not even about a $200 dinner," Petrus said. "It's that he's an alpha male, he's aggressive, he's a go-getter, he doesn't take no for an answer, he's confident, people respect him and that creates the whole mystique of who he is."

Maybe I'm reading between the lines too much, but it sort of sounds like these women like bankers not because of the money, but because they're jerks. This suspicion was confirmed by one of today's entries on the DABA site titled, "Ain't Messin' With No Broke Banker."

 "Overnight, he went from unavailable to downright clingy.  He wants to have dinner every night.  By dinner I mean staying in and cooking as Megu is no longer in the budget," laments a sad, sad DABA. "Thanks to the recession, I now have a completely devoted BF, which is exactly what I wanted.  So I should be happy, right?  Wrong.  I’m bored and can’t stop thinking about my perpetually unattainable Euro ex-boyfriend who is recession proof courtesy of an offshore trust account." Is it possible that even if Donald Trump were broke, he'd still be a model magnet as long as he remained emotionally adolescent?

Even though they may date wealthy louts, don't cry for the DABA girls: Word on the street is they've locked down a book deal for their tales of fiscal woe.  

On Not Sugarcoating the Future

That's a good question, Dahlia, and the answer for me is definitely wanting that economic security later. I don't claim to speak for all of twentysomething ladies, but when I fantasize about my work-life balance, I want what my parents had. They're both doctors who met in med school. My mother is a psychiatrist, my father, a cardiologist. From the time my brother was born, we had a housekeeper who did not live with us, but was with the family from 9 to 5 on weekdays. When I was 8 or so, my mom went into her private practice full time, and so worked from home, though was largely not available during the day. We always had dinner as a family and when we were little, my dad did the majority of the playing with my brother and me. Also, we went to a good suburban public school, if that's relevant. My parents both still work more or less full time.

Do I expect the full time housekeeper on a writer/editor salary?  Of course not. Does it sound nice in my fantasy world? Dear God, yes. As both Dahlia and Dana expressed, I have no idea what the reality of working motherhood is like. As Noreen points out, this is all still theoretical. I agree that the scars of this financial downturn will change the way Gen-Y thinks about money, Noreen. However, I also think we're more resilient and technologically adaptable than some of the generations before us. Even before this meltdown, we didn't expect company loyalty or consistency, so beyond the cosmetic (less conspicuous consumption, botox, and $400 strollers) I don't think there will be a major restructuring of romantico-fiscal relationships (and yes, I just made that word up).

And even though I aspire to my mother's example, she still likes to tell the story about how my brother burst into tears at his kindergarten class picnic because she had to leave and go to work. "You can't leave me!" he cried. The story is told jokingly, but you can tell that 25 years later, she still feels vaguely guilty. Maybe, as Dana suggested, Obama can help move policy toward helping working women, but I'm not holding my breath. Nor am I expecting to not feel conflicted about my work-life balance. Jeez, this conversation is making me really glad that I'm living in child-free, economically unencumbered sin with my boyfriend.