The XX Factor: What women really think.



  • Girls Love Vampires Because We Want To Have Sex With Gay Guys?


    The real root of the vampire trend, according to Stephen Marche at Esquire, is that straight women want to have sex with gay guys. It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not buying it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

  • Prefer Drop Dead Diva to The Ugly Truth?


    June, Drop Dead Diva ties together two things we’ve been kicking around the blog the last few days: Is T.V. a better place for women than film?... (Read more in Double X.)

  • One More Way TV Will Save The World


    What is television good for? Curbing population growth, of course! Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare Minister, wants to bring electricity to the most rural parts of his country, in hopes that it will slow down the baby making... (Read more in Double X.)

  • Why "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" Is a Runaway Hit


    Why is The Real Housewives of New Jersey a smash-hit? The season finale's 4.6 million viewers in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic testify to its broad appeal, but why are we so enamored with these table-tossing housewives? Is it the big hair? The brash talk? The back stabbing? One thing's for sure. It's not their manners.

    Out of all the Real Housewives series—from Orange County to Atlanta to New York City—"New Jersey" is the breakaway hit. Because I have deeply bad taste in TV... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

  • Celebrity Health Advice on Oprah Not Always Sound Science. No Duh.


    Newsweek has an article out debunking much of the health advice shilled by celebrities on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Most famously, Jenny McCarthy has been on Oprah several times claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism (the vaccine/autism link has been scientifically disproven). But, more entertaining is the anti-aging regime that Suzanne Somers promoted in January:

    Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day, she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina ... Next come the pills. She swallows 60 vitamins and...

    (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

  • Should the National Spelling Bee Make Us Squirm?


    Tonight you can see the finals of the National Spelling Bee on television and watch as the kids contort under the mounting pressure. They “tug at their hair and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates, let alone... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
  • I Won't Stop Believing in "Glee"


    I really, really wanted to love Glee, the new Fox comedy about show choir—that strange, unholy amalgam of drama club, choir, and dance team. After all, I have already made my love of such dorky performance activities rather public. And before the first commercial break, it seemed like Glee was really gunning for my affections in particular, showcasing all of the following... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

  • Tracy Flick Never Rests


    The joyful, saccharine, karaoke-inspring Glee, which premiered last night on Fox, got me wondering: What did we do before Tracy Flick? She first appeared, embodied by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's Election, a previously unidentified personality type, the driven, ruthless, terrifyingly ambitious striver who micromanages her inevitable rise to power in relentlessly cheerful tones. In the decade since Election, Flick has been transformed from a fresh, new character into an archetype, found frequently in... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)

  • HBO Seeks to Replace "The Sopranos" with "The Penis Diaries"


    No longer the home of hits like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire, HBO is looking to replace its sex-and-violence lineup of yesteryear with ... more sex. Last spring, the network issued a somewhat mysterious announcement about Hung, a dramatic comedy that debuts this summer... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

  • Possibly the Most Feminist Season of 24 Ever


    In seven seasons of 24, I've never given much thought to its gender politics. For one, I've mostly tuned in for the escapism of watching Jack Bauer save the world. For another, it's always had enough strong female characters—villains, heads of CTU, and the ass-kicking-yet-socially-awkward Chloe—to make up for the damsels in distress. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Kim Bauer.)

    But two sequences at the end of last night's finale jumped out at me for their portrayal of the women. (Warning, if you have the finale waiting on your TiVO: Spoilers ahead.) To wrap one storyline, President Allison Taylor has to decide... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

  • Why Buy the Film, When You Can Get the Trailer for Free?


    More and more frequently, movie trailers are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot, they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.

    David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

  • Liz Lemon: "You Have Sexually Transmitted Crazy Mouth. Deal Breaker!"


    Last night's season finale of 30 Rock wasn't the best episode of the season—the A and B plots didn't hang together especially well—but the episode provided some of the best lines of the year. The Liz Lemon plot revolved around... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
  • Kate Gosselin's Hair Frightens Me


    This week, is there a tabloid that doesn't feature Jon and Kate Gosselin of TLC's mega-spawn reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" fame? Today, Kate vomited her guts to People, revealing that her marriage to the man with whom she fathered a pair of twins and a set of sextuplets may be deeply...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
  • Web TV Now Officially Better Than Regular TV


    Has anyone else checked out the second season of the Sundance Channel's Green Porno series? Starring Isabella Rossellini, it's an amusingly surreal look at the secret sex lives of animals. If you thought human sex was weird, we've got nothing on wild things. The first season was great, but the second season is even better. This time around, Rossellini dresses up as a six-foot-penised whale, a self-replicating starfish, and a sexless limpet. If you haven't detected a theme thus far, the episodes focus on how creatures do it under the sea. Besides being beautiful to look at, Green Porno is educational. Without it, I never would have known that during the mating process, the deep, dark, sea-dwelling male anglerfish becomes its female counterpart's "own personal sperm bank." (Warning: The webisodes are not exactly safe for watching while at work.)

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