The XX Factor: What women really think.

Joyce Maynard Learns to Respect Privacy

In last Sunday’s New York Times Modern Love column, author Joyce Maynard wrote about trespassing into the e-mail account of her 22-year-old daughter, Audrey. The daughter had temporarily relocated to the Dominican Republic when her communications home were abruptly and, to Maynard, ominously silenced. From reading the correspondence, Maynard learned that her daughter was embroiled in a personal dilemma—one that she apparently needed to resolve without involving her mother. After justifying the invasion of her daughter's privacy ("I dreamed my daughter was running ... her face a mask of grief"), Maynard goes on to tell Modern Love readers the details of her daughter's very emotional crisis, including results of her HIV tests.

Maynard has, apparently, always had difficulty with boundaries. In 1972, when she was 18, the writer published a confessional essay in the Times about her generational perspective (sample: “Marijuana and the class of '71 moved through high school together”) that brought her national attention. She was later criticized about her 1999 memoir that excruciatingly detailed her teenage affair with then 53-year-old novelist J.D. Salinger. Maynard also auctioned off her love letters from the reclusive author.

Tell Us Your Awkward and Wrong Internet Tales

Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Burned By Modern Love? Here's Your Chance For Revenge.

Love Is Knowing When Saying Less Is Saying More?

Jessica, I agree with you about Layng Martine's over-sharing; his unconditional love certainly doesn't give him the right to reveal way TMI about his wife's diminished physical capacity and her inability to control her bodily functions. I must admit those details made me recoil as well. I would never, ever want my husband to share this sort of detail with millions of NY Times readers. I assumed he must have done so with his wife's blessings, and I hope he at least had enough respect for her privacy to ask for permission to write it. That said, I think the details added a layer of intellectual honesty to the piece and illustrated that even though the challenges in the marriage posed by his wife's disability were very real, and sometimes very unpleasant, they still managed over the years to retain a strong love and partnership. Yes, they were able to go on long dreamy drives and spend hours at the beach, but in between their daily life was, well, no day at the beach. To me this was the crux of the piece: They've managed to stay together and, at least from his perspective, to stay in love. He does sound as if he might be over-romanticizing their situation a bit, but I tried not to judge him because, after all, he is talking about a unique circumstance that he lives every day, and he does seem to be speaking sincerely from his heart. Still, I would have loved to hear her side of the story to see if it meshes neatly with his.

Love Is…Telling The World About Your Wife's Incontinence?

Love, in Sickness and in Health

Modern Love Revenge

Rule Britannia

According to an article published in the London Times today, we Brits are now the most promiscuous nation in the world (of the western industrial nations, that is). In terms of one-night stands, total number of partners, and our "relaxed" attitude to casual sex, we beat Australia, the United States, Italy, and France. France! Where having extra-marital affairs is a favorite national pastime! If nothing else, at least now we might lose our reputation for being frigid and repressed.

In all seriousness though, Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the highest teen STD infection rate in Europe (although both are significantly lower than here in the United States, where abstinence-only sex education doesn't seem to be helping much). Premature sex education in British schools (it can be taught to children as young as 4) has long been blamed for the epidemic, along with the inappropriate sexualization of children by toy manufacturers and the media. But here's a thought. In Britain, we also drink more than any other country in Europe (apart from Ireland and Finland, bizarrely), and our alcohol-related death rate has doubled since 1991. We've also, according to this reasonably insulting story in the New York Times, been causing havoc on summer vacations with our abhorrent, booze-soaked behavior. Could there be a correlation somewhere between the beer goggles and the newfound sluttiness?

"Gray" Rape Doesn't End When You Start Going Gray

The economy is on life support, yesterday's bloodbath in Bombay has thrust terrorism suddenly back to the forefront of the international agenda, a record number of Americans are on food stamps…well, here is something I for which I am thankful: that I am not Lois Feldman of Carroll, Iowa. Who says she does not recall stumbling drunkenly into the men's room during a football game at the University of Minnesota Metrodome last weekend, having sex with a stranger 12 years her junior in a stall as a crowd assembled to watch and cheer or even being subsequently arrested by the police, to whom she could not even recall her correct middle name, for indecent exposure. "What Lois Feldman, 38, will remember," writes the Des Moines Register, "is the humiliation afterward." She's been prank-called by all manner of trolls and fired from her job as a receptionist, but credits her husband Kelly, who regrets not accompanying her to the bathroom, for being "supportive."

Uhhhh, yeah, maybe he's supportive because it sounds like she was…raped? Not that Feldman is using that term. Nor does she seem like the, er, "type." Nor is it clear just how drunk her partner in misdemeanor crime, Ross Walsh -- who came to the game with his girlfriend, for Chrissakes -- was when Mrs. Feldman showed up in his stall, or however it happened.

But I'll be interested to see how this news plays out on the feminist blogosphere, which does not seem to have yet seized upon it. Because it's possible Feldman was the victim of what Cosmo last year controversially termed gray rape -- a term I halfheartedly endorsed, because I think it captures the fogginess of circumstance that enables people on both sides of an unintentional incident to understand, make sense of and ultimately get past what happened.

It's also possible, of course, that she was the victim of a predatory overgrown frat boy with serious mental issues. I don't know, and I don't have a strong view on this; my inclination is to hope it's the former, and that one day the Feldmans can joke about their Larry Craig incident -- but either way, she doesn't remember. What is true is that it wasn't so much the event that traumatized her: it was the aftermath. And while it is clear that whatever the case, Feldman was the victim of a lot more than her own inebriation, her own employers won't stand by her. It's sickeningly reminiscient of a depressing Modern Love last year written by a woman who'd been publicly date raped by a frat boy her freshman year, only to find herself a pariah in her own sorority, an event she blamed for turning her into a misogynist. Ugh. Well, the bad news is that crap like this doesn't stop happening after one deactivates from one's sorority. The good news is that Feldman, a married mother of three, is courageous enough to tell the media exactly what happened. She has nothing to be ashamed about, of course -- beyond being a lightweight, which I find admirable -- but there a lot of societies that don't see it that way.