The XX Factor: What women really think.

Let Us Now Praise Helpful Wives

It would have been so much easier for me to find the time to write this post if I had voice-recognition software, a sophisticated self-built database with all my contacts including my Double X blog posting instructions, which I keep losing, and most of all if I had an administrative-assistant-type of husband who handled all the household bills and dental appointments and child-care challenges and playdates and grocery shopping and left me free to spend more time at the keyboard.

But I don't have these things. I mean, I do have a husband, and he does what he can, but he leaves for work earlier than I do, so this morning I was the one who took the cat to the vet. Despite the resulting time crunch, I am posting anyway to say that I was fascinated by David Pogue's column in the New York Times revealing his work efficiency secrets... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Communicating Despite Technology

Recession Entertainment: Watch Other People Buy Things

Via Flowing Data, I see that Zappos.com will now show you who is buying what from where in real time. Thus I can sit in front of my laptop, stare at pictures of shoes superimposed on a map of the United States, and make wild generalizations about regional fashion preferences based on isolated financial transactions. Rigorous preliminary research reveals that people in the Los Angeles area like cute strappy sandals.

Is Blogging While Female Really So "Perilous"?

On the occasion of a zillion geeks descending on Austin for SXSW, the Austin Chronicle considers the so-called "perils of being a female blogger." According to the article, while the blogosphere is rife with chicks everywhere you click, the "professional blogging sphere" raises the question: "Where are all the women?" From the ranks of the purportedly underrepresented, Mediabistro's Rebecca Fox and the Daily Beast's Rachel Sklar step forward to helm a SXSW panel: "Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport for Women?"

To wit: "For professional female bloggers, writing online can get painfully personal—and so can the criticism. Oversharing, sex-blogging, fameballs, Tumblettes, Jezebelism—why is it (still) so difficult to be a woman online?" Who's to blame for making lady bloggers online lives so miserable? The patriarchy and Christianity, of course! Or, as Fox puts it, "keeping your mouth shut has long been tantamount to being 'good,' and the virgin/whore complex is alive and well both online and off." In the end, they conclude, it's (gasp) "dangerous to be a female blogger."

Dangerous to blog if you have a vagina? Blogging while female a "bloodsport"? "There are endless examples of female bloggers coming under the knife for being bitches or media whores, while male bloggers' gender is either ignored or heralded," the Chronicle's Sofia Resnick writes. Really? If there was ever an equal opportunity attack forum, the Internet is it. Mostly upper-middle class, well-educated, by-and-large Caucasian women who seek to publish their words on the Web get what everyone else gets online: a free, uncensored platform with a roving pack of readers who have the right to say whatever they want as part of the "conversation." Get over yourselves, and get on with it, ladies.

In the Future, You Will Twitter to Your Own Face

Among the uses envisioned for the "nano skins" are facial or hand displays. These displays would be synched to a WPAn, or Wireless Personal Area network. There would be a display driver implanted to receive signals and allow you and others to communicate wirelessly. This would allow you to send information about remembering things instantly or communicate to someone else discreetly, receiving a friend's text to your hand instead of your phone. You could also have the option to communicate back to your friend your mood. That way, they won't have to ask how you are doing; they can just take one quick look and know.

I envision a texting set-up similar to my computer's calendar. A timed notice would appear conveniently on my hand saying "15 min till you have to call so- and-so" or "1 day till you need to bring work cupcakes."

Dare to dream!

Smartphones, Dumb Stories

Why is the New York Times still flummoxed by the idea that women might embrace technology? The paper's Technology section today ran a "trend" story marveling at how women are expected to buy the new iPhone in record numbers (sample quote: "'Companies need to be careful to not think that to sell smartphones they just need to be pink," she said. ‘There are other things women want.' " Gosh, really?) It's not even been a year since the paper wrote another color-schemed piece on the breaking news that women had really gotten behind improvements in technology, with the headline "To Appeal to Women, Too, Gadgets Go Beyond ‘Cute' and ‘Pink.' " In February, it delved into the world of girls who create Internet content (quoting an expert as saying that to these girls, hotlinking is "the digital equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as another girl).

To affect surprise that women are using technology and the Internet in an era when it's nearly impossible to be engaged with the world and ignore either one is a rich bit of condescension for the paper that endorsed Hillary in the Democratic primary. Was the editorial board expecting her to receive those 3 a.m. phone calls on a hot pink Swarovski-studded BlackBerry Pearl? This feels a little like hearing someone express surprise that women might want to play sports or enjoy sex. The notion that using technology would make you a geek is also a straw man argument that's years out of date—can't remember thinking that way since perhaps middle school, which was right around when IMing became cool, not just the late-night pastime of pimpled anime enthusiasts. (And besides, haven't pimpled anime enthusiasts become cool since then?)

Despite the price scale-back and functionality improvements, the iPhone is still at least as much status symbol as useful tool. The Times is clearly no stranger to the commodity fetishization beat, especially when it comes to women, so you'd think they'd be all over the digital desideratum angle. But I guess the paper thinks this recent story sheds some light on how technology is changing the way women live.

Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Two articles about the latest surveillance technology available to the modern family-- you can read here in the Guardian about a new jacket with a GPS chip in it, and here in the New York Times about new GPS-equipped cell phones—have left me feeling more spooked than such stories usually do. My nostalgic reflex is to feel sorry for kids. In the constant struggle for independence, today’s teenagers have it so much harder than we did, boomers often sigh. They’ve got helicopter parents in thrall to an ethos of hypervigilance and tempted by all kinds of gizmos, who feel any youthful misstep should be preventable—and if not, is somehow partly their fault. We had parents who worried, sure, but from a distance. They couldn’t track our whereabouts on weekend evenings, and the tacit ethos was that minimal information probably was better for all concerned. But the Times story suggests a more oppressive development: At this point, kids may have only themselves to blame. It seems we have a market of non-stop networking students, unable to bear being out of the social loop for a minute, to thank for the latest surge in tracking technology. Don’t they see how they’ll come to regret this? It's grist for, what else, yet more self-blaming angst on the part of parents: Look at what our hovering has produced—a generation at risk of undervaluing autonomy.