It’s been 10 years since Time changed its “Man of the Year” (or “woman” or “planet” of the year) award to the grating-to-my-ears "Person of the Year." Time purportedly made the switch to be “more inclusive,” as the Wikipedia entry on the topic states, but it just serves to whitewash the fact that the recipient is usually a guy. Why not just call it what it is? If it’s a man, he’s the Man of the Year. If it’s a woman, then Woman of the Year.

From 1927 to 1999, women were chosen by Time four times (not counting group awards that went to “scientists” and “Middle Americans"). Since then, and with today’s announcement that the 2009 honoree is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, women haven't made much more of a dent in Time's list. Melinda Gates was honored in 2005, but only along with husband Bill Gates and Bono, when the award went to “Good Samaritans.” At least in 2002, the selection of “Whistleblowers” highlighted Sherron Watkins of Enron, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom. (I am ignoring that "we" all won in 2006.)

I’m not big on political correctness and don’t feel a burning need for affirmative action in the meaningless-year-ending-attention-grabbing awards department. I don’t care who Time picks. (And, believe me, I’m not sad it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi this year.) But if Time is so uncomfortable with itself because its “Carbon-Based Life Form of the Year” award comes across as sexist, it should, you know, give the honor to a woman once in a while.

Tags: Ben Bernanke, Time magazine, Time person of the year

Daphne Merkin's great profile of It's Complicated writer/director Nancy Meyers in the upcoming issue of the New York Times Magazine is online, and it dances around the question that everyone's been buzzing about this week: Why aren't there more female directors in Hollywood? (Click here for a compelling Jezebel interview with Manohla Dargis, who attempts to tackle this one, too). Merkin tries to explain why Meyers—who also wrote and directed the Diane Keaton vehicle Something's Gotta Give—has succeeded where so many other women directors have failed: at the box office. She spends a lot of time talking about how Meyers softens all the rough edges—emotionally and aesthetically—of her films:

Whether her insistence on “softening the message” through plush surroundings ultimately weakens the films—renders them more glossy and insular than they need be, even for a genre that is inherently fizzy—is a question I have debated with myself and others. Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of the film-studies department at Wesleyan University, says that unlike Frank Capra, who believed that victory over something significant was essential for a comedy to be memorable, Meyers’s movies don’t require that you think about them again. “She makes it easy for the actors and the audience,” Basinger says. “They can slip into their parts and be happy, and we can slip into our seats and be happy."

This, to me, is why Meyer's films are so successful, and it's why movies like Twilight and G.I. Joe and The Bourne Identity and pretty much any box-office blockbuster of the past 25 years has worked. People—both men and women—go to the movies to forget themselves and their troubles. There are certainly exceptions to this rule, but generally movies that are painful viewing experiences or make you think deep thoughts are critical winners that don't make wild profits (see pretty much every movie made about the Iraq war). Maybe the truth is that women primarily escape through romantic fantasy, and according to Merkin, "Meyers’s vision of life is unabashedly romantic—call it retro or call it postfeminist—but what sets it apart is that she is putting it at the disposal not of unformed 18-year-old girls but of accomplished 50-something women." There are worse fantasies for grown-ups to have.

Tags: daphne merkin, manohla dargis, nancy meyers

Last fall, law firm graduates with offers to start work at high-profile firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore (where I worked after my own law school graduation) were offered the option of accepting $80,000, with benefits, to defer their start date at the firm by a year. Why? The most obvious reason is that law firms make their offers in the fall of the preceding year, which means that these students were made offers in the fall of 2008, well before the full impact of the recession was felt. In casual conversation, Cravath people will tell you that they simply had—again, thanks to the recession—far more acceptances than they'd expected. A number of other firms found themselves in the same position, and made similar offers, all meant to prevent the arrival of far too many young associates at a moment when there was less work to be done than anyone had anticipated. At first blush, how tempting does that sound? $80,000 for, as Elizabeth Wurtzel put it in the WSJ, "bubkes."

Except that it's not bubkes. For a student who expects to make a career in the law, that year off could easily have an eventual cost far greater than $80,000. The only student that $80,000 offer makes sense for is one who (like Wurtzel, who remains primarily a writer and has a part-time job in the law) doesn't really want the job—and that's exactly why it's not safe to take it, and why anyone looking at a career opportunity that seems too good to be true should look twice.

It's very difficult to succeed in a top law firm for many reasons. Statistically, it seems to be even more difficult for women, as, even in recent years when more women partners might have been expected since classes with increasingly large numbers of women have competed for the title, the percentage of female partners hovers at around 19 percent. In a law firm culture where the ability to withstand long hours is paramount, where Saturday night phone calls are run-of-the-mill and the best first-year associates are on a first-name basis with the all-night cleaning crew, taking an optional year off could brand you permanently as a dilettante, uncommited, or worse. I'm 100 percent sure that those students were assured that this would have no effect on their future career with the firm, and I'm also 100 percent sure that, in a world in which assigning, work level, and partnership decisions are made behind closed doors, that assurance—while probably well-intentioned—won't hold true.

Even assuming the very best, taking a year off from starting a career has other costs. Women planning to combine family life with a law career find that it takes time to earn enough credibility at any job to get the consideration you need to combine a hard-core work environment with parenting a baby or small child, whether it's part-time work, extra time off, or just a little room to let a few things slide. Taking a year off puts you one year further away from the moment in your working life when those things become possible and will probably increase the odds that even a woman who'd planned to continue working may find that it doesn't feel worth it. And for any student, taking that year off may simply put you behind the curve. As the economy improves, they'll be a year behind their peers in their ability to take advantage of it, and if another recession hits, they'll have a year's less seniority to rely on when facing layoffs or a job search.

Not many of us are in the position of these law school graduates, but this is a moment when voluntary plans for extra vacation time, sabbaticals, extended maternity leaves, and such abound, and all of those things have their temptations and their dangers. When Wurtzel suggests taking a year for "sleeping and loafing around Park Slope," she's offering possibly the worst recession career advice ever. The smartest students won't (and apparently didn't) take it. Instead, driven students who want to make a career with a firm will determinedly start their careers, while those confident in other plans (or those, like next year's class of future Cravath attorneys, with a mandatory deferral) will take their year and their salary and put it into public service, earning more experience that will eventually benefit the employer who's paying for it, while nonprofits and government agencies short of both staff and money gain much-needed help. Neither of those options is the obvious choice, and that's why the example of the "lucky" law student has a message for anybody mapping out a long career through a really tough moment. Do look a gift horse in the mouth. Count its teeth. Think twice, and then again, about what you're really being given, and what you really want.

Tags: career, Elizabeth Wurtzel, glass ceiling, law jobs, law school, salaries

In a lighthearted piece in the New York Observer, Simon Doonan makes the case the past decade was defined by a bunch of appearance-obsessed cool-chasers constantly trying to outdo one another. In a word: hipsters.

It was—drumroll—the INDIE decade. It was the decade of desperately-trying-to-be-the-edgiest-person-on-the-planet. It was the decade of I-don’t-care-if-these-skinny-jeans-are-going-to-induce-a-thrombosis- I-am-hip-therefore-I-am.

Sure, hipsterism became a thing sometime over the last few years. But it seems like every decade has had its own alternative culture. The '80s had punk. The '90s, grunge. Are the indie twee passengers of the L train really so representative of the decade as a whole? Doonan seems to think so, and predicts that soon the masses will be eschewing cool in favor of simple mainstream flavors:

What does all this mean for you, the ordinary woman in the street? Girlfriend, it bodes well. Relax! Roll down your Alexander Wang knee-highs and prepare to welcome in the DORKY TENS. Prepare to embrace populist pursuits like the Eurovision Song Contest (May) and the World Cup (June). No more obscene headache-inducing obscurantist poetry slams for you. No more nerve-racking-am-I-cool-enough gallery openings, and, most importantly of all, no more drinking your own urine. Mazel tov!

Out with the hipsters, in with the dorks! Except that dorkhood has already been appropriated by the denizens of cool. In fact, hipster culture has never involved a complete disavowal of mainstream taste but rather an embracing of certain populist elements, albeit with an ironic attitude. Have you been to the Jersey City Chili’s lately? It’s like a Yeasayer concert in there. And no one has gone to “headache-inducing obscurantist poetry slams” since the '90s—for the last decade the cool kids have been lining up at the East Village McDonalds for a quick bite before their Webster Hall show. The age of ironic populism is far from over. The cool kids will still be around, and they’ll be at the World Cup in their skinny jeans. Maybe they’ll be wearing Dorky Tens, but if so, only as a mocking embellishment.

Tags: 2000s, dorks, hipsters, new york observer

Amanda, I was also struck by the disparity between the sexting data to come out of the Pew poll dated December 2009 and the earlier studies done by the National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. The earlier survey had one teen in five reporting having sent or posted naked photos of themselves. The new Pew data shows just 4 percent of teenagers ages 12-17 reporting having sent "sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images" to someone via text message. That is a pretty enormous disparity and may represent the difference between an epidemic and the cable ratings grab you describe. Tracy Clark-Flory thinks the change in the numbers may have happened because kids wised-up after the sexting media frenzy last winter. She thinks they may just have stopped using their cellphones to show off their naked bodies. I also wonder if the string of draconian criminal prosecutions last winter affected how likely they were to self-report sexting afterwards, since the Pew poll took place from June to September of this year.

Maybe even more interesting is the decline in the numbers across the two surveys with respect to teens receiving sexual images. The National Campaign to Prevent Pregnancy survey showed 25 percent of teen girls and 33 percent of teen boys seeing naked images originally sent to someone else. A more recent MTV-Associated Press poll of young adults ages 14 to 24 indicated that 17 percent of the kids who'd received sexually explicit photos reported passing them along to someone else. The Pew survey shows 15 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 have received a sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photo or video of someone else. Those numbers are still awfully high, but they do appear to be dropping. I wonder if that means teens have learned at least one useful thing from the sexting frenzy: that passing these images along to third parties is a form of bullying with lifelong—sometimes even life-threatening—consequences.

Tags: teens; sexting

Josh Gerstein of Politico has the answer:

Oct. 22, 2009: NBC's Savannah Guthrie asks Obama about all-male basketball games at the White House.

Oct. 25, 2009: New York Times' Mark Leibovich makes the Sunday front page with a story about whether the White House "feel[s] like a frat house."

And now we learn, via the White House Flickr photo feed ...

Nov. 5, 2009: Obama hosts/joins a dinner for female White House staffers in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House.

"Yes, ladies, a girls' rollerderby team is an excellent idea."

Tags: Obama and women, White House dinner for women

The kids are more boring than you might think. Or that's the conclusion one is forced to reach after reading a Pew Research Center study about sexting and a University of Minnesota study about casual sex among college students. The latter got some play in the blogs and in the mainstream media for the headline-grabbing finding that screwing around doesn't mean you're screwed up, but researchers also found that there isn't as much screwing around as breathless stories about the "hook-up culture" would have you believe. Between these two studies, it was found that only 4 precent of teenagers have sent a sexually provocative photo through text message and 80 percent of college students' most recent sexual encounter occurred  in the context of a committed relationship.

Don't expect these studies demonstrating that kids are boring to have much influence on the mainstream media coverage of youthful sexuality to budge one bit from the breathless hysteria we've all come to know and feel queasy over. As well we should. There is a line between titillating ourselves by disingenuously judging young people for having sex and expressing genuine concern for young people's well-being, but the day time talk shows that cover the "hook-up culture" not only cross that line, but they can't even see it anymore in their rearview mirror. A vicious, ratings-grabbing cycle has been established: Titillate the audience with images of adolescent sexuality and then lash out at the young people for having so much fun (in your imagination). Here's a classic example, complete with jokes about threatening young men with physical violence because of their youthful sexuality. Ha ha! You may think you're hot stuff, what with your legal right to have sex with teenagers, young man, but daddy's got a gun/phallic symbol!

The titillation/condemnation cycle is more than a ratings grab, however. It's also an excuse to exert control over young people's lives and bodies, under the ruse of concern. Lurid tales of casual sex do a much better job of selling virginity pledges and abstinence-only education and even keeping condoms off high school campuses than the much more likely, boring stories of young people falling in love and having sex within committed relationships much like your own. With that kind of incentive to keep pushing these stories about how kids don't date anymore and all sex is meaningless, how does a small thing like scientific evidence stand a chance?

Tags: hook-up culture, sexting

In an essay about Tiger Woods on Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes, "Congratulations, 2000s—has there been a sleazier era since Caligula's?" and goes on to list all the sex scandals of the aughts along with the the resulting 15 minutes of fame for the sundry "skanks" who participated in them. She particularly notes "the stark contrast between his demure Scandinavian wife and the parade of Hooters girls, porn stars and possible professional escorts who've come out of the woodwork."

Williams might need to buff up on her history, as the sexual appetite of JFK and the "stark contrast" between his wife, Jackie, and his parade of '60s-era side dishes was just as—if not more—epic than Tiger's "apparently bottomless sexual appetite." JFK's mistresses also cashed in on their liasons with the president, just as Tiger's girls are trying to get theirs: Judith Exner wrote a book about her relationship with Kennedy in 1977. What has changed in the past 50 years is not that powerful men sleep around as much as they want or that some women will try to capitalize off that power. It's that the cycle happens within days, rather than within decades, of the scandals breaking. One could argue that the media is more likely to report on the affairs of powerful men now than they were in Kennedy's day, but since Tiger was clearly fooling around on Elin for the entirety of their marriage and we're only hearing about it now, it seems like they still give billionaires and their brethren a pretty wide berth.

Tags: affairs, JFK, tiger woods