A review from DoubleX guest writer Adrienne M. Davich:

Kent Meyers’ Twisted Tree must be one of the most beautiful and unsettling novels of 2009. Meyers’ novel, set in and around the small town of Twisted Tree, S.D., opens with a horrifying drive: I-90 killer Alexander Stoughton has Hayley Jo Zimmerman in his passenger seat. He has chosen Hayley Jo, like girls before her, because of her anorexia, and now he’s racing down the highway making conversation and delighting at the drive before the murder. His “Anas” are all the same; they all have blind faith when they step into his car, but then, “It’s never joy and welcome when the Anas realize who he is, never happiness that here at last is their friend.” Anyone could mistakenly trust the wrong person, but anorexics, to Stoughton’s mind, are predictably gullible, the most easily ensnared.

The opening chapter of Twisted Tree is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. Alexander Stoughton, like McCarthy’s rapist and child-killer Lester Ballard, lives outside the moral universe. But whereas Ballard is spontaneous and physically and mentally ravaged, Stoughton is a meticulous planner. He appears unthreatening until he has his Ana trapped in his big blue Continental. This is a horrifying premise for a novel, but it moves beyond the voyeuristic in chapters that take us into the lives of townspeople who are affected by the loss of Hayley Jo. Ultimately, Meyers offers not a nihilistic vision, but a window into human endurance, faith, and the longing to be unburdened of a traumatic past.

Among the more striking characters in Twisted Tree is Hayley Jo’s father, Stanley Zimmerman, who turns his attention to his herd of buffalo and his land, in part to stave off the guilt he feels at having failed to protect his daughter. Stanley, quite heroically, endures his loss by becoming more vigilant. The process of finding peace is disordered and painful, but the hurt, as Meyers depicts it, is not just about loss or shame or loneliness. It’s about finding out that what you’ve believed isn’t so, and reaching for cathartic solutions, ways to explain violence and salve the pain, when none exist. It’s about seeking solace after trauma—and very often, self-forgiveness and love.

Tags: anorexia, book of the week, child of god, cormac mccarthy, kent meyers, twisted tree

We judge men as hypocrites all the time, so why shouldn’t women have to live by that standard? We skewered John Edwards for talking about the poor while getting a $400 hair cut (in retrospect, the least of his transgressions). We condemned Mark Sanford for touting family values and having an affair. So it matters what Jenny Sanford and Elin Nordegren choose to do in response to this public humiliation. It doesn’t matter absolutely. It shouldn’t be, as you say, Jessica, a feminist litmus test. But it does mean something.

There is a disturbing trend in feminism lately to turn women into passive beings. We saw it during the Botax debate, in which Gloria Steinem and other feminist leaders were arguing that the tax on cosmetic surgery discriminated against middle-aged women. The problem, argued Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization of Women, was that many women take time off to raise children and then try to re-enter the workforce in their forties and fifties and are deemed too old.

The assumption here is that things happen to women; that they are the victims of larger societal forces they can not control. But women are making choices. They choose whether to stay home or not stay home. And as I say to my children all the time, there are consequences to these choices. If you stay home for 10 years, more power to you, but you can not expect finding a job in middle age to be easy. Sanford and Nordegren are choosing to leave powerful husbands, and that counts as a kind of bravery, or, at the very least, a strike against passivity. They may not have chosen to be public icons but the fact is, they are, so now their decisions resonate.

Does that make them feminist icons? I’m not sure. Divorce as a feminist statement is a very 1970s idea, and women have already won that battle. Surviving through your husband's philandering and then upstaging him, as Hillary did, almost seems like the more radical thing. For my part, I consider it less a victory for feminism than one for romance. The standard view of both these women is that they have struck some deal, either actually or implicitly, trading money or status for love. But apparently both of them are still capable of having their hearts broken.

Tags: Elin Nordegren, Jenny Sanford, Nordegren feminist, Sanford feminist

A New York magazine blog post calls Jenny Sanford and Elin Nordegren's choices to leave their philandering husbands "practically groundbreaking" and adds that "their decisions could begin to repair the damage done to women over these past couple of years." The theory behind this assertion (though writer Sheela Kohlatkar is careful to say they're "not exactly" feminist heroes) is at base problematic, because it opens up the door for judgement of women's romantic choices to be a feminist litmus test.

Even established feminists have always been criticized for their choice in lovers: Simone de Beauvior's relationship with Sartre, though ostensibly an "open marriage," was deeply uneven. "It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own," Lisa Appignanesi notes in the Guardian. Does it make her any less of a foremother to the movement because she was dependent upon a cad?

These days it seems impossible to pass every feminist test when it comes to love. Gloria Steinem and Jessica Valenti have been criticized for getting married at all. Instead of applauding Nordegren and Sanford, whose choices are dubiously feminist at best, let's not bring the f-word into romantic choices to begin with.

Tags: Elin Nordegren, Jenny Sanford, marriage, simone de beauvoir, tiger woods

While the question of whether kids today are sexting up a storm or reaching new heights of prudery may never be satisfactorily answered, the window for such wireless waggery might be closing. On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case of a police sergeant who sued his department for reading the lewd text messages he sent on a company pager. As Emily Bazelon reported in Slate on Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the sexting cop and held that users have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in their text messages” regardless of whether an employer supplies the equipment or pays for the service.

Unfortunately, the lower court's attempts to forge progressive digital policy may turn out to be the ambitious opening sallies in a battle that cannot be won. If there is one common thread among the current justices of the Supreme Court, it is a strong bias in favor of government plaintiffs. Given the Court’s equally powerful penchant for minimalism, electronic privacy advocates are hoping for a narrow ruling that applies exclusively to public employers. Even so, with the arrival of America's favorite wise Latina to the bench, right-leaning privacy foes will likely enjoy a wider margin of victory than the usual Roberts Court 5-4 split. While Sotomayor's views on most issues fall squarely within the traditional bounds of liberal jurisprudence, one of her past decisions reveals a bias toward snooping bosses in workplace search-and-seizure disputes.

In a 2001 opinion, then-Second Circuit Judge Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge brought against an employer for ransacking a worker's computer. She concluded that the search was reasonable due to the employer’s "need to investigate allegations of misconduct as balanced against the modest intrusion caused by the searches.” By framing the issue as a balancing of interests and privileging the employer’s ability to discipline its workers above the employee’s constitutional protection against warrantless searches, Sotomayor dealt a crushing blow to digital privacy rights. The parallels with the cop case are obvious, and the news this week does not bode well for the longevity of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling.

So, kids, to those 94 percent or 80 percent of you not bombarding your petite paramours with salty puns and hook-up requests, I exhort you to start exercising your civil liberties and sext like there's no tomorrow—because there might not be one. If your algebra teacher catches you tapping away during class, tell him it’s a civics project.

Tags: cyberlaw, law, privacy, sexting, Supreme Court, teens

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: At what point do catcalls, wolf whistles. and flirtatious street comments go from compliments to harassment?

Nina Rastogi: Catcalls usually skeeve me out more than anything else, but when they do cross the line to scary harassment, it's usually because a) it's dark on an empty street, or b) it's a group of guys collectively appraising my “bits and pieces.” Generally speaking, I prefer the compliment-as-statement (“Damn girl, you look like J. Lo!”) to compliment-as-interrogation (“What's your number? Where are you going?”). The former lets me smile and keep walking, but the latter makes me feel like I'm being pulled into a conversation I don't want to have.

Margaret Johnson: I've tried to take catcalls as compliments. At the very least, I try not to let them annoy me. This behavior can't actually get these guys very far, I tell myself, but, hey, if this is their mating ritual of choice, let them keep hooting and bellowing. Still, I can't quite get over it. I want to walk down the street without being shouted at. I wouldn't be treated this way if I were a man. I know, there are a lot of things I'm offered that I might not be if I were a man. But I would happily give up the occasional drink on the house or seat on the subway if it meant that random strangers would stop calling me out for their own gratification.

Jessica Lambertson: The worst are the attempted pick-ups while I wait for the bus. There's no walking away, and the perpetrators are far more tenacious than the standard construction worker with a whistling problem. A drunk, middle-aged man began to overtly flirt with me while I waited on the late-night X2 bus in Chinatown in Washington, D.C. He wouldn't take no for an answer and actually followed me home.

Jessica Dweck: To my knowledge, I've never been hit on, hollered at, or propositioned by a stranger. I've always found women's complaints about unwanted male attention akin to thin women who lament that they can never find size 00 pants in stores. I can recall only one incident that comes close: In college, a homeless man approached me and told me I looked beautiful. Whatever boost of self-confidence it gave me was completely negated three seconds later when he used the same adjective to describe a nearby food cart.

Liza Mundy: A friend and I once marveled that the sidewalk catcalls stop, almost magically, when one turns 35. Maybe there is an evolutionary biology thing going on? Maybe they are wolf-whistling at perceived fertility? At any rate, I sure don't miss it.But I do sometimes ask myself: Has a wolf whistle or catcall ever worked? Has any woman in the world ever responded favorably?

Julia Felsenthal: I find it hard to imagine that the goal of a catcall is actually to win a woman over. I believe there was a Sex and the City episode to that effect—some construction worker repeatedly harasses a sexually frustrated Miranda as she returns her Blockbuster movie each week, until one day she gets so desperate she tells him she'll do it with him. He uncomfortably mumbles something about being married. I think it's more about a macho display of aggression or dominance than it is a genuine statement of appreciation or interest.

Lauren Bans: I don't think it's always an act of aggression. There are definitely cultural distinctions. In some places, hollering a compliment at a gal walking by can actually end in conversation, maybe courtship.

Hanna Rosin: I spent my teenage and young adult years on the New York City subway. Wolf whistles were a fact of life, and I could never convince myself that they were flattering. (In general, I can't take a compliment). In my senior year of high school I developed a strategy. Whenever I passed a crew of construction workers, or a posse of boys on the E train, I headed them off by picking one, smiling in a very no-nonsense, dorky way and saying "Hello." It always worked.

Tags: catcalls, sexual harrassment, street harrassment