The January issue of Consumer Reports has a charticle comparing personal-care drugstore products targeted toward women with the gender-neutral (or male) version made by the same company. There's no discernable difference in active ingredient and function—but a marked one in price. Women pay lots more. For a can of Barbasol shaving cream, for instance, the men's version is $1.69 for 11 ounces; women's (sorry, "Pure Silk") is $2.49 for just 9.6 ounces. (Plenty of ostensibly unisex products are prettied up to be marketed to women—Torie Bosch recently highlighted the "Pink it and shrink it" school of gadget-selling in a DoubleX slide show.)

So why are women so much more susceptible to gender marketing? Aren't men supposed to be the ones so deeply worried about telegraphing their masculinity? Isn't it easier for women to float across and back gender lines? (I'm painting with a broad brush here, I realize. But still.) I'm not convinced this phenomenon is entirely about the looks of the packaging—although women probably do care more, on balance, about how harmonious a stick of deodorant sitting on a dresser looks than the average man. Maybe we're willing to pay a slight premium for that. But I'd imagine it has to do more with price creep. We're used to paying stunning amounts (or at least reading in magazines about other people who pay stunning amounts) for La Mer face cream or Chanel lipstick. Even if that Nivea body wash for women is $2 more than the version marketed to men, it's a bargain compared with, say, $54 Guerlain shower gel.

Tags: drugstore products, marketing

Claire, I'd love to join you in indicting those limp pastries—and the ineffectual bureaucratic dithering they inspire—for the shameful silence surrounding sexual assaults on campus. But there is a bigger factor at play than the fractured reporting system. While loopholes in the current framework certainly assist universities in saving face and steering clear of the U.S. News & World Report's “Best Colleges for Vicious Sexual Predators” list, these permissive policies are primarily a response to the evolution of rape law over the last several decades.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the law of sexual assault underwent dramatic reform, shifting focus from female purity to personal autonomy. Conviction for rape now relies on the victim’s nonconsent rather than a physical display of “utmost resistance,” which had previously set the burden of proof at an unattainably high level and required victims to risk their lives during an attack. These victim-friendly reforms increased the number of successful prosecutions, which, in turn, provided potential complainants with a greater incentive to file police reports.

As bastions of progressive thought, universities should have been perfectly poised to absorb these modern regulations and encourage greater reporting of suspected sexual assaults. But the expansion of victims’ rights and remedies coincided with a corresponding curtailment of offenders’ civil rights. These opposing trends have strained universities’ dual allegiance to victim and assailant, both of whom are students.

Schools are charged not merely with providing a safe learning environment but with molding students’ characters and preparing them to be productive members of society. In the context of campus sexual assaults, rendering justice to one student comes at the expense of branding the other a sex offender, depriving him of employability and any hope of social inclusion. Although the average prison sentence of rape defendants has remained relatively stable over the years, the average time served has increased significantly. And even if a student manages to escape with a light sentence, the stigma persists. With the federal passage of Megan’s Law in 1995 and the enactment of other state-specific restrictions, including a recent New York law banishing sex offenders from Facebook and MySpace, conviction effectively relegates the student to the status of burger-flipping pariah.

While this may be a fitting penalty in clear-cut cases of violent crime, the hazy, bacchanalian atmosphere of a college party complicates the moral calculus. Administrators are loath to destroy a student’s entire future for an isolated incident of poor judgment and impulse control. This is not some relic of the old boys-will-be-boys attitude; rather, school officials recognize the unique role of college as a launching pad for the real world, as a place where students’ inexperience and newfound independence come together to create four years of ad hoc, trial-and-error learning. By weighing the costs and benefits to both the victim and offender of a formal report, universities are simply engaging in the kind of prosecutorial discretion that government attorneys practice every day.

University administrators may point fingers at the flawed reporting system, but the real problem lies with the officials themselves, who feel obligated to look out for the best interests of all their students, victim and perpetrator alike.

Tags: campus sexual assault, college, law, Rape, sex offenders

One of Tiger Woods’ paramours is claiming the two of them took Ambien before sex because, “You know you have crazier sex on Ambien. You get into that Ambien haze.” My husband and I have a bottle of Ambien, and while I’ve heard of the dangers of Ambien sex, I also know that anyone’s marriage could use improvement, so we considered being inspired by Tiger. But we realized this is what would happen: We would pop our pills, get into bed, and he would say to me, “Hey, baby, you are turning me zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.” At least in the morning we would be very well rested.

Tags: crazy ambien sex, tiger woods, tiger woods cheating

Divorce is officially a casualty of the Great Recession. Rates are down for the first time in five years, according to the newly released study of the National Marriage Project. Michael Gerson has called this shift a kind of “cultural renewal”; the idea is that when times are tough, people connect with their cherished values and stop indulging in the kinds of luxuries a fat economy allows. Divorce rates also dropped dramatically during the Great Depression. The reality is, however, that divorce is just expensive. People can’t afford to get divorced during a recession. Marriage rates are down as well; they can’t afford that luxury either.

The researchers don’t quite say this but it seems as if the recession just keeps a lid on a lot of unhappiness. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine brought us a close examination of one companionate marriage, which seemed equal parts passionate, dull, rocky, exciting, and definitely salvageable. Companionate marriages—also known as “soulmate marriages”—the modern idea that spouses should choose each other as friends and lovers and that marriage is intended for happiness more than expediency—is working out well for the kids of people who may get to write about it in the New York Times one day, but not so well for everyone else.

In less educated, less wealthy classes, women, now given the choice, are lately finding their husbands wanting. This is a form of feminism but also a form of instability. Researchers predict that once the recession is over the working class will start to look like the inner city—a matriarchy with struggling mothers and drifting men and unmoored children. The most amazing statistic comes late in the report—the percentage of people who describe themselves as “very happy” with their marriage is way down since 1960.

Photograph of wedding rings in mantle by Comstock Images/Getty Images.

Tags: divorce and recession, divorce rates, national marriage project

I've rolled it over and over in my head, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that this New York Times article on White House social secretary Desirée Rogers is irresponsible at best and inexcusable pandering at worst. While I think that the whole party-crashers story is being blown way out of proportion, I'll accept that there's an argument for the obsessive coverage of it and for looking into Rogers' potential liability for what happened. But I fail to see what her larger-than-life personality, strong self-esteem, and love of fashion has to do with this story. When taken in along with the shaming of Rogers for falling down on the job, this kind of coverage stinks of smacking down a black woman for the crime of being "uppity."

Conservative pundits have a long tradition of looking for scalps to collect in Democratic administrations, and they far prefer to take the scalps of nonwhite, nonmale, or nonstraight folks above all others. Taking out a black female administration employee would be exactly the sort of thing that the pundits could use to drum up white male crowing in their base, even if she's just a social secretary. In fact, one could argue that the scalp of a social secretary who works so closely with the First Lady might even be a bigger prize, as it would function as a symbolic strike at Michelle Obama, an object of fear and loathing for many on the right.

The media should not pander to racist, sexist right-wingers like this. If they must hammer this party-crashers story endlessly, they could at least do it without indulging narratives about how black women who live the high life are stepping out of their station. But of course, responsible coverage of this story would be missing the point for those beating this story to death. Even Howard Kurtz had to admit that the story reigns in the news because of the "gossipy aspects." Unfortunately, if you start to cover news stories as if they were tabloid stories, then you will slip into indulging in all the racist, sexist pandering that we're so used to seeing in the supermarket stands. Burying this story in the fashion pages of the Times doesn't excuse the general slant of the story; it's still a swipe at a black woman for behaving in a way we indulge when it's wealthy white women.

Tags: Desiree Rogers, White House party crashers

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It’s almost Christmas! Which means the anal-retentive demographic is busy getting into the holiday spirit, waving white-knuckled fists at a number of gift items deemed detrimental to the well-being of society. (The site Landover Baptist Church hilariously spoofs on this phenomenon with a yearly list entitled “Lucifer’s Toy Chest” – i.e., gifts that will send your children straight to the fires of hell. On last year’s list: Tickle Me Elmo, tickle him between the legs and ... ) This year, conservatives have their Xmas stockings in a bunch over the new Dragon Age game which features, gasp, the possibility of gay romance and homosexual relations between a man and an elf. As Ryan Tate on Gawker puts it: “Who, in these United States, could possibly object to foisting this content on teenaged boys? Oh, right, like half the population.”

As reported in the New York Times' Art Beat blog, dissenters include the right-wing site World Net Daily, which just can’t get enough of abusing the descriptor “dirty,” first calling the scene as a whole an act of “dirty gay sex,” and later describing how the two men are “dirty, naked, and kissing.”

Are you as turned on as I am right now? You can watch the video yourself here.

Here’s how the dirty gay sex scene goes down, according to the WND screed:

During a fireside chat, the player's Grey Warden character asks warrior-elf Zevran, "Can you join me in my tent?"

The elf reveals he specializes in assassination, and the other character replies, "I bet you're good at a lot of things."

The elf responds, "Mmmm, that's quite an offer, especially coming from another man—if we are both speaking of the same thing."

If the player selects the response, "I suspect we are," the elf agrees to have homosexual sex with the character.

Yep, real vulgar. The FCC chip embedded in my brain is all a-bleep.

Of course, like most video games these days, Dragon Age offers plenty of hetero-sex for teenagers unwilling to have their impressionable young sexualities swayed. There's also female-avatar-on-female-avatar Sapphic love in the game, which garnered absolutely no protest because two hot virtual females locking lips is preferred by nine out of 10 patriarchy overlords.

Tags: Christmas, Dragon Age, Homophobia, video games, WND

Apparently, if you are married to Tiger Woods and he cheats on you frequently then you get a “Kobe special,” Tiger’s reference to the house-sized, $4 million ring Kobe Bryant bought for his wife, Vanessa, when he was cheating. So now all women of a certain class understand that the sudden appearance of eight carats out of the blue means he is definitely cheating. But what about the rest of us? Are there appropriate cheater jewels for every class and situation, the way there are monthly birthstones? What if your husband comes home with one carat, or sudden rubies? Does that mean only a single mistress? And cubic zirconium? That he only had lust in his heart?

Tags: Kobe special, tiger woods, Tiger Woods and Kobe special