I get what you say, Meghan, about the benefits of broadening the range of publicly-noted female roles beyond those old standbys, “nurturer” and “supporter.” But I can’t share your pleasure in the finding that 40 percent of workplace bullies are women. After all, isn’t “bitch”—or even “office bitch”—just as much a stereotype as “nurturer”? Judging from The Devil Wears Prada and Working Girl, two of many fictional studies in the vicissitudes inflicted by female bosses on their (ultimately triumphant) female underlings, this particular stereotype is well established in the cultural consciousness. We even know without thinking what these witchy characters look like, right down to the thin lips and the pointy, expensive shoes.

This is part of what Catalyst found in Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t, its report on the challenges faced by women trying to ascend the corporate ladder. Viewed as either too soft or too tough depending on their willingness to practice stereotypical feminine—read “nurturing”—behaviors as opposed to more aggressive, stereotypically masculine ones, the report notes that women have great difficulty avoiding the perception that they’re either nice but not very competent or competent but not very nice, especially in the rarefied upper echelons of the corporate world. (Another striking Catalyst finding: only 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women).

In light of the bullying study, though, I think Catalyst may be letting women off easy by suggesting that they’re tagged as aggressive, tough or mean simply because they act male. It seems likely that the awkwardness for women of finding comfortable and acceptable ways to operate in male-dominated fields contributes to their bullying. But at base, women who bully are just women behaving badly—something for which they should be criticized, not cheered. While I’ve been lucky enough to work with many supportive women, few things in my professional life have been more upsetting than encountering women, usually in positions of authority, who seemed determined to keep other women down. (It should be noted that, as the study suggests, they did not exhibit the same behavior toward men.) These women’s reasons were no doubt many and various, but their meanness was unmistakable, and it felt like a particularly exquisite betrayal.

Tags: bullies, work, workplace

This week, is there a tabloid that doesn't feature Jon and Kate Gosselin of TLC's mega-spawn reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" fame? Today, Kate vomited her guts to People, revealing that her marriage to the man with whom she fathered a pair of twins and a set of sextuplets may be deeply in the crapper. Rumor has it he cheated on her with a school teacher. Other rumors claim she cheated on him with their bodyguard. (Bodyguard? Who knew having so many children could be so... Bond?) Whatever's going on with those two, I'm not surprised, since more than anything else Kate has become the shiny new postergirl for those ladies who threaten to topple the bad mommies brigade: the bad wives club.

Personally, I'm less interested in the Gosselin's test-tube babies and their supposed extramarital affairs than I am in Kate's hair. What is the deal? You can see it here. Or here. A frightening asymmetrical mashup of stripes and spikes, part bob and part pixie, a cartoonish mix of blond and brunette hair shingles, it looks like someone took a blender to it. Once upon a time, Kate had normal mom hair. Short. A little choppy. Whatever. Now, it's crazy. Dlisted deems her freakdo a "reverse mullet," which I guess means party in the front and business in the back? I look at it and see a possum attached to the back of her head, wild in a frenzy of chewing and scratching, and then, voilà, Kate walked out the door.

Apparently, I am alone in my confusion regarding what is now known as the "Kate Gosselin Bob." For busy moms on the go, it's the new new hairdo! Here's how to do it yourself in eight complicated steps! Or style yourself there! I guess I can't quite figure out what it all means. Because what that hairdo says to me is, "I'm a mom. And you know what? I'm insane."

Tags: Jon & Kate Plus 8, Kate Gosselin

Forget your budding little artists’ portraits of Obama, and check out Michelangelo’s “Torment of St. Anthony.” There’s a fascinating—and somewhat frustrating—article in the New York Times today about the debate over whether he did, as a 12- or 13-year-old, in fact paint the portrait, based on an engraving. The controversy has been raging for 400 years or so, so I was expecting some decisive new evidence or angle to have occasioned the headline, but was disappointed. A recent cleaning has introduced some new data in support of the notion that this is the master himself at work, not a workshop production in which he might have helped as a pupil. But experts still disagree on whether the new revelations add up to proof: The “quality” (how’s that for vague?) of the work is clearer, the now-vibrant colors call to mind the Sistine Chapel vault, and there’s a “kind of emphatic cross-hatching” on some rocks that, according to an expert, is typical of Michelangelo. But is no one looking for tell-tale signs of immaturity? After all, even geniuses develop. On that score, here’s an amateur, totally anachronistic take: Look at the zeal expended on those demons, and tell me that doesn’t look like a brilliant young teenager at work.

Michelangelo, The Torment of Saint Anthony, c. 1487–88. Oil and tempera on panel, 18 1/2 x 13 1/4 in. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Tags: genius, Michelangelo, Obama portraits, young artists

You know, screeds like Linda Hirshman's in Double X are why I waffle so much about identifying with the feminist label.

It isn't even that Linda Hirshman is using every ounce of her online persona to live up to the stereotype that plagues the second wave—you know, the one about older feminists being insensitive to issues of race, class or sexuality. It's more the willful misunderstanding of why discussions of feminist ideas have veered into deeply personal territory. Yes, we understand that abortion rights are important, and need to be preserved. But that statement doesn't speak to the reality of events like being on the abortion table for the second time and finding your ideals getting jumbled up with ideas of who you thought you were before you hopped up on that table.

Nor does Hirshman seem to pause and consider that the reason so many young women do not seek help from law enforcement when they are sexually assualted and/or raped is not that they don't consider it important but that the system, often—most recently in Texas—places the lion's share of the cost on the abused. Back when I wrote "The Not Rape Epidemic" for Yes Means Yes I made sure to note my thought process in not reporting my abuser—there was no physical evidence, there certainly were no witnesses, and it would quickly come down to my word against his. In a horrible twist of fate, I found out that my abuser had gone on to participate in the gang rape of another young woman—and while the brusies on the girl's face, the broken blood vessels in her eyes, the DNA evidence collected at the scene, and testimony from the other participants clearly told the story, the defense attorney still felt that he could initiate doubt by implying that this girl had in some way asked for it.

By willfully ignoring the circumstances in which we live, and the nuance with which Megan and Moe reveal their stories, Hirshman becomes complicit in the very misogyny that she purports to be against.

With fellow feminists like this, who needs the patriarchy?

Tags: Jezebel, Linda Hirshman, Rape, Yes Means Yes

The Real Housewives of New Jersey premiered last night on Bravo and it was just as gaudy, Mystic-tanned, and big "bubbied" as any trash-television lover could have hoped. The series, part of a growing Housewives franchise that also includes New York, Atlanta, and the original Orange County branches, depicts "real-life versions of Carmela Soprano, loud, nasal, nouveau-riche wives who raise spoiled children and spend their husbands’ money in vast marble and onyx starter palaces in Franklin Lakes, N.J.," according to Alessandra Stanley at the New York Times.

Though Slate television critic Troy Patterson finds RHNJ the most "synthetic" of the franchise because "the drama queening in these parts is much too blatantly contrived," Stanley thinks that this is the most realistic edition, because almost all of the five women on RHNJ are related, either by blood or by marriage:

"The suffocating family ties are an improvement over past incarnations, when producers often threw together women who were not really that close and whose frictions often seemed forced. These women actually do know one another well, talk every day and raise their children together (badly). The camera crew seems to be eavesdropping, rather than masterminding. Some of the women seem to have a sense of humor, or at least to enjoy the joke that is their lives on film."

I'm with Alessandra: The true closeness of these women is what differentiates RHNJ from the Botox-laden denizens of New York and the O.C., but the other difference between the New Jersey women and their counterparts is their lack of obsession with class.

Certainly the New Jersey ladies love to spend money—they're all festooned with bling—but while the New York women worry about getting invited to the right parties and sending their kids to the proper boarding schools, the Atlanta women are constantly hosting charity balls and fundraisers, and the O.C. women take lessons on deportment, the New Jersey women are only worried about "the family" and any perceived slights made towards their tightly-knit unit. The mama bear of the group, Caroline Manzo, even flatly states in the first episode that she thinks "street smarts" are more important than "book smarts," and is baffled that her oldest son is not only graduating from college, but also going to law school.

Their lack of class consciousness shows particularly in their attitude toward possessions. While all the other Real Housewives judge each other for the way they spend their money (I can't believe she spent $16,000 on a purse, they'll say, while sitting on a $30,000 sofa), these Housewives encourage each others' blithe shopping sprees—though they might criticize each other for lack of "bubbies" to fill out a bejeweled bikini top.

If, as Alessandra Stanley says, you're watching a show for its "free-floating vulgarity," it's refreshing when the participants are so gleefully shameless.

Photograph of the cast of The Real Housewives of New Jersey by Virginia Sherwood © 2009 NBC Universal Inc. All rights reserved.

Tags: Alessandra Stanley, Caroline Manzo, Real Housewives of New Jersey

Though I was not qualified to be a secretary when I was 25 (nor am I now, 35 years later, based on the super organized executive assistants I've run into since then), I would certainly have been affronted to be mistaken for one as Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote she was when she shared an elevator with a veteran newswoman at the New York Times three years ago. The younger woman was quitting a great job, with nothing lined up, to move to Boston with her fiancé and she took the job confusion, and the older colleague's advice the couple's next compromise should benefit her, as condescending and patronizing. But the remarks were hardly as insulting as the Generation Y writer's ungrateful description of another encounter with the same superior recalled in Double X yesterday, "as I stood there looking at her rumpled suit and dated hair and frown lines, I was overwhelmed with pity."

Mangu-Ward, not yet 30, admits she was able to "breeze into life" in part because of feminist values the older woman had adopted and compromises she refused to make. The senior co-worker ungracefully offered career and education advice that was not relevant to the Yale-educated departing researcher because, by 2006, her prospects were already stellar. She was "free to make professional and romantic choices in a far better world" than when her would-be mentor had started out. Mangu-Ward still has years of energy-filled opportunities rolled out before her including, not insignificantly, newly created media to showcase her work.

The talented but callow writer doesn't say whether she has children though she sniffs at endless discussions on "work-life balance." Still in kindergarten when The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades was released, the recently married journalist has still not arrived at the age when, if you lose a night of sleep, it shows on your face for a week. When the lines of her life's success (perhaps not as "laboriously carved out for herself" as that of the middle-aged feminist), add character and gravitas to her visage, I hope she will have something she's proud of to pass on to future daughters and the young women she will encounter when her elevator is going down.

Tags: post feminism

A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female—i.e., whether the determination relies on the gender you were assigned at birth or the gender you self-identify with, and whether or not surgery affects that determination—the landscape can get very muddled very quickly. Boylan quotes a lawyer from a 1999 case concerning a transgendered woman, Christie Lee Littleton, whose biologically male husband had passed away. See if you can manage to follow along:

... Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.

Confusing, right? Even Boylan—an incredibly lucid, intelligent writer—sometimes has a tough time pinning down these complex concepts into simple language. Originally I'd wanted to pull out this paragraph for my blog post, but then for the life of me couldn't understand the last sentence:

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

What does "anatomically female" mean here? Someone who was born female, or someone who was born male and has had sex reassignment surgery? After consulting with a friend who works at an LGBT organization on precisely these kinds of language issues, he confirmed that Boylan probably meant the latter. The fixation on surgery and genitalia as some kind of marker for what "makes" a man or a woman is inherently problematic, but it's not likely to go away any time soon—the concept is too culturally hard-wired for most of us to abandon completely. Until then, let's just hope we have more people like Boylan, helping us parse things out, one step at a time.

Tags: same-sex marriage, transgender

"The World of Womenomics has arrived," announce Claire Shipman and Katy Kay in a breathless piece over at the Huffington Post. Shipman and Kay insist that as the recession tips the gender composition of the workforce in favor of women, companies will be forced to accommodate womanly demands. What follows is some extremely promiscuous usage of the first-person plural:

"Could it be that it's okay—finally—to state the obvious? We're not men. We not only don't work the same way—we don't want the same things or relish the climb up the corporate ladder with such testosterone-driven zeal."

Really? Must an article on gender and the recession immediately go all Mars/Venus on the subject? Since the start of the credit crisis we've seen this kind of pseudo-feminist drivel all over the place. The crash itself was supposedly "testosterone-driven." Women, on the other hand, "might have been able to temper the excesses that led to the current financial crisis." Women could have prevented the whole thing, apparently, by playing prudent schoolmarm to their cowboy colleagues. It's not a particularly inspired vision of the future of women in business.

I don't question the descriptive aspects of most of these pieces; women may well be more willing to trade salary for time, as Shipman and Kay claim, and they may also be more risk-averse in the boardroom. But assuming that such claims accurately track the state of the world, are we really so thrilled that they do? One reason recent job losses skew so heavily male is that women are concentrated in less volatile sectors, such as government, education, and health care. A general pattern of risk avoidance among half the population doesn't seem worth celebrating.

Tags: economics

Over at The Root, Lisa Crooms has penned something of a takedown of the recent, very Lysistratan Kenyan sex strike, wherein women, organized by the Nairobi-based Women’s Development Organization, went on an, ahem, handshake-only basis for one week. Their aim, as yet unresolved, was to prevent a breakdown of the fragile coalition government between Prime Minister Raila Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki, instated as co-leaders of Kenya after the surprising round of intranational violence in late 2007.

But what’s the point? Crooms writes:

At first glance, the Kenyan women’s sex strike seems like a clever political ploy. Like trying to force a junkie to kick his habit, the women involved are supposedly forcing their men to make a hard choice—put an end to the violence or kiss the pum pum goodbye for at least a week...

But this high-profile political demonstration, which ended last Friday, did more to threaten the image of woman Kenyan activists than it did to threaten Kenyan men. This is the country that elevated the cause of environmentalist and human rights activist Professor Wangari Maathai, who, in 2004, became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Does withholding sex really meet the bar Maathai and other women activists set?"

I personally think conjugal disobedience and coitus interruptus are nothing short of brilliant. The ability to control one’s body, to decide where and when and with whom to have sex is a fundamental right that is almost never freely available to women, even in the United States. Marital rape statistics in America always shock me—and a new study based in Swaziland, which has among the highest rates of HIV infection (26 percent) in sub-Saharan Africa, suggests that the practical and psychological effects of such stolen agency are, of course, longlasting and detrimental.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, the problem of sexual violence is particularly pronounced in African societies matriarchal in name, but patriarchal in practice. From the non-criminalization of marital rape to the still-boiling sex trafficking industry, Croons gives an effective rundown of the various bedroom injustices in Kenya and beyond. (Nations like South Africa have been just shocking offenders on this front as well, and Senators Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold will hold a joint hearing of the Foreign Relations Committee on the endless stream of rapes in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.) Her argument against the now-concluded strike seems to have been that it runs the high risk of backlash, reducing women to what they already often are—a sum of their private parts—rather than focusing on getting, say, more women judges or parliamentarians in government.

But I have a hard time agreeing with that. Where women are so much more vulnerable, it seems almost dangerous to avoid sex politics entirely. Sure, we’re probably talking about it more here, stateside, than they are in the Maasai market in Nairobi. But publicizing the idea that women have agency in sex is way welcome, especially in a culture that these eleven protesting women’s groups describe as ontologically dismissive of female sexual desire. As one of the organizers told the British Telegraph: "We have looked at all issues which can bring people to talk and we have seen that sex is the answer."

Tags: kenyan sex strike, Lysistrata, marital rape

Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.

The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of women not being attracted to the GOP (hmm ...).

I was by far the youngest and had the least respectable job—not a lawyer, doctor, or entrepreuneur but a member of the mistrusted media. At one point, it dawned on our host that I must know how to use Facebook! I could start a Facebook page for this group! It was a genius idea! It would attract women all over the country! I bit my lip and nodded noncommitally.

The women I know who have gotten into politics aren't motivated by power. They're motivated by a desire to tackle specific problems in their schools and local communities. At this lunch, the women I talked to didn't care so much about some race in Pennsylvania or the opportunities that could move us up the political ladder as about the issues that we're confronted with every day in the newspaper headlines and routines of life: school vouchers, high taxes, national security, or abortion.

My take is that there are some good reasons for women to be Republicans: True republicanism is a platform where local communities are empowered to solve their own problems. It's a good model for women, who like to accomplish tangible change in specific situations. But until the Republican Party can articulate what it stands for and how it's going to bring those ideals about, I'll probably keep on bringing my own lunch to work.

Tags: Facebook, Republicans