In the spirit of Meghan's stated desire that the XX Factor blog remain a site of amicable cacophony, I'm feeling the need to stand up for my girl Dooce. Well, the blogger who goes by that name, Heather Armstrong, is "my girl" only in the sense that, like millions of her readers, I've been following her life online for more than five years now on an almost daily basis. But after reading Susannah Breslin's recent takedown of the "bad mommy" phenomenon, Ann Hulbert's review of a spate of recent confessional parenting memoirs, and a terrific discussion of those same books between our beloved Double X editors and the redoubtable Stephen Metcalf, it strikes me that something obvious is going unsaid in these blanket dismissals of navelgazing "mommybloggers": Not all writers on a similar subject are equally worthy (or unworthy) of being read. Heather Armstrong is a success, not only because of her subject matter or what Ann calls her "very pretty self," but because she's a sensational blogger.

I say "blogger" and not "writer" advisedly: Though Armstrong can write circles around most parenting memoirists online or off, where she really shines is as a serial chronicler of daily domestic life, a genre she has been crucial in helping to invent. Like the Andrew Sullivan of personal blogging, she's created a huge following just by showing up every day and telling us what she's thinking about. I read Dooce before Armstrong became a parent (I still remember the day she posted a photo of her positive pregnancy test, and how weird it was to feel thrilled for a total stranger) and long before I became one myself. I don't read her because I need confirmation of my own bad or good mothering, or because I identify with her struggles with postpartum depression. I read her because she's funny and smart as shit, and because she maintains an elegantly designed, frequently updated, terrifically entertaining website.

I haven't read Armstrong's new book, It Sucked and Then I Cried, and I'm not sure I will—in the past I've found that the work of bloggers I love doesn't always translate that well outside the serial format. But I read her website nearly as dependably as the daily paper, and plan to keep doing so as long as she keeps making it worth the visit. Though I'm fairly sure the estimates that Dooce.com makes $40,000 a month in ad revenue are exaggerated—if monetizing online writing was that easy, we'd all be in stretch limos right now handing each other Grey Poupon—I admire the fact that she's pulling in enough money for her husband to quit his job and work full-time designing and managing her site. (Come on, admit it—is that not the ultimate writer's fantasy?) Dooce may not be to everyone's taste, but as women in the process of launching an online publication, we should seriously consider, like the woman in the deli scene in When Harry Met Sally, having some of whatever she's having.

Tags: Dooce, Heather Armstrong, mommyblogging, parenting

Men, skip this post. A new study revives a very old method of birth control, and it's not happy news for you. Withdrawal, says the Guttmacher Institute, is not a bad way to go. Many studies, and couples, don't really consider it a "method" so they don't talk about it or study it. But turns out it's almost as good as condoms (for pregnancy prevention, not for preventing transmission of diseases). For a couple that uses withdrawal every time they have sex, the woman has a four percent chance of getting pregnant, or a "realistic" chance of 18 percent. With condoms, it's a two percent and 18 percent.

Among the responsible class, withdrawal is having a revival as the more natural method. "You can still keep going, you can still have sex, it doesn't smell bad, [and] it doesn't have chemicals in it," one woman told the researchers.

Withdrawal will never have the glory of condoms. Going to the pharmacy to buy condoms is a teenage rite of passage, featured in every movie from Porky's to Dazed and Confused. Men can brag to their friends about using the condom. Not so much about withdrawal. Still, it's starting to have a kind of slacker appeal.

"I like pulling out in some ways-I see the yield," said one male participant. "At least it's some half-assed effort."

Tags: birth control, withdrawal method

Our first week at Double X is drawing to a close. And we’ve heard all sorts of responses. We’re not feminist enough. We’re too feminist. We say we’re not feminist but then we talk a lot about feminism. We (and Slate) are ghettoizing women. First, I want to second my co-editors Hanna and Emily in what they wrote yesterday and today about why we wanted to create Double X and its relationship to Slate. Second, I want to take this moment to clarify some things about the disparate points of view you’ll find on the site.

The spirit animating the site is the spirit of debate. We do not edit the blog posts before they go up, or read them over to make sure they all hew to a single party line. And so XXFactor blogger Susannah Breslin, for example, may have one take about feminism, while our essays reflect another. When we at Double X have said that we’ll have a “feminist” viewpoint, we do not mean that this viewpoint will be doctrinaire or singular—or even that every piece will have a “feminist” angle. For example, for our launch, we asked a range of women to answer our question, “What is the primary problem facing women today? What is today’s problem that has no name?” Many of the essayists in our symposium chose to point to the problems with feminism itself. We did not coach the responses, or set out to hack feminism off at the knees. The essays reflected the writer’s own views.

And that’s, in our view, as it should be. We created Double X so that readers and writers would get to hear women’s voices raised in cacophonous debate—not in well-oiled agreement. As editors, we believe in the importance of discussing issues of women’s equality and identity, and we are not afraid of the word itself. But some of our bloggers and contributors might not agree with us. Maybe they’ll be cacophonous and contradictory for a while. So be it. That’s the reality of where we are the moment. Let the arguments continue.

Tags: double x, feminism, feminists

I know that Sonia Sotomayor is a crazy, overemotional, hysterical, aggressive bitch because some anonymous lawyers told me so. On the other hand, she sounds quite rational in this 2002 speech on whether the gender or race of a judge should affect judicial decisions. The New York Times has the full text:

No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice. I need not remind you that Justice Clarence Thomas represents a part but not the whole of African-American thought on many subjects. Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging.

Sotomayor outlines what strikes me as a fairly subtle position; impartiality is a noble aspiration all judges ought to share, but if we are clear-eyed we recognize that we will never quite get there. And in acknowledging our limitations as objective decision makers, it makes sense to appoint judges with diverse life experiences. If we cannot all converge on some hoped-for Platonic truth, we can at least try to ensure that one perspective doesn't dominate.

But subtlety is not a quality Congress is known to value. Through the lens of populist Republican conservatism Sotomayor's remarks on objectivity will read something like "there is no God, morality is for suckers, and I will decide cases based on how my period is making me feel that day." This may be the kind of thing an aspiring SCOTUS nominee does well to leave unsaid.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor, Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

I had a sense of déjà vu watching the Grey's Anatomy denouement of the Katherine Heigl character Izzie's season-long cancer diagnosis, juxtaposed with the surprise hit-by-a-bus plot twist killing off T.R. Knight's George O'Malley in the last scene. Until I read Willa Paskin's post, I wrote the feeling off to general season finale redundancy. After all, just this week Gregory House's hallucinations imitated Izzie's endless conversations with her dead fiancé Denny proving there is nothing original where ratings are concerned. But something in Willa's post about Grey's forgetting its pact with readers reminded me when I had felt the same bait-and-switch let-down from a series before. This is ancient history by TV drama standards, but the writers of TV classic thirtysomething pulled the same stunt back in 1991 when viewers, agonizing over the possible death of Patricia Wettig's beloved character Nancy Weston, were completely surprised to learn that, though Nancy pulled through, college professor Gary Shepherd, played by Peter Horton, was summarily taken out off-screen. The surviving characters learned he was hit by a tractor trailer in the last moments of the episode. It's probably not a coincidence that Peter Horton went on to executive produce Grey's Anatomy.

Tags: Grey's Anatomy, House, killing off characters, Season Finale, thirtysomething

Science reporter Joshua Wolf Shenk describes his visit to the famous Grant Study archives (named for the dime store magnate who originally funded the experiment) in the new issue of the Atlantic and includes a video interview of George Vaillant, the longitudinal assessment project's director for the last 42 years. Vaillant's perspective on the 268 "well-adjusted" sophomore male participants' much-examined lives boils down to "loving is the most important," but, as Emily Yoffe pointed out, his conclusion, "happiness is love," seems as clichéd as one tin soldier on judgment day.

In 1937, the creators of the project, also called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, set out to discover "a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life." The study designed by experts in "medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work" measured the mental health of the participants and periodically assigned the subject of each dictionary-sized case file a happiness quotient based on his adaptive mechanisms.

Trying to get at how the men individually responded and adapted to trials in their lives and where those choices led them, subjects were quantified from worst to best as "psychotic" (paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania), "immature" (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria"), "neurotic" (intellectualization dissociation repression), or mature (altruism, humor, anticipation). Shenk reports that over the course of the research, "almost a third of the men had...met Vaillant's criteria for mental illness." These men of great potential had power, wealth, and education, but their happiness was not guaranteed in the end. (And the end has arrived for about half of them. As Emily says "they are coming to the point at which their files are closed.")

Their identities are deeply confidential (except for a few, such as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who outted himself), but the subjects' accomplishments, failures, tragedies, and personal fortunes are documented to a fair thee well. Every era's children have their own unique challenges. Most of the Grant cohort fought in World War II. Later, several ran for U.S. Senate. One (JFK) made it to the White House, and another was a cabinet secretary. Many divorced and remarried multiple times. At least one of the men in the study acknowledged his sexual identity and came out as homosexual. (Shenk is silent on the effect of feminism on the men who, in their 40s during the 1960s, were contemporaries of the successful sexists in grey flannel suits portrayed in the AMC series Mad Men.)

Longitudinal studies, which revisit case subjects many times over a long period, (the best known are Michael Apted's Seven-Up! documentaries) have always fascinated me, particularly because of the extraordinary commitment required of those being studied. The Harvard undergrads who arranged to have their life milestones (marriages, jobs, children, divorces, illness, loss) chronicled by medical exams, psychological tests, questionnaires, and interviews for at least the next 72 years may have wanted something more useful for their efforts toward posterity than love = happy = good. But for some Grant participants, it sounds like the study was the one constant they could rely on.

Tags: Happiness, Harvard

Like Hanna, I accept Ann Friedman's welcome challenge. Yes, please! We want to influence the national conversation, and send our writers and editors out to go forth and prosper in plenty of other pastures. We're not interested in roping ourselves off into a pink ghetto. I understand the fear that other people will do the roping off for us. When we first started talking about the idea of a separate site early last summer, several of the veteran women of Slate said, hey, we've spent years getting strong women's voices into the magazine. We've succeeded. Now you're taking us out and putting us somewhere else? The answer we all settled on, in the end, was no. Dahlia, Meghan, me, Emily Yoffe, all the women who write regularly for Slate are still doing that. We're just adding more in a new space, as well.

Why not add more content written by women into Slate? It's a matter of home page real estate. The coveted slots on the home page of every site, the ones that get a lot of eyeballs, are limited. Slate has increased the number of those spots in all kinds of creative ways—with multiple covers, sliding panels, and other clever attractions. But we can't expand limitlessly. At some point, if we want to put up more articles and blog posts and slideshows and video, and give them their due, we need more home pages. And so we've begun collectively to sprout them. It’s an exchange: The best content from the sister sites feeds and strengthens the Slate home page. You see that every day, when Slate promotes our pieces, and pieces by The Big Money, The Root, and Slate V. And we pick up the Slate content that we think is most relevant to our readers. It’'s a work in progress, and an experiment. But if it works, we’ll have the best of both worlds: A women’'s magazine that has its own space, but lives in a beloved older magazine, too.

Tags: ann friedman, double x, Slate, the american prospect

There's a sort of covenant, an unspoken contract, entered into when a person commits to a television series. Something like, "I, the viewer, agree to watch this program, to care about these characters, to invest in this world week after week, because you, the TV creator, agree to make it fun." Last night, Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes broke this "we watch, she entertains" contract by engaging in reckless character assassination—by which I mean she actually went and assassinated one of her main characters.

Death is not, in and of itself, a TV dealbreaker. Anyone who's ever cried her eyes out at a TV death (even a mediocre TV death) knows they can be entertaining. They deliver drama, catharsis, and a little bit of the twisted glee you feel when imagining your own funeral—the emotions are muted enough that you can focus on the eulogies.

So life-shortening storylines are contractually acceptable—when used appropriately. Appropriately doesn't even mean sparingly. Lost has probably killed off more major characters than any show in history. On Wednesday it likely executed the best female character it's ever had, yet it has not broken its pact with its audience. The deaths aren't vengeful. The creators aren't trying to punish their audience or their actors. They're following the dictates of the story. They're advancing the plot.

What went down on Grey's last night felt as vengeful and coldblooded as a contract killing—which, in a sense, it was. Both Katherine Heigl, who plays the cancer-stricken Izzie Stevens, and T.R. Knight, who plays George O'Malley, have been rumored to want out of their contracts. This episode ended with both of them flat lining. Coincidence? Rhimes says no, telling EW, "I don't think there are any coincidences. I think Katherine's stated publicly that she's happy to stay. I think that there have been lots of rumors about TR, but TR's never said anything. Take from it what you will." I, like all other sentient beings, take from that, come Season 6, Izzie will have a heartbeat and George will not.

And it's George's death, not Izzie's, that was the breach of contract. Izzie's been seriously ill with metastatic skin cancer for weeks. Her illness has been conducted along ideal TV death lines, which is to say, there have been some tears, some laughter and a swanky last-minute wedding. It's not that I wanted Izzie to die last night. But if she had, at least her story had been moving, fleshed-out, thought-through, and had affected other characters. At least it was entertaining.

Not George's death. Nope, George's death was a big ol' eff you to the actor and to the audience. Last night George, who has been noticeably and woefully underused all season, enlisted in the army as a trauma surgeon, which would have been a perfectly acceptable, if totally lackluster way to send him off. But getting shot at in Iraq was too good a fate for George, who instead became "roadkill" (as one of his doctors put it) after pushing a stranger out of the way of a bus. His friends only realized it was him underneath all the swollen damage a few seconds before he coded.

George is a character Shonda Rhimes has spent five years making us care about—and she didn't even give him his own death scene. Instead he got a brutal, shocking, expedient death he had to share with the show's real star (Izzie). His violent end wasn't necessary to the plot, the character, or the story. It was just some grizzly afterthought. And you know what? I don't tune in to Grey's Anatomy to see a huggable, sweet guy die just so the cliffhanger is more hangy. If I want to consume ultra-violent tragedy, I'll read Shakespeare or watch the episode of The Sopranos where Adriana gets whacked. I watch Grey's for fun—there's nothing else to watch it for! And the particular fun of Grey's has more to do with multiple sex partners than multiple funerals. I'm sure I'll watch the show again, but I'll know better than to trust it to be a good time. The contract's in the shredder.

Tags: Grey's Anatomy, Season Finale, Television

Last night's season finale of 30 Rock wasn't the best episode of the season—the A and B plots didn't hang together especially well—but the episode provided some of the best lines of the year. The Liz Lemon plot revolved around her sudden fame as a relationship advice-giver. Liz had written a character for show-within-a-show star Jenna that inspired the catchphrase, "It's a dealbreaker, ladies." As a result, Liz and Jenna got invited on a Tyra-esque talk show to dole out similarly pat relationship counsel.

Poking fun at female-centric institutions (the trashy talk show; the cheesy, useless, he's-just-not-that-into-you-style romantic advice book) is where Tina Fey shines—it harkens back to her Mean Girls roots. The advice Fey's Lemon gives to desperate audience members is completely priceless. "You have sexually transmitted crazy mouth," she tells one woman. "Deal breaker." To another woman, whose stylish boyfriend is about 10 times more attractive than she is, Lemon says, "You have a classic case of fruit blindness. Deal breaker." And my personal favorite, "S that D. Shut it down." In this clip, Liz starts giving advice to her co-workers' disgruntled spouses, causing Tracy Jordan's wife to cry, "Teach it like you preach it Liz Lemon!" Lord, will I miss that woman during those 30 Rock-free summer months.

Tags: 30 Rock, Liz Lemon, Season Finale, Tina Fey

Sara, I agree with your defense—in response to Katie Roiphe's piece about women hiding behind their children on Facebook—of a woman's right to put her kids first. I'm 25 and enjoying my selfish years now, because, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out in her piece about the seasons of a woman's life, I fully expect them to end when I have kids. And I think that's natural. Just as natural, in fact, for fathers as it is for moms.

My mother once relayed to my sister and me a hypothetical question she'd posed to my dad. A bus is hurtling down the street, about to hit her. Would he jump in front and sacrifice his life to save hers? He wavered. Perhaps to protect herself from having to hear him deliver a "no," she quickly presented a second scenario. "What if it were one of the girls?" This time, no wavering. "Yes, I'd jump in front of the bus."

My dad's response is more about evolution than self-definition, though. It's not that he would save my sister or me because we're his proudest accomplishments. It's that we're his genetic offspring who still have kids of our own still to produce—kids that will carry on his DNA. Isn't that how the whole circle of life thing is supposed to work? And while the bus scenario is farfetched, the same mentality would apply to everyday decisions, like whether to miss a big conference to take care of a sick child.

I think in discussing Roiphe's piece (and what a discussion it's triggered in the comments section!), we're conflating too many things. While I agree with you, Sara, that it's okay (good, even) to put your children first, I'm with Roiphe on the point that that shouldn't mean your kids are all you can talk about, their faces all you care to have anyone see when they type in your name. One of the things I'm most grateful to my parents for is raising me in a home where dinner table conversations were interesting, involving thoughts on the day's news, the books we were reading, their issues at work. If Roiphe's women friends can only talk about their kids at dinner parties, I hope—for their kids' sake, at least—that their family-dinner conversations are a little more expansive.

Tags: Facebook, katie roiphe, parenting