Surely it’s auspicious that the weekend after Double X launched, a filly won the second leg of the Triple Crown—the Preakness Stakes—for the first time since 1924. That’s right: a girl by the name of Rachel Alexandra—a girl’s name if there ever was one—held off all the boys, including Derby winner Mine That Bird, in a stunningly dramatic race. She did so against great odds: Breaking from a bad position (she was 13 in a field of 13) she scrambled to the front of the pack and led from pole to pole—meaning at every point of measurement she was in front. When Mine That Bird made a hard run at her in the stretch (he does have heart, it turns out) she steadily held him off, flicking her ears back at him and at the crowds. Her jockey, Calvin Borel—who rode Mine That Bird in the Derby—said she was the best horse he’d ever been on (see for yourself in the clip below). Take that, gender essentialists.

In her front-running style, Rachel Alexandra reminds me of another great filly, Ruffian, who never let another horse get in front of her, and who became a symbol of 1970s feminism.(I wrote about Ruffian and another Triple Crown-winning filly, Rags to Riches, for Slate.) Ruffian had to be put down after she took a bad step in her first race against a colt, a famous match race with Derby champion Foolish Pleasure. Afterward, Moody Jolley, father of Foolish Pleasure’s trainer, declared, "First time they throw some speed at that bitch, she comes unbuckled." Never mind that she’d been pulling ahead when she broke down. Ruffian must be nickering in her grave; no one can say that about Rachel Alexandra. On Saturday, the girls got their own at last.

Tags: gender, preakness stakes, rachel alexandra

Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues. I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m right with the president on his call “to reduce the number of women seeking abortions … reduce unintended pregnancies” and make adoption easier.(Other pro-lifers are not swayed so easily, as 40 protesters were arrested trying to get onto Notre Dame’s campus Sunday.)

What I’m curious to see now is whether that talk turns out to be just that. Finding “common ground” means both sides have to give a little. Obama promised a “sensible conscience clause,” but he has long supported the Freedom of Choice Act, which would toss out any limitations on abortion up to the time of viability and could even “invalidate the freedom-of-conscience laws on the books in 46 states,” as Melinda Henneberger pointed out in Slate last fall. True, he did say recently that FOCA is not his “highest legislative priority.” But one of his first acts in office was to restore funding to overseas family-planning groups that provide abortions, and he’s working to reverse the conscience clause that President Bush pushed through before leaving office. If it’s really common ground he’s looking for, he could impress a lot of us on the right by vocally dropping his support for FOCA.

Tags: abortion, FOCA, Freedom of Choice Act, Notre Dame, Obama, obama notre dame speech

The striking jump in the new Gallup poll of people defining themselves as pro-life—7 percentage points in one year, for a total of 51 percent—doesn't explain itself. You may be right, Hanna, that scientific advances or a truly deep shift in attitude aren't the rationale, given that the breakdown didn't change when Gallup pinned people down further by asking them if they think abortion should always, sometimes, or never be legal. But the words "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have long been as freighted with meaning as they are now. No event in the last year I can think of rocked the definitional boat on this one.

So I'd love to hear from anyone out there who used to think of herself or himself as pro-choice, and in the last year or so has had a change of heart. Why? What accounts for the shift in your thinking? Post a comment if you're up for doing that, or send me an email at bazelon@slate.com.

Tags: abortion, abortion rights, pro-choice, pro-life

Did anyone catch Anna Wintour's interview with Morley Safer on last night? (Side note: I like the way this YouTube teaser's headline makes it sound like Anna Wintour is, in fact, the Secretary of Defense. This seems like a sensible foreign policy move to me.)

Watch CBS Video Online

Despite the frisson of excitement that came with actually seeing and hearing Wintour speak—she lives! she lives!—the interview was mostly a puff piece. However, there was one moment that made me both LOL and die a little: when Safer asked, "When the time comes, will you go quietly?" and Wintour sort of smiled and batted her eyelashes and said, "Certainly. Very quietly."

First of all, like Amy Odell over at New York magazine's fashion blog, I'm not even sure what any of that means. Are we talking about when she dies? When she gets kicked off the Vogue masthead for a younger, fresher editrix? Are those concepts one and the same? Even more confusing, am I happy that Wintour plans to make a gracious exit, because I value decorum and civility and don't want her to be burdened with the "bitch" label any more than she already has been? Or am I a little heartbroken at the thought of this regal woman going off with a whimper and not a bang?

One thing I do know for sure: I wish Andy Rooney had been the one doing the interview. Every week's segment with him is like a glimpse into some unfathomable, fascinating abyss of cooter-dom. Whenever he's on, I cannot look away.

Tags: 60 Minutes, Anna Wintour

More and more frequently, movie trailers are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot, they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.

David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing a mysterious fact about one of the protagonists. ("I won't deprive you of the pleasure of figuring out his secret for yourself, about an hour and a half before the Big Reveal," he writes). The trailer is not nearly as circumspect, having revealed months ago that the protagonist in question is, in fact, a hunk of metal.

Another trailer that outdoes its source is the glorious promo for Glee, Fox's new show about a high school glee club, premiering tomorrow night. The show itself is, apparently, "sweaty and desperate to impress," but the trailer...Wow. The trailer is the Platonic ideal of trailers for anyone who enjoys fictions involving high school, angst, music, geeks, jocks, teachers, highly choreographed dance routines, and "Don't Stop Believing." (How long before the cultural capital accrued from its appearance in the final minutes of The Sopranos starts to dissipate? Years?) It's a larger population that you might imagine.

One new trailer that doesn't ruin everything is the sneak of Nine, a musical inspired by Federico Fellini's 8 ½ co-starring Daniel Day Lewis, Judy Dench, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, and, confoundingly, Kate Hudson and Fergie. The trailer, like the film, is overly ambitious, stuffed with dance routines, period costumes, black-and-white footage, baby blue convertibles and a charmingly brusque Judy Dench. It's a treat. After watching it, I had no clue if the final product will be hugely inspired or a huge mess, and that uncertainty was a nice surprise.

Tags: Glee, Nine, Terminator, Trailers, TV

With stylish women flaunting recessionista chic and Michelle Obama embracing her modest roots—“my parents were working class people,” she repeats in speeches—it may seem like a timely advance that a flurry of independent films (in theaters and on DVD) are depicting those forgotten heroines, working-class women. In Wendy and Lucy, a deglamorized Michelle Williams lives out of her car while driving to Alaska in search of a job. There’s Frozen River, with Melissa Leo in her Oscar-nominated role as a trailer-park single mom, and Julia, with Tilda Swinton playing a downwardly spiraling alcoholic.

These movies are unsentimental and wonderfully realistic on the surface, but take a closer look: why is every one of these heroines involved in some kind of crime? With acts as petty as shoplifting a can of dog food and as horrendous as kidnapping a child, it seems no struggling woman on screen can live inside the law. Under their admirable surfaces, these films subtly reinforce the old assumption that poor equals criminal.

The real problem is the lack of exploration into these characters’ motives. We can assume they are driven to despair and crime, that society just won’t give them a break, but that’s not the same as seeing it portrayed on screen. In Frozen River, Leo’s character, Ray, stumbles into a scheme to earn cash by driving illegal immigrants across the Canadian border. The film makes it clear that the smuggling is wrong and dangerous; we sympathize with and fear for Ray even while we disapprove. We have to take a step back to realize that director Courteney Hunt’s taut filmmaking and Leo’s nuanced performance allow the film to glide past Ray’s moral dilemma. And why didn’t Wendy ask for a job before stealing from the grocer? What possessed Julia to accept a working mother’s bribe to kidnap her child from his grandfather’s custody?

The Hollywood working-class heroine is usually a Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich, a reformer making a grand social gesture. The new indie films more authentically depict their characters’ workaday lives. That’s why it’s so disappointing to find them undermining their own heroines, reinforcing an assumption that should have been blasted away long ago—that the poor are morally suspect and quick to steal.

Tags: Julia, Michelle Williams, Tilda Swinton, Wendy and Lucy

In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse. She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.

How is Obama going to close Guantanamo in eight months when his lawyers just asked for a four-month extension (the second one) in the legal proceedings against the detainees? It's hard to square the promise with the developing facts. Nor is it a happy sign that the president is decorating Bush's military tribunals with more detainee rights rather than swearing them off in favor of federal court. As a New York Times editorial argued on Sunday, tribunals have a place, but it's for trying prisoners of war captured on the battlefield, not anyone we picked up after 9/11 who we don't know what to do with, which describes the detainees.

Congress refused to give Obama the $80 billion he asked for to relocate the Gitmo detainees because he has laid out no plan for which of them are going where. It's time to make that plan. Try as few of the detainees as possible in the Bush-Obama tribunals and get the rest either into the federal criminal system or on a plane home, like the Supreme Court litigant Lakhdar Boumediene, who flew to France last week. When you set your own deadline, it matters much more that you meet it. No one forced Obama to promise, by executive order, to close Guantanamo by next January. But he did, and he got a lot of mileage out of it. Don't blow past this one, Mr. President.

Tags: Ann Althouse, detainees, Guantanamo, Lakhdar Boumediene, Obama

In case you haven't heard, magazines are dying right and left. Who knows which one will be next? One day, that may be the sound of Anna Wintour's head rolling across the floor. Not unlike the adult movie industry, which thought it was so ahead of the curve, technologically-speaking, that it neglected to jump on the Internet bandwagon until its product had gotten away from them and it was far, far too late, magazines and newspapers have failed to exploit the Web to their advantage. Now, they're suffering for it.

No one will ever say so of Nick Knight, the British fashion photographer who created SHOWStudio.com, a website dedicated to closing the gap between high fashion and aspirational fashionistas. Most recently, Knight pulled back the curtain on a provocative shoot for Wallpaper* magazine's sex-themed July issue. On a set art directed by designer Peter Saville, Knight shot model Mariacarla Boscono et al. for a stripped-down, hyper-sexualized layout that, according to the site, "fetishis[ed] furniture, fashion and flesh alike." But rather than play the engimatic editorial game in which readers have to wait months to see by-then bygone fashions, SHOWStudio live-streamed the whole thing so you could peek behind the scenes at life live on a fashion shoot. And they tweeted it, too.

Now, the full series of clips from the shoot are available online. Be forewarned, the videos, which can be found here, feature more than one female breast and at least one not-turned-on sex machine. In other words, they're NSFW—unless you work for a bondage gear manufacturer in Karachi, Pakistan, that is.

Tags: Nick Knight, Peter Saville, sex

Does the idea of a candy bar with pink girlie wrapping, a sexualized name, and a marketing promo urging women to "pleasure yourself" by eating said candy bar seem annoying as hell to anyone else?

When I heard this piece on NPR yesterday about the new Fling candy bar, also known as a chocolate finger, I thought it was a joke. When I realized it was a real news story, it made me so mad that the only finger I thought about was the middle finger I'd like to give to the person who came up with the idea. I so hope it wasn't a woman.

A few lines from the NPR piece:

The Snickers bar has a new sibling, and it's a girl. She's sexual, uninhibited—and only 85 calories. The Fling is the first new chocolate bar Mars has introduced in more than 20 years. Wrapped in a shiny pink and sliver package, this delicate chocolate finger is intended for women. The word finger is an industry term for a long, slim confection, Mars spokesman Ryan Bowling says, but with ads that invite you to "Pleasure yourself" in pink lettering, consumers might come to other conclusions.

The tag line on the package is "Naughty, but not that naughty." A TV spot starts with what looks like strangers having sex in a store dressing room. Currently the candy bar can be bought only in California and online, but if all goes well, Mars is hoping women will be having Flings all across the country.

What's up with this marketing trend that rests on the assumption women will buy anything wrapped in pink or that has an implied orgasmic result? It seems so retro and reminds me of these once very popular shampoo commercials?

Funny how the marketers of Viagra and Cialis didn't similarly see fit to promote their products as self-pleasuring tools for men. Seems to me they could have wrapped these erectile dysfunction products in manly dark blue packaging and named them Hump or Tryst, or simply marketed them as the "ultimate man-handle," the medical antidote for the busy man who has no time for dating and needs to handle his business by himself.

Tags: chocolate as sex-substitute, gender, pink marketing