In The Supremes Edition of our XX Gabfest this week, Hanna and Meghan and I talk about (of course) Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Also a new study showing that women are more unhappy, not less, 30 years after the sexual revolution, and why Terminator Salvation has such lame female action stars. Download the podcast, or subscribe to our RSS feed, or through iTunes.

Tags: Jon & Kate Plus 8, Kate Gosselin, Sonia Sotomayor, Terminator Salvation

Alongside all the finger pointing about bank failures and the collapse of the US housing bubble has come the slow puncturing of the legend of consequence-free 1990s economic growth. Peter Baker's fantastic New York Times Magazine piece takes a good, hard look at the maker of that world: Bill Clinton. Like Hanna, I find the portrait both honest and poignant. The meat of the article—which follows Clinton on various travels, speeches, meetings, and duties related to the Clinton foundation—is naturally the substantive, frank, and reflective conversation between Bill and Baker with respect to the Clintonian economy. David Leonhardt, also of the Times, parses the back and forth, wherein Bill admits that he "should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated."

That's a big concession for a former president who in the past has been fairly prideful about his legacy. But of course, the real story is that, writes Baker, "No one has combined the roles of former president and cabinet spouse before, and the lines are blurry." He begins the piece by narrating Clinton's trip to a Peruvian crafts market:

Standing all by himself, the former president of the United States moved his eyes methodically across shelves of wooden carvings, jewelry and sculptures as he searched for something distinctive to bring his wife. “She used to look forward to me coming home from wherever I’ve been,” he mused with a laugh. “Now I’m afraid I’ll be second fiddle to whatever world leader she’s just met.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, had in fact just returned home from a trip to Mexico, then rushed to the White House to help announce a new war strategy. “I saw her on CNN standing behind the president talking about Afghanistan,” her husband said. “Then she went to Dallas for something. I don’t know why.”

He spotted a turquoise bracelet. “Hillary likes turquoise,” he noted as he fingered the piece.

With all due respect to Linda Hirshman's desire for more spinach in ladyblogging: What a divine lead.

Sure, the passage tactlessly preys upon dated gender norms ("Bill Clinton likes to shop," it opens)—poking fun at the supposedly emasculated former leader of the free world. But I'll forgive this transgression, merely because the imagery so finely evokes a man who is totally enjoying the "stay-at-home" life. (Which is hardly stay-at-home; Bill has just accepted a position as U.N. special envoy to Haiti.)

Reading the scene again, I realized this must be enormously different from the arrangement that the Clintons had in mind when Hillary first began her extraordinary campaign for president of the United States. Rather than campaigning as "two for one"—which they did in 1992, when it was pretty unthinkable that a woman could win higher office—the Hillary Clinton campaign was largely about her: her record, her solutions, her commander-in-chief threshold, her fluency in domestic policy. She kept the "white boys" of Bill's circle out, and it seems her mistakes were her own. For his part, Bill was used as an effective surrogate in key swing states and remote, blue-collar areas of the country, but (and especially after the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries) allowed the Hillary who'd "found her voice" to shine.

That Hillary ended the campaign with an ability to barn-burn and kiss babes and rile a political base of her own, bigger (or, in the Internet age, at least more quantifiable) than her husband's. That itself is a remarkable outcome.

But that doesn't mean Bill wouldn't have liked another crack at 1600 Pennsylvania. Yet in countless ways, the Secretary of State job has forced the titular "Mellowing of Bill Clinton" and kept the focus on Hillary alone—a good, if bittersweet gift from the president. Having had nearly six months to adjust, the naturally feminist (I await the howls on that one) Bill, who didn't mind sharing the 1992 ticket with his pioneering wife, suddenly doesn't seem to mind at all that he's picking jewelry in Peru.

This is something of an instance of playing against type. The pink-faced "fairy tale" campaign Bill; the defensive "What'd you say about my economy?" Bill; the slavering "Oh, man, do I want another crack at Israel-Palestine" Bill—they are gone. Now, he tells Baker, "If [Hillary] asks, I tell her what I think ... And if there’s something that’s going on that I feel that I have a particular knowledge of, I say that." The boy genius who charmed his way into extraordinary power says this like it were no big deal.

Rather, I imagine, like having your children young so that you can start the Sandals Jamaication as soon as they leave the house.

Tags: bill clinton, deregulation, former presidents, Hillary Clinton

With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California. Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be forced to comment on the gay marriage ban.

Obama has been relatively mum about gay marriage recently. According to a New York Times article from earlier this month:

While Mr. Obama has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views on same-sex marriage are misguided, he has offered no signal that he intends to change his position ... Anything substantive he might say on same-sex marriage—after the Iowa ruling, the White House put out a statement saying the president “respects the decision”—would be endlessly parsed. If Mr. Obama were to embrace same-sex marriage, he would be seen as reversing a campaign position and alienating some moderate and religious voters he has courted.

What do you think, ladies? Was the announcement of Sotomayor timed so that Obama could ignore the California conundrum, or was it a coincidence? Tobias Wolff, a law professor and Obama's campaign advisor on gay rights, told the Times about Obama's gay-marriage stance: "I think [Obama] has a genuine sense ... that in order to move these issues forward you need broader buy-in than you are going to get if you poke a stick in too many people's eyes." But is he pulling the wool over those eyes instead?

Tags: Barack Obama, conspiracy theories, gay marriage, Obama, Prop 8, Sonia Sotomayor, Sotomayor

Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think, is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama) v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or skin color than with their respective ages. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to understand how race or gender played out in their lives until you know when they were born.

Obama, crucially, is 14 years younger than Hillary. As a result, he wasn't part of the civil rights movement. He was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement—and there's a big difference. For all the genuine obstacles he overcame, he enjoyed a kind of ease and place in the world that for many black men (or women of any color) would have been unfathomable even 15 years earlier. By the time he reached adulthood, for example, it wasn't unusual for an accomplished man to marry a graduate of Princeton (which didn’t admit women until 1969). This, in turn, surely informed his and Michelle's relationship and marriage going forward.

By contrast, Hillary wasn’t the beneficiary of the women's rights movement. Being so much older, she was the women’s rights movement—and as a result, her life and career are necessarily messier and full of more contradictions than for younger women, for whom she helped blaze a trail. Much of what people criticized her for during the election—her stridency, her career and romantic choices, her voice and ever-changing hairstyles, even her privilege—always struck me as largely a function simply of her having come first.

Sotomayor is almost exactly seven years older than Obama and seven years younger than Hillary—a lifetime, in many ways, in both directions. She could attend Princeton (as Hillary could not), but was in only the fourth class to admit women—a far cry, presumably, from Michelle’s experience nearly a decade later, when women and minorities were no longer such a novelty. In sum, part of the diversity Sotomayor will bring to the court, if confirmed, is not merely her sex or ethnicity, but how both have interacted with the particular age in which she grew up—which is as different from mine as it is from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s and Sandra Day O’Connor’s. To that older generation of women, Sotomayor's outspokenness that Dahlia and Emily have alluded to is probably as unfamiliar as it is to women in their 20s. In the confirmation process, it will be interesting to learn how Sotomayor's perspective has adjusted, over the years, as the world has changed around her. But in asking that her present temper her past (rather than the other way around), I hope we won't deny, as I sometimes felt we did with Hillary, the age-related uniqueness of her story.

Tags: ageism, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Obama, Princeton, racism, sexism, Sonia Sotomayor

We spend so much time dissecting First Ladies living in the shadow of their husbands that this portrait of Bill Clinton as First Man is startling, and so poignant. New York Times reporter Peter Baker addresses how little access Clinton has in the Obama administration, but the story succeeds mainly as a character sketch. Clinton is a Philip Roth character somewhat restrained, trying to explain his outbursts during the campaign, coming to terms with the indignities of aging, and of being eclipsed by a younger, more vibrant man. A man who, to top it off, now has his wife's loyalty. Some key scenes:

• Clinton browsing a trinket shop, looking for the right jewelry and carvings for his wife and other female friends.
• Clinton showing off his cool new hearing aide.
• Clinton complaining, sort of good-naturedly, about how hard it is to get his wife on the phone.
• "I've got plenty to do. I've got a full life here. If I come up with an idea I think that's helpful to them, I give it to them."
• Clinton trapped in the audience listening to Obama praise Edward Kennedy, whom he now hates, for his work with the Americorps program, which Clinton founded.
• "Stay in touch," said Obama.
• Clinton and Vladimir Putin talking well into night, presumably because Putin believes Clinton has the ear of the new administration.
• "I also noticed since I had the surgery—and this is what you picked up in the campaign—that if I'm really, really tired ... It's neither an excuse for any mistake I made or anything else. I'm just explaining. It's something I've noticed. My life has changed."

Tags: bill clinton, new york times magazine

Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh just called Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor "reverse racists." He is referring to the controversy over Sotomayor's line, from a speech given in 2002, that she believed a Latina woman would make a better decision than a white man. Limbaugh might have ground to stand on had Sotomayor been making a blanket reference to the inherent superiority of Latina women to white men. But she wasn't. As Hanna pointed out yesterday, Sotomayor was talking about sex discrimination cases, about which there is evidence that having female judges leads to outcomes that appear to be fairer for women. She was not being a reverse racist; she was being a pragmatist, and perhaps, a wee bit of an activist in that moment. What's more, it was a rare moment of unsubtlety in an otherwise judicious (no pun intended) lecture. The reverse racism line reminds me of the opening to "Goodbye to All That," where Malcolm Cowley describes a game of intellectual ones-up-manship where men of his generation would try to take an argument or an insult one iteration further, always seeing if they could turn it back on whatever had come just before. Limbaugh is doing the same thing, telling us that "liberals" would say that "minorities cannot be racists because they don't have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone, because reverse racists certainly do have the power. ... Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one.” Which would make Limbaugh what? A reverse-reverse racist, someone who sees no color?

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

I agree with Dahlia that humility is rare in Sonia Sotomayor's professional circle, but I do hope this self-effacing quality helps her in the very humbling confirmation hearings coming up. In the context of introducing herself to the American public, however, I doubt, as Samantha wonders, that the judge was downplaying her achievements to counter critics who consider powerful women "bitchy." (But as an aside, I'd add a little self-deprecation in the face of such dazzling glory is certainly not "harmful to the rest.") Although modesty is encouraged in immigrant families, in fact, in the nominee's biographical statement, "ordinary" was an apt comparison to the odds-overcoming determination of her extraordinary mother. Celina Sotomayor, a foreign-born widow with two small children, one with diabetes, worked as a nurse distributing methadone in a drug clinic six days a week to afford rent in a Bronx housing project and her kids' parochial school tuition.

Even a mother who just does the regular impossible decades-long job of educating, nurturing, and economically supporting her children, busts her buttons when they succeed. Imagine the head-exploding pride for Mrs. Sotomayor yesterday, sitting in the White House while the President, her child at his side, praises both her accomplishments and the texture of her life. You can see how well her daughter Sonia was raised, though. In all the excitement, she still understood the importance of thanking her mother.

Tags: immigrant experience, motherhood, Sonia Sotomayor, thank you

Dahlia, I agree—the more I digest Sotomayor's Berkeley speech, the more I also appreciate it. Where Sandra Day O'Connor was too macho to admit that being a woman on the high court made her different, and where Ruth Bader Ginsburg is still hesitant to step too far from that party line, Sotomayor is frank and full-throated. She's also not afraid to mull over the thorny and vexed topic of diversity without reaching a firm conclusion or making a wholly linear argument. Bracing, all of it.

Nor does it look to me like her Latina filter clouds her legal judgment. In 2002, in a case called Pappas v. Giuliani, Sotomayor had to decide whether to allow a suit to go foward that was brought by a New York City police officer who was asked, at home, to donate to charity and instead stuffed the reply envelopes with fliers asserting white supremacy and warning against the "Negro wolf ... destroying American civilization with rape, robbery, and murder." The other judges on her panel in the case upheld the firing. It would have been easy for Sotomayor to go along. Instead, she dissented. She called the mailings "patently offensive, hateful, and insulting." But she said the majority "enters uncharted territory in our First Amendment jurisprudence," because the police officer hadn't indentified himself or connected himself with the NYPD. Sotomayor pointed out that he'd sent the mailings outside the office and on his own time. And she concluded that his speech was personal, and so he shouldn't be disciplined for it at work. The bottom line is that Sotomayor cared more about freedom of speech than about punishing racism. That should be reassuring to all the critics who are trying to use her Latina pride to twist her into a small-minded and angry version of that identity. They're wrong. That's not her record.

Tags: first amendment, Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court

Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves.

Yup, that's right, Amish romance novels exist, and they're popular. So popular that two of them, part of The Sisters of the Quilt trilogy by Cindy Woodsmall, have been on the New York Times bestseller list. The extremely chaste Quilt series (there's one kiss in the whole series) seems to follow the standard script, except in the specifics (no electricity etc.). Hannah Lapp, a 17-year-old Amish girl, falls for a Mennonite (the Montague to her Capulet), and drama, romance, and tragedy ensue. The sub-genre even has a nickname: "bonnet books."

Why isn't the existence of bonnet books common knowledge? Or, put another way, why are romance novels still so ghettoized? They're hugely popular, accounting for 32 percent of mass-market fiction sold. Sales were up seven percent at the end of 2008, even while other book sales have plummeted due to the recession. Sure, some are terribly written, but a high ratio of junk to quality hasn't stopped us from taking television, comic books, and video games seriously. In a recent piece on the history of Harlequin, The Walrus posited that romance novels are to women what porn is to men: We spend a lot more time talking, thinking, and arguing about porn than we ever have romance novels. Speaking to NPR, the two women who run the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog, a site on a mission to rescue the romance novel's rep, theorized that overt female sexuality and desire makes people uncomfortable. (A less positive gloss was provided by Andrea Dworkin, who said the books are "rape embellished with meaningful looks.") What do you all think? Anyone want to start a book club for When The Heart Cries?

Tags: Amish, Bonnet Books, Romance novels

When it opens this weekend, I hope a lot of XXers will go see Drag Me to Hell, the new Sam Raimi horror movie, so we can discuss it here. In addition to being (I thought) a satisfying two hours' worth of alternating laughs and screams, it's a very rich text about female power. So rich, in fact, that I'm not sure yet exactly how to read it. The heroine, Christine, a young bank loan officer played by Alison Lohman, denies an old Hungarian woman, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) an extension on her mortgage payment, and as a result, the old woman stands to lose her home. Mrs. Ganush, a practitioner of the dark arts, puts an ancient curse on Christine: she will be haunted by horrific visions for three days, at the end of which time she'll be snatched down to hell by the devil himself.

A battle ensues between the two women that takes place on both the physical and metaphysical planes: They slug it out in a parked car, an open grave, and assorted spooky venues suspended between this world and the next. What sets this movie apart from your average slasher thriller is the main character's fierce rejection of victimhood; she's a pretty girl in danger, yes, but also an ambitious career woman who morphs over the course of the movie into a fierce (and at times unscrupulous) warrior fighting for her own soul. The cronelike Mrs. Ganush is unmistakably the villain, but she's deeply sympathetic in her way. She's not a hockey-masked chainsaw-wielder but an immigrant grandmother who begs on her knees to be allowed to keep her house and who, when wronged, resorts to the only power she can command: Satan. I also loved that the film's men, Christine's puppylike boyfriend (Justin Long) and her palm-reading spiritual adviser (Dileep Rao), were relegated to the loyal-helpmate positions traditionally reserved for girls in B-movies (just think of Bryce Dallas Howard in Terminator: Salvation, standing by her man.)

But an equal and opposite reading of the movie might see it as antifeminist and even misogynist, a punishingly negative allegory about female ambition. Christine denies the old woman a loan because she has her eye on a promotion at the bank. In exchange for choosing to prioritize her job over human relationships (ie., for not being "nice" to the old woman), she is literally damned to hell, while her even more unscrupulous male colleagues get off scot free. In this second reading, the crone character, with her wizened face and icky false teeth, would be an expression of the filmmaker's (or the audience's) fear of the aging female body. The message to viewers would then be: Old women are unacceptable at all times. Beautiful young blondes get a pass, as long as they act nice and don't get too many ideas about getting ahead.

I won't reveal whether or not Christine suffers the fate threatened by the movie's (awesomely pulpy) title. But if you do see it, please drag yourselves back here to talk about it next week.

Tags: Alison Lohman, Drag Me To Hell, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Sam Raimi