I think you're right, Hanna, that the first woman president will announce herself, thrillingly, as our very own bolt from the blue even though we can't pick her out now. But that doesn't entirely settle the lingering problem of sexism in the 2008 campaign for me. What about the effect on more ordinary female candidates of the flattening sterotypes that are so hard for women in politics to shake? I'm thinking, of course, of Martha Coakley, because who can think of anything else today? Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast points out that Coakley doesn't seem to be running strongly ahead with women as you might expect. Look for harder numbers after the election, but for now she's polling about even with her opponent among women. And as Dana says, "she has called her gender 'secondary,' " rather than playing up her feminism or any historic aspect to her candidacy given the power of the Massachusetts old boys' network. Game Change tells us that Hillary didn't even want to say the words "18 million cracks in the glass ceiling" even though it was the best line of her campaign, as far as I'm concerned. No wonder Coakley also presumably thought that playing it safe meant downplaying her gender. Maybe if she loses, the next candidate like her will do it differently. But until we bust through that ceiling, I doubt it.

Photograph of Martha Coakley by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Game Change, Hillary Clinton, martha coakley

Among other things, the gay marriage trial unfolding in California has served as a referendum on the modern marriage and what it’s good for. The attorneys defending Proposition 8 have trotted out the usual reasons we should preserve it: procreation, the distinct roles of mothers and fathers, civil stability. Then last week they came up with a novel defense: “We can also agree that men can’t breastfeed, and breastfeeding clearly has benefits for children in that it provides sources of immunity that are beneficial to children.” In her dispatches on the trial, The New Yorker's Margaret Talbot dissects this comical logic.

Now, one of the things that happens when people are staking out positions in a culture-war trial like this is that they can end up sounding curiously like their opposite numbers—in this case, a conservative male upholder of traditional marriage sounds like a crunchy, feminist La Leche Leaguer. But this also strikes me as a rather problematic point—and not unlike the argument that marriage is for procreation. Plenty of mothers don’t breastfeed, despite the fact that they are physically equipped to do so, and no one would seriously contend that such a choice should disqualify them from parenthood.

Tags: gay marriage and breast feeding, gay marriage trial, Perry v. Schwarzenegger

Last week Emily reminded us that if elected, Martha Coakley will stand vigilant against the worship of Satan. This starstruck 1999 profile of Coakley, unearthed by Dan Riehl, suggests that her perchant for prosecutorial excess extends beyond distaste for alleged ritual abuse. Coakley is portrayed as a complete badass: "A problem solver ... a doer. Icy. Unflappable ... shaking hands in the night, her brilliant yellow hair glinting beneath the street lamp, those shimmering pumps pivoting on the pavement." (I am not making this up.) Her greatest achievement at this point was the zealous prosecution of 19-year-old Louise Woodward, the British nanny convicted of shaking an 8-month-old to death. This was the case that introduced the United States to the term "shaken baby syndrome." Coakley is pretty jazzed about the whole thing, though probably not as excited as the profile writer:

No one knows the benefit of exposure better than Coakley. She was a relatively anonymous assistant prosecutor in the Middlesex office until the media explosion that engulfed the Woodward case slapped her into the red plush armchair of the Today Show and onto television screens around the world... Coakley was the victor in the long, tangled process that was the nanny case. It was she, the most poised, media-savvy member of the prosecutorial team, who was generally put forth instead of lead prosecutor Gerard T. Leone to field press questions and appear on a platoon of television shows, including 60 Minutes. Her opponents in the DA's race criticized her for exploiting the case for political gain and for using an image from the trial in a campaign ad.

The prosecution's decision to seek first-degree murder charges looks less glowing in retrospect. The science on which Woodward was convicted has been discredited; the prosecution's own medical expert reversed his opinion in 2007. Woodward was very possibly an innocent 19-year-old, separated from her family and country, subject to the wild accusations of publicity-seeking prosecutors. One can make excuses for Coakley, who was only the most public part of her team, but her ascendance reveals something about the incentive structure with which ambitious district attorneys are faced. Overreach is rewarded. If she goes down in the polls today it won't be because she was too willing to indulge the fantasies of the electorate.

Tags: Louise Woodward, martha coakley, Shaken Baby Syndome

There's a new report out from the Pew Research Center called "The Rise of Wives." According to the new research, more and more men are married to women with higher levels of education and earning power than they have. The Washington Post quotes the report's co-author Richard Fry as saying, "What's radically changed is that marriage now is a better deal for men." In 1970, unmarried men did better economically than married men, but now that's not the case, Fry says. Marriage rates overall have declined. In 1970, 84 percent of people ages 30-44 were married. Now only 60 percent of people in that age range are wed.

At the same time, there are slew of books out just this year that involve educated women lamenting the difficulty they've had in finding a mate: Marry Him, by Lori Gottleib, In Her Own Sweet Time, by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, and A Little Bit Married by Hannah Seligson are among them. While the first two are memoirs, Seligson's is more of a self-help workbook for people (mostly women) who are stuck in long term, "marriage-lite" relationships and want to figure out if they should get married or cut ties. She has an article in the Daily Beast today listing the reasons why people are so reluctant to get married. One of the reasons that she gives is that men do not want to settle down unless they feel like they are economically secure. "Careers are now something we have many of and the path to them is often murky, at best. ... For men in particular, this new order of events is causing an interference with mating—research has consistently shown that whether and when a man marries is closely tied to the adequacy and stability of his earnings."

Here's the rub: Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz tells NPR that women don't care that much about male career establishment anymore. According to Coontz, women say "overwhelmingly—87 percent—that it's more important to have a man who can communicate well, who can be intimate and who will share the housework than to have someone who makes more money than you do." Perhaps that's part of why the marriage rate has dropped considerably—modern men and women want different things, and their desires are not yet aligned.

Photograph of couple by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: a little big married, hannah seligson, in her own sweet time, marriage, pew research

Last Friday, blogger and professor Clay Shirky posted an interesting, if unfortunately titled ("A Rant About Women"), blog entry about how women screw themselves career-wise by not acting like self-aggrandizing jerks when the moment calls for it. He starts with a story about a student who asked him for a recommendation and submitted a screed of personal merits so overblown and fantastical that it "would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush." But the result of the student's pomposity was not a bad recommendation; rather, Shirky, in the process of toning down the letter, realizes that he ended up writing the best letter of recommendation of his life for this student. And probably undeservedly. The gender of the student? Male.

Shirky goes on to lament the fact that in his years of teaching and working, the talented women around him never really mastered the role of egotistical self-promoters, even when obnoxious behavior would benefit them, even when the men around them do. He writes:

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.

It's a valid point—if, ironically, a little bit overblown. (I know plenty of women who are comfortable with blatant self-promotion. Myself included.) But what Shirky doesn't delve into in his post is that the world responds to women acting like pompous blowhards in a much different way than it reacts to men doing so. To some degree, a man taking what he thinks he deserves, outright and forcefully, is just, y'know, being a man. A woman doing the same immediately marks herself as a bitch, a dyke, or other unsavory labels. It's a cultural message reinforced all the time—as Jess just pointed out, Sandra Bullock was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in the The Proposal, a movie that was essentially a Taming of the Shrew remake wherein the powerful, hated boss lady just needs to be taken down a notch—and her lowly assistant's boner is just the trick. (One of the last lines of the movie is an employee shouting to Reynolds before he kisses Bullock: "Show her who's boss!")

If women aren't good at self-aggrandizing, it's probably not an innate character default, it's because self-aggrandizing doesn't work for women the same way it works for men. And one learns behavior that works. I know a woman who confronted her boss after she was passed up for a promotion only to be torn down, called arrogant and too big for her britches, and subsequently set back at work because she dared ask about a promotion she rightfully deserved. Teaching women self-advancement techniques doesn't do much when those traits are, for the most part, only valued in men.

Photograph of Ivanka Trump by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

Tags: clay shirky, self-promotion, women at work

Those of us on the left more inclined to see the value in old school tactics like collective action mainly like to cite effectiveness as the reason, with a side dish of increased opportunties to create alliances and friendships while breaking down arbitrary boundaries. But add one more reason to the pile: It could save your marriage. As someone who has more than a little bit of angst about personal responsibilities to be green, even I could not refrain from rolling my eyes at couples who are torn up fighting each other over moral purity rituals in the name of environmentalism.

Clearly, the government doesn't need to create such strict mileage laws as to ban SUVs strictly to save the planet; they need to do it to keep the peace in families, if holidays are being ruined over fights about whether or not someone is a goody-two-shoes-know-it-all because they get mad at the phallic-issues cases in their families who drive SUVs. That, or your family needs a few unrepentant racists and men who crack jokes about women drivers so you have something more pressing to fight about.

As long as environmentalism dwells in the no-man's land of consumer choice, I fail to see much value in bugging your significant other because the clash betweeen their commitment to the planet and commitment to personal comfort shakes out differently than yours. I've been a vegetarian for seven years and managed to get my driving down to nearly nothing even when living in Texas and dating someone less committed to the bicycle and more committed to the BBQ plate. Instead of this causing fights, though, I left him alone and he praised me for at least moving him more in the right direction. And I borrowed his car when I had a big grocery run. When you see yourself as less than perfect, it's easy enough to avoid riding someone else's ass for environmental imperfections. Especially since few of us are reducing our carbon footprint to zero by living off the land in mud huts. Plus, our choice to avoid having kids probably does more for our carbon footprint bona fides than all the cold showers and long bicycle rides you can imagine put together.

Then again, that's within the good ol' conjugal home. No matter how conflict-averse you are, if you're visibly "green" in any way, that will cause people who feel guilty to decide to jump all over you for being a goody-two-shoes, and this sadly often includes family members. It took years of stubborn refusal to eat meat and protection from my mother before some of my extended family stopped giving me hell over my holiday plates laden down with side dishes, even though I'm the queen of skipping the meat without saying a word. Even in my former hometown of Austin, which is generally a liberal place, bicyclists will occasionally get aggressive treatment from drivers who perceive a smugness in your cheery, exercise-receiving bicyclist demeanor.

If being green means anything to you, you have to learn to live with this. It helps to remember that they're likely acting out because they feel guilty. The mother in this story who claims that food tastes better off Styrofoam sounds infuriating because she's obviously in deep denial, but on the flip side, you have to laugh at the idea. It's almost as preposterous as saying that you prefer the smell of exhaust fumes to the clean air of the untouched wilderness.

Photograph of couple by Digital Vision/Getty Images.

Tags: environmentalism, going green, marriage

James Cameron’s waxy face and silvery mop of hair were far more irritating the second time he climbed the Golden Globe stage. Did Avatar deserve the award for best drama? Well, if your definition of cinematic greatness is a whiplashing moviegoing experience and genius use of CGI technology, then yes. If you need a nuanced story, intelligent writing, and developed characters, then no. Both positions are defendable. My personal prejudices tend more to the latter.

What really added the sting to Cameron’s second victory was Kathryn Bigelow in the audience, who directed the Iraq war drama TheHurt Locker. Seven critics' groups named Bigelow the year’s best director, while five called her film best picture. No critical circle gave Cameron a best director nod for Avatar. If Bigelow had won the Golden Globe for either best director or best drama, she would have been the first woman ever to do so. Bigelow is also Cameron’s third of five wives. Cameron is Bigelow’s only husband to date.

The Hurt Locker’s third Golden Globe nomination was in the best screenplay category, while Avatar’s other nominations were for the original score. So even the Hollywood Foreign Press knew deep down that The Hurt Locker was a better movie, if we take depth and originality of story as fundamental judging criteria. “Frankly, I thought Kathryn was gonna get this,” Cameron even admitted in his best director acceptance speech.

There was a quick shot of Bigelow, too—part of the traditional schadenfreundlich loser montage. Look how well he hides his pain! Look how you can sort of see her pain in her left eye muscles! Look how he’s practically crying!

Cameron and Bigelow seem amiable. Four years after their divorce in 1991, they even collaborated. Cameron wrote and produced Strange Days, which Bigelow directed. But really, Cameron has been working on Avatar since 1994. He had 15 years to release his monster spectacle and yet had to do it the same year his ex-wife, struggling for decades in the boys’ club of Hollywood, made the most critically beloved movie of the year?

My bitterness really comes from his acceptance speech. Mo’Nique set the tone for the evening. She dedicated her best supporting actress award to victims of sexual abuse and, staring at her husband, remembered their more modest past: "I look into the eyes of the man that I stood next to at 14 years old and said, 'We're gonna be stars...' He said, 'You first.' ”

Cameron chose not to weave a tale of dreams-comes-true or speak against injustice or defend his obvious fortune in a time of global trauma. “I just think this is the best job in the world,” he said. “You know ... it just really is.” Yes, James Cameron, it’s probably pretty sweet to be a multimillionaire artist, so adored that kids are threatening to kill themselves on Internet chatrooms in order to escape to the fantasy world of your brain.

“I just wanted to say give up for yourselves,” he continued. Really? Isn’t that what the whole ceremony is for? “We all have the best job in the world and what we do is we make entertainment for a global audience. And that’s what the Golden Globes mean.” It was a masterful performance of self-congratulation, while at the same time justifying Avatar's victory over The Hurt Locker, a film that lacks the global language of in-your-face rainforest.

All the women who gave speeches throughout the evening managed to channel surprise, humility, and emotional paralysis. Even Meryl Streep, no stranger to the Beverly Hills Hotel stage, admitted relying on the memory of her mother for the strength to grin at the flash bulbs, given the tragedy in Haiti. Is it that men can get away with callous displays of self-love, while women can’t? Or can a man only get away with it if he’s made the two top-grossing films of all time?

Tags: avatar, golden globes, Hurt Locker, James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow