Ha, Amanda, I don't think there will be a slew of takers for your Wonder Woman wife. Or rather for Dr. William Moulton Marston's. It sounds too much like the unsettling, self-abnegating arrangement at the center of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, not to mention Big Love. Myself, I've actually switched from making the I-want-a-wife joke to longing for a secretary—the old-fashioned kind who picks up the dry cleaning and buys birthday presents for my kids' friends (not for my own children; I haven't sunk that low). I also really like the idea Lisa Belkin flagged from this academic article, "Housework Is an Academic Issue." The authors suggest an employer-provided housework benefit: Money that you can spend on whatever part of taking care of your home that you don't want to do yourself. Of course, this could also just be called a raise. But I like the idea of bosses out there recognizing this as a real, felt need that's worth a serious response.

Tags: housework, Lisa Belkin

We're looking for summer interns for Double X. Interested applicants should e-mail us a résumé, three clips (published articles, blog entries, and classroom assignments all acceptable), and a short critique of the site. Interns must be able to commit to at least four days a week. Ideally applicants will work from the New York office but we will consider applicants in Washington, D.C. The deadline for applications is March 1.

Tags: summer internship

There’s no question, as Charles Schulz once said, that, “Happiness is a warm puppy.” For every baby-sitter-gets-hardcore-DPed video on the Internet, there’s a clip of sleepy-eyed, murmuring golden retrievers rolling around in a picnic basket. Even scientists have enumerated on the value of Snoopy: Pet owners recover faster from heart attacks than non-pet-owners do, children who grow up with dogs turn out to be more empathetic. Apparently man’s best friend helps in the sack, too—a 2008 study proved what you already knew if you’ve ever seen, oh, any C-grade romantic comedy: Men with dogs snag more female phone numbers than men without.

But what do we do for our dogs exactly? It’s the central question of John Homans' piece “The Rise of Dog Identity Politics” in this week's New York magazine. When Lassie, the quintessential dog of the ‘50s, dies, she goes to the big farmhouse in the sky. But urban dogs, whose numbers are ever-growing, don’t have a backyard to play in, let alone the faintest conception of the idyllic pasture where a dog can run around and just be, you know, a dog. When a New York dog passes, she goes to the big tray of all-organic, vegan, flax-seed-peanut butter dog treats in heaven’s version of the Park Slope Paw-tisserie, then maybe to the doggie massage parlor in the sky. City living and city culture, Homans argues, are turning dogs with all their beastly glory into whimpering little beta-mammals, with a bad case of “learned helplessness.”

Of course, there’s some truth to this. My parents own a King Charles Cavalier. She’s the cutest, fattest ball of mammalian warmth and should come with the warning “May Cause Heart Murmurs,” but her life as a beast is somewhat neutered. She doesn’t walk on pavement in the summer (“Her paws get too hot!”), she eats organic chicken drizzled in flax oil for dinner, and she has a doggie stroller in case she gets too tired on her walks. (Yes, I just linked to a YouTube video of my own dog in her stroller. Sorry.) But it’s also hard not to read this article as a tie-in to the recent deluge of anxiety-mongering pieces devoted to the great “downside” of feminism and the liberal city culture it created: the neutering of just about everything “male.” First there was the Katie Roiphe piece positioning the new male author as a ball-less, sexual wimp compared with the animalistic lust of Roth and Updike. Now is seems like we’ve ruined the basic essence of our pets, too.

Tags: dogs, feminization, new york magazine

At 90, Doris "Granny D" Haddock walked across the United States to raise awareness for campaign reform. At 94, she ran for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. She has often credited her longevity to the vigor of her drive for political reform, but I'm pretty sure she would have liked to sit back and eat a little cake last week instead of watching the Supreme Court open up a whole new world of corporate ability to influence elections.

Campaign finance reform isn't often a human interest story, but Granny D made it one. What news outlet could resist a woman in her 90s willing to call a corrupt spade a spade? At 100, she's still advocating reform, and wisely taking the new ruling as an opportunity to call attention again to the problems that still exist in campaign financing—an issue that's easy to ignore. I shop in a bookstore that offers a discount to members, but you can only sign up online, and I never think about signing up except when I'm actually at the cash register. Most Americans don't think much about reforming campaign financing except when we're in the middle of a campaign, but maybe now, with states addressing this ruling and more advocacy from Granny D, we'll see real change.

Kudos to Sandra Tsing Loh for recycling an old joke into an article in the New York Times for which she was no doubt highly paid. I remember my divorced mother and her divorced and nondivorced friends sitting around laughing about how they wanted wives of their own so that they could come home to dinner cooked and kids behaving. Tsing Loh's piece echoes a famous feminist satire by Judy Syfers titled "I Want A Wife" that ran in the first issue of Ms. magazine. Of course, Tsing Loh and Syfers were making different points. Syfers was using humor to expose the male selfishness that perpetuated women's oppression in the home, and Tsing Loh is taking for granted many feminist gains. And Tsing Loh is so funny that she squeezes some freshness out of that old lemon.

Being the dork that I am, I can't help but point out to those who make jokes about wanting wives that non-lesbian-identified women have, on very rare occasions, been able to live the dream. Just last night, I read about such a household set-up in the course of reading a history of comic books. Dr. William Moulton Marston, who created Wonder Woman under the pen name Charles Moulton, was married, and he and his wife Elizabeth had another wife named Olive Byrne, who played the role of housewife while Elizabeth Marston was the primary breadwinner for much of the marriage. Each woman in the marriage had two children, but Olive raised them all, and I have few doubts she also aped the role of the Manhattan-shaking, slipper-bearing, enraptured-listening housewife. So Tsing Loh and other straight women who long for this, know that it's possible to have the housewife of your dreams, if you're willing to let your man sleep with someone younger and more compliant than you. Of course, putting it that way makes mixing your own Manhattans seem like not that much work at all.

(I don't want to paint William Marston as a patriarchal monster, however. He was just a weird dude, and was devoted both to fantasies of BDSM and his strong belief in female superiority. He explicitly saw Wonder Woman as propaganda aimed at ushering in a new era when men would relinquish rule to women, whom he saw as naturally more gentle and wise. All of which casts the feminist adoption of Wonder Woman into a comical light, since very few feminists want more than mere equality with men.)

Of course, the catch to all this is that even for those of us willing to swallow our jealousies and control over our homes to collect a conjugal third to play the role of housewife, there probably are even fewer takers than you'd get in the 1930s. Nowadays, even men who are willing to settle for uninteresting, unambitious women who'll play housewife have trouble finding any takers. Good luck hitting that jackpot of someone open-minded enough to be your third but unambitious enough to give up any hope of a career.

Photograph of woman by George Marks/Retrofile RF/Getty Images.

Tags: housewives, wonder woman