The oddity of Charlotte Allen’s entertaining Weekly Standard cover story begins, well, on the cover, in which we learn that “thousands of years of human mating rituals are vanishing.” (Thousands of years? What ritual popular in year 10 are we on the cusp of losing?) The article proceeds much as one would expect. We visit with Tucker Max. We get long, lurid descriptions of sexual encounters, which we are then invited to denounce. We confirm my long-held hypothesis that if anyone associated with the Independent Women’s Forum goes 10 seconds without mentioning a middling play called The Vagina Monologues, she will effect a rip in the space-time continuum.

It’s a whirlwind journey through the landscape of the traditionalist mind, and perhaps inevitably, we alight upon the subject of the “seduction community.” Allen is sympathetic; loose women reap what they sow. In this Allen agrees with the more subtle Kay Hymowitz, another social conservative who has written about angry, undersexed men and the game to which they turn. There is a confluence at work here between the pick-up artists and the social cons. The seduction people are taken as evidence for something that social conservatives very much want to believe—that a world in which women are free to sleep with whom they choose is a world in which women are necessarily treated with scorn and derision. There is a shared vocabulary based on primitive notions of evolutionary psychology: dominance, alpha, hunter. There is the kind of mechanistic logic traditionalists love to deploy in these discussions: cows, milk.

Among the many bizarre statements Allen makes is the following: “No woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives.” The world I live in is not so homogenous in its preferences, but Allen does have enough journalistic integrity to source her statement. She delivers to us a quote from a single anonymous blogger who fancies himself a master of seduction. That guy thinks wives should be virgins, ergo, every male is out for a parasol-wielding, intact maiden. We are overhearing a breathless conversation between tongue-clucking older women and disaffected young men. It is an orgy of confirmation bias, more vulgar—but perhaps more entertaining—than anything Allen can tell us about the depredations of modern dating.

Photograph by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: Charlotte Allen, non sequiturs, pick-up artists

What exactly constitutes “women’s fiction” is always a fraught question. As publishers market it, it’s book-club fodder: more intellectual and less materialistic than chick lit, but still relatable and stylistically accessible. At worst, it’s the literary equivalent of Lifetime: Television for Women. Lori Lansens’ 2006 bestseller The Girls, about a pair of conjoined twins, was an example of the genre near its best: a story of two female characters in rare circumstances so meticulously imagined that you couldn’t put it down.

Lansens' new novel, The Wife’s Tale, is more problematic. The wife is Mary Gooch, a middle-aged woman who has lived her whole life in a small Canadian town and been obese for most of it. On the eve of her 25th wedding anniversary, her husband, Gooch, disappears. Suddenly there is something she wants more than the massive quantities of food she consumes to mute a lifetime’s worth of worry and guilt. The woman who couldn’t bear being too far from her refrigerator follows Gooch’s trail to California.

The book’s main weakness is that the oversimplified moral nearly obscures the story. That moral is risky, a stand against the gospel of self-acceptance regularly preached to the exact demographic that reads Lansen’s books. The lesson we are meant to get out of Mary Gooch’s story is that fat people are inherently unhappy and losing weight makes them happier. A little more subtly, the book suggests that compulsive eating is, for women, an anti-feminist act. Mary Gooch feels so addicted to food that her ambitions are no greater than arranging her next binge; her release from that dependency parallels her decreasing emotional dependence on her husband.

And yet, Lansens’ rendering of the hell that is compulsive eating somehow transcends these overarching positions, eliciting simultaneously compassion, revulsion, and, for anyone who has ever struggled with emotional eating, undeniable recognition. And when Lansens isn’t indulging in the overwrought attempts at poetic language that give "women’s fiction" a bad name, Mary Gooch’s thoughts and gradual discovery that there is more to her than the eater and the wife, seem to arise from the character rather than the author. In other words, Mary Gooch becomes real and unforgettable.

Tags: book of the week, chick lit, DoubleX Book of the Week, lori lansens, the girls, the wife's tale, women's fiction

Valentine's Day is a high-pressure holiday with great possibilities for joy ... and disaster. In order to inject a bit of laughter into this potentially disappointing occasion, DoubleX contributors recollect the Valentine's Day memories they've tried to repress.

Emily Bazelon: On my worst Valentine's Day, my college boyfriend broke up with me. I deserved it but I didn't see it that way. I staggered out of his apartment. It was cold—thank you, February—and my hands were shaking. I couldn't unlock my bike, which was chained to a parking meter. I stood there, crying, and finally a man with a beard and a wool cap stopped and unlocked the bike for me. He was my Valentine's Day hero. Except then, of course, I had to ride home.

Ellen Tarlin: When I was in grade school, we used to exchange store-bought valentines in class. I had only bought enough for the girls in my class because I wasn't sure whether I should give any to the boys or not. I got the girls' ones all enveloped and labeled, but then I thought I should give some to the boys. Not having any storebought ones left, I made some with crayons, coloring in giant red hearts, and it seemed to take forever. But then I thought the fact that they were personally made might be misinterpreted. I was in Maine with my family for the weekend and I tied a rock to the Valentines and hurled them into the sea!

Jessica Grose: I'm not a big V-Day person but was looking forward to going out to a nice dinner with my now-fiance the first February 14th we were a couple. He was looking forward to it, too—until he got awful food poisoning the night before. He spent all of Valentine's day yakking. That night I went over and took care of his pukey self—which actually turned out to be a perversely sweet way to spend the evening. Nothing says I love you more than fetching someone ginger ale and crackers when they're laid low by bad chicken.

Lauren Bans: A few years ago, my boyfriend and I went to the candlelight dinner at White Castle. It was my first time consuming sliders, as I have an aversion to anything that one can gum instead of chew, and lo and behold I ended up getting really sick and ruining even the scant trace of tongue-in-cheek romance we had going. Come Valentine's Day the next year, our picture (we dressed in formal wear as a joke) ended up front and center on the White Castle homepage, though by then we were broken up.

Amanda Marcotte: I went out to a somewhat swank club with my then-boyfriend for Valentine's Day in my early 20s. Because I was wearing hose, I decided to skip the panties. Because I'd had a couple of drinks and didn't have a lot of experience walking in heels, I should have realized the high probability of what in fact happened, which is that I took a dive while walking through the club and flashed a rather private part of my body to the crowd. Good thing my date found it more funny than mortifying.

Hanna Rosin: My mom recently sent me a package of stuff she'd saved from my elementary school days. In the package was a red envelope with a valentine inside from "Your Secret Admirer." I opened it up, my heart beating. It said: "I really like your handwriting."

Jessica Dweck: I've always been single on Valentine's Day—perhaps that's one big horror story in itself. But as a connoisseur of sweets, I can never bring myself to hate such a candy-centric holiday. Whatever animus I feel toward all those saccharine couples nuzzling in public disappears when I raid the shelves of discount chocolate at my local drugstore the next day.

Photograph of woman by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: Valentine's Day, valentine's day disasters

The default assumption about the American male figure skater is that he is gay. No matter that he probably exhibits none of skater Johnny Weir’s famous flamboyance, which will be displayed prominently this evening at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, or that he may still wear a ring given to him by his ex-girlfriend, as reigning world champion Evan Lysacek admitted to doing in New York magazine. The assumption persists.

Compare that with the image of Russian heartthrob Ilia Kulik, who won the gold medal at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano. Tall, blond, and boyishly good looking, soon after his win he was named to People’s annual list of the 50 most beautiful people. He dated a Russian actress. He welcomed frequent comparisons to Leonardo DiCaprio. Numerous fansites emerged featuring breathless comments from female admirers. Kulik went on to court and marry the glamorous skater Ekaterina Gordeeva, whose figure skating partner and husband had died suddenly and tragically in 1995. He did all this after proudly donning a bright yellow and black giraffe print shirt under a white and black tuxedo vest for his moment of Olympic glory.

Kulik isn’t the only Russian skater to set hearts thumping. 2002 champion Alexei Yagudin and Vancouver contender Evgeni Plushenko are thought of as similarly dreamy. "Figure skating in Russia is not considered a feminine sport whatsoever," says Mauro Bruni, a former U.S. national competitor who has performed in Russia. "Actually, it is revered, and Russian figure skating champions, men and women alike, become sports heroes." One explanation for why being a male figure skater is so much more acceptable in Russian culture could be that Kulik and his countrymen did not select their own vocation under the Soviet regime. If they exhibited talent, they were plucked from the masses for intensive training in a figure skating machine that was exceedingly well funded by the state. It’s hard to stigmatize a guy who was more or less forced into his position. Though that old system crumbled along with the Berlin Wall and communism, but the idea of skating as a masculine activity stuck.

In the United States, though, children generally choose their activities. A little boy would typically have to express a personal inclination toward the elegance, athleticism, and solitude that define figure skating before his parents would sign him up for lessons. Gay or not, these boys possess the very traits that fall beyond the narrowly defined American definition of acceptable masculinity.

Photograph of Ilia Kulik by Mike Powell/Getty Images.

Tags: evan lysacek, ilia kulik, johnny weir, male figure skaters, vancouver winter olymics

—Sarah Palin, the consummate elitist-bashing elitist. [Salon, Washington Post]

—According to a new Washington Post-ABC news poll, three-quarters of Americans support gays serving openly in the military. LGBT advocates hope these findings will motivate President Obama to get moving on his promise to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." [Washington Post]

—Research shows that daytime-TV viewers now prefer Ellen DeGeneres to Oprah Winfrey. [New York Times]

—Just in time for Valentine's Day, chick-flick auteur Nora Ephron picks her favorite romantic comedies. [The Daily Beast]

—White House peeved by Nancy Pelosi's increasingly public disagreements with the President. [Politico]

—Lisa Belkin explores the effect of pregnancy on memory. [New York Times]

Photograph of Ellen DeGeneres by Ethan Miller/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: congress, don't ask don't tell, memory, Nancy Pelosi, nora ephron, politics, pregnancy, romantic comedies, Sarah Palin

It's hard not to speculate about the suicide of Alexander McQueen: What drove him to tie a noose and hang himself? Various possibilities have been trotted out. There is the 2007 suicide of his earliest supporter and confidant Isabella Blow, the woman who singlehandedly lifted him out from poverty. She tracked him down after his student show at Central Saint Martin's in 1991 and bought his collection for 5,000 pounds, which McQueen promptly hand-delivered—in trash bags.

McQueen suffered another great loss last week. His beloved mother Joyce died. She was his greatest booster. I don't mean to diminish his suffering, but perhaps we should pause for a moment and look back at his recent dystopian work—because the man was a genius artist, and there was a perceptible shift that occurred one year ago in his fall 2009 collection.

Critic Sarah Mower wrote this after viewing:

It was certainly meant as a last-stand fin de siècle blast against the predicament in which fashion, and possibly consumerism as a whole, finds itself. The set was a scrap heap of debris from the stages of McQueen's own past shows, surrounded by a shattered glass runway. The clothes were, for the most part, high-drama satires of twentieth-century landmark fashion: parodies of Christian Dior houndstooth New Look and Chanel tweed suits, moving through harsh orange and black harlequinade looks to revisited showstoppers from McQueen's own archive

As I clicked through the slides, I felt despair and sorrow. It was the first time a fashion show—viewed on a laptop screen in slideshow format, no less—made me cry. The trash-bag fabrics, the recycled silhouettes, the magpie prints, the grotesque red lips parodying cosmetic surgery ... the scrap heap. The show was not suggestive of anything. It was retrospective, darker than anything I have ever seen on a catwalk. I wondered: What else can he say? I considered the possibility that the show might be his last. It had all the elements of a grand farewell.

The genius took his own life, but his work remains. Of course McQueen will never run out things to say.

Photograph from Alexander McQueen's 2009 collection by Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: alexander mcqueen, fashion week