The other day, the Guardian published a list of its favorite literary stepmothers, scouring children's classics for the few that aren't just pure, unredeemable evil. Here at DoubleX, we asked: Why are stepmothers always pure, unredeemable evil? And why do characters' biological parents so frequently have to die?

Meredith Simons: Just last week, my mom asked me, "Why doesn't Disney make a movie about a wicked stepchild?" I'm biased, but my impression of blended family situations is that often stepparents enter a marriage with genuinely good intentions and affection for their stepkids. The kids, meanwhile, feel an almost innate desire to sabotage, undermine, and generally make the stepparent miserable. Yet this doesn't seem to be reflected in our literary (or at least fairy tale) canon. There's only one put-upon stepmother on the Guardian's list.

Rachael Larimore: Can anyone think of ANY Disney movie with two parents? It's a common trope among the old fairy tales, like Snow White and Cinderella . But even the more modern movies almost all have single parents.

Hillary Busis: Mulan had both her parents, but other than that, the only two-parent families I can think of come from much older Disney movies: Peter Pan and 101 Dalmatians .

Jenny Rogers: Sleeping Beauty . But I suppose she's torn from her parents.

Hillary Busis: Mulan and the kids in Peter Pan also spend most of the movie away from their parents.

Noreen Malone: Isn't that just the classic kid fantasy? In nearly every single game I played as a kid, we pretended we were orphans. No authority figures that way.

Dana Stevens: It's an age-old trope in children's lit—all the big Grimm's Fairy Tales have dead or absent mothers, replaced by mean stepmothers or bad moms who die in the course of the story, like Hansel and Gretel's. Even more modern kids' fiction, like The Secret Garden , A Little Princess , and my old fave Ballet Shoes , dispense with parents, especially female ones, early and unsentimentally.

Hanna Rosin: In all great children's books, kids used to be orphaned (and in some cases still are, like in Harry Potter and the The Mysterious Benedict Society ). Now at least they get one parent.

Claire Gordon: I think it's a Freudian thing. In James and the Giant Peach , the wonderful parents die, then James runs away from his abusive aunts and then travels the sea in a giant womb. Rereading the scene where he climbs up the sticky peach hole: awkward.

Dahlia Lithwick: Michael Chabon has a nice riff on this in his fatherhood book. That kids can't grow unless they are ditched. He says his kids would have to be frogmarched into the wardrobe at knifepoint to meet the lion.

Jessica Lambertson: Do you think the stories cause kids to fantasize about being orphaned or in some way abandoned? Is it just natural to imagine being alone to have adventures? My sister and I always imagined ourselves as parents in the new frontier (Laura Ingalls Wilder style). We turned the couch into a horse-drawn buggy and used our American Girl dolls as our babies, but we always had husbands, imagined though they were.

Dana Stevens: I think it's the opposite—the fantasies give rise to the stories, or rather, the stories that best speak to children's fantasies are the ones that survive for generations.

Jenny Rogers: In my childhood games, I was always an orphan and usually a maid. I blame Cinderella for these strange fantasies.

Tags: children, death, Disney, fairy tale, families, orphans, step mothers

Reading Matt Labash's skewering of the enviro-guru Low Impact Man, I snorted with laughter and overlooked the glints of climate-change denialism peeking out among the jokes. For about a minute. Then I read the piece again and launched a big e-mail argument with Matt, who is a friend of mine. It is in this spirit that I recommend his new book, Fly Fishing With Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys.

It's a collection of Matt's work, which means it's a collection of inflated egos, delicately punctured. You can hear the hiss as the air goes out of Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Sharpton, Marion Barry, and Roger Stone. At the same time, you'll also come away with some sympathy for these men, or at least their foibles. At moments, Matt gives a tutorial in gonzo journalism—hey, what's he doing on stage with Arnold? At other times, he is all appreciative audience, "mainlining the very soul of New Orleans," as he writes of a jazz musician he profiled in the city after Katrina. You may not agree with his every underlying theory. But go along for the ride. And then afterward, argue with him.

Tags: al sharpton, arnold schwarzenegger, book of the week, dick cheney, DoubleX Book of the Week, fly fishing with darth vader, marion barry, Matt Labash, roger stone

Emily B., Rachael, I'm not very comfortable with the idea of soft-focus ads either for or against choice. Although I still agree with Jess that the Tebow ad isn't the end of the world, I really think this is one of the few things that just can't be marketed—and to the extent that it can, the powerful positive imagery is nearly all on the side of "life." I am as uncomfortable as Will Saletan about an ad advising women to go against their doctor's advice and carry a pregnancy to term that might kill them. I can imagine, too, many situations in which a woman might be pressured to do just that. It's wonderful that the Tebow's situation worked out as it did, but I am sure that most of us know people who hoped for a similar miracle and didn't get it.

So yes, Rachael, your ad would be an improvement. Happy people, here because their mothers chose life—who could argue with that? You would, I imagine, skip the flip side—unhappy people, say, or the kid reduced to being a lookout for the corner dealer because his mom can't or didn't buy him anything to eat today, or anyone whose quality of life might be aesthetically less-than-appealing. And that's fine—because no one wants to actually sell abortion. But I'd argue that your ad is disingenuous—because you're selling babies, not a world where abortion is illegal. An honest ad for that would include babies, sure, but it would also feature graveyards and clothes hangers. The alternative to safe, legal abortion isn't safe, happy families. It's much more complicated than that.

I could envision an ad to counter the Tebow ad—one featuring a different family in a different world, one where that Tebow ad and others like it have been successful, and Roe v. Wade not just overturned but crushed in many parts of the country. A lineup of four kids, perhaps, with the oldest one speaking. "Our dad says our mom was a wonderful woman," she says. "She was pregnant, and there were problems, and some doctors told her that having the baby might kill her. But some doctors disagreed, and in our state, she didn't have any choice. She hoped she'd be one of the lucky ones, but she wasn't. We miss her." That's an ad I hope we never see.

Photograph of Tim Tebow by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images.

Yesterday, Jessica Wakeman of the Frisky asked Lori Gottlieb about the article I wrote earlier this week about Gottlieb's book, Marry Him: the Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. To recap, Gottlieb's argument is that college-educated women in their late 30s and early 40s who are still single are without husbands because they were too picky when they were younger and more marketable. In my Slate piece, I quote statistics she uses directly from her book to show that her argument is not grounded in data: Marriage rates are still quite strong for college-educated women, and overall marriage rates have dropped in the United States because the least-educated women are not getting married.

"I don’t see how that speaks to anything that I say in the book," Gottlieb says of my article. "What I’m saying in the book is for those people who are not married and who want to be married and are wondering why they’re not, here’s what I learned and maybe you can apply that to your own life, too." This is disingenuous. She is not benignly trying to share her experiences, she's trying to scare women. As Liesl Schillinger notes in the Daily Beast, Gottlieb "intends this book, she writes, as a blood-chilling cautionary tale, 'like those graphic anti-drunk driving public service announcements that show people crashing into poles and getting killed.'" And Gottlieb very explicitly tries to make the case—using statistics—that there are a lot of women who need this graphic PSA. Check out this passage from her prologue, called "The Husband Store," about the traits she desires in a mate:

Basically, my Husband Store went from a six-story bulding to the world's tallest sky scraper. And I didn't think I was alone. Could the be one reason that in 1975, almost 90 percent of women in the United States were married by age 30 but in 2004, only a little more than half were? Or why the percentage of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Burean (from 25-44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?"

As I said in my piece: No. Those statistics have nothing to do with upper-middle-class women having "unconscious husband-shopping lists" a million pages long. Of course, I do give her credit for making a provocative argument for the narrow slice of women to whom she is speaking. I don't deny that there are successful women out there who are too picky or overly entitled.

But then Gottlieb gets personal:

Some of these people are really addressing their own issues. I understand. What’s exciting about this is they’re really touching a nerve and it’s getting people to think and I hope people will be open-minded. I think what Jessica [Grose] was doing there was, she’s probably highly-educated and she’s probably one of those women who’s saying, "Well, we do fine! We eventually get married!"

Gottlieb's condescending implication seems to be that my piece was written out of defensiveness—and not because I found her argument lacking in solid data. If this is really what she is telegraphing—I'm just one of "those women" addressing my "own issues," it's insulting, not just to me, but to female journalists in general. Any woman who criticizes her book, Gottlieb is saying, must be doing so because she's has her "own issues" about marriage and is lashing out. We're all so emotional, we can't possibly have rational arguments against her!

In reality, my piece was not written because of personal problems with marriage (I'm engaged). I am not "one of those women" as she put it, but even if I were, that wouldn't make my original objections to the book any less sound. I'm going to finish this post with a little more from Liesl in the Daily Beast, because she puts it better than I could:

There’s such a thing as luck, and there’s such a thing as love. Sometimes the two forces combine, sometimes, they don’t. If luck and love had combined for Gottlieb, today she might be a housewife in Teaneck with an SUV of her own, two kids and a mortgage, and she would not have had the need or the time to have built her fabulous career, or to have written this whining, corrosive, capricious book.

Photograph of woman by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: lori gottlieb, marry him: the case for settling for mr. good enough

Edwards' family, take note: There's life after public scandal after all. According to the Daily Beast, insiders say one Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor and rough-sex-with-call-girls-enthusiast, is considering a return to politics. Says one family friend:

He wants to be relevant ... I think he keeps toying with it—running against Kirsten Gillibrand or running for comptroller. He doesn't have to raise the money. He already has the money, if he decides to do it. I told him he had to consider if this was something he wanted to drag his family back through again, especially if there is anything else [that is, a fresh scandal] out there.

The bizarre truth is that sexual scandals no longer hold anyone back, or at least not for long, it seems. Ashley Dupré, Spitzer's call girl and possessor of the much-touted "best vagina in New York" (I imagine that means it emits warm light and automatically syncs to iTunes playlists?) now has her own New York Post advice column. It took Bill Clinton more than a few years to bounce back into public favor after his sex scandal, but a mere nine months after resigning from governorship, Spitzer was writing financial columns and appearning on a host of cable talk shows on the regular. At this point in time, all the details of Spitzer's sordid sex life, the ones that were so fascinating and grotesquely tabloid just two years ago—he wouldn't take off his black socks during sessions, he insisted on rough, bareback choke-sex—seem like white noise. For as harsh as public opinion is during the height of a scandal, we are a very forgiving, and forgetful, bunch.

Photograph of Eliot Spitzer by Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images.

Tags: Eliot Spitzer, public office, sex scandals

I agree with Jack Shafer that the ritual self-criticism Rahm Emanuel was forced to engage in for using the word “retarded” is ultimately counterproductive,  even if it makes sense to retire the word as a medical description. But I have my own case to make for retiring a commonly misused medical term. In a recent piece on whether Barack Obama is the next Jimmy Carter (dear God, please, no), Walter Russell Mead describes Obama’s “split personality” on foreign policy and then writes, “Afghanistan is a case study in presidential schizophrenia.” I often see the word schizophrenia used to describe conflicting impulses in mentally healthy people, but this does a disservice to our understanding of this devastating disease. Schizophrenia is characterized by delusions, social withdrawal, and malfunction. It’s just wrong to use it to describe a person who has rational but incompatable impulses. If Mead felt Obama was delusional about foreign affairs, the label might have fit. But saying someone has schizophrenia rarely works as a figure of speech.

Photograph of Rahm Emanuel by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Tags: language, schizophrenia

—Authorities in Alaska claim that Sarah Palin failed to pay taxes on two house-sized "cabins" built on her land. [AP]

—Nancy Pelosi hinted that Democrats may wait until after midterm elections to vote on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. [Politico]

—Turkish teen was buried alive by family members in an honor killing. The crime? Talking to boys. [Guardian]

—Illinois Democrats picked a lieutenant governor who dates hookers and has been accused of beating and raping his ex-wife. [Gawker]

—DoubleX contributor Rebecca Skloot has a new book about Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cancer cells populate biology labs all over the world. While Lacks' descendants languish in poverty, her cells continue to contribute to some of the most important advances in medicine. [New York Times]

—Olympic skier Lindsay Vonn talks about family, competition, and crouching on the cover of Sports Illustrated. [New York Times Magazine]

Tags: bioethics, don't ask don't tell, female athletes, honor killins, Nancy Pelosi, olympics, politics, Sarah Palin