On Feb. 22, Forward writer Elissa Strauss asked a number of editors from thought-leader publications to respond to a report from the organization VIDA about the paucity of female bylines in their pages. (Read Slate’s take on the VIDA research here and here.) The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait told Strauss, "I've come across several writers in my career who are good at writing in the argumentative style but lack confidence in their ability. They are all female." If you can get past Chait's somewhat patronizing tone, he has a bit of a point about confidence. Which brings me to mine: Women are not well represented in the most respected publications because they lack mentors.

The experience of being an intern at one of these magazines gave me insight into the way men and women are treated differently. While it might not be overt sexism (though there is some of that as well), the problem is more that women face an encouragement deficit. In other industries, it has been proven that women with mentors at work do far better, receiving more promotions and higher pay than those who have no one advocating for them

Perhaps the mostly male editors at these magazines take a rather fatherly approach to mentoring and prefer to find a budding writer to groom who reminds them of their young selves. That’s what I observed at the Atlantic. There were 12 editorial interns when I was there in 2010, five of whom were men, which from the outside is a great ratio for women. However, at the end of the six month-long internship, three people were offered editorial positions in the company and they were all men.

During the internship, the views and opinions of these same three were encouraged. I'd watch male editors stop by their desks just to talk or tell a joke and their pieces for the Web site were praised and discussed at meetings. Writers by nature are needy people, and the attention that was batted back and forth between men at the office felt like a game we women weren't invited to. So we worked quietly, cheering ourselves up with baked goods while the others were able to build a professional network. The men became more confident and secure with time, whereas I grew confused and isolated, desperate for somebody to tell me I was doing something right. My female peers felt the same way. Looking back at my lack of self-esteem by the end of the experience, I might not have hired myself either.

The worst part was that I only took the internship to find a mentor. I was old for an intern, already 28 when I started. It was next to impossible. Instead of being given useful advice, I was told to give up when I was struggling to figure out how to pitch ideas.  In an encounter I had before my Atlantic internship, I was told to "stop being such a Pollyanna" once when I expressed the desire to publish something in a magazine the person I was speaking to deemed above my weight class.

It has worked out relatively well for me, but I think about how much better my life would have been for the past decade if I had found someone to mentor me.

Tags: VIDA, women and bylines

All together now, please, ladies: "Motherhood is my greatest role. My children are the center of my life." Last night, at the Oscars, it was Natalie Portman spouting the party line so often offered by everyone from, well, Natalie Portman to Michelle Obama. I've complained about this before, and I stand by it—every time a powerful woman downplays her other achievements as inferior to her maternal status, she feeds the doubt that still pursue working mothers at every end of the spectrum: Will she really take her work seriously or will she put her children first? Children are wonderful, family fantastic, but, as Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams asks, "Is reproduction automatically the greatest thing Natalie Portman will do with her life?"

But I find myself wanting to cut Natalie some slack. She's pregnant, after all. It was an Oscar speech. It was a cute way to slide her fiance and baby-father into her list of those being thanked, and if a few grinch-y celebrity watchers doubt the permanency of the star's commitment to her choreographer, well, they're just a bunch of meanies, that's all. As for impending motherhood, the "greatest role" of her life? Let her have her babymoon. Soon enough, she'll be frantically trying to figure out exactly what "putting your kids first" really means in the context of a career, just like thousands of women before her (only, of course, as HuffPo pointed out in including "Movie Star" on its tongue-in-cheek list of the 100 Best Jobs for Moms, with a trainer and a crack team of nannies at her call). Maybe she'll always feel like motherhood is her greatest role. But it probably won't be her last.

Tags: natalie portman motherhood, natalie portman speech

Hey, batterers: Do me a favor. Move to New York City. There are five boroughs, it's a big place. So just move ANYWHERE in New York City. Please.

Since last year all prisoner calls there, save for those to physicians or their attorneys, have been recorded, and boy have they been helpful to domestic violence prosecutors.  Here's what these face-burning, chick-punching, child-abusing sphincters say to their victims while staring at an "All Calls Are Taped" sign:

“I need you to prepare the kids to start lying.”

“Whatever you do ... do not speak to the D.A.”

“I just stuck her like a little.”

It's hard to choose, but this one might be my fave:  “I need you right now in my corner,” begged Eric Persaud, the man charged with branding his girlfriend’s cheeks with [an] iron. He had a strategy, he said: She should vanish for the trial. “ 'I’m smarter than you,' he said in one of what prosecutors have said were 437 calls from Rikers Island."

According to the Times, 1,200 such calls seems to be the record. Given that 75 percent of victims drop their cases or stop cooperating before trial, these tapes have been crucial in proceeding without a victim and in convincing juries of just how the abusers go about controlling their prey.

Liberal/libertarian as I am, I can't imagine running a jail whose inmates could concoct all the escape, violence, and smuggling schemes they saw fit, so I see no way around reading their mail and listening in on their calls. For months at a time over the years, I've visited and traded letters and phone calls with the incarcerated and certainly assumed we were being monitored. I've sent inmates weeks' worth of letters and hundreds of dollars worth of books (they must come directly from the publisher) that "never arrived." There needs to be a way for inmates to get word out of abuse and the like, though unmonitored phone calls to anyone at all are not that way.

But catching these perps with their own words? Not too shabby.

Tags: criminal justice, feminism, New York State, technology

Ireland might be the new Iceland in more ways than one. After the Scandinavian country suffered its devastating financial crisis, women vaulted into positions of power in government and business, under the assumption that they’d be better suited to “clean up the mess” the country’s men had made: In an interview with the Guardian, one executive explained that she’d be operating under “core feminist principles” that included risk awareness, profit with principles, emotional capital, straight talking, and independence.

On a smaller scale, the same thing seems to have resulted from Ireland’s parliamentary elections, which saw a record number of women, 23 thus far and maybe as many as 26 when the counting's done, elected to the chamber’s lower house (the Dáil). This was despite the fact that a lower number of women had run than in previous elections, sparking worries that the number of women in the Dáil would actually decrease. None of the women elected are members of Fianna Fáil, the ruling party that's borne the brunt of the blame for the crisis.

Also noteworthy is the overwhelming re-election of Joan Burton, the deputy leader and financial spokesperson of the Labour Party, and one of the loudest voices arguing against the government’s fateful decision to guarantee the debt of the country’s banks. Actually, make that one of the shrillest voices: As Michael Lewis wrote in his blockbuster Vanity Fair analysis of the Irish crisis, “ [I]n an hour of chatting about this and that, she strikes me as straight, bright, and basically good news. But her role in the Irish drama is as clear as Morgan Kelly’s: she’s the shrill mother no one listened to. She speaks in exclamation points with a whiny voice that gets on the nerves of every Irishman—to the point where her voice is parodied on national radio.”

But maybe the parodies ended up helping Burton—or at least that was her good-natured assessment.  According to the Irish Times, “Ms Burton said she had received strong support from young women in the constituency who had taken notice of the fact that she was the only female candidate running in Dublin West. ‘And Mario Rosenstock did me no harm either,” she added, referring to the impressionist.’ ”  After all, unlike Tina Fey’s famous Sarah Palin impression, which portrayed the vice-presidential candidate as dim but attractive despite her Wasilla lilt, these showed Burton as stridently annoying but basically correct—perhaps still a gendered stereotype, but one that seems to be helping rather than hindering Burton at this particular moment in Irish history.

Tags: joan burton, michael lewis vanity fair on ireland, women elected in ireland

It didn't seem possible to me that Kay Hymowitz could come up with a piece that's lighter on evidence than her recent Wall Street Journal piece that cast all twentysomething women as dour marriage obsessives and all twentysomething men as perennial children, because that's how she saw it in a Judd Apatow movie.  But she really outdid herself in the Daily Beast, with an article explaining why men are universally angry with women.  Her evidence for this?  The rantings of men on internet boards that are dedicated to misogyny.  That's like reading a white supremacist website and concluding that all white people worship Hitler.

The Web sites Hymowitz (who has a forthcoming book, Manning Up)  uses as evidence for her "men all hate women now" theory are all on the far end of the "men's rights activist" spectrum, which is a subculture of anti-feminists who spend all their money on "pick-up artist" scams and mail-order bride businesses, at least when they're not tying their ex-wives up in court for years at a time with frivolous lawsuits.  George Sodini, the misogynist who shot up a gym class and killed three women, sprang from this subculture.  So did the guy who keeps suing nightclubs for having Ladies Night, because he's still bitter that his Russian bride got the hell out the second she secured her green card.  And so did Darren Mack, the man who killed his ex-wife and tried to kill the judge presiding over their divorce. Men join up with this subculture because they buy into the belief that feminists have convinced women to make up rape, domestic violence, and child abuse to control men, and that men are a deeply oppressed group, and that the more money and leadership positions thing is just an illusion concealing the truth of our matriarchy.

In other words, not the guys you want to ask if you're looking for average male sentiments about women.

Unsurprisingly, asking a bunch of misogynists what they think of women results in hearing that the worst part about women is that they're all different people, instead of easily controlled sexbots:

Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure. The might hook up as freely as a Duke athlete. Or, they might want men to play Greatest Generation gentleman. Yes, they want men to pay for dinner, call for dates—a writer at the popular dating website The Frisky titled a recent piece “Call me and ask me out for a damn date!”—and open doors for them. A lot of men wonder: “WTF??!”

And sometimes they don't!  Oh horrors, women are human and variable, when the misogynists were promised computer programs that always produce the same results when you type in the same commands.  In Hymowitz's world, women have an obligation to all be exactly the same, and have exactly the same priorities and desires, so men don't have to demean themselves by having to bother to get to know you.  In a world where men weren't so oppressed, men could just go to the store in the morning, buy the first woman on the shelf that fits their list of physical characteristics, and have their new wives scrubbing floors in sexy French maid outfits by the afternoon.  Instead, men are forced to go through this hell of treating women like they're people, and Hymowitz is having none of it.  Honestly, I don't particularly understand why it is that women reading this are supposed to be so upset that a handful of men who hate women so much don't want to date you.  Men who are upfront about their hate save you the effort of worrying what they think of you.

Ironically, kissing the ass of men who hate women so much isn't really doing Hymowitz any favors. The same group of misogynists she believes represent all men tend to think any woman who shows enough literacy and ambition to write for the Wall Street Journal must be a hated feminist.  Hymowitz may think that the online misogynist communities are fonts of wisdom, but they look at her and see just another dumb broad flapping her lips.

Tags: dating, Kay Hymowitz, men's rights activists

The Charlie Sheen rant express keeps chugging along this morning with an epic Today Show interview. In this latest public appearance, Sheen says that he is a "total rock star from Mars" who is completely sober without the aid of Alcoholics Anonymous. You see, AA is for regular people, Sheen explains, "people who don't have tiger blood and Adonis DNA," like he has. Oh and by the way, he says he's not going back to work on the hit CBS show Two and a Half Men unless he gets $3 million an episode, up from his current salary of $2 million.

Any sentient person watching the distressing interview below—in which Charlie Sheen's complexion could be charitably described as wan—would think that Sheen is on drugs. However, he did pass a drug test administered in front of Radar Online, which screened for "(illicit) marijuana, cocaine, opiates, methamphetamines, ecstasy, amphetamines, phencyclidine (PCP)  and (prescription) tricyclic antidepressants, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, methadone and oxycodone." It's hard to believe Sheen's not on something, but if nothing else, he's high on his own hubris and decades of celebrity enabling.

Tags: charlie sheen drugs, charlie sheen meltdown, charlie sheen today show

Attention, grown-ups. If you’re going to read or write about fairy tales, you must be prepared to face the genre’s First Principle: These brutal fantasies are not for children, not really. Whether you’re secretly horrified to learn how many taboos have been packaged between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” or whether you’re the kind of adult who will happily snatch any chance to revisit that terrifying, enchanted terrain, you‘ll be bewitched by the new anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. The 40 authors that Kate Bernheimer has gathered to rewrite and modernize classic fairy tales are experts at collating darkness and wonder.

Bernheimer is the founder and editor of Fairy Tale Review, a journal “dedicated to fairy tales as a contemporary art form.” She’s assembled a dazzling line-up of heavyweights to rehabilitate the old myths. So Kellie Wells takes on “Red Riding Hood” and John Updike revamps “Bluebeard.” Aimee Bender does a brilliant rendition of Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin,” in which the princess barely figures next to the gutsy craftspeople charged with coloring her sun-, moon-, and sky-hued dresses. Expect both lyric beauty and wickedness; overt sexuality (as opposed to the diffuse kind that hovers over most children’s stories); Hans Christian Andersen-style heartbreak; slapstick and sly humor. Also unabashed strangeness. In Francine Prose’s realist adaptation of “Hansel and Gretel,” for example, the witch is an avant-garde performance artist from Italy who photographs herself in flagrante with her cat.

Behind the bell sounds of the fairy story plod the banalities and disappointments of everyday life. Some of the saddest and scariest moments in these tales have nothing to do with magic. In Prose’s tale, the Gretel figure, Polly, confides that nothing “violent or dramatic” caused her marriage to unravel. “Before the wedding he’d liked me; afterwards he didn’t.” Similarly, real terror in “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child,” by Joy Williams, comes not from chicken-footed cottages or talking dogs, but from the genteel British naturalist John James Audubon, who captures Baba Iaga's beautiful pelican daughter and "pierces [her] with cruel rods," before arranging the dead bird in a lifelike position so that he can draw her.

Bernheimer uses the term “fairy tale” inclusively. “Cupid and Psyche,” a Greek myth, moves online in Francesca Lia Block’s semisweet ode to cyber romance. Also represented are stories by Goethe, Yeats, and Italo Calvino, refracted through the minds of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Jim Shepard, and Chris Adrian. (Bynum’s “The Erlking” and Shepard’s “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay” shine amid distinguished company.)

While traditional folklore leans on formulae, this collection aspires to a kind of lawlessness—how often do Russian wood spirits meet British ornithologists without blinking? If the individual stories weren’t so gorgeously stitched, their sum might feel a little haywire. But thanks to charmed language, Bernheimer’s contributors evade this pitfall with the nimbleness of a witch’s fingers.

Tags: kate berheimer, modern fairy tales, My Father He Ate Me, My Mother She Killed Me

Jess, I agree that meltdowns of public figures are fascinating, as is trying to figure out what line has been crossed when a career takes a possibly fatal hit. You have a convincing theory on why Charlie Sheen was able to skate on domestic abuse charges, but may have done himself in by referring to his television show’s producer, Chuck Lorre, as “Chaim Levine.” (Lorre was born Charles Michael Levine. Sheen was born Carlos Irwin Estevez.)  Sheen’s entire interview sounded like the insane ranting of someone who had just snorted a super-sized line of coke. But it’s the vaguely anti-Semitic references to his boss that seem to be what’s shut down production of his show, Two and a Half Men. (A mystery to me is the appeal of the show.  I’ve only seen it on airplanes and 10 minutes is all I’ve ever been able to take.)

But then how do we explain the similar downward trajectory of Mel Gibson’s career? When he was arrested for drunk driving in 2006 he went into a full anti-Semitic tirade, blaming all wars on Jews and inquiring of his arresting officer if he was a Jew. (Miraculously, he was!) Gibson was wounded, but continued to work. It’s the most recent revelations of his domestic abuse, the release of the recording of his panting tirade against his ex-girlfriend, and an apparent physical assault that appear to have torpedoed him.  This is so unfairly confusing for celebrities and their handlers! How are stars supposed to keep straight—especially when they’re zonked out of their minds—when it’s OK to slap and when it’s OK to rant?

Tags: charlie sheen chuck lorre, charlie sheen domestic violence, charlie sheen meltdown, charlie sheen two and a half men, mel gibson, mel gibson anti-semitism, mel gibson domestic abuse

The White House has announced a new social secretary, and for the first time ever, it's a man: Jeremy Bernard, previously the senior advisor to the U.S.'s Parisian ambassador. Oo la la!

Bernard was an early supporter of Obama and a key fundraiser (a trait he shares with the two previous Obama social secretaries, Desiree Rogers and Julianna Smoot). The handsome, openly gay Texas native has an impressive and eclectic resume and a background in finance; he's also served on the President's Advisory Commision for the Kennedy Center during the Clinton presidency, and on several advisory boards for LGBTQ issues.

Bernard's selection comes after a mini-campaign for the Obamas to select a man for this historically female job. I argued that maybe until there are more women in key administration positions, we shouldn't be so eager to push for that. But I can't help cheering Bernard's selection, after all. It's fun to see gender norms like this one reversed, and just as I want to see women represented in key administration roles, I want to see  openly gay members of an administration that's finally making gay rights more of a priority. I do feel a bit of a twinge that the selection does still play somewhat to stereotype—women and gay men only can plan the parties!—but the position is far more than that, and I'm excited to see how Bernard puts his own stamp on it.

It looks as if President Obama's announcement that the Justice Department will stop legally defending the Defense of Marriage Act won't actually be as controversial as anticipated. According to the New York Times, it "has generated only mild rebukes from the Republicans hoping to succeed him in 2012, evidence of a shifting political climate in which social issues are being crowded out by economic concerns."

Yet that reading is at odds with the findings from the Pew Study I wrote about yesterday, which showed that the Tea Party is more socially conservative than its reputation. A full two-thirds of Republicans say they oppose gay marriage, and only slightly fewer Tea Partiers hold that view, too. That's not such a different stat from 2004, when it was a key "wedge issue" that helped get conservative voters out to vote. (In fact, it's higher than the 59 percent of Republicans who said they strongly opposed gay marriage that year.)

One thing the latest Pew Study didn't measure for, though, was the intensity respondents felt about each issue. All other things being equal, a Tea Partier might want to prevent gay marriage, but perhaps it's not at the top of his list—especially since the culture at large has moved in the direction of accepting gay rights, and railing against them probably isn't going to bring anyone new into the movement.

The Times article groups abortion in with gay rights, saying it's no longer an important wedge issue either, but that seems like a too-facile pairing. There has lately been a fresh crop of anti-abortion legislation on both the federal and state levels, as the paper elsewhere reported, which has people on both sides of the aisle whipped into a frenzy. Maybe it's just that it's harder to make a budgetary argument about gay marriage, as these bills have done on abortion funding. But I suspect that it's just that views on abortion have remained basically stable—as they have for years now—while those on gay marriage have rapidly evolved, even if some polling numbers haven't quite caught up.

Tags: DOMA, gay marriage