-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 5
Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.
The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of women not being attracted to the GOP (hmm ...).
I was by far the youngest and had the least respectable job—not a lawyer, doctor, or entrepreuneur but a member of the mistrusted media. At one point, it dawned on our host that I must know how to use Facebook! I could start a Facebook page for this group! It was a genius idea! It would attract women all over the country! I bit my lip and nodded noncommitally.
The women I know who have gotten into politics aren't motivated by power. They're motivated by a desire to tackle specific problems in their schools and local communities. At this lunch, the women I talked to didn't care so much about some race in Pennsylvania or the opportunities that could move us up the political ladder as about the issues that we're confronted with every day in the newspaper headlines and routines of life: school vouchers, high taxes, national security, or abortion.
My take is that there are some good reasons for women to be Republicans: True republicanism is a platform where local communities are empowered to solve their own problems. It's a good model for women, who like to accomplish tangible change in specific situations. But until the Republican Party can articulate what it stands for and how it's going to bring those ideals about, I'll probably keep on bringing my own lunch to work.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 4
Sara, I agree with your defense—in response to Katie Roiphe's piece about women hiding behind their children on Facebook—of a woman's right to put her kids first. I'm 25 and enjoying my selfish years now, because, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out in her piece about the seasons of a woman's life, I fully expect them to end when I have kids. And I think that's natural. Just as natural, in fact, for fathers as it is for moms.
My mother once relayed to my sister and me a hypothetical question she'd posed to my dad. A bus is hurtling down the street, about to hit her. Would he jump in front and sacrifice his life to save hers? He wavered. Perhaps to protect herself from having to hear him deliver a "no," she quickly presented a second scenario. "What if it were one of the girls?" This time, no wavering. "Yes, I'd jump in front of the bus."
My dad's response is more about evolution than self-definition, though. It's not that he would save my sister or me because we're his proudest accomplishments. It's that we're his genetic offspring who still have kids of our own still to produce—kids that will carry on his DNA. Isn't that how the whole circle of life thing is supposed to work? And while the bus scenario is farfetched, the same mentality would apply to everyday decisions, like whether to miss a big conference to take care of a sick child.
I think in discussing Roiphe's piece (and what a discussion it's triggered in the comments section!), we're conflating too many things. While I agree with you, Sara, that it's okay (good, even) to put your children first, I'm with Roiphe on the point that that shouldn't mean your kids are all you can talk about, their faces all you care to have anyone see when they type in your name. One of the things I'm most grateful to my parents for is raising me in a home where dinner table conversations were interesting, involving thoughts on the day's news, the books we were reading, their issues at work. If Roiphe's women friends can only talk about their kids at dinner parties, I hope—for their kids' sake, at least—that their family-dinner conversations are a little more expansive.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times, my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled. "People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media (television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience, individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise. The early Internet was a less nuanced, glaringly public forum where sharing information did largely mean sharing it with anyone who cared to look. I wouldn't have known what it meant, back when I was tooling around Prodigy in 1995, to "untag a photo" or defriend an oversharing acquaintance. We're constantly told that we lack social conventions for a digital age. It's easy to forget how rapidly technology has adapted to pre-existing social conventions, providing users with more and more tools to reproduce the sense of control they have in a traditional conversation.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 8
Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried to find friends who went to his college so they could show me his extended Facebook profile.
I see, though, that at some point we all reach the edge of our Internet comfort zone. For me, the awkward part is how to navigate everything that comes after the first date: Do I owe him a wall post to prove that I care? When do I change my relationship status? How do I explain to my mother or my bosses, who are also my Facebook friends, the cryptic status message I'd rather they not understand?
Double X wants to hear your awkward and wrong Google, Facebook, and Twitter stories—the times when things went awry in a relationship because of these tools (combined with your inexperience or lack of willpower or bad luck or whatever else). Send your tales to us, and we'll excerpt our favorites on the site.
Photograph of woman on computer from Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 8
Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried to find friends who went to his college so they could show me his extended Facebook profile.
I see, though, that at some point we all reach the edge of our Internet comfort zone. For me, the awkward part is how to navigate everything that comes after the first date: Do I owe him a wall post to prove that I care? When do I change my relationship status? How do I explain to my mother or my bosses, who are also my Facebook friends, the cryptic status message I'd rather they not understand?
Double X wants to hear your awkward and wrong Google, Facebook, and Twitter stories—the times when things went awry in a relationship because of these tools (combined with your inexperience or lack of willpower or bad luck or whatever else). Send your tales to us, and we'll excerpt our favorites on the site.
Photograph of woman on computer from Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 1
10. The mom still does most of the heavy lifting with raising the kids.
9. Men you thought were “happily married” start asking to be your Facebook friends
8. Everyone wants to know how the money is divided and how much support you’re getting, even if they don’t ask directly.
7. It’s a good way to lose weight.
6. A major haircut seems to take place, even when you didn’t have any conscious desire to get one.
5. Country music suddenly seems appropriate programming in the car.
4. One begins to wonder if Kegels should be put back in the fitness regimen.
3. Building a social life requires infinite inspiration and meticulous planning because there’s no one around to “just hang” with.
2. There’s plenty of closet space, finally, and finally…
1. There is the delightful prospect of “new” sex!
Photograph of Vicki Iovine by Alison Reynolds.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 4
Social networking sites have always been a little bit about voyeurism, maybe more so than about networking. I joined Facebook in its earliest days, in the spring of 2004, as a freshman in college. No one using it then realized that it was going to be a Silicon Valley juggernaut; we were delighted for an easy way to find out more about that dreamy upperclassman on the crew team who, sigh, also listed existentialism as an interest.
A term quickly evolved for these embarassing bouts of recon work on a love interest or even just someone who'd idly grabbed our attention: "Facebook-stalking," a process that got much more fruitful once pictures were added. "Stalk" was definitely ironic (unlike, sadly, that Sartre-loving rower), not a legal term. Unlike real stalking, the Facebook variety was all as harmless as it was silly. Yes, there have been plenty of warnings about privacy and social networking, and yes, even legal action and frightening incidents. But it took a recent Harvard Business School Study on who looks at what on Facebook to finally unsettle me. The findings of show a monumental gender imbalance that casts a creepy shadow over the widespread, jokey use of Facebook-stalking:
The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don't know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.
And 70 percent of all actions on Facebook come from people looking either at posted pictures or individuals' profiles.
This is in contrast to Twitter, where men's tweets receive more page views. One theory as to why? Twitter revolves around words, not pictures.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 2
Reading Amanda Fortini's piece on the way that Facebook is turning previously private parts of life, such as your divorce, into public spectacles, I realized suddenly why the idea of having everyone in your virtual community know about your divorce and its details as soon as you do doesn't bother me as much as it might other people. I spent my entire adolescence living in a community of 6,000 people, which means that having control over what details of your life everyone knows about seems like the novelty to me. You don't have to put tales of heartbreak on Facebook, but in small towns, you don't have that choice.
The luxury of being scandalized at public displays of unhappiness and heartbreak is really an invention of the modern, urbanized world, a world that I fled to as soon as I could, but for reasons other than irritation at everyone being up in your business all the time. Learning about your divorce through the grapevine, everyone and their dog witnessing you on your worst days, divorce lawyers knowing every thing about the opposition's behavior in order to build a case—all old hat to small town folks. My mother's divorce lawyer didn't need Facebook to learn about her ex-husband; he saw him at the shooting range every weekend and had the grapevine to provide information. I have countless tales of spouses learning about infidelities only after everyone else in town saw the adulterers snuggling in some public place, and horror stories of false rumors spread by spurned lovers taking over the town before the truth could get its pants on. That was our hell, and now everyone else gets the joy of experiencing it.
Somehow, small town people manage to endure the slings and arrows of everyone knowing your business. In fact, I've always been impressed by how divorce and adultery not only survive but thrive in an environment where there's exactly no way you can go about either without everyone you come across knowing all the dirty details. I've seen people get into loud fights about cheating in public places, making sure that any details that the town didn't already know were exposed, and then go straight back to carrying on the affair the next day in full view of everyone. The dark part of the human spirit that wants to lash out at the demands of marriage will not be hemmed in by something as minor as public humiliation.
And so I face the expansion of Facebook and the creation of virtual small towns with no fear that it will do anything significant to change anyone's behavior. If anything, I admire the fact that Facebook creates a neat compromise between the anonymity of the city and the gossip of the small town. It both fills our need to be nosy while giving ultimate control to the person being gossiped about. Since you don't have to sit down and type out what you're feeling, the act of gossiping about someone is a lot more consensual in our digital age than it was in my small town youth.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 2
Reading Amanda Fortini's piece on the way that Facebook is turning previously private parts of life, such as your divorce, into public spectacles, I realized suddenly why the idea of having everyone in your virtual community know about your divorce and its details as soon as you do doesn't bother me as much as it might other people. I spent my entire adolescence living in a community of 6,000 people, which means that having control over what details of your life everyone knows about seems like the novelty to me. You don't have to put tales of heartbreak on Facebook, but in small towns, you don't have that choice.
The luxury of being scandalized at public displays of unhappiness and heartbreak is really an invention of the modern, urbanized world, a world that I fled to as soon as I could, but for reasons other than irritation at everyone being up in your business all the time. Learning about your divorce through the grapevine, everyone and their dog witnessing you on your worst days, divorce lawyers knowing every thing about the opposition's behavior in order to build a case—all old hat to small town folks. My mother's divorce lawyer didn't need Facebook to learn about her ex-husband; he saw him at the shooting range every weekend and had the grapevine to provide information. I have countless tales of spouses learning about infidelities only after everyone else in town saw the adulterers snuggling in some public place, and horror stories of false rumors spread by spurned lovers taking over the town before the truth could get its pants on. That was our hell, and now everyone else gets the joy of experiencing it.
Somehow, small town people manage to endure the slings and arrows of everyone knowing your business. In fact, I've always been impressed by how divorce and adultery not only survive but thrive in an environment where there's exactly no way you can go about either without everyone you come across knowing all the dirty details. I've seen people get into loud fights about cheating in public places, making sure that any details that the town didn't already know were exposed, and then go straight back to carrying on the affair the next day in full view of everyone. The dark part of the human spirit that wants to lash out at the demands of marriage will not be hemmed in by something as minor as public humiliation.
And so I face the expansion of Facebook and the creation of virtual small towns with no fear that it will do anything significant to change anyone's behavior. If anything, I admire the fact that Facebook creates a neat compromise between the anonymity of the city and the gossip of the small town. It both fills our need to be nosy while giving ultimate control to the person being gossiped about. Since you don't have to sit down and type out what you're feeling, the act of gossiping about someone is a lot more consensual in our digital age than it was in my small town youth.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
Amanda, I like your comparison of the boundary-less world of Facebook to the typical small-town life. If we can’t bump into the former homecoming queen at the grocery store (OMG she works at the grocery store now? And did you hear she got dumped by her high school sweetheart who we were all sure she’d marry, like, the day after graduation?), we can at least follow her fall from grace remotely.
Still, it seems like there’s something unique about the unraveling of a marriage—or any relationship, really—as it’s broadcast on these social networking sites. Although news spread through your small town, Amanda, about relationships crumbling or adulterous ones sparking, I doubt the lead players in those romances would find a perch in the town square to shout out their latest feelings or relevant song quotes about the whole thing. Dahlia’s chick lit novel, which is unfolding on Slate now, gives us a great example of the divorce as narrated through Facebook and Twitter. I can see how someone might actually see this as the ultimate retaliation against small-town-style gossip: Instead of being talked about behind your back, you’re blasting out your own take on the matter.
We’ve asked before for you to share your awkward and wrong stories about Facebook, Twitter, texting, and the like, and now seems like a good time to ask again. Has anyone had a particularly trying or hilarious or uncomfortable experience with a social networking break-up? Did you have to watch your mom’s TMI tweets during the trial separation, or negotiate with your ex about when to finally update your Facebook relationship status? Send your tales to us, and—with your permission, of course—we’ll run our favorites here on the site.
