Butler, feminist philosopher and author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity writes persuasively about the flaws in the IAAF's gender-testing system:

[I]f we consider that this act of ‘sex determination' was supposed to be collaboratively arrived at by a panel that included ‘a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender' (why wasn't I called!?), then the assumption is that cultural and psychological factors are part of sex-determination, and that no one of these ‘experts' could come up with a definitive finding on his or her own (presuming that binary gender holds). This co-operative venture suggests as well that sex-determination is decided by consensus and, conversely, where there is no consensus, there is no determination of sex. Is this not a presumption that sex is a social negotiation of some kind? And are we, in fact, witnessing in this case a massive effort to socially negotiate the sex of Semenya, with the media included as a party to the deliberations?

Media outlets have generally used the phrase "gender testing" to describe the ordeal the IAAF put Semenya through, but many have pointed out an inaccuracy in the terminology — if sex is biological, and gender is socially constructed, then what was really at issue was Semenya's sex. However, as Butler explains, the testing appeared to be an effort to socially construct the runner's biological sex via the opinions of a panel of "experts." The bizarreness of this approach shows how poorly understood sex still is. And the sheer number of experts the IAAF relied on (maybe they should've called Butler) speaks to the fact that the group really hasn't arrived at a single standard of what makes someone "female enough" to compete. Butler says they should simply decouple the question of femaleness from that of eligibility. She writes,

[W]e can invoke certain standards for admission to compete under a particular gender category without deciding whether or not the person unequivocally ‘is' that category. If the standard turns out to be, for instance, hormone levels, and it is decided that one cannot exceed certain levels of testosterone to play in women's sports, then a competitor could still be a ‘woman' in a cultural and social sense and, indeed, in some biological senses as well, but she would not qualify to compete under those standards. [...] standards for qualification do not have to be the same as final decisions about sex, and these can certainly be distinct from larger and overlapping questions of gender.

If only the IAAF had adopted such a sensible approach — focusing only on whether Semenya could run and not on "what" she "was" — perhaps the media wouldn't have felt so free to define Semenya's sex for her. But few involved in the case have been sensible. Ariel Levy, writing in The New Yorker, quotes bioethicist Alice Domurat Dreger, who describes the IAAF's approach to sex testing as "a kind of ‘I know it when I see it' policy." And she talks to Athletics South Africa president Leonard Chuene, who not only lied about authorizing sex tests for Semenya, but allowed her to compete in Berlin against others' advice, even though he knew the test results were "not good" and scandal was likely. Chuene sounds fantastically self-absorbed when he tells Levy,

If I will do this, it's ‘Why did you withdraw her?' If I did not, ‘Why did you allow her to run?' Whatever way you look at it, I'm judged. I'm judged!

He adds,

This thing has given her more opportunity! Everybody knows her. The world is out there to say, ‘Your problems are our problems.' Imagine if I had not let her win!

Chuene's words about "opportunity" are pretty insensitive, especially given that Semenya has indicated she's uncomfortable with her notoriety. Still, her story has inspired more public discussion of intersex conditions, and it might encourage some people to examine their preconceptions about sex and gender. Levy includes in her piece an interesting discussion of various movements within the intersex community. Some object to queer and/or transgender people aligning themselves with those born intersex, while others go even further, preferring to describe themselves as having "disorders of sex development." Levy writes that "they want disorders of sex development to be treated like any other physical abnormality: something for doctors to monitor but not to operate on, unless the patient is in physical discomfort or danger." Whether intersex conditions are indeed "disorders" or simply points on a non-binary gender spectrum is an interesting question, and Semenya's ordeal may have done some good if it brings this issue into the open.

But what has it done to Semenya herself? Former ASA official Wilfred Daniels says, "now her life is over," and many others have had similarly dark predictions for her future. However, at the conclusion of her piece, Levy talks to Semenya herself:

I asked her if she would talk to me, not about the tests or Chuene but about her evolution as an athlete, her progression from Limpopo to the world stage. She shook her head vigorously. "No," she said. "I can't talk to you. I can't talk to anyone. I can't say to anyone how I feel or what's in my mind."

I said I thought that must suck.

"No," she said, very firmly. Her voice was strong and low. "That doesn't suck. It sucks when I was running and they were writing those things. That sucked. That is when it sucks. Now I just have to walk away. That's all I can do." She smiled a small, bemused smile. "Walk away from all of this, maybe forever. Now I just walk away." Then she took a few steps backward, turned around, and did.

Despite all she's been through, Semenya appears to have more dignity than any of those who have tried to test her or speak for her. Her running career may be over, but her life is not.

Wise Distinctions [London Review Blog]
Either/Or [The New Yorker]

Levy's main target is Leslie Sanchez's book You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman (note the first names), in which Sanchez comes out against "bra burning" and in favor of "calm concern for how women [are] faring in the world." But how they're faring seems to mean mostly whether or not they have jobs in government and corporations. This isn't, of course, a trivial measure of women's success, but as Levy points out, it isn't the whole story. Sanchez is a Republican political strategist, and her prime example of successful contemporary womanity is Sarah Palin. She writes, "most of us are Sarah Palins to one degree or another," and complains that Gloria Steinem's criticism of Palin sent the message that, "you can run, Sarah Palin, but you won't get my support because you don't believe in all the same things I believe in."

Which, well, duh. The idea that men had the luxury of choosing candidates they actually agree with but women had to vote with their vaginas was one of the most upsetting things about the 2008 election, and the fact that Sanchez doesn't think Steinem's beliefs are an acceptable basis for her political choices says a lot about how women are, in some quarters, expected to behave. The message of Sarah Palin's entire vice presidential bid was that women were supposed to care not about issues, or even about competence, but simply that one of "their own" appeared on the ticket. As Levy says,

If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists. You could have, for example, Leslie Sanchez or Sarah Palin.

In a way, feminism-without-feminists is a depressing reversal of the optimism of the second wave. Movements for womyn's lands and political lesbianism implied that there was something special and good about being a woman, and that all-female societies and relationships would necessarily be healthier and more feminist than the messed-up mixed-gender world. Womyn's lands themselves may actually have been (and continue to be) feminist havens, but the idea that women leaders are always better for women is all too easy to turn on its head: if women are so great, people like Sanchez can say, what's wrong with Sarah Palin?

The truth is, equal representation for women is important — but as an end, not as a means. Women deserve opportunities to serve in government and the corporate world because it's fair and right, not because they will necessarily act as advocates for feminist causes. Just as feminists need to accept that not all women will share their goals, non-feminists must understand that feminism isn't just "identity politics" — feminists won't sit down and shut up just because there are, as Levy says, a significant "percentage of people with government jobs who wear bras." Levy writes persuasively of the real need for government-subsidized child care that still goes unmet after a near victory in the seventies, and there are many other issues from reproductive rights to equal pay that won't be resolved by electing George W. Bush clones with two X chromosomes. In order to resolve them, women need to claim not just representation, but another right that men have always taken for granted: the right to stand up for what we believe in, even if it means disagreeing with one another.

Image via The New Yorker.

Lift And Separate [New Yorker]
You've Come A Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, And The Shaping Of The New American Woman [Amazon]

Earlier: •Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Feminists
• Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Michele Bachmann
•Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Perez Hilton
•Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. The Real Housewives Of New York
•Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Kathy Griffin
•Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Sarah Palin
•Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Amy Winehouse
•Conceptual Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Latarian Milton
•Comic Confrontations: Judge Judy Vs. Crazy Hillary Supporters

• Marc Jacobs and his Brazilian fiancé, Lorenzo Martone, are set to marry next month in Provincetown. Also, Jacobs is taking the artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, plus Madonna, to the Met ball. [FWD]

• But Jesus Luz won't be in his fall Louis Vuitton campaign. "Why is everyone asking me about him? He's not modeling for me. I don't do menswear," said the designer. He did say, however, that Madonna and Steven Meisel are shooting the campaign right now, right here in New York. "She's the ultimate professional and she and Steven are amazing. I love working with her. There's no one better." [The Cut]
• Steven Alan, on this one time he opened a barbershop: "My mom was getting her haircut at this hairdresser's in the East Village, and the lady told her she was interested in opening her own salon, so my mom goes, 'Oh you should talk to my son!' And I'm like, 'Mom, I'm not opening a hair salon.' And she goes, well you should meet her anyway. So I met her and I was like, 'If I open anything it's going to be a barber shop,' and she was like, 'Ok, I can cut guys' hair.'" [Fashionista]
• Lanvin's Alber Elbaz — who seemed talented, fretful and difficult in Ariel Levy's recent New Yorker profile — is questioned by Stephanie Seymour in the new issue of Interview. "We really started from scratch eight years ago at Lanvin. It's the oldest couture house in the world, but when I came onboard, it was a great name without much in it. We slowly moved in. I love coffee, but I always say not everything has to be instant. We took the time. It took eight years to move from 15 accounts to 400 accounts. What's important is to maintain it as a family business. It's very much like Interview, which you don't talk about as a group-it's a family. The nature of fashion is family. You see that at almost every house-it was owned first by a family. It wasn't owned by a bank. In fact, the bankers went into fashion later...And look what happened to fashion!" [Interview]
• Alexander Wang, last year's Vogue CFDA fashion fund award-winner, is teaming up with the Gap. And unlike in previous years, where the CFDA designers re-imagined the retailer's white shirt — with mixed results — Wang has done something that sounds kind of exciting. Says Gap designer Patrick Robinson: "This year it's with khaki. He did this incredible motorcycle jacket in khaki that's going to be under $100. It's coming out on June 16th, so get ready!" [Fashionologie]
• Thinker of deep thoughts Michael Kors wishes there were some kind of Spanx for men. It exists, Michael! [The Cut]
• All that lobbying from the First Lady's favorite designers must have worked: a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House has reintroduced a modified version of the design piracy bill. [WWD]
• The ever-humble Isaac Mizrahi: "I just love women in dresses. Last night I was at an event at the Pier [in New York] and everyone looked just ugh ... except those wearing my clothes." [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Soon, there will be Jessica Simpson lingerie. And sleepwear. Fantastic. [WWD]
• And Paris Hilton is doing sunglasses. [PopDirt]
• Anne Hathaway may not be doing the next Marc Jacobs campaign — but she looks good in her new ad for Lancôme perfume. [E! Online]
• WSJ. took Hilary Rhoda to Miami to shoot swimsuits, and shot this nifty behind-the-scenes video. No amount of overdubbed music can hide the fact that modeling is generally about making odd positions look natural. [WSJ]
• This list of the top 20 fashion Twitterers covers all the bases, but all you really need to know is: Fake. Karl. [Times of London]
• In a similar vein, Rachel Roy held a press conference via Twitter. She answered such hard-hitting lines of inquiry as, "Rachel, you absolutely glow! How do you stay confident through tough times?" Oh, the vaunted democracy of the Internet. [WWD]
• Revlon is launching a new mascara, and adding two items to its ColorStay product range. [WWD]
• Henri Bendel, the department store founded in 1895, is no longer going to sell clothes. The retailer will shrink its New York flagship by one floor, and concentrate only on selling accessories, beauty products, and gift items that leverage its brand and signature colors. Eight percent of its 250-strong workforce will be laid off. [NY Times]
• Timberland's profits declined 12% in the first quarter of this year. [WWD]
• Breaking: Tiffany & Co. has bought the bankrupt Lambertson Truex handbag brand from Samsonite. [WWD]
• Abercrombie & Fitch, meanwhile, is in its second round of layoffs this year. After making fifty workers at its Columbus, Ohio, headquarters in January, the company is letting go an addition 170 this week. [The Street]
• Joe's Jeans actually rose slightly in its sales and earnings for the first quarter. [WWD]
• The Gap is recalling 22,000 toggle coats for babies, up to size 24 months. The toggles can come off, and pose a choking risk. [Babble]

• Naomi Campbell stalked the runway like a thoroughbred in Mumbai for a charity show. Last time Campbell blended fashion and philanthropy, the supermodel raised over $1 million for Hurricane Katrina survivors. [Daily Mail]

• Mikhail Gorbachev is not enough for some people. The rapacious machine of Louis Vuitton's advertising, which most people don't realize actually sucks its subjects' dignity through the lens of Annie Liebovitz's Canon, has claimed more victims: Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and fellow astronaut Jim Lovell. That's right: men and women who could withstand the g-forces of extraterrestrial flight could not say 'no' to LVMH. [WWD]
• British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman says her biggest concern about taking the position back in 1992 was that it would involve a lot of flying. "I hadn't been on a plane in 10 years," she said at an event in England. "How could I accept a job that would mean that I had to fly all the time? I'm still very nervous on a plane." [Vogue UK]
• More bad news for Halston: the oft-revived label, left semi-conscious as of late following the firing of its latest creative director, Marco Zanini, is now down one vice-president of marketing. Atul Pathak resigned two weeks ago, just after the Paris shows. [WWD]
• Los Angeles fashion week happened recently. Don't feel too badly if you missed it: the LA Times itself called proceedings "more than an exercise in futility." [LA Times]
• Vera Wang's Lavender line is in trouble. Hitting the high end of the price range for a contemporary line is causing some grief, and Saks has dropped it. Neiman Marcus will carry Vera Wang Lavender in only ten stores this season, and drop it for fall. Wang says she's mulling over lowering the pricing, or spinning it off into a license. [WWD]
• Lanvin's London flagship store is now open. I suppose that means Alber Elbaz's long contretemps with the architects, related by Ariel Levy in her recent New Yorker profile of the designer, was happily resolved. [FWD]
• Kira Plastinina's still got stores a-plenty, too. (Albeit not in the US, where her eponymous pink-themed clothing chain went bust less than a year after her entry into the market.) As soon as she finishes high school in Moscow this spring, the fruit juice heiress intends to take a step that most designers tackle before launching international retail chains — going to fashion school. Since Kira Plastinina rather strikes one as the kind of person whose life is the sustained experience of getting what she wants, without regard for talent or even passion, she's expecting acceptance at Parsons in New York and Central St. Martins in London, the Yale and Oxford of fashion design, respectively. [FWD]
• Fiona Ellis, who scouts models for the London agency Independent, thinks Tyra's shorties-only season of America's Next Top Model is dumb. The woman who found Alek Wek and Erin O'Connor, among many others, would know. [Vogue UK]
• Net profits at Versace fell 30.7% in 2008, but it was largely due to the softening of the Euro against the Dollar. Without the hard shift in the rate of exchange, their profits would have grown by 10%. [WWD]
• "Heavy black lines and crisp, grid-like patterns created an Op Art effect in Dries Van Noten's spring collection," says the LA Times. Which is why you should...wear a plaid shirt from Express. [LA Times]
• The top 10 new models of the Fall/Winter 09 show season: 90% white, 10% Japanese, 50% not actually "new." [Style.com]
• Do. Not. Want. Spanx clothing. No, just...no. [Glamour]
• Christian Siriano has picked up one hell of a stockist for his line: Saks Fifth Avenue. The department store will sell his fall collection in a new store-within-a-store for emerging talents. [WWD]
• Iekeliene Stange, the quirky Dutch supermodel/photographer, has an exhibition opening in London this Wednesday, following a successful show in Berlin. [The Horse Hospital]

Elbaz, who has long won accolades for designs that consistently hit at the sweet spot of the continuum between beautiful and interesting, started off in the industry working on "horrible mother-of-the-bride dresses" in New York's garment district. Given a leg up by Geoffrey Beene, who took him on as an assistant, Elbaz eventually earned his first head designer position at Guy Laroche in 1997. A stop at YSL followed, but what Elbaz is known for is the eight years he has now spent at Lanvin.

In the pages of the New Yorker's Style Issue, Levy captures Elbaz's uneasy relationship with the images of luxury he so skilfully creates. Elbaz is 47, and, Levy writes, "there seems to be something fundamental about him in need of comforting." He is also overweight, and in a moment that must ring familiar to almost any woman on earth, Levy observes him dithering over his breakfast order at the Carlyle Hotel: " 'Should we be good today or bad? Maybe we start good and get bad later.' He ordered the fruit salad. He wanted the pancakes."

Some designers are, or at least seem, to the manner born: Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, and Tom Ford, et. al., embody the moneyed ease and supreme self-assurance their particular labels sell. Other talents clearly retain something closer to an outsider's perspective, some sense of a life beyond the lifestyle evidenced through frumpy outfits or quiet demeanors. (Some designers, like Marc Jacobs, start up in one camp and end up in the other — the early Jacobs, with his nerd glasses, pallor, and paunch is orders of magnitude away from the contemporary gym-toned, tanned, health-farm Jacobs; it's like looking at an El Greco and then a Botticelli.) Elbaz is clearly in the more modest category. He compares his job shaping the dreams and expectations of the select group of women that are his customers to working as a concierge in a fancy hotel — the concierge being the person who has to go home at night. "You have to go back to reality. You have to go back to nothing in order to maintain the dream," he says. "The moment the dream becomes reality and you start to mingle too much with all these people..."

Photo by Tim Walker

Levy's profile really heats up when she contrasts Elbaz's aesthetic with that of Tom Ford, who took the Moroccan-born Israeli's job at YSL Rive Gauche a few months after Gucci Group's acquisition of the brand in 1999. (Yves Saint Laurent had at the time been grooming Elbaz as his successor.) Ford, in Levy's construction, was the spirit guide and permanent booster of the ra-ra bling-bling late 1990s and early 2000s, while Elbaz was the quiet talent cut out for more unassuming times.

Ford could not have been a more maddening foil. Where Elbaz was pudgy and Jewish and self-doubting, Ford was toned and tan and Texan. Elbaz is shy and still not exactly a household name; when Ford guest-edited an issue of Vanity Fair, in 2006, he put himself on the cover, flanked by Scarlett Johanson and Keira Knightley in the nude. Perhaps most significant, Elbaz has always presented in his work a quiet, complicated conception of female sexuality. One of Ford's more memorable ads as the designer for Gucci featured a woman [Estonian supermodel Carmen Kass] pulling down her underwear to reveal the letter "G" shaved out of her pubic hair.

Perhaps the New Yorker's sense of propriety forbade Levy from mentioning Ford's other boundary-stretching campaign of the period, when, during his time with YSL Rive Gauche, he chose to advertise the men's fragrance M7 with a full-frontal nude portrait of martial arts champion Samuel de Cubber.

"But," writes Levy, "little by little, as the money and the grandiose sense of self-assurance of that era fell away, Ford's sensibility came to seem less stylish." The writer narrates Ford's retirement from women's fashion and the Gucci Group, in 2004, and mentions that a pair of cufflinks she recently browsed in Ford's eponymous Manhattan men's wear store costs $34,000. Her conclusion:

In our current moment, Tom Ford, with his tan, and his cufflinks that cost as much as a car, and his naked-man-on-bearskin-rug aesthetic, seems distant and comical. He has become Bijan. And Alber Elbaz has gradually won.

If Levy's skewering of Tom Ford, whose idea of recession-friendly pricing is a pair of jeans that costs $990, is a delight of schadenfreude, it's also a little easy. Elbaz, and his aesthetic, were never in any mortal danger after being cut loose from YSL; the designer walked into a dream position at Lanvin, where the label owner's only instruction was to "Please wake the sleeping beauty" less than a year later. Moreover, Elbaz's clothes for Lanvin are every bit as expensive as Tom Ford's were for Rive Gauche and Gucci. It's difficult to imagine many women who can admit a $4,000+ sheath dress into their wardrobes without hardship.

Elbaz explains the huge cost of his garments in terms of their materials and workmanship — which is true to a point. (The markups that retailers typically add, which can be 60-70% over wholesale prices, go unmentioned by both Levy and Elbaz.) Elbaz, who alternates in the profile between the airy fashion-speak of one who spends his life on the astral plane of aesthetics, and more articulate quotes, analogizes making a dress with the research and development requirements of pharmaceutical companies. "Doing a collection, for me, is almost like creating a vaccine," he says. "Once you create the vaccine, then you can duplicate it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. But see if you can create it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, and the answer is no. In that sense, I have absolutely no problem with the prices. I don't think we do it just to do it." (It's also worth pointing out that the Lanvin atelier is located in France, where garment workers earn a middle-class living, and where Elbaz claims his company pays 65% taxes.)

The designer has said in the past that he does not care to design the dress that will make a man fall in love with a woman; he wants to make the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love herself. But I'm not sure the rhetorical inversion necessarily works: although I appreciate woman-centered design, that departs from the first principles of the wearer and her needs and desires, as opposed to those of the implicit male observer of the dress, whoever knows ahead of time when they're going to fall in love? A dress to make you more loving is a curious idea indeed.

At times, Elbaz seems flinty and difficult, which can often be the downside to being a visionary (at least for those who surround you). When he visits a potential site for his fall/winter show with his team, a former load-out station in the 13th Arrondissement, Elbaz speaks in a stream-of-consciousness that must be impossible to parse. "I had many, many thoughts. The dogs. The black car waiting outside. The man with the white coat and the dirty hands. The crystal on the floor and the train station just in the back. I'm looking for something to clean my eyes!" He muses for a while on the "bad spirit" of the warehouse space, before, in what comes across as a self-pitying gesture for its very unseriousness, momentarily contemplating leaving fashion. There's also an episode over some handbags which aren't to his liking, and an hours-long meeting with the team of architects who are at work on his London store, in which he exclaims, "If a woman comes in and it doesn't smell right or the light isn't right, she will think the dress doesn't look good!" Elbaz sometimes seems like that maddening boss who expects everyone to do the right thing but cannot articulate what it is.

All in all, I think Levy's thesis — that women have moved beyond Tom Ford's sexy dresses, and into the prim refinement of Lanvin under Elbaz — isn't entirely spot-on. Any woman, no matter her career or age, wants at least occasionally to look hot; if that note is missing on Elbaz's scale, it's a lack. And it's a heartbreaking statement about women in general that Elbaz should have such a presumed accord with our needs because he personally understands feelings of physical inadequacy. (When Levy asks him what his life would be like if he were thin, Elbaz doesn't skip a beat: "Amazing.") But Elbaz's work as the concierge of Lanvin, ironically, displays all the assurance he himself can't seem to muster. He never exhibits the clumsy pretty-ugly tics of Miuccia Prada — he knows real women don't want to look dowdy. His idea of sexy is never louche, like Roberto Cavalli's. His clothes are tailored, but not restrictive like the work of Roland Mouret. Intellectual touches don't impede wearability, as they can at Comme des Garçons. ("If it's not edible, it's not food," says Elbaz. "If it's not wearable, it's not fashion.") Alber Elbaz's work, for those who can afford it, is classic without the connotation of dustiness. And it's nice to get to know, at least a little, the fevered, nervous, visionary personality behind the curtain.

Ladies' Man [New Yorker — sub req'd]
Ariel Levy On The Designer Alber Elbaz — Audio Slideshow [New Yorker]
Lanvin Fall/Winter 09 Collection [Style.com]

As Levy explains, the late seventies were a time of lesbian separatism in America, a time when it made sense to say, in the words of separatist publication The Furies, that lesbianism was "not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy." But for the Van Dykes it was both — they refused to speak to men except waiters and mechanics, believed the world was suffering from "testosterone poisoning," and tried to stop their vans only on Women's Land, "places owned by women where all women, and only women, were welcome." However, they were far from the "celibate 'political lesbianism'" of such activists as Barbara Lipschutz, who said women should "free the libido from the tyranny of orgasm-seeking. Sometimes hugging is nicer." Ex-Van Dyke Chris Fox says of her time with the group, "people were fucking their brains out."

The Van Dykes embraced sadomasochism — according to Levy, "it was permission to focus on what turned them on, rather than what was politically correct, a way of appropriating the lust and power hunger that feminist doctrine had deemed male." Their practice of S&M angered other feminists, who thought that "lesbians should permit themselves only those sexual interests that reflect superior female ideals" and that "whips and chains or dog collars in public space" would disturb those recovering from domestic or sexual violence. But for the Van Dykes, S&M was an expression of identity as well as desire. The group's de facto leader, Lamar Van Dyke, says,

I felt like I had been in trouble my whole life for being too big, too loud, too demanding, too bossy, too everything that I am. When I discovered this S&M thing, it was actually a place where people loved me for those things. It was very liberating and quite a treat.

Lamar Van Dyke is perhaps the most inspiring figure in Levy's piece. Now living in Seattle, Van Dyke works for an Internet-service provider, where she works and speaks with men. "But," says Levy,

she is still wild, a big pirate of a woman. Regardless of the different people of different genders she has chosen over the years as her comrades, Van Dyke's primary loyalty has always been to her own adventure. A woman in her sixties who has been resolutely doing as she pleases for as long as she can remember is not easy to come by, in movies or in books, or in life.

The political climate may have changed a great deal since the late seventies, but it's a sad sign of our times that a woman who does what she wants still seems like a radical.

Lesbian Nation [The New Yorker - abstract only]

[Illustration by Edward Koren via the New Yorker]

"Feminism has been suffering an identity crisis for years, and it's only gotten worse during the 2008 election cycle," Lantham says. "Frustratingly, no clear leader from the third wave has emerged to lead women out of the void…the third-wavers are lacking the vision to grab the keys to the throne…The leaders of the third wave seem to keep saying the same thing. We get it: women enjoy sex just as much as men. Isn't there something more profound you'd like to promote?"

Frustratingly, Lantham is completely off the mark. First of all, the reason "no clear leader" from the third wave has emerged, Steinem-like, from the so-called ashes of the second wave, is because the feminist battle in the aughts is a much more subtle fight. In the 60s, feminists raged against some very real, very crippling sexism. They weren't allowed to participate in many businesses and weren't taken seriously in many arenas, and discrimination against women was not only legal, it was acceptable. While it's undeniable that sexism continues to exist (and be accepted), because women superficially have all the rights of men, fighting sexism is a far more amorphous battle. One could argue the same thing for racism. Obviously racism still exists, but where's Generation Y's Martin Luther King or even Jesse Jackson? There isn't one, because it's difficult to rally people around a cause when the problem — discriminating against people because of the color of their skin — is technically illegal.

Secondly, it's insulting, and completely incorrect, to say that third wave feminists are only concerned with sex. Really Robert? Do you actually read, say, Feministing, Jezebel or any other pro-female site on a regular basis? Because if you did, you'd realize that we talk about sex maybe 5% of the time, if that. We pay more than fleeting attention to some very "second wave" problems like sexual harassment in the workplace, equal pay for equal work, and sexism in the media. And even though there is no single feminist who is as publicly prominent as Steinem once was, I can name several young feminists who are making waves in discourse: Ariel Levy, Jennifer Baumgardner, and Jessica Valenti among them.

Finally, reducing third wave feminism to sex positivity betrays a lack of understanding of third wave feminism. What are his criteria for third vs. second wavers? Chronological age? Because it's obviously not ideology alone. "In the presence of this void that Sarah Palin has risen from the flames of the second- and third-wavers. The torch has been dropped, setting the whole damn succession ablaze," Lantham argues. But he's ignoring the fact that it's potentially positive that feminism is no longer a monolith. Sarah Palin has risen because John McCain promoted her in a jarringly pandering move to appeal to evangelical Christians. It has nothing to do with the lack of a single, unifying feminist doctrine.

The one place I could argue that there is a real chronological break between feminists is in their fear of Palin's fumbles. In one corner, we have Rebecca Traister representing the third wave. She doesn't feel sorry for Palin because Palin is a grown woman who got herself into this mess. In the opposite corner, representing the the second wave, is Slate's Emily Bazelon, who worries that Palin's gaffes will prove to the country that women are not competent enough for the highest office. "Palin won't bust through the ceiling that has Hillary's 18 million cracks in it. She'll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one," Bazelon posits. Maybe it's naively third wave of me, but I think the country is beyond thinking that one unqualified woman ruins everything for all women in general.

Macho Ma'am [Radar Online]
The Un-Hillary [Slate]
Poll: Palin Less Popular With Women Voters Than With Men [Time]

If you've been following the campaign closely, you're familiar with Cindy's biography. Born Cindy Hensley, heiress to the largest beer distributorship in Arizona. She met John in the late 70s while on vacation in Hawaii, and after a whirlwind romance, the two were married in 1980. Levy makes reference to the mini-scandal surrounding the McCain's initial courtship, (John was still married to his first wife, who had been crippled in a car accident); she discusses Cindy's involvement with Operation Smile and Mrs. McCain's lil' painkiller addiction that involved her stealing money from a medical charity she ran.

But at the beginning of their relationship, a McCain friend told the New Yorker, "Cindy stood for everything he didn't have in prison. This was the sweet, innocent, pure American dream." And it seems that in someways, their marriage is set up to preserve John's idealized notions of Cindy, since he barely deals with her in reality. Cindy often brags about how she adopted a daughter from Bangladesh without telling John. She has said, "For most of the twenty years we've been married, he's been in Washington all week while I'm in Arizona with the kids. I've never spent this much time with my husband." Levy observes: "John McCain seems to gravitate toward women who endure pain in silence."

Like her husband, who seems to gloss over the familial reality to paint a pretty, loving picture, Cindy McCain has covered over all those unhappy circumstances of her past. When speaking at her father's funeral, her half-sister was in the audience, and Cindy referred to herself, quite callously, as an "only child." Perhaps her painkiller addiction, which was uncovered by her parents (John McCain only found out his wife was a pillhead when he was informed that the DEA was investigating her charity), helped her blot out all the nastiness so her internal image was the same as her plucked and groomed exterior.

There's a passage towards the beginning of Levy's profile that essentially explains Cindy's entire persona, and I'll repeat it here to save you the trouble of reading those many thousand words. "Since childhood, McCain has been expected to embody certain pillars of conventional femininity; beauty, refinement, altruism, and an inclination to encourage the ambitious men in her life," Levy writes. "She is probably better suited to this particular formulation of public wifehood than the outspoken, muscular, and frankly powerful Michelle Obama. But if you watch her closely, from time to time you can see Cindy McCain slip out of character." It's like Cindy is going through her own personal 60s revolution, like Betty Draper. She's realizing that keeping up appearances is untenable in a modern political world.

The Lonesome Trail [New Yorker]

Earlier: Cindy McCain's Marriage Is Not Exactly A Straight Talk Express
Oh, About That First Wife

Jacobs openly courts his celeb status. “There is definitely part of me that just loves the idea that I’m the headline—I do get some weird thrill out of that,” he said. “I’m human. I love attention. Actors don’t go onstage
because they don’t want attention. If you show your art, if you show your fashion, that’s also a very human thing, and, in terms of contemporary life and the twenty-first-century fascination with personalities, I like that I get out of that fashion-designer box and become, I don’t know, personality box or celebrity box. I love that! It’s fun.” Jacobs' nightlife forays, the high-profile romances, the MySpace confessionals, have rendered him far more accessible than most fashion fixtures. Not to mention the ubiquity of his muses and purses. And Jacobs loves this recognition. As Levy puts it, "there is nothing he loves more than seeing his work woven into the culture...Jacobs also enjoys the idea that the brand is the product being sold" as opposed to the traditional view that fashion is an art form for the privileged few.

Of course, fashion has always mirrored the idiosyncrasies of its icons; Karl Lagerfeld's imperious views of weight have fluctuated in accordance with his own poundage. But Vreeland, Chanel, Lagerfeld were a very different breed: they were Fashion people. They were set apart from the mainstream; when they were arbitrary and self-centered, the ripples were smaller and only served to increase the industry's reputation for vaguely absurd aloofness. "Marc Jacobs’s brand of success is unapologetically less dignified," writes Levy, and as such, by bad luck but also by design, Jacobs does not have this luxury. He, more even than Lagerfeld, has consciously made himself a brand. As such, Marc Jacobs the product is influential, "as famous for what he means as for what he does". And this product — the new, made-over Marc Jacobs, homogenized and sleek, certainly healthier but also more conventional, is in some ways unfortunate. If a designer was going to have this kind of influence and recognizability, it was kind of cool that he could be a shleppy outsider with glasses. Now he's another perfect fashion-world creation, and because he's made this metamorphosis publicly, and because it's so dramatic, and because now he's a big celebrity — and not, incidentally, off drugs, which is a good thing! — that's what people ultimately take away from it. Physical perfection of a conventional nature is once again, by extension the ideal, the road to success and happiness.

Enchanted [The New Yorker]