In an essay of epic and varied nastiness in the new Atlantic, Flanagan argues that Brown was no champion of working-class women — she was a champion for home-wreckers. Flanagan quotes Jennifer Scanlon, author of Brown bio Bad Girls Go Everywhere, saying,

As Scanlon aptly notes, Brown "appointed not predatory or non-committal men but married women as the sorry counterpoint to her sexy girls." For the reader with moral qualms? "I'm afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives," Brown announced from the outset of her public life. To Scanlon-whose besotted encomium may constitute Brown's final caress in this vale of tears-the attitude amounts to "she who keeps the man happy keeps the man," a point of view the biographer hails, several times, as being fundamentally "libertarian." By this, she means that when two women bid for a man, no advantage shall be given to the one who might have children with him, or an economic dependency built upon their marriage. There is only the marketplace of feminine wiles, in which a concubine's feigned interest in a man's workday trumps a wife's quiet plea for help around the house, in which young is better than old and new is more exciting than familiar.

Here Flanagan takes the worst kind of antifeminist rhetoric — the kind that speaks of women in terms of quasi-monetary sexual "value" — and makes it run both ways. Now women are "bidding" on men, using their riches — the "concubine" (!?) her youth and "wiles," the wife her children and "economic dependency." Both men and women are reduced here — men, for a change, are commodities, but women are merely sexual pocketbooks competing in an auction. And wiles win out, but not for long.

Flanagan jumps from Brown to John Edwards's paramour Rielle Hunter, a loose woman perhaps influenced by Brown's celebration of single sluttiness (because, of course, adultery was invented in 1962). Flanagan has some incandescently insulting things to say about Hunter, including this:

Hers is not an intelligence or an ambition difficult to plumb, and her dream is almost certainly to have Elizabeth shuffle off the mortal coil so that she can instate herself in the North Carolina pleasure dome and become the fun, hip, "Being Is Free," bleached-blond, super open-minded, videographing, Power of Now stepmom, a prospect so hideous that it makes Elizabeth Edwards's last-chance book tour look like what it is: a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died.

Flanagan (who, as the tabloids say, does not treat Rielle Hunter) knows exactly what Hunter wants, down to the intellectually lightweight cultural references. And she knows she's not going to get it:

Deep within Rielle-this little minx of pleasure and profit-guess what there is? A heart that aches like a woman's but breaks just like a little girl's. [...] I don't imagine that Rielle's decision to have her baby (whoever the father) came from a strongly pro-life position, or from a plan to jack some cash out of the ambulance chaser. It came, surely, from the powerful emotions that accompany all pregnancies, but especially those that occur in women who probably thought they would never get to have a baby, and who find out, at the 11th hour, that the dream might come true after all, and they might have a home and a child, and (please, God) a husband and father to go with that child.

So, to recap, Helen Gurley Brown made it sound like it was okay to steal someone else's man, but it really isn't, not only because marital commitment should override "wiles," but also because a married man will never leave his wife for you. The wages of sin are ... still being single, a prospect Flanagan seems to abhor. She writes of "the desperate, Blanche DuBois tinsel of [Brown's] new creation-the single girl" and "the possible pitfalls and sorrows of life as a sexually liberated, 'all the time in the world' unmarried woman" in such a way as to leave no doubt that she views Hunter as the ultimate loser in the affair — and to imply that unmarried women in general are really kind of sad.

But it's men who fare the worst in Flanagan's moral reckoning. Amy Benfer of Broadsheet offers a smart roundup of Flanagan's many insults (Brown was "pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash;" the "ladies of the steno pool" include "Bertha in Accounting, with the hair on her chin;" anyone who hasn't had a kid is "just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming it's the right name for a feeling you've had"), but she doesn't mention Flanagan's implicit denial of male autonomy. Flanagan makes much of Rielle Hunter's pickup line to John Edwards: "you are so hot." She writes,

"You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign-with the personal losses and long separations that come with it-and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. "You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives.

Interestingly, these words were also the subject of an article in last month's Cosmo, about how to keep your man from cheating. Both Brown's former magazine and her modern-day critic act like Hunter made Edwards sleep with her using these simple words. But Rielle Hunter didn't break John Edwards's vows. She didn't cheat on his wife in her hour of need. He did.

Ultimately, Flanagan and Brown make the same mistake: assuming that women can control men. Sex and the Single Girl wasn't all that far off of the seduction manuals George Sodini read, in that both taught readers that fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex could be had through manipulation. Flanagan might not agree with the "fulfilling" part, but like Brown, she seems to see an adulterous affair not as a choice made by both a man and a woman, but as a competition between wife and "concubine." The man is just the prize.

Of course, they're both wrong. Rielle Hunter may not be a good role model, but ultimately the blame for Elizabeth Edwards's pain rests with her husband. Because women — single or married — can't actually control men. Luckily, it's not our responsibility — it's theirs.

Sex And The Married Man [The Atlantic]

Relate: Who You Calling White Trash? [Broadsheet]

Clune trots out the old chestnut that women are too tired to bone after working, grocery shopping, and taking care of the kids. She also complains that, "these days women are expected not only to be the perfect wife, mother and career woman but also a naughty nymph at bedtime." But the only solution she offers is one already espoused at length by Caitlin Flanagan: "Just Do It." Though she jokingly blames her triplets on "Just Doing It," Clune seems to agree that "sex is just like jogging - you don't always fancy the idea of it, but once you start you wonder why you don't do it more often." True enough — but why do the legion of columns about busy women's low sex drive offer lying back and thinking of England as the only real fix for the problem?

Clune does name-check the recession ("money worries, redundancy and falling house prices aren't the best aphrodisiacs") — but she doesn't make the obvious connection that people's work lives are ruining both sex and sleep. Other writers on this issue — Ayelet Waldman among them — have suggested that men should shoulder more of the housework to get their wives in the mood. Equality in the home is a great idea, and, which really practiced, has probably sexed up many a celibate marriage. But individual men doing more laundry is no substitute for an examination of capitalism's demands on families. We live in a world where both parents must often work to support their kids, where maternity and paternity leave are substandard, where child care is expensive, and where women and men both suffer in the workplace when they put their families first. And the recession has not changed the mentality that the best employee — single, childless, partnered, or parenting — is one who always puts his or her personal life second. Until these things change, people will always have to make the sad choice between sex and sleep.

At least, though, the Brits surveyed had a choice. A new Australian film, My Year Without Sex, tells the story of Natalie, who suffers a brain aneurysm and is told to forgo sex or a year to avoid triggering another one. The movie shows not just how Natalie and Ross navigate Natalie's sexless year, but also how they raise their two children and interact with a richer family "who spend their time making money, arguing and shopping." Reviewer Paul Byrnes says My Year Without Sex gives viewers "a strong sense that raising a family now comes with unforeseen difficulties" and "a year without sex is actually one of the lesser challenges that [the director] tackles." Nonetheless, Natalie's plight should serve as a reminder to people prevented from screwing by the more common libido-killers of long hours and housework — sex, and a fulfilling personal life in general, is worth fighting for.

8 out of 10 Brits prefer sleep to sex [GMTV]
Is sleep the new sex? Yes! Yes! Yezzzzzz [Daily Mail]
My Year Without Sex [Sydney Morning Herald]
"Year Without Sex" proves to be time well spent [Reuters]

Flanagan - whose mini-essay is just one of many in the magazine's package on the "Power Of Michelle Obama" - starts off by echoing British criticisms of Michelle's gifts to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's sons — she calls the toy helicopters "the diplomatic equivalent of a rewrap." But that's okay, she says, because Michelle Obama is totally cute in other ways! Like how she "cuts a pretty figure in her big-and-tall gal ready-to-wear." And how "she lacks taste; her consumer preferences seem to have been rendered into being by the Mall at Short Hills." "This is not the time for taste," says Flanagan. In fact "American women" just love Michelle more for her "cock-up" with the Brown boys, because it sends the message that "times are lean, the fripperies of entertaining don't come as effortlessly as they once did, and-heads up, folks-the lady of the house is a little bit frazzled right now."

Caitlin Flanagan is the queen of trying to have it both ways, and this time she seems to be trying to make a populist point about Michelle Obama's "frazzled" everywoman-ness while at the same time being snooty about her taste. We'd venture to guess that she's the only woman in America who looks at Michelle Obama and thinks "frump," and her "this is not the time for taste" backpedaling seems more than a little disingenuous. She comes off like that friend who spends an hour trashing someone, then puts on a fake smile and says, "but that's why we love her, isn't it?" And given the choice between that kind of friend and someone who might buy a less-than-perfect gift from time to time, we know whose house we'd rather visit.

Good White House Keeping [NY Mag]

Related: The Wifely Duty [Atlantic]

Obviously "wifely duty" is far from a new idea — but even neo-wifely-duty isn't new. Caitlin Flanagan was telling wives to overcome their low libidos back in 2003. In fact, Bettina Arndt uses the exact same very unsexy phrase that Flanagan used to describe how you will probably like sex even if you didn't want to have it: "Once the canoe is in the water, everyone starts happily paddling."

First of all, canoeing makes us think of family vacations and mosquitoes, neither of which we want in bed with us. Second of all, both Arndt and Flanagan assume that feminism has turned the modern-day wife into a compassionless, self-gratification machine who has no concern for her husband's needs or desires. Arndt does acknowledge that sometimes the man is the one with low libido. But she also writes,

These days unless women want sex it just doesn't happen. Women's right to say no has been enshrined in our cultural history since the 1960s when women's sexual rights became a rallying cry. As terrible stories of marital rape and sexual violence claimed the public's attention, women's right to refuse sex became fundamental to decent relations between the genders. The new rule was that sex must wait until women are well and truly in the mood.

And Flanagan says,

To many contemporary women [...] the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfillment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters. Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end.

In both cases, the idea is that the battle against rape and domestic violence (which it, it's worth pointing out, far from won) has made women care only about their own sexual desires, not their husbands''. But many women with low libido feel huge guilt over it, and most women have probably had sex when they weren't totally in the mood, just to please their partners. The idea that wives are unapologetically and obliviously indifferent to their husbands' sexual desires, and just need a little nudge into that canoe, is damaging to men as well as women.

When sex drives are out of sync, it can be a problem for both partners, and most relationships are probably healthier if those drives can get synced up again. But to say, as Arndt does, that "women must get over that ideological roadblock of assumptions about desire and 'just do it'" is to oversimplify both the problem and the solution. Like most problems in a relationship, sex problems are usually best solved together — not by telling one partner to just get over it.

Women Need To Say Yes To Sex [Canberra Times]

Related: The Wifely Duty [The Atlantic]

While the essay covers pretty much every facet of girlhood - and does a good job of capturing a lot of adolescence's pain and rapture, Flanagan's ultimate take on Twilight's appeal is in some ways reductive:

If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. ...That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel...But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church...The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.

Flanagan is not the first critic to make the explicit link between Edward's self-imposed restraint (he is afraid, to the uninitiated, that if he loses control with Bella he'll be overcome by the temptation to drink her blood, killing her) and the loss of virtue. In several reviews, critics called this out as a transparent bit of moralizing; or a whitewashing of teen sexuality. At the risk of lowering the discourse, sometimes a vampire is just a vampire. To my mind, such simplification — and co-option — does a disservice to the story's elemental appeal. Whatever the author's own inclinations, the book's moral universe is not a didactic one (except in the good/evil way, of course.) Parents advise using birth control; in a later book, characters aren't adverse to abortion. If Meyer had wanted to impose her moral views; she could have — the book was hardly undertaken as a commercial labor. More to the point, were sex actually morally wrong in this universe, there'd be no real tension to the story. That's not to say that the lack of sex isn't a driving force —vampires by definition conflate seduction and death, hence: conflict. Rather, what some critics describe as chaste and Flanagan as essentially puritanical is a return to the basic principle of the page-turner: make them wait for it. I'm passionate about this because I went into the movie without any particular investment, and found myself so swept up in the maelstrom of teen emotion that I fainted. (Yes.) Had this been rooted in a deep-seated puritanism I don't think this would have been the case. More likely, it was the result of a drama that came from something much more fundamental, tension.

Flanagan feels Twilight succeeds because it taps into the innermost wishes of teen girls — for comfort, for love, for reassurance. While we might disagree on the particulars, I won't argue with that: what I will say is that (based on my own humiliating experience) people generally — not just young girls — are moved by simple stories, well-told, and that is not something anyone grows out of. (And it's a pet peeve when teens are treated as a separate species with unfathomable motivations.) Restraints make for good stories (see: the popularity of Jane Austen adaptations) but as society loses them, usually the fictional substitutes we come up with are too lcking in urgency to really command much interest. We've lost a lot of the tricks of good storytelling, and if vampire love is the only way to make people realize that, bring it.

What Girls Want [The Atlantic]
Twilight Is The New Breed of Chick Flick [AP]

Earlier: 7 Vampires Better Than Twilight's Edward Cullen
Twilight At Midnight: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Not surprisingly, Flanagan has a conservative view of Juno, branding it a "fairy tale" in a New York Times op-ed yesterday because "surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure."

Following that overly-generalized statement, Flanagan gets into some sticky paternalistic territory. She mentions the Victorian era as a time when, "[G]irls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences." While Flanagan doesn't support the limiting of horizons, she does support the safeguarding from consequences, which doesn't seem to be realistic or ultimately beneficial. What young girls need, in my mind, is to be educated about sex so that they can make their own informed decisions. Some of these decisions, naturally, will be completely idiotic, but the only way a person can forge his or her sexual identity is through trial and error.

Sex scribe Susie Bright certainly disagrees with Flanagan on more than one level, but most glaringly when speaking of her two abortions, which caused her far from a "lifelong cost." "I was filled with happiness and relief in the aftermath of the two abortions I had," Bright writes on her blog. "I had a supportive, enlightening, and even sentimental experience at the abortion clinic, which is either an anomaly, or has simply never been shown on screen. By sheer coincidence, two acquaintances of mine were in the same recovery room; we were in each other's arms as soon as we could sit up! Physically, it was painless, and my doctors were awesome."

Bright also concedes that the lack of abortions in movies has a lot to do with needing to move the plot forward: an abortion is usually a plot ender, not a beginner. Nonetheless, would you go see an abortion comedy in which the abortion was followed through on? Could one even succeed in this country?

Sex And The Teenage Girl [New York Times]
Anatomy Of A Smushmortion [Susie Bright]
Juno, Scolded [Slate]