Double X's new column, "Modern Love Revenge," is potentially pretty genius - provided, that is, the subjects are as prone to soul-baring as the original authors. Although Audrey Bethel, whose lack of communication causes mom Maynard to break into her email and discover a scary situation, you may recall - seems perfectly ready to go public, albeit in more diplomatic terms. Bethel's response is more measured and less personal than her mother's - but there are plenty of small digs in there.

It's pretty clear from Audrey's - and her mom's - pieces that living material is no novelty in the Bethel-Maynard house. As Audrey says, "My mother, Joyce Maynard, writes for a living, so I have spent my life learning that an event recounted by one person might not sound like the same event when recounted by another person, even if she was there, and witnessed it, and was at the center of it. It can be frustrating for me to let my mother own her stories-and by proxy, the stories of the people close to her." (As the daughter of two writers, I should point out here that this isn't typical. It probably is, though, of writers who write regularly about their own first-person.) "Over the years, my mother has often written works of nonfiction detailing my family's life and times-but never had anything so intimate or inherently mine to tell been the topic of her writing."

Here, Audrey reproduces the oddly loaded email her mom sent her before running the piece.

Dear Aud, I have written an essay that I need to show you. An editor at the New York Times would like to publish it, but I will not do this unless you can feel alright about this. I am guessing that if you could have chosen, you would prefer to have a mother who did not, as I do, write about her life. Though of course, if that were the case, you would have a totally different mother. And be a different person yourself.

And if that, in context, seems passive-aggressive - kind of defiant and impotent (how did "The New York Times" see this essay before Audrey granted her permission? Magic?) - check out this line: "I knew her primary purpose was not to write an academic piece to raise social consciousness, but I still felt strongly that the original draft of my mother's piece perpetuated certain stereotypes and assumptions. I knew how much she wanted me to tell her to go ahead with the piece, especially since it would be good publicity to coincide with her new book coming out."

Holy underlying tensions, Batman! In the end, Audrey, obviously a good sport, works with her mother to edit the piece into a compromise that acknowledges the social issues close to her heart. But her ambivalence, in the article, is palpable. And if this retort isn't an act of veiled aggression, I've never seen one. Sure, we know these people only by what they've shown us - maybe it's no relation to who they are in real life. But as characters in a public drama, they're choosing to paint quite a fraught picture. It would be interesting to see the exchange in which Audrey informed her mother of this piece - if in fact she did. Having made her, by her own admission, who she is by dint of her oversharing, Maynard could hardly object.

[Image via JoyceMaynard.com]

Modern Love Revenge: Joyce Maynard's Daughter Gets Her Turn To Speak[XX]

Related: Joyce Maynard Looks Back On Life?

Illustration by Christopher Silas Neal, via NY Times.

The essay, by Cathleen Calbert, starts out cute.

John Wayne was a man. The young Marlon Brando was a guy - didn't you see the hurt and indecision in his eyes in "On the Waterfront"? Rock Hudson was a man. James Dean was a guy...On the other hand, I want the E.M.T.'s who show up when I've collapsed to be men, not guys. I don't want someone responsible for saving my life to be torn up about the death of his dog or how some chick hurt his feelings.

You get the idea: "men" are competent and 1950s-repressed. "Guys" are arrested and boyish, but in touch with their feelings. She likes guys.

And then:

After I was molested in a deserted schoolyard, my father explained to me the difference between boys and men. "If it's a man," he told me, "you don't scream. With a boy, you scream." The logic being, I suppose, that a man would do whatever it took to make you stop screaming whereas boys still have fear in them; a boy would run away.

Her dad goes after the teenage molestors and scares them. "That's what a man does. He takes revenge...My father didn't speak to me again about that day. That's also what a man does." Then it becomes all about her dad, distant and mid-century-repressed and unable to give the author more than this harsh guardianship. He dies when she's young, and she thinks that's okay because "I suspect we would not be on speaking terms had he lived."

It's a good, personal essay. But what I found kind of ironic about it is that she's let her dad's harshness color her perception of the world as starkly as he did. "Men" and "guys." "Her dad" and "people she likes." Of course, everyone does this to a degree, but I think the binary she outlines isn't uncommon: we've got the repressed masculinity of a Don Draper and modern guys, and as a culture we've never reconciled the two at all. Even now, the dudes we see on ads or TV tend to be goobers or douches, with not much in-between. Men have to be harmless or they're...not, just as her dad viewed every boy the author dated as a potential molester. We cut "guys" slack. We hold them to a lower standard. Even growing up with a loving, sensitive dad, I fall into this: I've talked about dating "grownups," the men in suits who take you on real dates - as opposed to the vaguely-careered sensitive types who don't seem to have earned the "man" appellation. Time was, this limbo didn't exist.

And that can't be easy. It's easy to blame the Boomers here, but hell, we're adults in a post-existentialist world, with a degree of buck-stopping autonomy nowadays. We know well that stark gendered expectations are constricting, and surely "guy" and "man" is as damaging as "girl" and "woman?" And the truth is, we can like both, because people can be both - but only if we let them, right?

Forget The Men. Pick a Guy. [NYT]

Maybe it was inevitable that Joyce Maynard should end up penning a "Modern Love." Probably. This is, after all, one of the progenitors of the confessional essay, famous for her youthful affair with J.D. Salinger and equally well-known for writing in detail about that same affair thirty-some years later. When that essay came out (besides wondering at the good fortune of finding the entire Salinger part excerpted in Vanity Fair) many of else felt a little funny about her spilling. Even as we marveled at his creepiness, weirdness, at his arrested coldness, at the predatory emotional stranglehold he placed on a young and vulnerable girl wholly in his power, it was hard not to think, how he must hate this. For the most famous recluse since Howard Hughes, such a tell-all must have seemed (were he aware of it) both incomprehensible and vulgar. And as a writer of emotional restraint - even as he mined his own troubled psyche - the baldness of it must have grated. Maynard's essay engendered no sympathy for the great man: I know I for one was disappointed, fascinated, appalled. And yet, looking back I find it doesn't especially impact on my feelings about Salinger's work. There is a power in total silence that no amount of words can equal. That's something we forget now, that level of control being in short supply. And of course, ironically, it's worth remembering that it was Maynard's first-person Times magazine essay, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" that first attracted Salinger's attention - back when such confessions felt fresh and bold.

In yesterday's essay, Maynard writes about breaches of trust. Specifically, reading her daughter's email when the latter falls out of touch - and, in the way of such things, finding things she doesn't want to know.

Slowly, then, in messages she had written to friends, the story unfolded. She and Johnny had gone for their H.I.V. test that December. Two weeks later: A clean bill of health for Audrey. But the man my daughter believed to be the love of her life was H.I.V. positive. Back then, for an undocumented Haitian living in the Dominican Republic, the medical services necessary to keep him alive would be available only at a cost beyond his means...It got worse. They had mostly been careful, but not 100 percent. And the test results Audrey got could not be viewed as accurate until three months had passed.

Now, Maynard finds herself in the painful position of the successful snoop: how to deal with the reality of what she's not supposed to know. In the end, Audrey is OK - she reads, clandestinely - and one can only assume that had Maynard not found "the story," she might have saved herself a great deal of vicarious pain. But that, of course, is her point: this is not an option for a mother - and a child cannot, in fact, expect months of silence and anxiety to go unchecked. Even as Maynard acknowledges the betrayal of the act, we know she would do it again. She's talking about the pain of being a parent, yes, and the overweening panic it breeds. But also the pain of being cut out of her children's life: by her own account, at this point, her three children have all left home and she is left behind. Her daughter does not confide in her, but in, presumably, friends. "You don't need to try and fix my life any more, Mama," she tells me. "I can handle that part on my own," says her daughter - but what we see is not "fixing" but the inability to do so, the impotence of someone who wishes she'd been asked to.

Finishes Maynard,

It is a lesson long in the learning, though the first intimations of this came to me that summer day seven years ago, when I stood on the deck of the ferry to catch a last glimpse of my daughter waving to me from the shore, with her pink hat and long braid and her wide, bright smile. We stood that way, waving, for a long time, as the boat moved steadily away from land - she in one country, I heading toward another, until she was just a dot on the horizon, same as I must have been to her. We were off to live our lives.

But this strikes me as ironic - and more than a touch bittersweet. The essay that follows this hopeful parting is not about Maynard's life, a life so famed for its burdensome promise of precocity, so much as her daughter's. And ironically, it's not the daughter, she who lived it, who chooses to share it. Maynard is a very fine writer and always has been. With novels - including To Die For to her credit, it is strange that her name should always be twinned with an episode of her youth. And yet, it's hard to know whether she fights it. And the dynamic of this essay, back where she first started, does little to challenge that perception. Rather, Audrey is characterized by her reticence, her unwillingness to confide. Although, as Maynard says, it is she who "allows me to tell this story," at the end of the day it is her mother sharing something that is not fundamentally hers to share.

My Secret Left Me Unable to Help [New York Times]

Unmarried couples live together because they just want to spend more time together. Crazy!

"People who are engaged think of (living together) as the next step before they get married, but in many couples, it's part of the dating relationship — pretty serious, but still well shy of the marriage part," researcher Scott Stanley, co-director of the University of Denver's Center for Marital and Family Studies, told USA Today.

While this may seem obvious, it does represent a shift in thinking: There was a time that "living in sin" was truly taboo. And the study did find that 30% of cohabitors agreed that living together without getting married is not in sync with their religious beliefs.

As someone who lived alone for a really long time and recently shacked up with a very nice guy, most people — leaving out my mom — don't even ask, "So, when are you getting married?" There's something to be said for living in the now and enjoying what you have, instead of thinking of cohabitation as a trial or experiment.

But while there are a few people who think of moving in together as a "test run" for marriage (9% of men and 5% of women) — it seems that for the most part, it's an organic step that has little to do with societal pressures and the institution of marriage, and more to do with emotions. Which, when you think about it, sounds pretty romantic. And isn't that the point?

Study Debunks 'Trial Marriage' Theory [UPI]

It went on. "Used in the bedroom by lovers to describe parts of the body, and physical activities, they are very proper indeed, and they distinctly enhance sex. Overhaul a prudish attitude. Don't whistle and stick up your nose, at least, not up in the air."

And here, of course, is the rub. In a post the other day, I asserted that "online dating has long since lost its sad-sack stigma." This sparked a conversation in comments: is it really free of stigma? And even if it is, is there a reason for the stigma? Several people mentioned that they found the process unavoidably fraught and "manufactured," while others made the point that the element of "screening" involved in fact makes dating easier. Several people - like friends and relatives of mine - had met their significant others on these sites. Others had been put off by the unavoidable creeps who find their way into any community. And almost everyone had good stories. One thing came across: most everyone had tried it. And isn't this the most telling thing? Those who'd hated it, overwhelmingly, said they hated dating anyway, with its expectations and awkwardness and sense of judgment.

Katherine Sharpe's N+1 piece on her online dating experiences reinforces this: online dating, now, is tantamount to dating. Especially in cities, it's simply a useful shortcut, and for every self-aggrandizing frog, there's the great guy who, like Sharpe, you date for two years. Now, she explains, she's back online, and while there may be no stigma, she brings up other potential problems:

I worry that online dating has the potential to become an end in itself, an empty activity that soothes in its ability to offer casual, meaningless contact, and the illusion that whenever you wanted to, you could dip into the well and walk off with a partner. I wonder whether that sense of available variety makes it less likely for us to choose, to take something home today. After a while, the thumbnail images and clever sobriquets all blend together, equally desirable, equally "meh." My California roommate may have been right about this one thing: no one ever stayed together because they had a great "how we met" story, but it doesn't hurt at first, when you need some kind of glue to bind you to a complete stranger. I feel as though I could wander forever through these halls of pixel, unable to tell one well-traveled, dive-bar-loving hopeful from another.

I remember when I set up my Nerve.com profile. I posted a single picture of Mr. Met, said something terse about not looking for any man who thought Harold and Maude was a beautiful movie and, when I failed to elicit so much as a wink, took it down after a day with a crushing sense of rejection. In this way, it mirrored my real-life dating experiences of the time: agreeing to attend a party, standing around glaring in a corner for 20 minutes clutching a pineapple juice, then storming out under a cloud of furious self-reproach. The funny part was, I had always looked forward to online dating: I liked the idea of being able to write rather than talk, to have a modicum of control over the situation. Sure, you have to admit to wanting to meet someone - maybe the issue for some - but in a normal frame of mind, this seemed to me natural enough. I have also never found such "how we met" stories unromantic; I find the details of correspondence, a la Shop Around the Corner, to be infinitely fascinating. What was a revelation was that the feelings were the same as "real life" dating (even after I took down the profile, I'd spend hours looking at pictures and profiles), no safer or kinder. As more and more people dip their toe in the online world, surely it's this that will become manifest - that at the end of the day it's the same thing, but we're more willing to admit, as in previous centuries, what our intentions are. It's only recently, after all, that interaction has taken on the agonizing ambiguities that define "dating" today. If you look at the 19th Century personal ads on the estimable "Advertising for Love" blog, after all, they're as frank and unsentimental as Craig's List, albeit more family-friendly. Although it should be said no one was being ordered not to "whistle and stick up your nose, at least, not up in the air."

Scattershot, Desperate And Sleazy [N+1]

Related: Recently-Divorced Guy Dates 50 Women To Find Ms. Right
"Show Your Moral Courage, Young Ladies, And Write"

The easiest thing to dismiss about the matchmaker herself, 47-year-old and notably unmarried Patti Stanger, is her emphasis on a purely mercenary view of coupling. In addition to her show, she's written a book called Be Your Own Matchmaker, "aimed at women who hope to find love offscreen" (does it even count then?). The book calls wealthy suitors "buyers" in a way that Gould suggests isn't even really metaphorical. And the show itself, with its homogeneous beauty standards, its superficial and capricious screening process, and its creepy, brothel-like "mixers," encourages relationships "founded on the idea that a man's job is to make money and a woman's job is to be one of the possessions he buys with it." Ick, right?

More existentially upsetting is what Gould thinks Millionaire Matchmaker says about American ideas of love and marriage. She writes,

Patti [...] is convinced that there are biologically determined laws that govern why women and men are attracted to one another, and if you know these laws you can exploit them to your advantage whether you're a man or a woman. That idea is what Patti sells-not, as it turns out, "LOVE." But the inarticulable problem for the show is that when you reduce people to their basest caveman impulses it becomes hard to then shunt marriage back into the equation. No evolutionary biologist will ever tell you that humans have evolved to mate for life. Lately some of them will tell you that humans have evolved to pair-bond for four-year increments (about as long as it takes to get a child up and running), which seems about right. This information is not particularly hard to come by. But a weird thing about the show, and about American culture in general, is that we are so eager to hear and believe scientific and pseudoscientific explanations of why people "fall in love," but then we cover our ears and hum so that we don't hear the end of the sentence, which is about why people fall out.

Of course, some people do offer explanations for why we fall out of love, but these people are mostly idiots. Plenty of self-help books will tell you that a man tires of a woman because she can't make a decent brisket, has fuchsia sheets, or lets him see her removing body hair — or because she makes the mistake of trying to be friends with him. But even the smartest-sounding of these ideas don't actually explain why most relationships end, and they may even be more insidious than the ridiculous ones, because at least thinking people are unlikely to explain their love lives based on sheet color.

Scientific explanations for how relationships work, like the four-year thing (I've also heard three), seem more compelling than the pop-psych canards of self-help books, but they don't do a particularly good job either. Anything based purely on our supposed drive to perpetuate our genes at all costs ignores the influence of culture, which in the case of love is almost certainly huge (for instance, why are overweight women more likely to worry that their partners are dissatisfied? Could it be because culture is telling them they're a bad catch?). It also ignores the human drives for companionship and social interaction, just as strong as if not stronger than the drive for procreation. Trotting out evolutionary biology as evidence for why monogamy doesn't "work" is pretty simplistic.

The truth is, nothing "works." Lifelong monogamy means you might get tired of your partner, a series of four-year relationships means you (and your kids, if you have them) have to go through a breakup every four years. No model of human romantic relationships can reliably insulate anyone from pain. But Gould is right — the promise of Millionaire Matchmaker, and of much American pop wisdom about love, is that there exists for all people a relationship "out there" that will solve all their problems. In the face of the non-panacea nature of most relationships, Stanger uses exceptionalism. Though she presents marriage as the be-all and end-all to women on her show, she's not sure if she herself want to get married. Gould writes, "maybe we all believe that there are rules, and also that those rules don't apply to us."

Maybe. Reading about Stanger's "myriad weirdnesses" reinforced the firmest conviction I have about love and relationships — that no one really knows shit about them. It's depressing — no one can really tell you what to do. But it's also comforting — you don't have to listen to anyone else. Certainly not the Millionaire Matchmaker.

Qualify Your Buyer [n+1]

Any kind of "type" is inherently creepy when it becomes deliberate and self-determining. I mean, my mom tells me she always "ended up with" Jewish men; and a friend recently mentioned that for some reason she has dated four Scandinavians in a row. But of course, this is quite another matter from a white man seeking out, specifically, Asian women. In a piece in Salon, Laura Miller asks, "What is the deal with Western men's erotic obsession with the East?"

We all know the cliches: the creep looking for a "subservient" woman to cater to his every sexual want without raising a ripple or an opinion. Miller was prompted to look at the issue by a new book called The East, the West, and Sex, which chronicles this stereotype's long and distasteful history, from the 16th century, when the Western "Arabian Nights" myth took hold on, and, as she puts it, all the attendant "uncomfortable thoughts about race, power, sexuality, gender and history."

The book actually doesn't unilaterally condemn the dynamic; as Miller paraphrases, "In spite of the undeniable backdrop of injustice and exploitation, some of these encounters have been a Good Thing, offering to the men a reprieve from the repressive sexual morality of the Christian West and to the women a chance at a less traditionally patriarchal relationship than they might have had with many of their countrymen." Miller takes a dim view of this: as she points out, even if one can find the nuance in the story, the larger context is damning. And the legacy of this exoticized Orientalism speaks too loudly. As she puts it bluntly:

The power and wealth of Westerners — officials of colonial Britain, American GIs stationed in Vietnam, European expats in Thailand — when introduced into poor Asian societies where women have few other options, makes commercial sex pretty much inevitable. For all the rhapsodies about silken hair, "surrounding sensuousness," esoteric erotic arts and the ultrafemininity of Asian women, it is this economic imbalance that makes places like Bangkok so magnetic to Western men. A dollar goes much further there, whether you're buying hours of someone's labor at a sweatshop sewing machine or sexual services.

And we see the trickle-down of a reductive stereotyping every day. While very few men we know would admit to such retrograde "submission" fantasies, it can't be denied that in some ways the "Asian fetish" cliche has evolved in a way that's no less alarming for being less acknowledged. There are scores of young guys - white, hip, sophisticated, theoretically enlightened - who seem to regard having an Asian girlfriend as some kind of a status symbol. And, weirdly, they aren't embarrassed about it. The cliche is just as simplistic: in these cases, even if she's not subject to the old-fashioned "China Doll" image, she's reduced to a set of assumptions. Here's what one of my friends, a Chinese-American woman, says: "These guys who approach me half the time, clearly have "Asian fetish" written all over them. You can always tell...these dudes for whom an Asian girl, any Asian girl, is the ultimate hipster trophy." Adds another, "Maybe it's because they buy into this idea of some kind of inscrutable sphinx, and to them that seems like a good muse, because it's all about them." She also added, "the ironic thing is, it's the guys with the 'Asian woman' thing for whom we seem to be interchangeable. I mean, who just dates one kind of person, period - isn't that kind of a red flag? You'd never hear someone say, 'oh, I only date black women' - but I've heard guys say that about Asian women!"

Oh yeah, that dude I mentioned? He lives in China now. And yes, he's single.

White Male Seeking Sexy Asian Women [Salon]

Related: Did "Hipster Grifter" Play On Loathsome Hipster Asian Fetish?

I'm happy to talk personal history and mental health struggles, but I've never been keen on sexual exploits. Largely because there's so little to tell. I've always been embarrassed that I didn't have a cache of raunchy anecdotes and ribald mistakes to draw on, felt unworthy to contribute anything to the discussion. But lately it's seemed worth talking about - that, if we must use the term "Jezebel Lifestyle" whatever that is, it's not monolithic.

Despite sometimes feeling embarrassed or alienated, the funny thing is, I feel good about my choices. From a very young age I knew instinctively that I was not someone with the remove or resilience to sleep with a lot of people. I take things too seriously, I take them too hard, and even in those times when I've been single and considered changing my ways, I always knew, at the end of the day, that that wasn't me. Maybe there are times when I wish I had a more easygoing nature, could have more fun, but it's simply not who I am.

Here's the strange part: I've gotten flack for my staid choices, but not from my own generation - who, as a rule, genuinely does comprehend the notion of choice. It's women of my parents' generation who've been most critical; I remember one neighbor taking me aside to tell me earnestly that I was too young to settle down and should "enjoy being young." How dare she? Because she had fought for gains did not mean it was a personal affront if I chose not to live the free love dream. And what is this idea that the only way to "enjoy" youth and life is through variety - a strikingly narrow view and a didactic one at that. Once a professor grilled me on "why" I hadn't been with more men: was I religious? Repressed? From a conservative home? I explained that it simply felt right for me, which she greeted with knowing condescension.

I have a number of friends who are quietly, and not ideologically, circumspect in their love lives, with histories as tame or tamer than my own. Smart, modern women who for one reason or another, have chosen to support unfettered sexual liberation more in word than deed. And yet, to a woman, they embody the "Jezebel lifestyle" of independent, unorthodox thought and respect for choices, including sexual - a disconnect which some would apparently find "paradoxical." It's because I think there are a lot of us out there that I wanted to write this, although I'm flushed with embarrassment as I do. But is it because it's private - or because my choices feel inadequate? Because if it's the latter, I need to embrace my choices; as a Jezebel, it's the only way!

*Originally I had 12 for dramatic purposes, but perhaps too dramatic!

First, the essay: David Finch's marriage is in trouble, because, he feels, he's no longer able to hide his "real self" - neurotic, distant, obsessive - from his wife, Kristen.

She started observing my unusual behaviors - rigid adherence to routines, unusual reactions to social stimuli, conditional regard for the needs of others - as I became less capable of hiding them. Before long, my endearing quirks multiplied and became exponentially more annoying until eventually her life was flooded with my neuroses.

Kristen, who happens to be a speech pathologist who works with autistic children, eventually comes to suspect her husband in fact has Asperger's Syndrome, the Austism spectrum disorder frequently associated with obsessive behaviors, and that typically interferes with development of social skills and empathy. She administers a test at home - "an armchair diagnosis that would later be seconded by a health-care professional." The two set about addressing David's Asperger's by targeting the specific behaviors jeopardizing their relationship.

Whenever my routine got disrupted, or I was made to do something that didn't interest me, I would shut down, unable to engage in any constructive way. To get me to overcome this, Kristen started pushing me to my breaking point, backing off just before I was about to snap. If she thought I could handle 10 minutes of a TV show I didn't pick, but 20 minutes would send me over the edge into meltdown, she would change the channel after 18 minutes.

The author is clearly a willing student, able to apply his uniquely single-minded focus to identifying "bad" behaviors, keeping track of them, addressing them. Indeed, his willingness to take complete blame for anything wrong with his relationship seems almost of a piece with it. He does a wonderful job of expressing the relief that someone must feel at realizing that what he'd thought was a personality 'problem' is in fact a syndrome beyond his control - and the unique position of being hyper-aware of, almost detached from, a physiological impulse that determines his behavior. As he puts it,

We're not out of the socially crippling woods yet, and we probably never will be, at least when it comes to my fixations and repetitive behaviors...But over all I'm a good patient, and we've made steady progress. We've even reached a therapeutic milestone. When something is wrong, Kristen is able to whisper to me those three magic words: "Can we talk?" And instead of shutting down and freezing her out with silent brooding, I'm able to provide an equally magical response: "Yes."

The essay is heartening and touching and tremendously hopeful. It's a testament to the power of love and partnership and doubtless encouraging, too, to all those parents and people who worry Asperger's can't be addressed. The new awareness of the Autism spectrum and the prevalence of Asperger's is a great thing, and pieces like this are an important part of raising awareness and, one hopes, aiding in destimgatizing the syndrome. I was glad to read it, just as I was glad to see an episode of Made in which a much-mocked boy explained his Asperger's syndrome to his classmates. But it also made my heart sink a little. Because lately, people have been tossing this term around a lot, without knowing what it means. "He can't help it, I think he's on the Asperger's spectrum," remarked my boyfriend's sister recently when he was demonstrating what was obviously just self-absorbed and assholeish behavior vis-a-vis a family dinner he didn't wish to attend. I pointed out that, if this was true, his "Asperger's" seemed limited to those situations when he didn't want to do something or endear himself to anyone. My second-cousin recently diagnosed her philandering on-again off-again boyfriend as "having Asperger's" to explain his appalling behavior, despite the fact that he didn't seem to meet any of the clinical criteria (as long as we're all amateur diagnosticians here.) And when, at a reunion event, a childhood friend's boyfriend answered his phone ten times in the course of a heartfelt discussion of her dad's illness, she turned to me confidentially and said, "I think he has Asperger's."

No, he doesn't. Or, maybe he does, but that's not really for us to say. Yes, this is a far more common syndrome than many people realize, and the spectrum is a wide one, leading to many undiagnosed cases. But it's also an actual clinical syndrome, and cheapening the term does no one any favors. if this keeps up, US is going to be diagnosing celebrities any second. Maybe I'm extra-sensitive because I've watched several people in my family struggle with Asperger's, and watched the toll it took on their lives and sense of self. Or because I used to work with a specialist who treated kids on the spectrum and learned a lot about the clinical definitions, challenges and realities of it. For one thing, plenty of folks with Asperger's are considerate and treat their girlfriends well. For another, some people are assholes who were poorly brought up. As the author of this lovely and informative essay could tell you, Asperger's is more than a word.

Somewhere Inside, A Path To Empathy [NY Times]

Although Japan's unmarried population has risen steeply in the last few years, and its birth-rate declined (possibly as a result of increased wealth and dedication by both sexes to career), the last year has witnessed the creation of a new movement: konkatsu, or "marriage-hunting." The term is a literal adaptation of "job-hunting," and the process is not dissimilar.

While the raft of new matchmaking services and sites are not unfamiliar, and matchmaking is as old as time, the pragmatic, modern, businesslike approach - and cultural embrace of the phenomenon - are. Basically, "marriage-hunting" employs the methodology of a successful job hunt. Konkatsu@net, a marriage-hunt site, explains the approach, as translated by Global Voices, thusly:

During a ‘job hunting' period, it's not only important to have contacts with the company you want to work for participating to its ‘company explanatory meeting' and interviews....In the same way, ‘marriage hunting' consists of many different activities.Men will ‘train their body', ‘improve their taste in choosing clothes', ‘increase the number of subjects to talk about' and ‘go to aesthetic salons'. Also women will ‘have aesthetic treatments for body and nails' and ‘learn how to cook'. All these measures are considered necessary to konkatsu. However, the most important thing is ‘increasing the number of opportunities to meet people'.

This particularly straightforward approach is, some feel, the result of a paradigm shift. Explains the maker of that forementioned bra, "Japanese women are becoming more aggressive than men, working actively to make marriage happen, whereas in the past it was men who led women toward marriage." And "aggressive" new women are the target demographic for the terrifying konkatsu bra, lingerie worthy of a regressive Bond villainess. We couldn't have made this up - nor would we have wished to:

Triumph's latest novelty bra features an electronic nuptial timepiece, putting women seeking spouses literally on the clock. If an engagement ring is inserted into the mechanism, the countdown stops and the bra plays Felix Mendelssohn's "The Wedding March." The bra also includes holders for the traditional seal some people use to sign off contracts and a pen for any possible nuptial agreement.

If this is the armor of female empowerment, well, we're doin it rong. One older lady objects to husband-hunting on more romantic grounds, writing on the Konkatsu message board,

They have got to take interviews and exams to meet their partner? They have to dress up to pretend like good person?
The people who make up these new words must have a plot. They try young people to feel rushed to get married and persuade to join the marriage agencies [ja]! Don't be deceived, ladies and gentlemen! Don't be rushed and don't fake yourself!

Japan: Marriage Hunting! [Global Voices]
Japan bra maker offers support for husband hunters [Reuters]

The author, Debra Gwartney, has experienced a parent's nightmare of difficult teen years with her daughters.

Our estrangement, the not speaking, had come after years of trouble with Amanda and her sister Stephanie...To even mention their father in our household meant a dose of scorn from me, and when the two oldest girls and I began arguing about friends they hung around with, about skipping school, about staying away from the house for days on end...One night when they were 16 and 14, the girls loaded their army packs and headed for the front door, where I stood with feet planted and arms crossed. We collided there, pulling and pushing and grabbing while their two younger sisters cried, "Stop it! Stop!" from the other side of the room.

The two girls ride the rails, go missing, fall into drugs and trouble, and obviously their mother knows pure hell. This essay recounts a tentative detente, a Mother's Day bonding over a Tom Waits concert. Tom Waits, the author explains, had been the soundtrack of her divorce, and for her daughters, of their period of their wild emancipation

"the only adult who could possibly understand why they had hit the road. At least that's how they thought of it. Tom Waits knew what it was like to be torn apart by people who claim to love you; Tom Waits knew why they chose to abandon their home, their sisters, their town, their mother.

When she arrives at the concert, the author realizes her daughter's bought her a ticket some six rows away. But she's glad just to be there, to be speaking, to feel her daughter will allow her in her life. It's unspeakably sad. We've all seen or experienced these relationships: the shift in power whereby a parent becomes pathetically grateful for any contact or any sense of normalcy. To the child, it can seem inexplicable;forget authority or respect - when things get to this point, a parent is eager for crumbs of friendship, happy to walk on eggshells for the privilege of being in a child's life, eager to bond over the music of an artist who may express many things, but for whom normal parental responsibility seems fairly alien. The burden of the love is stifling and reassuring, and something about this essay expresses it perfectly.Even those of us past those tumultuous years have heard that note in our mothers' voices sometimes - eager for our time, grateful to hear our voices - and had moments of sadness at the power shift that's taken place.

I remember riding in the car with my own mom as a pre-teen and her saying how she used to know Tom Waits a little bit in the 70s and how he'd prey on young girls. I wonder if it was true; back then I didn't question it, of course. But either way it made him seem like an especially meaningful choice for a mother-daughter reunion. What's so sad about the essay is that one doesn't know if the author's relationship with her daughters will be repaired, because she clearly has so little control over the situation; she pours her 18-year-old a glass of wine, does her hair, bites her tongue. All the reader can do is hope with her that things will be okay, marvel at the power of parental love, and maybe make a mental note to call home a little more often, if only to help repay the karmic debt that teenage years seem all about amassing.

The Long Way Home [NY Times]

Marche argues that "brilliant, funny, and powerful women are retreating from sex" and uses the Tina Fey character Liz Lemon as an example:

The most complicated and intelligent woman in television comedy barely ever has sex. She doesn't sit on laps, either - "not a lap sitter," she tells one handsome date she brings home in the first season. (He turns out to be her cousin.) She admits to losing her virginity at twenty-five and accidentally reveals that she doesn't believe people can have intercourse standing up. Liz Lemon's low libido is one of 30 Rock's running gags…"

Things were not always so, Marche claims. He notes that just a decade ago, Seinfeld's Elaine Benes was "hilarious, smart, familiar with Russian novelists, an aggressive and demanding professional, and a woman who fooled around a lot."

Of course, Marche being an egotistical heterosexual man (writing in a magazine for men), his real complaint is that this situation is a "disaster" for men. "Until now," he writes, "feminism has been the best thing that ever happened to us, because it means we get to sleep with people rather than ciphers." Okay, your opinion! But it is interesting that lately, the female characters in the entertainment zeitgeist — from Pam on The Office to the shrill duo of Bride Wars to the chaste, bloodless pairing in Twilight — have sex as the last thing on their minds. There was a Sex And The City movie in which Samantha barely had sex. Seinfeld's Elaine had just as much sex as the guys on the show — maybe more — and was neither labeled a slut nor thought of as a some aberration of the norm. She was just a modern woman. A woman who dates men, and has sex with them. Revolutionary?

So Marche mourns the lack of Elaines in this world. Putting aside his needs — and what men like Marche want for a moment — wouldn't a smart, ambitious woman who has a healthy (meaning active) sex life be a great role model for women? Using 30 Rock as an example, the only choices shouldn't be the prudish Liz Lemon or the disastrous Jenna Maloney, who is all wiggle and no wit. Seems like the only ladies "allowed" to be sexual these days are the dreaded "cougars," and that label comes with its own mocking and derogatory baggage. So where have the loose women gone? Not you, or your friends, but the chicks on TV and in the movies? Let me know; I'll be watching Seinfeld reruns trying to figure it out.

Where Have All the Loose Women Gone? [Esquire]

PMS time? Maybe. How else to explain weeping at the end of Jennifer Finney Boylan's
"Modern Love" essay on becoming a transgender dad? Because, I mean, this was hardly tragic; rather, it's like the Ozzy and Harriet of transgender dad stories, when you think about it. Jim has always felt trapped inside his man's body, and years into his marriage, begins his transition. His wife and sons are totally cool with it.

Because of the love of my spouse, Deedie, not to mention that of my boys, I found the courage, somehow, to traverse the weird ocean between men and women, to make the voyage not only from one sex to another, but from a place where my life was defined by the secrets I kept to a new one, where almost everything I'd ever held in my heart could finally be spoken out loud.

Deedie, he finds, "decided that her life was better with me in it than not" and their domestic routine continues, seemingly as untroubled and enviably organized as ever. Recently, the author relates, their older son came to them with a confession and the parents, Mommy and Maddy, brace themselves for a seismic revelation about gender identity. But, poignant family sitcom style, the boy just wants to become a pacifist, take up the Irish fiddle, and give up the tuba. Later, this son (who is apparently perfect) pens the following essay for school:

Once the transition had taken place, I was comfortable with it. But I was worried what my friends would think. I kept it secret for a little bit, but eventually they found out. They all accepted it a lot better than I thought they would...Maddy is funny and wise. We go fishing and biking. We talk a lot, about anything that is on our minds. One night this spring, Maddy and I had a fancy dinner at a restaurant in Waterville. It was a special night. I wore a jacket and a tie. I had a steak. It made me feel like Maddy and I were really close. Maddy said that she thought I was growing up and that she was proud of me.

In my progressive, aggressively secular elementary school, we had a bi-weekly class called "Ethics" in which we read stories, discussed them, and came to mutually satisfactory conclusions about what constituted a good person. The stories were often like this, with saintly kids undergoing family changes that other kids Don't Understand, but ultimately helping other people grow and change and appreciate difference. I was invariably moved to tears. As indeed, I was reading this. My friend returned from getting our coffees at the mediocre 60s-tinged spot where we had escaped the heat and asked me what was wrong. "This transgender father..." I choked out, and wordlessly handed her the paper. She read it and looked at me blankly.

"What?" she said. "It seems pretty straightforward. Feel-good. But isn't it pretty cliched?"

Well, yeah. Isn't that kind of the point?

‘Maddy' Just Might Work After All [NY Times]

Natasha Sajé's's essay deals with the struggles of interracial marriage, the tragedy of losing a partner to cancer, the realities of living in Baltimore - all seen through the lens of The Wire. Plenty of people love the show - many describe it as the best TV they've ever seen, life-changing, even. But to this couple, it's a lot more than that - it becomes a cathartic means of dealing with their life's struggles - and, more immediately, his dying - writ large on the small screen.

Sitting together on our couch in Salt Lake City during those months, Tyrone and I couldn't help reveling in "The Wire." There was so much that we recognized as true. Tyrone was black - born in Jamaica, raised in London. And I am white - born in Germany and raised mostly in New Jersey. As an interracial couple from such different backgrounds, we loved the show's painfully accurate take on race and class.

The essay charts the the couple's meeting, and her family's prejudice, as well as the myriad indignities he and they suffer through on a daily basis. The Wire's gritty setting reminds them of the time they spent living in Baltimore, and the show's realism, funnily enough, becomes an escape from the reality of Tyrone's death.

Every morning and every night - up until the last 36 hours, when he couldn't speak - Tyrone would say to me: "Another day. I'm glad to see it." We celebrated his ability to read the newspaper, to eat the flan I made, to sit with me in the den and watch yet another episode of The Wire.

There's a lot going on in the essay, and the story's a specific and personal one. if there's a thesis, maybe it's this:

I once read an article about interracial marriage that told me what I already knew: interracial couples are more likely to stay together. After you've faced the wrath of family, the stares, the cold shoulders, the stupid comments, you create a bond and other people become irrelevant.

But, without trivializing this, the essay's also an eloquent testament to the power of entertainment. The Wire, as the author points out, addresses issues of race and class and flat-out humanity with unprecedented honesty. That the show can move and support people at this basic a level is more than mere escapism, it's art in the true sense. And it's encouraging and moving; this is the point. The culture still has good things in it and the capacity to make amazing work out of pain. Can more people take the example and run with it, and see that people can handle intelligence and depth? If it did nothing else, this essay should show that they can. And the point of this feature, at its best.

Down To 'The Wire' [NY Times]

The essay, "My Clock Was Already Ticking," is a bit of a mind-bender. The author wants a baby. Her boyfriend, who incidentally seems to be a materialistic dick, does not. When she gets pregnant, she wants to keep the baby; he doesn't.

I argued weakly with him that we could make it work. Without him, I didn't see a way forward. I had no savings, and no family around to support or encourage me. I was terrified, and not just about being a single parent. I was afraid that with a baby I'd be off the market for good. And I wanted a husband as much as I wanted a baby, if not more. Maybe I knew instinctively that I wasn't cut out for single parenthood. And I wanted what I wanted: husband, home, baby, in that order.

She has the abortion, even though she doesn't want to. The author is at pains to say that her objection to the abortion is not moral, but personal. He breaks up with her anyway, and gives her some Deco clock as a kiss-off.

He was a charming architect with a BMW and perfect teeth. I thought I wanted him. Turns out what I really wanted was that baby. What he really wanted was to move on with minimal disruption or conflict, and he was willing to part with one of his precious possessions to send me off with a clear conscience. He had two of them. The clocks, that is. He knew I admired them. Thus, the parting gift. I imagine it was, in his way of thinking, a bargain.

She moves on, still regretful about the abortion, and meets another guy.

Our betrothal was sealed the day he said: 'I think we should start a family right away. What do you think?" "I think that's a very good idea." I wondered what god in which heaven could possibly have deemed me worthy of this chance at redemption.

They have trouble conceiving, so they end up adopting two boys. Their "family is complete." Says the author, rather oddly, "Occasionally I do think about the price I paid for getting what I wanted the way I wanted it: husband, home, babies. Was I weak? Or strong? Would I have been a good single mom in Los Angeles?"

The "price?" I tried for a long time to put my finger on what exactly was so peculiar about this essay, and perhaps this is it: the tone of self-sacrifice throughout. She doesn't like the guy, but is willing to stay with him for the baby. She doesn't want an abortion, but is willing to do it for the relationship. All of it is necessary to "redemption," apparently, and the life she always wanted. The story is not unusual; many people terminate pregnancies for one reason or another, and some surely regret it. For those, certainly the experience must color future events. But this is more than that; it has all the weighted morality of a Flannery O'Connor story. "Forgiving yourself takes time. You don't do it just once. You do it over and over. Year in, year out," she says. For what, though? For betraying herself for a man? For losing a chance at biological motherhood? Or merely for disrupting such an inviolate life plan? Or for the actual procedure? Does she blame herself for having such conventional goals, perhaps? Or for abandoning them? Not everything needs a thesis or a moral, of course, and one person's experience is allowed to be just that. But to a reader it can feel disconcerting when the most passion in an essay is reserved for regret and self-castigation. Is it comforting that she ends the essay with the somewhat equivocal, "I guess it's just best to assume that heaven is right here, right now, and let the stars fall where they may?"

My Clock Was Already Ticking [NY Times]

Robert Leleux's grandmother is a larger-than-life figure, a beautiful, quick-witted, Texan Mame-type whom the author dotes upon, and whose Alzheimer's diagnosis feels particularly cruel. Leleux reflects on her stoicism:

'Sad lives make funny people,' she told me when I was 16. At the time, this remark had just sounded like one more zinger. But eventually I came to consider it the distillation of her philosophy. Humor was the way she had coped with every unpleasant thing in her life, from her long estrangement from my mother, her only child, to the onset of a crippling disease.

The product of one of those insular, Reaganesque marriages whose passion leaves little room for anyone else - particularly children - Leleux's mother hasn't spoken to her parents in years. And despite the tragedy of the diagnosis, her mother's illness makes a reconciliation possible. Leleux explains it thusly:

Imagine: to be freed from your memory, to have every awful thing that ever happened to you wiped away - and not just your past, but your worries about the future, too. Because with no sense of time or memory, past and future cease to exist, along with all sense of loss and regret. Not to mention grudges and hurt feelings, arguments and embarrassments...And that's the fantasy, isn't it? To have your record cleared. To be able not to merely forget, but to expunge your unhappy childhood, or unrequited love, or rocky marriage from your memory. To start over again.

The reconciliation is kinder, gentler and warmer than any interaction mother and daughter have ever had. As Leleux and his mother are leaving, his grandmother says,

'Thank you for coming, Jessica. I want you to know how much it means to me. I want you to know that I know we've never been close. And I know that's been mostly my fault. I'm not sure how much time I've got. But more than anything, I want to have a shot at spending it with you. It's so important. I mean, after all, Jessica, we're sisters.'...I groaned, then looked over to see my tough mother crying. 'Close enough, Mama,' she said.

To anyone who's read Leleux's memoir, Beautiful Boy, the riotous tone and outsize characters of the essay will feel familiar. To anyone who's dealt with the injustice, the tragedy, the dark comedy and the poignancy of Altheimers, so will its content. While it may seem optimistic to call the manifold indignities of Alzheimer's a blessing (Leleux admits openly that "I've always preferred fairy tales to literal truth") it's also true that one hears these stories of softening and reconciliation as frequently as one does those of anger, frustration, and deep sadness.(Some of this surely has to do with age; it is a lot harder to be philosophical when one is struck down with early-onset, methinks.) By story's end, one can't help thinking of the author's grandfather, who he says is bereft; surely this "glass is half full" approach doesn't reconcile him to the loss of a companion. And does such a reconciliation "count" when you're no longer dealing with the person who wronged you? For once, let's take Leleux's "fairy tale" approach: why not?

A Memory Magically Interrupted [NY Times]