Merkin notes that Meyers has achieved her almost unequaled commercial success as a woman in Hollywood by making funny, appealing movies with the message that strong-willed women can find "a man who has been brought to his senses in time to appreciate you—a woman who arouses, but even more important, understands him."

This message, argues Merkin, addresses "a previously unsatisfied hunger, composed of two parts daydream and one part hope, that is finally being addressed" among middle-aged women, among others. Like many Hollywood movies, this involves an element of fantasy.

"[Meyers] rescues the middle-aged and manless woman from her lonely plight. She has taken this sorry creature, who is bombarded with reminders of her vanished youthfulness everywhere she turns, and placed her in an alternate universe, where she is not only visible but desirable just the way she is."

While all this is leaps and bounds better than what most romantic comedies have to offer, its emphasis can sometimes come at the expense of the movie itself. Diane Keaton was certainly winning in Something's Gotta Give, but the Keanu Reeves character was one-dimensionally saintly and appreciative, and half the film seemed devoted to telling Keaton's character how fabulous and attractive she was while she bashfully denied it.

There's another nagging problem with the fantasy world of Nancy Meyers. Merkin draws attention to it by focusing on Meyers' well-documented interior design obsession — that beautiful Hamptons house that took up the other half of Something's Gotta Give — which "renders [the films] more glossy and insular than they need be, even for a genre that is inherently fizzy." Like the Sex And The City movie, exquisite consumption is equated with personal fulfillment.

And then there are the people who are imagined to live in those houses. Just look at the photo that ran with the story online, of Meyers and her cast on set.

It reminded me of this:

Both photos (besides making me wonder if all of these women have the same pricey colorist) underscore how just because Hollywood brings in a female director, writer, or actress outside the usual mold, doesn't mean all that much has changed. (When I asked the ladies of WoWoWow about the crew's homogeneity last year, Liz Smith did say, "We'd like to have some hot Spanish dancers. And some black women.")

I'm all for women being given a chance to tell their stories and wield some power on the mainstream stage, including wealthy, white, boomer-and-onward women with a fondness for highlights. I just hope they won't always be (almost) the only ones.

Can Anybody Make a Movie for Women? [New York Times Magazine]

Related: Boldface In Cyberspace: It's A Woman's Domain [New York Times]

Earlier: Women Over Forty: So Hot In Hollywood This Year

In her story, which just went online, longtime Times magazine entertainment reporter Lynn Hirschberg writes,

In the last month, Fox and her team - her agent, Chuck James, and her publicists, Leslie Sloane Zelnick and Dominique Appel - have grown increasingly nervous about her media image. The lack of success of ‘‘Jennifer's Body'' highlighted their concern: the outrageousness that made Fox an instant star was not attracting a paying audience, especially among females. They were hoping that hosting ‘‘S.N.L.'' and some recent appearances on talk shows on which she seemed demure might help to change the dialogue about Fox from the out-of-control sex bomb to the Fox they know, who is a homebody with a longtime boyfriend (the actor Brian Austin Green, who is 36) and a fondness for spending Saturday nights at Red Lobster, where she likes the cheese biscuits. That, they maintain, is the girl that girls should see. But Fox is less certain. ‘‘Women tear each other apart,'' she told me now. ‘‘Girls think I'm a slut, and I've been in the same relationship since I was 18. The problem is, if they think you're attractive, you're either stupid or a whore or a dumb whore. The instinct among girls is to attack the jugular.''

This isn't the first time Fox has (implicitly, at least) blamed jealousy for her apparent unpopularity among women. In June, she told Entertainment Weekly, "I come across as confident and [women] assume that means that I think I'm hot shit. And that makes them feel bad about themselves and so they hate me."

Hirschberg also has a theory: women, she says, are unmoved by Fox because they "tend to prefer movies that feature more approachable, less vixenish actresses, like Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston."

I happen to think Hortense had a more nuanced analysis in her post about Fox last September:

"Women don't hate Megan Fox because she comes across as confident; they hate the Megan Fox Archetype, because, in a way, it validates all of the high school notions of what sexiness is: porn-star poses, slow motion boob shots, and references to lesbianism and bisexuality as kinks instead of sexual orientation… She is the personification of the Cosmo brand of sex, and that is why women find her so annoying."

Of course, if every woman was truly turned off by the "Cosmo brand of sex," that magazine wouldn't still be selling 1.6 million copies a month. And although Elle raised eyebrows when it put the men's magazine staple on its June 2009 cover, a look at the Audit Bureau of Circulations figures indicates that wasn't a bad bet after all — the issue sold just over 300,000 copies, a respectable number on par with the same issue the year before. (It's too early to know how Fox did when she was actually on the cover of Cosmo).

Whether or not Fox is actually alienating all women, she herself is chafing against this cartoonish image of her, even as she's participated in building it, one self-consciously raunchy men's magazine quote at a time. ‘I have to pull back a little bit now,'' she tells Hirschberg. ‘‘I do live in a glass box. And I am on display for men to pay to look at me. And that bothers me. I don't want to live that character.'' Ironically, it might take even more tugs at the marionette strings from her people, this time in a different direction, to come up with something different. That, or walking away entirely.

Stardom Becomes Her [NY Times Magazine]

Related: Megan Fox, Fallen Angel [EW]

Earlier: Oh My God, I Think Megan Fox Is Winning Me Over
Megan Fox's 50 Best — And Worst — Bon Mots

• What appears to be Kanye West's campaign for his Louis Vuitton sneakers has leaked. Amber Rose, the woman he squired around fashion week, is featured, along with a truly hideous crocodile bomber jacket. [Nah Right]

• George F. Will: hates jeans, or as he likes to call them, "the demon denim." "Denim," he says, "is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances." Then the columnist writes that the only acceptable jeans are "authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil." He he he he horny. [WaPo]
• The New York Times is ending its weekly fashion spreads — which were always, to my eye, surprisingly good — its Sunday magazine. Ad pages are down 41% on last year, and the Times is going to concentrate its fashion coverage in the execrable T, as well as the Styles section. [WWD]
• Heidi Klum confirmed the seventh season of Project Runway (applications are due April 24, guys!) will be filmed in New York, not L.A. [E! Online]
• Prada is nearing the completion of some kind of an epic building in Seoul. Designed by BFF starchitect, Rem Koolhaas (who did this season's lookbook), and called the Transformer, the building's components will rotate and re-align to transform the structure completely. It'll be flexible enough to host film festivals and exhibits of all kinds. The building will be contained by a thin, elastic white membrane. [WWD]
• At least Karl Lagerfeld is honest about modeling. "[I]n fact there is no advice, because all circumstances are very different. It depends on what you are ready to give, the kind of life you bring, what may be exciting or disappointing … You can't accuse anyone of not doing enough to help you, because, besides yourself, there's nothing anyone can do. You have to be given what's needed by nature, and what's needed is to bring something new. But it's the most … (hits hand on table) unjust … (hits hand on table) thing in the world." [Fashionologie]
• Jewelry designer Anna Sheffield is the next in line for the Target: GO International diffusion line program. And Macy's will sell a cheaper capsule collection from Rachel Roy, under the label Rachel Rachel Roy, starting this August. [Fabsugar]
• Vivienne Westwood is now making pillows. Naturally, they're awesome but perhaps a little extreme — which is Westwood's aesthetic to a T. [FWD]
• Could Jennifer Connelly be making a return as the face of Balenciaga this fall? [The Cut]
• Cynthia Rowley turned up on the cover of an auction catalog with her guitarist husband. They like to collect contemporary art to decorate their West Village townhome. [WWD]
• Stefano Pilati, the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent, now has a floral sleeve tattoo. [Purple Diary]
• Coco Rocha says the weirdest thing about hosting that E! Canada documentary on New York Fashion Week was having to actually interview people. "For me to run up to people who have like, eight bodyguards was not my scene," said the model, who recently died her hair red at the request of Steven Meisel. "I don't like to get into people's personal space, I don't believe in it, so I was like, whoa!" [The Cut]
• WWD has a fascinating look at the process of clothing restoration. The case study: the work of Madeleine Vionnet. [WWD]
• There is now a thing called ModelFeed, which functions like a group blog, for models. So if you ever wanted to know how Myf Shepard feels about contemporary art, now's your time. [ModelFeed]
• Do you want to watch Rick Owens — a designer who bears some resemblance to Professor Snape — grinning maniacally for Nick Knight while Richard Strauss' Salomé plays in the background? The answer is yes. (Moreover, Owens takes his shirt off suddenly, and lets his trademark black sweater blow in the studio fan. It's dramatic.) [ShowSTUDIO]

Here's a snippet:

Bret: [New York is] a good city if you want to struggle. It's easy to struggle in New York. I think New York is a bit expensive. It's too expensive to hang out unless you've got a TV show.

Any thoughts on the president's new stimulus package? What do you recommend for the U.S. economy?
Jemaine: Budgeting.
Bret: Yeah, the government should do a budget.

I believe we already have a budget.
Jemaine: It doesn't seem like it…Maybe the American government could get a second job.
Bret: A part-time job. Or maybe the government should get its own TV show.

Photo courtesy of The New York Times Magazine

Tyra is obviously a quick study, and in her quest for branding "Tyra" as what she refers to as "attainable fantasy," TyTy has no doubt closely watched her idol Martha Stewart, and has learned from her mistakes as coming off too cold or business-y. Bu it's hard to believe that Tyra's first concern isn't money, particularly because she continually talks about it in the article. Normally cartoonish, she actually comes off like Montgomery Burns.

"I'm frugal," she said. "I've always been this way. When I was young, my mom would give me my allowance, and I'd peel off a little each week and have some to spare." She looked around the room, which had cream industrial carpeting and walls painted in a shade somewhere between cantaloupe and terra cotta. "When we moved into these offices, I didn’t like the carpet," she continued. "But do you know what carpeting costs? It’s really expensive. So, I picked out a color palette that would go with this carpet, and I painted the walls instead. Painting is much less expensive than carpet." She considered this decision for a moment. "One of the first things I ask when I hire someone who deals with the financials of the company is about their spending habits. How you spend money reveals a lot about you."

Only people who super care about money say they're frugal. She also writes in very small print so that she doesn't have to go through notebooks as quickly. And you know that has nothing to do with being green.

Hirschberg remarks on Tyra's weird, yet winning, combination of deliberate details and chaotic improvisation when it comes to her shows and producing projects. But even Tyra herself talks about how her current success was a longtime in the making, a plan she and her mother (her best friend, manager, and onetime stage mother to a child star, although the two would deny that) had carefully mapped out years ago when she first got into modeling.

"My mom said, 'You will not go to Paris without studying the industry first,'" Banks said. "I went to the fashion library in Los Angeles and looked at all the French magazines from the past. My mom explained that I should study the names of the hairdressers, the stylists, the makeup artists, the photographers, the editors and, of course, the designers. I watched videotapes of models walking. My mom said, 'This is not just glamour — it is a business.' So when I arrived in Paris, I was ready.'"

Um, except she never bothered to learn French. LOL!

Once she got to Paris, she "saw that the girls with cosmetic and swimsuit calendars made more money than the high-fashion girls," so when she began to gain too much weight for runway, she looked at it as an opportunity to really cash in with Victoria's Secret contracts and Sports Illustrated covers. She even viewed her skin color as a lucrative opportunity rather than a setback, because at the time, there was no "black Cindy Crawford." as she puts it.

At the end of the day, Tyra—who points out that she doesn't drink and is not into the latest fashions — is just like any other success story: She's a geek who made good. And like most embittered geeks, she wishes to inherit the earth. Or at least to rule it.

"I want power," she said. "The power to make change. I have never been interested in being ‘hot’ or ‘cool.’ I’m not interested in walking down a bunch of red carpets, dating someone famous, being in a big movie. I’ve done those things, and it never felt right. But I do want power and not for financial reasons."

But it's kinda hard to believe that someone so calculating isn't all about the numbers. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Banksable [NYT Magazine]

"With all due respect," the mom replied, "Fuck yourself."

Okay, not really; she said something maybe slightly more polite, but it was that sort of typical male-female exchange that prompted Sax to do that thing where a dude throws all his assumptions into the air, replaces them with a bold new age-old assumption and dives headfirst into a brand new worldview with the help of a few supporting theories, promising studies and convincing anecdotes. The story focuses on his conversion and ideas in a cover story on the rise of the single-sex education movement, which has over the past ten years yielded 45 single-sex public schools and hundreds of schools offering single-sex classes.

Sax thinks there are vast differences in the ways that boys and girls learn. Baby boys look at mobiles; girls look at stationary pictures. Boys draw pictures depicting action, girls draw pictures depicting nuance and detail and color. Girls' brains develop earlier, with with their cerebral volume peaking at 10.5 while boys peak four years later. Girls hear and smell slightly better than boys, who don't like school because it's taught "by soft-spoken women who bore," according to Sax.

Sax: gets accused of sexism and molding the facts that support his thesis; relishes that. Sax has never been a teacher.

The ACLU and such people believe single-sex education is undemocratic. "Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there's also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

Richard Kahlenberg has also never been a teacher. This is the last sentence of the story. Has Richard Kahlenberg ever been inside a public school?

And then there is Emily Wylie. Emily teaches at an all-girl's school in East Harlem. She is an advocate for same-sex education as well, in large part because she appreciates the desexualized environment: "Sure, when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I'm giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. " "It's my subversive mission to create all these strong girls who will then go out into the world and be astonished when people try to oppress them."

So one day they can go self-confidently out into the world and spar with the likes of men like Sax, who will in turn be so bowled over by the elegant simplicty of their logic as to take up their causes with messianic zeal for themselves, fighting wars to defend their pragmatic notions, for which they can then take all the credit in the New York Times Magazine because that is the way the world works. But at least they will probably stop bothering to check their mascara first.

Teaching Boys And Girls Separately [NY Times]

Meanwhile, the vast preponderance of abortions are conducted in the first half of the first trimester of pregnancy, increasingly by women who forego any sort of anesthesia so as to carry about their abortions at home with the help of some pills. And, guess what, it hurts!

Soooo, recently I found myself researching the pain involved in pill abortions, namely because a friend of mine had told me that most purveyors of the pills don't prescribe the FDA-recommended regimen of 600 mgs of RU-486 followed by an optional few hundred mgs of something called misoprostol a few days later, because they had found a new regimen — of 200 mgs of RU-486 plus 600 mgs misoprostol all at once — that was "more effective." This friend had also found the new regimen to be really really painful. But when I started researching the differences between the two pharmaceutical cocktails, I found a lot of evidence that the new regimen was a lot cheaper, and numerous studies claiming it was just as effective, but nothing about the pain.

Jesus Shit! I thought. There are motherfucking studies about the responses of women on birth control to porn, there are studies on the impact of videogames on navigational skills, there are probably studies on the prenatal effects of playing video games during the third trimester, and there are no studies about abortion and pain? Is it too late to sign up for that whole "woman president" thing?

The First Ache [NY Times]
Little Children [NY Times]

Is it all just the selfish pursuit of recycling our genes and keeping the Human Race from going extinct? Readers, I pondered all this and the ethics of throwing a fat man in front of a trolley to save five thin workers — most people wouldn't do it, apparently for biologically-ingrained moral reasons —over the weekend, when I ventured deep into the 90 zillion word philosophical abyss that was the cover story of the New York Times Magazine. I did it so you wouldn't have to, and I probably should have just gotten drunk because all I got for ya:

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like."

The Moral Instinct [NY Times]

So in a bloodless coup, which is to say, bloodless if you don't count the blood of thousands of tiny woodland creatures, Rachel Zoe has become the new Anna Wintour, and in honor of it we decided to read the whole fucking profile of her, and here's what we learned:

• She only drinks Starbucks, even when she is in France, because she is patriotic that way, which is to say in the way patriots tend to be completely retarded.
  
• She uses two cups for her Starbucks iced tea, because she hates the environment and does not like to remember what happens when climate changes force water to change phases.
  
• She the term "bananies," which we assume denotes the new "bananas."
  
• She no longer speaks with Nicole Richie.
  
• Nicole Kidman is a really horrible person who should be shot.
  
• She has a branding guru who may be an even bigger douchebag than she is who publicly doubts her ability to revive the brand Halston. "They've tried to revive that brand before, and it hasn't worked. Sometimes the universe gives us a signal."

Being Rachel Zoe [NY Times]