Eric Felten opens his Journal column with the line, "Pity the man whose wife writes a memoir." His Exhibit A: Elizabeth Weil's Times Magazine piece about the intimate details of her marriage. I'll admit I winced a bit when reading this piece — Felten quotes Weil's mention of the "safe, narrow little bowling alley of a sex life" she and her husband shared, and I for one hope never to have my relationship problems written about in the Times. But I don't believe that men I've dated have never discussed those problems with anyone. Interestingly, Felten does. He writes,

No husband I know speaks out of school about his wife. You wouldn't trust any man who did. Say what you will about the male half of the species-famous for its promiscuous and predatory proclivities-but they can be remarkably discreet about the intimate aspect of marriage. Whether this is stoicism or a residual chivalry, it is a core part of the male code. Consider Tiger Woods's alleged transgressions: Perhaps the most appalling of them is the report that he prattled on to one of his cookies about how she connected with him in a way his wife did not. As if cheating weren't bad form enough.

Etonian diction aside ("speaks out of school?"), Felten's claim will seem pretty laughable to anyone who's ever heard a male friend complain about his significant other (I'm raising my hand). And the phrase "my wife doesn't understand me" became an old chestnut for a reason. Apparently, though, Felten is of the opinion that men remain stoically silent about their dissatisfactions while women chatter hennishly away:

Women, by contrast, seem to be at somewhat greater liberty to share private matters. This can be reflected in trivial indiscretions. DoubleX, a blog on Slate, asked its contributors for their Christmas wish lists. First up was Rachael Larimore, who proclaimed "All I want for Christmas is for my hubby to get a vasectomy. And he is!" I'm sure that made his day. Still, that's nothing compared to what gets aired in coffee klatches, where, according to writers such as Sandra Tsing Loh, the ladies get together to talk about how their husbands haven't touched them in years.

OMG vasectomy gross! And where those "coffee klatches" are concerned, if your husband "hasn't touched you in years," it seems legitimate to find some outlet for your frustration. Perhaps Felten would recommend the arms of an (appropriately quiet) mistress, but I think the ability to talk openly to friends about relationship problems is something men would do well to learn, if they haven't already. I'd also like to wag a finger at Tsing Loh, for feeding men's fear and hope that women's private conversations are all about them.

As The Daily Beast's Rebecca Dana points out, men have been responsible for this year's major sex scandals. Dana quotes Emily Gould, who says,

Men are typically seen as having agency and women are typically seen as being acted upon in romantic relationships. So then even when those stereotypical power dynamics aren't really the ones at play, the culture-making machinery will simplify whatever the real story is until it is a more familiar wronged-woman, lothario-man narrative.

But one of the ways women have been able to reclaim some agency, especially in times of great subjugation, is by talking. It's no accident that Scheherazade saved her skin with stories, or that the Little Mermaid had to give up her voice to land her prince (some view this as a metaphor for castration). Women may not actually have a monopoly on words, but men have always feared female "oversharing," because it's a way of taking back a narrative otherwise controlled by men. If women can write about their marriages in the New York Times, then the "familiar wronged-woman, lothario-man" story, along with the story about how women become asexual when they hit forty, and the one about how men need variety and women need security, and all the other patriarchy-approved stories about sex and love and female identity, have some competition. No wonder Felten wants us to keep our mouths shut.

Wives Who Kiss And Tell, And Tell, And Tell [Wall Street Journal]
Why Women Don't Have Sex Scandals [Daily Beast]

Liz Jones is starting to make me uncomfortable. I mean, more so than usual. And in different ways. I can sum up her latest screed in one line: She hates rich women.

Although Jones, a former Marie Claire editor and owner of a farm, is not what anyone would call destitute, she's a far cry from the posh women she lambasts. In some ways, this class-rage is typically British; in America, despite our yawning inequalities, we simply don't have millennia enough to build up the same caliber of inherited resentment - and even our "oldest" and richest families are mere parvenus by Euro standards. In England, the posh are as 50s suburbia is to us - universally and tacitly reviled, even by those who come of it and try to distance themselves via self-loathing. So in that way, regard it as an interesting window into enduring cultural implacability. In every other way, regard it as madness, and back away slowly.

Jones hates posh women even more than she hates mothers. She hates their beauty. And their gap years. And "the fact they have so many friends." She hates their vacations. She hates their tans. And, oh yes, their "filth."

I once went to a party at a posh woman's house on Exmoor. It was freezing (they only lived there at weekends, so the heating never had time to crank up) and filthy - there were mouse droppings on every pillow. Their awful posh children were milling about on long limbs, tossing honeyed locks and seeping privilege instead of sebum from every tiny pore. I wish I, too, partook in blood sports so I could put a bullet through the space where their brain should be.

Charming. Time was, Liz Jones could work in the occasional reasonable opinion. But in the last year especially - and even more so since she published her memoir - she's become a byword for overexposure and instability. In recent weeks, her scathing dismissal of her country neighbors has apparently resulted in some serious criminal harassment - including someone shooting up her mailbox - and having by her own blithe account long-since alienated friends and family through her lack of discretion, Jones must be alone indeed. She's long-since ceased to speak for anyone other than herself, and she's long-since established herself as nuts. However much of it is purely exhibition, she seems to have blurred the line beyond what's healthy, and reading her nowadays is more voyeuristic than anything - which is why, having said this, I don't think I can cover her antics any longer. While it's hard to feel generous towards someone so consistently bilious, it's easy to feel pity, and I think we all should - however fascinating her ongoing performance piece might be. This is not Howard Beale speaking truth to power in his madness; this is someone looking at a perfectly well-dressed emperor and declaring triumphantly that he's naked. But I'm starting to feel like the Network parallel isn't that far off, like we're watching human pain play out publicly, in slow motion. Maybe that's melodramatic - and that's obviously how Jones makes a very good living - but I just hope Jones realizes there are other options, and it's really not too late. And, as her eds at the Fail can tell her, redemption's the best copy of all.

Liz Jones Moans [Daily Mail]
Rachel Johnson Offers A Few Home Truths: Liz Jones, You're The Marie Antoinette Of Exmoor [Daily Mail]Local Difficulty For Country Columnist Who Was Rude About The Villagers [Guardian]
Between Ourselves [BBC]
Enough About Me [Guardian]

Elizabeth Bernstein opened for peace with the charming tale of two men having a heart to heart — about motorcycle oil. She writes,

It's no big secret that men don't share their emotions easily. Numerous research studies-and millions of baffled women-can attest to that.

But is it really so harmful if men want to keep their feelings hidden? And don't women share too much, yammering on about their husbands to friends, co-workers and sometimes even strangers?

The answer to both questions is an emphatic yes.

O rly? Bernstein follows this assertion up with anecdotes about men whose relationships failed because they couldn't bring themselves to ask for advice, and a woman who complained about her husband to "her mom, friends, co-workers, housekeeper, husband's best friend and two radio stations." The couple reconciled, but, unsurprisingly, he now feels uncomfortable around her family. Bernstein rounds out her discussion with a mention of the amateur gender theorist's hormone of choice, oxytocin. Apparently it helps women bond with each other, but testosterone limits its effects on men. Or something like that.

But is having the whole town up in your business really the biggest problem with oversharing? A study last year suggested a more pernicious effect — "co-rumination," or discussing the same problems over and over, can increase depression and anxiety in girls. Boys have fewer of these types of conversations, and seem to suffer fewer ill effects when they do.

Many of us have likely been in a situation where talking about a problem too much just made it seem bigger, with two brains obsessing on it instead of one. And while we don't buy that only men are capable of a get-in-get-out approach to emotional conversation ("What they had accomplished in 20 minutes took us two hours," says the girlfriend of one of the motorcycle oil dudes about their parallel tete-a-tetes), it is sometimes helpful to have someone who tells you to quit your bitching and move on. This is a good argument for having friends with different communication styles, which may mean friends of the opposite gender. While the men-talk-about-machines-and-women-talk-about-feelings dichotomy is an artificial one, it's still true that men and women are socialized differently, and taking your troubles across gender boundaries can give you a fresh perspective. It can also teach you that — oxytocin and motor oil aside — men and women actually suffer from many of the same problems.

How Much Sharing Is Too Much? [Wall Street Journal]

Earlier: Positive Teen Talk Can Sometimes Turn Into A "Mutual Complaint Society"

First, disclosure: Managing editor Anna Holmes, former editor Moe Tkacik and this website's commenters are all quoted at length, posts are cited, and Jezebel is credited as one of the progenitors of the the new openness, "the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation." And we can't deny it: we have been known, on occasion, to wax anatomical. Not only do we as a community not happen to find the female body an uncomfortable subject, but it's safe to say we all appreciate that there's something uniquely fascinating about its mysteries. Graphic accounts can be gross, sure, but also comforting, reassuring, informative and funny in ways probably mysterious to men but very important to women.

In a larger sense, it is, of course, as Anna terms it, "cathartic." Traister identifies the phenomenon's larger implications: "Oversharing is in. And for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much "too much information" as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body." What may have been rooted, as Traister says, in a touchy-feely second wave Our Bodies Ourselves mentality, in more politicized "reclaiming" of the female body and, more lately, vaginas-are-outrageous shock-value humor is, hopefully, morphing into something neither shocking nor particularly charged.

As Moe says in the article, these pieces are about more than just tampons, female ejaculation and garlic cloves: they're about vulnerabilities, insecurities and fears - a female shorthand that implicitly evokes the biological push-pulls that govern so much of our lives. Such accounts can be frank, but what people are learning is that they are not inherently vulgar. Quite simply, when talking openly and honestly about women's issues, it would be disingenuous and bizarre not to "overshare" about our bodies. The female body will not be ignored: it burbles and leaks and creaks and drips and emits and produces and reproduces and generates and puffs and inflates and occasionally reeks. It is fascinating. It is scary. It is alarming. It is hilarious and silly and mysterious. As the range of experiences in "My Little Red Book," the new "first period" compendium, makes clear, this openness is a stark contrast to the fear and secrecy and implicit judgment that surrounded anything anatomical in the past. So when you're grossed out, just remember: we overshare because we love. And you can always skip the post - at least we have the option.

The Great Girl Gross-Out [Salon]
Earlier: Aunt Flo Visiting? My Little Red Book Demystifies Periods
Ten Days In The Life Of A Tampon
Shejaculation: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gush
Where Garlic Has Never Gone Before: Or, How Not To Cure A Yeast Infection

At a recent dinner function, I was seated next to a stranger who told me about her divorce, abortion, gynaecological troubles, abusive childhood and teenage sexual experimentation all before the main course was served. I responded with polite interest and sympathy but cheerfully declined to reciprocate with confessions of my own. Later, I learnt that this woman had found me "uptight" and "secretive".

Maguire is not the first to talk about this phenomenon, of course, but her perspective, that of a writer who's tipped her toe in overshare, is an interesting one. She mentions a Variety piece in which the author excoriated Matt Damon for keeping his family life private, an act of unfairness that seems to Maguire emblematic of our sense of public entitlement.

But chronic oversharing is not just a celebrity disease. Producers of reality and lifestyle television shows have no trouble finding people desperate to talk about their sex lives or air their overeating issues on camera and those who can't get a television gig can simply start a blog or YouTube channel....And then there's Facebook, where relationships are announced, questioned and destroyed in tiny, instantly published snippets.

We can debate the implications of society's lack of boundaries till the cows come home and, whatever our thoughts on TMZ, maudlin personal essays or uncomfy interviews - when it's ok, when it's not, whether money figures in or it devalues personal relationships and true sharing - at the end of the day we're forced to agree that it comes down to personal choice. Maguire's point is that choice is the operative word: people can spill their guts, but it shouldn't be mandatory. More to the point, someone shouldn't be considered 'uptight' or somehow disconnected from their emotions because they don't share this openness. As Maguire puts it, "Today we all live with the expectation that we must happily spill our guts for whoever cares to slosh through them. Once considered a virtue, discretion is now viewed as either a character flaw or a sign that you're hiding one." What I think most people will agree is that we've all gotten unreasonable: we may judge people for overspilling, but we still read it, and indeed, expect it. And then feel comfy airing our own thoughts about their behaviors in public forums.

But at the same time, when we, and Maguire, talk about these issues, we're still using the moral language of previous eras, much of which is simply anachronistic. Any celeb can tell you that the face the public sees and knows bears little resemblance to their real selves. The 'selves' every high-schooler might show the world nowadays is probably not the essential soul his parent imagines (and this, is, of course, part of the worry.) Perhaps unconsciously, most people now have a kind of public face that was simply not necessary in previous times, and while this is probably no palliative to a social critic, it's also true. If we feel an entitlement to celeb lives, I wonder if part of the reason isn't that we've had to adopt some of their guises and wiles, the art of sharing and keeping, of exposing and staying yourself. And if we can do it, why shouldn't they? Too much information [Sydney Morning Herald]

I suppose it's telling that Modern Love's best-known piece was by a woman who found a way to train "the American husband" as one would any dolphin, killer whale, or baboon. (It became a book.) So perhaps it's unsurprising that this week's essay—which might be headlined "I Hate Sex And Told My Husband To Eat It"—boils over with unusually dunderheaded self-justification and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes about women's sexuality. (As in, that most of us would be happier making stained glass than makin' it.)

The unhappy marriage is Modern Love's richest vein for material, a thick, gristly sinew that holds the feature together even as it sticks in the reader's craw. Why was reading Lauren Slater's non-apologia for her intimacy-avoiding ways such an unpleasant interruption to my Sunday brunch? Let's see:

I met and fell in love with my husband for his beautifully colored hair, his gentle ways, his humor. We were together many years, and so sex faded. Then we decided to marry.

I'm distrustful of people—especially writers—who can't seem to find any way of expressing their love aside from the usual lazy clichés about appearance and that old stand-by, the sense of humor. And don't you love the way Slater works in that bit about how the union was sexually threadbare before marriage was in the offing—a subtle way to reframe her low libido as an issue of hubby's due diligence.

Predictably, almost as soon as the engagement ring slid onto my finger, I fell in love with someone else. I fell madly, insanely, obsessively in love with a conservative Christian man who believed that I, as a Jew, was going to hell. We fought long and hard about that, and then had sex. This is so stupid, it pains me to write about it.

Not as much as it pains me to read about it! In another, humbler essay, this might be the moment where the writer explains how a series of errors in her judgment led her to reflect, re-evaluate, and change. Not so Slater, whose breathtaking entitlement spawns only the following self-justification: "This affair, I sensed, was necessary for me to move forward with my marriage. It was a test." Fooling around on her fiancé—Slater feels the need to point out she and the other man never technically had intercourse, "though we did just about everything else"—was only going to help her relationship, silly! Because as soon as the passion faded with the fundamentalist fuckbuddy, Slater would be free to run home to her waiting partner, secure in the knowledge that for her, exciting sex past the six-month mark of a relationship was an impossibility, so she might as well get hitched to the dude with the pretty hair.

The parts of the essay where she writes about some of the times she has had real desire—for the Christian, and for the man she lost her virginity with, who is described, many times more evocatively than is the father of Slater's children, as "a broody bad boy who had a muscular chest and a head roiling with glossy curls"—must be infuriating for her long-suffering husband to read. Who wants to know their spouse can still summon a tactile memory of their first sex partner's (roiling!) curls, while loudly claiming perfect and permanent marital frigidity in the pages of a national newspaper?

Slater acknowledges the pain having mismatched sex drives has caused. "It makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy, living this way," she writes. But at the same time, she is unwilling to admit her lack of desire is any kind of problem. Throughout the essay, she casually denigrates the physical act of love: "I have never much liked sex because, when all is said and done, there’s not much to like." She even asks, "What is the big deal?" before concluding that, "For me, sex does not even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window I will use, of hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect."

Curiously, she admits to the stereotypical cocktail of bodily shame and simple irrationality that men have always alleged of "frigid" women, but Slater doesn't seem to sense how deeply sad that is. She writes of her first orgasm, which came courtesy of the guy with the Botticelli hair, "This was softer, gentler, full of a wide-open love, a deep falling-down love. When it was over, I hated him. I hated that man (that boy, really). The intimacy was too much, too wrenching and shameful." (Emphasis added.) What's pathetic is she doesn't seem to realize how downright sad—not to mention self-defeating—that misdirected hatred is. There is absolutely nothing shameful about pleasure. There is nothing shameful about love. And there is definitely nothing shameful about our capacity for intimacy: the ability to share the spectrum of desire with another person, without guile or gamesmanship or internalized shame, is part of what makes us human. Cloaking personal problems in obfuscatory reminiscences about other men and the rhetoric of rights seems childish in comparison.

Slater seems to want badly to convince us of this idea that never wanting to be sexual with her husband is not a pathology, but a legitimate part of her identity. That it's "fair" for her to withhold sex within her marriage, to make a point of not enjoying it, to be as close to asexual as someone who admits to occasional blinding bouts of desire can be. But it reads like one big cop-out; the idea that one partner's low libido is something the other must simply grin and bear might have more merit if that partner didn't simultaneously confess to a much more garden-variety personal problem: wanting to fuck other people instead.

Modern Love: Why I Love My Husband But Not Sex [NY Times]

So, the wife goes into labor, the dad freaks and calls 911, while he's on the phone, she has their daughter in the bathroom. "In the months that followed, I often told the story and would pay tribute to how Leslie gave birth. I reveled in our miracle, a testimony to a mother’s independence, a father’s irrelevance and the magic of our relationship," he explains. They listen to the 911 call all the time, which is all fun and games until their marriage falls apart and the tape becomes imbued with all kinds of sinister significance

It was perhaps fitting that the first woman I dated post-Leslie found the story appalling — despite my selling it, as I always did, as a kind of crazy and comical adventure. “It must have been terrible for you,” she said. Her response caused something to snap in me, and I opened a door to a closet. Inside was raw anger over what had happened that day.

Although this mythical incident becomes the fulcrum of the narrative, it's kind of hard, from the reader's perspective, to really understand the rage here. Is an at-home birth scary? Of course. Are the breakups of marriages and families devastating? Always. Maybe it says something terrible and jaded about me or our society that, while I'm sure this tape was a Big, Significant Deal to the author, this synecdoche doesn't serve to illuminate anything about his marriage nor about divorce and masculinity generally. I'm kind of left thinking, "and...?" Does a personal essay need to include some universal truth? Of course not — but good writing kind of does. The guy says near the end, "I hate that tape. And I know it’s amazing. It reminds me of how I failed to display any heroism, how I did the best I could in a tight situation — and how Leslie didn’t need any such help." Um, that's good, I guess. Thanks for sharing?

Have That Baby, Dear. I’ll Just Watch. [New York Times]

So, some child in their small elementary school carves "I love Sarvis" on the bathroom stall. No one will admit to it. So the kid's mom, Kate Krautkramer, the elementary school writing teacher, takes matters into her own hands.

"So I tried my own approach: greeting the girls in Sarvis’s class with different facial expressions, first accusing, then questioning, in the hope that someone would crack. Whoever Graffiti Girl was, she was impudent: a little child who obviously shouldn’t be allowed to say anything about love. She didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed. All of this I communicated

Then things get...weird. "I started using the vandalized stall exclusively. After a few weeks, I even started thinking of it as Sarvis’s bathroom. I was haunted by the comment a friend made following the birth of her second son. 'He’s very cute,' she said, 'but I’m worried. It seems like sons, no matter how much you love them, just grow up and leave you to marry someone you hate.'"

Well, apparently she "hates" all the little girls in his class. She imagines one "turning her 18-inch hips just so for the very first time, or taking a try at batting her lashes." While initially the author expresses some semblance of concern over her son's embarrassment, or the destruction of school property, the essay quickly becomes nakedly Oedipal.

"Who among them could possibly fail to recognize that her third-grade infatuation was no match for my perfect, clear memory of Sarvis’s 3-year-old voice singing 'Fuzzy and Blue' along with Grover? [People still like Grover? We thought Elmo had replaced him. - Ed.] Graffiti Girl didn’t even know where I kept Sarvis’s immunization record. She didn’t have a clue about how much he liked lemon pepper on his spaghetti. She couldn’t 'heart' Sarvis more than I 'heart' Sarvis. Every week when I got to school, I stepped into the 'I love Sarvis' stall as if it were a sacred chamber. Eventually, the bathroom wall became a metaphor for my own love for Sarvis: industrial, resistant, indestructible. One day I went in and traced the little girl’s writing with my finger. I traced my son’s name and the original heart, which was dented in places. As I traced her words, however, I started to identify with her. Putting my hand in the middle of her carved heart, I commiserated — 'I love him, too.'"

In the end, of course, the mom decides to be reasonable towards the anonymous little girl — 'no matter that she was using her fresh skills and knowledge to steal Sarvis away from me...And I knew that for now, anyway, and maybe for months or years, she wouldn’t really be able to compete with someone like me who had the power to feed Sarvis, drive him places and rent from Netflix." Because, of course, that's what he'll want from a romantic relationship!

As for the bathroom wall, because it embarrassed my child, I wanted the satisfaction of tearing it down myself. But because it expressed so forcefully a plain, unequivocal truth, I also wished to hijack Graffiti Girl’s intentions and keep the wall as a shrine. The thing would look great, I thought, hanging as an extra panel in our garage or barn where I could go to affirm my love every day.And where some child wrote, “I love Sarvis,” I would like to use a knife, a screwdriver, or even the little piece of metal that holds an eraser to a yellow pencil to add to the graffiti. 'More than you ever will, little girl,' I’d carve into that metal wall. 'I love Sarvis more than you ever will.'"

Okay then! The author's mental state and the probable issues of the adult Sarvis aside, can we talk about a culture in which someone feels like this is an appropriate essay to share? We've discussed, before, the "I write therefore I am" ethos that's abroad nowadays — and we're certainly all in the gut-spilling game here, to varying degrees. There is a sense that if you say something it's valid — especially if you say it in pre-approved MFA terms that demonstrate a degree of narcissism masquerading as self-awareness. I don't even blame this woman for writing this; people are screwed up. But why does the Times run it? And in so doing, are they validating her sentiments, or simply giving them a platform - and in so doing leaving them open to well-earned censure? The better question is, is either of these rationales a valid one? I get it: "Modern Love" is a column which aims to explore "love" in all its many permutations and the modern world is a complex place, etc. etc. But the act of publishing is not an objective one and I think one could argue that whatever one;s interpretation of this article — and I'm seriously hoping most people's reaction is wtf? — running the piece is in some wise an act of irresponsibility.

That said, the ultimate responsibility is of course the author's, who seems to be attempting to apply an implicit universality to emotions which, while perhaps they're somewhat common — motherhood is complex! — are obviously not healthy given her relationship to the little girls involved. It's perhaps naive to ascribe a saintly impartiality to teachers, but one does imagine that the person teaching one's children doesn't necessarily come equipped with a preemptive distrust of half her students. Kids have crushes. And from what I remember, there was nothing particularly sinister about it.

It's true, kids today are living in a highly sexualized time. But the only overt sexualization in this piece is, ironically, projected onto these children by the author. I was talking recently with a friend who told me about the 'Robin Hood' party she'd thrown for her son's sixth birthday. There was a little girl he liked, and she was Maid Marian; he gave her a special flower crown to wear. My friend thought the story was adorable; it seems like the author of this piece would likely have ripped the crown off the child's head and paraded around triumphantly. Which is, of course, totally valid.

The Tiny Hand That Robs The Cradle[New York Times]