After referring to the (relative) success of those in the gay-rights movement who directly link their political dollars to political action, Hirshman seethes over the fact that while Stupak passed,

we do not hear that Denise Abrams, Anne Abramson, Elizabeth Alter or Amy Stan — just to take the first names on the list — have threatened to withhold further $28,500 maximum contributions until the representatives stop the barefoot-and-pregnant campaign.

She continues:

Why won't women take a lesson from the bold voices of the gay movement? It cannot be that women think their contributions aren't large enough to pose a credible threat. Not only did women number heavily among the max givers to the DCCC, but they also accounted for 42 percent of the donations to the presidential campaign, a whopping $145 million. By contrast (although statistics for the heterosexuality of donors are not kept and strategic gay donors are clearly giving in ways that do not show up on surveys) we do know that during the primary, Barack Obama raised about $1.7 million, or about 3 percent of his contributions to date, from the gayest ZIP codes in the country. But that didn't stop the gay activists from raising the ante on him when they thought he was screwing them over.

Hirshman's piece reminds me an argument I hate when people who try to make a connection about other groups and organizing: no coalition is perfect, and it can take years of dedicated organizing (along with continued slights from the majority) to galvanize enough people to take action. There is an idea that I have heard pushed in feminist circles that "the blacks," "the gays" and other minority groups seem to have some inner organizing/hellraising gene that women do not possess. "This would never happen to black people!" they huff, "they wouldn't get away with it!"

But, like all notions of a movement from the outside, things are different from how they appear. There are breaks, protests, and counter-protests within any minority group, and it can take a long, long time to get enough people to agree there is even a problem that needs a solution. Linda Hirschman stumbles by using a blanket analysis - she rails at women voters, and assumes they all have the same goals. But which women is she talking about? Pro-life women who vote democratically? Women who are not feminists who vote dem? Women who, like many women columnists and pundits, feel that this hit is worth taking in order to get health care reform?

While I agree with the overall thrust of Hirshman's piece - that women joining a coalition need to constantly evaluate whether this coalition values them as participants or just happily pockets their money and votes - her cause and effect based analysis leaves me cold. To solve such issues, activists need to figure out why more people do not demand more of their political representatives in the first place, and what motivates donors and voters before assuming they'll automatically lean one way or another based on their gender.

Don't Just Swallow It [Salon]

I feel her. I used to hate emoticons myself, and they ranked fairly high on a long, obnoxious and completely hypothetical list of things I considered romantic dealbreakers, somwhere between an inability to catch car keys and enthusiasm for Eric LInklater. (Reality has forced wisdom, humble pie, and a collection of heist DVDs on me.) Along with e.e. cummings punctuation, it was the sort of thing which some modern U (as opposed to Non-) Did Not Do.

And then I got a job on a blog. And in our particular bit of the blogosphere, we communicate almost exclusively via IM. Since we're always on deadline, these communiques are generally terse, even curt. And I soon learned the value of the emoticon: a handy shorthand for softening a brusque one-liner, indicating sarcasm, and, occasionally, injecting completely inappropriate whimsy into an otherwise grim day. Whereas a text can be succinct - we're paying for them, and typing them out is a pain - these indicators are often necessary in other media where the implication might otherwise be, "it's not me, it's you." (Indeed, so precious is our time that we never use that archaic bit of iconography, the em-dash "nose.")

Says Williams,

What is it about the emoticon that fills me with such loathing? Maybe it's the wastefulness of the enterprise, the redundancy of it, the implied lack of confidence in the writer's ability to communicate, or mine to comprehend. If you say, "I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight," I think you're looking forward to seeing me. If you say, "I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight. :-)," I think you're not sure I understand the extent of sentiment in that seven-word message. And if you write, "I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight ;-)," I think your assumption of getting laid this evening may have been a bit premature, Winky.

But, see, nowadays I'd look at that first unadorned statement and it looks, without benefit of so much as a gratuitous exclamation mark, both naked and aloof. Email is, in a way, a cold medium: anyone who's worked in an office has probably trebled his use of excited punctuation, to sweeten requests and imply enthusiasm. And emoticons are just the next step. I wonder if this is what the emoticon's creator had in mind in the early days of computer profileration. And, yes, there was a creator, as Williams tells us.

That man was Scott Fahlman. On Sept. 19, 1982, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist sent out a message with the subject head ":-)." It was intended to clarify communication on a message board at the university, and it read, "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-). Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(." The genie was out of the ASCII bottle.

The crying face, the animatronic gif steaming with rage, the bashful, blushing neo-Pac Man were inevitable outgrowths. Of course, in one regard Williams' rant is inarguable:

Of all the crimes perpetuated by the emoticon, surely the most grievous is its role in the passive-aggressive insult. There's at least an honesty to a plain old sarcastic, snotty comment. A group e-mail or Facebook comment to the effect of "Nice dress – I didn't know there was a hooker convention in town. ;-)" or "I guess I'll do all the cooking again like I always do! :-)" is just bullshit. And sarcasm with a wink isn't sarcasm. More than a quarter-century into Internet culture, we can safely say the emoticon has not eradicated flaming or general online assholery. It' s just another useful tool.

But by the same token, I'm guessing the assholery would exist in the absence of the emoticon. The problem, after all, is the brain, not - wait for it! - the smiley face.

Death To smiley [Salon]

Kate is also a regular contributor to the Broadsheet section of Salon. When she is not knocking Jez editors' socks off and inspiring millions of readers with her intelligent, humorous, and decisive writing about all manner of issues pertaining to women and body image, she is chilling out at home in Chicago with her husband and two dogs. Please give her a warm welcome.

Shapely Prose [Official Site]
Kate Harding Writes Stuff [Official Site]
Kate Harding's Twitter [Twitter]
Lessons From The Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting And Declare A Truce [Amazon]
Yes Means Yes: Visions Of Female Sexual Power And A World Without Rape [Powell's]

Rebecca Traister's "So you still want to date a banker?" asks: why is the media so desperate to trumpet the anachronistic archetype of sugar-daddy and golddigger? In the past few weeks we've been hit over the head with the hoax group Dating A Banker Anonymous (which, as Traister points out, the Times lapped up eagerly in the unpleasant "It's the Economy, Girlfriend!") and the all-too-real douchebaggery of the Washington Post's "Market for Romance Goes From Bullish to Sheepish: Are Guys With Less to Spend Less of a Catch?" in which youngsters complain about how their reduced portfolios have put a crimp in their social lives.

The truth is, those who are pining for the days of free bottle service and the outmoded gender stereotypes it carries are a tiny minority. More to the point, the proliferation of such stories is misleading: in fact, as men lose their jobs in greater numbers than women, the workforce is increasingly female, and right now a female breadwinner is a more common phenomenon than the whiny leech the media is so fond of. So why do we keep reading about the outmoded dynamic of acquisitive strumpet and hapless douche? Traister suggests that in some wise we find it comforting: a sign that cliches are in their heavens and all's right with the world. Just as rom-coms traffic in well-worn stereotypes, so too do we look for their comforting familiarity in our real lives. As the article puts it, "In hard times, we want to be served stuff that is cheap and comforting: meatloaf, Campbell's soup and tales of women and men that conform to our most dated expectations of gender, money and power."

Of course, it's not just that: as much as anything, we want escapism, and these alleged golddiggers make for good copy. Then too, these women are presented, uniformly, as horror stories: a disgusting Other being forced to reap what they sowed while the rest of us sit back in pious judgment. Traister points out that part of this is our cultural love of watching the rich suffer: In a time when it seems like very few of the Haves are getting their just desserts, we're eager to seek retribution where we can find it. But I'd take it a step further, even if it's not a pleasant step: it would seem we, as women, take an especial relish in punishing those women who'd seek to cut the line with anachronistic wiles. In this regard, the phenomenon may be regarded as misogynistic, sure, but a less simple case than Traister would indicate: there's an element of girl-on-girl shaming that's ugly. Where she asks, why do we take comfort in sexist tropes, I'd say, why do we take such pleasure in seeing other women get their comeuppance? The DABA hoax was perpetrated by women, after all, who saw the rage such a phenomenon could provoke, and on both the Times' website and the blogosphere some of the the harshest comments have come from women. It's we who feel a visceral sense of shame and rage when we see the cause betrayed by such naked avidity and such blatant disregard for gains made and opportunities squandered. We may be pushed to the defensive, but it would be disingenuous to suggest there's no relish to such attacks. The fact that we can't see such cases as isolated but feel the need to distance ourselves is sad and telling. To dismiss this as a simple bit of patriarchal nostalgia ironically does us a disservice: while it may be forced upon us, we are complicit.
So You Still Want To Date A Banker? [Salon]

It's The Economy, Girlfriend! [NYT]
Market for Romance Goes From Bullish To Sheepish: Are Guys With Less To Spend Less Of A Catch? [Washington Post]

Earlier:Underemployed D.C. Douchebags Are Depressed By Recession

Unlike Modern Love, Salon's "Americans Talk About Love" stories are told orally to editor John Bowe, so Louise's tale arrives on your screen in a conversational style. Of her first husband, "Gary," she says,

I mean, I would rather be with my friends anytime than be with my husband. The few times that he would go out with me it was like, it kinda put a real damper on things. You know? Like, if he wasn't my husband I wouldn't have hung out with him.

Enter "Brian," Louise's first love, whom she dated when she was 15. Louise contacted Brian after she found out he was divorced on Classmates.com. She was still married to Gary, but she and Brian began seeing each other. They didn't have sex, but Louise decided to divorce Gary and move in with Brian. Now this is the point in "Modern Love" where everything would go to shit. But behold:

I've been with Brian now for five years. [...] How do you describe the person that you have found  he's my best friend. Which was a new concept for me. Not just loving the person you're with but liking them. You know, you've probably heard people say, "You should be friends first." It's so true. He's the love of my life. It doesn't depend on whether he has been nice to me that day or did he buy me some nice Lindt chocolate or jewelry. Or did we have good sex last night. It's because  just because I want to be with him. I'm like a little puppy. I just want to be with him all the time.

There's nothing groundbreaking about Louise's story, perhaps nothing as unusual as, say, flipping out over your 8-year-old son's name on a bathroom wall. But its sheer commonness  we all know someone whose marriage didn't work out, and someone who reconnected with an old flame  combined with its matter-of-fact tone make it rather pleasant to read. And while some "Modern Love" columns make us feel, in Sadie's words, "disturbed, vaguely dirty, desperate to talk to a therapist and maybe call social services," Louise's story made us feel kind of... nice. Even though Louise has made some mistakes and done some bad things, we kind of feel like we get her, which is more than we can say for her or her or her.

Louise, 52 [Salon]

She writes:

I suppose I could Internet date, but the very idea exhausts me. It feels like applying for a job I'm not sure I want. And it's so unfair, so hopelessly based on superficial things that I could weep. Cruise the online personals  just scan the 40- and 50-something entries  and you'll see that even men built like Danny DeVito demand youth and beauty. They say they're seeking "slender" or "slim" women at least 10 years their junior. Do I really need to pay a monthly fee for this sort of rejection?

And of her last love, she says:

[H]e eventually married a woman some 15 years his junior. I went to their wedding. She is lovely, but they divorced within a couple of years. "She has no sense of humor," he complained. "She's so earnest about her career, and she's not all that enthusiastic in the sack."

"Well, what did you expect?" I asked him when he called to tell me they were through.

"I expected somebody like you, only younger," he admitted. We haven't spoken since.

Has Internet dating further calcified male demands, creating a marketplace where only young, thin women need apply? Naylor acknowledges that's not the whole story: "plenty of zaftig women have husbands and lovers who adore them." So does Naylor's penchant for unavailable men predispose her to the kind of douches who find what they want, then look for a younger model, then act shocked when she's not what they were shopping for? Sure, that guy's divorced now, but he's not writing articles about his "sell-by date" and his cats.

Of course it's possible to have mixed feelings about being alone, to relish your independence while sometimes craving for companionship. But I still wish Naylor came off as less of a sad sack and more of a proud spinster. Or more accurately, I wish a woman could live alone with her cats and her TV remote and her "discreet" vibrator without feeling like a reject. Is that too much to ask?

15 Years Without Knocking Boots [Salon]

Earlier: Old Maids And Spinsters: The Best Female Role Models A Teen Girl Can Have

Just as Gould is infuriated by all those "Scary Sadshaws," wandering around in search of baubles and boys... [I find it] maddening to have to wonder  Carrie Bradshaw-style  if Gould's story would have run had she not been beautiful, and maddening to then hate oneself for having had to wonder that at all.

But perhaps most maddening is the way the buildup of critical attention to a piece like Gould's  or to a cultural phenomenon like "SATC"  only affirms that certain kinds of women, and only those kinds of women, are worth elevating to begin with, in part because of the delight people take in tearing them down.

And this:

No matter how angry you felt about Gould's piece, it was almost impossible to read the comments and not feel terrible: for her, about her, and about yourself for having even peeked. The process is exhausting, and not good for anyone, especially women who get stuck with some lame avatar they feel does not represent them, but whom they do not particularly feel like burning at the stake just for having been clever, lucky or talented enough to wind up drawing a spotlight.

Another Pretty Face Of A Generation [Salon]
Related: The Times Magazine Dapples Sunlight On Its Memoirist [NY Observer]
Exposed [NY Times Magazine]


Earlier: 5 Things About That Times Magazine Piece On Masturbatory Blogging
The Problem With Chick Lit

And I don't necessarily mean "frequented prostitutes" while the two of you were together. I think for most people, being cheated on with a prostitute would be serious cause for relationship reevaluation. I dated one dude who admitted to frequenting hookers when he lived in Ecuador, and I must admit, it made me think twice about getting in a serious relationship with him. But that was just me; have your say in the poll below and/or in the comments.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

We never thought we'd say this, but we have to agree with the New York Post's resident Candace Bushnell impersonator Mandy Stadtmiller, who rails on People's choice of Matt Damon as 2007's Sexiest Man. "Sexy is nasty, dirty, rough," Stadtmiller says. "Sometimes you just want someone you can feel terrible about in the morning."

Sexiest Man Living 2007 [Salon]
Bring Sexy Back [NY Post]
Related: Sexiest Man Alive 2007 [People]

Far too many contenders seem to have selected their better halves from the Political Helpmate Bin made available to eighth-grade boys who already know they want to be president. I often wondered if these guys were spirited away during gym class and presented with a kick line of apple-cheeked, god-fearing, pearl-wearing, cookie-baking girls willing to sacrifice independent thought, sensuality and their postgraduate education in service to the highest office.

But guess what! Times have changed! Kids in eighth grade these days, they're having anal! (Fuck, they're probably doing that Dirty Sanchez thing!)

And at the same time, it's crazy, I know! Presidential marriages have gotten, well, much more COMPLEX. Even Fred Thompson's hot wife  "the notion that she is a slutty twinkie is just the wet dream of every hard-up pundit on cable news," writes Traister. And today, for instance, you can have a First Lady who is actually smart enough to be the president. Like Elizabeth Edwards!

Isn't it amazing????

So yeah, this whole thing about Hillary: She can't show her tits or guffaw without being scrutinized! She just can't win! But at the same time, it's inevitable that she does win! So we are still stuck in some Cold War eighth grade gym class? But we're not, because we're about to elect a WOMAN.

Guess what? UNSUBSCRIBE.

I = OVER IT.

See, Hillary is totally one of those women who wants to have it all and I hate her for that because it's impossible to have it all and everyone knows that she doesn't have it all, that you have to make sacrifices once in awhile, that the twenty-four hours in a day and the howevermany tons of fossil fuels are a zero=sum game and everyone knows it so why don't you just admit it already????

Seriously, admit it! You would maybe be happier if you weren't so fucking ambitious and greedy! Maybe there is a lesson in that for all of us!!!! Or maybe it's just my generation, because you fucking Cold War boomers totally spoiled the dream! And left us with fucking Vladimir Putin. And...that's why people like Michelle Obama don't make it to the White House. Better luck next wartime!

America's Next Top Spouse [Salon]

"I feel like they labeled me the harlot who almost ruined their marriage, and I suspect he didn't fess up to his wife how emotionally involved he was with me. Although I don't want to apologize, I also feel an obligation to, just to smooth things over and make them feel better. But I'm uncomfortable apologizing because I feel like it gives them more fodder to use me as an excuse for their marital problems. Does my ex-boss's wife deserve an apology from me?"

"If his wife deserves anything, she deserves an end to the conspiratorial intimacy between you and her husband," Cary writes. "He is now trying to use you to manipulate his wife, as though you were currency. You are not currency for him to spend in his fragile marriage. You are not a messenger for his guilt. You are not a singing telegram he can send to his wife to say I'm sorry I was such an asshole."

You are not a singing telegram. Words to live by!

My Boss Wants Me To Apologize To His Wife [Salon]

Boston Globe:

Lohan's performance, by contrast, is so superficial that you hate Rachel more at the end of the movie than you did at the start, and that can't be right....It takes real time and effort to trivialize incest. "Georgia Rule" does it in just 113 minutes.

Village Voice:

Georgia Rule might profitably be retitled The Lindsay Lohan Story, but peeking out from all the strutting and preening is a strong, decent person in the making. With luck that same person may yet rise up to deliver Lohanwhose well-documented freak-out occurred on the set of Georgia Rulefrom her off-screen antics.

Salon:

[T]here's something unsavory about the way it uses a character's emotional and psychological scars as a gimmick, a way for us both to enjoy the vision of Lohan in a series of skimpy baby-doll mini-dresses even as we're ultimately supposed to murmur, "Poor little thing, no wonder she's so sexually precocious!..."Georgia Rule" made me, a full-fledged, life-in-the-slow-lane grown-up, feel like acting out; maybe it had the same effect on Lohan.

Washington Post:

Lohan..[is] 20 and looks about 35. With her fully developed woman's body, her potty mouth, her makeup-slathered eyes and a wardrobe of frilly, feathery things that just keep slipping off, she looks like she's just in from a night of drunken clubbing. You wonder: What is this adult doing in this child's role? She should be running a brothel in Nevada, not working in a vet's office.

God, we love Fridays.

We always thought that the plethora of wedding announcements in the New York Times featuring brides who "until recently" held jobs was evidence of the powerful parry and thrust between male Manhattan investment bankers and the female public and private school teachers who know how to love them. The equation was easy: Well-meaning gal meets gazillionaire Prince Charming, and voila! All ambition to teach the ABC's goes right out the window, along with those worn-down Nine West leather pumps.

But no. No, no, no. Salon reports that, according to Daily Telegraph writer Tara Winter Wilson, these public-school teachers of yore/manicured mommies of tomorrow are more than just trophy wives. They're toxic wives.

Wilson describes a Toxic Wife (TW!) thusly:

"She is the woman who gives up work as soon as she marries, ostensibly to create a stable home environment for any children that might come along, but who then employs large numbers of staff to do all the domestic work she promised to undertake, leaving her with little to do all day except shop, lunch, luxuriate. Believe me, there is no shortage of the breed and I've been inundated with horror tales about them."

Us too! But how can an innocent investment banker or Wharton grad protect himself from falling into what Wilson calls This Deadly Honey Trap?

In this iteration of her piece, Wilson offers a handy guide to identifying potential toxic wives, including tips like: "She will choose the most expensive item on the menu or the most expensive drink." And: "Even though she may have an impressive job, her main asset is sex. She will come on in a highly provocative manner, be wearing lots of make-up and revealing clothes. Potential toxic wives are extremely clever. Do not equate intelligence with emotional values and worth."

Maybe it's just us, but this sounds more like a description of 80% of the men at Goldman Sachs.

Toxic Wife Syndrome [Salon]

Apparently we aren't the only ones troubled by Oprah Winfrey's wholesale endorsement of the recently-released new-age sensation The Secret. Yesterday in Salon, writer Peter Birkenhead launched a surprising but thoughtful warning shot over the bow of Winfrey's self-help ship, and our jaws went slack.

You can forgive us our shock and awe. After all, the episode of Winfrey's show in which the talk-show host publicly endorsed the book aired in mid-February; a follow-up episode on the book and the accompanying frenzy followed just a week afterwards. Other than Variety columnist Brian Lowry's brief and rather timid Feb. 20 critique of Winfrey's endorsement of the book, the issue seemed to be dead in the water; the media oblivious, or worse, indifferent. But, as The Secret so fervently instructs: if you believe in it, it will come.

And come it did. In a five-page screed, Birkenhead accuses Winfrey of positioning herself at the top of the book's "pyramid scheme", having helped The Secret's self-help gurus to "create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame", and adding that the media mogul's crass consumerism, obsession with aesthetics, and narcissism is doing her followers (particularly those girls at her new South African Leadership Academy) a disservice, rather than making them the best they can be.

The academy is a controversial enough project in South Africa that the government withdrew its support, because of the amount of money that's been spent on its well-reported, lavish design  money that could have gone instead to creating perfectly fine schools that served many, many more students than the 350 who will be making use of spa facilities at the academy. But, when I watched Oprah's prime-time special about interviewing candidates for the school, it seemed to me that she wasn't nearly as excited about providing an education to the girls as she was about providing a "Secret"-like "transformative experience." (And not just for the girls, for herself; the first thing she said to the family members at the opening ceremony wasn't, "Welcome to a great moment in your daughters' lives," it was, "Welcome to the proudest moment of my life.")

On the special, Oprah talked far more about what the school would do for the girls' self-esteem and material lives than what it would do for their intellects  sometimes sounding as if she was reading directly from "The Secret." And in discussing what she was looking for in prospective students, she didn't talk about finding the next Eleanor Roosevelt or Sally Ride or Jane Smiley. Instead she used "Entertainment Tonight" language like "It Girl" to describe her ideal candidate. She praised the girls for their spirit, for how much they "shined" and "glowed," but never for their ideas or insights. Oprah puts a lot of energy and money into aesthetics  on her show, in her magazine, at her school. The publishers of "The Secret" have learned well from their sponsor and are just as visually savvy. They have created a look for their books, DVDs, CDs and marketing materials that conjures a "Da Vinci Code" aesthetic, full of pretty faux parchment, quill-and-ink fonts and wax seals.

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hourlong infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared  would they have "shined" and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

More  much more  below.

Oprah's Ugly Secret [Salon]