"In a study of 170 volunteers asked to record their most recent dream, 19% of men reported a nightmare compared with 30% of women," the BBC reports. Additionally, the changes in body temperature that women experience during their menstrual cycle can lead to disrupted sleep, and as a result, "pre-menstrual women report more vivid and disturbing dreams."

Not only do we have more vivid and terrifying menses-visions, but we also are more likely to be insomniacs. "In terms of processing emotional information, women may be more prone to taking unresolved concerns into their sleep life," Dr. Jennifer Parker, a sleep researcher, told the BBC. This must be why my Palin-induced terror has led me to more than one night of less than five hours of sleep. Thanks for nothing, ovaries!

I Dream About Sarah Palin. Do You? [Slate]
Women 'More Prone To Nightmares'[BBC]

[Image via Barista]

New York Times: Kakutani

Errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book — a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.

Feminism, like a trampoline, has made possible this splendid provocation of a book, levitating to keep company with Hunter Thompson's fear and loathing, Leslie Fielder's love and death and Edmund Wilson's patriotic gore.

Throughout the book, Faludi provides stunning and depressing evidence of a concerted effort to silence women and roll back women's rights in the wake of 9/11 and to transform the attack on a U.S. financial symbol where men and women worked side by side into an assault on family and hearth.

Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of Sept. 11, 2001, isn't just burning her bras but smoking them.

Her thesis may arouse skepticism, but she marshals provocative evidence, documenting such phenomena as a decline of women's bylines in national newspapers and a forty-per-cent drop in federal sex-discrimination prosecutions.

[The Terror Dream] does not mention Joseph Campbell and his "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," or Robert Bly and his "Iron John," or Carl Jung and his theories, but hers is a work of cultural interpretation on the order of theirs.

Faludi proposes that post-9/11 myth making owes its provenance to the frontier narratives emerging from the Indian wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially those concerning abductions...It's an original and audacious thesis, but an oddly unsatisfying and problematic one. Her cultural critique is undermined by a lack of comparability.

Earlier: 9/11 Made Our Men Macho Pigs, Or How To Sell A Book About Gender Roles In Wartime