The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Upsetting "Blame the Victim" Mentality in this week's "Friend or Foe"

To the DoubleX commenters who were outraged with Lucinda’s “Friend or Foe” column from Monday, and who don’t feel mollified by this morning’s apology: I see where you’re coming from. When I first read Lucinda’s response to the girl who says someone “slipped [her] a mickey” at a concert and then was ditched by her friends, I gave Lucinda the benefit of the doubt. I’ve talked to her before; I like her; I didn’t want to believe she’d be quite this flip about such a troubling tale.

So I reasoned that Lucinda, who is older than you’d think by her impeccable skin, just didn’t know what “slipped me a mickey” meant. It was this line, I thought, that revealed her ignorance:

Yes, overnights at the E.R. are the opposite of fun. So are disastrous drug trips. (I had one in my twenties, which pretty much sealed my fate as an illegal-substance ninny.)

This was not a disastrous drug trip. This was someone being drugged. To conflate the two is to imply that a woman getting drugged at a bar is as responsible for that outcome as one who willingly sneaks into a bathroom stall to snort a line. That couldn’t be what Lucinda meant, right? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Spelling Sisters

A Friendship That Can't Fade Fast Enough

How Women Talk to Women About Men

So, who saw He's Just Not That Into You last weekend? I had all the complaints I thought I would. The 8,000-person cast meant no character or storyline could develop beyond the fairly superficial. Vague jobs requiring scant hours and minimal concentration somehow paid for breathtaking apartments. And no group—women, men, gays, Africans—escaped total stereotype.

None of those gripes kept me from getting sucked in and teary-eyed as I watched the characters fret their way through happy-hour courtships, sultry affairs, lavish home renovations, and general realizations about love. What made it more than your typical rom-com was the use of themes and taglines from the book of the same title on which it's based (which itself was based on a Sex and the City episode)—a gimmick that starts in the surprisingly insightful first scene. In the opening, a mom tells her adorably expressive prepubescent daughter that the boy who pushed her on the playground did it because he has a crush on her. (You can watch it in this preview.) The playground gives way to a montage of various women advising their female friends on love problems, all by making excuses rather than delivering the obvious truth that, cue the title screen, he's just not that into them. In other words, the white lies that start at childhood turn into a parade of convoluted, esteem-boosting reasons that women give one another throughout life about why guys are treating us like crap. ("Maybe he hasn't called because his cell phone died." "He may be avoiding commitment now, but that's what my husband was like, too, until he came around.") Well-intentioned, but detrimental, since those responses delude us into thinking that we will get to waltz away with a storybook ending to a bad romantic start instead of facing the facts and moving on.

But the well-delivered message of the introductory scene wasn't adequately resolved. The only character who ever offers those no-nonsense, hard-to-hear truths about how guys are feeling is a guy. So if the point is supposed to be that women should change the way they talk to one another about love, it doesn't seem that any of the characters got that message. (Or text. Or Facebook wall post. Or any of the other methods of communication that lead to Drew Barrymore's silly little drugstore rant.)

What do you all think? When a guy seems uninterested in your friend, is the best thing for you to do is say so? Or is there a value to offering possible excuses to preserve your friend's ego and keep her hope alive? After all, sometimes his cell phone really DID die.

A Half a Loft of One's Own

I've lived by myself for the past year or so. And while I love having my own space (so much so that a swinging Friday night for me sometimes involves sewing new throw pillows) I often miss the social nature of roommate life—sometimes you just want someone to sit next to you while you watch The Real World. If you assume that singleton living is just a stop on the way toward romantic cohabitation, then fine; the loneliness can be dealt with as a character-building exercise. But if you don't want to shack up with a partner—or reproduce, essentially birthing your own roommates—and you don't want to live alone, what are your options?

If you have the money—and a good architect—you can do what the two women profiled in Sunday's New York Times Home and Garden section did: design a loft that consists of two connected but separate apartments. The gorgeous space (see the slideshow here) provides the women—who are 54 and 65—both "companionship [and] a great deal of privacy." The arrangement is less than official—one woman paid for the loft and the renovations, and there's no written or legal agreement between them—but to me it's a heartening step toward recognizing the very real, very concrete role friendships can play in our adult lives. Hell, if I could have a two-fer apartment with my best friend (complete with 90 YARDS of bookshelves!) I might never move in with my boyfriend, either.

Which City Is That Again?

Oh gosh. Can I hide in a closet for the next two weeks, until, like a bad skin peel, this movie flakes off and goes away? For the first five or six or 20 seasons that it was on, I avoided the show, out of principal. What principal, I'm not sure—just the commercials about it on HBO made me twitchy with disdain. Then I realized that it was hardly fair to judge a show without ever having actually watched it. So I did, catching maybe six or eight episodes in a row. It was, I admit, oddly addictive. Still, I stopped when I realized I was missing half the scenes because my eyes were rolling so hard in my head. Also, I got a headache. I disliked much about the show, including the blatant, smug narcissism of all the characters. (The last show I watched was the one in which none of them even knew where they were supposed to vote, because they never bothered. After that, I was done.)  I realize that was the point, in part; I just didn't like it. But my major problem was the total and complete absence of black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc. etc. etc., people in that fairy-tale New York. Not just in starring roles— because, let's face it, most people in America, even in urban areas, lead fairly segregated lives—but even in background scenes! Except, of course, for Blair Underwood, Hollywood's designated black man. It was as if a plague had descended on the NYC that I know and love, wiping out only the dark-skinned and unfabulous. Someone must have painted the blood of a lamb over Underwood's door so that he alone was spared. 

I preferred Girlfriends. Equally ridiculous in many ways, but five times funnier.
 

As Lavender Is to Purple

Rachael, I could not agree more. Hillary Clinton is far too smart a cookie (oops, is that sexist?) for me to believe her comments were but a sad, sad slip of the tongue. She knew exactly which signal flag she was waving toward the hills of West Virginia. Let's give credit where credit is due.

Hillary aside, though, what I've been wondering about more and more during this endless primary season is whether the damage done to black women/white women relationships will be permanent or not. That there has been damage to this ever-fragile sisterhood is clear to me, both in reading the millions of words flooding the Internet about this subject and in my own personal life. Problems seem to arise not when friends discover they stand on different sides of the Hillary/Barack divide, but when they discover that the very prisms through which they view this contest, and thus the relative importance of race and gender in this society, are—surprise, surprise—miles apart. More critically, the damage is deepened when one party insists that in failing to share her view, the other party is somehow less enlightened.

Just the other day I had a very awkward conversation with a white woman acquaintance who recalled aloud that infamous Gloria Steinem piece in the New York Times way back when. She recalled the article as refreshing and necessary and brave. I remembered it as the first rock tossed in what would become a battle of who-has-it-harder. Most of all, I remembered reading Steinem's line that gender was the most restricting force in America today and laughing aloud, because I was so sure that what she meant to say was that gender is the most restricting force in America today—if you happen to be white and middle-class. Having spent some time that week at a Boston public school that is visibly and painfully segregated—segregated and restricted by race and economic status and parental educational attainment and maybe some other things but certainly not by gender—and having looked up a number of statistics on the economic status of white women versus black men, including, by the way, the number of white women currently in the U.S. Senate (16) compared with the number of African-Americans (um, that would be one), found her view utterly unsupportable. My friend suggested that I was wrong. I said we might have to agree to disagree; she insisted that sexism and misogyny remain a more potent force than racism not only in America, but in my own life if I just had the good sense to realize it. And we were off on that ridiculous hamster wheel again. She quoted poor Barbara Jordan, who has been trotted out so endlessly this year by people who want to disavow the impact of race on a black woman's life that she must be begging to be allowed to rest in peace. I quoted Alice Walker, who famously wrote that womanist (feminist of color) is to feminist as lavender is to purple. In other words, our struggles are not the same. For a while there we seemed to be working together, though. Is that all over now?

Galjinks