The XX Factor: What women really think.

Chuck Bass Kissed A Boy and He Liked It

A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans.

Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass always had polysexual tendencies in Cecily von Ziegesar’s YA book series, but it took the WB until the third season to indulge us just a simple kiss with a man. But when it finally happened last night, it was splendid. It was swift, it was sexy, it was, most importantly, not a big deal ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Worrying About Bruno

Bruno approaches. It’s three and a half weeks until the arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat follow-up, about a gay, Austrian fashion reporter who talks like this “Ich sleep in a seaweed body wrap under a Zac Posen Navy-Cut Nightshirt. In mein dreams, ich sleep naked in a giant reed basket drifting slowly down ze Nile, cradled in ze arms of Daniel Radcliffe.” But Cohen’s already posing naked on the cover of GQ, worrying Austrians, troubling troubgay rights groups, and sticking his bum in Eminem’s face. The emerging question: Will Bruno be good for the gays?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

The Queer and the Missionary Hold Hands on "American Idol"

It turns out Adam Lambert was too weird to win American Idol. Possibly gay, possibly Jewish (here's a video of him singing in Hebrew!), definitely wearing nail polish, Lambert was too much of a challenge, as they say politely, to American notions of masculinity. There was no way... (To read the rest of this post... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Pondering the Queen's Day Attack

As Slate's foreign editor, I'm always aware of the odd and sometimes iffy news priorities the media invokes when deciding what "foreign" stories to cover. And because I'm prone to guilt (despite being neither Catholic nor Jewish), I spend a lot of time wondering why I'm more interested in one place than another—even when, all too often, the stakes, the body counts, and the atrocities are much more mind-boggling in the place I just can't get all that excited about.

I mumble all this psychobabble because I'm currently obsessed with the developing story of the vehicle that drove into a Dutch crowd gathered to greet Queen Beatrix on Queen's Day, a national holiday. As Britain's Daily Telegraph put it:

Witnesses said that the black Suzuki Swift appeared to deliberately target an open bus carrying Queen Beatrix and her family. ... The car swerved across police railings, where crowds of people were waiting to see the queen pass, and slammed into the foot of a stone monument, where it came to a halt, its bonnet crumpled and scraped.

Thus far, there are reports of four people dead and 13 injured, and authorities seem to have agreed it was a deliberate assault.

Still, four people dead? What's that compared with the body count in the Democratic Republic of Congo? What's the horror of having a car drive at you when you're waving at the monarch (even a cute, right-on one like Beatrix) compared with what civilians are being put through in Sri Lanka? Am I just reacting this way because I've been in a crowd like the one in Apeldoorn, whereas I've never, say, gathered firewood like the women of Darfur (a task that leaves them prone to all manner of horrific abuses by marauders and Janjaweed militias)?

Or perhaps it's a gay thing. Queen's Day is a very gay holiday in the Netherlands. Could this morning's incident be a homophobic attack? Yes, that's my excuse, I'm watching out for my people. OK, guilt gone.