The XX Factor: What women really think.

A Woman Speaks Up for Injured NFL Players

A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:

Congressional committee hearings are usually the domain of dark-suited men speaking in carefully-modulated tones. So Gay Culverhouse, who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting in an unapologetically purple suit and spoke with both intelligence and anger, was startling. Culverhouse, a former president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, wasn’t a breath of fresh air; she was a bracing gust of wind as she outlined the ways in which (in her view) the NFL abuses and then abandons its players ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

The Pill Could Do You Wrong In Many Ways

If the blood clots and stroke risks don’t scare you off the pill, maybe this will: Women taking oral contraceptives are less attractive to the opposite sex and less likely to pick a good mate, according to a roundup of studies on the pill, published in this month's Trends in Ecology and Evolution, that Sarah Kliff at Newsweek reported on today.

When a woman is ovulating, her hormonal fluctuations affect her “facial appearance, her vocal pitch, even body odor,” Kliff writes. “And during ovulation, those changes increase a woman's attractiveness because they indicate fertility.” Hardly as dramatic as the potential side effect that terrified many of my friends when we started going on the pill: rapid weight gain. But apparently men—who, so the legend goes, don’t even notice a new outfit or restyled hair (or is that just my dad?)—pick up on these shifts, as shown in a study in the roundup that found that lap dancers make higher tips when they’re ovulating ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Why Can't Doctors Admit it When They Don't Have an Answer?

How sad that Summer Stiers, the young woman suffering from an as-yet uncategorized illness who was profiled so heart-breakingly by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine, has died. At least she ended up at the National Institutes of Health where the doctors tried—unsuccessfully—to puzzle out the reason for her many medical maladies.

Why Did Summer Stiers Die?

A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig, a contributor for the New York Times Magazine (and Sam's mom!):

The death two weeks ago of Summer Stiers, a young woman I met last year and wrote about at length for the New York Times Magazine, made me think about how hard it was for her to get anyone to take her perplexing illness seriously. Whatever ailed Summer seemed to cause a wide range of symptoms, which is why nobody could quite figure out what was wrong with her. She bled from her intestines; her kidneys failed; she had chronic pain in her legs and back; she developed severe toxemia while pregnant and lost her baby; her bones were damaged; she had frequent mental blackouts attributed to seizures; she had lost one eye, and the retina in the other was damaged; she was profoundly fatigued; her hair was completely gray, even though she was only 31 ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

If Boys Had Girl Parts

Generally, I try to avoid advertiser-created viral videos like the plague. Created by corporations, they tend to make me feel duped into watching them, whether they're any good or not. But I found a new series of viral videos by Tampax to be unusually amusing and surprisingly endearing.

At Zack16.com, 16-year-old Zack Johnson wakes up to find his penis has disappeared and been replaced by a vagina. Quelle horror!... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Celebrity Health Advice on Oprah Not Always Sound Science. No Duh.

Newsweek has an article out debunking much of the health advice shilled by celebrities on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Most famously, Jenny McCarthy has been on Oprah several times claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism (the vaccine/autism link has been scientifically disproven). But, more entertaining is the anti-aging regime that Suzanne Somers promoted in January:

Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day, she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina ... Next come the pills. She swallows 60 vitamins and...

(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

A Blog Worth Reading

If you're interested in adding another woman-authored blog to your list, I recommend Sarah Scott's Mayday Productions. A former Martha Stewart employee, Scott ended up "tits-up in a ditch," as she put it to me once in a line borrowed from the title of an Annie Proulx short story, when she was in a cycling race accident in 2005. "I don't remember if the EMT woke me up, or I just came too on my own, but I remember looking down at my thighs and thinking... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com)