The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Mean Girls Stand Out

Say No to Mean Girls—and Women

A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:

I get what you say, Meghan, about the benefits of broadening the range of publicly-noted female roles beyond those old standbys, “nurturer” and “supporter.” But I can’t share your pleasure in the finding that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at doublex.com!)

Opted Out or Pushed Away?

Sugar Daddies, an XY Perspective

A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:

Nina's excellent post inspired me to volley back from the male side of the Slate court. I'm also twentysomething, also living off an unlavish editorial paycheck, and parts of this discussion leave me quaking in my holey boots. If the brilliant and accomplished women of my peer group secretly hope to snag men who are filthy rich—or who happen to be filthy rich (and the distinction there seems so thin you could make shadow puppets behind it)—then I might as well tonsure my head and hone my bocce skills now. Noreen's brilliantly described vertiginous landscape is eerily close to mine.

Which is why I suspect that Nina, June, and others are right: This is definitely a complexly gendered issue, but it's a vocational issue, too. What sort of writer—or filmmaker or songwriter—wouldn't go weak-kneed at the prospect of a benefactor? I've certainly shared June's Pookie fantasy. (In fact, sugar daddies themselves are hardly relegated to one gender: The dowager-with-stud trope has been immortalized from Laura to Alfie to just about everything in which the phrase pool boy has ever been uttered.) Many of us tell ourselves that a chance to do good, meaningful work is worth some sacrifice. From there, it's easy for both men and women to fall into the trap of thinking that a less-than-scintillating partnership is worth the opportunities it affords. Hence the tendency that alarmed Hanna: the place where self-possessed ambition and domestic prostitution cross.

Of course, the idea that one's work would sparkle under the influence of a clear schedule and a seaside cottage—equally the fantasy of men in the profession, I'd offer—is probably a canard. As Jessica suggests, people with a windfall of time and money tend to end up mushy as an apple in a steam bath, even if they started with sharp minds and orderly ambitions. There is a chance to catch up (at last!) on your reading or home improvement. There is the endless rewriting of sentences. There is the all-devouring black hole of the Brookstone catalog. Meanwhile: Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children while working full-time at an ad agency, Joan Didion did her best work in a partnership of two young freelancers with a small kid, and J.K. Rowling—well, everyone knows about J.K. Rowling. I'm baldly naive, but I'd like to think that learning how to do good creative work among these pressures—the process of making it work—helped those writers hit their strides on more than the electric bill.

Is It Really Just A Woman Thing?

Juliet, I also think we're talking about at least two different kinds of fantasies in this sugar-daddy conversation. On one hand, there's the writer's desire for a magical windfall that allows her to pursue her pure-hearted literary dreams unfettered by dirty money business. (And on that point, Virginia Woolf has us all beat by a few decades with her sugar-auntie scenario in A Room of One's Own.) I'm not convinced that that fantasy is particularly gendered, or even generational, though I'm sure it has a lot to do with one's class upbringing.

The other fantasy is about wanting someone to swoop in and take responsibility for all the big, scary, money-related issues that loom in grown-up land: mortgages, tuition payments, health insurance, 401(k)s. And that, to me, has more to do with Americans' seeming inability/unwillingness to face their own economic realities and make responsible financial choices than a failing in American women, specifically. (My mother, a financial consultant who is always trying to convince me that America's days as a superpower are numbered, likes to point out that people in Asia put something ridiculous like 25 percent of their paychecks into savings. The mind boggles.)

On both points, I direct you all to Meghan Daum's excellent essay, "My Misspent Youth," which I think is an excellent cautionary tale for young, creative urbanites, female or otherwise. Daum was a very successful New York-based freelancer who realized, at some point, that she was way over her head in debt and decided to move to Lincoln, Neb., and she's particularly good at illuminating the kind of double-speak and self-justifications creative types make in the face of impending financial doom (and this was written almost 10 years ago).

Whatever Will Be, Will Be

Oh, Bonnie, thanks for that inspiring and wise post. With a job I love, a child that is a serious contender for the title of world's greatest kid (I know every parent thinks that, but hey, one of us has to be right, right?), not to mention a partner so devoted, hardworking, and cute that I recently compared him to Wall-E, I know I have precious little to bitch about. (Not that that's ever stopped me before.) The story of your years as a single-mom private investigator in D.C. is riveting (have you pitched this to Showtime yet?), and that vision of happily-ever-after—you and your honey pursuing your writing on separate floors, with occasional YMCA breaks—is something to aspire to. (Oh, and thanks for calling me "thirtysomething." Heh.)

And Samantha, because you solicited our thoughts on what to say to a daughter daydreaming about a financial Prince Charming: Though I'm sure it is likely happen at some point, I would be horrified. This is why I plan to keep her away as long as possible from Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid—pretty much any Disney movie or other heterosexual rescue fantasy. Can't she have a few years of imagining her life in some way unbound by those narratives?

My grandmother used to sing my siblings and me a song, "Que Sera Sera" (it's the song sung by Doris Day to her son at the creepy climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much.) The lyrics of the first verse go like this: "When I was just a little girl/ I asked my mother, what will I be?/ Will I be pretty, will I be rich?/ Here's what she said to me ..." Now, since I'm put off by the the values espoused in those lines, I sing it to my daughter like this: "Will I be happy/Will I be strong?" I know my doctored version won't keep the princess fantasies at bay forever, but whatever will be will be.

2 Types of Sugar Daddies

Richard Gere Need Not Apply

The more I read these posts about the struggle of the work-life balance, the more I realize that I should refine my initial definition of the sugar daddy that I at some level, coldly practical though it may be, want. To have a true sugar-daddy/daughter relationship (wow, it sounds a whole lot grosser when you add the "daughter" half), the woman is supposed to be sort of indebted, right? Even if he tells her she isn't? I'm picturing a Pretty Woman scenario: No matter how much you've changed his life in that sexy red dress of yours, as long as he's still the sole provider, you're still the whore.

That's not what I want. That's humorously far from what I want, and I'd imagine the same is true for many women my age. But Melinda, I've had those co-workers you mention, the ones who pull me and other twentysomething women aside and tell us that they're making less money now than they did before they left to raise their kids. It doesn't make me resent them; it makes me terrified.

So the fantasy, as June calls it, of the rich white knight who takes all your money worries away is just my flippant answer to the troubling questions that bubble up when that co-worker spouts the truth about salaries after a lengthy maternity leave, or when I read those doomsday articles. I don't really think a man will take all my troubles away, nor do I let that vague hope prevent me from the sort of aggressive self-promotion you advise, E.J. (Believe me, it took a painful amount of that to get hired at Slate!) But instead of tackling how I'm actually going to make the whole thing work—which at this point seems more an exercise in self-induced anxiety than practicality—I just pencil in the easiest solution, the fantasy solution: a rich husband. (For the record, in that fantasy, he's someone I love and respect, and part of that means he's someone who wants me to keep up my job and be successful. He just wants to pay our bills while doing it.)

The part that troubles me is that I think males probably pencil in something different when they're confronting problems, and it's probably more along the lines of "work harder." So as much as I believe I'm doing my damnedest to get ahead despite my deep-pocketed-dream-man backup plan, I wonder if I'd be going at it differently if I hadn't grown up thinking "maybe my financial situation will someday be solved by marriage," and instead had spent those years expecting that I'd have to fix it myself.

A question for the mothers of the group: If your daughter ever said "When I marry my rich husband ..." as I started doing from a frighteningly young age, would your stomach drop? Would you think you had failed somehow as a role model?

Mama, Can I Come to Your Lifehacking Seminar?

Dahlia, now I'm cracking up at the image of you racing off to give talks on work-life balance while two midgets yank at your coat begging you not to go. "Hands off! I have to go talk about work-life balance!"

Now or Later?

Here’s the only quibble I have with your smart (if depressing) post, Dana. I wrote yesterday assuming that younger unmarried women are fretting about such things as work-life balance when constructing their fantasy lives. But on second thought, I wonder if that’s really what’s driving Sam and some of Jessica’s young writers into the arms of Daddy Warbucks. I'm reconsidering because I’m sometimes asked to speak to students about work-life balance, and two things always strike me: 1) Men never show up to these talks;  and 2) women can’t really imagine what its like to have a toddler yelling “mommy don’t work” as they struggle into their Spanx, because until you’ve actually experienced the sheer lunacy of working motherhood, it seems like it might be sort of manageable. So I guess I am asking the younger women in the group to clarify whether they want Mr. Howell for now or for later?

Sugar Pie in the Sky

Jessica, I want to know: What are these fabulous, creative, part-time jobs that we would all be enjoying if only our putative sugar parents would subsidize us? Is there a job, freelance or no, that offers "lucrative assignments and continued relevance" (not to mention a dental plan) and that doesn't entail longer hours of work than anyone with a child (or anyone who wants a rich personal life outside of work) can possibly spare? I fear that Dahlia's stark assessment of the reality of working motherhood is soberingly true: If you dedicate yourself to excelling in your field, you will daily find yourself enacting scenarios from the Harry Chapin ballad "Cat's in the Cradle," that AM-radio classic in which a busy father misses out on his son's childhood because ... oh, don't make me describe that song, I'll start weeping. I talked about this a bit in Slate's Movie Club yesterday when I described my daughter yelling "Don't work!" as I hustle off to yet another movie screening at 6 p.m. To be a working mother is to be told daily by everyone, including an authority as irrefutable as your own 2-year-old, that you're doing it all wrong. And they're all, in some way, right—but what's the alternative? Is there any middle ground between "Cat's in the Cradle" and sitting home smoking Djarums on someone else's dime?

It seems to me that what Jessica's asking for—and it's a completely legitimate thing for the next generation of women to want—isn't so much a wealthy suitor as a restructuring of the American workplace, not to mention the American educational system. Why marry Thurston Howell III to ensure your kid a spot in private school when there's a good public school down the block? Maybe Barack Obama will be our Prince Charming. But with the economy in the shape it's in, he ain't gonna be anybody's sugar daddy.

Sugar Is Power

Dahlia, how would a sugar daddy give you the freedom to work and take care of your kids, too? Because then you can outsource the rest of the treadmill, not just doing the dishes but also buying Hanukkah presents?

My own feeling about work-life balance is that the problem isn't work and it isn't the kids: It's all the other expectations of middle-class life, some of them, at least, self-inflicted. Do I—do my husband and I, I should say—really need to have friends over for brunch this weekend and throw my older son's birthday party? And so I do fantasize about a fairy godmother who whisks all the errands away. (In the meantime, shopping on the Web helps. A lot.) But I'm with Hanna, for this reason along with many other good feminist ones: Money is power. If you make it, you also make decisions. If you don't, you often end up deferring to the breadwinner. Not always, but often, and no matter how well-intentioned and theoretically equality-espousing both partners or spouses are. Such is my observation, anyway.

Don't Pour Some Sugar on Me

I’m with Hanna, June, and E.J.: I prefer my sugar self-administered and have never entertained the fantasy of being kept by a sucrose parent of either sex. (Having money and nice things, without having to work hard to pay for them … that’s a whole 'nother fantasy.) Before going on (unpaid) maternity leave, I freelanced like a mofo to sock away money, embarrassed by the prospect of going to my partner hat in hand—though I’m sure he would have been both willing and able to spot me on living expenses had I run short at the end. Maybe this is a result of growing up with a Jill Clayburgh-ian '70s working mother (though my parents stayed married and were well enough off). Honestly, I’ve never even understood what still seems to be an acceptable default assumption that a man should pick up the tab in restaurants on dates. Why, because I have a physiognomy that’s potentially capable of childbearing, should I not be responsible for providing my own nutrition? And doesn’t that moment when the guy gets out his wallet and you don’t do jack make the whole dinner feel like a sordid transaction?

Of course, there’s a world of difference between “someday my prince will come” and a couple with a child making a life that makes sense for them: You work while I take care of the kid for a few years. Then later, when the kid is in school, I go back to work, or maybe we take turns. For people doing it, this arrangement, which often makes more financial and emotional sense than “let’s both work like dogs to pay the baby-sitter,” is often experienced as the furthest thing from a luxury.

I remember thinking about this stuff when Meryl Streep’s character sang “Money, Money, Money” in Mamma Mia!, as a fantasy sequence showed her being kept in style by a zillionaire. The character Streep played, an independent ex-hippie single mother running an inn in Greece, seemed an odd candidate to entertain such a reverie. But, you know, they had to work all those great ABBA songs in somehow.

Nice Fantasy, Shame About Reality

Isn't the sugar daddy—or, for some of us, the sugar mommy—just a lovely fantasy? And aren't people's fantasies supposed to be off limits for criticism? (I'm not entirely sure what the official position is on that last issue these days.)

I love my job, but are there times when I wouldn't rather pursue my own wonderful creative flights of fancy—research and write the stories I think are fascinating and important? Sure! Doesn't everyone with a full-time job fantasize about walking away, at least now and again? For those of us in journalism, that fantasy has a name: going freelance.

Of course, the reality is rather different. There are many successful, high-earning freelance journalists—several of them contribute to this blog—and then there are a lot of people struggling to pay the rent and others being subsidized by their families.

I would never voluntarily go freelance—I'm an immigrant, and I don't have family who could bail me out if I didn't sell enough stories or if a check didn't come through—but naturally I've dreamed about that special someone reaching across the dinner table and saying, "Pookie, your ideas are so wonderful, I don't want to deprive readers of them any longer. Why don't you give up your job and just focus on your own projects? Don't worry; I'll take care of the bills so we can stay in our lovely apartment in this fabulous neighborhood, and we can keep premium cable, and have a fresh batch of bonbons delivered every Monday. ..."

And then I wake up.

In other words, writers (and just about every other group of people) would be crazy not to have this fantasy. Just so long as they don't expect it to come true ...

... Except That Princess Dreams Eat Away Your Self-Respect

Jessica, Samantha: I recognize this impulse, the vague belief of some middle-class or upper-middle-class girls and young women (primarily white, I think; don't know if brown and black women have this too) that the world owes them a living so that their creative, artistic, interesting inner selves can be supported and thrive. I certainly had this in my 20s, when I graduated from college with my brilliance in English literature and writing poetry. I was shocked by the cold, brutal world of the itty-bitty paycheck and the boring filing jobs. I think this vague sense that we will be rescued—whether by NEA grants, as I imagined, or by a sugar daddy—is a serious problem in girls' upbringings and inner lives. It's what worries me about the cult of the princess toys for girls.

Here's what I've come to feel, in the decades since: I was insanely lucky to be a lesbian. Not just because girls are so much cuter than boys (ahem!!), but because it's forced me to test myself in the harsh world of the market ... and to grow up. No more protecting my precious creativity! I've had to market it. It's terrifying at first, but a gas, really, to get good at negotiating and at making demands in charming ways, to stop being afraid of being smart in public, and all the other challenges that grow from knowing that no one is ever gonna support you—so you have to figure out how to support yourself (and potentially a family). Honestly, I feel my life is much bigger, more rewarding, and richer precisely because I never had the sugar-daddy option.

So Samantha—don't do it. Don't retreat. Figure out how to dive in and turn your education and talents into your own income. Not only will you be safer from the post-divorce poverty that struck my mother waaaaay back in the late 1970s, which still strikes too many women who rely on their husbands' incomes, and of course, from the widow's poverty that strikes when the husband's pension and Social Security dies with him—but you'll respect yourself more in the morning.

Toward that end, some interesting reading: Linda Hirshman's Get To Work struck me as harsh, but I know a lot of young women who have found her message to be bracing and helpful. Anna Fels' Necessary Dreams takes a good look at the female retreat from work as well. And Hannah Seligson's New Girl on the Job has some good practical suggestions about how to cope with the scary, nasty office.

Searching for My Sugar Daddy

Jessica, I fear I am solidly, if not proudly, in Abby Ellin's camp. It's not that I want to be rich, exactly, but I do want those upper-middle-class comforts: separate bedrooms for the kids; occasional family vacations to far-flung countries; the assurance that I'll be able to send my kids to the college that's right for them, even if it's not the cheapest option. And, at least at age 8 or so, I also wanted a second car for my house in the country ... but that's a dream I'm willing to give up.

I remember in college having a long discussion about exactly what kind of sugar daddy would be right for me. I figured an investment banker or corporate lawyer wouldn't really work, since I find those professions fairly dull and have always had high on my List of Traits for My Future Husband that he have a job I enjoy hearing about at the dinner table. The other obvious choice was old money, but that didn't seem right either—I had spent a year of high school at a ritzy Manhattan private school (sandwiched among 12 years of public school in suburban Maryland) and found it tough to relate to the über wealthy there. By the end of that college conversation—still completely unaware of what my starting salary would be after graduation or if I'd even manage to snag a journalism job—I had at least one thing sorted out: I'd need to find an inventor of some kind, a creative thinker entrepreneurial enough to turn his grand idea into an equally grand paycheck. And then I'd need to marry him.

I don't think that any of that fantasizing (creepy as it was) took away from my assumption that taking care of myself would be my responsibility long before I brought a partner on to share the burden. My first priority out of college wasn't finding that inventor; it was getting health insurance. And unlike Karen Karbo, I've never let my boyfriends pick up all the tabs.

But I will say that I get it. I get how someone with a strong working mother can still grow up with this notion that she will be provided for in a vague sense that, when probed, starts to materialize as a man. And although I'm sure part of that stems from growing up in a society that continues to trumpet the notion—although obviously more subtly these days, than in the Mad Men era—of woman being cared for by man, I think another part is just the general tendency for people of both sexes to imagine things they can't have, then make the logical leaps to whatever missing factor might make those things possible. I've known for a long time that I won't have a job that gives me that extra car for my country home. And it seems less dangerous for me to occasionally wonder if a marriage might make that possible than to start hoping something like the lottery will.

But a Boob Job IS an Investment

In his "Human Nature" blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the grounds that their plastic surgery was "an investment." Saletan cries foul: "When you can't pay the mortgage, we're supposed to bail you out? And your surgeon calls what you did an 'investment'?"

But isn't that a perfectly reasonable perspective? Sad but apparently true: We live in a society that rewards beauty and punishes ugliness, often using the medium of cold, hard cash. A 2005 Federal Reserve study, for instance, found that attractive people—in all occupations—earned 5 percent more per hour than the physically average, while the ugly earn 9 percent less an hour than everyone else. So say you find yourself, through sheer genetic bad luck, stuck in the low-earning "ugly" category—why shouldn't you decide that putting down $5,000 for a nose job or $2,500 for a "chin augmentation" is a smart long-term investment? If you can go from "ugly" to "average," you've potentially got a lifetime 9 percent income boost right there! Even if you're utterly devoid of vanity, some wisely chosen plastic surgery might be a sound economic decision.

I'll go further: Research suggests that the benefits of physical attractiveness start at birth. Nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. And even parents, God help us all, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones—in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children often didn't even bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts. Clearly, parents, if you want your ugly kid to get a fair shake in life, you need to get him or her to a cosmetic surgeon, pronto. And this, comrades, should be our new rallying cry: high-quality, government-subsidized day care; universal preschool; and free pediatric cosmetic surgery on demand!

Dispatch from the Mommy Wars

Mom who works at home: Bill will be picking up the girls today.

Non-salaried mom: Why, are you out of town?

M: No, just on deadline.

N: Well that's awfully nice of him. I hate for him to have to do that.

M: It's not nice; he's their dad.

N: But, you can't come?

 Is this conversation ever going to change?

Obama's Sexist Dog Whistle

Barack Obama brought up Hillary Clinton's period! "I understand that Senator Clinton periodically,'' (See? He said it!) "when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal." Clearly, he was saying his rival ought to look into hormone replacement therapy.

What, this sexism is too subtle for you? Not for pro-Clinton blogger Taylor Marsh, who accused Obama of "demeaning women,'' or even straight-down-the-middle Andrea Mitchell, who said on MSNBC, "When you start describing a female candidate as being 'down' and 'striking back,' I don't know, that's a little edgy, don't you think?" Karen Stabiner, the author of well-received books about single-sex education and breast cancer, wrote that when she heard what Obama had said, "That was the moment when I, and other women of a certain age, all over the country, winced. The change candidate had embraced one of the oldest clichés in the book—that women are held hostage by emotion, that we can't be trusted with the big decisions because, depending on our age, we're either on the rag or having a hot flash.''

Beyond this accusation itself—so ludicrous my eyes might twirl right out of their sockets—what makes me wince is how such claims undermine actual affronts to women: One in six American women has been raped or endured an attempted rape, and stories about pregnant women killed by their boyfriends are commonplace. Female employees in this country made 77 cents for every $1 a man earned—in 2007, for heaven's sake—and the workplace has not, alas, been utterly transformed since as a college kid, three male supervisors at my summer job in a Texas bank called me in to say I should be wearing a real bra instead of camisoles. Then there was the boss who guessed my weight every time I walked by his office—with such accuracy that, had the whole newspaper thing not worked out, he could always have joined the circus. So far be it from me to say women should declare victory in the war on stuff that shouldn't happen but does, still, all the time. Yet I'm not sure that Clinton supporters who read sexism into Obama's recent remarks are helping her candidacy. And wouldn't we hate to look back on this presidential race as the moment feminists themselves undid some of the progress that has been made—by reviving the defunct stereotype of the hysterical female, strategically overreacting to imagined offense?

More Time With the Family or in Timeout With the Family?

A report in the Wall Street Journal today about the departure last weekend of former Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle offers up this explanation for the departure:

Ms. Solis Doyle recently returned home after two months on the road to find a family accustomed to her absence, she told colleagues. When her 6-year-old son cried out one night recently, he rebuffed his mom, saying, "I want Daddy." Ms. Solis Doyle flew out of the room in tears and told her husband: "Joey doesn't want me. S- this campaign, I'm quitting."

Aside from prompting a desperately funny string of intramural Slate e-mails about what the S stands for (Fraysters???), the anecdote raises a whole lotta questions for the mommies and daddies on this blog: Like doesn’t this scene happen to every mom after every single business trip? My heart goes out to her. My 4-year-old spent much of October ritually biting some kid at preschool every time I left town. On the one hand I was about ready to quit over Coby’s daily nibblings (especially when he started telling his teacher “Mommy is on vacation in Washington for 100 days” each time he did it). On the other hand, this smells like a gender-fraught cover story to justify what Josh Green says was definitely a firing. Help?

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