Amanda Fortini

“People aren’t lukewarm about it,” Susan Anderson, the artist, says. “They either really like it, or they have a problem with it. But I have no reason to make something that people don’t react to one way or the other.” Anderson first became interested in the $5 billion-a-year child pageant industry after watching a television documentary about the history of beauty contests. She began to research the topic on the Internet, and, eventually, contacted the director of University Royalty Beauty Pageants to ask if she could document their upcoming event in Austin, Texas. That was 2005; she has photographed four pageants since. To capture her shots, Anderson sets up in the lobby of the hotels where the pageants are held — Doubletrees and the like — and photographs a gussied-up girl as she enters or leaves the competition. “They’ve just done their performance, or are waiting to go onstage. It’s this very charged environment,” Anderson says. Every child chooses her own pose, while the mothers, who have signed a release, watch. “I’m documenting a moment in time, not setting it up.”

Anderson’s main interest lies in the “High Glitz” aesthetic — the excessive makeup and Elvis-in-Vegas spangled outfits — wherein more is always better, and the trendy hairstyle of the season might be inspired by that year’s special-edition Barbie. “It’s a world unto itself, with its own rules,” she says. “I really don’t understand where it comes from. Who is making these aesthetic choices? I have seen some of the hairstyles in a Seventeen magazine from the 1970s, or maybe on ‘Star Trek.’” She insists that she photographs in an anthropological capacity, as an objective eye, the pageant-world equivalent of a wartime photojournalist. “I’m not here to judge these girls or what their parents are doing. I’m here to look at it from a different perspective, to go out there and collect the facts, to learn about the pageants and the costumes.”

But it’s impossible to look at these photographs from an aesthetic point of view only, as they inevitably provoke questions. Are the girls being objectified — by us, or by Anderson, or by the pageant industry, or by their parents, who have involved them in it? Are they simply dressing up in fancy clothes and makeup, as little girls do, albeit in a formalized way? Are they being inappropriately sexualized, and if so, will this have any lasting consequences for them? Likewise, will there be any psychological fallout from the emphasis on looks and weight starting at such a young age? (A study conducted by the American Psychological Association in 2007 found that premature sexualization of preteen girls and “frequent exposure to cultural beauty ideals” was linked to eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.) Will these girls grow up to be women who believe, like so many do, that their looks are the measure of their self-worth? What about the narrow aesthetic these pageants peddle: Are our collective notions of female beauty so impoverished? And then, the shadow of JonBenet Ramsey looms large — who can forget those videos of the 6-year-old victim-to-be prancing like a showgirl? — raising the worry that the tiny contestants might be prey for some sicko voyeur.

Moral and ethical questions aside, we wonder, simply, what motivates a parent to enter his or her daughter in a pageant. Because, as David Hinckley wrote in the New York Daily News, “[I]t doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize that the parent, not the 4-year-old, is the engine driving this train.” Some pageant parents say they compete for the prizes (tiaras and cash), some for the hope of future fame, some to give their daughters a better life than they had. Still others talk of the discipline, poise and confidence pageants instill. Of course, one might argue that piano lessons, or ballet class, or athletics would instill those qualities, too. 

But Sarah Palin’s story is also peculiarly modern and culturally apt in another, more unsettling way. As the vice-presidential candidate, she showed, despite her postgame spin, little real knowledge of matters non-Alaskan, and at least for the span of the campaign, she didn’t seem bent on acquiring much more. Her current desire for visibility, the motives for which remain unclear, suits our age of reality television, this moment in American life when fame for fame’s sake is the ultimate goal. One might argue that Palin’s ambition, which some have branded simple narcissism, allowed her to forget her own unreadiness for the presidency and accept the nomination in the first place.

Yet in her interviews the past two days with Oprah and Barbara Walters, Palin seemed wiser and more seasoned than she was just one year ago. It wasn’t only that she looked older, the creases around her mouth having deepened, it was also that, no longer under the shadow of McCain and his handlers, she came off as natural, confident, good-humored and even, at times, articulate. Though her tendency to ramble persisted, she wasn’t as awkward and garbled as in the past. She was also disarmingly honest. “It was easy to understand why a woman would feel that it’s easier to just do away with some less-than-ideal circumstances, to do away with the problem,” she told Oprah, about the soul-searching she underwent on learning that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. And about that fateful interview with Katie Couric, she noted, “Of course, I’m thinking, ‘If you thought that was a good interview, I don’t know what a bad interview was.’” Watching her — though I may be nearly alone here — it was almost possible to buy the narrative that McCain’s advisors, in their contempt for her, genuinely threw her off her game and then, by silencing her, conveyed the sense she shouldn’t have tried to play at all. Or at least it was possible to understand why many Palin supporters believe this. It even seemed plausible that her risible cocktail of big words and folk sayings was an attempt to ape political rhetoric that she wasn’t trained in and found intimidating. Maybe, in an earnest, rushed attempt to jam together a highfalutin idiom, to sound like the politicians on TV rather than the one she happened to be, she scrambled her own persona.

After all, as the populist governor of a state whose voters respond to plainspoken directness, she suddenly found herself a national figure addressing big-media sophisticates. She was given about seven seconds to learn her role and then, after eight seconds, patronized and mocked. The reasons she performed so poorly are the very reasons her fan base loves her. If, over the next three years, her performance improves as much as it appears to have in just the last year, the conventional rap about her rustic idiocy may come off as mean-spirited and archaic. Her foes might be wise to contemplate the notion that someone of Palin’s background and sensibilities has a right, regardless of her views, to participate in the national debate merely because she speaks (though often unclearly) for many like her. If this possibility can’t be countenanced, then government for the people by the people is an abstract idea we’ve grown too cynical to practice. Sarah Palin endures not because she’s brilliant, smooth or philosophically correct, but because hope in democracy endures, too.

Since the article published, Lipman has been taken to task for her tendentiousness and factual inaccuracies, for her “gratingly pompous” tone and “insanely massive overwhelming ego” — her ego, I have to confess, was refreshing — as well as her bizarre argumentative mash-up connecting 9/11 to the supposed flame-out of female advancement. (This argument, a colleague of mine pointed out, was first made by Susan Faludi, though I would say not very convincingly then, either.) But what of Lipman’s declaration that cultural attitudes toward women have regressed? Have they gone the way of the caveman in recent years?

It’s unlikely there’s a woman who writes for a living, or whose work has made her subject to public judgment of any kind — hell, it’s unlikely there’s a woman living in America today — who would argue with the assertion that the “conversation online about women” is “just plain ugly,” as Lipman writes. She tells readers that she has been called “a witch and a bimbo.” Most women, at some point in their lives, publicly or privately, have been insulted similarly, or worse. (When I wrote for Salon about my faulty iPhone, the reaction was overwhelmingly sexist, with letter writers calling me, in various colorful phrases, a dumb girl.) The Internet, of course, is a magnifying glass for all forms of vituperation, with bloggers and commentators drawing on a rich fund of misogynist language. And the sexist talk of male media personalities, including many of the supposedly liberal persuasion — Keith Olbermann and David Letterman and Chris Matthews and Bill Maher — is often shocking, especially when they are criticizing women reviled by their fellow liberals, like Michelle Malkin or Sarah Palin (or Hillary Clinton). 

This sort of abuse needs to end. But are the attitudes on display new? Didn’t the Internet just provide a novel, free, easy-access, anonymous pasture for the age-old dinosaur of sexism to roam? Perhaps more to the point, do such attitudes, even if they are more public or available or distributable than they once were, indicate a corresponding stall-out of progress? Might they actually be a result of progress? During the presidential election, in an essay I wrote about Hillary Clinton, I argued that the success of her candidacy had brought long-latent fears about women and power to light. The criticism is loudest when the successor is approaching the throne. Seventy-seven cents on the male-earned dollar, or the dearth of women in corporate boardrooms, are indeed pitiful statistics, but I’m not sure they indicate backsliding, or even that progress has ground to a halt. What about the proliferation of feminist Web sites and mommy blogs? What about those women in Congress? What about all the “great news” with which Lipman opens her essay? The picture may not yet be rosy, but I’d still say we are inching along.

Lipman is right to argue for an overhaul of “popular perceptions” vis-à-vis women. In order for women to, well, progress there needs to be a change in the way we are perceived. But for this to happen, we must put an end to the notion that we are fundamentally different or “Other” — a few short steps to “inferior.” Tossing out  Lipman’s own gender “exceptionalisms,” as Jezebel’s Anna North calls them, would be a start. Lipman tells us that women are risk-averse (and thus hesitate to ask for things, like raises), that they tend not to laugh at their mistakes, that they are “built to withstand hardship and pain,” and that they “are less likely to define themselves by their job.” I am a ninny about pain, and if I lost my job, my identity would suffer. I know I’m not alone. Friends who work as accountants and software executives and real estate agents in the Midwest, where I was raised — women who, unlike me, have children and houses and husbands — would feel the same. My mother, who runs a marketing company, tells me her female employees do in fact ask for promotions and raises, often with a greater sense of entitlement than the men. You might say that Lipman’s own attitudes about gender are as antiquated as the more poisonous ones she decries. 

The reaction was white-hot and furious. To say people did not agree with Rosenfeld is to put it mildly. Commentators shared stories of going to the hospital with their friends. “I cabbed her over to the ER and waited for her parents to show up,” one man wrote of a woman he didn’t even know, whom he’d found in her underwear in a stairwell, “and I didn’t even think twice about doing it. AND I AM KIND OF AN ASSHOLE.” The question was not open to debate: Every commenter was a good person who would go to the hospital — no matter what, no questions, no caveats — and Lucinda Rosenfeld was a shit. She was also a shit for her blame-the-victim stance, which many felt veered uncomfortably close to the sort of “mentality we’re so used to hearing and striking down when it comes to rape,” as Samantha Henig wrote, in an apology of sorts, posted on DoubleX.

But did Rosenfeld really blame the woman? If yes, what for? Let’s start with the basic premise that if your friend calls you at 4 a.m., you go to the hospital. It’s certainly what I believe, and from what Rosenfeld writes, she mostly agrees, too, at least in a dire emergency, though she is a cooler customer than most, who draws a distinction between a near-death situation and comforting a friend in hysterics, especially if that friend is well enough to call and ask you to come comfort her. (How you deny a friend who asks for this, even if you’re already in bed and annoyed with the request, I’m not sure.)  So if your friends won’t go to the hospital for you, if they refuse, even when you call sobbing, even when your mother calls, if they show up the next day angry and annoyed, something is wrong. There are three options: There is a problem with them, there is a problem with the friendship or there is a problem with you. Why did this woman’s friends not have what is, if all the comments are to be believed, the instinctive human response?

Rosenfeld faults the friends for not driving the letter writer “all the way home the next morning,” or “following you there to make sure you got through the door on two feet,” but she doesn’t outright call them crappy companions. Partly, of course, this is because she doesn’t believe friends are obligated to provide comfort in the wee hours of the morning, a point of view that is eminently open to criticism, but that’s her view, let’s let her have it. I suspect she also avoided bashing the friends outright because if the girls were categorically bad people, or categorically bad friends, they would have had a different reaction entirely — they would not have shown up at all — and the letter writer would presumably not have been close with them in the first place. Instead, the two friends arrived indignant. And so the question arises: How could anyone be infuriated with someone who had just been through such an ordeal?

Rosenfeld theorizes that the pair thought the letter writer was “lying about the mickey.” In fact, they could have been mad at her for any number of reasons — the letter writer tends toward melodramatic antics, they’d had an argument before they went out, whatever, whatever — but Rosenfeld hazards a guess based on the information at hand. Hers was a spectacularly tone-deaf guess, true, in its failure to recognize that blaming the woman for an incident like mickey-slipping is behavior so common in our culture that people are sensitive to it, and will sometimes react even when it has not occurred. But what she was trying to figure out is this: “Why were they so unforgiving?” What had pissed them off? “The fact that ‘Drugged’s’ friends were described as ‘angry’ the next morning made me think there might be a back story we weren’t hearing,” Rosenfeld wrote in her apology letter, as readers began calling for her head, “I’m not suggesting that the writer is lying about what happened. But possibly she has asked favors like this more than once in recent years. Otherwise, there is no reasonable explanation for why her close friends would be anything less than sympathetic for what was, by all accounts, an awful night.” There is, of course, another explanation, and in her apology Rosenfeld finally alights on it. “Unless they’re simply nasty people. Which, in turn, begs the question: How did they become ‘Drugged’s’ best friends?” Had Rosenfeld raised this possibility in her first letter — even if it didn’t seem likely, given how hurt the woman was by their rejection — she might have saved herself the past week of grief.

If Rosenfeld blamed the letter writer for anything, it was for her friends’ reluctance to retrieve her, for the shaky state of the friendship — not for being drugged. Blaming her for this is not the same thing as saying she asked for it, as defense attorneys often claim of rape victims. It’s just not. In her first letter, Rosenfeld did write that saying you were slipped a mickey is “sometimes used as a cover for irresponsible behavior.” This is actually true. Rosenfeld doesn’t say the letter writer was slipped a mickey because she was irresponsible, rather that women sometimes claim it to cover for irresponsible behavior. But again, why go there? The friends might have declined to come pick up the writer for any number of reasons; it didn’t have to be that they suspected she was lying about having been drugged. (And if Rosenfeld thought the letter writer was lying about having been drugged, why use the letter at all?)

As it happened, the friends had a reason for their poor showing, and a lame one at that. In a response written by “Advice Seeker” published late Thursday evening the letter writer herself fills us in: “[A]s it turns out, there was one big piece of the puzzle missing that fell into place later — the explanation for why my friends were angry the next morning. When I was drugged, my friend tells me I ended up dancing with a boy my friend had a crush on.” That’s about as small, selfish, juvenile a reason not to pick up a friend at the hospital as I can think of, but it seems to point to the fact that, again, there may be a deep reservoir of ill will in this friendship, a paucity of trust, for whatever reason. It also reveals that Rosenfeld was right to suspect that there was more to the story.

But she erred by filling in the contours of that story in ways that were speculative and, to many, offensive. Rosenfeld is first and foremost a novelist — a rather good one, though with a generally dark view of female friendships — and perhaps this explains her imaginative leap. The job of an advice columnist has traditionally been to give generalized guidance; she (or he) directs her words to one person, but they are dispensed for the masses. The best advice columnists are thus clear, direct, uncompromising, even overly simplified at times. Their job is to reduce ambiguity, not to increase it. (That’s why people solicit their help; the world is an ambiguous place.) There is little room for nuance or relativism, for shades of gray — if your friends didn’t come meet you, they suck. You might say the advice columnist acts as a final arbiter with an accessibility denied the rest of us to the absolute verities of life. A novelist, on the other hand, must understand human motivation in all its bizarre and glorious and sometimes-perverse complexity. Ambiguity is her métier. She who is a good novelist may be an unorthodox giver of advice.

“If you wanted to know whether I have a history of getting drunk and wandering off (I don’t), or even just getting wasted-drunk (again, I don’t), could you not have emailed me?” the letter writer asks in her wounded response. Rosenfeld could have emailed, I guess. Though to do so would have broken the fourth wall separating advice columnist from advice seeker. Between these two parties there has always been a tacit contract — pick a letter and answer it based on the information within — an implicit barrier crossed as infrequently as that between a reviewer and the author of the book she reviews. Of course, one could argue that if Rosenfeld was going to deviate from classical practice by assuming context beyond the letter, why not throw tradition to the wind and fire off an email as well? In the end, Advice Seeker’s reply points out not only that her friends are creeps, but also that the advice column format may be a fossilized form in the age of the Internet. Why not have the columnist and those seeking her pearls of wisdom email or IM back and forth? The columnist could ask clarifying questions. There would be no doubt, in any muddy situation, who was the victim and who was the perpetrator.

In an article published in the Guardian on Friday, writer Kira Cochrane situates “My Little Red Book” at the center of a new wave, as it were, of “menstrual activism.” (The movement is also called “radical menstruation,” “menstrual anarchy” or “menarchy.”) The term, she writes, “is used to describe a whole range of actions,” such as “simple efforts to speak openly about periods, radical affronts to negative attitudes, and campaigns for more environmentally friendly sanitary products,” since a woman could create her own personal landfill with the 11,400 tampons she uses in her lifetime. (What I want to know is: Who counted?) Chris Bobel, a women’s studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of an upcoming book, “New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation,” explains that many “menstrual activists begin by thinking, wait a minute! Do we have to regard our period as something dirty? Do we have to greet a girl’s first period with silence?” According to Cochrane, these women are attempting to take “the shame out of periods,” to overcome the supposed “menstrual taboo.”

Cochrane provides numerous florid examples of menstrual activism. In addition to the aforementioned books, there is “Period: The End of Menstruation,” filmmaker Giovanna Chesler’s documentary response “to the growing number of hormone treatments that promise to end the monthly bleed altogether.” (The health consequences of taking Seasonique and Lybrel, birth-control pills that limit menstruation or suppress it completely, remain a topic of debate.) There are the monthly-cycle celebrants who, unlike the hippies of the ’70s — with their red tents and moon-tides, their talk of “transitions” and “honoring your changes” — are said to be punk-style anarchists (menarchists?) who dress up as bloody tampons and holler rogue cheers: “Smear it on your face and rub it on your body, it’s time to start a menstrual party!” Artist Chella Quint publishes a zine, “Adventures in Menstruating,” which features DIY tampon projects and the requisite “leakage horror stories.” And another artist, Ingrid Berthon-Moine, has made a video in which she is “twanging her tampon string” to the tune “Slave to the Rhythm,” an apt theme song if ever there was one. For her latest project, Berthon-Moine has photographed women wearing “lipstick” made of their menstrual blood. To the consternation and disgust of Guardian readers, the article is illustrated with one of these images. “A woman who has smeared blood on herself and pictured herself on the front of a family newspaper obviously has a social problem,” writes one commentator. And another: “Ewww. Just ewww.”

Countering reactions of this stripe would seem to be the point of all the menstrual militancy. But is it necessary? Is menstruation really such a taboo? To put it bluntly, not wanting to see menstrual blood on a woman’s lips is not the same thing as being disgusted by the fact of it between her legs. (Actually, I wouldn’t want to see any kind of blood on anyone’s lips.) While in certain religious milieus shame and silence still surround the topic, in mainstream American society, the reality that women menstruate has been out of the closet for a while now.  Men are dispatched to buy tampons for their girlfriends and wives and do so without embarrassment. Single fathers are obliged to discuss menstruation with their adolescent daughters (though doing so still probably involves at least a tinge of embarrassment). Much of the pejorative language once used to describe the phenomenon (“on the rag,” anyone?) isn’t as common as it used be. It’s so normal to talk about periods that there is even a juvenile iPhone app devoted to it. “I am a Man” tracks the monthly cycle of one’s girlfriend — or multiple girlfriends, if needed, with a password for each one. “You will know about your girlfriend’s period and her mood. You can plan your dates, evening and save some money,” reads the gross app copy (just because periods are out in the open doesn’t mean there aren’t still sexist ideas about them). 

But the greatest indicator that the cultural attitude toward menstruation has shifted may be the ads for “feminine products.” Ads have ceased to be so euphemistic you have no idea what product is being peddled (“Be free and active!”). The latest from Tampax are hilariously direct in their wink-wink indirectness. Mother Nature (played by Catherine Lloyd Burns) offers a “monthly gift” — a box wrapped in red paper, a symbol obvious enough to please teenage boys and dissertation writers alike — to various women (in one ad, it’s Serena Williams) at inopportune moments. When primetime viewers are savvy enough about menstruation to get in-jokes about periods and blood, it’s a safe bet that the stigma has eased.

Those who prefer to remain quiet about the subject may not be evincing gynophobia so much as conversational etiquette. It may be an act of modesty, not of shame. People don’t much discuss erectile dysfunction or bowel problems either, and not for reasons of gender, or because those bodily processes are particularly taboo. When menstruation is a relevant subject between people — girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives, female friends — it’s not generally treated as humiliating or distasteful. And indeed, women don’t seem to feel much fear about talking about it. Case in point: “My Little Red Book,” for which 90-odd female writers agreed to share their stories.

Menstrual activism thus seems like an overreaction to a taboo that has mostly dissipated. People don’t need to see menstrual bloods on lips — a PETA-ish gimmick — to shock them into recognizing a hostility they don’t feel. At a time when Tampax is employing menstrual humor, guerrilla tactics like this seem sour and antiquated and out of place. And while some activists must surely be fighting important menstrual-related battles (advocating against dioxins in tampons, say, or for the environmental benefits of multiple-use products) might not the energies of those playing their tampon strings like a guitar be more effectively utilized if applied to any number of feminist causes such as, I don’t know, equal pay or domestic violence or human rights abuses committed against women? Maybe advocates who want to focus on menstruation could talk about some of the less-than-pleasant issues that often accompany it (polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, or cramps so painful you can hardly go to work) and push for doctors to find treatments other than handing every woman the pill. But to fret that menstruation is taboo when it’s not risks making it so. Some advice for the menarchists: Let it bleed. 

During the month that followed, as the marriage continued to unravel and her grief intensified, Lauren began chronicling her divorce via status updates. “Lauren would cry, but then he wins,” she wrote. “There isn’t enough Kleenex in the world.” “My house is a mess. My life is a mess.” “Lauren is facing the aftermath.” Her very private ex-husband-to-be soon grew enraged. “I would write that I was upset or what have you, and he would assume that every negative thing I wrote was about him,” Lauren told me. “I didn’t feel like I was overstepping any boundaries, but he did.” When she began to write about her new relationship, her husband finally lost it. “I wrote that I was ‘Going to pizza night and beyond,’” Lauren said, “and he was offended by it. I thought it was vague enough.” Lauren’s husband then warned her that he planned to “un-friend” her. “So,” she said, “I did it first.” Call it “War of the Roses” on Facebook.

We have long known that social networking facilitates hooking up. But what about breaking up? Does processing — and broadcasting — our feelings from the real, private realm in a virtual, public realm like Facebook make ending a relationship, that most painful of human experiences, more or less difficult to endure? It depends. Do you like your arguments, your recriminations, your teary confessions, your rantings and ravings to remain intimate (if acrimonious) interactions between two people, or do you enjoy a communal narrative on which an online village weighs in? Unfortunately, even if the latter notion makes you shudder, it may be unavoidable, as Facebook is the theater where some of life’s most chaotic, catastrophic and bewildering moments are now being played out. Not even the rich or famous are immune: Chelsea Davy, ex-girlfriend of Prince Harry, made the demise of their five-year relationship official (and officially public) by changing her status to “single.” The quick, unceremonious execution of the Facebook breakup — it’s like ripping off a bandage.

This is hardly news to 20-somethings, who have been airing their adventures online for years. But now that the demographic of Facebook has shifted to include those in their 30s, and 40s, 50s and beyond — there are 300 million active users, so many that the Facebook backlash has already begun – dramatic Facebook breakups have turned into dramatic Facebook divorces.

The problem is, Facebook is still a lawless frontier. (Though lawyers, particularly divorce lawyers, have come to view the site as an “evidentiary gold mine,” as a recent piece in Time magazine put it, and they regularly pan for nuggets in the opposing side’s pages.) There aren’t any definite principles, precepts or binding contracts between individuals, and its habitués are forced to improvise as they go along. An example: Earlier this year, in Lancashire, England, a man named Neil Brady announced the dissolution of his six-year marriage with a status update. Here was the online equivalent of Matt Damon breaking up with Minnie Driver on national television. And yet, in an inadvertent nod to how muddled our on- and off-line realities have become, his wife, Emma, who learned of the break from a friend, remarked, “What upset me the most was not the fact that Neil had written he had ended his marriage, but the comment from a girl in Canada who said: ‘You are better off out of it.’”

The bizarre truth is that your Facebook divorce will likely be more public than your actual one. You are stating, in front of perhaps hundreds of witnesses, that the relationship has run its course. It’s like taking out a full-page announcement in the Times. “For a long time I kept my status as ‘married. I didn’t want to change it,’” said Elizabeth, a hairdresser from Illinois, who discovered her martial-arts instructor husband was having an affair with the mother of one of his students — and immediately updated her status to read, “Ladies, Don’t Ever Get Married.” Elisabeth LaMotte, a family and couples therapist in Washington, D.C., who has been “observing the ways in which technology affects relationships for many, many years,” told me, “Facebook becomes a definite point of tension between couples, and the relationship status in particular. For people who were dating or married, how quickly the person changes their status back to single is a big deal. It’s like, ‘we were just dating yesterday, and you changed your status so fast, and do I have to do that, too?’ It’s very public and emotional.” Myriad issues of etiquette remain undecided. If, for instance, you’re breaking up or divorcing in the real world, at what point is it no longer heartless to change your status on Facebook to “single” or “it’s complicated”? Do you need to warn your significant other that his or her status is about to change in turn?

Watching friends and co-workers attempt to navigate this pothole-riddled terrain can be — I’ll just cop to it — fascinating. Keeping up with the messy lives of others has become a guilty pleasure not unlike reading about the spectacular implosion of the Gosselin marriage. In “The Peep Diaries,” a book I wrote about in July, Hal Niedzvecki argues that we are witnessing the tabloidization of everyday life. Regular people are acting like mini-celebrities, announcing their every move in the way famous people once did in the gossip pages. Needless to say, that girl from junior high, the one with the boyfriend troubles who is a fixture on your Facebook feed, is often no more familiar than some starlet in a magazine. Stephanie Nelson, a family lawyer from Texas (she asked that her real name not be used), described reading the posts of a woman she hasn’t talked to since high school, whose regular updates narrate a custody battle with an ex-husband who has put their child in a mental institution, and florid fights with a current husband of only five months. “There’s part of me, the goodhearted lawyer in me, that thinks, you should keep this down,” Stephanie told me. “And part of me, the part that reads Us Weekly, is like, what happens next?”

Of course, not every spurned lover provides a blow-by-blow of their marital meltdown. To do so takes a peculiar mix of anger, candor and exhibitionism, maybe even a tinge of desperation. Reading some of the more dramatic updates in my own feed, it’s hard not to wonder about the people behind them. Recently, in a late-night online procrastination session, I was sucked into the Facebook drama of an old high school classmate, whose smiley, strawberry-blond wife had been swapped out for photos of an attractive brunette woman in a variety of come-hither poses: in a coral bikini, in tank tops so tight they revealed her padded bra underneath. I felt transfixed, embarrassed for him, judgmental — like a creepy neighbor peeking in their window at night. Stephanie, the Texas lawyer, described a similar tangle of curiosity and secondhand shame. Her former classmate “posted on Friday at 9 or 10 p.m., ‘He’s decided that he can’t stand me, he wants a divorce, we’ve only been married 5 months, I’m pregnant, he’s on the phone with his ex-wife right now, asking her to take him back.’” She continued, “This thing is happening to you, right, and you get on fricking Facebook? I would call my best friend crying, I would leave the house — I don’t know what I would do — but writing on Facebook would be the last thing on my mind.”

Who can know what prompts people to expose their most intimate moments on Facebook? For some, Facebook makes it possible to confess what might otherwise feel too personal. “A lot of times you don’t get to talk to people about that stuff,” says Elizabeth, the hairdresser from Illinois. “It can be hard to discuss in person.” For others, the billboard approach has its benefits. It’s like a dark take on the holiday circular — a quick, pro forma way of notifying people about your life. “It cuts a lot of awkward conversations, because people already know I’ve gotten divorced,” said Chad Post (was ever there a more appropriate name?), a 30-ish man in Rochester, N.Y., who runs Open Letter, a small press that publishes literature in translation, and whose divorce is in the final stages. “I don’t want to call people up and dump a bunch of shit on them, but I don’t mind if they know my life got screwed up. There’s something passive about it. No one has to respond.” But when people do come forward, it creates a feeling of being supported (which can be especially comforting when friends and family live far away). “People e-mailed saying, ‘I’ve been through this; if you want to talk, great; sorry this is happening,” said Post. “That was the thing that made me feel better — it was self-selecting. If I talked to any friend, he or she would have said similar things, but they would have felt obligated.”

But let’s be honest, for people in a frantic or vulnerable state, the siren call of Facebook can be hard to resist. Freud would have loved the site, enabler of the id that it is. The aggrieved parties can spy, stalk, trash-talk, gossip about, even publicly shame each other by way of dueling wall posts — everything you want to do in the real world but that would be way too obnoxious. Lauren, for example, “tagged” her ex-husband in a photo of their two boys and a coral snake — she gave the snake her husband’s name. When he complained, she said, “I was not trying to imply that you were a snake; I just thought you’d want to see this photo of the snake our kids caught.” (Still, you have to wonder.) When you want to be permanently free of your ex (at least online), there is the strongest weapon in a Facebooker’s armamentarium: deleting them, the fabled “defriending.” Chad Post was expunged by his wife after he posted about chopping down trees in preparation to sell their house. “I wrote that I was probably not in the best mental state to be using a chain saw,” he told me. “My wife didn’t say anything, but then she defriended me. She just wasn’t there anymore. It was super-surreal in a 21st century-meets-third grade sort of way.”

All of this is why lawyers both love and fear Facebook. “It’s a great new way to get information, a really immediate way,” said Laura Merritt, an Austin-based attorney, who last week taught a Web seminar sponsored by the Texas Bar Association, “From Lawbooks to Facebook: What Lawyers Need to Know about Social Networking Sites.” “It’s part of your due diligence now: Do clients have an active online life, social networking sites, blogs, etc.?” Lawyers hope to excavate information on lifestyle, relationships (“persons of interest”), whereabouts — mentions of affairs or parties, say; money spent on gifts, lavish purchases or trips; photos of a parent smoking or drinking. In a custody or settlement case, such information can be used to show financial resources, state of mind, even lack of fitness to parent. If, for instance, photos surface online of you and your new paramour toasting each other at a pricey restaurant, you could be found to have committed “marital waste” (spending marital funds on another person). And it’s difficult to testify to psychological damage or humiliation when you are trumpeting your post-breakup happiness in status updates. (Most divorce decrees also prohibit one parent from disparaging another in front of a child, and a judge may view writing about your former spouse on Facebook as public disparagement.) “[C]ourts have come a long way from regarding the Internet as a source of ‘voodoo information,’” John G. Browning, a Dallas-based attorney who co-taught the Web seminar, notes in an article in Voir Dire magazine. A 2008 poll conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 88 percent of members had seen a “dramatic increase” in the use of digital evidence. Increasingly, this evidence is proving pivotal: In a Louisiana case, sexually explicit boasts on the MySpace page of one woman’s boyfriend convinced the court to award custody to her husband. It’s one thing to lose your head in an update; it’s something else to lose your children because of it.

Don’t think you’re in the clear because you’ve set your privacy settings to “high.” In legal terms, information is treated as private when the person writing it had a “reasonable expectation” that it would remain so. But when you post on Facebook, you are aware, even if this awareness is submerged, that it may be viewed, not only by your own carefully curated collection of friends, but often by their friends — indeed by anyone else they may allow to view their page. “By its very nature a social network makes information available for all to see. This means that there is no right to privacy,” writes William Jones IV, a Memphis divorce attorney, one of many lawyers on the Internet with ads and blogs that warn of the pitfalls of social networking. As Facebook’s own privacy policy reads, “Please keep in mind that if you disclose personal information in your profile or when posting comments, messages, photos, videos … this information may become publicly available.” Facebook is not like Las Vegas: What happens there rarely stays there.

If you wrote it, a lawyer is sure to find it, even if you’ve gone back and deleted material you worried might be incriminating. Lawyers hire computer forensics experts who know how to extract material that has supposedly been erased from a hard drive, or that is lingering out there in the blogosphere. Often, the opposition is ordered to refrain from taking any “destructive action” — thus the seemingly benign act of deletion becomes the “spoliation of evidence.” Many lawyers, in fact, advise clients not to get on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter at all during a divorce, and some firms require that clients suspend their accounts. “Those bunny ears at Halloween may have been harmless, but they can be used to paint a fairly nasty picture in court,” writes Jones, the Memphis divorce lawyer. If you do continue to social network during a divorce, you might want to act like a modern-day celebrity, not an old Hollywood one, and reveal nothing telling about yourself at all.

Still, beware. Facebook, like the weather, is impossible to control. ”It’s not like bitching about your ex-wife to your neighbor over the fence,” said Laura Merritt, “you just told 600 people, who might tell 600 people …” Find yourself a neighbor and a fence. After all, during a divorce, people need to vent — non-disparagement clauses exist for a reason — it’s only now, post-Facebook, that there exists a permanent digital footprint of that venting. As a law student wrote in “Social Media Law Student,” an online blog about the topic: “People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums, whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more. Social media networks are not to blame for sheer stupidity … stupidity is now just easier to prove.”

Legal concerns aside, when any narrative is written down, experience does not decay over time. You are not left with your own memory of unrecorded moments but with a collection of status updates as indelible as photographs. The crying phase, the tearing-your-hair-out phase, the three-months-into-therapy phase: Each track is eternal, and can be eternally embarrassing. “In short, social networking sites have become the digital equivalent of what Jimmy Buffet once described as a ‘permanent reminder of a temporary feeling,’” writes John G. Browning in Voir Dire. How to explain these sentiments away in a later, cooler moment? It’s not as easy as calling up your sister to sheepishly admit that your beloved apologized and the situation has (once again) changed.

And in a relationship, change is often the only constant: “When he moved out,” Lauren said, “we would see each other for maybe 10 minutes without fighting, if we were lucky. Then he came here to do his laundry, and we talked for an hour and a half. It was the first lengthy conversations we’d been able to have. After that conversation he said, ‘Maybe we’re ready to be Facebook friends again?’”