But just to be sure, maybe we should compare this data to what we know about Best Actor winners. Writes Jessica Grose at Double X, "The implicit (sexist) idea behind the 'curse' is that men are so uncomfortable with their wives and girlfriends' mega-success, they are driven to cheat or flee." She's referring only to the first "curse" article, by the way; the Daily Beast piece makes that quite explicit. "But if you take one look at the list of best actor nominees and winners, you'll see that their relationship track-records are not much better: 2008 winner Sean Penn's relationship with Robin Wright broke up about seven times; when Russell Crowe won in 2000, he was busy breaking up Meg Ryan's marriage to Dennis Quaid."

Grose also mentions nominees George Clooney, Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke -- but wait, there's still a lot of ground left to cover just among Best Actor winners! For starters, let's not forget Penn's first win, in 2004 -- Wright filed for divorce between the two and after the second. (Contrast this with Hilary Swank, whose marriage to Chad Lowe lasted six years after her first Best Actress Oscar, but who landed on the Daily Beast's "ultimate castration" list because they divorced after her second. And that was the one she thanked him for!) Also, not long after Crowe won, Meg Ryan was busy breaking up with him. William Hurt and Marlee Matlin called it quits somewhere around the time of his win for "Kiss of the Spider Woman," and Dustin Hoffman was both divorced and married in 1980, the same year he won for "Kramer vs. Kramer." Because I have access to a top secret journalistic database known as "Wikipedia," I can tell you that men who were divorced within two years of winning a Best Actor Oscar also include: Clark Gable, Jose Ferrer, Ernest Borgnine, Yul Brynner, Sidney Poitier, Lee Marvin, Rod Steiger, George C. Scott, Art Carney and Robert Duvall. If we expand our parameters to include divorces within six years of an Oscar -- and if Swank counts, I don't see why we shouldn't -- we can throw in Marlon Brando, and I think a couple more I didn't write down. If I had the patience to dig into the romantic histories of Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Adrien Brody, etc., the list might grow longer.

That's fifteen confirmed Best Actor winners who were splitsville not too long after taking home their awards -- one of them twice -- versus eight Best Actress winners making LaPorte's case for a curse. That is, in fact, double the break-ups attributed to Best Actress Oscars. So why aren't we more worried about the poor men? Jeff Bridges may have been married to the same woman for over 30 years, but you'll also note that he never won a Best Actor Oscar before this year. Given the bleak history associated with that award, who knows what could happen now? Poor Jeff Bridges.

On the other hand, despite the well-documented presence of a Best Actress curse, Helen Mirren's been with Taylor Hackford since 1986 -- even though she's been nominated twice, won once, and racked up four Emmys along the way; Frances McDormand's been married to the same guy since 1984, Jessica Lange since 1982; Susan Sarandon stayed with Tim Robbins for more than ten years after "Dead Man Walking"; and curse victims Helen Hunt and Julia Roberts have been hitched to new guys for most of the last decade -- all indications that there are, in fact, men who do not view their partners' possession of a gold statuette as symbolic castration! Hell, Marion Cotillard got married just before she won, even, and there's so far no news of a split! So perhaps it's possible that some of these women who won Oscars but lost loves were just, I don't know, with the wrong people at the time? Kind of like all those men presumably were?

I mean, for all I know, maybe every last one of those guys really did flip out at such an unequivocal symbol of their wives' success, scream, "Ow, my balls!" and hit the road. But given the number of Best Actress honorees whose marriages didn't founder immediately after their wins, and the number of much less successful people who end relationships every day, I'd be wary of reading too much into it even then. Especially since such interpretations always seem to be framed as as cautionary tales for high-achieving women, rather than exhortations to men to suck it up and support their partners' ambition. Do you see what happened to Sandy, gals? You've got to ask yourself: Do you want to be at the top of your field, or do you want to be loved? Put your career ahead of your man's ego, and he'll be banging a neo-Nazi tattoo model before you know it. Don't say we didn't warn you. (And psst, Sarah Jessica, we know you've worked really hard to earn so much attention, but oh my god, look behind you!)

When a supposed trend is used to send yet another message that women had best put relationships before careers -- by the way, have you given any thought today to how many eggs you have left, missy? -- I'm always skeptical. But this one is even more ridiculous than most. Grose already made the point a lot more efficiently than I have here: "Needless to say, the notion of a such a curse is a load of bull."

Personal note: This will be my last post as a regular Broadsheet contributor. I'll still be around doing occasional features, but I'm giving up the daily ladyblogging grind for the forseeable future so I'll have more time to work on other projects. I have no doubt that some commenters will be busting out the champagne over that news, but to those of you who have been reading and sending positive feedback over the two years I've been here, thanks so much.

 

I mean, "where there's war, there's Amanpour," right? In my mind's eye, she is something of a dream female action figure. She's earned viewers' respect and trust, and with remarkably very little attention paid to the fact of her happening to be a lady. She embodies all of the crucial traits Katie Couric was roundly criticized for lacking when she took the helm at "CBS Evening News" -- namely "gravitas" (which many apparently translate to "balls"). Of course, it's easy for me to complain that I liked it better when she was risking her life on the front lines, and it certainly isn't her responsibility to chart her career according to the types of female role models that are sorely lacking in the world. It's just, damn, I'll miss seeing her in a bush jacket.

In honor of her 18 years as an international correspondent, behold this cheesetastic CNN commercial (which, OK, totally gave me chills).

Natural childbirth advocates, meanwhile, are sure that the rising rate of C-sections and other interventions is contributing to the rising maternal mortality rate. Amnesty International agrees, citing a "lack of information and autonomy" as the cause.

The report has made for frightening headlines: "Too Many Women in US Dying While Having Babies," reported Time, while CNN's headline called it "scandalous." However, it is not clear that maternal mortality is even rising, let alone rising because of decreased access to care or increases in the C-section rate. Review of the data suggests that changes in the way that maternal mortality is assessed may be leading to a spurious "increase" in maternal mortality. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the causes of maternal mortality casts serious doubt on either access or interventions as the reason for any rise. And while the statistics for African-American women truly are horrific (three and a half times the rate of white women) -- this disparity has existed almost since the statistics were first recorded 80 years ago.

In the last two decades, awareness that maternal mortality is underreported has grown. Vigorous efforts have been made to correct that problem. The CDC report Maternal Mortality and Related Concepts (2007) explains these changes:

In 1999, the coding guidelines used in the United States were expanded ... Along with the new definitions, the [new coding guidelines] introduced new details and categories in the cause-of-death titles associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the puerperium ... Furthermore, in 2003, the US Standard Certificate of Death was revised to ask explicitly whether any female death was associated with pregnancy, instead of relying on the person filling out the form to voluntarily provide that information.

The results of these changes are captured by the following graph.

The 1999 and 2003 changes in reporting of maternal mortality resulted in large "increases" that are not actual increases at all. They reflect the more accurate measurement of maternal mortality just as they were designed to do.

Yet some of the increase may be real. What about possible causes?

Curiously, the Amnesty International report provides no evidence that there has been a decrease in access to maternity services. Almost all states provide public health insurance for the duration of pregnancy in any woman who needs it. Indeed, 99+ percent of births take place in hospitals, so there is certainly no decrease in access to hospital care.

If decreased access to healthcare were responsible for an increase in maternal mortality, we would expect that the increase would be spread evenly among all possible causes of maternal mortality, but that's not what we find. The following chart shows maternal death rates from pre-eclampsia/eclampsia, hemorrhage, embolism (the three most common causes of maternal death) as well as other direct causes (all other obstetric complications) and indirect causes (from other medical conditions).

The most common causes of maternal mortality remained flat. In contrast, the categories expanded in the new reporting guidelines contributed almost all of the observed increase. This suggests that the "increase" reflects more comprehensive reporting, not an actual increase in maternal mortality.

What about an association between the rising C-section rate and rising maternal mortality? A graph comparing the maternal mortality rate and the C-section rate certainly shows a correlation.

But correlation is not causation. If the rising C-section rate were leading to an increased maternal mortality rate, we would expect to see C-section complications, such as hemorrhage and embolism increasing disproportionately. But as we saw above, both hemorrhage and embolism death rates remained flat.

What can we conclude about the observed rise in maternal mortality? First, we can see that the 1999 coding revision and the 2003 birth certificate revision captured more maternal deaths, as they were designed to do. Together they account for 80 percent of the observed increase since 1998 (5/100,000 out of a total change of 6.2/100,000).

To the extent that there has been a real increase, is decreased access or the increased C-section rate the causes of this increase? That seems unlikely since the increase was not distributed evenly among all causes (as would be expected if decreased access were to blame) nor is the increase predominantly distributed among common C-section complications (if the increased C-section rate were to blame).

Despite the rhetoric of Amnesty International, it is unclear whether we are experiencing an increase in maternal mortality rate or a crisis of any kind.

Amy Tuteur is a retired OB/GYN who also blogs for Open Salon.

 

As an avid reader of fiction by and for women, I'm at least partly with both of them. I'm also with Salon book critic Laura Miller, who recently wrote, "American writers in particular are often anxious to be perceived as 'serious,' which they tend to equate with a mournful solemnity. Like most attempts to appear grown-up, it just makes you look childish. Comedy is as essential a lens on the human experience as tragedy, and furthermore it is an excellent ward against pretension." Miller, by the way, was speaking without regard to gender; the tendency to go full-tilt humorless to bolster one's Serious Writer cred is by no means restricted to women. But I think Duchen's absolutely right that the popularity of "chick lit" -- as both a genre and a remarkably tenacious catchphrase -- gives some female writers a special motivation to shroud their stories in unrelenting misery. Let one character crack a joke, and you risk inviting a candy-colored cover and all of the attendant derision.

But then, that derision isn't reserved exclusively for the specific genre known as "chick lit." As Rebecca Traister wrote in 2005, "Beating on 'women's' fiction -- and dismissing certain literary trends as feminine rubbish -- has a history as long as the popular fiction itself." Traister thoroughly documents the charges against chick lit -- including the complaint of a 1999 Orange Prize judge that she had to read entirely too much of it -- but situates them in a long line of rants about the supposed frivolity, excessive sentiment and limited scope of novels written by women. It almost sounds like people's impressions of women's writing are influenced by some long-standing, widespread attitude that women's interests aren't as serious or important as men's -- you think? As for more recent complaints, Goodwin is hardly the first to slam what she calls "misery lit." Have we already forgotten Oprah's original book club, or how her preference for stories about women living through horrific situations contributed to the perception that her taste ran strictly to middlebrow gloom and doom -- and thus, given the club's popularity, so did the average American woman's?

Perhaps that trend is just coming late to the U.K., but here, overwhelmingly grim stories about rape, abuse, lost children and all manner of emotional explosives took off at the same time chick lit did; in the late '90s and early '00s, getting Oprah's imprimatur was the ultimate jackpot for an unknown author and her publisher, but getting a chunk of the Bridget Jones audience was still a pretty big win. So of course everyone and her sister scrambled to produce work that might fall into either category. A decade later, a lot of people are sick of both (as one literary agent puts it, although the genre still does all right, "the term chick lit is taboo and not to be spoken of ever again"), but no other runaway trend has emerged, so here we are still talking about misery lit and chick lit as the defining subgenres of women's fiction -- ignoring everything else women read and write. Which is ... everything else.

Female writers hold the top three spots on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list at this writing. The first, by Jodi Picoult, one of the most successful authors of "women's fiction" going, is about an autistic teenager accused of murder. The second, by first-time novelist Kathryn Stockett, also falls under the "women's fiction" umbrella. It's about the relationships between white families and their black servants in Mississippi in the early 1960s. The third is the 31st book in a crime series by J.D. Robb, aka Nora Roberts, who also churns out romance bestsellers by the dozen. Despite her female protagonists and massive female audience, Roberts writes "genre fiction," not "women's fiction," so she doesn't really count. Nicholas Sparks, on the other hand -- who currently holds three spots on the two paperback bestseller lists -- does count, because his market is primarily women, and his lightweight love stories are not technically romance novels.

Are you seeing the obvious commonalities among Sparks', Picoult's and Stockett's books? Me neither. And are you seeing why Nora Roberts doesn't count as an author of "women's fiction," despite the fact that her audience contains just as many vaginas? Me neither. (Note: Yes, I understand why different categories exist within the publishing industry. What I don't understand is why those distinctions carry over into discussions of "women's fiction" among laypeople.) Chris Cleave's "Little Bee," Robert Goolrick's "A Reliable Wife" and Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" are all surely on the trade paperback bestseller list thanks to enormous numbers of female readers -- and if Cleave and Goolrick were women, their books might well be called "women's fiction." It's a term that actually comes in handy when a book defies classification as strictly "literary" or "commercial." But of course one is reluctant to saddle a man with it, unless he's a hearts-and-flowers sap like Sparks.

Now, what if I told you that on the whole, women buy a lot more fiction than men, period? In light of that and all of the above, wouldn't it make sense to consider women the default buyers of fiction, and men the picky niche market? And yet. As with film, the prevailing wisdom is that women like men's stories, but men don't like women's, so dude stuff is universal and chick stuff has a more limited, specific appeal. But a Barnes and Noble bookseller and blogger highlights the problem with trying to define a genre by gender: "Obviously, 'women's fiction' in the broadest sense would be any fictional piece written by a woman or for women. This is too broad a definition for me to adequately wrap my reading and writing around." Me too, honey. Even more to the point: "It's hard to define 'women's fiction', particularly since we don't define 'men's fiction', without sounding like an egotistical, sexist snob."

So. Because "women's fiction" is a category with no clear definition and few recent breakout trends -- but everyone remains convinced it must be a meaningful category -- we're stuck still talking about the phenomenal female-driven success stories of a decade ago as if they're the beginning and end of women's literary tastes. Sure, women are still writing -- and buying -- both "misery lit" and "chick lit," just as men are still writing and buying fiction about war and spies and politics. (As are women.) But suggesting that's all women are writing and reading -- that if the genre of "women's fiction" isn't wholly defined by one or the other, we must be "torn between the two" -- is ridiculous and insulting. Worse, it perpetuates the attitude Traister follows back at least a couple hundred years, that female novelists and their audiences are essentially unserious, that we're primarily drawn to escapist fluff, small-scale relationship dramas, or anything that elicits a good cry, no matter how cheaply. And it's exactly that kind of thinking that makes authors like Duchen go out of their way to "be taken bloody seriously for once" -- only to find that, oops, they're still women writers. So even if they escape the high heels and martini cover trap, they'll get slammed for being too bleak and weepy, too "issue"-oriented, for making the reader feel, in Goodwin's words, "like a social worker by the end of it."

That's not to say Goodwin's wrong to complain about tedious, preachy drama, or that Duchen's wrong to complain about the "miserable sexist assumption that women writers only write fluff, and that that is all women readers want to read." Like I said, to a large extent, I'm with both of them. But the reason I can agree with both is that I don't believe "women's fiction" is essentially about one or the other, nor do I believe either category is all bad. I think there are some real gems among "chick lit," "misery lit," mysteries, thrillers, sci fi, historical fiction -- probably every identifiable genre in existence -- but in each one, there are a lot more forgettable stories and characters than outstanding ones. The problem is, when men publish mediocre books, they're just mediocre books, but when women do the same, they're "what's wrong with women's fiction." Even if nobody has a clue what that term really means, and the only answer to "What kind of fiction do women read?" is "All kinds. And usually in larger numbers than men."

Pardon me, Margaret Wente, but didn't your country just play host to a little sporting get-together that seemed to offer ample evidence that chicks can dominate quite nicely in the "higher, faster, farther" department? Lest I appear to be soft-pedaling in my oh so feminine style, let me put it another way -- did you watch the freakin' OLYMPICS?

But more than being a mite out of touch on the issue of women's desire for conquest, Wente is also clearly getting her version of Internet demographics from the division of "Things Pulled Out of Her Ass." The blogosphere has females galore. In fact, as another Salon staffer face-palmed after reading Wente's story, who among us hasn't heard the argument that blogging is actually a femmy pursuit, because we love to share our thoughts and special emotions so much? Why, just last Sunday, in one of the most condescending New York Times Styles pieces to run in at least days, Jennifer Mendelsohn devoted much virtual ink to the revoltingly nicknamed phenomenon known as "mommy blogging." Why do women so love to blog, she mused? Well, Mendelsohn summed it up by using the word "kaffeeklatsch." Twice.

And this week, Michael Wolff, whose insights are always good for raising the blood pressure a few points, likewise dismissively declared that Twitter is for girls because of the "dear-diary nature of the medium."

Yet in Wente's world, "Opinionizing in public is a form of mental jousting, where the aim is to out-reason, out-argue or out-yell your opponent," and "Women are simply not as interested in doing it." I guess that's why there is no such thing as Jezebel or Bitch PhD or XX Factor or the Sexist or Shapely Prose or – wait! I'm soaking in it! Broadsheet! Also, the sky is red and Paul Rudd is my boyfriend because I deem it so.

So which is it, really? Is the Internet just a big Yoplait ad via the Oprah book club, with a bunch of girls sitting around processing their feelings about lipstick and boyfriends? Or is it a giant dick-waving contest? Hint: This is a trick question because the answer is, it's both. And more. Men and women may have different communication styles, to be sure, but we both have things to say, and a burning desire to share them. Though real numbers are hard to come by, a 2007 survey found that the ratio of men to women who blog is about 58 percent to 42 percent. Hardly a single-sex community.  And believe it not, men blog about fashion and women blog about news. You can Google it before you write your next Op-Ed, folks.

That's why, although it's an exercise in barrel of fish shooting to point out that if you took the combined understanding of social media that Margaret Wente, Jennifer Mendelsohn, and Michael Wolff possess, it would fill one Twitter update with characters to spare, those of us who care about Net culture need to keep doing just that. Because all of them write for major news outlets, and have editors who somewhere along the way actually thought their inane, unproven thinky thoughts on a culture they know nothing about were worth publishing. Which is unacceptable, insulting and plain old lazy-ass journalism.

On one front, however, Margaret Wente is absolutely correct. In her summation, she explains, "These days, you don't even have to start a blog to get an audience. All you have to do is write 'Margaret Wente is an idiot' and hit send. Instant gratification!"  Yup, Margaret Wente is an idiot. And it's so very gratifying to say so.

All in all, the measure's aim pretty modest, especially when you consider that many attempts have been made nationwide to institute a 2 to 1 ratio for public restrooms, since women spend twice as much time in them than men. (This makes sense when you factor in periods, breastfeeding and the fact that moms are more often charged with taking the kids to go potty.) A previous draft of the bill actually called for a 2 to 1 ratio, as well as applying the standard beyond just federal buildings, but it was met with resistance.

So, now we have a no-duh bill that calls for the most basic level of commode equality. As for when women will be able to breeze into public bathrooms without a wait just like men? Well, don't hold ... it.