Campbell, frustrated at his inability to pull off a longer-term affair with Beth Dawes, was talking about women as sexual gatekeepers. Despite having all the trappings of privilege and power in his world, Pete is not only unsatisfied, he’s enraged by the belief that this erotic capital somehow makes women more powerful than men.

But we’re talking about a man who blackmailed a scared au pair into having sex with him – rape, to my mind – and, when he showed up at Beth’s home with her husband after she rejected him, seemed to be trying for a repeat. In Pete's turn this week as Joan Harris’s pimp, stacking the deck to make her choice all but inevitable, he is trying to restore a sexual order where women have very little decision at all. No wonder the selling point of the Jaguar is whether you can truly own something beautiful -- this episode is all about men trying to own women.

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I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick -- he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance -- and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time "chick jobs" paid 40 to 80 percent less than "guy jobs," he'd get all irritated with you for being a drag. He's still an idiot, though, even if he's an idiot in quotation marks. That's kind of the problem with "Mansome," which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.

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It was, of course, a lie. Romney was conflating two different pills: emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which prevents a pregnancy; and chemical abortion, or mifepristone, which ends a pregnancy of up to seven weeks' gestation and isn’t covered under the new guidelines. Since both pills were marketed in the U.S. around the same time, even some pro-choicers have gotten confused. But Colorado happens to be the epicenter of people confusing them on purpose. It’s the birthplace of the Personhood movement and home to Focus on the Family, both of which have strategically called emergency contraception "abortion" on the scientifically unproven basis that they could block a fertilized egg from implanting.

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How did you come up with the theme of “strong women in bad marriages” for our conversation?

I was looking over the books I enjoy and can recommend highly, and this was undeniably one of the underlying themes that seemed to tie them all together. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that a strong woman is likely to have more difficulty in marriage. At least, that definitely applied to a number of royal wives! What is interesting is that sometimes they triumph over their husbands, and sometimes their husbands triumph over them.

For our first example of just such a strong woman, let’s go back to the Middle Ages to someone who was considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe and one of the great heroines of the middle ages – Eleanor of Aquitaine.

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But the people claiming to be the truest hip-hop fans only seem to prefer half of the artist, namely when she claims to be playing an invented male personality named Roman. This is often dissonant with her feminine aesthetics and Lady Gaga-influenced wardrobe, part of why she’s celebrated as such an original. So why does a rapper as self-evidently talented as Nicki have to recast herself as a man? Well, to get respect.

Minaj has spent much of her career playing up an image of traditional (almost cartoonishly so) girliness. One of her earliest mixtapes was called "Barbie World" and “Harajuku Barbie” is one of her many nicknames. On the "Pink Friday" CD cover she intentionally resembles a lifeless, leg-lengthened plastic doll. Her near-literal hourglass figure is widely assumed to be unnatural. In videos and album art she’s bedecked in pastels, shades of rainbow and, yes, pink.

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As you certainly know by now, in "The Hunger Games," Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl living in a dystopian far-future America where children from slave communities are forced to slaughter one another on television for the amusement of the wealthy. Katniss is moody, rebellious, deeply committed to protecting her mother and baby sister, and can incidentally shoot a man's eye out through his windpipe. Right now, millions of nice young ladies all over the world want to be her. This should probably worry Rick Santorum more than it seems to.

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While VAWA has not yet faced a full Senate vote, all Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted in February against reauthorization. Democrats are clearly trying to use this to capitalize on the recent interest in Republican misogyny, which, legislatively speaking, has become mainstreamed in the party. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asserted on the Senate floor last week that “This is one more step in the removal of rights for women.” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shot back Thursday, citing a Politico article to suggest Sen. Chuck Schumer “is sitting up at night trying to figure out a way to create an issue where there isn’t one … to help Democrats get reelected.”

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In case you didn't catch on, the sex strike is tongue-in-cheek. Annette Maxberry-Carrara, founder of Liberal Ladies Who Lunch -- the group that proposed the "Access Denied" protest -- tells me with a laugh, “We're not looking at it as a literal strike." But they are making a serious political statement. The event's tagline reads, "If our reproductive choices are denied, so are yours."

You would have to be profoundly tone deaf to not recognize the satire in recent bills proposed by female lawmakers that proclaim "every sperm is sacred" and restrict access to the blue pill. Last month, Oklahoma state Sen. Constance Johnson offered a bill in response to Senate Bill 1433 -- which seriously and nonsatirically holds that a fetus at “every stage of development” has “all the rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons, citizens and residents of this state.” Her proposal states, “[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

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Inconveniently, Paquiot-Mose hadn’t been on it.

Still, the gentlemen insisted that she had, despite the fact that Paquiot-Mose and Latoya Peterson, the panel’s moderator, honestly couldn’t figure out which of the black female panelists she had even been mistaken for. It didn’t help that the panel was called “Race: Know When to Hold It and When to Fold It” – on diversity and representation in technology – and by my count, the confused white man must have been one of the only half-dozen of his demographic who bothered to show up.

On the other hand, he seemed to be really trying, whoever he was, and the panel was far from the only example of SXSW broadening from its typical-tech-dude roots. Such is the uneven distribution of progress.

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In her new book, “Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire,” Julie Berebitsky, professor of history and director of the Women’s Studies Program at Sewanee University and author, previously, of “Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood,” explores a vast array of sources, including advertisements, advice guides, archival sources and actual experiences of male and female office workers, to better understand which of our attitudes have changed, and which have stubbornly remained the same. It's a dramatic reminder of the fact that men have claimed to be hardwired for sex -- and women have been accused of being temptresses seeking special favors -- long before Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas.

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The answer to all those queries is yes -- but none of those factors is the genuine news of the matter. Instead, what makes Limbaugh's apology so important is its context. Capping off other similar brouhahas from across the mediasphere, Limbaugh's mea culpa -- however insincere -- is significant because it is proof that America may be both setting some basic standards for political discourse and rejecting the right-wing shrieks about "censorship" and "political correctness."

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One of their primary goals was to reform the Afghan justice sector. And they waded in with a confidence bordering on arrogance, combined with a troubling disregard for the legal structures, however precarious, that were already in place.

In just a little over two years, Afghanistan had a new Constitution; there were training programs for judges and lawyers, and international organizations were making millions providing services to the U.S. government in its quest to make sense of the muddle.

Ten years later, these efforts have become a nearly $1 billion “Rule of Law industry,” as one international legal specialist, who has spent several years in Afghanistan, dubbed the enterprise.

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Much like J.C. Penney's recent "Too Pretty to Do Homework" shirts or, more revoltingly, Topman's  line of rape apologist wear, the revelation that somewhere, men's trousers are telling them to pawn off their dirty laundry on the nearest set of ovaries was not met with universal amusement. On Monday, Barnett tweeted a photo of the tag, saying she was "so shocked at this label in my boyfriend's new trousers."

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Since the election of Barack Obama, the Tea Party GOP has embraced a kamikaze-like politics in which they are willing to destroy the proverbial village in order to liberate it. This appetite for destruction has reached a fever pitch during the last few weeks. Rick Santorum and the Republican Party have called for limiting women’s reproductive rights under the guise of defending “religion” from the “tyranny” of the Obama administration. A federal judge was caught forwarding an email to his friends suggesting that Barack Obama’s conception was the product of drunken sex between his mother Ann Dunham and a dog. And Rush Limbaugh launched a viciously misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a private citizen, who dared to testify before Congress in defense of a woman’s right to have equal access to birth control.

On the surface, these incidents appear to be unrelated. They are simply the desperate graspings and mouth utterances of an increasingly fringe and desperate Republican Party which is determined to defeat Barack Obama by any means necessary. However, these events are all symptoms of a bigger problem. In the Age of Obama, white manhood — and a particular type of conservative white masculinity — is frightened, unsettled and terrified of its obsolescence. White (conservative) masculinity finds itself in an existential crisis.

Read more on Chauncey DeVega's Open Salon blog.

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Moments ago, her doctor told her that she won't be allowed to start taking estrogen to aid her full transition -- not for a long while. That means it's time for yet another shot of Lupron, a drug that suppresses testosterone production. The Canadian teen has videotaped each of her six shots thus far -- along with updates on the changes brought about by the drug -- and posted them on YouTube for the world to see.

This particular video marks a low point after a particularly difficult visit: First, her mom referred to her as a "he," then a nurse did the same. When she finally got to see her doctor, her hopes of moving on to estrogen treatment were dashed. "It's too slow," she tells the camera, angry with her doctor's caution. "They gotta make sure I'm trans? Of course I'm trans. Who in their right mind would go through this [otherwise]?"

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Doctors and psychiatrists at work on the newest version of the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders -- the American Psychiatric Association's bible for mental-health professionals -- describe this confluence of symptoms as Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). The revised version of the DSM, just the fourth new edition in 52 years, will be published next year.

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