Gender Roles - Salon.com

The president shamefully uses his daughters to justify limiting the healthcare options of America's young women

By Rebecca Traister

(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster/Salon)

When will Barack Obama learn how to talk thoughtfully about women, women’s health and women’s rights?

Apparently, not today.

On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius unexpectedly overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that emergency contraception be sold on drugstore shelves and made available without a prescription to women under the age of 17. The move came as a surprise blow to healthcare and women’s rights activists, the kinds of people regularly counted as supporters of the Obama administration.

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.

Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”

Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.

Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.

: Rebecca Traister writes for Salon. She is the author of "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" (Free Press). Follow @rtraister on Twitter. More Rebecca Traister

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Why celebrity daddy issues never disappear

On TV and in memoirs, embittered daughters of famous men are evening scores. Why can't successful women let go?

By Megan Abbott

The Fondas and The O'Neals. (Credit: AP)

Topics:Gender Roles

“But all I could think about was Daddy”

–Alexandra Styron, “Reading My Father: A Memoir”

“Ocean’s Kingdom,” a ballet composed by Paul McCartney, with costumes by his daughter, fashion designer Stella McCartney, had its starry premiere in New York in late September, marking the first formal collaboration between a father and daughter who are famously close — and the happy antidote to what has otherwise been the year of Embittered Daughters of Famous Men.

In recent months, we have seen high-profile memoirs by the daughters of writers Joseph Heller and William Styron. Dubbed the “daughterati” by the New York Times, Alexandra Styron and Erica Heller both chronicled difficult, distant relationships with fathers so absorbed in their own careers and personal miseries they barely seem to notice their offspring. Jane Fonda’s latest self-help book, “Prime Time,” again revisits her famously prickly relationship with her aloof father — a relationship already explored at length in her 2005 memoir (and in Patricia Bosworth’s new Fonda biography as well).

But while all of these women have built successful lives in spite of their fathers’ varying degrees of emotional neglect, they can’t entirely seem to let them go, or even to stop engaging with them. These daughters seem less interested in revenge so much as comprehension: Why did I matter so little to him? They circle their subjects compulsively and the critical rigor of their analysis of their fathers’ weaknesses and failures feels even more intimate than a love song. They want to get close. Devoting a year, two years, even more to their fathers means extending a relationship that never satisfied.

What is it about these high-achieving daughters that seems to make them want to keep revisiting (through books, interviews, articles) their relationship with the man they feel has wounded or neglected them? There are many easy answers, such as financial rewards or attention, though none of these women — Fonda least of all — seem to be seeking either. The most oft-cited rationale (especially on book-jacket copy) is one we know so well from the pop psychology shelves: “closure.” But, as James Ellroy has said countless times about his own relationship with his mother, about whom he has written two books and several essays, “closure is bullshit.” By writing about them, talking about them, these daughters are able to continue the “dance with dad” another year, two years, even more, the book leading to book promotion, interviews, articles — more opportunities to extend the relationship indefinitely. When Fonda titles the chapter about working on the film “On Golden Pond” with her father “Closure,” you don’t believe her anymore than the speaker of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” when she insists, in the closing line, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

As is often the case, however, the most fascinating and extreme manifestation of this trend is its tabloid variation: the tormented relationship between Tatum and Ryan O’Neal. This summer marked the publication of Tatum O’Neal’s memoir, “Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home,” and the airing of an accompanying TV show on the OWN Network.

“Ryan & Tatum: The O’Neals” documents (or, more accurately, dramatizes) her attempts at reconciliation with her father, with whom she has been estranged for most of her life. From age six to 16, Tatum lived with her dashing movie-star father when her mother lost custody due to problems with speed, alcohol and boyfriends who liked to beat her children with fig-tree switches. After a decade of being her father’s partner in crime, however, Tatum watched her father “abandon” her for Farrah Fawcett, leaving his daugher to raise herself and her younger brother, Griffin. This abandonment — told, retold and told again in both of Tatum’s memoirs (this is her second) and the TV show and in countless interviews — is the Dominant Narrative of their relationship and, in some ways, Tatum’s life.

For women of a certain age, Tatum O’Neal was the “cool girl” ideal — sophisticated beyond her years, with her knowing turns in “Paper Moon,” “Bad News Bears” and “Little Darlings.” Now, we see her nearly 40 years later — blonde, beautiful and yet clearly broken — still playing the part of the desperate, attention-seeking little girl role with her father.

Their dynamic is perpetually pained and stoked regularly — even (or perhaps especially) during the media frenzy following Farrah Fawcett’s death. Few who heard the tale can forget it: Ryan hitting on Tatum after Fawcett’s funeral, not realizing, behind her sunglasses, it was his daughter. As he told Leslie Bennetts in Vanity Fair: “I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me … I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me — Tatum!’”

“That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” Tatum told Bennetts. “You make of it what you will.” Sighing, she added. “It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.” It’s a complicated reaction to what one might expect to be a rather appalling Freudian moment. First, she asserts that her father’s seduction attempt was not an oddity but a fundamental feature of their relationship. Then, she tries to explain away the mistake. Finally, she points to his Don Juan qualities in a way that feels almost a sneaking celebration of him, and of herself for attracting his attentions.

You would not require this backstory, however, to find “The O’Neals” a dizzying, squirmy and occasionally deeply haunting experience, in particular the ways Tatum turns herself inside out for her father. Most of the time, she is the rueful daughter, still suffering and raging, while Ryan plays the befuddled helpless dad, seducing his daughter with attention and with sly attempts to get her to take care of him.

Unlike Styron, Heller and Fonda, Ryan O’Neal is the opposite of remote. Always ready to try to charm her and, more particularly the camera, he “gives” the most, always willing to stir up his daughter’s snarl of emotions and past grievances. He will feed his daughter’s rage and longing forever and still never give her exactly what she wants. The question is, what does she want?

The series’ most telling (and canny) scene is titled, on the OWN website, “He Said, She Said: Hot Tub Therapy.” As they lounge, Tatum speaks pensively of her desire to repair their relationship and Ryan dodges and dances his way through. It is a scene that recalls the famous father-daughter reconciliation scene between the Fondas in 1981’s “On Golden Pond,” daughter Jane, in exquisite aerobicized form in a bitty red bikini, trying desperately to connect with remote father, his eyes constantly drifting from her, refusing connection. Ryan O’Neal, however, gives Tatum everything Henry Fonda held back.

Then comes the inevitable moment when Tatum brings up, for what appears in the ten-thousandth time, her father’s desertion of her for Fawcett. Like a weary Spencer Tracy, Ryan insists, “You were not a kid. You were one of the most sophisticated 16-17 year olds I ever met.” Then he lets the hammer fall: “I know what I wanted,” he says to her, over the steam, over his own misty memories of Farrah. “I wanted her.” Quickly, Tatum, as if a wounded puppy, retreats, blaming their estrangement on his “temper.” His reply seems even more crushing. “It was the temper,” he concedes. “I fight with everybody, Tatum. Not just you. It’s nothing personal.”

Tatum stares at him a moment, then rests her head on ledge of hot tub, defeated. Because, of course, she desperately wants it to be personal. She wants to be just about her. She wants it to all have been about her.

One recalls Erica Heller recounting her horror over reading the gloomy portrayal of the protagonist’s daughter in her father’s autobiographical novel, “Something Happened.” When she confronted him, he replied, “What makes you think you’re interesting enough to write about?”

Ultimately, this string of daughter tales begs the question: what are we, the readers and viewers getting from it, other than a little schadenfreude over the difficulties these charmed girls have endured? How is it for women in particular seeing figures as accomplished as Alexandra Styron or Erica Heller still circling in that Freudian “remembering, repeating and (never quite) working through” dynamic, perpetually? One wonders how much of it might have to do with a possible curse of a generation (or two) of women who identified more with their fathers than their frequently career-less, unhappy or self-sacrificing mothers. Indeed, while women may not identify with their glamorous upbringings, those of us in the second or third wave of feminism may understand more than a little what it means to feel, all too strongly, the burdens associated with feeling, always, like one’s father’s daughter. After all, these are women who, to varying degrees, have followed not in their mother’s footsteps but their fathers.

Were they sons rather than daughters, we might immediately see these women as attempting, Oedipus-style, to overthrow their fathers, take his place. But instead we seem to be watching daughters trapped between identifying with their artist-fathers and sympathizing with their mistreated mothers with whom they cannot identify at all. But, perhaps most of all, they are stricken a terrible yearning. They want to, at least in part, be their father but also have his love as no one else has. There is a hunger in it that is desperate but also strangely moving. In her memoir, Jane Fonda cites a quote from psychologist Terrence Real, “Sons don’t want their fathers ‘balls’; they want their hearts.” “Daughters too,” Fonda adds — an addendum as rich in Freudian fervor as any you could hope for. In some ways, with these memoirs, they seek both.

Meanwhile, we might savor the seeming ease and contentment of the Paul and Stella McCartney relationship, which has led to “Ocean’s Kingdom,” the crown jewel of the New York City Ballet’s fall season. “I am a daughter working with her father, which is an incredibly remarkable experience in life no matter who your father is,” Stella told the Daily Mail. “It’s also quite an emotional thing.” After the premiere performance, she joined her father on stage to take a bow. “Ocean’s Kingdom” is, by the way, the story of a king and his daughter.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar award-winning author of four novels. Her latest, “The End of Everything” (Reagan Arthur Books), was published in July 2011.

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Straight male friendship, now with more cuddling

As homophobia declines, some heterosexual boys are getting cozier and telling each other, "I love you, dude"

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: iStockphoto/Dizzy)

Topics:Gender, Gender Roles

It starts with “John” hugging “Leo” tightly. Then, a few snapshots into the Facebook photo album, the baby-faced 16-year-old softly kisses his friend on the cheek. It culminates with a shot of the British teens holding up their shirts to reveal their tanned, washboard stomachs and the elastic waistbands of their designer underwear. On the boys’ respective profiles they leave each other comments reading, “I love you,” sometimes in all-caps, along with teeny-tiny heart icons.

These may seem like startling displays of same-sex affection and innuendo for a pair of heterosexual teenage boys — even despite their blow-dried Justin Bieber bangs — but Eric Anderson, an American sociologist, says it’s part of a larger trend among teens and young adults.

“It is normal in the United Kingdom for young straight boys to sleep in the same bed, frequently, and to cuddle,” says Anderson, who has primarily focused his research on white males living above the poverty line. In a recent study, he found that 90 percent of heterosexual undergraduate men in the U.K. had at least once kissed a straight male friend on the lips. Things are not so fluid in the U.S. — he found 7 percent of heterosexual college guys had smooched a straight male pal — but his in-depth studies of American jocks and frat boys, those expected to be the most homophobic, have revealed them to be increasingly comfortable with same-sex physical and emotional intimacy, he says.

His hypothesis runs counter to a New York Times piece just over a week ago about how boys are discouraged from having intimate friendships. It also seems to blatantly contradict recent headlines about bullied gay teens committing suicide. Anderson, author of “Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities” along with two other academic books about male sexuality, says it’s remarkable that these news stories even exist — it used to be that families would be too ashamed to admit that their child was a homosexual. Nowadays, it’s typically “extreme femininity” that’s being targeted: “It’s more femme-phobia than it is homophobia,” he claims. As homophobia continues to decrease at a rapid rate, “boys don’t have to align their behavior with extreme masculinity — they can move much closer toward femininity.”

It’s certainly true that the concept of “metrosexuality” loosened up mainstream understandings of male straightness in the ’90s, and the past decade introduced the “bromance” into our cultural lexicon with movies like “I Love You, Man.” These are signs of progress, to be sure, but they still reek of defensive heterosexuality. Take the “no homo” meme where guys say something “gay” like, “Hey man, nice shoes,” followed by the caveat “no homo.”

Anderson tells me that no stats will convince me of this trend better than talking to some of these boys myself, so he introduces me to John, the British 16-year-old. He gamely tells me via Facebook chat about his relationship with Leo: “i’ll hug him, kiss on the cheek; anything! we’re so close, we genuinely don’t care what other people think,” he writes. “i’m very confident and comfortable with my sexuality.” So much so that he almost seems baffled by my questions about further sexual experimentation with Leo: “nope, never happened haha!” It isn’t about sex, he says. They just love each other as friends and aren’t afraid to show it. As John writes on Leo’s profile, “I genuinely love you an extraordinary amount, for a straight sixteen year old male. In conclusion, you are also my best friend.”

Now, lest you think these boys are all sugar and spice, they also call each other “cunts” and “wankers.” They are football fanatics and hardcore fans of Lil’ Wayne (who can hardly expect any awards from GLAAD after penning lyrics like, “You homo niggas getting AIDS in the ass”); Leo even fancies himself a white rapper. A Facebook status update from John reads, “love walking down the road to college with your trousers round your ankles, just to gain man points.” So they don’t lack stereotypically masculine credentials, and their declarations of love sometimes seem so over the top as to be tongue-in-cheek, maybe even a way to preempt being attacked as gay. Still, formerly strict boundaries are being crossed — and frequently, playfully.

Things are much different stateside. In yearly surveys of young men on either side of the pond, Anderson has consistently found that the U.S. ranks 25 percentage points higher on homophobia. Why the difference? “The primary reason for a lag between what occurs in the U.K. versus the U.S. is American religious fundamentalism,” Anderson explains. “The U.K. has long-divorced themselves of this.” Aside from religious fundamentalism, there is also the fact that “we shelter our teenagers in America from sex, drugs and alcohol until they’re 18 or 21,” he says. “In the United Kingdom, it’s legal to drink at 18, but 15- and 16-year-olds are going to parties and getting smashed and nobody cares.”

Anderson puts me in touch with Jordan, a straight 17-year-old cross-country runner from Southern California who paints a subtler portrait of change. He’s never seen someone at his high school called “gay” for actually being gay — but it’s still used as slang for “lame.” (Anderson says, “Adolescents are just as adept in knowing whether one means ‘gay’ or ‘gay,’ just as they do ‘duck’ or ‘duck.’”) Jordan has told his best friends “I love you, dude” before and his teammates horse around in familiar sportsman fashion (hugs and ass-slaps are common) – but it stops there. “We don’t ever kiss. I think that would be weird, to be honest.” The craziest things Jordan reports are the time his team had a pillow fight — “a whole 15 guys having a pillow fight, that would seem pretty gay to me” — and when they stayed in a hotel for a competition and “had a huge jacuzzi tub and we all went in together.”

In junior high, he worried a lot about people thinking he was gay because he liked to dress nicely; he was the first guy to wear a v-neck to his school. “I am metro, I guess. I care about what I wear, what I look like and it seems nowadays it’s more acceptable to be like that,” says Jordon, who has the angular bone structure of a leading man and recently got into modeling. His Facebook profile is strewn with glossy head shots from professional photo shoots and some of his guy friends even weigh in to tell him that he’s looking good. “I’m sure people still think I’m gay, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me anymore ’cause I know who I am.”

Anderson says his findings should be taken as tremendously positive news, and “not just because they indicate a better lived experience for male sexual minorities.” He explains, “It used to be that male adolescents — too old to cuddle or emote with their parents but without having a girlfriend — were alienated from this type of human affection and interaction.” Now, a single 16-year-old “receives cuddles and love from his mate, drunk or sober,” at least in the U.K., and can “open up about his fears and anxieties, his weaknesses and failures in a way that men from my generation” — he’s in his 40s — “will read and absolutely disbelieve.”

It’s hard to believe even for someone like myself who is just a decade older than John and Jordan and grew up in one of the most liberal, gay-friendly cities in America. There is no question that homophobia has decreased dramatically — support for same-sex marriage is skyrocketing, even among fundamentalist Christians, and never before have gay celebrities enjoyed such visibility and respect — but these achievements are precarious and certainly not universally enjoyed. Take the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, a gay teen who was called a “fag” and teased for being an effeminate Lady Gaga fan. He filmed a video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign, just months before hanging himself outside of his family home in Buffalo, N.Y. He looked into the camera and said: “It gets better — I mean, look at me, I’m doing fine!”

It’s true, it does gets better, and as a society we’re getting better — but we aren’t there yet.

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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Why should marriage last forever?

'Til death do us part is so permanent. Does Mexico City have a good idea with renewable marriage contracts?

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

(Credit: Perov Stanislav via Shutterstock)

Topics:Gender Roles, Gender

When you live in a place with a 50 percent divorce rate, is “till death do you part” even a realistic concept? In a radical rethinking of matrimony, Mexico City’s assembly is mulling a proposed civil code reform that would enable the city to issue marriage licenses with time limits.

The idea, explains assemblyman Leonel Luna, is to help couples avoid “the tortuous process of divorce.” Instead, couples could opt for a renewable contract for a minimum two-year term, complete with provisions for the division of assets and custody of children. “If the relationship is not stable or harmonious,” Luna says, “the contract simply ends.” Luna says there could be a vote on the new marriage contracts by the end of the year.

Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church, still fired up over Mexico City legalizing same-sex unions in 2009, is none too pleased with the move. Mexican archdiocese spokesman Hugo Valdemar told Reuters this week that “This reform is absurd. It contradicts the nature of marriage. It’s another one of these electoral theatrics the assembly tends to do that are irresponsible and immoral.” Because anything other than a lifetime binding contract between a man and woman is hooey!

There’s something irresistible about the notion of a love that can last forever. But matrimony has always existed as both a business relationship as well as a romantic one. Sure, plenty of arranged marriages have led to deep and lasting love, but they’ve also been built on practical social alliances between families. The blending of fortunes, the rearing of children — they all factor into the culture of marriage. Just ask Patti Stanger. It’s not just about eternal ardor. So why not make it easier for couples to openly acknowledge another practical aspect of marriage – that it doesn’t always last until one person gets the privilege of burying the other one?

Love, even under the best of circumstances, is not a static condition. Even if you’re with the same person, the relationship you’re in at 24 isn’t the one you’re going to be in at 64. And though it may sound harsh to subject it to periodic review, there is in fact both a pleasantly incentivizing reason to do so and a luxuriously liberating one as well. Think of any couple you’ve ever known — or possibly participated in — in which domesticity was taken as Let Yourself Go pass. Partnered life doesn’t have the urgent frisson of early dating, but it’s not an excuse to stop putting in the work, either. How different might the experience of marriage be if both participants in it were subject to periodic, mutual review? The chance to say, here’s what’s working, here’s what’s changed, here’s what needs improvement? The opportunity, even, to say, maybe it’s time to move on? Why not acknowledge that a great five-year run could be more satisfying than a 30-year sentence? After all, we leave jobs and houses and quietly distance ourselves from old friends all the time, and it’s rarely considered failure. Instead it’s understood to be part of growth and the nature of life. So why is permanence so highly prized? Why is endurance equated with commitment?

Not everything about the temporary marriage idea is perfect — it certainly could make it easier for partners to absolve themselves of responsibility when the going gets tough, either because of money, kids or any number of real-world challenges. But guess what? Marriages bust up all the time over those issues anyway, and with plenty messy consequences.

In recent years, I’ve been to a few unions where the couple has substituted the phrase “as long as we both shall live” with “as long as we both shall love.” The idea of life outlasting love, especially right when romance is fresh and new and being celebrated, is a harsh one. And endings, unmistakably, bring heartache. The notion that the person you’ve pledged yourself to might opt not to re-up your contract is a painful one. But it could also be a very freeing one. Because staying together would then become a matter less of obligation than one of ever-renewing choice. And within the scary yet already quite real prospect of love dying and marriage ending, there would be the chance to freely and openly choose each other on an ongoing basis. To say, if I had to do it again, I would. And in fact, I still do.

: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams

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What fantasy football taught me about guys

As football season opens, a female fan of FX's "The League" joins one of her own to glimpse the secret world of men

By Alyssa Rosenberg

The cast of "The League"

Topics:Gender Roles, The League, Television

Three rounds into my fantasy football draft last week, my co-manager and I were cruising. We’d snagged Kansas City Chiefs running back Jamaal Charles, Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Roddy White and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Mike Wallace, in that order, when we made a critical error. Under time pressure, we failed to double-check that we had the right player highlighted in Yahoo’s fantasy system and accidentally took Carolina Panthers quarterback Derek Anderson. The deep boneheadedness of wasting a fourth-round pick on a quarterback I wouldn’t have even considered as a backup was a new kind of agony for this fantasy newbie. In an effort to move beyond narrow, team-based rooting — and an experiment in guy culture — I decided to kick in $50 and help run a team, and to take FX’s fantasy-football sitcom “The League” as my guide.

“The League,” which debuted in 2009 and returns for a third season on Oct. 6, is ostensibly about the way fantasy football ties together a group of friends, but it’s also a minor gem about how men regulate their behavior around women, and around each other. When I first started watching the show, part of the fascination was the chance to observe a phenomenon that I’ll never be able to see myself: what a tight-knit group of guys acts like when there are no women in the room — rape jokes, smack talk and slightly creepy innuendoes about their wives. It’s not that in the absence of women, the main characters are free to indulge their inner sexists. These men — dorky, divorced and overmatched by their hot wives — after all, are our heroes. It’s that they have space where they can say wildly inappropriate things without anyone believing they mean it.

It’s interesting to see the characters come up against their limits. In the second season, Ruxin (Nick Kroll) convinces his friends to let his wife’s cousin Rafi join the league — only for all of them to get uncomfortable when, among other things, he gets a little too casual with the rape talk. Similarly, the league’s championship trophy is named for Shiva, the valedictorian in the men’s graduating class who’s outgrown her nerdy high school identity to become a beautiful doctor. When Andre, one of the league members, begins dating her after she moves back to town, he gets skittish when his friends make jokes about their memories of Shiva and their attempts to harass her. Once one of your recently divorced friends starts faking prostate trouble to make an unnecessary appointment with your urologist girlfriend, well, suddenly the joke isn’t funny anymore. Of course, when Andre starts bragging about bedding Shiva to sound like one of the guys, he pays for it with a dumping and a severe case of bruised testicles.

Even more than the question of how men behave when women are safely outside their circle is what happens when the characters in “The League” come into contact with women who can compete with them on a level playing field. There’s the stripper in Las Vegas who, overhearing the league members’ pre-draft speculation, dismissively tells them that “[San Diego Chargers quarterback] Philip Rivers isn’t going before the third in any of my mock drafts … I won my league last year.” Then she lets them hire her for draft consultations.

And there’s Jenny — who is married to Kevin, the league’s commissioner — who demands to be let into the league as an equal player after years of helping her husband coach his team. (When her insistence on starting Peyton Manning costs Kevin a playoff game, she even suffers the consequence of the usual bet and walks naked down an alley.) “I have all this knowledge! I need to use it!” Jenny tells him. “Give it to me!” Kevin resists, hoping he can get her to commit to staying usefully on the sidelines. But Jenny’s not dissuaded, explaining that she’s sick of watching Kevin waste her insights. “I love my wife but I don’t want her in the league,” Kevin grumbles to his friends. “This is my thing.” But after Rafi’s kicked out, Kevin and the guys let her in — and she proves to be a fierce competitor. As they negotiate sex as rival managers (“I don’t want to talk smack while I”m about to enter you,” Kevin complains), trade waiver priorities and family chores, and figure out how Jenny fits into beer-and-bull sessions, they’re not just adjusting to her role as the league’s first female member — they’re figuring out their marriage.

I don’t have a marriage to be improved by fantasy football, and my co-manager and I have been drinking beer and arguing about sports together for years. I didn’t have to fight for my right to fret over how Peyton Manning’s metastasizing neck problems are going to impact Colts receiver Pierre Garcon’s performance this year. But I’ve already learned one lesson about manhood and football from playing with the boys: Don’t let anyone else draft for you without confirming your picks first. And the season doesn’t even start until 8:30 p.m.

: More Alyssa Rosenberg

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One case where market forces actually work

A new study suggests gender equality leads to more sex. But can supply and demand really explain love?

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Topics:Sex, Love and Sex, Feminism, Gender, Gender Roles

The idea that “gender equality means more sex” seems like a slogan cooked up by cynical young feminists. Instead, it’s the conclusion of a recent study by social psychologist Roy Baumeister of Florida State University — and politically correct it is not.

His study, “Sexual Economics: A Research-Based Theory of Sexual Interactions, or Why the Man Buys Dinner,” was presented Sunday at the American Psychological Association and shows that countries with greater gender equality have higher rates of sexual activity. With parity comes a greater likelihood of casual sex and more sexual partners. This might seem like excellent news, just one more argument in favor of equality — and it is! But it also paints a mathematical, emotionless portrait of relations between the sexes.

Instead of using evolutionary or social constructionist theories, Baumeister turns to economic principles to explain sexual behavior. The result is a world where women use sex to get what they want from men — whether it’s a free dinner or a lifetime commitment. It’s similar to an argument made by Mark Regnerus, author of “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” who talked to me earlier this year about his belief that feminist advances have driven down the price of sex to an all-time low in the U.S.

These are compelling theories and it’s hard to argue with the cold, hard facts that they present — but certainly economics alone can’t adequately explain the complexities and idiosyncrasies of sexual and romantic relationships. It’s also worth noting that despite this latest study’s appearance of strict impartiality, it’s clear from Baumeister’s book, “Is There Anything Good About Men? How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men,” that there is some serious gender politicking at hand. (Beyond the book’s title, he repeatedly bemoans the “endless sexual deprivation that is the lot of many married men.”)

Baumeister spoke to Salon by phone about how sex is like real estate, why female gossip regulates the sexual economy and whether his theory applies to love.

Why do we see this positive correlation between gender equality and sex?

The point of sexual economics is that sex is a resource that women have. Men trade women other resources for sex. Historically, women have restricted each other’s sexuality in order to make the price of sex high, so that men pretty much have to make serious commitments of marriage in order to [have sex].

When women have more access to educational and financial opportunities, they don’t need to hold sex hostage as much, so they relaxed the controls they’ve put on sexuality.

How do we know that women are withholding sex? Couldn’t it also be that countries with great inequality regulate women’s personal autonomy thereby constraining their access to sex?

That is not in evidence from this study. There is rather extensive previous work looking at cultural constraints and suppression of female sexuality; the thrust of that work is almost invariably that the pressure on women to restrict their sexuality comes from other women. It’s really informal stuff, like gossip, bad reputations and so on. Even in countries like the United States, women say the pressure to restrain sexuality mainly comes from other women.

So, the motivation on the part of women to regulate each other’s sexual behavior is to maintain the high value of sex?

Yeah. It’s a bit like OPEC: You restrict the supply and you’re going to drive up the price. When it comes to sex, women have the supply and men represent the demand. So, things fluctuate — when you have a lot more men than women, then the price of sex is very high and those cultures tend to be very prudish. In contrast, when you have a surplus of women relative to men, then there’s a lot of premarital and extra-marital sexual activity, and women can’t demand too much in terms of commitment and fidelity in exchange for sex.

What is the motivator in more equal societies for women to have casual sex?

Almost all studies show that casual relationships appeal more to men than to women. Again, it’s just a supply-and-demand thing. Economically, it’s minority, not majority, rule. You try to sell a house, it helps if you have a lot of buyers and there aren’t a lot of other sellers. But when there are a lot of houses on sale and people don’t want to buy, then you have to lower your price.

It’s not a very romantic theory.

No, it isn’t. How does love factor into this?

You can have sexual norms and still have plenty of love, and you can have plenty of love when sex is very permissive. I think this is a little independent of love. It just again indicates that men are usually ready to move the relationship along at a sexual pace before the women are.

How should we look at the situation of casual-sex-having women in more equal societies: Have they lost their sexual bargaining power, or have they gained sexual freedom?

Both factors are there. Certainly it’s easier for women to enjoy sex, but there is a sense among many women that they were better off when the price of sex was higher and men had to invest more before having sex. We’re not making a value judgment, aside from that we’re in favor of equality — but we don’t have a strong moralistic stance about sexuality either way.

It comes down to the fact that if sex is a woman’s only ticket to a good life then she needs to get a really good return on that, but that isn’t as important when women have a higher level of equality.

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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Obama’s woman problem