Creepiest wedding gift in human history? You decide:

The present I humbly send her today is this column; this public note, this irrevocable display of affection and support and gratitude; this worldly absolution from any guilt or sadness she felt between the time she said no to me and the time she said yes to him. No one ought to have to carry that with them into a marriage. I showered her with as much love as I could muster when we were together. I still love her and always will. So I am only too happy to offer my toast to her now, one more time, before she takes her vows.

Politics Daily's Andrew Cohen is obviously in a pretty weird place in his life right now. And he has decided to share it with us all! So let us count the backhanded compliments Cohen delivers, as "the great love of my life marries today and I am not the groom" [Thanks to Date Lab for the tip]:

* Crazy love: "not enough" or too much? And am I to blame for my own unhappiness, or are you? Oh, it's probably me:

I had my chance, a few years ago, but did not realize until too late how fleeting my moment with her was meant to be. Whether it was my fault or hers, and, let's face it, it was probably mine, I will wonder always about the life I might have had with the most loving and loveable woman I have ever known. Sometimes, I finally now understand, love, even crazy love, is not enough. Sometimes, as the romance novelists know, timing is everything.

* Hope you made the right choice!!!:

But today is not a day for remorse. It is not a day for lost causes. Today is a day for celebration. The woman I once promised to keep happy is happy. She tells me she is marrying a wonderful man, with a good heart, whom she believes I would have liked had we met in different circumstances. She lives where she wants to live. She has selected her life's path. All that is left for me to do is to wish her well and to hope that she has made the right choice; that she continues to find in him what she did not find in me. And I am sure he considers himself today the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.

* Did I mention the son you left still talks about you?:

I want to thank her for being so delightful with my son, who talks about her still.

* At least my dead dad thinks we're still together:

Until almost literally his dying day, my dad would ask me about her. Near the end, almost exactly two years ago, I did not have the heart to tell him that we had broken up. It gives me peace figuring that he died thinking she'd be in my life when he was gone.

* Even though you're gone, you helped me discover that I could find happiness again. By impregnating you:

Before I met her, as a single father, I never would have considered having another child. Although it took more time than it should have, I came to realize through her love and devotion that there would be nothing more I would rather do in the world than have a child with her. How many poor souls go their whole lives without the heart-string pull of such emotions?

* Thanks for inspiring me to resent most other women in this city:

I want to thank her for being such an inspiration. She did not give in or sell out or become one of those poor women of a certain age in New York who have put their careers ahead of their lives. When we met, she was living in New York but was not of New York; transplanted from the West Coast, she had not allowed herself to be seduced entirely by the City's charms. She took from Manhattan, like so many other beautiful women do, but she never gave to it her heart and soul. She was always rooted even among the rootless of her age and time. She knew she would one day leave the City, and she did, on her own terms. I admire her for that. I respect her for that. And I love her for it.

* Our imaginary wedding doesn't make my love for you any less real:

It wasn't too long after we met that I began imagining what our wedding day would be like. My second, her first, I nonetheless pictured her not taking it too seriously, laughing off the little crises that always pop up. I pictured her stunning in her dress and with that smile that would melt me. I pictured her having a vodka and soda to ease her nerves. I pictured us laughing a lot. I pictured myself at the end of the aisle. It was not to be. I've known that for years. But that doesn't make the love any less real.

So . . . was he invited to the real wedding?

* NOM's nationwide "One Man, One Woman" bus tour takes a turn: Dude with sign voices support for lynching gays.

* Via Broadsheet, the gays aren't the only ones destroying marriage: Sleeping in separate beds may also be threatening the institution.

* Sady Doyle writes in support of snark (kinda):

"Snark" is one of those fundamentally goofy internet neologisms that we could try to fight, but are better-off just learning to work with. The word denotes mean humour: sarcasm, venom, the art of the put-down. Mostly, it's an attitude. Snark is the kids at the back of the class, heckling the substitute teacher; it's the voice of people who feel stifled, talked down to, or left out; the tool of people who have discovered that honing in on the weaknesses of those in power, exposing them publicly (if only to their own circle of friends), and reducing them to figures of fun (if only in their own minds), makes them feel a little less helpless.

* The Washington Blade has more on the death of Secrets dancer Mark Gower:

Although it couldn’t be immediately determined how long Gower was dead inside his apartment, White said police indicated he could have died shortly after he was discovered missing, which was nearly two weeks before the body was found.

* Lilith redux: NPR talks to 700 female musicians about the industry.

When NOM's mandatory heterosexuality tour stopped by Newark on Tuesday, Parents & Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) leader Greg Quinlan was on-hand to present the ex-gay position on heterosexual marriage: Desperate! "If you know of anybody, send them my way," said Quinlan, who is totally straight now (and divorced). "I live right here in Roxbury Township, up in North Jersey. I’ll give you my name and number afterwords, if you know of anybody who’s available." He then offered his criteria for a potential mate: "Female. And breathing." Go get him, ladies!

Want to help poor people while secretly scoping the charity "scene" for prime hubby material? Ask Miss A contributor Laura Swanstrom Reece has penned a guide to D.C.'s "charity circuit" for women interested in reaping some personal benefits from their selflessness. Work the circuit, ladies—feeding the homeless has never been so sexy! Or strange. A quick primer on a socialite's most social of charity options:

Interested in putting your sex appeal at work to cure dementia in the elderly? Suit up for Blondes vs. Brunettes, a "powder-puff football game" (ew) that pits the only two flavors of women against each other, for Alzheimer's. Cute boys of both hair colors serve as coaches. Bonus: The organization will also help you "stay fit."

Looking for a more exclusive charitable organization to add to your MRS resume? Try The Madison. This local civic organization, which only accepts 20-somethings, caps membership at 100 local ladies and requires members to "possess a college degree" and "have never been married." No leftovers!

If you have been divorced, resign yourself to joining Single Volunteers of DC, which requires only that members be "single . . . not married, and currently not in a committed relationship." Volunteers must also be ready to mingle. Members, paradoxically, must always be prepared to find romance with fellow volunteers—"If you are unable to enter into a dating relationship at this time, you should not volunteer with us"—at which point, presumably, they must cease their charity work with the organization. No kids allowed, but the recently separated are free to join—as long as they are prepared "to date others" and are "honest about your status" with dates. You know: "Cathy, before we deliver these hot meals to the elderly, I thought you should know that I'm still legally married."

Really want to help feed the homeless? For a charitable organization devoid of juicy deets about its bumpin' social scene, try Martha’s Table, where volunteers are always needed to help "at-risk children, youth, families and individuals in the DC area" by facilitating with "educational programs, food, clothing and enrichment opportunities." Huh.

Since the strangely explicit anti-pornography briefing "Porn Harms" hit Capitol Hill in June, commentators have been weighing in with alternate perspectives on the state of smut today. Their thoughts—from a defense of "the fuck me look" to nostalgia about a 1978 Penthouse, after the jump:

* GLAA Forum takes on the fervor over porn addiction: "why don't we explore the harm done by some people's addiction to snooping into their neighbors' entertainment choices and bossing them around?"

* A reader of Andrew Sullivan's writes: "The only thing [Gail Dines] convinced me of is that she's got shoddy methodology and her kids must spend an inordinate amount of time rolling their eyes."

* The Good Men Project surveys a couple dozen public figures for their thoughts on porn. Twitter owner Todd Dagres says: “If you have to ask whether porn is good or bad, then you already have the answer. The question is how bad?”

* Bay Windows rejects the feminist take on the "fuck me look":

Dines has more in common with Jerry Falwell than she does with Gloria Steinem. Take, for example, her views on what is termed the "Fuck Me Look" —the sultry come hither look adopted by models since models were first photographed, and which is used to sell almost anything—from cars to mouthwash— no matter how tenuous the product’s actual connection to anything sexual.

Said Dines at a Pornography and Pop Culture conference, "The problem with [the FML] is that males in our culture are socialized in a society in which they are bombarded with the 'Fuck Me’ look, where it offers visual entitlement to ownership of women’s bodies. And what is rape and sexual assault if not taking them up on that offer that she’s offering? The only trouble is that she’s not walking down the street, WE ARE."

Got that? It’s not just genital objectifying hard-core pornography that we need to worry about. It’s now sexy looks that will also bring down civilization as we know it.

* Lifechurch.tv is also leading an online crusade against smut.

* Rod Dreher thinks of the children: "I fear for them all, especially my daughter, trying to find a suitable marriage partner in a world in which so many of their peers will have grown up with widely-available pornography."

* But Time's Joel Stein [via the Good Men Project] says boys will be boys: "What is going on to create such an accelerating and insatiable appetite for porn among men in our country? You clearly have no idea how much of 1985-1989 I spent looking at the same three 1978 Penthouses."

Last month, I wrote about how chivalry encourages men to take responsibility for maintaining feminine virtue. Of course, once men assume ownership over the actions of women, women are encouraged to police themselves in order to avoid embarrassing the men in their lives. Endless cycle, no?

Let's take a look at how this collaborative gender policing works when the roles are reversed. Who is to blame when a man doesn't act masculine enough when fulfilling his traditional role in a heterosexual relationship? According to traditional gender role expert Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the woman is always at fault (also, she's a mouthy, feminist prude).

Andrea writes in to Dr. Laura for some advice about her husband. Apparently, Andrea is a bit concerned about his tendency toward sissiness on one particular issue:

"My friends and I, who are stay-at-home moms, would love to have you address how we can help our husband be strong fathers. We're doing our best to be great wives (we've read your books)"—good—"who support and respect our husbands. Yet, we think feminist concepts still influence us because we tend to entirely take over the discipline of our kids. Our husbands seem to be more gentle and compassionate than we are! We can't use that old line 'wait 'til your father comes home!' We didn't marry wimps. These are men who bravely and patiently put up with our occasional crabbiness. They provide for their families, listen and care. Are we doing something wrong?"

As far as traditional gender roles are concerned, Andrea and her friends are fulfilling their responsibilities as women. They've rejected careers in order to stay home to care for their children and husbands. They've read Dr. Laura's books on how better to cater to their husbands' desires. They work to appear gentle and compassionate and allow their husbands to assume the domineering, disciplinary role in the household.

But their husbands aren't holding up their end of the bargain. They're acting like women when they need to be acting like men. That's the deal. These women are doing everything right. . . or are they? Schlessinger responds:

On a prior YouTube, I was asked about a three year old who says "shut up," and I was telling the person who asked me the question that probably they're saying "shut up" and that way the kid is learning to say "shut up". So here I am, being a total hypocrite: Shut up! When your husband starts disciplining the kids, even if you don't like it, don't agree with it, think it should be done a different way—leave it alone.

You are emasculating your husbands by judging and critiquing what they do and taking over, just because what they do is different. I am here to tell you, kids don't do well in a house without an alpha male. And if you emasculate your husband so that he's afraid to express himself because he's going to get garbage from you and no sex, he's going to seem like a wimp. He's not going to be an alpha male and that's going to hurt your kids. And frankly, a guy who's not an alpha male is not very horny, even for a feminist. So, what I want you to do is, "Honey, they did 'such and such'. Could you take care of it?" And afterwards go, [takes a deep, sensuous breath] "I love when you handle things that way".

Interesting. So while chivalry encourages men and women to police female behavior to shoehorn women into traditional roles, the policing of men in these backwards heterosexual relationships functions much differently. For good housewives like Andrea, a man's failure to embody the "alpha male" role still reflects her own personal failure as a woman. But the solution, unlike with chivalry, isn't to encourage her man to be more masculine. The solution is to pretend that he's more masculine than he is, and to put out more.

According to the Dr. Laura model, a woman is required to fulfill her role—no excuses. But if a man is uninterested in fulfilling the traditional male role—hey, maybe he's just not into yelling at and/or hitting children!—no problem. We don't want to inconvenience a man—but we also can't just let his effeminate behavior slide.

So we place the full responsibility for the husband's more feminine qualities on his wife. She needs to (a) pretend that her husband is "alpha," even when he doesn't really want to be; and (b) privately focus on fulfilling her own role better, regardless of what her husband does. In Dr. Laura's world, that means offering herself up for sex more, remembering to always let out "deep, sensuous breaths," and intensifying her feminine performance in order to make her husband appear more masculine in contrast.

And if her man doesn't want as much sex as she's aggressively offering him? That's the woman's fault, too. Perhaps she should try offering even more sex! Nevermind that aggressively pursuing sex is traditionally considered a pretty masculine thing to do—if this shit actually made any sense, it would make it a lot harder to indiscriminately blame women for everything.

Last week on the Sexist, we payed tribute to the wedding industry's focus on women's "health," as evidenced through its tireless "BIG DAY" diet promotions, its images of women squeezing into too-small white dresses, and its total obsession with brides, not grooms. Commenters weighed in (GET IT?):

Shinobi on what wedding "health" looks like:

I remember one time a friend of mine was eating nothing but special K for two weeks before her wedding. (to fit into her dress, which she had purchased while on weight watchers.) Our conversations were pretty much limited to what she had eaten for the last two days, oh yeah, super interesting. When I failed to be particularly supportive she was all “Don’t you want me to be HEALTHY!?!?!?!?!”

And so I realized the error of my ways. The true road to health is crash dieting to fit into dresses.

Jess on the very healthy double standards of wedding "health":

I am getting married in October, and I cannot believe the amount of pressure I am getting from family and coworkers about my weight. I am a lifetime member of Weight Watchers, having met my goal a long time ago. I am a healthy weight for my height (5′9, 150lbs) and my wedding dress is a size 8. But all my coworkers and some annoying family members are telling me that I really should “tone up” or take off about 10 more lbs. Why? Why am I supposed to starve myself for a freaking wedding?! Not a chance!

Oh, and my fiance is about 25lbs overweight. No one has said a word to him about his weight and the wedding.

juicepockets on the beautiful moments that a focus on wedding "health" inspires between family members:

I was a fat bride three years ago (am still fat), and the amount of guff I got from my mom about it was alternately infuriating and heartbreaking. At one of my dress fittings, my mom looked at my reflection in the mirror and said sadly, “Your arms are so big.” Oh well, I wore the shit out of my sleeveless dress anyway!If you want an antitode to the People piece, take a look at the Museum of Fat Love.

Lesley of Fatshionista.com created the site to document ACTUAL EVIDENCE that fatties can and do find love and even sometimes GET MARRIED WHILE FAT. The gallery is full of adorable fatties in love.

PD on the media's helpful focus on wedding "health":

I was a fat bride two years ago. I’ve gotten fatter since—the back of my dress kept popping open because I’d put on a few pounds right before the wedding, and my husband shed blood trying to pin me back into it. Frankly, I think I looked great on my wedding day, probably better than I ever have in my life including my high school days, when I was definitely at my most fit.

No one who knows me personally—besides my mother, who does it all the time—suggested I try to lose weight in the two years I spent planning my wedding. I was, however, inundated with weight loss advice from the numerous wedding-related magazines and web sites I immersed myself in. Everywhere I looked I saw ads for “GET FIT FOR THE BIG DAY” schemes, and everyone on the internet was really, really invested, apparently, in making sure I was as trim and toned as possible before walking down the aisle. HOW DARE I be fat on my wedding day, when EVERYONE IN THE WORLD would see those pictures FOREVER? How dare I look at those pictures and think about how happy everyone was and what a great time we all had and how great the man I married is instead of focusing on how flabby my arms looked that day?

Listen, I’m like 70 pounds overweight, I know this is not great and it’s not healthy. I’m down with that. I’m also down with my own body—the body my husband has loved for 10 years, from 150 pounds to 230 pounds—even if the rest of the world is not. The wedding weight loss thing is, like pretty much everything else related to weddings, a scam to make money and make women feel like they have to conform to a certain standard of what brides should look like. I’m pretty sure your “bridal white” yoga mat costs twice as much as a regular one because someone screen-printed some doves and “FUTURE MRS. ____” on it or something.

Photo via sylvar, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

This week, I wrote the paper's cover story on the gay wedding business that's popped up in the District since same-sex marriages were legalized in March, and how local businesses are competing for a piece of the pie. Pick up a paper or read it online here.

Michigan family lawyer Ryan Hill is so morally outraged by extramarital affair dating website Ashley Madison that he launched the "My Marriage Matters" campaign—and shot this awkward television spot—to bring the cheating service down. The result: Schmaltzy piano, sexy infidelity shots, and Hill doing the Bill Clinton thumb-gesture in front of a waving American flag. Vote Ryan Hill for Dude With A Website That's Against That Other Website, I guess? He's also currently asking 1,000,000 people to sign his petition against people who support cheating. [Thanks to Kay for the tip].

When same-sex marriage was legalized in D.C. this March, Mike Newman offered himself up to officiate local gay marriages free-of-charge. Since them, Newman has wedded 44 of the District's same-sex couples—and one opposite-sex pair. Here's a taste of the ceremonies he's seen:

* "Most of them I’d describe as sort of guerrilla-style," Newman says of the typical same-sex wedding he's been called to officiate.  "We'll find a public space and do a ceremony that lasts only a minute or two . . . most of the the time it's just the couple says," he says. Newman, 43, says his officiant style is likely to attract more casual couples: "I'm obviously not a wedding professional, and I made it known I'm up for doing this wherever, whenever," he says.

* Also turning to Newman: Couples who don't want to get hassled by mainstream officiants of unknown tolerance level. "A lot of people I’ve spoken to are used to seeing a lot of discrimination. If they just make a blind phone call to an officiant and it comes out that it's a gay wedding, it can turn out to be a big deal," says Newman. "I'm vocal about wanting to perform these weddings, so they know right away it's not a problem."

* Since March, Newman has performed same-sex weddings in front of the Capitol, outside the U.S. Botanic Garden, in various local restaurants, on the roof of the Newseum, and in his own Capitol Hill living room. "A lot of people just drop by my house," says Newman."We've done half-a-dozen or so in my home, either in the living room or in the backyard," he says.

* Since March, Newman has also lent his services to a couple of heterosexuals. "I’ve performed one opposite-sex marriage in the past few months," says Newman. "It was a couple who said they were waiting to get married until their friends could get married, so it was a part of the same trend."

* On the first day same-sex marriage was legal in D.C., Newman performed eight weddings. Now the demand has tricked down to about one wedding a week. As demand has gone down, Newman's rate has increased. "I have recently started charging for the weddings," says Newman. As of a few weeks ago, the current going rate for his services is about $50 a pop. He's also recently taken on an apprentice—Newman recently endorsed his wife to become an officiant, as well.

Photo via Mike Newman

Today, the D.C. Court of Appeals will hear arguments over the fate of same-sex marriage in D.C.  In January, the D.C. Superior Court decided that a ballot initiative to define marriage as between a man and a woman would violate the District's Human Rights Act; anti-gay-marriage activists appealed the decision.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Most of the time, too many wives just get lazy and self-centered about taking care of their romantic and sexual lives . . . Women’s sexuality requires “priming,” while guys are just about always “ready to roll.” A lot of that priming has to happen in her head:  thinking affectionately about sensual things, bathing, primping and flirting—the kinds of things wives tend to leave at the altar or in the birthing room.

To Dr. Laura, a woman's work includes bathing, primping, flirting, buying pretty outfits, doing her hair, and painting her nails. But it also requires a woman to devote some of her brain space to "thinking affectionately about sensual things," just in case her husband is horny when he gets home from work. Interestingly, Dr. Laura doesn't admonish women as "lazy and self-centered" for literally refusing sex to their husbands—she calls them selfish for failing to perform the inner work of actually feeling sexy when they do have sex.

Laura's sex advice reminded me of Amanda Marcotte's observations on the conflicting theories of traditional gender roles in the conservative movement. Social conservatives, Marcotte notes, alternately argue that gender roles are innate, and that they are learned. To these folks, acting "like a man" or "like a woman" is the "natural" thing to do, but it also takes a whole lot of work to achieve proper masculine or feminine performance. As more social spaces open up for people to be freely gay, bisexual, butch, unmarried, gender non-conforming, or anything else that defies the idea that traditional gender roles are in fact "natural," I'd argue that the performance model becomes more crucial to maintaining the conservative social order. So instead of working to dismiss gender non-conformists as "unnatural" freaks of nature, conservatives have just decided to paint them as lazy, bad people who aren't working hard enough to fulfill their constructed roles.

Now that conservatives have openly acknowledged that masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality actually take a lot of work to maintain, they have to work doubly hard to attempt to normalize this performance. So, good people work hard to fulfill their gender roles, but better people don't whine about having to perform that work. And the best people really, truly, actually love to perform their roles—or at least appear to love it. Hence Dr. Laura's insistence that women not only perform sex for their husbands, but also internalize that performance in their own minds—a feat that is so unnatural that women may even need to buy Dr. Laura's book, "The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands," in order to do it right.

Under this model, it doesn't really matter if gender performance is "natural," as long as it's sufficiently difficult. Take the openly gay social conservative who argues that sex between two men can still satisfy the requirement of fulfilling proper gender roles as long as one of the men agrees to wear a dress and properly submit. Or the ex-gay activists who argue that same-sex sexual attraction is naturally occurring, but that the Christian thing to do is to resist it through intensive (and sometimes expensive) "therapy". Or the deeply religious woman who received breast augmentation surgery before her fiancee (or any man, for that matter) had ever seen her naked, because unnaturally augmenting the body that God gave you is actually a sign of ultimate love and devotion, as long as you hand that body directly over to your husband.

The "unnatural" aspect of Breast Implants for Jesus doesn't concern me—it's the completely bizarre attempt to justify plastic surgery through scripture that sets my bullshit meter off. Not because I'm interested in upholding the sanctity of the Christian church, but because Breast Implants for Jesus reminds me a whole lot of a bullshit justification closer to my heart—Breast Implants for Feminism. While social conservatives are latching onto the performance model of gender, post-feminists (some of whom just call themselves "feminists") are taking the opposite tactic—arguing that our performances of masculinity and femininity are a matter of individual choices and preferences. So whenever a woman "chooses her choice" that happens to fulfill these gender roles—even if it involves painful and invasive surgery of the boob—her choice is necessarily an empowering move that can't possibly inspire a larger feminist critique of the culture that informs that choice. I Blame the Patriarchy calls this justification-happy post-feminist the "empowerful woman":

Today’s woman isn’t a feminist. She doesn’t need to be, because she’s empowered. She may only earn 3/4 of what a man earns, but she damn well has the empower to look sexy doing it in her cheapcrap push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret. She has the empower to demand pink products from manufacturers. She has the empower to cry out ‘I did it for me!’ when she gets her boob job; maybe she even has the empower to believe it. The empowerful woman is saucy, yet feminine. Clever, yet feminine. In her early thirties, yet feminine. Heterosexual, yet feminine. Stays in shape eating Lean Cuisine and sweating blue Gatorade while kickboxing in slow motion, yet feminine. Yes, the empowerful woman is many things. Too bad powerful isn’t one of them. That’s because feminine is all of them.

The way I see it, the difference between Dr. Laura's traditional wife and post-feminism's "empowerful woman" is that the empowerful woman doesn't admit that her performance of femininity is in the service of pleasing a specific man. The empowerful woman doesn't perform femininity to please her man—she performs femininity "for herself." And so while Dr. Laura openly admonishes women for not feeling feminine for themselves for their husbands, the empowerful woman conveniently fends off any arguments that feeling feminine "for herself" actually has a lot to do with how our larger social structure feels about women. I'm afraid that the real difference emerging between Breast Implants for Jesus and Breast Implants for Feminism is that the latter is just less honest than the former. The cult of Dr. Laura at least recognizes that a woman's work often really sucks.

That's not to say that feminism should shame the woman who is traditionally feminine, or who gets breast implants, or who spends her days thinking sexual thoughts in order to steel herself for her husband's penis. Feminism should, though, work to encourage that woman to:

(a) stop feeling that her gender and sexuality requires a lot of unnecessary work in order to please people like Dr. Laura;

(b) realize that gender performance is highly valued in our culture, and to stop feeling like she has to justify her gender performance as a completely independent choice;

(c) understand that living in the patriarchy while refusing to justify it is going to require a whole lot of cognitive dissonance, but hey, it's better than lying to yourself;

and (d) just consider the possibility that you're really getting Breast Implants for the Patriarchy.

The City Paper's Best Of D.C. issue hits stands today. Pick it up! On a personal note, the yearly Best Of issue gives me some wiggle room to write on my non-Sexist-related interests. (Yes, I do have them, but they largely involve drinking). Check out my entries for Best Coffee Shop, Best Dive Bar, and Best Bar Game. But even when I'm not writing about sex and gender, I'm writing about sex and gender, and two of my Bests picks are of particular Sexist concern.

The first is on the three fine bloggers behind BYGays, who took the honors for D.C.'s Best New Nightlife Blog. Bradley Portnoy, Deb Greenspan, and John Marble, the ringleaders of BrightestYoungThings' new gay contingent, were nice enough to talk to me about heterosexuality in gay nightlife:

Introducing the newest addition to gay nightlife: straight people. “I like a party that’s about 40 percent gay,” says Bradley Portnoy, one of the founders of Brightest Young Things’ new LGBT nightlife contingent, BYGays—a site aimed at adding a queer twist to BYT’s party promotion and scene coverage. “To get gay people to your party, you have to show them that there’s a potential for them to get laid that night,” explains  Portnoy, 23. “When it’s 30 or 40 percent gay, you can identify where the gay people are and approach them and hit on them. If you don’t have that, the gays aren’t going to show up. But once you get to about 50 percent gay, the straight people start to feel alienated.”

The heterosexual discomfort, Portnoy says, has an innocent partying explanation. “It’s not homophobia,” he says. “I think everyone wants to make sure they can get laid without too much of a hassle.” But since when have gay nightlife promoters been concerned with getting straight people laid? [Read the rest here].

The second is Best Newlyweds, shared among the hundreds of same-sex couples who lined up for recognition at D.C. Superior Court this month.

The D.C. Superior Court’s marriage bureau typically processes about 10 marriage applications a day. On March 3—the first day same-sex marriage applications were accepted—151 couples waited in line; in the next five days, 315 more couples had waded through the process of getting hitched, all but a few of them gay [Read the rest here].

For more sex & gender-related stuff, check out the Reader's Poll which gauges local opinion on D.C.'s strip clubs, sex shops, drag queens, and gay bars.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Thanks to the Economist for crunching the numbers on just how significant the legalization of same-sex marriage was for Washington, D.C. Of jurisdictions that currently allow gay marriage (or recognize out-of-state gay marriages, or grant equal rights to gay partnerships), the District of Columbia has the highest percentage of same-sex households by far. In other words, D.C. is likely in for a whole lot of weddings [via Queerty].

Today, the much-anticipated Fred Phelps counter-protest finally came to fruition—albeit a couple of hours after Phelps' homophobia parade got going. City Paper photog Darrow Montgomery was on-hand to document the results. (See all of Darrow's photos of D.C. gay marriage day here).

Below, counter-protesters utilize the Burger King Guy, God Hates [Blank], and unclear messages about vaginas in order to protest Phelps' bigotry.

It's no "REACH AROUNDS FOR JESUS," but it is confusing!

I'm not sure what this message says in full, but it includes "vaginas" and more than one "nom," so it's got to be something important.

Good start.

This line is nothing compared to the White House Easter Egg Roll of 2006. Four years ago, Terrance Heath and Richard Imirowicz waited in line overnight, in the snow and the freezing cold, in order to secure tickets for their son, now 7, to roll some eggs on the White House lawn. Imirowicz had come unprepared with little more than a sleeping bag—what was he thinking?—and the couple ended up crawling into a "lesbian tent" in order to stave off the cold (another couple had charitably invited them in). "Thank God for those lesbians," says Imirowicz.

This was under the Bush administration, when even bringing your family to push around a couple of colored eggs on the grass was a political statement for a gay couple. "People were being told so many bad things about our families and who we are, that it was an opportunity for us to show how not scary we are," says Heath. Today, Heath, 41, and Imirowicz, 43, joined the line at D.C. Superior Court to achieve a less symbolic victory—securing all the legal rights owed to them as a married couple in the District of Columbia. "Like the rest of the couples in line, we've built up our family and relationship on our own, and finally the rest of society is catching up," says Heath.

Not that the symbolic victories along the way haven't been fun. Heath and Imirowicz have celebrated their union so many times that they're not even sure what to celebrate as an anniversary. The day they met in June 10 years ago? The day in October of 2001 that they exchanged rings in Hawaii? The day in the summer of 2007 that they renewed their vows—this time, in front of their son—on an LGBT family cruise led by Rosie O'Donnell? Or, now, next Tuesday, when they plan to hold a small ceremony recognizing their legal marriage (finally!) at D.C.'s All Souls' Church? How about the unknown date in the future when same-sex marriages are recognized across the United States?

"We're not as married Mississippi as we are in Massachusetts," says Heath. "There are a lot of families in states across the country that can't do what we're doing now." If gay marriage does become a reality in all 50 states in their lifetime, Heath and Imirowicz aren't eager to add another anniversary to the list. "As much as I love him, this will technically be the third time we've been married," says Heath. "Our hope is that by the time our son is an adult, he'll be able to look back on this week and wonder what the big deal was."

As for the third ceremony, the couple is planning a small service for them and their children—since the last time they've exchanged vows, they've fathered another child, a two-year-old. The affair will be modest. "We might take the kids to McDonald's afterwards, pick up a Star Wars toy," says Imirowicz. "At this point, we don't need a big wedding."

UPDATE: CP photos of the ceremony.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

In this edition of Dr. Laura Schlessinger's YouTube extravaganza, the Doctor tackles a series of questions from Susan, a woman who has been forced to date men in order to ultimately become married to one of them. Susan is understandably confused on the specifics of such a modern endeavor.

Susan asks: "After years of dating, I still have a lot of questions. And since dating is essentially a prerequisite to marriage, I'd like your opinion on some of those questions. After one date, if a girl isn't interested in a serious relationship with a guy, should she go out with him again anyway? I've ben told that it's courteous to go out with a guy a second date unless the guy is a complete jerk. Until there's a definite dating relationship, should the girl pay for her share of the meal? How soon is it to considerate to disclose health issues? Information about past marriages? And other unpleasant corners of your life? And finally, how soon is it okay to kiss and hug?"

Over the next four minutes, Schlessinger informs Susan how to know when to ditch him ("With me, if he didn't open a door, take off my jacket and put it on the chair, pull out the chair and pay the tab, and open the door to the car, and pay for the gas to get me there, there wouldn't be a second date"); how to know when to tell him about your STIs ("For example, you have herpes. That's communicable!"), and how to know when to put dating on hold ("Gee, I was molested when I was five and I hate sex. This would be a good thing to clarify with your therapist before you begin dating").

Finally, Dr. Laura lets Susan know when to kiss him: "Hugs are nice at anytime. Pecks are good anytime. Really slobbery kisses and sucking on each others' face, that should wait awhile until you think each other is a keeper, I can't believe I answered that question. So until next time—I'm going to stop blushing—I'm Dr. Laura. Take care."

In the video, Dr. Laura became visibly uncomfortable discussing only one of the following topics:

a) "Gee, I was molested when I was five and I hate sex."

b) "For example, you have herpes. That's communicable!"

c) "Really slobbery kisses."

Hmm.

The Archdiocese of Washington has been battling the D.C. government for the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians since D.C.'s same-sex marriage legislation got rolling last year.

One major point of contention: Once gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, the Archdiocese—which employs plenty of locals through Catholic Charities—will be required to provide health benefits to same-sex spouses, an act which it says would fly in the face of the Catholic church's teachings on homosexuality.

The solution? No spousal benefits for anybody.

Today, Catholic Charities President and CEO Edward Orzechowski sent out a memo to staffers informing them of the change to the health care coverage, which will go into effect tomorrow.

In short: If you and your spouse are already enrolled in Catholic Charities health coverage, your spouse will be grandfathered in. Starting tomorrow, however, new employees (or newly married employees, hint hint) will not be allowed to add spouses to the plan. So: Longtime employees will receive the spousal benefits they've always had; Catholic Charities will get to keep its pool of covered spouses gay-free; only fresh employees and gays will feel the sting on this one.

Here's the memo:

I am writing to you to inform you of an important change to our group health care benefit plan that will take effect on March 2, 2010 due to a change in the law of the District of Columbia. It is important to note that the existing health coverage of current employees will not be affected by the change. New employees and current employees requesting revisions in benefit coverage will be affected by this change.

Catholic Charities will continue to honor the health plan coverage that current employees have as of March 1, 2010. As of March 2, a new plan will be in effect that will cover new employees and requests for benefit changes by current employees. The new plan will provide the same level of coverage for employees and their dependents that you now have, with one exception: spouses not in the plan as of March 1, will not be eligible for coverage in the future. If your spouse currently has coverage in our Plan, he/she may continue to be covered by the health benefit plan, even if you later add a dependent or decide to change your option level (e.g., change from low option to high option). Please see the attached formal Plan Amendment.

We sincerely regret that we have to make this change, but it is necessary to allow Catholic Charities to continue to provide essential services to the clients we serve in partnership with the District of Columbia while remaining consistent with the tenets of our religious faith.

A summary of the Plan modification has been mailed to you at your home address. If you have any questions on this matter, please e-mail your Human Resources manager or, if you do not have access to email, call. Please remember, this change does not impact your current coverage in any way.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter, and let me again express my appreciation for your support and patience over these past months as we have worked hard to arrive at a decision that allows us to continue to serve others in a manner that is consistent with our religious beliefs.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Gay and itching to get married? On March 3, 2010, same-sex couples will be legally allowed to marry apply for marriage in the District of Columbia, and the D.C. government has just issued some guidelines on how it's all going to go down. Here's how to get hitched as soon as possible [This post has been updated to reflect the latest info from D.C. Superior Court]:

* On the morning of Wed., March 3, head to D.C. Superior Court's H. Carl Moultrie Courthouse at 500 Indiana Avenue NW. The courthouse marriage bureau will open at 8:30 a.m., but couples will likely be gathering outside beforehand in order to secure their place in line. God knows at what hour the most marriage-eager couples will arrive.

* Fred Phelps' anti-gay brigade plans to show up as well to district you from your mission, but Phelps is planning on a late start, around 11 a.m. Show up early and you may only catch their protests on your way out the door. Join up with these folks if you want to participate in the counter-protest.

* Once inside, know how to get through security quickly. You'll have to take off your coat and feed all of your belongings through a metal detector. If you have a camera or recording device, you may be asked to tag it with your name and leave it at the front door. You're wasting precious time! After you get inside, head up the escalators and find the D.C. Superior Court Marriage Bureau at room #4485. UPDATE: D.C. Superior Court says that in order to accommodate the rush, applicants will be asked to line up outside 4485.

* Once inside room 4485, be prepared with the necessary documents to get hitched. Both One party to the marriage must bring proof of ID for both parties (acceptable forms include a driver's license, passport, or government-issued I.D.). You also must have also decided on an officiant for your marriage ceremony. You must list the name of the person who will be performing the marriage—acceptable officiants include D.C. judges and "anyone who is authorized by a religious organization to officiate marriages, such as a minister, priest, rabbi, imam, so long as he or she is registered with the Marriage Bureau to officiate marriages."  UPDATE: D.C. Superior court says that marriage applicants can also request a civil wedding at the courthouse with their applications, but you'll have to wait a bit longer for that—the ceremony will be scheduled at least ten business days later.

* Familiarize yourself with the application [PDF]. This version, from Dec. 2008, specifies a "Bride" and "Groom." Presumably, there will be an updated version of the application available that doesn't specify the partners' gender once same-sex marriage becomes legal in D.C. UPDATE: The court has since updated its application in gender-neutral language.

* Come with $35 cash or money order made out to “Clerk of the Court, D.C. Superior Court." Bring along an extra $10 if you want a "certified copy of the marriage certificate." If you're already registered as domestic partners in D.C., don't worry about the $35 application fee—it's waived, as long as you bring your certificate proving the partnership. UPDATE: If you want, you can also pay the fee on another day before the license is issues; you can pay anytime, you just won't get your license without the receipt.

* Ask yourself: Are you already part of a domestic partnership or civil union from another state? If so, make sure you've checked up on your state laws to see if you need to have that union dissolved before you get hitched in D.C. Are you and your partner already legally married in another state? Go home! According to the D.C. gov, "If you are part of a same-sex couple that has been legally married in another state or country . . . there is no need for you to register your marriage or domestic partnership with the city."

* Save your receipt. You'll have to come back down to court to pick up your license. UPDATE: If you can't make it to the courthouse yourself, you can also have a friend pick it up for you!

* Wait. After you file your application, you're legally required to wait three full days before a license can be issued. So if you apply for a marriage license on Wed., March 3, your license cannot legally be issued until Tues., March 9.

Photo via nerdcoregirl, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Mistresses! Whenever a public figure takes one as a secret lover, Society at Large is obligated to publicly shame this woman for her untoward behavior. But just how much shame shall we pile on a woman accused of having sex with a man who has pledged to only have sex with one other lady? Use this handy guide to determine how much irrational hatred she deserves:

a) if she is a mysterious and beautiful Argentinian mother of two, leak romantic e-mails.

b) if she is a fertile campaign videographer, proceed with light mockery over musical tastes.

c) if she is a cocktail waitress, insinuate that she is actually a sex worker.

d) if she works in a strip club, lose all ability to refer to her as anything other than "stripper."

e) if she is a porn performer, release grainy video stills of her shaking her boobs in front of a fire truck.

f) if she is literally the Devil, insinuate that she is actually a sex worker.

In this week's edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I discuss why mistresses receive the brunt of all our projected self-hatred, wonder why the term "Mistress" has no male counterpart (I nominate "Mrstress"), and respectfully request that Tiger Woods set his Facebook statuses to private.

SADY: Mistresses!

AMANDA: Indeed. I have heard many sordid tales of their existence as of late.

SADY: sometimes, mistresses talk about being mistresses. At other times, they do not talk. In either case, it is fine to talk about them! For they are MISTRESSES, scourge of the "I am married to a cheater" world.

AMANDA: Can we talk for a second about this "mistress" business? Is there a word for the "mister" of a married woman? like a "Mrster"? Or something?

SADY: I prefer the term "Mister Mistress." Which is also the name of my new glam-metal band, in case you were looking for an update on that.

AMANDA: I think that was also a Hulk Hogan movie.

SADY: But really, we know that the appropriate word for "man mistress" is "totally rocking dude."

AMANDA: The only other term I can think of that is dismissive (dismistress!) in the same way is "pool boy."

SADY: Yeah. Basically, the only words we have for dudes who are being cruelly exploited for sex on the side by lady types are class (and often race) based.

AMANDA: Yeah. "Mistresses" (ugh) on the other hand, have to be cornered into this odd cultural Other Wife space, even though they are not married to this guy, and they actually have plenty of their own shit going on as well. They are still defined solely by this relationship.

SADY: Yeah. I mean, we have this strangely romantic Victorian version of the mistress, STILL. It is not just "I hooked up with a dude, he is married, sometimes I make bad decisions in my personal life," it is this strange thing where we still think of them as dissolute Women of Leisure who are sexfully attending to their patron's sexful needs while draped in diamonds which of course are the whole point. And I think, weirdly, though I definitely GET that intimacy and all of that are scary, and the fact that you could love someone and they could love hooking up with other people is really unsettling for just about anyone, our need to drag mistresses into the light and be like, "mistress! Behold ye alle this Creature, captured in thee most Wanton Abandon!" Well, it's people working out personal anxieties, sure. We WANT to hate them because then the people who are cheating on us are clearly choosing people lesser than ourselves. But also: it's a way of deciding which women are all right. A way of deciding what makes a good woman (being cheated on!) and a bad one (being cheated with!) if that makes sense.

AMANDA: Yeah, and I have found that to be a really weird part of the Sanford / Edwards ladies' narratives, where there is an attempt to make some sort of Character Coup out of being cheated on.

SADY: Well, but also, that excerpt from "Game Change," about the affair, went to great lengths to portray Elizabeth Edwards as a screaming, controlling harpy who clearly deserved to be cheated on.

AMANDA: But the thing that really disturbs me when people get to talkin' about cheating, is that we know that about 50 percent of married men and women (and men I think do it at higher rates than women, but not significantly higher) will cheat on their spouses at some point. And so all of this faux outrage tends to worry me, because either these people are just ignoring their own realities, or they are attempting to work out their personal issues by piling their hatred onto these women.

SADY: Right! And it is like: I would prefer people not to cheat on me. I am not a fan of cheating in general. I think it is a thing you should not do. And yet, affairs are such a commonplace part of human life that they form the basis of: much literature, much television, "Mad Men" specifically for like three seasons, many movies, music, and now apparently our salacious news headlines that are going on when also there is a huge recession which I find sort of important. So, when a marriage is found to contain cheating, and everyone panics gets all, "this is the worst thing! The worst thing that could happen! Ever! For marriage is a sacred covenant, united by God's holy tears of joy over the entwined bodies of lovers!" Well: but you know it happens all over, right? People just want to be clear that they are in the OTHER FIFTY PERCENT, maybe. Even right now, I am worrying that people are going to think I am a cheater because I am inappropriately freaked out by mistresses, strangely.

AMANDA: Cheater! Cheater! I think it's that people have always wanted to hold their public figures and role models to a higher standard than themselves, and that makes sense to me. But they also, now, want to bring them down to our level. Which is really easy! Because they have never been morally superior to us in the first place, and the news of their private lives has just been more strictly controlled. I think at some point we are going to have to just stop giving a shit, I guess? Because it is getting boring, to me. I don't think our 24-hour news cycle can endure the weight of all the revelations of cheating that will occur among the huge number of suddenly newsworthy people we're reporting on now. For example: I recently read a very large-fonted Huffington Post headling about Matthew Fox possibly cheating on his wife with a "stripper" (the most reviled form of Mistress!) How long can people keep clicking on that? Tell me it's not forever.

SADY: God. Okay, can we talk about this? Sex worker mistresses? One of Tiger Woods' mistresses was apparently a porn performer, and there is a lawsuit going on have been vague threats of a lawsuit which I don't clearly understand, but which has to do with her quitting porn for Tiger, and thinking she was his only girlfriend, and etc.

AMANDA: (I also don't understand the legal precedent here).

SADY: I think it is lost income? Because she stopped working due to their relationship? It does seem like a frivolous and fairly transparently mercenary deal, from all I can understand. And taking a dude to court over your failed relationship is a bit over-the-top. But also, people are just shocked, SHOCKED AND APPALLED, that a person who made PORNOGRAPHY could DARE to express hurt in public! Like: it is that, not the nature of the debate here, that is getting some I think unfair focus.

AMANDA: It ... has feelings?

SADY: She made PORNOGRAPHY Amanda! I do not understand it! I thought the pornography cameras stole your soul!

AMANDA: That is the rumor.

SADY: Like: that's the thing. Mistresses are always slutty, trashy, tacky, la la la. I think it is bad form to date a married dude, not least because what is the best-case scenario for YOU, Mistress, in this relationship? Dating a dude who hurts ladies' feelings? No. But when they are also sex workers—and there is always, if not a specifically Matthew-Fox-centric version of this rumor, a version of this rumor floating around— then they are basically the devil. Women get to be like, "and also, my husband cheated on me, and it was with Satan."

AMANDA: I think that the intensified shaming of the porn actress goes back to the idea of the Mistress as well being this woman who is committed to the married man, even though he is married. Tiger Woods has like a million "Mistresses" at this point, who are really just women he's seen at some point or another, and who were obviously not under any obligation to only have sex with Tiger Woods. But we are somehow encouraged to see them that way, because if you have sex with a married man, the only way to come out looking a tiny bit better in the public eye is if you were just so totally and hopelessly in love with him that you were sexually committed only to him, and all 12 of you thought he was the real deal, or whatever. Which is gross. Tiger Woods himself actually did get a little sensitive about his "Mistresses" seeing other dudes, from the literature I've read on the topic. So even Tiger couldn’t find a reasonable perspective on cheating with someone he was cheating on his wife with.

SADY: Right. Some mistresses get to be like, "well, but my heart and feelings were involved." And it helps if we can see them as not-at-all sexual outside of this relationship. But when a lady clearly engages in sexual activity elsewhere, people are like, "wait a minute! This is about FUCKING, isn't it? Gross!"

AMANDA: Right. Because if you're a porn star ... well, then, many other dudes who are not Tiger Woods have seen you, like, naked and stuff! Bad mistress! We grade Mistresses now.

SADY: Heart and feelings involved: A+

He really was getting divorced though and now also you have his baby: B+

Clearly having had sex with people not your Mistressifier: F. For Failure.

AMANDA: Being married to a guy who cheats on you with a woman who does porn: Priceless, or something.

SADY: Yeah. I feel for that lady. TO THE MAX. In conclusion, can we all just agree that sometimes DUDES who cheat are really the ones who Destroyed This Marriage, though?

AMANDA: Sure, but can we also agree that unless the dude in question is like a noted marriage advocate or some shit, I don't particularly want to see him stand on a podium and cry about it? Just go deal with your own business.

SADY: Yeah. Seriously. We are not Facebook friends, your Relationship Status Updates are not really my personal concern. TIGER WOODS IS IT'S COMPLICATED.

Image via Wikipedia Commons

Conservative stunt journalist James O'Keefe—of alleged Mary Landrieu wiretapping "misunderstanding" and ACORN pimp fame—joined forces with another straight guy in 2008 in an attempt to enter into a Massachusetts same-sex marriage. The secretly-videotaped shotgun wedding was cooked up in order to score one of O'Keefe's more bizarre wingnut points: To prove that government bureaucrats in charge of administering marriage licenses don't care about love.

"What if two straight men wanted a same-sex marriage?" the video asks to a stock investigative soundtrack, before running the tape of O'Keefe and friend informing Massachusetts government officials that they are 100 percent hetero, dating women, and interested in getting hitched. For the insurance benefits. Here's the "Gotcha!" moment: The officials don't appear to give a shit. Probably because no American couple, gay or straight, has ever had to prove to their state government that they really, truly want to fuck each other in order to secure their official paperwork.

O'Keefe and his stunt fiancee take this to mean that same-sex marriage is bad because . . . maybe gay guys who don't really love each other can get married, now? Or something? Meanwhile, gay men and women have been cornered into opposite-marriages far before the institution of marriage edged away from the strictly heterosexual.

When asked why, exactly, the totally straight O'Keefe and his totally straight friend tried to get gay married, O'Keefe told the Washington Examiner that he was "investigating the way soulless government bureaucrats treat the institution of marriage in Massachusetts."

Exactly! This is why the government should concern itself solely with administering legal benefits of its citizens' partnerships, and not at all with the moral business of determining what sorts of people should be allowed to couple up. Thanks for reminding us, O'Keefe.

According to a new Gallup poll,  Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America. Barely. Clinton's runner-up, Sarah Palin, almost knocked the Secretary of State from the most-admired perch she's assumed 14 times. If you think that's sad, check out the also-rans:

The third most admired woman in America is Oprah Winfrey, with 8 percent; fourth on the list is Michelle Obama, with 7 percent. Makes sense so far. Next up is Condoleezza Rice and Queen Elizabeth II—each with two percent. (Oddly, British royalty counts: The poll is actually meant to determine the most admired woman by Americans). Then we have the one-percent group: A four-way tie between Margaret Thatcher, Maya Angelou, Angela Merkel and . . . Elin Nordegren Woods.

Let's see: We've got heads of state, cultural ambassadors, high-ranking government officials, and a lady who married a douchebag. One of these things is not like the other!

Marrying (and divorcing) douchebags, sadly, has been hailed as a resounding achievement for women in 2009. Jessica Grose chastised Barbara Walters for placing Kate Gosselin and Jenny Sanford, two ladies who married douchebags, in the top 10 most fascinating people of the year: "Being publicly cheated on does not automatically make you an interesting person, much less interesting enough to appear on one of these silly lists." Phoebe Connelly also chimed in on the absurdity of giving the feminist treatment to Sanford: "The news that Sanford is leaving her national punchline of a husband, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, is no reason to hail her as a feminist icon."

Look closer at the cultural narratives surrounding Gosselin, Sanford, and Nordegren Woods, and you'll find three different monsters born of our fascination with wronged women. Sanford gracefully endured her husband's infidelities before calmly divorcing him. She is respected. Nordegren Woods allegedly chased her philandering husband down with a golf club, leaving him laying delirious in the middle of the road next to his wrecked car. She is celebrated. Gosselin, star of Jon & Kate Plus 8 and wife to confirmed douchebag Jon Gosselin until their separation this year, broadcast her marital troubles for all of America to see. She is pitied.

When we have women like Clinton, Angelou, Thatcher, Rice, and Merkel to admire, why are we still eager to recognize the long-suffering wife whose greatest accomplishment is no longer being married to a douchebag? Perhaps it's because divorcing a douchebag is an achievement that regular women can foresee accomplishing in their own lifetimes. Most women won't become Secretary of State or a celebrated writer—or end up married to a catch like Barack Obama. But many, many women will marry douchebags, and about half of those douchebag unions will end in divorce.

Most women won't find the strength to face their divorce with Sanford's calm and collected exterior. They won't get away with Nordegren Woods' outburst of spousal abuse (though many will fantasize about it). They won't attract the unwavering public attention that Gosselin's divorce has. But these public narratives of divorcing douchebags lend a certain gravitas to the personal lives of normal women—women who are not likely to be admired or celebrated or even pitied for finally severing their marital vows. For a long time, getting a divorce was seen as a failure, which meant that half of married women were failing. No wonder America has labored to find something to admire about these women—they are us. The problem with the current narrative is that we're celebrating divorce as a failure of men and a triumph of women, instead of focusing on the real triumphs of women like Clinton, whose marital status has been made irrelevant to the discussion of her success.

Photo via marcn, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can
Seldom found in woman, never found in man.

We often hear that "patience is a virtue." It's the second half of the sentiment largely goes unspoken: Patience is a virtue for women. What is patience, exactly? In Helper By Design, Elyse Fitzpatrick's guide to submitting to your man in the name of God, patience is defined as the "power to endure without complaint something which is disagreeable." That's right, ladies—our gender is number one in leading lives of quiet desperation.

Throughout history, this "power to endure" has proven . . . inconvenient. While patience has its perks in dealing with events that lie entirely outside of our control—war, famine, terminal illness—it becomes a bit of a bother when applied to the realm of romantic relationships. Wait to be asked on a date. Wait to be swept off your feet. Wait for sex—if not until marriage, then at least 90 days. Wait for him to bend down on one knee. Once hitched, wait on him. Then, die.

Why are women encouraged to wait around for major life events to just happen to us? Patience, my dear. These relationship milestones have been engineered and reinforced along traditional gender lines in order to test a woman's ability to shut up and sit pretty, while encouraging men of action to make all the decisions around here. But unfortunately for the patience lobby, us women have figured a few things out over the history of time. One: Our vaginas won't implode upon completion of premarital sex. Two: Our significant others can still love us without investing two paychecks worth of bling into one of our virtuous little fingers. And three: Waiting does not work. Ever.

In light of these developments, some have chosen to trash those pesky romantic milestones altogether, refusing to see virginity and weddings as indicators of our worth as women. Others have flipped the gender script they're based upon: Ask out. Initiate sex. Propose. But some just can't let go of the passivity thing, and they're going to try their hardest to make feminine patience work in the 21st century. For them, the ideal of passive patience needn't be discarded; it's just got to be re-coded and re-sold as proactive patience. Nowadays, getting men to come to you doesn't have to be a pathetic waste of time—it can be a subversive, brave, and even—yes—feminist act of empowerment!

Coincidentally, all of these people appear to be concentrated in our nation's record labels, movie studios, publishing houses, and newspapers. Behold, pop culture's vision of a feminism of patience: No need to abandon traditional marriage—just celebrate women who are strong enough to get what they want (that ring). Don't propose to your significant other—just subversively coerce him into doing it for you. Don't bother waiting around in your ivory tower for your prince to come—just make damned sure you're on the receiving end of that fairy-tale ending. Girl power!

—

Exhibit A: The works of Taylor Swift.

[youtube:v=2CZQZohbZcQ]

Hoo boy, how are we going to reconcile this one, ladies? Taylor Swift sings songs about waiting around, being a princess, and crying for her "Romeo" to rescue her from her dad, who is so mean. Then, she makes videos for these songs where she is literally waiting in an ivory tower for her prince to come:

Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone
I'll be waiting all there's left to do is run
You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess
It's a love story baby just say yes

Okay. Breathe. Despite the traditional trappings—Romeo, waiting, prince, princess—it's not hard to find a girl-power lining in this song. Swift is coaching Romeo here. She's giving him exact instructions on where to find her. She's charting out their escape route. And she's imploring him to say yes to her demands. That is, until we get to the fairy-tale ending:

Romeo save me I've been feeling so alone
I keep waiting for you but you never come
Is this in my head? I don't know what to think
He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring

And said, marry me Juliet
You'll never have to be alone
I love you and that's all I really know
I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress
It's a love story baby just say yes

Ooh! So close! Notice how Swift whiles away her time waiting, crying, wishing, hoping, praying, etc. while all Romeo has to do is . . . go over and talk to her dad. It's not exactly rocket science, folks. And yet, Swift expends a whole lot of emotional energy in order to goad the love of her life into performing the most basic of tasks, instead of just, like, dealing with her father herself, or realizing that her father is a dick and she's 18 so he can't tell her what to do anyway. But whatever—surely we can channel all of Swift's emotional energy into some sort of feminist reading of her work? Alyssa Rosenberg, noted critic of passivity in popular culture, sees Swift as feminist, in a way:

I am an enormous sucker for . . . Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is an absurdly mature and lovely piece of pop songwriting. "I was a scarlet letter" spoken as a declaration of pride, devotion, and sexual desire is kind of amazing as a commercially successful act of feminist reclamation.

I don't see the phrase as a "feminist reclamation" so much as a mixed literary metaphor inserted into a song about waiting to get a ring on that finger. And "Love Story" is not Swift's sole offense: In "You Belong With Me," Swift passively spins elaborate fantasies that the boy of her dreams is dating her, and not his girlfriend. In the song, Swift is "Dreaming bout the day when you'll wake up and find / That what you're lookin' for has been here the whole time." Since Swift refuses to just ask him out or something, her solution is to aggressively strut her passivity in front of his face at every opportunity.

But let's be fair—while Swift's princess persona is a bit dull, Swift herself has been spending her pre-wedding days writing and recording hit crossover records. That's something, Ann Powers argues for the Los Angeles Times:

the authority these fledgling artists claim is a great sign of feminism's ripple effects. Swift might play a princess in many of her songs—in fact, the best parts of "Fearless" meditate on the princess myth and how reality subverts it—but in the studio she's her own boss, writing and producing those fairy tales.

This is the Sarah Palin theory of feminism. If she's a woman, and she does stuff, it's feminist—even if that stuff is writing songs about waiting around for boys do stuff to you. These women don't deserve our ire, but they don't deserve a cookie, either. Swift should be celebrated as a promising entertainer who writes catchy tunes I like to listen to on the radio. Feminist? Not so much.

—

Exhibit B: The cautionary tale.

[youtube:v=PITgjb9Xtr0]

If "Anna", the central character in the upcoming rom-com Leap Year, is a "princess," it is in the urban dictionary sense of the word: She is a beautiful, well-heeled control freak with a serious thirst for a solitaire diamond. Anna wants to propose to her boyfriend, but she can't, because girls can't propose to boys. So our determined young heroine finds a patience loop-hole: Propose to her boyfriend on a day that only comes around once every four years, because it is socially acceptable to do so, in Ireland, on that day alone (?). Anna hops on a plane to secure the man of her dreams on her own terms.

But ho ho, no, not so fast, independent woman. You've still got to wait—for your plane to get re-routed, your car to get blocked by a sea of cows, your ass to fall down a muddy hill, and a charming and handsome Irishman to accompany you on your hilarious misadventures. In fact, our heroine has to wait juuuuust long enough for her boyfriend to realize that he, in fact, wants to propose to her—and for the charming and handsome Irishman to begin to aggressively court her also.

Moral of the story: There's nothing more irresistible than a woman who desperately needs to get married as soon as possible . . . as long as she doesn't end up doing the proposing. That would be pathetic.

—

Exhibit C: Team Bella

Bella Swan, the heroine of the Twilight series, gets a lot of flack for being a passive lump of femininity with no defining characteristics besides her tasty blood. (Rosenberg has penned an exquisitely written anti-Bella screed). By series end, that blood will catapult her into vampire royalty, making her a—you guessed it!—princess. But in New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight series, Bella actually takes on a ton of pretty sweet hobbies.

She fixes up old motorcycles! She jumps off cliffs! She goes on joyrides with dumpy bikers! She sees movies with her friends! She uses e-mail! Okay—so our expectations for Bella's extracurricular activities are pretty low. She actually spends the better part of New Moon staring out of a window, watching the seasons change as she "endures without complaint something which is disagreeable"—bad vampire break-up. But the motorcycle thing is pretty rad, right? Too bad she only does the more interesting stuff to prove how vulnerable and suicidal she is in an attempt to coerce her ex-boyfriend to come back and save her from herself.

Bella's empowerment of desperation presents the most difficult form of patience to re-cast as a new feminism. But let's give it a try—if we can't give up the wedding shit, and we can't give up the princess shit, and we can't give up the patience shit, then we have got to find some way to justify this to ourselves. Sady Doyle, in a brilliant turn, points out that Bella is passive in the way that men in porn are: They're faceless, save for one sizable talent (tasty blood = big penis), and somehow they've got tons of perky, tanned blondes servicing them for no apparent reason. This is exactly what happens to Bella—she does nothing, she is nothing, and hot guys fight over her. (Nevermind that one other thing Bella doesn't do: Sex before marriage). No, it's not feminist. But at least women aren't alone in this peculiar set-up. Plus, it helps religious ladies get off, apparently, so proceeds go toward a good cause.

—

Exhibit D: Feminist v. Princess

Last year, the Washington Post published Rachel Beckman's "One Ring Circus," a story about the years Beckman spent waiting, wishing, agonizing and flat-out fantasizing that her boyfriend Eli would propose to her. Beckman is more attached to the romantic relationship milestones than most—she began imagining Eli's proposal after their first kiss. A few years down the road, she had formed an "Engagement Watch Team" among her coworkers to chart Eli's every move. The obsession was not all white taffeta and seating arrangements; the anticipation of the proposal haunted her. One Valentine's Day, Beckman "carefully checked every dish of food for a diamond ring so that I didn't accidentally swallow it and become one of those proposals-gone-bad stories in the bridal magazines." When Beckman, then in her early 2o's, realized Eli wasn't popping the question that moment, she wept.

Unsurprisingly, the diamond fever left Beckman with some personal conflicts:

I felt like engagement was the one off-limits topic. I didn't want to pressure him or spoil the big, elaborate surprise proposal (that he hadn't even started planning). I was caught in a Catch-22. I could be hands-off and leave it all to him (feminist Rachel says no), or I could be hands-on and get what I want (princess Rachel says no).

I don't doubt that Beckman has been largely influenced by the feminist movement. But the distinction between the "princess" who waits patiently for her boyfriend to propose to her and the "feminist" who actively coerces her boyfriend into proposing sets up a bit of a false dichotomy. The main difference appears to be that the princess waits around for her prince to ride up on his horse, while the feminist pressures her boyfriend to man up and play his assigned role.

A desire to get married is not necessarily an anti-feminist one. The problem is when the decision to wed is left exclusively to the man, leaving the woman to waste years of emotional energy as she waits patiently for him to do so.  The whole point of the milestone is to set up a relationship based on feminine patience and masculine decision-making. Beckman's "feminist" solution is to micromanage the process—to talk openly about her desire to get married, open up negotiations as to the time frame, and instruct Eli on the perfect ring. In doing so, Beckman converts her private agony into proactive patience, but she can't go so far as to pop the question herself—in order to fulfill her lifelong engagement fantasy, she must submit to Eli's better judgment.

Beckman may see this subversive engagement planning as a feminist development, but really, women have always coped with a lack of institutional power by working behind the scenes. I appreciate Beckman's essay, because it's good to remember that achieving patience takes more than switching on your feminine tractor beams and waiting for your prince to come. Getting what you want while seemingly doing nothing is work. Even in 1964, Burt Bacharach knew that just waiting around and being a woman wasn't going to cut it. You have to strut your patience. You have to work your waiting.

[youtube:v=ycbgHM1mI0k]

"Wishin' and Hopin,'" a ditty made popular by Dusty Springfield, instructed women to stop their traditional wishin', hopin', thinkin', prayin', plannin', and dreamin', and instead, get off their asses and do stuff: like "the things he likes to do" and wearing "your hair just for him." As the song demonstrates, aggressively pursuing what you want isn't always an act of female empowerment.

Photo via George Eastman House

Today's Economist graph ran the numbers on the prevalence of same-sex households across the United States. According to the data, collected by the Williams Institute, Washington, D.C. has the highest concentration of gay households—14 out of 1,000. If that number sounds small to you, keep in mind that the data excludes single gay men and women. This study is only concerned with American households run by gay couples.

D.C. far outstrips the national average. In America, only 4.7 per 1,000 households are run by gay couples who identify each other as either "spouse" or "partner." D.C.'s number are nearly double the second-highest jurisdiction, Maine, which boasts a rate of 8.3 per 1,000. Compare those numbers to the roster of states that can't even muster up three gay households per 1,000: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia.

I'm sure that plenty of fundies (do fundies read the Economist?) will look at this graph and say, "I knew it. All the gays are concentrated in those godless coastal areas, but at least they're staying away from good 'ol Alabama." But what the graph actually indicates is how many closeted gays are living lives of quiet desperation (or having hot, anonymous sex) right in the conservatives' backyards. As one commenter writes:

Unfortunately this graph can easily mislead. A distribution map of gay couples is really showing where gay relationships are more socially (and legally) acceptable, not where 'gayness' itself resides. A social conservative in Idaho may see this graph and comfort himself that he and his state are "safe" and that there is no need to acknowledge, much less accommodate homosexuality. The tragic story of Senator Craig demonstrates how mistaken this can be.

The Economist notes that the very action of legalizing same-sex marriages or civil unions tends to encourage coupling up. "Those states where gay marriage is legal or where same-sex partnerships are recognised have a higher proportion of same-sex couples than the national average of 4.7," says the magazine. If a state recognizes same-sex coupledom, it either inspires an influx of out-of-state gays, or encourages locals to come out as couples. Which means that if D.C.'s gay marriage legislation is passed, our fair city may stand to get even gayer. Take that, haters.

(You can read the full Williams Institute study here [PDF]).

Tomorrow, as per tradition, hundreds of drag queens will race down 17th Street between R and Church Streets NW. According to Metro Weekly, the 24th annual Dupont High Heel Race will see a couple of changes this year: One, you won't be able to drink beer outside anymore. And two, it's political this time.

Metro Weekly delivers the bad news: This go-around, the "traditional beer garden adjacent JR.'s" will be closed due to inclement weather. In place of beer, however, this year's High Heel Race will provide racers and on-lookers with a sense of purpose! Will O'Bryan reports:

the event is now being run under a First Amendment permit rather than a parade permit, reflective of the event's gay identity. That distinction clears the way for street closures and a police presence. Loosely speaking, it's the difference between a political rally and a block party.

"Until we have complete equality and people want to show up at gay events, they need to realize we don't have the same rights," says [Dave]  Perruzza [vice president of JR.'s]. "The [volunteers'] shirts will probably say, 'Equality for Everyone.' It's the High Heel March for Equality. It's a gay event, put on by gay people."

It's unclear why the permit switcheroo was necessary—the parade has run for years with street closures and a police presence. Whatever the rationale, the designation may help drum up support for a pending bill that would recognize same-sex marriages in the District of Columbia. So, who's running for domestic partnerships?

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Responding to criticisms of the provision, Catania Chief of Staff Ben Young said that domestic partnerships will be "unnecessary in a world with marriage equality." Young told the Blade, "Domestic partnerships were developed as a substitute for civil marriage for gays and lesbians, and could continue to serve as a vestige of an era of inequality." But as Harrice-Lacewell details, the institution of marriage itself is a vestige of centuries of sexism, racism, classism, and heteronormativity. Will incorporating same-sex couples into the institution manage to fully strip marriage of its problematic history?

In D.C., domestic partnerships afford same- and opposite-sex couples "nearly all of the rights, benefits and obligations of marriage." Here, the difference between partnership and marriage is largely symbolic. Marriage equality advocates across the country are fighting for that symbolic cultural recognition as much as they are the hospital visitation rights and the tax breaks. But for some couples, both gay and straight, the symbolic implications of marriage are precisely what  turn them off to the institution. For these people, domestic partnerships have functioned not as a vestige of inequality—a poor substitute for marriage—but rather as a welcome legal alternative, minus the cultural hang-ups. These couples should be allowed the option to secure the rights and benefits of marriage without associating with what has been, for centuries, a bigotry shit-show.

Even when everyone who wants to get hitched is allowed to, a "world with marriage equality" may still leave unmarried gay men and women outside the fold of this new-found social acceptance.  "I think that the more gay life can become legitimized (which is usually just code for "heteronormafied"), it will create a further subclass within the gay subclass," says Zack Rosen, editor of The New Gay. "[The current movement's] school of thought is that we can win rights by being the best damn gay people we can. That means getting married, washing behind our ears, etc. The problem with that, though, is that if it only rewards gay people that want to get married and have kids, the gay people that decide not to do that will become further marginalized."

Those gay people who do want to couple up for the long-term shouldn't be forced to opt into this problematic social institution in order to secure their legal rights. By denying couples the ability to enter into domestic partnerships, the District of Columbia tells its gay population that the road to legal and social equality must end in marriage. For those couples, gay and straight, who see marriage as an institution historically dedicated to inequalities, that reasoning is hard to swallow.

According to a recent Pew Research study, the District of Columbia has the lowest marriage rate in the country. Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. are so low that they lie entirely off the Pew map's color key. The closest states to D.C.'s numbers are Rhode Island, where 43 percent of women are married, and Alaska, where 47 percent of men are married.

Why aren't D.C. residents getting hitched?

The Pew poll offers up one possibly related figure: residents of D.C. get married significantly later in life than do the residents of the 50 states. In D.C., the median age at first marriage is 30 for women and 32 for men. In contrast, the median age for a first marriage in the state of Idaho is 24 for women and 25 for men.

Additionally, marriage rates are generally lower in urban areas than they are in rural areas. A quick review of the Pew map shows that states like Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas have the highest concentration of married couples, whereas the states which host the nation's biggest cities—like New York and California—generally have a lower percentage of married people. D.C., which is all city, all the time, would clearly trend toward singledom.

But the District also has another demographic issue working against high marriage rates. In the 2000 "gay census," the District of Columbia ranked first in the nation for its percentage of same-sex couples. Same-sex couples, of course, cannot currently be married in D.C., and their out-of-state marriages became recognized in the District only recently.

If D.C.'s gay marriage bill is successful, it won't just ensure equality for all. It will also, strangely enough, make D.C. look a lot better in the eyes of conservative defenders of traditional marriage. When those people glance at a report on the strength of marriage in this country, they probably think that us heathens in the District of Columbia are singlehandedly rejecting the institution. But in a couple years, D.C. may appear significantly more married. I'm not a big proponent of the institution myself, but I can appreciate the irony there: in D.C., at least, the tradition's remaining relevance may just depend upon same-sex couples wanting to opt-in.

Last week, Jimi Izrael wrote an essay on the Root telling black women to "get real," give up the search for their own Barack, and stop valuing their educations so much. Since I'm not into sexist drivel disguised as relationship advice, I disagreed—and commenters weighed in with their own thoughts on education, elitism, and "bitches." Plus, commenters call my education level "fluffy" (B.A. English, '07), my disagreement with Izrael "so sensitive," and me? "Amy."

The comments of the week, on "Why Black Women Shouldn't Go to College":

Victor says:

Not to ask a stupid question, but why does he assume black women have to limit their choices to black men? It seems a bit antiquated to me, as pairing off has become more and more based on education and career ambitions than race these days.

The days of an educated man wanting to settle down with a high-school educated waitress are long gone. I wouldn’t even consider dating a woman without an advanced degree, in a real field (read: history and english are fluffy and do not command respect).

This only seems like an issue if:
1 – you refuse to date outside your race
2 – You’re uneducated, black and male and you have issues with potential partners being successful.

Bitter Elitist writes:

Victor: As a SBW-attorney #2 is his problem. #1 is NOT mine.

There were 5-6 black women, for every black man at my law school. Seems like black women aren’t/don’t have a problem.

kza writes:

Victor. You realize that people can be intelligent without a advanced degree right? You come off as pretty elitest there.

Victor writes:

kza – yeah… so?

I didn’t say that I was using education as a proxy for intelligence. I stated that I take educational level (and have a minimum set) in to account. I happen to also require intelligence, and an entire bevy of other variables. In fact, I’m extraordinarily lucky to have found someone who fits my myriad requirements.

Whats your point?

Jennifer writes:

I wish to God somebody would bring this article to Mrs. Obama’s attention and she would denounce it as the trash it is. And what’s with this “love came first” crap? Last I checked, Michelle Obama had a helluva career before and all during her marriage to the president – including now, as the First Lady.

Usually Jimi’s “bitches ain’t shit” manifestos at least make sense. This one was obviously written after he got yet another child support court over, because it’s even longer and more incoherent than usual.

furious_styles writes:

Did we read the same article?

I didn’t hear him suggesting that black women have ruined the race by the act of going to college or getting careers. It’s not that black men don’t want women who are educated and successful (as a black man that is what I have been used to in my past partners). But being a successful black woman doesn’t automatically make you marriageable if you , at one extreme, are too damn goal-oriented and mercenary and see a black man as an item on the checklist along with the house, car, and big-screen tv, or at the other, have a chip on your shoulder. That’s just for any person.

jimi izrael writes:

To Izrael, there are four kinds of black men: the "Sugar Daddy," the married dude women have sex with for money; the "Pierre Delacroix," the educated black man who is probably gay; the "Bar-Napkin Poet," the open-mic night poser who will get you pregnant; and the "Bartleby," the poor slacker. Black men, in other words, are not marriage material.

There are only three kinds of black women, however: "Dr. Donhavamon," the PhD who "doesn't know what a dustpan is for"; the "Poetess," the open-mic poser who won't give you head; and "Goldbrick," the girl without a degree who is "jealous of anything you may have going on." All black women aren't marriage material, either but for a different reason: not because they cheat on their spouses, or don't use condoms, or are secretly gay. Black women aren't marriage material because she, in Dr. Donhavamon's case, went to college and was really fucking good at it; in the Poetess's case, went to college and thinks it's important; or in Goldbrick's case, simply wants to go to college. Of course, the one black man who succeeded in college, "Pierre Delacroix," doesn't get off either—Izrael even argues this guy doesn't count as "black" anymore.

Apparently, black men and women are just not supposed to go to college. Make sense? Of course not. It makes no fucking sense. Perhaps, you think, Izrael is simply engaging in an ironic exercise in order to remind singles men and ladies that no one is perfect, and stereotyping the opposite sex can be damaging to everyone? Nope: He's pretty much arguing that while the stereotypes of no-good black men are bunk, the stereotypes of overachieving black women have got a grain of truth to them. The argument, in a nutshell: everyone still sucks, but all these sucky people could, at least, suck together, within the context of marriage, as long as one set of sucky people—specifically, educated black women—take one for the team, quit their jobs, and lower their standards. Also, Michelle Obama something something:

There are a lot of women, but not a lot of GOOD women to choose from, educated or not. For some reason, every woman with a college degree now presumes herself to be a Michelle Obama looking for her Barack, when few of them have any of the other qualities that made Michelle a good catch: patience, vision and a sense of purpose and priority.  She wanted a career, but she wanted to be a wife and a mother more, so she figured out what was important to her and made the necessary sacrifices. She didn’t just have a child baby-mama or turkey-baster-style—she wanted a husband and a family. You see? Love came first, it was the first consideration beyond her career. (What kind of lawyer-on-the-rise shackles herself to a broke community organizer driving a hoopty?) And her decisions paid off.

Love was first: that was her choice.

I don't disagree that Michelle Obama is a pretty great lady who looks happy with the life she has. But I don't know—maybe it's because she lives in the White House, is married to the President of the United States, and has found that, for the time being, she can accomplish her professional goals through her national leadership role and enormous celebrity? No, to Izrael, the only incredible thing about Michelle Obama is that she's the only successful black woman willing to get married and have kids. Nevermind that the dude she married was a highly successful, Ivy-educated black man that Izrael would probably razz as overly white and overly gay if he didn't happen to be necessary to his Michelle Obama myth.

It gets better:

I love me some black women—all the most important people in my life are black women. My daughter will be a black woman one day. The truth? Many “successful” black women have simply made choices they can’t reconcile. They have skewed measures of success. Because if you are the other of 35 with an advanced degree, a high-level career but no man or family to share it with, you have successfully isolated yourself, but I don’t know that we could call your life a success story by any measure.

That may not be what you want to hear and I know it’s hard … but it’s fair.

Yeah. After all of the rambling over the failures of both black men and women, the story circles back to the same sexist classic.  At least black men are responsible enough to reconcile their choices. Women, of course, don't know how to choose for themselves. They don't know what they want. They certainly can't multitask well enough to hold down a job while simultaneously fostering personal relationships. They're so stupid, they don't even understand that their masters diplomas don't magically poop out a baby after a couple of years! If they say they're happy, they're lying. And no matter how successful her choices have made her, no one respects her. Because she wasn't smart enough to let some relationship writer make those choices for her.

Police records obtained by the Courier-Journal show that, according to Pitino, the then Karen Cunagin approached him in a Louisville restaurant where he had been drinking on Aug. 1, 2003, and the two had sex later that night.

. . . Pitino told police that Cunagin Sypher called him about two weeks after the initial encounter and said that she was pregnant. They arranged to meet at the condominium of Louisville strength coach Tim Sypher, whom she did not know at that time but would later marry.

Cunagin and Sypher married six months after the meeting. Then, she demanded "cars, tuition for her children and finally $10 million" from Pitino. Then, she was indicted for extortion. Then, she reported that Pitino had raped her. Now, "Cunagin Sypher and Tim Sypher are now estranged and divorce proceedings have been initiated." Which is a shame, because I know we were all really pulling for those kids.

If you chose to wed this morning at the H. Carl Moutrie I District of Columbia Courthouse, you would have entered on Indiana Avenue NW, past the seemingly interminable entrance renovation. You would have risen four floors through the atrium on escalators, passing the packed courtroom where a judge would be sentencing accused child murderer Banita Jacks. You would step off the escalator and wend through hallways, past the domestic violence branch, past a family court proceeding. And you would walk into the marriage bureau office, through a perfectly normal waiting room, under a flowered arch, and into the wedding chamber. There, underneath the seal of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and another flowered arch, you would be wed by the lovely Toni F. Gore, branch chief of the family court division.

"Please approach the arch!" she'll tell you when the time comes.

Gore has been doing weddings here for three years. She estimates she's done at least 300 of them. And she doesn't do matrimony every day—just Wednesdays; her deputies handle the other days. You have to call ahead to schedule a half-hour slot, and today, she'll be doing four.

If you ask about her job, she'll tell you: "I do two happy things: marriages and adoptions." But Gore spends the rest of her work week doing other stuff—making sure courtrooms are staffed, reviewing court records, and other managerial tasks. And one other thing: "I don't tell them I do divorces. They don't need to hear that."

She doesn't have to do weddings—when she was promoted to branch chief, she insisted on still doing a few a week. Gore is very good at making a courthouse wedding—what many couples expect to be a prosaic thing—into something worth remembering. It starts with the room, which is clean, quiet, and well-appointed. And it has to be reserved; there's no walk-ins. "It's not a cattle call," Gore says. "It's their special day."

Her favorite wedding, she'll tell you, happened this Valentine's Day—the first time the marriage bureau had been open on a Saturday. She married a couple that had been living together for more than 20 years. They had several children, some of them teenagers.

"At the end of the ceremony, the [teenage] son said, 'Mom, now we've got the same name.' And they hugged. Her son was so happy. They kept hugging."

This Week in Sexist History:

Good Ol’ Day: July 12, 1909

Dateline: Berlin, Germany

Subject: German woman's body caught in a patriarchal double-bind: How to satisfy the "natural ample proportions" required to fulfill the role of Wife, while achieving the "modish slimness" required to fulfill the role of Sex Object. Sound familiar? Modern women, too, must navigate between "sexually desirable" and "baby-making factory"—it just usually doesn't up as cause for divorce, because nobody needs a reason to get divorced anymore.

Anyway, back to 1909, when this woman's husband:

Now that we've got the woman's vital stats out of the way, let's find out why someone's BMI makes them unfit for marriage:

Guilty! Of a crime of fashion. But seriously, that's all this woman has committed.

This is a toughie. While I can't support a woman's husband divorcing her because he doesn't like the choices she's made about her own appearance, I also have a hard time defending the forces of darkness ("fashion") which require a woman to lose ten pounds a month in order to fit into some clothes. Surely, this is a weight battle for the courts to decide.

Aw, at least she got to wear the dress. The really, really fashionable dress that would cost her her marriage!

Wait . . . he "bargained" for her? Yeah, I'm siding with fashion on this one.

The Washington Post's breakout Weddings section, "OnLove," has debuted, providing Washingtonians with another outlet for more-of-the-same coverage of the institution. You've got your pair of interlocked golden rings illustrating the header; your bouquet-clutching, white-veiled bride gracing the front page; and your tales of everlasting love sparked in Dewey Beach spicing up the copy.

But WaPo's weddings page is stepping out of the traditional mold in one way: It's soliciting stories and photos of same-sex weddings and commitment ceremonies, as well.

The OnLove "Wedding Story" submission form requests deets from two parties: "Bride" or "Partner #1" and "Groom" or "Partner #2." Later, the form then reverts back to regular old bride-and-groom. And there's no telling how seriously the Post will consider same-sex unions in its romanticized coverage: so far, the Post's wedding page appears exclusively hetero.

Even if OnLove ends up covering enough gay weddings, it will probably end up covering way too many weddings, period. Although I'm not married, I can understand why a couple's wedding is a very important moment in their lives. What I don't understand is why that couple's wedding is even a vaguely interesting moment in my life, however, unless something very horrific—death and destruction—or awesome—jet packs?—went down. If it's just the same old white dresses, flowers, rings, and vows, that's not newsworthy—that's just a wedding. Happens every day.

Wedding news certainly isn't the only fluff filling out the pages of the Washington Post. I realize that the "Arts & Living" section also devotes entire pages to glorifying our pets and critiquing celebrity fashion sense, as well. But while weddings may not be the least fit-to-print, they do manage to inspire the most predictable boilerplate feature coverage known to journalism.

Weddings, even same-sex ones, are about fulfilling tradition, after all—the whole story depends on the dresses, flowers, rings, and vows being there. In that world, even the tiniest breakings-of-tradition qualify as enduring details. We're talking rose-colored wedding dresses and Vegas-themed receptions here, not a jet-pack experiment gone awry.

Wedding coverage may never go away, but I like to think, at least, that the idea of wedding reporting actually equating writing "on love" is beginning to erode. Wedding coverage is all about artifice. At least fashion reporting attacks the subject with a critical eye.

The Lysol douche: for when your husband locks you out of the house

The Lysol douche: for when your husband locks you in the house

The Lysol douche: for when your vagina deteriorates after only five years of marriage

The Lysol douche: for when the "precious air of romance" is directly related to the scent of the air surrounding your vagina

The Lysol douche: for Germans

[youtube:v=JSxJ1bkqgZA]

Cutie (am I right ladies) recorded the above video for Beliefnet, which has recently appended the advice with this note: "Editor's Note: Father Albert Cutie recorded this video for Beliefnet several years ago. Recently, he was placed on leave after photographs of the priest with a woman on a beach were published in a magazine."

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a love letter to young love by Mark Regnerus. Piggybacking on the trend of couples marrying later in life, Regnerus argues that today's young adults should stop delaying matrimony by "hitting the clubs, incessantly checking Facebook, Twittering their latest love interest and obsessing about their poor job prospects," and just get married already.

But Regnerus isn't really P.O.ed at eternal undergrads drinking their lives away—only the females. What Mark Regnerus is truly lamenting is a trend away from what I like to call the "Tenderoni" theory of marriage:

The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That's up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren't pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn't be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well. The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. I used to think that only young men—and a minority at that—lamented marriage as the death of youth, freedom and their ability to do as they pleased. Now this idea is attracting women, too.

"Tenderoni"—"a slang terminology which refers to a younger male or female love interest"—emerged in the 1970s, but the concept is as old as time. Ah, the '70s—when women, on average, married half a decade older than themselves. Creepy.

[youtube:v=Xx_L7WABf5k]
Michael Jackson, lifetime Tenderoni enthusiast

But alas, the 1970's are over—have been for decades! That doesn't deter Regnerus, who pulls some stats to argue why older men should return to the good old days of marrying 'Ronis: "women's 'market value' declines steadily as they age, while men's tends to rise in step with their growing resources," he reports; "women who marry at 18 have a better shot at making a marriage work than men who marry at 21."

It's telling that Regnerus' arguments for marrying young are all about making marriages work, not making women's lives better. Women should get married young because young women can devote themselves to staying married (instead of their careers). If women wait don't settle early on, maybe no man will ever marry them (and what will support them then—certainly not their own careers!)

Let's go back to Regnerus' vision of unmarried 20-something for a moment. They're all wasting their time "hitting the clubs, incessantly checking Facebook, Twittering their latest love interest and obsessing about their poor job prospects," right? Oh, wait a minute—that last one is actually not a waste of time, but the point of many people's lives! Too bad these young people have such "poor job prospects"—they should probably just abandon them and marry someone who already has a career, like an old dude. (Too bad Regnerus is taken!)

I'm not going to argue why people ought to wait until they're older to get married. But I will argue against the "Tenderoni" theory of marriage—that men should wait, but women can't. If women are expected to marry older men, they're forced to enter into an inherently unequal union. Younger women may be better prepared to stand by their men than young guys, but they lack other marks of maturity—established careers, higher salaries, direction in life. If one partner has a well-established career, and the other is just beginning to weigh her "poor job prospects," his job will always take precedent. He will be the breadwinner. She will get some job—whatever best accommodates his. She'll abandon it when she moves where his job moves. When marriage is urgent, the career always waits.

But if the marriage ends—and most do—where does that leave our aging Tenderonis?

[youtube:v=ey5hWPFBvcM]
Bobby Brown was actually Whitney's Tenderoni!

Judging local takes on sex and gender.

What a week to launch a new sex and gender blog. Since Sunday, The Washington Post's Style Section has been going balls out on its trad. values coverage with "Wedding Week 2008." Whether you've feasted from the Post's Wedding Week buffet or merely dipped your finger in its room-temperature hollandaise sauce, The Sexist has your guide to what coverage catches the bouquet and what pieces are so homely they might never find a man who could ever love them.

Naughty: Rachel Beckman's "One Ring Circus." This piece is your typical girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, girl spends several years waiting for boy to ask her to love him until they die, girl converts her workplace into an "Engagement Watch" bitching den until she finally wears boy down enough to propose to her type of story. In other words, a success!

Beckman, a former City Paper writer, spends the piece struggling to align her "feminist" side with her "princess" side. "I was caught in a Catch-22," writes Beckman. "I could be hands-off and leave it all to him (feminist Rachel says no), or I could be hands-on and get what I want (princess Rachel says no)."

Let me make it easy for you, Beckman: You're a pretty, pretty princess.

For the sake of the story, though, let's imagine that, by virtue of picking up Bust Magazine a few times in college, Beckman is, like, a totally liberated woman beneath that frilly exterior. Beckman's idea of compromise between the feminist and the princess is to coerce her boyfriend to propose to her how she wants it, when she wants it, and with the appropriate cut of diamond—but to maintain the artifice that he is running this entire show in order to preserve what she calls the "purity" of the engagement.

Years ago, these sort of behind-the-scenes marriage machinations might have been seen as clever tricks for women to transcend patriarchal control in order to get what they want. But this is Wedding Week 2008, Beckman!

If a "pure" union requires a woman to kill herself in order to make it appear as if her "man" is making all the decisions and that she agrees to every one of them, consider me the piss stain in the freshly fallen snow of modern marriage.

Nice: After that, Caitlin Gibson and Rachel Manteuffel's "The Anti-Wedding" reads positively radical. Gibson and Manteuffel's piece—their attempt to deliver a "Fuck You" to the marriage industry by planning the nuptials of a wedding-averse alterna-couple—is largely a pleasant romp through the tedious wedding-making machine. Still, I can't help but see this piece as token "Other" coverage in an entire week of features that pander to the wedding industry. Just how Anti-Wedding is this wedding anyway?

Nontraditional:
- wedding occurs not in church but in street
- bride wears red summer dress
- service marred by miserable, miserable rain
- guests brandish signs reading "'Til Debt Do Us Part" and "Money Can't Buy Me Love"
- no rings exchanged
- in place of champagne and cake, beer and pizza consumed

Traditional:
- requires two wedding planners
- union between man and woman
- photo shoot printed in national newspaper
- couple still fucking getting married

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

Where I come from, women don't abandon their absurdly offensive and largely nonsensical blogger personas just because they are so in love they have chosen to get married forever.

"It recently occurred to me that I might be one of the only girls whose reputation is ruined by committing to one guy for the rest of my life," wrote Egan. Call me old fashioned, but getting hitched is no excuse to quit self-identifying as a wholesale distributor of the sexually promiscuous. But there's more—even the purging of Slut Machine is not enough for the Wedding Machine, which will not rest until it bulldozes a perfectly innocuous moniker as well:

"I actually might be changing my last name, too, which is something I never ever thought I'd do," writes Egan. "But my fiancé's last name is really cool: Morrissey. And I kinda like the sound of 'Ms. Moz.'"

Whatever. What Ms. Moz does in her personal life is her own business. Just keep blogging the good blog.

Photo by odius.