Slate, which has been rolling out its female-specific content in the form of the XX Factor blog for months, has finally relaunched the feature in full-fledged magazine form. I haven’t fully dived into “DoubleX” yet, but it already registers one improvement on its predecessor: You don’t have to jump over to Slate’s alien message board “The Fray” to write a comment—comment forms now pop up directly beneath the post.

… But thats not all! DoubleX is doing even more to encourage you to fill out a comment form. In an e-mail last month, the magazine’s editors informed loyal readers that they’re “going to start having cocktail meetups and other fun events for our core commenters in New York and D.C.”

So if having your voice heard ain’t enough—drink specials?

Now that e-Harmony is legally required to provide dating services for gays, newly single (possible) lesbian Lindsay Lohan has created a video profile seeking love in a spoof on the site for FunnyOrDie.com. In the faux singles ad, Lohan describes herself as “a workaholic, a shopaholic, and, according to the state of California, an alcoholic,” which is pretty funny, and also, depressing.

Daily Intel and Slate’s XX Factor have congratulated La Lohan on the video, saying she’s found the one way to make the public embrace her again, as XX Factor’s Samantha Henig writes, “in spite of the mess she has become—or rather, because she is so self-aware of said mess.”

But despite the funny lines she’s been fed, and her willingness to be a good sport by choking them out, I can’t help but noting that Lohan looks mechanical, exhausted, and lifeless throughout this thing. Perhaps it’s too soon for Lohan to enthusiastically embrace self-deprecating jokes on her very recent split with Samantha Ronson. She half-heartedly endures them instead—below.

Mmm hmm, yeah, are you hot yet, ladies?

Quick quiz! Does the sight of bonobos fornicating, paired with the sounds of chimpanzees fornicating, turn you on?

- If you answered “NO,” you are a man.

- If you answered “NO,” but are secretly lying, you are a woman.

Yesterday on Slate’s “XX Factor,” Susannah Breslin penned a short post on the implications of Daniel Bergner’s “What Do Women Want?” on the feminist critique of the porn industry (read my take on Bergner’s piece here). In an aside, Breslin asks, “Is not one among us going to confess to being turned on by bonobo porn?”

Read More “Does Bonobo Porn Turn You On, Ladies?” »

* Metro Weekly opines on 25 years of Mid-Atlantic Leather weekend.

* Tyra Banks finds the one woman who has never heard of Sarah Palin.

* Tiger Beatdown tells you who’s faring better this week—chicks or dudes—based on evidence culled from extensive personal experience crack reporting a Google alert she’s set up for “women than men”. But take heed: ” When it comes to the Dreaded Crotch Rot, no one wins.”

* Gender Goggles gives a refresher course on feminist theory.

* Melinda Hennebeger at Slate’s XX Factor calls bullshit on this whole virgin auction thing:

So does that gal attempting to auction off her virginity to the highest bidder remind anyone else of the young woman at Yale who was supposedly documenting her multiple self-induced miscarriages as a senior art project a while back? Not that I have any trouble believing that lots of people would cash that check. Yet something about the whole enterprise seems fishy to me. And I dunno about those “housewives” either; are they for real, or just hideously conforming to expectations?

Photo by trialsanderrors.

* The New Gay writes in defense of public displays of affection, despite the consequences:

Yesterday after brunch, my boyfriend and I decided to nap off a hangover in Kalorama Park. So on a perfect afternoon I was lying with my head on my boyfriends stomach while his hand rested on mine. And thats when the trio of 13 year-olds starting calling us “gaylord fuckers” from all the way across the park.

* Reproductive Reality Check attempts the impossible: Advising “adolescents to make wise sexual choices.”

* Erin Niumata for Ladyblog doesn’t think the premise of upcoming Kate Hudson/Ann Hathaway BFF wedding-off comedy Bride Wars looks very funny. “The movie is ostensibly a comedy. But is watching two intelligent, grown women being verbally abusive and playing nasty tricks on one another actually funny? No. It’s tragic. . . . True friendship, like marriage, means supporting one another, overcoming petty jealousies and being there through sickness and health.” I don’t think the movie looks funny, either, but I’m not sure a film about two “true friends” “supporting one another” would be a laugh riot, either.

* Feminist book corner: Feministe reviews So Many Ways to Sleep Badly by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

* XX Factor’s Melinda Henneberger goes to the mall:

I wound up spending my Friday night at the Montgomery Mall. And seeing for myself what deep trouble we are in: No one was there, shoppers or salespeople, to the point that I began to have horror-flick fantasies. (Oh no, it’s the Rapture and we’ve been left behind at the Montgomery Mall? How humiliating.) Because no one can afford new inventory, it was also like a visit to the Island of Misfit Toys (and Sweaters).

Photo via trialsanderrors.

* Chelsea Schilling of WorldNetDaily—which appears to be some sort of Ann Coulter-9/11-Real America news outfit—reports on former Washington City Paper staffer John Cloud’s condemnation of Barack Obama as a “bigot” and a “problem for gays” following Obama’s Rick Warren nod. A “homosexual” reporter versus our terrorist communist Leader? This is like some sort of fantasy WND morality play! How will it end?

WND sides for Obama! Schilling places scare quotes around the word “homosexual” in her headline, as in “‘Homosexual’ Time reporter: Obama is a ‘bigot,’” then pepper her report on Cloud’s smack-down with this description of Cloud’s work for CP:

In his earlier days as a reporter for the Washington City Paper, Cloud described his first-hand experience and arousal at a Washington, D.C., group-sex party for homosexuals in 1997. His report was sexually graphic and filled with expletives.

Bravo, Schilling, but you left out the link! Read up on Cloud’s arousal here.

* Gender Goggles rants on the use of the term “failure of feminism” to describe shit that happens that’s not great for women. Don’t call it a failure of feminism when you mean “a failure of mainstream society to embrace feminism fully.”

* Great conversations going on at Slate’s XX Factor: Eve Fairbanks on claims that the media turned sexist in 2008; Melinda Henneberger asks, “are traditional Christians necessarily haters?” (Short answer: Mmmm, no).

* Some dude has started a blog of photographs his three-year-old child took with his digital camera that provide “a window into the perspective of a child.” Are we’re supposed to glean from this that a child has the perspective of a lazy, indiscriminate photographer?

* McCain Blogette is back! Meghan McCain jumps back into the blogosphere to wish us a happy new year and update on her post-election “emotional rollercoaster.” This is just a hunch, but I have a feeling there’s a third-wave feminist blogger in Meghan just waiting to rise from the ashes of her aging parents’ cold, political marital agreement (just look at those sassy red shoes!). Come, young Padawan. I will guide you to shed your earnestness and adopt left-leaning positions on women’s health!

Photo via trialsanderrors.

* Slate’s XX Factor hashes it out over Rick Warren. Sara Mosley hates Warren, but admits that “engagement with the other side” sometimes “makes everyone a little unhappy and uncomfortable.” Noreen Malone thinks Obama’s “selling out.” Hannah Rosin thinks this is all “liberal group think” that amounts to “pretending evangelicals don’t exist”—and calls to let Warren speak for himself.

* In inauguration dating news: This 40-year-old seeks a date for a ball; this out-of-town 26-year-old is looking for a place to stay—not for the inauguration, just any old time.

* Local poet Sandra Beasley wrote this week’s XX Files essay on how to fake it: If “it” means becoming an impromptu motorcycle model for a televised magic show:

The director hadn’t instructed us on attitude, so I kept rotating expressions. Ten seconds smiling. Ten second scowling. Ten seconds of terrified, we’re-crushing-him! face. We kept rolling. Down the ramp. Steve cut the engine.

“That’s it?” I asked.

* The Candy Pitch presents: The Twelve Days of Christmas, burlesque style.

Photo via trialsanderrors.

Slate’s year-old female blog, the wonderful XX Factor, will come of age this spring when it blossoms into a beautiful full-fledged Web ‘zine. The project shall be known henceforth as Double X, and those who want to offer up ideas, writers, or a managing editor can make their case at doublex.slate@gmail.com. A full description of Slate’s “post-election adventure,” after the jump.

Read More “Female Blogs March Boldly Toward Web Domination” »

* Slate is all over the sex & gender beat this week! First, Jack Shafer debunks the New York Times Sunday Styles “dudes love cats” trend piece:

How to write a bogus trend story: Start with something you wish were on the rise. State that rise as a fact. Allow that there are no facts, surveys, or test results to support such a fact. Use and reuse the word seems. Collect anecdotes and sprinkle liberally. Drift from your original point as far as you can to collect other data points. Add liberally. Finish with an upbeat quotation like “My cat takes priority over the new relationship. Realistically, unless there’s something absolutely amazing about [the woman I'm dating], he wins.”

* Then, Explainer explains how to tell whether your 13-year-old kid actually wants a circumcision—or whether you could be pressuring him to have one. Is it so wrong to ask kid owners to err on the side of “foreskin intact”?

* And the XX Factor’s Melinda Henneberger probably doesn’t want your flowers. Henneberger lays out the rules for flora-purchasing significant others:

- A dozen for no reason: You shouldn’t have!
- A bouquet on an actual occasion: No, really, you shouldn’t have.

Speaking from my estimable position as “local blogger who sleeps on a mattress on the floor of a group house flanked by two squatter-occupied abandoned properties and counts among her possessions a bunch of old newspapers stacked in milk-crates recovered from darkened alleyways”—I, too, may never understand women.

Photo by Robyn Gallagher