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About this James Chartrand business.

A lot of people are seriously chuffed with her for pulling a fast one, selling out, betraying other women writers, and (hey, this one bugs me too) extending her adopted macho persona into an entire professional-writers website, Men with Pens.

Second, based on my (peripheral) experience with commercial writers over the years it’s not that uncommon for a single writer to work with mulitple pen names. For instance the local edgy alt-weekly might rather not use the same writer who also writes the gardening tips for the local flower and garden newsletter and ad copy for the local university alumni office. So folks use different names — big deal, so what? And if you use different genders? Also big deal, so what?

Note also the e-book title available under “Our Books” at Men with Pens: How To Create Believable Characters. Nice work, James!

Some things I do get uncomfortable about though. For instance that a lot of people prefered to hire and read copywriting from James… as long as they thought he was a man. Published research says academic reviewers consistently give higher ratings when a single letter in a submission is changed, turning the author from, say, the woman’s name “Joan Smith” to the man’s name “John Smith,” or “Jean Fitzpatrick” to “Dean Fitzpatrick.”

That Chartrand got pulled in when she dropped that hook over the side isn’t a problem for me at all. What is a problem, though, is that despite thoroughly faking it she built a website that’s… well, more aggressively “masculine” than I, a thoroughly red-blooded, XY-chromosomed man, am able to manifest. Which, if I was conflicted all Hemingway/GQ/Details-like about what “being a man” might mean probably wouldn’t be doing me a lot of favors. So in other words it’s not as much that Chartrand was “selling out” women as that she was helping to continue setting up men with, in this case, literally made up standards of what constitutes an authoritative male voice.

“Masculinity” already impoverishes men enough without people — women and men — literally playing it up. Although I think it’s a marvelous indictment of the whole conceit that biological women are able to pull it off as effortlessly as biological men. But here’s the deal: masculinity, like femininity, is a total fucking joke. Name one thing besides maybe peeing on cigarette butts in a urinal and needing to do things to keep your testosterone levels on an even keel that’s really all that “essentially” male? Right, that was a trick question! There are plenty of men throughout history who never saw either a urinal or a cigarette butt who nevertheless made it from first breath to last without ever losing a Y chromosome. And, to be perfectly fair, there are plenty of women, Chartrand not the least of them, who are able to nail the concept on the first go.

Meaning it’s all made up. Which wouldn’t be a problem at all if drunks in bars, bullies on playgrounds, and psychos with handguns weren’t either perpetually trying to live up to those meaningless, in some cases literally fictional standards or, worse, using other people’s failures to meet them as an excuse to do violence against them. Which sets off yet another cycle of men and boys looking for answers to the literally unknowable-for-certain question “what does it mean to be a man?” And finding hints in… “manly” graphics like the bullet-shattered logo James Chartrand chose to keystone her blog, or teasing remarks about “mommy bloggers” on… a working mother’s blog.*

Bottom line: getting jobs with fake names is fine. Finding success with your fake name is fine too. Taking your fake name and using it to perpetuate your ideas about your name’s gender attributes, though, isn’t so hot.

* For the record I don’t believe Chartrand ever suggested there’s any problem at all with bloggers who are also mothers. As for the “mommy blogger” genre, well, fair or unfair that gets a lot of criticism from most quarters.

Update: Woah, as Sungold ever set me stright? And in comments, below, Anonymous points to a post by Chartrand’s erstwhile gender-bending partner, “Harrison McCleod” who says the choice wasn’t as simple as Chartrand makes it sound. But it does indeed sound like she at least occasionally specifically criticized women writers as a class. Good to know. —fl

Summary: Failing to understand “everything I do is masculine” causes men (and their partners, and fellow men) unimaginable but also unnecessary grief.

Samhita of Feministing says

A movie about the changing tide of masculinity? I want to see.

She wrote about it here.

You know what drives me crazy about the trailer? A bunch of grown men with beards, penises, jobs, and partners wandering around worrying that they’re somehow not… men! WTF?

My metaphor for “masculinity” has cutting, carving, or tearing away of everything about biologically male humans that doesn’t fit the stereotype.

How can it be that we call rediscovering, embodying, or otherwise adding back the cut-away parts emasculating? Instead of, I don’t know, maybe remasculating.

What’s funny is that you never see “men’s liberation” groups pushing to expand the definition of masculinity to include more of the full range of human possibilities. Instead it’s all about trying to get everyone to agree our metaphorical amputations should be accepted and/or seen as superior.

p.s. and dear sweet mother of pearl how bought into stereotypes is it to say men are “finding their feminine side” when they do anything outside the confines of masculinity?

Via Amanda Marcotte, ace political statistician Nate Silver puts the scope of exaggeration by organizers of this weekend’s teabagger rally into perspective. Organizers claim there were two million people, pretty much everyone else put the figure at closer to 60,000.

Silver uses a vivid, and funny, but unfortunately gendered analogy.

That’s not a twofold or threefold exaggeration—it’s roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn’t “in error”, as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

He said it here.

I’m, um, not an ace mathematician so check my figures, but there’s a hidden insult in Silver’s number that a) makes it an unfortunate gendered insult but also b) diminishes the scope of Kibbe’s lie. Short version: Kibbe’s penis would have to be 1.5 inches long for his exaggeration to equal only 53 inches. Assuming he’s of average size instead then it’s like him telling people his penis is 196 inches long! Or 16 feet!

Point by implying Kibbe has a smaller penis Silver also made him seem like less of a liar.

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Long answer, showing my work:

First, let’s do the numbers to see just how big an insult Silver has cooked up.

60,000: Consensus crowd size estimate, discarding wingnut outlier
1,000,000: First estimate claimed by FreedomWorks organizers
1,500,000: Second estimate claimed by FreedomWorks organizers
2,000,000: Further inflated estimates by unidentified tweets

1,000,000 / 60,000 = exaggeration factor 16.7
53 inches / 16.7 exaggeration factor = 3.2 inch penis-size estimate for Kibbe by Silver

1,500,000 / 60,000 = exaggeration factor 25
53 inches / 25 exaggeration factor = 2.1 inch penis-size estimate for Kibbe by Silver

2,000,000 / 60,000 = exaggeration factor 33.3
53 inches / 33.3 exaggeration factor = 1.6 inch penis-size estimate for Kibbe by Silver

Unfortunately-gendered insults aside, and assuming Silver has no direct measurements of the specific teabagging wingnuts in question, then based on average penis sizes worldwide Silver would still only be exaggerating downward by a factor of 2 or 3, compared to an upwards exaggeration factor between 16.7 and 33.3 by FreedomWorks organizers.

Not that Kibbe comes out looking any better. Assuming he’s of average size then using the same exaggeration factors he used for his crowd estimates it’s the equivalent of him telling people that his penis is not 53 but between 98.5 and 196.4 inches! (That would be between 8 and 16 feet! Or for non-anti-science or French-cheese-eating types between 2.5 and nearly 5 meters! Or for football fans that would be between 2.7 and 5.5 yards!)

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Anyway, I guess me being a political sex blogger means I’m the one who has to grouse about the use and misuse of highly gendered body parts in political discourse. Even though he’s a racist, violence-advocating anti-democratic demagogue Matt Kibbe’s body is no more Nate Silver’s business than, say, Michelle Bachman’s body would be. In fact, because they’re both racist, violence-advocating, anti-democratic demagogues their bodies should be the least of our concerns.

In her unfortunately-subtitled post about being parent to a newborn, Katie Roiphe writes at Double-XX “When the baby was four weeks old… I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home.”

She also said

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby’s hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.

Vicki Iovine, mother of four children and, ahem, author of at least four books and numerous articles, wrote in the staggeringly stealth-brilliant The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy that we forget to take into account the post-delivery “fourth trimester” at our peril. That was her term for the foggy, sleep-deprived shakedown/recovery period that goes almost entirely unmentioned in medical and anecdotal parenting lore. People who adopt newborns report something similar, and after only four weeks I certainly couldn’t stay focused when I was away from home either. So it’s not too surprising that Roiphe had a hard time at her book signing.

Just one more reason we have feminism to thank for the Family Leave Act. And one more reason why American feminists continue to advocate amending the act to make it paid leave. Just saying.

Doh! But then we get to the real rub in Roiphe’s article:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a “vocation.” The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Um, no, it hasn’t. One major dishonesty of anti-feminism is that these feelings are exclusive to biological mothers. As I mentioned they’re not. Not for fathers. Not for adoptive parents.

And if I may anticipate a possible objection to the preceding point, a second dishonesty of anti-feminism is that new mothers are perfectly prepared to be left at home to resume any and all prior domestic duties, including caring for previous children, as soon as they return from the birthing center and their partner returns to work. If you’ve been pregnant then even if you’re not caring for a newborn that 4th trimester (which, remember, takes its pound of flesh from fathers and adoptive parents too) is not recovered from overnight or in a couple of days. And so no, the average mother of the average newborn is probably not ready to be dropped back into her domestic routine. And, thus, probably not ready to hop back into a career either. (See, again, Family Leave Act and recommended extensions.)

Point being that if Roiphe feels feminism wrongly pressures women to believe they should resume their duties before they’re ready, and if it’s true that feminism actually does say having a newborn should have no, zero, none impact on one’s career, authorial or otherwise, then that’s a fault feminism shares with anti-feminism.

And srsly, 17th-Century women’s activist Anne Hutchinson (ahem, author of no major books but any number of lectures and sermons) was pregnant with her 15th child when she went her local Puritan magistrates put her on trial for blasphemy and sedition. And so again what’s Roiphe’s point about feminism being indifferent to women before, during, or after pregnancy compared to its contemporaries — in the Colonial era or any other?