Gender

"Commercialism is a vacuum," my mother warned me. "It will suck you in."

I was seven or eight years old and my mother was running a bath for me. I imagined being sucked down the drain into a wet underworld of nefarious Disney characters. Read More

"I cannot stand to disappoint him. It goes way beyond doing my best. It's doing my best with a claw in my chest." -- Third year associate, speaking of the law partner to whom she is assigned. Read More

In her September 19th column, "Blue Is the New Black," Washington Post columnist Maureen Dowd related the fact that, according to the General Social Survey, which tracks the general mood of Americans, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier while men are becoming cheerier. Read More

What's it like to grow a baby in your body for nine months, feel it start to move and kick, give birth, and watch as the newborn is whisked away to the waiting arms of its...mother?

  Read More

 The Other Dirty Family Secret...Most parents who introduce their first born to a new brother or sister are well aware of, if not totally versed in, the difficulties that may arise. Parents read one or more of the books categorized as "how to introduce your child to a new sibling." Apparently much of this good intention and preparation goes unheeded. Read More

Placing something in a category and describing its properties have very different effects on the way we think about things. In my last post, I pointed out that calling someone a musician makes playing music seem much more central to their being-more essential-than just saying that they play music. What about categorizing people by their race? Read More

By turning speed dating events into social science experiments, psychologists are gaining new insights into human behavior and mate selection. This second post in the "science of speed dating" series takes a look at the role of arbitrary social conventions on how selective we are in our partner choices. In particular, it reconsiders the commonly held belief that women are inherently more selective about potential mates than men. Read More

Women, the Shriver Report cares about you. The authors want you to be everything you can be - as long as you don't choose to stay single, to not have children, or, most horrible of all - both. You won't find an explicit call to marriage and parenting in the report. Those goals are simply assumed. In the Shriver Report, marriage and mothering are compulsory, in the same way that Adrienne Rich described heterosexuality as compulsory in her ground-breaking essay nearly three decades ago.

  Read More

We've long held the view that stepmothers are wicked and powerful excluders who mistreat their husbands' children. But they may actually be uniquely vulnerable to violence--from their stepkids Read More