Jessica Lee Jernigan: Work

Female Trouble: Barbara Seaman Tells the Truth About Estrogen

Marketing has always had a role in hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women. Some of the ads you describe in your book are shockingly misogynistic—aging doesn't just make a woman unwell, they suggest, but actually unwomanly. The tone of this message changed over the years, certainly, but did the content?

Barbara Seaman: By 1947, estrogen products were among the leading advertisers in gynecology journals. At first the ads depicted happy and stylish mid-life women waltzing the night away with their adoring husbands or beaux. The simple message was that patients no longer needed to suffer from hot flashes and sweats at menopause. Now they could enjoy a good quality of life during this transition. As time passed, the manufacturers changed their tune. They came up with profit-boosting slogans such as "Keep her on Premarin." They switched to scare tactics, depicting troubles that presumably called for long-term treatments. Now the models were shriveled and bent. They were losing their tempers, losing their minds, losing their urine, even losing their sex drive and their husbands—all because they had "outlived their ovaries," and were suffering from a "deficiency disease like diabetes." Read more…

Of Monkeys and Men: Steve Jones on the Science of Maleness

Did you find out anything in researching this book that particularly surprised you?

Steve Jones: [Sighs.] The general wimpishness of men, the rather pathetic nature of manhood, is what surprised me most, I think.

[Laughs.] Well, I'm sorry. Was that a particularly upsetting discovery?

SJ: Well, no. Almost all of us—myself, most of your male acquaintances, I'm sure—fail, thank God, to live up to the conventional pictures of manhood. I mean, I've never been to a sports event in my life and I have no plans of going. I've never hit anybody—well, almost never, only when I've been hit myself. The realization of how little biology says about being a man was startling, but it was also the most comforting thing I discovered.

I spend most of my time with beta males myself.

SJ: Yeah, well, that's for the best, really. Although I don't talk about it much in the book, if you look even at things like gorillas, when you've got an alpha male, this guy goes around being a goddamn nuisance and banging his chest and so on, and—so we assume—passing on his genes. But if you do paternity tests it turns out he does no better than all these wimpish little gorillas who are going to the library and all that kind of stuff. As it turns out, there is an alternative strategy in all kinds of animals. There's the alpha-male strategy, but this other strategy—named the "sneaky fucker" strategy by John Maynard Smith—that is much more quiet and surreptitious, but just as effective. It's actually very comforting to know that we sneaky fuckers do just as well as the alpha males, if not better. Read more…

Hermaphrodite's Memoir: Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides

Although this book is, in many ways, very different from The Virgin Suicides, like that novel it revolves around the secret lives of suburban girls. Were you especially observant as a kid, or have you had access to this otherworldly realm?

Jeffrey Eugenides: I had no sisters, only brothers. This had the effect of making me highly aware of what some Gallic semiotician might call "the approach of the feminine." Whenever I went to a friend’s house, a friend who had sisters, I checked out the exotic terrain. Growing up, I was very close with a family of five sisters. This family wasn’t the model for the Lisbon sisters, as some people think. But I basically spent my adolescence in their house, amid the sprawl of their clothes and makeup. I draw on those memories in my portraits of teenage girls. People always expect that I grew up with lots of sisters. A few people are now questioning whether I may have been a girl myself once upon a time. But the truth is more prosaic: I knew the Casey girls, and I snooped. Read more...

Are You a Real Woman? Consulting the Experts with Lynn Peril

So, fighting communism isn't just about keeping the house clean, but it's about sexuality, too—the right kind of sexuality.

Lynn Peril: The history of sex education in the United States is really interesting. In the 1840s and the 1850s, you'll see sex manuals that talk about how important it is for both partners to have pleasure. And then there was a big religious revival, and after that it's all about reproductive sexuality. I have some absolutely killer sex manuals from the turn of the century that talk very, very specifically about when and how married couples—of course, only married couples would be having sex—should have relations. Sex is all about breeding the healthiest, most beautiful, most intelligent children possible. Read more...

Some of My Best Friends Are Transsexual

Even if we reject the idea that FTMs prove anything about lesbian identities, the existence of FTMs does suggest that there is an innate difference between men and women, a difference that made it impossible for you to just be "masculine" in a female body.

Griffin Hansbury: Yes. A lot of people don't want to believe that. I was coming out to a friend of mine at graduate school (this was before I started physically transitioning), and he was very upset because he did not want to believe in gender, he didn't want to believe in gender difference. He wanted to think, "Hey, you can just be a masculine woman, that's OK." A lot of people say that to me, "Why can't you just live as a masculine woman, what's wrong with that?" People who say this to me are people who tend to think of themselves as progressive, sexually progressive and open-minded, yet they're so bothered by this disruption to their way of understanding. They think that they're beyond gender, yet they're really clinging to it, you know? If you need to control what I do with my gender, then gender must be far more important to you than you're admitting. Read more...

Resetting the Regency: Dara Joy's Feminist Romance

How do you see Ritual of Proof fitting into your growing body of work? How does it fit into the evolution of the romance novel?

Dara Joy: My readers have come to expect the unexpected from me. I've never followed the conventional path. My first four books were in four completely different subgenres. At the time, most writers were not allowed to do this. Publishers believed that writers needed to stay within their own established genre to keep the numbers up. But all of my books were bestsellers—which allowed me to break through that glass ceiling. I've always liked to push the boundaries; so in that regard, Ritual of Proof fits into the body of my work. Read more...

Women on Top: Cheryl Benard's Utopian Vision

Do you think that there is such a thing as politically correct sexuality and romance?

Cheryl Benard: I left that question open because it's not going to be resolved in our lifetime. To answer that question, you need "two consenting adults," and you're never going to find them as long as one side generally has more money, more opportunities, more status, etc. We have to unmix sex and power, which will be quite a project; fortunately, it's a project that can be fun to work on, as Lisa is beginning to realize. Read more...

Maps of Resistance: Carol Gilligan on The Birth of Pleasure

You just mentioned the inclusion of gay and lesbian voices in collective cultural discussions. I know that, in your couples therapy practice, you work with heterosexual couples. In In a Different Voice and The Birth of Pleasure, there's a two-gender model of desire and identity. How do homosexuals, transsexuals, and the intersexed fit into your vision?

Carol Gilligan: The question I'm raising in The Birth of Pleasure is, "Is there an intrinsic tension between love and patriarchy?" To look at that, I wanted to look at the form of love that's sanctioned by patriarchy. I say this in the book. It seemed to me you could easily identify gay love or lesbian love as a site of resistance in itself, so I wanted to look at love that's culturally sanctioned to see if, even here, there's a fundamental tension between love and patriarchy. Read more…

Identity and Gender, or, My Dad is a Woman

Your descriptions of your own high school years and young womanhood—your experiments with makeup and clothes and social personae—are rather poignant illustrations of what you're talking about. You were trying to be a girl by dressing in girl drag.

Nicole Howey: Yes, exactly! [Laughing.] I still feel that way now, at 29. And I think that's why people are frightened by cross-dressers and transsexuals and the transgendered—not because they're this scary other that people can't relate to, but because they remind us of ourselves in ways that might make us uncomfortable. It's not that they're unfamiliar, but that they're too familiar. I think we're all in drag, you know? Read more...

Arts & Crafts

Art as we experience it today is largely the invention of modern art history. As Western art became more abstract, more arcane, art historians became translators, high priests who could mediate between the heroic, omnipotent artist and the mortals who visit galleries and museums. In order to sustain this art that only a minority of people could appreciate, art historians spilled a lot of ink defining art by what it is not: It is not decorative; it is not nostalgic or romantic; it does not tell a story; and it is not useful. Thus, most of the work that women create is not art, nor is it valued as highly as art: When Claes Oldenburg sculpts a giant BLT from fabric, it's art; if a suburban housewife were to create a giant BLT as a Halloween costume for her child, it would be craft. It's worthwhile to note here that some art historians believe that, while Oldenburg designed his soft sculptures, his wife did most of the sewing. This dichotomy is not solely the creation of modern art historians; rather, they codified an already existing hierarchy, a system in which a man's work often has symbolic, distinctive, public value, while similar work by women—no matter how well-crafted or inspired—remains almost invisible, never to emerge from the domestic sphere. And, even when women paint or sculpt or engage in some type of work recognized as art, they seldom gain the same kind of recognition available to their male peers. Seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi created canvases that demonstrated consummate skill, originality, and personal expression. In her lifetime, though, she was mostly appreciated as a novelty act: What could be more absurd and sensational than a woman painter? Read more…