The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

The Guys'-Eye View?

Meghan, you ask how male writers treat their wives in print, and I can't say I've been browsing the magazine racks. But for a recent sample, I looked back at Philip Weiss' New York magazine piece on "the trouble with sex and marriage," which supplied us here at XX with a lot of grist not so long ago. I thought I'd recalled squirming at his portrait of his wife. Here's how he and his friend describe their spouses: "He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I'd be as lost as plankton." It's a far cry from trashing, but it's rather narcissistic damning with condescending praise, isn't it? And I wonder if it might go some way to explaining why so many writing wives don't hesitate to eviscerate: Maybe a new power dynamic, at least in the world of dual-career couples, spurs Ellen Tien, et al., on. Do they assume that hubbies, desperate to avoid the plankton fate, will put up with a lot? How ironic, yet classic, if the dependence of empathy-challenged guys is goading women to violate those famously wound-binding ways of females.