In the Noah Baumbach movie Greenberg, out in limited release this Friday, the eponymous main character is having trouble being a man. The 41-year-old Greenberg, played by Ben Stiller, tells his 25-year-old love interest that when he was a kid he dreamed of being an astronaut. Now he can't even drive, much less pilot a shuttle. He sabotaged his career as a musician, so he's trying the old-fashioned, manly pursuit of carpentry. He pretends not to care about his new line of work—he tells his friends he's doing "nothing for a while"—yet Greenberg is seriously wounded when an ex-girlfriend tells him she doesn't remember the bed he built for her. All she recalls are his anxiety attacks.

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Virginia Thomas has many ardent defenders. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't think that Ginni, as everyone calls the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has a perfect right to launch herself headlong into the Tea Party movement with the founding of her own group, Liberty Central Inc. As Thomas herself said, pointing out that the Supreme Court's ethics office had approved her new endeavor, "I did not give up my First Amendment rights when my husband became a justice of the Supreme Court."

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My roommate and I spent a solid hour on the couch one evening discussing a wedding Web site we'd been sent. The people getting married were strangers, but that didn't stop me from forwarding it to a friend or two I thought might get a kick out of it. Pretty soon everyone had seen "Jane" and "Tim's" site, on which they treated their impending nuptials with all the pomp that preceded Princess Diana's wedding. Except Jane and Tim's wedding won't just be broadcast live on their special day, like Diana's paltry event was. In the months preceding their marriage you can watch the Flash slide show that explains how the pair met-cute while rooting for opposing teams during a Yankees-Red Sox game as many times as you want. But that's only if you tire of the video showing Jane and Tim lovingly washing their dog, Mr. Snuffles.

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Slate's DoubleX Gabfest on Liz Cheney, Kathryn Bigelow, and why married people are too tired for sex.

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Angie Jackson, the Florida mother now known as the abortion tweeter, isn't the first woman to try to demystify abortion by talking about her story publicly. Since Romper Room personality Sherri Chessen got a very public abortion in 1962 after taking thalidomide, women have tried to erase the lingering shame of abortion by publicizing their own. Author Jennifer Baumgardner recently started the "I had an abortion" T-shirt project. A forthcoming Web site, ShareWithThree.org, urges women to "come out" to three friends about their abortions.

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"My goal is to be like the guy who invented Velcro," marriage researcher John Gottman once told an interviewer. "Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro." Gottman's own road to Velcro-level fame started with a 1998 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Did they criticize? Were they defensive? Did either spouse curl his or her lip in contempt? Then, three to six years later, Gottman's team checked on the same couples' marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced.

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A woman's existence, wrote French literary critic Dominique Aury in 1958, is "charged with truths of two kinds: those concerning submission and folly in love –– and those regarding daily life." These days, much of the writing about women's lives tends to concern daily life—work, child care, Internet dating—rather than passion. Occasionally, though, the folly bursts to the surface in all its tumultuous glory. One such moment has just arrived in the form of a graphic-novel adaptation of the dirtiest and most daring of French books—one that still feels shocking more than 50 years after it was first published.

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The woman who David Paterson may have intimidated from going to court wasn't married to David Johnson, the Paterson aide she says choked her and smashed her into a dresser. But for every five married women, one is married to an abusive spouse. Domestic violence brings women to court seeking protective orders, as in the Paterson mess—and also divorces. But when women who say they've been beaten up try to end their marriages, they find themselves at a disadvantage. In family court, they probably won't be offered mediation—the cheaper, less antagonistic alternative to litigation.

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Julie Klausner has slept with a lot of losers and perverts, she tells us in her funny, trenchant new collection of essays I Don't Care About Your Band. She is not permanently wounded by these encounters and yet she feels bad. And then she feels bad about feeling bad. "When you cry about things not working out, you're crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn't seem to care you're alive," Klausner writes, "but also because you're ashamed of yourself for crying."

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Alex, 43, a father of two who lives in San Francisco, is an alum of a private high school in the city that today charges upward of $30,000 a year. But while his eighth-grader and fourth-grader now attend private school, they won't be continuing on to posh high schools like the one he graduated from. "Hope to be a private school refugee family," Alex writes in an e-mail with the subject line, "Many of our friends are doing the same thing."

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When Donor 3066 signed up with the California Cryobank, he offered some basic information about himself on a piece of paper: that he had a BA in theater; that his mother was a nurse and his father was in the Baseball Hall of Fame; that his birthday was Sept. 18, 1968. He made it clear that he didn't want to be found by signing a waiver of anonymity.

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Kelly Cutrone, the plain-spoken head of a PR firm with a high-minded name, People's Revolution, has spent the last few seasons berating her vacant employees Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port as a peripheral character on MTV's reality soap operas The Hills and The City. Now, she has her own show on Bravo, Kell on Earth, which chronicles her life as a fashion publicist. Watching Cutrone admonish her idiotic underlings is psychic relief for the engaged TV fan: For once, everything you'd like to shout at the screen is being said for you by a woman who dresses exclusively in black and has the pallor of someone who eschews both under-eye concealer and sunlight.

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Last week, I talked about Amy Bishop on the "Slate Political Gabfest." Bishop, of course, is accused of shooting and killing three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. She also has a history of violence. But there's another aspect to the story: Before the shooting earlier this month, Bishop was denied tenure and filed a gender-discrimination suit. And so, on the Gabfest, I speculated that Bishop could represent an extreme (and violent and awful) manifestation of some women's frustration with unequal treatment in the workplace. Not to excuse her behavior, but as one lens through which to view it.

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To listen to the DoubleX Gabfest, click the arrow on the player below. You can also download the audio file here or subscribe to the DoubleX podcasts feed via iTunes or directly with our RSS feed.

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I have two master's degrees from Columbia, keep the h silent in haute couture (you'd be surprised at how few Pakistanis like me do so), and know to scour the fine print before I sign anything. But I scrawled my signature on the most important contract of my life without reading a word. And, as I later found out, many of my also well-educated female friends did the same. Why do Pakistani women agree to marriage contracts without scrutinizing them first and making sure they won't be sorry later?

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Jenelle, the young subject of the latest episode of the MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant, which aired on Feb. 16, is a spectacularly surly new mother. Before she gives birth to son Jace, Jenelle says in her thick North Carolinian accent that she imagines motherhood will be like "dressin' up a doll every day." But when the baby comes, it's not like her fantasy at all. Jenelle's "alcoholic," ex-model boyfriend refuses to visit and calls her a "piece of crap" repeatedly, and her mother is constantly haranguing her for going out clubbing and leaving the baby at home. Toward the end of the hourlong episode, Jenelle openly regrets having a baby while still in high school. She says to a friend, "Imagine bein' in prison. That's what [motherhood is] like, bein' in prison."

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Click  to read a slide-show essay about the unlikely uses of pink.

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Child care is a subject we debate endlessly in exactly the wrong ways: Should moms work? Are nannies evil? The truth is, child care is a fact, and what we should be talking about is that most people cannot afford it and get no help. Obama is the first president in decades to pay serious attention to the issue as a matter of policy. With an increase in subsidies to help low-income families pay for child care, new funding for improving infant and toddler care, and bigger tax breaks for child-and-dependent care for middle-class families, the Obama budget is an overdue acknowledgement of working parents' pain.

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As we are enjoying a day off of work in honor of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, it's worth revisiting Lincoln's troubled wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. Most Americans think of Mary—if they think of her at all—as crazy. In 1875, she was publicly tried for insanity by her only living son and found guilty. Then she spent months in an asylum against her will. As one contemporary summed it up, "She was not like ladies in general."

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To listen to the DoubleX Audio Book Club discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed, click the arrow on the player below. You can also download the audio file here or subscribe to the DoubleX podcasts feed via iTunes or directly with our RSS feed. insertAudioPlayer("http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.slate.com/media/slate/Podcasts/doublex/SG10021101_DoubleX_Gabfest.mp3","true")201021111414PMThursdayFebFebruary132/11/2010 6:14:14 PM634014908540000000201021111414PMThursdayFebFebruary132/11/2010 6:14:14 PM634014908540000000

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