"That being said, there are women out there who just don’t. They don’t wear swimsuits. They don’t go to the beach."

"They basically forgo summer, and the camera, because they hate the way they look. Thus, our excursion to the roof. I put on sunscreen, and lipstick, and a new size 16 swimsuit, black with a ruffled pink trim and a little slip of a skirt. I took a deep breath, pulled my shoulders back, and tried to believe that I looked O.K. and not to flinch as he said, 'Here we go.' Inside, I picked out my favorite shot, skipped the filters, went to my Facebook page, held my breath and hit 'post.' The next time I looked, there were dozens of pictures of women in swimsuits — women who looked more like me, less like the airbrushed, perfected creatures I seem to spend my life looking at."

That's Jennifer Weiner writing on a topic I have seen as long as I've been reading the news for women (i.e., since the 1960s). Body anxieties heightened by the desire to wear a bathing suit. The Facebook part is new, but I don't think that's why the NYT is publishing this piece in late August. Weiner makes no mention of the French "burkini" issue, but I think that's what's pushing this old American topic forward right now.

Here's that Facebook photo showing the suit she picked picked out. It's a lot less silly looking than "ruffled pink trim and a little slip of a skirt" makes it sound. But Jennifer Weiner is 46 years old. Why is she resorting to a skirt with pink ruffles to deal with her body anxieties? I was researching the burkini issue and got to thinking about women who want more coverage for whatever reason — religious or other expression, modesty, sun protection, aversion to shaving — and I discovered these swim capris (and swim tights). I hadn't noticed these before, so I'm thinking there are many women — possibly including Weiner — who are locked into thinking swimwear must expose your legs (if not half or more of your buttocks). It's odd, because Weiner discusses the Olympics, and the Olympic swimmers — female and male — all wore suits that covered their thighs.

I'd like to encourage women to think about wearing swim separates with the longer legwear, capris and tights. 2-piece suits have been around for a long time, so the tops are easily available, both bra tops and tankini tops.I think this is a nice, comfortable option for all kinds of women, and it has the positive side effect of making those who wear covered-up styles for religious reasons feel less conspicuous (which is what covering up is supposed to achieve).

The "meternity" leave.

It's maternity leave without having a baby — me... -ternity.

Women are bad at putting ourselves first. But when you have a child, you learn how to self-advocate to put the needs of your family first. A well-crafted “meternity” can give you the same skills — and taking one shouldn’t disqualify you from taking maternity leave later.

As for me, I did eventually give notice at my job and take a “meternity” of my own.... Ultimately, what I learned from my own “meternity” leave is that any pressure I felt to stay late at the office wasn’t coming from the parents on staff. It was coming from myself. Coming back to a new position, I realized I didn’t need an “excuse” to leave on time....

That's from Anna Davies, who has a book. Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington, who also has a book, is making herself about sleeping. 

“I want to rekindle our romance with sleep,” said Ms. Huffington, 65, in a lullaby voice as soothing as her floral perfume. “It’s a central part of life and a gateway to our dreams.”

Trashing contempt for women with contempt for men.

I tried to read this WaPo column by Alexandria Petri called "Why Bustle.com doesn’t work for women." It's about how the male founder of a website for women has "ample contempt for the very market he was aiming at." I think Petri, aiming for the market he has contempt for, aims contempt at him. But she quickly dives into generic contempt for men, on the theory that men don't read "books," and by "books," Petri means novels, and somehow the general failure of men generally to read novels feeds back into the topic of why Bryan Goldberg's Bustle sucks.

Excerpt:

Reading is one of the few sure-fire ways to become better at being human. So it’s a problem when anyone doesn’t do it — and an especial problem recently, when boys are increasingly slipping behind, at least compared to their female counterparts.

As of 2009, boys lagged 39 points behind girls, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment. One of the suggested reasons that boys aren’t reading is that unlike girls, who are somehow fonts of empathy capable of leaping from one perspective to another at a single bound, reading books from male or female perspectives with equal vigor and ease, boys can only be summoned to respond to the stories of other boys.

Who suggested this reason? No one's name is stuck to that stereotype, it's just a "suggested reason." Boys can't read because "books" are those fictional stories told from a perspective that can only be understood if one possesses empathy and that's something boys lack or Goldberg lacks or who the hell knows? It's just a theory out there, not a theory Petri herself admits to embracing as she wanders about trying to aim at that man who takes aim at women.

"23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing."

I thought that was the title of a parody of internet "listicles," but it's a real article at Huffington Post, one that that inspired me to compose a list of things not to do:

1. Succumb to the temptation to read articles with titles like that.

"[S]ome have wondered if Wales, who couldn’t figure out a way to become rich off his innovation, was cynically making a play to cash in on being a great humanitarian."

From the NYT Magazine article "Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire."

Wales... realized early on that the community would revolt if he were to monetize Wikipedia by selling ads. He may now travel the world giving speeches and even include Bono as a friend, but Wales’s celebrity relies largely on being the guy who made the sum of the world’s information free without making a penny himself. As such, his reputation remains inextricably linked to the noisy, online volunteers who got him there.

Much more at the link.

Wales likes to invoke the higher purpose of Wikipedia. He applies his libertarian worldview to the Internet and has taken on institutions like the United States government and Apple for threatening to curb the free exchange of information on the Web....

[His] proximity to famous people doesn’t sit well with some members of the Wikipedia community who assert that Wales’s new life is, in some ways, contradictory to the egalitarian online world he created.....

Wales... ensures he is not taken for a radical. He treads carefully when weighing in on more extreme members of the free-culture movement, like Julian Assange — who he has criticized for using the “wiki” name — and online hacking collectives like Anonymous. Wales and I met for lunch the day after the 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz killed himself. The community had erupted with calls for Wales to weigh in, but he was hesitant. “People have been pushing me to comment, but I didn’t know him,” Wales told me. He has also stayed mostly mum on Edward Snowden, the contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked confidential information about widespread snooping by the United States government....

The article begins and is larded with info about his wedding and his wife (and wives), which I suspect is another example of the NYT's hackneyed, desperate playing up to female readers.

"I'm delighted to announce the launch of HuffPost Good News..."

"... a new section that will shine a much-needed spotlight on what's inspiring, what's positive, what's working -- and what's missing from what most of the media chooses to cover."

How perfectly insipid. It's like Martha Stewart, but for news. Is it bad of me to feel like this is meant to work as news for women? Relatedly, my father used to insist that the news should be entirely about people who died. Dying being such a profoundly important matter. As long as anyone has died — and there's never a day when no one dies (if there was, would we notice?) — that's what the news should focus on. I tried to say, but wouldn't that be monotonous? It's banal, isn't it? Why not report that people are breathing? The real question is: What are people doing that's different and important now, not who did something in the past that makes it seem significant that he has now died? It's that thing, that for the newly dead makes us care that he has now died, that we should be learning about now. No, whatever that thing was, death is bigger. Death is the news. The news for men.

AND: Here's HuffPo's news for men: Weird News.

"I love the excitement of coming out here and seeing all these beautiful people I know."

"Even my dates are a comfort. This place has made me strong. It keeps you young.”

Says a 52-year-old prostitute, who's been walking the streets for 30+ years and now has the NYT writing a flattering story about her. Why would the NYT publish this? Because the NYT is all about helping its aging female readers feel good about themselves.

Time Warner's cable guys "assigned to the highest-end 'Signature Home' jobs will be getting a more 'fashion-forward look' soon."

And Verizon's recent ads "highlighted its technicians’ dress shirts"  and "characterize the install as a white glove experience."

That's from a NYT article — promoted top and center on its front webpage — called "Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed." The photo at the link shows a clean-shaven, crewcut cable guy — with white paper booties over his shoes to protect the gleaming hardwood floor — demonstrating how to use the TV to a woman standing by her side. There's a second photo of another cable guy — also in booties. He's the bearded type. This better class of men will come to your house and help you set up the company's elaborate "suite of products."

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters...

Now — it's been obvious to me for quite a while — the New York Times is written for women. But at what point does it actually become... ridiculous...

[Selene Tovar, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three] needed the Internet service at her three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to be fast enough to power the family’s six televisions, five Xboxes, several PlayStations and multiple iPads and laptops. Even a new scale — a Hanukkah present from her husband — required a fast connection so it could send daily weigh-ins to an iPhone app.

Note the clueless husband: thinks a scale is a nice gift. Coming to Ms. Tovar's aid was Quirino Madia who "wore a white button-down shirt and gray slacks."

But watch out, affluent ladies of New York, "many cable technicians still wear the standard work clothes and tool belts."

***

And I'm sure it's got nothing to do with anything the New York Times would ever have intended to allude to, but reading that article made me want to Google "cable guy pornography," just to see how prevalent that genre was. I don't know. That's just the direction my mind went. Not that I clicked on any of the links. I didn't. And my Google search only retrieved about 4 million hits, so maybe it's not such a big porn sub-genre. I don't know if the new "fashion-forward look" will heat up the sub-genre or not. Actually, I think not. But I'm no porn connoisseur. I'm more of a Google-search connoisseur. For example, I moved on to the search: "fashion-forward cable guy porn" — 192,000 results — and found "James Franco Porn Documentary: Disappointing Sex Tape Inspires Film," an article in HuffPo (the San Francisco edition). Speaking of disappointing! James Franco does not appear as a fashion-forward cable guy in any porn film. Apparently, one time Franco made a home video with his girlfriend and realized: "Those people in pornos, they are great performers. They're not just doing it, they're selling it to an audience." The guy's a genius!

***

Rereading this post, I suddenly see what the real porn is for the ladies who read the New York Times: "three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood."

Can the police break down your door and burst in on you if they smell marijuana burning?

They don't have a warrant, but no warrant is needed under "exigent circumstances," such as when there is evidence of destruction of evidence. In the case argued in the Supreme Court today, after the police knocked and announced themselves, they heard a toilet flushing. Is that enough?

Kennedy uses this opportunity to ask why the smoking of marijuana itself doesn't constitute the destruction of evidence.

"She was wrapped in her fuzzy blanket, ready to listen to Taylor Swift or play Fruit Ninja on her iPod."

From an op-ed the NYT chose to publish in the wake of the Gabriel Giffords shooting. Please add this to the pile of evidence that the NYT aspires to be the newspaper for soft-hearted, soft-headed women.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth wins the thread:

I had a discussion with my daughter Amy the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was....

(Link added.)