Mad (Wo)men

I am not really sure why this article about women and online advertising exists, considering it's nothing groundbreaking to expose that women go online and, you know, also buy stuff. My favorite part, though, is the fact that one adman interviewed is named Mr. Draper. His lines might as well be coming from Don himself:

"I love women. Women are more than half the population, and they do most of the shopping," said Tim Draper, the venture firm's co-founder and managing director. "We are constantly looking for more sites that cater to women."

All tied up

Stay classy, Sarko.

And taking names

Manohla Dargis's review of Wanted makes it sound pretty much like what I would expect. Guns, post-Matrix effects, etc., and Angelina Jolie's character's too perfect name, Fox.

As Dargis says re: Jolie, "Few American actresses, especially those with such pin-skinny arms, can make beating a guy to the ground look so easy and, yeah, man, like fun." Here is where I maybe would have liked an Uma reference, because, hello, as much as Tarantino likes his obnoxious T&A closeups, he has some effing badass heroines. Stuntwoman-cum-actress Zoe Bell is also pretty great in Death Proof.

Love is like a bottle of gin

The graphic for yesterday's Modern Love column, which was by essay contest winner and college junior Marguerite Fields, sums up the content better than illustrations sometimes do. Find it here.

The idea, in short:

And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.

This article is about 120,908,325 times more insightful than any Laura Sessions Stepp article or book has ever been--and it comes from a girl who hasn't even graduated yet. Pure gold:

Then there was the installer of soy insulation who cooked soggy pasta and made me watch football and whimpered and kicked in his sleep. In the spring there was the guy 12 years older than me who shared an apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park with an antediluvian man who walked around in graying long underwear.

Unfortunately the end is kind of weak, but overall it's one of the more refreshing things I've read there in awhile.

It also makes me think of the last New Yorker cover, which had the gall to include "Mother's Day" in the title--the image of a woman drooling over babies that are enclosed as if in a pet store, while the man whose hand she is holding is desperately trying to lurch her away. It could have felt more like a comment on noncommittal guys if the desperate woman and the babies hadn't been the ones in the foreground. Blah.

Obama's sweetie

So Obama toured a textile factory in Allentown, Pa., which is essentially my hometown. (My postal address is Emmaus, but that's only because the post office for my actual neighborhood is literally one very tiny room. I digress about rural Pennsylvania.) Anyway, surprise, he charmed all the ladies working there. Apparently he called someone "sweetie," which to some rings condescending.

As someone who still recounts how two years ago Patrick Ewing, Jr. called me "sweetheart," I think it all depends on the person and the context. In that instance, PEJ was giving me a hand with a book in the library. If I were, say, a secretary on the set of Mad Men, and my boss called me sweetie, it would only hammer in how much I was treated like a piece meat. When I was 10 or 11 and my grandma called me a "little girl," I hated that. Stuff like "little lady" bugs me, but I kind of like it when a significant other calls me "babe." And Obama always at least seems respectful, to me.

Honestly, I think it's mostly when nonfamous strangers call me "hun" or the likes that I really stop to analyze it. It generally doesn't offend me, but it robs terms of endearment of their meaning. Cuz 9 times out of 10, I'm not your honey.