Kate and Leo are hellbent on each other's destruction, whether they realize it or not.
Screaming, yelling, breaking furniture, soul-sucking jobs, mental illness, infidelity: Revolutionary Road is not your typical holiday season movie. Don't be fooled by the Kate-Winslet-and-Leonardo-Di-Caprio pairing -- this is not Titantic.
Frank and April Wheeler are two bright young things in 1950s New York City who fall in love, get pregnant and move out to suburbia with stars in their eyes. But seven or so years later, the daily commute and absurd office nonsense is doing Frank in. Back home, April feels bored and stifled by domestic life, aching over both of their unmet potential. As she energizes Frank and they start to claw their way out, real life sets in and throws every single roadblock imaginable in their way. There's many Mad Men parallels in the analyses of post-war life, but ultimately, Revolutionary Road is just a portrait of a straining marriage: it's about the capacity that two people who are in love have to be cruel to each other.
What makes some people who are jilted go completely crazy?
This is the saddest story ever: a 27-year-old man threw acid on the face of Iranian woman Ameneh Bahrami, blinding both her eyes, after she refused repeated marriage proposals from him.
According to CNN, her attacker, who is known only as "Majid," fell for Bahrami at college and his mother attempted several times to arrange a marriage between them. Bahrami refused and even lied to Majid, telling him she was already married. Despite her refusal, he stalked her at her workplace to harass her. She even reported him to police, but the cops said there was nothing they could do until he actually tried to hurt her.
What, no restraining orders in Iranian law? Maybe if they existed, the horrific attack on Bahrami that followed would not have occurred: one day in 2004, Majid followed her home from work and threw a container of acid on her face. Passersby tried to wipe the acid off and took her to the hospital, but doctors were unable to save her eyeballs. She is now blind.
Younger men don't know how to un-clog a drain. But who needs 'em?
A new study shows Mr. Fix-It is a dying breed: London's Daily Mail reports the younger generation of men is less handy around the house. Tsk, tsk. Guess this means men are only good for sex.
Kidding!
In a study of 3,000 men, among those under age 40, almost 33% didn't know how to unblock a sink, 25% did not know how to change a fuse, and 7% couldn't change a lightbulb. Over-40 men proved to be much more handy (except for when it comes to assembling flat-pack furniture, which we guess means IKEA). Of course, the survey was on a home improvement web site, which has a vested interest in selling products to bumbling Mr. Fix-Its.
But in any case, who needs men to unblock the sink for you? We women can do those things, of course (see: Martha Stewart, This Old House, Domino magazine, Extreme Makeover: Home Addition) and the reality is that if we are single and living alone, or suddenly become widowed or divorced, we'll have no choice but to care for our home ourselves. Being dependent on a man to do household improvements that might get your hands dirty is so not 2008.
Whether she's single, dating or married, a girl's got to have her own toolkit and know how to use it!
An updated version of the female condom has been endorsed by an FDA advisory panel.
There's two types of condoms, you say? Yes! The male condom (the one you likely learned to put around a banana in sex ed class) and the female condom, which.....um......um......wait, you don't know anything about it, either?
We like to think of ourselves as pretty knowledgeable about how to practice safe sex, but we were embarrassed to discover how little we knew about the female condom.
Even if you grew up with abstinence-only education, you'll know what a Durex or a Trojan looks like. You also know that some men hate to wear 'em.
Enter the female condom, method of birth control that basically involves inserting what looks like a larger version of the male condom inside your vagina.
When you hear the term "breadwinner," you're likely to think "father" or "male." But the New York Times' Modern Love essay this week is penned by a former-female-breadwinner, who later scrapped breadwinning entirely for a more egalitarian - and less romantic - set-up.
The author, Karen Karbo, reveled in a whirlwind romance with a Frenchman around whom she never opened her purse once. Then he showed up at her apartment, caught her 'unaware' in unattractive sweatpants, and informed her that he expected her to look pretty for him all the time. Quite rightly, she dumped Monsier Jerkface.
In successive relationships, Karbo found herself in the position as breadwinner quite accidentally. The first husband chased his dreams while Karbo held a steady job; the second husband quit his job on a whim and became a househusband, but spent all day playing video games while she kept the family in milk and cookies. When she divorced him, he tried to shake her down for alimony, child support and the house. The third relationship seems to have been the charm: each half of the couple pays his or her own way.
In the shower! In a hot tub! With a vibrator! During a sex dream!
Masturbation: ladies are doing it! Jezebel blogged about a UK study of 1,000 women ages 18 to 30 which found a whopping 92% masturbate!
Two-thirds of women in the Gossard Big M survey touched themselves three times a week and women living in London self-pleasured four times a week.
According to past surveys, 74% masturbated in 1974 and 62% did in 1953. (1953? Really?)
Of course, the study took place across the pond, so we can't be totally sure women here are just as frisky. We'd guess that with the shame surrounding the female body and female pleasure, less American women masturbate.
Don't get your panties in a twist! Shopping for undergarments is easy.
Us romantics subscribe to the notion that, lingerie is a window into a woman's soul. It shows how she feels about herself and how she wants to express herself to her lover. And while communication is essential for any relationship, nowhere does a lover risk potential miscommunication in gift-giving than in the purchase of lingerie!
We've all dated someone too bashful to step inside a Victoria's Secret. That's a recipe for under-the-mistletoe rejection! Fortunately, over in England, a shop called John Lewis thoughtfully created a"lingerie academy" for men, complete with leather couches, Wii and free beer, to take the terror out of T&A gift-giving.
What are these daring men learning? We scoured the observations of the Times of London's brave reporter and here's the top tips for buying lingerie.
How does someone end up not having sex for 15 years? By accident, swears writer Kit Naylor on Salon.com.
We've all had dry spells, but man, 15 years is one hell of a dry spell!
Naylor is a middleaged woman, a self-described recluse with two cats and no kids. She calls herself "a spinster long past my sell-by date." Spinster! We think that's a sexist way to refer to herself, but nevertheless, we admire how she got that way: she wants to be in love to make love. It seems that by eschewing casual sex and being committed to personal integrity, she's condemning herself to accidental celibacy.
Moms exposed to exposed to chemicals make sons with smaller junk.
News Flash: it's really bad for the baby when a pregnant mom is exposed to chemicals! But just how bad is it? New research says if the baby she's carrying is a boy, chemical exposure may cause him to be born with a smaller penis.
The New York Post reports that chemicals in fire retardants, cosmetics, food wrappers and baby powder are called "endocrine disrupters" and can interfere with hormones. This means the size of your man's genitals may be affected (stunted, if you will) while he's still in the womb.
The difference between being masculine and being a jerk.
By all means, boys, revel in happy ending massages and seek refuge marathan rounds of Halo. Adulthood is hard, y'all!
Asshole is "in" right now for men, says Details magazine. As relationships become more egalitarian, author Simon Dumenco writes, some men feel more pressured to seek sex on the sly to prove to themselves testosterone still courses through their muscles as they empty the Diaper Genie. If a boyfriend or husband acts immature or selfish, is he just acting out of frustration?
We beg to disagree: asshole doesn't mean the same thing as masculine.
We think we know which show to blame for this confusion: Mad Men, which is about Madison Avenue advertising men in 1960's America.
