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In The Politician, the book by a former John Edwards factotum, Andrew Young describes Edwards’ duplicity, his noxious self-entitlement, and the rot at the heart of what was publicly proclaimed to be the ideal marriage between John and Elizabeth. The sad news that Elizabeth Edwards died this week has made me think one tragedy of the Edwards’ story is that Elizabeth was not the one to become the politician. While John had boyish looks and an oily, phony sheen of charm, it was Elizabeth who really connected with the crowds, Elizabeth who had a passion for policy, Elizabeth who had a cause—health care—she truly believed in.

Elizabeth Edwards, 61, met her husband at law school—she was of a transitional generation, one in which women in significant numbers started entering professions once closed to them. The Edwardses raised two children and both launched successful careers. Then their teenage son, Wade, died. She remade her life after that crushing loss. She left the law, had a second set of children, and then joined with John on the quest to make him president of the United States. It all turned sordid when the National Enquirer got onto the story of John impregnating a campaign aide. Elizabeth refused to believe the accounts and helped her husband continue the campaign, but the truth finally came out. Later many ugly truths were revealed about the couple's marriage and Elizabeth’s behind-the-scenes behavior—wrenching private scenes disgruntled aides were only too happy to tell.

But there’s no mystery to the outpouring of love and sorrow for the end of her amazing, tumultuous life. The way she faced her terrible illness was a model of forthrightness, of courage.Your heart breaks for her and the children she won’t be able to raise. Elizabeth’s life is a lesson in the dangers of a woman investing everything—her ambition, her intelligence, her dreams—to be fulfilled by a man. I wish long ago Elizabeth had said to her husband, “Guess what, I’m the one who’s going to run for the Senate.”

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Whenever you hear about twentysomethings still living with their parents, it's always accompanied by middle-aged hand wringing about "boomerang kids" who have failed to launch into respectable young adults. To these boomer hysterics I offer the counterexample of wunderkind Lena Dunham, the writer and director of the hugely buzzy Tiny Furniture who is profiled in this week's New Yorker.

Dunham still lives at home in New York with her parents, the artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham. Simmons plays Dunham's mother in Tiny Furniture, which is a vaguely fictionalized account of Lena Dunham's own post-graduate malaise. The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead writes, "Laurie Simmons recently figured out that Tiny Furniture is a love letter to her. Who else, Simmons told Dunham, would want to spend so much time looking at her mother's enormous face?" Even among a generation whose closeness to their parents is unrivaled, Dunham's bond to her mother and father is extraordinary:

Dunham has no desire to move out of her parents' apartment, and they do not want her to go. She doesn't have a curfew, though she is required to text her father if she plans to stay out all night . . . Dunham's closeness to her parents is remarkable even to those who know her well. "In high school she was almost never able to hang out," Jemima Kirke says. "She would say, 'I need to go and hang with my parents because we are all watching the L Word tonight.'"

The argument about twentysomethings who are this tight with Mom and Dad is that they are unable to achieve any sort of success in the adult world because they are so coddled. But here's another theory — perhaps Dunham's closeness with her parents is precisely what has allowed her to achieve so much, so soon (she is also developing a series for HBO under the watchful eye of Judd Apatow). The crippling doubt that a lot of men and women in their early 20s feel may be alleviated by the parental support. The self-aware Dunham jokes about her stunning confidence. She tells Mead that instead of "Untitled Lena Dunham project," a friend says her HBO show should be referred to as "Entitled Lena Dunham project."

Find out more, after the jump.

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Looks like someone wants a book deal! Back in May, married blogger Jen Byck decided to live the life of a 1950s housewife for two weeks and blog about the experience (despite the fact that blogging didn't exist in the '50s). She culled together a list of goals from vintage magazines and household guides and came up with some basic ambitions like: "Create a comfortable, clean, and beautiful home" and "Show pride in being a Mrs. by putting a concerted effort into my appearance." Byck measured the results in physical stats (weight, blood pressure) as well as the experiment's mental toll on her marriage, which seemed to be overwhelmingly positive. Her conclusions? Apparently being a 1950s housewife will make you gain a few, but your marriage will be "happier, more relaxed, and more connected now than before." OK, then. No long-suffering housewife malaise. Though I suspect "pretending" for two weeks probably makes days of cleaning and cooking easier than when it's the immutable reality of your life. (Looking at you, Betty Draper.)

This week, Byck is at it again, this time experimenting with playing a "husband-obsessed" 1950s housewife. Byck will cook all her husband's favorite meals, leave him alone if he needs alone time, avoid nagging, and provide constant encouragement (but, God forbid, not advice). Her first post is up today. Patrick, the husband, seems unimpressed with a mighty number of vegetables.

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Earlier this week, Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion released the results of a new nationally representative survey of American sexual behavior. The study covered everything from condom use to the increased popularity of anal sex, as Slate's William Saletan has extolled.

What, exactly, is going on? Why are so many women experiencing pain during sex? We don't know. That's both the answer to the question, and the root of the problem. American attitudes about sex keep us from sharing and learning crucial information with each other, and they stymie scientific attempts to learn more about why sex is painful for so many women. We, the fine, sex-having people of America, don't know how to speak openly about our sex lives and, as a result, scientists don't have the resources or the knowledge to help us improve them.

Dr. Debby Herbenick, Associate Director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion and one of the study's co-authors, believes that "the way women and men are talked to about sex when they're growing up is very different." Women, she said, are often told to expect that sex will be painful, and "have this sense that sex is supposed to hurt. So when they have sex and it hurts, they're not surprised and they don't talk to a doctor and they don't talk to a partner and they don't say it to their friends." There is also probably pressure to stick to the cultural consensus that sex is always pleasurable.

A silver lining: Few women reported being in a great deal of pain. But the survey didn't go into much detail — it didn't explore the location, duration, or nature of the pain, nor did it ask if the pain was a one-time occurrence or a chronic problem. So there's a lot more to learn about this.

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News broke this week that police in Lehi, Utah are looking into prosecuting the Brown family, stars of TLC's new reality show Sister Wives, for being bigamists. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah code "defines bigamy through cohabitation, not just through legal marriage contracts." As Sister Wives portrays the happily polygamist relationship of the aggressively cheerful Kody Brown and his wives Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn, it's not surprising that local cops don't appreciate the show—it not only celebrates an illegal relationship taking place in their town, it's also been receiving positive publicity from national publications.

And the show does show this polygamist family in a pretty glowing—and mesmerizing—way. Sister Wives is edited to make a four-wife household seem not only normal and relatable, but the wives also use the language of choice to make clear that their lifestyle is a conscious, wise decision—they're not being coerced into sharing one man.

In terms of how they normalize their unusual family structure, anyone who has watched other reality shows about large families (Kate Plus 8; 19 and Counting) will recognize the domestic scenes in Sister Wives: Watch them cook breakfast—just like you do, but supersized, with obligatory shots of enormous condiment containers! Watch them do yard work as a merry, laughing team! Listen to them talk about the nitty-gritty details of their family arrangement in a way that is familiar and appealing!

On this last point, I was especially struck by Janelle's narrative.

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Last year, I lived and reported from Yemen and grew to loathe the niqab (the face veil) on the grounds that it's an oppressive and anti-feminist tool to keep women both fearful and subservient. In speaking with both educated and illiterate Yemeni women, as well as Muslim women's rights activists, I learned that many of them also loathe the niqab for all the same reasons. (And also because the Quran does not say women must have their faces covered. And also because it's hot and itchy.)

That said, all of those women, me included, think the "burqa ban," which passed the French legislature Tuesday — on the rationale that covering one’s face is an affront to France’s “republican values” and, according to President Nicolas Sarkozy, “a sign of enslavement and debasement” — is a step in the wrong direction. For one, it will serve only to alienate and further marginalize the small group of conservative Muslim women who, perhaps more than any other group in France, would benefit enormously from access to schools, public spaces, and interactions with women outside their religious circle.

Certainly, the niqab is both a side effect and a symbol of the resurgence of ultra-conservative Islam, but it is not the cause of that resurgence. The burqa ban not only doesn’t address the problem of hateful, radical Islamic terrorism; it debases Western society by playing by those hateful, radical terrorists’ world view, which pivots on the idea that there is no room for religious tolerance. Are we really going to play that game, too, by alienating Muslims on the grounds that their outfits are an affront to our “republican” society’s world view? Isn’t the entire point of a republican society to be more tolerant than our totalitarian foes?

I’m no fan of the burqa or the niqab, but legislating intolerance in the name of freedom is illogical and wrong.

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Though NBC comedy darlings Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did not take home awards this year, that doesn't mean that the Emmys weren't rewarding an impressive group of women who portrayed a bunch of smart, nuanced characters. Archie Panjabi, a relatively unknown Brit, took home a best supporting actress in a drama Emmy for her work on The Good Wife, where she plays a sharp, sexually ambiguous private investigator. (Our own Nina Rastogi has already given props to Panjabi's blunt charms.) This is an unexpected win, as Panjabi was up against the one-two punch of Mad Men's Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss.

On the comedy side, the fantastic Edie Falco won for Nurse Jackie, where she plays the titular, drug-addled ER nurse. Falco was a critical darling from her days playing Carmela Soprano, and the hosannas haven't stopped: One critic calls her performance as Jackie "beautifully spare and completely free of all visible signs of vanity." Jackie is a deeply flawed heroine, and it's wonderful to see such a character rewarded. Since the Emmys have such a good track record for honoring complicated women, maybe next year my favorite sour girl on TV—Parks and Recreation April (Aubrey Plaza)—will be feted for her deadpan hilariousness.

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Michelle Obama is being sent out to campaign for select Democratic candidates in the fall. She won’t say anything negative, only highlight her husband’s successes. Still, I’m happy to see her out there in the mix. The flap over her recent vacation to Spain, on her husband’s birthday, seemed trivial. We no longer need a first lady who stands beaming at her husband at every possible opportunity and can bake him a chocolate cake. And her rising or falling popularity is not all that interesting either. The public is fickle and bases its judgments of a first lady on very little.

But what I’ve lately started to feel is some anxiety that Michelle Obama will waste this perfect opportunity. Here is a smart, successful woman, the first African-American first lady. And what she’s known for most is her fashion sense. She does fewer appearances than most first ladies, travels less, and even on her pet issue—childhood obesity—spends relatively little time. And her media appearances tend to be in old-fashioned lady journals and on daytime talk shows. Maybe she felt burned by the campaign and so has kept a low profile. But two years later, maybe it’s time to take a risk or two.

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Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever, who has a high tolerance for low culture, has had it with the Real Housewives. In his interesting essay this Sunday previewing The Real Housewives of D.C., Stuever puts his finger on exactly how the series has gone south. Once, he argues, Bravo was on “a mission to develop morality plays that covertly teach people (women and men, young and old) how not to behave.” The network was conspiring with us to recreate a universal code of conduct, by showing us what was outside the bounds of normal. We all understood that the ladies of Orange County are the anti-models of American parenting. We were in the pews and they were the point of the sermon.

Now we seem to be missing the point. The Housewives have become deeply ingrained in our culture, so we accept them. We buy their clothes and perfume; we read their books. Their behavior does not even seem so outlandish anymore, so we join along with them.

"The overall effect, he writes, "is one of mutual contempt — the Housewives hate one another, and the women who watch decide which woman they hate the most and which woman they hate the least. Men who like to watch women fight tune in, too, and the circle is thus complete: "The Real Housewives imparts a sinking feeling that it's made by and for people who can't stand women."

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Photo courtesy of Bravo