The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma to the brain. But still, the game encourages brain trauma. And people cheer.

I can understand if it’s like smoking. You’re addicted, you can’t stop. But what about bringing your kids to the game? What about all the people who make the Superbowl a family TV event? Kids who play football in high school are more likely to die from that than drunk driving or guns. And parents encourage their kids to play this sport?

The culture of football amazes to me — the incredible level of denial. So what I'm thinking is that people are delusional. And they know it, but they keep going. They cultivate delusion.

That's what I think of when I hear about the HBO documentary about Temple Grandin. She's a total freak. This is why she’s interesting. Because people love an underdog—people love seeing weirdness succeed because most people feel weird and they worry it’s going to hold them back.

The problem is that a little weird is normal, but Temple is weird in a way that makes her a statistical improbability. Unlike Temple, most people with Asperger Syndrome are very smart but cannot hold down a job. Most Asperger people are living at the edge of poverty. They divorce at very high rates, and they are at high risk for depression and suicide.

Journalists who interact with Temple say that, on a personal level, she is absolutely impossible to deal with on a regular basis. This is not surprising. (Being difficult is what Asperger’s is about, in a large way. Everyone tries to isolate themselves from things that drive them crazy. Someone with Asperger Syndrome just has a much longer list with a much lower threshold in the you-are-driving-me-crazy department.) So it's lucky that she is an absolute genius in a field that has very little competition from people with good social skills. Most people with Asperger’s, even if they are geniuses at, say, engineering (which is very common) get in trouble mid-career for lack of social skills.

I hate the glorification of abnormal. People who are abnormal have an enormous struggle to find a place in the world. It’s not fun or glamorous. The celebration of abnormal is a delusional luxury of the relatively normal population.

More about the world of delusion: Time magazine reports that 78% women feel that media does not accurately represent women with kids.

Probably the most accurate representation of women is in the blogosphere. There is no filter here, no need to appeal to both Peoria and Pasadena all at once. But even the whole of the blogosphere does not represent the female experience particularly accurately.

Here’s how I know: I compare the traffic for dooce.com and thepioneerwoman.com.

The Pioneer Woman is largely housewife porn. The men are hot and rugged, just like in a romance novel. The author, Ree Drummond, is running an operation similar to Rachel Ray or Martha Stewart, but she markets herself as a stay-at-home mom, and a homeschooler at that. The whole thing strikes me as totally preposterous. It’s as impossible as Friends, where everyone had a pricey NYC apartment, and not-high-paying job. But regardless, The Pioneer Woman’s traffic is absolutely through the roof, proving the appeal of preposterous escapism.

Dooce, on the other hand, is more gritty, and has about half the traffic of Pioneer Woman. On Dooce, Heather Armstrong blogs about depression, her kids being difficult, and her parents being Mormon. I love Heather Armstrong. But she’s the gold standard for writing a blog about your life and keeping a marriage together, and she is not, actually, writing about the female experience for married women.

Here is the female experience for married women (from a survey from PayPal):

37% of arguments are about money

24% are about household chores

15% are about in-laws

13% are about sex

Heather does not write about any of these arguments, except, maybe, chores. So who is writing about these fights? Where is the blogger explaining how she got through these fights?

I think the truth is that women don’t want to see themselves reflected back to them. Family life is messy right now. No one would aspire to have the life the baby boomer women had; people won’t even use the word feminist any more. And Generation X women, after creating the first fertility crisis in history by putting off kids for work, realized that they’d rather be home with kids than work full-time. So Gen X doesn’t want to look in the mirror. It’s too painful.  Gen Y looks ahead and has no role model that looks appealing.

At first I was going to tell you how everyone who watches football and Temple Grandin are delusional. But I guess I am, too, because I read Pioneer Woman and Dooce all the time. And I like it.

But mindfulness goes a long way. For example,  if you carry a book on your head every day for ten minutes, you will actually have more self-discipline to do the stuff in your life that matters more than a book on your head. It might seem like just a funny example, but don’t underestimate how hard it is to get yourself to keep a book on your head for ten minutes each day.

I think this works with facing reality, too. Maybe if we do it daily, in some aspect of our life, we get the temerity to implement that discipline in other parts of life as well. But we have to start somewhere in order to battle the magnetism of delusion.

It's easy to call out other peoples' delusions. It matters much more to call out our own.

Comment on: Check-up for self-delusion

But today I’m trying something new. I’m doing a post that is useless to you. Here are four ideas I was just about to toss out as incurably useless, but instead, I bring them to you:

1. Law firms are making concessions for women.
One of the top law firms in the world, Allen Overy, just announced they are letting people become part-time partners. This would be news if no one had tried it before. But many firms that have already done this in response to the extreme brain drain in the legal profession due to women leaving law firms because they are so inflexible.

So now there is the idea that there can be a part-time partner. Fortunately, like most things in workplace reform, Gen X-ers have already been the guinea pigs. My friends, in fact, have tried this. And it turns out that if you give a lawyer a part-time job, she ends up working 50 hours a week instead of 80, and gets part-time credit, which isn’t exactly encouraging.

2. People live together instead of getting married.
This is not news you can use because you already know it. This is what I said to Hannah Seligson, who asked me to write about her new book, A Little Bit Married: How to Know When it's Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door.

I like Hannah. She wrote a great piece for the Daily Beast, about the orgasm gap between men and women. I also like Hannah because when I told her that I thought her book was not news, she exhibited a charming relentlessness about publicizing her book, and she told me:

- Co-habitation is a bigger step in the marriage direction for women than men.

- Women are ready to get married before men, even when they're already living together.

This mostly seems like things have not changed. In fact, the most surprising thing about this news is that women are earning more than men, and men have seen a generation of women with fertility nightmares from putting off having children in favor of building their career,  yet still, nothing changes in the marriage equation.

So I don’t know about this book. I’m not sure how useful it is. And I think a book on the orgasm gap would have been more useful, but maybe Hanna's got a few orgasm pages tucked into this book…

3. Texting while driving is bad.
Already 19 states prohibit texting while driving, so that’s gotta make you think twice about doing it in the other 31. Also, it’s clear that even if you’re great with just one-finger on the keyboard, texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk.

I would never drive drunk. But I text in car all the time. I tell myself not to, and then I do just one more quick one.

Which is why this falls into the category of news you cannot use: Texting while driving requires the same rules for oneself that driving drunk require. We each self-police, and it’s an issue of self-respect, but also, a social contract with the other people on the road that we will not endanger each other’s lives.

You decide where you are and then no amount of scaring you changes you. So, I read the data, and then I texted that very day. I know I’m a terrible person. But I’m not ready to make the change.

4. Pig sex is on the demise.
The farmer went to grad school for pig genetics, and he has a lot of pigs on his farm. The farmer buys boy pigs to impregnate the girl pigs. But the last batch of boys he bought did not know how to have sex. They would mount the girl pigs, but their penis didn’t go in where it was supposed to. The farmer tells me that so much of pig reproduction is by artificial insemination now that farmers aren’t breeding for pigs who know how to have sex. This is amazing to me. Though I cannot think of how to use the knowledge in any work except farm work.

Okay. So we’re at the end of my post. I thought it would be fun to write about stuff I wish was useful but it is not. I thought it would be fun to break the rule that I have to be useful. But you know what? It wasn’t fun.

My blog is about me doing something nice for you, and then, in turn, you doing something nice for me, by talking about what I want to talk about. But if I am not trying to be useful to you in some way, then I’m not really in a relationship with you. I'm just writing like it's my diary.

There is something really fulfilling about being useful. So here's my tip: You should be useful to readers each time you post. It feels better. For everyone.

Comment on: Workplace news you cannot use

I don't usually post clips of myself when I go on TV. But I'm posting this one, where I talk about trying to get an abortion in Wisconsin and end up with a miscarriage at work instead. It was a difficult interview, which is why I like it. And, remarkably, I have good hair without trying, which is another reason I like watching the clip.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. Here's my twitter that caused uproar. And here's my post about it.  To give you an idea of the recent coverage, here's the link that is, right now, on the front page of AOL, and here's a link to an article by Lara Salahi at ABC News — I really like that one.

If you are new to my blog, and you've gotten this far, maybe you'll like staying here for a while. Here's a good page to begin on: About this blog.

I know I said that that this week is Asperger's at work week on my blog. Maybe me talking about my miscarriage to newscasters is part of this series. I'm not sure. But I've been learning a lot about women from the comments about the miscarriage twitter — on my blog and on other sites. So I'm sure that other people are learning a lot about the lives of women — at work and at home. And that has to be good.

Comment on: My miscarriage — on CNN, ABC and AOL

"I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin."

Why the uproar over this twitter?

Not only have bloggers written whole posts about the disgustingness of it, but 70 people unfollowed me, and people actually came to my blog and wrote complaints about the twitter on random, unrelated posts.

So, to all of you who think the twitter was outrageous, think about this:

Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working. Most miscarriages run their course over weeks. Even if you are someone who wanted the baby and are devastated by the loss, you’re not going to sit in bed for weeks. You are going to pick up your life and get back to it, which includes going back to work.

This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day. That we don’t acknowledge this is absurd. That it is such a common occurrence and no one thinks it’s okay to talk about is terrible for women.

Throughout history, the way women have gained control of the female experience is to talk about what is happening, and what it's like. We see that women's lives are more enjoyable, more full, and women are more able to summon resilience when women talk openly about their lives.

To all of you who said a miscarriage is gross: Are you unaware that the same blood you expel from a miscarriage is what you expel during menstruation? Are you aware that many people are having sex during menstruation and getting it on the sheets? Are you aware that many women actually like period sex? Wait. Here is a link I love, at askmen.com, telling men that women like it so much that men need to be aware of this preference.

To all of you who are aghast that I let myself get pregnant: having sex is playing with odds. There are no 100% sure methods of birth control. I am 42 years old. The likelihood of someone my age getting pregnant even with fertility treatment is less than 5%. The likelihood that a pregnancy in someone my age ends in a miscarriage is almost 75%. This means that even if I had done nothing for birth control it would have been as effective as a 25-year-old using a condom. So everyone who is complaining that I’m an idiot for getting pregnant should go buy a calculator.

To all of you who said I should not be happy about having a miscarriage: You are the ones short on empathy. Any woman who is pregnant but wishes she weren’t would of course be grateful when she has a miscarriage. Yes, there are many women who want the baby and have a miscarriage. I was one of them. I cried for days. I get it.

But if you have ever had an abortion, which I have, you would know that a miscarriage is preferable to an abortion. Even the Pope would agree with that.

And what is up with the fact that just one, single person commented about how Wisconsin has a three-week waiting period for abortions? It is absolutely outrageous how difficult it was going to be for me to get an abortion, and it’s outrageous that no one is outraged.

Wisconsin is one of twelve states that have 24-hour waiting periods. This puts a huge burden on an overworked system. These are also the states where there are few ways to get an abortion. For example, in Wisconsin, the only place to get abortion that is covered by insurance is at a Planned Parenthood clinic. There are 3 of them in all of Wisconsin. In Chicago, you can get an abortion at Planned Parenthood with less than 24 hours notice. In Wisconsin, there is a week and a half wait to get the first meeting and a week and half wait to get the abortion.

A digression: I’m linking to Planned Parenthood so everyone can make a donation. This organization is enabling women to have the right to abortion. Planned Parenthood seems to be the only effective, community-level force against states that are attempting to legislate the choice into oblivion.

To all of you who think this has nothing to do with work:

I think what really upsets people is the topic. We are not used to talking about the female experience, and especially not in the context of work. But so what? We can start now. The female experience is part of work. What we talk about when we talk about work defines how we integrate work into our lives. If work is going to support our lives, then we need to talk about how our lives interact with work. We need to be honest about the interaction if we hope to be honest about our work.

Comment on: You can't manage your work life if you can't talk about it

Email number one: The obnoxious reference check

[Name redacted] is applying for a position at our company and listed you as a reference. I was hoping that you could complete the brief questionnaire attached to this email to provide your feedback. Thank you in advance for your help, and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This email is from InvestorGuide.com. Let me tell you something: That questionnaire was not brief. It was about ten essay questions and then insanely inapplicable multiple choice questions.

This company is ridiculous for sending an onerous questionnaire to references. For one thing, it puts me in a bad spot because I loved working with the guy who gave my name as a reference, so I want to give him a good report, so I have no choice but to fill out the BS questions and try to have a good attitude.

The other reason the company should not send a form like this is they look incompetent. Not just for destroying the relationships potential new hires have with their references, but also for not being able to make hiring decisions without asking a third-party if the candidate is professional. Seriously. Open your eyes in the interview, guys.

Email number two: The annoying request from mainstream media

I write for BusinessWeek Magazine and I am putting together a special report for Businessweek.com called “Managing Gen Y”. We are inviting a few experts such as yourself to contribute articles. I thought you might have some great thoughts on some aspect of managing gen y and I wanted to see whether you would be interested in contributing a column? We would need the piece in about 3 weeks. What do you think?

I know, you’re thinking, what’s the problem here? Who doesn’t want to write for BusinessWeek. And, in fact, I did. (Here’s the link.) But here’s the problem: BusinessWeek doesn’t pay me. That’s problem number one. I wrote basically the same thing for Time magazine (here’s the link), and they paid me. Which makes sense. Because I’m a professional writer. I mean, I have a book on the topic. I have a history of working in journalism. That counts, right?

Okay. So they tell me they are not paying me, but I will get a lot of traffic. Then they tell me how many zillions of page views Businessweek.com gets a month. But I wrote for Yahoo for a long time. So I know the page view game. These big sites get tons of traffic but the traffic is spread out over tons of pages. Zillions or something. So, the truth is that my most current post gets more traffic than 90% of the pages on Yahoo or Business Week.

So don’t tell me I’m writing for you for free in exchange for traffic. Just because I’m a blogger doesn’t mean I’m stupid. In fact, it means I have a lot of metrics at my disposal. (Another crazy thing: You never find out page views for your own article when you write for a huge site in mainstream media.) The week my Business Week article came out, here is a list of blogs that sent me more than twice as much traffic as Business Week without me having to write anything for them:

Lifehacker.com

Getrichslowly.org

Barstoolsports.com (not safe for work)

I’m not going to go on and on about Business Week because first of all they gave me the best review of my blog ever: A Business Week writer called my writing “poetic.” I love that. And when I complained about all this stuff, they were nice. I mean, they listened to me. That counts for something. And I really need Business Week to write favorably about my company when it’s time for my big publicity moment. So. Um. I love Business Week so much.

Email number three: Salary gap whiners

[This is for every single person in the whole world who bitches to me that there is a gender gap in the salary department. All of you. Your emails are so annoying that I’m not going to print one. ]

The reason the emails are annoying is that I’ve spent the last five years interviewing the people who do the salary discrepancy research, and digging into the details, and I report on it constantly, and the people who tell me there is a salary gap do not read this stuff.

First: Women who are in their 20s earn more than men in major cities. So this means that any data you show me about salary gap is focusing on older women. They had less opportunities, they are gonna retire, and the world has already revolved around the baby boomers. I’m done talking about salary gap like baby boomers are the only demographic that matters.

Second: Feminism in the workplace is over (link one, link two). So everyone should just shut up about dividing the workplace into men and women. Men are helping women all the time. Women love working with men. And look! Workplace spouses are the only intense flirting outlet that Cosmo readers voted was within relationship bounds.

Even if there were a salary gap, which there isn’t, women do not help themselves by bitching about it. If you work for a company that pays women less than men, just leave! Who controls you? You do.

Third: The gap is a result of women making decisions that men don’t make. I have written about this so many times because the research pops up constantly. Here’s another piece. From Cornell University (via Self magazine) A woman whose spouse works 60 hours a week is 52 percent more likely to quit her job than a man whose wife does the same.

Women choose different paths than men. Which means that women who have the same education and same skills set earn less than men because most women want different things than most men do. And this is okay. Really.

Comment on: Hatemail: Email I get that I hate

The first one was when I was twenty-seven. I was playing professional beach volleyball. I was playing volleyball eight hours a day and I spent two hours a day at the gym. I noticed that I was getting tired more easily, but I thought it meant I needed to train harder.

Then one weekend, a doctor friend on a visit saw me drop a plate one day, and a vase the next. I told her my hands just gave out because they were so tired.

She said I was anemic. Then she said, “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I have a regular period.”

It turns out, though, that you can have a regular period and still be pregnant.

And I was. Fourteen weeks.

My friend said, “Schedule the abortion now. You’re already late for it.”

I didn’t do anything. I was in shock. My boyfriend was in shock. Neither of us had ever had a pregnancy. I couldn’t believe the whole process actually worked, to be honest.

I told my mom I was pregnant. She said, “Get an abortion.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t really thinking I had any choices. I didn’t have a job that could support a child. And I wasn’t sure if I was planning to marry my boyfriend, although we were living together. I knew that I had big ideas for my life and I hadn’t figured things out yet.

My mom got militant. “You’ll destroy your career possibilities.”

She riffed on this theme for a week, calling me every night. Her passion is understandable. My mom took a job when I was young because she hated being home with kids. She endured interview questions like, “Does your husband want you away from home working?” She was one of the first women to become an executive at her Fortune 500 company. She blazed trails so I could have career goals that required an abortion to preserve.

Here’s what else happened: Other women called. It turned out that many, many women I knew had had an abortion. This is not something women talk about. I mean, I had no idea how ubiquitous the procedure was, at least in my big-city, liberal, Jewish world.

Each of those women told me that I should get an abortion so that I could keep my options open. “You’re a smart girl. You can do anything with your life right now. Don’t ruin it.”

My boyfriend was laying low. He was no slouch when it came to pro-choice politics and he knew it was, ultimately, my decision.

But the minute I said I would get an abortion, he was driving me to Planned Parenthood.

You had to go once to set up the appointment, and then go back.

When I went back, I had a panic attack. I was on the table, in a hospital gown, screaming.

The nurse asked me if I was a religious Christian.

The boyfriend asked me if I was aware that my abortion would be basically illegal in seven more days.

I couldn’t stop screaming. I was too scared. I felt absolutely sick that I was going to kill a baby. And, now that I know more about being a mother, I understand that hormones had already kicked in to make me want to keep the baby. We left. No abortion.

My boyfriend started panicking by suddenly staying really late at work and going out with friends a lot. I stopped playing volleyball because I got tired so quickly.

People kept calling me: They said, “Think about how you’ll support the child. Think about what you’ll do if your boyfriend leaves you. You’re all alone in LA with no family. How will you take care of yourself?”

People gave me advice: Get a job. Once you have established yourself in a career, you’ll feel much better about having kids. Figure out where you fit in the world. Get a job, then get married, and then have kids.

I scheduled another abortion. But it was past the time when Planned Parenthood will do an abortion. Now it was a very expensive one at a clinic that seemed to cater to women coming from Christian countries in South America. I knew that if I did not go through with it this time, no one would do the abortion. I was too far along.

So I did it.

I went to sleep with a baby and woke up without one. Groggy. Unsure about everything. Everything in the whole world.

People think abortion is such an easy choice–they say, “Don’t use abortion as birth control.” Any woman who has had one will tell you how that is such crazy talk. Because an abortion is terrible. You never stop thinking about the baby you killed. You never stop thinking about the guy you were with when you killed the baby you made with him. You never stop wondering.

So the second time I got pregnant, I thought of killing myself. My career was soaring. I was 30 and I felt like I had everything going for me – great job, great boyfriend, and finally, for the first time ever, I had enough money to support myself. I hated that I put myself in the position of either losing all that or killing a baby.

I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant. I knew what they’d say.

So I completely checked out emotionally. I scheduled the abortion like I was on autopilot. I told my boyfriend at the last minute and told him not to come with me.

He said forget it. He’s coming with me.

I remember staring at the wall. Telling myself to stop thinking of anything.

The doctor asked me, “Do you understand what’s going to happen?”

I said yes. That’s all I remember.

I got two abortions to preserve my career. To keep my options open. To keep my aspirations within reach.

I bought into the idea that kids undermine your ability to build an amazing career.

And here I am, with the amazing career.

But also, here I am with two kids. So I know a bit about having kids and a career. And I want to tell you something: You don’t need to get an abortion to have a big career. Women who want big careers want them because something deep inside you drives you to change the world, lead a revolution, break new barriers.

It doesn’t matter whether you have kids now or later, because they will always make your career more difficult. There is no time in your life when you are so stable in your work that kids won’t create an earthquake underneath that confidence.

I think about the men I was with when I had the abortions. They were not bad men. One is my ex-husband. So much of life is a gamble, and I think I might have had as good a chance of staying together with the first guy as I did with my ex-husband. And I am not sure that my life would have turned out worse if I had had kids early. I am not sure it would have turned out better. I’m not even sure it would have been that different.

You never know, not really. There is little certainty. But there are some certain truths: It’s very hard to have an abortion. And, there is not a perfect time to have kids.

And I wonder, are there other women out there who had abortions in the name of their career and their potential? What do those women think now?

Comment on: What's the connection between abortion and careers?

Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist favorites, then are there any gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes. Here are three:

1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they’re part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.

VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it’s incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don’t pay women more. Here’s the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he’s doing a good job at parenting, but not the woman.

This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else they wouldn’t leave and no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “This is good enough” and then the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.

How this translates to the VC world is that you need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men. Other industries have done it in order to benefit from women's brains. The VC world should follow suit.

2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better at work: they earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which, of course, inspires confidence.

So we need to pay attention to the orgasm gap, which Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: "Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there's one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn: The orgasm gap."

Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, "The orgasm gap is an inequity that's as serious as the pay gap, and it's producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry."

Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed—and who's expending it. England's study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts—from casual hookups to serious relationships—at significantly higher rates than men do. (Hat tip: Sepideh)

And if you’re wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd—Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.

3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. So we should all start learning to have some levity early on, and this is the damage of the fun gap.

You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it okay for men to get drunk in order to have an easier time hooking up, but it’s not okay for women? This is such a serious problem that New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.

It’s clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy the more we get of what we enjoy.

It starts in kindergarten, where the girls sit in their chairs and pay attention in class, and they socialize in the lunchroom. The boys, on the other hand, have spent the first five years of their lives turning everything into a gun or sword and cannot be contained in a classroom atmosphere.

Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two young boys, I have never heard any parent disagree with these generalizations, (and it's official that boys are six months behind girls developmentally by kindergarten). I did not buy guns for my sons. I didn’t have to. They can use anything. And I remember as a fourth grader thinking, (from the back of the classroom, where all the strong performing girls sit because they don’t need help from the teacher) “Wow, the boys sure are doing poorly in school.”

The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school is not what makes kids successful at work. What actually prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.

Comment on: New gender gaps for the new millennium

1. Lie if you are a messy person.
People make a wide range of judgments based on your office, whether you like it or not. For example, a plant makes you look stable, and a candy dish makes you look like an extrovert, according to Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at University of Texas and the owner of the hottest head shot I have ever linked to on a university web site.

If you have a messy desk, people think you’re incompetent. They think you are overwhelmed by your workload, that you are not conscientious, and that you are not thinking clearly. It doesn’t really matter if you really are those things, since you are promoted and fired based on peoples’ perceptions of you. You cannot control for what people base their perceptions on, but you can make changes in your life to change how people perceive you. So do that.

But before you say messiness should be acceptable, consider this report in the Economist, that shows people are nicer, and better versions of themselves, in an environment that is neat and clean.

This means you should consider making your office clean even if you think cleanliness is BS. And you can just pretend to be clean by making your office neat but leaving your computer desktop a mess (there is no research that says that people judge you by that.) And you can have your house be a mess. (Although Gosling has research to suggest that this will affect your dating life.)

If you want to control peoples’ perceptions by managing the stuff in your office, read Gosling’s book: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

Before you argue with me about if you should have a messy office, please read this: I have already received many emails from people defending their messiness. And all the emails are lame. The research is clear. People don’t want to work with people who have messy desks. Stop defending stupidity. Get a life.

2. Lie if you are pregnant.
It’s illegal for someone at work to ask if you are pregnant. Flat out illegal. So give a dishonest answer. Because you are cornered. You can’t refuse to answer by saying, “That’s an illegal question.” Because usually this question is in an interview, and usually they are asking because they won’t hire a pregnant you, and usually if you tell someone in an interview that their question is illegal, they will not hire you. So telling them it’s an illegal question is pointless.

(Don’t tell me you want to change the world by telling them it’s illegal. Women do not change the world by doing things in interviews that don’t get them hired. Women change the world by gaining power to make the rules themselves.)

Many working women ask if they should tell their employer they are pregnant. They usually mention how good a manager has been, or how much the woman likes her company. Listen: telling people you’re pregnant does not help you. Ever. And there is no law that says you have to tell. And there are many laws, that are never enforced, that say that an employer cannot give you crap projects because they know you’re going on maternity leave and they think you’re never coming back.

Do you know why those laws are in place? Because employers do it all the time.

It makes sense. Women have no idea what they will want to do after the baby comes. We all know that. So why do we make women announce before hand what they are doing? We all know it’s crap. But since we’re all playing the game, say you’re coming back. Full time. Really fast.

And tell them that only when you absolutely can’t hide the bump any longer. Because however much time that is will be enough for your employer to decide how to cope with you taking maternity leave. And whatever you do, make sure you get that paid leave. It’s your legal right (when you have it – few women in the US actually have it). Do not feel guilty that you might not come back. Who cares?

If you are thinking of revealing a pregnancy early, remember this: When a guy is dealing with alcoholism, or a divorce, or a kid getting kicked out of school, he does not announce it to the company because it might affect his ability to work. So why do women feel the need to announce a pregnancy before they have to?

3. Lie if you are job hunting.
Who isn’t thinking about what they want to do next? Only losers who have no vision for their lives. Everyone has their eyes open because everyone knows that no job is permanent. People in their 20s start looking for their next job on day three of a new job. And we know that the most desirable employees, even at the executive level, are those who are employed. Which means that the top tier of employees are all job hunting while they have a job.

If you go on an interview, go at lunch, or take the day off. If you do a phone interview, do it at night, or at a time you can go off-site. The interviewer understands this. You cannot do an interview from your desk. This is normal behavior.

Your boss would give you very little notice if you were getting laid off. You can do the same for your boss. And anyway, what is your boss going to do with information that you are looking for another job but do not yet have an offer? Nothing. There is nothing to do except stop giving you interesting work. Or fire you. Both bad for you.

So instead, be a good employee and do good work while you job hunt. Besides, it’s very hard to get a good, new job if you are not doing good work in your current job.

So why bother telling anyone? It’s assumed – by any wise manager – that you’re always looking. It’s just like when you’re not engaged. You’re not engaged because at least one of you is still looking. You don’t tell the person every day. But we all know.

Comment on: Three times you should lie at work

So, in a moment of innocent desperation, I wrote on Twitter: “No school today and the nanny's on vacation. A whole day with the kids gets so boring: all intergalactic battles and no intellectual banter.”

I almost didn’t post that Twitter because it’s so banal.

But, in just seconds, because that’s how Twitter works, there was a firestorm of men telling me that I’m a bad mom. Really. Yes.

Here’s one from David Dellifield:
“@penelopetrunk sorry your kids are a burden, send them to OH, we'll enjoy them for who they are”

I couldn’t believe it. It’s one thing to be a total asshole to me on, say, Yahoo Finance, where someone used to spend a good portion of each day making sure that the C word did not appear in the comments for either Suze Orman’s column or mine. (The best days were when the C word appeared in a way that linked us. Really, those were some creative commenters on Yahoo Finance.) The difference between Twitter and Yahoo is that Twitter is intimate, and real-time, and pointed directly at me, not at the editorial board of Yahoo.

Like many people who are total assholes online, David’s contact info was easy to find. I called him at work, because, big surprise, he is not a stay-at-home dad talking about how everyone should love parenting. He is a dad who is not home all day talking about how everyone should love being home all day with their kids.
There was no answer at his work. But I noted the number so I could ruin his life there if I ever felt like he needed to be taught a lesson.

Then I called David Dellifield’s house. I thought maybe his wife would answer and I could ask her if she knows that her husband is emailing other women to encourage them to send more kids to his wife to take care of. All day.

There was no answer. Maybe by then he had alerted his wife that he is being pursued by a psycho who maybe will kill her kids or maybe will kill him. Maybe they will never answer their phone again.

So I wrote to David – a “direct message” in Twitter terminology: “I’m surprised by what you wrote. Are you intentionally being mean to me in a public forum?”

He wrote back: “no, but it seemed you were complaining about your children on an open forum, kids have faults, lets love for who they are”

So here’s the problem: Parents need to be able to say that parenting is not fun. The day-in and day-out of parenting is very, very difficult. This is not even news. There is a reason for the reams of research showing that having kids does not make people happier.

Daniel Gilbert, psychologist at Harvard, writes in Time magazine that we trick ourselves into thinking kids make us happy.

Nattavudh Powdthavee, an economist at the University of York, published research in The Psychologist, that concludes, "Social scientists have found almost zero association between having children and happiness."

Scott Stanley, a psychologist at University of Denver, reveals research that shows that marriages are much happier before the couple has children.

So first of all, anyone who says that parenting makes them happy is probably lying. Just statistically speaking. But also, we know the people who are well positioned to like parenting. There are sixteen personality types, and only a handful are perfectly tuned for staying home with kids.

People can have competing feelings. For example, I love my job but I hate getting up and going to work every day. Or, I love this blog but I often have to force myself to sit down and write a post.

Competing feelings happen to healthy people everywhere. St. Augustine called this dualism; mommy bloggers call it reality.

It’s a big deal that women are writing publicly, in real time, about how difficult it is to stay home with kids. Look, I get emails every day from women who left the workforce for kids and feel lost. Here’s the blog of a woman who wrote to me two days ago: The Reluctantly Frustrated Stay-at-Home Mom.

These women feel lost because you can love your kids and still be bored. Kids are not nonstop fun. Talking with young children is stultifying. Yes, they are funny. But in general, you have to pay attention to them every second, even though they are not really doing something every second.

And as soon as your mind wanders too far, something bad happens. For example, I took the kids on a hike yesterday, taking a coat for myself but not for them. Because I checked out. Because I wanted to think about things that are more interesting than coats. This is normal behavior. I mean, intellectuals need intellectual stimulation, and that’s not something kids give.

This does not mean I don’t love my kids. Only an asshole would suggest that because I don’t want to stay home with them all day, I must not love them.

And all you people who say you’d love to stay home all day with your kids if you could, you are completely full of shit.

I know because I was living at the poverty line in NYC while I stayed home with my kids. That’s how important it was to me to stay home. I wanted to be with them for every moment, be a great mom, all that. So I did it no matter what – no financial situation could have stopped me.

And if you really wanted to be home with your kids all day, you’d do it. David: That means you, too. But, newsflash: going to work is 10,000 times easier than staying with kids all day. Yes, I know, staying with kids is more important. I agree. So is saving children from starvation in Malawi. But we each do what we can. And the best of us are honest about it.

For all you guys who Twittered back to me that I’m a bad mom and that I should love being home with my kids, here’s a link for you: CEOs who are on Twitter. Because let me tell you something: None of these people needs to earn the money they are earning. They have enough money. They can stay home with their kids. But instead, they are at work.

David, can you publicly ask each of these guys if they want to send their kids to your wife in Ohio? Because each of these guys is choosing to go to work instead of stay home with their kids. Do you know why? BECAUSE THE CEOs THINK KIDS ARE BORING. This is not news. The top 10% of the tax bracket system does not need to leave their families to go to work every day. But they do. Why is that?

Here’s another idea, David. How about approaching all those guys with Blackberries at soccer games? Let me ask you something. Do those guys check their email when they’re getting a blow job? Of course not. Do you know why? Because it’s INTERESTING. They are checking their blackberries during soccer because soccer is boring. The kids can’t figure out where the goal is. The kids (and their parents) lose interest. They want snacks more than they want to learn soccer. They are cute, yes. But even cute gets boring.

Here’s another Twitter from David Dellifield: “been on twitter several months, still trying to figure out the conversation part of it”

@DavidDellifield Maybe you don’t understand the conversation because you have so little self-knowledge to add to the party.

Comment on: I hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio.

Competent, powerful women know that the best way to look like you have no power is to run around in circles that are by their nature limited to women. The G-20 Wives’ Club photos are particularly insulting because these women are being associated not by their special interests, or particular education, or common background, but merely by who they are sleeping with. Seriously. When, other than when rounding up prostitutes for jail, has this approach to grouping women been acceptable to society?

In an interview in People magazine, Michelle fielded the question, "How do you like the job as First Lady?" She said that she likes it but "the pay is not great."

Total understatement, right? I mean, she does not get paid to do any First Lady duties. But she has a law degree from Harvard. And she supported her whole family financially for a good part of their marriage. She has huge earning power. And she is putting that aside to run the circus social life of the wife of the US President. This is not a small job. This is a full-time job. So full-time that our only bachelor President had his niece do the job. And when Hilary was pissed off at Bill, Chelsea started taking First Lady duties because really, it's a job that someone has to do.

I adore Michelle Obama, and I adore Carla Bruni – First Lady and First Model, and First Homewrecker, of France. But I don't want to see them grouped together for something other than who they are. They are special and fun and innovative and strong. They do not deserve to be grouped almost randomly with other women based on who they married. I want to see Michelle and Carla hanging out together so I can have a vicarious girls-night-out in London.

While I write this post, Adam Toren has the unfortunate timing of sending me an email to tell me I have been named one of the top 100 women bloggers. I email him back immediately to ask him if he has a similar award for the top 100 men.

And here's my point: women do not need to be called out just because they are women. It's bullshit. Women are doing fine competing with men. Women are earning more than men in corporate America, women are keeping their jobs at a higher rate than men in the recession, and, Adam, when it comes to making money from blogging, the mommy bloggers knock the ball out of the park. So what's up with segregating women? What is the point?

How should women respond? Say no when you can afford to. I will not be putting Adam's badge on my blog. I don't pitch to women-only investor groups. And I don't read women-only business magazines.

But women need to know when to play along, too. Michelle is not going to boycott the G-20 girl's club, and when an investor group tells me they are looking for women CEO’s (yes, this happens often), not only do I deal with them, but I wear a skirt and heels to the presentation.

You should know when you can help yourself more by participating and when you will hurt yourself. But also, Adam's going to get a lot of traffic from this post, so I want to add one more thing: Be nice and be gracious, because almost everyone who segregates women foolishly thinks they're doing us a favor.

Comment on: The G-20 is Complete BS for Women