You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music.

The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, October 6th, the Jessica Rabbit Edition.

I'm Hannah Rosen, editor of Double X.

I am here in the Washington, D.C. studio with

Kate Julian, my fellow editor. Hi, Kate. Hello, Hannah. And we are joined in New York by Jessica

Gross, another editor of Double X. Hi, Jess. Hi, guys. Today, we're going to talk about three topics.

The first is the Amanda Knox trial and whether beauty and privilege got her both in trouble

and out of trouble.

Second, we're going to talk about the new romantic comedy called What's Your Number and the larger question of whether women pay a price for having too many sexual partners.

And third, we're going to talk about a story that just went up in Slate by Katie Roefe, arguing that people secretly believe that single moms are crazy. So let's start

with the Amanda Knox trial. Amanda Knox was a foreign exchange student who was living in Italy

and four years ago was convicted of murdering her roommate along with her boyfriend. That is,

she and her boyfriend were convicted of murdering her roommate in a kind of satanic ritual. It was a horrific trial. It got a lot of attention. She's extremely attractive. And yesterday, a writer at the Huffington Post, Casey Greenfield, argued that if Knox were homely or modest or a male, she never would have been charged in the first place. And this is the thing that hangs over Amanda Knox's case. She's very pretty. There's always pretty photos of her out there. And so thus we all became

incredibly fascinated with this case. Kate, do you think this is a plausible, plausible thing

to posit that her attractiveness had so much to do with why this case got so much attention

and how it unfolded? I think that explanation has grown on me. I have to say I'm sort of in the minority on this one in that when Amanda Knox sort of first entered our consciousness four years ago or however long ago it was, I never really understood what the big deal was about her allegedly, you know, attractive. Allegedly satanically ritual. No, no, I got the allegedly satanic part. I didn't get the allegedly attractive part. Like, she's never really struck me as this great beauty. Clearly, everybody else thinks that she is. And, you know, the language in this appeals process has, like, been, you know, quite stunning to that effect. I mean, we've had her called an enchanting witch.

According to one of the summations on Monday, I think that her attorney compared her to Jessica

Rabbit. I think a lot of this has more to do with the fact that she's young and female and a girl

abroad, you know, a foreigner. Maybe you don't have to be absolutely beautiful. I think that any 21 or 22 year old who's like, you know, passively photogenic in the age of Facebook is going to be okay, right? I mean, a lot of these pictures, Jess was pointing this out to me earlier. A lot of the pictures that we first saw of her were from her Facebook page. And nobody puts up ugly pictures of themselves. But beyond that, it was just the

sort of picture of youth, I think, more than anything. Well, the argument I found more plausible was

the privilege argument that Casey was making. The attractiveness argument, I think, has to do with

...