By its title, Connie Schultz's memoir of life on the campaign trail, ... and His Lovely Wife, would seem to be dominated by gender politics. Schultz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Plain Dealer columnist, married Sherrod Brown when he was a congressman and begins her book when he is considering a run for the Senate - which would cast the opinionated writer in a mostly quiet and subordinate role on the campaign trail, and complicate her life in the PD newsroom. The title echoes the words so commonly used to introduce a political wife.

But the book ends up being more reportage than equal-rights rant, more about the campaign trail and a relationship between two specific people than it is about women playing second fiddle in politics. All that is a strength - not because readers aren't always in the mood for equal-rights rants and exposes of gender dynamics, but because in a show-don't-tell kind of way, it embodies the fact that men and women, even when they're married, can rise above their socially pre-cast gender roles even when they are reflecting on how other people perceive them.

One of the book's greatest moments comes a little more than halfway through, when Schultz finds her voice and speaks off the cuff after a man in his 70s introduces her to a crowd of about 150 people in an Eastern Ohio working-class town. As Schultz tells it, the man says, "Well, now we're going to hear from Sherrod Brown's wife. She's one of those women who won't change her name, but here she is."

There's a moment of tension here as the author sees a couple of campaign aides exchange glances, the unspoken subscript being that there's a danger of the "lovely wife" taking offense, which just might not be good for the campaign. But instead she hits a homerun by taking up the point honestly. She tells the crowd how she and Brown had been married only recently, after she was already entrenched in a career where her name is her currency. Then she shifts gears, telling the story of her parents, neither of whom went on to college, but who worked hard to make sure four kids did. Her mother was a nurse's aide, her father a union member for a utility company. "My parents wore their bodies out so that we'd never have to, and one of the reasons I fell in love with Sherrod Brown was because he has spent his entire career fighting for the people I come from."

Occasional stories like that give the book heart and depth that is rewarding, even as extensive shout-outs to colleagues in the PD and elsewhere seem off the point.

TO HAVE A PENIS and to read Jessica Valenti's He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 other double standards every woman should know is to be on the receiving end of page after page of broad generalities. This is not a book very many men will make it through. Neither does it simply target the differences between the expectations of men and women. Instead Valenti goes looking for arguments, often reaching to extremes to make them - in the process seeming to take seriously that which any man

or woman whose thoughts don't dwell at those extremes would simply laugh off.

For example, Double Standard No. 23, "He's Getting an Education, She's Getting in his Way," would seem to make the argument that men resent women for going to college and graduate school in greater numbers than men in recent years. Where are the men who have a problem with this, in great enough quantity to make it a societal double standard? Valenti found one - a 17-year-old from Massachusetts who has filed a suit alleging that his high school discriminates against boys. A quote from the Boston Globe, which Valenti identifies as the most telling quote from her favorite article, has a senior observing that he is "surrounded by a sea of girls in his classes." How she amplifies this scrap of lunacy into a societal double standard worthy of warning people about is not clear.

To the book's credit, the opposition is not men: it's societal expectations and labels as they apply to men and women. And women certainly have plenty to complain about. Chapter titles all are built on a he vs. she confrontation, each of them targeting an area of judgement - such as the stud/slut dichotomy of the title, or the expectation that women take care of birth control, the differences in expectations of beauty, etc.

But Valenti explores in broad strokes allegations that just about any man reading the book could prove untrue. The idea that men aren't referred to as sluts, proven by her Googling of the term "male slut," for example, would be disproven by a trip to any college campus. Her claim that it is women's "responsibility to have safe sex: ... shit, we even have to convince men to wear condoms!" is an affront to all the men who don't want diseases or children, and all the men who laugh at the jokes about condoms in wallets because they always carry one, too.

Another example: In discussing the inequities between men and women regarding birth control she asks and answers: "When was the last time you saw conservative groups up in arms about condoms being available in schools? Hell no. Because they couldn't give a shit about whether guys have sex or not." It is in no way standing up for conservatives to rhetorically ask, Is that true? Last I checked, conservatives had a problem with any kind of birth control being distributed in schools.

Valenti hopes that her book brings humor to the discussion. Her humor is more of a brand that might keep conversation light, but falls short when cast in book text. The book's greater flaw, though, is that it comes up very short dealing with a serious subject.

... And His Lovely Wife, by Connie Schultz. Random House, 2007. Paperback reprint edition, 2008, 304 pages, $15.

He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 other double standards every woman should know, by Jessica Valenti. Seal Press, 2008, 200 pages, paper, $13.95.