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I'm prepared to take the heat for my controversial opinion that the appearance of Miley Cyrus' cherubic face on the side of a package of condoms would be a positive development and significantly raise the profile of contraception among teens. It's easy to see though why some, if not most of participants in this debate don't see her as the right girl for the job. I still do, for exactly the same reasons that the endorsement seems taboo:
She doesn't have to do it. You're right, Rachael. Miley Cyrus has no obligation to get behind the LifeStyles campaign. I just think that her "do as I say, not as I do" demeanor has been frustrating to watch, especially when so many look to her as a role model. And as I said, I'm not advocating that she break her own vow of chastity. But if she, as a teenager, is going to display her sexuality on a public stage she might as well focus on a positive, as opposed to a hypocritical message while she's at it. I don't think Miley is obligated to provide sex ed to a million young girls, I just think it would be progressive, inspiring, and much more honest if she did.
She's a girl. I've got to protest the suggestion that the role of condom spokesperson be outsourced to Miley's male equivalent. Condoms are worn by men, yes, but their benefits are often much more tangible to women. Females are both more susceptible to infection and slower to exhibit the symptoms that allow for the detection and treatment of many STDs. Many of the most serious problems for women are the result of undetected chlamydia and gonorrheal infections. Ectopic pregnancy, infertility, cervical cancer—these problems are admittedly not those of a pre-teen. Rather they're the problems of an ill-educated preteen who had unprotected sex and didn't suffer the consequences until 20 years down the line.
Beyond these health reasons, however, there's a cultural standard that's begging to be overturned by Cyrus' endorsement. Before Trojan's 2007 "Evolve" campaign, most U.S. condom advertisements not only perpetuated a male-centric model for sex, they were also frequently misogynistic and occasionally violent in the messages they portrayed. Isn't it about time that an intelligent young woman replaced the machismo that dominates the market today?
She's (too) young. According to a Durex Global Sex Survey in 2007 the age at which virginity is lost in developed nations varies between 15 and 19. In the United States, it's 16. And this is the age at which people first have sex, not the first time they think about sex or are exposed to it. Of course, every parent has the right to breach the topic of sex and contraception when they feel that the time is right. But in reality, relying solely on parental and/or scholastic guidance hasn't really been working. Miley's peers are already having sex. Girls younger than Miley are already having sex. By the time they're watching Gossip Girl, it's probably too late. In my opinion kids, specifically girls, should know about contraception long before they know everything there is to know about sex, something I think every parent would like to control but ultimately cannot. Kids learn about sex from other kids. And unfortunately, when they get the message about safe sex from their parents (if they get the message about safe sex from their parents, and the most at-risk teens usually don't) it often comes after they've already become curious or nervous about the subject or received conflicting accounts from their equally uninformed friends.
It's a total sellout. It's undeniable that both Miley and LifeStyles have already gained by the mere hint of their association. Considering the minute possibility that Cyrus would ever get behind their product, this may be all that LifeStyles was hoping to accomplish in the first place. I don't think it's necessarily exploitive for LifeStyles to target Cyrus with their offer—they're looking to make a big impact among teens and she's one of the most visible celebrities in any demographic. For all we know, this was an insider deal and the Cyruses wanted the offer to be extended just so they could shoot it and any rumors of her waning abstinence down. So, if the damage has already been sort-of caused and both sides have already come out ahead—what's the big problem with finishing the deal?
Whether you think it's exploitive or a setup or just plain inappropriate the fact of the matter is that updating the way teens and young girls learn about sex is no easy job but someone's got to do it. Miley Cyrus has this chance. And whether it's Miley or some other courageous young celebrity who ultimately takes up the cause of teen sex in earnest, it's not as if everything will suddenly be changed. But this would be a pretty good start.
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Nayeli,
In regards to LifeStyles offering Miley Cyrus a condom-endorsement deal (talk about a dead-on-arrival proposal), Noreen and Torie made a lot of the points I was going to make, so I won't be redundant. (Except to say I can totally imagine an 8-year-old running up to me, waving a box of Miley condoms, and asking if she could have them. Parents have a responsibility to teach their kids about sex, but they have the right to determine the time and place of that conversation. The pharmacy aisle at Target would not top my list.)
But I'd like to focus on your point about "denying contraceptive education to teens." Cyrus' refusal to take $1 million to endorse a commercial product is not denying anyone an education on birth control. Suggesting as much puts a burden on Cyrus that not only did she not ask for but that runs counter to her abstinence pledge (and so far, she deserves the benefit of the doubt on the authenticity of that pledge). It's the jobs of parents and, in this day and age, schools to teach kids about contraception.
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Nayeli, I think it's pretty clear what Miley Cyrus is afraid of (though the better question might be, "What are Miley Cyrus' handlers afraid of?"). She might want to escape Disney's clutches, but becoming the underage spokesteen for a condom company seems like an easy no. She's a Christian who advocates waiting till marriage, so promoting condoms might make her seem hypocritical. (I'd like to forget I ever saw those much-blogged "sexy" photos allegedly taken from her iPhone—thanks, Perez Hilton.) More importantly, she isn't exactly marketed to her teenage contemporaries. Middle- and high-school shows on Disney, Nick, etc., are aimed at elementary students, not teenagers. They aren't accurate depictions of adolescent life—they're an idealized, sanitized world in which you get punished the first time you make a mistake like cheating, lying to your parents, or drinking. They're morality shows. I was a Saved by the Bell fan as a kid and still love looking back at those shows for the unrealistic way they portrayed high school. People "went steady" and exchanged friendship rings. School dances had punch; prom had a hoedown theme and was held in the gym. And certainly no one had sex. Safe sex is a message that needs to be out there, but someone who actually appeals to teenagers, not the prepubescent, should be making the pitch. I'd like to propose an alternative celeb, but I'm pretty out of touch with who's hip these days. Maybe the cast of Gossip Girl?
Like Noreen (who I think very astutely diagnosed LifeStyle's motivation for the offer—and there's something so exploitative about the company publicly salivating over using a tween star to sell contraceptives), I would be discomfited if I saw 15-year-old Miley Cyrus' just-recently-orthodontiaed grin slapped on a condom box in the "family planning" (what a laughable euphemism that is) section in the grocery store aisle. I can just imagine a 6-year-old walking past the department grabbing the box and saying, "Mommy, can I get this?" That might make me sound prudish, but so be it.
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Evidence today of the persistent nature of the significance of race in the campaign: The percentage of young people who say they're unwilling to vote for a black candidate is 22 percent, according to one poll, and not dropping. Get it together, 18- to 29-year-olds! But Obama's comment is still problematic. He raised race not in terms of voters' attitudes, but in terms of Bush and McCain's—when, John as you say, they haven't given him call to. I suppose the Obama camp could argue that McCain's supporters are doing it for him. But the ellision seems like a bad idea. For one thing, if McCain is going to be accused of race-baiting whether he actually does it or not, doesn't that give him less incentive to muzzle the 527s that might do this? And for another, we expect Obama to be America's leading sensitive spokesman on racial politics. If he's careless about who he tags as a bigot, that gives the rest of us license to be.
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Nayeli, maybe I'm just a little more cynical than you are, but I don't read the Miley Cyrus condom non-deal as a "huge loss," but rather a huge gain for both the starlet and LifeStyles. Though of course you're right that it would be wonderful if someone with the influence and reach Cyrus has among teen girls took on the issue of safe sex (and that missed opportunity, indeed, is a loss), I think the LifeStyles offer has a lot more to do with the buzz generated by even the proposal of the pairing. LifeStyles gets gratis association with the Hannah Montana brand, with all its increasingly fraught but consistently lucrative connotations. Canny Miley gets to continue her coy, stutter-step march toward sexpot-dom, chastely refusing the condom deal but grabbing some column space that portrays her not just as a cute little kid any longer.
I'm also not sure, even if Miley were to take on the issue of safe sex as her particular project, that becoming a spokeswoman for a condom company would be the best soapbox—setting aside issues of objectification and commercialization, women don't wear condoms. It's true that women shouldn't be passive about their sexual health. But why should the onus for safe sex be put only on the woman, as this kind of marketing seems to suggest—couldn't, say, Zac Efron slap that oh-so-manly mug on a condom box and encourage teenage boys to take responsibility to wear them, and not just when nagged to by a pretty girl?
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A guest post from Slate's John Dickerson:
"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama said this week. "You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
I'll give Obama "scared," and he's got a good case on the patriotism charge, too, but race? Wouldn't the world have gone nuts if Hillary had said something similar about being a woman? They would have said she's playing the gender card. Despite the reckless McCain attacks, about which I've already written, there's no evidence that he's ever made Obama's race an issue. In fact, he's done the opposite -- he called out one of his supporters for doing so at a public event. Immediately, without it becoming a flap. McCain's "black" daughter (she's actually Bangladeshi), we also might remember, was used in an attack against him. So, why isn't Obama going too far here? I suppose one response is that if McCain can completely make up things about Obama then Obama can make up things about McCain. Of course, yelling racism is taking it one step beyond making up his positions on oil, energy taxes, and his visit to the troops in Germany.
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Hot on the heels of last week's contraceptive debate comes a fresh piece of news that is bound to stir the pot among condom fans and haters alike: Condom manufacturer LifeStyles is courting Miley Cyrus, Hannah Montana star and one-time Vanity Fair pinup, to be its new spokesgirl. Cyrus seems an unlikely candidate. At 15 she is younger than the age of consent in most states and once infamously (and unoriginally) proclaimed her intention to stay a virgin until marriage. Fearing for the already doomed reputation of the Hannah Montana brand's flagship starlet, the Cyrus camp has already denied that any deal with LifeStyles is in the works, and it's pretty much certain that they wouldn't accept it anyway. Despite LifeStyles' offering of $1 million and a lifetime supply of prophylactics to secure Cyrus as the face of safe sex, we're probably never going to see Billy Ray's baby on the side of a box of condoms.
This, to me, seems like a huge loss. Not only for Cyrus (lifetime supply!) but also for young girls who look to her as a trendsetter for both clothes and behavior. Modes of sexual practice seem to follow a trickle-down pattern, with women passing on their wisdom and advice to those less in-the-know. Miley Cyrus, role model to millions, is therefore in an ideal position to promote a healthier example for young women who are probably already contemplating or having some form of sex. Her celebrity endorsement could be the first since that of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes to significantly de-stigmatize condoms among teens and reverse some of the bad PR they've been receiving lately.
As we've seen, teen celebrities' vows of virginity are hardly guaranteed to stave off unplanned pregnancies, nor have they proven inspirational among their peers. And it's unsurprising that the threat of pregnancy and STDs doesn't stop teens from having sex altogether when it doesn't even stop grown Jezebels who should know better.
So what are Miley's people afraid of? That she's too young to know about condoms? I see denying contraceptive education to teens as akin to preventing alcoholics from entering rehab just because they're too young to legally drink: blind adherence to an ideology that's being flouted at large. Do they fear for her future earning power? It's unlikely that Cyrus' endorsement of LifeStyles would derail her seemingly unflappable star. Her career would continue, albeit probably not with Disney, which has reacted less than happily to displays of sexuality by its young stars in the past. And what's more, Cyrus would be free to keep her promise of premarital chastity (though that, too, seems doubtful). Cyrus' promotion of safe sex needn't be a promotion of licentiousness. It should simply prompt young women to be more scrupulous and pragmatic about the choices they make, encouraging longer, healthier lives among those who've already made up their minds to have sex.
Read more on Miley Cyrus and condoms from XX Factor contributors Noreen Malone, Torie Bosch, and Rachael Larimore.
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Emily, you and Michelle Obama aren't the only ones who love The Brady Bunch. As I read that nugget in Jodi Kantor's New York Times story this morning, I couldn't help thinking about another politician with a Brady connection.
Allow me to quote from that oracle of our modern age, Wikipedia. This is from the entry on Louisiana's current governor:
According to family lore, Jindal adopted the name "Bobby" from the character Bobby Brady after watching The Brady Bunch television series at age four. He has been known by that name ever since-as a civil servant, politician, student,and writer--though legally his name remains Piyush Jindal.
C'mon, John McCain, please name Gov. Bobby Jindal to be your running mate!
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The New Yorker has a fascinating piece this week about devadasis, sacred sex workers in India. It's not online, but it's worth checking out. Delhi-based journalist William Dalrymple (author of White Mughals) focuses on two contemporary devadasis dedicated to the goddess Yellamma, in the southern state of Karnataka. It's a hard tale. Both women take a certain pride in their work—they make relatively good money, for example, and they have more dignity than "common" prostitutes. Because they're considered auspicious, they're often invited to bless upper-caste weddings and receive various gifts during holy days. At the same time, their lives are exceedingly grim. AIDS is a major issue, and many women are sold into the profession against their will by destitute families.
Dalrymple quotes his subjects extensively—at one point, there are nearly 20 unbroken paragraphs of straight quotation—and he does a skillful job of revealing the tensions between what these women say their lives are like and the reality of those existences. I found myself wishing for more, for better context, though. I still had a lot of questions about the practice when I was finished—like, for example, how legitimately "sacred" is the sex work if the priests themselves denounce these women? Maybe Dalrymple's chapters about devadasis in the forthcoming anthology Aids Sutra (about AIDS in India) or in Dalyrmple's own book about pre-Hindu religious traditions will shed more light on the subject.
In the meantime, you can check out Mrs. Marcus B. Fuller's The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood—written in 1900—for her take on the subject.
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Was Carolyn Maloney not adorable on Colbert last night? She has a new book out, Rumors of our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, about how little the wage gap has narrowed over the years—and what is the glass ceiling made of, Plexiglas? But Maloney did break one barrier last night, becoming the first member of Congress I've seen on that show who actually seemed to get the joke, understand the deal, and have ever heard of the program prior to appearing on it. So the laugh was not on her when she kept right on pitching Obama while Stephen pretended to use a breast pump that sounded more like a buzz saw—supposedly to show how right employers are to fire lactating women for distracting their co-workers. And when he asked for guidance on the proper way to compliment a subordinate on her great breasts, Maloney didn't fume like all those unfortunates who'd come on before her, whose passive-aggressive aides seemed to have forgotten to brief them. Nor did she play along to her own detriment, like that ninny Robert Wexler, who Colbert got to say that of course he loves cocaine and prostitutes. She was funny, but without making an ass of herself. And I guess it's a sign of how far we still have to go that I actually found myself feeling relieved.
Emily, your post on relating to Michelle Obama because you both grew up grooving on the Brady Bunch seems like exactly the sort of response that Bill Bishop (also hawking a book, The Big Sort) was talking about on Jon Stewart last night when he said we don't actually vote on issues any more. Instead, having organized our whole lives around sticking to our own kind, politically speaking, we tend to go for the candidate who most reminds us of ... us. "We vote lifestyles,'' he said, in response to campaigns designed to hold a mirror in front of the voter and say pssst, "Vote for you!'' Not that you're going to base your vote on the Marcia Brady connection or anything. (And thank goodness, because Michelle was really more of a Jan.) Even after all that has been written on the role emotion plays in our electoral decisions, there's still more to this than we'd like to admit. But enough of this, or authors are going to be calling my house at all hours trying to get me to stay up late more often.
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We are both Brady Bunch addicts, I learn from Jodi Kantor's story in the New York Times today. What does this mean? Well, for me it means lots of childhood afternoons spent reveling in the scrapes of a family that was even bigger than mine. Since I'm the oldest, it's no surprise that I fixated on Marcia and Greg. Remember his groovy pad? Ridiculous, yes, but also familiar, in the sense of wanting to grow up and away from a household filled with younger kids. I think it was this preview of adolescence that stuck with me, rather than the show's retro-gender roles for the parents. Of course, for Michelle O. the show's significance could be entirely different—there's its utter whiteness, for example, and those loopy trips to Hawaii and the Grand Canyon. But never mind—this is exactly the sort of tidbit about a candidate's family that gives me a sense of closeness. False, no doubt. But I get to imagine sitting down and talking favorite episodes with her.
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The following is a guest post from former competitive swimmer Michelle Brafman, who teaches and writes fiction in Washington:
Dara Torres. Dara Torres. God, it would be so easy to hate her. Let's start with the abs that defy nature, maddening proof that a 41-year-old mother can successfully model a bikini. There are the masseuses and trainers who knead her muscles and stretch her limbs myriad times a day to flush out lactic acid built up from swimming laps and pumping iron while a nanny cares for her toddler. I'm guessing she's not folding much of her own laundry, but I could be wrong.
I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not. If I sound a little obsessed though, it's for good reason. If I had a quarter for every time someone asked me "So what do you think of that Dara Torres?" I could fill every parking meter in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. Why do people associate me with Dara? Believe me, it's not the abs. Dara and I are of the same vintage; I swam competitively for almost 20 years, and like Dara, I was a drop-dead sprinter, not an Olympian but an NCAA All-American.
My daughter's recent foray into competitive swimming has catapulted me back to this chapter of my life, particularly the swim meets: the thick summer air scented with chlorine and mildewed towels, the national anthem performed slightly off-key, and the munchkin swimmers hooting and hollering for each other. By the last event, I'm fighting the urge to pull on my Land's End tankini and recruit one of the timers to run a clock on my own 25-meter freestyle.
Last week, I traveled back to Milwaukee, my hometown, to visit a high-school friend and former swimming buddy; within hours of my arrival, we found ourselves in front of the Whitefish Bay high-school pool, sheets of rain pounding the roof of her minivan and drenching our clothes during our short sprint to the field house. We made our way past the faded canary-yellow lockers, up to the pool, to the record board that hung in the diving well. Phew. My 100-yard freestyle record, now more than two decades old, still stands. We giggled at the absurdity of my pilgrimage—not my first, I confess—as we fanned our T-shirts and shorts under the warm air blasting out of the hair dryers.
Unlike Dara, I have no aspiration to break my record. I just like to know that it's there. I have new dreams, my strongest my humbling desire for my children to grow into happy, healthy, and compassionate beings. From watching footage of Dara and her daughter frolicking in the pool, I suspect that she shares my hopes. Dara and I have got dreams for ourselves, too. For the past eight years, I've spent the bulk of my free time writing fiction. I write after my children go to sleep, before they wake up, and during random cracks in the day. My house could be cleaner, our dinners more edible, and our cottons less wrinkled; my lower back is a mess, and I've written through elbow pain which has left me with a recurring case of tendonitis. I likely earn less per hour than we pay our teenage baby-sitters, and there are no guarantees that I will publish anything I write.
There are no guarantees that Dara's enormous financial and emotional investment in her swimming will yield any hardware at Beijing. Athletes and artists gamble hours of sacrifice on a medal or a record, and the few who score big undoubtedly overcome hurdles along the way. Dara's suffered a torn meniscus, a bone spur in her shoulder, and various personal and professional hiccups. Writers suffer plenty of setbacks. I've received rejection letters that have made me want to throw in the keyboard, letters that demand to be shaken off so that I can plot another comeback. I always come back.
In 10 years, I'm not going to remember the editors who have passed on my stories, and I probably won't think much about the ones who haven't. In the year 2018, will anyone recall if Dara broke the world record in the 50-meter freestyle or if she even medaled? Probably not. My hunch is that we will remember Dara Torres for redefining our notion of our collective potential, as a species. Body and mind. We will remember that three weeks after she gave birth, she broke an American record in the 50-freestyle, the most exacting physical and psychological race in competitive swimming. We will remember that she did it by training as smart as she did hard, and by plugging her ears and singing "la, la, la" when the skeptics got nasty.
I'm fairly certain that I won't redefine any idea of a greater literary potential, but I'd be pretty happy if I realized my own. I'll keep at it. When my demons taunt me and I need to find my way to the junction of talent, heart and promise, I'll think: Dara Torres, Dara Torres.
For more on Dara Torres, Slate's June Thomas and Josh Levin discuss her amazing form at Bloggingheads.tv.
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You know it's a bad day when the inspector general for the Department of Justice issues a report with your name in the title. As in"An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring by Monica Goodling and Other Staff in the Office of the Attorney General." When DoJ hires career attorneys—as opposed to lawyers who are political appointees picked by the administration in power—it is barred from considering "politics" or "political affliation." Goodling broke this rule in lots of ways. The IG reports that sometimes she got right to the (illegal) point by asking job candidates, "Why are you a Republican?" On the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr describes a similarly soliticous moment. Goodling also blocked the detailing of a lawyer to particular projects because she thought that lawyer was gay, even though DoJ policy prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Was Monica Goodling, young Christian college graduate, really at the heart of all the hiring shenanigans going on at Justice? When Dahlia and I (with Slatesters Kara Hadge and Chris Wilson) wrote up potential Bush administration proseuctions last week, we suggested that Goodling might not have been as involved as some of her higher-ups. And we thought that because Congress gave her immunity from prosecution, except for perjury, when she testified in 2007, her role might be to help catch bigger fish. Now I'm less hopeful. Because Goodling no longer works at DoJ, she can't be compelled to talk unless a criminal investigation is opened. Breaking the civil service laws at issue here doesn't count; that's not a criminal violation. And nothing in the IG report, based on my quick skim, reaches to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is the big tuna. Did Goodling really dream all of this up without Gonzales' explicit urging or tacit approval? I'd say we've learned from the IG that if Gonzales (or someone from the White House) was in on Goodling's out-of-bounds litmus tests—and I still don't see how she comes up with this all on her own—he was smart enough not to leave an e-mail trail behind.
And so for now, we have to settle for Goodling's embarrassment, along with that of Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' former chief of staff who turned on his boss before Congress. Sampson and Goodling are responsible for what the IG calls "the most systematic use of political or ideological affiliations in screening candidates for career positions." This involved the hiring process for immigration judges. Sampson went so far, in 2003, as to make the White House the "sole source" for generating IJ candidates. He told the IG he thought that the judges were political appointees. The report doesn't buy that excuse and finds that both Sampson and Gonzales committed misconduct. That's something. But the whole thing makes one former DoJ attorney I know "physically sick." Nor, he says, has current AG Mukasey done nearly enough in response. He says, "Simply expressing regret and issuing the odd memo is not the response of a real manager and certainly not a response that recognizes the importance of righting an institution as important and fundamental to the country."
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Now this is interesting: Obama might pick a Republican woman as his running mate. It's hard to know how seriously to take a trial balloon like this; some of the people rounding out these lists are obviously there for courtesy's sake, or in the hope of attracting some of his or her supporters on the cheap. (And Sen. McCain, sir, if you are really considering that Joe Lieberman fella, I know someone you should speak to without delay—a guy you used to work with, actually. Joementum notwithstanding, I'm not sure he will hold up under pressure, is what I'm saying.)
If Obama did choose former Bush ag secretary Ann Veneman, who served during W's first term before going to work for UNICEF, it would definitely send a great message about bringing Americans together. Maybe it would close the sale with those Hillary fans who are still playing footsie with McCain, and draw in some independents, too. But according to Politico, Veneman "was close to food and agriculture industries'' and "clashed with farm-state Democrats and environmentalists,'' and I'm not sure how many people would view the selection of an anti-enviro, pro-industry Bush retread as the kind of "fundamental change'' he is promising. Wonder if Caroline Kennedy is considering putting herself in contention, as Dick Cheney did when he ran Bush's vet-the-veep team?
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Here's the thing: I just do not see you chasing anybody into the men's room in the middle of the night, Emily B. Or you either, Mickey. And believe me, I mean this as a compliment. So, if you wouldn't want all-night stakeout duty outside the hotel where the National Enquirer seems to have cornered John Edwards and his "love child''—sorry, but I can't hear that phrase without imagining Diana Ross breaking into song—why are you so enthusiastic about having someone else do the dirty work?
Isn't cheering and leering from the comfort of the cheap seats on something like this (yeah, you go out and get that sleazo story that I personally would consider beneath my dignity) the journo equivalent of being a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-style chickenhawk? And isn't there a journalistic equivalent of the fruit of the poison tree? I mean, this is how sex scandals become news: Either the stories burble up from the tabloids, like toxic sludge at a superfund site, or the former lover steps to the microphone, a la Gennifer Flowers. (I used to think the reason we had so many more Democratic than Republican sex scandals was that the conservatives were rather more liberal in taking care of their former close personal friends—a theory developed after some or other supposed mistress was busted for failing to pay duty on several fur coats she was bringing into the country. But this is an outdated assumption on several levels.)
Anyway, the relevant question isn't whether every time a fire breaks out in somebody's pants it's news; if people want to know about it—and oh, we do, and me as much as anybody—then of course it meets that low bar. To me, the question is whether this is how we in the news business want to spend our time, energy, and ever-shrinking resources. Mickey quite fairly accuses me of failing to get totally "inside the marriage'' of John and Elizabeth Edwards and I don't disagree; that is an awfully big claim. (That he saw my piece on them as a PR release in defense of their big ol' house, however, just shows that the reader brings at least as much to the story as the writer does; I'd be willing to bet good money—euros, in other words—that Elizabeth didn't see it that way.) In any case, there is a difference between "inside the marriage" and inside the pants! We can learn plenty that's legit and pertinent about a candidate by looking at his or her spouse and their relationship without necessarily providing a detailed sexual history.
And if you think stories like that are no problem to double rivet even if you wanted to, just look at the debacle of the NYT piece on John McCain and Vicki Iseman; four top reporters were on the case for months and netted only hearsay that struck readers across the political spectrum as cheap and beneath the paper's usual standards. Not that I'm looking down my nose at their efforts, because the exact point at which the public interest outweighs privacy concerns is not always so easy to pin down, either. On the contrary, it's because I've been sent out on so many stories like that—located out there somewhere in the vast expanse of moral gray area—that privacy issues are not theoretical for me.
Grieving relatives? I've knocked on their doors at daybreak and approached them coming out of church. Politicians and their personal lives? I've asked questions that made even me wince lots of times, and written a handful of stories that were true but broke my own heart to see in print. On one memorable occasion, I was ordered to "dress up like a delivery girl if you have to'' to get the scoop on Donald Trump's first divorce. (No, it didn't come to that, but I did come back with the story and made my editor's day.) So I'm not pure, pretending to be pure, or acting like these aren't ever hard calls. And if you've never toiled in these particular vineyards, then how much easier it must be to declare, as Emily did at this week's "Gabfest," that love affairs involving public figures are always news and that proof of philandering is automatically disqualifying. (Can I possibly have heard you right? You really couldn't bear having an AG who had fooled around? After all we've been through with this crew of perhaps perfect husbands who happened to be lousy public servants?)
So here's my invitation to Emily and Mickey: If you are so high on stories like this, if they seem to you such a cinch to nail down and such a no-brainer to run with, then what's stopping you? It's not like all the good ones are taken, just because the Edwards story is already in print and available at your local supermarket. No, there's a wide selection of rumored philanderers out there—gay and straight, old and young, R and D—just waiting to be bagged. And once you have done that, then you can get back to me on whether that experience has altered your opinion at all, about either the righteousness or the relative value of these stories.
Meanwhile, the bottom line for me looking at the Slate site back when we started this conversation was wow, here we have this great, well-reported story on how a bunch of top Bush officials may have committed war crimes they will in all likelihood never be prosecuted for—but a luv child, now that's a clear career-ender? Sometimes, I just think that when it comes to sex, our whole country needs some kind of therapeutic intervention.
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Your Friday firestorm watch: After NPR (NPR!) published an audio essay titled "Sex Without Condoms Is The New Engagement Ring" (which prompted a heated debate) Moe Tkacik of Jezebel responded with a wistful ode to the joys of barebacking. "[H]ere is the irrefutable," she writes: "it feels awesome." The biggest downside, as Moe sees it, is the increased likelihood that you'll have to have some very awkward conversations with your future partners.
The post has generated a lot of comments, both on and off Jezebel, ranging from people who agree with Moe to those who find her sentiment to be glib at best, flagrantly irresponsible at worst. Moe—who’s about to leave Jezebel for Gawker—seemed to take all the hubbub as one big don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out, and a few hours later posted a bitter, rambling non-apology.
Ignoring her ill-advised detour into STD statistics (the apparent point being: Lighten up, ladies. Chances are you’re white, which means you probably don’t have AIDS!), she touches on some issues that we’ve been mulling over here on "XX Factor," particularly with regards to Jezebel—namely, what’s the line between honesty and indulgent oversharing? Can you still be a feminist if you sometimes have very un-PC desires and opinions? Should young female public figures try to comport themselves with more decorum and propriety, or is that a condescending point of view?
In this case, at least, I’m more offended as an editor than as a feminist—Moe’s second post, in particular, flirts with incomprehensibility. As far as the charges of irresponsibility go, I’m tempted to say: Meh. Frankly, if you’re going to take sex-ed advice from a Web site whose best writer goes by the moniker “Slut Machine,” well, you have bigger problems to deal with. I’m mostly disappointed that the NPR story’s initial thesis—that deciding to go mano-a-mano with your partner can be considered a serious expression of commitment, especially when skyrocketing divorce rates mean that a marriage certificate isn’t the signifier it once was—got lost in the shuffle. That idea has a kernel of weird, gross, uncomfortable truth about it. I'm a big fan of Jezebel’s dedication to airing “Id-level truths,” as Moe put it in her second post. Sometimes I just wish they let their ego do a bit of cleaning—not for decorum’s sake, but for clarity’s.
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Hmmm. What must Yoko Ono, herself a formidable artist and media force, think about her de facto daughter-in-law's performance art in New York magazine this week?
Charlotte Kemp Muhl, apparently Sean Lennon’s girlfriend and Sarabeth DeLeury (a "philosopher and actress"), Charlotte’s "best friend," are pictured in the magazine’s weekly portrait essay called "Look Book." The best friends are "trying to create a new way of moving forward as a collective." How? "We eat watermelon and make art."
There was no age listed for them in the piece, but they appear to be teenagers pictured provocatively touching tongues and spouting inanities ("We're friends with Sean Parker, who invented Napster, who just sold his business for, like, a billion dollars and always carries around a syringe full of antidote"). The “best friends” met at a party, where someone noted to Charlotte, "Hey your breast is hanging out." When Sarabeth heard her reply, "That's OK, I have another," the two became soul sisters. The two later “went to Europe and L.A., where … we both had mental breakdowns.”
I suspect the women are not total nitwits (despite one blogger calling them "culturally parasitic members of the human race") and were instead engaging in high-octane preciousness and self-parody. After all, Ono's art usually contained a deep bed of irony.
Even if it was a satire, two gratuitous mentions of the iconoclastic artist struck me as odd. Isn’t there some code among Gen Y not to discuss friends in the context of their well-known forebears? Perhaps the iconoclastic Yoko is in on the joke (it's not clear whether NY mag is ... ), or maybe young Charlotte represents some kind of cosmic karma messing with the older artist's oeuvre.
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Last year, when he was running for president, Rudy Giuliani explained his thinking about the courts. He complained that "civil litigation consumes 2.2 percent of America’s gross domestic product" and argued that "to reduce the impact of the trial lawyer tax, we should reform the system by adopting rules that discourage frivolous lawsuits."
This week, Rudy's son Andrew, 22, filed a suit against Duke University, where he is a student, because he was cut from the golf team. The suit "accuses the university of bad faith by aggressively recruiting him to play golf for Duke and then dashing his dreams by taking steps to remove him from the team," the NYT writes. Andrew G. wants damages and "the right to use Duke’s golf center for the rest of his life." This is such a genius exhibit of self-parodying entitlement that I almost wish Rudy were the GOP candidate, so he'd have to answer for it. As is, he's getting away with no comment. I will have to content myself with the service Andrew does himself by including, in the court filings, that "he may have misbehaved in February when he tossed an apple in a teammate’s face, flipped his putter a few feet, threw and broke a club and gunned his engine in a parking lot."
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This week's renewed discussions about women "opting out" of the work force—or being forced out—make me think of Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That." It's about her life in 1950s New York as a twentysomething, when the city emblematized endless possibility, even though she was making very little money. She loved her career and reveled in the sensory experiences of just being there. And then her attitude toward the city soured with age, when she realized "that not all of the promises would be kept."
I was reminded of Didion's journey to disillusionment when I came across a couple studies about women's success and happiness this week. The first (which is new only to me) was a New York Times article from last summer about how young women in their twenties actually out-earn men in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and several other big cities. These women have more education than their male city peers and are less likely to be married and raising a family than their suburban female counterparts.
The second study (by USC's Richard Easterlin and Anke Plagnol of the University of Cambridge), forthcoming in the Journal of Happiness Studies, found that women overall are happier than men—until the age of 48. The authors measured happiness as a combination of financial and family satisfaction, and men exceeded women in the first category at the age of 41 and in the second at 64. This seems to suggest that somewhere between 41 and 48, women are more satisfied with their family situation than with their finances. Now add in the conclusions of the previous study of urban women—are young women happiest when facing bright prospects unrelated to their family situation or marital status? Or has the availability of greater professional opportunities simply postponed women's frustrations with the working world?
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On Thursday, the usual taping of Slate's Political gabfest turned into a smackdown on the question we've been debating on "XX Factor"—should the National Enquirer have published its John Edwards story. Here's the resulting slugfest, from Slatesters John Dickerson, David Plotz, Bill Smee, and me. Go to minute 29:00 (about two-thirds of the way through) for the Edwards bit (the earlier segments are about Obama and McCain). Forgive the profanity—don't listen to it with the kids!
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Melinda, I don't mean to sound calloused and insensitive on top of my stated willingness to invade personal privacy, but, notwithstanding how plucky and determined she is, Elizabeth Edwards has inoperable metastasized cancer. Cancer grows, that's its job (though, to be sure, effective treatment can slow it way down and seems to be doing so for Edwards). Of course, one hopes for a miraculous survivor story, but a practical conversation about the other woman who might someday be raising her children is, though unimaginably difficult, not inappropriate.
I had breast cancer in 1995 and share Melinda's post-surgical hopefulness. If I'd had a less positive outlook, however, I would certainly have wanted my husband to remarry someone who could be a mother to my then-minor child. (I would, however, expect him to sequence the two events more traditionally than John Edwards has.) Now that Edwards must, as Emily Y. points out, inevitably exit political life, the next order of business should be the welfare of all his young children.
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I'm with Emily B that you can feel terrible for Elizabeth Edwards and still recognize the John Edwards' love child story is news. It's especially news since Edwards has always made biography his strongest selling point. I see Edwards as a sanctimonious phony with no public policy accomplishments, and no record of the kind of executive skill it takes to head a Cabinet department. So if the National Enquirer story has killed his chances of having a high post in an Obama administration, then thank you, National Enquirer.
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About a minute into overreacting to Bonnie's completely hypothetical scenario—hello, Elizabeth Edwards is still very much alive!—I see that I may be identifying with her a little too closely, as an oversharing cancer survivor and all. (Plus, my husband has a nice head of hair! OK, I made that part up. Good thing he never reads this blog.) Still, I can't bear to see her written off when there's always the chance of an alternate ending.
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OK, Melinda and Hanna, I wouldn't want to have the job of stalking John Edwards either. But so what? If it's true, the National Enquirer story about him and Rielle Hunter is news, absolutely clearly and by any definition I can think of. And if I'd stumbled on that story—yes I realize that's a fairly ridiculous hypothetical, since the prize goes to the digger, but just imagine for a sec—I'd surely have published it. And I don't really care if the hypocrisy parallel with Larry Craig is exact or not, or how far down the VP list Edwards was when the story broke. He is a major Democratic politician. He could run for election again. He could be in an Obama Cabinet. The press has been poring over sex scandals involving Republicans all year—not just Craig but also David Vitter and the D.C. Madam and whoever else I'm forgetting. I am sorry for Elizabeth Edwards, and their kids, and for the disillusionment of Edwards fans everywhere. But Rachael is right. His middle-of-the-night hotel skulking is fair game. (Plus the part of the story involving his friend Andrew Young is so odd that it's begging to be explained.) Sure, maybe Edwards would still make a great labor secretary or head of HHS, whether or not he's had an affair, etc. And if he loses out on that post because of this, that may be too bad. But tough patooties. He should have thought about that before he started it (if, if, if it's true). The purported hubris is staggering, and we're better off knowing about it.
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Bad juju? The National Enquirer lived down to its tabloid expectations and gave the press a sweetheart of a bone to chew in the weeks before the political conventions. Mickey’s MSM should send them a thank-you note. Rachael is right. The Edwards’ personal privacy is a non-starter. I am always amazed at the different places various journalists draw lines over where or how they will pursue a story that invades someone’s privacy. The truth is, we all have our own comfort zones and it varies from story to story.
As a private investigator in the '80s, my clients, leading lawyers of the day, would ask my partner and me if we would be conducting surveillance on, say, a CEO principal in a corporate takeover. “Of course not (how sleazy!),” we’d say (and think). We were professionals who did interviews, looked at public archives and wrote detailed, footnoted reports with tabbed attachments. By the mid-'90s, however, I had become an investigative producer for ABC News and soon found myself sitting in a rented windowless van with a camera crew waiting to catch a small-time Miami clinic owner involved in Medicare fraud. Another producer inside wore a hidden camera in her cap. It got worse. A couple years later, I persuaded the mother of an 11-year-old boy who had recently ambushed and killed several fourth-grade classmates to (exclusively!) share her raw feelings about the tragedy with the viewers of 20/20. She had another son in the school system and needed to remain in their small Arkansas town. I told her it was a way to tell her neighbors how sorry her family was for their loss. Melinda, I shamelessly enjoyed the byline but I still hope that mother was right to trust me.
John Edwards' humiliating dénouement and yes, Elizabeth Edwards' penchant for oversharing will make us all voyeurs to the couple's very bad summer, and I do sympathize. Their situation recalled for me the 1998 tearjerker Stepmom with Susan Sarandon, as a "terminally ill mother who has to settle on the new woman," (played by Julia Roberts) in her ex-husband's life. Ed Harris plays the movie triangle husband. After some bad blood in the beginning, the three come to an understanding about the future of Sarandon’s children. I am able to picture a falsely cheery Sarandon portraying Elizabeth Edwards in my conflated version and can see Ed Harris as the southern senator. I can even imagine a Brockoviched Reille Hunter but I cannot envision a frank meeting among the three (as a private eye, I never worked domestic cases). Maybe the adults in this mess will remember there are three small children affected and be able to convene such a civilized gathering. Should they pull it off, unfortunately, we can count on the National Enquirer to provide pictures.
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Anyway, Hanna, we agree that the Edwards family should be left alone. (And post-Alberto Gonzales, an AG whose biggest problem is a baby? Sounds good!) My son's question wasn't a hard one as in, "Uh-oh, what to say?' Just sad, as in another person he looked up to turned out to be human. Which is part of growing up, yes, but depressing all the same.
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Boy, have the tables turned. All that summer chick-lit that features the mother-in-law as the harridan has it backward. Clearly, we are deep in the age of Bridezilla. Inside the Styles of the Times today is a story about brides who want to help the women in their bridal entourage do "something for themselves." In this case, a little Botox, or Fraxel laser treatments. What I love the most is the hush-hush, benevolent tone of the whole enterprise—the white spa robes, the gauzy curtains, and the earnest bride vowing to do something more "meaningful" for her guests than just giving them a silly old bracelet.
Mother, now that we've found you a dress, can we do something about that nose of yours?
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No, I don't mean cancer should be kept under wraps. I just meant that for a prospective first lady, Elizabeth Edwards behaved more like a 24-year-old blogger. (Here's the link, which someone just sent me). I meant this admiringly; I deeply respect people who repeatedly, compulsively overshare, especially in public. And the voters loved it as well. And I have to say, I don't think your son's question is such a hard one. I mean, I'm not sure how much you divulge to a preteen, because I don't have one of those yet. But we are all complicated people. Edwards' concern for poverty seems to me to have nothing to do with his affair. Whereas how priests behave with children entrusted to their care has everything to do with their pastoral fitness. Ditto with Larry Craig, and his anti-gay votes. We can make distinctions here. Having an affair says something about a person—maybe a lot about a person. But it does not devalue their entire public career.
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I don't think it's Elizabeth's oversharing that was the problem! (And you don't mean, Hanna, that cancer ought to be kept under wraps, so as to avoid scaring the grown-ups?) Tonight, my 12-year-old who has been a big fan of Elizabeth's husband since '04—and still remembers that story about the girl with no winter coat—asks me, "So, was John Edwards not who we thought he was all along?'' Which is maybe not the saddest question of his that I've ever had to field. (That prize was handed out long ago, after he asked about the Catholic bishops: "Was what happened to those kids a conspiracy? Because otherwise, how did they all know to do the wrong thing?'') Still, this one is right up there. Oh, and he agrees with you, Rachael, that no one hog-tied the man and dragged him to Larry Craig land.
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While we are quoting ourselves today: In December I wrote a profile of Elizabeth Edwards for the New Republic (which for some reason is not showing up online). My main point was that Elizabeth has an overshare problem. In her book, on the campaign trail, to her friends, she spills everything—everything—freely: about her son who died, her cancer, her marriage, her other kids. Now the tell-all strategy which has served her so well in the past has come back to bite her. So she—the real victim of this story—would be hard pressed to unleash her fury at the press.
But I will do it for her. There is no reason on earth I can think of to have run this story, much less stalked the guy at a hotel. Public figure? Who isn't a public figure? Unless the guy is having Nazi orgies in a brothel, this seems a pretty weak excuse. Vice -presidential candidate? Also weak. That was hardly likely, and you can kill that with rumors. Jack Shafer's hypocrisy argument I find totally unconvincing. The kind of hypocrisy that counts is when someone's public position is at odds with their private behavior. If Larry Craig votes against all gay rights legislation but solicits gay sex, then the gay community is allowed to out him. Ditto Pastor Ted Haggard, who preached weekly on the evils of gayness. But when a man says he's not having an affair when he is—that's just lying, same as most men would do in that circumstance. There are honorable reasons to lie in such a situation—namely, protecting your wife and children. We are still in the private realm here. This is just one of those cases where the press gets into a froth merely because the guy lied about something they thought they had him on, and then late one night they all made a bet to screw him. No honor there, no larger purpose served.
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OK, Rachael, so how about the selfish reason most of us wouldn't want to be that particular messenger? Unless I trip over a presidential candidate in the Bois de Boulogne some night - unlikely, as I live in Maryland - I am just not that eager to write up whose-what-is-going-where; that sort of thing might give readers a little wahoo, she said haughtily, but they will not respect you in the morning. Or on any subsequent morning. This is an especially tragic admission, I know, coming from your adultery, I mean, marriage correspondent. (While I'm confessing, I also got thrown out of Arthur Ashe's apartment building on purpose the day the world found out he had AIDS, so as to avoid having to ask him, "So, sir, plan on dying soon?' And doesn't every reporter have at least one story like that, about hiding behind the potted plant when they were supposed to be harrassing people?) Nobody who could also make a living doing data entry wants to be the one to break a story like this. I mean really, I try to put myself in the gum-shoes of the guy who says he chased John Edwards into a bathroom stall, and is there any chance in heaven he is thinking ah, now this is the reason I got into the biz; why can't every day be like this? No, he is going home, drinking himself to sleep as it's getting light outside, and dreaming about the various ways God will pay him back. Bad juju, I tell you.
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Sorry, Melinda, I have to disagree, though I do share your sympathy for the Edwards family. I was just reading Elizabeth's touching farewell to Tony Snow yesterday. She told the tale of a gentleman who approached her at a parade and gave her good wishes for her health and added "although we don't agree on much of anything." That's how I feel about Elizabeth, too. It's hard not to admire a woman who overcame the loss of a child, who had a second round of children in her 40s, and who bravely and selflessly told her husband to soldier on with his campaign after her cancer reappeared. So I think the National Enquirer story—if true—is devastating for her and her children. But the tabloid—however scuzzy—can't take the rap here. This isn't chasing an ambulance carrying a mentally ill Britney Spears to the hospital. John Edwards is still a prominent public figure, of sound mind and body, and at least until recently he was being touted as a possible vice presidential candidate. (And on that note, isn't it better for Obama that this comes out now?) He's fair game, and if his family gets hurt, the "bad juju" belongs all to him.
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Emily, I do understand what you and Linda are saying: It's demeaning to dismiss what women say about their lives as lying or mere rationalization. But I'm not suggesting that. I do know that both women and men say that they want to spend more time with their families (and not just when they are politicians who've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar). But for women, that explanation for leaving a job is socially acceptable, while for men it's appalling (except for the aforementioned politicians). Women are pushed in that direction by social structures, including stereotypes that have been peddled and internalized over a lifetime—for instance, by New York Times articles that say that say women leave their jobs to stay home with the kids, reinscribing that cultural narrative.
To Linda's point: I'm not proposing, as you say, that "the findings about working-class women apply to elite women." My post said nothing about your work, because I wasn't concerned with your work; my concern is with the New York Times' long history of treating women's economic lives as personal rather than public. You are writing about what elite women should and shouldn't do. I care about the pundits and policymakers who are influenced by articles about the elite women—and who make policy based on those anecdotal stories that then is applied to all women.
But news media coverage only about that side of things ignores important other factors at work, like subtle and overt discrimination, that women may be less willing to acknowledge to themselves. A story: A friend of mine got a promotion after her partner, the biomom, gave birth to their child. The co-mom concluded that her boss was a little mind-boggled about exactly how to treat her—and ended up treating her as a "dad," someone who needed a promotion and a raise to support her wife and new baby. That would be consistent with how researchers have found women and men are treated after a child is born: There's a "mommy penalty" and a "daddy bonus." For instance, in experimental reviews of comparable résumés, women with children are less likely to be hired,pare paid less, are more likely to be fired, and are allowed fewer absences or late arrivals than women without children or than men with or without children ... while men with children are treated better than men without.
The social scientists I interviewed all agreed that Lisa Belkin's "research" method—asking people after the fact why they did what they did—was invalid and would never pass peer review. (This would be true as well of Linda's questioning of NYT Styles section brides, although Linda, your goal is different than Belkin's, which is why I am not writing about your work: Your goal is to warn and counsel young elite women about navigating the hazards ahead, and you succeed admirably.) But basic social science and the new neurobiology have consistently shown that post-facto explanations for behavior are unreliable: Healthy people settle on the most livable and socially comfortable story. To find out why people actually do what they do requires prospective, not retrospective, research into what they are thinking as they are making their decisions, not after the decision has been made—as well as into studies of comparable populations' behavior with variables changed. This isn't saying that people lie; it's saying that the human psyche is complicated and resilient and that our internal story is shaped by many factors.
But here's my bigger beef with the news media on this story: Women's economic lives are covered as personal issues ... while men's economic lives are covered as public issues. Moms out of work = style section; dads out of work = business section. That's just appalling. There is no going back to June and Ward Cleaver; the American economy desperately needs to adapt to reality. Flip the issue, and consider the fact that 80 percent of American children are living in households in which all adults are in the work force. That leads to an entirely different set of public policy discussions than does the "moms just wanna go home" storyline.
I will now indulge myself and quote my CJR article here:
... yes, maybe some women "chose'"to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full-time.
By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what [researcher Joan Williams] calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. ... And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?
The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to [Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers], as saying, "Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous."
Hurray again to Uchitelle and the NYT for doing it right this time.
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E.J. and Linda, I'm glad you're reprising your debate, because I'm titillated by this new data about women dropping out of the workforce, paired with Heather Boushey's explanation: "When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement. ... We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” I'm struck, as I am whenever this comes up, by how deeply some of us are invested in one explanation over the other. Lisa Belkin's 2003 thesis, that highly educated women were quitting work because, well, they just wanted to, was anathema to a lot of feminists. They (to a degree me included) just wanted her to be wrong. But of course she's not wrong entirely—in upper-middle-class circles, there are women who say their choices are driven by disaffection with the work they had and affection for taking care of husand and kids. E.J. has an interesting explanation for why they should frame their decisions in this way, and amen to her point that it's a mistake to let this small cohort of women stand for the whole. Linda responds, here in the Fray, that she doesn't see a link between the problems the economic downturn has created for lower-income women, and the conclusion that bad times are also the reason that well-off women drop out, since "the low wages and layoffs did not affect elite workplaces, where wages and demand continued to rise."
I'm eager to hear Boushey's response to this—I have a call in to her—and E.J., yours too. In the meatime, aren't all the explanations correct, to one degree or another, and isn't the argument really about how much various groups of women's choices are affected more by one (hooray for staying home) over another (I'd work if I had better childcare, more flexible hours)? I see why the numbers matter: If all women were staying home for one clear reason—or if lower-income women tended to have one reason, and higher-income women tended to have a different one—that would tell us a lot about where we're at, culturally speaking, and perhaps about the policy prescriptions we'd advocate for. But will it ever sort out neatly? So often, it seems to me, these intimate and difficult decisions are made for a tangle of reasons that shift over time.
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And guess what? I still don't want to know. If this story about John Edwards is true—and yes, I still say if—I might have to snatch him bald-headed myself. But you know what would be worse? Chasing a man who is out of politics up and down the back stairs of a hotel in the middle of the night for the purpose of ... what? Making his family suffer more than they already have? Bad juju, people.
Click here to read more from XX Factor on the John Edwards scandal.
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Oh Linda, are we going to go round on this again? You and I have had this discussion in person and in print. Those Sunday Styles women with children who told you they were "opting out" weren't lying to you; they were fully engaged in the very healthy psychological strategy of wanting what they had. Given the constraints facing them—hostile and inflexible workplaces, internal and social expectations that they (and not their husbands) were responsible for their children's well-being and daily schedules, sudden triggering off the "moms can't work" stereotype in the behavior of those around them (and probably a silent withdrawal of good assignments, promotion opportunities, and the like)—these women "chose" to stay home with their kids. Of course they fell in love with the children—but that wasn't the only force at work. Take any psych class and you will learn about this phenomenon: It's often called "sour grapes," but it's really very healthy. What, they're going to say: I hate spending my life stuck with snot-nosed screaming kids all day, I miss having adult conversations, but I was too angry at my condescending colleagues to accept the cut-rate hours and mommy-penalized pay and insane stress of making everyone happy—just for a few early years? (Most, of course, had a false idea of how easy it would be to get back into a good job—in part because of those rosy "opt-out" articles, as Joan Williams has documented in such detail.) Nope, they "chose" to stay home, as expected.
But what if those elite women (and men!!) had had some better choices—early childhood education and school schedules that match 21st-century workdays, less demanding hours, and the like? Then many of them, male and female, would "choose" reasonable, high-paying, well-respected, career-track work that also gave them some flexibility to care for their families. I had a long list of women tell me this when I interviewed them: If they were single mothers, they bit the bullet and took all the insulting treatment to keep feeding their kids. But if they were married to men with high-paying jobs, those who could sometimes bailed out.
As a point of fact, however, high-education women are more likely to be working once they have kids (presumably because they can afford better child-care options) than are the women for whom earnings are more marginal. If you press me on this I can find the correct BLS table; don't have it at hand (and I have another deadline just now!).
Most important, however, is that the Times has stopped peddling the suggestion that Lisa Belkin's Princeton-grad friends stand in for a wide swath of American working women. Uchitelle's coverage (and the front-page placement!!) is much more promising for the kind of working-family-friendly policies needed for this country's economic growth. I want the newspapers of record to talk about most people, rather than the few, when they're guiding our pundits' and policymakers' thinking.
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A guest post from Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work:
XX Factor is full of talk of how the Times just corrected its 2003 opt-out story about why women quit their jobs (it's the economy, stupid). Short version: Female factory workers' wages decline and they won't work for less. Then they cover their decision with talk of falling in love with their babies.
I don't know about Lisa Belkin, who wrote the most famous version, but I feel compelled to remind Slate's readers that her opt-out story was about high class dames, many her Princeton classmates, workers at the Maytag plant not so much. The women who announced their weddings in the New York Times and inspired me to tell them to Get (back) to Work, similarly tony bunch. Unclear to me why these stories are rebutted by a study of the working class, not to diss the working class, but during the recent economic bad stuff, Princeton grads didn't actually experience wage cuts. Here's the estimable Wikipedia on what happened to the classes, rather than the masses:
Considering how education significantly enhances the earnings potential of individuals, it should come as no surprise that individuals with graduate degrees have an average per capita income exceeding the median household income of married couple families among the general population ($63,813).[21][22] . . . While educational attainment did not help reduce the income inequality between men and women, it did increase the earnings potential of individuals of both sexes, greatly enabling many households with (a) graduate degree householder(s) to enter the top household income quintile.[21]
Household income also increased significantly with the educational attainment of the householder. The US Census Bureau publishes educational attainment and income data for all households with a householder who was aged twenty-five or older. The biggest income difference was between those with some college education and those who had a Bachelor's degree, with the latter making $23,874 more. Income also increased substantially with increased post-secondary education. While the median household income for a household with a household holding an Associates degree was $51,970, the median household income for those with a Bachelor's degree or higher was $73,446. Those with doctorates had the second highest median household with a median of $96,830; $18,289 more higher than that for those at the Master's degree level, but $3,170 lower than the median for households with a professionals degree holding householder.[18]
Congressional economists say that babies don't predict dropouts, even among the top earners, but they are bailing for some reason, and it sure ain't plant closings at Debevoise. I tend not to think that women are lying to me when I interview them. Maybe the laid-off washer-makers tell sociologists they love their babies when they actually just hate their paychecks, but I don't think the Times brides were having me on.
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Thanks, Meghan, for the pointer to Louis Uchitelle's sharp article in the NYT, noting that women have achieved a new and unwanted equality: equality in unemployment during and after a downturn. At long last we have a front-page correction to the opt-out myth—a myth that the Times has been peddling since 1952, when it first started publishing a decadeslong series of "Career Girls Just Wanna Go Home and Raise Babies" pieces. The most recent and most notorious iteration thereof was a 2003 Sunday Times Magazine article called "The Opt Out Revolution." Besides making many women spit out their coffee and fire off nasty e-mails, that article started up a whole industry of refutations. I published one such refutation in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, called "The Opt Out Myth"; you can find a footnoted version here, with links to some of the underlying social science research about how women get sidelined for "working while mother."
Kudos to Uchitelle for getting the story right—and to the NYT editors for putting it on the front page, above the fold!
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CBS anchor Katie Couric, in Israel covering the Obama foreign tour, gave an interview to Haaretz in which she discussed being a TV anchor: "I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary's race are important steps in the right direction." I find it unseemly for people like Couric and Clinton, who have been rewarded greatly for their talent, skill, and drive, to complain that sexism is the reason when they don't succeed at absolutely everything. (Couric is paid $15 million a year, a higher salary than her male counterparts.) Sure, she and Clinton have both gotten bashed—that's part of the territory of being a public figure. Couric's predecessor, Dan Rather, was widely mocked for wearing sweaters, for his corn-pone sayings, for his penchant for misadventure. Finally, he was kicked out of his anchor chair in a humiliating fashion. At least he couldn't complain all this happened because white guys can't catch a break. Does Couric believe that if she were a black man she'd be No. 1 in the ratings?
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The New York Times just posted an interesting story about women dropping out of the work force. It says that many economists now think that the supposed "opt out" movement has less to do with women's alleged desire to leave the work force and more to do with America's economic downturn. On Tuesday (tomorrow), a new congressional study will lay out all the data. As the Times reporter summarizes it:
The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.
As Heather Boushey, an economist who's written a lot about the opt-out movement, observes, women who lose their jobs and can't get another say that they're staying home with the kids—the implication being that saying so saves face. Whereas for a man that's not the case. Another economist observes that women's median wages have dropped since 2004. She notes that this is a relatively new experience for women in the work force—not since the 1970s has there been so prolonged a decline—perhaps making women more reluctant than their male peers to accept lower wages.
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In 1979 Samir Kuntar entered Israel on a boat from Lebanon and kidnapped a young father and his 4-year-old daughter. He shot the father, Danny Haran, to death in front of his daughter, Einat, then killed her by smashing her skull against a rock with a rifle-butt. Israel has just released him and others of his ilk, in exchange for the bodies of two of their soldiers. His return to Lebanon is a national holiday. The streets are filled with cheering. What a triumph for the terror organization Hezbollah, which all but controls Lebanon and has long been demanding Kuntar's return. In an excellent column on this, Mona Charen asks, "What can you say about a people who welcome a child murderer as a hero?"
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Nayeli, I'm with you in favor of adorable underthings. Definitely worth the money for the personal confidence and the occasional zing in the eyes of one's date. (Someone I dated briefly liked to call me a "smartypanties.")
And yet at the same time, like Lucy and Amaka, I feel sickened by the culturewide commodification of sexuality—of intimate life and personal worth, really—especially when it's aimed at children (by which I mean anyone under 20! I'm old) who are still developing a sense of self.
As the Rolling Stones knew well, all consumer advertising peddles one basic thing: dissatisfaction. We're constantly being sold the idea that we could be happy if ... if we just fixed X problem by buying Y product. Soft-porn merchant Victoria's Secret, like Abercrombie & Fitch, is in the business of selling the belief that you should be sexier. Sure, they have a right to do it, and I even sometimes wear their underthings. But it is especially disgusting to peddle to young girls—and here I'm not targeting VS alone, but also MTV, Girls Gone Wild!, and the soft-core underage porn culture et al.—the feeling that she's really a ho in training, that her personal worth depends on arousing others' lust. That's selling the idea of being an object, not a subject—-a big difference, although sometimes hard to define.
There's a subtle line between liking to wear fancy panties ... and needing to see others drool over your bottom before you can feel worthwhile. One is powerful; the other's an eating disorder in waiting. One is finding power in enjoying yourself and your body in a mature and confident way ... and the other is a degraded manipulation of self by instincts out of whack and in thrall to others. Sometimes, of course, both are at work at once. Which is why we're having this discussion: figuring out which is which isn't so easy in the consumerized world in which we live.
There's a very odd overlap here between feminism, on the one hand, which wants women to take power without being pornified, and on the other, Christian activists who also want to resist the consumer culture's attempt to drag us around by our gonads and insecurities. At their best, both groups want to respect the individual as being more than just her body, as having a meaningful inner life. This resistance against personal degradation is also why feminists and Christian activists have a similarly uneasy alliance against sex trafficking.
I'll take any and all allies in standing up against personal commodification, whether "chosen" or forced. Christians talk about maintaining a meaningful inner life as having a relationship with God. The God-language can make some feminists gag, but I respect it—even though I don't necessarily agree with each and every one of God's self-appointed personal emissaries. Especially not when they think they know exactly what I should and shouldn't be doing with my smartypanties.
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I once tried to rationalize spending more than $40 on a set of unmentionables to my mother and less-fashion-inclined little sister.
"Look, if I don't have quality underwear, what else do I have?" I recall saying.
My sister told me I was being ridiculous, and that I was wasting my money. My mother suggested in no uncertain tones that the only thing my purchase would accomplish would be to secure my role as an eager-to-please trollop. "That underwear is only made to be seen," she said.
These women, whom I love dearly and who routinely purchase their undergarments in packs of 10, successfully shamed the pants off me.
I understand the source of complaints against lifestyle advertising like Victoria's Secret's, which perpetuates the idea that "sexiness" is mostly about showing off for someone else. Making purchases purely for the sake of seduction seems tacky and compliant. Futile, too, when, as my family was eager to remind me, I'm usually the only one who notices.
But that's just the point.
I'm well aware that buying into the whole "I can't live without this bra" line is completely offensive in a few very obvious ways. But honestly, I do enjoy spending money on and wearing underwear that I find appealing. And I don't think I'm being duped by advertisers. I'm a smart, successful, and informed woman who has managed to secure a disposable income, which I'll spend as I choose. I happen to enjoy knowing, privately, that beneath my day-old jeans and college sweatshirt are garments about which I'm more enthusiastic.
I suppose that if I were to press the issue with own my high-school-age sister, who is only now beginning to form opinions on the subject, I think she would agree with you, Lucy and Amaka, that sexiness is best characterized by confidence and good health. But confidence includes standing behind the consumer choices that make you happy.
As I read it, the Very Sexy campaign's demarcated punctuation speaks less to a lower standard for feminism than a greater appreciation for women who'd rather not feel sorry about dressing up for themselves.
I do agree, however, that the "Behind every very sexy woman is a Very Sexy ® Bra" catchphrase is a little off. Behind my very sexy bra is a very sexy woman. And that's not something for which I'm going to apologize. Period.
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I once walked into a Victoria's Secret when they were running some campaign or another, and a saleswoman waltzed right over to me and purred: "Hi there. Can I help you find some sexy little things?" I was tempted to tell her that what I would like were some frumpy big things, but instead I just said no and walked out. It was my fault, after all, for having entered in the first place. I've since avoided Victoria's Secret like the plague. When I took my 13-year-old sister shopping for a new bra a few weeks ago, she pouted when I refused to set foot inside.
That my sister, who is barely high-school aged, considered Victoria's Secret a prime shopping destination speaks to the company's marketing strategy. In 2004, Victoria's Secret launched its PINK line, which is marketed directly to tweens and teenage girls. PINK is that brand that makes those icky sweatpants with giant lettering that hordes of teenyboppers slum around in, as they bare their bellies and panties. PINK also appeals to this younger crowd by offering too-cute hoodies, fake college logos on their clothing, and free stuffed animals with purchases. To me, this is an obvious ploy to get young shoppers interested in the even raunchier stuff in the store sooner. Growing up Victoria, or something. Certainly a company has a right to push its clients into push-ups, but the approach strikes me as a little trashy.
Before I'm dubbed completely puritanical, none of this is to say I object to "sexy little things." I just take issue with a company whose chief mission is to sexify its shoppers, no matter their ages. Amaka exercised restraint when she neglected to mention the Very Sexy ® Bra's tagline: "The classic seduction begins with lingerie. Behind every very sexy woman is a Very Sexy ® Bra." I've done some seducing in my day, and I'm pleased to report that such a garment is not a necessity.
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The latest development in Victoria Secret's inspiring e-mail solicitation campaign comes in the form of a subject line: "The Bras You Can't Live Without. Period." My sister forwarded it to me with the accompanying note: "After reflecting on this subject line, I understand now why some portend that feminism is dead."
I'm struck by how resoundingly the death toll sounds, illustrated by the boldness of these lame advertising campaigns.
It's the "Period" addendum that gives the tagline its je ne sais quoi. Not that I am surprised, coming as it does from the same company that brought us such inventive names for their different bra lines as "Very Sexy". If the lingerie-seller's home page is any indication, in the world of VS, young college-bound girls hop off to campus wearing thigh-high rugby socks, a pair of underwear, a belly shirt ... and a cute pink hoodie. You know, because it is autumn after all, and it gets cold. So while your exposed buttocks and navel chill in the fall wind, you can be sure that you're covered from head to midstomach-ish; from toe to lower thigh. A VS girl is sexy and sensible, it seems.
I really wonder about Victoria Secret's vaguely dire world view. Take for example another VS subject line from February: "What is Sexy? TM ... New! Very Sexy ® Low-cut Push-up." Oh! I had been wondering what sexy was ... I thought it had something to do with confidence or being healthy. Thank you for clearing up my confusion. Question: What is sexy? Answer: You Spending Money on This Bra.TM
If they are going to shamelessly push their wares upon my person, I'd appreciate a little more creativity. Where are the days of subversive advertising? Is it me, or is Victoria's Secret doing a really sloppy job when it comes to fooling me into thinking a $40 bra will turn me into an impossibly hot Brazilian, accent not included?
Read more "XX Factor" entries on Victoria's Secret.
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Most of the time, the Constitution doesn't let employers refuse to hire people on the basis of religious conviction. This has the comforting ring of a bedrock American freedom. But lately, it's being manipulated. First by pharmacists who say they refuse to dispense emergency contraception on the basis of their religous beliefs. And now by the Bush administration, which this week ordered family-planning clinics who receive federal grants not to refuse to hire nurses and other medical staff who object to abortion "based on religious beliefs or moral convictions." And not just surgical abortion, but “any of the various procedures—including the prescription, dispensing, and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action—that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”
There's some serious accordionlike expansion of categories going on here—from objecting to abortion based not only on a religious belief but on a presumably secular moral one. And from D and Cs to emergency contraception. Worse, however, is the way in which the administration's directive feeds into the conflation of religious freedom with the idea that people have a right to a job even if their religious beliefs mean they can't do it. What does a nurse who objects to abortion do in a family-planning clinic? Sit out the procedures she was hired to help with? Hang protesting posters in the waiting room? I don't get it.
There have always been exceptions to the idea that employers can't discriminate. If you need to be Christian or Jewish or Muslim to fill out the four corners of a job description, then you can be denied the position if you're not. Example: An evangelical college can interview only Christians for the post of president. A synagogue can hire only Jewish Hebrew-school teachers. This isn't discrimination, in any legally recognizable sense of the word. Here's the family-planning parallel: If you are a nurse who feels she can't assist at an abortion or give a patient the emergency contraception the doctor prescribed, it doesn't matter whether your refusal is for religious or moral reasons or because you're not in the mood. You can't do the job. Maybe the Bush directive allows for this, in the sense that it's only protecting job candidates who could object to abortion and do the work that's required anyway. They also presumably wouldn't hang graphic posters of fetuses in the waiting room. I hope that's the right interpretation, anyway.
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By the time The New Yorker
landed in my mail slot today, I'd seen the cover so many times already
it was like, "You, finally!'' As if it had stopped off for a couple of
drinks on the way over here and lost all track of time. So, allow me to
be the last to tell Jack
why I totally hate this image of the Obamas: It would be funnier if
half the country didn't actually think of this hardworking,
high-achieving woman—remind me again what Michelle Obama has not done right?—as
Angela Davis in a sheath. I don't know whether to cry or spit for every
morning she got up before it was light outside to make sure she
got every single thing on the do-list done, only to be looked at like
this. But I am not tempted to laugh.
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Emily wonders whether what would once be seen as merely
"youthful error" is far more perilous to a girl’s reputation in the
Internet age than it was a decade ago when Emily was in her 20s.
Lizz Winstead’s video interview with Jezebel's two
founders, Tracy and Moe, showcasing the edgy young bloggers' drunk
appearance on Winstead's oxymoronically named stage program "Thinking
and Drinking,” turned into a full-out public trainwreck after Winstead
ungenerously uploaded the conversation over at HuffPost.
The raw nature of the self-exposure displayed by
the two inebriated women reminded me of a young exhibitionist woman in
Emily’s age cohort, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the talented but personally
undisciplined author of three memoirs. Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, subtitled “Young and Depressed in America,” was a self-indulgent best-seller published when she was 26. She went on to write two more confessional books, Bitch in
1998 (which featured the naked author on the cover), and, perhaps
predictably, by 2002, a sad chronicle of Wurtzel’s struggles with addiction.
Fortunately for Wurtzel, now 40, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. There are second acts in American life. Wurtzel,
who complained to a Canadian reporter that the outpouring of grief
following 9/11 was misplaced (“I just felt, like, everyone was
overreacting”), was favorably profiled in the New York Times last year. She had re-invented herself and was attending Yale Law School. In March, in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Wurtzel counseled college coeds that spending “spring break in a shower with your roommate in Daytona Beach” for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild
is a bad idea. So, Emily, though your concern for Tracy and Moe is
well-founded, we can be optimistic they will withstand public
approbation and recover nicely. Apparently even overexposed divas
eventually grow up.
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I can't help myself: I have to weigh in on the the New Yorker cover in which the Obamas are drawn as terrorists (one homegrown, one international). Yes, the cover was a veeeery feeble attempt to satire the right-wing response to the Obama's televised fist bump. Yes, they have the right to run a cover like that. But it makes me feel a little sick.
I appreciate, Kim, your big yawn about the controversy. But the cover does matter, and no one seems to understand why. Not because the cover is Good or Bad for the Obama Campaign, which is none of my business. Rather, in displaying these images, The New Yorker reinscribes ugly stereotypes that are already etched deeply into our mind. It doesn't matter that the magazine's or cartoonist's intent was satirical. The cover "activates" certain points of view and thereby strengthens them.
That's just how stereotypes work, as social psychologists have been discovering in amazing depth and detail for the past 20 years. Our minds are always, below our awareness, automatically slotting perceptions of the world around us into categories. Just as your growing brain learned that (say) birds have wings but lizards don't—which is why pterodactyls are so thrillingly boundary-breaking—so it also soaked up all sorts of ugly categories that you may consciously reject. Go take one of these short online tests if you think you don't have any unconscious beliefs about one group or another: If you're human, you can't help it. Our busily categorizing brains more easily gather up any information that reinforces unacknowledged categories and rejects information that doesn't fit.
And those powerful, pre-installed concepts really do affect how we behave. Consider Claude Steele's well-documented concept of "stereotype threat," in which activated stereotypes lead some groups to underperform. For instance, in one experiment, when one group of students were told that women and men did equally well on a particular math test, they did score equally well; when a matched group of students were subtly reminded of the belief that men are better at math ("I'm sure you girls will do fine"), the women scored lower on that test.
So what? So when The New Yorker runs a cartoon showing Barack Obama (with his suspect name) as a Muslim terrorist and Michelle Obama as the classic angry black woman, as Angela Davis/Jackie Brown, it reinforces both those neural pathways in our brains—no matter how sophisticated and satirical we readers may be. Arabic name = Muslim terrorist. Black woman = gun-toting rage. Like that horrifying New Republic cover (which I refuse to link to) of Hillary Clinton as shriekingly hysterical, it tosses dirt into our minds, making the world a little uglier. It works the way a catchy song does, a song that worms into your head and unexpectedly becomes your soundtrack for a week: You can't help it; it's just there, whispering to you in the background. That New Yorker cover, sitting on newsstands in airports across the country, is doing the dirty work of the tribal mind.
(Note for nerds: Click here for a famous and influential Law Review article about how the fact of these unacknowledged mental categories should be dealt with in the law. The social science has gotten more sophisticated since, but the concepts are the same.)
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While we're in Jezebel land, who can resist a little rubbernecking? Tracie and Moe of the site recently made a spectacle of themselves onstage in Manhattan at the Thinking and Drinking series put together by Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show, all captured on video, alas for them. Winstead is furious (clips there and everywhere), and the whole thing already has been raked over the blogosphere coals.(Best and raunchiest post title: Jezebels Gone Wild: In Which Feminism Finally Bends Over and Eats Itself From the Ass Up.) On Jezebel itself, damage control includes calling the whole thing a "fucking shame." But on her own blog, Tracie prefers blurry denial:
Anyway, I thought this thing was supposed to be a comedy show, but to be honest, I didn't really do my research on how the interview was really gonna go. I tried to make some jokes, but they fell super flat. ("I don't get raped because I live in Williamsburg, and all the guys there are pussies.") It all seemed really horrible at the time, but now, looking back, I sort of have to laugh. I mean, to our friends, it was just Moe and Tracie being Moe and Tracie—drunk, irreverent, drunk.
Wow, yes, a shame. And another lesson, if we needed one, in the perils of overexposure, oversharing, over-the-top Internet/video self-indulgence. But isn't that the whole story, really, as opposed to a broader of indictment of feminism and a prediction of its ever-impending doom, as some of the commentary seems to have it? What I wish for these women are the days when a bad small stage appearance or college newspaper column was quickly mothballed, never to be viewed again. Maybe the Web is creating a scary new boundary-free generation, and for sure talking smack about sex has gone way beyond what I remember from my decade—ago 20s (see Emily Gould). But maybe also it's just gotten way too easy to rubberneck, and so youthful errors become train wrecks. Thoughts?
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Juliet, you're right that what's most offensive about the Jezebels' discussion of Polanski's rape of a 13-year-old is its glibness; the very title of their post, suggesting that exploiting a child might not be as bad as making a movie about that exploitation, is just galling. Sorry, a 44-year-old having sex with a drugged 13-year-old is never consensual. I'm too steeped lately in research into serious child sexual exploitation to make jokes about it. I've been at conferences where law enforcement folks are being trained in how to respond when they find, say, sex with a 13-year-old being sold on Craigslist (see John R. Miller's excellent op-ed in the NYT today). And in researching sexual harassment of teens on the job, I've seen statutory rape laws used to excellent effect in stopping predatory men from going back to work with underage girls.
But here's the other thing that offended me about the Jezzies' post: They get the facts completely wrong. Eighteen-year-olds can legally choose to have sex, everywhere in the country. In at least 44 states, 16-year-olds can say yes. (My main source is this 2004 study, but I had a friend with a Westlaw account do a spotcheck to see if its table on Pages 6 and 7 is still accurate. Nope, the ages have dropped. For instance, Wisconsin's age of consent is now 16; so is Delaware's, with a Romeo-and-Juliet clause for 12-to-15-year-olds.)
Here are some more of the complicated details, for nerds like me: Idaho is the only state where you have to be 18 to consent, with no Romeo-and-Juliet exception. Which means that even in Idaho, you would have been free to choose sex with your older boyfriend; he broke no laws. (And yes, I am forcibly restraining myself from making any jokes about the relevance of your name.) California puts it at 18 with a very, very carefully graded and complicated set of exceptions: At 17 or under, someone can have a lover within three years of his/her age; but the state only really aims its heavy guns at you only if you're over 21 and have sex with someone 15 or under. Many states get especially punitive when there's a larger age gap and the child is 14 or 13 or 12 or under—because the bigger the gap and the younger the child, the more coercive it is on its face.
Your argument about how patronizing stat rape laws seem, in other words, is precisely the argument feminists have been making for decades—and because of that feminist effort, the age of consent is lower than it used to be. So why would the Jezzies go joking about it? As far as I'm concerned, they just deflect attention from Polanski's crime in coercing this child into sex. Check out the documents about his actions. Disgusting.
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The Jezebel team posted a conversation recently about the new HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. I haven't seen the doc, but I know the bare bones of the Polanski story—the director sodomized a 13-year-old girl, was charged with statutory rape, and then fled the country. While the Jezebels don't exactly excuse Polanski's behavior, they have a fairly glib conversation about the whole affair. They posit that age-of-consent laws are "a gray area"; they seem to agree that the victim's mom should have taken some of the heat for leaving her nubile daughter alone with an older man of questionable morals; and they wonder if what Polanski did is worse than the fact that Hollywood doesn't care about what he did.
Unsurprisingly, lots of Jezebel readers have found the conversation offensive. "I think being the actual pervert instead of exploiting the pervert for his talent is worse," writes one commenter. "[S]he was a 13 [year] old child it's wrong and illegal," writes another.
Part of me agrees with the commenter outrage, but I think the Jezebels have something here. This particular case is likely just plain wrong and out of the gray area (I just don't know enough about it), but in general I find myself saying, "Yeah, but ..." when it comes to the age of consent. Thirteen is young. No doubt about it. But 18 strikes me as a little old if we're talking about the youngest age at which someone can say yes and mean yes. Isn't it just a little condescending?
Full disclosure (or is it oversharing?): I entered into a relationship with an older man when I was 18. I knew what I was doing, and frankly, I would have known what I was doing at 17 or at 16. But since this wasn't a Romeo-and-Juliet situation (i.e., we weren't just a couple of years apart in age), it would've been criminal to get together any earlier. To which I say, get off my back, government!
These laws are very culture- and century-specific. What we call May-December now would have been called June-September not too long ago. Not everyone's sexual desires fit neatly into the particular mores of the time they live in.
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If Obama is really lucky, Jesse Jackson will curse him every day from now until November—and keep right on apologizing. The candidate himself shouldn't issue any more needless apologies, though, as he sort of did in second-guessing his decision to let his little girls be interviewed on television. It's easy to understand how he came to that conclusion, though his girls were nothing but charming. But as LBJ said, Americans will forgive you anything except looking weak. For a long time, they loved it that Bush never seemed to second-guess himself on anything. And though I happen to think the ability to admit a mistake is a sign of strength, Obama should do nothing to validate the Republican suggestion that he's got a little Jimmy Carter in him.
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Dahlia, you ask, "Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes?" I think the gray area—where a marriage is neither deliriously euphoric for years on end, nor a bastion of bitterness, infighting, and "divorce dreams"—may not be written about partly because those extremes sell better but also partly because they're easier for the writer. It's a lot harder to be realistic about the gray area. Because that gray area lets on that, heaven forbid, your marriage might not be perfect. It's as though if you acknowledge that a gray area exists, you come off looking like you're trashing marriage—your own.
The closest analogy I can think of, I hate to say, is the various plot endings of the recent Sex and the City movie (note: major spoiler alert), which focused a lot on fairy-tale endings of deliriously happy marriages (or one in particular). As much as it pained me to see Carrie marry Big in the end—not only because he'd consistently screwed her over throughout the series, but also because, after leaving her at the altar, it didn't make any sense (why not live together happily ever after if he's that freaked out by marriage?)—I was heartened to see the ending written for Miranda and Steve. Contrary to the foolish, the-bad-guy-will-change-for-you message sent by the valentine that is Carrie's marriage, Miranda and Steve seem to really struggle and really try to work it out (at the very end) after Steve's affair. Granted, the circumstances of one party cheating are much more dire than the vanilla-esque gray area items I'm mulling over (like leaving the cap off the toothpaste), but it's not too often, especially on the big screen, that you see the struggle and mediocrity of a marriage—along with the moments that endear the betrothed to each other, by the way—getting equal airing. It was a refreshing antidote to the overblown central story line, yet it hardly got any attention.
Perhaps the reality of it is just too banal and maybe, as Dahlia again pointed out, we might need to stake out outrageously simple positions to get published. But I think there could be more to it than that. (I also add that my own marriage is a bed of roses every single day. Seriously.)
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Jesse Jackson says he wanted to "cut off" Barack Obama's "nuts" because the presidential contender has been saying black men have to take more responsibility for their behavior, stop acting "like boys," and not father and abandon children. Jackson said that Obama was "talking down to black people" with these remarks. In a turgid apology, he explained, "My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.'' So we are to understand that it was "government and the public policy" and a "lack of good choices" that led in 2001 to Jackson, who was then a famous, wealthy, 59-year-old, issuing another apology and withdrawing temporarily from public life when he had to reveal—because the tabloids got hold of the story—that he had fathered a toddler out of wedlock. This is in addition to his apology in 1984 for calling New York "Hymietown." At least this time Jackson didn't have to be forced to apologize.
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Like Emily Y., I did not exactly grow up planning my wedding—or picking out baby names, for that matter. In fact, the whole time I was single, I had this recurring nightmare that it was my wedding day and there was nothing I could do about it. Even as the actual day approached, I was completely terrified, and vividly remember a conversation I had with a photographer I worked with at the time, about how scary it was to think I’d never have another relationship with anyone else, ever. “Statistically unlikely,’’ she said, and somehow, that made me feel a lot better. And it still does—and that’s no reflection on my marriage. Which I guess is why I take these pieces about moron husbands no more seriously than I take the opposite kind. (Have you ever noticed how super-mushy book dedications seem to be a pretty good predictor of divorce within the year?) The impulse to make our marriages out to be worse than they are, rather than better, also just seems to be a part of this culture of competitive griping we've got going; even after I wrote about a love affair that ended badly, in an assisted living facility, for heaven's sake, between an 82-year-old woman and a 95-year-old man, I can’t tell you how many (apparently happily married) people in their 40s said wow, hubba hubba, they just couldn’t wait. … And none of them meant it, I'm pretty sure.
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Well, what confused me is that Tien does not describe her marriage as a bad marriage, or her predicament as particular. "Don't misunderstand. I would not, could not disparage my marriage," she writes, after spending 500 words describing her husband as a drivelling idiot. And then: "Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is a Moderately Bad Man." And then she has a scene in which she and her friends are standing around and one of them announces she is getting divorced, and none of them expresses shock or pity. Instead, their faces show "could it be?—yearning?" Now the fact is, in our class and generation of women, and presumably Tien's, far fewer marriages actually do end in divorce. (Ten percent is the lowest statistic I've seen.) So maybe this is all about fantasy, and thus harmless. The flip side of this argument is Roiphe's—that in our child-centric culture when a woman with a child does actually get divorced, she suffers a fair amount of scorn and stigma. So the surprise for me was that even in couples with decent marriages—or who seem to have decent marriages—women spend a lot of time hating their husbands and fantasizing about divorce but not actually pursuing one.
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It seems we are having two discussions here: writing about a rotten marriage, and having one. I agree with Hanna, I don’t know how you write a piece that begins, “I contemplate divorce every day” and not end up writing the sequel, “How I Chose My Divorce Lawyer.” Hanna, you quote Ellen Tien’s assertion, “Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce," and wonder if those of us whose running chyron is saying “I am so lucky I am married to this man” are deluded. I agree with you, Hanna, that Tien is deluded to think there are no happy marriages, and that it demonstrates a rather narrow worldview not to understand there are many couples, who even in their worst moments, have never contemplated divorce. On the other hand, how (and why) do you write about your happy marriage? It would feel like one of those gloating Christmas letters. I grew up with a terror of marriage. My parents’ was comprehensively awful. The only thing that seemed to keep them together for 20 years was that it took them that long to finish shredding each other. I didn’t get married until I was 38, and the miracle of my life is that we have been happy for the 14 years since. But maybe this is due to the fact that early on, while watching A Few Good Men, we decided we needed a motto for our marriage and took Jack Nicholson’s line: “You can’t handle the truth!”
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Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.
But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!
Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?
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Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John Cheever era. And now we have our raging house bitches, freed by the pen. And I suppose there's a certain justice in that. Men don't do it because it still seems petty or pathetic or somehow beneath them to trash their wives in print (i.e., Philip Weiss' condescension). With women, the act still carries an outrageous glamour. (Katie Roiphe wrote a recent essay in New York about how happy she was about her divorce. Claire Bloom's memoir about her marriage to Philip Roth, among others, is a classic, and Roth only sought revenge obliquely, through a fictional Eve.) But I guess I don't see the liberation or happiness at the end of this road. Freedom from housework, freedom from the sole responsibilities of child-rearing, freedom from semi-arranged marriages. I'm with you. But freedom from intimacy? Freedom from love? And then what?
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Ann and Meghan, when I tried to come up with male journalists and essayists who run down their wives last night, Norman Mailer kept popping into my head. Wrong era (and maybe wrong kind of misogyny). The men's companion volume to The Bitch in the House, as I recall, was mild and mewling by comparison. Do women bitch more because they're bitchier or because they have more to bitch about? I like Ann's image of Iron Women wives clubbing their plankton husbands, but I wonder if those are mostly literary poses. Another thought: Writers like Ellen Tien are practicing self-deprecation run amok and misdirected to include not only themselves but the men near and dear to them. When I wrote recently about parents who dissect their family lives in print, the writers I interviewed unfailingly told me that they themselves, and their failings, were the real subject. The Bitch writers seem to depart from this model all too readily. Maybe that's because they extend their unflinching self-analysis to their husbands and marriages. Their men's pores and warts are as coldly exposed as their own, but maybe somehow that seems OK, because the whole thing originates in self-critique, even if it ends up somewhere else entirely.
Hanna, I don't know about you, but I feel like among the married women I know, contemplating divorce is a huge fault line. For some women, it's like prodding a sore tooth—both irritating and somehow comforting. And for other women, it's just not part of their universe—not today or yesterday or 10 years from now. Tien implies there's no real understanding among women across this divide, because she can imagine only one side of it. Is that right? I hope not, but I'm not sure.
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Meghan, you ask how male writers treat their wives in print, and I can't say I've been browsing the magazine racks. But for a recent sample, I looked back at Philip Weiss' New York magazine piece on "the trouble with sex and marriage," which supplied us here at XX with a lot of grist not so long ago. I thought I'd recalled squirming at his portrait of his wife. Here's how he and his friend describe their spouses: "He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I'd be as lost as plankton." It's a far cry from trashing, but it's rather narcissistic damning with condescending praise, isn't it? And I wonder if it might go some way to explaining why so many writing wives don't hesitate to eviscerate: Maybe a new power dynamic, at least in the world of dual-career couples, spurs Ellen Tien, et al., on. Do they assume that hubbies, desperate to avoid the plankton fate, will put up with a lot? How ironic, yet classic, if the dependence of empathy-challenged guys is goading women to violate those famously wound-binding ways of females.
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Are yoga-toned women of a certain class all secretly dying to get divorced, you ask us, Hanna? I find it hard to believe—whatever Ellen Tien at O might say about her own divorce daydreams. But a follow-up question might be: Are many women of a certain, er, journalistic class not-so-secretly dying to shred their husbands into tiny little pieces in the pages of a national magazine? Or in a themed anthology to be heavily promoted at the Barnes & Noble front table? Are simple bitch sessions with a best friend over iced coffee no longer enough to get the weight off our chests? For a while now, it's seemed to me that everywhere I look—in Vogue, in O, in Glamour, in books like The Bitch in the House— there's an essay by a woman about the challenges of matrimony that basically devolves into a long humiliate-the-hubby session. Usually these verbal drubbings come high up in the piece. In distress, one searches in vain for some humor, some lightness of touch. ... But as you point out, Hanna, there's no Lucy-and-Ricky good cheer there.
Now, I see the virtue of tearing down certain conventional ideas about marriage: For example, it's clear that separate apartments work well for some folks. But it does seem to me that whatever form marriage takes, it has to be a shelter. It's a little circle two people draw around themselves in order to protect each other as best they can from life's slings and arrows. And the old moralist in me feels that while you're in that circle, you don't deliver your partner a cathartically vituperative tongue-lashing before scores of strangers. (If you really feel you must, don't do it in a personal essay in O; at least aim to produce a new Tender Is the Night.) I'm curious: Does this seem like an old-fashioned idea now? In our age of disclosure, is marriage on the same plateau as everything else—friendships, sex, boyfriends? Or does it, should it, still occupy a separate realm?
Meanwhile, it seems to me that this mini-phenomenon is majority-owned by women. But do you all see lots of essays by men—in GQ, in Men's Vogue, wherever—running down their wives?
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I want to take advantage of what Maureen Dowd dubs the celebrity divorce moment (Christie Brinkley, Madonna) to talk about how this great American pastime figures for the rest of us. When David and I did the Slate V feature in which we spent a day no more than 15 feet apart, I got one overwhelming response from women: How could you do that? I could never do that! That would be torture! For a while I wondered whether people were exaggerating their horror. After all, how hard could it be to spend a mere 24 hours tethered to the man you married? Annoying, maybe, but torture? And then I came across a story in O called "Divorce Dreams." New York Times reporter Ellen Tien begins the story with a portrait of her bumbling fool of a husband, who lies, always says exactly the wrong thing, scratches his armpit at a parent-teacher conference and then "absently smells his fingers." These anecdotes are not recounted in Lucy-and-Ricky good cheer. The story's first sentence is: "I contemplate divorce every day." Three paragraphs in, I was shocked that someone would write this way under her own byline about her living husband, and not her ex. But apparently I am an idiot. The premise is that women of certain class, flush with financial independence, yoga-toned arms and infinite choices, all yearn for divorce every day. The other ones, who say things like, "My husband and I never fight," or "My husband is my best friend" are either willfully deluded or liars. "Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce." So, help me out here, ladies. Is this true? Am I living in a fantasy land? Or is Ellen Tien as bitchy as she seems?
Read the rest of the XX Factor conversation about divorce and the way men and women treat one another in print.
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Rachael,
All right, you caught me on my own overheated rhetoric (see what I get for posting at 6 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend? I had a great time at Boston's beautiful fireworks, by the way—hope you had a fab weekend too!). No, I do not believe that being willing to perform abortions should be a requirement for getting and keeping a medical license. However, polls show that for the past decades, upward of 80 percent of Americans believe that abortion procedures should be legal at least in some circumstances. Presumably, then, that's also true of upward of 80 percent of physicians.
So, why aren't life-saving abortion procedures taught in medical schools' ordinary ob-gyn classes? Why don't 80 percent of women's ob-gyn practitioners offer the procedure, at least sometimes? Why must the procedure be ghettoized in special clinics, performed by only the few who are willing to risk their lives to save women from having their uteruses pierced by coat hangers, protected by extreme security procedures?
Because performing abortions at all—in any circumstances—brings in credible death threats, murder attempts, and sometimes murder. The 20 percent (or fewer) of Americans who believe it should never be legal to free a woman of an unwanted pregnancy—even if doing so would save her life—have scared the rest. That's what I mean by the overheated rhetoric. I should have added "and homicide."
EJ
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EJ,
I hope you had a great holiday weekend. I don't want to wade into general disagreement territory, either—I suppose most of us have our heels dug in deeply enough that we're not going to change one another's minds. But I wanted to address a few points that you made.
If indeed the "harsh rhetoric" has made abortion less accessible, isn't that a reflection of the unease that a large segment of the population has with the legality of abortion? Just because it's legal doesn't mean that we pro-lifers are going to sit quietly on the sidelines. And, no, just to be extra-super clear, I'm not condoning murderous scare tactics like clinic bombings. But speaking out against abortion, protesting outside clinics, and voting for pro-life candidates are fair and legal ways for pro-lifers to express our belief that abortion shouldn't be legal. It's not a perfect analogy, but death-penalty opponents haven't been quieted by court rulings that uphold the legality of executions, and indeed their protests and agitation have led to more humane executions and more challenges to the death penalty.
You ask, "Why doesn't every ob-gyn offer this surgery?" You wouldn't compel doctors to perform abortions, would you? Even I don't like the South Dakota law that forces doctors to say things they don't believe. It would be far more troubling to force doctors to perform a surgery that violates their own moral code or, in their eyes, the Hippocratic oath (which originally mentioned abortion). How many wonderful doctors would we lose because pro-lifers wouldn't go into the specialty? And what about doctors who are pro-choice but uncomfortable actually doing the deed? What an incredible internal conflict! A doctor could spend most of her day working to bring healthy children into the world and then spend another fraction of it doing the opposite. How do you walk into one exam room and tell a woman that, despite years of trying, she won't be able to have children of her own and then walk into the next room and tell someone else that you'll terminate her unintended pregnancy? Surely there are some doctors who see only the woman as their patient and can make that separation, but there have to be some who see the woman and her child as patients.
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This abortion ruling strikes me as a lot like the religious culture-war debates, where we spend a lot of time fighting about symbolics and very little about things that matter (a creche vs. faith based funding, abortion language vs. actual access) The language suggested by the South Dakota law seems wholly beside the point. For one thing, sonograms make it obsolete. By now, women requesting an abortion usually have to undergo a sonogram to make sure there is a heartbeat, etc. If that doesn't shove in your face the reality of what you're doing, I'm not sure what will. For another, this is yet another case of a liberal straw (wo)man that hasn't existed for at least 10 years, if it ever did. Things have changed a lot since the "My Body, My Choice" protest days. In the literature, in the movies, on TV, there hasn't been a portrayal of a woman casually undergoing an abortion since, since ... Murphy Brown? No wait, she was an unwed mother. Even she didn't get an abortion. ... In fact, I don't know if there ever was one. And it's been a few years since even Naomi Wolf occupied middle ground. What woman desperate for an abortion will bother reading the fine print? And if she does, what will she feel more than the pang that was already there?
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As if Emily's article hadn't left me appalled enough about South Dakota's Orwellian new abortion "disclosure" law, I actually clicked over to read the 8th Circuit's appalling decision. Fortunately, no one else was in the office—everyone's sensibly headed out for the Fourth of July holiday—so they couldn't hear the astonished and foul language erupting from my corner.
Let me add some thoughts to what Dana has been saying. First, I have trouble believing that any female in the country has failed to think about what's happening in her tummy (to use the technical term) when she's pregnant. I remember imagining it when I was in grade school, putting my hands on my tummy just like my mother did, and thinking about something growing in there. Maybe I was an unusually imaginative child, but every girl knows the story: that collection of rapidly dividing cells could become a human being if not stopped. That's the whole point of getting an abortion: to prevent that cluster of cells from becoming an actual person who is your responsibility. It is insanely paternalistic to suggest that girls and women haven't considered what they are doing—especially, as Dana suggests, if they must make the 350 mile drive to the clinic.
Second point: that 350-mile drive. Rachael, to me, the point of noting that distance isn't to decide whether or not this dearth of full ob/gyn health clinics in the state is an evil conspiracy, or a consequence of the harsh anti-abortion policies and rhetoric of the past 30 years, or just a neutral fact. The point is that a lot of thought and planning goes into making that trip, and into pulling together the gas money and funds to pay for the procedure.
Third point: To force doctors to mouth nonsense language that they flatly can't believe about a blastocyst being a human being, or about unlikely and unproven possible consequences—well, I don't think I can finish that sentence. It's appalling. The very fact that the law must mandate such statements reminds you that there is a furious national debate over precisely this question. Which tells you outright that the 8th Circuit was on crack when it said there isn't a free speech issue here: The government is forcing doctors to mouth political beliefs that they do not agree with. What's worse is that the 8th Circuit says that a court shouldn't easily overrule duly elected representatives. Well, yes—except when the government is trying to violate an individual's basic rights. As it is trying to do here. Isn't that why we have a Bill of Rights and constitutional review: to protect the individual from the overreaching state?
Fourth, the dearth of abortion services IS a consequence of the harsh rhetoric, et al., of the past 30 years. Why doesn't every ob/gyn offer this surgery? Wouldn't they all, if they'd seen the deaths and maimings of women that came before Roe, and could see that legal, medically supervised abortion is a lifesaving procedure? Yes, I am writing this even though, for decades, I have had zero risk of accidental pregnancy. (It always used to be fun to answer a new doctor's or nurse's questions: "Are you sexually active?" Yes. "What contraception method do you use?" None. Their doubletakes were very amusing.) But I have friends, sisters, cousins who need to control their own sexuality and fertility. And I care about women being able to have a say about what happens inside their own organs.
I realize that I am aiming now into basic disagreement territory, so I will stop. Besides, it's time to start celebrating the July 4th weekend.
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Dana,
Even though we sit on opposite sides of the abortion debate, I am also uneasy with South Dakota's law compelling abortion doctors to tell women that they are terminating the "the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." There are a million and one better ways to reduce the number of abortions, from better sex education and better access to birth control to charities who work tirelessly to support women who choose to keep their child or keep the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption. And while I do think pre-operative counseling for women seeking abortion is beneficial and would support laws mandating such counseling (it seems like some in the pro-choice movement are acknowledging the emotional and psychological difficulties that some women who choose abortion face, as there are pro-choice groups springing up that offer counseling to women post-abortion), this particular law seems unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
But I'd like to address another part of your original post. The fact that there is only one abortion clinic in South Dakota is not that remarkable and I'm guessing has little to do with the state's abortion laws. South Dakota's population hovers below 800,000. North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming—states with similarly huge square mileage and tiny populations—also have a single abortion clinic each, at least according to Abortion.com. For the Dakotas, at least, it's been that way since the late 1980s. Such a lack of services isn't limited to abortion providers. Any kind of medical specialist could be a half-day's drive away, depending on where you live. An ob-gyn can be an hour or more away. You might find the dearth of abortion providers unfortunate, but it's not a conspiracy.
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But the point, Melinda, of my hypothetical story about the pregnant woman in South Dakota is that neither she nor her doctors necessarily hold the belief that abortion is the taking of a life. The doctors who require her to sign aren't "pointing out" that there's "a person in there" (or "a human being," in the carefully parsed words of the bill). They're being compelled by the state to go through the motions of simulating that belief, which, I'm sorry, is a Stalinesque absurdity that serves no purpose I can see besides terrorizing that individual patient and driving a wedge into Roe v. Wade nationwide. Doctors in South Dakota, or anywhere else, who are morally opposed to abortion have an option: They can work in a practice that doesn't offer the procedure. In fact, that's what the vast majority of women's health practitioners in South Dakota already do. But for women seeking what is still, whatever one's personal beliefs about it, a legal medical procedure, the options in South Dakota (and if copycat legislation has its way, elsewhere as well) are rapidly narrowing.
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I agree with Will Saletan that it is an abomination that the late Leona Helmsley wished her potentially $8 billion foundation to go entirely to the dogs. Uber-narcissist Helmsley left one of her largest personal bequests, $12 million, to her badly behaved (surprise!) Maltese dog, Trouble, an amount cut to $2 million by the judge overseeing the case. Looking at the photo of Helmsley's taut, rotten face cuddled up to Trouble, the only creature on earth who could bear the sight of her, fills one with faint longings for the return of Marxism. Helmsley's newly revealed preference for her foundation's mission does not have legal standing, so let's hope the trustees ignore it completely. How much better if they decide to do something useful with the money, follow Warren Buffett's lead, and give the pile to the Gates Foundation. If they do honor their benefactor's wishes, be prepared to see that the best-endowed professorship in the country is the veterinary school that establishes the Leona Helmsley Chair in Canine Anal Gland Impaction.
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Actually, Dana, I am a big fan of moral bullying, and wish it had been more effectively used to keep us out of Iraq. I'm hopeful that eventually, through better moral bullying, we will join other civilized nations in outlawing capital punishment. And it is only by building a moral consensus - bullying, if you prefer - that we'll ever see a real reduction in the number of abortions performed in this country every year. I'm not so sure I approve of the particulars of the law Emily wrote about; if the evidence is iffy on whether having an abortion is any more likely to lead to depression than giving birth is, for example, then doctors obviously shouldn't pretend otherwise. But as to whether they are being "forced to lie'' when they point out that there's a person in there, we will never agree. I get that if you don't see an abortion as the taking of a life, you'll see this exercise as offensive. But if you did see it that way, why would you blanch? (You'd still expect doctors to behave with compassion -- and if these are the same doctors who perform abortions, why wouldn't they?) But why would people who sincerely feel lives are at stake think, "Darn, I'd like a shot at saving those lives, if only I didn't have to go so far as to make women read a piece of paper and then sign it; that I will not do!'
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Emily’s piece about the new abortion bill set to go into effect in South Dakota has me madder and sadder than anything I’ve read in some time. (Actually, the last thing that got me into this state was also in Slate: In Steven Greenhouse’s story about the scarcity of vacation time in America, he mentions that the United States is one of four countries in the world without required paid maternity leave. The other three are Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea.)
But back to South Dakota. Imagine you live there—in Rapid City, say—and you want an abortion. Who knows why? Maybe you’ve been raped; maybe you’re in an abusive relationship with a partner on whom you’re financially dependent; maybe you’re only 15. Or maybe, for reasons that are nobody’s business, you just really don’t want to have a baby right now. The point is, you need, with some urgency, to schedule a medical procedure that’s been legal in this country for 35 years.
So you get in your car, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and drive 350 miles to Sioux Falls, where the state’s lone abortion clinic is located (let me repeat that: a state with an area of 77,121 square miles has only one clinic that will perform abortions). How you get time off work to make this six-hour-each-way drive, what you tell your family about where you’re going, or how you get past the protesters screaming outside the clinic is not my concern here. No, I’m thinking of the moment when, filling out the paperwork for a procedure that (like many medical events in life) may already have you ambivalent, worried, and scared, you’re asked to sign a statement attesting that what you’re about to do will “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” To translate: We’ll help you terminate that pregnancy right away, little lady—as soon as you admit in writing that you’re a murderer.
The trauma induced by this forced confession probably will scare a few women out of the clinic (hell, all it took for Juno was an ugly waiting room), and thus slightly increase the population of South Dakota. But it seems incredible that the state legislature, with its Justice Kennedy-inspired concern for the “depression” and “increased suicidal ideation” that abortion supposedly brings about, haven’t considered the harm that might come as a result of being forced to sign such a document (in the presence of a doctor who, as Emily points out, is also being legally compelled to lie about his or her beliefs). I’d hope that even those opposed to abortion, whether for themselves or as a matter of public policy, would blanch at the idea of such state-sponsored moral bullying.
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Pixar’s latest kiddie masterpiece, Wall-E, did some massive damage at the box office on its opening weekend. As A.O. Scott recently noted in a New York Times essay about Kit Kittredge (watch this space for more on that film), Pixar has yet to build a movie around a girl protagonist. But Wall-E does prominently feature a pretty bad-ass lady: Wall-E’s crush object, Eve, a sleekly minimalist commando-bot with an itchy trigger finger. What kind of girl is Eve? One XX Factor-er wondered whether Pixar had intentionally made Eve beautiful but dangerous. The hapless Wall-E “is attracted to her,” she noted, “yet fears she will destroy him or, at the very least, come to his house and mess up his stuff.” Is Eve some kind of femme fatale? (Or, given the fact that she looks like a floor model from a Japanese tech show, is she an electronic dragon lady?) I, for one, found Eve’s wanton destructiveness hilarious, and it occurred to me that she actually evokes a specifically male comic archetype—the powerful brute who can’t control his own strength—which I think makes her even funnier, not to mention a little subversive. In other words, I think she’s more Small Wonder than Angelina Jolie.
Eve also fits into another classic comedy narrative: the chic, competent career woman who falls for a bumbling but sweethearted schlub. Do you think Judd Apatow got a consulting credit for that?
The more I thought about it, though, what Eve reminded me of most was the world’s first Eve—in particular, the vision of her found in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Like her namesake, robot Eve’s initial design objective is to incubate the first stirrings of life; it’s no coincidence that she’s shaped like an egg. And the biblical Eve was pretty destructive in her own right. (“Oh, honey, about that whole ‘ruining our chances at immortality and losing God’s everlasting favor’ thing: Totally my bad.”) But even more significant in my eyes, both Pixar’s film and Milton’s poem are about the importance of finding a true partner and companion. The famous last image of Paradise Lost shows Adam and Eve standing outside the gates of Eden; as they prepare to begin a brand new life in a brand new world, they take hold of each other’s hands. If you saw Wall-E, you know that it’s pretty much a 100-minute pantomime about a boy robot trying to hold hands with an oblivious girl robot—before they go repopulate the Earth. The good stories never change, I guess.
Also in Slate, read Dana Stevens' review of Wall-E and see what critics are saying about the new Pixar film in Slate V's Summary Judgment.
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The whole Yearning for Zion case left me creeped out. The feminist in me finds polygamy in general a little creepy, but even more so when young women—girls even—are married off to more powerful older men. The mother in me hates the way they kick out the boys to make the numbers work, and I'm saddened by stories that the children apparently grow up without toys or anything else that might inspire their imagination. But the civil libertarian in me also gets creeped out when the state oversteps its bounds and removes children from loving homes on grounds of child abuse wherein the "abuse," it turns out, is largely having a weird religion.
So this story from the Salt Lake Tribune (via the Drudge Report) brought a smile to my face. The hundreds of children who were taken from the YFZ ranch have been returned to their mothers, but the mothers have been advised not to return to the ranch. They are renting apartments and trying to feed their families, and—contrary to one of the arguments against polygamy, that it increases the welfare roles—the women are trying to make it on their own. So some of them have launched a Web site to sell the modest garb that their sect requires. One of the mothers is quoted in the story thusly: "They accuse us of [relying] on welfare, but that's untrue. We like to be busy and learn to meet our needs—out of ashes growing lilies."
I'm still creeped out by the FLDS, and I probably will stick to Old Navy when I need to stock up on kids' clothes, but I admire the heck out of these women for trying to make a go of it in a way that allows them to be true to themselves.
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I'm struck by this debate because in many ways it perfectly encapsulates something I've been feeling lately. As a 20-year-old girl (woman?!) who aspires to a career as a conservative journalist, I find myself agonizing over where I'll find my place professionally.
I've spent several summers working in journalism, and I've always thought it's better to be a conservative in a liberal pool than to hole myself away with a bunch of neoconservatives. But sometimes I feel like I don't get credit for that. I've found that at many news outlets, conservatives are written off as either stupid or delusional. Smart conservatives tend to be regarded as interesting conversation pieces. Experiences such as those have me toying with the idea of dyeing my hair a few shades blonder and throwing myself into a career as the next Ann Coulter.
Emily may be right that there's more immediate glory for women who play "truth-teller" against feminist tenets. My own critics would probably label me that way, and in truth, in my short writing career as a college undergraduate, I probably have gained more attention than I otherwise would have because of my willingness to bash one popular feminist cause or another. Still, I like to think that I'm taking those stands because I'm searching for intellectual clarity, not because I like attention. (On a related note, I won't even tackle the Larry Summers reference of earlier posts, because then we could be here awhile.)
Suffice it to say that I worry every day that I could fall into the peroxide trap of some of the Fox News extremists (though those women do dress well). Maybe other conservative women are not as idealistic as I am, but I think we might need to cut them some slack, "ka-ching, ka-ching" and all. If we don't, there really is nothing keeping these new conservative voices from diving into the right-wing deep end—yes, I acknowledge there is a very troubling conservative deep end. Once that has happened, the landscape of media could become even more polarized than it is now and even less effective. And that's a problem I'm eager to avoid.
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I'm saying, Emily, that it's not acceptable, much less a Fast Pass, to question feminist dogma on choice within the ranks of "mainstream media"—though I'm sure there are no shortage of book contracts to be had at Regnery. Until the Times hired Bill Kristol, weren't such voices almost exclusively consigned to conservative outlets? Maybe you're thinking, "Sure, isn't that where they're supposed to be?' (And maybe you're not, though ah, how much easier to win arguments with myself; I also enjoy solitaire Scrabble.) But it does seem to me that that is the one issue on which there is little to no diversity of opinion at news organizations that otherwise try to present all sides.
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Emily, you asked why self-identified feminists like Susan Pinker and LouAnn Brizendine publish books that focus on the differences between men and women. The cynic in me says: The marketplace finds it sexier than more talk about feminist goals that haven't been met yet. (As you pointed out, Brizendine's book was a best-seller.) But to be less simplistic about it: It seems to me that we are at a crux where we think we know more about the brain than ever before. Whether we do or not is perhaps subject to debate—and I really look forward to reading Amanda's series. But all this scientific novelty has resulted in a frenzy of really old activity: the use of new technologies to reaffirm traditional canards about "how women are." (We don't like to take risks, etc.) Whatever the realities of "hard-wired differences," it's kind of astonishing to watch so many columnists and authors use "brain science" to embrace the idea that things are the way they are for a reason.
So in response to your fascinating question, I have to conclude that even for women it's sometimes a relief to imagine that we don't need to set ourselves the task of reinventing the world. That, combined with the fact that there are some studies that show "real" differences, makes for a tempting menu option. Not to mention that sometimes relationships can make everything seem completely oppositional. Hence, the paradigm that men are from Mars; women are from Venus. It's easier than thinking we're all on Pluto and need to do the hard work of getting back to Earth.
A wonderful book that debunks a lot of gender myths is Carol Tavris' The Mismeasure of Women. I read it a few summers back, and parts of it are a bit outdated now. But I still recommend it to anyone interested in these questions. Among many other useful exercises, she invites the reader to try to perform a useful thought experiment: Imagine there were a third gender. Men, women, and, say, it. Would we be so focused all the time on construing "difference" as "oppositional"? As she points out, differences between the genders may indeed exist; but as more than one scientist has noted, the differences may pale in comparison to the similiarities.
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Melinda, I think you are tellling me to go have that drink. Actually, I can think of more than two fingers' worth of women journalists who are pro-life, or who I think are, but I'll stipulate that they are relatively few. So what does that prove? That not many pro-life women are drawn to journalism, especially opinion journalism? Or that there are lots of women out there who are being stomped on by the liberal establishment and not enough conservative outlets to house them? I'm not sure I buy the idea of making the pro-choice/pro-life divide stand for feminism more broadly. But is your point that women commentators pay for having conservative views much more often than they're rewarded for that, and that I should welcome the exceptions who stumble through somehow? Because you may well be right about that, though I'm not sure how we'd prove it one way or the other.
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Emily: Ha! Here's a question in answer to your question about whether women who take on feminist orthodoxy are making a wily career move: How many pro-life female journalists do you know?
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Yes, I think it's safe to say that Clark Hoyt doesn't get Maureen Dowd, despite her efforts to explain herself to him (what a fun interview that must have been). Dowd said that she's playing with sexist gender constructs, not aping them. She also defended herself as an equal opportunity offender—she questions Obambi's masculinity as well as Hillary's womanliness, and this makes it all more OK. That works for me, most of the time.
It does drive me crazy, though, when women writers or TV commentators, or whoever, make their name by taking supposedly brave stands against what they've decided are feminist platitudes. I'm not talking about Dowd. The easy-mark offender of late is Charlotte Allen, and sometimes Caitlin Flanagan plays this game; in past days, Ruth Shalit had it nailed, if I remember right.
Today in Slate, Amanda Schaffer has a series that takes on a related breed: two scientists (Louann Brizendine and Susan Pinker) who say they're feminists, have read the literature on sex differences in the brain, and emerged to tell us what they frame as the politically incorrect truth—women really are from Venus and men really are from Mars. Specifically, they say that women have better verbal aptitude, talk more often and use more words, are better at empathizing. Men are better bets to be top mathematicians and scientists, a la Larry Summers, and that's not likely to change as the culture changes. Amanda expertly goes in and takes her own look at the science and finds that Brizendine and Pinker played down the contrary evidence, made various questions seem far more settled than they are, and hype the idea that differences are innate, and fixed, when that may well not be the case. She also interviewed various scientists who said, hey, Pinker and Brizendine made my work stand for a proposition it doesn't stand for.
Amanda has also done some thinking about why the reluctant truth-teller female scientist walks among us so prominently at the moment. (Other than the obvious ka-ching, ka-ching answer: Brizendine's book, which came first, was a best-seller.) That part of the series won't run til next week. In the meantime, any thoughts? Do you think that bashing principles or ideas that feminists hold dear fast-tracks certain women to success? Or am I oversensitive, huffy, and in need of a tall glass of iced tea since it's too early in the day for a drink?