Thursday, December 04, 2008 - Posts
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Not to, like, stereotype of course!
The media is instructing feminists to direct our feminist outrage at Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell over a wholly innocuous especially for Rendell comment he made in support of a female potential cabinet member. Normally I would file this under the category of never-clicked headlines I call "Media Doesn't Matters" in reference to the lefty media watchdog organization that kept such tiresomely relentless tabs on Chris Matthews' venal sins of sexism during the Democratic primaries as to render the cable news blowhard a viable candidate for Senate in Rendell's state. But today I worry something more insidious is at work, because the Rendell gaffe successfully diverted attention away from a far more serious charge of chauvinism in government that could have potentially deleterious consqeuences for the economy: incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's attempts to oust FDIC chairman Sheila Bair, a Republican whose sterling reputation on both sides of the aisle conservatives feared she might be appointed to Geithner's job, thus fulfilling Obama's pledge to put Republicans in his cabinet with the most liberal GOP member not to have actively campaigned for Obama. Geithner reportedly accuses Bair of not being a "team player" -- which of course also begs the question as to what the hell team Geithner is playing for, as Barney Frank points out to Bloomberg:
“I think part of the problem now, to be honest, is Sheila Bair has annoyed the ‘old boys’ club,’” Frank said today. “To some extent, bank regulation and mortgage foreclosure have made a situation where we have several regulators up in the tree house with a ‘no girls allowed’ sign -- and it’s aimed at Sheila Bair - - who’s been really good.”
Sheila Bair was the American Prospect's pick for Treasury Secretary. Sheila Bair is Barney Frank's favorite regulator. Sheila Bair even seems to command the respect of the generally reflexively pro-Wall Street commenter population over at the blog Dealbreaker. Because Sheila Bair has been working tirelessly for years to get failed mortgage lenders and homeowners to negotiate more workable terms to save the system from the massive financial and social costs of foreclosure contagions. Her results have been mixed, which is only about 1000% better than we can say for the results of Hank and "Government Sachs" to leverage the power of Big Numbers to save the financial system from the systemic risk of the panic wreaked by the sudden system-wide acknowledgement of the Big Numbers it had squandered in the systemic risk binge of the past five or seven or ten or so years.
Tim Geithner is notable for…looking young for 47, swearing a lot, and snowboarding. Early reports added "skateboarding" to the list of pastimes, but Fed spokesmen played them down, offering that he was not an active skateboarder.
I wanted to like Geithner. Despite the extreme sports and Kissinger/Council of Foreign Relations/elitist plutocrat cred he does not appear to totally fit the jet-setting obnoxiously well-roundedly overachieving handbag designer marrying Type Freaking A Clinton guy mold. Like Obama (and also me) he spent formative years in Asia, and the college sweetheart he married 23 years ago is not easily findable on society party pages or anywhere that might suggest that Geithner, like Bob Rubin and Rahm Emanuel, is at heart himself not much different from the financiers whose fortunes swelled so large over the country's three decade orgy of oversightlessness he helped accelarate during his years in the department. But this is just the sort of episode I feared when the market went so irrationally exuberant over (see #5) the appointment of another straight white guy from Wall Street to make right the multitrillion dollar disaster that is Wall Street. He's one of them. That doesn't make him bad. It just means he has been a party to a lot of incredibly bad decisions made using a lot of incredibly flawed assumptions that lined the pockets of a lot of already incredibly rich people. One of them is Hank Paulson, who at least seems somewhat humbled by the catastrophe. I guess Geithner has another few decades before he has to learn what humility is.
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In light of recent conversation here--"Do You Really Want a Sugar Daddy?", "Sugar Daddies We Love," "True Romance"--inspired by college senior "Melissa Beech"'s "My Sugar Daddy" story on the Daily Beast, I thought it would be interesting to hear from an expert. After all, since Slate has given a john a column, it's only fair a former sex worker gets to speak here, too. I asked my friend, blogger and retired courtesan Debauchette, what she thought of the piece and discussion. Is Beech a savvy romantic, a "sugar baby," or a prostitute in denial?
Debauchette writes:
"I read the Melissa Beech piece with interest, which discusses her relationship with a sugar daddy. I don't have much love for the term 'sugar daddy'--it's infantilizing and makes me think of tiaras and baby talk. That said, this 'daddy' aspect of the term is a reminder of where the power lies in this sort of arrangement. Sugar babies sleep with men for money and material perks, but when that perk is a credit card or an apartment in someone else's name, it results in financial dependency, not financial freedom. This is why I prefer prostitution.
My first client was a sugar daddy type. He was very charming, very kind, and very married, and when I met him, he offered a similar sort of arrangement. His reasoning was that if he couldn't offer commitment, the right thing to do would be to pay me for my time, time that might be better spent elsewhere. It was sort of a cost-benefit balancing act, and it worked because I never felt like I'd wasted my time with him. But unlike Beech's arrangement, I didn't want gifts or a monthly stipend. I wanted to be paid for time spent, like an attorney, or a therapist. And it worked. For the time we spent together, it felt as though we were two independent people put on equal footing with the exchange of cash, and that transaction freed us to have a very open, honest, and sexual relationship. Six years later, he remains one of my closest friends.
A friend of mine believes that every relationship involves a transaction, that everyone makes an emotional compromise for end goals, like marriage, or family, or financial stability, or a life that isn't spent alone. Personally, I don't believe that all relationships are transactional, but I do think it's common, and I think that might be why Beech's piece has provoked such a response. She appears to be committed to one man who's offered to cover her financial needs and wants, and her relationship developed from a clearly articulated transaction. The thing is, this doesn't just remind me of sex work. This could apply equally to marriage."
I couldn't agree more.
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According to an article published in the London Times today, we Brits are now the most promiscuous nation in the world (of the western industrial nations, that is). In terms of one-night stands, total number of partners, and our "relaxed" attitude to casual sex, we beat Australia, the United States, Italy, and France. France! Where having extra-marital affairs is a favorite national pastime! If nothing else, at least now we might lose our reputation for being frigid and repressed.
In all seriousness though, Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the highest teen STD infection rate in Europe (although both are significantly lower than here in the United States, where abstinence-only sex education doesn't seem to be helping much). Premature sex education in British schools (it can be taught to children as young as 4) has long been blamed for the epidemic, along with the inappropriate sexualization of children by toy manufacturers and the media. But here's a thought. In Britain, we also drink more than any other country in Europe (apart from Ireland and Finland, bizarrely), and our alcohol-related death rate has doubled since 1991. We've also, according to this reasonably insulting story in the New York Times, been causing havoc on summer vacations with our abhorrent, booze-soaked behavior. Could there be a correlation somewhere between the beer goggles and the newfound sluttiness?
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Not sure what we should or could do about baby-brained grown-ups who suffer from a total lack of sense, Emily. But you are so right to point out that cyber-strega Lori Drew didn't "cause'' that poor girl to kill herself. Not to give this horror show of malignant, helicopter mommying a pass, but these arguments over who or what ever "make'' someone do such a thing always seem to undermine the most important thing we know about suicide, which is that the culprit is pretty reliably the disease of depression. (I was reminded of this a few years ago when a friend took his life. Oh no, I told another friend; he called me last week, and I never returned the call! Gee, don't think that's why he lost hope, she answered--snap.) And I also agree that we cannot criminalize every invitation to "Oh, go jump off a cliff!''--whether issued on the Internet or nose-to-nose.
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I can't believe I'm posting this, since these are not the arguments I would make at all ... but for anyone in need of wasting a few minutes laughing, check out "Prop 8—The Musical" at funnyordie.com. It includes Jack Black (in a role that's very much against type), Alison Janney, Andy Richter, Margaret Cho, John C. Reilly... have fun. And if there's anyone near you, put on your headphones before clicking.
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I've been chewing over the conviction of Lori Drew in the MySpace suicide case, with super-blogger law professor Ann Althouse here, and here in Slate. Torie pointed out last week that Drew should have stayed out of the teenage realm of MySpace. I agree, but I'm also left feeling like cyberbullying is a problem that parents, not the government, have to chip away at. I realize, though, that there's a harsh edge to that. It's not as if telling parents to look after their teenagers is a panacea (or hasn't been said many times before). I wonder if any of you wiser moms have thoughts?
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