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Hanna, you may well be right that government is the only thing that can save us from this financial crisis. But like Abigail and Bobby Jindal and many of my fellow conservatives, I'm going to maintain a healthy skepticism. Because even if government is going to be our savior, I am not convinced that our government has yet taken the right steps. The stimulus package might indeed have some provisions that actually stimulate, but they're buried among the hundreds and hundreds of pages of pork and years-old Democratic Christmas wish lists. Only 23 percent of the money in the stimulus package will be spent in 2009 and 2010 (by estimate of the Congressional Budget Office), but it was so urgent to get it passed that members of Congress had no time to read it? The market tanked earlier this month after our new treasury secretary announced a bailout plan with no details, apparently because at the last minute he scrapped the plan he'd been working on for months. Chris Dodd—the chairman of the Senate banking committee—had to apologize earlier this week after claiming that maybe banks would be nationalized, causing the market to tank last Friday.
Believe me, I'm not rooting against the economy. I want nothing more than to see my friends and family who've been laid off find new jobs and for things I used to take for granted, like a modest summer vacation, no longer to seem like inaccessible luxuries. But unlike those poor folks who gave all their money to Bernie Madoff and watched it disappaer, I'm not going to put all my hope and faith in the government to sort this out by itself.
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I honestly never thought I'd see the day when James Dobson stepped down. To me, he so perfectly encapsulated this moment in evangelical history, when conservative Christians feel simultaneously persecuted and entitled. To much of America, Dobson was revered as a kind of friendly living God, dispensing advice on all things family from his headquarters in Colorado Springs, through his books and radio shows. Then every once in a while, Dobson would step a big foot into secular politics, often with disastrous results.
Rick Warren is the closest Dobson has to a successor. Until he was embraced by Obama, Warren too operated as an outsider, keeping a low profile as he glad-handed around Washington. Dobson operated much more clumsily. He would declare someone—Gingrich, Bush—the next savior and then be bitterly disappointed when things didn't work out. He remained to the end baffled and angry about the outside world, despite his considerable influence in it.
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"Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" Others here have weighed in already on why the literary canon seems to be lacking when it comes to Great American Novels written by women. What struck me about Laura Miller's essay was the same line Noreen pulled out:
Prose is right that many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Male authors also fetishize writing the Great American Novel. Somehow, I get the sense Miller finds all this male ambition problematic. Is it? Or is there a serious lack of female writers who aspire to write the Great American Novel? That, I find, would be problematic.
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As Jessica just noted, the Obama administration has announced it’s moving to rescind one of the most troubling of President Bush’s “midnight regulations”—a vague and subjective “conscience” rule that allows seemingly everyone with an opinion about abortion and a job connected to health care, the right to make on-the-spot decisions about when and how to do their jobs. We’ve written about this issue here before, both pro and con. But the one thing nobody can claim about the "right of conscience” protected by the new HHS rules was that it afforded any legal clarity to a very rancorous and emotional issue. The Post story today suggests that the move to lift the conscience clause represents “the latest challenge to the Obama administration's attempt to find more of a middle ground on issues related to abortion.” But that strikes me as oversimplification. The decision to craft what an unnamed HHS official characterizes as “a tightly written conscience clause” (er, they already exist ...) isn’t really a capitulation to the abortion lobby. It’s simply a way of saying that health care workers, like everyone else, can’t make up the rules as they go along. Efforts to rewrite fuzzy laws with precision and clarity shouldn't be derided as partisan. Clarity benefits everyone I think.
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Abby, you suggested calling the new Obama puppy "Government." I'd say how about calling the dog "Northern Trust Corp." Noco for short. Or maybe "Wells Fargo." (Welly). That way we can employ that old-fashioned doggy command, not much in vogue anymore: "Beg," whenever Welly comes to the president wanting treats, particularly after he just peed on our rug.
I can see by your post, and Sen. Bobby Jindal's response to the president this week, that conservatives are holding fast to that old Reagan motto: "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." Holding fast, that is, despite all evidence. If there's any moment when that attitude is proving fantastically, stupendously wrong, it is this one. We can argue forever over whether a hands-off government got us to where we are today. But one thing is for sure: Only government—" a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason," in the words of Leon Wieseltier—can dig us out of this one.
Obama is by temperament such a conciliator, so judicious, that he is failing to embrace this triumphal moment for liberalism and what should be the new motto: "Good boy, Government!"
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Emily, there's another decision from the Obama White House that women can cheer about: Word is they're rolling back the provider conscience rule today. Bush finalized the legislation in the waning days of his administration, and it allows medical professionals to refuse to do anything they object to on moral grounds, including, but not limited to, family planning services. The Chicago Tribune notes that seven states filed suit against the Bush rule, "arguing it sacrifices the health of patients to religious beliefs of medical providers."
According to the Trib, the Obama administration says they will look into a new, differently worded rule that will "clarify what health-care workers can reasonably refuse for patients." Hopefully the new rule will not include denying rape victims emergency contraception.
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Wall-E's Oscar win for best animated feature has reminded some bloggers about Pixar's lady problem, or more exactly, its lack-of-ladies problem. In the words of Vast Public Indifference, it's not that Pixar doesn't write female characters so much as present them all as "helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives." Wall-E's Eve might have been a move in a more girl-powered direction, but the forthcoming Up! doesn't seem to have any women in it at all (though it does look predictably delightful).
Buffy creator Joss Whedon, whose feminist credentials are better than just about any other Hollywood dude's, thinks Pixar got girl trouble too. (Whedon tangent: Anyone watching Dollhouse? Just saw the second episode, in which Eliza Dushku spends an hour running from a crazed lover trying to track her down with a compound bow and arrow, and it's only the memory of Buffy, which is strong in me, that has kept me from a DVR purge.) Here's what he said to Mother Jones about Pixar this past November:
MJ: As a father, what do you think about the fact that Pixar doesn't have a [top-billed] female protagonist yet?
JW: I wrote Toy Story [for Pixar]. And I remember at the time having a crisis in myself because I couldn't figure out Bo Peep. There's no reason why there couldn't be [female Pixar leads]. There is that moment in The Incredibles, when the mom has a pep talk with Violet and Violet stands up like a hero and you can see her other eye for the first time. [My wife] said, "Oh look, they wrote a scene for you."
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The teachable moments continue with yet another instance of a politician who should know better making a supposedly well-intentioned racial slur then falling back on a stammering defense. ("But being clean is a good thing!" "But I said I liked his tan!") The latest: Los Alamitos, Calif., Mayor Dean Grose's claim that he didn't know there were racial undertones to a doctored image of the White House lawn as a watermelon patch, which he sent in an e-mail with the subject line "No Easter egg hunt this year."
Grose announced Thursday that he plans to resign because of this controversy. But first, he argued that he hadn't meant to offend anyone and wrote the following in a fairly unrepentant e-mail response to a black businesswoman who demanded an apology: "The way things are today, you gotta laugh every now and then. I wanna see the coloring contests."
The first problem here is that, as with the New York Post cartoon, the joke excuse falls flat when the thing just isn't funny. There's also the issue of the way these apologies are phrased: the passive voice; the attitude of I didn't mean to offend you and I'm sorry you got offended, rather than I did something offensive and I'm sorry for my action.
We as a nation may have felt triumphant and accepting on Nov. 4 and Jan. 20. But a black man leading the country hardly means the end of racism within it, as shown by these ongoing gaffes—and the conviction of the offenders, whether honestly held or not, that their racially motivated comments or drawings or actions were not in fact race-related at all. Eric Holder was right. We need to talk more about race. Maybe then it will stop keep popping up where Grose and Murdoch swear they didn't expect it.
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The case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was No. 1 on my list for Bush holdovers in desperate need of new thinking from the Obama administration. It wasn't a hard call. Al-Marri is the only person arrested in the United States who the government is holding indefinitely in military detention without charges. And now, in a huge switch that makes me feel a whole lot more sure that we've finally made it to a new legal era, al-Marri is about to be indicted. Normally, defense lawyers don't applaud when it's announced that their clients will face charges. But Marri's lawyers have been battling since 2003 to get their client before a judge in the regular old federal-court system.
Those same lawyers will no doubt be incredibly frustrated if the Supreme Court now dismisses al-Marri's constitutional challenge to his detention as moot. If the court had ruled for al-Marri and rejected the sweeping Bush claim of executive power, that would have been enormous vindication. But we don't know what the court would have done. And now we know that the executive branch is capable of doing the right thing.
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Um, Susannah, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems kind of obvious to me why johns seek out prostitutes: They get sex with no consequences or commitment. So it make sense that when we create a system where there are consequences, a lot of guys stop coming. Is there something I'm missing about "understanding the complicated realities of johns' psychologies"?
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We are very pleased to announce that Peggy White will be the publisher of Double X, the online women's magazine that Slate will launch later this year. Peggy was formerly general manager of Yahoo Finance, and before that vice president and general manager of Business Week online and vice president of sales and business development for MSNBC.com. She'll start March 9. We can't wait!
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Emily Y, with a couple of days to let Obama's first annual address to Congress sink in, I totally agree with you re: its uncomfortable expansiveness. He exuded a wonderful self-possession, an almost amazing glow and confidence—amazing given the uneven success of his administration's first moves and the difficult decisions he faces. OK, GOP responder Bobby Jindal's delivery was worse than Obama's—oh, God, so much worse. Indeed, his bizarrely lulling, cheesy mantra "Americans can do anything!" made Jindal sound like a child therapist.
But wasn't Obama's message kind of the same thing? Yes, he made rhetorical nods to sacrifice, but to sacrifices (like relying more on alternative energy sources) that aren't much of a sacrifice at all for the progressive-minded. Both Obama's and Jindal's expansive optimism that Americans Can Do Anything!, even cure cancer while crawling out of a deep recession, reminded me of the every-day-just-goes-up-and-up mood of ... the subprime mortgage bubble.
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Enough about dogs, presidential and otherwise. How about this disturbing story from today's Times about domesticated monkeys? It's pegged to the sad tale of Sandra Herold, whose pet chimpanzee, Travis, viciously mauled her friend last week. If you're unconvinced about the idiocy of keeping a wild animal as a pet, check out this passage about the proud owners of Higgins the baboon:
When Higgins was 3, he slept with the couple, often awakening Bob in the morning by climbing to the bedroom rafters and dropping onto Bob’s stomach. On one occasion, they got in a wrestling match, and Higgins put one of his “steel-like fingernails” through Bob’s scrotum.
I don't really have anything to add to that.
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Jessica, I, too, read the Los Angeles Times piece on "john school," the traffic-schoollike program for men who seek out prostitutes. As the article states, programs like this one are nothing new; they've been doing it in San Francisco for years. And, at least according to the article, it sounds as if it's an at least moderately effective way to discourage johns from seeking out working girls in the future. Typically, arrested johns pay a fine, do or not do a few days in jail, and are done with it. In this case, johns who fulfill the course requirements (they must be first-time offenders, have to take an HIV test, are required to fork over $600) can choose to attend john school, for which they will score a "free pass—of sorts." The solicitation charge is held over the john's head for a year after completing the course, and if he doesn't repeat offend, his case is closed. According to one study, since the San Francisco program was created over a decade ago, recidivism rates have dropped by 30 percent. Why? Well, perhaps it's because, at least in the case of the Los Angeles john school, looking at pictures of the penile consequences of sexually transmitted diseases, listening to the hard-core testimonies of real street workers, and learning how johns can get set up and robbed instead of laid doesn't really inspire johns to go out and repeated offend. What john schools lack, though, is any kind of deep-seated interest in why men seeking out prostitutes. As I've mentioned previously, I solicited stories from men about why they pay for sex as part of an online project called Letters from Johns. Without understanding the complicated realities of johns' psychologies, the system fails those caught up in it.
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I wanted to watch last night's finale of Top Chef, I really did. But I can no longer stand to watch Padma Lakshmi on TV. She is like a bad porn actress, slashing knives past her ample, tanned bosom, popping champagne corks, saying "mmmmm" and licking her lips. And I can guarantee you that she never swallows any of that food. Probably there is a gilded basin in the back room where she gently deposits the morsels. In this fawning Vanity Fair profile, she tries to pass herself off as a trash-talking intellectual, Germaine Greer for the post-feminist age. But the phoniness grates.
“I wish I could have shared this Emmy nomination with him," she says of ex, Salman Rushdie. ” Now they were divorcing, and, she said, “I’m really fucking sad.”
Yeah, and wipe the doorknob on your way out, Salman. Now, we know who's taken his place in her bedroom.
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Maybe since this whole presidential dog thing is such a symbolic act, Obama should use it as a teaching moment. It could be a perfect opportunity for him in his quest to convince us of who truly is man's best friend. How better to do that than to name the dog Government! The instructive moments are endless:
"Whose turn is it to feed Government?"
"Aww, you're getting so big!"
"Government, you're not supposed to be in there!"
"Someone go chase Government, he's run off again!"
But seriously, I'm starting to wonder if Mr. President realizes that all his promises have price tags. Somebody's not doing the math if they think raising taxes on 2 percent of the wealthy is going to fund a bailout, a whole new health care infrastructure, and push our transition to alternative energy. All this money will have to come from somewhere if not from taxes. Print more? Call China?
Lots of parents don't give in to their kids pleas for pets because they realize they're not prepared for the cost and responsibility involved. I'm starting to feel like it would be nice if our president could show that much restraint.
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I can't stop thinking about today's article in the New York Times about parents who obsess over food choices, who are sure to serve only organic food and have "5-year-olds ... [who] can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats." On the one hand, it's tempting to dismiss the whole article as what my Slate colleague Jack Shafer would call "bogus trend-spotting": stories that hype a "trend" that may or may not exist, fueled by anecdotes rather than statistics and filled with vague terms like "many," "more" or "a sign that ..." However, the anecdotes are heartbreaking: A mom worries that her daughter is bulimic, but it turns out the preteen just doesn't like brown rice. When a dietitian tells the girl it's probably OK to order white rice when she eats out, the mom freaks. An 8-year-old is afraid of salt. Kids are afraid to partake in birthday cake at friends' parties.
Now, I will be the first to admit that my kids aren't the world's best eaters, and their reluctance to try new things and refusal to eat vegetables has driven me to tears in the past. And I'll be the first to admit that we could probably do a better job in preparing healthful food in our household. But I've learned that it does NO GOOD to obsess over it. I focus on the bright spots: Our kids drink no pop, very little juice (except for orange juice) and eat almost no candy, cookies, or chips. (I'm pretty sure there's a Ziploc bag full of rock-hard Tootsie Rolls, stale Skittles, and other remnants of Halloween lurking in the back of my pantry.) They eat fast food a few times a year, and even sit-down restaurants are a treat, not a regular part of their week. We talk to our 5-year-old about the importance of eating a variety of foods and about how healthy foods will help him grow bigger and taller, but if he's checking out the cereal box, it's to see if there's a toy, not to read the nutritional information.
It's easy to be annoyed that parents are seemingly passing their own neuroses on to their children, but I think there might be more to it. It's almost like they are passing off some of the responsibility that comes with being a parent: "My kid doesn't eat bad food, so of course he is healthy. I've done my part." The problem is, such strict control doesn't teach kids about making careful, measured decisions—"I'd like fries with my dinner, so I'll eat an extra apple tomorrow"—something that will help them as they grow up and go out on their own. It's impossible not be reminded of Todd Marinovich, a quarterback for USC and (ever so briefly) the Los Angeles Raiders. Marinovich's father controlled every aspect of his son's childhood, famously denying him Big Macs and Twinkies and surrounding him with specialized coaches and a psychologist. Marinovich flamed out, getting arrested for cocaine possession while still at USC in 1991. Subsequent arrests hint of a long struggle with drugs. ESPN.com ranks him as one of the biggest flops in sports. Granted, not every kid whose parents make her eat organic tofu is going to go to college and find a drug dealer, but there is more to raising a healthy kid than what you serve for dinner.
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Jess, how about this one for baby brothels: Six Pennsylvania teens are facing child pornography charges after the girls sent the boys nude pics of themselves by text message, known to the teen set (to clue in all ignorant parents) as "sexting." The girls, who are 14 or 15, face charges of manufacturing or distributing child porn. The boys, who are 16 or 17, face charges of possession. I don't know if the disparity in charges is fair or unfair. If my memory of high school serves me correctly, the power dynamics in these skanky relationships run all ways.
Our own Dahlia Lithwick explains what's involved in distributing porn of yourself if you're underage. Your average teen can explain the thrill of seeing an ant-size image of a naked classmate.
A recent study claims that 20 percent of teens admit to sexting at some point. However, the study asked about sending "semi-nude" or "sexually suggestive content." Which, as my friend Linda Perlstein, expert on all things preteen, points out, can mean "Hey baby, here's me in my swimsuit" to a confused 13-year-old. So as usual with these teen trends—grinding, blow jobs—likely an exaggeration.
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Have you ever been burned by a Modern Love column in the Sunday New York Times? Ever opened the paper to read about the boorish behavior of Nick or Pooky or Husband X, only to realize that Husband X is, in fact, you? Or do you know anyone who's had such an experience? Well, now is your chance to respond. If you, or anyone you know, has been written about by an ex-lover or ex-husband or girlfriend of an ex-husband in a Modern Love column, XX is asking to hear your side. Please send all leads, rants, long-stored and never sent vicious e-mails to hannawrosin@gmail.com.
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Now that the Obamas' commitment to the Portuguese water dog has been thrown into question (apparently the matter is still under debate) I wanted to second Julia's unashamed poodle partisanship—best breed ever, and completely undeserving of the "girly" label the president has pinned on them (unless by "girly" he means awesomely smart, athletic, and friendly, and why shouldn't he?) I also wanted to tell Hanna that my own beloved childhood poodle (who was gray, not apricot) was named nothing other than: Muffin!
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There are two stories today about how different prostitution-related crimes are being prosecuted. One is the story of 16-year-olds Tatiana Tye and Jazmine Finley, who are accused of running a brothel out of an apartment in Phoenix that they allegedly rented solely for prostitution. Both girls are being tried as adults, and according to CNN, Tye is charged with "one count of child prostitution and three counts of pandering, or serving as a go-between or liaison for sexual purposes," while Finley faces "nine counts of child prostitution; two counts of receiving earnings of a prostitute; and one count of pandering."
The other comes from Los Angeles, where men caught soliciting prostitutes are given the opportunity to attend a scared-straight-style program rather than face prosecution. According to the L.A. Times:
For eight hours, the men are yelled at, pleaded with and lectured. One weary-looking john, who says he has come straight from a night shift at work, receives a firm shake from Margolis every time he nods off and eventually is told to stand up to stay awake. Each presentation is aimed at either scaring them straight with all the terrible things that can be inflicted upon a john or opening their eyes to the ugly realities of the sex-for-money industry. It's not meant as a feel-good therapy session or an opportunity to explain away bad decisions, so there is no give-and-take in the class. The johns are not allowed to ask questions or speak. They sit and listen.
A similar program in San Francisco boasts only a 30 percent recidivism rate. There seems to be a dissonance to the leniency shown here and the harsh penalties Tatiana and Jazmine are facing. Is the decision to try them as adults a sound one?
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Time for a guessing game. What "things" are being discussed in the following text, excerpted from a forthcoming ad campaign, aimed explicitly at women?
"These things are the best invention since the push-up bra," one woman says. The other, admiring her bra-enhanced chest, responds, "I wouldn't go that far."
Cheeseburgers in a can? Blowguards? Mortgage-backed securities? Tropicana's new packaging? Take 5s? Nope! The correct answer is: Baked Lays. Well, at least it's true that Baked Lays aren't quite as awesome as push-up bras, what with them being salted cardboard and all. (Though the other kind of baked lays, Matthew McConaughey's presumed speciality, are obviously way awesomer than body-sculpting undergarments).
This snippet of dialogue comes from a print ad that is part of Frito-Lays new, big push to sell Baked Lays (and Baked Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, etc.) to women, who snack twice as much as men, just not on salty junk food, a situation that clearly needs rectifying. The Times has the skinny on the "thinking" that went into the new campaign. Some highlights:
Part of the strategy was to tone down the packaging and show off healthy ingredients in the snacks. ... Baked Lay's will no longer be in a shiny yellow bag, but in a matte beige bag that displays pictures of the ingredients like spices or ranch dressing. ... At the grocery store, Frito-Lay will pull all of its women-friendly snacks together at the end of the aisle where possible, Mr. Jones said. Often, he said, the chip aisle is disorganized and unappealing to women.
"The obvious is what's insulting to women," Freud said, like a pink package or something highlighting calories. ... Frito-Lay will introduce television, print and online advertising in early March, that features four cartoon women who are "fab, funny, fearlessly female," who talk about exercising, eating and men—something of an animated "Sex and the City."
I highly recommend reading the article in full because it taught me many, many astounding things besides the fact that ranch dressing is considered a healthy ingredient. Among them: Women feel guilty all the time, about everything, especially eating, but not if what they are eating comes in beige; ads mimicking Sex and the City are not too "obvious"; advertisers are now using "neuroscience" to make assertions about "women's brains" that are so hilariously banal and speciously scientific ("A memory and emotional center, the hippocampus, was proportionally larger in women, so [Lays' advertiser] concluded that women would look for characters they could empathize with.") I'm fairly certain Clueless's Cher Horowitz—"Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex"—has gone into advertising.
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The Washington Post's Ylan Mui writes on the new American trend of "insourcing." This means, basically, do for yourself what others used to do for you. Apparently, people are pulling up their own weeds, dyeing their own hair, grooming their own Portugese water dogs, changing their own car headlights, baking their own birthday cakes, asking the manicurist to cut nails extra short to increase time between visits. One woman Mui quotes even tried dyeing a dress, to make it seem new! Stores, meanwhile, are reporting increased sales of sewing kits, car filters, and herb garden starters. I keep the XX lipstick level at 40. Until we are actually, you know, growing potatoes, or biting our own nails off, we're not yet desperate.
In the meantime, readers who are attempting their own creative insourcing, please send me ideas: hannawrosin@gmail.com.
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Just wanted to flag this great piece in The Root about Venus and Serena Williams—not simply because my sister and I played competitive tennis as youngsters, and were constantly being compared to the Compton-born phenoms—but because author Jewel Edwards is preaching hard truths about standards of beauty when it comes to athletics. Extra points to this piece for subtlety; it took me a while to realize that Edwards is male! His awesome point:
Black female athletes, on the other hand, are put in the unique position where developing their bodies makes them the object of spectacle. For female athletes, the perennial insult is, "You look like a man." As a result, any girl—black or white—involved in sports has to make choices that a boy never has to make.
That’s a very important insight; and the tough calls faced by female athletes extend not just to physical appearance but to lifestyle choices, such as when to have a baby, get hitched, or embark upon puberty.
Samantha brought up Michelle Obama’s guns getting lots of attention on Tuesday evening. (I thought that going sleeveless in February was a bit gauche—but that’s another tale.) Obama looks great, but that kind of positive reinforcement is a stark counterpoint to the ogling and snark that attends the biceps of the decorated Williams sisters. It’s clearly hurtful:
Serena, when asked about her body yet again, said, "Just because I have large bosoms, and I have a big ass [laughter], I swear, my waist is 30 inches, 29 to 30 inches, it’s really small! I have the smallest waist, but just because I have those two assets, it looks like I’m not fit."
Imagine that! You are the most dominant person in your sport in the world, but you consistently have to defend having your curves. Listening to commentators persistently speculate and scrutinize Serena about her weight and fitness—which are metaphors for her body—is like having the buttocks and breasts of Hottentot Venus debated for public consumption.
Yes, imagine that. More extra points for bringing up Saartje Bartman—made famous once more by inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander in this phenomenal work. But in terms of beauty norms: Really, what’s the difference between upscale yoga arms and those that can bench 200?
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Now there's a manly headline. What should he name him, ladies? Muffin?
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That's quite a stat you unearthed, my dear fellow Emily, about the number of Portugese water dogs in need of rescue: a scant two. When Obama said in November that his family wanted a dog from a shelter, he joked about how "a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me." Endearing, but how to ensure that a mixed-breed dog wouldn't make allergy-prone Malia sneeze? Never fear, PETA rushed to assure, there are plenty of purebred dogs in shelters. The thousands of rescue poodles you found on Petfinders.com, Emily, proves as much. I'm partial to standard poodles like Julia—I grew up with a lovely apricot one. But rescuing a Portuguese water dog when it's from a breed that doesn't appear to need rescuing is a long way from cheerfully embracing one's mutt affinity. I feel bad chiding the Obamas for their choice of dog. Must their every family act be laden with symbolism? But hey, so it goes when you're picking the nation's first pet.
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Surely the first family's decision to get a Portuguese water dog will mean that that the long reign of the Labrador as this country's family dog of choice is at an end. (Farewell, Marley!) Not only is the Portuguese water dog sufficiently manly and low-allergenic to meet the first family's criteria, the choice of one also has a political dimension: It is the favorite breed of Ted Kennedy. Kennedy is so enamored of his PWD named Splash (no, I'm not making that up) that he wrote a book about him: My Senator and Me: A Dog's-Eye View of Washington, D.C. Surely in announcing this selection, the Obamas are paying tribute to the man who put the power of the Kennedy name behind Obama's campaign at a difficult time in the primaries. Michelle says in her People magazine interview that the family is interested in getting a grown, rescue PWD. Since they were able to get the Jonas Brothers to entertain for their girls' first night in the White House, I have no doubt that the Obamas have the kind of clout to have their pick of rescue PWDs. But from browsing through the used dogs available on Petfinders.com, the pickings are slim. I found only two rescue PWDs listed in the entire country. Compare that to 2,133 rescue poodles. Julia, if the first family is serious about a rescue, I agree with you, the poodle is the way to go.
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People breaks the news that the Obamas have settled on a breed for their new pup: Portuguese water dog. In January, the president revealed that two breeds were in contention, the Portuguese water dog and the Labradoodle (a cross between the poodle and the Labrador retriever). Allow me to posit a theory about these choices: The Obamas really wanted a poodle.
Consider the evidence. The family narrowed the field to two breeds that are not very allergenic and of good size. A third breed that fits this description and shares the desirable traits of being smart, friendly, and easily trained, is the standard poodle. (To my knowledge, most other less allergenic dogs are on the small side, and the prez has famously dismissed smaller dogs, like Barbara Walters' Havanese, as too "girly.") What's more, the Labradoodle and PWD both look a lot like the poodle. The poodle, however, would be an unacceptable choice for a modern president, especially one who has already confessed that he prefers wine to beer and considers arugula a staple: It is derided, incorrectly, as a a froofy pet for mincing elites who enjoy bedecking hounds in rhinestones and taking them to the hairdresser. Could it be that the Obamas considered the optics of poodledom and demurred?
If so, for shame! At the risk of sounding like a poodle partisan (which I am), I will note the breed's superior intellect and working-class roots. An all-time great Slate "Explainer" reveals that the traditional poodle haircut kept the dogs hydrodynamic but warm-jointed when they were hunting in marshes and moors. If Obama wants us to look past idle stereotypes and embrace change, he should put his doghouse where his mouth his: Standard poodle '09!
Check out Slate's slide show of presidential pooches.
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Whoever thought the shiny, cheesy Eurovision Song Contest could become the site of radical protest? The Israeli singer Noa, who interests me less for her droopy ballads than because she shares my daughter's name—has decided to use that stage to make a diplomatic point. For years she has collaborated with an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad. Now she is insisting Awad share the stage with her in representing Israel, and everyone is up in arms. The right, expectedly. But even the left is now on her case, complaining that she's putting a shiny face on the war in Gaza. What's impressive about Noa's request is the smallness of it. This is the musical equivalent of Hillary's recent creative diplomacy in China—a tiny act of connection that makes its point gently. What's even more impressive is that it comes at a time when the left in Israel has long given up and grown entirely cynical about the possibility of co-existence. So let's all support Noa by joining hands and singing ... Abba?
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I agree with the consensus that Obama was at his best last night. Even in these terrible times, it is a pleasure to watch him at work. One feels grateful for his intelligence, his confidence, his quick mastery of policy, his charm. And yet, when he mentioned that one of his goals was to cure cancer, I thought of the sandstorm scene in The English Patient. Ralph Fiennes and Kristen Scott Thomas find themselves stranded as a desert sandstorm descends. She asks him if they are going to be all right, and he answers "Yes. Absolutely." She replies, " 'Yes' is a comfort. 'Absolutely' is not." When Obama mentioned cancer, I started to feel less comforted. How in the world can he keep shoveling money at the economic crisis and provide universal health care, achieve energy independence, reform our school, cure cancer—while cutting taxes for 98 percent of Americans? I doubt the 2 percent who aren't getting tax cuts are still rich enough to provide the trillions necessary. And I wondered if it is better for a president to have an ambitious agenda and not deliver or scale back his goals so he can possibly actually meet some of them.
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TMZ reports the San Fernando Valley-based adult production company Vivid Entertainment has offered Nadya Suleman $1 million to star in an adult movie. Taken at face value, this story is all kinds of wrong. How the story of a freak-mother has twisted itself into a tale of a would-be MILF? OctoMILF? is beyond the scope of my limited brain capacity. Whatever those parties involved or not involved have in mind, I know I do not want to see it. What the story does testify to truly is that the adult movie industry is suffering mightily during this recession if these are the lengths it has to go to to get attention these days. Once upon a time, XXX was outre. After a while, it went mainstream. Now, I guess it's just passe. For some reason, the conflation of OctoMom and pornography brings to my mind the ancient Japanese tradition of tentacle erotica and The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which a woman finds herself in the erotic embrace of an octopus. I suppose these United States really have been pornified, when starring in an adult movie is the punch line to the new American Dream.
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Anyone have reactions to Obama's speech last night? John Dickerson does a great job analyzing it here, and Politico's Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen have an interesting translation of what Obama really meant in his key passages. And then, of course, there's the chatter about Michelle's "super-sculpted arms."
I don't have much substantive to add to the analysis already going on, but I do have two incredibly superficial additions! One was the apt comparison some of my friends made of the setup last night to a bar mitzvah, both in terms of the relentless standing and sitting ("not another Amidah!" one groaned, as the 2,000th standing ovation erupted) and also the beaming parents sitting in large wooden chairs behind the bar mitzvah boy, inadvertently (or possibly deliberately) stealing his spotlight. Hard as I tried, I just couldn't take my eyes off Nancy "Oh please please can I stand up and clap again this instant" Pelosi and Joe "I'll just scribble some quick notes for my rebuttal" Biden.
My other superficial realization of the night was finally pinpointing why Timothy Geithner has always creeped me out and why I keep picturing him all sweaty and frantic and secretly evil. He looks just like Carl, the Patrick Swayze killer! I Googled it this morning, and I'm not the first to draw the comparison. But man did it put me at ease to pinpoint the source of my discomfort.
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It's pretty difficult to argue that gays should not be allowed to see their ailing partners in the hospital, E.J., but your post reminded me of Ariel Levy's article in this week's New Yorker about radical lesbian feminists of the '70s. The feature focuses on Lamar Van Dyke, née Heather Elizabeth, a woman who help found the feminist separatist movement the Van Dykes, "a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men, and lived on the highways of North America for several years."
At the end of the article, with an "almost incredulous maternal disappointment," Van Dyke tells Levy, "Your generation wants to fit in. ... Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?" Van Dyke's disappointment in the lack of radicalism in the feminist and lesbian movements is something I've thought about. I'm no radical myself, and the idea of "making the National Organization for Women look like an appeasement policy," as Levy says the Van Dykes did, holds no personal appeal. But I wonder if part of the reason the feminist movement is currently so disparate and fragmented is partially due to a lack of radical thought and action.
Van Dyke also says of my generation, "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. ... We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted." Which reminds me of the study Emily Y. wrote about yesterday, the study that claims technology is permanently infantilizing us, ruining our attention spans and ability to communicate. But Van Dyke's fear, that my generation is narcotized by all the screens, is potentially more troubling than accusations of mass ADD.
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Jessica, it doesn't surprise me that tailors are getting rich these days. Last weekend, I was perusing the Bureau of Economic Analysis' quarterly data on Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Product (don't judge, it's a more amusing pastime than Sudoku in these apocalypse days) and noticed that it's the repair industries, like auto or jewelry repair, that held steady or did well in the gloomy fourth quarter of 2008. And among retailers, it's "health and personal care" stores (body repair!) that have experienced the biggest recession boom. (I do have to say, though, that the spend-money-on-repair phenomenon seems to have skipped over my household, whose Saturn lost the use of its horn last month in its slow, untreated process of multi-organ failure.)
I wonder, too, whether family-owned businesses aren't seeing a boost compared with chains. The article on tailors you linked to suggests that the "bright smile and homespun advice" customers receive at Andy's Secrets tailor are a big part of the store's recent success. That anecdote jibed with a shopping experience I'm having. The last time I bought glasses, a few years ago, I went to an outlet of the hippest, most pretentious Washington chain and felt as though I was being fleeced of all my money by unctuous hipsters, for whom fashion was all about the price tag—but hey, those were flush times. Now I need new ones, and while I swung by the Pretentious Chain, I ended up at the slightly dowdy little glasses shop next to my office, whose rather bootleg Web site boasts that its staff "hasn't changed in 15 years." I walk by the Dowdy Little Shop every day and know and like the guys inside. In the end, I'm going to pay nearly as much for what I'm ordering as I did at the Pretentious Chain. But the purchase feels less like a commodity-for-cash trade and more like an exchange of gifts. Giving the Dowdy Little Shop a substantial gift in thanks for their earnest, friendly work to find just the right frame to fit my narrow nose-bridge establishes a bond between us, a sense of integration and community in an unsettling moment.
Unfortunately, the Census Bureau tells me it doesn't monitor retail sales broken down by corporations versus small, family-owned businesses, and I haven't seen another group out there that collects these data. But I wouldn't be surprised if little family-owned oases in cities are seeing some extra business.
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You Know You're A Nerd When ... you treat a national policy address as serious entertainment. I've never watched the Academy Awards—I get too bored too easily—but I am a State of the Union junkie. Last night I was amazed by how moved I was to see that particular triangle of faces—Biden, Pelosi, Obama—up onscreen: one white-haired white guy, one white woman, one black guy.
I was wowed. Who expected to see that in their lifetimes? Not me.
For those keeping score at home, I counted 39 standup applause moments, an important part of any nerd's drinking game (although I didn't actually drink ... weeknight and all that). Pretty run of the mill for these things, which are all pomp, circumstance, and rhetoric. I counted only one obligatory mention of this being A Great Country. I liked the "in crisis there is opportunity" theme, and the nyaah-nyaah moment in which he said, "The United States does not torture."
Most inspiring moment to me was when Obama told young folks that graduating from high school was their obligation to their country: if you drop out, you're not just letting yourself down, you're letting down your country. I hope teachers across the nation are pasting that on their bulletin boards today.
And how cool was it to see the lines of D.C. powerbrokers getting Obama to sign their copies of the speech as he left? The man's a rock star.
Of course, there's another way to view the speech: as a signal moment in the world's downward slide into financial apocalypse. Perhaps that's how we'll remember it, ruefully, in 30 years. An economist reminded me last week that the United States is losing 20,000 jobs each day. Or as the Onion wrote after the inauguration, "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job ":
WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans. ... Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."
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I'll be the first to admit that I can't turn down free stuff. It's an impulse that defies logic. I hate key chains, and I don't really like ice cream, but I still find myself grabbing the tacky keychain at the convention booth because it's free and I religiously wait 45 minutes every Earth Day in line at Ben and Jerry's on free cone day. Something about those four letters messes with my brain.
Thankfully, there are people out there with more will power. Today, the gorgeous and brilliant Dambisa Moyo is arguing that the temptation to accept what's free at the expense of what's best is wreaking havoc in Africa. In her book Dead Aid she argues that one of the best things that could happen for the continent is for leaders to start defying the impulse to accept free aid from the likes of Bono and the U.S. government. In her fabulous interview with the NYT she gives a Capitalism 101 lesson that should be required reading for celebrities and congressmen who might have slept through economics class. (Or if you are Lawrence Summers, Obama's head of the National Economic Council, that would be sleeping through last week's "Fiscal Sustainability Summit." He literally was asleep on the podium.)
A handful of Republican Governors are also resisting temptation. Govs. Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Sarah Palin of Alaska are refusing—or at least talking about refusing—to take some of the free money from Obama's massive stimulus bill. They're essentially echoing Moyo, arguing that the money will only leave them dependent down the road. In this moment when corporations are asking for handouts on the order of billions, this level of restraint should count as saintly.
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Nina, maybe you're right that more women might pick up a pen during this recession (though I'd imagine the free time offered by unemployment is more likely to be the impetus than money, as Bonnie notes). What struck me, though, about that Laura Miller Salon essay "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?" is encapsulated in this bit:
[M]any critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Meghan wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago, when the New York Times polled critics to find out what they thought the most important books of the last 25 years were, and big novels by men dominated the results. America's big, and any novel that represents it has to be big, or so that line of thinking goes. Even Norman Mailer, the most macho of all the 20th-century literary macho men, seemed cowed by how big a "Great American Novel" would have to be, saying once that "The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed." (If you'll allow me a moment of blatant gender stereotyping, that sort of literal-mindedness—I must capture every single detail!—seems pretty classically male.)
The term "Great American Novel" first appeared in 1868 in an essay in The Nation when, America was trying to define itself, culturally and otherwise, against still-dominant Europe. The original coinage definitely didn't exclude women—George Sand was one of the European authors namechecked, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was cited as the closest thing we'd had to date. It also called for the Great American Novel to be "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." On the face of it, that's a pretty humble definition, and one that wouldn't seem to exclude those "domestic" novels we think of as typically female literature. So when did we decide that we couldn't beat Europe by merely painting the ordinary? (This all might just be the simple fact that women usually don't go in much for pissing contests, literary or otherwise.) Or was American life so gender-fragmented in the 20th century that it became hard to have a shared "ordinary"? Jezebel and Esquire seem to think so—their wildly different lists of the books every man and every woman ought to read certainly suggest that. I've read far more on Jezebel's list. So, XXers, should I be mad at myself because my reading habits have tended toward the stereotypically female, or should I be mad that more books on Jezebel's list haven't gotten wide-ranging critical acclaim?
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Two years ago, doctors and hospital workers refused to let Janice Langbehn come into the hospital room with her partner of 17 years, Lisa Marie Pond, while Pond died. Why? Because under Florida law, Janice wasn't immediate family to Lisa—never mind that Janice tried to show everyone the signed medical power-of-attorney documents that she carried with her to the hospital. Janice is now suing for emotional distress and negligence.
I hate these stories. My head is full of scores of them. I heard my first one nearly 20 years ago, when my friends Matt and Mark (names changed—it was a long time ago!) told me that when Mark was shot while on a business trip, the Dallas hospital that was treating him refused to tell Matt (technically a stranger) whether Mark was dead or alive. Matt called for six hours before he got the news. After being terrified by that hair-raising story, my then-beloved and I got our documents written and notarized within the week. (She's now my beloved ex, after 19 years together, but that's another story entirely.) During those 20 years, I wrote a book about the history of marriage and why same-sex couples belong. A marriage movement took shape, including some now-famous lawsuits. We won in Massachusetts, my home state, and Connecticut; we won partial partnership recognition (called things like "civil unions" or "domestic partnership" and so on) in another 10 states; we won the dubious privilege of celesbians getting full-color and front-page photo coverage in People while dating and getting married (cf: Ellen and Portia's big fat white wedding). Meanwhile, most of the United States came to agree that same-sex partners ought to, at a minimum, be able to hold hands in the hospital, for God's sake.
And still, because Lisa Marie Pond—who was on a cruise ship with her beloved and their three children—had the misfortune of having a heart attack while off the coast of Miami, she had to die alone, without the woman she loved.
It breaks my heart.
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At the beginning of this year, Tropicana redesigned its packaging, replacing its decades old logo—the highly identifiable straw-impaled orange—with an artistically framed cup of juice and a sleek, vitaminwater-esque aesthetic. Orange juice drinkers and grocery store goers the country over were aghast, universally agreeing that that the makeover sucked, badly. Customers were so horrified that they complained to Tropicana directly, telling the company, according to the Times, that the new packaging was "'ugly' or ‘stupid,' and resembled ‘a generic bargain brand' or a ‘store brand.' "
Tropicana, heeding the advice of its "most loyal consumers" and recognizing that it had "underestimated the deep emotional bond" between juice drinkers and juice containers, decided to trash the new look and return to the old favorite. Yay! Victory for the people! They really told that Tropicana how to ... sell juice to them better?
The new packaging does stink and I'm glad to see it go, but there's something unsettling about consumers getting together to complain about a company's crappy ad campaign—no one should care this much about something created expressly to manipulate them. Beloved packaging is, it turns out, just like a beloved TV show: Some people will sign petitions, send letters and make phone calls to save them both. It renders the standard complaints about product placement incredibly quaint—how can anyone get aggravated when a show like 30 Rock maybe pushes McFlurries to its audience, when, in all likelihood, a certain segment of that audience would happily advise McDonald's on the best way to sell said ice cream, especially if the company was doing it wrong?
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After reading yesterday's glowing review of My Little Red Book in the New York Times, I finally took a peek at the cute little hardcover I had been brushing off as gimmicky. The pieces are fun to read—some breezy, some touching, all evoking that sweet, misplaced anxiety of youth that Billy Collins so beautifully captures in "On Turning Ten." The authors include names you know (Erica Jong, Joyce Maynard) and amateur surprises, and range from fleshed-out essays to two-sentence snippets. But the earnest introduction by 18-year-old author Rachel Nalebuff strikes me as off-base. She writes that she "decided to commit social suicide" by asking about periods and that the book "shares the revolutionary spirit of its Chinese namesake."
Is it really that revolutionary in the United States these days to talk about menstruation? Holly at Woman Tribune seems to think so, writing this of My Little Red Book's origin: "Something needs to be done in this society that would let this silence continue for so long and keep so many women captive in its process of women-shaming."
If "this society" means modern-day America, I disagree. I've never felt silenced when it comes to my period. Sure, I don't bring it up with male co-workers, but nor would I expect them to tell me about their nocturnal emissions. I've often swapped first-period tales with friends and family, though. My favorite is from my friend who got hers while visiting her dad one summer. Eager to play the situation right, he came home that night with a heart-breakingly well-intentioned purchase: a T-shirt with a silkscreened baby photo of her on the front, and the special day's date on the sleeve. Talk about not feeling silenced—she actually wore the shirt all the time!
Do any of you think this book is a bigger deal than I'm giving it credit for? I respect Nalebuff for avoiding the crass oversharing that seems so popular among young women these days and for assembling well-written and varied tales. But I'm not sure I respect whatever greater social mission she and others say was accomplished here.
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Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo detainee released by President Obama, flew back to his native Britain this week and, like many a former detainee before him, said the U.S. had tortured him. He used the adjective "medieval" to make sure to get his point across.
In a sense, this is useful for the Obama administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder travels to Guantanamo for military briefings about the 245 remaining detainees. Disturbing accounts like Mohamed's—though aspects of them can't be verified—spotlight all the problems with the Bush approach to the detainees, and all the reasons for Obama to deal with them differently and eventually to close Gitmo. And there's another kind of utility, as well: The attention to Mohamed and torture takes attention away from the dense, tricky legal questions on which the Obama lawyers have been siding with their Bush predecessors. So far, there's the new administration's defense of the state-secrets privilege in the case about extraordinary rendition and torture by the CIA, its quiet effort to dismiss the lawsuit demanding that Bush officials find 15 million e-mails missing from White House accounts, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Senatory Leahy's truth commission proposal. Mohamed's story is terrible, and also easier to make a headline out of.
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Nina wonders if the financial downturn will force more women to pursue writing careers in order to become breadwinners, but I don't believe anyone turns to the life of letters to ward off economic calamity. While writing skills can indeed be marketable (a young stay-at-home mom I know takes projects translating academic research into coherent grant proposals and reports), nobody would choose a writing profession for the money. It has worse hourly wages than busing tables, and there's no tip out. Despairingly, as difficult and time-consuming the labor of prose, many writers consider it a gift to get paid at all. A writer writes, at the core, because she needs to hear her voice on the page and see her thoughts expressed on the computer screen. You write because the muse tells you that you must.
That said, I hope Emily's skepticism that Facebook "infantilizes" human brains and impairs attention spans is well-placed. I worry a little that cell-phone best-sellers popular in Japan are already a sign of the digital impact on the printed word, and tomorrow's written narrative will be 10 consecutive status updates.
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An Oxford neuroscientist is suggesting that social networking and the hours kids spend doing it is rewiring their brains so that we are at risk of raising a generation of solipsists. Dr. Susan Greenfield fears this exposure is permanently "infantalizing" young brains, leaving them with truncated attention spans and the inability to interact face-to-face with other human beings. Her conclusions feel instinctively right (as I've found even adult brains can be rewired for such stunting), but then again, isn't this always the cry of the older generation when a new technology comes along? Television, radio, and telephones were all supposed to ruin the generation that grew up glued to these devices. Even the printing press—which allowed people to absorb cultural knowledge privately—was supposed to destroy the group cohesion that was enforced through the oral tradition. Do others feel Greenfield is right? Or is she just the latest adult warning that rock 'n' roll, et. al., is producing degenerate kids?
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At the early end of the current economic downturn, the New York Times published an article about how lipstick is a potential economic indicator. The theory is that in times of fiscal woe, women won't be able to afford that $200 frock, but they'll splurge on a $10 lipstick, a cheapo manicure, or some other kind of small luxury. And lately we've heard reporting not on just the lipstick effect," but also on how the credit crunch is killing boob-job loans, how Nordstrom's profits have tanked since the ladies who lunch are brown-bagging it, and how moms are cutting back on their kids' birthday parties, causing a seismic blow to the clown community.
It seems that every day now there's a trend piece on the way women are spending—or not spending—our increasingly meager earnings. That's why we're introducing the Lipstick Level, an occasional Recession-o-Meter in the mold of Slate's Change-o-Meter rating how the economic downturn is shaping the way women make purchases. A low Lipstick Level score indicates spending as if you still believed those returns from Uncle Bernie were for real, like the article on Bloomberg.com today about how Shiseido is still profiting from a face cream costing $1,350 for a 1.4-ounce jar. “High-priced cosmetics are resisting the economic downturn,” says Shiseido president Shinzo Maeda.
A high Lipstick Level score says we're fast approaching diets of ramen and Target-brand pants held together with twine. An article in Women's Wear Daily by Rosemary Feitelberg on the notoriously spendthrift fashion crowd cutting back is an example of this. According to Feitelberg, "Constance White, eBay’s style director, said she has been trying to explain to her husband what Wal-Mart is." Even those who are aware of Wal-Mart are finding new ways to save: Tailors are doing better business as people try to revive old clothes rather than buying new ones.
So what's today's LL? I'm going to give it a 40 on a scale of 1 to 100. If people are still blowing rent money on cold cream, it could get much, much worse.
Addendum: The Big Money's Hans Eisenbeis wrote brilliantly on the lipstick index theory late last year. His take? "For this recession, lipstick has been upscaled right out of its own economic index. Hello, Hosiery Index!" Sigh. TBM also wrote on Uggs as an economic indicator here.
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Laura Miller at Salon has a great essay—provocatively titled, "Why can't a woman write the great American novel?"—on lit-crit rockstar Elaine Showalter's new book, A Jury of Her Peers, a mammoth study of American women writers. Lots to chew on, but the following bit jumped out at me, considering Emily's recent musings on how recession affects marriages and XX's conversation last month about writers' sugar-daddy fantasies:
... surveying this history, it seems that before the 1970s there was nothing more conducive to a[n American] woman's literary success than the failure of the men in her life. More often than not, what prompted these writers to sit down at their desks and send out their manuscripts to magazines and book publishers was the bankruptcy, desertion, idleness or death of her husband or father. When the touted sanctuary of the nuclear family let them down, and they needed the money to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads, their talents were finally loosed.
A potential silver lining to our current economic woes?
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Hanna, what did you make of Anne Applebaum's take on Hillary's so-practical-it's-just-short-of-cynical diplomatic style in today's Washington Post? It was kind of a grudging shout-out, too, although I thought Applebaum didn't give Hillary quite enough credit. Amnesty International, I understand, was "disappointed" that Clinton failed to adequately whine about human rights abuses to the Chinese government, but I really liked that she replaced the ritualized righteous complaints with simple frank talk. Applebaum did praise Hillary, though, for comprehending the power of gesture over words:. "In China, a country where religious believers are harassed, all prominent visiting Americans should make a point of going to church—as Clinton did," she wrote, suggesting another potentially galvanizing gesture Hillary could make: "In Russia, a country that is ambivalent about its repressive past, all prominent visiting Americans should make a point of visiting a memorial to the victims of Stalin."
Hillary's church visit apparently hit a real nerve in China. I like this fledgling model for a secretary-of-state-ship, one that emphasizes gestural actions over endless diplomatic gabfests. And I like it all the more for the way it gently flips the gender stereotype that all women like to do is talk.
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Imagine if you took American Idol, added shinier clothes, cheesier production values, slighter pop songs (I know, I know how could it be possible!), and then topped it all off with an oversized helping of nationalism. The result would be the extremely trivial, highly political, tremendously campy annual Eurovision Song Contest, in which musical acts from various European nations, plus the likes of Israel, Turkey, and Russia, slap on headsets and some discarded Backstreet Boys duds and vie for simultaneously meaningful and meaningless cultural bragging rights.
This year's contest, which will take place in Moscow, goes down in May, but participating nations are in the midst of choosing their representatives now. Israel's selection, an Arab and Israeli duo that were picked the day after the Gaza war began, has already generated some controversy. The Times reported over the weekend that Georgia, on the heels of August's war with Russia, has mischievously selected "We Don't Wanna Put In"—as in Vladimir Putin—as their Eurovision entry. Should the song make it to the finals (voters are allowed to vote for any song but their own country's), it would, theoretically, be broadcast on Russia's state-owned Channel One—where it will be the most critical item to air on Putin in recent memory. Not bad rabble-rousing for a lousy pop song.
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Riffing slightly on the gasping that accompanied Michelle
Obama’s pulled back “executive” ‘do, Dana Goldstein makes an interesting point
about Obama’s hybrid feminism (third-wave, to some). Though Obama has dubbed herself the “mom in chief” countless times, pledging to work with military families,
dishing on work-life balance with women at Howard University, and presiding over a
feel-good children’s concert at the White House last Wednesday, Goldstein
notes:
… in unscripted moments and with
small gestures, you can see the old
Michelle Obama emerging from behind the Jackie O facade.
Most obviously, there is Michelle's tour of federal agencies, where she's been
pitching her husband's stimulus package and thanking tens of thousands of bureaucrats
for their service. A friend pointed out to me that these events are making
Michelle more visible than Joe Biden. That's true. Don't look
too closely, or you might see the Obamas' marriage for what it really is:
something quite like the infamous "two for the price of one" that so
terrified conservatives when it came to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
In the days before the Recovery Act passed, I, too, watched
as the listening tour took on a tone of subtle flackery. And yes, Obama is a
former hospital executive who shares a pillow with the man crafting national
health care policy. Yet I believe Michelle is really far more of a
traditionalist than anyone gets. More than I am, certainly.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bang-up profile of Obama
does the best job I’ve seen of fleshing out the first lady’s nostalgic, early ‘60s
view of America.
A child of Chicago’s
South Side and of a household with small-town values and traditional gender
roles, Obama is fiercely enamored of the “good old days,” of stoop hopscotch
and such, and it is the nation—blinded, somehow, by her blackness—that has
lagged behind in recognizing that. Despite the president’s lighter skin and Kansan roots, in
many ways, Coates argues, Michelle is the more American of the first couple.
The
superficial references to Camelot (and her “Mad Men” outfits—on the day she
hosted middle-schoolers in the East Room, she wore a mint green cardigan and conservative
pink tweed skirt, topped with the classic Jackie flip) contribute to the
impression that she is not interested in “two for the price of one.” She may be
or she may not. But the point is that, unlike her predecessors, she will do
both or neither if she damn well pleases. Though “Hillary Kissinger” empowered Obama to
eschew cookie-baking, the lack of scones at 1600 Penn is more likely to be because Obama's bad at it than because she feels social pressure to be a full-frontal working girl. That choice, I
guess—and the pretty clothes—makes her a lucky lady.
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Like Jessica, I can't see the Oscars as much more than Hollywood giving itself a big old sloppy wet kiss on national TV. But I thought there was a high moment and a low moment worth mentioning. The first came when Heath Ledger's family accepting his Oscar for best supporting actor. It was sad but, well real -- this was a family up there, a crew in a whole other sense, and the award had a meaning for them that went deep. The low moment came when, during the award for best adapted screenplay, they flashed up a section of the script for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And it had a huge grammatical mistake! As I recall--and I could be wrong--it said something about an "inept silence"; the word they meant, presumably, was "awkward."
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A little shout-out for our new secretary of state, who, this past week, has been carving out her own brand of so-practical-it's-just-short-of-cynical diplomacy in China and elsewhere. Clinton was criticized for not publicly sticking it to Chinese leaders, like her husband did when he declared they were on the "wrong side of history." But what she's doing is much more interesting, and potentially effective. Clinton is giving up on the grandstanding because she knows it doesn't work. She didn't lecture Chinese leaders about human rights because "we pretty much know what they're going to say," Clinton said (candidly), causing all manner of diplomat to spill his scotch and soda in alarm. Chinese leaders have never responded to public scolding, so it's no use trying again. What she did instead is meet with a group of women involved in grass-roots and mildly subversive activism. This is strategic scolding of the kind Chinese leaders are sure to notice. And it gives a boost to the people who can actually make something happen in China. Clinton also spoke freely about Burma and North Korea in a way American diplomats never do. This is exactly why Obama chose her. She is the muscle behind his "negotiate with anyone" strategy. Sure, we'll negotiate, but only if it will work.
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Thanks to a bunch of great e-mails from readers (you are a smart and articulate bunch), I posted a piece about the recession and its potentially deleterious effect on marriages. I've got a follow-up question: If your husband or wife has been laid off, or if you have, is that affecting how you and she or he divide up who picks up the kids, does the dishes, takes out the trash, pays the bills? Is the person who's newly staying home putting in more hours on what's known as the "second shift"—the time for domestic chores that working spouses put in at either end of the day? Traditionally, women have shouldered more of this burden. Even as their rates of full-time employment have risen, the time-use numbers showing that men do less around the house have stubbornly refused to budge. I wonder if this round of layoffs is changing that. Please send your stories to doublex.slate@gmail.com, and I look forward to hearing them. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be quoted anonymously, please let me know.
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Despite the extraordinary long-distance diagnostic skills of Sen. Jim Bunning, R. Ky., who predicted at a Saturday Republican fundraising dinner that she’ll be dead in nine months, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the bench for oral argument this morning, just as she’d promised. Ginsburg underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer earlier this month. Her doctors are optimistic about her prognosis. As her clerks will tell you, Ginsburg doesn’t do drama. She also doesn’t miss court.
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A guest post from Slate intern Laura Bennett.
The XX Factor conversation in the wake of Facebook's revised Terms of Service raised some interesting points about why we use Facebook and what we expect from the site in terms of privacy and security. On Friday, Facebook returned to the limelight when a young man from Brooklyn, Paul Zolezzi, hanged himself in a playground shortly after posting his suicide note as a Facebook status update: "Born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn...And couldn't have asked for more." According to the New York Daily News, friends saw the status update and commented on it ("Are you dying, or just staying Brooklyn? I hope it's the latter," one friend wrote), but no one took action.
The way Paul's friends reacted to his grim declaration points to the peculiar space that Facebook occupies: both fact and figment, reflection and projection. As Margaret mentioned, managing a Facebook profile has become a massive, multimedia exercise in self-creation that borders on fabrication. We can de-tag photos taken at unflattering angles, de-friend people for dramatic effect, and delete unsavory comments posted on our walls. Is it that spectacle of self-presentation, then, that makes a foreboding status update seem different from a scrawled suicide note?
What should the Facebook staff's responsibility be to react to red flags like this one? Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post on Monday responding to the Terms of Service controversy that "[t]he trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work." But what exactly are we trusting them to do? Just to give us our privacy, or also to monitor and respond to self-destructive content? Zuckerberg and his crew already boot users who misbehave, censor inappropriate photos, and take other behind-the-scenes steps to ensure a safe, smoothly run community. Should they intercede in situations like Paul Zolezzi's as well, or is it in the interest of trust and privacy to leave such intervention to others?
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I didn't love the entire Oscars telecast, but I did think there were some lovely grace notes, like Dustin Lance Black's speech (can we all agree it was the high point of the night?) and Kate Winslet's whistling, gap-toothed dad. And who knew Janusz Kaminski was so funny?
But what really made the night for me was the sheer number of foreign accents on display, from Penélope Cruz and her Spanish shout-out, to my dad's beloved A.R. Rahman. ("I chose love, and I'm here." Yes you did, you fillum king! Jai Ho!) Animated short winner Kunio Kato's minimalist and slightly absurd acceptance speech had me giggling all night. There's been a lot of talk about whether the night's big winner, Slumdog Millionaire, can be taken as an authentic portrait of India, or of Bollywood filmmaking in general. (See Dennis Lim's excellent Slate essay here.) I have a lot of conflicted feelings on that topic, but last night, at least, I was basking in Hollywood's internationalism.
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I just finished paging through the latest issue of Vogue, which the editors have billed as the "Power Issue." In addition to a profile of cover girl Michelle Obama, there are pieces on Carla Bruni, Silda Wall Spitzer, Melinda Gates, and Queen Rania of Jordan. Exceptional, intelligent, accomplished women, all. But I couldn't help noticing that all are famous chiefly in their role as helpmate to an even more famous husband. And, yes, all have turned that role on its traditional head, and yes, all were just as exceptional and accomplished before their marriages. But would they have been included in the issue without that new last name? The grouping seems to suggest they would not. (To be fair, there is also a story on Twilight author and self-made woman Stephanie Meyer, but she's not mentioned either in the cover lines or the editor's note, and relegated all the way to the back of the book. It seems almost tacked on; one never wants to be too matchy-matchy, and they'd already used so much first spouse in this issue!)
I don't pick up Vogue expecting it to be Ms., but still, this issue is clearly intended as a self-conscious departure from the usual breathless accounts of socialites who have just vacationed somewhere fab, or started fashion companies on a whim. It's meant to be Serious with a capital S, and to explore the ways women wield tremendous power in spheres outside of fashion. And it's precisely that intended scope that makes the implied definition of how power can be gained appear so incredibly narrow. In an odd way, it's collectively insulting to all the women included in the issue, who—as the profiles within prove—are anything but narrow-minded themselves.
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Willa, I wish I had enjoyed last night's Oscars as much as you did! I found Hugh Jackman—sweet and exuberant though he was—totally embarrassing to watch. The first medley was so awkward and triggered such an uncomfortable silence among my Oscar-watching crew that we decided to mute the second song and dance number and rewatch Joaquin on Letterman instead. (Ben Stiller's vaguely amusing parody got us in the mood.)
There were, though, two moments last night I think were award-worthy.
For most pathetic coverage of the red carpet, the winner is E! During the pre-show parade of wedding dress after wedding dress after wedding dress, Ryan Seacrest seemed like he'd never done a celebrity interview in his life ("Uh, have you thought about what you'll say if you win?" he asked Mickey Rourke, as though the answer to that could possibly be interesting). His co-host Giuliana Rancic took the level of professionalism down about 83 notches when she let out a little screech when Brangelina arrived, then sputtered "Oh my god I'm such a freak of nature! How about I scream like a freak when Brad and Angelina arrive?"
Don't worry, I won't do any medleys before I announce the next winner. For most pleasant surprise of the night, the award goes to Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Not only is he a total stud, but he was well-composed while delivering a powerful speech that struck just the right note. Get that boy in front of the camera more often!
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I'll take the bait, Willa. I found the Oscars as predictable and smarmily self-congratulatory as usual. Unlike Slate's Troy Patterson, who called the presentation of the acting awards by the five previous winners "a welcome development," I found it awkward and forced. The worst was Nicole Kidman, whose love of botox has rendered her face nearly immobile, thus making her tribute to Angelina Jolie in The Changeling seem insincere. The effort Kidman was exerting just to smile was gargantuan. I will admit, though, that I don't really have much of a stomach for this sort of thing. The Oscars comes at the end of awards season, and I don't find Hollywood giving themselves a new set of prizes every weekend especially inspiring. Am I hopelessly cynical, Slate women? Have I lost my sense of wonder? Check out the video of Kidman and Jolie below and see if you agree.
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OK, I'm just going to take the plunge: This was the most entertaining Academy Awards I've ever seen. That is sort of damning with faint praise, since watching the Oscars is usually about as exciting as watching a really slow person run every minute of an entire marathon—kind of thrilling at the beginning and end but mostly endless, and you're just trying to find a way to sneak off to the bathroom the whole time. This, too, felt never-ending at points, especially between the best supporting actor award (how poised was Heath Ledger's family? Unbelievably restrained and touching) and the big awards at the end, but, in general, I thought it was much, much better than usual.
Hugh Jackman's energetic willingness to do even the shlockiest thing with a convincing smile single-handedly put over the opening musical number, which didn't have nearly as good lyrics as it should have but was executed with breathy exuberance and set a fun tone. Changing the order of the awards, so that interesting ones for screenplay and supporting actor and actress were mixed in with the boring stuff, helped the pacing. Even though the musical number was an incoherent mess (just let Beyoncé sing!), it broke the monotony and staved off serious boredom for about 15 minutes. The speeches (even though I'm super bummed we'll never get to hear Mickey's) by Penélope Cruz, Danny Boyle, Dustin Lance Black, and Sean Penn were thoughtful and well-delivered (even Kate Winslet did much better than her usual histrionics). Even some of the presenters, like Tina Fey and Steve Martin, were actually, well, funny. And though having former Oscar winners laud each one of this year's nominees personally got a little awkward and long at points, it was more interesting than usual, very sweet, and an excuse to bring out awesome old-timers like Christopher Walken and his crazy hair, Whoopi and her crazy leopard-print dress, and Sophia Loren and her crazy tan. OK, now you can all tell me whether I'm crazy: What did you think?
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Quote of the night (so far):
"I've had dresses thrown at me, diamonds thrown at me!" from Taraji P. Henson, up for best supporting actress for her role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Henson is green enough that she talks about such things. I'm with Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan. With the fashion industry "hanging by a thread," the least they can do is pay for their own clothes.
Runner-up
"Angelina's like my favorite person in all history!" From Miley Cyrus, of course.
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Despite her courage, Jess, though Marisa Tomei performed her heart out as the pole dancer Mickey Rourke courts in The Wrestler, her (OK, let's call her "feminist") character didn't quite sell me—showing more compassion than passion in the film's fleeting love story. It may be a chick flick, but it ain't no romance. Speaking of, while everybody has a different reason why Millionaire will win the best picture statue tonight, for me, Slumdog's happily ever after fade out puts it solidly ahead. The Bollywood ending wins by a mile in a field where the only other love stories are the doomed courtship of Brad and Cate in Benjamin Button and The Reader's bordering-on-child-molestation sexual trysts between Kate and impossibly young actor David Kross. (Parenthetically, I wonder whether Harvey Weinstein—if Wall-E, the other love conquers all narrative in this year's top films, had been nominated in the BP category, as many fans and critics opined it should have—would have run a whisper campaign charging cartoon-robot exploitation?) Meantime, as we wait for confirmation of the Slumdog sweep, in honor of romance classic It Happened One Night's 1935 Academy Award shut-out of The Thin Man, I heartily recommend reading Slate's Nick and Nora of movie-criticism trash talk, the matchless Dana Stevens and Troy Patterson.
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I came away from The Wrestler feeling exactly as you did, Hanna. This was a movie for women. The common denominator here isn’t just that Rourke and Tomei have allowed themselves to be exploited and objectified. It’s that screaming, frothing men are the reason each has become a busted shell. This is a movie about fantasies. But the female characters long for connection while the males long for action figures. Even the men Rourke serves at the supermarket meat counter (yes MEAT COUNTER ... well, nobody said it was a subtle film, as my friend Liz observed last night) are aggressive and brutal.
I don’t know that the whole men-as-animals subtext turns this into a chick flick. I found the violent bits so unbearable that I spent a lot of the movie deeply involved with my Milk Duds. And as Jessica notes, even if she were played by Dame Judi Dench, that whole stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold character can never be anything but a dreary cliché. Still, The Wrestler lodged itself someplace in my chest after I saw it lost weekend and it’s still sitting there. There was one moment when Rourke looked straight into the camera when he was begging his daughter’s forgiveness, and I’d swear that whatever he let loose in that instant caused me brain damage at the other end. Yes, he deserves the Oscar, and, yes, he’s crazier than a moonbat. But what this movie says about men and their dreams is probably less chick flick that horror movie.
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I find the notion that The Wrestler is a feminist flick intriguing, but ultimately it's problematic. Although Rourke's character is trapped in an endless cycle of bodily abuse and exploitation, the biological women in the film are not particularly shining examples of feminist thinking. Marisa Tomei plays that same old trope, the hooker (or in this case, stripper) with a heart of gold. Since Tomei is such a fine actress, she keeps the role from devolving into that clichéd territory. As our own Dana Stevens put it, "I hope Marisa Tomei won't be overlooked for what I consider the single best female performance of the year, supporting or otherwise. She's smart, earthy, and astonishingly real in a role that could have foundered in cheap sentimentality." But still, Tomei's character is pretty one-dimensional. She lacks flaws either to her earthy personality or her slammin' bod. And what about the other woman in the movie, Rourke's daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood? The wrestler tugs on her vulnerable heart strings, only to let her down as he has throughout her childhood. In a way, every character in The Wrestler is trapped in a larger system beyond his or her control. Mickey Rourke doesn't deserve a special citation for feminist filmmaking for being trapped in this way, but agreed, Hanna: He does deserve that Oscar.
Rourke already won best actor honors at last night's Independent Spirit Awards, and his acceptance speech was definitely 10 times more entertaining than whatever bleeped out pleasantries he'll probably have to offer tonight. Check out the rambling six-minute monologue below. This is what he had to say about Marisa Tomei's work: "I wanna thank, uh, who else? Oh! Melissa? Marisa Tomei. Goddamn she had to do all this with a bare ass, and she brought it. Is she here? Not many girls can climb the pole. You understand what I'm saying? She climbed the pole, and she did it well, and it was a very courageous performance."
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Whether or not to see The Wrestler is a common argument among my couple friends these days. But I was surprised to learn that The Wrestler, for which Mickey Rourke is sure to win an Oscar tonight, has a distinctly feminist edge. Or at least it settles an old score. In the movie, Rourke plays an aging wrestler who continues to abuse his body for the pleasure of the crowd. The abuse is both casual (tanning salons, hair dyes) and extreme (staple guns to the chest, falling from heights onto barbed wire). The crucifixion metaphor is always in the background. Usually when the exploitation of the male body is a theme, the context is noble sport, or test of manhood—boxers face off like warriors, quarterbacks take one for the team. But here the context is pure exploitation. What's happening to his body is the exact equivalent of what's happening to the character played by Marisa Tomei—an aging stripper who can't persuade any of her clients to buy a lap dance. The wrestler often refers to himself as an "aging piece of meat," and he is always objectified by the camera—shot from behind or from the chest down. He's not a victim in the straightforward sense—the wrestlers are all very polite and discuss their moves in advance. But he is in the second-wave sense—trapped in a larger system that gives him no other choice. And by the way, he definitely deserves that Oscar.
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The Washington Post's Monica Hesse makes a good case here for killing the best actress and best supporting actress categories, because, after all, an actor is an actor:
Yes, it might seem screwy to compare Angelina Jolie's emotional "Changeling" performance to Richard Jenkins's in "The Visitor." But is it any more sensical to judge Jenkins's minimalist turn as a college professor against Brad Pitt's wide-eyed romp through "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? Or really, to compare anything about the low-budget "Visitor" with the star-powered, animatronic "Benjamin"? Film is a vast and disparate medium; true apples-to-apples comparisons are almost impossible in any category.
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The current meta conversation burning up the net is the controversy over some media outlets' decision to publish a photo of a bruised Rihanna, post alleged battery by her boyfriend Chris Brown. The anti-publishing faction argues that it's an invasion of Rihanna's privacy, obviously an even more dire invasion than merely printing Rihanna's name in conjunction with the crime.
Gawker's Ryan Tate, in an entry discussing his site's decision to post the photo of Rihanna, says:
Critics say running the picture humiliates Rihanna at a time when she's already in emotional agony, that it pierces a zone of emotional and physical privacy already grossly violated in the apparent attack on her. Victims of domestic abuse and rape have long been accorded special rights in the criminal justice system; it is argued they should retain a similar degree of control if and when information escapes that system. Finally, it is lost on no one that sensational pictures like the Rihanna shot can bring profit-making publishers large amounts of traffic, opening publishers to charges of exploitation.
Those who support the publishing of the jarring photo of Rihanna make a similar argument to the one that I made when discussing the L.A. Times' decision to print Rihanna's name in the first place: By not printing the photo, which is clearly newsworthy, it's reinforcing the idea that she has something to be ashamed of.
It is also of note that photos of nonfamous women in domestic violence situations have been published without remark on sites like the Smoking Gun (example here). Is the outrage over Rihanna because that particular photo is so graphic? Is it because Rihanna had a pristine image, and it shatters the vaunted fantasy? If a less heralded celebrity, say, an Amy Winehouse, were in a similar domestic battery situation, would the publishing of her photos provoke such an outcry?
Finally, Newsweek has an interview with Leslie Morgan Steiner, the author of a forthcoming memoir about domestic abuse called Crazy Love. Steiner points out that Rihanna's well-publicized trauma may break down stereotypes of abused women. "I didn't understand that cycles of violence are passed from generation to generation, and I'd never known anyone who was abused," Steiner says. "I thought it only happened to poor women with children and without options."
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A post from guest blogger Abigail Pilgrim:
Maybe from now on when you sit down to confessional you'll hear a recording saying, "The following conversation may be recorded for Vatican polling purposes." But seriously, the rankings are just in from the Pope of which of the seven deadly sins men and women struggle with most often. These top five data confirm that women struggle more with internal sins: Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust, and Sloth. Men, on the other hand, take to the more active vices: Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Anger, and Pride. So now we can add sin preference to list of ways men and women don't quite see eye to eye.
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I don't blame you, Margaret, for feeling misled and misused by Facebook, but the whole thing reminds me a bit of the coachmen of Pleasure Island offering toys and candy while quietly turning Pinocchio and the other wayward boys into donkeys. I think your outrage that its CEO "could make big bucks selling information we volunteer for our own purposes," is a healthy wake-up call. Five years into the social networking phenomenon, its naive beneficiaries are suddenly troubled that young Mr. Zuckerberg is running a business. Along with offering strangely satisfying cupcake images, movie quizzes, free karma, and opportunities to throw sheep or hatch rottweillers, Zuckerberg, without asking for compensation, has created a very valuable forum. Users all over the world put their current Faces forward and entertainingly connect with one another over years and across generations. It seems likely that providing tempting and easily acquired treats must run up expenses and follows inevitably that the clever wunderkind will seek to monetize his principal asset: many millions of members about whom so many useful, voluntarily supplied, tidbits are readily known.
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson.
Emily, I agree that privacy is not terribly precious to many members of our generation, proven narcissists that we are, and I don't think it's impossible to reconcile our lack of concern for privacy with a desire to control our information, as Bonnie suggested. But it seems useful to clarify what kind of control we value online and why. Our desire for the last say in what happens to the information we store on Facebook is not about wanting to restrict access to our information; the reason we post anything on a social networking site in first place is that we want it to be seen. What we value is having sole power to decide how we present ourselves online, to create a stage—I mean page—and persona that we can alter when and as we choose. And since that is way more important to us than issues of privacy, I suspect that most of us are satisfied with being able to strike photographs and messages from other users' view, whether or not Facebook retains a copy. Facebook's much maligned and eventually reneged changes to their terms of use didn't threaten this control, so I disagree with you, Emily, that our desire to maintain it is the root cause of our indignation over the new terms. What actually offended us is that Big Brother Zuckerberg could make big bucks selling information we volunteer for our own purposes without his asking or in any way compensating us. It's not being seen that bothers us, it's being used.
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The Oscars are Sunday night (maybe you heard). When Kate Winslet finally gets awarded the shiny, gold-plated, bald phallus she's been so volubly longing for, I'm going to feel tempted to throw the remote at the television while damning Academy voters for rewarding just an OK performance in a dreadful film. Come on, Academy! Aren't the Oscars about rewarding quality acting? Ha-ha, I kid. Of course not! As this year demonstrates, even better than most, the Oscars are all about rewarding compelling campaign narratives.
Front-runners Kate Winslet, Mickey Rourke, and Heath Ledger (nominated for performances in The Reader, The Wrestler, and The Dark Knight respectively) all have just such a narrative, and you can tell because each of their victories is easy to imagine as a scene in a movie. (Try to do this trick for any of their fellow nominees—it's much harder.) Winslet's win is the moment the heroine's childhood dreams all come true. Rourke's is the instant the hero's comeback is finally complete. Ledger's victory
actually will be a scene in a movie, the inevitable Heath Ledger Story. (Can't you see it? A packed auditorium of the best actors in the world rising to give a bittersweet standing ovation to his immense talent.) If any of this trio wins this weekend, it will have something to do with singular performances and a whole lot more to do with their real-life stories and how those stories have been pitched to the voting public. (A similar logic applies to Slumdog Millionaire, which should win because the field is weak, people dig it, and, as the unheralded, multi-ethnic crowd pleaser, it is the Barack Obama of the best picture category.)
Excellent backstories have propelled many past Oscar winners. To name just a few of those many, think of Jennifer Hudson, Matt and Ben, the coronation of Julia Roberts, or even someone like Al Pacino, who won for Scent of a Woman not because it was his (or the year's) best work but because he had been Oscar-less for too long. Academy voters have proved again and again that they love a great story as much as a great performance—they're movie people after all; great stories are their business. It's about time I stopped being surprised.
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We often talk here at Slate about how to have tough conversations. Whether it’s Bristol and Greta and their inability to be candid about teen pregnancy or Meghan’s stunning account of how badly we do at talking about death. Emily and I wrote several years ago about the brutal isolation that arises when you try to talk about pregnancy loss. So often the public call to real, brutal, and honest dialogue is met with a lot of earnestly nodding heads and a request to pass the remote. That said, it’s hard to ignore yesterday’s speech by Attorney General Eric Holder, who used the occasion of Black History Month to ask Americans to stop being “a nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race. This was not a policy speech. Holder returned over and over to the idea that the “artificial” construct of Black History Month should be used “to foster a period of dialogue among the races.” The call here is for a public debate that is “nuanced” and “principled” and “spirited” and above all, honest. He doesn’t exactly tell us how to get there—he wants us to talk to our colleagues more and blend America's race history into our core curriculum. But it was an incredibly poignant speech about silence and the failures of political speech on hard questions. Here’s hoping it’s not met with more silence.
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Did you know that teens are more likely to face a sexual predator on the job than on the Internet (a "danger" that's been exposed as mostly hype)? This Friday, Feb. 20, at 8:30 p.m., PBS's public-affairs show NOW will broadcast a collaboration with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University (where I work), investigating the sexual harassment of teens in their after-school, weekend, and summer jobs. Here's a preview. The show is eye-opening—and (despite the fact that I'm in it) well worth watching for anyone whose young son or daughter might someday get a job.
Many people think "sexual harassment" refers to aggressive flirting or sexual horseplay on the job. But to get into court, harassment has to be intrusive, aggressive, and nearly endless—predatory or nearly so. And few teens (girls or boys) know what to do when a supervisor begins to talk ceaselessly and intimately about their bodies and lives, discussing sex acts in detail, propositioning mercilessly, pinning them in a car or stockroom, and groping, grabbing, stalking, threatening, or sexually assaulting them.
The collaboration grows out of research I did a few years ago, which resulted in a Good Housekeeping article with this blog post's title. Maria Hinojosa, PBS NOW senior correspondent, takes that research and runs with it, talking to young women who were unprepared for what they faced at work. The show tracks these young women's legal journeys, and examines how sexual harassment affects an estimated hundreds of thousands of teens across the country—many of whom don't know how to report workplace abuse, or even how to recognize when their bosses cross the line.
I hope you all will watch ... and we can discuss. (Especially you, Susannah, since you and I had an exchange about the subject back in January. I would love to know what you think.)
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For those of you still suffering from post-holiday doldrums, or recovering from sticker shock over post-holiday credit card bills, or already thinking about Christmas 2009—even if in a post-economic meltdown mindset—here's a gift idea to file away for your Xmas shopping list under "practical" or "unique" or even "exclusive yet affordable." A simple yet elegantly titled book called Selected Speeches by Michael Chertoff, our former homeland security chief, is now available for only a select few in Washington.
In it, Chertoff, who was not known for possessing soaring Obama-style oratory skills or for being a dynamic speaker who engages his audiences, regales readers with various speeches he made during his tenure. It includes such stunningly beautiful prose as:
If we are going to arrive at a day when terrorism no longer casts a dark cloud over the civilized world, we have to be prepared to advance international cooperation to hitherto unseen heights. And that's because ... terrorism is also spreading its ideology of hatred and intolerance around the world, and we have to match it in geographic location point by point.
A Washington Post writer suggests the book would be a perfect gift for the sleep-challenged, and as a shameless and unreformed Ambien user, I agree. I imagine keeping SS by my bedside at the ready for when the countless sheep keep sleep at bay, picking it up and turning a page or two and falling into a deep slumber in a matter of minutes—without having to worry about dangerous side effects like sleepwalking, sleep-driving, or horror of horrors, sleep-eating.
I can get my ZZZs in, minus the calories, and wake up refreshed and more enlightened about the security of our homeland. Fat brain without the fat ass. Sweet! Thanks Mike, you've done a heck of a job.
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Emily, I can't reconcile the conflict your freshly minted Generation Y (is it Gen Z now?) has embraced of eschewing privacy, which you all seem happy to do, yet expecting, even demanding as you wrote, "complete control over the private information we make public." The uncomfortable truth is you can never remove all traces of the past. That said, your general forthrightness and candor about your own lives shows a trust and wonder missing during my cohort's coming of age. My pre-alphabet age group of former flower children thought ourselves bold and experimental, but we only flirted with the openness and lovely acceptance members of your on-beyond-zebra generation typically show one another. Each of you inhabits her own skin so comfortably and displays such cheerful self-confidence, it does your elders proud. We third- and fourth-wave Facebook users now crowding your playground are grateful for your gracious reception, but Emily, you are also at the age when you come to realize we can't control what people know about us. We live in a public environment and people like to observe one another. You can't hold a megaphone and then tell people not to listen, nor take pictures of yourselves, post them, and expect the images to remain unseen. Despite the harsh trade-off, I say, go for it. Create as many online personae as you wish to, express yourselves honestly and sincerely, and enjoy the marvelous digital era you were lucky to be born into. Although you do not control who sees what you post nor what they do with it, remember, you will always have absolute power over what you say next.
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This guest post comes to us from Lisa Lerer, a staff writer for Politico.com.
BBC correspondent Katty Kay has an interesting piece up on the Daily Beast complaining about the use of sports metaphors by pundits and politicians:
Because women feel excluded from these sports discussions, our normally confident voices are subdued. To turn the tables, imagine if these public conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to fashion, or yoga. It's as if Dana Perino had compared getting out of Iraq to extracting yourself from pigeon pose, or tracking Osama to finding vintage Pucci on eBay. But she didn't. She's a woman and more inclusive than that.
As a non-fan, I frequently have to ask for a translation when the stock metaphors come out on the trail and in the briefing room. Some of my female political journalist friends make a practice of routinely reading sports pages just to be more conversant.
But I think Kay is getting at a larger problem here: The Beltway can be an incredibly chauvinistic, macho place—a fact that won't change even if the pundits and pols drop all their sports clichés. What we really need to improve political discourse is a deeper bar of up-and-coming female politicians. To that end, it’s heartening to see this article from Alexandra Starr in the New Republic about Kirsten Gillibrand and other female career politicians.
The fact that women like Gillibrand don't feel obligated to speak about how they entered politics because of their work on behalf of kids, not to mention having to toil for years as local volunteers, shows that the landscape has changed. Gillibrand's aggressiveness may have engendered Tracy Flick snickers, but her rapid political rise used to be the exclusive province of men.
But back to the baseball diamond: I know sports metaphors are common not only in politics but business and other fields. Do they annoy you, XXFactors, as much as they annoy me? And, do they cut women out of the conversation?
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Dahlia's recent article on "sexting" asked whether it makes sense to charge teens who exchanged naked photos with producing or possessing child pornography. Apparently, that's not the only cell phone behavior that can leave a kid in cuffs. According to this report from the Smoking Gun, a 14-year-old high-school student in Wisconsin was arrested for disorderly contact for texting during class. Long story short: A teacher called a "student resources officer" after the girl refused to hand in her phone. She denied not only texting in class but also having a phone at all; a female police officer searched her and uncovered the Samsung Cricket in her "buttocks area." The person she was texting during class? Her father.
It must be maddening for teachers to deal with students texting during class. But arresting a kid for disorderly conduct? Wouldn't a suspension be a better approach than arresting and strip-searching a 14-year-old for a cell phone?
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was supposed to give the keynote address last week at a conference on women's equality and the law, at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. She couldn't make it, because of her recent cancer-related surgery. But she called, en route from leaving the hospital, to wish the conference goers well and to announce that she was on the mend and feeling good. Justice Ginsburg was clearly sending a message of strength—one that, as Dahlia pointed out, is entirely in line with the forceful approach she took to denouncing the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter pay discrimination case.
The Rutgers conference reminded me of an earlier era of Ginsburg as tireless tigress: In the 1970s, she was an early and forceful litigator for women's rights. It's a story well told by Fred Strebeigh in his new book, Equal: Women Reshape American Law. Fred was my undergraduate writing teacher; this book is an incredibly industrious reporting effort that takes full advantage of his access to Ginsburg's litigation files. A revealing how-far-we've-come moment from 1970: One of Ginsburg's clients, Nora Simon, was a former Army nurse who was barred from further work in the military because she had been pregnant. "Under Army regulations a discharge for pregnancy renders a person ineligible for re-enlistment," Fred reports of the rules then. For Ginsburg, Simon's plight was personal. Five years earlier, as a professor at Rutgers without tenure, Ginsburg herself had gotten pregnant over the winter. Worried about whether her contract would be renewed, she said nothing about her pregnancy all spring, had her baby son in early September, and went right back to work. Tireless, indeed.
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A second post from guest blogger Abigail Pilgrim:
I have a hard enough time determining where Bristol and other teens fall on the spectrum of helpless kid to responsible adult. But regardless, it's hard to think that sexually active kids and teens will benefit if David Ogden, Obama's nomination for deputy attorney general, gets approved by the Senate later this month. Ogden's resume reads like a who's who of the porn industry, with a special emphasis on defending child porn. There's no doubt there will be plenty of other issues for Ogden to deal with as deputy attorney general beyond the lucrative sex realm, and I'm sure he's qualified to address them. But I can't get over how creepy some of his past brief statements read. Things like: videos aren't child porn unless "the genitals or pubic area exhibited" were "somewhat visible or discernible through the child's clothing." [David Ogden in Knox v. U.S., (1993)]. It seems like child porn is only going to become a bigger and bigger issue as the lines of consent get blurrier. Tech-savvy kids are doing a good enough job exploiting themselves—as Dahlia just wrote in her story about "sexting." The last thing they need is the government giving a helping hand to all of Ogden's past clients. Anyone else have a reaction to Ogden? I'd especially love to hear some parents weigh in, although being a parent doesn't necessarily make you against child pornography, as Ogden's three kids testify.
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Another early test for Obama and the Democratic Congress on the war on terror front: The D.C. Circuit just stopped the release of the poor beleagured Uighurs, 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees whom the Bush administration admitted posed no threat but refused to let go. A district court had ruled in favor of releasing the men, saying that the president had no legal basis for detaining them. No threat, no detention—seems right. The problem is that it's not clear where the Uighurs should go. They're from a remote northwestern area of China. They're not fans of the Chinese government, and the government hates them right back. Which means they're at risk of torture if we send them home, according to both the government and their lawyers. That means that our government either has to look for another country to bear the brunt of China's anger by agreeing to take them—a deal that apparently hasn't gone well for Albania, which took five other Uighur detainees three years ago—or release them inside the United States.
Why not repatriate the Uighurs here, if the government has determined they're not dangerous? Today's court decision doesn't argue against doing that. Instead, it's about separation of powers. The D.C. Circuit said that a district court can't order the release of an alien from Gitmo without authorizing legislation from Congress. OK, Congress, are you going to move on this? And will the Obama administration support such a bill?
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Reading "Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm," I had to laugh. Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske used an MRI to scan the brains of men as they were shown a variety of images: clothed and unclothed women and men. Upon eyeballing the images featuring scantily clad women, the portion of the male brain dedicated to "tool use" lit up like a Christmas tree. Meanwhile, the portion of the brain devoted to recognizing the subject as human didn't react at all in some subjects. Fiske notes: "The only other time we have seen this is when people look at pictures of the homeless or of drug addicts. ... "
Men objectify women! Color me shocked. Apparently, Fiske was "shocked" at the results. It sounds like she didn't enter into the study entirely objectively either. When the idea for the study was suggested to Fiske by Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who predicted the "tool use" effect: “I said, ‘Oh, Jennifer, that’s disgusting. I can’t believe you’re predicting that.' ” I am fascinated to know what bubble it is these people live in. Or maybe they just never leave the lab.
Of course, feminist bloggers are having a field day with the results, although they can't quite seem to decide if it's male biology that's the culprit here or that infernal patriarchal society they're always talking about overthrowing. Feministing: "I think this argument proves that despite some pre-historic desire for men to get horny over scantily clad women and for women to want rich husbands that provide security and ability to nest (this is what evolutionary psychologists would argue), most of this desire comes from cultural conditioning." Thank you for clearing that up for me. (See Tracy Clark-Flory for a more rational response.)
What's being overlooked here is twofold. One: Fiske et al. studied a whopping 21 men. Who were all college students. To leap to grand generalizations based on such a limited pool seems foolish, at best. Two: Why do the results of this limited study have to lead to the conclusion that men are somehow "bad"? Can't they just be, well, men?
And everyone seems to be happy to overlook the fact that when asked if women view scantily clad men the same way, Fiske responded that women tend to privilege the bank balance and age of a man over his looks. How's that for objectification?
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Hi Abby, and welcome! You asked if I thought Bristol Palin "was going to present some kind of five-step plan outlining the ‘details of abstinence or safe sex' " in her interview with Greta Van Susteren. I never had any expectations of Bristol presenting any particular plans on anything—that is, until she explicitly told Van Susteren that she wants to be "an advocate against teen pregnancy." If she wants to take on this issue, then yes, I do think she needs to put forward some thoughts about how, exactly, to go about preventing the thing she's supposedly advocating against. You also asked, Abby, whether her mistake was "the sex part, the getting pregnant part, [or] the having the baby part." That's the same question I have of Bristol! I criticized Bristol earlier for her vague statement that she wished this had happened in 10 years. As Tina Morrison at the Kansas City Star astutely points out, "Pregnancy doesn't just ‘happen.' ... There are things leading up to it. Things you can control, such as how much wine you have with dinner, if your pants stay zipped, or whether or not to use a condom!" Right. So what, exactly, does Bristol wish she had waited on? Sex? Unprotected sex?
Lauren B.'s essay on abortion that Rachael found so appalling may have been a bit crass, but at least it made a point. Which is good: As a writer, she has a responsibility to say something substantive in her piece. As an 18-year-old mother—even one with a celebrity mom—Bristol has no such responsibility. She can go about motherhood as quietly as the media outlets allow (and they have been pretty quiet since Tripp's birth), and the public would have no right to demand that she use her situation to promote safe sex or abstinence education or a pro-life or pro-choice agenda. But Bristol made the decision to call herself an advocate. At that point, I think it's fair to expect a little more.
So what was her mistake? Saying she wants to be an advocate against teen pregnancy but dodging questions about abstinence and safe sex. Well, that and the obvious mistake, if it's true that she wants to break out from the shadow of her domineering mother: naming her child Tripp.
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A guest post from our Slate V intern, Lindsey Hough:
The onslaught against obesity continues in New York City. A federal appeals court yesterday rejected a challenge to a 2007 city regulation requiring large chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus. According to the NYT, the New York State Restaurant
Association contended that the requirement that they display calorie information violated their rights, including those protected under the First Amendment. City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden called the ruling against the Restaurant Association good news for all: “Nearly all chain restaurants are now complying with the law. Consumers are learning more about the food before they order, and the market for healthier alternatives is growing.”
But maybe not everyone stands to gain when calories are posted. While this information may help foster a health-conscious environment and alert those who routinely underestimate their caloric intake, posting nutritional values can actually be very harmful in communities in which food obsession cuts the opposite way. I’m thinking here of college campuses, where anorexia and bulimia are often huge problems. In December, for instance, Harvard removed the nutritional information from their dining halls after students voiced concerns that it lead to or worsened eating disorders. Same discussion surfaced at my school, Notre Dame recently for the same reasons, with the school eventually resorting to creating an online nutritional database rather than tacking information directly to the buffet lines.
Many universities have long-standing issues with women and eating disorders, and you can be sure these young women who will be tuning into the newly posted information, for the wrong reasons. These food-labeling rules assume that the only problem facing Americans is that we are obese. But there are many young women who very wrongly think they’re obese when they weigh 97 pounds, and they are starving themselves to death.
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Bristol, Bristol, Bristol—can we talk about Sarah Palin for a second, the public figure with whom we'll have to live for at least the next four years?
I thought her drop-in to Bristol's instant-classic Fox interview was creepy, domineering, and inappropriate. Greta Van Susteren established that doing the interview was Bristol's decision, and that she pointedly made it on her own: She didn't even tell Mom about it until the day before it happened. Agreeing to the interview—her first post-birth sit-down on national TV—had to be one of those major moments in late-adolescent life when a kid breaks off from his parents and dramatically establishes his authority to run on his own steam and do it alone. When I was 19, I unilaterally decided to move to Brussels and, for a reason I couldn't identify at the time, didn't tell my mother until after the plans were set in stone. She was upset, but she didn't buy a plane ticket and announce she was crashing my trip. That's what Sarah did by horning in on her daughter's interview. Even if Van Susteren asked Mom to come, she shouldn't have shown up.
And the way she showed up. Ick. Fast-forward to 8:20 in this segment. Sarah lumbers right into Bristol's frame and doesn't even sit down but rather hovers weirdly over Bristol, wearing a heavy coat, a bit like a subtly threatening mafia don. Obviously, any publicity Bristol gets complicates Sarah's already complex political image. But her responsibility as a mother was to stay clear of Bristol's moment, even if, as a (notoriously controlling) politician, she felt desperate to do damage control.
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A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe:
Bonnie, your take on the Facebook information uproar is interesting, though I wonder if you're overlooking a key part of the issue: that most Facebook users don't actually care about privacy. As a longtime Facebook user (I joined in 2005, back when membership was still limited to college students), I have to say that I don't think privacy was ever a big concern for the first (or second, or third) wave of Facebook users. During a lecture I attended given by Harvey Rishikof, the national security expert suggested that my generation is the first group of Americans that puts almost no value on our privacy, and I tend to believe it.
Starting with the ancient AOL member profile and extending now into the detailed personal information sections on sites like Facebook and MySpace, the concept of publicizing private information on the Web has always seemed natural for the cybergeneration. We see that with personal blogs, too: People will put all kinds of detailed information about themselves and their lives on the Internet without much thought for the safety or security of doing so. There has been controversy about Facebook's privacy standards before, and it never seemed to cause this much of a stir. Even the rumblings in early February about Zuckerberg's intent to sell off personal information on the site as the biggest microtargeting tool ever didn't garner as much attention as the Consumerist article (which was met with enough protest to make Zuckerberg change his mind).
So why are Facebook users suddenly worried about the security of their information? In part, I think it's because Facebook isn't just for co-eds anymore; people of all ages are jumping on social networks now, and with them come their concerns about free and open information-sharing. But I also think the issue is not one of privacy but of control. While my generation may not mind broadcasting intimate details and photos, we've always felt we had complete control over the private information we make public. The sudden realization that we might not have the power to remove all traces of ourselves from our electronic playground is what is giving users the heebie-jeebies. It's that lack of power, not privacy, that's making these information exhibitionists suddenly try to cover up.
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Jessica, I don't think we're quite "piling on" Bristol Palin for either her interview or her teen pregnancy, but I do see quite a difference between Bristol and Rachael's examples of Lauren B. and Amy Richards. Lauren B. is a writer and Richards is an abortion rights advocate, and they both decided to make their stories public. Bristol, on the other hand, was thrust into the spotlight—had her mother not been running for vice president, the news that the governor of a noncontiguous state had a pregnant 17-year-old daughter likely would have escaped notice altogether or been acknowledged only in short news items. Bristol chose to do this interview, but she didn't choose to become a poster child for teen momhood in the first place. I applaud Richards and Lauren for frankly discussing their experiences with abortion, but, as I'm sure they would both agree, they offered themselves up for discussion and criticism—two things Bristol has certainly been subjected to without having the same opportunity to tell her story herself first.
I don't know what her primary motivation for the interview was—to fight misconceptions about being an uneducated high-school dropout, to piss off her mother, or to warn other girls against unprotected sex (her "abstinence or whatever" comment seemed to me like a veiled attempt to advocate for contraception without speaking the words). Perhaps she merely wanted an excuse to put on makeup and do something a little exciting after six weeks of mothering a newborn.
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I think Bristol's insistence that her pregnancy was her own choice is entirely consistent with the notion that her interview was a tacit rebellion, despite what Rachael thinks. Bristol was further asserting her independence by saying: "It doesn't matter what my mom's views are on it. It was my decision. And I wish people would realize that, too." As Rebecca Traister at Salon cannily points out, regardless of what Bristol's views on abortion are (and those are still unknown, thanks to Greta Van Susteren's softest of softball interviews), she's using the language of choice to describe her decisions. As Traister puts it, "Bristol's ability to make her own decision, without regard to her mom's views on the issue, is precisely the freedom for which reproductive rights activists fight, trying to ensure that no daughters surrender control of their bodies to their mothers or fathers or husbands or clergymen or governments."
And to Abby (hi Abby!)—I think choosing to do an interview on national TV was Bristol's only mistake. She had sex, she got pregnant, she dealt with the consequences. Seventeen-year-olds have been doing the same thing for eons. The idea that we're "piling on" Bristol by commenting on her nationally televised appearance is ridiculous. She's legally a grown woman and a mother. If Rachael can so harshly judge Lauren B. and Amy Richards for sharing the personal stories of their reproductive choices, I don't understand why we should be treating Bristol Palin with such a delicate hand.
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Just when you think everything having to do with Jane Austen that can be invented has been invented, another twisted take on Pride and Prejudice comes along to prove otherwise. A few weeks ago, news of a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies broke on the Internet, became a viral smash, and rose to No. 181 on Amazon's sales rankings (it will be released in the next few months). The book "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action," but I am hoping for some dialogue like this:
"You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason for my journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience must tell you why I come."
"Mmmnuuuuhhhh"
"This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?"
"MNNNNUUUUUHHHHH"
"Ms. Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such language as this."
"BRAAAIII ..."
"I will not be interrupted! Do you not consider that a connection with you, must disgrace him in the eyes ..."
"BRRRAINNNNS!"
After all, if any one deserves to be eaten by zombies, it is Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
But that's not it for fresh, absurdist Austen adaptations. Sam Mendes, aka Mr. Kate Winslet, is producing a movie version of Lost in Austen, a nicely silly British miniseries about a present day Pride and Prejudice obsessive who magically switches places with Elizabeth Bennett and lands Darcy.
Even better, Elton John's production company plans to make Pride and Predator, which, according to Variety, "veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about." Wow. Between this and the zombies, a whole new sub-genre is being born: the Merchant Ivory horror flick. Coming soon to a theater near you? A Room With A View of Monsters, Sense and Sabertooth Tigers, Brideshead Decapitated.
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This is a guest post from Abigail Pilgrim, a writer in Washington, D.C. Welcome!
Samantha, were you really expecting that she was going to present some kind of five-step plan outlining the "details of abstinence or safe sex"? And Susannah, do you call her "astonishingly dim" because she got pregnant, because she's not as articulate as Obama, or what?
I personally loved Bristol's interview, not because she came across as a polished poster girl but because she presented some of the real feelings and questions that can too often go missing from the teen pregnancy debate. I didn't find anything immature about her sitting down with her parents and feeling terrified. But maybe it was just me and Bristol that have ever had that so-sick-I-can-barely-talk-but-I-know-I-have-to-tell-you feeling with my parents. I hope those kinds of confrontations happen more often than the cases that my sister (who's a nurse) tells me about of the teenage girls who show up at the hospital, find out they're pregnant, and then refuse to let the nurses inform their parents before they get an abortion. Speaking of which, does anyone else think it's crazy that girls get reproductive rights before they get their learner's permits? Are you really prepared to choose whether or not to have a baby if you're not even capable of choosing whether or not to change lanes on I-495? It's insane to me.
The main takeaway I had from Bristol's interview is that there's something twisted when culture is practically doing everything it can to encourage teens to have sex, but then when they do and someone gets pregnant, we all act completely horrified because they're obviously unprepared to be a parent.
Everyone seems to agree that she made a mistake. But what was her mistake? Was it the sex part, the getting pregnant part, the having the baby part, or maybe just the choosing to do an interview on national TV part?
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I'm afraid I have to agree that on the vapid-to-moving continuum, I’d put Bristol Palin’s interview a lot closer to the vapid side of the spectrum. It wasn’t just the likes and the ums; that’s standard-issue and I do it, too. But I don’t understand how someone who clearly wants to take on an advocacy role has given no thought at all to what it is she wants to advocate. As several of you have already noted, “wait 10 years” and “abstinence is not realistic” is just not a public service message. It’s confusing, if not totally contradictory. Now I don’t think I agree, Willa, that this is attention-seeking or career-planning on her part. Bristol mostly looks like she’d rather be pulling a dogsled through the tundra than giving this interview. I think she really does want her life to be an example to other teens. But since she doesn’t seem to know what her message is, the net effect seems to be completely unrealistic and chaotic. (“I take care of him all the time except when I’m at school"?!). And Gov. Palin’s glossy observation—that having a baby at 18 is very unfortunate but also very fortunate—only contributes to the sense that the only message here is: “Don’t do what I did. Unless you do.”
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Jessica wondered earlier why Bristol Palin would agree to do an interview at all, now that the feeding frenzy is largely over, and posited Bristol's telling her overbearing mama to step off. I buy that, but I think there's an even simpler reason she might have decided to sit down with Greta: She wants the attention. Bristol mentions a number of times that having a baby isn't at all "glamorous." That doesn't sound like news, but I think it might have been to Bristol. She repeats the insight a number of times, enough for it to seem like one of her big revelations about having a newborn. (It's also a nod to the insidious power of the same tabloids that Bristol dismisses as trash. Where else would one get the idea that glamour has anything to do with child-rearing except from watching the likes of Ashlee Simpson, Gwen Stefani, and Angelina do it in $500 dollar jeans?) Greta Van Susteren may not be glamorous like Vogue, but she's chic-er than nothing (or what most 18-year old mothers have access to).
I was also struck by how often Bristol talked about how having a career would make raising a baby easier. Keeping herself in the public eye is a pretty savvy, if yucky, career strategy. Being notorious has already proved to be a viable career option for some. If Bristol seems unlikely to follow in Paris' exact footsteps, she can at least use her fame as a springboard to something else, be it advocacy or handbags. But she's got to extend her 15 minutes in order for that move to work.
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My reaction to Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren falls somewhere between Hanna's "most honest and moving political interview" and Susannah's "mind-bogglingly vapid." Among the "ums" and the "likes" and the teen-speak—being a new mom is "awesome"—are a few moments of stunning honesty—telling her parents about her pregnancy was "harder than labor," for example. (Funny, to me, is that if this was a giant f-you to her mother, why she was so adamant to insist that having Tripp was her choice and not something her mother forced on her in the name of political expediency?) But mostly, she struck me as an average 18-year-old who is dealing with the pressures of unexpected motherhood. And yet so many are piling on.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Web, we’re either supposed to
celebrate or sympathize with, I’m still not sure, Lauren B., who has an essay
on Nerve.com about the crimp that her abortion put on her relationships with
men. Her story starts with her telling a man on their second date—and third
drink that evening—that she’d had an abortion the month before. She told the
first guy she dated seriously post-abortion about it on New Year’s Day because
she was “too out-of-control wasted” (and later complained that he insisted on
using condoms even though she was on the pill). Mixed in are the account of a
friend who got pregnant after a night of heavy drinking, and insults directed
toward abortion protesters and “teenagers in Utah practicing the pray-to-God-and-please-come-on-my-ass
method.” All this from a woman in her mid-20s who really, it turns out, just
wanted someone to be able to laugh with her about her abortion. Is this really
how the pro-choice movement presents itself? I feel about as sorry for her as I
did for Amy Richards, who gained notoriety for a New York Times Magazine essay
about how she’d aborted two of her three fetuses when pregnant with triplets
because otherwise “I'm going to have to move to Staten
Island. … I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying
big jars of mayonnaise.”
Maybe Bristol Palin shouldn't be a poster child for teenage
pregnancy. But she's doing more for the pro-life argument than a bunch of
narcissistic twentysomethings who get abortions because they're drunk and
forgot their birth control are doing for the pro-choice side.
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I am really enjoying the Bristol Palin discussion, and hesitate to change the subject. I'm also a document nerd, though, so I'm fascinated by the Consumerist.com blowup over Facebook's latest iteration of its Terms of Use. On Feb. 4, the social network dropped a sentence in their service agreement that stated each member "may remove your User Content from the Site at any time." Two weeks later, the consumer blog interpreted Facebook saying, "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever," and at least three new Facebook groups were instantly formed demanding control of data be returned to users.
Now I love the Consumerist, a cheeky Web presence from Consumer's Union, publisher of the reliably survey- and chart-happy Consumer Reports. Recently, I wanted another look at the service representative training manual I was schooled on at my first full time job at Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, circa 1968. The helpful Consumerist had a leaked version circa 2007 which was remarkably similar to the one I learned from 40 years ago. But on the data-control dispute, my sympathies are with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After the Consumerist story and member protests, Zuckerberg worried on his blog that while "[p]eople want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time," that door is not so easily locked. The Facebook founder could only offer weakly, "in the development of the open online world ... these issues are being worked out."
At my long ago phone company job, when dealing with the public, we were trained to: "Attempt to identify and resolve the root cause of the issue. Empathize with the customer. Listen attentively to the customer's complaint and do not interrupt." We also learned early on, "If the customer is insistent on contacting an outside agency or an executive, immediately refer the customer to a Manager." At 19 years old, this was a valuable part of my education.
My more lasting impression from that job was that an individual's transactions and communications with institutions are rarely private. In the interest of customer service, my co-workers and I regularly poked around in installation and billing records and had ready access to non-published phone numbers. Although generally protected from dissemination, our personal information is typically not secret. (Deep and very personal secrets are, though usually anonymized, also public lately, but that deserves to be the topic of another post.) The closest we come to privacy, is what academics call "practical obscurity." Every day others have access to our banking, job performance, grades, medical records, magazine subscription histories, and yes, e-mail, text, and Facebook posts but, for the most part, our personal documents are of no special interest to the folks who review, analyze, crunch, or transmit them.
Now, given that he recently agreed to pay $65 million to a trio of upper classman who briefly employed the Harvard wiz kid then claimed he stole their source code, design, and business plan, Mark Zuckerberg may not be the most trustworthy of stewards for our collective socialization data. He has, however, for better or worse, produced a virtual gathering of friends, family and colleagues that is far more pertinent and entertaining than the White Pages or desktop rolodexes I used to collect. For that, I will happily forgo lifetime control over my status updates.
If we are worried about cyber stalkers, snoops, or helicopter mothers, a Facebook spokesman pointed out obliquely to the Industry Standard, it might also help to adjust our privacy settings.
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I thought Bristol Palin came off as astonishingly dim and mind-bogglingly vapid. She reminded me of the random young women that show up on MTV's True Life documentary series, saddled at too young of an age with children they are neither psychologically nor financially able to take care of. I agree with Jessica that the interview seemed more like a f-you to her mother than anything else. When Sarah Palin showed up at one point, it looked as if she could barely contain her desire to climb across the table and throttle Bristol for having agreed to this ... interview? While watching "news" as substantive as cotton candy that made me wonder if it induced IQ point loss, I was most embarrassed for (by? on behalf of?) Greta Van Susteren, an obviously intelligent woman who for reasons beyond my comprehension has lowered herself to political coverage that has more in common with an E! Miley Cyrus profile than whatever this was supposed to be. My favorite Bristol sound bite: "Everyone should be abstinent or whatever." Whatever, indeed.
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I agree with Hanna that Bristol came off as remarkably unaffected in her Fox interview. But that still doesn't explain why she felt compelled to do this interview in the first place. Why now, since the media lost interest in badgering Bristol months ago? It didn't seem like Bristol was positioning herself as the poster girl for teen screw-ups, or any sort of poster girl at all. The interview read more like an attempt to gain agency over the situation. Bristol was thrust into the spotlight mostly against her will, and I saw this interview as a tacit f-you to her mother. When Bristol told Greta Van Susteren that she neglected to inform Sarah about the interview until the day before, she looked pretty darn pleased with herself. And you know, I can't say I blame her. Being the unwitting centerpiece of a three-ring media circus when you're several months pregnant would make any normal teenager—or even grown woman—pretty resentful.
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Hanna, that's interesting that we had such different reads on the Bristol Palin interview. I agree that she was refreshingly honest in her shock about being a mom, but I hardly saw her as a poster girl. Her refusal to talk about the details of abstinence or safe sex—or, for that matter, to have been the one to tell her parents she was pregnant—struck me as immature, not endearing. My mom's golden rule of sexual activity was always that if you're not able to talk about it, you shouldn't be doing it. It's admirable how well Bristol's soldiering through her unexpected hardship (and lucky, as Gov. Palin told Greta Van Susteren, that she has such a huge, supportive family to help her through it). But if I got to hold an audition for my ideal teenage screw-up poster girl, I would make sure she could say words like condoms and sex, instead of coyly talking around the acts and choices that accounted for her screw-up in the first place.
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Sam, I found that Bristol interview one of the most honest and moving political interviews I've ever seen, if we can call it a political interview. And it would have been totally ruined for me if she had pulled out some party line abstinence stats, or some church agitprop, or whatever half-baked policy solutions she's now dreamed up. She seemed utterly shell-shocked and nervous and humbled, even before the ever-friendly Greta Van Susteren. She described telling her parents about the pregnancy as being like a scene from Juno, with her so "sick to my stomach" that her best friend had to say the words for her. It's clear that she's freaked out and not at all ready to be a mom ("I wish it had happened in 10 years"), but also clear that she won't drop the ball. She was very endearing, I thought, and a real poster girl for teenage screw-up.
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I just discovered that About Last Night, the much-watered-down, mediocre, 1980s film version of the David Mamet play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, is available to "Watch Now" on Netflix (Reihan Salam reviewed this Netflix capability for Slate last year). It stars Demi Moore and a dewily beautiful Rob Lowe as a twosome who hook up, shack up, break up and get all confuddled about love, sex, and commitment in the process. It is, as stated previously, truly mediocre, if not downright terrible. I love it. It belongs to a category of film that brings me great joy: bad movies I love to watch on television.
These are the movies that, when you discover they're on while channel surfing, make you immediately think "Score! I know what I'm doing for the next two hours!" For me, fully great movies never elicit quite such a tickled response—maybe because commercials actually ruin them, or I feel as though they deserve my full attention: The Cutting Edge does not ask this of me (it asks only that I believe in the physical possibility of the Pamchenko twist). Neither does You've Got Mail, Dirty Dancing, Twister, The American President, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Sweetest Thing, or Soapdish, just some of the films mentioned to (and by) me while I conducted a highly unscientific survey on this subject. (What other movies fit the bill? There must be scores)
Given my feelings for About Last Night and the fact that it is rarely on TV anymore (Rob Lowe's glory days are, alas, long behind him), you'd think I'd be psyched to learn it is now, thanks to Netflix, available to me instantaneously, 100 percent of the time. I am not.
It turns out bad movies I love to watch on television are not as enjoyable when they are bad movies I can watch whenever I want. Infinite access transforms About Last Night from a surprise treat (look at what WPIX has for me today!) into what it is: a lame movie I am willfully choosing to waste my Saturday afternoon on. Without a cable channel picking my favorite bad movie for me, I feel like I should select something better, a different film or maybe, I dunno, an outdoor activity. This is why, though I now have The Cutting Edge on my DVR, I've only ever watched it when it turned up randomly on some Tuesday night. Sometimes, having all the control really takes the fun out of a thing.
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Bristol Palin spoke to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren about life as an 18-year-old mom. She looks beautiful (what cheekbones!) but nervous, her eyes darting as she delivers clipped responses—far from the rambling poetry of now-Grandma Palin. It's unclear why Bristol agreed to the interview (which, in true maverick fashion, she didn't tell her mom about until the day before). She doesn't seem to have any clear message she's out to deliver, and her thoughts on teen pregnancy—ostensibly one of the topics of the interview—are frustratingly vague:
I wish [getting pregnant] would happen in like 10 years so I could have a job and an education and be, like, prepared and have my own house and stuff. ... I hope that people learn from my story and just, I dunno, prevent teen pregnancy I guess."
Right. But prevent it how? And wait 10 years for what? To have sex? Or just wait to get pregnant, by, you know, using birth control? Bristol "doesn't want to get into detail about that," but says she thinks expecting abstinence is "not realistic at all." Van Susteren doesn't probe, and in a second clip featuring Gov. Sarah Palin, we find out why. Cutting Bristol out of the interview now that the real star is in the room, Van Susteren asks the governor:
Isn't the bigger story or the bigger issue how important it is for families to pitch in? It's not just an issue of abstinence. ... When you have the conversation about abstinence, I almost feel bad because there's this wonderful child here [presumably she means Tripp, not his mother], so talking about abstinence ... it doesn't sound very nice.
Well, it's not always a journalist's job to be nice. If Bristol wants people to learn from her story and to prevent teen pregnancy, as she explicitly said, then Van Susteren owes it to the audience to ask the obvious follow-up: How?
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Aasiya Hassan, a 37-year-old Buffalo woman and mother of two young children who was seeking divorce from her husband, was decapitated by him in at the office of his television station, Bridges TV, which he started in order to "portray Muslims in a more positive light." Police are calling the beheading "the worst form of domestic violence." Indeed. But the president of the New York state chapter of the National Organization for Women said it was more than that: “This was apparently a terroristic version of honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men." Phyllis Chessler has a study in the current Middle East Quarterly titled, "Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?" Her emphatic answer is, "No." Read the list of dead Muslim women, many of them daughters brought to the United States or Europe, who embraced the freedom and opportunities of their new countries only to be killed for it by fathers, brothers, and even mothers. Chessler says too often the West averts its gaze from attitudes and behavior in Muslim communities that preceed honor killings—the beatings and forced marriages, for example—out of a misplaced sense of nonjudgmental multiculturalism.
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Bonnie, your continued fascination with octomom Nadya Suleman reminds me of the most recent headline-grabbing baby story: England is all atwitter with news of Alfie Patten, the 13-year-old father of newborn Maisie. Impregnating a fellow teen (the mother is 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman) in middle school isn't necessarily tabloid-ready news, but Alfie clocks in at around 4 feet tall and looks like he's about 8 years old. Alfie's notoriety might have just been another flash in the sordid tabloid pan, but according to the AP, his tween parenthood has reignited the teen pregnancy debate in the United Kingdom. Britain's teen pregnancy rate is among the highest in Europe, though it's still far lower than the United States'.
Alfie's story broke last week, and today the Daily Mail is reporting that the wee teen is demanding a paternity test on the advice of his father. In addition, two other minors have stepped up to claim paternity of Chantelle Steadman's baby girl. One could dismiss both Suleman's and Patten's stories as tabloid trash, but both tales have gained traction in the mainstream media. Richard Lawson at Gawker posits that celebrity baby mania has created a greedy gaping public maw that yearns to be filled with any and all baby news. I guess people need something to distract them from the economy until Brangelina decide to adopt a South American to round out their brood.
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Although it seems to be having a few technical problems, Nadya Suleman, ad hoc CEO of the octuplets+6 media corporation, recently set up a tasteful portal to capture a revenue stream (accepts credit cards!) during the launch of her new family business. As Dahlia mentioned last week, the newly delivered mother of eight slightly resembles Angelina Jolie. In addition to their age and some physical similarities, both women also seem very comfortable with far more notoriety than a truly rational individual would ever want. (Is it a coincidence that Jolie's 1999 breakthrough performance as a mental institution patient in Girl, Interrupted was the same year as Suleman's injury at her California mental hospital job? The worker compensation settlements provided development capital for her new venture.) Giving a whole new meaning to the notion of sweat equity, to provide manpower for the company, the fecund executive also ovulated enough viable IVF embryos to incubate 14 of them to delivery from six pregnancies.
Speaking of compensation, NBC insists it paid "not a dime" to air the first post-birth Ann Curry interview with "Octomom," nor for any of the access and personal materials used in the network's "special Dateline" featuring her other six children. Nevertheless, I'd love to read the contract between NBC's legal department and Ms. Suleman's business managers, spelling out what everyone did agree to.
Anyway, I applaud the fledgling media dynamo's entrepreneurship and resourcefulness and hope for Suleman that she gets that cable reality show. Who knows? Maybe it will even get network interest from, say, NBC. As for Suleman's 14 fatherless offspring, they will, it seems, be joining the growing ranks of working realty actors that includes ratings magnet and 3-year-old son of the current Bachelor star Jason Mesnick. While the Pitt children, though perhaps too often pressed into service as accessories, are so far still unemployed.
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At last, a new book reveals the secret identity of Sarah Palin's personal idol. Apparently, a People editor has churned what I'm sure is a very winning biography of Palin: Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin. (Intimate? What's that all about? Do we get to rifle through her underwear drawer?) Along with exposing various other creepy Palin factoids—including that she hid her Trig pregnancy until one of her daughters found the ultrasound scan and concealed his medical condition from her other children until he was born—the book discloses who Palin's girl-crush is.
Palin, who became an overnight sensation once John McCain tapped her to become his running mate, can fall victim to being star-struck. She once told husband Todd she was going shopping at Costco in Anchorage but detoured to J.C. Penney's to meet Ivana Trump—in town to promote a cosmetics line.
Ivana Trump. Ivana Trump! This explains so much. A woman best known for doing little more than marrying well, her stiff retro-hairdos, and her meticulous makeup, Ivana was the woman Palin aspired to be politically: a vapid statue with a hollow inside waiting to be toppled.
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Has anyone seen this strangely unsettling Lime-A-Way commercial? I caught it last night during a disappointing episode of Saturday Night Live. (Much could be written about that cougars sketch; luckily, Jezebel already did.)
A young mother is walking through the supermarket with her arm in a sling. She tells the first person who expresses concern that she fell while rollerblading; the second that she had a mountain biking accident; the third that she hurt herself while hang gliding. Then she runs into another woman with a broken arm who gives her a knowing look and says, "Hard water stains, huh?" To which the first mother ruefully shrugs and smiles.
Now, first of all, this commercial suddenly makes me very self-conscious about the state of my own shower fixtures. But does anyone else see an awkward similarity between this perky hausfrau and a battered wife, lying about the source of her injuries? I can't imagine why Lime-A-Way would want potential customers to make that mental connection (unless they're truly sick, patriarchal little puppies), but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this ad goes in the Woefully Misguided category.
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Susannah, reading your post about plastic surgery I couldn't help but think of Octomom, who, with each passing revelation, seems to be even more deeply troubled than she first appeared. Though Nadya Suleman has denied adoring Angelina Jolie or having had plastic surgery, rumors contradicting both those statements persist. Most recently, the Daily Mail claimed Suleman sent Jolie some adoring fan letters; various acquaintances keep insisting she had her lips and nose done in order to resemble the world's hottest mama. It's creepy information to add to an already creeptastic situation: Is this a case of childbirth as plastic surgery, i.e., were the babies another medically driven way for Suleman to resmeble her hero? And is Suleman (or, say, the twins who underwent multiple surgeries to look like Brad Pitt on MTV's incredibly upsetting series I Want a Famous Face) inhabiting a triple consciousness, stuck between who she appears to be, who she wants to be, and who she really is?
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Reading "Plastic Surgery Confidential" and "Growth Industry," I was struck by the similarities between the two. In the first, 27-year-old, 120-pound Melanie Berliet visits a slew of plastic surgeons who inform her that she's in dire need of $30,000 worth of plastic surgery. In the second, Kent Sepkowitz investigates male "enhancement" procedures that promise to turn men's penises into frankenfurters. There are plenty of women-run sites devoted to lamenting the multitude of ways pop culture turns female self-love into self-loathing, but far less attention is paid to how pop culture makes men neurotic about their masculinity.
In one surgeon's office, Berliet meets the Axis Three, a high-tech digital visualization program that uses fancy effects to show prospective surgical patients what their boobs might look like after they've been implanted. Meanwhile, at the University of Belgrade, men can have their penis disassembled and lengthened with the help of a transplanted rib. I'm actually all too familiar with the male "growth industry," having done more than one story on the subject, from penis weight-lifting to penile enlargement surgery. (Regarding the latter, suffice to say, it wasn't pretty.)
In "Posthumans Go Hollywood! (Maybe)," Charlie Jane Anders asserts the cyborgization of the population is about escapism. But when the cyborg is you, is the escape from yourself or from the human population? While there's something pleasurable about imagining a world in which you can become whomever you want to be, the haunting backdrop is that of someone who inhabits a double-consciousness, stuck between who they appear to be and who they really are, the gap between unbridged.
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There's been a spate of recent female suicide bombers in Iraq, most recently a woman—who is suspected to be a Sunni linked to al-Qaida in Mesopotamia—who killed 30 Shiite pilgrims today in the village of Abu Jasim. According to the New York Times, the upswing in female bombers is becuase of adjusted tactics by aggressive insurgents wanting to avoid detection:
Cultural mores here generally mean women are subject to less intrusive searches, while their loose robes more easily hide explosive vests or belts. Iraq’s police and military have responded by trying to hire more women as security officers to search women at checkpoints.
Anne Applebaum wrote about the strategic advantages of female suicide bombers for Slate in 2002, focusing on Palestinian women who chose to blow themselves up for their cause. But Anne's points are applicable to this most recent explosion, since today's Iraqi bomber targeted tents of women and children:
Yet the use of women—young women—isn't entirely a matter of terrorist tactics either. There is a public relations game at work, too. By sending someone like Akhras into a supermarket to set off a bomb, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade—or its backers—are knowingly breaking down whatever frail, lingering barriers remain between combatants and noncombatants, terrorists and innocent civilians in the Middle East. The war has come to this: Women and children are now killing women and children.
Obviously in the seven intervening years since Anne wrote this piece, things have changed, and the situation in Iraq is not identical to the one in Israel, but her point about the barriers between combatants and noncombatants is still a relevant one. If you want to know what's in it for these female martyrs, since they don't get the 70 virgins promised to male bombers, Michelle Tsai did an excellent "Explainer" on the rewards awaiting female suicide bombers in heaven.
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Just in time for Valentine's Day: The British Library is exhibiting a long-lost love letter from Henry VIII to his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Henry's no Shakespeare (or Sidney), but he's not too shabby: "For my part, I will out-do you, if this be possible, rather than reciprocate, in loyalty of heart and my desire to please you." Note especially the adorable way the corpulent monarch doodled his beloved's initials in a little heart.
V-Day haters, you can take pleasure in the letter, too—Henry did eventually have Anne beheaded, after all.
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I agree with Emily 100 percent about Diane Keaton's $2 million book deal. Maybe her Random House editors can persuade her to write a Hollywood memoir and give those 90 diaries her mother kept, the ones "chronicling the upbringing of her children and her frustrating marriage," a rest. The New York Times reported that Keaton read the journals aloud to her mother during the final years of Dorothy Keaton Hall's battle with Alzheimer's. I imagine her work on this book, which Keaton started last year after Hall succumbed to her illness, must be therapeutic but nevertheless quite painful. I shudder at the thought of my daughter exhuming my spent life out of hundreds of notebooks, particularly if I had had the poor luck to leave the building early.
As an aside, if I do lose ability to remember who I used to be, I hope I do so as elegantly as the Alzheimer's patient in the 2007 film Away From Her played by Julie Christie (coincidently also once romantically linked with Warren Beatty). For obsessed boomers, Christie's character is a role model for going gaga gracefully.
Getting back to Diane Keaton, Jessica is quite right the Academy Award-winning movie star has a platform of readers no matter what her topic. If she must pay tribute to her mother, we all understand where she's coming from. But let's hear how mom let her audition for the Broadway rock musical Hair, only insisted her daughter keep her clothes on, or maybe write Hall's observations about her daughter's ex-boyfriend and frequent co-star who later settled down with his teenage stepdaughter.
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I wanted to flag that touching exchange at President Obama’s town hall in Fort Myers, Fla., on Tuesday, wherein a homeless woman named Henrietta Hughes told the nation of her employment troubles, and begged the president for action: “We need something more than the vehicle and the parks to go to,” she said. “We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.” Rather brilliantly, Obama showed he can channel Bill Clinton whenever he wants—as he pulled her close for an embrace, he was definitely feeling that woman’s pain.
But more than showcasing Obama’s talents as both stimulus salesman- and empathizer-in-chief, the video footage of that event reveals a woman, just to Hughes’ right, in, um, well—in heat. Practically. Watch as she aggressively mouths “I love you, Barack” in his general direction. While Hughes is now being trumpeted as “the face of the economic crisis” (which has hit women of color particularly hard), this white, middle-aged, pant-suited, brooched woman stole the show. She just loves him—and, this Valentine's Day, she doesn’t care who knows.
This reminded me simultaneously of two things: One, the absurd Judith Warner column that was essentially an inbox dump of lusty/ envious notes from friends detailing their fantasies—mainly, it seems, sexual—about Obama. Choice excerpt:
Another Washington woman, a global health care consultant, expressed her sense of Obama-inadequacy in a dream: “I dreamed I was an Obama girl. I had a chance to be in the same room with him for the first time. There were dark velvet chairs and he was standing there with all this dark and mist around him. His lips so purple and sensuous as if to be otherworldly,” she wrote to me. “I moved gently toward him and then I said the wrong thing. Obama tamped it down like some vapor that didn’t register. He wasn’t even flattered.”
“Purple?” Must have been from all the grape drink. … But seriously—creep show! During the primary, Web sites encouraging readers to write in their dreams about Obama and about Hillary Clinton served as an entertaining, if voyeuristic testament to the nation’s collective, REM-altering election fatigue (which was only to begin—no word on whether similar sites sprang up for John McCain and Sarah Palin). And the question of whether “Ab-bama” deserves the title will certainly provoke strong responses at your next dinner party. But this is just grist for more inane articles about women fainting and slavering over a mere politician. At least repressed 1960s women kept their feelings toward the last hot president under wraps.
And two: What a weird, yet timely subversion of the old racial fixation with black men whistling at white women—which, when you get down to it, has caused an unbearable share of violence over the years. Now chicks with almost-mullets and in Sidwell book clubs are suddenly hollering back? Sure, it’s change we can believe in—but is this “faux-familiarity,” as Warner puts it, not a little much? Barack is going to get a big head.
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Calling all intellectually curious, engaged, and excited readers: We're looking for two summer research assistants to help us at Double X, the new website that is developing out of Slate's XX Factor blog (For more on Double X, click here). One of these assistants will be in the DC office, the other will be New York based. Interested applicants should send a résumé, three clips (published articles, blog entries, and classroom assignments all acceptable), and a short critique of the XXFactor blog. Email this to doublex.slate@gmail.com with Research Assistant in the subject, and please specify whether you want to be considered for the DC or NYC position.
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Dahlia, thank you for pointing to that poll. One of the things that makes me feel ashamed, occasionally, is that I lived through an era in which my country tortured—and I did nothing about it. Seeing these numbers helps lift that feeling of shame. You point out that 38 percent of those polled want a criminal investigation. The more moving thing, to me, is that an additional 24 percent want an independent panel to investigate. Only 34 percent want us to forget all about it and move on.
The best reasoning I've heard yet for investigating instead of pretending that now everything is peachy keen, despite the fact that our nation violated some core Constitutional principles, international laws, and moral foundations: without an investigation, all the people and principles that brought us to torture will remain unquestioned—and can easily return to power in another era. Let's air the dirty laundry and name the dirty launderers. Nixon's pardon left us with Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Do we want the likes of John Yoo, David Addington, and their own pro-torture followers waiting in public life for decades, saying that no authority ever explicitly rejected the horrific moral reasoning that they put in place—and taking their places in future administrations?
Speaking of which: In a few weeks, I'll be at a weekend seminar on constitutional issues with Prof. John (Torture Memo) Yoo himself, along with a panel of other legal luminaries. If anyone wants to send me some homework and reading, and perhaps some questions you'd like me to ask Mr. Torture, please, please do.
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Emily, I don't think that a memoir of Diane Keaton's relationship to her dementia-suffering mother is what readers of any age necessarily want. I think publishers are grasping at straws in this economy and are willing to publish anything with a celebrity name attached. The common wisdom is probably that a book by Diane Keaton on any subject—from Alzheimer's to zoology—will sell more than the latest literary tome from Richard Ford or any similarly revered author.
With news yesterday that HarperCollins is cutting staff and offering buyouts, after a winter of similarly depressing news from other publishing houses, people are getting desperate to sell books. Which might explain the just-announced book deal for Alexandra Penney, the former Self editor who lost a ton of money with Madoff and then complained about having to lay off her maid, Yolanda, and take the subway in a much-reviled story in the Daily Beast. As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker puts it, " 'Notorious' is the new 'Deserving.' " It remains to be seen whether or not this attitude will save the publishing industry, but I guess at this point anything is worth a shot.
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I’ve posted on this before but this amazing new poll from USA Today/Gallup reveals that 38 percent of Americans support launching criminal investigations into the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping. Oh, and 41 percent are in favor of a criminal investigation into their use of the Justice Department for partisan purposes. To the extent that the Obama Administration is of the view that there is no political mandate for such investigations, or that the tanking economy has diverted our attention, these numbers would suggest otherwise. We seem to be able to find the time for bloodlust. Emily and I just finished a Washingtonpost.com chat that showed readers about evenly split between those demanding accountability for Bush era misconduct, and those who encouraged anyone seeking such accountability to be medicated.
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The New York Times just ran a piece about Julia Roberts, who's coming out of self-imposed semiretirement in March with Duplicity, a comedic caper co-starring grizzly man Clive Owen. Roberts has been taking it relatively easy since 2001, in which time Hollywood suits have been desperately, futilely searching for the "Next Julia Roberts" (all they've found are various Witherspoons, Heigls, Garners, Adams, and Hathaways): Have audiences missed her as much? The Times' story floats a tentative yes, quoting one of the film's producers as saying the audience goodwill for Roberts "is just so clearly there ... I don't know how we know it, but we do."
That sounds about right to me. Maybe that's because, as the Times puts it, Roberts has successfully left audiences wanting more; maybe that's because I still really, really love Pretty Woman (my bad?). Roberts strikes me as a movie star who still makes sense—what was appealing about her in her heyday she still has (which boils down, in her case, basically to that smile), and even more importantly, it still seems appealing. As a counter-example (a movie star who no longer makes sense), think about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even if he wasn't busy governing, he wouldn't have a blooming film career: What was appealing about him at his peak (something like, very macho, life-saving-yet-kindhearted muscles) he still has (if they're a little deflated), but they couldn't woo audiences anymore: We've moved onto schlubs, twerps, and pretty boys, not a muscle-bound or heavily accented action hero among them.
At least I can remember what was once charming about Ahnold. What about the formerly appealing movie stars whose former appeal is now totally inexplicable? I got a real brain cramp watching Renee Zellweger totter around in a mermaid's mourning garb at this year's Golden Globes: How had I ever found her anything less than 100 percent unhinged and annoying? Then Jerry Maguire and Bridget Jones nudged their way into my consciousness, and I had to admit to myself, I liked her once. Damned if I could remember why.
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Diane Keaton has just sold her memoir for a reported $2 million. You'd think getting the dish about her famous affairs with Woody Allen, Al Pacino, etc., would be worth the publishing world's bidding war even in these strapped days. But the subject of her memoir is how she cared for her late mother during her 15 years with Alzheimer's disease. I know these are depressing times and all, and we boomers have become obsessed with the sense that if we're lucky we might make it to the end of the month without going completely gaga. But now it's come to this: What we want from Diane Keaton is the story of how she lovingly attended to her mother's bodily needs, rather than how Warren Beatty lovingly attended to hers.
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And now for the good news: The “State Secrets Protection Act of 2009,” was introduced in the House today by John Conyers. And over in the Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced the 2008 State Secrets Protection Act, slow-walking courts through the cases in which the government asserts the state secrets privilege. This is how the system is supposed to work: They blow it, we fix it!
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In the audio version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama takes on the role of his best friend in high school, "Ray." At upscale Punahou School in Honolulu, Obama and "Ray" were among the few multiracial students, and their friendship was an important one in terms of shaping Obama's racial identity in the making.
If you're interested in finding out what it sounds like when Obama swears, "Barack Obama is @#$% tired of this @#$%!" offers an earful. Between "Sorry-ass motherfucker ain't got nothing on me" and "Sure you can have my number, baby!" I think I just found my new ringtone.
Amid the motherfuckers and the shits, though, there's another provocative line: "You ain't my bitch, nigga! Buy your own damn fries!" So, I'm wondering: Is it OK if this POTUS uses the N word?
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Eve, I wish Portfolio had been a little more specific in their recession belt-tightening survey. "Stop coloring hair" is a pretty limiting response that doesn't factor in some other options to save money on maintaining that hair hue. Women (and men) who want to save money might come to terms with their roots and go longer between touch-ups. They could downgrade to a cheaper colorist or even buy a DIY hair-dye kit from the drug store. And if you're selling your home, chances are that your financial problems are too critical to be solved by forgoing lattes and trips to the salon for a few months.
I was initially struck by the claim that only 4.1 percent plan to donate less in 2009, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that a study foresees just a 3 percent to 5 percent drop in corporate giving this year. No word on how much individuals plan to reduce or increase their personal donations, but hopefully Portfolio readers tend to give a little bit of that money saved on lattes and vacations.
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Conde Nast Portfolio polled its readers to ask "where they've already cut back or where they plan to in the coming year." The results provide a little bit of an unsettling look at our priorities. The top and bottom results, with a selection from the middle:
Stop eating out: 29.4%
Move in with parents: 8.1%
Stop buying clothes: 7.3%
Sell eggs or sperm: 5.4%
Sell home: 1.8%
Let go of housekeeper: 1.6%
Stop coloring hair: 1.1%
Stopping buying clothes is a more upsetting prospect than moving in with the 'rents? Selling one's entire home is less depressing than laying off the household help? And five times more people insist they would sell their eggs than say they'd stop dyeing their hair?
P.S. Reader MK notes that "the unusual distribution probably has less to do with relative
preferences between dissimilar solutions and more to do with how
desperate people are," suggesting that it's a different class of people contemplating selling their home than considering stopping coloring their hair. Very true, and related to the point Torie made. Still, this wasn't a random survey; it was a poll of readers of Conde Nast Portfolio, whose financial situations are probably more alike. I'd reckon a majority of women who answered that poll color their hair. The finding struck me, too, because it jibed with a (yes, small and random) anecdote I heard at the place I get my hair cut, which does a big business in "color." The stylists at this salon reported a recent uptick in requests for coloring, not a downturn.
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Just a quick cold-water dump on the "25 Random Things" Facebook craze, which I see is being breathlessly tracked on Slate and deconstructed for its social implications in the Wall Street Journal. (Click on either link if you are logging on from Xingu National Park after six months lost in the Amazon and have somehow escaped an encounter with this trend yet.)
Look, the sudden profusion of these "25 Random Things" notes is sort of odd and irritating if you don't want to fill out your own, but it's nothing new. Their evolutionary ancestor, the quiz, was a huge thing when I was in middle school in the '90s and everybody was getting into chain letters: The quiz was a chain letter asking things like, "What is your greatest fear?" and "What's your favorite color?" The answers were more prompted than in "25 Random Things," but the yield was the same: weird tidbits about folks you normally wouldn't have known unless you were best friends. The original "profile" feature in America Online—which asked you for random information like your "favorite quote"—and profiles on social networking Web sites provide a permanent outlet for the same kind of quirk oversharing. A ramble through my Facebook friends' profiles yields "interests" that are less how anybody actually spends most of their time and more like tidbits they might put on a "25 Random Things" note: "C-SPAN radio," "listening to acorns," "skeletons," "penguins," "debunking the pythagorean theorem." I don't think the "25 Random Things" craze says much about our particular moment—it's more like a randomly (sorry) mutated expression of a desire that's been that's been out there for ages.
P.S. As is often the case, Slate does it best. Make sure to check out Chris Wilson's hilariously scientific article on the epidemiology of the "25 Random Things" "infection."
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Glenn Greenwald does a great job of eviscerating the lame argument—about how the government is just buying time—in defense of the Obama administration's blanket defense of the blanket state-secrets privilege on Monday. When lawyers want more time, they ask the court for a continuance. When invoked to dismiss a case, as opposed to prevent disclosure of particular documents or other forms of classified evidence, the state-secrets doctrine is the government's big gun for getting rid of lawsuits it doesn't like. Obama and Biden objected to the Bush administration's use of it as candidates, as Dahlia points out. If they'd stuck with that position in court, what would have happened, anyway? The case would have gone back to district court. Jeppesen DataPlan (the defendant in the suit—more of the facts here) would have argued against disclosure of the same documents that the government preemptively blocked access to. There would have been a year or two of wrangling. The judge would have reviewed the documents and, if they're really as sensitive as the government says, kept many of them secret. In the meantime, the less sensitive material would probably have come out in one of a variety of other ways—via congressional subpoena, or voluntary release by the Justice Department, or in another lawsuit.
Why then did the Obama administration stick with state secrets? This makes most sense I think viewed in terms of Obama's perceived need to prove himself to the CIA. After the election, there was the flap over whether Obama should name John Brennan to head the agency, a name he withdrew. Then he picked Leon Panetta instead—the opposite of a CIA insider. If DoJ had abandoned Bush's position on state secrets in the Jeppesen case, CIA agents and officials would have had one more reason to be nervous about the new guy in town.
It's also worth recognizing that this case is a big deal, historically speaking. Litigants haven't ever, as far as I know, successfully sued the CIA (which is what's really at stake here, even if Jeppesen is formally the defendant) over torture, which is what this case comes down to. The state-secrets doctrine has been the government's customary tool for getting courts to dismiss somewhat parallel accusations, like the 1970s suits that followed the revelations about wiretapping that led to the Church Commission.
But you can duly note all of that and still see the Obama administration's move as the wrong one, because of the smothering blanket nature of invoking this privilege in this way, and because doing so seeks to end a discussion about accountability that we should be only just beginning. If we haven't had successful lawsuits involving CIA torture before, maybe that's because we haven't had torture on the scale that the Bush administration perpetrated. Obama has made it clear every time he is asked that he's not eager for criminal liability. If his lawyers cut off the avenues to civil liability as well, doesn't that mean that they've legalized the torture of the past? Yes, their promise not to do more torture and detentions going forward matters more. But it's not the only thing that matters.
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Both Us Weekly and People put falling star Jessica Simpson on their covers this week, where they're defending her from nasty Internet chatter about her recent weight gain. (The smack talking was set off by these photos. Obviously, if the haters were going to be mean about something, it should have been the belt.) People went the uplifting, school-marm route ("She's Proud of Her Body: Stop calling her fat! Inside the bold choice to lead a real life") while Us practiced it's more typical schizophrenia, simultaneously sympathizing ("Jessica's Agony: Bullied for her weight") and twisting the knife ("Suddenly back with a trainer"; "She's tortured by food"; "Did Tony cheat?")
While I can't help but feel some sympathy for Simpson—I'm sure getting skewered for looking like a regular person isn't pleasant—when I think about how tiresomely manipulative the whole drama is, my compassion dissipates. Bottom line: Getting called fat is the best thing that could have happened to Simpson’s career, which is in desperate need of a boost. (The photos that started it all were taken at a chilli cookoff where she was performing.) As Oprah has taught us, nothing generates goodwill quite like courageous, highly public struggles with one's weight. The tabloids and Simpson have taken note and jumped on some Internet trash talk, hoping to reap the benefits in copies sold and minutes in the spotlight.
It worked for Tyra Banks and Jennifer Love Hewitt, who were both recently involved in "You call me fat, I earn public sympathy" kerfuffles. Banks appeared on the cover of People ("You Call This Fat?") in January 2007. Besides aiding Banks' ongoing, ultra-serious mission to become Oprah's heir apparent, it helped drum up interest in yet another cycle of America's Next Top Model. After pictures of Hewitt in a bikini made the rounds in December 2007, she landed on the cover of People ("Stop Calling Me Fat"), possibly her biggest brush with relevancy since Party of Five. Eight months later, Us Weekly put her on their cover for losing "18 lbs in 10 weeks" because, obviously, it's great to be comfortable with your body, but better to be a size 2.
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Feministing writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay is up in arms because the Los Angeles Times published Rihanna's name as Chris Brown's accuser. For those of you who missed it, Brown, Rihanna's boyfriend, was arrested Sunday for felony domestic violence. Mukhopadhyay argues that Rihanna's privacy has been violated and also posits that Rihanna "is a model to young women and they are affected by how she responds to this problem. This is a tremendous amount of pressure for anyone, let alone a young woman who is a victim of domestic violence."
Let's start with the first point, which is that Rihanna's privacy has been violated. Most newspapers do not print the accuser's name in sexual and domestic assault cases without the victim's permission, though it's Slate media guru Jack Shafer's anecdotal sense that the press tide has been turning on the naming of accusers in recent years. In the American Journalism Review, Geneva Overholser, Missouri School of Journalism professor and the Pulitzer prize winner for a series on rape, argues that "in the long run, we'll never get rid of the stigma if we don't treat these like regular crimes. ... It's just not ethical to make a choice about guilt or innocence, which is effectively what we do. It makes us look like we are assuming innocence on one part, guilt on another. ... We should not be determining who deserves our protection." It's also worth reiterating that this is a domestic violence case, and not a sexual assault case, and from what I've seen it's much more common for newspapers to print the names of domestic assault accusers than rape accusers.
But more practically, Rihanna is globally known as Chris Brown's girlfriend. The second Brown's arrest for domestic violence was publicized, the world would know that Rihanna was the accuser. To gingerly dance around her name would be ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room to a nearly absurd degree.
As for the notion that Rihanna is going to be thrust into the position of unwilling poster child for domestic violence, I think that is a byproduct of the sort of squeaky-clean celebrity image she's so carefully constructed. And besides, as Jo-Ann Armao noted in the Washington Post two years ago, shame is for criminals. If Rihanna's the paid and willing poster child for CoverGirl, Totes umbrellas, Clinique, and Secret Deodorant, is it so terrible for her to be encouraged to speak out against domestic violence as well?
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My sister e-mailed me this morning with an interesting addition to our conversation about M.I.A's Grammy outfit. She's on Jessica and Nina's side that the get-up wasn't particularly revealing, especially by pop-star standards, and questions what's causing people like Marjorie to feel uncomfortable with it:
The only reason people are pearl-clutching over it is that the body underneath it is pregnant, and we're socialized to believe that a pregnant woman's body no longer belongs to her alone. Look at all the "think about what your future kids might think!" horror—like just because the fetus is in there right now, he's got some say over the exterior decorating. Sorry, but the fact that you don't give up ownership of your body (and the right to make ugly fashion choices) just because you're incubating is kind of a basic pillar of feminism.
There's also a great conversation going on in the Fray about this, with most posters agreeing that the polka-dot onesie was more kick-ass than indecent. And kak79 makes a good point that the artist herself was actually fairly M.I.A. in the Grammy performance:
I think what astonished me more about M.I.A's Grammy performance than her outfit was that she had such a small part to play in her own song. Was she not good enough to perform her own song on her own? Yes, I know the Grammys are big on pairings. So, I'll grant them the desire to do a remix with another performer. But, really, they practically wrote her out. It was her and four men and they held a good 95% of that performance. I think we should all be talking about that and not her crazy fashion choices.
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Shout out to Broadsheet for noticing this video of Salma Hayek breast-feeding a sick African 1-week-old. I always want to make fun of dear Salma, only because she starred in my least favorite movie ever—Dogma. And the Angelina bitch-fight jokes write themselves. But, in fact, the short clip is quite moving, because it scrambles our fixed proto-Victorian image of who is the mother and who is the wet nurse. Unlike, say, the infamous Alex Kuczynski photo in the story about her adventures in surrogate parenting. Plus, Salma is quite humble and practical about the thing, not aiming for the Madonna pose Angelina likes to strike.
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At the risk of an overdose of Friday Night Lights fandom here at Slate, I'd like to link up to the great FNL "TV Club." And what could be more fitting here on XX than leaping to a defense of Tami in her dealing with the JumboTron drama. I don't see the humiliation that made Hanna cringe, or real wrong-headedness, either. Yes, as Meghan and Emily have emphasized, it was clear from the start that Tami would lose her fight to put academics above football. It was also clear that Eric knew she would lose, and I agree that her opponents are (alas) on pretty solid ground: Donors should be able to expect to get what they thought they paid for.
What wasn't so clear was 1) whether Eric was setting Tami up for a fall by not telling her what he thought, and 2) how blind she really was about her uphill battle. The answers, which I thought emerged in this latest episode, are that both of them—he more consciously than she—felt that making a very public point about Dillon's pigskin-skewed values was worth Tami blowing her honeymoon as principal. (In fact, she surely won points with her teachers by lobbying on behalf of supplies and staff!) The coach wasn't about to talk her though her position as she agonized and vented to him, because he knew Tami had to proceed in her own inimitably passionate way. Nor did she really need to be told by her husband—teary though she was—that, despite the loss, it had been worth it. On some level, she knew it. And it's what Dillon (and we and Tami herself) expect from her.
It's interesting that Eric did need to talk through his quarterback dilemma with Tami. These aren't quite the gender stereotypes we're used to, especially in the red-state realm: husbands who ask for directions (but hold back from giving them) and wives ready to trust their own guts and plow ahead. Here, too, I think Eric is totally (and rightly) prepared to lose, while knowing that he, like Tami, has the priorities straight. In Dillon, the Taylors are the rare couple with the luxury, and security, not to have to cling quite so hard to the football ethos of winning at any cost.
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I still don't think M.I.A. was trying to look sexy, Marjorie. I think she was trying to look provocative and faintly goofy. She's wearing puffy white sneakers with that getup, not spiked heels. And M.I.A.'s not the only one to find the polka-dotted dress entertaining: the designer, London-based Henry Holland, tells New York's Fiona Byrne, "We are going through all the blogs and looking at all the comments people put about the dress. It's quite amusing," adding that some bloggers were "saying that she’s a skanky ho who couldn’t wait to get her baby out before getting back in the game!"
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EJ, one other thing about Ledbetter: Obama’s signing of the act came just days before the announcement that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. While Ginsburg appears to be recovering nicely from her surgery, the announcement last week brought a rash of speculation about who might replace her. I am not prepared to even think along those lines, but I am prepared to speculate that without Ginsburg’s lifelong commitment to women’s equality and her passionate (and very personal) dissent in the Ledbetter case, the issue of pay parity would not have blossomed into the national Ledbetter tsunami that helped sweep Obama into office in November. Ginsburg is not a diva, but when she read the majority opinion in Ledbetter, she went as close as she goes to ballistic; begging the court for just a sliver of reality-based thinking. She gave those of us who know that pay discrimination rarely comes with an embossed card explaining that you’re being screwed, a charge to fix the court’s mistake. I believe that as Ginsburg has gotten older and gone from being one of two women on the court to the only woman on the court, she’s come to understand that sometimes making a little noise is the most ladylike thing to do. The passage of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is ultimately a tribute to her as much as anyone.
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Sorry, Willa, to hijack your post's title for a completely different topic, but this hardly registers in today's episode of: How bad a blogger am I? I'm so bad that even though Obama signed his very first bill, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, on Jan. 28, I'm not shouting about it until today, nearly two weeks later. You, dear highly informed XX readers and bloggers, probably know all you want to know about it by now. For instance, that for decades Goodyear paid Lilly Ledbetter of Alabama 40 percent less than it paid her fellow workers (read: men) for the same job. Ledbetter sued as soon as she found out about her personal wage gap—but in 2007, the Roberts/Alito Supreme Court decided that wasn't soon enough and that Ledbetter should have sued within six months of when Goodyear started paying her unequally. (As Gail Collins wrote in the NYT, "Let us pause briefly to contemplate the chances of figuring out your co-workers' salaries within the first six months on the job.")
I'm proud as heck that my old boss, former Massachusetts Lt. Gov . Evelyn Murphy, was there at the signing, as she should have been. I helped research and write her book Getting Even, which launched her campaign at the WAGE Project to get women paid fairly. FYI, women working full time (i.e., not part-time workers or work-free octo-moms) still make only about 77 cents to a man's dollar. We can talk about why another time, but for now, how cool is it that the very first thing Obama endorsed with his signing pen is paycheck equality? Very cool, I say. For this we can forgive many venial stimulus sins.
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Nina, I wasn't calling for a beatific and glowy M.I.A., as you say, or a saintly Mother Earth aesthetic. I was calling for a modicum of modesty and good taste. Many rock stars exhibit fashion taste without sacrificing their individuality. But I agree with you that taste is in the eye of the beholder.
I admit that I was unaware of her "whimsical" style before I saw her onstage. But if M.I.A's performance was really about her music and not about craving attention she could have worn any number of great outfits, including the unique one she wore on the red carpet that night that neither hid her pregnancy nor shouted: Look at me. Look at me. I'm pregnant, I'm cool, and I'm still sexy.
As for the performance harkening back to the Rat Pack days, I don't remember any scenes from the old Rat Pack movies that included anything close to a pregnant woman wearing a silly and revealing bumble-bee outfit. And if M.I.A. was supposed to be part of the pack that night, she could have taken a cue from the suited men on stage and wore something more in keeping with the Rat Pack's formal/cool sensibility.
And Nayeli, my point was not that she committed an ethical lapse, my concern was about the imagery of a fashion lapse. I don't think dressing in clothing—pregnant or not—that leaves little to the imagination is empowering or radically feminist, as you and Jessica imply. It's not M.I.A.'s outfit that is "debunking notions of feminine delicateness," it's her ability to make it to the top of the hip-hop hierarchy. She would have been just as effective performing with those men while wearing a suit—albeit a suit that proudly accommodates the protruding stomach—and even more so a dress.
My larger point is that young, female rock/rap/R&B/country music/whatever stars, much like the female dancers in music videos, are wearing less and less and revealing more and more of their bodies for the entertainment of whom? Other women? Themselves? I don't think so. They've brought into the notion that equates being sexy with revealing all. I would argue that's not a feminist notion but a creation of the male-dominated fashion and music industries. It makes me sad for female artists who bare more than they should, and for the young girl fans who emulate them and put a premium not on being smart, kind, independent-minded, or socially conscious, but on being sexy and famous, even famous for doing nothing like Paris Hilton.
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Absolutely, yes. Samantha, if your friend is in a bad relationship, speak up. The advice I would give my women friends, daughter, or daughter's women friends, if they were wasting time on a boyfriend not adequately crazy about them, is this: "You can do better." "You deserve better." "This guy might be perfect for somebody else, but you need someone who truly gets you and celebrates your special qualities."
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Speaking of women who overshare and occasionally commit crimes against fashion, British pixie and MySpace star Lily Allen's got a very charming album, It's Not Me, It's You, out today. Unlike most musicians, funny is one of Allen's priorities, and she's good at it. Listening to the album is like having a chat about the tabloids and relationships with a very clever, saucy friend who speaks only in rhyme: enjoyable and not particularly taxing.
The album's got three types of songs on it, more or less: 1) Make-up and break-up songs. 2) Jingle-based op-eds about various of-the-moment topics, including drug use ("So you've got a prescription/ And that makes it legal/ I find the excuses/ Overwhelmingly feeble") and celebrity culture ("I want to be rich and I want lots of money/ I don't care about clever I don't care about funny/ Now I'm not a saint but I'm not a sinner/ And everything is cool as long as I'm getting thinner") 3) Musical interpretations of various Sex and the City episodes.
This last category is where Allen runs into some trouble. She's fine when sticking to Charlotte-esque sexcapades, as in "Not Fair:"
"There's just one thing
That's getting in the way
When we go up to bed
you're just no good
It's such a shame
I look into your eyes
I want to get to know you
And then you make this noise
and its apparent it's all over."
But she gets tripped up by lame accepted wisdom on "22," a song about an unhappily single 30-year old. Allen sings, "It's sad but it's true how society says/ Her life is already over/ There's nothing to do and there's nothing to say/ Til the man of her dreams comes along picks her up and puts her over his shoulder." Allen, who is only 23, might be trying to sympathize with this unattached woman, but with sympathy like that she might as well have told her to give up on life and start hording the cats. It's one of the album's few tone-deaf moments.
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Facebook may have started with the kids, but the geezers have been playing with the children's toy (thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, your mother must be so proud!). Grandparents, too. My quite senior mom, currently snowbirding in Palm Springs, Calif., has 21 Facebook phriends consisting of her various children, grandchildren, and cousins. She had a great status update the other day. My Facebook news feed reported my eightysomething mother "is home from exercise and eating a tangelo before I go out to the pool." Bravo, right?
Only next Sunday the New York Times Magazine's the Medium column will be asking "What's the secret to the ideal Facebook update? Virginia Heffernan sets out to find the best updater out there."
I am a big fan of Heffernan's take on the Y Generation's fortunate access and facility with digital networking, but this troubles me. I didn't realize status updates were competitive. I am an inveterate over-updater, but that kind of pressure might make me choke. I still consider having Twitter subscribers too daunting a responsibility. I recently posited with a dear Facebook phriend whether one's status updates have become the new memoir. Do 10 consecutive updates constitute a narrative? Now that S/Us are being ranked—does Facebook have a pageview counter application?—I'm afraid I'll awkwardly overthink the form.
I'd also hate for competition to sour the daily updates of my group of friendly phriends. I enjoy the warm singsong of perspectives and observations from people I am curious about, mingled with peeks and reassuring glimpses into the ordinary days of distant friends and scattered family. I‘ve even enjoyed the chorus of Random comments about relative strangers I've run across recently. (I would not, however, recommend that my children post their own 25.) Speaking of my children, both have accepted my phriendship and to me a perfect status update would be "is happy today" by one of the two. Instead, my son, who is 20, has a privacy filter to keep me from posting on his wall and recently started an open Facebook group, "Oh My God, My Mother Is on Facebook."
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So, who saw He's Just Not That Into You last weekend? I had all the complaints I thought I would. The 8,000-person cast meant no character or storyline could develop beyond the fairly superficial. Vague jobs requiring scant hours and minimal concentration somehow paid for breathtaking apartments. And no group—women, men, gays, Africans—escaped total stereotype.
None of those gripes kept me from getting sucked in and teary-eyed as I watched the characters fret their way through happy-hour courtships, sultry affairs, lavish home renovations, and general realizations about love. What made it more than your typical rom-com was the use of themes and taglines from the book of the same title on which it's based (which itself was based on a Sex and the City episode)—a gimmick that starts in the surprisingly insightful first scene. In the opening, a mom tells her adorably expressive prepubescent daughter that the boy who pushed her on the playground did it because he has a crush on her. (You can watch it in this preview.) The playground gives way to a montage of various women advising their female friends on love problems, all by making excuses rather than delivering the obvious truth that, cue the title screen, he's just not that into them. In other words, the white lies that start at childhood turn into a parade of convoluted, esteem-boosting reasons that women give one another throughout life about why guys are treating us like crap. ("Maybe he hasn't called because his cell phone died." "He may be avoiding commitment now, but that's what my husband was like, too, until he came around.") Well-intentioned, but detrimental, since those responses delude us into thinking that we will get to waltz away with a storybook ending to a bad romantic start instead of facing the facts and moving on.
But the well-delivered message of the introductory scene wasn't adequately resolved. The only character who ever offers those no-nonsense, hard-to-hear truths about how guys are feeling is a guy. So if the point is supposed to be that women should change the way they talk to one another about love, it doesn't seem that any of the characters got that message. (Or text. Or Facebook wall post. Or any of the other methods of communication that lead to Drew Barrymore's silly little drugstore rant.)
What do you all think? When a guy seems uninterested in your friend, is the best thing for you to do is say so? Or is there a value to offering possible excuses to preserve your friend's ego and keep her hope alive? After all, sometimes his cell phone really DID die.
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Since Spitzergate broke, I've been pretty ho-hum about the whole thing. Men cheat. Men have sex with prostitutes. Such is the nature of the universe. But when the guy who ran the escort service that Spitzer patronized got 2½ years in prison last Friday, I couldn't help but think: And Spitzer got a Slate column? As the kids say, WTF?
Mark Brener, a 63-year-old former tax specialist, was convicted on prostitution and money laundering counts. In court, Brener asked for leniency, and his lawyer suggested Brener's crime had no victims, although, that's a claim I'd refute. As the judge put it: “It may go on all the time and be the world’s second oldest profession. It’s certainly my view that a number of people are significantly hurt by this.” I suppose I have less of a problem with Brener's conviction—it wasn't like he was sitting around baking chocolate chip cookies—than the vast discrepency between Brener's sentence and Spitzer's never having been charged. With anything.
Obviously, I'm no legal eagle. I'm not even exactly sure exactly why this contrast so bothers me. Any of you legal birds interested in weighing in with your thoughts? I guess I thought all's fair in adultery and prostitution. Apparently not. That the pimp is punished more harshly than the governor who partook doesn't seem like the best policy to me.
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Allow me to leap to jump to Marjorie's defense on M.I.A.'s outfit from the Grammys. I've got no problem with the "whimsical" polka dots. It's the see-through mesh and the practically nonexistent skirt that have me cringing.
Don't get me wrong; I don't think pregnant women should be shrouded in mumus for nine months. There's nothing wrong with looking gorgeous or sexy while you're pregnant. And heck, there's even nothing wrong with performing while you're about to burst, as long as the doctor says it's OK: I remember how amazing Catherine Zeta-Jones looked and sounded when she performed at the 2003 Oscars while eight months pregnant.
But something that all mothers learn after they have kids (if they haven't learned it before) is that it's not all about you anymore. This is true whether you're a stay-at-home mom or a career woman or a wildly successful performing artist. Sometimes it might not hurt to ask yourself, "What would the kids say if they were old enough to see this?"
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Marjorie, I've been watching and rewatching the clip of a past-her-due date M.I.A. performing at the Grammys, and like Jessica am unable to muster up the same kind of ethical and fashion objections you express. Like Nina, I couldn’t get enough of M.I.A.’s stage strut or the male performers’ reactions to it. (Whether Kanye West’s frightened expression was made out of squeamishness or spotlight envy, one of the biggest egos in hip-hop was decisively outdone that night.)
And beyond the normal satisfaction I feel whenever female rappers, regardless of their crazy getups, are given the chance to showcase themselves, I actually saw M.I.A.’s performance as a feminist triumph. The ability of famous fetuses from Nadya Shuleman's brood to the latest Brangelina offspring to dominate headlines lends credence to the idea that a new mother’s career must re-center around her image as a mom to be a success. It was refreshing to see an expectant celebrity who didn’t fall victim to the tabloid characterization of pregnant women as either reformed sluts or pious earth mothers.
There’s also been plenty of judgment passed recently on mothers who work versus mothers who choose not to work, sacrificing themselves and their hard-won equal opportunities. Considering this, I guess it was inevitable for M.I.A. to take some heat for her choice of outfit and decision to perform but I was happy to see her making the choice to stay in her game.
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Marjorie, are you offended by M.I.A.'s Grammy duds because they're fugly or because they're inappropriate? As to the first—well, we could argue ourselves in circles about that outfit's aesthetic value. I happen to think it's a perfect encapsulation of a look we might call le punk rock jolie laide. (Björk being another big proponent of the look, as Jessica pointed out; Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is a third.) We could also talk about the fact that Ms. Arulpragasam can only pull the look off because she's totally gorgeous—which makes the look compelling, rather than repellent—but that's another post.
As far as whether it's inappropriate—I can't say I agree. Pop-lets have certainly appeared in less. Modern dancers at Alvin Ailey wear less! You write:
The imagery of a scantily-clad, or should I say scandalously-clad, pregnant young woman dancing onstage with a bunch of male rappers whose rhymes sometimes debase women, was just too much for me.
I read it completely differently. In M.I.A.'s hook (which clips from her hit "Paper Planes"), she brays that "no one on the corner have swagger like us/ swagger like us, swagger swagger like us." I thought the performance seemed defiant, cool, confident. Check out the video: M.I.A. and the boys look like 21st-century Rat Packers, what with the elegant suits and bandstand in the background. Not every pregnant woman has to be beatific and glowy. Sometimes they can be rock stars! Note the awesome way those crazy polka dots echo her big belly and other round, pregnant parts. She looks like a hot, Sri Lankan version of Baby Huey.
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1. I once knew a man from Nantucket.
2. I am bored.
3. I love you.
4. I can has cheezburger.
5. I kissed a girl.
6. I once shot a man in reno.
7. I am legend.
8. I google.
9. I love money.
10. I once wrestled a bear.
11. I carly.
12. I kissed a girl lyrics.
13. I touch.
14. I only want to be with you.
15. I once believed in perfect love.
16. I am sasha fierce.
17. I am sam.
18. I am the walrus lyrics.
19. I only have eyes for you.
20. I am pregnant.
21. I am the walrus.
22. I am legend 2.
23. I believe I can fly.
24. I once had a life or rather life had me lyrics.
25. I am green today.
.... a slightly disordered but otherwise faithful version of the top results Google offers when you plug in "I..." and "I am..." and "I once..."
(If you haven't followed the "25 Random Things" craze, click here. Of course, I also posted this list on my Facebook page, where it more properly belongs.)
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I missed out on the Grammys live, so when I read Marjorie's post on M.I.A.'s polka dot outfit, I figured it would be a fashion disaster of Lil' Kim proportions. But looking at the photos of the Sri Lankan star, it seems that her frock was more Bjork than Beyonce, which is to say: whimsical and slightly ridiculous, but certainly not worth any gaspy pearl clutching. Her fashion has always been silly, and this over-the-top outfit is no exception.
M.I.A.'s pregnancy peekaboo actually seems to be very similar in spirit to the "gross-out girls" Meghan blogged about last week. Just as my old colleagues at Jezebel and writers like Miranda Purves are debunking notions of feminine delicateness, M.I.A. is showing the world that a woman who's just shy of the delivery table can rock out on stage in a peekaboo getup. Like everything else, though, it's all about execution. I can say for the Jezebels that when they write their most graphic pieces, the aim is not just to potentially inform, but also to make the reader laugh. Which is why Wetlands is such a failure. I read it last month, and when it wasn't actively turning my stomach from its exponentially disgusting descriptions, it was turning my stomach with its aggressively artless prose.
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I'm not a fashion connoisseur or a hip-hop etiquette expert, or even a mother, but I don't think this disqualifies me from being able to ask the following question: What the heck was the very-pregnant rap artist M.I.A thinking when she went on stage during the Grammy Awards show on Sunday wearing this utterly ridiculous outfit?
The imagery of a scantily-clad, or should I say scandalously-clad, pregnant young women dancing on stage with a bunch of male rappers whose rhymes sometimes debase women, was just too much for me. And don't even get me started on what this cringe-worthy antic might say to impressionable teenage girl fans.
I know I sound like a scolding, prudish Ms. Crabtree, but I don't care. I grew up with hip-hop and still like a lot of it, and despite the sometimes potty-mouthed and offensive rhymes of Jay-Z, Kanye West, and T.I., there's no denying their talent. But the men were beside the point on Sunday night; M.I.A. was the point. She made Brittany Spears' 2007 MTV Video Awards fashion faux pas seem tame.
I don't care if she's unconventional, uber cool, young and reckless, or supremely confident; someone, anyone, should have pulled her aside before she went on stage and simply said NO! You can't wear that outfit. Please don't wear that outfit. If she has a fashion consultant that person should be promptly fired and run out of town. The British designer who came up with the polka-dotted creation should be fired too. Given the recent discussions on XX Factor about children being exploited by their parents in embarrassing YouTube videos and the discomfort those children might feel watching the videos as adults, I'd still rather see myself on YouTube looking behaving like a funny little dork during a captured moment of youthful indiscretion than see my half-dressed mother dancing onstage before a television audience of millions, while carrying me in her womb no less, acting like she has no sense.
Tell me, Slate women, do I need to lighten up and just let M.I.A. be? Should I accept that maybe she just has a whimsical sense of humor?
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So much for a perfect score. In a piece today, Judith Resnik and I came up with a top 10 list of Bush legal positions that Obama's Department of Justice should drop. No. 5 was the "state secrets" defense, as invoked by Bush lawyers to block a lawsuit by five men who say the U.S. tortured them abroad. The old DoJ argued that the "very subject" of the case—against the private contractor (Jeppesen Dataplan) that flew the men to their foreign destination—is a state secret, and so walled off from any investigation connected to the lawsuit. Today in court, Obama's new DoJ stuck with that line. “The change in administration has no bearing?” Judge Mary Schroeder of the 9th Circuit asked, with apparent surprise. "No, your honor," the lawyer answered.
At the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder shrugs. "Obama certainly never promised Americans that he'd declassify everything, or that the government had to renounce its right to assert a state secrets privilege forever," he reminds us. Well, no. But there's a weird disconnect here, since many of the relevant facts in this case are already known, thanks to reporting by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and others. As ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said, "the only place in the world where the facts of these claims can't be discussed is in this courtroom." More crucially, the state-secrets defense doesn't just mean that a judge decides what evidence to keep classified and out of public view. It means that based on the government's say so, no one even gets to open the lid of the box to find out what evidence is inside. Not even the judge. It's a blanket defense designed to halt potentially legitimate claims in their tracks. To add insult to injury, the Supreme Court fashioned it to preserve secrets in a 1953 case—about why an Air Force flight went down in the state of Georgia—in which the government's professed reason for secrecy turned out to be completely bogus.
As his department's lawyer held the Bush line in court today, Attorney General Eric Holder promised a review of all the government's uses of the state-secrets privilege, "to ensure that is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations." Maybe at some point down the line, that will seem reassuring. But at the moment, Holder's promise plus today's developments in court equals not much.
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Dahlia, I see the Angelina resemblance (morphed a bit with Janeane Garofolo). Both women have youth, beauty, and more notoriety than a sane person would ever dream of. But Nadya Suleman has 14 kids to support, no job, and no Brad Pitt. Possibly, the publicity machine will take her somewhere ("Tuesday a special Dateline: How are her other six children doing?"), but despite her chances for a cable reality show, I have a bad feeling her steely optimism will not be enough to carry her to a movie-star happy ending.
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Sen. Patrick Leahy, chair of the judiciary committee, is calling for a truth commission to investigate various unfortunate doings at the Bush Department of Justice. The commission would have subpoena power but witnesses wouldn't open themselves to criminal charges by testifying, except perjury. That probably means immunity—if not blanket immunity, then protection for anything a witness tells the committee. In other words, it's about finding out what happened, not punishment. There are other ways this could happen—various lawsuits could reveal more about DoJ's innerworkings, and the Obama DoJ could also just release internal documents on its own. The advantage a congressional commission offers are a few good interrogators (calling Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse), and the chance to frame the questions, and to write a big report with gravitas, 9/11-commission style. But Leahy's proposal isn't what the Obama administration has called for. Good for Leahy for putting this on the table so that the president and his new lawyers will have to respond.
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I can’t tear myself away from the story of Nadya Suleman, who recently added octuplets to her family of six small kids, without a job, home, or spouse. She lives with her mother in a three-bedroom home, although it looks like her rent free days are soon to be over. Yet in a series of interviews with NBC’s Ann Curry, the 33-year-old Nadya sounds like she’s got it all figured out: She’s just going to finish her degree and get a job and move her 14 children into a new house. Good thing the economy is booming.
Suleman told Curry—and Nancy Gibbs at Time seems to agree—that we are judging her differently from other parents of multiples (who get showered with Pampers and phone calls from the president) merely because she isn’t married. Are they right? Noreen, you posted about free-floating squeamishness about big families, but are we even nastier when there is no dad? Suleman is not on welfare (she is collecting workers compensation) and she really does appear to adore her kids. So is she really all that different from another famous baby-collector, Angelina Jolie, to whom she bears—by the way—a freakish resemblance?
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Last night, the heretofore squeaky clean heartthrob Chris Brown turned himself in to the L.A. police for allegedly making criminal threats against his girlfriend, the hugely successful pop singer Rihanna. He's now out on bail and is also under investigation for felony domestic violence. In lieu of any verifiable, definitely accurate information about what went down between the two, I don't feel particularly comfortable opining on the dispute, but I will say this: The gossip industry (blogs, tabloids, TV news magazines) is positively gleeful, albeit in the most concerned way possible, to be covering such a high-profile incident (TMZ has seven posts up about it since 8 p.m. ET yesterday).
In the absence of the radically unhinged celebrity behavior that was commonplace during the Brit-Paris-Lindsay era (and, wow, look around, we're finally out on the other side of that mind-deadening national obsession. Maybe there's one good thing about mortgage-backed securities after all), the gossip biz hasn't had a chance to stretch its rumor-mongering, banal-detail-finding wings in some time. Now it's got a chance to do what it does best (forget this "covering" politics thing) and, judging from this morning's saturation coverage, it's not going to let up anytime soon. Not so long ago, there would have been another sordid story in the pipeline, ready to snatch the news cycle away from Brown and Rihanna—now there's just the stimulus package. I'm not sure the gossip media is equipped to cover domestic assault admirably/responsibly/interestingly, but we're definitely going to get to watch them try.
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Meghan, I, too, felt Rebecca Traister's "The Great Girl Gross-Out" raises more questions than it answers. Moe Tkacik's tampon-gone-missing tale, Tracie Egan's female ejaculation chronicles, Miranda Purves' post-childbirth sex life—they're all a strange mix of the need to confess, the desire to shock, and the want of page-views. I don't think any of this "gross-out girl" writing is particularly feminist, postfeminist, or whatever else kind of feminist, nor do I think it is without import or solely designed to garner attention. It strikes me as copycat fratire—the boneheaded hijinks of Tucker Max meets the Farrelly brothers. How about: chicktire. Boys can sleep around? We can too! Boys can do gross-out stuff! We can too! Freud: "The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology." Taking the metaphor literally, they've located the dark continent between their legs and, scrutinizing it in public, presume themselves investigators of female sexuality by way of taking a trip up the river of their vaginal canals.
I'm more interested in Meghan's question: "Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting [the] female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect?" Perhaps "modest" isn't exactly what we're looking for here; maybe not "neutral" either. Can writing about the female body go beyond the literal, transcend the body itself, make a point that exposes something more than the fact that bad things happen when you leave your tampon in for 10 days?
Looking around, it's hard to come up with examples of writing that does so, frankly. Marguerite Duras? Hélène Cixous? Molly Bloom? Addie Bundren has a great line in As I Lay Dying: "I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a ----- and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse." The place where Faulkner "writes" what Addie "is" is a blank space on the page. Écriture féminine it ain't (or is it?), but the place where the words aren't may speak more to the totality of womanhood than any gross-out girl's words could ever hope to reveal about their writer's darkest places.
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More fun with press releases! We got a bulletin this afternoon announcing that the celebrity spokeswoman for Pantene's new Pro-V Nature Fusion line is none other than Top Chef hostess and beloved dingbat, Padma Lakshmi. With its minty color scheme and promise of "naturally derived" ingredients, Pantene is pushing the green angle pretty hard. (The word "natural" appears eight times in the 12-sentence press release, and that's not even counting the number of times they name-check the product itself.) Forget the fact that words like "natural" and "organic" are bogus when it comes to shampoo. The kicker, for me, was this line:
Because of Padma’s unique natural beauty and strong Indian roots, she is the perfect representative of the Nature Fusion collection, which key active ingredient is the India-derived Cassia seed.
I think it's kind of funny that Padma got the gig because she, like the Cassia seed, is India-derived. (Reminds me of those great Levy's ads from the '70s.) But what exactly do natural and unique mean in this context? Is she natural because she's from India, like yoga? Is it because she's ethnic? Because I'd say Lakshmi—like most gorgeous models—is about as unnatural looking as you can get. And "unique"? She's beautiful in the most classical sense imaginable. (Unlike, say, past spokeswoman Stacy London, who looks like a superhot witch.)
Quibbling with the marketing department aside, I do want hair like hers, so I guess that's what counts. Though I take umbrage at the description of her as "the first international Indian supermodel." Does no one remember Persis Khambatta?
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A guest post from Politico staff writer Lisa Lerer:
At first glance, Michelle Obama's schedule this week seemed beyond boring. On Wednesday, she visited HUD, allegedly to thank government workers for their service. On Tuesday, she read a book to second-graders at a public charter school. And on Monday, she stopped by the Department of Education—again, to "thank the employees." A listening tour through the federal bureaucracy? Zzzzzz...... She even wore uninteresting clothes. According to a Wednesday pool report, an aide removed a print scarf before Michelle entered HUD—leaving the usually fashion-forward first lady in a plain gray suit and purple top. It looked like the White House was making a very conscious effort to put Michelle right into the classic first lady part. Except that during each televised stop, Michelle spent most of her appearance pushing Obama's stimulus plan, selling the bill as a way to prevent everything from rising heating costs to homelessness.
This seems like an unusual—and almost subversive—use of the role for a first lady to make such a direct political appeal. Can you imagine Laura Bush stopping by the State Department to push the war in Iraq?
Of course, there are some compelling political reasons for the new White House to at least put up the facade of playing it traditional. A slew of new books about the first lady and a rumored Vogue cover are in the works over the next few months. Her heightened profile will paint a huge target on her for the administration's political enemies. Still, the obvious subtext of this week's stops was for Michelle to do some heavy politicking. What do you think, XX? I know you've worried over the first lady role and stuck up for Michelle's feminist cred. Is she starting to expand the first lady role?
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Like Sam, I too found "David After Dentist" more charming than creepy when I first saw it: David immediately got filed in the mental category "Awesome Little Kids I'd Like to Hang Out With," alongside Amelie Jr., the Korean "Hey Jude" baby, and Gio Escalante. I worry less that this video is cruel in the here and now and more about what David will think about it when he's a teenager or when he's applying for jobs. Will David be embarrassed? Proud? Will he be like a former child star, who can't walk down the street without someone leaning out of a car window to yell, "DUUUDE, IS THIS GOING TO BE FOREVER?"
What's really scary, though, is the speed at which this video has been remixed and re-posted—there's already a Dr. Katz-style animated version and a Christian Bale mashup. Maybe I'm being primitive about it (they're stealing David's soul when they copy his picture!), but that sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies. Something like "David" is different from, say, a clip of your kid on TV's America's Funniest Home Videos. Web stuff can move around the world so easily, getting copied and reproduced—not to mention archived indefinitely—that it's unnerving. I can make myself forget about this when I'm sharing information about myself. (I'm working on my "25 Random Things About Me" list, so I've been thinking a lot about the nature of my personal privacy threshhold.) But is it ethical when it's your kid? Now that my friends are trickling into their child-bearing years, I see infants all over Facebook. I'm not sure if this is due to the simple fact that since we live a lot of our lives online, it's natural that our kids are coming along, or whether it has something to say about the extent to which we view those kids as extensions of (accessories to?) ourselves. I'm sure that, when I reproduce, I will be putting lots of totally hilarious clips and pictures online. The question is: Will I be mother enough to hesitate before I hit "post"?
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It looks like perhaps beholding Obama as a mere saint might not be wishful thinking enough for some folks. An update from the far realms of fantastical projection, via a press release that popped up in my inbox this afternoon:
In a recent appearance at a Washington, D.C. elementary school, President Barack Obama indicated that his favorite superheroes are Spiderman and Batman. But who do Americans think Mr. Obama would be if he were a superhero, and what about the other inhabitants of the White House?
Recent poll data from E-Poll Market Research's E-Score® Character and E-Score® Celebrity surveys suggests that Mr. Obama's personality profile most closely matches that of Batman from the recently revamped film franchise, while Michelle Obama compares closely with Princess Fiona of the Shrek series. Additionally, Vice President Joe Biden's personality shows a close resemblance to Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots from Transformers. ...
... Can this trio of Superheroes turn the White House into a new Justice League? Can they vanquish the nasty recession, health care troubles and evildoers both foreign and domestic?
Uh-oh. Batman as played by Christian Bale has vexed politics at best—though I guess maybe Obama's comment that he'd meet with dictators without preconditions is kinda sorta like Batman's willingness "to go outside the law to meet terrorists 'on their own terms.' " (But Bale can't play our President Calm-Cool-Collected!) I guess I can buy Michelle as Fiona. (From Wikipedia: "She is really a very down-to-earth and independent woman who is a match for Shrek at burping and farting, is a loyal friend, and unlike princesses of fairy tales, an expert in hand-to-hand combat with knowledge of Chinese martial arts.") And while I'm no Transformers expert, it appears that Optimus, like Biden, is a bit of an old-school warrior for justice, had his original moment in the ‘80s, and has enjoyed a recent renaissance in the spotlight.
So who's Hillary? Who's Rahm? Who's Daschle? Who's our Joker?
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Oh, Hanna, I beg to differ! I found young David's trip through the post-dental bends to be an awesome example of the Internet-enabled, 21st-century, DIY version of "Kids Say the Darndest Things." The video isn't, in my opinion, amusing because it's "Ho-ho! Look at the kid acting high!" It's because what David, with the aid of some drugs, is saying to his father's camera is so profound, so eternal, so deeeep. "Is this real life?" "Why is this happening to me?" "Is this gonna be forever?" These are the very questions I ask myself, day in and day out, toiling at my computer, wondering what I'm doing, wanting to know what does it all mean. Hanna, perhaps you might try the animated version? I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the "Is This Real Life?" T-shirts appear in online stores.
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I think the "David After the Dentist" video passes the "appropriate to post" test. This isn't likely to haunt him forever; given how fast kids grow, it won't be long before even his biggest fans wouldn't recognize him on the street. (And since the clip is from last summer, he probably already has enough new front teeth to disguise him.) He's old enough that his dad probably asked and got his permission before posting, and young enough that it's not likely his peers are out there on CollegeHumor.com discovering this clip and laughing behind his back. And the material is harmless enough that I think when David revisits it in a few years, he'll crack up as much as the 3-million-plus who've already watched it on YouTube.
I can see your point, Hanna, that the dad comes off as kind of cruel, the way he's sitting up there laughing and filming while his child suffers. But I feel like it's how the kid—not the blogosphere—interprets what the parent is doing that matters, and David doesn't seem to mind his dad's low-key attitude. In fact, it might be putting him at ease. Of course, this is coming from someone who thinks it's hilarious that my parents used to coo to my sister and me, when we were too young to understand anything beyond tone of voice, "You're such a stupid baby! Awww, look how ugly you are!" Sure if someone were watching (online or otherwise), that would seem awful. But since all we took from it was the affectionate cadence, I think it's genius.
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It's taken me a while, and a schooling from a couple of Slate men, to figure out what's wrong with David's dad. As anyone online this afternoon knows, his dad posted a video of him freaking out after getting anesthesia at the dentist. My husband and I have just started posting a couple of kid videos on YouTube, and it never occurred to me that anyone other than my mom would look at them. But every once in a while, the blogosphere picks one up, and then suddenly you and octuplet mom are in the same boat. Probably, in that car, what Dad and David were doing made some kind of sense. But from the outside, here's what it looks like: David is sitting in the back of the car, suffering. He is seriously discombobulated. He thinks his entire life from that point on will be a bad acid trip. And Dad is grooving on it, joking, recording the lolling of the head, the screaming, with his handy camera, looking forward to the moment he can post it as a cool video online. Ladies, anyone else want to join me in judgment?
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Welcome, Willa! I have been a Grey's watcher since the first episode (Meredith and McDreamy's lust at first sight in Joe's bar didn't grab me as much as Christina's painful perfectionism). I also wondered what Shonda Rhimes was thinking when Denny Duquette insisted on being a major character in Season 5 despite his prolonged tragic death in Season 2. Sadly, despite the astounding 15-year record of NBC's ER, it is very difficult to keep hourlong medical dramas compelling and original after five years (witness Fox's House), so I hoped the silly dead-Denny story arc would resolve quickly (with Isabel's brain tumor diagnosis, no doubt) and possibly postpone the shark-jumping a bit longer. Alas, the conceit went on a bit too long—she's supposed to be a doctor; how about a little self-diagnosis?—and became tedious and annoying. Yet I've had a standing appointment with the ABC full-episode player every Friday this season (um, my DVR won't let me watch The Office and record G's Anatomy simultaneously), and the plot still manages to make me respond. The pairings and re-pairings at Seattle Grace have lost their surprise but, so far, despite its creator's originality fatigue, the program still delivers a serving of irony, pathos, or character twist stirred into every script in spite of itself.
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Leon Panetta, Obama's pick for CIA chief, earned $1.2 million last year as a corporate consultant, speechmaker, and board-sitter. (Included in that was a $150,000 fee for consulting for the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University. And if I were a California taxpayer, I'd be thrilled that the school was able to snag Leon Panetta to consult for the Leon Panetta Institute for a mere $150,000.) Like Tom Daschle, Panetta took in about $250,000 last year making speeches to corporations—Panetta got $56,000 from Merrill Lynch alone for two talks. I know there's been a lot of bashing of our corporate financial titans lately. How they live like pashas and pay themselves grotesque salaries in spite of the fact they have pretty much brought down the world's economies. But sometimes you've got to feel sorry for these former masters of the universe. For years they have been forced to sit at luncheons and fight to keep awake while listening to Tom Daschle or Leon Panetta drone on and on. How hard it must have been for them to fight the impulse to say, "Leon, I'll write you a check for $56,000 right now if you'll just stop talking."
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I don't know why I'm on the sex-and-body beat this week, but ... Has anyone else read Rebecca Traister’s smart Salon piece about the rise of the girl gross-out essay? Traister argues that we’re seeing a spike in women writing about squishy, gooey bodily functions:
Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation.
Trend stories usually seem fake to me, but I think Traister’s right about this one—though we’ve seen waves of similar self-revelation in the past. (Do you all agree? Disagree?) As for me, I confess I’m both repelled by and attracted to all these bloody confessions—at times amused and impressed by the frankness of these women, at other half-put off by it. Perhaps that’s because I come from conflicted Catholic stock. But I think it’s also that the phenomenon Traister is describing is more multi- than single-faceted, in ways I wish she'd teased out more.
Which is to say: I have different reactions to different parts of Traister’s piece. Miranda Purves’ graphic description of her pregnancy in Elle seems to have a purpose that goes very beyond exhibitionism. You have to be graphic to write that piece in the first person, because the piece has to enact Purves’ own shock at what happened to her body and to convey her sense of feeling gypped that few people had spoken explicitly about this to her beforehand. She's onto something. In an age of disclosure, it’s (paradoxically) shocking how many women are surprised by what can happen to their bodies during delivery. (I remember reading a brutally honest description of birth in, of all places, Sylvia Plath’s diaries when I was 24, and thinking: Why on earth has no one ever told me this stuff? )
But I’m not sure I feel the same way about Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, where, I’d say from my brief perusal of it to date, the reader finds a lot of youthful narcissistic exhibitionism on display. So far I don’t get the value of that exhibitionism; the writing seems bland, and the “rawness” is designed to shock—a stance I find increasingly tedious in our bare-our-souls-and-bodies culture.
Which brings me to a question for all of you: Is being relentlessly in-your-face the only way to write about the secret reality of the female body? Is this mode of brazen oversharing a kind of feminist reclaiming? Or is it mostly a canny method of self-packaging? Of course, as Traister herself notes, those two questions may not necessarily have mutually exclusive answers. The either/or approach is used far too much when it comes to women who write (or speak) provocatively about themselves.
So I’d like to ask the inverse question: Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect? I’m trying to think of examples. … Sontag’s journals actually come to mind. She writes at times about female genitalia with a coolness in tone about that's eerie yet revelatory. What else?
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Tonight, television's pre-eminent hot doctor shows, ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice, are teaming up for an "unprecedented crossover event," or what I think of as a last-ditch effort to keep me and millions of others from breaking up with them for good.
Grey's has always had its detractors (like, all those people who laugh belittlingly whenever it's referred to as simply Grey's—whatever, this show and I, we're on a first-name basis), but when it debuted in 2005, it was the perfect treat: good-natured, sexy, casually multiracial and female-centric, funny and touching in perfect proportion and, in some truly ineffable way, supremely satisfying. But since the end of Season 2 it has become increasingly erratic, annoying, and dark; bad habits that have culminated in this year's bonkers story line about a very dead guy loudly shagging one of the show's very not-dead heroines.
All of Grey's—the good, the bad, the sexually stupendous ghost—can be pinned on Shonda Rhimes, the show's creator and producer. Rhimes belongs to that posse of TV savants—Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, David E. Kelley, and on and on—who are the living embodiment of the auteur theory as it applies to television: writer/producers with a distinct sensibility, style, and syntax that they bring to project after project, week after week, for better and worse.
What's currently happening on Grey's is, absolutely, for worse, but it's also totally spectacular, in the way of Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and other infamous botch-ups (Ishtar, etc). It's not every day you get to watch uniquely talented artists fail at what they usually do best. Grey's no longer reliably delivers enjoyable television, but it does consistently provide the rare opportunity to see genius imploding in real time. Riveting stuff.
Should you choose to watch tonight's "event," here are two thoughts on the "why" of Grey's collapse: 1) At a certain point, showrunners get so powerful no one can say no to them, even when their ideas don't make sense. Rhimes wants to ax one lesbian story line that's working for ... another lesbian story line? Uh, sounds amazing? 2) Rhimes doesn't know exactly what makes her show any good. Take a look at what she's done to Addison Montgomery, the star of the wholly execrable Grey's spin-off Private Practice. On Grey's, Addison was classy, brassy, and smart, an adult among emotional adolescents. Now that she's got her own show, she's an insecure, boy-crazy head case. Rhimes didn't know what was great about Addison, even though she made her, and she doesn't know what's great about Grey's.
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I was amused by this AP photo of Obama, haloed by the gold presidential seal, looking for all the world like a medieval saint—maybe St. Augustine. Augustine was a North African who wrote at a time when Christianity was just shifting from a scattered, messianic utopian community—dedicated to personal purity and a willingness to risk martyrdom—into a state religion. Among other things, Augustine wrote City of God, which clarified how a Christian ruler could govern in an impure world.
I love that this picture portrays Obama as our sainted and purifying ruler coming in to force the medieval oligarchs—er, the Wall Street CEOs—to reduce their take to a morally respectable size.
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When I was a child, I was a huge fan of a series of books that featured small, soft, furry white creatures known as Moomins. Of course, not everything in Moominvalley was as nice as the Moomins. There was another character who came along every once in a while, the Groke. Wherever she went, she left behind a trail of frozen ground that killed all living things. Dick Cheney has always remind me of the Groke.
In a new interview with Politico, Cheney pronounces the United States should expect a catastrophic nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the near future—and the Obama administration increases the likelihood it will happen. Cheney's penchant for practices like water-boarding, he claims, kept more 9/11-style attacks at bay during the Bush administration.
[Cheney] asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans—and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team—understand ...
He expressed confidence that files will someday be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted—over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism—were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks. ...
“If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth—then we would have been attacked again," he said.
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Willa, to quote Cher from Clueless (which I seem to be referencing daily now)—trying to find responsible messages about eating in The City is like looking for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. Which is to say, ultimately fruitless. But the flippant handling of anorexia in The City is definitely worth mentioning because it seems that in the three decades that the disease has been in the zeitgeist (basically since the 1978 publication of Hilde Bruch's seminal anorexia text, The Golden Cage) the media has still portrayed it in a completely unproductive way.
Women's magazines are particularly ham-handed in the way they deal with eating disorders, and I was reminded of this when perusing the February issue of Elle earlier this week. They have a personal essay by recovered anorexic Abby Sher, which reads like a pro-ana handbook:
I had new rules: No eating before the show. No eating in public. No less than an hour and a half at the gym every day. I started drinking diuretic teas and devouring magazine articles about how to feel full from your daily intake of water. ... I’d have high-fiber cereal covered with chicken broth and melted fat-free cheddar cheese on top, sometimes hummus and carrots, washed down with watery cocoa. Whenever I didn’t think I could make it another mile on the stationary bike or felt light-headed on the treadmill, I imagined this banquet awaiting me and tried to pedal faster, harder, stronger.
For those without eating disorders, Sher's chronicle of her not-eating is terminally boring. It is exactly like every other personal account of anorexia that's been in every women's magazine since the days of Karen Carpenter. For those with eating disorders, or perhaps those perilously on the brink, this sort of story is a blueprint, a possible enticement. There seems to be very little literature and media devoted to addressing the causes of anorexia, only these train-wreckish essays for others to gawk at.
So, Willa, I agree—MTV should treat discussions of potential anorexia with more gravity than they treat a shoe purchase, but that would require them to cast a critical eye on the extreme thinness that's the current beauty ideal. I'd bet you some hummus and carrots that they're never going to be willing to do that.
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In other news of the peculiar and amazing, via the Drudge Report: NBC just