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So the American public has sounded off—and the stank-face has it! The "angry" Michelle Obama is oddly compelling to some of the average men and women surveyed—the counterintuitive, apparently gender-neutral enjoyment of a spanking speaking. I can't help but have many opinions on Michelle Obama, which range from praise for her double-dipping in home life and work life, her evasion of ready-made racial categories for black women (Mammy or Jezebel?) to distaste for her meta-modeling of a White House victory garden. But oh man does Stanley Crouch have an opinion. From his piece on The Root today:
Michelle Obama is much more than the superficial assessment of being a “real” sister or “too real,” which is usually attached to some sense of pathology and deprivation. Every background contains stupidity and evil, and no one seeking to understand the troubles and the mysterious aspects of human beings should ever forget those facts of life. It is quite clear that this is not a bitter woman, and it is just as evident that she has forgotten nothing. She embodies that quality of deep Americana essential to what got us through slavery and all of the tribulations that followed it until the votes were counted on Nov. 4, 2008.
She is both brilliant and down home, free of the solitary confinement of ethnic nationalism and low expectations for the nation. Like her husband, Michelle Obama embraced the deathless presence of the bitter and the sweet in both human life and our national history. That embrace retooled American patriotism and established a maturity that was not expected in our time of protracted adolescence and overstatement.
Above all else, the first lady has done everything exactly her way, never seeming to hide her heart behind a pit bull exterior, which is the crucifix of the contemporary female for whom respect arrives with far more regularity when the tool used to beckon it is a cold, cold bark.
OK, get through it. Now: I like Crouch’s embrace of Obama’s embrace of the sweet and sour, the contradictions that come with making it to the middle class in a place where the black middle class came to make it; of going to a great school (and enjoying every advantage that comes with it) at a time when faces like hers were few and far between; and of being the closest thing America has to a real-life princess at the same time that Disney is getting around to its ragin’ Cajun version.
I accept that the global public is coming around to the “pit bull exterior” they so disliked during the 2008 campaign—but am convinced that there is a meaningful difference between affection and respect. A barking woman (and let's not forget, bitches bark) may be respected, but she doesn’t elicit the warm sentiments Crouch feels toward Michelle. Rather, I think that public adoration of Obama (rather like the self-styled “fighter” Hillary Clinton) is still leavened with a little bit of fear. Would Obama prefer pure affection? Perhaps—though fear is good for the eat-your-vegetables business of being FLOTUS.
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Hanna, the counterpart to your post about the dangers of prostate screening appeared in today's New York Times—a story about whether annual mammograms may be doing more harm than good. This isn't the first piece I've read that questions the mammogram orthodoxy. There's no argument that finding a potentially fatal breast cancer can save a life. But the skeptics say that many, many woman who have indolent cancers that would never progress are forced into surgery and chemotherapy. The problem is that medicine cannot sort the dangerous tumors from the relatively benign ones (and who'd have thought we'd hear that some cancers are better just left alone?). The piece ends with an expert in health risk saying having mammograms or not having mammograms are both reasonable choices for women to make. That's helpful!
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Madonna wants to adopt another Malawian child. And according to news reports, she's picked Mercy James—or maybe she was offered the little girl by a country grateful for the millions Madonna donates to care for other needy children.
Here's the problem: Mercy's grandmother wants to bring her home too, according to the London Times, which reports:
Lucy Chekechiwa, 61, Mercy's grandmother, described Madonna's interest in her granddaughter as "stealing". "Why doesn't this singer pick other children? It is stealing. I want to go to court, I won't let her go," she said. Mercy has been living in an orphanage and Mrs Chekechiwa claimed it had been agreed the child would go to her when she reaches the age of six. Mercy's 18-year-old mother died five days after her birth, according to The Sun.
Orphanage is the confusing word here. Few Westerners understand that in much of Africa and Asia, what we call "orphanages" are actually boarding schools for poor children—places where extremely poor families in temporary distress drop their children off for food, education, and shelter, and then they bring the children home when things get better. Offering to house these children temporarily and then selling them for international adoption (er, "accepting donations" in exchange for adoption) is one of the common ways of defrauding poor birth families out of their children. (Need I say that not all internationally adopted children are illicitly acquired? But hundreds, and more likely thousands, are—and however large or small the proportion of the total, it's too many. Find more documentation on the extent of the problem here.)
Is it OK to swoop into a country and take someone else's child just because you're rich? Is wealth all it takes to have a "better life" ... or might it matter that you get to stay with the family you already know and love? Madonna's not alone in what she's doing, although she is unusual in knowing there's a family that wants Mercy back. Save the Children and other human rights groups want her to back off. She is setting a dangerous example, leading more Westerners into a "humanitarian" mission that is anything but.
Ethica, an American nonprofit that advocates for ethics in adoption, has launched a fundraising campaign to help Mercy stay home with her family. According to Ethica, Malawi's average annual income is $160. Ethica's goal is to raise $2,240—an annual salary for her grandmother until Mercy reaches adulthood—so that she can stay home. You can donate here.
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A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe:
I have to disagree with you, Jessica, on the idea that college admission boards favoring rich kids is not a problem. There are already plenty of ways in which the children of deep-pocketed parents have a leg up on their less-privileged counterparts. Starting as early as pre-K, wealthy families have the option of sending their kids to swanky private schools, where the combination of stellar faculty, name recognition, and powerful alumni networks paves the way for admission to top-notch colleges.
College students from wealthy families can also take unpaid internships in New York City and Washington, D.C., while their not-so-wealthy counterparts spend summers working jobs to cover living expenses that might not be so résumé-boosting. (I'll openly admit to being one of the former; I get to intern for the XX Factor this semester while many of my classmates must dedicate those out-of-class hours to paying gigs.) There's also the more extreme example of some parents buying internships for their kids, a phenomenon Slate's Tim Noah discussed here.
Jess, you ask in your post: "Is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?" But the recession's impact isn't limited to the biggest and best private schools. It's hitting everyone, from the Ivies to the smallest liberal-arts colleges. That means students in need of financial aid will have trouble getting into any school where money is tight—and that's every school. Sure, it would be great for the next wave of coeds not to have huge student loans to pay back when they enter the workforce. But if the alternative is no college degree at all, a few thousand dollars' worth of debt doesn't sound so bad.
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Meghan McCain. Bless her heart. From the side ponytail to the fake catfight, she had us all fooled. We thought she was a dingbat. In reality, she's clever like a fox. Writing a column for the Daily Beast? Everyone scratched their heads. She's so ... vapid. So ... devoid of ideas. Was there something we were missing? After her weak attempt to draw Ann Coulter into a "debate" that even Coulter wouldn't stoop to partake in, McCain has finally made her writerly mission clear. She's looking to get laid!
This week's installment reads like a masturbatory reverie in homage to (gasp!) our youngest (swoon!) congressman, Aaron Schock (insert "shocker" joke). Mr. Illinois is Mini-McCain's "GOP's House Hottie"! ZOMG, Megs, I am, like, so with you on this one! Frankly, the Schockster had me at that photo of him greased up by the pool, browner than fried pig fat, basking in the shade of a faceless young woman's hot pink ta-tas, but Meghan closed the deal with her 1,500-word essay on how he's, like, totally smart, and also supergreat, which is, like, superawesome for the GOP!!! Yay! Schock in 2012. Or whatever.
According to McCain, who only figured out who Schock is because those half-naked shots of him appeared on TMZ, Schock is, well, interesting. As she puts it: "Schock’s rapid rise to the national level is, if nothing else, interesting, especially given the serious soul-searching the Republican Party is experiencing." So, he's interesting because he's ... interesting? I am intrigued.
Apparently, McCain likes Schock because: a) he's young, and her dad was old and that was bad, so Schock being young is good, b) he's not a radical, just like Meghan!, which is good, because the Republican Party needs all the help it can get at this point, c) he totally understands the power of the Internet (see: half-naked photos), which can be bad, but which can also be good, or, as Schock opines of the American people with an eloquence that suggests McCain may have found her intellectual match: "They watch pop culture, but they are also voters." Obvs.
Clearly, I hadn't given Meghan McCain enough credit. It never occurred to me to use my platform here on The XX Factor to get laid by some guy in Congress. I'll have to work on that.
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Today the Washington Post published the results of a survey on Michelle Obama. Two months ago, people questioned her patriotism and said she looked angry a lot. Now, they love her. Her favorability ratings are at 76 percent, up 28 points since the summer. "The number of people who view her negatively has plummetted," Lois Romano writes. That's great, right? We like Michelle, and we're glad other people do too. And it should count as some species of miracle that America (not to mention the world) is in love with a strong black woman. So why is this survey making me uneasy? More specifically, why is it making me feel like I live in 1967? (the year Guess Who's Coming to Dinner came out?)
Maybe it's these individual testimonies Romano pulls out of the survey. From a 34-year-old white woman:
She definitely has this black woman's attitude. ... White girls have more insecurities, which is why they care more about being ingratiating. I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- I like that about her -- but she's just a very strong woman and that can come off as condescending.
Or from a Colorado independent:
I don't see the angry Michelle anymore.
Or is it the feeling I have that Michelle is putting on a show? Or that America can only handle one specific kind of black woman? Any ideas, ladies?
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Willa, you bring up a great point about the attempts and failures by movies and TV shows to capture courtship and romance as it actually exists in 2009, in all its technological glory. That Drew Barrymore speech from He's Just Not That Into You annoyed me, too, because it's Just Not That accurately getting at the issue. For me, the problem isn't fear of rejection via "different portals." When a conversation meanders from Facebook to e-mails to texts to phone calls, I'm not really all that conscious that the portal is shifting. The problem is that, because of all the portals, the bar for rejection has gone from pole vault to hurdle to metal beam lying on the ground. We've come to expect constant communication and instant responses, which means that five minutes of waiting for a reply from a guy (via whatever) can be agonizing. The other day, I actually instructed gchat never to show my boyfriend in my list of friends, because I couldn't handle seeing that green "available" ball next to his name without wondering why he wasn't responding to that e-mail I'd sent him a few hours earlier. (After a few minutes I realized I was being crazy. But you see my point.)
If these new movies and shows don't capture the way love has changed in the era of smartphones, are there better examples out there? Surely not the early attempts like You've Got Mail (does anyone actually read IMs aloud while typing them?). Quarterlife and Gossip Girl seem to understand how people actually use their computers and cell phones, but both treat all things social as if they are tied to a single Web presence, which isn't quite right either. The stars of One Tree Hill
are too incestuous to bother with dating sites and too up in one another's faces to need cell phones or e-mail. And on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs they're still using pagers!
Has anyone actually seen a movie or TV show that does this well—shows people meeting and communicating online or by cell in a way that doesn't make you cringe? Accepting nominations in The Fray!
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Willa, if you think dating in the Internet age is hard, try dating while autistic. This is a snippet from the autobiography of Quinn Bradlee, son of Washington royalty Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. (Here is a fuller excerpt.) The book is very moving on the subject of his troubles navigating relationships with women, particularly his powerhouse of a mother, and the average potential date. It's written through the eye of a mildly autistic person but speaks to the Everykid:
I seem to have the worst luck with women no matter how hard I try. I feel they're picking up some vibe from me that says I can't handle a relationship, or I'm not mature enough to be in a relationship. Whatever it is, I am apparently doing something wrong. I've taken and followed all of the advice my friends and my parents have given me about dating, but it hasn't quite worked out for me yet.
I have trouble with reading cues and I can never tell if girls like me sexually. If you're having an intimate friendly conversation and a woman is smiling and you're making her laugh, then you think that maybe it's possible to take it to the next level. But, typically, the day after that kind of thing would happen with a girl, I wouldn't hear back from her.
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A guest post from intern Margaret Johnson:
A few thoughts came to mind when I saw the video demonstration of Esquire's May "Mix 'N' Match" cover, which, according to AdAge, is "perforated to split into a flip book that will let readers play mix and match with the facial features of President Barack Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake." First of all, a video demonstration? I thought the point of Esquire was to teach men how not to look desperate. More importantly, is Esquire demeaning the president by making his facial features interchangeable with those of an actor and a pop musician? (Not that you aren't Obama-dreamy, George and Justin.) Or is this a claim that we need to focus on the man behind the image, which can be so easily sliced and reassembled to please or amuse the beholder?
And what's with the physical format of the flip book? This is the magazine whose October 2008 issue featured a digital cover. Those build-a-man flaps on the new cover seem decidedly analog to me. The gimmick is, of course, aimed at boosting newstand sales, which every magazine needs right now, but the editors of Esquire know that even October's über-gimmick didn't sell as many copies as Angelina Jolie did on the July 2007 cover or Johnny Depp did this January. Do the folks at Esquire think our attention spans have decreased to the point that we need our magazines to "do something" besides provide a good read? Are they afraid their stories alone are no longer enough to engage us? If so, is that about the quality of the stories, the quality of the readers, or just the fact that to sell anything in this economy you have to throw in some bells and whistles? The video demonstration is pasted below—does it make you want to buy the fancy flip book and play along?
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Though some have speculated that the recession might create more equality in the domestic sphere, apparently the recession means less of an even playing field when it comes to college admissions. According to the New York Times, in this time of plummeting endowments, colleges may be looking more favorably on students who can afford tuition without financial aid.
Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.
I wonder if this is such a terrible thing. Even without the recession, my generation is crippled with staggering debt, mostly from higher education. If there's no guaranteed reward of a moderately well-paying job at the other end, is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?
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Does dating ever change? That's the question hovering around ABC's newest dramedy Cupid, about a man who's either the god of love or a delusional crazy who thinks he is. The show, which premieres tonight, stars Bobby Cannavale as Trevor, the maybe-god on a mission to match 100 couples, and Sarah Paulson as Claire, the supremely grounded love interest/celebrity shrink/court appointed guardian with whom he trades witty banter, heartfelt epiphanies and mixed drinks. The show's central tension isn't whether Trevor's really Cupid (he's probably Cupid), but whether Trevor's faith in the big romantic gesture and love at first sight is a better—more powerful, more helpful, more successful—approach to relationships than Claire's level-headed belief in mutual respect and taking it slow. In other words, does a guy schooled on love and dating 3,000 years ago know more about matchmaking than an MD schooled by the Ivy League and Oprah? The show's answer is usually yes: Claire really needs to lighten up.
But dating has changed—not just in, erhm, the last 3,000 years, but in the 11 years since Cupid first aired. Fourteen episodes of the series, with Jeremy Piven (so charming once!) and Paula Marshall in the lead roles were broadcast in 1998 (you can watch them here). Except for a new cast and a move from Chicago to New York, Cupid has weathered its hiatus more or less intact—and that's too bad, because this little thing called the Internet took off in the interim and it really shook up how lovelorn strangers meet and interact with one another.
In both the original and current series, Claire runs a singles group where Trevor finds the heartsick men and women he eventually pairs off. In the old series that was an acceptable narrative trick. Now it's implausible. If Cupid were a mortal he wouldn't be bothering with small-fry gatherings, he'd be running a dating site. Maybe one called something like... Okcupid.com?
The cloying speech Drew Barrymore gave in He's Just Not That Into You ("I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my blackberry so I texted to his cell, so now you have to go around checking all these different portals to get rejected. It's exhausting") irked, but it was onto something. Technology has made dating, and the manners of dating, newly strange. Cupid gives all this fresh weirdness a pass because it's shackled to 1998, a not-so-distant past that's long gone. Cupid's not lacking all charm (it's made by the same guy who wrote Veronica Mars after all), but it's not nearly as interesting, or relevant, as it could be.
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Hanna, I can't get too hot and bothered about the Choose Life license plates in Virginia either. There's a confusing legal fight over whether these plates like these violate the First Amendment right to free speech, which as Dahlia explained way back in 2003, comes down to this:
To understand the free speech issue, it's important to clarify whether specialty license plates represent government speech or private citizens' speech. Why? Because there is no question that the government may speak in a partisan manner without violating the Constitution. The First Amendment applies only to government efforts to restrict private speech; it doesn't apply back to the state itself. This is why the state is perfectly free to tell you to stay in school, or drive sober, without having to broadcast the opposing viewpoint. States may have preferences for all sorts of messages. But if, on the other hand, the government opens a forum for private speakers—if it creates a park or builds a street where you and I are free to talk—it cannot be in the business of censoring some viewpoints while permitting others. This is the core of the First Amendment.
Lesson: If you don't like the Choose Life message, come up with a pro-choice one of your own to propose to Gov. Kaine and the Virginia legislature. If they nix it, then maybe you have grounds to sue. There's something odd about a government-issued Choose Life plate, but then there's something odd about zipping around with OPNWDE on the back of your car too, as the guys on You Look Nice Today have pointed out.
About the Kansas ultrasound law: It sounds like this one merely requires abortion providers to give women the option of seeing an ultrasound before the procedure. If so, ok. Most clinics do ultrasounds before an abortion anyway, to make sure they know how many weeks along the pregnancy is. Ten other states, by my count, have laws like this one in Kansas, and as Will Saletan has argued in Slate, why should women be shielded from accurate scientific information, which is what an ultrasound is?
But there's another kind of ultrasound law that's quite different in my mind. Under this sort of statute, which is the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, the state requires women to review the results of an ultrasound even when the patients expressly say they do not want to. This is creepy and invasive paternalism. The Oklahoma statute went so far as to provide that a woman could avert her eyes from the image on the screen. A law that has to grant such permission doth protest too much. More here.
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Jess, I one-up your post about Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius approving the ultrasound law with this one. Virginia Gov. and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine signed a bill that allows the state to sell "Choose Life" license plates and give some of the revenue over to "crisis pregnancy centers." These centers have always driven pro-choice groups crazy. In their eyes, these are places that draw in innocent pregnant teens and convince them to keep their babies. NARAL, for example, is furious at Kaine. But supporting the centers is not the equivalent of restricting the right to abortion. These are private groups that sprung up to counteract places like Planned Parenthood. Fair play, it seems to me. Secondly, there is a rich irony here in the wrath toward Kaine. A devout Catholic, he was one of the first to show that Democrats too could use their faith to win elections. He became a party hero when he was elected governor in a Southern state in 2005, and paved the way for the party's return. Now when the left realizes he wasn't kidding—he actually IS a Catholic. Well, we can't have that, can we?
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Last week Miss Universe visited Gitmo, and blogged about it here. This is not a joke. I highlighted my favorite bits.
This week, Guantanamo!!! It was an incredible experience.
We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big lunch and then we visited one of the bars they have in the base. We talked about Gitmo and what is was like living there. The next days we had a wonderful time, this truly was a memorable trip! We hung out with the guys from the East Coast and they showed us the boat inside and out, how they work and what they do, we took a ride around the land and it was a loooot of fun!
We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the Army were amazing with us.
We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting.
We took a ride with the Marines around the land to see the division of Gitmo and Cuba while they were informed us with a little bit of history.
The water in Guantanamo Bay is soooo beautiful! It was unbelievable, we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour. We went to the glass beach, and realized the name of it comes from the little pieces of broken glass from hundred of years ago. It is pretty to see all the colors shining with the sun. That day we met a beautiful lady named Rebeca who does wonders with the glasses from the beach. She creates jewelry with it and of course I bought a necklace from her that will remind me off Guantanamo Bay :)
I didn't want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.
I was back in NY on Wednesday and on Thursday I did some paper work at the office and went out for dinner. On Friday I flew to Miami for the weekend because I had a photo shoot for the magazine People en Espanol. So hopefully I might be a little lucky and have some time off to take the sun for a while :)
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Are the Republicans lining up for their first Obama filibuster? Dawn Johnsen, the president's pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, was supposed to come up for a confirmation vote in the Senate today. Instead, as Scott Horton alerts us, the vote was put on hold. This comes after every Republican on the Senate judiciary committee voted against her, except for Arlen Specter, who abstained. The Office of Legal Counsel is the sensitive branch of DoJ that advises the president on what's legal and what's not--past home to John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and the infamous Bush torture memos. What's at issue in Dawn's nomination—disclosure: She is a former Slate contributor and a friend—is her opposition to that past record and her determination to change it. If the right is going to go after her as they have, then the Obama administration and the left will have to step up in her defense. The NYT ran an editorial supporting her last week; now that seems like the opening drum roll in what will be a longer campaign.
Meanwhile, similar opponents seem to be testing the waters on going after Harold Koh, nominated to be Hillary Clinton's chief legal adviser in the State Department. Disclosure on this one, too: I have a fellowship at Yale Law School this year, where Harold was the dean until he went to D.C. last week for this appointment. The opening salvo against Harold is an attack by former Bush speech writer Meghan Clyne in the New York Post that's full of wild-eyed distortion. Perhaps the silliest but also sensational claim—and thus the one that Clyne leads with—is that Harold thinks that "sharia law could apply to disputes in U.S. courts." This supposedly comes from what one lawyer thinks he heard Dean Koh say to the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007. Honestly, this is the best they can come up with—one guy's account of Islamic takeover after drinks and golf? Let's get behind these lawyers, Obama and the left, and stop the trouble before it really starts.
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Earlier this month, Abby wrote about a Texas bill that would require doctors to give ultrasounds before performing abortions, and now pro-choice Kansas Gov. (and potential Health and Human Services head) Kathleen Sebelius has signed a similar bill into law. According to the New York Times, "The measure, which the governor signed on Friday, requires abortion providers who use ultrasound or monitor fetal heartbeats to give their patients access to the images or sound at least 30 minutes before an abortion."
The Times also quotes Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri CEO Peter Brownlie, who says that the Overland Park location of Planned Parenthood "already allowed women to see ultrasound images, but that few accepted the offer." Somehow I am unmoved by this legislation. I think that most women who are confident in their reproductive choices will not want to see the ultrasound and that giving them the option won't deter them from their conviction. What do you think, Slate women? Is this really a defeat for pro-choicers?
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Newsweek’s big lady-baiting package this week offers a detour from the catfighting between Princeton Nobelist Paul Krugman and the White House (What? You can call it that when boys do it, too!) in order to focus on the creeping “diva-ization” of America’s young women:
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that's got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras" look ordinary. "My daughter is 8, and she's like, so into this stuff it's unbelievable," says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. "From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities."
Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading.
The article’s premise, essentially, is that women will spend a lot of money (see infographic) on things that are judged by enlightened society to be feckless and unnecessary. Yet these imposed norms about beauty get less play than the footage of hens-in-waiting clucking about lip gloss.
Perhaps the sensationalism arises because the pressures on women are so timeless. While gamely revealing her own, er, elaborate, grooming habits, author Jessica Bennett makes the fair point that TV shows like My Super Sweet 16 “raise the bar for what's considered over the top.”
But I don’t think girls are any any more worried about sprouting crow's feet than they used to be. Rather, the 21st century has amplified the traditional idea that appearance can be perfected via externalities. Leaps in technological capacity—regarding both products and the marketing thereof—have increased the pressure on us all. Suddenly, young women can learn where to get liposuction, and Botox (themselves improvements over the Ice Age techniques of never eating and never aging) via text message, or Web advertisement. They can compare themselves to schoolmates and celebrities instantly on Facebook. When I was a 'tween, you had to wait for YM magazine to come in the mail before you felt bad about yourself.
As usual, the immensely talented Sarah Haskins nails the convergence of stupidity and modernity better than I do: “Products that use pictures of science” are clearly the culprit.
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This post comes from Tim Noah, a Slate-ster of the XY variety who has written extensively on health care in the United States, in response to our conversation about Natasha Richardson and socialized medicine:
The Great Debate about whether socialism (in the form of Canada's single-payer health care system) killed actress Natasha Richardson turns largely on the availability of CT scans. In the March 26 New York Post, a stateside physician named Cory Franklin wrote:
Richardson's evaluation required an immediate CT scan for diagnosis-followed by either a complete removal of accumulated blood by a neurosurgeon or a procedure by a trauma surgeon or emergency physician to relieve the pressure and allow her to be transported.
But Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts is a town of 9,000 people. Its hospital doesn't have specialized neurology or trauma services. It hasn't been reported whether the hospital has a CT scanner, but CT scanners are less common in Canada.
Two days later Max Harrold, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, acting on a hunch that at the very least Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts has telephones, phoned the radiology department of the hospital in that remote town to which the actress was taken after she complained of a headache. Do they have a CT scanner? They do.
I take Rachael's point that the United States has almost five times as many MRI machines per person as Canada, and about 1.5 times as many CT scanners. But this is not an unmixed blessing. In her excellent book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, Shannon Brownlee writes, "In cases involving a head injury, giving a patient an unnecessary CT can be almost as bad as not ordering a test and missing a brain bleed" because a CT scan can render a false negative and/or cause unnecessary delay in treatment. A common complaint about contemporary medicine is that doctors are so fretful about malpractice lawsuits and so enamored of medical technology generally that they over-rely on high-tech imaging at the expense of more reliable diagnostic methods. British doctor/blogger John Crippen writes:
These days, and particularly in the medico-legal climate prevalent in North America, it would be a brave doctor indeed who did not wait for the CT scan before drilling the burr holes. It would be a career making or career breaking decision. Few American doctors are brave. Defensive medicine is the order of the day. You cannot have a migraine in the USA without someone ordering an MRI scan.
Had this accident happened at base camp on Everest in a helicopter-blocking snowstorm, a doctor would likely have drilled. Had this accident happened in a ski resort forty years ago, before CT Scanners had been invented, a doctor would likely have drilled. Then a subdural/epidural haemorrhage was a clinical diagnosis. Apparently minor head injury, lucid interval, headache, sudden deterioration in consciousness, a dilated pupil ... all adds up to an obvious diagnosis.
Medical technology has deskilled doctors.
Also, she really should have worn a helmet.
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Here's my culture question of the week: Is it possible to put on a good production of Hedda Gabler in an era when women have so many choices available to them? Hedda, after all, is one of Ibsen's great female characters, a restless housewife with an existential streak; she roams the rooms of her villa wondering how to achieve freedom. (A much more interesting version of the Betty character on Mad Men.)
I ask because on Saturday I saw the Roundabout Theater Company's new production of Hedda Gabler, starring Mary-Louise Parker. And I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since, because Parker's interpretation of Hedda is at once incoherent and fascinating. She plays Hedda with a detached, ironic anomie that illuminates the play's dry humor but makes it hard to understand the character's motivations (particularly her choice at the very end of the play). Afterward, I was reading about the play on the Web and saw that David Edelstein asks a version of this question is his sharp New York review of the Parker production. He's on to something interesting: Today, I think, contemporary movies, plays, and art are much more likely to depict trapped women in one of two distinct ways: Either they are trapped by social circumstances, trapped in a non-progressive society (think Betty in Mad Men) or they suffer from some existential ennui. (Think, I don't know, something like 4.48 Psychose.) But you rarely see a female character in which these two issues are blended together... Or do you? In any case, I think it gets to part of what makes Hedda so difficult to produce today.
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Eve,
It makes me uncomfortable when individual medical cases become fodder for national debate, from Terri Schiavo to Natasha Richardson. It seems macabre to turn a family's private grief into a public debate. But since you brought it up ...
You make a valid point about helicopters: They are perhaps overused here. I certainly wouldn't want to use one in the event of non-life-threatening injuries.
But I had a different takeaway about what makes Natasha Richardson's death the fault of socialized medicine. The New York Post's article on this matter suggested that the first hospital that Richardson went to might not have had a CT scanner and that by the time she got to a hospital with one, it was too late. This blog post says that she did have a CT scan at the local hospital, but that she wasn't transferred to a larger hospital with a trauma center for another three hours.
Either way, it sent me a-Googling for numbers comparing the United States with Canada. During a conversation with a friend who'd just had an MRI, my friend told me that the MRI tech had told her there are more MRI scanners in Orange County, Calif., than there are in Canada. If that's inadmissible as hearsay, there is this: Canada in 2007 had 419 CT scanners and 222 MRI scanners. We have more than 10,000 MRI scanners in the United States and more than 6,000 CT scanners. Even if you account for the population difference (33 million people in Canada vs. 300 million in the United States), this country is outfitted better with high-tech life-saving medical equipment.
Did socialized medicine kill Natasha Richardson? I don't think we can say one way or the other, and I hope that her family is able to ignore the hubbub and grieve in peace. Health care in this country is far from perfect. But even with all the problems we have, this is just one reason that I'll take my chances in the United States over Canada any day.
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For months, or maybe it's years by now, critics of the Bush administration's wrong turn into torture have been musing that the officials behind it might soon be forced to stop traveling abroad. Behind this fond hope or fear, depending on where you stand, lies the threat of prosecution abroad for war crimes. And now the Spanish may oblige, courtesy of prosecutor Baltasar Garzon, who made his name going after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Garzon’s list of six high-level American officials is in line with much of the reporting, including ours at Slate, on who knew about and approved coercive interrogation—Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Jay Bybee, Doug Feith, and John Yoo. You can’t fault the Spanish for settling for the low-level bad apples, as the Abu Ghraib prosecutions here in the United States did. Though missing from the list are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush—suggesting that Garzon is bold, but not crazy bold.
Losing the freedom to travel abroad isn’t the more serious curtailment of freedom that some critics of the administration might wish upon these men. But it’s not nothing, either. It’s an embarrassment. It pushes these former officials off the world stage—now they’ll have to think twice about defending themselves before a European audience, even if they want to. The threat of prosecution is also, of course, a challenge to American dominance. At home, it will fuel the criticism of international treaties and institutions that in any way purport to give foreign courts jurisdiction over Americans. Abroad, this news from Spain is of a piece with international defiance of the United States over the financial crisis leading into the Group of 20 meeting this week. How has the United States lost its moral authority abroad? Let us count the ways.
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Pixies bassist, Breeders front woman, former high-school cheerleader and all-around indie rock icon Kim Deal was on NPR's Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me yesterday morning, because the show was broadcasting out of her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Superficially, Kim is a cautionary tale: She is a seminal figure in indie rock who even had a good deal of commercial success with the Breeders in the early '90s, only to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction and end up living with her parents back in Ohio. But listening to her girlish Midwestern twang on the radio yesterday, it's clear that Kim is not some pathetic example. She charmingly answered questions about squid sex and seemed in general good spirits. It's more proof that Cool as Kim Deal is a state of mind and not about the trappings of rock stardom. For you '90s-rock aficionados, here's a clip of the Breeders' biggest hit, "Cannonball."
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During the brief period when I wanted to be a photographer, Helen Levitt, who died Sunday, was my muse. She was the slightly underappreciated member of the great '40s generation of photographers; profiles always mention that she was "friends" with James Agee and Walker Evans, as if she couldn't stand alone. She always said, girlishly, that she was too shy and tech-phobic to be a photojournalist, although that's essentially what she was. She roamed the poorer neighborhoods of New York and captured what I always think of as the theater of hanging out. She loved to photograph people on the stoop wearing exaggerated expressions—crying or laughing so hard they look like they're faking it. Often "props" appear in her photos—a cardboard cutout of the president or a strange figure drawn on the street in chalk. Her many photos of children had none of the poster cuteness of Henri Cartier-Bresson's—something I imagine she tried hard to avoid because she was a woman. The effect is of New York as one giant improv, with a huge cast of characters, human and otherwise, and alternating moments of hilarity and grimness.
One thing she did better than any of the male masters is transition to color photography. Her contemporaries seemed scared off by bursts of street color they couldn't control but she just got better and better. In every photo in her book, Slide Show, it's hard to believe she didn't place that red balloon or those aqua shorts just so, but of course she never did. Unlike the men, she was happy to submit to the randomness.
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Sometimes in politics a sudden spewing of bile means that the target of the nastiness is doing something right—at least that’s how the negative attention recently directed Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party feels to me. Last Friday, a Daily Telegraph columnist referred to “the monument to absurdity that is Harriet Harman.”
Harman has been an MP since 1982, serving in a number of Cabinet positions since Labor took power in 1997. She has always come in for scorn: She’s a serious person whose earnest demeanor doesn’t win her points in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the House of Commons. A civil rights lawyer before she went into Parliament, she’s done a lot of work on social-justice issues that, outside the writings of Dahlia Lithwick, rarely lend themselves to laughs.
In the last month or so, though, the anti-Harman murmurs have become a clamor. With Gordon Brown traveling the world, she twice substituted for him at Prime Minister’s Question Time and was mocked and bullied both times. Of course, mockery and bullying are the prevailing tone of PMQ, largely because of the old boy’s club atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament. In his (not terribly kind to Harman) Guardian review of her March 4 PMQ appearance, Simon Hoggart described the Tory opposition acting like “playground bullies [who] had caught the whiff of [Harman’s] victimhood.”
Harman is certainly not blameless—she made some unwise populist comments about banker Sir Fred Goodwin, whose remarkably generous pension plan is more or less the British equivalent of the AIG bonuses—but I suspect the negativity has more to do with Gordon Brown’s sinking popularity. The bookies have Harman as the favorite to succeed him, so, for the ambitious members of her party she is now a serious rival. Apparently, she tends not to brief against her parliamentary colleagues, which means she’s no favorite of political journalists.
But take a look at the video of the March 4 PMQ. When William Hague, her main opponent for the day, brought up Harman’s political ambitions, the Guardian’s Hoggart described her zinger-less response to Hague’s taunting as being made “in the tone of a girl reprimanding her little brother for saying ‘poo.’ ” It’s true that after sitting stone-faced while her fellow MPs indulge in shoulder-shaking laughter at her expense, she simply stands up and launches into a rather dull description of the government’s ideas about “mortgage support.” But these days, isn’t helping people stay in their homes more important to most people than political infighting? When ordinary voters see videos like this, I suspect they’ll relate more closely to earnest Harman than to an entertaining bully like Hague.
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Last night I went to the pharmacy to see if I could pin down something that would speak to Abby's worry that Plan B might change teenage sexual behavior if/when it becomes available OTC to 17-year-olds. That would be the price. I knew the morning-after pill was expensive, and it's been my assumption that a contraceptive for which teenagers have to shell out a lot of money is not a contraceptive that is going to radically change teenage lifestyles. Turned out it is even more expensive than I thought: $49.50, according to the CVS pharmacist leaning discreetly toward me at the "consulting" alcove. "For a single dose?" I kept asking, my voice getting louder so that the man in the other alcove began to look alarmed. One might argue that the real danger of the morning-after-pill is that, at half the price of a pair of Uggs—OK, a third the price—teenagers won't use it at all. It's a little less expensive in some other stores, I think, but not much.
I've always thought Plan B is an important addition to the contraceptive array, because it does something no other pill or device does: contracept after the fact, rather than before. It's the only contraceptive that can stave off unintended pregnancy after a mishap has occurred, forestalling a lot of difficult decisions. This seems distinctive and invaluable—maybe especially for teenagers. The younger a girl is when she has sex, the more likely the sex is coercive rather than consensual, so younger teenagers might have particular need of this. If they can get that kind of money.
But I should also say that the pharmacist provided a gloss that might revive Abby's concerns. When I told her I was writing about girls younger than 18 having easier access, she said, "I think a lot of them are already getting it." She said she sees a number of males 18 and over buying it for their younger girlfriends, "sometimes more regularly than I would like." She thought it would be better if the girls got a prescription for the pill. When I voiced surprise that young men would pay $50 over and over for emergency contraception, she said maybe they were old enough that it didn't seem so much. I am way older than they are, and that sticker price certainly gives me pause. I think it would be interesting to report out how the price affects use.
As for Gardasil, like Megan I am bemused by the fact that sex educators and public health experts worry less about promiscuity among boys. In a way, boys have always seemed to me more vulnerable than girls. If a girl gets unintentionally pregnant, she, at least, has some control over the outcome. If a boy gets a girl unintentionally pregnant, he has none. I'm not saying he should have control, but the consequences, for him, are profound. Maybe that's why those 18-year-old boys are paying big bucks for those pills.
In answer to Jessica's question, I'm not sure whether Gardasil should be mandatory. I am not yet convinced that it should. I do have a problem making it mandatory too young. And I think that doctors who administer it should have some training in how to talk to the really still quite young children they are thinking about administering it to. As the parent of kids who have just recently survived their yearly dose of Family Life Education, I have always believed in erring on the side of too much information: When they come home looking shellshocked I listen, explain, correct, commiserate, whatever. But my frankness is nothing compared to the gory detail that one pediatrician went into when my daughter, who was barely older than 12, went for her last checkup. The doctor brought up the topic of Gardasil and when my daughter asked what it was, I was prepared to say simply that it is a shot that can prevent cervical cancer, which seemed to me, as her parent, really all she needed to know just then. But helpful Doc took this opportunity to go into an excruciating level of detail about genital warts, multiple sex partners, and how it would be good if you were always monogamous, but we all know how things work in reality, and my daughter's eyes kept getting bigger and more horrified, and I wanted to take one of those vaudeville crooks to TMI Doc's neck. I kept expecting the good doctor to add something like, "And then there are the nights when you get so drunk you don't even remember his name in the morning."
It's true that all these good innovations do have unforeseen consequences, in the case of Gardasil the possibility that young girls given the vaccine may end up scarred, in other ways, even as they're being protected. Their mothers, too.
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Jess, I'm glad you brought up the Gardasil news. I'm amazed (if not surprised) by how different the rhetoric surrounding boys getting it is. A while back, I wrote about the totally bizarre idea that an HPV vaccine for girls would somehow promote promiscuity. As you may remember, this was the conservative critique opponents of the HPV vaccine: Having one would turn girls into sluts, and even allowing your teen daughter to getone somehow besmirched her purity. Never mind that according to the National Cancer Institute nearly 3700 women die a year of cervical cancer, which sometimes develops from the HPV virus; implicit in the opponents' critique was the idea that it was only "loose" girls who got HPV. (And I guess they don't matter as much. Or, serves them right.)
What was so strange was how the conservative firestorm somehow ignited another kind of anxiety, one more typically associated with crunchy liberal types: namely, vaccine anxiety. When Gardasil began to be administered, there were widespread reports of group fainting fits among the girls who received it. And so even liberals began to wary about the drug. I can't help but feel that the liberal anxiety grew out of the conservative one, partly because teenage girls, so quick to internalize external cues, were picking up on the fact that this particular vaccine had...drama at the heart of it. Every vaccine produces a few adverse reactions in those to whom it's administered; but in this case, those adverse reactions were being magnified, it seems, by the reactions of parents primed to be nervous about the vaccine, and by suggestible teenage girls who (in some cases, at least) had more of a psychosomatic response than a purely physical one.
The libertarian in me at times resists the idea of making any vaccine mandatory. But this vaccine will save women's lives. Cancer is not pretty. And it would be awful if our collective squeamishness about female adolescent sexuality meant that this vaccine never became as effective as it could be. To me, the great irony is this: We have been trying to come up with vaccines for cancer for decades. We have spent millions of dollars doing so. Now we found one. And no one wants to use it. Is teen sexuality that scary?
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Has anybody else been picking up on the effort to create a comparative health care storyline out of the Natasha Richardson tragedy? A friend mentioned a couple of days ago that she wondered if Richardson's death from "talk and die" syndrome would have been prevented had she fallen sick in the United States, and then today, this PR e-mail from a think tank that promotes health savings accounts arrived in my inbox:
NEWS REPORTS REVEAL NATASHA RICHARDSON’S DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN PREVENTED WITH U.S. HEALTHCARE
Lack of Equipment Under Government-Run System Delayed Lifesaving Measures
Washington, DC – News reports of the skiing accident, medical treatment and eventual death of actress Natasha Richardson last week shed new light on the limits of the Canadian health care. The timeline of the afternoon’s events indicate that the lack of medical equipment—a trauma helicopter and basic CT scanning equipment at the local hospital—delayed the treatment that may have saved her life.
Well, it's certainly possible. But I'd hope the Natasha Richardson Proof—the Canadian health care system didn't work perfectly for Richardson, ergo it sucks—doesn't become some major PR tactic during a health care debate, because it's a serious case of missing the forest for one tree.
A trauma helicopter might have helped Richardson, but on the flip side, in the United States such helicopters are generally way overused, in part because they're profit makers and because the burden of their costs is distributed in such a way that it isn't appropriately felt: This past September, a Medevac chopper crashed in Maryland, killing three personnel (including one ambulance volunteer, a gig I've done) and one of the two wounded girls it was transporting from the scene of a car crash. Both girls originally had non-life-threatening injuries. "We've just gotten into a situation here in the United States where we think that the helicopters are a panacea," an emergency medicine researcher told the press after the accident. The September crash, sort of the reverse image of the Richardson incident, could be considered an event in which the overabundance of medical equipment killed.
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I can't really say how I came to be reading a recent journal article on "discourses between physical, legal and linguistic frameworks impacting on the New Zealand public toilet." As it turns out, the culture surrounding illegal sex in New Zealand's public bathrooms—known as "bogs"—is full of terrific linguistic subterfuge. Here's a work-safe bit of "bogspeak" from midcentury:
A lockable door was known as a brandy latch, but the door itself was called a trade curtain. A nanti bog was one that was ineffective for cruising. Nochy and sparkle bogs described public toilets that were cruised at night or in the daylight respectively. A bog that had its lights broken to provide some security of darkness at night was called a nochy bog.
"Sparkle bog" sounds like it ought to be the name of a literary magazine. Bogspeak has since evolved into textese (n2 str8 act blks), and the Internet has encouraged the emergence of a written language alongside the older oral locutions.
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There's an interesting profile in this weekend's New York Times Magazine (it's not online yet) of playwright/screenwriter Neil LaBute. You get the impression that press-wary LaBute resigned himself to being interviewed because his latest play, reasons to be pretty, debuts next week, yet the resulting piece is, well, creepy. I'm sure many find LaBute and his work to be creepy already, but I've been a fan. I loved In the Company of Men, a heartless tale of two men who trick and seduce a woman, not for its cruelty but because its fundamental truth was about cruelty, something that seemed to escape the scores of viewers and critics who dismissed it by deeming it misogynistic. I've found his depictions of manhood, how complicated it is to be a man, some of the best discourses on the subject. Your Friends and Neighbors took his vivisections of relationships one step further; in LaBute's reality, nobody wins—regardless of gender, we're screwed equally. In the Times profile, though, LaBute comes across as a strange mix of one-note and enigmatic. First, he appears to be elusive about his Mormon upbringing, his maybe divorce, his estrangment from his children. When his profiler attempts to go deeper, LaBute balks at telling his own truth.
Then LaBute stopped. ‘‘I don’t want to talk about that,’’ he said. ‘‘And I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’’ (Later, LaBute e-mailed me through a publicist and said that if I didn’t mention his wife or kids or religion or misogyny that he’d tell me ‘‘a doozy of a childhood (personal) story that nobody knows about.’’) LaBute stood up and said: ‘‘I have to go. I’m tired of answering questions."
In the end, we never get LaBute's personal story. And maybe that's for the best, leaving us to experience reasons, "a love story about the impossibility of love," at face value, minus the psychobiography of its creator. Or maybe LaBute has something to hide. Reasons director Terry Kinney suggests LaBute is equal parts the misogynist men of which he writes and the deaf girl from In the Company of Men, their brokenhearted victim.
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With all this talk about OTC birth control, we've ignored another recent story about reproductive health: the news that Merck is trying to peddle Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, to boys. According to the Washington Post, when Gardasil was initially recommended for girls as young as 9, the argument against it focused on promiscuity and whether or not the vaccine would encourage girls to have sex. "Now the vaccine's maker is trying to get approval to sell the vaccine for boys," according to the WaPo, "and the debate is focusing on something else entirely: Is it worth the money, and is it safe and effective enough?"
It makes sense to give boys the vaccine as long as its safe, as they are carriers of HPV even though it primarily affects women's health. However, Merck is also lobbying for Gardasil to become mandatory for school attendance for girls—something that gives conservative organizations like the Family Research Council palpitations. "We do not oppose the development or distribution of the vaccine," the FRC's Peter S. Sprigg tells the WaPo. "The only concern we have is about proposals to make vaccination mandatory for school attendance. It's a parental rights issue." So I ask you ladies, should the administration of the vaccine be left to the parents? Or is HPV a public health nuisance on the level of measles and should Gardasil be mandatory?
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A trailer (see below) for the upcoming film of Where the Wild Things Are is out on the Web, and while I know the world has bigger problems, watching it infuriated me. I don't want a real-life Max, who goes to school and has a backstory! I especially don't want to see his face while he peers at his parents kissing in their bedroom! Nor am I moved by the 2009 special-effects version of Maurice Sendak's 1963 monster illustrations. Why did Hollywood have to come for this short poem of a children's book, which I'II bet many of us know by heart?
The magic of children's literature is the magic of imagination, of making up the visual renderings and actions of the characters for yourself. I know that some books are filmmaking candy, and to the inevitable screen version of Harry Potter I am resigned. I'll even concede that once in a while the movie or TV version of a kids' book augments the original, though for me these exceptions are usually cartoons, like The Hobbit. (And no I am not pleased that there seems to be a real-life version of that one in the works.) But do the imagination thieves in Hollywood really have to rob me of Max? All I want from him are the few words Sendak gives him. No more.
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Vampires have been done to—undeath?—this year, and most people have probably quenched their neck-blood thirst with True Blood, Twilight, and Let the Right One In. But as a longtime Buffy fan and a lover of all things CW, I can't wait for the new drama Vampire Diaries, which I just read some buzz about. As vampireophiles know, all mortal actors get about 50 times hotter when playing a vampire. (Was anyone else shocked to see James Marsters looking all drawn and old in P.S. I Love You—a mere shell of the sexy, leather-clad non-man he was as Spike?) So the combination of Ian Somerhalder (blue-eyed Boone from Lost) and Zach Roerig (sexy cowboy from Friday Night Lights) is almost too sizzling to imagine. Willa, do you have any inside info on what to expect?
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In all the XX Factor rejoicing of making Plan B available to 17-year-olds, no one has mentioned one peep about any of the possible consequences this change could bring about to high school sexual culture—we are talking about juniors and seniors in high school here, not adults, after all. Judge Korman's ruling is certainly a triumph of "science"—in the sense that there's no known greater physiological harm to 17-year-olds vs. 18-year-olds taking the drug. And from the research I've done, I haven't been able to find any distinct scientific reason that the limit is 17 and not 16 or 18—in fact, Judge Korman implied that the drug should be available to even younger women.
By definition, most of the legal age limits the government imposes are arbitrary in a scientific sense, but less arbitrary from a cultural sense. Why 16 to get your driver's license? Why 21 to drink? Why 65 to qualify for Medicare? Sure, there are basic principles that dictate the ballpark age-range for laws, but there's nothing usually medically or psychologically magical about any of those numbers. To me they're more a reflection of our cultural expectations and traditional chapters of American life.
So in this case we're talking about a law that takes control away from parents' rights to be involved in the lives of their not-yet-legal-age children. How you want to live your life once you're an adult is one thing, but laws like these make sex something completely private and of little physical consequence for high schoolers! I get that there's nothing "scientifically" wrong with this—but science is hardly the final promoter of happiness and mental health. So while Emily and Kerry seem to think the Plan B ruling is something to celebrate, I can't help but think that having easy access to this drug is going to have a serious impact in high school culture—and not necessarily in a way that empowers and encourages teenage girls to become confident and successful women down the road.
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In her first trip to Mexico as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton put some of the blame on us for the drug violence that is ravaging Mexican society and now spilling over the border. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," she said. Ain't that the truth. I wish this meant that the Obama administration was going to consider decriminalization as the most obvious solution to this failed drug war. You'd think we would have learned from Prohibition that making illegal the human desire to take the edge off is bound to fail. You'd think the billions of dollars spent on this war and all the lives lost to violence and incarceration would have taught us that. But I'm sure there is no political will to change the institutionalized insanity of our drug laws, whose perverse incentive has been to create these criminal cartels.
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Emily, thanks for the link to that meta-analysis in cautious support of over-the-counter birth control. For what it's worth, I certainly didn't mean to imply that annual cancer screenings are a waste of time. I am arguing that doctor's visits made solely for the purpose of obtaining permission to access a relatively safe form of contraception are pointlessly and harmfully burdensome. I've had to make quite a few such visits, in part because I move frequently and am incapable of getting an overworked doctor on the phone with an understaffed pharmacy. It's possible that I am overgeneralizing from my own deeply annoying experiences.
I've lived in countries where the pill is kept behind the counter and would be more than happy with such a compromise. But the FDA, unlike its counterpart agencies in England and Canada, only very rarely considers this third option due to complex regulatory barriers. (When the FDA rejected OTC status for Merck's Mevacor, for instance, several panelists said they'd be comfortable with the drug as it is sold in British pharmacies; in other words, behind the counter. They weren't given such an option, so the panel overwhelmingly voted down the application.) It's not clear that the FDA even has the authority to create a third class of drugs. But thanks in small part to Plan B, it looks like our binary classification system might be changing.
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Today is a bad one for the lipstick level: first is news that despite its reputation for trendy cheapness, H&M profits fell 12 percent this quarter. According to Women's Wear Daily, H&M blames the profit plunge on "currency fluctuations."
Even worse is this human interest story from CNN, about a recently married woman who moved in with her ex-husband to make ends meet. It sounds like a nightmare on paper, but CNN makes Nicole Thompson-Arce's relationship with her ex, Craig, actually sound sort of sweet: "The ex-husband hasn't dated since the divorce. He said it's because he's been focused on work and taking care of the kids. Thompson-Arce, however, said that she and her husband are forever trying to get Thompson on the dating scene and want him to meet someone special."
One silver lining is that weekly jobless claims fell more than expected last week, to 646,000 from 658,000 the week before that. However, claims are still at their highest since October 1982.
This week's lipstick level is 15. Things are pretty bleak when shantytowns start making a comeback.
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Just when you thought it was safe to channel surf, it turns out HBO is making a movie out of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal of yesteryear. The title? The Special Relationship. Special, indeed. The casting is just plain odd. Dennis Quaid is Wild Bill. Hillary Clinton? Julianne Moore. Apparently, the film focuses less on Slick Willy's hijinks and more on the president's relationship with Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen), which devolved purportedly due to the sex scandal. Peter Morgan, who scored with Frost/Nixon, wrote the screenplay and is set to direct. Supposedly, Quaid beat out some actual A-listers for the role—Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins. I wonder if he truly eclipsed them or if the actors were steered away from taking the part of a man tasked with running the country who couldn't keep his hands off the help. Who'll play Lewinsky? Mia Kirshner? Megan Fox? Jessica Simpson? Nope. "Morgan has decided to use only archive footage of her culled from TV news bulletins and video of her closed-door testimony to Congress." Well, maybe the real Lewinsky will sell a few handbags out of it.
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An answer from Slate medical columnist Amanda Schaffer to my question about why the Pill is a prescription drug. Amanda supports, with caveats, Kerry's argument that oral contraceptives should be sold over the counter:
The downside risks of the pill (strokes, breast cancer) are pretty small, especially with newer formulations. And the upside of reducing ovarian cancer risk (as well as preventing unwanted pregnancy, of course), has led some researchers to argue for over-the-counter access; in fact, a meta-analysis in the Lancet from last year had an accompanying editorial making this case. The counterargument is that women who smoke or get migraines should not be on the pill, and a doctor's involvement might prevent that from happening. Plus, since women stay on oral contraceptives for long periods of time, it may be wise to have more medical oversight.
Amanda and I disagree with you, Kerry, that annual visits to the gynecologist are a waste of time. Breast exams, pelvic exams—that's trouble-catching time.
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Meghan, thank you for writing something about the death of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who killed himself earlier this week at the age of 47. I've been unsettled by this news all week but unable to think of anything to say besides: how horribly and irredeemably sad. To readers who grew up on the myth of Sylvia and Ted (and if readers have a tendency to mythologize Sylvia Plath, it's also because she mythologized herself, with maddening narcissism and consummate literary skill, in her poems and journals), Nicholas will always be the baby of Plath's brilliant final poems, the one whose "clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing." "I want to fill it with color and ducks/ The zoo of the new," she wrote in the poem "Child." Instead, her legacy to him was a lifelong struggle with depression, what the last lines of that poem call "this dark/ Ceiling without a star." "The pain you wake to is not your own," she assured her then-9-month-old in "Nick and the Candlestick." But, of course, it was: Our mother's pain is always our own. While there's no way of knowing whether Nicholas' depression was the result of nature, nurture, or both, it's difficult to imagine a more painful early childhood: Assia Wevill, the woman Ted Hughes left Plath for and who would raise Nicholas and his sister for six years after their mother died, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter in a grotesque copycat suicide/murder six years after Plath's death.
Like you, I found the New York Times' roundup of tributes to Plath surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous (including, for me, Elaine Showalter's, which argues for Plath's inclusion in the "they-died-too-young" literary pantheon alongside Keats without giving a sense of what her contribution to 20th-century poetry actually was). I've always thought that, had Plath lived, she might have become one of the great poets of motherhood. Her poems about pregnancy are delightful (and unexpectedly playful for a poet we associate with suicide and despair), and her description of the experience of childbirth in her journals, which you mentioned in a post some time back, is the least sentimentalized and most gripping I've ever read. The awful news of her son's death seals the deal: The poet who could have been the bard of maternity (among the most under-represented of all human experiences in literature) will now be remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of maternal depression.
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Condi Rice appeared on the Tonight Show last night as her first post-White House event (click here to watch), and the always affable Jay Leno asked her some semi-political questions. Leno inquired about George Bush's historical legacy ("History has a long arc, and what is popular today and today’s headlines are rarely the same as history’s judgments") and whether or not she'd be giving the Obama administration public advice ("We owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it"). Rice gave an utterly dignified and commendable interview for a general interest show. Of course, Leno's not pressing her on the torture meted out at Gitmo, but that's not really his job.
"I am so happy to get up in the morning, read the newspaper, and not think I have to do anything about what’s in it," Condi said last night. But as details of the torture tactics continue to emerge, reading the newspaper may not be so pleasurable, and history's judgment may not be so benign.
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I love studies that unravel the mysterious predilections of children. Especially when they remind us that young minds aren't mini versions of older ones. This new study, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, explains why when you tell your preschooler 10 times to put on his coat before he goes outside, he won't, and then he'll complain that he's cold. The previous assumption, the researchers said, was that kids were doing what adults do—listen, take in information, use it to plan—and just doing it badly. But this study suggests that they're doing something different. They listen, store what they hear, and then only use it after an experience (like being cold) triggers them to. Eureka. The problem isn't "in one ear, out the other." It's in one ear and stored up for later. Like a squirrel.
The finding even comes with advice for parents about how to hound their kids more effectively. From Science Daily, quoting lead researcher and psychology professor Yuko Munakata:
"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom.' "
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I imagine a lot of you saw that a few days ago, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide. Today, the New York Times has devoted a short commentary section to answering the question "Why the Plath Legacy Lives." To answer that question, they've wrangled short pieces from smart commentators like Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). Of them all, only Elaine Showalter begins to answer the question by really addressing Plath's work.
Certainly Plath's honesty about suicide helps create a mythology about her, but it's hardly the whole reason readers are drawn in. Plath made being a woman an equal subject for the imagination as being a man, and she did it (mostly) without being didactic or ideological, unlike many of her peers. Plath's poetry is astonishing for its musical insistence; she was inspired by nursery rhymes (which she was reading to her children) to explore hard, repetitive rhymes as a way of creating meaning. Her poems about motherhood, particularly "Morning Song," capture the ambivalence of the mind that has been tangled up in the bodily reality of motherhood. In that poem, she speaks of standing "cow-heavy" in her floral nightgown looking down at her child, whose "moth-breath" has tickled "the flat pink roses" of the wallpaper. And she records an impermissible thought:
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
I have written about Plath for Slate here and here, and for Poetry magazine here, and I continue to think that Ariel, her posthumous book of poems, is one of the most important books of English-language poetry of the 20th century.
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Speaking of the silly, I think the fact that this story from today—about the popularity of candy shops during a recession—is the most e-mailed article at the New York Times Web site says more about public appetites for absurdist, sometimes funny, mostly groan-inducing trend stories during a recession than it does about candy’s allure in times of trouble. I, recessionista, myself bought some sweets recently—but not because pink Peeps make me remember the days when the Dow topped 11,000, but because it’s almost Easter, and man is that stuff on sale. (Also, just as a nod to an actual policy discussion: Corn syrup, subsidized, even/especially in a recession, is still cheap.) Back to the media criticism: Perhaps consumers are trying to escape by eating more junk food—but they're certainly reading more of the equivalent, too.
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On the occasion of daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful's 22nd anniversary (the little-recognized molybdenum anniversary) Entertainment Weekly has a slide show counting up super-couple Ridge and Brooke's many jaunts down the aisle. It's not necessary to know who Ridge and Brooke are to enjoy this list, since it perfectly encapsulates soaps' semi-heroic insistence on remaining absurd with or without prior knowledge of BRidge. Since 1990, the two have been the bride or groom in 19 weddings. For some of these weddings they married each other. For some they married each other's relatives. Some were completed, some were interrupted (by presumed dead wives and other inconveniences), and some took place on beaches. Ridge was shirtless for one, unless a lei counts as a top. All but the most recent (which took place in January 2009) have ended, usually in a divorce. (Sometimes you get married because you think you're carrying one guy's baby, but then it turns out to be his brother's, OK?)
Soaps are the television that time forgot. While the networks and, especially, basic and premium cable are churning out better and better shows, soap operas remain fundamentally the same. There have been some technological advances—Guiding Light shoots digitally now—but the plots are still overdramatic and ridiculous—a dead girl's doppelgänger just showed up on General Hospital. (Please don't ask me how I know this.) The form is hemorrhaging viewers because younger audiences just aren’t interested. I have a hard time imagining what soaps would have to do to attract new viewers in large numbers (not pretending marriage No. 12 is perfect and going to last forever and ever might be a start) and so suspect they won't be on daytime TV indefinitely. Laugh while you can.
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The Observer has an admiring piece on Eliot Spitzer's phoenix-like public image "resurrection." First came the Slate column. This week, there's a Newsweek byline, an interview, and a Nation nomination for treasury secretary. "[H]e says what he thinks!" Slate editor David Plotz crows. "[I]t's back-to-square-one time, and Mr. Spitzer seems to be bringing all of his Sisyphean strength to bear on the project," the Observer admires. "At rare moments, I’ll do my best to add to the public conversation," Spitzer demurs. What struck me as interesting was less this latest installment of a fallen politician's return from a sex scandal (yawn) but the contrast with the media's portrayal of his wife, Silda. The March issue of Vogue makes it more than clear how we're expected to see Mrs. Spitzer a year later: as a victim. "The survivor," the headline slapped next to her reads. I guess, in the end, it's all pretty typical. The public's initial stance of scorn at Spitzer's sexual transgression was just that—a show, designed by a public that wishes to perceive itself as above the very behaviors that its members partake in regularly. Meanwhile, Silda gets stuck in the victim rut, where America will keep her, if it has its way. If we had to perceive her any other way, we'd have to ask ourselves if we would do the same thing that she did—and, if we did so, if we were right in doing so.
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Hah, Jessica, thank you for posting that Meghan-McCain-as-goth-Betty-Boop TV clip. The thing I find the weirdest about McCain is that even as she flaunts her next-gen cred (telling Larry King she likes it when Republicans in their 40s and 50s bash her and encouraging the GOP to get with the 21st-century program), she's fashioning a personal image for herself that's oddly retro: the cute, bubbly, vintage-fashion-dudded (she's got a bit of a Felicity Shagwell look going) girl who can barely add and is all-over sweetly clueless about book-smart things. It's kind of political pundit meets I Dream of Jeannie.
Am I too harsh? It's funny how this whole persona was a lot more charming when it represented McCain's rebellion from being just another rigid, scripted, all-too-professional-and-poised candidate's child, like in this from-the-trail blog post I still remember from last summer:
On our way home we met a police officer whose last name was “McNutt.” It reminded me of "McLovin" in the movie, “Superbad.” It still makes me laugh!
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Emily and Torie, my grasp of the regulatory issues is imperfect, but it’s my understanding that a drug company would have to apply for over-the-counter status through the FDA. (I've never heard a single plausible medical justification for keeping birth control prescription-only.) There are various reasons why drug companies would not want to attempt this; the most obvious being that pharmaceutical companies can charge much higher prices for prescription drugs covered by insurance. Companies would also see resistance from gynecologists, who rely on their prescription powers to keep women coming back for annual appointments.
Torie, I understand your concern about insurance refusing to pay for OTC drugs, but it seems to me that your logic applies to every single drug that has gone over-the-counter, from Prilosec to Nicoderm. Keeping birth control prescription-only actually raises the cost for the poorest women—those without insurance who must pay retail at that the pharmacy counter and pay out of pocket for the doctor’s appointment required to get the prescription. When drugs go OTC the price plummets, so the cost to the consumer without insurance falls. Here's a blurb from a 2006 survey by the Pharmacy Access Partnership, a group that advocates for wider emergency contraception access:
Women said convenience, simplicity and affordability were their highest considerations when choosing their current contraceptive. Fifty-four percent of women also chose their method because it did not require a prescription. African-Americans (65%) were more likely to choose a method because it did not need a prescription, compared to Caucasians (51%) and Latinas (54%). Importantly, 20% of women said the cost of a visit to the doctor was an obstacle in obtaining a prescription contraceptive. Overall, 28% of women have had problems with obtaining a prescription for contraception, filling the prescription or getting to their supplies when they needed them. Women who had fewer resources to manage an unintended pregnancy (uninsured women, single women and younger women) were more likely to have experienced problems with obtaining a prescription for contraception.
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I, too, applaud the move to make Plan B available over the counter for 17-year-olds, but, Kerry, I have to raise one problem that could accompany making hormonal birth control OTC: insurance. Many insurance plans don't cover OTC medication, unless it's a special program intended to keep costs down, like providing an incentive for people to use a specific OTC heartburn medication instead of an expensive prescription drug that's not more effective. Insurance companies like the checks and balances of going through a doctor and a pharmacist before shelling out. Yaz, which you mention, costs about $60 per month retail, I believe, depending on the store, the state, etc. Planned Parenthood and other resources might step in to help, but those of us who already have high copays on birth control would feel the hit if we had to start paying full price. Considering the battles waged over getting insurance companies to pay for birth control, I can't imagine that many plans would be willing to alter their OTC policies to cover the an over-the-counter pill.
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Kerry, interesting point about making regular birth-control available without a prescription. I wonder what the medical reasons for classifying it as a prescription drug are—do you know?
In the meantime, I'm relishing Monday's Plan B decision as a rare fact-based inquiry and denouncement, by a federal judge, of the kind of monkeying around with science that we've long heard pervaded Bush agencies. Federal judges don't interfere with the decisions of federal agencies unless those decisions really, really have no legitimate basis—in legal-ese, they have to be deemed "arbitrary and capricious." This is what Judge Edward Korman concluded in his ruling kicking the Food and Drug Administration for its denial of access to Plan B (the morning-after pill that prevents pregnancy) to girls who are 17 as opposed to women 18 and older.
Because of the FDA's stubborn insistence on its arbitrary age-based distinction, the Plan B pill, which is not a prescription drug, had to be stocked behind the pharmacy counter rather than out on the shelves. And 17-year-olds, of course, weren't allowed to buy it at all. I hear you, Rachael, in wondering whether feminism is broad enough to include women who are pro-life. But making birth control harder to get is a whole different ball game to me. I understand that Plan B falls into a tricky in-between zone because it's post-sex, but I'd like to think we could draw the line on the side that helps the girls and women who want to take it. I only wish Judge Korman's ruling had come earlier, when it would have forced the Bush FDA to get its act together.
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Back during the ridiculous brouhaha over access to the morning-after pill, regulators compromised by making the pill available without a prescription only to women of 18 years of age or older. A federal judge, noting that this restriction is arbitrary and without medical justification, has ordered the FDA to review the policy and make Plan B available to 17-year-olds in 30 days. I imagine that the policy will change pretty quickly; you know things are looking up when the Washington Post has to go to Concerned Women for America to find some quotable pushback.
All of which allows me to climb astride an old hobby horse: Regular old birth control ought to be available without a prescription. Hormonal birth control meets all of the FDA requirements for over-the-counter access; Plan B, after all, is just a mega-dose of the pill. We've all heard stories of women being denied birth control by squeamish doctors and pharmacists; there is no reason such women shouldn't be able to grab stacks of Yaz off the shelf at Walgreens. The aggregate burden of all those pointless doctor's appointments and hourlong pharmacy waits is surely massive.
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Hanna: I was at a "cowgirl" bachelorette party in Texas this weekend, and everyone was talking about Michelle's gardening look. "Heels????" one asked, incredulously. "To hoe?" (Texas is the capital of stylish outdoor clothing: Cowboy boots and hats look good on everyone, but they're also practical.) She looked silly, I agree, but I'm with Dahlia: Let's give Michelle a break. She's gotta wear something.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure you're right the White House garden is just another instance of bourgeois locavorism. Apparently, many Americans hit by the recession are planning vegetable gardens, or so this piece reported. It noted "double-digit" growth in the number of vegetable gardens and reported that many seed catalogs "have run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers." Who knows, of course, whether those seeds will ever be planted.
I like the White House garden. And, in my eyes, it's not just another way of touting the so-called superiority of organic food you can buy at places like Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. Yuppie fetishizaton of organic food, by the by, has led to real, and dangerous, confusion of "healthy" food with "organic"—or expensive—food, according to this New York Times piece. By contrast, the garden underscores the fact that vegetables and fruit are healthy, wholesome, and available (in season) to many. Democracy at work!
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Looks like Meghan McCain is here to stay as a Republican pundit: She has a column out today in the Daily Beast, interviewing Bobby Jindal's wife, Supriya, and she was on Larry King last night talking about her party. It also looks like she's not doing anything to dispel those accusations of ditziness, as Meghan's interview of Supriya was one softball after another. First, Meghan discovers that Supriya excels at Sudoku Samurai and says in response, "Oh my gosh those are so hard! I can barely add! You do those for fun?" Then, Meghan proceeds to ask Supriya a series of questions about her early dates with Bobby, and in the intro she describes Supriya as a positive role model within the Republican Party. Couldn't Meghan have found a single positive Republican role model who was actually elected to office?
Anyway, here's a clip of McCain on Larry King last night, talking about the Republican Party's lack of leadership and her support for gay marriage while wearing a giant hair bow.
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Sometimes events occur that make me feel as though I live in a nation of strangers. My fellow citizens plunking down $24.8 million to see a Nicolas Cage movie (Def: A crummy action thriller in which the willfully hackish actor sports a thinning helmet of strange hair while simultaneously saving the world and confounding viewers who remember When Peggy Sue Got Married, Leaving Las Vegas, or even The Rock) is such an event. But that's exactly what happened this weekend when Cage's "the time capsule predicts the future!" thriller Knowing took the top spot at the box office, ahead of brotastic bromance I Love You, Man and Julia Robert's Duplicity. (Are we bummed that Newsweek guy turned out to be right or what?)
This is not the first time an obviously execrable Nicolas Cage movie has opened big (See National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets), so his success cannot be blamed entirely on the economy, which has been boosting Americans' already endless patience for shlocky films. No, some moviegoers must still really like this guy. I don't get it. He gives me the creeps. Not just minor that-person-keeps-giving-me-weird-looks creeps, but an Oh-lord-I-think-that's-half-a-cockroach-in-my-grilled-cheese creeps. In other words, Mega Creeps.
Cage, a once-serious, seriously weird, Oscar-winning thespian last gave acting the old college try in 2002's Adaptation and has since made much progress crafting a B-movie résumé Bruce Campbell would be proud of. What happened? His transformation, from caring about what he does to so obviously not caring about what he does, plus additional oddities like the hair and the fact that he named his son Kal El (Superman's birth name), adds up to a persona I find freaky and unsettling even while it's saving the world in escapist action movies. But, hey, $24.8 million don't have these same qualms. Can someone please explain?
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Emily and Jessica,
I was very interested in reading Sandra O'Connor's interview in the New York Times Magazine, and I wish she had elaborated more on why she doesn't call herself a feminist. I've never been comfortable identifying as a feminist, but neither do I like the implication that I'm anti-feminist. To me, abortion has always been something of a litmus-test on that front. If being anti-abortion means I can't be part of the club, well, so be it.
But it goes beyond that. Sure, I want women to have equal pay and equal access to education and jobs, and protection from violence and domestic abuse. Yet I still end up with the nagging feeling that feminists talk about women having more opportunities and choices available to them, but are mostly supportive only of those who make the "right" choices—having a career, for example—or focus on the right priorities. (I get a hint of this from Jessica's post, when she says that the pro-life movement and even the cardio-striptease phenomenon have "co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism.") The quest for universal day care, for example, ignores the fact that providing such programs for working families will doubtlessly punish with a higher tax burden those single-income families in which women have chosen to stay at home to raise the kids.
That does not mean I feel a need to be recruited or won over by a cadre of well-meaning feminists who want me to change my mind about how I identify myself. I'm quite content to live in not-quite-a-feminist limbo. So, Emily, to answer your question, maybe it doesn't matter.
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Emily, I've been mulling over your question all morning: Does it matter that Sandra Day O'Connor won't call herself a feminist? My gut instinct is that actions speak louder than words, and as a feminist I would vastly prefer better work policies for women than widespread embrace of the term. But I suspect that O'Connor's reticence to self-identify as a feminist is for different reasons than later generations' reaction to the word.
Though you say that Sarah Palin doesn't call herself a feminist, she actually flip-flopped on the matter: She initially called herself a feminist to Katie Couric but refused to label herself when interviewed by Brian Williams. She's even a member of a organization called Feminists for Life. I suspect that deep down, Sarah Palin does think of herself as a feminist, and that's precisely why I think women of later generations may be uncomfortable with the term: Its meaning has become completely muddled.
So many things have co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism—from the pro-life movement to cardio striptease classes—I wonder if women of generations X and Y are afraid to call themselves feminist because that self-definition is more confusing than illuminating. Sandra Day O'Connor may have been defining herself in opposition to the bra burners, but today's young women don't have such a clear-cut foil.
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Hanna and Dayo: Ouch. Imagine if Michelle Obama had been caught breaking ground on her victory garden in her mommy jeans and a plaid shirt. “What a Hag!” the headlines would read. “E-I-E-I-No!” She couldn't show arms. She couldn't wear pearls. So she opted to do what all women do when they have no good fashion choices: She wore plain, skinny, well-fitting black clothes and hoped her wardrobe would fade out behind the 23 fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School with their shovels and wheelbarrows and puffy coats. No such luck.
The Obama crop isn’t just slated to “delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries.” The plan is to send produce along to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen. This is a nice small lesson in stewardship and compassion that’s been spun as elitist and anti-feminist and inauthentic and out-of-touch because that’s how we talk about nice small gestures. Maybe there really is nothing to wear for those occasions on which one can do nothing right.
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Asked if she calls herself a feminist, Sandra Day O'Connor demurred to Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. That shouldn't surprise me—O'Connor is a rock-ribbed, ranch-girl Republican, even if she drove the right wing of her party crazy when she was on the bench. Still, her disavowal struck me as one of the more drily amusing examples of women who are pioneering, ball-busting feminist icons but not feminists. Maggie Thatcher comes to mind. Who else—Sarah Palin?
You could try to dismiss SOC's declining of the label as a generational tic brought on by the reflexive (though false) image of bra burning. But it's more likely that Justice O'Connor, ever timely, is giving voice to an enduring reluctance among moderates and conservatives to identify with the political movement to increase opportunities and equity for women, even if that's what their life's work, in fact, stands for. Is this just a tic, nonetheless—actions speak louder than words—or does it matter?
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Hanna, I agree in part with your assessment of the nation’s general judginess when it comes to feminism and FLOTUS fashion—but think it’s totally valid to critique Michelle Obama’s choice of attire when it comes to planting what’s essentially a victory garden for the nation.
In black boots, a black sweater, and the obligatorily cinched waist, Obama looked great, but absolutely unfit for the task at hand. I know plenty of women (myself included) who would rather wear a cute outfit than dungarees, especially when there are cameras around—but the posh outfit seemed only to underscore the posh surroundings and the sense that this vegetable garden was more photo op than a testament to the FLOTUS’ farming fetish.
Herbs from this garden will delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries and assorted diners at the White House. Maybe some of that lettuce will make it into the first daughters’ sandwiches. But this ain’t subsistence farming (see this intriguing NYT video essay for what a real victory garden looks like). So was the outfit a) a calculated middle finger to mores that expect a woman to have a green thumb? b) A naked push to look fab for history? Or, perhaps c) a glimpse of Obama as a model in her own public service ad campaign—dressed to the nines, as we expect mannequins to be—but selling a product she would never use? Maybe all three, but c) is anything but revolutionary.
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I've been in Britain for a week now and really should be accustomed to the idiosyncratic standards of the mainstream U.K. press, but nevertheless I was surprised to wake up Sunday morning to hear the announcement of reality-TV star Jade Goody's death lead the BBC newscast. (This on Radio 4, the Beeb's flagship "intelligent speech" channel.) A Monday-morning trip to the corner newsagent confirms that Goody has received the full Princess Diana treatment—Stephen Fry, whose connection to Goody seems to have been appearing on a chat show with her "a year or so back" provided a very convenient sound bite, calling her "a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks." All the tabloids devote their covers to the "news" of Goody's death, as do several of the broadsheets. (The Times relegated Goody to a small reefer in the margin of its front page, but it stuck with the prevailing mood of ghoulishness by splashing a photograph of Sylvia Plath with her baby son Nicholas under the headline "Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide.")
Although I grew up in a tabloid-reading British home, I'm shocked by the papers every time I come back here. The red-top tabs now seem to be pretty much devoid of news, with 95 percent of the paper devoted to stories about reality-show contestants, members of third-rate singing groups, and footballers' wives. And as the Goody treatment shows, the broadsheets are by no means immune. (Lest you dismiss the tabs as marginal nonsense, remember that the combined circulation of Britain's five "quality papers" is less than that of the Sun, the most popular tabloid.)
What seems weird, though, is that almost all the tabloid targets are female. Perhaps it's an odd corollary to the children's book phenomenon in which girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls: Male tabloid readers will happily flip through pages of fluff about pretty young female celebs, as will women readers, but readers with Y chromosomes won't hand over 30p for a paper full of stories about celebrity studs.
Of course, the American press isn't altogether immune, either. I notice that the New York Times has done more stories on Jade Goody than it has on Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that won 62 seats in the 2005 British election.
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This weekend, I sat through a couple of heated discussions about that photo on the front page of Saturday's New York Times, showing Michelle breaking ground for that vegetable garden on the South Lawn. The views divided roughly between: a) annoyed feminists, who said some version of: "enough with the happy shots of kiddies swinging and mom planting vegetables. What will they bring out next? The checkered apron? After all, in Chicago it was Michelle who wore the pants in the family." And then b) enviros, who said some verion of : "Cool! They finally got that vegetable garden on the South Lawn."
As for me, I'm mostly taken by the unspoken irony I read in the photo. Despite what readers of the New York Times think (and the White House, apparently), this urban locavore movement is something that's gospel among a small percentage of people who can afford to shop at the farmer's market (see example of excesses of movement here). Most people, I think, just go to Wal-Mart and plant pansies on the front lawn.
And while Michelle is concerned about childhood obesity, she doesn't strike me as a rip-up-the-front-lawn kind of gal. How do I know this? Look at what she's wearing. Those could be muck boots but I believe they have heels. And she's in a long sweater, fashionably belted, and all black. And her hair looks perfect. Ladybird at least put on some gardening gloves and a sun hat for the photos. Michelle looks like she's impatient to get to dinner. Between this and the sleeveless gowns, I'm beginning to think Michelle rebels against the strictures of first lady life silently, through her outfits, the sartorial equivalents of a middle finger.
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More on the permutations of parenthood: I wonder what to make of this 2005 Census table about "self-care" among children of various ages, up to 15. It seems like some indicator, however rough, of the supervisory ethos in families (though I can't figure out how much variation is encompassed by self-care-regular long stretches, shorter interludes, or what). If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to confirm Liza's hunch that there may not be a class schism between hovering-haves and hands-off-have-nots. In fact, if anything, it suggests the trend may not tend the way we think. It looks as though the more education and the higher the income a mother has, the more likely it is her 11- 14-year-old kids spend some time fending for themselves. This isn't what I would have expected. And obviously, it doesn't tell us anything about the situations of kids older than 15, among whom birth rates are creeping up (while staying steady among 11- 14-year-olds). There, too, class differences can surprise you. As Margaret Talbot's great New Yorker article "Red Sex, Blue Sex" suggests, less-educated parents who run a tight ship don't necessarily inculcate sexual self-control in kids, just as more affluent liberal parents big on youthful autonomy can produce some pretty strait-laced teenagers.
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CBS News has discovered that both the Army and the Marines have given "moral waivers" to men who have been convicted of rape and sexual assault—related felonies—despite an initial denial from the principal undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, Michael Dominguez. In the clip below, Katie Couric talks to a former military medic named Wendy who was sexually assaulted twice while serving abroad. According to CBS:
Wendy’s experience is not unusual. Since 2002, the Miles Foundation, a private non-profit that tracks sexual assault within the armed forces, has received nearly 1,200 confidential reports of sexual assaults in the Central Command Area of Responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Those reports have increased as much as 30 percent a year.
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Nina, I didn't mean to leave your post on Disney's Princess and the Frog hanging out there. (For the record, I thought hard about Lilo--was going to disqualify her for youth, but the real Pocahontas was only 14!) I think you're right that avoiding a Manichean idea of race in America is desirable (today, essentializing brown people is harder, yet more prevalent than ever). And I definitely don't have the heart for a flame war about which ethnic group deserved which princess in which order. A former editor of mine often told me of this game he'd play with his sister as a child, which went:
Of the following minority groups, which is most likely to become president first?
a) gays,
b) blacks,
c) jews,
d) women.
Needless to say his prediction was wrong. But clearly the categories must be expanded! Politics have already bent the rules; hopefully the ever-growing horseshoe of Princesses will do the same.
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I ‘ve enjoyed every word of the helicopter parents versus adventure-parents conversation, and while I am probably just echoing Liza’s great post of this morning, I’ll say that there’s a microversion of the heli-debate that isn’t about class or income or education. It goes like this: Just about every time my kids have made some huge developmental leap, it’s happened around their cousins or grandparents. Like the time I left my then-baby with my dad for a few hours while I ran to a doctor's’appointment. After about 45 minutes I dutifully called home to see how it was all going.
Me: How’s Coby?
My Dad: Oh he’s climbing up and down the stairs.
Me [flipping out]: He doesn’t know how to climb up and down the stairs
My Dad: He does now.
Like Emily B, I’ve been hugely influenced by Blessings of a Skinned Knee. It doesn’t incline me toward sending my kids out to roam the local creeks unescorted. But I am constantly aware that my boys really do have better adventures when I am waaaay out of range. That said, this Coby-stairs story is funny only because he didn't fall on his head and injure himself. Which makes me wonder whether the over-/underparenting calculus just comes down to blind luck.
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Last night I was sitting at my computer when I got a Facebook message from Kimya Dawson, the singer who became an insta-indie folk-rock heroine when her music populated the Juno soundtrack. "Cool," I thought. "I really like Kimya Dawson." This is payback for all those times I defended her when my friends said her lyrics were corny, annoying, or inscrutable or that she was perpetually stuck in freshman year of college.
Then I quickly scanned the message and saw the words, contact my lawyers. Uh-oh. Turns out she was mad that her music was used in a video that accompanied my recent Atlantic story about breast-feeding. "I don't agree with your message and I don't want to be associated with it."
So you think this means she won't friend me?
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Yesterday, the Texas state Senate debated a bill that would require doctors to perform an ultrasound before performing an abortion, but that would give the woman the choice whether or not to see the findings. The underlying motive behind the bill is to give the pregnant woman as much information as possible to make her decision.
The ACLU is fighting back, claiming that the bill assumes that women aren't well-informed already, or that it opens the door for women to be pressured and intimidated into not having an abortion. But this seems like a shallow argument to me—and one that misses the point. For one thing, there may actually be women who aren't all that well-informed about how close a fetus is to human form. Juno captured that perfectly when our uninformed protagonist was swayed by the reality that "... your baby has fingernails!" After all, the women most likely to have abortions are young and less educated. Also, the pro-choice movement has been adopting a line of moral responsibility over the years, starting with Bill Clinton's safe, legal, and rare. Why not take this to its logical conclusion, and let women absorb the full knowledge of what they're doing when they're having an abortion?
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Amy Sullivan has a great piece in Time this week about the answer to the tired old abstinence debate we are about to launch into. Everyone fights over whether or not to mention condoms, she says, when the reality is that most students get no sex ed at all. Only one state requires schools to spend any specific amount of time talking about sex ed. When schools do, they might detail a gym teacher in his or her spare time to do the job. Sullivan says we already know from the research what is the most effective program: comprehensive sex ed, sometimes known as abstinence plus. She then profiles what she considers a model program in South Carolina, where a group of educators bypassed the culture war and constructed a program tailored to the realities of teen lives.
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Dayo, you pose a good question about why women don't watch women's hoops. Commenter Tradbert from the Fray had this to say on the matter:
You
might start by asking why anyone watches sports? It's more than a little
bit odd that some people (mostly men) will literally devote the
majority of their free time and mental energy to watching other men
throwing leather balls -- a game for which non-gambling fans have
absolutely no concrete stakes in the outcome. My guess is that this has
something to do with fantasy fulfillment (this is pretty obvious with
"fantasy" leagues, with children who emulate sports starts, and I would
think it applies to other fans as well). Maybe a lot of guys like to
see themselves as quarterback, b-ball star, etc.
Perhaps women don't fantasize as much about contact competition, and
so they don't see a point in watching other people indulge in this
activity. If this is true, there is no point in hand-wringing about
female fans and female sports. Would it really be so awful if women
didn't enjoy this bizarre pastime? By all logic, this would make women
more rational.
This certainly held true for me -- I used to watch the UConn Huskies and Rebecca Lobo as a tween, but once I realized that my full adult height was going to be 5'7'', I gave up my basketball fantasies. I'm not sure that women don't watch sports because they're "more rational," but I don't know many women who enjoy picturing themselves in Sheryl Swoopes' shoes.
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The talk of teacups and helicopters has me thinking about Taken, the fourth most popular movie in America and a film engineered to play on the worst, most irrational fears of American fathers—think Babel plus white slavery. A former CIA agent played by Liam Neeson is trying to spend more quality time with his 17-year-old daughter. She announces that she is going to spend the summer in Paris with a friend. "Paris!" he exclaims, "Paris is very dangerous." (Spoiler alert!) There is much talk of a seedy Gallic underworld. She persists, and he gives in despite his better, CIA-trained instincts. When she arrives in Paris she is immediately sex-trafficked by crafty Albanians. The Parisian police are in on it; Paris, it turns out, really is an amoral anarchic sexually perverse dystopia. Leaving U.S. jurisidiction sure was a mistake!
Liam Neeson tortures and kills some non-Americans and saves his daughter before anyone can touch her virginity, the loss of which is obviously the worst thing that could ever happen to an American 17-year-old female. Morals include: 1) Never let your virgin daughters leave the soft, warm womb of the United States and 2) The CIA is an omniscient, omnipresent organization whose competence and essential goodness should never, ever be in doubt.
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Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province
alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the
country."
Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered
by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive
and digestive systems are beyond repair."
A 45-year-old widow called "L." was raped by two armed men, an attack that left her pregnant, suicidal, and an outcast.
L. gave birth to her child today. Her mother was at the hospital for
the delivery. But her father in-law refused to visit her. “The family
has rejected me,” explains L. “I cannot live with them anymore. A
neighbour has taken me in, and that’s where I stay now. I still need
support. I have been stigmatised and rejected by my family, by some of
my children and by my community. 'A widow who gives birth at her age,
it’s shameful,' that’s what they say about me."
"My two elder sons have been with the military service for a long
time. Another one lives in the street and when he heard that I was
pregnant, he sent death threats to the baby and me. He said that he
would kill both of us if I gave birth to a boy who could claim fields
for himself later on.”
Today, L. holds a little girl in her arms. She is breastfeeding her.
“This child has no problems. I must accept her, welcome her and take
care of her. My daughter is innocent and today I look at her as a
mother. We must stick together. I’ll go back to my village soon. I’ll
continue to stay with my neighbour. I’ll have to carry goods for people
to earn a bit of money because my family-in-law won’t let me work in
the fields any longer."
"I would like to have my own house one day, from where no one can drive my daughter and I.”
[Condition: Critical]
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June recently pointed out that Friday night has become TV's "butt-kicking women" night thanks to Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and, if you don't use the term butt-kicking quite so literally, Friday Night Lights, as well. With Battlestar set to go out in a blaze of glory this evening, I'd like to nominate another Friday show to take its slot on your DVR—BBC America's Mistresses, an overwrought, gripping little soap opera that's not exactly about butt-kicking women so much as bed-hopping ones.
Mistresses, like Sex and the City, is about four friends who shag and chat about it, though not while wearing designer duds and hardly ever over brunch. None of the women (a married lawyer, a single doctor, a playgirl party planner, and a 9/11 widow) are mistresses in the classic sense, though they do have more experience with adultery than good girls should. If Sex and the City is the Jane Austen take on the four-friend relationship—comedic, funny, money-minded—Mistresses is the Brontë sisters one—overly dramatic and full of secret plot twists and distraught heroines who would almost certainly be running around on the moors but for the fact that they live in London. It's also a good short-term substitute for The L Word, since it shares that Sapphic soap's overall mood and has an experimental lesbian story line to boot. Best of all, since it's British (the second season is airing there right now), all the high drama has to resolve itself in just six plot-packed episodes.
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While I enjoy March Madness for the entertainment of watching the earnest, last-gasp efforts of talented young athletes, I didn’t fill out a bracket for the men’s tournament this year. And even though I consistently watched one of my best girlfriends play hoops throughout college, I didn’t even consider filling out the women’s bracket. Martin Johnson has an interesting piece in the Root telling me why. I pretty much exhausted my knowledge of college basketball while recording our weekly podcast (give it a listen; you can tell). But I buy his analysis—that there is some weird stigma still attached to women’s basketball in particular that is not present for say, women’s tennis, or women’s swimming, or even women’s golf.
Here’s my armchair psychologist’s take: The female players are not overexposed. Call it the Imus effect? Basketball is all long shorts and sweatbands—even male athletes have only their arms (sexy!) to rope with elaborate, distinguishing tattoos. During last year’s Olympics in Beijing, there was much to-do about half-naked women athletes winning press coverage not for their high level of achievement but for their (obviously) slammin’ bodies. And anecdotal experience suggests that hot, female “on-the-court” television anchors are as much of a draw for men’s sports-watching as the games themselves. Perhaps dudes, subliminally accustomed to a little tittilation with their sports fix, take a pass on lady hoopsters, and speculation—and general spectatorship—for the female Final Four falls.
That’s not terribly well-reasoned as much as it's provocative. (Though, searching around to try to pin down how many more men watch sports than women, I found that “Since the 1999 regular season, nearly every NFL team has implemented a series of classes meant to educate female fans. NFL 101 Workshops for Women invites women to increase their understanding of football's history, offensive and defensive strategies and how to decipher game officials' signals.” Nice.) Any other theories?
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Emily Y, you're right about the large number of women who are having babies outside of marriage. In 1960, 5 percent of kids were born to unmarried mothers. Now the rate is about 40 percent. That is certainly a broad cultural shift, over a couple of generations. But unmarried doesn't necessarily mean single as in all by yourself. University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock has shown that as many as half of unmarried mothers live with the fathers of their children when those kids are born. That doesn't mean those relationships are long-term and stable—compared with marriage, they are less so. But the data paint a different picture, I think, than the one we usually see when we think single mom.
As for whether to recommend single motherhood by choice, Bonnie, this one to me is part of what I was puzzling over the other day, about audience. Most unmarried mothers are low-income and young and haven't gone to college. They're the people for whom unwed motherhood is an engine of social inequality, as Emily aptly put it. That's the main story, in terms of the numbers, and so we should have our eye on it. But then there is the much smaller—but growing much more rapidly—group of Murphy Browns: single mother by choice who have gone to college, make good money, and for one reason or another don't find husbands but in their 30s decide to have kids anyway. When I hung out with some of those moms for a magazine piece earlier this year, I was struck by their autonomy. (Their kids were adopted or sperm babies, so no dads in the picture.) I'm not suggesting we design policy around this much smaller group. But the framework for their choices is simply different from the framework of a 20-year-old who has no clear way to support herself and her kid. Whether growing up without a father, to get back to that point you raised Emily, is just as difficult no matter what other resources your family has—that's a hard and big question.
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Emily's post about whom we write for when we write about parenting raises always-worth-asking questions. But I'm not convinced that poorer parents and more affluent ones always have different concerns (I know she wasn't implying this) or even different styles of parenting.
Six years ago, when my children were younger and I wrote about them with some regularity—I still do, but not as often, since they are, in theory, old enough to write letters to the editor denying my assertions and correcting my anecdotes—I did a piece about what I realize, now, was helicopter parenting. I was looking at the way in which mothers are absent from so much children's literature and wondering whether that's because children can never have interesting adventures unless mom is out of the way.
In reporting out the heli-parenting phenomenon a bit, I talked to Kristin Moore, a researcher with the organization Child Trends. I had the notion that maybe affluent kids were the ones bottled up in houses, now, and sent to classes and constantly watched, and that poorer kids were the ones with the freedom to wander. That seems to be pretty much what Annette Lareau found, as summarized in that NYT piece by Paul Tough—that kids from poor and working-class families experience "natural growth" childhoods in which they still get to ride bikes with friends and invent games in the neighborhood. But Moore's research suggested that all parents, now, share some of the same anxieties and that all children share some of the same restrictions; she found that poor children are actually more likely to be supervised and contained. "Low-income parents are very concerned about safety, and place a lot of restrictions on their children," she said.
At that time, her research showed that 17 percent of kids aged 6-12 from families with incomes over $35,000 are latchkey kids—nobody there when they get home from school—compared with just 12 percent of kids from families whose incomes are lower. I have to say that Moore's comments rang true to me, based on anecdotal reporting experience. I'm not convinced there are many kids of any socioeconomic level out riding bikes and building forts and walking to school anymore. One of my colleagues has a relative who, when her 12-year-old was riding her bike, actually followed behind in her car.
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Hanna, your great post on the science of prostate cancer treatment reminded me of this interesting op-ed that ran in the Post a week back but that—amid the beginning simmerings of the AIG furor—didn't get much attention. The writer, an endocrinologist named David Shaywitz, suggested that we tend to treat scientific research with far too much reverence:
A lot of science, it turns out, can't withstand serious scrutiny. Thoughtful analysis by John Ioannidis suggests that more than half of published scientific research findings can't be replicated by other researchers. Part of the problem is that we've been conditioned to trust university research. It is based, after all, on the presumably lofty motives of its practitioners. What's not to like about science carried out by academics who have nobly dedicated their lives to understanding the unknown, furthering knowledge and serving humanity? ...
[But] the university is not a peaceable kingdom, and life is far more Hobbesian. ... University researchers are in a constant battle for recognition and the rewards associated with success: research space, speaking engagements, funding and autonomy. Consequently, while academic research is often described as "curiosity-driven," the reality is messier, as (curiously) many researchers tend to pursue the trendiest technologies and explore topics that happen to be associated with the most generous levels of research support.
It's a twist on the expert problem—most of us aren't scientists or doctors, and our ignorance weighs heavily on us. We feel we've just got to trust scientific or medical analysis, because we wouldn't have a clue where to begin questioning it. But we also operate from the assumption that scientific or medical researchers are an especially holy kind of expert, the intellectual ascetics sweating their lives away over petri dishes in pursuit of Truth. But maybe we should be just a little more open to treating scientific studies like we treat the bid of the mechanic who wants to fix our car.
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While we're on the subject of teen sex, I thought I'd raise this post from Constantino Diaz-Duran at the Daily Beast. He describes the case of two 17-year-olds from Sheboygan, Wisc., who were arrested for having sex with their 14-year-old significant others. Same town, same age difference, same assistant district attorney. But one of the 17-year-olds was charged with a class C felony (maximum sentence: 40 years in prison), and the other was charged with a misdemeanor (maximum sentence: nine months in jail).
Why the disparity? In one case, it was a 17-year-old guy sleeping with his 14-year-old girlfriend; in the other, the sexes were reversed.
Diaz-Duran asks if the "boy was a victim of gender bias." Certainly it seems that his gender influenced the charge. But maybe that's as it should be. Yes, a 17-year-old female is capable of causing harm to an innocent 14-year-old with her sexuality, just as is her male counterpart. But men tend to be bigger, stronger, and have more parts that they can force into you. That's a crucial difference, and one that explains to some extent why rape laws would (and should) treat the sexes differently.
Gender discrimination aside, statutory rape laws do seem problematic. Obviously we should protect youngsters from the Humbert Humberts of the world. But what about teens whose sexual relations are totally consentual, like the case of Genarlow Wilson? (And yes, I do think teenagers are emotionally capable of coming to such mutual decisions.) In those situations, it seems like the statutory rape card is just a way for angry parents to convince themselves that their own child is pure by pinning the dirty sex act on someone else. And too often, those angry parents may be reacting to something other than actual predatory behavior, such as a boyfriend they don't approve of.
I'm curious, especially in the context of yesterday's discussion about the balance of raising kids who are safe but independent, how others—especially Emily B. and Dahlia—feel about statutory rape laws. Can't there be a better way of protecting against genuine predators without ensnaring teens engaged in consentual sex?
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The Senate has just confirmed Elena Kagan to be solicitor general of the United States by a vote of 61-31. She's the first woman to be confirmed to the post.
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Ladies, you can fret about your mothering methods all you want, but you will never, never beat Big Edie Beale.
Big Edie and her daughter, Little Edie, are the stars of the 1976 cult classic Grey Gardens, a documentary madly beloved by fashionistas, feminists, and gay men the world over. In the '40s, they were glamorous relatives of Jackie O; by the '70s, the Edies were living, Tennessee Williams-style, in a squalid Hamptons manse, locked in a toxic battle of wills (not to mention a toxic fug of cat-piss fumes). On April 18, HBO is going to be airing a feature film based on the documentary, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Fans cried foul at the casting of Gertie as Edie, but the official trailer has been making the rounds this week, and gosh darn it if Drew isn't spot-on. (See the O.G. Little E here and here.) And how gorgeous are those period costumes?
I did an interview once with Doug Wright, who wrote the book for the 2006 Grey Gardens musical. As Wright described it, the whole saga of the Edies can be read as a parable about overparenting:
I'll watch the film once and think, wow, Big Edie was really a toxic narcissist who forced her daughter to live according to her rules, and in doing so undermined her daughter's entire life. ... And then I'll watch the documentary a second time and think, wow, Little Edie was really ill-equipped to live in the world; thank God her mother gave her sanctuary. And I think at the end of the day, both things are true.
Something to think about for those of us (be-childed or otherwise) planning to spend April 18 fashioning turbans out of hand towels.
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Believe me, Ellen, I probably practice better-safe-than-sorry parenting more than I preach it. I watch my oldest son the entire way if he so much as walks across the street to ask the neighbor kid to play (and we live on the world's quietest cul-de-sac). The fact that our subdivision spills out onto a windy country road is enough to make me want to move before he gets his driver's license (and I have my fingers crossed that the driving age will be 18 by the time he's 16). When you've spent nine months taking vitamins and shunning booze, sushi, and undercooked eggs so as not to harm the wee one you're carrying, when you've invested in car seats to keep them safe, and kept the baby in your room at night for months just so you can reach out and touch him to make sure he's all right when he's sleeping, you're not going to start letting him play in the street overnight.
If the last five-plus years have taught me anything, it's that parenting is actually just a series of agonizing decisions and dilemmas, from breast-feeding or formula? when the kids are infants all the way to when can they start dating? and what college can we afford and can they get in? when they're older. Some decisions come easily and some require much discussion with my husband and with friends who have kids the same age. One of the hardest things—and yet at the same time the most rewarding—is letting them take those steps toward independence: letting them play unattended in an upstairs playroom, letting them play outside by themselves. Someday soon, that will expand to visiting friends more than a few houses away and riding bikes beyond my sightline. Nobody wants their kid to be the next Etan Patz. We just had a terrible, terrible tragedy here in Cincinnati, where a 13-year-old girl was killed while jogging near her home. But, as Emily pointed out, abductions are extremely rare. Kids are far more likely to be injured in a car accident, or falling down at home, or stricken by a terrible disease. No matter what you do, there are risks. I want to foster independence in my kids, at age-appropriate levels, so that as they can grow they can make decisions that will keep them safe. For example, say I tried to shelter my kid from dating, driving a car, and any exposure to alcohol in high school. Something tells me his first trip home from college would see him driving drunk to introduce me to his pregnant girlfriend.
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Audrina Partridge, the resident brunette on MTV's loathsomely addictive love letter to the meaningfully meaningless stare, The Hills, is getting her own television show. Burning yule logs hold the camera better than Partridge, but burning yule logs have never gotten a chance to think confuddled thoughts near Hills star Lauren Conrad, lay out on chaise lounges next to Lauren Conrad, or to mistakenly accuse Lauren Conrad of making out with their greasy, manipulative on-again, off-again boyfriends. If yule logs had such opportunities, and looked as good in a bikini, one would expect yule logs to break out of the Christmas Eve type casting and land their own reality show, just like Audrina and all her Hills co-stars, including The City's Whitney Port and Bromance's Brody Jenner.
Audrina's show will be produced by Mark Burnett, the reality TV guru who created Survivor and The Apprentice. Say what you will about Burnett (like, he’s the guy who briefly resurrected Donald Trump's reputation), but he understands how reality TV works. Just like in movies and politics, a name is better than no name. Partridge doesn't have to be interesting or charismatic in the limited way of The Real World cast members or the expansive way of the hilarious loonies on The Real Housewives of New York City because we already "know" her. In a sweetly human, but incredibly undiscerning way, prior knowledge of Audrina's story is all some of us will need to care about what happens next. She can continue to be as dull and dim as a burned out light bulb and she will have an audience.
In a big leap from brow to brow, Audrina’s show got me thinking of David Foster Wallace. In the recent New Yorker piece on him, D.T. Max wrote that Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, about IRS employees, suggests that “Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment.” I wonder what DFW would make of our dependence on entertainment that is already well and truly boring.
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Emily Y is right to be concerned. Though I was one before unwed mothers were a rising statistic, I don't recommend becoming a single mother by choice. Obviously having social standing, a college education, and a loving husband all make a big difference in the large bore challenges of raising children: assuring a secure environment, good education, and culturally uplifting activities. (Not to mention equipping them with GPS navigators or latitude homing devices as Abby suggests.)
As women, however, we share many experiences not limited to members of "our own middle- and upper-middle-class world" that Emily B describes. Economic assumptions aside, young, poor mothers are just as motivated to do the best they can for their offspring as the moms with manicured lawns or doorman buildings, and a well-heeled background, sadly, doesn't mean we will always remember to speak lovingly to our children when they disappoint us (as they are bound to occasionally), even under the best circumstances.
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Fear not, Bonnie, Emily, Ellen, and Rachael! No more need to worry about whether your teenage daughter is really over at her girlfriend's house on Saturday night or if your son makes it to soccer practice on time. Google is here to save the day with its new Latitude program, launched in February. Now you can pinpoint your kids, your friends, even your kids' friends at any given moment of the day (well, almost—they still have some kinks to work out). It's creepy, useful, and sort of irresistible all at the same time. Now if I could only get my boss to sync up so that I could always beat her to the office in the mornings ...
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Today's paper has a story I knew was coming but have truly dreaded. It turns out that PSAs—the screening test for prostate cancer—may do more harm than good. Most of these cancers are very slow growing, it turns out, and may not need to be treated. Meanwhile, the operations to treat them have serious consequences. So many men have undergone the surgeries needlessly. My father had the surgery, and it really ruined his life. The idea that he may not have needed it kills me.
My takeaway from this story is that when a certain kind of science hysteria takes hold, rational risk analysis goes out the window. When you say "test" and "cancer," the rest of the qualifications and probabilities don't get heard. This is on my mind because of the reaction I've gotten to my recent Atlantic story, "The Case Against Breast-Feeding," where I challenge some of the science supporting breast-feeding.
Of course I've heard from hundreds of grateful moms, and an equal number of people telling me what an evil mother and wife I am. And I've also heard from lots of science scolds. A typical such response is this one from our sisters at Salon.
On closer inspection, we have to conclude that her reporting is biased. She cherry-picked research that suited her agenda, the research suggesting that breast milk isn't really all it's been hyped to be. Yet between us we have interviewed dozens of highly regarded researchers and pediatricians who could offer a point-counterpoint to the research Rosin highlighted.
This is really not good enough. As the latest prostate cancer study shows, it's perfectly possible for the scientific establishment to be in agreement and also wrong. This is like interviewing generals in Iraq about whether the surge is going well. They may be experts, but they are experts with a stake in the outcome. Yes, I highlighted a few studies that support my point. But mainly what I did was critique the research as a whole. And what I found was that if you say "infant" and "health" in the same sentence, no one bothers with the details.
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Hanna and Jessica, perhaps complacency that teen pregnancy rates had been successfully declining for so long, and perhaps ineffective abstinence-only education has something to do with the disturbing rise in young unwed motherhood. But my favorite theory is that such sexual behavior is culturally transmitted. While teen pregnancy rates have started to rise a little, among women ages 20 to 24 who give birth, 60 percent are having those kids of out wedlock. For a large segment of our society, it has become the normal thing to do. But if you're 22 and just had a baby, that probably means you haven't gone to college. As Kay Hymowitz has written, unwed motherhood is the greatest engine of social inequality in this country. There are actually very few Murphy Browns—college-educated professionals deciding to raise children on their own. College-educated women, as Hymowitz writes, have a life script and things follow in sequence: education, career, marriage, children. Following this order means their children will follow the same script. This has broken down for large segments of our population. There is no shame or embarrassment at out-of-wedlock birth anymore; there is often the sense this is a better way to go than getting married (as if the child's father would even entertain getting hitched) and inevitably getting divorced. The year-by-year increase in out-of-wedlock births in this country shows how self-perpetuating this is. What the statistics don't show is the suffering of children whose longing to have a father will be unmet, and who are being raised by overwhelmed mothers.
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Bonnie, your lovely, loving mea culpa raises what's for me a central conundrum of writing about parenting: audience. Do we write for our own middle- and upper-middle-class world? In which it's an easy call, to me, that helicopter parents pose a greater danger to kids than wandering the streets, or rather, the well-groomed sidewalks. Or are we writing to 22-year-old moms like your former self and to poor ones? Sometimes the message is the same. But often it's not, because the set of assumptions we're speaking to are very different. See Paul Tough's smart reporting on Annette Lareau's studies about how child-rearing differs by income. It's a split that affects this discussion we're having and a lot of other ones, I find.
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I have some convincing theories about the rise of teen pregnancy and AIDS cases, Hanna! Let's start with the increased percentage of pregnant adolescents. In an article that "XX Factor" friend Margaret Talbot wrote for The New Yorker last year called "Red Sex, Blue Sex" she quotes sociologist Mark Regnerus on teens who delay sexual activity:
They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.
Hanna, you note that the Latino population has seen a particularly notable spike in teen pregnancy, and that doesn't surprise me. As an article in Sunday's New York Times about the education of nonnative English speakers showed, there are near-impossible barriers for recent immigrants that prevent them from the "bright futures" Regnerus speaks of. The Times article quotes a 19-year-old Guatemalan woman named Amalia Raymundo, who "was a rising star in her remote village in Guatemala, the region’s beauty queen and a candidate for college scholarships." Because of her experiences in American public school, Amalia saw that her dreams of becoming a doctor were so far out of her reach, she thought about dropping out. “If I am going to end up cleaning houses with my mother ... why go to high school?”
If that's the reality for most recent immigrant women, why would they delay sex or prevent pregnancy? What's the motivation? Which brings me to my next point: I think AIDS is on the rise because condom promotion has all but disappeared and AIDS is no longer seen as a death sentence. If you don't believe you're going to die, and many think sex feels better without a condom, what's the motivation for use? In addition, as Talbot wrote in her New Yorker article, "many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease." So you have informed people who choose to take the risk because they think AIDS won't happen to them, and you have underinformed people who think that condoms don't work. Those taken together seem like enough to cause a statistical increase.
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Emily has written lovingly about her sons numerous times here on XX Factor and contributes frequently to Slate's irregular Family columns, so, just as she has demonstrated as a lawyer, journalist, Slate senior editor, and co-founding editor of Double X, I know she is a high achiever in her mommy job. Most mothers are not as accomplished. On the other end of the parenting spectrum from Emily, I had so many mishaps when my adult children were young (especially my daughter who I had, unmarried, when I was 22), I probably should have been charged with child endangerment. The thing is, raising children is a moving target and most of us, even my pediatrician friends, make it up as we go along. As much as we try to maintain policies and structure in our homes, conflicting agendas, wanting to please our children, the gravitational force of the daily grind, absent baby sitters, new friends, sick siblings, sick friends, and new siblings all impact our decisions. Although I was immature, careless, and accident prone most of my questionable parenting moves still somehow turned out OK. Although I expected too much of my little girl, she more often than not lived up to those expectations. At least twice, her lack of supervision led to panicky alarm. Once in Mexico, like the children in Babel, her whereabouts were not traceable overnight. Another time in Key West, Fla., she disappeared in a bookstore. (After police were called, she materialized from behind the chapter-book shelves where, blissfully reading, she'd lost track of the time.)
Despite these parenting accidents, at the same time, I was responsible for her values and self-worth, and on that front, I didn't renege. Stealing was ugly, lying was dirty, other people's feelings were fragile, and she was, always, very loved and cherished. The lessons we pass on to our children come from years of teachable moments. Better safe than sorry is, as Emily says, a pat homily that can't be applied to a nuanced situation. But in a complex, always-changing, child-raising obstacle course, parents need to develop our own aphorisms to guide us.
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Congress spent yesterday grilling a guy who wasn't working for AIG when the infamous bonuses were drafted. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae—an organization that has requested $15 billion in bailout cash—plans to reward some of its top executives with AIG-like bonuses. (Thomas Lund, the guy in charge of Fannie's mortgage business, is slated for precisely $1 million.) Similar bonuses, yet to be revealed, may be in line for Freddie Mac. Add to all that bonus money a $10 million executive suite in the works for Citigroup (lucky recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds—you're welcome!).
The politicization of, say, Citigroup's decision to buy a Sub-Zero refrigerator does not bode particularly well for anyone who wants a quick return to boring, predictable market outcomes. But when you accept heaps of the public's money, you agree to run your company in constant fear of what is derisively referred to as "populist outrage."
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Dayo, I, too, am eager to see Disney's awesome-to-be-beheld marketing forces plaster Tiana's face on lunchboxes and bathing suits. I remember how important the Polynesian Barbie was to me, and I'm thrilled to have cheesy fantasy avatars available to little girls of all colors. But I've never really understood this line of argument:
the Mickey Mousers have cycled through the Middle Eastern, Chinese, Native American, and Hawaiian princesses, not to mention six kinds of white—why not black? Compounding the frustration is the distinct lack of “live action” roles for black actors and actresses, which makes any perception of Hollywood bias smart a bit more.
I understand that Disney probably has more to redress vis-à-vis the African-American community, and obviously roles are limited for performers of color. But Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Native American actors get even less screen time than black actors. (Does the Hawaiian Lilo count as a princess?) I'll admit it right here: I cried when I saw Mulan. In fact, I still cry whenever I see it. I don't think this is or should be a racial pissing contest, but those intervening films are important, too.
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Nina, I think you’re right on about the silliness of hating the light-skinned Prince Naveen character in Disney’s forthcoming Princess and the Frog movie. He’s clearly black—and for a film set in New Orleans, his creolized look is pretty accurate.
But the increased sensitivities are totally understandable—it’s taken how long exactly for the Disney marketers to come up with a black princess? I wrote on this movie as a leap forward for beauty politics back in December 2007; the Mickey Mousers have cycled through the Middle Eastern, Chinese, Native American, and Hawaiian princesses, not to mention six kinds of white—why not black? Compounding the frustration is the distinct lack of “live action” roles for black actors and actresses, which makes any perception of Hollywood bias smart a bit more.
I’ll keep my powder dry because I plan to write a longer piece on the topic soon, but I think this debate is most productive when seen as an issue of branding: Now that Princess Tiana will join Jasmine, Belle, and Ariel on lunchboxes, stickers, and sleeping bags—and will, presumably, have her own doll—shouldn’t we be cheering the crossover potential of this flick? Much like the kerfuffle surrounding stuffed likenesses of Malia and Sasha Obama, I think it’s never bad, and in fact, deliciously ironic, that little white girls might soon be toting black dolls around town.
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Today's news brings us a few dispatches from the land of reckless teendom. Here we have some high schoolers in the Bronx who, upon viewing a picture of pop singer Rihanna's bruised face, remarked "She probably made him mad for him to react like that"—him being her still-boyfriend, Chris Brown. More importantly, we have the latest stats on the Bristol Palin constituency. Teen birth rates among 15- to 19-year-olds have been creeping up for a few years, "putting one of the nation's most successful social and public health campaigns in jeopardy," writes the Washington Post. Given the Obama administration's latest pledge to take politics out of science, we will likely be treated now to fierce debate on the morning talk shows about the effectiveness of abstinence education. True, those programs have been much less effective than the Bush administration lets on. And I would love to put the blame all on them. But I imagine the causes are much more complicated than that. For one thing, it can't be a coincidence that the AIDS virus is also increasing. Condom vigilance waxes and wanes, and we are probably coming out of a lazy period. Also, check out the list of which states have the highest increases. Many are places with relatively recent waves of immigration. The most interesting sub trend is about young Latino rates of teen pregnancy, which are now the highest in the country.
Anybody know any other convincing theories?
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Better safe than sorry: It's unassailably pat. But that's not the real framing of the choice. Actually, there are always nuances: How old is your child, what kind of neighborhood are you letting her walk alone in, at what time of day? And what's the cost of never letting her out of your sight? Because there is one. Wendy Mogel, psychologist and author of Blessing of a Skinned Knee, who I've written about before, calls overprotected kids "teacups" and "krispies." They get to college and they can't fend for themselves because their parents never gave them breathing room.
Maybe the risk you took was too high, Bonnie, because the vacant lot your daughter walked through was trashy and isolated. The story of Etan Patz, which I know, is undeniably and stupendously awful. Beyond the paradigmatic parent's worst nightmare. But a friend of mine whose pediatric practice consists largely of helping abused kids reminds us that child abduction in this country is extremely rare. Almost all of the time, harm comes to kids from adults they know, not ones they don't. We're so transfixed by the worst nightmare scenario that we miss the more mundane but prevalent risks. Or we snatch from our kids any semblance of independence. My friend whose kid went to the store on the corner by himself e-mailed yesterday to say she hopes he can go to the park by himself—or with my older son—in a year or two, or sooner. I hope so, too.
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Rachael and Emily, like Bonnie, I am of the better-safe-than-sorry school of parenting.
First, I should say, Rachael has two-plus young children, Emily has two, Bonnie's are grown (correct me if I am mistaken), and I am childless by choice.
I am a bit older than Rachael and remember well the freedom of my childhood. I grew up in a semi-rural suburb of Boston, where we used to take off in the morning, go play on the catwalks (yes, the ones that led to the power lines!), go tramping through tick-infested ponds and swamps, trolling for frogs and salamanders, climb sap-covered trees, and come home right before dark with our white socks soaking wet with swamp muck and our hair matted.
We played baseball and softball in the streets until our parents rang bells out their front doors to call us home for dinner. We sought out an adult only when something went wrong: Kevin is stuck in a tree and is too scared to climb down! Kay has a giant bloody tick on her head! Paul smacked Ellen in the leg with a Whiffleball bat and now she's crying!
It was awesome.
But it was only awesome because no one was seriously maimed, abducted, or otherwise traumatized. And this was pure luck.
I do wonder and worry about these poor kids today, who have to be so constantly supervised: strapped into car seats, unable to wander or take off for an afternoon walk to find someone to play with. No more can they just stroll up to a neighbor's house, ring the bell, and say, "Can Kay come out and play?" It's all prescheduled, prearranged, and it's even called a date!
While Rachael says the kid in the story knew where he was going, had a cell phone, and his mom would be at the soccer field a few minutes after him so would know if he had arrived safely, what would she have done if he hadn't arrived safely? What could she have done?
Since I don't have children, maybe I have an unrealistic idea of what could happen, fueled by too many news stories, movies, and my own parents' paranoia (yes, even they who let me run wild as a child were terrified of crazy things). I have no doubt that the kid was capable, self-reliant, knew where he was going, etc., but his abilities are not at issue. Could not someone have driven up and pulled him into a car and driven off? Or is that just my imagination running wild?
I agree with Bonnie: Better safe than sorry.
The only thing I can compare it to is my dog. I now live in the city, in a neighborhood where the park is in one direction and the street on which you can do all your errands is in another. And so it is a constant dilemma for dog owners: walk the dog and then do errands or take the dog on errands even though it will mean having to tie her up outside? (Is it true or an urban legend that people steal dogs and sell them for science experiments?)
I try to never tie her up outside. If I have to, it will only be at stores that I need to run into for less than a minute with glass fronts so I can see her the whole time. Once I did have to run into the bank to get some quarters for laundry and parking, and I tied her up. I had to wait in a slow-moving line and I was a nervous wreck. Why was I doing this? Would $10 worth of quarters be worth losing her over? How would I explain it to my husband if someone took her? And would I ever forgive myself?
Granted, a dog is not a child: She is not my flesh and blood, not human, and I don't have to worry about guiding her toward independence so I can send her off to college and to become a self-sufficient adult.
But if she were taken, if that kid were taken, wouldn't the parent do anything to get back that moment and make a different decision? I know I would.
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Rachael, you are the same age as my daughter, making me among the lead-paint-exposing, tummy-down-crib-placing cohort of child neglectors whose Gen X children narrowly survived. In fact, I was probably among the worst of the loosey-goosey caretakers of the era, taking risks with my first-grade child that, in retrospect, should have brought the police. The cop who scolded the Mississippi soccer mom for letting her 10-year-old walk a few blocks to the playing field may have over-reacted, but, belatedly embracing my geezer curmudgeon, I say, better safe than sorry. When I was a young single mother in 1978, we lived in the unrenovated Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. My little girl's public school was about nine blocks west on Calvert Street from the city bus stop nearest our rented row house. Where a park would form a few years later, my 6-year-old cut daily through a vacant lot strewn with old tires to get to the 40 line stop. I walked with her to the bus stop the first few days of the school year, but after she knew the way, I let my self-sufficient grade-school child set out alone every a.m. with a bus token and a peanut butter sandwich. My daughter survived my cavalier and inexperienced parenting and took her independence with her when she moved to Manhattan for college. As so many of you Generation X achievement goddesses, she grew up fearless at facing her professional and personal challenges. The self-reliance forged in childhood has served her well. That said, I was a nitwit who acted as if the innocent were immune. My neighbors should have blown the whistle on me. That spring, another child the same age as my daughter, destined perhaps for a similar happy future, wasn't as lucky. A set of well-intentioned but naive New York City parents heard a wakeup bell that reverberates today in Mississippi; Washington; New Haven, Conn.; and Ohio. The boy's parents, Julie and Stan Patz, were loving caretakers who, like me, failed to estimate the risk of allowing their 6-year-old to walk two blocks from his apartment door to his school bus. I've just finished reading a new release, After Etan, by my former ABC News colleague Lisa Cohen (who now teaches journalism at Columbia). Lisa's book is a disturbing and harrowing dissection of the unsolved Etan Patz missing child case that "held America captive" for days, weeks, and years after his disappearance. I'm certain that National Missing Children's Day, observed every year on the anniversary of their son's kidnapping, offers little comfort to his parents.
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Yesterday's "Well" column in the New York Times links to a quiz to determine what kind of cook you are. The story explores the idea that the family's healthfulness is determined not by the food preferences of family members but by the "nutritional gatekeeper"—mother, father, nanny, grandparent—whoever does the shopping and cooking. Although the piece praises healthy cooks, they come out in the quiz as the ones you'd least like to have dinner with: They use fresh ingredients but don't care about taste. (Reminds me of something Julia Child once said about vegetarians: "Do they ever enjoy a meal?") The "methodical" and "competitive" don't seem all that fun either. I rated "innovative" (translation: erratic). I can live with that.
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Disney's newest animated film won't be released for another nine months, but The Princess and the Frog—Disney's first to feature an African-American princess—is already being scrutinized. First it got knocked because the heroine was a black chambermaid working for a rich white woman, then because one of the animal sidekicks was a toothless, seemingly redneck Cajun firefly. Plus there were plenty of people who were peeved that it took Disney so long to feature an African-American princess in the first place. (Dodai at Jezebel has been tracking the fracas; scroll down to see more links.)
Now, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail, bloggers are up in arms because Princess Tiana— reimagined as a young woman living in Jazz Age New Orleans—falls in love with a guy who isn't black. Prince Naveen (an Indian name, I'll note) is heir to the throne of "Maldonia," and is voiced by a Brazilian actor. I'm not quite sure he's white, let alone "the whitest frat boy dickhead you can find," as one commenter put it, but he's definitely much lighter-skinned than Tiana. I think he looks sort of Mediterranean, myself.
I'm not surprised that people are pre-emptively monitoring this film's sensitivity levels, but I honestly can't tell if this tweaks my sensors. On one hand, it sucks that little African-American boys won't get to see a black prince, and I don't like the equation of lighter skin with desirability, either. But on the other hand, I'm all for seeing more mixed-race couples in the popular media—how annoying is it that, in most movies and TV shows, minorities are always getting paired with partners of the same race? I've been watching old episodes of Firefly lately, and the Gina Torres/Alan Tudyk pairing still seems really fresh to me. I'm going to try to reserve judgment till I actually see the film, but what do you ladies think?
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Rachael, I'm also thoroughly depressed over the story of the cops getting called on the mom who let her 10-year-old walk one-third of a mile to soccer practice alone. Not just because of my own childhood walk to school, over several blocks in Philadelphia that added up to more than a mile (woo hoo). But also because kids need to be able to go places alone for their own sanity. In the New Haven neighborhood I live in now, there's a beloved Italian grocer down the street. My parent friends and I have debated when our kids can go there by themselves, and then lo and behold, one of the dads went ahead and sent his 8-year-old over. Bless him. The next hurdle is the park three blocks away. You have to cross two busy streets to get there, and a couple of years ago a babysitter was raped in the woods that border it. So it's not an easy call—we don't live in a big city, but it's still a city. But I really hope that as my kids turn 10 and then 11 and 12, they can have some sense of the power of their own mobility. When you walk alone, you get to think your own thoughts and make your own choices. Even if it's just when to jump over a crack in the sidewalk or watch a cat curl up on a porch, it matters.
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:
I was perusing the Simon & Schuster children’s book catalog to see what the kids are reading these days, and I came across a picture book written by none other than Meghan McCain, whose recent cat-fighting Dahlia rightfully skewered in her great piece in Slate today. That’s right, folks, your favorite daddy’s-girl blogopundit and mine is an author, too. My Dad, John McCain, came out last September, midcampaign, and features lots of lovely, nostalgia-inducing illustrations of father and daughter by the guy who drew Felicity and Samantha for the American Girl books. And to think, all Cate Edwards wrote about her dad’s campaign was her Princeton thesis.
Here’s the blurb from the catalog:
Born with a commitment to serve his country, Senator John McCain was destined to run for president one day. In this picture book, written by his daughter Meghan, young readers will learn all of the fascinating and sometimes dangerous events that helped shape the senator and prepared him for the race for the White House. From perilous wartime service to a twenty-year plus career in the Senate, this book will give readers an inside look at a man who has devoted his life to his country. The publisher shall donate one percent of its net proceeds from the sale of this book through regular U.S. trade channels to Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. (Net proceeds are the gross amounts received by the publisher less shipping, mailing, and insurance costs or charges and taxes.) Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund is an organization that aids military personnel and veterans who have suffered severe traumatic brain injuries while serving our nation.
Has the Candidate’s Daughter become a stock character in our political narratives, and if so, what’s that about? And does anyone think 1 percent is a pretty pathetic donation to brain-damaged veterans, especially for a book by a woman who brags in its pages that her “ancestors have fought for their country in every American war since the Revolution”?
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The Fairfield Weekly has an interesting piece on the public's enduring fascination with Sarah Palin: "The Porn Identity." It opens in a strip club where adult film star Lisa Ann, who played Palin in Hustler's XXX-homage to the once aspiring VP, "Who's Nailin' Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF," takes the stage dressed as Palin to perform a striptease. Acccording to Hustler Video, "Who's Nailin' Paylin" is one of their all-time best-sellers, proving so popular they're producing a follow-up this spring, "Hollywood's Nailin' Paylin," which "will parody Palin's imagined new career as book author and talk-show host and, of course, put her in bed with a bunch of spoofed celebrities." Hustler says there's just something about Sarah:
"There aren't many franchises in the adult world. It's a one-trick pony," [Hustler Director of Operations Jeff] Thill says. "It's really different with her. She's not really in the news right now and yet we can't keep the title in stock. Assuming the second one goes well, we'll continue on forever if we can get away with it."
In an interview, the Weekly asked her impersonator about Palin's sexual mystique. The woman who's walked a mile in stripper shoes as Palin responded: "It's a distraction from politics. I hope people wouldn't be swayed either way by sex appeal. People vote for all the wrong reasons anyway, but if we throw sex appeal into the mix we'll have [a disaster]." But is she right? Months after Palin's disastrous run, we're still intrigued. She's the anti-Hillary who won't go away, and judging by her stickiness, I can't help but wonder if Palin has some strange hope in her rumored possible run for the presidency in 2012. Maybe Palin's sublimated-yet-paraded brand of sexuality is the key to her success—and the farthest thing from a disaster.
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In today's installment of "Wow, I feel like a geezer" ... I'm feeling like the stereotypical old man who grouses to his grandkids that when he was a kid, "We had to walk five miles to school, uphill each way, in three feet of snow."
BoingBoing picked up this post from a blog called Free-Range Kids. Turns out a mom let her 10-year-old walk one-third of a mile to soccer practice ... wait for it ... by himself. Kind of. He had a cell phone, and anyhow Mom had to be at the soccer field a few minutes after he got there, so she would find out quickly if he arrived safely. Alas, the poor kid got only three blocks before a cop stopped him. When the cop found the mom at the soccer field, he explained that they'd received "hundreds" of calls to 911 and said she could be charged with child endangerment. (I somehow doubt that this small town in Mississippi has the population density to lead to "hundreds of calls.")
I know that my generation (X, if you must know) likes to joke about how it's amazing we survived childhood, without five-point-harness car seats and cribs that had lead paint and parents who let us sleep on our tummies. Of course we can joke about it, because we survived. There's no doubt that improved safety guidelines for children's products and better advice from pediatricians have indeed made us safer. But when I was a kid, I walked to kindergarten by myself. Sure, there were other kids in the neighborhood and we'd walk together when we saw one another, but I knew where I was going and how to stop at the stop signs and look for cars and not talk to strangers. At the pool we swam at every summer, every kid looked forward to turning 10 because that's when you could start going without your parents. (Yes, there were lifeguards.)
I don't know if neighborhoods are safer or more dangerous today than when I was growing up. As with most things, it probably depends on where you live. And no doubt, people are influenced by a 24-hour news cycle filled with accounts of missing Caylees and Elizabeths. But parents need to be able to take reasonable steps to foster independence in their children, free from the meddling of nosy neighbors.
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I've never been a huge fan of Ellen Degeneres. I always thought she was funny enough, but maybe I was just a little resentful because she made the name famous before I ever could.
Yet somehow, even though I have a day job, I've managed to become a fan of The Ellen Degeneres Show. I watched it once when I was home sick and started TiVo-ing it after that. I certainly don't watch every show from cover to cover. I just dip in now and again (now that I have time after getting sick of Oprah).
The show is good enough. It's got a light, fun feeling to it—particularly helpful in these dire economic times. Degeneres remains funny even though she has had to bring it down to a PG level for her daytime, mainstream network audience.
But what I am most impressed by is how forthright she is about her sexual orientation, despite the fact that she has a large, broad, national, daytime network audience that certainly must include more than just a few homophobes. And Ellen's likability must do much to thaw their hearts.
She routinely mentions her wife, Portia de Rossi, who appeared on the show on Monday, their recent marriage, and regularly sprinkles the details of their lives together into her jokes.
Maybe I am naive, but I think this is how our country will finally change: When people who are anti-gay finally learn that someone they already know and love is gay, and they want every happiness for their loved one that they are entitled to. Or even better, when they are willing to let someone who they know is gay into their lives, despite their homosexuality.
And I admire Degeneres and de Rossi for being so public about their sexual orientation and relationship, even though it is a huge risk for both of their careers.
(I'd also like to thank Degeneres for all the "Ellen" merchandise, which has already been personalized just for me.)
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After reading Dayo's disheartening post on Friday about teenagers' reactions to Rihanna and to domestic abuse in general, I was wondering why female adolescents were so quick to blame the victim. I haven't come up with a particularly good answer but did hear something positive that complicates the matter. I was talking to a social worker friend who works with urban fourth and fifth graders, and she said that Chris Brown and Rihanna came up in class. "They were unanimous in thinking that Rihanna should not have gone back to Chris Brown," my friend said. She asked them if they would think differently had Rihanna hit Brown first, and they said no, because you should never hit a girl. "They all think that men have an obligation not to hit women," she said.
My friend conceded that there might have been a bit of group think going on—that the loudest kids came out against Chris Brown and the quieter ones followed—and that it's possible that they were just parroting what their teachers and moms had told them. But still, being "very very dismayed" at the idea that Rihanna would get back with Brown after he hit her, as the middle schoolers were, is a huge difference from saying "I would have punched her around too," as some high schoolers have been. Do puberty-related hormones make your thinking that fuzzy? Does all self-esteem go out the window between the ages of 10 and 14? At the risk of sounding like an old codger, what is going on with teens today?!
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Josh Schwartz, the guy responsible for The OC, Gossip Girl, and Chuck, has a new Web-series, Rockville, streaming over at theWB.com. Each episode is five minutes long (Schwartz told New York magazine that amount of time "is perfect for my attention span," which explains a whole lot about the recent plotting of Gossip Girl) and takes place in a music venue that is populated by Schwartz archetypes: the nervous talker guy, the chick he banters with, and the surprisingly cool authority figure.
Like Marshall "My So-Called Life" Herskovitz and Ed "thirtysomething" Zwick's Quarterlife, the only other serious "Web drama" made by people with experience making great television, Rockville is not any good (if this showed up on your set, you would groan, loudly, and flip away, which is exactly what happened when Quarterlife aired on NBC), but it is still perversely enjoyable. Schwartz deploys all of his typically charming tricks to ill-effect: Why doesn't his self aware, nerdy banter work on the Internet? Is it the acting? (Yes, it's mostly the acting.) The pacing? The way everyone gets too earnest too fast because they need to provide an emotional payoff in less than 300 seconds? But then before I can get well and truly annoyed, it's over. And I'll probably watch the next episode, because getting a smidge worked up about what's happening on-screen is one of the particular pleasures of TV watching. Plus, this could be the future of television; it's intriguing to watch it work out the kinks.
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Seriously, I write about sex, so I know I'm not the best one to ask. But it seems like ever since—well, I want to say ever since the Obamas got elected, it's all sex all the time. At least in the media. Usually, there are periods of time when you'll see more sex-related stories than others. In the spring. If there's a political sex scandal. If another low-ranking celebrity spawns another low-budget sex tape. After election night, I noticed there was a slow but discernible increase in the number of sex-related "news" stories. Sure, there were the obvious ones—the "aren't the Obamas sexy" ones (click here for the latest from the meme that wouldn't die)—and then there were the recession ones—call girls are dropping their rates! housewives are selling sex toys to make extra money! recession sex: here's how to have it!—but I expected at some point for all the sex stories to stop. But they haven't. They keep, well, coming. So, did the Obamas spawn this mini-sex revolution—or was it all that hope—or is it just me?
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If you have a pessimistic nature we live in gratifying times. There are two op-eds (here and here) in the New York Times today that are reminders that while we wait to see if the economy will stabilize or continue its free fall, parts of the world continue to bubble along ominously. These pieces describe the utter catastrophe of the resurgent Taliban both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's hard reading: the bombing of schools (the particular life-threatening danger to girls who are brave enough to become literate); the slitting of the throats of journalists and government officials; in Swat, the stringing up of decapitated corpses for being "un-Islamic." One op-ed ends with an ominous line that reminds us why these are not just troubles in distant lands we have had enough of:"[Pakistan] risks becoming a nuclear-armed Afghanistan". And in the Washington Post today is a story about what preventing this—if we can—will cost us. It is about the burial at Arlington Cemetery of 29-year-old Army Capt. Brian Bunting; his not-quite 2 year-old son was given the flag from his coffin. Capt. Bunting was killed last month in Kandahar by a roadside bomb along with three other soldiers. Bunting's widow, Nicki, learned a few days after his death that she was pregnant with their second child.
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Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican from the great state of Iowa, ponders the AIG bonus scandal:
I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.
And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.
Grassley, of course, voted for bailouts that were structured in such a way as to allow taxpayer dollars to go to bonuses. But he’s not the only guy calling for ritual purification. “The American people,” as Grassley puts it, obviously want to focus their animus on something less nebulous than a broken feedback loop. Jim Cramer will do; anonymous cigar-smoking yacht club members who happen to work at AIG will do as well. Thus we get round-the-clock newspaper coverage of the unremarkable fact that a massive insurance corporation cannot simply rupture its contracts at will.
Grassley has a habit of saying appalling things, but he’s not stupid enough to believe that AIG’s boardroom fatcats are the only movers in this mess. A huge swath of Americans making large numbers of small decisions contributed to our current situation, so you have to wonder how far down the chain of moral culpability Grassley is willing to go. This collapse involved Wall Street bankers hawking mortgage-backed securities based on what they may or may not have known were lousy mortgages. It involved lowly local retail bankers knowingly making sketchy loans because they could just sell them on the secondary market to Fannie and Freddie. One step further down, it involved homeowners pretending they could afford the suburban McMansions of their dreams. I would venture to guess that it even involved some Iowans. But I don’t foresee Grassley calling for the blood of his own constituents.
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Can we talk about Caitlin Flanagan's underminer-y commentary on Michelle Obama's hostessing? Flanagan contributed a short essay to New York Magazine's cover story package on Mrs. O, and the entire thing is a litany of backhanded compliments:
Michelle Obama cuts a pretty figure in her big-and-tall gal ready-to-wear, and she has Joe Kennedy’s understanding of the power of family photographs to advance a political career. Like Hillary she lacks taste; her consumer preferences seem to have been rendered into being by the Mall at Short Hills. But ours is not the moment for taste. Or, for that matter, for a Nancy Reagan/Candy Spelling hyperattention to “gifting.”
Is Flanagan just a clear-eyed Obama observer, ignoring the swoons over Michelle's style and telling it like it is? Or is she just being contrarian to get our attention?
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According to new research in International Studies Quarterly, "members of households with girls tend to be less isolationist, more open to using military means to prosecute foreign policy, and more likely to feel that ongoing conflicts have been beneficial on net than are those who live with boys." Robert Urbatsch, a professor of political science at Iowa State, analyzed data on household composition and political opinions included in the 2004 National Election Study. Controlling for income, religiosity, and education, he found that people in households with girls (a proxy for "parents with daughters") had foreign policy views similar to those of people in households without children. In contrast, people in households with boys reported being significantly less hawkish and more isolationist than both groups—possibly because it is young men who are most likely to enlist. Parents of boys may find the prospect of war more personally threatening.
This seems like a good time to quote Plutarch's "Sayings of Spartan Women":
One woman sent forth her sons, five in number, to war, and, standing in the outskirts of the city, she awaited anxiously the outcome of the battle. And when someone arrived and, in answer to her inquiry, reported that all her sons had met death, she said, "I did not inquire about that, you vile varlet, but how fares our country?" And when he declared that it was victorious, "Then," she said, "I accept gladly also the death of my sons."
Would Spartans with daughters be more intense?
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In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein has an essay about Facebook's impact on today's youth. Orenstein worries about two different, separate things: first, that college-age kids will find it difficult to forge new identities because of their social networking pasts, and second, that Facebook provides such a comforting connection that these members of Gen Y will lose out on "an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness."
As an older member of Generation Y, I think Peggy misses the mark a bit. While I'm certain college kids do spend a lot of their time networking socially, there's not a one-to-one correlation between their Facebook selves and their personas in real life (or IRL, as the kids say). Part of the reason Facebook is so popular is that it allows the user to control his or her experience. It truly is possible for an 18-year-old to delete their profiles or to have the wherewithal to defriend the people who made them miserable in high school. Even though they spend a lot of time on their MacBooks, I find it difficult to believe that they're not also disengaging from the computer, having late-night real-person chats with their floor mates, and experimenting with Sartre and sex, just like many college kids before them.
Which brings me to Orenstein's other point: that Facebook somehow alleviates or prevents the loneliness that many young people feel when first leaving the nest. Nothing sounds more alienating than being miserable at college and seeing Sarah's status message pop up about how she's "On her way to the Bon Iver concert with Dave." Being constantly confronted with your friends' social triumphs when you're flailing seems like it would be incredibly lonely-making. Even if your buddies are all similarly depressed or floundering in college, there's still something sterile about the clean lines and ice blue color scheme of Facebook. I find it hard to believe that it's a satisfying replacement for actual human contact, even for those born after 1990.
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David Chase, the maestro who created The Sopranos, just announced that his next project will be A Ribbon of Dreams, an HBO miniseries about the early days of Hollywood. (The title comes from an Orson Welles quote. Even the greats use lame metaphors sometimes.). Variety reports that the show will focus on a cowboy and a mechanical engineer who become producing partners in 1913 and go on to work with the likes of D.W. Griffith, John Ford, John Wayne, Bette Davis, and Billy Wilder.
I have a knee-jerk antipathy to Hollywood projects about Hollywood as just so much tiresome navel-gazing (the guy who makes movies for a living thinks movies are uniquely important to the American story? You don't say!), even though the resulting films can turn out mighty fine (Sunset Blvd., etc). But if anyone can make Hollywood fresh, it's Chase, who took a genre (the gangster pic) that seemed pretty well tapped out and proved the opposite was true.
Ribbon is the second upcoming HBO project set in the past. Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire, about Atlantic City, N.J.'s transformation from sleepy beach town to gambling mecca, is scheduled to air sometime this year. This form, the historical TV drama, is a relatively new one, introduced by Deadwood, perfected by Mad Men, and attempted on basic cable by Life on Mars. I wonder what it means about us, right now, that these shows, set in the past but obliquely speaking to the present, are having their moment.
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Emily, you are absolutely right that we've known for a while, in a vague sort of way, that terrible things happened in the CIA's "unofficial" black-hole prisons. But you are also right that the question of what, now, we are going to to do with the legacy of American-government-sanctioned torture is not fading away. On the contrary, it is growing ever sharper. Just as it usually takes awhile—sometimes a whole generation—for countries that have committed political crimes to come to terms with them, so too will it take some time for all of us to understand that the abuses of detainees that took place during the past seven years in CIA and U.S. government custody were not only immoral but illegal, that they violated both our own Constitution as well as international treaties we signed decades ago, and that the people who gave the orders to use torture on prisoners in American custody knew all of this perfectly well.
Right now, the Obama administration—and indeed the general public—is inclined to "focus on the future," not the past, and I sense that even Congress would be made queasy by a full-scale prosecution of the torturers. But give it a few more years, and that might no longer be the case. When I read Mark Danner's essay yesterday, I suddenly thought, for the very first time: President Bush might go to jail for this. Eventually.
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Here's a clip of the frantic females fleeing the scene at the America's Next Top Model auditions on Saturday. Tyra is "concerned" about the situation, according to CNN. Who wants to bet that there's a very special Tyra Banks Show addressing the melee? Thanks to BuzzFeed for the tip.
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The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is worried that fast-rising populist fury at financial sector piggishness (post-bailout bonuses for the very people who dealt in credit-default swaps!!) may threaten its recovery plan. But I wonder if, in fact, we have the ideal recessionary spectacle to watch: call it How To Catch a Greased AIG. Just hang in there, Geithner et al., and don't let the slippery swine go. After refusing all demands for transparency in its use of the huge fall rescue loan, invoking privacy concerns, AIG squealed today: Now—for whatever it's worth—we've got the names of the trading partners who got big chunks of the money. "These are extraordinary times," an AIG spokeswoman explained to the Washington Post.
I confess utter lack of expertise here, but is there a reason not to aim for yet more public squirming by AIG, now on the bonus issue? Citing "privacy obligations," AIG refuses to name the 400 employees covered by the roughly $165 million bonus plan it claims is contractually binding. If those recipients were to get outed, is there a chance that at least a few among them—those, say, in line for more than $3 million—might be too embarrassed to collect? These are, after all, extraordinary times.
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We knew, thanks to Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side, that the International Committee of the Red Cross called the Bush administration's treatment of certain detainees in CIA custody torture. Now we know, from the text of the ICRC's report leaked to writer Mark Danner, about the mountain of specifics behind that label. See here for Danner's shorter New York Times op-ed and here for his longer piece in the New York Review of Books.
The ICRC interviewed 14 high-value detainees in late 2006 at Guantanamo. The Red Cross points out that the "consistency" of their accounts "adds particular weight" to their credibility. Some details also match the stories of former British detainees who described what happened to them after release.
What repeats: a month of standing, arms over the head and shackled, in a frigid room with incessant noise. Little sleep. Face-slapping and head-smashing against walls. Doctors checking for vital signs during water-boarding. The ICRC also picks up on refinements. A towel around the neck of one detainee (Abu Zabaydah) during head-smashing turns into a plastic collar for detainees interrogated later. When Walid ben Attash is forced to stand shackled, the stump of his amputated leg hurts, and he kicks away his prosthesis. Then the pressure on his good leg increases, and he calls his captors to give him back his artificial limb. Afterward, they sometimes take away the prosthesis and then measure the swelling in the leg he has left to stand on.
In Israel in 1999, when a state report came out of the intelligence service's use of cruelly painful stress positions and sleep deprivation on Palestinian detainees, the country's Supreme Court essentially banned torture by forcing the government to plead a necessity defense for any interrogator who used it. Here and now, the Obama administration has forsworn water-boarding and is currently holding the CIA to the standards for interrogation of the U.S. military, which preclude the techniques in the ICRC report. But the government has left open what it will let the CIA do in the future, and at his confirmation hearing, CIA head Leon Panetta signaled that he is open to some harsher techniques, case by case.
Is it better for the executive branch to answer these questions itself, or for a court to step in, as Israel’s did? Does the leak of the ICRC report further the goal of truth-telling for the sake of telling, as Sen. Leahy has been arguing in favor of the truth commission he has proposed for the Senate judiciary committee? Or does knowing what happened mean wanting to know who exactly authorized it, at the highest levels? And then once we know that, how do we thread the president's needle of “looking forward, not backward” and prosecuting the crimes we have evidence of? The questions are sharpening, not going away.
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Dayo, just as you couldn't help but post about the America's Next Top Model stampede (3/14, never forget), I can't resist posting on this New York Times style section piece about the One Taste Urban Retreat Center, epicenter of the "slow sex movement." Naturally it's in San Francisco, and it's "a commune dedicated to men and women publicly creating 'the orgasm that exists between them,' " according to the Times. That orgasm is brought about by the men stroking the women for a prolonged period of time, "in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation — 'OMing,' for short." The men do not make eye contact with the women during OMing, and they don't climax either.
First of all, the authors of the piece don't say how expensive entrance into this vaunted One Taste commune is, but one can assume most of the residents don't need to earn money since they're devoting so much time to that ideal O. The Urban Retreat Center is run by a woman named Nicole Daedone, and late in the piece it is mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that her tech-millionaire boyfriend is bankrolling the joint.
This is not to say that a woman's orgasm isn't an important thing, but isn't it horrifically self-absorbed to join a commune dedicated to the pursuit? In addition, all the focus on the female orgasm somehow feels like another expectation placed on women: If you don't have a 20-minute orgasm, you're not fully realizing your sexuality and have somehow failed. First we're bad mothers because we don't breast-feed, and now we're inadequate because we don't devote hours to coming. We can't win.
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How ‘bout that stampede at the America's Next Top Model tryouts in New York City this weekend? If ever there were a green light for inside-the-beltway crowing at the fallen northern metropolis, this is it. Money quote from the New York Daily News report (complete with video, and screams):
Screaming as they ran for their lives, hundreds of hotties in heels toppled over barricades along W. 55th St. … By the time the model madness ended, six women were injured and two women and one man were busted for inciting a riot, authorities said.
"The girls were running like it was 9/11 part two," said Jennifer Brown, 27, of Kensington, Brooklyn. "I feared for my life."
Apologies for disrespecting those whose modeling dreams were crushed Saturday, but HA! Compare that to the civil proceedings that went on in our nation’s capital earlier in the month: Several thousand women—literal “shorties” this year, at the behest of the ever-enterprising Tyra Banks—tried out without incident. The Washington Post writeup painted a rosy picture:
"D.C.'s off the chain," casting director Michelle Mock-Falcon happily wrote in a text message to the show's producers … Proving that nothing -- bank failures, real estate foreclosures or a stock market freefall -- can dampen the spirit of young people with a dream, women from the Washington region and beyond waited patiently for hours in one line, then a second, and yet another, to get into the secret chamber for their casting call.
And, I submit, the caliber of analytic thought at the DC tryouts was exceptionally high:
“What is the craziest thing you have ever done?" was one question. Apparently, these women were not particularly crazy in the grand scheme of crazy: "Coming here" was a common answer.”
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Holly's eloquent post is a testament to the difficulties that beset legislators and ordinary people when it comes to thinking through the ethics involved in making policy regarding human embryos, stem cells, IVF treatment, and reproductive freedom. Congrats on your twin boys, Holly, and I sympathize with the difficulty of figuring out what to do with those frozen embies. Studies have shown that disposition of embryos is difficult and even agonizing for IVF patients, who at the end of it all want to do the right thing by any leftover embryos, often feel quite attached to them and/or responsible for their welfare, aren't quite sure whether to think of them as tissue, future children, wards, or what, and up to now, at least, have found it often logistically hard to donate them for research, because so few labs could take them. That's why there are about 500,000 frozen IVF embryos in storage around the country. I love the Georgia bill's title, "ethical treatment of human embryos." Given the evolution of that bill, ethical here seems to be a concept that can accept editing.
The bill seems mostly to be part of a periodic conservative effort on the state level to pass some kind of law that will equate embryos with people. I think this particular bill must be the result of two tides washing together. One impetus of course is octo-mom Nadya Suleman, whose eight premature babies are the result of an IVF treatment in which six embryos were transferred. (That eight babies were born is a result of the curious fact that IVF embryos split in two more often than other embryos do.) The other was the Obama administration's loosening of rules on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Talking to people who follow this closely, I gather that in Georgia the Senate tried to put significant restrictions on in vitro fertilization, with some of the limitations that alarmed Holly, most notably a directive that would have essentially done away with embryo freezing, all of which which seems to me a confused attempt at defeating both the Sulemans and stem-cell researchers of the world by forbidding the creation of excess embryos. Infertility patients protested; the bill was modified to direct that (as near as anybody can tell) embryos can only be created with the intent of growing them into children, not using them for research. Meanwhile the Georgia House passed a bill entitling human embryos to the same adoption status children have. The two bills are not identical, and it's not clear they will get resolved. Both endeavor to secure elevated, person-y status for an embryo. I think Holly is right to be confused, because when vague measures are passed equating embryos with children and permitting (but not, I think, compelling) embryo "adoption," it raises a host of questions about the pesky details. MUST embryos be adopted, if they are "children?" CAN embryos be frozen, if they are "children?" If Georgia does pass a law, those details might have to be resolved through litigation.
It should be noted that is yet another bill in Missouri, before the House. It would direct IVF doctors to adhere to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's guidelines on how many embryos may be transferred. This is a sane proposal. I think infertility patients should have the freedom to freeze embryos and decide what to do with the leftover ones—I also think they should be counseled in advance on how hard it might be—but I don't think they should have the freedom to choose how many are transferred during IVF. Or maybe they could choose within a very narrow range—like, one vs. two—but they shouldn't be able to treat the petri dish like some kind of all-you-can-use buffet.
Holly, your post raises an interesting question. You point out that Suleman is a single mom, but not infertile. This implies that people who aren't infertile but want to use reproductive technology may be in a different ethical category than people who are infertile. Should the non-infertile people be regulated differently? Suleman is a persuasive case if anybody is (though some articles have suggested that her many issues actually include infertility) but this is difficult ethical terrain. What about single women who sense that they are on the verge of infertility and use sperm donation, maybe combined with IVF, to conceive before it's too late? Are they not legitimate patients? Then again, 67-year-old IVF moms (or whatever the world's record is, now) are technically infertile. It's hard to draw the line, which is probably why we've found it so difficult to regulate this arena. Nontraditional patients, who include single women, gay men, and lesbians, sometimes are leery of any government involvement or laws or whatnot, for fear they could be excluded. They probably aren't wrong to worry.
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Susannah, thanks for sharing the article about the SXSW fem-blogging panel. When I read your post, I could think only of our former contributor Melinda Henneberger, who back during the early days of this blog, while commenting on a study comparing men with women on something or other, quoted Bush Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. To wit: "Put on your big girl panties and deal with it." (Which is my way of saying I agree with you, 100 percent.)
I've often thought (jokingly) that "Putting on our big girl panties" should be the motto of this blog.
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On the occasion of a zillion geeks descending on Austin for SXSW, the Austin Chronicle considers the so-called "perils of being a female blogger." According to the article, while the blogosphere is rife with chicks everywhere you click, the "professional blogging sphere" raises the question: "Where are all the women?" From the ranks of the purportedly underrepresented, Mediabistro's Rebecca Fox and the Daily Beast's Rachel Sklar step forward to helm a SXSW panel: "Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport for Women?"
To wit: "For professional female bloggers, writing online can get painfully personal—and so can the criticism. Oversharing, sex-blogging, fameballs, Tumblettes, Jezebelism—why is it (still) so difficult to be a woman online?" Who's to blame for making lady bloggers online lives so miserable? The patriarchy and Christianity, of course! Or, as Fox puts it, "keeping your mouth shut has long been tantamount to being 'good,' and the virgin/whore complex is alive and well both online and off." In the end, they conclude, it's (gasp) "dangerous to be a female blogger."
Dangerous to blog if you have a vagina? Blogging while female a "bloodsport"? "There are endless examples of female bloggers coming under the knife for being bitches or media whores, while male bloggers' gender is either ignored or heralded," the Chronicle's Sofia Resnick writes. Really? If there was ever an equal opportunity attack forum, the Internet is it. Mostly upper-middle class, well-educated, by-and-large Caucasian women who seek to publish their words on the Web get what everyone else gets online: a free, uncensored platform with a roving pack of readers who have the right to say whatever they want as part of the "conversation." Get over yourselves, and get on with it, ladies.
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My dislike of Gwyneth Paltrow and her utterly inane, completely tone-deaf weekly lifestyle newsletter GOOP is well-documented, but I had to share this week's edition because it is the platonic ideal of a GOOP entry. In it, Gwynnie gives the masses DVD recommendations from five of her famous friends. It has all four elements of Gwyneth's signature brand of dim elitism: celebrity name checks, spelling errors, a perfunctory attempt to connect with the little people, and searing insight. Let me break it down:
Celebrity name checks: Usually Gwyneth mentions her celeb friends in passing (i.e., "Stella McCartney recommended this brand of quinoa ..." sort of thing), but this week's GOOP is filthy with celebrities. The recommendations are from Gwyneth's close buddies Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, Jon Favreau, James Gray, and Sophia (sic) Coppola.
Egregious misspellings: Did you get that? Sophia Coppola? They're such good friends that Gwyneth doesn't know her name is spelled Sofia.
Stars! Just like us!: "I’m not one of those film people who can tell you who the cinematographer was on On the Waterfront or who most influenced Truffaut. When it comes to knowledge of film history, I’m semi-rubbish. ... I can do the whole rap at the end of The Revenge of the Nerds and all of Jeff Spicoli's dialogue, but sadly, my expertise ends there." See, she's relatable for the average Jane!
So insightful: On Sophia (sic) Coppola: "I have never worked with her but I thought it would be cool to hear her picks, as she is not only incredibly talented, but a woman as well!" A human can have incredible talent and be a woman! Revelatory!
If she's going to go to the trouble of putting this thing out to the public, she should at least try to make it professional. What do you think XXers? Should I just let Gwyneth do her thing in peace?
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A version of Senate Bill 169, the Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act, was passed by the Georgia Senate today. As an Atlanta resident who had IVF to become pregnant and is currently sitting on six frozen embryos, struggling with what to do next, this struck particularly close to home. From what I’ve been able to piece together (and the language of the bill is incredibly vague), it seems legislators in Georgia want to give embryos the same rights as you and me. What does this mean for my frozen embies? What about stem-cell research? Could they force me to have six more children? Could my embryos take me to court? It gets fuzzy.
I suspect that all of this is backlash to the octomom case, which makes me steaming mad. She was, after all, single—not infertile—and there is a difference. It scares me to think that this one case of an irresponsible doctor and an irresponsible mom could turn me into a criminal.
If the bill had passed in its original form, I simply wouldn’t have my precious twin boys. If this was law, because I’m just a squeak under 40, they would have only been able to attempt to fertilize two eggs. Odds are not in your favor there—just because you attempt to fertilize an egg does not mean it will fertilize. In my experience, we retrieved 19 eggs. Only 13 of those fertilized. I’m not good at math, but that’s certainly far from 100 percent success. And there are more obstacles, too. We implanted two of those 13. Of the remaining 11, only six made it to freeze. This gave me such great hope because if my first two had not taken, we would have had another chance. We could not have afforded to do a fresh IVF cycle again, but a frozen cycle is much less expensive. (It requires no surgery and far fewer drugs.) Also, if only one of our embryos had stuck, this gave us hope for a sibling later on down the line. Under this bill, freezing an embryo might be illegal. Hope would be gone for people like me.
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Domestic violence being an atrocity, I have tried to ignore
the rather disgusting “Crihanna” tit for tat that’s competing for shelf space
beside Michelle Obama on newsstands across the country. But this new study out
from Boston University spun my head:
Nearly
half of the 200 Boston teenagers interviewed for an informal poll said pop star
Rihanna was responsible for the beating she allegedly took at the hands of her
boyfriend, fellow music star Chris Brown, in February.
Of those questioned, ages 12 to 19, 71 percent said that arguing was a normal
part of a relationship; 44 percent said fighting was a routine occurrence.
The results of the survey, conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission
across the city and equally among boys and girls, are startling for local
health workers who see a generation of youths who seem to have grown
accustomed, even insensitive, to domestic violence.
"I think you'd have to be pretty jaded if you weren't startled by
it," said Casey Corcoran, director of the health commission's new Start
Strong program.
Maybe. But I have to say I’m not that surprised: In college, I participated in a program called “Community
Health Educators” (the founders have scaled up their model via a national nonprofit
called “Peer Health Educators” that I strongly endorse). The idea is that, because
many local school districts don’t have a budget for health education, kids not too
much older than high school students would travel to local schools—in my case,
an urban setting with a mix of white, black and latino students—bearing
lectures and props and index cards for awkward questions. And that this would
fill the gap. I taught different individual subjects for two years, and in my
senior year I had the chance to participate in a pilot program where I’d see
the same kids every week, teaching the entire curriculum over the course of ten
weeks.
This preamble is by way of saying that I saw the way 17-19
year olds (in a “second chance” high school, where some of the kids had dropped
out or been through the juvenile justice system) absorbed the range of topics
we discussed, from contraception (the wooden penis was a hit), nutrition (“sugar
is not a food group”) to drug and alcohol abuse (one kid asked us, in the
throes of senior spring, if we had ever been drunk). They were on the whole
receptive, if restless and often skeptical of our preachy tone. Learning about
hallucinogens certainly livened up what could have been an afternoon of
trigonometry.
But, far and away, the subject that penetrated the least was our
unit on “relationships and abuse.” This dealt with date rape, molestation by
adults, domestic violence and bullying. It never sunk in. Worse, while the guys
were boorish in the extreme—one male student in one class said if a girl “snitched”
on him for sexual assault, “I’d kill her”—the
girls, I found, were even more likely to say that a male-on-female altercation
involving kicking, punching and hitting was a girl’s fault. (“Why’d she make
him mad?” etc.) Even kids who could rattle off the ins and outs of
contraception without shame (one girl in my class had a toddler already) regressed mightily when it
came to the issue of gender and violence. It was, honestly, chilling. What's that about?
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I've enjoyed Jon Stewart's skewering of Jim Cramer and CNBC. Up until last night, it had been dead on and hilarious. Last night, it was mostly just dead on. That said, I remain unconvinced that Jim Cramer is the guy, and CNBC the institution, that most needs public chastising at this particular juncture. Stewart himself probably agrees with that, but, nonetheless, here's Jim Cramer, a guy who literally wears a costume (those cuffs must have been cutting off his circulation), on the receiving end of the most unrelenting dressing-down we've had the satisfaction of witnessing. I'm sure Stewart vs. Cramer will be more entertaining than whatever painful courtroom proceedings are in store for Bernie Madoff, and, just by virtue of having taken place, will be more cathartic than cutthroat interrogations of, say, Alan Greenspan or Dick Fuld, but none of that changes the fact that Stewart's attack was basically a show trial, and a pretty meaningless show trial at that. (The Times compared it to a Senate hearing). When are some of the more serious culprits going to be forced, harassed, teased into explaining themselves? Or can we be sated with the sacrifice of a clown like Cramer?
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This morning, everyone is talking about Jon Stewart's smackdown of CNBC talking head Jim Cramer. Stewart has been appropriately critical of Cramer and CNBC of late for peddling bum advice to the little guy while lobbing softballs at visiting CEOs. Cramer tries to defend himself in the Daily Show clip below, but Crooks and Liars description of Cramer as a "wounded puppy" is pretty spot-on. If this clip inspires you to play a computer game involving Cramer's disembodied head, click here for The Big Money's answer to your prayers.
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Looks like we've got a new contender for what contributed most to the emancipation of Western women in the 20th century. The Vatican said it was the washing machine; Bonnie countered with the pill. According to a new study, it was more basic than either of those: running water. Emanuela Cardia, an economics professor at the University of Montreal, used census data to study the effect of modern appliances and modern plumbing on women's foray into the workplace in the 20th century. She found that, more than electricity or refrigeration, it was the spread of indoor plumbing that was tied to women entering clerical and sales jobs. Cardia points to previous studies that found that more advanced innovations like the washing machine addressed chores that already may have been the job of hired laborers so had less of a direct impact than running water on the amount of time the woman of the house spent on housework.
In explaining her methods, Cardia writes, "The simplest model of home production assumes that ... men always work and women have one unit of time which they split among market work, housework and leisure." It may be the simplest, but as Emily wrote yesterday, there are a lot of more complicated models being forged now, as laid-off men navigate their new role in the home. I'll bet some of them are feeling pretty liberated by the washing machine these days, too.
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Marjorie, I'm glad you came out against Michael Steele's dorky grasp at urban cred. Sprinkling "off the hook," "friggin' awesome," and "slum love" into his discourse and then prancing around acting like he's started the business of redeeming the Republican Party suggests an insultingly superficial, cynical view of how voters make their choices and why they've chosen Democrats of late—that Americans are no better than magpies, drawn to whatever's flashiest, and that Obama won because he acted cool. It's not just Steele who takes this view, either. It's a widespread idea throughout the GOP that Obama outcooled Republicans, and what the Republicans really need is to double their number of Facebook friends, get hip to Twitter, and start dressing in Baby Phat instead of Brooks Bros.
The afternoon Steele was elected GOP chairman, I stood at the back of the Capital Hilton ballroom with a cluster of young African-American Republicans there to support—unexpectedly—Katon Dawson, the RNC chair candidate notorious for formerly belonging to an all-white country club. This group of Katon junkies argued that yeah, electing the South Carolinian would trigger a brief period of bad PR, but they actually liked him because he was the candidate the least enamored with reanimating the GOP with a superficial makeover. Steele, on the other hand, came in for special derision: He talked the outreach (er, inclusion?) talk but didn't walk the walk. As Steele walked toward the podium to accept his party's nomination after the fifth ballot, one black Republican whispered to me he never could forgive Steele for shamelessly busing in homeless Philadelphians to campaign for him in black neighborhoods during his '06 Maryland Senate campaign.
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Melonyce, I don't know if you are the only one who "finds RNC Chairman Michael Steele's dorky grasp at urban credibility a little endearing." but I surely do not. Why does Steele even need urban credibility? To relate to that large and growing GOP demographic of young black men who wear baggy pants and listen to Jay-Z, Lil' Wayne, and T.I.? I'd be willing to wager they aren't lining up outside the RNC's headquarters, and neither Michael Steele's election as chairman nor his urban-cool, or should I say urban-fool, way of speaking is going to change this.
In what way is Steele more sincere than his predecessors? Ken Mehlman went on listening tours before black organizations and black journalists and publicly acknowledged GOP mistakes and apologized for playing racial politics in the past. He courted black voters and didn't talk down to them. His efforts may not have gained the GOP tons of new black voters, but it earned Melhman some respect. Steele, by comparison, wants to give the GOP "a hip-hop makeover"? (I'm rolling my eyes here because I have no idea what that even means) and has banned the word outreach.
If it's the golf shirt set—whether black or white—that Steele is after, then why not speak to them in their own language, like a serious-minded adult? Given Steele's many missteps that have already led members of his party to call on him to step down, I don't think anyone could argue that he has made the GOP look looser or more dazzling. If anything, he looks just as befuddled and grapsing as his discredited party as it tries to change its image overnight after having been soundly rejected by voters in November.
If Steele really wants to shake up his party he should take a page from Colin Powell, an unapologetic black Republican who was not afraid to criticize the GOP or take positions against party dogma on such things as affirmative action. Black Americans may not have voted with Powell or agreed with his support for the Bush administration, but they respected him. Steele is losing fast what little respect he has with black folks, and with white folks, too, for that matter, and it has nothing to do with whether "he's black enough." It has everything to do with whether he's credible enough. He isn't.
Steele would be more defensible if he would just embrace his inner geek and stop trying to sound hip by using outdated hip-hop terms. I mean is it really necessary for him to sprinkle "off the hook" throughout every conversation? We get it, Mike; you know black slang, congratulations. Bling, bling for you and all that. But trying so hard to showcase your skills in black vernacular makes you seem like you're trying way too hard. It's called pandering, and as a black independent voter who tries to keep an open mind about black Republicans (as hard as that is), I find it deeply insulting. I don't want to be talked down to, or patronized, by a Republican of any color who is stupid enough to think I can be persuaded to give the GOP some love if he slings silly slang my way. This is just as transparent as reluctantly selecting a black man to lead the Republican Party soon after a black Democrat is elected to the White House and selecting an Indian-American to give the Republican response to the new black president's address to Congress and selecting a black Republican carpetbagger and perpetual candidate from Maryland to run against a popular black Democratic candidate from Illinois for the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The same Democrat who would become president four years later.) It reeks of rank desperation and recalls the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia when the genius organizers of that pseudo-diversity fest bused in black preachers and black church choirs to perform at the convention. That party leaders actually believed this would ensure their big-tent, we-are-the-world bona fides, was the subject of many late-night talk-show jokes.
The GOP would do better to simply try to address some of the issues important to black voters, such as racial inequities in the criminal justice system and the warehousing of black men in prison and on death row. How about they tone down their hypocritical hostility to social programs (Republicans prefer the term "entitlement programs") that help lift black families out of entrenched poverty? How about they at least pretend to be just as outraged over the level of corporate welfare that took place under the last administration and that enriched Republican fat cats and contributed to the economic morass we now find ourselves in? How about if Michael Steele got a clue?
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The Hollywood Reporter posted last night about a musical version of Heathers, the 1988 black comedy film (oh, has a genre epithet ever seemed more inadequate?) starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. I'm dubious and excited at the same time. This is sacred material we're talking about here: What slightly offbeat, sorta-smart girl in the late '80s to mid-'90s didn't identify with Ryder's Veronica Sawyer? She was like a proto-Daria, only less acidic and with a higher body count. Girlfriend rocked a monocle!
On the other hand, the thought of finally seeing a fully choreographed version of "Teenage Suicide—Don't Do It!" fills my heart with gladness. Just take a look at all these great Heathers quotes that would make excellent song lead-ins:
Heather Chandler: Corn Nuts!
Veronica Sawyer: Plain or BQ?
Heather Chandler: BQ!
Veronica Sawyer: This isn't just a spoke in my menstrual cycle.
Veronica Sawyer: I just killed my best friend.
J.D.: And your worst enemy.
Veronica Sawyer: Same difference.
Meanwhile, I'm happy to report that while researching my "Explainer" today about the global uses of the mother-incest insult, I discovered that Heathers is offered as an example in the Oxford English Dictionary of "f-ck me and elaborated variants: expressing astonishment or exasperation." The linguistically significant quote—and if you're a fan, you've probably used it a dozen times yourself—"F-ck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Theresa?" That's lyrical gold right there.
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Am I the only one who finds RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s dorky gasp at urban credibility a little endearing? He’s getting flak for trying to give the GOP a “hip-hop makeover.” But isn’t that kind of what it needs—loosening up, a bit of dazzle? Who better for the golf-shirt set to relate to than a middle-aged guy who uses the word bling unironically? And, guess what, the golf-shirt set includes people of all colors who come from diverse economic backgrounds. Steele’s flailing stab at inclusion seems more sincere than what any of his predecessors tried.
We can’t all be as cool as 44; Steele knows he’s the Steve Urkel to Obama’s Stephan Urquelle. And is that so bad? Politicians like Steele and Obama are constantly having to straddle the line between the black community and the mainstream. Calling Steele out for being out of touch with hip-hop culture smacks of the “not black enough” heat both he and Obama have faced—an experience many a bookish black kid can explain in detail.
Steele ran into bigger problems today with his anti-abortion bona fides being called into question by his own party members. Instead of backpedaling about abortion and Rush Limbaugh, he needs to put this plan to build a more ideologically and socially diverse party into overdrive. There should be room under that big GOP tent for everybody. Squares of all stripes need a party to believe in.
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Some of the other "XX Factor" women and I took that interactive quiz Abby mentioned from the Center for American Progress in order to find out how progressive we are. Turns out, we are quite the bunch of liberals. (I know: shocker). Twelve of us took the quiz, and on a scale of 0 to 400 (0 is the least progressive; 400 is the most progressive), we came out with an average score of 245. To put that in context, the mean score for liberal Democrats is 247 and 160.6 for conservative Republicans. Our median is somewhere in the mid-290s; our high is 313, and our low is 112.
Abby, I don't know what Meghan McCain's score on the progressiveness scale would be, but here's an interesting tidbit on Ms. McCain from Think Progress. Apparently this morning on Fox and Friends, Meghan said that she thought the earmarks in the spending bill were "disappointing and scary" while she found the prospect of a second stimulus package nonsensical. This is in direct contrast to what Meghan said last night on The Rachel Maddow Show (bold from Think Progress):
McCAIN: Spending freeze? You know, econ—economic things, I said this last night on Hannity, I said is my—I didn’t even take econ in college. I don’t completely understand it so I’d hate to make a comment one way or the other. That’s—truly of all the things—I keep reading and I just don’t understand it.
She seems to understand it just fine when she's criticizing Democrats!
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I have to agree with you, Susannah. Could someone please get this girl off Twitter long enough to read the news? Even if you're only 24 and just want everyone to get along, is it too much to ask that you deliver a one-liner about your opinion on the economy? Which would lead me to assume that the whole buying an apartment in NYC thing that Maddow asked her about is really Daddy buying her an apartment in NYC. (How many houses are we up to now, Sen. McCain?)
I think Meghan is right that the Republican Party needs some charismatic leadership in order to reach out to more young people—or just more people in general. But she's case in point that there's no sense in reaching out if you can't even articulate what you believe and why.
And speaking of figuring out what you believe, I'd love to know Meghan's score on this interactive quiz from the Center for American Progress. I love it—it's like this number could be the new political secret handshake, essentially your political SAT score! Would love to hear how you XX ladies score—it takes about two minutes and will give you a number to quantify your political slant. Let's just say I bring the average down ...
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Thanks, Jessica, for the YouTube clip of Meghan McCain on Maddow's show last night. Now can I have my IQ points back? From start to finish, it's a profile in Republican idiocy, from mini McCain offering herself up as some type of towheaded neo-poster girl for the right to her faltering faux-platform that consists solely of her picking a fight with Ann Coulter. That's like picking a fight with Hitler. I mean: What? Are we supposed to be impressed she doesn't like the She-Devil? McCain takes Republicans to task for being too extreme and offers her idea of an alternative: "Be more moderate and reach out to people." That's. So. Deep. What's delightful is to see her paired with such a brilliant interviewer. Every word that comes out of Maddow's mouth only serves to make the New Poster Child of the Republican Party appear even stupider. What's a tougher call is that McCain and her commentaries are so insipid, her presence begs for the question: Who's worse? Meghan McCain or Ann Coulter? Tough call, in my opinion. At least Coulter has a brain. What she does with it is the problem.
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Speaking of Facebook, or at least the Facebook generation, Meghan McCain was on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, ostensibly to discuss her burgeoning feud with Ann Coulter. For those of you who missed it, Meghan McCain wrote an article for the Daily Beast called "My Beef With Ann Coulter." Her "beef" is that Ann Coulter "perpetuates negative stereotypes" of Republicans. Not exactly a revolutionary screed, as others have pointed out.
Meghan is trying valiantly to revive the image of the Republican Party, but like Bristol Palin before her, Meghan doesn't exactly have the political chops to do so. She freely admits that she doesn't really understand the financial crisis. What I don't understand is why the Republican Party can't find a smart young woman to represent their movement who does understand the recession. Perhaps someone without a political legacy! Anyway, John Cook at Gawker says that Meghan "made a fool of herself." While I think she was short on substance, I don't think Meghan looks like a fool. She's incredibly poised and camera-ready, and compared to Bristol she sounds like a rocket scientist. But, again: The bar is pretty low. Watch the clip below and tell me what you think.
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Hey, crankypants—or is the right term crankybra? Yes, I'm talking to you, Hanna Rosin. Your generation may not have "found an easy way into Facebook," but my peeps—as amazing as it may seem with my youthful visage and my love of TV shows featuring high school kids, I'm older than you are—are all over it.
You see, my peeps aren't my birth cohort or any other demographic slice; they're my partners in procrastination and time-wasting. Facebook attracts people who watch a lot of television, have a lot of opinions about pop culture, and don't have very well-developed impulse control (check out some of my photos, Sam!). My peeps. Your peeps are way too busy writing brilliant books and numerous genius magazine pieces.
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Samantha, I understand your disappointment that Facebook isn't the cozy place it used to be, but can I chime in on behalf of the old folks? While it might be desirable to make your profile more "professional" if you're going to be using it for work, please don't think that we're all a bunch of humorless, judgmental old biddies. I, for one, refuse to detag the photo that a friend recently posted of me from college in which another friend and I are posing in the men's room of our co-ed dorm. It brings back too many funny memories. (Just like every generation thinks it invented sex, I suppose every generation thinks it's the first to get away with underage drinking and similar craziness. I assure you, there's probably little your generation can do to shock us.)
And I trust as you get older that you will see the other benefits of Facebook. I don't feel like I'm that old, but I've been out of school long enough to have had a half-dozen jobs in three states. I've always left behind people I adored but didn't manage to stay in touch with, which happens when you get married and start popping out kids. (Let me warn you, kids are a time-suck!) Thanks to Facebook, in the past few months I've found childhood friends, college friends, old co-workers. Granted, I don't spend hours obsessively e-mailing my long-lost pals, like some of Hanna's friends do, but it's great for catching up after years of silence and then occasionally responding to comments or posting. Back in January, I survived Ohio State's loss in the Fiesta Bowl by trading wall comments with a friend from first grade. When two beloved teachers from my high school passed away a couple months apart this winter, not only did I learn about their untimely deaths via Facebook, but I was able to come together with former classmates as we shared favorite stories about them.
Facebook, I guess, is like every other aspect of growing up. It might not be as carefree and fun as it used to be, but it offers its own rewards.
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Sam, your post about how adults have ruined Facebook got me pondering a brain teaser: What happens when we, our generation of twentysomething, Original Gangsta Facebook users, becomes—gasp!—grown-ups? (And, if we're not now ... when? Though I wish it weren't so, we definitely qualify as "adults" to a decent number of users already.) What happens when we're the boss ladies? Will people still feel compelled to edit their drunken photos for our benefit? Or will it just be understood that we've got them, too, and so long as you're not breaking the law in any of them, it's all good? And is that even something we would want our one-day inferiors to see, with a click of a button, us authority figures flush-faced, droopy-eyed, and whooping it up while drinking everclear and punch out of red plastic cups? Probably not. So, while it might hurt a little now, I think all these adults on Facebook are just doing what adults are supposed to do and pushing us "youngsters" to grow up. Or, at least to behave like grown-ups, which often comes before feeling like one but is a necessary part of the process. This whole maturing thing can be a drag, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need doing.
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Sam, you're grieving that adults have crashed Facebook? Get over it. This will happen, in various ways, to everything in your life. It's like the restaurant in that Yogi Berra line: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." What is exclusive becomes inclusive; in the process, it is irretrievably changed.
But so are you-changed, and changing. Nostalgia for the early Facebook years is like nostalgia for flower power and anti-war rallies. Don't get too attached to your generational pleasures lest you turn into one of those old folks who can't stop griping about how young people these days don't but should appreciate, oh, waltzing or the Rolling Stones. The world around you-political, social, cultural-is constantly changing in ways that will seem utterly incredible in about 15 more years: You'll look up and say, "Wait a minute, when did everyone start believing XYZ, which was so unthinkable when I was young? I thought everyone was against war/homosexuality/virginity/drugs/obscenity on the radio/regulation/deregulation, so how did policies get changed in this utterly weird direction? Where did these crazies come from, and how exactly did they start running the world? I want my intimate little Facebook back!"
Won't happen. Might as well start getting used to it now.
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Sam, you hit us where it hurts. It's true, my generation hasn't found an easy way into Facebook. I have friends who use it obsessively, like teenagers, and I'm sort of embarrassed for them. I have others who use it like Linked In, to make professional contacts. And others who are so ambivalent that in all their photos they hide behind their kids. Most, like me, just start a page and then neglect it. But I guarantee you, once you're in my shoes and actually start the breast-feeding phase of life (see cranky breast-feeding me in my Atlantic story), as opposed to just dreaming about it (see giddy, insouciant Sam on breast-feeding here), you'll neglect/misuse Facebook too.
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Like Hanna, I, too, am finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for the White House Council on Women and Girls. Obama's heart is certainly in the right place, but this council seems amorphous and somewhat random. What I can get onboard with is all the funding increases for sexual and reproductive health programs coming out of the omnibus bill the Senate passed last night. Providing more money for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and 14 million less for abstinence-only programs seems like a much more concrete, results-oriented way to keep improving women's lives. I was also encouraged by the bill's inclusion of the Affordable Birth Control Act, which restores access to birth control to low-income college-age women whose contraceptive resources were restricted under the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005.
No less important, of course, was the restoration of U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, providing a total of $545 million for family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide.
With all of these councils being created, bills being signed, and funds being allotted to various women's interests, it is easy to forget that much of the recent progress has been a mere correction of Bush administration policies like the global gag rule. The White House Council on Women and Girls is the first truly nonreactionary measure Obama has taken with respect to women, so it will be interesting to see how the council, as it hopefully takes a clearer direction, defines Obama's own vision for American women and girls.
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I second Jess' call for you to become fans of Double X on Facebook. But as happy as I'll be to share that virtual connection with you, I'm not happy this is what Facebook has become. I joined Facebook in the golden years, back when the bulk of its users were friends of friends of Mark Zuckerberg. Younger than Friendster and more exclusive than MySpace, Facebook let us figure out college life as a group. We shared snippets of this strange new experience with the kids we met in class that day and kept tabs on our scattered high-school friends. Facebook let us grow up and apart within view of each other. And then, suddenly, also within view of the grown-ups. And that's when the fun ended.
In preparation for the launch of the Double X page, I started off on a mission to "clean up" my FB profile. I'm friends with my bosses now, after all, so it's time to get profesh. But the same drunken pictures that I know I should untag are also the ones I most love revisiting—driven by that intense nostalgia that causes me to reread my humiliating middle-school diaries every time I visit my parents' apartment. Ever since adults crashed the party, though, Facebook profiles are more like cover letters than diaries. So I embark on my Facebook makeover grudgingly, because I'm way more embarrassed to reveal myself as self-promotional than drunk.
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The XX Factor blog is spinning off into its own site called Double X in the spring (more on that here). If you want to stay informed about our latest stories, news, and events, you can click here to follow our Twitter or click here to become a fan of our Facebook page. We're so excited to bring you the new site and will be keeping you posted.
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Hanna, I feel pretty much the same about Bristol Palin’s predicament as I felt about the Crihanna debacle. The baby beaus weren’t going to stay together anyway, so why stay together in the midst of such drama? At these young ages, there are no guarantees—and actuarial tables, if not common sense, would counsel against making puppy love permanent. Sure, Rihanna and Brown became the breadwinners for their older family members at 21 and 19, respectively (a whole different story), and the 18-year-old Palin became a “role model” before even leaving the province of underaged handle-chugging, but someone (um, you know, parents) should have reminded them: You are not adults.
So of course Levi isn't "hands on." We should applaud Palin—however belatedly, she came to the right decision. But why don’t we teach kids that it’s OK to break up? Give it two years, max—and if by then you’re over 25, split or get married. Seems clinical, but is it any worse than this surreal mythology of true romance that allows teens to tear at each others’ emotions until, one day, there are bruises—or a baby on board?
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I'm not sure what to make of the new White House Council on Women and Girls. Seeing that snapshot of Pelosi and Boxer up there had a throwback feel, and not entirely in a good way. (Back to the tokenism!) And coming in a week when the Washington meme is Obama doing too much, this seemed like a frenzied afterthought. That said, Obama's words were just right, or at least they spoke to me.
"I've seen it in Michelle, the rock of the Obama family, juggling work and parenting with more skill and grace than anybody that I know. But I also saw how it tore at her at times. How sometimes when she was with the girls, she was worried about work; when she was at work, she worried about the girls."
Now that women are nearly half the workforce, it's high time we had some national policy to figure this out, or at least tried. What we have now at the top of the pay scale is pretty good—a lot of flexibility in certain kinds of jobs. But the burden is on each individual woman to carve her own path. At the bottom, of course, it's a different story. As Jennifer Barrett wrote recently in Slate, it's not exactly true that the stimulus bill is shafting women. It's just that when it comes to women, there are not many decent industries to stimulate. Women work in service jobs, not the high-paying union construction jobs.
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We should have guessed it would end this way. Of course, Bristol and Levi have broken up. In America of 2009, stories that begin with the words pregnant and high school don't end in fairy-tale summer weddings. And I suppose if Bristol were going to become a poster girl for the Real Lives of Evangelicals, she might as well go all the way—pregnant at 17 and unmarried. In the semirespectable news stories that followed the tabloid stories, Bristol complained about people cashing in on her name and Levi complained about false Internet rumors. But those rumors were pegged to his own sister, according to Radar. Mercede, they reported, "says Bristol even told him that she hates him and, when she learned she was pregnant, wished the baby wasn't his."
"Bristol's just crazy," said Mercede. "That's the nicest way I can put it. She and Levi actually broke up a while ago!" Then she debunked the whole "hands-on" dad thing—a soundbite from the Greta Van Susteren interview of last month. "Levi tries to visit Tripp every single day, but Bristol makes it nearly impossible for him. She tells him he can't take the baby to our house because she doesn't want him around 'white trash.' She treats him so badly!" (Wait until he applies for a state trooper job.)
Next on Jerry Springer, a Connecticut group is starting the first draft Sarah Palin group.
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I'm still years (and, I hope, a wedding) away from being a lactater, so I've yet to experience the pressure from other mothers or lactation specialists or medical studies about how to nourish my newborn. But I must say, I'm excited to breast-feed (and, I suppose, pumped to pump). As women, we're so often battling our bodies, cursing the way we put on weight or break out or start menstruating years before we actually want to reproduce, and making all sorts of decisions and purchases to try to counteract those truths. Breast-feeding is this one perfect, incredible thing that our body actually does right. Our breasts know when we have a hungry baby, and they make it food! And not just any food—food that's "better than a mango, even." If my breasts are willing to be so intelligent and industrious, I am eager to put 'em to use.
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Hanna, I'm glad Obama's grand claim to separate politics and ideology from science bothered you, too. It disturbs me when politicians and pundits talk about science as if it's a separate force all its own, somehow divorced from rational decision-making in which moral forces always come to play. There was a line in last year's movie Flash of Genius in which Greg Kinnear's character points out this political deception to his students. He reminds them that it was engineers who did incredible good when they invented the replacement heart valve and also engineers who were responsible for so much evil when they invented the Auschwitz gas chambers. The examples are extreme, but the point is a good one: Just because science gives us the capability to do something—it doesn't make it the best thing to do. Science allows us to destroy human embryos, but it can't answer whether that's right or not.
So, if anything, Obama's choice to lift the ban and begin to fund morally questionable research when science is giving us such promising, noncontroversial alternatives seems like more like a "Flash of Grandstanding" than anything else, but one that has some seriously scary consequences.
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Ann, here is my best guess about the success of the breast-feeding brigade. Some of it is because of external forces, and some is our own inner craziness. The researchers who helped the American Academy of Pediatrics craft its rigid pro-breast-feeding statement came of age during the '70s. They watched formula companies peddle their product in Africa, where the dirty water turned out to be fatal to babies. They also watched hospitals routinely inject mothers with hormones to stop the flow of milk. To them, this is a war, and there's no middle ground.
Now, why do they have a receptive audience? Breast-feeding gets us where we are vulnerable; if you are a working mother, it's the one thing you can do that your nanny can't. Also, it fits in perfectly with this current moment in parenting, where the child is an improvement project, and no amount of tinkering is too much. It is an odd thing, of course, that this intensive form of parenting thrives at exactly the historical moment when women have the least time for it. I'm sure you could shed light on that conundrum, Ann.
I also think the green/farmer's market obsession has something to do with this. Feminists chucked natural childbirth without much guilt long ago, but breast-feeding is riding the tails of the organic food movement. If they could only find a way to make formula look less like Hi-C and smell less like an old tire, we'd be golden.
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I just wanted to chime in in support of Hanna's great Atlantic article. Like Hanna, I happily nursed my first two children for a year. With my second, I had the great luxury of working from home, so I rarely even had to pump. I'm planning to nurse my third. (For one, it's free; for another, it's a lot easier to get back to sleep after those 2 a.m. feedings if you're nursing than if you have to schlep downstairs to the kitchen to make bottles.)
But I think it's crazy for women to guilt one another into breast-feeding, or for women to feel like they have to exclusively breast-feed. Two anecdotes from my older son's first few weeks hammered it home to me. First, while I was still in the hospital, recovering from an emergency C-section and trying to grasp the whole concept of motherhood, the "lactation specialist" visited our room. She handed me a bottle of glucose water and said, "Now, if baby gets hungry, just give him this, not formula." When my nurse saw it, she flipped and ordered me to hand it over. Turns out the lactation specialist hadn't bothered to inquire about my son. I'd had that emergency C-section because he weighed 10 pounds, and the doctors suspected I'd had undiagnosed gestational diabetes, so he was also dealing with blood-sugar issues. Glucose water was the last thing I should give him.
Still in new-mother mode, I tried to avoid formula when we went home, but I still remember the night Brandon cried, and I tried to feed him. And he cried, and I tried to feed him. And so on. Until we gave in and gave him just an ounce or two of formula. And then we all got four hours of sleep.
To me, it seems like breast-feeding is just another front in the "Mommy wars"—whether to work or stay at home, whether to live in the cities or the suburbs. I'm not sure why women feel compelled to guilt one another over such decisions when there is never one right answer that applies to every woman. But consider me Switzerland.
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I've been waiting for your breast-feeding article, Hanna, so thanks for the alert that it's now out in the Atlantic, Emily. The piece is great, and persuades me that nursing isn't the secret to thinner, smarter, healthier babies—certainly not among the well-off set that swears by the practice. It also reminded me of the many reasons nursing isn't exactly the secret to well-rested, maritally contented, productively employed mothers, either. Which leaves me with a question: Why is it that the pro-breast-feeding brigade has had such success peddling its message at precisely the moment when you would think women would be least receptive to it?
Clearly the audience is complicit here: At the turn of the 20th century, the newly scientific experts peddled their intricate formula recipes not because they were better or safer (back then, when cow milk supplies were dicey, they were anything but). They peddled them because they were well-aware that middle-class "modern" mothers were eager not to be tied down all day the way their mothers had been. So how do you read the peculiar eagerness among mothers recently, as they stream into the workforce, to, well, swallow the opposite, highly inconvenient expertise? In the video accompanying your piece, you and your friends touched on this, confirming my sense that nursing isn't about helping our kids to ace their SATs. Isn't it more about helping to reassure ourselves that we mothers really are indispensable?
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A few years ago, Education Next ran a terrific article about how the teachers assigned to Manhattans smartest high-schoolers are there because of seniority rather than expertise. According to that piece, half of the teaching vacancies at Stuyvesant are reserved for teachers seeking transfers from other New York City schools, and those must be "filled solely on the basis of seniority."
As someone who had to suffer through a computer science course taught by a fairly batty, near-retirement woman who seemed to be gazing upon Microsoft Word for the first time, I know how painful it is to be taught by someone whose only qualification is having put in some time. I hope Obama strives not just for getting smarter teachers in the classrooms but for creating a system that encourages them to stay there. Teach For America hasn't quite nailed that. TFA puts smart, motivated, overachiever types straight from their elite college campuses to impoverished school districts, and studies show they are effective. But most of my friends who've done it burn out almost immediately—not a huge surprise, given that they're idealists used to succeeding, having to face their failure not only to change the world, but even to get their students to sit down. What we need are smart teachers who can stick around long enough to get that last stint at Stuyvesant.
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From today's New York Times:
[Gourmet editor Ruth] Reichl would like the White House kitchen to issue regular news releases that describe what the first couple and their daughters are eating. (Then parents across the country could tell their children, "You know, Malia and Sasha were eating salad yesterday ...")
Excellent idea! What 10-year old would not benefit from national news releases detailing the number of calories she consumes daily? Why not release updates on Malia's BMI as well? Then the girls would know that they are eating salad for America.
The Times' article is on Michelle Obama's "Healthful Eating" agenda. I cringe every time Obama slips into domestic goddess mode, and this is no exception. I do not want the first lady's agenda to have anything to do with kitchens or children's libraries. I do not want her to submit recipes to cookbooks or talk about her efforts to make her husband pick up his dirty socks. I realize that Obama is trying to navigate an incredibly backward set of norms (Washington is a conservative place no matter who is in power), and that David Brooks will find her terrifying no matter what she does, but I wish she would resist the impulse to become our Nurturer-in-Chief. (When Hillary Clinton said that she would not "stay home and bake cookies," it was not the caloric content of cookies that concerned her.) The idea of Michelle doing talk shows about how to prepare kid-friendly broccoli dishes while her husband is discussing nuclear armament with Russia makes me want to do a lot of things, and planting a sustainable vegetable garden is not among them.
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Today, the Washington Post features two op-eds criticizing the president's decision to lift the ban on federally funded stem cell research, one from the more libertarian Kathleen Parker and one from the social conservative Michael Gerson. While I disagree with both of them—I'm glad he lifted the ban—I can't say he didn't deserve it. Obama's spin that he was just taking the politics and ideology out of science was coarse, glib, and just short of insulting. (See Slate's own William Saletan's warning against "Winning Smugly.") There are many areas of science President Bush handed over to unqualified political cronies in order to push certain results: Endangered species, drilling, and condoms come to mind. Stem cell research is not one of them. Like abortion, this is a legitimate moral issue with reasonable objections on all sides. The left should have learned something from the abortion debate. Eventually, the feminist movement came to regret talking about fetuses as if they were just another appendage. The left has just swiftly won the stem cell war. But as Saletan warns, "Don't lose your soul."
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Margaret, Marjorie, I've been studiously avoiding reading your posts on The L-Word finale until now. My prosecutor recorded it and—tell me this isn't love—waited until I could watch it with her last night. Finales tend to be disappointing; this one was as well. (And how disappointing that we didn't get to see more of Lucy Lawless as the butch detective, a little wink to her longtime role as lesbian icon in Xena.) But gosh, the show was fun while it lasted. In the last season I enjoyed watching them turn Jenny (possibly the least believable lesbian on the planet, except maybe Erin Daniels as a tennis god—yeah, right) into an all-out bitch who hurts every last friend. I kinda enjoyed how much fun they had making everyone into Jenny's potential murderer; I'll vote for Bette. But the sixth season didn't have nearly enough sex. The fifth season included Tasha and Alice going at it with some excellent hungry heat, which they didn't have this season. And aside from them, there was all kinda kitschy sex: sex on a movie set! Sex in a movie trailer! Prison sex! Car sex! Bridesmaid sex! Adulterous sex! Shane, that hounddog, racing away from angry girls who've just had the best orgasms of their lives! Oh lordy, I laughed so hard at it all. And I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to watch girls do it the way girls really do it—not with long nails, like a porn movie for men, but down and dirty. Straight folks get this in their dramas and comedies all the time—realistic, well-shot heat—but I've never before seen it depicted well so consistently for lesbians. Just that deserves some awards.
And oh, how I loved Pam Grier being rescued from the purgatory of the blaxploitation bin. She should have a show all to herself, somewhere, somehow.
But you both should know that the biggest surprise audience—bigger than straight men, who didn't watch as much as expected—was straight women. They ramped up the clothes in the second season into goofy-looking femme wear specifically to appeal more to that Sex in the City-missing demographic. Thank god for Tasha and Shane, who provided at least a minimum weekly requirement of butch girls, one for whom I could pine. I got more good dyke hit off Rachel Maddow most weeks than off most of The L-Word. Not that I'm complaining! I could have gone on watching dyke drama with those femme gals for years to come.
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Every so often a song appears that is obviously best listened to in pajamas at a slumber party with fake microphone in hand. Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You" is such a song (it's also the No. 1 single in the country). You've been warned if you decide to put this on in a place where you have to behave like a proper adult because, among other things, it sounds a lot worse when you're sitting still. On the "Like a Prayer" scale (that Madonna song being, at least for a subset of women my age, the track most likely to have inspired juvenile dancing en masse or, in significantly lamer present-day terms, the wedding song most likely to make everyone start hysterically laughing and get on the dance floor), I think it clocks in at about a seven, just a smidge behind Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone." (The two songs sound almost exactly the same. If it ain't broke and all.) Another track off Clarkson's new record, All I Ever Wanted, the awesomely titled "I Do Not Hook Up," is almost as power chord catchy. With this album, Clarkson is burnishing her everygirl cred: Unlike Madonna, but like most everyone else, she tried rebelling and failed. (She released her last record over protestations from music suits who told her the album was a mess—it was, and it flopped.) So she went back to the authority-approved stuff and is now bettering sleepover parties across the nation.
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XX Factor's Hanna Rosin has a fascinating piece in the latest Atlantic on the breast-feeding myth. She writes that after nursing her first two children for a year each, she finds herself longing to free her breast early from the mouth of baby No. 3. Hanna looks at the studies we've been spoon-fed over the years about the incalculable superiority of breast-feeding and finds that when you actually examine the numbers, most fade to statistical insignificance. She is not making a case against breast-feeding (despite the fact that's the title of the piece!): She acknowledges its many benefits, and she is saying there is a rational choice to be made to not breast-feed and those mothers shouldn't be treated as if formula is laced with anthrax. As Hanna points out, a miserable breast-feeding mother is not an optimum mother. I know we all should support whatever good choice women make for themselves (I happily breast fed for a year), but her piece made me think of the alternate phenomenon. I confess something bothers me about when I see mothers who won't stop breast-feeding. These are the women whose 4-year-olds walk up to them and demand a slurp. I always wonder if these mothers are going to be waiting in the wings, nursing bra at the ready, when their kids need a boost during the SATs.