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Willa, Hanna, isn't there a problem in writing a tell-all if you avoid telling about the most important thing? According to reports Elizabeth Edwards acknowledges that John confessed to her about his affair—although his confession was a lie in that he made it sound like a one-time slip instead of an on-going thing—but she does not mention at all the baby that has resulted. The fact that she doesn't is a kind of back-handed confirmation that baby is Edwards' since a tell-all book would be a good place to assert he wasn't the father if that was actually the case. I can understand Elizabeth wanting to tell her story. Hanna, as you point out, she feels comforted by being open. Because she is so ill, the criticism of her decision to do so, and of her choice to participate in Edwards' doomed presidential race will be muted. But why subject herself, and her family, to more public rehashing of what a creep her husband is? Hanna, he may have tried to create the appearance of sincerity, but he was always so disturbingly artificial. That actually may be the most authentic thing about him—how utterly insincere he is.
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Willa, you question whether Elizabeth Edwards should have written a tell-all about her husband's affair. In my experience covering her during the campaign, she is, in her bones, a tell-all kind of person. In her books, in her speeches, in her blog posts, she reveals an extraordinary amount of personal information for a political wife—exactly what she did after her son was killed, where John touched her when they discovered her cancer had returned, how she yells at her kids. That is, however, not exactly the same as being honest. I've always thought of her as a model of Lionel Trilling's concept of "authenticity." What's most important to her is being true to herself at any given moment. If she is angry at her staff she will yell at them. If she hates John she will kick him out of the house. If the next minute she feels love for him, she'll feel it. Authenticity requires no consistency. So in her book I imagine she is heartbroken one minute and vengeful the next (such as when she calls Rielle, the mistress, "pathetic.") John, on the other hand, veers more towards Trilling's concept of "sincerity." He conforms himself to an external standard of moral uprightness and honorable behavior. Not a hair out of place, not a word changes in his stump speech; it's always consistent and polished. This is an outdated model, which is why I think he always seemed so insincere when he was trying to be sincere. Also, as we all know, he fell badly short of it.
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I sure have. We all know how we're supposed to apportion our budget (10 percent into savings, no more than 30 percent towards housing, etc.), but how many of us really stick to that? And when we veer off course, what are the sirens pulling us away? I spend too much on cabs and Greek yogurt, for instance. This Mother Teresa figure drops $650 on dry-cleaning and a cool grand a week on skin-care.
So, to satisfy that voyeuristic impulse and perhaps do a little pop sociological research in the process, we're asking for XX Factor readers to participate in an experiment. We'd like to have a handful of women, from various parts of the country and occupying different income brackets, keep scrupulous track of their expenses for a week. We'll publish the results on Double X, the new Slate women's site that's launching in May. (We won't use your real name on the site, unless of course you want us to.) If you're interested in participating, send an email to DoubleX.slate@gmail.com with the subject line "Track My Spending," and we'll send along more details.
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While it’s true as John says that the 100-day presidential milepost is media-made, it does afford time to ponder swift and striking changes, such as Michelle Obama’s rise in poll ratings. Less than a year ago, in June 2008, as the Washington Post pointed out in its 100-days section yesterday, Michelle Obama’s favorable rating was 48 percent. Now it’s 76 percent, meaning that this first lady is more popular than Hillary Clinton or Laura Bush at similar early junctures. Andrew Sullivan has acknowledged that Michelle’s “public relations success” is one of the aspects of this time period that surprises him. But last week, poll results from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press provided some clues as to why this has happened. To wit: conservative women like her a lot more than they did this time last year.
You can glean this from one of the center’s fun tricks: one way its pollsters probe the collective unconscious is to ask people a single word they'd use to describe the person in question. Among the top three words used to describe Michelle Obama are three—classy, nice, and intelligent—that were also in the top four for Laura Bush. But while Bush tended to evoke words such as ladylike, quiet, loyal, dignified and pleasant, Michelle Obama is more likely to cause people to say things like strong, confident, smart and wife. (Why in the world “wife” didn’t spring to mind in the case of Bush is hard to imagine, but whatever; Curtis Sittenfeld corrected that.) In the top twenty for Michelle Obama, the only pejorative was “arrogant,” which occurred to seven people, the same number that came up with “awesome,” “mother,” “outgoing,” and “terrific.” Laura Bush’s only pejorative was “invisible.” For some reason, both women prompted a good number of readers to say, simply, “OK.”
But here's where the one-word-thing gets sort of telling: As the Pew analysis points out, in July 2001, “conservative “ was the seventh-most-common word used to describe Laura Bush. Yet out of almost 800 respondents this year, only one person responded to the words “Michelle Obama” with the word “liberal.” Apparently, people see Michelle Obama as non-partisan, which presumably gives her crossover appeal. Someone who came into contact with her on a national service initiative recently described her to me as a “political tiger” who made effective behind-the-scenes phone calls, but the public does not see her as political.
And perhaps because that is the case, the cohort among whom Michelle’s polls numbers has risen most strikingly is Republican women. In January, Pew found, just 46 percent of Republican women had a favorable view of the new First Lady. Three short months later, that figure had risen 21 percentage points, to 67 percent. That’s a big change in a short period of time. To me, this suggests that the first lady's shrewdly tended public image, which emphasizes her family values—mother, wife, daughter, vegetable gardener—has gone a long way toward winning over women of a more conservative bent. Republican men like her better now, too, than they did in January—and a lot better than they did last year—though the change is not quite so striking. So Andrew, I think there’s your answer. Or some of it.
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More from our feature
on kids' drawings of the commander-in-chief:
XX Factor reader Jaclyn Young sent in this Inauguration Day
card of President Obama drawn by her 7-year-old nephew, Shane. She called
Shane to thank him for his card, with "President Obama in what looks like a pink
bathing suit on the cover." His response: "Oh yeah, the pink bikini. I had
that idea first. If anyone else says they had the idea first, they are
lying."
Another reader, Mardi Pinkney, submitted this work by her
godson, Dominic Williams-Dzirasa, age 7. When Dominic learned of Obama's
victory, he said, "You mean there has NEVER been a brown
President...EVER? That's just
strange!" He drew this to celebrate the occasion.
And this one came from a friend of mine, Ilana Lorge, who
teaches third grade in Singapore.
It's by one of her students, Alex Soikkeli.
Want to brag about your own presidential portrait artist to
be? Keep the submissions coming!
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Hanna, speaking of marriages that make you feel uncomfortable, the Edwardses are back in the spotlight today. The Daily News got its hands on a copy of Elizabeth Edwards' forthcoming memoir, Resilience, and have predictably highlighted the salacious stuff. (John Edwards told his wife Elizabeth about his affair with Rielle Hunter, whose name Elizabeth never uses in print, just days after he announced his candidacy. Upon finding out Elizabeth writes that she "cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.")
The excerpts seem—and not having read the book yet, big emphasis on the seem— to be a kind of correction to the Stepford, "stand by your man" approach so often taken by political wives (and Elizabeth Edwards did, at least, refuse to physically stand next to her man while he made his confession and apology)—but only kind of. Edwards tells her side of the story and publicly chastises her husband ("He should not have run," she writes) but he's still her husband. Her critique has a narrow outer limit. Is writing about this better than keeping mum? Or, in a way, is it exactly the same? Is telling us all the true, clichéd things about why a person might decide to stand by her jerk that different from, or that much more informative than, silently standing by said jerk?
The News does pull out one genuinely heartbreaking quote from the book: "I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters." And I'm sure it does matter, and yet, I can't help but wonder if the look she's describing resembles the supposedly earnest, empathetic stare Edwards utilized on the campaign trail, which some people, myself included, always found to be so disingenuous (and that turned out to be, to the extent that Edwards' ambition did trump his judgment, truly disingenuous). And then I wish I could un-think that thought, because it would be nicer to believe Elizabeth Edwards' version of things.
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When I'm not a journalist, I'm a poet, and today some bad news came: Craig Arnold, winner of the Yale Younger Series of Poets prize and author of several collections, has gone missing on a small volcanic island off Japan. He was there on a creative fellowship exchange. A search party was sent out for him, but it's not clear whether the search is ongoing, and so poets and writers are trying to ensure that it is not given up yet. Here's a link to more information, and a call for help from anyone who might have connections in the area. Here is the beginning of a lovely poem of his, which you can also find on the Poetry Foundation Web site:
The bird who creaks like a rusty playground swing
the bird who sharpens the knife the bird who blows
on the mouths of milk bottles the bird who bawls like a cat
like a cartoon baby the bird who rubs the wineglass
the bird who curlicues the bird who quacks like a duck
but is not a duck the bird who pinks on a jeweller's hammer
They hide behind the sunlight scattered throughout the canopy
At the thud of your feet they fall thoughtful and quiet
coming to life again only when you have passed
Perhaps they are not multiple but one
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As Slate's foreign editor, I'm always
aware of the odd and sometimes iffy news priorities the media invokes when
deciding what "foreign" stories to cover. And because I'm prone to guilt
(despite being neither Catholic nor Jewish), I spend a lot of time wondering why
I'm more interested in one place than
another—even when, all too often, the stakes, the body counts, and the atrocities
are much more mind-boggling in the place I just can't get all that excited about.
I mumble all this psychobabble because I'm currently
obsessed with the developing story of the vehicle that drove into a Dutch crowd
gathered to greet Queen Beatrix on Queen's
Day, a national holiday. As Britain's
Daily Telegraph put
it:
Witnesses said that the black Suzuki Swift appeared
to deliberately target an open bus carrying Queen Beatrix and her family. ... The
car swerved across police railings, where crowds of people were waiting to see
the queen pass, and slammed into the foot of a stone monument, where it came to
a halt, its bonnet crumpled and scraped.
Thus far, there are reports
of four people dead and 13 injured, and authorities seem to have agreed it was
a deliberate assault.
Still, four people dead? What's that compared with the body count in the Democratic
Republic of Congo? What's the horror of having a car drive at you when you're
waving at the monarch (even a cute, right-on one like Beatrix) compared with what civilians
are being put through in Sri
Lanka? Am I just reacting this way because I've been in a crowd like the
one in Apeldoorn, whereas I've never, say, gathered
firewood like the women of Darfur (a task that leaves them prone
to all manner of horrific abuses by marauders and Janjaweed militias)?
Or perhaps it's a gay thing. Queen's Day is a very gay holiday in the Netherlands.
Could this morning's incident be a homophobic attack? Yes, that's my excuse, I'm
watching out for my people. OK, guilt gone.
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Vice President Joe Biden is clearly on a confidence high from having talked Sen. Arlen Specter into joining the other team. So now, after 100 days of relative silence, he's running his mouth again. On the Today show this morning, he said;
I would tell members of my family, and I have, "I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," the vice president said. It's not that he's going to Mexico, it's that you're in a confined aircraft, and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft...So from my perspective what relates to mitigation, if you're out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that's one thing. If you're in a closed aircraft or a closed container or closed car or closed class room, it's a different thing.
This is, of course, not what the president said last night. He stuck to the basics: Wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough. And the problem is not that what Biden said isn't true; the Mexican government has been spreading this message for over a week. It's that it gives the impression that public officials, trading on inside information, are telling their families something they aren't telling the rest of us. His spokeswoman quickly corrected the mistake, insisting he told his family the same thing he's been telling the rest of us: Only stay out of subways and airplanes if you're sick.
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From David Leonhardt's cool and meaty interview with the president. Obama says:
And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are
just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than
men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men
and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically
important....
I
think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay
better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more
men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an
egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the
stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender
stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the
primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.
LEONHARDT: Did Michelle ever make more than you did?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Probably only
for a brief time, because I was working three jobs most of the time
that I was in the State Senate.... But when I started campaigning for
the U.S. Senate and I had to drop some of those jobs, then she carried us for a couple years.
OK, so the last part comes off as a bit defensive. But mostly, hey, he gets it.
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Well, gals, if we're talking about old senators, we MUST mention the oldest of them all: Strom Thurmond, who more or less died in office, age 100. I remember watching TV, mouth open, as his aides moved him across the Senate floor. Honestly, the dude looked embalmed. It was awe-inspiring to watch him not break. (I would've been terrified to be one of those aides. Imagine killing your boss accidentally!) If he could be senator, well heck, Specter has another 20 years of useful public service in him!
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It's Obama's 100th day in office (did you hear?). John Dickerson says on Slate today that the hundredth-day hoopla is a "fake moment, a journalistic trope of premature measurement that the administration is compelled to go along with because we're insisting." We're insisting, by rolling out our assessment of the president through the eyes of young artists. Here are three Obama drawings by youngsters that show different sides of the man, the president. The princess side. The neck side. The killing side.
From Dahlia's three-year-old Sopher, a piece showing a triumphant Obama and a dead John McCain. Dahlia's description of the artist at work:
It was slightly awkward because he drew it in synagogue and was just putting the
final flourishes on it when the rabbi walked by and asked sweetly what it
was."Dead John McCain" elicited a very unrabinnical silence.
From Pearl, 5-year-old daughter of Slate design director Vivian Selbo, entitled "BrokoObama":
And from Angelica, an 8-year-old who lives next door to my parents and is prone to drawing Obama—and all people—as a princess, we have Obama With Basketball. Angelica's dad, George Bonanno, says his favorite part is "the long eye
lashes—I guess thats her way of saying 'attractive.'"
If your kid or grandkid or neighbor or niece or student has a great Obama drawing, please send it to us. We'll be featuring more throughout the week.
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Here a pandemic, there a pandemic, everywhere you look lurks the swine flu. What's a girl to do? Get stylish with it. In the blogyard, swine-flu-inspired fashions abound. Refinery 29's Pipeline suggests you weather the pigocalypse with panache, in a sequined hood and armed with cleansing hand gel. Over at New York, The Cut offers face masks for the fashionista, including the Richard Prince nurse-styled, the besnouted, and the Gitmo-esque. Me? I prefer the look of this latex pig mask. If you can't beat 'em, you may as well join 'em.
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The last time I had the misfortune of noticing Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, he was leading an attack on virtual beer pong. Now, in the wake of the (surprisingly well-kempt!) "Craigslist Killer," he has apparently turned his prosecutorial gaze toward Craigslist's "erotic services" section. Tracy Quan, writing in the Daily Beast, thinks Blumenthal is exploiting the public's ignorance about the Internet for a few minutes of airtime:
Craigslist is no more to blame for a homicidal attack on a working woman than is the Marriott hotel where Julissa Brisman was killed, or the BlackBerry her accused killer probably would have used to establish contact with her. Questions arise about whether Markoff's alleged violence is linked to a gambling problem—he was arrested while en route to Foxwoods in Connecticut—but it would be impolitic and irrational to call him "the Foxwoods Killer." Why are we applying a different logic to Craigslist?
The dubbing of Philip Markoff as the "Craigslist Killer" seems as unfair to Craigslist as the term "Swine Flu" is to Iowa pig farmers. Sites like Craigslist may or may not make the practice of sex work more dangerous, but the Internet almost certainly helps law enforcement track violent Johns. Investigators got to Markoff through his IP address, and prosecutors are using Craigslist to try to locate other potential victims. At any rate, Craig himself says the "erotic services" section is staying put, P.R. disaster be damned.
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June, I admit once you read the litany of illnesses Specter has dealt with—two brain tumors, recurrent Hodgkin's, cardiac arrest—you've got admire his self-proclaimed "vim,vigor, and vitality" (which as Slate's Andy Bowers observed are three adjectives which mean, "I'm really old"). However, I totally agree with you that we are strangely lacking a discussion about the fact that an 80-year-old man with this medical history should be willing to step aside and let someone new run for a job with a six-year term. It surely says something about the life-enhancing effects of power that jobs that come with it are clung to like life-support. While most Americans would probably love to hang it up in their 50s, we have the specter not just of Specter, but of many others, like the infirm Robert Byrd, 92, from the state of Robert Byrd—I mean West Virginia, who will have to be carried out. I was amused by the recent congressional battle in which the 83-year-old John Dingell lost a chairmanship because whippersnapper Henry Waxman, who will soon turn 70, was tired of waiting his turn.
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So, one day after Sen. Arlen Specter transitioned from R to
D, the consensus seems to be that he gave President Obama the best
100-days-in-office gift ever. For all the reasons Slate's John Dickerson pointed out, it's a canny move for
Specter, who knew he faced real trouble in Pennsylvania's 2010 Republican primary. But
here's what I don't get: Why is Specter, who'll be 80 years old by the time
next year's races roll around, so determined to serve another six years? He has
famously survived several serious illnesses, including cancer—twice. Perhaps
it's because I can't imagine working until 80, much less vying for one of the most
competitive jobs in the world at that age, but I just don't get why Specter finds
the prospect of pottering and porch-swinging so unattractive.
Clearly, in a democracy, the voters get to decide if they're
comfortable electing an oldster to represent their interests. Just as clearly,
the seniority system puts a premium on experience. Still, some of these guys
are too old to drive cars—yet we're happy to have them drive the ship of state?
Between the senior citizens on the Supreme Court and the
geezers in Congress, I'm starting to wonder if there's something in the D.C.
air. But we're in a recession: Let's open up some jobs for younger people.
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Thy Neighbor's Wife, a narrative of the sexual revolution and one of my favorite books, has recently been reissued with a new forward by Katie Roiphe. I read it long after the controversy that nearly sunk Gay Talese's writing career, and his marriage to publisher Nan Talese. In a fabulous profile in New York Magazine this week, he talks about that period and a new book he's working on, about his actual marriage. The controversy began when he let a reporter from New York follow him around on his reporting trips, which included jaunts to massage parlors and orgies. The literati iced him for supposedly betraying his very popular wife.
It was presented in a way that really trivialized what I was trying to do, says Talese. It didn't take it with any seriousness; it was a mocking piece. It really put me down as a silly person. It was very diminishing.
In retrospect, Talese seems to have triumphed. Thy Neighbor's Wife is fueled by an intense curiosity about his subjects' intimate lives, the kind that only comes when the author has a personal stake in the matter. Plus Nan swears in the latest profile that she didn't mind, and he called her every day from wherever he was.
Now, thirty years later, Talese is making the exact same mistake all over again. Here he is, with a reporter from the same magazine, drinking with Nan and their girls and talking too much about a book he hasn't even written yet.
Unlike his first love, his Zelda Fitzgerald, Nan was his compromise match, he says:
When I met Nan, I thought, this is a person that I'm not going to be dumped by. And that mattered to me. In a practical sense, I wanted to succeed, and I wanted to have someone who cared about me personally, and Nan did.
Nan obliges in turn.
I thought that it was my responsibility to take care of everything that involved marriage. He paid the Con Ed and the rent bill and anything he would have had to pay anyway. I would pay for the groceries, the nanny, and everything to do with the children. I never wanted to be a burden on him. I knew he always wanted to be free.
I'll read anything Talese writes. But somehow this is making me uncomfortable. I excuse his earlier "betrayals" in the service of telling the great American story no one else would tell. Also, his transgressions were so extravagant, and theatrical. But for a confessional memoir? And such small betrayals which feel more intimate than the flashy ones. In this case, it feels self indulgent, and I resist letting him have the last word
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Yesterday something important happened in the world of books: A federal judge ordered an extension of the deadline for authors to choose to participate in the Google book search settlement. The deadline had been May 5; now it's September 4. This is important, because the settlement is very peculiar, and more attention ought to be paid to what is going on. It presents a lot complicated questions that merit more debate. By settling, Google essentially transformed a relatively small lawsuit brought by the Author's Guild into a class-action style settlement that applies to all books. (Or so I understand from this piece.)
The part that is cause for concern has to do with so-called "orphaned books," or books that are out-of-print and whose copyright holders can't be located. In the fine print of the settlement, Google has in effect set up what some feel will be a monopoly on these books (you can read more at this New York Times blog) claiming it has the rights to scan them and put them online. This is one thing: Many writers would want their books to be widely available once they are, say, dead, and can't benefit from royalties. But Google isn't necessarily merely planning to make books more available. The company would establish something called the "Books Rights Registry," initially funded by it, which will, as I understand it, handle request for reprints, and be the recipient of monies derived from sales. All of this may end up being on the plus side for authors, but what is troubling is how far the range of the settlement was expanded, and with very little public knowledge. As Pamela Samuelson, a copyright scholar at Berkeley, put it last Friday:
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement—more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
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This afternoon—between Specter defections, Clinton-Obama joint appearances and a rare Tony Bennett sighting, one of the strangest I’ve spent on Capitol Hill—it’s worth looking miles from the Beltway, to Austin, Texas, where Vice President Joe Biden toured the National Domestic Violence Hotline Center. Joined by Austin Mayor Will Wynn, Biden surveyed the complex that hosts the hotline and other programs designed to help women, especially those suffering from emotional and physical abuse, help themselves. From the press pool report:
[Biden] was guided to the crinkled paper on the wall with the 2-millioncalls’ notation. With a marker, he wrote above that notation: “Keep thefaith! You are changing womens’ lives one woman at a time” beforeputting his signature below his message. Folks in the room broke intoapplause. VPOTUS then hugged Cindy Loper, a staff member whose cubicleis near the crinkled-paper wall.
VPOTUS briefly held staff member Anna Truchard’s hand—saying “we’vealready met; we’re old buddies”-- before continuing his walk-through... Atthe south end of the room, he hovered over staff members taking callsin Spanish.
VPOTUS then crossed the hall into a room where about 20 people wereclustered in anticipation of a group photograph. The people includingMarta Pelaez, described to me later as president and ceo of one of thelargest women’s shelters in San Antonio, spoke quietly to him beforeVPOTUS said over the past 15 years, he’s often been approached by womengiving thanks for the act leading to the center. “It is a big deal,” hesaid.
“We need someone to advocate for us and you are that person,” Pelaez said.
“Wellbaby, I ain’t going away,” he said, adding that he’s lined up two womento fill administration positions focus on preventing domestic violence.
What a guy! It’s easy to joke, as Sarah Palin did, about the vice president being dispatched to various funerals and second-tier conferences, but today Biden provided needed exposure for this increasingly critical resource and also provided an important reminder as to why these caricatures don't apply to him.
Biden’s authorship of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 was a remarkable piece of legislative doggedness, as chronicled by Fred Strebeigh in the New Republic last summer. The bill’s passage also depended in large part on the work of a group of female lawyers that Biden trusted and heeded at key moments in the fight to keep its provisions legal (a tale that Strebeigh also relates in his new book, Equal). Biden takes the thought of abuse so seriously, apparently, that people think he's been affected himself.
VPOTUS said everybody thinks he has a family member who was the victimof violence. “Thank god they weren’t,” he said. “I was raised by areally gentle decent man who thought the single greatest, the cardinalsin for real of all cardinal sins was the abuse of power. The ultimateabuse of power was for a man to raise his hand to a woman, or for awoman or man to raise their hand to a child. That’s the ultimate,that’s the serious abuse of power that can exist.”
With that kind of empathetic statement, I’d say that the vice president could stand to be known for more than verbal diddles and a prizefighter’s honor—his support of women’s rights makes far more of an impression.
ALSO: Via the White House, some background and additional resources:
Since the hotline center’s founding in 1996—spurred by congressionalapproval of the VPOTUS-sponsored Violence Against Women Act in 1994—thehotline has fielded more than 2 million calls. Its number is800-799-7233 (SAFE).
The Love is Respect hotline, focused on teen-agers, has handledmore than 25,000 calls and online chats since it started as ahotline-center project in November 2007. The hotline is called theNational Teen Dating Abuse Hotline; it’s 866-331-9474. Both hotlinesare open around the clock 365 days a year. The teen online chatsite—www.loveisrespect.org--is live from 4 p.m. to midnight Sundaythrough Friday, year-round.
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Emily you’re wondering why you're loathe to throw a ticker tape parade for Arlen Specter? E.J. is right. One does want to credit him for the good stuff as well as the bad, and he’s been willing to push back over the years. But I keep getting stuck by that lofty speech he gave in 2006—opposing the Military Commissions Act—which included a provision that stripped courts of their power to review the constitutionality of enemy detentions.
Remember when he stood up and announced, "I'm not going to support a bill that's blatantly unconstitutional...that suspends a right that goes back to [the Magna Carta in] 1215." And added, "I'd be willing, in the interest of party loyalty, to turn the clock back 500 years, but 800 years goes too far."
And then he voted for it?
Good times.
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Dear XX Factor readers: We want to introduce you to a new interview feature we'll be running on Double X, the our forthcoming web magazine expanding out from XX Factor. "Ask, Tell" will be a regular interview with writers, actors, filmmakers, and more. Our first interview is with Tilda Swinton, whose new film Julia is the story of an alcoholic who, in desperation, kidnaps a boy to extort money.
For each interview, we'd like to include questions from you, our dear readers. So, if you have a question for Tilda Swinton, send it to me at morourkexx@gmail.com by 1 p.m. tomorrow.
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just rejected President Obama’s claim of a wildly-overbroad “state secrets” privilege in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, a suit filed by five victims of the “extraordinary rendition” program against the Boeing subsidiary that flew planes for the rendition program. The district court had dismissed the suit after the Bush administration claimed that everything about the program was a “state secret.” Then-CIA-director Michael Hayden told the court that “[d]isclosure of the information covered by this privilege assertion reasonably could be expected to cause serious—and in some instances, exceptionally grave—damage to the national security of the United States and, therefore, the information should be excluded from any use in this case.” The Obama Administration surprised us in February by continuing to assert the same privilege at the court of appeals.
But today the panel that heard that appeal said “no.” Remanding the case back to the lower court, all three judges agreed that the all-or-nothing “state secrets” doctrine advanced by the Bush and Obama administrations “has no logical limit—it would apply equally to suits by U.S. citizens, not just foreign nationals; and to secret conduct committed on U.S. soil, not just abroad” and that “according to the government’s theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.”
The panel added that it was “the central judgment of the Framers” that “whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake.”
By sending this case back to the lower courts, the Ninth Circuit has ensured that these rendition victims can finally have a day in court, and that there can be a judicial reality check on executive branch claims of secrecy. Most importantly, the appeals court reminds us today that the widely-known fact of a U.S. torture program can't be deemed a "state secret" just because the government doesn't want to talk about it.
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I'd love to respond on everyone's Regnerus essay comments, and to
Bonnie on spinsterhood, a word derived from the spindle—spinning having been assigned to an unmarried woman, back in the traditional days when the average age of marriage
for women ran between 27 and 29. Getting promoted from being a spindle-wielder to being the shop's mistress—running the shop, rather than doing the day labor—was a promotion earned in part by having spent
all those years saving up money as a...spinster. Only from your years of labor would you, oh working girls, become a good catch,
someone who could help your husband invest in a shop that the two of you could
call your own.
That late-twenties average age of marriage was called the "Western model," since it took hold in Western Europe, not southern or eastern. Some historians have suggested that the relatively high traditional average age of
marriage was one of the economic engines behind western Europe's success. People in eastern and southern
Europe married their daughters off at comparatively young ages, with correspondingly
damaging effects on fertility (high), maternal and child mortality (high), and
female productivity (low). If you wait to get married, and both parties save up
their pennies to invest in the shop and the kids, it's good for you, good for economy,
and good for society. It's ahistorical to suggest otherwise. So there.
BUT I can't pause to write that paragraph because like Emily
B, I am absolutely gobsmacked by Specter switching parties. Yes, the Republican
party has moved sharply to the right (and to the south—the olde New England
Republican, capitalist, fiscally moderate, and socially liberal, is on life
support) since he was first elected. Are Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe next?
Like you, Emily, I have the image of Arlen Specter attacking
Anita Hill's credibility—and doing it hatefully, misogynistically—seared into my retinas. I swore back then never to forgive, as I suspect did hundreds of thousands of women, appalled by what we saw. But waiting right
beside that image is another one: of Ted Kennedy sitting limply on the same Senatorial
panel, silent and powerless to defend Hill because of his own mottled history. Politicians
are imperfect, much like the rest of us, albeit with more power and more media exposure.
I suppose—like the rest of us—they must be assessed by the totality of
their deeds, not by the worst of their televised moments.
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As Dayo points out, there is much to puzzle over in Mark Regnerus' push for earlier marriages in the Washington Post. For one, we're never actually told why late marriage is a problem, only that marriage "wisely entered into" has various social and economic benefits. (Note the hedge; bad marriages hit wellbeing hard.) We're told that the "fault" for this trend "lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents." Where is the evidence for this claim? It would seem to contradict a decade of research weighing the influence of parents versus the influence of peer groups. No responsible sociologist would privilege the influence of parents over the influence of friends in reference to say, declining birth rates; is there something special about marriage? Or is it just convenient to pretend that the desire for late marriage is imposed from above, forcing young women into a position they'd rather avoid?
Because he refuses to allow for the possibility that 21-year-olds just don't want to get married, Regnerus backs himself into a contradiction. He portrays young women as fickle children, desirous of marriage yet incapable of resisting the demands of career-focused parents. But given the thrust of the argument, he also needs to portray the same women as independent, responsible decision makers. "Most young women," he asserts, "are mature enough to handle marriage." Which is it? Surely a college kid helplessly subject to the whims of her mother is not ready for a ring.
I'm less troubled by the piece's clumsy condescension than its attempt to sell ideology as sociology. Regnerus claims that marriage is environmentally beneficial without any acknowledgment of the fact that marriages occasionally produce children, whose existence will surely wipe out the energy-saving benefits of combining households. He simply states, without explanation, that late marriage is an "emotional problem." Objective! But remember, we're doing science here, ladies: Though it may not be "cool" to state the cold, hard facts, Regnerus sighs, "My job is to map trends, not to affirm them." Oh, the courage.
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Sen. Arlen Specter is switching parties, from Republican to Democrat, Chris Cillizza reports for
the Washington Post. I am flamboozled. I understand the calculus—the
word from my family in Philadelphia was that he really was going to lose the
Republican primary to challenger Pat Toomey. What's throwing me, as a
native Pennsylvanian, is all my years of Specter despising. For his
prosecutorial strafing of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas
hearings, first and foremost. Yes I know the right hates him, but I hated him too! Even if he did upbraid Alberto Gonzales over wiretapping without a warrant, and vote against his (former) party almost 40 percent of the time. But now he is lecturing about rolling back executive power in the New York Review of Books and joining Obama and giving the democrats a filibuster-proof 60 senators once Al Franken is seated. What if he gets health care reform through, and good Supreme Court justices, and more immediately ends the confirmation block of Department of Justice appointee Dawn Johnsen? I'll have to eat all those votes I cast against him. Or just appreciate the spectacle of political metamorphosis.
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I'm glad E.J. mentioned the outdated and offensive label "spinster" (evoking the hag cartoon on an "old maid" playing card deck), because recently in news stories describing talent show contestant Susan Boyle, I've noticed the insulting characterization making a comeback. But what is the correct term for unmarried women in the post-feminist world? As Kerry noted recently about sociologist Andrew Cherlin's research, in a culture where "marriage matters more here than elsewhere," in the United States, "only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship."
Meantime, though the term spinster is rude, the condition it describes, unmarried women over 40, is common. I'm very glad Dayo brought up the Mark Regnerus essay on the appallingly short shelf life of women. Like Emily, I married relatively late in life. I was 35 when I got engaged, 25 years ago, and had life experience, a career, and a child. But, as a baby boomer, even at my mid-career age, there were comparatively plenty of single available men. Although I agree with Meghan's assessment that Regernus presents a narrow-minded and patronizing sociological premise, he was not wrong when he wrote, "Marriage will be there for men when they're ready. And most do get there. Eventually." Distressingly, however, somewhere along the line, many single ladies with career and education priorities find they have entered a no man's land. Awkwardly, as Jess facetiously (I think) supports, the geezerish single men my age prefer to date women 10 to 20 years younger.
In the sixth season of Sex And The City, the inestimable Candice Bergen, as Carrie Bradshaw's powerful, glamorous, Vogue editor, scolds the younger woman for dating Aleksandr Petrovsky (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov), one of the infinitesimally few age-appropriate men available. As Enid, Bergen tells Carrie, "There are no men, anywhere. I am a 50-something woman and there's a very small pool, it's very small, it's a wading pool, really." She tells the advice columnist, "so what I want to know, is why are you swimming in my wading pool?"
The answer is that a man shortage also affects women in Carrie's cohort. The character Mia played by Hope Davis in the new season of another HBO series, In Treatment, despairs of ever meeting a "smart, interesting, available man who's over 40." She tells the single, attractive therapist played by Gabriel Byrne, "they're either married or there's a very good reason why they're not...and if they're divorced, they want them young."
It sounds grim, but it's not necessarily so. A close friend much younger than I, who treats my husband and me so nicely that our daughter wrote on her Facebook page "thanks for taking care of bonnie and jim" is a former lawyer in her early 40s, stunningly attractive and funny, who has a gardening and flowers business. Though not lacking in male friends who "shoulda put a ring on it," my friend has never married. Wondering if, as an old married lady, I was poorly attuned to the word's connotations, I asked what she thought of the word spinster. "Sure, I'd like a partner and children" she answered the more general question, "but right now I have neither and I'm still pretty happy." In fact, she told me, "I'm into spinster power."
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The other day, Dana posted about Tom Hodgkinson's series on the "idle parent." According to Hodgkinson's new book, The Idle Parent, if more parents, well, just parented less, their kids wouldn't be so, well, crazy. Reading it, I couldn't figure out if Hodgkinson was being serious or pulling some sort of Swiftian joke. I asked Lydia Netzer, a busy mother of two, homeschooler, and writer, what she thought of this strange vision of the 21st century idle parent. Her response follows.
Tom Hodgkinson, principled idler and haughty bastard, has delivered his latest installment of parenting advice: "Don't take your kids to amusement parks or museums." The piece, at first read, is a trifling bit of silliness. Hodgkinson posits with strange earnestness, for example, that playing with your child when you really don't feel like it might give you cancer.
Idle silliness notwithstanding, Hodgkinson has actually figured out something really important. He just doesn't know it yet. Maybe reading his article, backward, starting from the end and working toward the beginning, will shed some light.
Let's begin with his conclusion: As a parent you must always consider yourself and your own happiness first. Putting your children first will cause resentment and ugliness. Moving from this backwards to his hideous opening anecdote, with the screaming children and the raging parents, the deathly detachment of parent and child, and the "interminable torture" of leaving the house, can't one perhaps infer a cause-and -effect relationship?
Maybe, just maybe, this laissez faire parenting isn't working out so well in practice. If my children behaved the way this man's children do, I wouldn't take them anywhere either. But it doesn't take me an hour of screaming to get out the door with my kids. I must admit that on many occasions I have put their happiness first, put their development, their ability to ride in a car without causing the driver to strike the windshield with his fist, ahead my own interest in reading a biography of William Morris. Now we can go to a museum without drawing repeated comparisons to hell. Good for me.
Look, you can make an argument for the simple life when it comes to children. Wooden toys, rural pleasures, and all that. We can all appreciate the value of a quiet afternoon at home. But this practice of idleness rings a little false as a philosophy when accompanied by the assertion that a little healthy boredom will prepare children for prison. In this context it becomes apparent that the real reason you don't leave the house on a weekend is that you've ignored your children for so long that you can't.
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The storm of criticism is already brewing, but I for one want to
commend Mary Ann Glendon, a professor at Harvard and a former ambassador to the
Holy See, for refusing to accept the Laetare Medal and speak at Notre Dame's
spring commencement.
I love the eloquence of her open letter to the press explaining why speaking
alongside Obama during the ceremony is against her conscience:
A
commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and
their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the
right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre
Dame's decision—in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to
honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church's position on issues
involving fundamental principles of justice.
After all the mind-bending
attempts of evangelical leaders like Joel Hunter to try and prove the existence
of some kind of secret Obama pro-life agenda,
it's a relief that Glendon at least personally recognizes the
contradiction. Not only does she personally recognize it, but it also
feels to me that Glendon has a deeper agenda that motivated the release of her
letter to the press: an attempt to force the some of the institutions and
members of the Catholic Church to do a little overdue soul-searching themselves.
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Hanna asked us yesterday to stand in for the New York Times' ethicist, Randy Cohen, to weigh in on whether it's ethical to request Tamiflu prescriptions from friends and family members who are doctors, even when you're not infected with swine flu. I took the reporter's way out of the assignment: Instead of stepping up to fill Randy's shoes, I asked Randy himself. He pointed me toward his answer to a question from 2005 that also deals with whether to prescribe Tamiflu to friends and family (scroll down to the second question). The 2005 question comes from the doctor being begged for prescriptions rather than the Tamiflu-hungry friend. Here's an excerpt of his advice to that physician:
You should remain firm. Family pressure can be powerful enough to
squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond, but it should not be powerful
enough to compel you to do for a relative what you would not do for
your patients, your spouse, your children or yourself.
You
rightly suggest that doctors should prescribe a medication only when
they believe it to be the best treatment for a condition a patient
actually has, not when it is a sop to a patient's fear of a
hypothetical crisis.
A relative's request is different from that
of a patient, if only because your patients are unlikely to show up at
a holiday dinner and pout. But you must find a way to preserve family
harmony without capitulating to a bully.
So Hanna, even if you decide to go soliciting precautionary flu drugs from your hook-ups in the medical profession (which, apparently, would make you a bully), ethics dictates that they deny you the Tamiflu.
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Give ScienceDaily credit: Next to the write-up of the new study that found a correlation between autism in kids and advanced maternal age (oo, rotten phrase) is a link to the 2006 study that found that "children of men age 40 and older have a significantly increased risk of having autism spectrum disorders compared with those whose fathers are younger than 30 years." There is so much scientists don't understand about the autism spectrum, which may very well turn out to be a constellation of related but different disorders, with their own or overlapping genetic links. Maybe these apparent correlations between the disorder and older parenthood will prove unimportant in the end, or as you suggest, Jess, a proxy for other underlying factors. But at least it's equal opportunity bad news in the meantime. And the findings about older dads reminds me of a Lisa Belkin's argument about why men might want to start worrying about their biological clocks, too. She cited the autism study and another one showing that the children of older fathers have slightly lower IQs. Now maybe focusing on all of this is wrongheaded, because people shouldn't decide when to have kids based on preliminary findings about slight upticks in risk. But since Meghan is right about how much more often women's marketability is on the line, I'm glad to have a reason to bring up men's, too.
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Meghan, I was reminded of your comment about young women being bludgeoned with reports of their declining fertility after age 35 when reading about a new study on autism that claims that autism may be linked to moms 35 years or older. This study, from the University of Utah, also found that autism is more likely in first-born children and also in babies born breech. However, even though the write-up of the study on the website ScienceDaily is quick to note that the research "didn't identify a causal relationship" between these things and autism, I fear this will just be another weapon in Mark Regnerus' arsenal. Especially since:
Their investigation showed that the mother's age when giving birth (older than 34), breech presentation, and being firstborn were significant risk factors for the development of an [autism spectrum disorder]. The researchers also identified a small but significant relationship between the increased duration of education among mothers of those children.
Of course, they don't mention in the article that perhaps more educated mothers get better medical care, and their children are diagnosed with autism more not because they are more likely to have the disorder…but because it's diagnosed more frequently. As you pointed out, Meghan, agency is key here. We're all well aware of the risks of waiting to have children later (even though this particular study seems dubious), and I don't see why a "small but significant" correlation between late child bearing and autism should make us all rush out to get knocked up in our 20s.
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Jess, Dayo: Mark Regnerus may usefully point out that some women wish it were more acceptable to get married young. But the larger thrust of his article is characterized by that depressing narrow-mindedness that older male writers always bring to the task when they begin bemoaning the sad state of young women's sexual, romantic, and reproductive lives. (And somehow it's always the young women's lives they're bemoaning, as I noted here for Slate some years back.) Regnerus can't seem to make up his mind. On the one hand, he acknowledges the well-known fact that getting married young means you're more likely to get divorced than getting married when you're older. (According to the National Marriage Project,getting married after 25 significantly reduces the chance of divorce.) Yet he states confidently that "Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed." Hmm? That may be his experience, but he doesn't have many facts to back him up. After all, marriage can be a deformative institution too, as all those divorces would suggest.
The most pernicious element of the article, though, is its didactic, implicit assumption that women heading into their 30s need to pay attention to their "market value," as if we were cows with no identity or worth beyond our saleability on the sexual market. Every young woman today has had it drilled into her head that her fertility diminishes "radically" at 35; reciting all the reasons that we should be terrified about our relative decline in sexual value is just another tired old form of what Susan Faludi so rightly named a "backlash" to feminism. For some reason, these men worry even more than we do about our futures. Leaving me to wonder what I always wonder: Isn't it time for them to stop reading studies that affirm what everyone already implicitly knows, and attend to their own affairs? Life isn't fair, as my mother always used to say, but marrying the wrong guy at 25 isn't necessarily the best solution to the problem.
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Steven Waldman, the editor of Beliefnet, makes an excellent case here for a new space in the abortion wars. He begins with this odd statistic: "Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe abortion is the 'taking of a human life,' but 72 percent believe it should be legal." So what does this actually mean? Most Americans think there are "gradations of life." They are more comfortable with abortions the earlier they happen. But policies on both the right and the left work against this. Pro-lifers oppose Plan B, or emergency contraception, but many of those women who fail to take it end up getting abortions later, according to studies he cites. Pro-choicers, meanwhile, focus on the absolute right, or the numbers of abortions, Waldman argues that much like in Europe, both sides should compromise by pushing for abortions to happen as early as possible.
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Jessica, thanks for your post on the Taliban’s latest
critique of the U.S.
military. It would be hard to overstate the seriousness of the Taliban’s
advances in Pakistan
these last few days, yet I think the significance is lost on most of us. In
fact, the Taliban’s conquest of Swat and (briefly) Buner is possibly the worst
news to come out of the region since we began paying serious attention to it on
Sept. 11, 2001.
Imagine there’s some bloodthirsty Christian fundamentalist
sect from Canada,
whose mission is to force the entire world to join a doomsday cult—and if you
refuse, you get your throat cut. This sect is based in Canada, and Americans generally don’t know or
care much about what goes on in Canada,
and besides, those people are Christians like most of us, so we ignore it and
go about our coupon-clipping, job-searching lives. But the baddies are slowly
moving south, first into the small towns of northern Maine
and New York, and then into the Buffalo
suburbs. More local police are getting killed as they try to fight the
invaders, but the news is relegated to the Nation Briefs section of the Times, and to many decision-makers in
urban America,
these places are the boonies. They’re probably already full of fundamentalists
with dubious ideas, so this newest enthusiasm causes little alarm. Slowly,
quietly, the sect gains strength. People in small towns and suburbs of New York
and Boston start to worry, but the police are busy with other crimes and
everyone is distracted by the heart-pounding daily drama of the Dow Jones until
one day we wake up and realize that these people are not just on the borders
anymore. They’re in Queens, they’re on the outskirts of Boston and millions of
people who never wanted to join them have been forced to go along. The police
aren’t strong enough to stop them, and when the president calls in the National
Guard, they fade into the landscape. They look just like the rest of us when
they’re not preaching or cutting throats.
That’s a version of what’s happened in Pakistan over
the last year or two, but instead of simply being distracted, the situation for
Pakistanis is much worse. Many have lost track of what their country stands for
and why it’s worth defending. Is Pakistan
the country established at the time of the British Partition as a refuge for
the subcontinent’s Muslims, many of whom have managed to live just as well or
better in democratic India? Is it the place where politicians get endlessly richer and more corrupt while ordinary people cope with day-long power outages and soaring food prices? A
place where a young man with a college degree feels lucky to get a job as a
waiter, serving sandwiches and tea to rich Pakistanis and foreigners? Where
children are kidnapped and bombs go off and people are found hanging from
lampposts, and no one really thinks that the government or the army can or will
do much to stop it?
Buner has a story. It has been told in part, but the whole bitter thing should be required
reading for anyone frustrated by the hesitation among Afghans and Pakistanis to
stand up to the Taliban. In Buner last summer, the Taliban executed a handful
of police. The men of the village of Shalbandi raised a
local defense force to avenge the slaying. This was seen as a model strategy
for Pakistan—local people fighting the militants with their own hands on their own
terrain, far more effectively than the police or the army could. The men of
Shalbandi fought hard, and they killed six Taliban. But it didn’t end there. In
revenge, the Taliban kidnapped two young sons of the defense force leaders, and
in December, a car packed with explosives exploded outside a local polling place,
killing more than 30 people who were lining up to vote. After that, the Taliban
promised to wipe out everyone in Shalbandi. The police, who are vastly
under-resourced, and the government, which is monumentally distracted, did
little to resolve the situation in Buner before the Taliban took it over last
week. Instead, when the Taliban rolled in, the people of Shalbandi were left
alone with their tormentors. On Sunday, the Times revisited the story, reporting that one of the posse’s organizers had tried
yet again to fight the Taliban, only to have his businesses, his house and
those of his relatives taken over by the militants while he fled to Karachi.
This is the point at which people usually bring up the fact
that Pakistan has a nuclear weapon, and how horrible would it be if the Taliban got a hold of
it. But I’m not sure we can afford to wait until they do. Is Pakistan’s
nuclear technology all that much safer in the hands of a government that can’t
control its territory or protect its people?
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Jess, I was honestly shocked yesterday morning when I opened my paper copy of the New York Times and saw Bea Arthur referred to—in print!!—as a "Battle-Ax." Who the heck was on the copy desk, and how is it possible he hasn't yet retired? I hadn't even heard that term for decades; didn't it go out with "spinster?" Here's a better view of Bea to cheer us all up.
Dayo, Emily, how do you think Regnerus would feel about young women marrying other young women? As I think I've mentioned here before, I've long thought there should be a two-year waiting period when two women apply for a marriage license; if they can make it past the U-Haul months, let 'em get hitched. (Note: this is a joke. This is only a joke.) I want my girls to Slow. It. Down. But for those who aren't gonna wait—or who've already been together a lifetime, or a decade, and can at long last make it legal in the cornbelt, here's a map (updated hourly) showing which Iowa counties have been issued licenses to same-sex pairs. Mazel tov to this week's Iowa newlyweds!
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Wait a sec, Hanna, you're not a conservative because the Buckleys were self-absorbed, screwy parents? What does that have to do with Pat Buckley's "appalling scenes," as her son Christopher put it? I can think of plenty of liberals who are equally appalling in their dealings with their children. This one is about fame and notoriety and narcissism I think, not politics.
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Emily, I am reluctant to excuse Pat Buckley's behavior as a mother on the grounds of her generation. If she'd been a writer, or actress or astronaut, instead of the devoted wife of William Buckley, she likely would have tortured her colleagues instead of her family. She certainly would have been less famous than she was. I found the excerpt of Christopher Buckley's memoir such an interesting psychological portrait of family, more so for being only partially digested. Christopher Buckley wanted so much to eulogize her as a great woman, and was almost apologetic about condemning her. But the condemnations overshadow. A young friend of her granddaughter's, a Kennedy relative, comes over for dinner, and Pat Buckley tortures her at the table with made-up stories about Michael Skakel, the murderer in the Kennedy family. The good news for feminists is, dad doesn't sound come off all that much better, failing to visit his 11-year-old son in the hospital, skipping out of his son's graduation because he was bored. My takeaway from the story: this is why I'm not a conservative.
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Jess, Bea Arthur's death makes me think about another thing, besides abortion, that's missing from network television: grown ups. I was a kid when The Golden Girls aired, but it was a favorite show of my grandmother's and I watched some of it at her house in Florida, on a set of coral sheets, a few miles from where the Girls supposedly lived. Dorothy, the character Arthur played, was the commanding, scathing, tall one—the straight woman in a house full of lovable wackadoos. Dorothy was extremely, continuously, witheringly judgmental. And though this word has come to be used as an insult ("Don't be so judgey!"), it was this quality, one Arthur oozed, and one that Dorothy shared with Maude, that made those two characters both indelible and admirable, if more than occasionally insufferable.
Maude and Dorothy had opinions. They had opinions about everything. If society, or one's roommates, was behaving badly, it was a person's duty to tell them so even if they didn't want to hear it. Perhaps it wasn't a person's duty to dispatch friends and neighbors quite as scathingly as Maude and Dorothy often did, but then, being right, doing right, was more important than being nice. Niceness was not one of their major concerns. They cared too much to be nice. They cared too much to modulate their judgment.
Looking over the TV landscape, it's hard to find a character, male or female, with this kind of conviction, and certainly not in a comedy. (It's hard to find anyone who even looks like Arthur, who got to be famous when she was already gray, a trick since pulled off by George Clooney and Anderson Cooper, but not by another woman). The socially conscious Norman Lear sitcoms that dominated the 1970s (Maude, All in The Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and more) by grappling with racism, sexism, class and most other -isms have disappeared and, with them, the fully engaged bleeding hearts, bigots and pioneers they starred. Since Golden Girls went off the air, there have been few shows about middle aged people, almost none about senior citizens. Sex and The City, the series that spawned a thousand copycats (SATC with black women, SATC with dudes, SATC for network TV, SATC with three), is really just a copy of Golden Girls (sexually adventurous Blanche is Samantha, sweet naive Rose is Charlotte, etc. etc.) i.e. Golden Girls with 30-somethings. On TV right now, there's nowhere Maude or Dorothy would fit in.
That's not to say either Maude or the Golden Girls is perfect television. Certain old movies momentarily make me feel like the space-time continuum has collapsed. Any notion that we have advanced, become smarter, more modern, more knowing, evaporates upon watching Casablanca—the only thing we know now that we didn't know then is how to film in color. Neither Maude nor the Golden Girls gives me that sense. They're dated, they're earnest, they're not always funny (though, sometimes, happily, they are), the laugh track grates. Yet in both of these shows there's at least person I'd really like to see more of—and maybe not just on TV. She's smart, she's imperious, she doesn't suffer fools, she's engaged with the larger world, she's engaged with her friends, she has opinions she will share, that she will advocate for, that she believes in, and if you banged your head and ended up in the hospital you'd be happy if she was the person they called. She's an adult. She's Bea Arthur.
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Dayo, let's play devil's advocate about Mark Regnerus's article, shall we? As women in our 20s, let's say we take his column about marriage as gospel, and try to get married as quickly as possible lest our eggs dry up and our "market value" plummets. How are we meant to go about this? As Regnerus points out, "Marriage will be there for men when they're ready. And most do get there.
Eventually." So I suppose we should only date older men, who may or may not be ready to marry us, even if our market value is premium.
I would argue that women getting married later and later has as much to do with us getting our "MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs" as it has to do with men who are continuously sent the message that marriage will be there for them whenever they want it.
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Here is a question I would pose to Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethicist (and I'm hoping all of you will stand in for him). The U.S. has declared a public health emergency over swine flu, having detected 20 cases. The president says not to panic, but the European Union advises its citizens not to travel here. A pamphlet quoted by the New York Times, raises this question: "What if there is lawlessness. I need to protect my family and myself. What are essential safety items to have?"
Well, Tamiflu, for one. And while news stories assure us there is ample supply, this is could be government P.R. designed to keep us from storming the pharmacy. I have friends and relatives who are doctors who can prescribe Tamiflu for me and my family. They are reluctant, and they should be. This is a public health epidemic, and giving prescriptions out to perfectly healthy people is detrimental to public health, because it risks cleaning out local pharmacies. Also, having a doctor friend do you a favor is a privilege of the upper classes.
Here's what makes it trickier. You are supposed to wait until there is a reasonable risk, meaning you are surrounded by sick people, or feel the symptoms yourself. But Tamiflu is only effective 48 hours after you are infected. Any later, and it doesn't work. So what's the right thing to do? Beg the doctor friend, or not?
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Dayo, you say the article in the Washington Post “conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.” Modern reality is exploding the connection between these two events, much to the disservice of the now 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers in this country. And there is no getting around the fact that women putting off marriage and childbearing until well into their thirties raises the risks of compromised fertility. I am the result of an early marriage—my mother was 19 and father 20 when they got married, and I was born a year later. Theirs was a thoroughly disastrous union and both my parents urged me not to get married, or if I had to, not to do it young. I grew up thinking that a major part of what made their marriage so bitter was they both felt it had robbed them of their youth. In an overreaction, I didn't marry until I was 38. Because of my own experience, I used to think it was crazy to get married early. Now I'm not so sure (although I'm not talking about teen marriage). I used to think marrying your high school or college sweetheart led inevitably to feeling a desperate desire for a fresh partner when you're 40. But maybe finding early love and making it permanent might be a beneficial thing for many people. It certainly saves on the years of heartache, dead ends, and wondering if you'll find someone while you can still have children.
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In the excerpt of his memoir that ran in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Christopher Buckley says of his mother:
She would have made a fantastic spy. Really, she would have made a fantastic
anything. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman
I have ever known...She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself,
heart, soul and body, to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)
Christopher the son doesn't link his mother's roads not taken to her "serial misbehavior," as he calls her bitter upbraiding of dinner guests and anyone else who stumbled into her lair at the wrong moment. But to me, the connection makes itself. We all know women of Pat Buckley's generation—she had Christopher in the 1950s—who poured themselves into their marriages instead of their careers. And who were ever frustrated, on some level, as a result. Because despite that reassuring "A full-time job," was it really, in a satisfying way?
And does that whole debate belong to the past, or will we see a similar pattern, in decades to come, from educated women my age (thirtysomethings) who opt out of work to raise their kids? (Without entering into the fight about whether their numbers are growing or shrinking or in any way represent a revolution, I'm stipulating that there are some.) If you're a full-time Mrs. today, you are choosing from among a set of alternatives that Pat Buckley didn't really have? Maybe that changes the calculus in the future as well as the present. Or maybe not. Thoughts?
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Bea Arthur, the irrepressible star of classic sitcoms Golden Girls and Maude, died on Saturday at the age of 86. The New York Times coverage of Arthur's death was notable for two reasons. First, when the Times initially put up the obituary, the headline was "Bea Arthur, TV Battle-ax, Dies at 86." Certainly the characters Arthur played—the titular Maude and Dorothy Zbornack on Golden Girls—were outspoken women, but to paint them with the "battle-ax" brush seems unwarranted and sexist. No wonder the headline was switched to "Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86"
And speaking of Maude's outspokenness, the Times also focused on the controversy surrounding the character's choice to have an abortion:
The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.
“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”
What's remarkable to me is that since this very special episode of Maude aired, the incidence of abortion on TV has been nearly nonexistent. The only semi-realistic abortion I can remember on TV happened on HBO's Six Feet Under. I have started referring to this phenomenon as "reverse-quicksand." You see movie and television characters get stuck in quicksand all the damn time, though death by quicksand is nearly impossible. Abortion, however, is something that 35 percent of American women will experience before the age of 45, and yet it is almost absent from our popular culture. Why has Hollywood, that bastion of supposed liberalism, kowtowed so completely to the far right on depicting this issue in fiction?
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Mark Regnerus has a piece in the weekend Washington Post that is crying out for young people to get married. That’s a fine argument to make, and he does it no extreme disservice—emphasizing, however, that early marriage has suddenly become stigmatized among young women:
[M]any women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they're at least in their late 20s. If you're seeking a mate in college, you're considered a pariah, someone after her "MRS degree." Actively considering marriage when you're 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it—it's that scandalous.
Firstly, the article’s catalogue of the dynamics between women in my peer group seems oversold (one female college student likens talk of marriage to “staging a rebellion.” What happened to lower back tattoos?). No one is forcing anyone to stay unhitched; this analysis seems a back door into yet another tale of women judging one another in some sort of endless, catty bride war, searching for “scandalous” behavior—whereas for the 19, 20, and 21-year-old men asking for these maiden hands in marriage, there is no such rush to judgment.
Regnerus then flagellates the parents of the young holdouts, and by consequence himself, for obscuring the many cultural virtues of early marriage:
How did we get here? The fault lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents. Our own ideas about marriage changed as we climbed toward career success. Many of us got our MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs. Now we advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent. We caution that depending on another person is weak and fragile. We don't want them to rush into a relationship. We won't help you with college tuition anymore, we threaten. Don't repeat our mistakes, we warn.
Yes, there are advantages—obvious ones—to getting married. I don’t think kids today are unaware that it’s a financially preferable arrangement. But this “our children” angle seems disingenuous. In fact, the whole piece seems targeted not at “indecisive young people” and their enablers, but at young women in particular. Maybe I’m as out of touch with shifting social conventions as the author, but I don’t sense coequal lecturing of men about the ills of dependence. (In my head, men receive more of a "wild oats" conversation.) Not to speak of withholding tuition!
I suppose Regnerus’ argument troubles me most where it suggests—with little proof—that a conservative, gendered norm is returning to what had been his generation’s wayward adventure into higher education and marriages “with math on their side.” Further, it’s hard to tell of what he complains: Does Regnerus want more marriages, younger marriages or more stable marriages?
If he had made the point that marrying early and then continuing the 20s and 30s trajectory of college, bars, apartments, mistakes, MBAs, JDs, MDs, and PhDs, that would suggest his flacking for marriage were based on some theory of economics and companionship. But his nagging is targeted at the women who have collectively embraced third wave feminist cake-eating because then they won’t procreate. Men who wait and wait for the ring “get there,” he says—whereas women must “beg, pray, borrow and pay” to reclaim fertility later in life. In other words, Regnerus conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.
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Sam and Hanna’s conversation about breastfeeding and its correlation with women’s earning power has me thinking about the series on “idle parenting” currently being published on Slate, excerpted from Tom Hodgkinson’s new book The Idle Parent. Much as I enjoy Hodgkinson’s magazine The Idler (and its accompanying website), with their pleasingly old-fashioned design and good-humored endorsement of the art of loafing, there’s something about this parenting series that’s been bugging me, and I think it has to do with gender. Hodgkinson’s argument, that our family lives and personal happiness would be better served by slowing down and doing less, makes intuitive sense to any working parent, but in practice, it's a lot easier to slow down when one has already established a career to do less of. Given that the period during which women have young children corresponds with the time when they’re building their work identities—and given our cultural assumptions about reduced hours and the “mommy track”— maternal “idling” might read very differently to employers than its paternal counterpart. Choosing to quit or radically downsize one’s job (like prioritizing extended breastfeeding over full-time work) could mean the difference, not between making partner next year or doing so in five years, but between having any meaningful paid work as an adult and having none at all.
That said, I’ll probably read The Idle Parent with pleasure, if only to daydream vicariously about the enviable design for living the Hodgkinsons have worked out: Sleep till ten while your kids make their own tea and porridge, then sit in front of the farmhouse and watch the wild bunnies hop by.
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Via Deadspin, the most baller pre-teen of the spring baseball season is a lady:
The taunting rings in your ears and burns like fire, and will for
years. A girl pitched a perfect game against your Little League team,
and you struck out three times. Nelson Muntz approves.
On Tuesday Mackenzie Brown
became the first girl to throw a perfect game in Bayonne Little League
history. Her reward? Today she gets to pitch for the New York Mets.
She'll throw out the first pitch before the Mets take on the Washington
Nationals at CitiField—finally Jerry Manuel has a reliable starter—as part of a whirlwind publicity tour that has included newspaper and
TV interviews and a mention on SportsCenter.
Yeah, McKenzie! Ignore the "taunts"—a perfect game (27 up, 27 outs) is even cooler than a no-hitter. I played Little League (not softball) for five years back in the day (HPK represent!) and while I was a decent batter, the few girls that did play with me alternated between second base, catching and the outfield—and were definitely not allowed to pitch. So props! Enjoy throwing one more strike tonight.
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On the "How much do you love your favorite TV show?" spectrum, a person could fall anywhere from "Who loves television?" to "If my favorite show was about to be canceled, I would feel duty bound to go to the store, buy a specific product (Tabasco sauce, light bulbs and peanuts were the chosen items for Roswell, Friday Night Lights, and Jericho, respectively), pack it up to United State Postal Service standards, and then pay to have it sent to the head of the network, the person deciding my beloved program's fate." Dedicated fans of Chuck, NBC's critically acclaimed action-spy-comedy show on the verge of cancellation, are on the "We buy Tabasco" end of the spectrum, but they're being both more clever, calculating and cynical than the peanut purchasers. They're not sending anyone anything—they're buying Subway sandwiches. Why? Because Subway had a big product placement in a recent episode. See, Chuck fans do more than just watch, discuss, obsess and debate their show— they actively support their show's advertisers. Best fans ever?
Rather than communicate to executives that Chuck has a passionate fan base by buying useless junk, these fans are buying branded junk. They are demonstrating their willingness to be successfully advertised to. But the advertising isn't working in the old fashioned sense, i.e. making the audience want to buy the thing advertised, it's working because the audience wants something from NBC. The product these folks want isn't a six-inch on wheat, it's Chuck, and they're buying the subs to prove it. (How much do you think Subway cares about their motives?)
Even if the fans are manipulating the typical network-advertiser-consumer dynamic, NBC and Subway are getting what they want—people with open wallets—which is why the strategy could work. Of course, if it doesn't, Chuck fans will have bought a lot of mediocre sandwiches from a huge company hoping to convince another huge company that their sandwich-buying ability amounted to something valuable. That's much more ambitious, and potentially misguided, than sending peanuts.
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Touche, Sam. You are absolutely right. It is highly unlikely that breast-feeding is somehow the cause of women earning less money. It is much more likely that breast-feeding is part of a large constellation of choices a mother would make about child-rearing that would pull her away from the workplace. Here is the one difference, though, between the scientific studies on the benefits of breast-feeding and this one about breast-feeding and future earnings. Sociology is a softer science so everyone would more or less understand what you have pointed out. A mother's decision gets folded into a second decision and so on, until suddenly she finds herself working two days a week, or not at all. But people assume that these studies about breast-feeding's effects on future diseases are hard science, where some component in the milk acts like a permanent vaccine, floating permanently in the mother's system and the baby's. And that is far from proven.
Even if you are right, though, and this latest study on a mother's future earnings is just as dubious as the ones on infant health, then I'd say at least let's put them both on the table and expand the debate, so it better reflects the actual realities of breast-feeding.
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Will has expertly shredded the claim in the Bush torture memos that waterboarding and the rest of the abuse didn't do lasting damage to detainees, given that the same techniques were used safely by the U.S. military on its own troops, at its torture-resistance training program, SERE. David Morris, who graduated from SERE and wrote for Slate about how his mind disintegrated there, adds this debunking:
A study published in 2001 in Special Warfare magazine measured
cortisol levels for SERE trainees and found the highest levels ever
recorded—more than in people undergoing heart surgery for example. Research on
PTSD shows that over time, high levels of circulating cortisol can lead to a
form of brain damage, specifically to the hippocampus, the part of the brain
responsible for the formation of certain types of memory and spatial
navigation. This might explain why my sense of time while at SERE was so poor. Perhaps the brain loses its ability to accurately record what is happening under
those conditions.
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The New York Times has a clip up from Britain's Channel 4 News last night that shows a Taliban rally in Pakistan's Swat Valley. According to the Times, the rally was held, in part, because of Taliban anger over female American soldiers in the region. The Pakistani government ceded this area to the Taliban as part of a cease-fire agreement. In the clip below from Channel 4 News, Taliban spokesman Haji Muslim Khan says, "[Pakistan's Prime Minister Asif Ai Zardari] should think about Western white women who take up arms and come from 20,000 miles away to fight against us here.”
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Hanna, as someone who's normally so attuned to the "correlation is not causation" argument, I'm surprised by your post yesterday applauding a new study about the effect of breast-feeding on a mother's work life. As you summarized, the study found that the mothers who breast-fed for more than six months were earning more than formula feeders when they first gave birth, but that 10 years later, they earned significantly less. You conclude that this means "that we should stop talking about breast-feeding as if it only affects an infant's health, and not the woman's life or position in her family, and her workplace."
But as you would likely be quick to point out if this study had the opposite findings, this doesn't quite mean that breast-feeding affects a woman's position in her family and the workplace. It just means that there's a connection between the two.
There's room here for another interpretation. Maybe you're right that breast-feeding requires a woman to sacrifice income and career status. Another option: Women who are attracted to breast-feeding, particularly prolonged breast-feeding, are the same women who are likely to put childrearing above their careers, which will lead them to do things like take longer maternity leaves, work shorter hours, or even quit work altogether. Not because of breast-feeding for more than six months, but in addition to it.
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"Why Democracy" is an organization that produces documentaries intended to "start a global conversation about democracy." One gets the impression, reading their website, that the filmmakers want to steer the conversation in a particular direction. As a foundation for art, this does not sound promising. But last night I watched and loved Why Democracy's Please Vote for Me, a film that follows three Chinese eight-year-olds in their quest to be elected class monitor. It's an unassuming, fascinating little documentary about the profound stress of being an eight-year-old. Along the way it makes the worst possible case for democratic reform in China or anywhere else.
The film starts with a change of school rules; instead of selecting the class monitor, as teachers have always done at this elementary school in Wuhan, the teachers will select three nominees and let the class elect its favorite. The process will involve a talent show, speeches, and debates. The nominees—two boys and a girl—are revealed. All hell breaks loose. Nice kids turn into scheming rivals, bullying their classmates into shouting down the other nominees. The children go home to parents who write their speeches, force them to stay up late rehearsing debate tactics, insult the other kids, and, in one case, bribe their classmates. Most painful to watch is how the process forces the overt expression of once-subtle social norms. The boys are vicious; the girl retreats into passivity and bursts into tears during her speech. The boys' parents tell them to attack the faults of their competitors and catch their fellow students in lies; the girl's mother reminds her of her own shortcomings, suggesting she work on her "communication skills."
I won't be giving anything away when I point out that this particular experiment in democracy ends in tears and tantrums. The shocking conclusion: Eight-year-olds are unfit for self-governance. No ideological points have been scored, nothing useful argued. But given the tendency of activism to quash inquisitiveness (see Tyler Cowen's take on The End of Poverty here), it's nice to see some filmmakers ask a question with some degree of sincerity, in the spirit of discovery and with genuine curiosity about what they might uncover.
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Sometimes I am amazed at the sheer amount of news that concerns itself with women's sex lives. Imagine the opposite were true, and these stories were about men: First, it's been announced that an L.A. film company (Kickass Productions) has offered Susan Boyle $1 million dollars if she chooses to "lose her v-card" on film. Second, the morning-after pill is now available 17-year-olds, despite the protests of many on the right. They argue that the drug hasn't been sufficiently tested on young women. Across the ocean in Britain, they're arguing over the effect on young girls of a new ad for the morning-after pill, which shows a woman waking up in bed next to her partner, then, later, asking for the medication at a pharmacy. Click here for more.
When you imagine waking to a paper full of stories about, say, a Samuel Boyle being paid for sex on film, and hand-wringing over young men's sex lives, you realize how jarringly different it is to be a young woman and a young man growing up in America today.
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Has anyone else checked out the second season of the Sundance Channel's Green Porno series? Starring Isabella Rossellini, it's an amusingly surreal look at the secret sex lives of animals. If you thought human sex was weird, we've got nothing on wild things. The first season was great, but the second season is even better. This time around, Rossellini dresses up as a six-foot-penised whale, a self-replicating starfish, and a sexless limpet. If you haven't detected a theme thus far, the episodes focus on how creatures do it under the sea. Besides being beautiful to look at, Green Porno is educational. Without it, I never would have known that during the mating process, the deep, dark, sea-dwelling male anglerfish becomes its female counterpart's "own personal sperm bank." (Warning: The webisodes are not exactly safe for watching while at work.)
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There's a gender drama of Olympic proportions being staged by the Canadian women's ski jumpers team. (The girls also made headlines earlier this year when
their chairperson Brent Morrice claimed they could all afford to lose
20 pounds. Too much Tim Horton's, maybe?) Since men's ski jumping is
already a recognized Olympic sport, the
ladies are demanding that there's no reason to leave girls out in
the cold and thus the team is suing the host of the 2010 games, the
Vancouver Organizing Committee, to allow them to compete.
In the Beijing Olympics, 42 percent of the competitors were women and 58
percent were men. And that number even included softball, which has now
been dropped from the Olympic line-up, thanks to a fluke vote where
International Olympic Committee members thought they were voting to get
rid of baseball.
Any
thoughts from you XX ladies on whether Olympic policy should require sports be split 50-50
between men or women? Or should other factors come into play, like
history and TV ratings? I certainly don't pretend to understand why
certain things become Olympic sports. I mean, ping-pong? Seriously? My
personal solution in this case would be to balance out the gender line-up and
bring women's ski jumping into the arena as a Olympic sport and trade
out men's figure skating, which (Scott Hamilton aside) seriously should
not be allowed to exist.
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Liza, thanks for the great insight on strip searches and female jurists. I am more and more persuaded that we need more women judges, not because their brains are somehow wired differently, but because they have lived and experienced life as a woman, and that still means something when they decide certain cases. I wrote about a study showing that male judges will look at gender disputes quite differently if there is a female judge hearing the case alongside them. Hopefully, Liza, by the time your daughter takes her seat at the high court, we’ll have moved past the need to patiently explain why being asked to show your breasts to a school official is nothing like suiting up for volleyball.
Emily Y, to your point about “zero tolerance,” I got a great note yesterday from Joshua Lanning, an attorney who has litigated several strip search cases who suggested, along with many readers, that schools have zero tolerance policies because they don’t trust the faculty to use their judgment anymore. Or as Lanning put it, “It's as if the Court believes all government officials are so perilously close to being ineffective at their jobs that any burden from the Constitution would render them unable to perform their public functions.” Zero tolerance implies that our teachers aren’t smart enough to differentiate between the dangerousness of ibuprofen and crack. And so to defend against that we institute a strip search policy that keeps them from having to differentiate between searching through students' backpacks and peeking into their bras.
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Like you, Emily, I was particularly interested to read Ali Soufan’s OpEd column in the Times today about the ongoing debates over the torture memos. Two things leapt out at me. First, the quote you already cited about traditional interrogation methods being as effective as water boarding. Second, and just as troubling, was this: Soufan contends that the CIA’s use of these techniques actually made it less likely that it could work with the FBI to stop another attack. As Soufan put it:
One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the CIA and FBI, similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.
If this is true, it’s ironic, since as you noted, Emily, some have argued that Soufan himself might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, had the CIA not prevented him. The whole torture question strikes me as the inverse Gordian knot, those “intractable problems” that are solved with a “bold stroke,” as per the myth of Alexander the Great. Torture looked like the bold stroke, but if you accept Soufan’s points—as I’m inclined to—it just tangled us up in more knots.
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Alaska's most famous heartthrob was down in the lower 48 last night, talking to Larry King about his association with the Palin family. Even though Sarah Palin, through her press agents, has repeatedly denounced Levi and his family's fame-whoring ways, she should actually be thanking him, and here's why.
First of all, he's keeping her name in the press, and not in an entirely negative way. On Larry King, Levi said, "[The Palins] always treated me like a son. They were real nice to me. And I thought of her [Sarah Palin] as like my second mother. You know, Todd was always a great guy and helped me out with a lot of things." Though Levi says that he is not allowed to see his son, Tripp, from his family's appearance on the Tyra Banks Show, it is clear that the problem is with Levi's bratty sister and not necessarily with Bristol, Sarah, or anyone else in the Palin camp.
Secondly, the self-proclaimed red neck and his publicly embarrassing mishaps help place Sarah Palin firmly in the pantheon of American politics. Let me explain: There is a long and storied history of political figures with completely humiliating, ne'er-do-well relatives. From Roger Clinton, Bill's hapless half-brother, to Billy Carter, who bragged about smoking pot at the White House, our century's political lights have almost always come with baggage. My favorite tale of political-relative embarrassment was told by Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan in her excellent memoir, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. Buchanan happened upon Sam Johnson, LBJ's "problem drinker" brother, while he was holed up in a Miami hotel with a platinum blond.
He and the blonde were delighted to have photos taken. Then he insisted that I pose with him. She helped him to a bedside chair and took my camera. I sat beside him. She found us in the lens. I said, "cheese." He lunged, grabbed me around the neck, and planted a big mushy kiss on my cheek. Then he tumbled back onto the bed, rolled over, and went to sleep in one violent motion.
When the story ran, it did not include any of these hilarious details—Buchanan said her editors decided to run it as a "perfectly straight interview with the president's brother." And that's the big difference between Levi's public speaking tour and the hijinks of previous political relatives: If that happened today, TMZ would have plastered photos of drunken Levi with a blonde as soon as they had been taken. In our current media environment, Levi has the power to take control of his own story, but even this "redneck" is smart enough to know he shouldn't be spotted out doing anything even remotely licentious. And that's the third reason Sarah Palin should be grateful for Levi: She could have it so much worse.
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In the debate raging over whether the Bush administration's torture
practices produced valuable intelligence, the voice I'm most interested
in, so far, is that of Ali Soufan. He is the FBI detective whom the CIA may have blocked from stopping 9/11,
one of the few Arab speakers in the bureau, the guy who was getting
Salim Hamdan to talk, according to Jonathan Mahler's book, The Challenge—and then had to relinquish Hamdan in frustration
when the government decided to prosecute him. He's an intelligence
officer who was close to but not part of the CIA interrogations of Abu
Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Today Soufan tells us, in a New York Times op-ed, that torturing Abu Zubaydah got us nada. Soufan writes:
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced
interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have
been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these
alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few
occasions—all of which are still classified. The short sightedness
behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the
methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of
the terrorists, and due process.
And then he takes apart specific claims for intelligence gains, much as Tim did about the supposed busting of the Liberty Tower plot in L.A., by showing that the timelines don't work. The key information was gleaned by traditional methods before the torture began, or at least before it was approved in the DoJ memos. What now, Marc Thiessen and Dick Cheney? Ball in your court.
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I was riveted by Dahlia's vivid description of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing of the Savana Redding case, which has been followed with interest in my household. Like Redding when she was summarily hustled into a school nurse's office and ordered to disrobe under the scrutiny of school administrators, my daughter is 13 and in public middle school. She immediately got what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also got: To be asked to strip to your underwear, and then shake out your bra and panties, exposing your private parts so that bureaucrats may look to see if you have extra-strength ibuprofen in your underwear, all because some ex-BFF wrongly ratted you out as a drug dealer, is, as Ginsburg put it, "humiliating."
Facebook pages and sexting notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that there is still no more modest creature on earth than the average adolescent girl. This is the age when the bedroom door is closed almost all the time, and girls in locker rooms develop elaborate, chrysalis-like methods of wriggling out of their clothes and into bathing suits or gym suits without exposing anything. That the male justices on the highest court in the land did not seem to get how Redding felt (an honors student, she left the school permanently after this episode) is dismaying enough; that they took the opportunity to reminisce about their own towel-thwacking locker room youth is hard to believe. Maybe they were so unnerved by frequent repetition of the word "underwear" that they started saying anything that came to mind. One wonders what Redding, now 19, thought as she listened; having hoped to have her situation taken seriously, she instead was obliged to listen to Justice Clarence Thomas guffawing as Justice Stephen Breyer recalled boys in the locker room sticking things into his underwear, or theirs, or whatever, exactly, happened. (But wouldn't even they, as boys, have been embarrassed if whatever was going on had gone on while school officials were intently watching?)
Thinking about this, I realized that the Redding exchange, and E.J.'s post yesterday deploring the tiny representation of women in the Mirror awards for media coverage, are really about the same thing: They are about the need for a proportional representation of women in important places, and the frequent, puzzling absence of same. That there is only one woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, in this day and time, is also hard to believe; if there were a lone male justice among eight females, it seems safe to say that many people would regard this as an unacceptable suborning of the natural order, but the reverse situation never seems to inspire much in the way of widespread objection. I think there have been discussions on this blog in the past about the question of whether female jurists rule differently than male jurists do. I am no expert, but it seems likely to me that in most cases they do not, but that sometimes, crucially, they may. That Ginsburg was the only judge who seemed to understand what Redding went through is a stark reminder that judging also involves reacting as a human being, and that this is why we need women human beings as judges. I don't mean to suggest that no man could have seen the situation as she did; I was chatting with a former criminal defense attorney—and father—who said that even given the special mission of school officials to protect students from drugs and other dangers, he would have ruled this an invasion of privacy. The only bright spot about the Redding case is that it has offered more evidence to my own children, boy and girl, about why women need to be in the workplace and, by analogy, why mom works. My daughter talks now about wanting to be a judge. I think we could use her.
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Nina, I hadn't heard that archaeologists may be on the verge of discovering Cleopatra's tomb until I read your post this morning. By coincidence, last night I was reading a chapter about Cleopatra in Christina Nehring's forthcoming book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. Nehring's contrarian argument complements Schiff's essay nicely. She argues that in domesticating love into egalitarian marriages, by emphasizing equality and intimacy rather than power-differentials and erotic distance, we've lost that special sizzle. Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Antony constitute one of her prime examples of a love match that really works, a love match filled with games and drama:
Convinced that docility in the life of the affections is the road to dreariness, Cleopatra offers Antony a smorgasbord of strategic contradictions. When Antony wishes to ignore a messenger, she orders him to pay attention; when he wishes to lounge in her arms, she reports herself missing; when he desires to go to sea-battle against his enemy Octavius Caesar, she accompanies him, only to flee at the worst moment possible, prompting him to withdraw his ships after her own, and humiliating him before the military world.
As he acknowledges to her after, "My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,/ and thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit/Thy full supremacy thou knew'st."
It's The Rules, the Nile Edition. Except that somehow in Cleopatra's case, the game-playing does seem like a form of strength rather than passivity scripted to look like authority. As you point out, Nina, we see Cleopatra as powerful, sexual, and forward. I can't think of all that many contemporary cultural figures who share her traits. I'm curious: Do you, like Nehring, think that her capriciousness is a crucial part of her appeal?
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Finally, the study I've been waiting for: "Is Breastfeeding Really Free: The Economic Consequences of Breastfeeding for Mothers." Two researchers looked into the effects of breast-feeding on a mother's work life. "Because of the massive push in the public health community to get mothers to breastfeed, understanding the economic consequences of breast-feeding on women's lives is essential," write Phyllis L. F. Rippeyoung from Acadia University and Mary Noonan from the University of Iowa. This should be an obvious question, but none of the breast-feeding literature addresses it. In most studies, the question is relegated to a footnote, in which authors assert that breast-fed babies are sick less so mothers have to stay home from work less.
The researchers surveyed 2,484 women each year for 10 years before and after childbearing. The mothers who chose to breast-feed initially earned more income than the formula feeders, worked more hours, were more likely to be married and part of the professional class.
One year later the picture starts to change dramatically. The breast-feeders divide into short duration (fewer than six months) and long duration (longer than six months). The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends six months of exclusive breast-feeding, and then continuing for at least a year while introducing solids. According to the study:
Although, at two years before birth, both breastfeeding groups earned statistically significantly higher incomes than the formula feeders, by year 10 this advantage has disappeared—formula feeders and short-duration breastfeeders do not have significantly different incomes, and long-duration breastfeeders earn significantly less than formula feeders.
This is a very important observation. It doesn't mean that women shouldn't choose to breast-feed, of course. But it does mean that we should stop talking about breast-feeding as if it only affects an infant's health, and not the woman's life or position in her family, and her workplace. It also means that breast-feeding now loses its free pass into the feminist cause.
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A team of archaeologists believe that they're on the verge of uncovering Cleopatra's tomb—a discovery that could potentially drive the whole world pyramid-mad, the way King Tut did back in the '20s and then again in the '70s.
Stacy Schiff has a fantastic essay in the New York Times
about the legend of Cleopatra—who, Shiff points out, was not just the
lover of two of the most powerful men of her time but a fearsome
monarch in her own right, a woman whose "antecedents were the
rancorous, meddlesome Macedonian queens who
routinely poisoned brothers and sent armies against sons...These
women were raised to rule."
And yet, as we all know, Cleopatra's legacy has little to do with her political prowess:
Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton seductress. She is the original bad girl, the
Monica Lewinsky of the ancient world. And all because she turns up at
one of the most dangerous intersections in history, that of women and
power.
She presides eternally over the chasm between
promiscuity and virility, the forest of connotations that separate
“adventuress” from “adventurer.” Women schemed while men strategized in
the ancient world, too.
So
is a double standard simply inevitable when it comes to female leaders?
Cleo herself is mum on the topic. As Schiff notes, "No matter what the
tombs of Taposiris yield, they are unlikely to offer
up an answer to the vexed question of women and power." (Though in Shakespeare's version,
our queen has some choice words on the subject, perceptively declaring
that future dramatists would chalk up Antony's indiscretions to
drunkenness, while she herself would have to suffer seeing "some
squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore.")
But according to the BBC, the dig may solve another eternally vexing question:
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, said the coins found at the
temple refuted "what some scholars have said about Cleopatra being very
ugly".
"The finds from Taposiris reflect a charm... and indicate that Cleopatra was in no way unattractive," he said.
Well, thank Amun-Ra for that.
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Meghan, your analysis of the Susan Boyle phenomenon was very astute, but I think it misses something important about why Boyle went viral. Yes, we identify with the judges and the audience—the haters who get to feel proud and magnanimous when we stop hating—but we also empathize with Susan Boyle, the underdog who knows, even though no one else does, that she's something special.
Susan Boyle isn't just, as you say, the "scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts." And that's because she's also Rocky (or a Bad News Bear or Karate Kid—Who wants to bet that the Susan Boyle Story gets optioned by next week?), the underdog facing doubters. Who can't empathize with that? So when Boyle sings, we're both the judges and the judged. And that means, yes, we got a hit off of her performance as said judges, enjoying the "crude catharsis," psyched to "learn" we're not as shallow and cynical as we thought. But we also got a hit off her performance as fellow underdogs, psyched to see Boyle, an extension of ourselves, triumph over the cynical haters trying to keep all of us down. Boyle plays to our ego on two levels then—by letting us imagine we're more generous and open minded about appearance and age than we thought, while also suggesting that, hey!, we just might rule at the next American Idol tryouts. I'm not sure which is worse.
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I hesitate to write this for fear of more hate mail, but here goes. There's a whole new angle emerging in the breast-feeding literature, as today's New York Times brings to light: Not only is breast-feeding best for babies, but it's best for mothers as well! The story highlights a study out of the University of Pittsburgh showing that mothers who breast-feed are at a lower risk of developing diabetes, high-blood pressure and cardiovascular disease decades later, when they are in menopause. The study's author, Eleanor Bimla Schwarz, offers this handy analysis:
Any breastfeeding was good, but more was better...Pregnancy without breastfeeding ups the risk of heart disease and stroke, but with breastfeeding a woman has the same risk she had before pregnancy. The more pregnancies you have, the more risk of heart disease you have. But if you breastfeed longer in each pregnancy you come out just fine.
Now this would be nifty if it were true. But this study is far, far from proving it. It has all the same flaws as most breastfeeding research, as I outlined in my recent Atlantic story. The study shows an association, not a causation. "Women who breast-feed may simply lead more healthful lives than those who do not." Indeed, mothers who breast-feed are much more likely to be white, educated, and older. The researchers guessed that maybe a decrease in belly fat helped explain the benefits. But other studies have shown that, contrary to popular belief, breast-feeding does not necessarily help you lose weight. Also, this should be obvious, but diabetes and heart disease are enormously complicated diseases, influenced by myriad factors. The idea that you should make a decision based on what might happen 30 years down the road seems ludicrous. Better to just stay reasonably healthy and hope for the best.
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True, Sam, my post, below, about the Mirror Awards is a tiny bit misleading. There are women on the list—four women, who won five of the 29 awards:
Rachel Sklar, twice, Julia Klein, Evgenia Peretz, Megan Garber. Go girls!
So women aren't "missing" from the list, exactly. Except in the sense that China has more boys than girls—missing in the proper proportions.
Is it that men are doing the best work? Or that men are getting the best assignments? Name a female media beat reporter in the high-end newspapers and mags. It's a cool beat. Why can't you think of one?
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E.J., you just asked what's missing from the list of finalists for the Mirror Awards just released by Syracuse
University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications. Despite the finalists' names that you mentioned (Eric Alterman, Ken Auletta, Seth Mnookin, Clive Thompson, Mark Bowden, Charlie LeDuff and
Richard Pérez-Peña), the answer is NOT that women are missing. Among the finalists you didn't call out: Rachel Sklar for her piece in the Huffington Post on a misleading Pentagon story in the New York Times; Evgenia Peretz for her Vanity Fair piece on James Frey; Megan Garber for her commentary for the Columbia Journalism Review.
It's fair to call out the gender imbalance of the list of finalists. There are 23 men and only five women, if you count repeat offenders like Eric Alterman and Rachel Sklar separately for each category in which they appear. But let's not pose a rhetorical question that implies that the list is devoid of women entirely when in fact what it's missing is much murkier: strict gender balance. And as we have already debated on the blog, maybe 50-50 boy-girl splits for all awards is not really a reasonable—or even admirable—goal. Give women an equal education; choose unbiased panels of judges. But after that, if the men are producing the best stuff, then go ahead and let the best man win.
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I'm feeling zero tolerance for zero tolerance rules. Dahlia's description of the Supreme Court oral argument about the case of a 13 year-old girl who was strip searched in school to see if she was smuggling Advil in a body cavity is worthy of Saturday Night Live. It would be funny, except for the fact that school administrators, and now apparently the Supreme Court, thinks this ludicrous humiliation is justified in order to uphold zero tolerance drug policies. It doesn't matter that this girl could stop at a drug store on the way home and buy an entire bottle of this contraband, because judgment and common sense apparently have been outlawed along with painkillers for menstrual cramps. The idiocy of zero tolerance was also described in yesterday's New York Times story about the Human Rights Watch official who is unable to join the administration because he is a registered lobbyist for the group. On the campaign trail, Obama declared a ban on lobbyists joining his administration, so the expert on human rights can't become human rights chief precisely because he is an advocate on this issue. Never mind that the right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances" is part of the First Amendment. Making ridiculous rules is easier than making decisions.
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I just got this announcement via email:
"Syracuse
University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications today announced 29
finalists in six categories in the third annual Mirror
Awards competition
honoring excellence in media industry reporting."
The winners include such media watchdogs as Eric Alterman, Ken Auletta, Seth Mnookin, Clive Thompson, Mark Bowden, Charlie LeDuff, and
Richard Pérez-Peña.
But hmm... something is missing from this list ... whatever could it be?
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A bit after the fact, but no less worth a look, the always remarkable Big Picture blog on Boston.com features an eyemazing roundup of photographs taken around the world during Holy Week. Inside: red, black, and green-hooded penitents, bloodied and bowed self-flagellators, and a true believer nailed to the cross. (Not for the faint of heart.)
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Damn, Jessica. You've really shown up the rest of us. How are we ever going to find Mother's Day presents to rival the one you arranged for your mom—weeks early, yet? Courtesy of your funny and clever new book, Love Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home, your mother gets to be in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town. She's described as "a psychiatrist with a cool haircut." And she's quoted saying sagely, “As my own mother always says, children are at the center of parents’
lives, and parents are on the periphery. We write e-mails that have to
be perceived as lame, because independence has to be preserved.” True. Coup. I quit.
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A guest post from Slate V intern, Lindsey Hough:
Dahlia's account of the oral argument yesterday in Savana Redding's case forced me to recall a memory of my own strip search. During my rebel stage of 13, I too had to take off my shirt for a school counselor so she could examine the little cat scratches I had etched into my bicep out of my devotion for a then-crush…let’s call him James. Out of adolescent defiance, I had somehow launched this fad of "cutting" in the 8th grade, and a small posse of girlfriends decided to grab their own bobby-pins to tattoo themselves. The school caught wind, and started interrogating.
One day, I was in PE class and watched as our counselor interrupted the game of kickball to drag a friend into her office. I knew what was up, and after class went into the girls' locker room to apply cover-up to the few scabs that measured the width of a strand of hair. I put on a long sleeve shirt and thought to myself, "There, no way they’ll find that." I tested my sleeve, pulling it all the way up to my shoulder with no success. My tracks were covered.
They made me take the shirt off, and obliterated any sense of autonomy I thought I had. I got the sense the counselor knew she was doing something fishy but covered by "bringing in the nurse who has to check it out." Forced to sit shirtless in front of these two women, I felt exposed and humiliated, embarrassed and angry. I felt they weren't just judging my actions but my body. We talk a lot on the XX Factor about young women and their changing ideas about privacy. But no matter who you are, being forced to take your clothes off against your will is an act of humiliation, embarrassment, and violation. It stings to know that 8 years after my own strip search, those feelings still don't matter.
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I never thought I'd write this sentence, but poor Dick Cheney. Last week's disclosure of the torture memos he fought to keep secret has forced him into the extremely uncharacteristic position of calling for more disclosure:
...they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified. I formally asked that they be declassified now.
Ah, secrets—if only Cheney had thought of declassifying these reports when he had the power to do it himself! It almost makes you wish he was vice president again, doesn't it?
Meanwhile, Jane Mayer reports at the New Yorker that the Senate Armed Services Committee's unredacted report (pdf), released Tuesday by Sen. Levin, shows that the CIA used torture before the first Bybee memo granted approval on August 1, 2002. Like I said the other day, I don't think prosecuting CIA agents for what they did in the months after 9/11 is the best way to go. But this kind of evidence of law-breaking could be hard for Eric Holder to ignore.
Then there's this from Dafna Linzer at ProPublica: dozens of former CIA prisoners have gone missing.
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I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.
But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.
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Kerry, you're exactly right. The "ticking bomb" torture scenario is a fairy tale. That justification for torture assumes that my government—or any government—can be as omniscient as Jack Bauer's screenwriters. How very convenient to imagine that the government would somehow know all about a plot, including when the bomb will go off and who has the code to turn it off! Why am I ever supposed to trust the rulers of any country—Russia, Iran, Morocco, or the U.S.—to know, with 100 percent certainty, that they've arrested exactly the right person?
Meanwhile, it looks like the people behind the torture memos (which did not, as Emily noted, result in information about a ticking bomb or any other plots), will be investigated—whether here or in Europe.
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon is known for attempting to extradite Pinochet from London for trial in Madrid ... and also for presciently indicting Osama Bin Laden and 34 other al-Qaida operatives in 2003. Unlike Gitmo's torture, Garzon's indictment actually led to long prison sentences, according to the BBC, for 18 people—including one person convicted for helping to plot the 9/11 attacks.
Now Judge Garzon has given the go-ahead to a criminal investigation of the Bush administration team behind the torture memos. Reuters says that the six indicted include "William Haynes II, former general counsel for the Department of Defense; John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote secret legal opinions saying President George W. Bush had the authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, Yoo's former boss at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, chief of staff and legal adviser to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney." Can Bush and Cheney be far behind?
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A friend of mine had a different take than Ann's and Meghan's on The New Yorker's article about "neuroenhancers." She worried that it perpetuated the stigma of taking these drugs for medically prescribed reasons. The article, after all, compares these drugs to cosmetic surgery and the sort of advantage gained by private tutors and mentions only college students who scam their way into prescriptions or who buy the drugs illegally, not the sort who take it to correct for a disorder.
And then there was the mention of "a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names." The author notes: "Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation...[But] maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill."
Which indicates that taking Adderall is taking the easy way out. Which maybe it is for students who would prefer illegally obtained Adderall to three Red Bulls in one night (which, while legal, surely pose their own health risks) or to less partying.
Meghan, you say, "As Margaret put it, while Adderall and Ritalin were once drugs mainly used to treat ADD and ADHD, now they're ‘drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted.' "
Except that this article lets us forget that these are also drugs still used to treat very real disorders. It is too easy to read the article and forget that there are people who are prescribed Adderall because they have ADD or ADHD, who take Adderall for good reason and who are not cheating or gaining unfair advantage or just trying to relieve themselves of their technological distractions by so doing. I would have loved to hear from a college student who takes Adderall for ADD and who has been asked to sell it by classmates or who struggles against the stigma of taking it to complement the students in the article who take it to pull all-nighters.
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Yesterday, in her taxonomy of torture defenders, Dahlia linked to this MSNBC clip in which Joe Scarborough bemoans our lack of support for the clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. Con Coughlin expresses a similar concern for the blow to the agency's morale here; Ex-CIA director Michael Hayden fears the release of the memos will introduce "institutional timidity," taken to be a bad thing. Thus we learn that the CIA is crippled by its need to answer to those it ought to protect. Left to their own devices—unconstrained by the demands of accountability—the good guys, who are probably very handsome, will roam the surface of the planet dragging bad guys from their respective holes. In Scarborough's words, the CIA operates most effectively when it is told, simply: "Go out and get the job done and dammit you keep my kids safe!"
I am struck by the romanticism of this vision, this willingness to place such faith in a government agency shorn of oversight. Scarborough clearly thinks it's morally acceptable to torture terrorists. But given that no one thinks it's OK to torture innocent people, why assume that the CIA can competently distinguish agents of terror from the general population? Recent history does not instill confidence. Ancient history does not instill confidence. One simply has to believe that the agents of this particular bureaucracy will not be subject to all the incentive-distorting forces that challenge every other bureaucracy.
Joe Scarborough is not a man known for his enduring faith in the capacity of American government to solve complex social problems. And I don't know where he would have gotten his idealized vision of the CIA—those taciturn, hyperacrobatic, brilliant, do-gooder patriots—if not from the Hollywood establishment he so despises.
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Could the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the torture memos really be on the hook, as I suggested Monday (and plenty of their critics have longed for)? President Obama left that door surprisingly ajar today. From his press conference:
With respect to those who formulated those
legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the
Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to
prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues
involved there.
So it's Eric Holder's call. Despite Obama's push to move forward without looking back, once you put historical evidence out there that's as disturbing as these memos are, it takes on a life of it's own. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates asks how we can expect the attorney general to be independent of the president since he or she is an appointee of the executive branch. It's a good question, and the difficulty Ta-Nehisi has his finger on is why we cherish the memory of Eliot Richardson, the Nixon AG who refused to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox when the president ordered him to. Richardson famously had to resign, but Obama is deliberately signaling that Holder has room to make his own decision. What happens next? I'd say all eyes are on the long-delayed report from DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility that reportedly creams the DoJ lawyers who provided the legal rationale for torture. The Bush administration sat on it. Time for the Obama team to let the report fly.
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Ann,like you, I was fascinated by Margaret Talbot’s piece in The New Yorker about Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil and other so-called“cognitive enhancers.” My curiosity wasn’t entirely vicarious. I’ve taken bothProvigil and Adderall for precisely the reasons the overworked Harvard seniorin her piece says he takes it: to get more done. As Margaret put it, whileAdderall and Ritalin were once drugs mainly used to treat ADD and ADHD, nowthey’re “drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to becomehigher-functioning and more overcommitted.” What she so astutely gets at are thecultural implications and ramifications, noting that “every era, it seems, hasits own defining drug.” Her piece reveals, as you say, the fact that we’re notquite enamored of our own need for these stimulants, though one could have imagined a piece some yearsback that would romanticize these stimulants the way the media used toromanticize businessmen who slept less than 4 hours a night. Instead, Margaretquotes many users who point out that these drugs don’t necessarily “enhance.” Infact, in my experience—and as Joshua Foer memorably wrote about for Slate—theycan bring a certain tunnel vision with them. They do not make you more likelyto be astute. Adderall, I found, was perfect for itemizing a year’s worth ofreceipts the day before you have to file your taxes; it was not useful forwriting a piece. (This is another good essay onAdderall, from N+1.)
But I think there’s a deeper irony here. Adderall is a drug for our Information Age notbecause it actually works as a “cognitive enhancer,” it strikes me, but becauseit merely makes it possible to do what we once used to take for granted, beforeinstant-messaging technology and mobile email started to make our brains gohaywire. That is, they make it possible to ignore that blinking light on the “CrackBerry”and finish a task. Studies have actually shown that multitasking and using emailat the office all day leadsto fall in IQ larger than if you smoked a joint at work. From that perspective,Adderall isn’t an enhancer. It’s just a corrective that gets you back to normal. Only it’s not really "normal," just as drinking a VitaminWater and eating apower bar is not the same as drinking water and eating vitamin-packed fruitsand vegetables.
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In Dave Cullen’s recent Slate piece about what we learned from
Columbine, he writes that “the first lesson is really one that we have unlearned, which is that there actually isn't a distinct
psychological profile of the school killer.” Nor, I imagine, is there one for a
Craigslist killer, but that hasn’t stopped the CNN morning news anchors from
expressing repeated shock that the man who was charged on Monday with the
murder of a woman he met on Craigslist is a 22-year-old medical student. An article
in the Boston Globe today has the headline “Charges conflict with
portrait of clean-cut student,” and the attached photo gallery highlights the
issue. It’s not just that he’s a med student. It’s that he’s an attractive,
broad-shouldered med student with a big white smile and a well-pressed polo shirt. Just
as last week’s Susan Boyle clip drew attention to just how strongly we (especially
those girls in the audience!) expect our pop stars to be hyper-groomed, thin
and beautiful, the circulating photos of Philip Markoff remind us that, as
Cullen mentioned, we still expect killers to be greasy-haired, scrawny, and
perhaps trench coat-clad. Well, ugly chicks can sing. And preppy hunks can
kill.
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Tara Parker-Pope has an interview on her New York Times "Well" blog with Trisha Meili, otherwise known as the Central Park jogger. To refresh your collective cultural memories: Meili was raped and viciously assaulted in Central Park in 1989. A group of Harlem teenagers was arrested for the crime, and convicted on scant evidence, only to later be exonerated. The case was famously written about by Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books and became emblematic of a racially and socioeconomically divided New York City.
Meili discusses with Pope her decision to come out publicly as the jogger in 2003, when she wrote the memoir I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility:
The media keeping my anonymity is something that I do appreciate. I was
known as the Central Park jogger, and when I told my story it was my
choice. That was a degree of control that I had completely lost with
the attack and the rape. When I’d meet someone it’s not like I would
say, “Hi, I’m the Central Park jogger.” It’s kind of a conversation
stopper. I decided to share my story because I had a real sense that
sharing the story would help other people. That’s the message I’ve
gotten, that sharing has given them hope.
I found this particularly interesting because Didion's essay has a large passage about the American media convention of keeping rape accusers names out of the press, something I've written about here before. Because of this convention, according to Didion, Meili was referred to by name frequently everywhere but the mainstream media.
Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a
paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever
professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all
court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days
immediately following the attack, on local television stations. She was
also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what
led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her
and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did, in
Manhattan's black-owned newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The City Sun,
and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by
a black partnership which included Percy Sutton and, until 1985 when he
transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.
Though New York City is not the tinderbox of racial unrest that it was in the late '80s and early '90s, nor is it anywhere near as crime-ridden, reflecting on the Didion essay makes me wonder if the case would play out in the media in quite the same way if it had occurred in 2009. Would the existence of bloggers make anonymity impossible for a woman like Meili, the unhappy victim caught in such a public trial?
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If I were an Adderall popper, I probably wouldn't have veered from my Slate tasks today to read Margaret Talbot's fascinating piece about neuroenhancers in the latest New Yorker. But I'll please my employers by turning an afternoon distraction to good use: a blog post!
Margaret points out that "every era, it seems, has its own defining drug," and astutely assesses what makes stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, the newer Provigil, and a drug called piracetam—touted for dispelling foggy-headedness and promoting productivity—such a good match for our moment. "Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy," she writes. "And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus."
It struck me that the era helps shape the media portrayal of that defining drug, too. The quest for the cognitive edge: Not so many years ago, I could imagine that a piece about a surge in cosmetic neurology might well have had a romanticizing bent—or at any rate might have sent readers scurrying off to score some pills, eager not to miss out on what go-getters were doing. For all I know, there were such pieces. Without demonizing these drugs, Margaret does something that I can't help thinking is a lot more useful and, when you stop and think about it, better suited to these already stressful times of ours. Her account makes the blinkered drive for focus and hyper-efficiency—in the face of what sounds like phenomenally little research on the drugs' long-term effects—sound strikingly narrow-minded. It's not that she romanticizes unadulterated genius, either; her piece is a reminder, in all ways, of the virtues of calm reflection.
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Last week Dahlia linked to a piece by Salon's Rebecca Traister about TV Land's new dating show The Cougar, in which a bunch of young dudes try and woo a 40-year-old woman. Traister hates the show and the whole cougar phenomenon in general because, "Of all the things that men do that women might reasonably wish to do as well isn't this....mimicking the midlife crisis-penis-car-crippling-insecurity version of mature masculinity...one thing we could have just walked away from without regret?" Some behavior isn't empowering, for anyone, and should be left well enough alone.
A story in this weekend's New York Times got me thinking a similar, if inverted, thought. It was a piece about how Hollywood's leading men are getting fat. Seriously. Apparently, the expanding waistlines of Russell Crowe, John Travolta, Denzel Washington, Hugh Grant and Leonardo DiCaprio constitute a trend worthy of examination in the paper of record. The piece's writer, Michael Cieply, describes a scene between Crowe and Jeff Daniels in the just-released State of Play as "Two men. One notebook. Four chins." Ba dum dum ching. To reverse paraphrase Traister, of all the things women do that men might reasonably wish to do as well, obsessing over one's weight—or being publicly shamed about that weight by the media—shouldn't make the list.
New York's Vulture points out that some might say, "[T]his kind of criticism levels the playing field a bit and puts men in the same position that women have faced for years." I would say it just gives everyone body-image issues.
Cieply writes in his piece that "Hollywood's women may [may!!] have weight issues of their own. But it is somehow less noticeable, possibly [possibly!!] because actresses who expand do not often get roles to showcase that growth." In other words, larger women hardly ever appear in movies because they never, ever get cast. Is it noble of the Times to draw attention to this double standard? So that, what? Larger men don't get cast either? Perhaps, in the interest of equality, actors, just by virtue of turning 45, should start losing roles—exactly like their female counterparts! Then we’ll never have anyone who looks even remotely like a normal, middle-aged person in any movies ever again, but, at least, that would be fair. Or, you know, equally unfair.
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As much as I need to carefully read the Bybee and other Justice Department memos to discover whether "dictated but not read" appears anywhere in the lawyerly text documenting the banality of evil, I can't resist one more comment on the Susan Boyle phenomenon, still reverberating in the Scottish village of Blackburn.
I'm afraid, Kerry, that the ham-handed and patronizing season seasoning you despair of, from Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden, who won't let Simon's dentist go near the "unspoiled" singer, is just the beginning of a giant social experiment and successful series akin to the Truman Show. (The twist here is the Jim Carrey role is played by a matronly Scottish lady who accidentally plucked herself from obscurity.) Susan Boyle and her neighbors may enjoy the media invasion of their small village now teeming with TV bookers and satellite trucks chasing 20 million hits on YouTube. Maybe the West Lothian community is comfortable with the lone Simon Cowell-dispatched handler, guarding the new celebrity at her cottage door, while everybody else in town shares tankards and talk, in fantastic accents, with the sophisticated cellphoned entertainment reporters in their midst. I personally tend to agree, however, with Fray commentator ScrewJack2008 who posted "My advice would be to return to anonymity as soon as possible before these people all chew you up and spit you out to serve their own agendas. Just run for your fucking life."
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But Emily, you are so clearly reading the wrong newspapers again! Because on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal today we learn that what was done to Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not only not torture—since it was being “continuously monitored”—but it also saved America from a a "second wave" of al-Qaida attacks, to be carried out by an "east Asian" affiliate, which would have involved the crashing of another airplane into a building in Los Angeles.” So quite obviously that 179th water-boarding of KSM really was as necessary as the very first.
To me the most interesting development in the torture debate this weekend is that the torture defenders deploy about three different playground techniques in an attempt to minimize the obscenity of what we have learned: Either they go the frat-boy route; the “hahahaha bugs-in-a-box-they-so-did-that-to-me-at-prep-school” defense. Or they trot out the sanctimonious claim that anyone who opposes torture must just hate America. Or, as we learn today in the Wall Street Journal, that it can’t have been torture if lawyers authorized it and doctors were monitoring it. Each argument is more circular than the next. But then I suppose if you're defending the legal principle that "it isn't torture unless we say it is," circular arguments are all you need.
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The only way to understand how the Bush administration could have waterboarded two detainees 266
times is to go back to footnote 27 of this
2005 torture memo, which Scott Shane pointed
to in the New York Times. It
discusses the “unnecessary use of enhanced” interrogation techniques—unnecessary
because “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be
compliant elements within the CIA Headquarters still believed he was
withholding information.”
The memo only admits to one instance of that kind of break
between the agents on the scene and HQ. But since we know that detainee Abu Zubaydah--83 waterboardings in August 2002, right after an earlier torture memo gave permission--gave up his most useful information in the weeks after he was captured, before or possibly immediately after the torture began. And so that "unnecessary" line stands for a much larger disturbing truth: The
people ordering the torture didn’t care about how much pain they inflicted for
how little gain. Efficacy, humanity—all of this became beside the point. The Bush
administration wasn’t really standing on the ground that torture was a terrible
means to the virtuous end of saving lives, as it so often claimed. There simply was no
necessity defense.
That footnote also demonstrates why if we’re going to
investigate or prosecute anyone, it shouldn’t be the agents on the scene. In
the wake of Obama’s carefully crafted statement fending off prosecution for
anyone who relied in good-faith on the DoJ memos, some commentators have called
for looking into whether CIA agents could go down for torturing before the
memos were written in August 2002. This seems wrong to me. If we went that
route, we’d get around version of Abu Ghraib: a few low-level scapegoats
standing in for their far more culpable superiors. Much more interesting is
another possibility Obama left open: going after the lawyers who wrote the
memos and the officials who demanded and approved them—David Addington, Alberto
Gonzales, Jim Haynes. Rahm Emanuel told
George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that Obama believes that “those who devised
policy… should not be prosecuted either." But what about disbarment? And impeachment for Jay Bybee, the
torture memo author who got life tenure on the 9th Circuit? It would
be a start. If you think these memos are good lawyering, then you don’t deserve
to be a lawyer. That’s a lesson the bar should desperately want to impart.
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This week's column from Meghan McCain is my favorite thus far. While her previous installments were solidly naive, this week's manages to be that and hilarious. As it turns out, the senator's daughter is on Twitter, and guess who's following her Twitter feed? Karl Rove. And that gives Meghan the creeps!
"Karl Rove follows me on Twitter," McCain reveals. "That's creepy." Surely, Rove on Twitter is a creepy concept. Does he really have so little to do with his time these days that he feels compelled to send messages like these out into the void? "Joining Bill O'Reilly tonight," he tweets. Not exactly breaking news. But there's more. "Got to the airport with a lot of time to spare." Who says Rove's post-Bush career is not without thrills? My favorite is the one where he discloses he's getting his shoes shined. Fascinating.
So, what's the probs with Karl's tweets, Megs? Apparently, she finds them "disingenuous." Possibly even written by a ghost-twitterer, she ruminates! (I doubt it. Nobody could come across as dull and unself-aware as Rove-on-Rove.) Therefore, she concludes, it's time for folks like herself to "take Twitter back from the creepy people." Employing her usual writing style, in which she expresses some random thought and never really unpacks that random thought, it remains unclear exactly why she finds Rove following her "creepy." In all likelihood, it's another one of her attempts to set conservatives like herself, who find themselves attempting to blindly steer forward a floundering party, apart from the icky old guys like Rove. The problem is that she and Rove have more in common than she comprehends. After all, she's just a Karl Rove creep in sorority girl clothing.
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I think the Susan Boyle Preservation Project has crossed the line into creepy. From Us Magazine:
"I won't let Simon Cowell take her to his dentist and I certainly won't let her near his hairdresser," judge Amanda Holden tells the U.K. Mirror.
The frumpy 48-year-old "needs to stay exactly as she is because that's the reason we love her," Holden insists. "She just looks like anybody who could live on your street."
"The minute we turn her into a glamour-puss is when it's spoiled," she says.
A makeover "can perhaps come later when she has signed the album deal and conquered America," Holden adds. "For now we'll keep her exactly as she is because that's why we've all fallen in love with her. I think it's the underdog thing."
Pretty Amanda Holden won't "let" Susan Boyle near Simon's makeup crew, lest she be "spoiled." In other words, the singer's frumped-up appearance is the most important thing about her; remove it, and we cease to care.
I don't know that turning Ms. Boyle into some kind of statement about physical beauty is any more respectful of her autonomy than forcing her into a makeover. She hasn't volunteered to be a feminist icon or morality personified or anything else we want to force upon her squinty visage. She is a person, not a placard, and her life is changing. Now that her audience consists of more than just Pebbles, she might well want to glam it up a little. There is nothing particularly authentic about preserving her appearance in amber while everything around her transforms dramatically.
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If you're ambivalent about having kids, you might want to rush out to see The Gods of Carnage, the latest play by French playwright Yasmina Reza. On Broadway for another week or so, in a star-studded staging, it's a witty, poignant critique of the contemporary bourgeois obsession with parenting. The play revolves around a simple dramatic situation: An 11-year-old boy hits another boy in his class with a stick, accidentally breaks two of his teeth, and partially exposes a nerve in his gums. In the old days, this was called "Boys will be boys." In the age of the Mommy Wars, it's an occasion for the parents to sit down to spell out exactly what happened in a formal legal document. At the opening of the play, the parents are arguing over whether the letter should note that one son was "armed" with a stick or merely "furnished" with it. But what begins as a highly scripted get-together with everyone straining to play the role of the engaged, together, thoughtful parent quickly devolves into total anarchy and chaos. By the end of the play, the nicely arranged tulips in vases have been strewn all over the floor, and everyone's drunk.
Reza is interested in how our preoccupation with parenting conventions is in fact a way of avoiding a messier truth: that few people have figured out how to have an egalitarian marriage; that trying to have one is itself exhausting; and that careful legislation of sex and power has only led to the repression of a lot of anger and transgressive eros. At one point, the character played by James Gandolfini—whose son was the "victim"—loses his temper and launches into a tirade that quickly devolves to a plaint: "Children come in to our lives, and then they destroy them," he says. I found the play at once hilarious and heartbreaking (to trot out two hoary adjectives), mainly because Reza is sympathetic to her characters even though they act, at many points, despicably. Even while cringing at their behavior, I recognized it—especially the way that the alliances shift quickly over the course of coffee. At moments each couple is pitted against the other; at others, the women against the men, and vice versa. Intelligently, Reza stages the whole thing without ever showing you the children themselves.
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io9, the Gawker empire's science/sci-fi blog, is wrapping up its weeklong "Spring Mating Season"
series, and it's pretty awesome. If you find that you need a break this
weekend from those repeat Susan Boyle viewings, I highly suggest checking it out. The io9 editors
highlight sex-related science news—such as a potential end to menopause and the discovery of the world's first all-female ant species*—and they've also put together some awesome top-ten lists, like this not-entirely-safe-for-work one about the all-time most embarrassing alien mating moments. (I vividly, unhappily, remember that Klingon one from when I was 11.) I especially recommend Takashi Murakami's creepy-sweet Inochi videos, about a prepubescent love-sick robot who looks like Eric Stoltz from Mask, and has similar girl problems. Happy Pon Farr, everyone!
*Correction, April 21, 2009: the original post said "all-female species," but the Mycocepurus smithii is actually the world's first all female ant species. Other all-female, non-ant species exist.
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Reading this much-e-mailed New York Times story on the joys of traveling through the five
boroughs on a stylish, yet inertial Dutch bicycle, I was struck by how
gender-specific all of the counsel seemed to be. To wit:
Can the bicycle, the urban answer to the wild mustang, slow
down and put fenders on? Can the urban cyclist, he of the ragtag renegade
clothes or shiny spandex, grow up and put on a tie?
Good question—but “Yes, she can” was clearly not the answer
that was intended. And later:
How should you dress to bike to work? Which bike has an
acceptable level of manliness? These are tricky questions. As the parade of
10-speeds, mountain bikes and, more recently, fixed-gear designs knocked the
upright, old-school bicycle off the road, accouterments like fenders and chain
guards came to be seen—by men, at least—as eccentric. If a guy is going to
get on a bike, he wants to imagine he’s Lance Armstrong, not Pee-wee
Herman.
No doubt. But, in the forward-thinking Netherlands,
where 27 percent of the public rides a bike (it’s only one percent of all trips
made in the U.S.
annually), surely women ride, too? And as someone who has personally struggled
with finding outfits to wear that won’t billow and bunch and flash passersby as
I two-wheel it to work (save pencil skirt
and rainy days), I know I could have used some tips, too.
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At a pro-life event in Indiana last night, Sarah Palin seemed to be telling the audience that for a moment, she considered aborting Trig:
There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know.
Of course, anyone who's ever been to a certain kind of church knows that this is a lead-in to a personal narrative, known as a testimony. The testimony follows an established formula, similar to a VH1 Behind the Music special: First things are going well, and then a moment comes when the subject flirts with sin, and their faith is tested. In the end the person triumphs and their faith is redeemed.
So in some sense it's "true" that Sarah Palin thought about it, but also true that there was no other possible outcome than she was going to ultimately decide to "walk the walk" and not just "talk the talk," or she wouldnt be telling the story.
What struck me is how her journey from regret to difficulty to acceptance sounds remarkably similar to the plot of 17 Again (as described by Willa and Dana here).
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This from an interview by Joni Evans on wowowow.com with Gloria Steinem, 75:
wOw: In your wonderful book, Outrageous Acts,
you advocate that we should do something outrageous every day. Your
quote: "Once I began to listen to my own authentic voice—or at least
to realize I had one—I discovered a new answer to my earlier
rhetorical question: How much more rebellious could I get? The answer
was: a lot." Are you still doing outrageous acts? What did you do on
your birthday?
Steinem: ... I’m thinking of having a tattoo for my birthday. I like the art
nouveau-looking ones that I see on women’s backs just below their jeans—it’s rebelliously known as a tramp stamp—but if it hurts, I won’t
do it. My real birthday present to myself is going back to Zambia to
live with elephants for a few days.
I can't decide if I'm more surprised that Steinem is considering getting a tramp stamp or that she doesn't know that tattoos hurt.
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Emily, thank you for your post of last night about
the torture memos. It's much easier to discuss singer-prodigies and puppy adoption
than to think about the fact that the very highest levels of my government authorized—no,
oversaw and urged—torture. The latter
makes me deeply ashamed.
But having my current government release the evidence is a strange kind of relief, sunlight coming out of the clouds. A few weeks
ago, I attended a panel on the the executive response to 9/11. Ann Compton, the
only reporter on Air Force One on 9/11 (after My Pet Goat), moderated Andrew Card, Michael
Chertoff, Douglas Feith, Tim Flanigan, and Ari Fleischer—all of whom had been intimately
involved in the response to the bombings. (John
Yoo was in the audience.) Let me say that
it was agony remembering 9/11, feeling again that scorched and distraught feeling we all had from being attacked. I was awestruck as they told what 9/11 had felt like from the inside—believing
that there were more planes in the air, ready to hit, and not knowing what to
do to prevent more attacks. They told unanimously about being given a single policy directive:
This must never happen again. Stop another attack at any cost. There was no
countervailing interest.
But that scorched feeling inside me quickly worsened into feeling
almost too sick to listen, knowing how that prime directive had forced my
country far off course, away from morality. We were a small audience of
journalists selected for our interest in constitutional law, and so we were soon drilling
them about the constitutionality of their responses. How could the administration
have authorized and implemented torture, indefinite detention, the suspension
of habeas corpus, the destruction not just of the Taliban but of Afghanistan itself
(that last a paraphrase of an Afghani journalist's question)?
My question: How they could have been so certain that anyone they
picked up on the battlefield had to be guilty? Why should citizens be expected
to believe that our government was omniscient, knowing in advance who should never
see daylight again? Chertoff answered that on a battlefield, they would have
been permitted to kill anyone there; where should the line be drawn between what
was permitted in battle and what was permitted to people picked up in battle? Then Flanigan looked directly into my eyes and said, essentially: We were the
lawyers. We did what we were asked to do. If you want to hold someone responsible,
look to the policymakers.
That disavowal took my breath away. (As did the moment Feith looked
straight into the eyes of the Afghani journalist and said: Our goal was to
prevent an another attack on the U.S. We were successful. In other
words, your country = not my problem.) Afterward, law professor Sherilynn
Ifill, who was sitting next to me, said: If I were to convene a truth
commission, Flanigan is the first one I'd call. He's ready to name names.
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Willa, I haven’t yet seen 17 Again, but after reading you on it, I want to. Not because the movie looks particularly enticing (the mere notion of Zac Efron aging into Matthew Perry is depressing beyond belief), but because I'm interested in the way it folds time travel and body-switching into a narrative of teen pregnancy. Time-travel plots are, of course, always about the fantasy of going back and changing the present by doing things differently in the past. It's worth noting, too, that those fantasies often involve motherhood or the possibility of a child: Keep Sarah Connor alive so her unborn son can lead the revolution! Ew, Marty McFly, don’t make out with your own future mom!
Yet even though this movie explicitly sets up the fact that Zac’s character is unhappy in his adult life because of the choices he made as a teen (ie, unprotected sex, having the child, marrying the girl), it sounds like those choices are ultimately affirmed in a feel-good ending. Even if he had the power to turn back time, Zac loves his family so much he wouldn’t have donned that condom. Everyone who’s already a parent gets the paradox of that logic: Once your child exists, it's hard to imagine a world without him. But for crushed-out adolescent girls not long on foresight, there’s a thin line between “Now that my unplanned-for child is here, I’d do anything for her,” and “Woo hoo, let’s make babies with Zac Efron!” The fuzzy-brained hypocrisy of the scene you describe, in which the body-switched Zac recommends abstinence over condoms to a group of high-schoolers including his own daughter, makes Bristol Palin sound like a savvy life coach by comparison. In her words: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”
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17 Again, a film about a 38-year-old named Mike with a sucky life who gets to go back to being 17, when he looked like Tiger Beat pin-up Zac Efron, opens today. ("What is Zac Efron?" Manohla Dargis wonders in in today's Times. He does have a space-alien quality—those vacant, kewpie doll eyes—but he's just the newest model in an old line of cars that go fast, for a short period of time. Think David Cassidy, Kirk Cameron, The Backstreet Boys). Why does Mike's life suck? Well, he just lost a promotion and quit his job, he's getting a divorce and his kids hate him—but the more fundamental reason that his life stinks is that Mike chose to become a teen father.
See, when Mike was 17, and a star basketball player with a bright future, his pretty girlfriend informed him she was with child. He decided to do the "right thing" (as EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum says, "Levi Johnston, consider yourself schooled.") and happily married his sweetheart. But 20 years later, Mike's decision has had unpleasant consequences. Mike never went to college, so he's been overlooked time and time again for a promotion. He's also spent the last two decades bitterly resenting his wife and kids for the sacrifices he made to be with them. Sacrifices that have kept him from the life he thinks he should have, and could have, had. So Mike wishes he could be 17 again, before he gave up his future for his family.
Unsurprisingly, the film goes out of its way to neutralize this message—that teen parenthood might require enormous, painful sacrifices that don't always pay off—by having Mike "realize," thanks to his repeat performance as a 17-year-old, that his wife and kids are the most important thing in his life and he really ought to appreciate them more.
The movie is schizophrenic about teenagers, sex and responsibility in other ways as well. When Mike returns to high school and condoms are being distributed in his health class he makes an impassioned plea for abstinence. This is played for laughs—Mike's daughter is in his class, and of course he doesn't want her having sex-—but since we know Mike was having sex in high school, and obviously without condoms, it's unfathomably short sighted. Wouldn't this man, of all men, know the importance of protection? Probably, but then he'd have to advocate condom usage—and God forbid a film intended for real teenagers do anything like that.
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Oprah started twittering this morning, in what might become the ultimate realization of the personal branding medium. Just one hour after her first tweet ("HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY ) she's approaching 100,000 followers-and gained about a thousand in the two minutes that I clicked away from her page and then refreshed. She could type gibberish, and the collective American consciousness would still be amazed that it was gibberish straight from her golden fingertips (cf: Shaq.) She might have shared an O cover, but surely Twitter's follower count was tailor-made to pump Oprah back up to her stratospheric personal sea level. How long will it take her to overtake Barack Obama? Ashton Kutcher? Can she top CNN? And how large of an Oprah bump will Twitter get? There's an increasingly symbiotic relationship between old and new media, but good old-fashioned red-blooded American television still has the upper hand-I think. Does Twitter need Oprah more for its brand, or does she need it more to keep hers relevant?
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
I was deeply moved by the sight of Afghan women marching in Kabul this week to protest the so-called “rape law,” which requires a woman to “preen for her husband” whenever he desires it, not to leave the house without his permission and to have sex with him on demand. The law affects Shias, and news photos showed the faces of female protesters from the Hazara ethnic group, Afghanistan’s beleaguered Shia minority, some smiling, some firmly set—and all uncovered. In their cultural weight, the pictures reminded me of another image, printed in Unveiled, photographer Harriet Logan’s book on Afghan women, of a Kabul street protest in 1972. In it, a young woman with uncovered hair stands amid a sea of teenagers. The woman—little more than a girl—reads aloud from a notebook, one hand cupped at her waist in a dramatic gesture. The banners behind her call for peace, democracy and social progress, yet how distant those goals would seem just a few years on, as the Russians rolled in, and later, when rival Afghan warlords tore the country apart, giving rise to the stringent, chastening dispensation known as Taliban rule.
What’s heartbreaking about these 1970s photos, taken during the reign of the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, is that the advances they document, as well as those under communist rule, were later used to drive Afghan women beneath the folds of burqas. The Russian invasion created a hierarchy of Islamic purity, with the corrupted, secular communist at the lowest level and the pure servant of God—as the mujaheddin leaders, and later Mullah Omar purported to be—at the top. Islam became an excuse for anything, a sheltering veil beneath which every kind of violence and immorality hid. Advances adopted by the admittedly flawed king, the Afghan communists and the Russian-installed puppet governments were condemned as un-Islamic, from the spread of secular education to the expansion of women’s rights. It would be ungenerous to say that we shouldn’t avidly support Afghan women’s protests against the so-called “rape law,” but when commentators talk about backlash, this is what they mean. Anything that looks like an import, like the hand of the west reaching too boldly into Afghanistan, will be furiously repulsed. It’s this outrage at foreign intrusion, regardless of its potential benefits, that’s already building in many parts of the country, and that feeds the Taliban resurgence. How else could insurgents slaughter Afghans and still win a measure of support, if they didn’t claim to be doing it in the name of Islam, which trumps all else? As a cleric who witnessed this week’s protest against the so-called “rape law” told the Times: “We Afghans don’t want a bunch of NATO commanders and foreign ministers telling us what to do.”
It’s frustrating, as a western woman, to be relegated to such a quiet supporting role in Afghan women’s struggle, but perhaps understanding the complexity of their situation counts for something. It might help explain, for example, an arresting NPR report about rising drug abuse among Afghan women (and men). Opium, Afghanistan’s main cash crop, is first and foremost a pain-reliever, and I’ve seen few places where pain is as dominant a part of memory and experience as it is in Afghanistan. Putting aside the horrors of 30 years of war, the inexorable rhythms of hope and disappointment that have characterized the lives of Afghan women—the fresh-faced girl speaking at a street protest and later, a muffled, cloaked women being publicly beaten for showing her ankles in the bazaar—are enough to make anyone crave opiates.
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Jess posted yesterday about the minds of female killers. What about the minds of female gamblers? I spent a few hours at an off-track betting site in Manhattan last week (you can watch my exploits here), and was struck by how few females passed through the doors. I only saw three, compared to, oh, 150 or so men. Why the disparity? Is there some physiological difference in the way women react to gambling? Scientists have determined that the "pleasure center" of the brain lights up among compulsive gamblers winning money the same way it does for a cocaine addict taking a hit. Are women less likely to experience that betting-induced high?
Not necessarily, but the gambling rush may not kick in until later in life. According to a few studies on gender differences in gambling (all of which, I'll admit, draw on fairly small samples), women gamblers tend to be older when they get started. But they catch up fast, progressing faster than the boys toward a stage of problem gambling. Another interesting finding: Among gamblers seeking treatment, females are more likely than males to be depressed.
Maybe the gender imbalance at the betting parlor I visited was less a matter of how women react to gambling, and more how they feel in that particular place. The woman I interviewed there chalks it up to the "unsavory" vibe. I can see that. The first time I went, I was uncomfortably aware of being in a dress, and in breaks between races, the lone woman in the room subs in as the next best thing to watch and comment on. I wonder if the observed correlation between female gamblers and depression might also be relevant in explaining the lack of ladies. The betting parlor I went to (where, I might add, I won my first and only bet!), "unsavory" though it may be, has a rowdy, social feel that I doubt would appeal to gamblers dealing with depression.
But before I draw too many conclusions, I think I'll check out one of the ladies nights that the district director of NYC off-track betting kept inviting me to. Any XXers fond of life's less savory pleasures want to join?
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As the entire world knows, the Obamas recently got a
six-month-old Portuguese water puppy named Bo. In an exclusive, I've learned that this might be only because Michelle is a stay-at-home mom.
A friend of mine—who adopted an infant a few years ago,
as a working mom—yesterday received this email when she applied to
adopt a puppy:
Thank you for your interest in Good Dog Rescue.
I'm afraid that our organization's policy on puppy adoptions is very stringent
due to the exceptional needs of the pups. They wish for a stay-at-home mom
that can help the pup grow. They feel you would qualify for one of our
older dogs at least 18 months or older. I'm very sorry to disappoint you,
but I hope you understand.
Remember—social workers approved my friend to adopt an
infant human. Apparently policies for
puppies are stricter. One concludes that, had Michelle O. held a
job, Malia and Sasha would have been denied their puppy.
Would a working dad have received this email? Inquiring
minds want to know.
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To me Susan Boyle seems like the anti-Octomom. Her homespun Scottish village upbringing, in her mother's sweet cottage, produced a 47-year-old single lady comfortable in her own stolid skin. I hope Emily's prediction about Boyle inevitably being seduced by a well-tweezed reflection is wrong. That she will not succumb to hair and make-up upgrades nor agree to strappy shoes and blingy accessories to enhance her image. I am rooting for the guileless churchwoman, seemingly without pretense or affectation, who told CBS Morning News, "you have to take yourself seriously." She strikes me as confident that her clear strong voice is all she needs to "rock the house."
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A post from Slate's Emily Yoffe:
Like Dahlia and Bonnie and E.J. I am enchanted by Susan Boyle and her angelic voice. However, I have seen enough makeover shows to know that after "they" get a hold of her and do her hair, pluck her eyebrows, put lipstick and mascara on her, and get her some flattering clothes, when she sees herself in the mirror she'll cry at how pretty she looks and how much she likes looking pretty. As she said in the Mirror story E.J. mentions, "I had my hair curled especially for the show and wore a dress I'd bought a few months back for my nephew's wedding." In other words, like just about everyone else, she'd like to look her best. This doesn't mean she had to submit herself to knives and injections. But now that she seems on the verge of what could be a big performing career, not plucking those eyebrows would eventually just be an affectation.
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When I lived in Southeast Asia a few years back, a couple of European expats asked me why gay Americans were "so obsessed with getting married." It struck them as a fundamentally conservative impulse for a group not beholden to traditionalist social norms. Sociologist Andrew Cherlin has just written a book on America's weird relationship to the institution of marriage, and he has answers for baffled non-Americans:
Same-sex marriage has been more of a battleground in the United States than in most other countries because marriage is more important to Americans than to people in other countries... In some European countries, gay and lesbian activists are asking instead: why, at this late date, should we buy into the oppressive, archaic institution of marriage? But in the United States many advocates say that only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship. And they are right, because marriage matters more here than elsewhere.
It has always seemed to me that the logically compelling arguments against same-sex marriage come not from the Christian right from but the secular left. If Cherlin is right—if marriage in America is, as he says, "the capstone of personal achievement," "the ultimate badge" and the key to "first-class citizenship"—gay Americans have more reason than many of their European counterparts to want access to the institution. But the arguments against "buying in" are also that much stronger, because the norm is that much more pervasive. (To be clear: I have bought in, and I think other adults should be able to buy in if they so choose. Or not.)
Cherlin's interview is full of interesting data-driven tidbits and well worth a read.
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The Justice Department has finally released four long-awaited torture memos. I've read one of them so far, the Aug. 1, 2002 memo (by then-Office of Legal Counsel lawyer Steven Bradbury. (Correction: OLC lawyer Jay Bybee wrote the 2002 memo. Bradbury wrote three additional memos in 2005.) I understand why the CIA and Bush officials fought hard against its release.
The memo is chilling for the pain and violence it portrays, and more than that for its efforts to minimize that pain and violence so as to make believe that it did not amount to torture and thus wasn't outlawed by the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture—treaties that bind the United States (except that obviously they do not). Bradbury recounts 10 techniques interrogators wanted to use against Abu Zubaydah, a high-value detainee they were confident they'd extract big al-Qaida information from. Water-boarding is among them. So is "walling," which means slamming a man's head against a wall while he's wearing a collar so he won't be brain dead from whiplash. Also sleep deprivation and shutting Zubaydah into a small box with an insect, which he'd be made to believe would sting. (The interrogators thought he had a particular insect phobia.)
According to Bradbury's analysis, these techniques are just no big deal. Really? Eleven days of sleep deprivation, the max the CIA asked for? No worries, a night or two of rest and you're back to normal. This is not what historians write about torture. And so the memo doesn't cite them. Instead it relies on officials from the military's SERE school, which teaches resistance to torture, and on stats showing that most SERE students don't actually lose their minds.
Down to many of the last details, the memos confirm the Red Cross report on the experience of Zubaydah and 13 other high-value detainees, made public last month by journalist Mark Danner. And they show us for the first time exactly how the Bush OLC lawyers played doctor and psychiatrist to wave away the reality of what they gave legal approval for. President Obama released the memos today with a promise not to prosecute anyone in the government who relied on them. That was inevitable. It may also be fair. But it won't be the last word. Whether by truth commission or congressional committee, there are more skeletons to be pulled from the government's closets, and much more thinking about them to do, once we can see them.
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Via a well-informed
Trinidadian, today's top billing at the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, on the occasion of
President Barack Obama’s trip to Port
of Spain for the fifth Summit of the Americas:
“Michelle
Obama Not Coming.”
Having missed out on Barack’s goodwill
op-ed, which ran in a rival paper today, the local Guardian—which, I’m told, fancies
itself as being “highbrow”—instead went with the FLOTUS scoop: Michelle is home
with Bo.
(cross-posted at The Browntable)
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Yes, Dahlia, you're right; I misread you. Perhaps Susan Boyle does look like a "real" 47 year old, pre-media-consciousness. But I wasn't talking about Westchester- or Alexandria-based suburban "babes"; I was talking about the women I see in the gritty working town of Worcester, Mass., or in train stations or at bus stops in various parts of the country: The plucking, colorizing, and gym-going isn't necessarily done in a sophisticated manner. (I really do mean over-plucking; skinny and abruptly abbreviated eyebrows of the Jennifer Garner variety are among my perhaps, um, excessively long list of pet peeves, right up there with the misuse of "reticent" to mean "reluctant.") These women don't necessarily look great. They certainly don't look like Madonna or Sheryl Crow. But they do look as if they've been watching too much TV and idling too long in the drugstore cosmetics aisle—as Susan Boyle doesn't.
As for Susan Boyle herself, our heroine of the day: The Mirror says here that she was oxygen-deprived at birth, learning-disabled as a result, and sang to escape her childhood bullies. I don't think she'll be looking polished any time soon—and thank goodness for that. Susan, fight off those tweezers at all costs!
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E.J., I think the only disagreement between us was that you thought I said Susan Boyle looks like an ordinary suburban women, where I in fact said she looks like a normal 47-year-old. At least where I live, a lot of 47-year-olds look more like Susan Boyle than the plucked, processed, creamed and lacquered suburban babes you describe. But when I wrote “normal 47-year-old” I was also thinking more about the natural aging process that has upended itself in recent years. I suspect that until a few decades ago most 47-year-olds looked more like Ms. Boyle than Paula Abdul, Marcia Cross and Sheryl Crow and the rest of the cohort of ’62-ers that—as you note—look closer to 29. I just can’t tell whether Susan Boyle doesn’t notice or care about her appearance. Even if she didn’t she probably does now.
I imagine if we see her at next year's Golden Globes in a sleek blonde blowout and a size 2 Reem Acra dress, we will have our answer.
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The femblogosphere is a-chatter over the latest issue of French Elle, which features a series of stars—Monica Bellucci, Eva Herzigova, Charlotte Rampling among them—sans fards—in other words, without makeup. Shine's Jennifer Romolini crows "Yay!" of the Photoshopping and retouching-free issue. It's a call to arms, as she sees it, to U.S. editors in love with images of women that have been airbrushed to death: "So American magazine editors, I plead to you: It's time to step
up your game." Feministing agrees, as if a woman who dares wear no makeup has come to embody the ultimate feminist act.
In contrast, Matthew Yglesias sees beyond the smoke and mirrors art of the stunt magazine spectacle that European editors have mastered as of late. These "untouched" images are no more "real" than they are "feminist."
"Obviously, artifice hasn’t, in fact, been done away with here. The
lighting, the attire, etc. is all being professionally done; vast
quantities of film is being shot and only the very best images
selected; and the 'stars' being presented 'sans fards' are extreme
outliers in the genetic lottery. All of which is no worse than
conventional magazine cover art, but it’s not really any better. And
just at a time when public awareness of the fakeness of magazine covers
is growing, we get a new artifice presented as unadorned reality."
And he is absolutely right. All of which seems to point out what a strange charade 21st century feminism has become, a so-called "movement" in which being "feminist" means carping about milk ads and empowerment is found in staged fashion magazine layouts.
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Well, Dahlia, I disagree: Susan Boyle doesn't look at all like an ordinary suburban woman. I'm as in love with her video as everyone else, and yes, appalled by the condescension with which she's being treated. But I think I understand it. In our era, ordinary suburban women overpluck their eyebrows, overdose their with hair with coloring and cream conditioner, and worry about when they can get to the gym. They don't confess to being 47-year-old virgins on international television. Susan Boyle looks like a throwback to a pre-modern era, a WWI Scottish villager, before 24-hour television, before self-improvement magazines, before the onslaught of the cosmetics and body improvement industries. She's astonishingly innocent of all that hyper-self-consciousness that a generation of para-feminists have been discussing, Naomi Wolf, Susie Orbach, and all the rest who wring their hands publicly about Barbie and absurdly slim models and adolescent bulimia in the Marshall Islands, about the vaunted pressure on girls to be perfect—gorgeous, brilliant, athletic, charming, and sexy all at once. Most human beings are sensitive to how we are perceived—and for many, that has become hypersensitivity in our media-tized world.
Susan Boyle seems like a kind of miracle: immune to, even innocent of, all that—and yet with a extraordinarily developed and sophisticated voice hidden in her extraordinarily unsophisticated package. It's that contradiction, I think, that has made her a huge hit. Most people would have been afraid and ashamed to appear on stage with an appearance that's so in conflict with how contemporary women are expected to present themselves. How refreshing to see someone who doesn't appear even to notice her appearance—and yet who is proud to carry that fabulous gift!
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Bonnie—thanks so much for posting on Susan Boyle yesterday. I have to confess I’ve watched her twice, and may well do so daily going forward, or at least whenever I feel the need to smile and cry at the same time. I think you are right to pick up on the fact that the shock of Boyle’s performance brought out a weird vicious honesty in the judges. Even after she had blown them away, they felt comfortable saying—because after all she still looked like Susan Boyle—that she was just too goofy-looking to sing that beautifully.
Now here’s the team from CBS’s Early Show this morning (clip below), insulting her again: Maggie Rodriguez’s patronizing “you look lovely, Susan” starts the interview—the way you might talk to a small child in clown shoes, and she then repeats the question about how Boyle managed to perform “even though everyone was laughing at you?” Co-host Harry Smith, fearing perhaps that Boyle is too provincial to have any cognitive abilities at all, presses her, “Do you understand that? Do you understand what a big deal this is?”
The reason everyone seems to feel the need to insult Susan Boyle to her face all the time is that she looks like a normal 47-year-old woman, and not like Stacey Anderson from The Cougar. That it’s OK to laugh at her for that, and to assume that she should be laughing along with us, makes me want to cry too.
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Dahlia has a piece in Slate today about how April tends to be the bloodiest month of the year, and while she focuses on mass killings perpetrated by men, there have been several murderous women in the news this month as well: notably Melissa Huckaby, who has been arrested for the murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, and Casey Anthony, who allegedly murdered her daughter Caylee, and against whom prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
ABC News quotes criminologist James Alan Fox, who says, "When a murder is committed by a female, it's more likely to be self-defense or can reflect some sort of mental illness." In addition, they have a forensic psychologist who implies the same thing—that only mentally ill women kill—"destruction and the ability ... [to] use power to knock someone down is so tied into a masculine identity," says Dr. Michael Welner.
Dahlia debunked the sexist notion that female killers are "insane" while male killers are violent criminals in a Slate piece from 2002. She talked specifically about mothers who kill their own children, like Casey Anthony, who are much more likely to enter mental institutions in lieu of jail than fathers who kill their offspring:
Even taking into account that some small fraction of the mental illnesses associated with maternal filicide—most notably postpartum depression—are triggered by the births themselves, the illness theory doesn't explain why mothers suffering from other mental illnesses, or who aren't ill at all, act out with their own children rather than strangers. The illness theory doesn't explain why we don't consider fathers who kill their children to be sick. Pulling murderous mothers out of the field of ordinary criminology and viewing them as fundamentally different raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps murderous mothers are no crazier than fathers. Perhaps murderous fathers are even crazier than mothers. Either way, the failure to view these crimes as morally or legally equivalent reflects a more central legal truth: We still view children as the mother's property. Since destroying one's own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else's property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals, who go to jail or the electric chair.
If Casey Anthony is sent to jail rather than the bin, it might mean that legally, things are shifting toward viewing children as entities separate from their mothers. It's a bit different in the case of Melissa Huckaby: Even though she is the mother of a 5-year-old girl, the child that she allegedly killed was not her own. Former O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark is arguing on the Daily Beast that Huckaby will likely plead insanity—but that it won't work, because Huckaby is also accused of raping Sandra Cantu before killing her. "There is nothing that could make a jury understand or forget the hideous fact, if proven, she defiled a little girl," according to Clark.
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Esquire is running a series of pieces that revolve around the idea of what it means to be a man. While others here took issue with another feature in the magazine, the cover story, "What Is a Man?," a rather ham-fisted take on what supposedly makes the 21st century man that comes across as more cartoonish than reality-based, I'm of the camp that while there's plenty of talk these days about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man remains one of the great under-discussed subjects of our time. Tom Chiarella may come across as Norman Mailer redux, but, heck, at least he's trying to sort it all out, right?
For what it's worth, another piece in this issue, "Interviews with Regular Guys," is a worth a look. The magazine asked a dozen so-called "regular guys" what they've learned thus far in life. My favorite comes from Gil Duran, a 32-year-old, D.C.-based communication director for Senator Dianne Feinstein.
My mother was the most important man in my life. I remember her
being six months pregnant with my sister, crawling around under trucks
with a rivet gun in a Grumman Olson factory in Tulare, California. With
a mother like that, you don't need a father.
It bears keeping in mind that what makes being a 21st century male so complicated has a hell of a lot to do with women.
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The Swedish government would like to inform "young girls" who strip in front of webcams that...their income is taxable. "We think that perhaps they are not well informed about the rules," says Dag Hardyson of Sweden's tax authority. Hardyson and his office appear to be targeting hundreds of stay-at-home strippers who don't bother to file returns. Meanwhile, in other important tax day news: Nevada's brothel owners say they want to be taxed at $5 per customer, presumably because industries that create tax revenue are less likely to suffer from political backlash. The state Senate is refusing to cooperate.
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I love this video of 47-year-old Susan Boyle in her audition for the new season of Britain's Got Talent, the U.K. version of America's Got Talent. Boyle, an unemployed village lady from West Lothian, was saucy but awkward in her short pre-audition interview with the panelists, and came off as a provincial, drab, stylishly frumpy, biddy with an unrealistic fantasy to be a professional singer on the scale of "Elaine Paige." As with the U.S. version, reality impresario judge Simon Cowell typically says insulting things to untalented contestants. Susan, seemingly selected for her comic value, was a sure target for Cowell's opprobrium until the decidedly unglam ma'am brought the mic to her mouth and rocked the room to standing ovations. Boyle had apparently never performed outside of her church choir before the televised audition, but her interpretation of "I Dream the Dream" from Les Misérable impressed the unanimous panel to put her in the season's competition. Unfortunately, the panel members couldn't help insulting Boyle a little bit, anyway. After the wild applause, Piers Morgan told her "everyone was laughing at you" before, and Amanda Holden delivered the heartfelt bulletin, "everybody was against you."
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Actually, Willa, there already has been a pro-life ad that uses the same concept as the German condom ad, but for a different purpose. While the condom ad implies that your sperm could turn into Hitler, the pro-life ad, sponsored by CatholicVote.com, is called "Life: Imagine the Potential," and it sends the message that the baby you're aborting could be Barack Obama. Check it out below. Just as the "self-flagellation" in the condom ad is very German, it's so American to say that any child raised by a single mother could be president, as if Barack Obama were not an exceptional person.
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Yet more high-powered support for Obama nominees Harold Koh and Dawn Johnsen: Endorsements from Douglas Kmiec, Jonathan Adler, and Glenn Reynolds for Johnsen (both Kmiec and Johnsen have blogged for Slate), and ones from Kenneth Starr and Ted Olson for Koh. In light of this growing split, it will be interesting to see whether John Cornyn continues to take his constitutional cues from these scholars and former government officials, or if he takes them from Glenn Beck.
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Not long ago, I became obsessed with a book of poems by Thomas James, called Letters to a Stranger. The poems were brilliant and uncanny, magical and beguiling. They were also out-of-print. I read them in a kind of samizdat xerox passed around by the poet Lucie Brock-Broido. They did not exist in book form, as I recall, because no one could find James' relatives in order to get permission to publish the poems. Just last year, these poems were finally published, and an underground classic became available in print.
I mention this because James's book is a type of "orphaned" book that Google is claiming it would one day have had the right to publish, had James's relatives never been found. At least, that's what this post over at BoingBoing says. The back story is this: As you may remember, many writers were happy when the Author's Guild and Google finally reached a settlement over Google Book Search, which authors had claimed infringed upon their rights. (See here for more.) But as the BoingBoing post notes, the settlement has a funny loophole: It apparently allows for Google to take over rights of books whose authors have died, disappeared, or can't be found. As I understand it, in the past the rights to some of these books would have returned to the public domain; now they will go to...Google. The brilliant Lewis Hyde is protesting here.
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I was happy for both the editor and the journalism graduate in Emily's story of a freelance assignment in the profession they both love. It emerged after her chronicle of the tough job market for newly-hatched graduate students, just as their fields are contracting. Since they are young, at least these earnest potential leaders have time to ride out the bad economy. Megan McArdle writes today on the Atlantic's website that workers over 55 who lose their jobs usually do not get rehired, ever. White collar workers, such as executives and journalists, whose salaries are inflated by years of seniority, find the experience they bring to a job, though useful, is no longer cost-effective for their organizations. The resulting layoffs and buyouts have rendered many able baby boomers unemployable way before their children's educations are fully paid for. These men and women of a certain age must use their well-learned skills to reinvent their professional identities just when they were hoping to coast into retirement. I know the kids will be ok. They are resilient, sharp and still free of the expenses of a family. The older workers need to be more resourceful as their specialized knowledge gets rebooted and rebottled. They won't have the jobs they expected to have, but they can still think for a living. Fortunately, as we mature we learn to adapt. As much as I want to see the next generation of leaders find platforms for their strong ideas and their wondrous inventions, I am eager to see what last best contributions the b-generation will offer the commonwealth before they take their elderly parents' places at the condo pool.
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Lindsay Lohan has an eHarmony spoof ad up at Funny
Or Die, which New York's Jessica Pressler rightly credits as performing "the awesome feat of getting you to
re-like" the busty redhead in spite of the mess she has become—or rather,
because she is so self-aware of said mess. Deadpanning to the camera, Lindsay
describes herself to potential blind dates: "I'm a workaholic, a shopaholic,
and, according to the state of California, an alcoholic, as well as a threat
to all security guards if they work at hotels." Oh Lindsay. You make a
total disaster look so good.
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I love the fact that the word teabagging has dipped its way into the cable news lexicon. For those of you who are fortunate enough not to know the original meaning of teabagging, you won't find it in a regular dictionary, and I will not retype it here, but if you are curious, you can find several definitions at UrbanDictionary.com. Be forewarned: Make sure you are not eating or drinking when you read it.
The term fell into our mouths more than a month ago, when the Republicans decided they were going to protest Obama's tax policies by symbolically re-enacting events from the Boston Tea Party. Now there are several planned protests taking place across the country, and to report on them, newscasters, commentators, and cable show hosts have been forced to take in this mouthful of a word.
I've heard it from Jon Stewart, David Shuster (sitting in for Keith Olbermann), and a poor blushing Rachel Maddow.
Of course, this is how our language evolves, and in this case, how an "unacceptable" word becomes an "acceptable" one. But, in the meantime, we are allowed to giggle a little, aren't we?
And it gave me an idea. The Republican Party, which has been foundering since even before the election of President Barack Obama as it struggles to find new leadership, new direction, new ideas, a new identity, and new members, should maybe start with a new nickname. The could easily shed the "Party of No" label if they began to refer to themselves as "the U.S. Teabagging Party." Catchy, right? Sounds like a ball to me.
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I hesitate to publish this, because both Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the "mommy wars" are media-driven phenoms that don't deserve any more attention. But I feel it's my public duty to step in, lest any poor unsuspecting mother fall for the trap. Dr. Laura has a new book out, In Praise of Stay-At-Home Moms, which she was flacking last week on the Today Show. In it, she argues that mommies should be with their children and "my heart goes out" to women who can't be. She offers herself as an example, discussing her difficulty getting pregnant and her heroic attempts to work only while her son was asleep.
So now for the fact-checking. Thanks to a 1998 Vanity Fair profile and an unauthorized biography, Schlessinger's hagiography is only credible to readers whose servers are down. She got pregnant only after leaving her first husband, and then having an affair with a married man, and then having another affair with Lew Bishop, a married father of three, whom she lured away from his own family. Getting pregnant was difficult because she'd had a tubal ligation and had to have it reversed. After her son was born, she claims she woke up every morning at 5 a.m. to do research, then cheerfully toted him around the neighborhood, then left for work at 9 p.m. when he was asleep. This is possible, I suppose, but the "cheerful" part is dubious. Also, did we mention that Lew quit his job to be her manager, and worked at home?
Schlessinger famously estranged from her entire family and tends to throw shoes at colleagues who displease her. Here she dredges that up again, with this lovely portrait of her mother:
I knew for sure that I was definitely not going to become like my perpetually angry, frustrated mother, who always behaved as though being a wife and mother were tantamount to self-immolation even though neither my dad nor circumstances ever kept her from doing whatever she wanted to do.
Very classy. As for her actual argument, it's barely worth engaging with. As her mother's example proves, some people should stay at home and others shouldn't.
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Communicating with boys is the theme of the day in the New York Times, which has a front-page article on how market researchers are communing with young guys to help Disney carve out a boys' entertainment niche, as well as the Science section column on how pediatricians tackle the sex talk with boys. Like you, Jessica, I like the basically egalitarian core of the message the doctors urge, which is an emphasis on respect and consideration; that strikes me as right, and something kids (especially teenagers) of both genders can't hear enough about. And I was surprised that the subtext of the Hollywood story seemed to be gender convergence, too. Forget the Girlz vs. Boyz approach to marketing, apparently. Expert "boy-whisperers" like Disney's Kelly Peña have discovered that boys aren't so into the stark winner-loser paradigm after all, and the no-girls-allowed ethos seems to be out.
But also like you, Jessica, I have my doubts about the adult presumption that all this communication is, or even should be, quite as open and revealing as it's cracked up to be. I'm dubious about the doctors' claims that if adults are at ease, the conversations about sex won't be awkward—and I wonder if it's a service to parents to suggest they can expect that. I'd say the Talk is easier to conduct with respect and consideration—qualities parents should model, after all—if adults aren't envisaging lots of cozy sharing and caring.
And based on the other Times article, I'd say the market researchers are kidding themselves if they think they've established great rapport with boys, whom I'd credit with doing a great job of keeping their own counsel in the face of those who want to snare them into endless show-based merchandizing. Certainly Disney's probing hasn't produced much in the way of insights: Show the underside of skateboards in movies, use check marks not Xs (which remind boys of bad grades). The boys aren't talking much, and it's not clear the adults are listening very well when they do. Disney seems to have concluded boys want "fun with a purpose," though the rare comment offered by a kid in the story did not exactly confirm that. The boy helpfully defined a popular boy pastime—to "crash"—for the nice, nosy lady. "After a long day of doing nothing, we do nothing."
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In response to my piece about grad school grads who who are suffering in the recession, I heard from Sam Eifling, who works at ESPN.com's outdoor web site. He said, "Today I read your piece about the value of advanced educations in a piss-poor hiring climate. The bit about the Mizzou j-school grad working at Applebee's sent a cold wind up my back. Do you still have that kid Sam's e-mail address? I'm thinking I might be able to throw him some freelance work."
And so, of course, I connected Sam to the j-school grad, whose name is also Sam, and who wrote back to say he'd already emailed Sam the editor. Then from that Sam, this morning, "the lad seems eager: 'Any kind of work that doesn't involve bringing people extra vats of ranch is fairly appealing to me.' I hope I can get him freelancing for me. I mean, if you can't throw a raft to a writer who's basically living your nightmare, what's the point in being an editor?"
Indeed. My hero.
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A guest post from contributor Linda Hirshman:
In response to my Slate essay "Crazy Choices, Crazy Love,"
Hilary Bok, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins (hilzoy to bloggers), generated
many words on why
women stay with abusers and why
I should not have even asked the question. Less
articulate opponents invoke her posts as evidence of the error of my ways. Instead,
she demonstrates how important it is to ask the question and how easily the
discussion becomes derailed.As to why women stay, Bok offered 1) the story of her own
abuse and 2) her experience working in a shelter. Individual stories eventually
add up to evidence, true, but a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what
is supposed to be a political conversation. If we are to discuss the politics of abuse, we
need to resist this rhetorical move. It
would be churlish of me to downplay the suffering of this well-known
intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere. How can I say, he never laid
a hand on you, what are you talking about? But other than evoking sympathy, her
story actually makes my point perfectly.
He screamed at her once; the second time, she packed her bags. In
explaining why she left, she says, among other things, "I'm a feminist."
Mining her shelter years for more data, Bok suggests that
being attacked by a lover is so shocking it deprives you of your capacity for
judgment. Utterly unexpected and incomprehensible, it's like having the car
turn into an elephant, she explains. The imagery is compelling, until one remembers
that from the Farah Fawcett movie, The
Burning Bed ,to Rihanna's swollen face on the internet, everyone on this
planet has been exposed to evidence that "lovers" can attack. The many comments
about my essay also reflect how much warning attackers often give and how many
victims come from backgrounds of abuse. Why, of all human experience, can women
not learn of the reality of domestic violence from what they see, read and
sometimes live through?
Bok also tries to explain why I should not be asking (and
implying) that women should leave their abusers.
Philosophers usually don't argue against asking questions,
so, Bok argues instead that I didn't ask the question right. I implied that women
are natural victims, and I was just using battered women as a battering ram against
"choice" feminism. If there's one take-away message in my piece, it's that women are not natural victims. Which means there
must be a way to reduce or arrest battering. Silent sheltering and waiting isn't
enough—that leaves between 600,000 and 2,000,000 women battered right now. If that prescription is all
feminism has to offer, I am certainly blaming . . . us. But it's not. As Debra
Dickerson brilliantly put it in her
piece at Mother Jones, asking is
in the long tradition of feminist awareness. "Have we forgotten how many millennia of consciousness-raising it's taken to
acknowledge the domestic violence, first, exists and second, is wrong? Feminism
is a roadmap . . .[It's] leaving a man who makes you weak in the knees. When he
isn't hitting you."
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Sarah Palin attracts national scandal so effortlessly, it starts to look as if she does it on purpose. Courtesy of Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast, here’s a little background on her pick for state Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross. Some of these claims are disputed, but Ross has allegedly called homosexuals “degenerates” and is rumored to have said in a 1991 speech to a fathers' rights group, “If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?” and “There wouldn't be an issue with domestic violence if women would learn to keep their mouths shut."
What's undisputed is that Ross has a voluminous collection of writings, frequently penned in the key of Limbaugh. He opposes, among other things, animal rights activists, environmentalists, legalizing marijuana, allowing Alaska natives to maintain their lifestyles, and abortion. He supports guns, fathers' rights, anti-government militias, and has defended a college student who created an “art project” featuring "a hooded and robed stick figure of a KKK member, bearing a cross in one hand and a flag in the other." Lauding the artist’s “courage” Ross then berated the African American student who objected to the work: “It might have been more fun to see Ms. [-----] try to remove the display. Then she could have been arrested and her future as a student of the university could have been resolved through the university disciplinary proceedings.”
Remember back in October when Gov. Palin couldn’t recall a single Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed, other than Roe v. Wade? Probably not a surprise, then, that her pick for the state AG says “his big remaining task on Earth is to help stop abortion, a practice he sums up as ‘killing kids.' ''I feel I have a good relationship with the good Lord (but) if I could overturn Roe v. Wade, I figure I got my ticket.”
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A truly astounding series of German condom advertisements are making the rounds this morning—each features a sketch of a sperm made to look like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden or Mao Zedong. Their not so subtle message being, "Better wrap it up... unless you want to bring evil into the world!" The ads are arresting and hilarious, but the self-flagellation inherent in them strikes me as being distinctly German: I can't imagine many American dudes susceptible to the suggestion that their sperm wear swastikas, or, to use a more purely American parallel, KKK outfits. (Obviously, their sperm have 90 mile an hour fastballs, good looks and a working familiarity with the art of the deal). It's a dark take on procreation, informed by an everyday awareness that people can go really, really bad. Of course, people can go good as well, and I almost expect to see these images re-purposed for an anti-condom or pro-life campaign, with sperm made to look like Jesus, Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr.
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The New York Times health section must have been reading my mind: They answered the question I asked last week, "Is the Teen Sex Talk Different for Sons and Daughters?" with an article and a blog post today. According to pediatrician Perri Klass, M.D., the way you should talk to your adolescent sons about sex is both the same and different from the way you might speak to your daughters. While it's important to teach both boys and girls basic tenets of politeness, Klass writes that, as a pediatrician and a mother of boys, "I acknowledge
that for their own protection, boys need to understand that there are
people—male and female—who will see them as potential predators,
and judge them automatically at fault in any ambiguous situation."
However, Klass notes that a little respect (as Aretha says) goes a long way. Klass quotes Dr. Lee M. Sanders, another pediatrician who takes care of teen boys, about how he approaches the subject of sex: "We’ll talk about respect, about whether they feel they are respected
in their own families, the respect they have for their mothers, the
respect they see other men paying to their own mothers or sisters—do
you think that applies to other girls that you meet?"
Tara Parker-Pope's related blog post opens up the question to commenters, and in the peanut gallery Alex Lickerman, M.D., argues, "If the adults participating in the conversation are comfortable talking
about sex, the child will be as well. We’re the ones who make children
nervous about this topic. Before having this discussion maybe we should
examine just how comfortable we are or aren’t with our own sexuality." As someone who was a teen not so long ago, I disagree with Lickerman—my parents weren't awkward when talking to me about sex at all, and yet I was still mortified—but I want to hear from the moms out there, especially the moms of sons: Do you speak to your sons and daughters differently about these issues?
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Dana, Jess, I too saw Observe and Report over the weekend and...thud. Much of the conversation about the maybe rape scene has orbited around whether it was funny or not. I didn't think it was funny (or offensive. Faris's injunction for Rogen to keep going neutralized the scene for me)—but then I didn't think the movie was funny. At all. And not because I was sitting through it constantly offended or icked out—that's actually what I was expecting and, in a perverse way, kind of hoping to feel: A movie that makes you want to walk out is always more interesting than a movie that makes you think "Eh. I wonder if they give free refills." Instead, I just thought the jokes didn't land—if "jokes" is even the right word to describe the stunts and dialogue contained in this film.
Observe and Report struck me as the kind of movie you have to come to wanting to laugh, at least a little, to find funny. Digging Seth Rogen or ultra-violent slapstick or the kind of counter-intuitive comment that might become hilarious if you were to repeat it to your friends 15 times outside the theater (Zoolander has a lot of these) could give you the necessary want. Otherwise, nothing helps a joke go over quite like a room full of laughing people—an audience in hysterics could make a comatose girl asking a psycho to keep having sex with her funny. (Oh, Anna Faris, please try a little harder to find a movie that deserves you.) It could probably make a lisping guy shooting heroin seem funny. I imagine it could make violently beating up teenage skateboarders funny. The audience I saw this film with found none of these scenes funny (they're all actually in the movie), and you know what? I think they're really not funny, even if, in the right moment, you could laugh at them. The only thing I thought was amusing about this film was the chase scene leading up to the final, violent ending—and I don't know how much credit director Jody Hill gets to take for the inherent humor of a flaccid penis. I'm pretty sure God wrote that joke.
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As Easter continued on the White House lawn this morning—and back to the dude-what-about-female-athletes beat—I was heartened to read this from Lynn Sweet’s pool report on the basketball station of the White House Easter Egg Roll:
At one of the baskets, the president is shaking hands with the girls from Woodson, when he spots number 50. “Didn’t I just see a story about you in the newspaper?” Obama says to Johnson.
“Johnson” is Jenice Johnson, a 6-foot-6 18-year-old female hoops phenom, profiled in the Washington Post this March. And later:
Obama tells a youngster he wants to “see you shoot a little game.” Tells another “he’s got good form.” Encourages a kid who misses to “keep on going till you make it.”
One small boy got special attention from the president. Obama lifted up the youngster, extending his arms to lift him high enough so that the boy dunked the ball in the basket.
Obama, concerned that no girls were lining up to shoot, asked, “where are the ladies?” That brought some young girls up. He told one, “you gonna be a star some day.”
Cute! For all the attention the New York Times Magazine lavished on little Allonzo Trier (also check out Jason Zengerle’s great TNR profile of Lance Stephenson and the NYC child hoops industry), it’s nice to see the president shower some encouragement on ladies that can handle the rock.
*Post title cribbed from Ryan Lizza's great campaign postmortem, in which the president talks hoops, and flashes a little of that famous ego.
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Given the precariousness of women’s rights in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s curious that the so-called Afghan “rape law” has drawn such fury in the U.S. and Europe. Not that the law isn't worthy of condemnation—it is. But being bound by written law to have sex with your husband on a regular basis is no better or worse than the de facto law under which the great majority of Afghan women already live. The more interesting question is why this is being treated like a new outrage when it really is an enduring one. Is it possible that Obama, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel believe that things have changed so significantly for Afghan women since the Taliban was removed from official power in 2001 that the “rape law” is anything but a codification of normative behavior? How we overestimate our ability to change people’s minds and re-orient their hearts! Law or no law, Sunni or Shia, an Afghan man—like a man in many other parts of the world—can have sex with his wife anytime he wants, whether she wants it or not. And as one commentator noted in response to a CNN story, citing Ohio statute that legalizes spousal rape under some conditions, this shouldn’t surprise us. Anyone who has broached the subject with American cops knows they hold widely divergent views of the validity of marital rape claims.
As a target of western outrage, the “rape law” is a red herring. The grave concern it has stirred devalues the everyday struggles faced by all Afghan women, as opposed to the 10 to 20 percent who, as Shias, would be governed by the proposed law. The greatest challenges to Afghan women’s freedom and safety lie in the unlegislated space of a war-ravaged society. In the Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan this winter—a short drive north of Kandahar, where I’ve been for the last few weeks—the chief prosecutor told me about a recent case in which a man and his wife had argued. Soon afterward, they found her beaten to death and stuffed inside a well. The thinking was that her husband had done this with the help of their son; both men had fled, and the prosecutor expressed little hope of finding them. His office was understaffed, and he was more preoccupied with the endemic corruption that made his job nearly impossible. He had recently arrested and jailed two prosecutors, he said, but his attempts to lock up another crooked local official had been derailed by high-ranking authorities in Kabul. He described this kind of interference, not drug smuggling, murder or rape, as his greatest law enforcement challenge.
The conversation about where Afghan women stand, where they should stand, and what changes are needed in both law and practice to bring them there must be undertaken by Afghans in the context of their own culture or risk sparking a xenophobic backlash that could ultimately be more damaging to women’s interests. That’s why it’s encouraging that more than 100 Afghan officials and public figures recently signed a petition expressing disapproval of the proposed law. Those signatures carry far more weight, in this instance, than the words of a U.S. president.
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According to the Financial Times (via Jezebel), lipstick is no longer the recession-related financial indicator: It has been supplanted by liquid foundation.
"L’Oréal,
the world’s largest beauty company, has found in the UK market that
foundation has edged out lipstick as the 'must-have' product for women,
with more than one third of 18 to 19-year-olds citing it as their most
essential beauty product against 8 per cent opting for lipstick.
"The
only age group which still appreciates the glamour of painted lips is
the over-60s, with 40 per cent surveyed citing lipstick as the most
treasured item."
What does the shift from lips to skin quality mean?! Is it a nod to the ubiquity of digital cameras among the under-20 set? Has gloss become ascendant in the post-recession world? So many deeply important and unanswered questions.
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Dana, I saw Observe and Report this weekend and I must say, I found the rape scene—in which Seth Rogen's sad-sack security guard has sex with Anna Faris's makeup counter floozy while she's passed out—to be just another stomach-turning plot point in a movie consisting of several similarly revolting scenes. If you are to take the film and its characters seriously, which perhaps is beside the point, Rogen's cop not only sexually assaults Faris but basically stalks her, and the movie ends with him publicly slut-shaming her.
Maybe I'll buy that the movie is failed satire, and certainly director Jody Hill's interview with the Onion's AV Club (via Majikthise) shows that he has a totally muddled vision of the rape scene and its context:
AVC: In the Times piece, they describe the scene you’re talking about as Seth Rogen’s character forcing himself on Anna Faris. Is that how you perceived that scene?
JH: [Pause.] I dunno. I’ve always kind of liked scenes that you talk about how fucked-up they are. I would have been happy without any dialogue in that scene. I wanted to show them just having sex and her passed out, and I thought that would have been funnier. But I think I have a darker sense of humor than most people. So at the end, [Faris’character] is okay with it. [Laughs.] And that was like, “I’ll shoot it both ways.” So I actually shot it both ways. I just kept the camera rolling. There’s like a line that’s “We’re okay laughing, and you’re pushing the envelope.” But you’re not really pushing the envelope until you cross that line where a lot of people don’t go along with you. I tried to do it in a few scenes in this movie, where a lot of people aren’t going to go along with the film or with what we’re trying to do.Hopefully that means we’re actually pushing the envelope. [Laughs.] You know what I mean by that? I think if you’re really pushing the envelope, you have to not include everybody, if that makes sense. Or else it’s not really pushing the envelope.
As blogger Majikthise points out, "[Hill's] reply seems to confirm my theory that Faris' 'motherfucker' line is a cop out—a ploy contrived to keep the scene 'funny' instead of taking it to an even darker place." And that's the crux of the problem with this movie: It tried to hedge its bets between dark comedy and just dark, and managed to accomplish neither. It's as if Will Ferrell tried to make a Todd Solondz movie—Hill went for cheap laughs rather than depth or coherence of vision.
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The Obamas said they wanted a rescue dog. The kind you take home from a shelter so it won't be put to sleep. They ended up with a purebred Portuguese Water Dog courtesy of Sen. Ted Kennedy, which, according to the Washington Post, was not a "good fit" for the family it lived with previously, and has been schooled by Kennedy's dog trainers. The Post continues:
"As for the rescue pledge, the Obamas came up with a solution intended to lend a serious symbolic note: They're going to make a donation to the D.C. Humane Society."
Two lessons: 1) See how great cap and trade is? 2) Moving to Washington means that powerfully persuasive people take you on little jaunts away from your modest and principled intentions—jaunts that seem harmless, but exert a symbolic power of their own.
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If you've been on Facebook or Twitter today, you've probably heard the news about Amazon: A few days ago, according to author Mark Probst, the company began removing the sales rankings from many gay- and lesbian-themed books, making it slightly harder to find them on the site. When Probst wrote to Amazon to ask what was up, the company replied that it had a policy of monitoring "adult" content on the site. Here's the letter he reprinted on his blog (which you can find here):
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage
Now, to my mind, any censorship is bad censorship, so even if this action were limited to gay porn I'd be deeply bothered by it. But to make matters even more complicated, so far Amazon's little project has affected not only books that might be deemed to have full-on "adult" content but also literary novels, memoirs and books of poetry that portray gay sex. Among them? Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, Mark Wunderlich's Voluntary Servitude, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.
The very problem with this enterprise is implicit in the quotes that Ashlyn D puts around "adult." Amazon gets to define it however it pleases, and in that definition takes away the act of choice from its consumers. One wonders, too: Why is it so bad for books to be "adult" when the company still sells plenty of sex toys over in its marketplace sub-section? Also: Why bother doing this when it's still pretty easy to find most of these books on the site? (If you have more info about the Amazon decision, email me at morourkexx@gmail.com.)
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If yes, I want to hear from you. Questions from the latest installment of my recession series:
Have you uprooted yourself or your family because of the
recession—downsized to a smaller place, moved in with your folks, gone
to a different city? I'm interested in stories about the recession and
the American habit of picking up and going someplace new when the going
gets tough. Send them to me at doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be quoted anonymously, please let me know.
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A guest post from the Nation's Katha Pollitt, responding to a recent piece in Slate by Linda Hirshman.
Linda Hirshman seriously misrepresents both me and my book Learning to Drive. In brief:
1. Linda equates me with a battered woman who stays with her abuser. My actual situation, unambiguously described in the book: I discovered AFTER MY PARTNER LEFT ME that he had been unfaithful many times. Linda strongly implies I knew about this all along and stayed out of sick romanticism. In fact, I would never stay with a philanderer, much less an abuser. I have never been in an abusive relationship. Learning to Drive cannot rationally be used to explain why a battered woman would stay with a violent man. Because that is not the situation it describes.
2. She compares me with the excessively romantic (her view, Flaubert's is a little more complicated!) Emma Bovary, who killed herself (actually not for love, As Linda implies, but because of debt). My book is about getting over a subtly infantilizing, undermining relationship and painful breakup by becoming a more independent, self-aware and skeptical woman, a woman less prone to denial, which, again IN THE BOOK, is connected to other kinds of rose-colored glasses (about politics, alcoholic parent, motherhood, etc.).
3. She ignores the fact that Learning to Drive is not a flat-footed piece of journalism, it is a book of essays which use various literary strategies, like, um, humor, exaggeration, irony, whimsy, verbal play, and self-satire. Every single quote she uses she takes literally, when they are all comic, i.e., calling my philandering partner a "psychopath." Obviously, he wasn't really a psychopath, he was a garden-variety manipulative charmer. "Psychopath" expresses rage and frustration in an over-the-top way that is meant to suggest maybe there's something funny about finding oneself in this pickle. It's not a clinical diagnosis. Similarly, obviously, when I describe his hat and coat in a romantically exaggerated way I am aware that it is a romantic exaggeration.
It's English 101: There is space between the autobiographical narrator and the autobiographical subject. As in fiction, the writer knows more than the character. Emma Bovary didn't write Madame Bovary! I can understand why that would be too subtle for Linda, who sees everything in black and white and whose main aim in life seems to be proving herself the world's only true feminist.
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Via Flowing Data, I see that Zappos.com will now show you who is buying what from where in real time. Thus I can sit in front of my laptop, stare at pictures of shoes superimposed on a map of the United States, and make wild generalizations about regional fashion preferences based on isolated financial transactions. Rigorous preliminary research reveals that people in the Los Angeles area like cute strappy sandals.
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Dana, perhaps I should not have compared Elizabeth Cousins to Bristol Palin; Cousins never offered herself as a spokesperson for anything, except herself and her own experience. While I agree with you all about preventing teen pregnancy, Cousins' baby is already here. She should be commended for rising to the occasion, rather than roundly chastised. In addition, I don't think Bristol Palin's example paints a realistic picture of teen motherhood, and in fact could be accused of glamorizing it: She remains living in her mother's mansion with ample help from her wealthy family and a nationally televised platform. Sure, Levi embarrassed her, but I'd bet when at least some teens saw him on Tyra, they were swooningly jealous of Bristol having such a dreamy boyfriend.
Emily, at the end of the day, I think we're all products of our own environments. Elizabeth Cousins and Bristol Palin both come from peer groups where teen pregnancy is rampant and opportunities for the future are limited. I sincerely doubt the kind of teen who is watching multimedia presentations on the New York Times website would hear Cousins' story and say to herself, "Having a baby now sounds like a great idea!" She'd be the kind of teen who would be well aware at how much she had to lose.
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A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:
Sam, the blurred boundary you describe between boyhood and adulthood rang true for me, as I expect it will for any member of the "educated, twentysomething, urban set" you mention. It certainly doesn't help that that the 20s are—perhaps now more than ever—an age of wildly divergent professional and lifestyle identities. Some of my old friends now wear suits daily and live in luxury buildings; those of us in the fuzzier professions wear jeans to work and spend the summer hauling secondhand air conditioners home on the subway. Others, still, have already scrimped and saved to buy property and start families.
As much as I agree with your description of the quandary, though, I wonder whether it's as unique to "our generation" as you suggest. This discussion made me think of an interview with Jonathan Franzen I heard years ago and just tracked down. Franzen teases out the cultural rift between his parents' postwar generation and his own post-'60s generation to describe exactly this kind of confusion:
I seem to have grown into a time and a place where adults didn't really want to be adults in the same way I understood them to be, which was well-mannered people who dressed differently than children and ... put their children's interests before their own, and all around, just were of a different class. They liked being adults. They got a satisfaction from that.
Ever since the boomer generation faced the problem of adulthood, with kind of dubious results, and since so much of commercial culture has come to focus on the 18 to 34 demographic, its seems as if adulthood itself is to some a threatened commodity.
I'm not sure I endorse Franzen's definition of adults as "well-mannered people" fixed in domestic life, but his observation does seem to suggest that this question has been floating for a while.
And, Dayo, on the swaggering, creepy tone of the Esquire piece: I found myself wondering whether this wasn't an effort to invoke, imitate, and channel the pithy declaratives of David Newman and Robert Benton's famous "New Sentimentality" Esquire cover story of 1964. If so, it's a bizarre allusion, since the New Sentimentality, as described, was pretty much a reaction against the ball-busting, domestic-providing sensibility of "What Is a Man?"
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Back at Jessica and Bonnie: To me the saddest part of that NYT slideshow interview with Elizabeth Cousins, the 16-year-old mother in Brooklyn, was the moment when she explained that she'd thought about abortion, but reconsidered because "people" told her that this might be her only chance to be a mother. It's one thing to decide against abortion because you have a deep moral repugnance for the practice. But how awful to bear a child at 15 (her daughter is 19 months old now) because your ignorant teenage friends tell you something that patently wrong. Assuming she has regular cycles and normal fertility, Elizabeth will have at least 300 more chances to get pregnant in her lifetime. There are plenty of things she will need to worry about in life, but having a baby as infertility insurance at age 15 creates a hell of a lot more problems than it solves.
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Now that my wildly ambivalent review of the disturbing new comedy Observe and Report is up, I can address that little matter of date rape in greater detail here. Is it true that Seth Rogen’s character Ronnie, a bipolar mall security guard, forces himself on drunk and drugged cosmetics clerk Brandi (Anna Faris) against her will? On New York magazine’s Vulture blog yesterday, Dan Kois makes a case for the prosecution. In a New York Times profile of the director Jody Hill, Dave Itzkoff disagrees, noting that before the scene is over Faris’ character “indicates that she had given her consent” (I love the Times-ian delicacy of that paraphrase. What she actually says is “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?” And she says it from the perch of a pillow stained with her own vomit.)
There are a lot of things in Observe and Report to feel morally icky about, but for me, this scene didn’t number among them. In fact, it probably made for the biggest laugh in a movie that often had me staring at the screen in slack-jawed dismay. By the rules of this movie’s crude, vapid and ultraviolent world—a world that the movie is (I think) a not-entirely-successful attempt to satirize—Ronnie’s hesitation when he notices his partner is passed out, and her slurred command for him to keep going, constitute a moment of tenderness between the two of them. And when what looks like a creepy sexual assault suddenly becomes a declaration of female agency (when she tells him to keep going, Ronnie apologizes and deferentially complies), it’s the reversal that makes it funny.
Remember the controversy over the use of the term “retard” in last summer’s far funnier comedy Tropic Thunder? My stance on both gags is the same: When a character in a satire engages in bad behavior, it’s not fair to disregard the satire and condemn the simple fact that said behavior is being represented. I’m hoping a few of you will see the movie this weekend and tell me what you think.
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There was a time when teenage mothers typically dropped out of school, moved out from their mothers and needed public assistance. Baby daddies would come and go (as has always been the case). Today, prospects are slightly better for mother and child. Nowadays children having babies often live with their parents and finish high school while the family weal provides for the child. Jessica quite rightly respects the Flatbush teen in the New York Times audio slideshow for having "a real head on her shoulders" because, after her daughter Mahniya, she does not want to have more children for a while, despite that she is still with the baby's father who participates in Mahniya's care. But, as Emily points out, the story of Elizabeth Cousins sends the wrong message. Her 19-month-old toddler is adorable and no doubt far more emotionally rewarding than the partying her young mother has had to give up, but, while thoroughly engaging, toddlers are the most exhausting creatures on earth. Moreover, as her young parents have most likely figured out by now, their tireless little girl is just going to keep on growing. Although Elizabeth may not look like it, or feel like it, that 16-year-old is the grown-up in her new family. For the rest of her life her daughter will need her to act like one.
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I posted earlier this week on a bogus trend piece in the New York Times linking buoyant romance-novel sales to the recession. The piece offered no evidence beyond bland generalities, like "In a recession, what people want is a happy ending." But that was nothing in comparison to the whopper in today's Times: "Uptick in Vasectomies Seen as Sign of Recession."
I could list all the reasons the article doesn't hold up under scrutiny, but why bother? Just get a load of this hedge, placed conveniently right after the lede, so you know you can stop reading: "It is too early to proclaim a bona fide trend in elective sterilization, because no organization regularly tracks the number of vasectomies performed on an annual or even a monthly basis."
It's true the birth rate fell sharply during the Great Depression, but at least as of yet, there's no proof we're heading towards a vasectomy-induced population decline.
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Jess, I actually prefer Bristol Palin as a poster girl for teen motherhood to the young woman in the New York Times you link to. If you're a teenage girl and you'd followed Bristol's saga, it might actually make you realize that getting pregnant in high school would pretty much ruin your life: the embarrassing attempt to tell your parents; the pressure to marry your boyfriend; the breakup with your boyfriend because he's an immature jerk; your boyfriend telling everyone about you; you having to spend all your time babysitting for your brother and your own kid—only it's not babysitting if it's your own kid. This New York Times piece, with its mostly happy narration and beatific photographs of mother and child sends the message that while teenage motherhood is hard, it's also doable and fulfilling, and the reward of an adorable child who loves you is enormous.
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Jess, I liked Parks and Recreation as well, and I think it can only get better. It's a great time to be making a show about governance and government. The fact that Parks is about small, silly government, far from D.C., should serve it well, allowing it to be current (Are they going to have budget cuts or get some infrastructure dollars over in Pawnee?) without being too inside baseball or Obama-philic.
I'm also intrigued by the ways it's not like The Office, which, granted, are very few. The Office, set in a dying paper business in a dying town (Scranton), has always been about how regular people cope with this—being a part of a dying business in a dying town—while simultaneously contending with all the other jokers wasting away their lives in the cubicle next door. The American version of The Office has done much to mute the essential soul-crushing, dreariness of this premise, fully explored in the wondrously brutal British series. (Liesl Schillinger wrote a great piece a few years ago comparing different nations' versions of The Office that speaks to the why of this watering down).
Given the relative positivity of the American Office, it's no surprise that when the guys who softened it up were tasked with making a whole new show, they came up with something a lot less inherently depressing. Despite all the ways that Parks is like The Office, it's not about dead end jobs in a dead end place—it's about everyday jobs in an everyday place (where people even have their own offices, like, with doors and stuff). In other words, compared to The Office's Michael Scott, Poehler's Knopes doesn't even rate on the loser scale. She may share Michael's linguistic ticks and social awkwardness, but, in just one episode, by dedicating herself to building a park, she's already done something 100 times more worthwhile than Michael ever has. The fact that Parks is about relatively dedicated, successful people may make it far less indelible, and a lot more standard sitcom, than The Office—or it might just make it that much more insightful in the long term.
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We've spilled a lot of digital ink talking about teen motherhood, though most of us have not been adolescent moms ourselves, so I thought I would post this New York Times package, which includes the narration of Elizabeth Cousins, a 16-year-old from East Flatbush, N.Y., and the mother of 19-month-old Mahniya. Bristol Palin could take some lessons on clarity and maturity from Elizabeth, who seems to have a real head on her shoulders. Elizabeth says she considered abortion, but ultimately decided against it because a friend pointed out that this could be her only shot at motherhood.
Elizabeth used to stay out all night partying, but having Mahniya has given her new focus on her studies, and the Times notes that Mahniya's father takes care of the baby several days a week while Elizabeth commutes to an alternative public school on the Upper East Side. For now, Elizabeth says she has "retired" from the motherhood business—she doesn't want to have any more kids until she has her future more settled.
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Dayo, I totally agree with your assessment of Esquire's "How
To Be A Man" cover story:
This reads like some kind of
grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns-jerky, reductive, and
obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze, breadwinning). Who
talks like that?
Who talks like that? Mad
Men's Don Draper and his compatriots, that's who, but definitely none of the guys I
know. In the office, Jessica and I have been discussing whether
males of our generation lack a sense of how to become men. The ones we know
among the educated, 20-something, urban set (not broadly representative, we
realize) aren't for the most part off at war or fathering babies or even
bringing in the big bucks. Without those traditional cues, how are they to know
when they've crossed over from boyhood to manhood?
Thanks to the feminists who came before us (and in many cases, birthed us), females
my age have been raised with the constant reassurance that there are many
acceptable ways to be a woman. "You can wear pants and still be a woman!" we've
been told. "You can play sports and still be feminine! You can choose to be a housewife
or choose not to have kids—both are fine paths for a modern woman!" But are
guys getting similar encouragement? I'm not saying that the Esquire cover package
is the perfect guide to manhood in the 21st century—it's more a
send-up to the male ideal of the Don Draper era. Still, do you think its
existence highlights the need among the XYs of this generation for some such
guidance? If so, what's the right way to answer that need?
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I did not have high hopes for the Amy Poehler mockumentary sitcom Parks and Recreation, which premiered last night, largely due to tepid previews from Nikki Finke and Slate's Troy Patterson among others. In part because my expectations were so low, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the show. In the style of the Office, the show follows a semi-inept manager of an Indiana town's parks department, this one played by the always-adorable Amy Poehler, whose considerable charm could carry even a (more) mediocre show. But Parks and Recreation is even better than mediocre, thanks to its supporting cast of Rashida Jones and Paul Schneider. I have been a fan of the low-key Schneider's since he starred in the sleepy Southern indie All the Real Girls. He is crushworthy as the object of Poehler's affection—he makes you believe that he has a soft spot in his heart for Poehler's yipping "labradoodle" of a bureaucrat (as Troy calls her). But, the show certainly has a lot of room to improve. The pacing was jerky and a few of the jokes went over like a lead balloon. I think the Rashida Jones character described Poehler and the show best when she said, "she's really nice…but doofy." Did anyone else catch the premiere? What did you think?
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Looks like Meghan McCain's wit and wisdom will soon be available in your local bookstore: the 24-year-old has scored a book deal based on her Daily Beast columns, for a reported six-figure sum. (Close Meghan-watchers know this will actually be her second tome). She's keeping mum on what it's about, but it probably won't stray too far from the major theme of her columns thus far: becoming young and hot and tech savvy is how the Republican party can fix itself. (For Meghan's sake, I hope the book gets a more surgical edit than the Daily Beast has offered her work). Here's my question, though: What's she going to write about when she's no longer young and hot and tech savvy? A handful of columns in, her schtick already has some crows feet. Will we be sick of hearing it by the time her book makes it through production?
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Ann: Thanks for sharing that "misread" headline. Indeed, it would be refreshing to see a headline about someone who "runs down mommy groups." As a non-mother who happens to be at that age when all of your friends suddenly become mothers, I find the mommy-group behavior utterly puzzling and mysterious. I confess I've wondered: When you become a mother, does your DNA mutate and briefly turn you into a 15-year-old again? Why else do otherwise relaxed, normal-seeming women become moralizers on behalf of the whole group? Isn't the whole pleasure of adulthood the fact that, finally, you're able to accept your own idiosyncrasies and faults? Just the other week I was having coffee with someone very close to me who was practically in tears at how mean the other "Brooklyn mommies" have been to her. I find it as puzzling as the dog yoga Jess just wrote about. But you (and, recently, Hanna, in her breastfeeding piece) have written astutely about this, suggesting that it's the fact that we don't have gender scripts now that may paradoxically--or ironically--be at the root of all this group identification and implicit peer pressure and rule-setting about what is acceptable for other parents to offer their children. (Only organic goodies, not too much sugar, etc.) And so I didn't know whether to feel relieved or horrified the other day when, out for a run, heading toward Prospect Park, I spotted a dad hanging out on a deserted block near the Gowanus Canal with his two sons, their skateboards, and....a palpable lack of helmets.
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What do you have to do to make a gritty, boundary pushing cop show these days? You can't top The Wire's complexity, soul crushing realism or commitment to unhappy endings. NYPD Blue fully explored unappealing semi-nudity, as well as racist badge holders—an archetype Crash then overdid to the point of absurdism. Law & Order: SVU has been beaming extremely unsettling sex crimes into living rooms for years. The Shield took on corruption and the CSI franchise has a lock on fancy gadgets and newfangled technology. What does that leave for a freshman cop show, out to prove that it's not just old and borrowed, but also something new?
Southland, an ensemble series about working the beat on the mean streets of Los Angeles that premieres tonight on NBC (it's also streaming on Hulu now), has come up with a fairly effective solution: Kill children. Grit cred established.
Television has become so "edgy," and viewers so familiar with the tropes of that edginess, that it's extremely difficult to subvert audience expectations, or more to the point, to make audiences feel something about all the dark events taking place on screen. (Some people unwind to episodes of Grey's and some to SVU. Just depends whether you prefer relaxing to elevator make-out sessions or sexual predators being brought to justice). Tonight's episode of Southland follows a rookie cop who is having a seriously unsettling first day—the kind of first day that involves gun-wielding, trigger-happy gang bangers, a racist, sexist, unhinged partner, a john picking up a prostitute with his baby in the back seat, an innocent teenager shot down in the street for no reason and a missing little girl. In other words, he's having the kind of day that makes him seriously consider quitting—but he's also having the kind of day cops have on cop shows all the time, the kind of day we've all seen before. Until a kid turns up dead. Southland is an extremely well-made, satisfying genre series that's in some ways a throwback to Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue— but to be as cutting edge now, as those shows were then, it has to be that much more brutal.
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Hanna, I see your insane Martha Stewart interview and raise you this utterly ridiculous New York Times style article about doing yoga with your dog. I don't think I need to unpack the absurdity of paying to gently stretch with a canine (nor do I need to point out this definitely falls in the bogus trend story category), but I did heartily enjoy this comment from a dissatisfied Doga attempter:
"It was lunacy,” Ms. Apro recalled. “Peanuts, my retired racer
greyhound, didn’t participate at all. Instead, I did downward-facing dog while he ate the most treats he’s ever had in a 60-minute period.”
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In the California
legal paper The Recorder, Dan Levine has an insightful profile of Jay Bybee, the author of notorious
torture memos for the Bush administration who is now, for better or worse, a sitting
judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Money quote:
Bybee declined to talk about his work at the Office of Legal Counsel. But
when he gathered former clerks last year at a Las Vegas steak house for a five-year
reunion, he was more revealing.
"He said our work has been well-researched, carefully written, and that
he was very proud of the work that we've done and the opinions his chambers has
issued," said Tuan Samahon,
who was Bybee's first judicial clerk and is now a UNLV professor.
According to Samahon, the judge then added: "I wish I could say that of
the prior job I had."
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Primed by a bunch of reading I've been doing about the vogue in bad-mommy confessionals (here's an interesting piece in the American Prospect on the topic), I misread this tagline—"Broadway Star Now Runs Downtown Mommy Group"—as I skimmed through the XX morning memo highlighting assorted articles. I read "Runs Down Mommy Group." So I hurried to check out the New York Observer piece about a Broadway singer who founded a mothers' group called Bowery Babes: Here, I thought, was the latest bad-mommy thing to do—rain on the parade of communal mommying. And my gut reaction was: A woman after my own heart! When I hear about mommy groups—especially if they have chic names, and (I imagine) members whose cell phones are constantly ringing—I suddenly feel like I'm back in high school, facing a peer group out of my league.
In fact, the article was about an ultra cool mom with just that kind of BlackBerry-buzzing life herself, surrounded by an entourage of other moms lucky enough to land a spot in her "cozy, grass-roots" group (the sort, it seems, who take in stride an activity like a "Halloween soiree" for 100 at a neighborhood bar). Mothering can be a very lonely business, and I'm all for companionship; I'm always glad when I see nannies congregating, because a happy nanny is surely what every parent wants. Still, the hyper-scheduled mingling—"proactively doing, rather than chatting," as a member put it—intimidates me now as it did two decades ago when I ventured with my brand new firstborn into a neighbor's basement with a bunch of mothers I didn't know. I never went back.
Now that it's all behind me, I'll speak up for being a bit of a straggler, rather than plunging into the thick of a "strollercizing" brigade—not least because it's easier to muddle in your own way, and let your baby do the same, if you aren't constantly tempted to make comparisons, as (let's face it) we all are, even in a gathering designed to be soothing. Bowery Babes may well be "unspoiled," but here's hoping the article doesn't lure yet more new moms into the "somewhat of an application process" (oh dear) that the super-popular group has had to institute.
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Men’s mag Esquire has always been one of my legitimate favorites, primarily because it offers at least one
if not two or three pieces of good reported journalism each issue—and
provides arch but accessible fashion tips to guys without descending into
the consumerism and petty quizletry that I encounter in even the
most edgy women’s magazines. Which is why this month’s “How to Be a Man” feature was so disappointing. From the cover story:
A
man carries cash. A man looks out for those around him—woman, friend,
stranger. A man can cook eggs. A man can always find something good
to watch on television. A man makes things—a rock wall, a table, the
tuition money. Or he rebuilds—engines, watches, fortunes. He passes
along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives him. This is
immortality. A man can speak to dogs. A man fantasizes that kung fu
lives deep inside him somewhere. A man knows how to sneak a look at
cleavage and doesn't care if he gets busted once in a while. A man is
good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not
his career. His job. It doesn't matter what his job is, because if a
man doesn't like his job, he gets a new one…
A man loves the
human body, the revelation of nakedness. He loves the sight of the pale
breast, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of
the flesh. He is thrilled by the snatch, by the wrist, the sight of a
bare shoulder. He likes the crease of a bent knee. When his woman bends
to pick up her underwear, he feels that thrum that only a man can feel.
A man doesn't point out that he did the dishes.
Oooookay.
I had been keeping a tally of things that I, woman, could also do—cash,
check; eggs, hell yeah; hungover Bravo TV, yup—but pretty much stopped
at “pale breast” (assumed that had gone out of vogue when they finally
started making band-aids for black people). Wait, no! At “snatch.”
I
generally enjoy Tom Chiarella’s work, but this reads like some kind of
grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns—jerky, reductive,
and obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze,
breadwinning). Who talks like that? The emphasis on earning potential
seems especially tone-deaf; in 2009, women are working in record
numbers, and it’s men bearing the brunt of the layoffs in this
recession. As for rebuilding “engines, watches, fortunes”: Just about
every man I know is so divorced from any vestigial handyman tendencies
that, if faced with an engine in need of assembly, he would
simply Google “mechanic” on his iPhone and let the ripoff begin. And
what’s wrong with that? At least it’s honest—and equal opportunity (I
could do that, too!).
Finally, when Esquire insists that a man
doesn't see himself lost in some great maw of humanity, some grand
sweep. That's the liberal thread; it's why men won't line up as
liberals
I just think of all the men who do identify as liberals, and never imagined doing so magically betrays their gender. Why peddle that political point?
And what would a women’s list look like? One longs for Salt ‘N’ Pepa at this point. Cool cover, though.
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Today's Washington Post Home section features a priceless interview with the First Diva of Craft, Martha Stewart, who has just come out with Encyclopedia of Crafts. The interviewer opens on a question about how the recession is affecting domestic life. (Er. Foreclosures? Glue gun out on the sidewalk, along with the rest of my possessions?) Martha falls right for the bait:
People are staying home and enjoying it by crafting and beautifying their home with decorating and cooking. They can't afford to travel, but they can afford a [$23] glitter kit.
Martha then digs in further and further, offering herself, whose net worth is $970 million, as an example of thrift.
I have always been kind of frugal and cautious in terms of extravagance. So I have always turned the lights out when I leave a room...I am a serious gardener, and I grow my own food and have my own chickens and eggs...I am not buying as many trees to plant as I would like, but that can wait until next year.
Yes, Martha, when I'm feeling the pinch, I too space out my tree purchases. And put my horse masseuse on a bi-weekly schedule.
Of course, Martha is only representing the brand here. She understands that we understand that she really does not dig her hands into the chickenshit every morning, but that we need her to pretend she does. And she keeps up a good front, until the interviewer gets to the toxic combination of her own daughter, Alexis, and the true habits of the hoi polloi. Her daughter conducted an online poll asking readers what they would bring if invited to Martha's house: wine, flowers, cake or brownies. (Flowers won)
If you bring flowers, it's like bringing coals to Newcastle. I have more flowers than most people. I certainly don't need a cake; I would be making the cake. Brownies? No.
No, indeed.
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Rosa Brooks, one of our XX Factor contributors, is taking a position at the Pentagon as an adviser to the Undersecretary of Defense for policy. She'll be working for Undersecretary Michele Flournoy, the #3 official in the DOD hierarchy, and the highest ranking civilian woman ever to serve at the Pentagon. Mazal tov, Rosa! We'll miss you on the blog while you're off saving the world.
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Well, Jess, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I wondered whether it was healthy for anyone if adolescents lived with their parents. I guess I need to either improve my written tonal control (is there a personal trainer for that?) or learn to use emoticons.
But I was thinking of precisely such parental traumas as The Sex Talk. Meghan, I love how your mother spoke to you! Very early on, my mother told me (this would have been, oh, 1973?) that If People Needed Planned Parenthood, It Was A Good Thing To Go There. I had no idea what she was talking about yet. She was clearly uncomfortable. Then she took me to her gynecologist, a very stern woman who gave me The Contraception Talk. By the time I was in college—and I got out of high school like a bat out of hell, at age 16—my dad implied jokingly that I must be getting plenty of exercise in bed, and told me flat out that he assumed I was using contraception.
It was the anti-virginity era, and what I wish is that someone had said to me: if you never have sex with a boy, that would be just fine. Later I learned that they all suspected that I was heading toward the land of Sappho: my parents, my little brothers, and probably passersby as well. So parents, here's a tip: It sure would have saved me years of misery (and a lifetime of pap smears) had someone said: You don't have to have sex with boys. Ever. Liking girls is just fine. You could even grow up to marry one.
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I hate to interrupt such a thoughtful discussion with yet another micro-dissection of what was in Michelle Obama's Grand Tour steamer trunk but I couldn't resist this item from the Times of London pointing out her false eyelashes. And not just any false eyelashes, but "full-on, all-out diva lashes, the kind you normally find on D-list celebrities or in drag-act dressing rooms." The Times says it was part of her plan to seduce Europe (easier to bat your eyelashes at a whole continent when they're industrially made!) but I wonder whether the thing Mrs. Obama is flirting with is the line between icon and camp. Of late, she's seen herself represented in wax at Madame Tussaud's and Barbie-fied on the cover of New York. Someone is ghostwriting a Tumblr as her arms. I might amp up my makeup routine, too. But is she purposely feeding our frenzy by becoming an ever-more bombastic version of herself, intoxicated just as much as we are by the whirlwind pace of her style canonization? Or are the eyelashes just a tacit, down-to-earth admission that, hey, we all need a little help in front of the camera? (A sharp contrast, I might add, to Carla Bruni, who's undermined every woman in the world other than Carla Bruni by saying makeup makes us all look bad after age 25).
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