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Emily B,
I agree with you that it’s really unfortunate that the conclusion that
we don’t need to routinely do mammograms until 50, instead of aparking
a national, rational discussion about the advisability of “screening
and prevention,” has become the harbinger that we’re all going to live
under British health care rationing. The debate over whether we benefit
from searching for early cancers is not new, and no wonder the public
is so confused. This is like the “no fat” to “no carbs” pendulum swings
on official diet recommendation ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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I've been trying to understand the flap this week over the recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Task Force—a group ill-prepared to handle the controversy—to
delay routine mammograms to age 50 for most women. And now, in a truly
terrible coincidence of timing, we have a second round of commotion
over the advice of the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists to push pap smears to screen for cervical cancer back to age 21 ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX Staff:
I know what they say, that holidays are occasions to revisit family
stress. Many a great novel and movie has been built on this premise.
And in general, I would say it's true. The Jewish holidays are all
about starving and yelling. Vacations involve too much childcare. But
for me, Thanksgiving is the blissful exception. Maybe it's because I
really like my in-laws. Maybe it's because turkey has a soporific
effect. Or maybe it's because my mother-in-law bakes dozens of pies, at
a ratio that works out to be about one per person. Who could complain
about that? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Time magazine's "Can These Parents Be Saved?" story
offers a glorious rundown of the rampant possibilities for
overparenting that have become available in recent years. From kid
leashes ("Kinderkords") to fears about kindergarden
"pencil-holding-deficiency," the opportunities for parental
self-congratulation are plentiful—almost anyone can think "I may have
hovered once in a while, but I was never that bad" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Kerry Howley:
Yoga is a meditative practice sometimes thought to help liberate the
soul from all worldly suffering. The Olympics are a tribalistic
sporting event in which nation states battle to produce impressive
feats of human athleticism. Bikram Choudhury—a man who teaches yoga in
a speedo and a diamond-studded Rolex, guards his trademarked pose
sequences like a Rottweiler on meth, and likes to compare his balls to “atom bombs”—says its high time to combine the two. “This,” Bikram’s wife tells the New York Times, “is our dream" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Oprah Winfrey is going to announce today that she will be leaving her eponymous talk show in 2011. The New York Times believes Winfrey is resigning from network TV in order to focus on the cable network she's working on, called OWN, which will feature shows from all of her favorite cronies, like Dr. Oz, Rachael Ray, and Dr. Phil. While this might be the case, I think another reason Oprah is hanging up the mic is because she has destroyed the core of what made her so popular in the first place: She's no longer relatable ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
Last week the Wall Street Journal interviewed basically every good living writer and asked them to share tips on sitting down and penning a book. The only clear lesson to emerge from the piece (titled "How To Write A Great Book") is that there is no set step-by-step instructional for writing a great book. That, and writing is hard so famous authors invent their own eccentric tactics to deal with the inevitable torture that is writer’s block ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Make no mistake, my main response to Sarah Palin's book is teeth-gnashing,
because 1) she lies and never admits it. And her death-penalty lie
mattered. And 2) she never acknowledges her debt to feminism ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A guest post from Cindy Pearson, the executive director of the National Women's Health Network:
Mammography screening just doesn’t work very well in women before menopause, as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has now recognized.
Everyone hoped that it would. But in 1993, it became clear from
well-done studies that our hopes hadn’t panned out, and screening just
didn’t work well for women in their 40s (or at all, for even younger
women). The fact that most women didn’t know this, and instead received
a falsely optimistic message about the life-saving benefits of
once-a-year mammography screening, was incredibly frustrating. More background here.
At the National Women’s Health Network, we’re glad that the
federally appointed task force has told the truth about what studies
have found. Now women have a better chance of getting an honest
assessment about the value of a heavily promoted technology.
Information is always a good thing ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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We keep hearing from proponents of health care reform that government rationing of health care is a “canard.”
We don’t have health care reform yet, but with the new recommendations
from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women shouldn’t get
mammograms until the age of 50, and then only every two years, it feels
like we’re getting the rationing.
The Los Angeles Times writes
that “[i]nsurance companies and Medicare administrators … said they
they would continue to pay for the procedure -- although it is not
clear how long they can resist the panel's influence.” The LAT adds that the panel’s recommendations are “generally followed” by insurers and Medicare ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Politico.com reports
that days after husband Mark Sanford admitted to having an affair,
Jenny Sanford filed an application to trademark her name for use in
"product merchandising to be sold at online retail store featuring
clothing, mugs and other household items; stickers, decals, notepads.’”
Herein, a few ideas that should sell out fast. OK, we get that this kind of thing is probably exactly what Jenny
Sanford is trying to prevent. But here are a few items we'd like to see
in our scorned-wife-fantasy-revenge-scenario of the still- (but
presumably soon-to-be-former) Mrs. Sanford's store (that would be
VindictiveBitch.com):
The "My husband went to Argentina and all I got was this damn divorce?" mug ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily Y., Emily B., Hanna, and Jessica: You’re all so on point with your observations of Sarah Palin. Like Emily Y., I would like to see her go away, but not before I add my voice to the chorus of why I believe she is a fraud.
I watched Palin on Oprah yesterday afternoon. I wanted to
hear what she had to say, since I have no intention of reading, let
alone buying, her book. There are enough published excerpts of Going Rogue that I’ve already gotten my fill ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily, Hanna, Jess, Rachael, if Sarah Palin were Sam Palin, would
anyone still be interested in her? Dan Quayle was a good-looking,
young, conservative, politician who, in his roll-out as a
vice-presidential candidate, impressed everyone as being a dope who was
in over his head. After his vice presidency, he blessedly slipped from
public life. Palin has shown that she doesn't think a mastery of—or
even much of a familiarity with—the issues of the day is a requirement
for highest office. I hope her political future will be Quayle-like
oblivion ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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After some deliberation, we have decided to fold DoubleX back into Slate.
The site will now become its own section, with our XX Factor blog,
articles, and special projects already in the works. Our aim is to
create a more intimate version of the community we have built, with
many of the same voices and passions ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
If you're interested in reading a refreshing burst of honesty today, you could do worse than Aaron Traister's piece
about the different reactions he received from people when he told them
he was expecting a son and when he told them, a couple years later,
that he was expecting a daughter. Americans tend to think we're above
the prejudices that drive people in China and India to use
sex-selective abortion, but as Traister's piece shows, we're far from
the angels we'd like to pretend we are. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Emily, I think Palin means this as one of her folksy nuggets of wisdom,
and you are supposed to chuckle as you imagine her mediating toddler
disputes over frozen moose pops. And of course it's not that. But you
have to admit that this is a thoroughly radical and maybe even weirdly
feminist notion, particularly coming from a conservative woman. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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I would really like to drive a stake in the heart of the argument,
repeated once again by Sarah Palin in her book, that “there’s no better
training ground for politics than motherhood." At first glance, it’s
oh-so unobjectionable. But in Palin's hands, the demands of motherhood
aren’t a form of preparation that complements other kinds, like
learning about the rest of the globe before you run for vice-president.
Nope, the motherhood version of the can-do ethic makes it OK to have a
know-nothing ethic as well. Hell, if you've got enough mommy moxie you
can celebrate your lack of intellectual know-how. And you can spit on
feminism every step of the way. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Emily, I too have been reading the dribbles emerging from the soon-to-be-published Palin memoir.
You're right that we mine her for insight on sexual politics, and I was
particularly intrigued with the information that the AP published about
Palin's reaction to Bristol's pregnancy
and the McCain campaign's treatment of that pregnancy. According to the
AP article, Palin felt that the statement prepared by McCain's team
about Bristol "glamorized and endorsed her daughter's situation." As
opposed to what? Debasing and shaming her daughter's situation? Making
her into a cautionary tale? The attempt at making Bristol an abstinence spokeswoman
who appeared on multiple national morning shows was far more
glamorizing than any statements the McCain campaign made on her behalf ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck:
In an Onion-esque piece of news this week, the New York Times reported
that Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered a student newspaper to “tidy up”
its coverage of his recent appearance at a high school assembly.
Kennedy, an ardent protector of First Amendment rights—and apparently,
irony–allowed the young journalists to attend the event on the
condition that his office would pre-approve any articles written about
him.
Why would Justice Kennedy do such a thing? Two reasons. First, the
Bill of Rights protects speech in part to encourage transparency and
create a Millian
slurry of ideas in which the creamy globs of truth eventually float to
the top. An inaccurate or misleading quotation by reporters with
exclusive access to Kennedy's speech would be nearly impossible to
correct. Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, the Supreme Court has a deep-seated interest in practicing defensive PR ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Gina Kolata points out,
once again, that diet and exercise have not been shown to affect breast
cancer rates. Massive, well-run observational studies and randomized
controlled trials turn up nothing. This finding appears to be
unacceptable; popular culture rejects it utterly. Women’s magazines
continue to preach the holy gospel of five fruits and vegetables a day.
Doctors continue to tell patients at high risk of breast cancer that
diet matters. The director of one of the (fruitless?) studies tells
Kolata that doctors need to “rethink the studies.” Diet and exercise
“are likely quite important, but we just aren’t getting the answers” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX Staff:
This morning, I told my kids about the no complaining project, pledged
to try it—and then promptly launched into a description of an expense
form I had to fill out that was driving me crazy. My husband reminded
me of my promise. But my 9-year-old son Eli pointed out that I wasn't
whining—I was explaining a problem, and this should be called an
"explaint." I like it. I also found that, duly categorized, my rant
turned more rational and moderate. I worked myself out of a lather
rather than into one ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
While conceding that Huffington Post might write headlines for its
celebrity bloggers, I still have to admit that I knew no good would
come from an article titled "Don't Forget To Have Kids."
This myth of the woman who "forgets" to have kids is so common that we
don't stop to think about how sexist it really is, since the
implication is that women are prone to such heights of stupidity that
they could forget about the existence of marriage and babies, even in a
world that has multiple cable channels (especially TLC) dedicated to
marriage and babies. If you think about the myth of "forgetting" to
have kids even for a moment, it falls apart, because the more common
problem is forgetting to use contraception, and having kids because of
it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Intra-party warfare starring Sarah Palin—who can resist the leaks about the jagged bits of her new book, Going Rogue?
She makes the bizarro accusation that the McCain campaign stuck her
with a $50,000 legal bill for her own vetting. (Convenient confusion
over the cost of defending herself against ethical accusations in
Alaska?) She goes after Katie Couric while at the same time claiming
the McCain people said “right on” about her first interview with
Couric. (Blinded by those lights from Russia?) She was awed by the
clothes and told they were “part of the convention.” That one actually
sounds plausible to me ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Who knows what to believe when it comes to celebrity "journalism," but it's apparently been confirmed that Angelina Jolie will adopt a child from Syria—something described on the website of the U.S. embassy in Damascus
as "a difficult process and often an impossible one." In many
countries, celebrity status probably has little affect on adoption
matters, but in a country where adoption is "essentially illegal," the
perverse effect is that anything pretty much goes—if you've got the
required currency ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Erika Kawalek:
I’ve always regarded “eco-fashion” with a suspicious eye, telling
myself that if somebody truly cared about the environment they would be
good stewards or tinkerers and make use what was already around—not
support the manufacturing of more and more ultimately disposable crap
labeled with vague tags conveying the object’s wishy-washy “cleanly
produced” narrative. Surely taking care of one’s possessions would have
a more positive impact, environmentally speaking, than shopping for
more stuff ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Linda Hirshman:
Relax and enjoy it, ladies. Here comes the Progressive Democratic Party with another plan for you to take care of its needs.
I don’t actually care all that much about the women who will have to pay for their own abortions after Representative Stupak and the others added their amendment. There are only a few hundred thousand insured women needing abortions, compared with the millions of really poor women trying to buy their constitutional rights after the (Democratic) Congress took abortion out of Medicaid in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment. Hey, women rich or lucky enough to have private insurance, welcome to the crowd of the people who can’t protect their interests (“women”). Your fate was sealed when the Democrats sold out poor women 30 years ago. And women let them do it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Emily and Marjorie,
don't you think we ask ourselves different questions about Major Nidal
Hasan because he wasn't just a Muslim or jihadist, he was also a U.S.
citizen and a member of the armed forces? It's easy to reduce the 9/11
terrorists to pure villains. Because Hasan was truly one of us—born
here of an immigrant family, like 20 percent of the population—this
feels different.
Both Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Brooks
fault the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting as a willful
avoidance of the obvious. Emily agreed with Rabinowitz, saying that we
as a nation find it "more comfortable to look away from his religious
beliefs for an alternate theory." Brooks claimed that looking beyond
Islamic extremism to the other factors affecting Hasan "sought to
reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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In reading all the accounts from fellow pro-choice women—like Emily's from earlier this week—bemoaning
the Stupak abortion restrictions, I noticed that many of the women who
were outraged by the concessions of the health care bill used the terms
feminist and pro-choice almost interchangably. Over at Salon,
Kate Harding writes, "Feminists have been up in arms about the latest
assault on access to abortion," but if you take one look at the website
for the group Feminists for Life, one of the first things you see is the banner proclaiming "Women the Winners in U.S. House Amendment Vote" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily,
When you say:
“Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the
military, we embrace fanatics in our midst,” you're surely not
suggesting, are you, that military generals would purposely sacrifice
the lives of dozens of soldiers, simply for the sake of political
correctness? I mean, there is a middle ground between withholding
judgment and “embracing fanatics in our midst,” isn’t there?
I don’t believe for a minute that these generals would risk the lives of 1.3 million U.S. military personnel on active duty (another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces.) if they thought Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, or any of the 10,000 to 20,000 Muslims who serve in the U.S. armed forces, posed a terrorist risk ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
I'm sure that President Obama and his wife have done their best to
prepare their daughters for the idea that there are crazy people out
there whose hatred for their father extends to them (although it's not
a job I envy). But it's difficult to prepare for this, posted on the
website (a site so offensive that I didn't link to it) of the Westboro
"Baptist" Church, which has organized an anti-gay protest outside of
Sidwell Friends, the school the Obama girls attend: "Quakers?! Are you
frigging kidding me? You pretend to be all non-violent, and you allow
the most bloody, deceitful, evil, murderous bastard and his shemale
sidekick to place their satanic spawn within your four walls" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal
today has a bracing piece about the almost surreal disconnection
between what’s increasingly clear about the Ft. Hood killer, Maj. Nidal
Hasan, and what officials and some commentators seem unable to
acknowledge. As she writes: “It was an act of terrorism by a man with a
record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments.
All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to
ignore.” She quotes Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. as
saying, “"This terrible event would be an even greater tragedy if our
diversity becomes a casualty." As Mona Charen
points out, the idea of a witch hunt is false and dangerous. Surely the
general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military,
we embrace fanatics in our midst. Rooting them out has to be to the
benefit of the brave, patriot Muslims who serve. Ralph Peters
makes the larger point that, “By protecting the fanatics, we betray the
peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak
out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and
communities” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Nobody cops to “political correctness” anymore; policing language is
what the other guy does. The rest of us are just, you know, telling it
like it is. But playing PC-policeman officer is a
relatively peaceful and noninvasive way to nudge the culture in a
particular direction, a form of persuasion in a democracy built on
consensus. And according to the authors of a little study in the November issue of the Journal Sex Roles, switching from one form of speaking to another might shift your inner liberal just as quickly.
The study authors wanted to see whether languages that assign genderto nouns, like Spanish and French, might implicitly encourage “opposition or hostility to extending equal opportunity to women, especially in terms of work-related issues” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Over the summer, Sara Morishige Williams, the wife of the CEO of Twitter, Tweeted while giving birth. A Minnesota woman named Lynsee has taken the natal overshare to the next level: she broadcast video of herself giving birth on a local social networking site called MomsLikeMe, and interacted with viwers while she was in labor. 23-year-old Lynsee, who would not give out her last name in order to protect her privacy (which apparently was not an issue when she decided to push out a person in front of thousands of other people), told ABCNews.com, "If I were in a classroom, I'd be teaching about development. It was a way for me to teach… A way for me to use myself as a textbook" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily and Meredith, you’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that I greeted the passage of the Stupak amendment with more of a cheer than a groan. However unfair it might be that well-off women have more access to abortion than low-income women, the solution should not be to compel those who are morally opposed to abortion to pay for them with their tax dollars. Just because the government recognizes a right to something does not mean that the government must also provide for it. If you can indulge me for a moment in a mildly absurd thought experiment (with emphasis on absurd and thought experiment), how would you feel about a program that provided guns to those who cannot afford them?
When this topic came up in August, Meredith wrote an article for Slate proposing a private fund to cover the cost of abortion for poor women. Citing data from the Guttmacher Institute, she wrote that it would cost $311 million a year to pay for abortions for low-income women. Compared with the numbers that are getting tossed around in the House and the Senate in the health care debate, that’s not that much money ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from DoubleX writer Sonia Smith:
For the past two weeks, I’ve been camped out in a west Texas courtroom watching the trial of fundamentalist Mormon polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop unfold. Sentencing begins today, and Jessop could face up to 20 years in prison for impregnating his underage “celestial” wife in 2004. The victim, 16 at the time of the sexual assault, never took the stand, and all the evidence in the case seemed to indicate that she was Jessop’s willing bride. But what does that even mean in an environment where girls are conditioned from birth to believe that marrying an older, powerful man is the highest honor?
In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, girls are taught that being a plural wife and mother is the only way to reach the highest rung of heaven. In this atmosphere, getting married at 14 or 15 becomes the next logical step in a girl’s life. They are into placed in marriages—"sealed for time and all eternity"—whenever the sect’s prophet deems them worthy, regardless of their age, according to the testimony of former FLDS member Rebecca Musser. Once married, girls must show perfect obedience to their husbands, who are viewed as their only connection to God ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
Meredith Shiner and Glenn Thrush at Politico ask the question: Why does the GOP have a "woman problem"—i.e., a problem recruiting female candidates? This should be one of those simple answers to stupid questions situations, because the easy answer is that the Republican party has become the clearinghouse for straight white men angry that they have to share a little power with everyone else. Running too many women, especially women who don't play sexpot or crazed right-wing shill (Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, respectively), would send the skittish angry white men of the party fleeing, hands over their ever-vulnerable man parts ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Since the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which barred federally funded Medicaid from paying for abortions, the whittling-away of reproductive rights has almost always affected poor women much more than better-off women. We have in this country a right to abortion that’s relatively easy to access if 1) you can pay for it, and 2) you live outside the large mostly rural swaths of fly-over country where abortion clinics are vanishingly rare. The geographic gaps (here's a map) come back to affordability, too. If you have the money to travel hundreds of miles and stay overnight, then you can exercise your right to have an abortion mo matter where you live. If not, then not.
And now in this same dreary tradition we have the Stupak amendment in the House health care bill ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
Remember those conservatives who don't want the government interfering in health care plans? Right, well, it turns out what they meant was they don't want the government interfering in health care plans, except when it comes to abortion. At that point, the government can interfere to its heart's content.
And it looks the government will, in fact, interfere, because in a bid to win pro-life Democrats' votes for the health care reform bill, Democratic leaders have agreed to allow a vote on an amendment that would ban both the public plan and private insurance plans that receive federal subsidies from covering abortions ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Bonnie Rochman:
Well, fire up your engines, ladies, because now there’s a new bit of research supporting a third conclusion: that being married with children is the key to happiness.
In contrast to previous research that indicates an inverse relationship
between satisfaction and number of children, this particular study,
which tracked 10,000 British households over 15 years, found that the
more kids you have, the happier you are. I think that would come as
news to those parents who’ve decided to raise a singleton because they
also want to have a life of their own ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
I admit it--I wanted my kids to watch Sesame Street because I knew it
was at worst harmless, and at best educational--although I've never believed watching TV could make kids smarter,
I'm willing to accept that it can teach them to recognize a rectangle.
But from the first, it held little interest for them. My oldest
preferred Baby Einstein, although with proper maneuvering, I could get
in a shower during "Elmo's World"--although not necessarily without
tears. He moved on to Blue's Clues, his younger sisters both preferred
Dora, and his little brother remains a fan of Little Einsteins. I kept
trying, but if Sesame Street was playing, they gradually drifted away.
(Not that that's a bad thing, but presumably some children actually watch the show) ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Like Lauren, I enjoyed Jim Windolf's insightful attack on cute culture, but I find the otters-holding-hands/Iraq War connection to be a bit of a stretch. Windolf suggests that we're asking for forgiveness through penitential offerings of cuteness, but it's not my impression that most Americans think we need to be forgiven. Maybe popular cuteness is intended "as some sort of correction" to our new status as invaders, but that presupposes a level of remorse I don't really see. Which is not to say cuteness and politics never meet; they certainly do in Japan. Here's Prince Pickles, the rosy-cheeked mascot of Japan's Defense Forces ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
Several times a week I walk by the marketing section of my office and see a group of grown men and women in their business-casual attire standing over someone’s computer screen giggling and cooing. Almost daily, I get an e-mail entitled, “SO CUTE I WANTZ TO DIE” or “AHHHHHHZZ! CUTEGASM!” along with a link for, say, a YouTube video of a sweet-faced pug so fat it can’t roll over, or a 4-year-old performing the Single Ladies dance. Most of these videos live up to the adorability claims of their “z”-infested titles. (Apparently bad grammar signifies something is SO cute it’s made one functionally retarded.) Though, admittedly, in order to enjoy the slew of children-dancing-to-Beyonce-videos I’ve been sent, I have to actively forget the gross reality that there are parents behind the camera who have trained their kids to be delightfully adorable circus monkeys for the Internet masses ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Sonia Smith:
What have I learned over the past week watching polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop’s trial in the sleepy west Texas ranching town of Eldorado? Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints save everything. And now, with the first criminal prosecution of an FLDS leader in Texas, this tendency to hoard every little scrap has come back to bite them. In trying to prove Jessop impregnated his 16-year-old “spiritual” wife in November 2004 at the sect’s Yearning for Zion Ranch, the prosecution is relying heavily on documents seized during last year’s raid. And there are a lot of them ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX Desire Lab blogger Daniel Bergner:
There’s a theory that has some currency among sex researchers and
therapists: that, over time in monogamous relationships, women lose
desire more than men do. Not much data exists; I’m aware of only one
large study on this subject. But the thought is that women’s libidos
need more spark in order to ignite, and so women are particularly
susceptible to losing desire as they remain with the same partner. It’s
an idea that runs somewhat counter to the assumption that female desire
tends to depend a great deal on the depth of relationships, on intimacy ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Amanda,
Before I begin, I want to clarify something. I’m not “anti-choice.”
I am anti-abortion. That might sound like semantics, but I think it’s a
sign of the gulf between abortion-rights supporters and abortion foes.
“Anti-choice” has a connotation of “anti-woman,” that being against
abortion means you think women shouldn’t have control over their
bodies. I will defend until my dying day a woman’s right to choose
whether to have sex. I think the pill might have been the greatest
invention of the 20th century. I’m all for passing out condoms in high
schools. Adoption should be easy, and birth mothers should be able to
have open or closed adoptions. Women who choose to keep their children
and who need help should have access to financial assistance and other
support programs that will enable them to be productive and gain
employment and raise their children. I just can’t support abortion. And
frankly, I can’t think of many pro-lifers I know who feel differently.
Yes, there are some who think sex is strictly for marriage and
procreation. But you’re not going to make any headway with them. If the
pro-choice and pro-life sides are to have any hope of working together
to reduce the number of abortions, which should everyone’s goal, we
need to try to understand one another and stop what’s essentially
name-calling ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Dan Halloran is the next City Council Representative for New York’s
19th district. He is a Republican. Also, he is the "First Atheling," or
prince, among members of a local pagan group that worships Norse gods.
"It is our hope," he explained on his now-missing website, "to
reconstruct the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic branch of the
Indo-European peoples, within a cultural framework and community
environment." Excellent ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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The turning point for the Virginia governor’s race came in August, when the Washington Post published a copy of Republican Robert McDonnell’s master's thesis,
in which he argued that working women were detrimental to America,
among other retrograde points. McDonnell’s genius in the campaign was
to instantly focus the debate on whether or not he thinks women should
be able to work (which, of course, he does) and thus obscure every
other way in which his policies are, in fact, retrograde and bad for
women.
McDonnell quickly quashed worries about him with these two videos, one of his daughter, who had served in Iraq, and the other of women state officials who had worked for him
or were appointed by him. Unlike in the attack videos made by his
opponent Creigh Deeds, these women were actual people who gave their
names and occupations. The point conveyed, effectively, was that of
course McDonnell appreciates working women. But it’s a pretty fringe
right-wing minority these days who doesn’t. Among even the most
conservative Christians, the argument is over whether women should work
when their children are very young, not whether they should work at all ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer K.J. Dell'Antonia:
Supreme Court followers (and NPR listeners) heard an outrageous story
today—that of an innocent man who spent more than two decades in prison
for a murder he didn't commit before evidence of the apparent gross
racism and misconduct of the police and prosecutors who put him there
was uncovered. It's hard not to crave justice for this man—but what
seems just for him will make justice less likely for everyone else.
Lawyers for Terry Harrison have argued that although it's long been
clear that prosecutors cannot be sued for doing their job—for actually
prosecuting a defendant for a crime—there is no immunity for
investigative activity. Harrison claims he can sue his prosecutors for
their participation in what was at best a botched investigation and at
worst an outright conspiracy to arrest the wrong person for the crime.
In other words, he's not suing them for prosecuting his trial, he's
suing them for helping to put him in a position to be tried in the
first place ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Beth Fertig:
In the new movie Precious, Clareece Precious Jones is
beaten by her mother and raped so often by her father that she’s
pregnant with his second child. She’s also illiterate.
I’ve spent the past three years profiling illiterate young adults, and I decided to take two of them to a preview screening.
Yamilka and her brother, Alejandro, now 26 and 24, are Dominican
immigrants. They’d gotten all the way to high school without learning
to read. After a hearing officer ruled in 2005 that New York City had
violated a federal law that’s supposed to protect them because they are
students with disabilities, the siblings received a combined total of
more than $250,000 in private tutoring.
Yamilka and Alejandro expected the movie to get the Hollywood
treatment. And they were fine with some of that, so long as they found
it generally believable. Yamilka—who was overweight and self-conscious
in school—related to the way Precious sat in the back of her class in
junior high. “I didn’t want people to notice me, to notice something
was wrong.” When she saw Precious guessing her way through a multiple
choice test, Yamilka said she had done the same thing ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex
marriage in 2003, the polls showed disapproval by a margin of 53
percent to 35 percent. After the ruling went into effect, legislators
geared up to reverse it by amending the state constitution. But two
years later, the poll numbers had flipped, and the backlash never came.
That's because reversing the court's ruling was a long process, not a
quick and hasty ballot initiative like the one that Maine passed in
Tuesday's election. In Maine, the law passed last May and never even
went into effect ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
I'm sorry, Rachael, but this story you linked about Abby Johnson's sudden conversion
from a Planned Parenthood director to an anti-choice fanatic has more
holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese after being used for target
practice. Johnson's story fits way too neatly into a bunch of easily
disproven anti-choice myths, the main one being that all it takes is
one glance at an ultrasound to cause someone to "realize" that hey!
abortion removes a fetus from your uterus. Pro-choicers already know
that. Johnson seems to be selling a story that's a tad too pat, too
close to what anti-choicers want to hear.
After all, your average person in the United States has
seen probably hundreds of sonograms in their lives, and most of them
show a fetus at gestational age well beyond the point that most women
get elective abortions. If you compare the ultrasound taken prior to an
elective abortion, the feeling is actually one of being underwhelmed,
because there's not much there compared to the ones we're used to
seeing. The anti-choice sentimental devices rely therefore on ignorance
more than illumination—their own mistaken understanding of what goes on
in an abortion clinic ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
There’s a funny spoof video up on Boing Boing
framed as a PSA of sorts in support of douchebag solidarity. It
features a handful of self-pegged douchebags, one pumping iron at the
gym, another riffing for the amusement of drink-dangling babes at a
bar, all waxing on about the persecution of the douches: “For too long
you’ve told us to shut the fuck up ... that people who are different
from me matter.” But because I evidently cannot take a joke (and this
may in fact make me a douchebag according to the video’s standards) my
first thought was: This is a grossly incorrect use of the word
“douchebag” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Just one small response to Hanna's excellent observations in today’s DoubleX discussion of an alternate universe in which Hillary had become President:
I can't resist disagreeing with her that the Obama marriage is
post-feminist. I don't think any marriage where one spouse is gone out
of the house to the extent that he was, and one spouse is left to raise
the small children and hold down the fort, and, oh yes, make the money
necessary for the mortgage payment, can be described as post-feminist.
At least not in the ideal sense. It may be a post-feminist marriage in
the sense that it's what a lot of women in her generation have
struggled with—albeit an extreme version—but it's not post-feminist in
the sense that it's the kind of set-up one would aspire to ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Hanna,
I am the product of the “simpler” '50s dating culture. My parents were
young, hot for each other, met their families' requirements of looks
(her) and potential earning capacity (him), and married at ages 19 and
20. Their union produced four children, lasted 20 years, and was a
nightmare for all concerned. So I do not share David Brooks’ nostalgia
for a time when dating had ‘guardrails.' I dated for decades in the
pre-cell phone era, and it wasn’t technology that gave me an ironic,
contingent feeling about my adventures. One of my male friends once
said to me, “Sometimes I think you deliberately go on bad dates just so
you have a story to tell” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily Nussbaum makes the case against Cougar Town in this week’s New York: Courtney Cox’s Jules Cobb is no Samantha Jones. “The Samantha Jones iconography has gone retro, regressing to a Cathy cartoon in heels,” Nussbaum writes. “Jules Cobb, the divorced ninny played by Cox, might date younger men but she’s no cougar. Samantha Jones might have been a cartoon, but she was a cartoon who loved pleasure.” But comparing Jules to Samantha is like comparing a mealy apple to a juicy orange: Yes, one is better, but that still doesn’t make them the same fruit ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
I usually love Charles Pierce's writing, but this recent piece in which he tries to pin some of the blame for the surge in right wing paranoia simply fails to make its point, and veers ever so slightly into the victim-blaming arena. It's tempting to suggest that if Obama made better choices, especially with regard to his appointments, then this whole right-wing freak-out wouldn't be so bad, but it simply isn't true ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from the DoubleX staff:
According to a recent issue of Wired magazine, women performed just as well as men in late 1950s astronaut training tests. What if a woman had been the first American in space? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)