Friday, April 24, 2009 - Posts
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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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