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Melinda, thank you for your heartfelt and eye-opening post on being a pro-life Democrat. I get frustrated enough being put on the defensive for being a women who is pro-life, without the added angst you have of feeling excluded from your own party. I've been trying to come up with a response to further the debate, but you put everything so well--enough with the fund-raisers and the noisemakers on both sides--and it's a little dull to write a post saying "Yes, I agree!"
But I am bothered by a broader problem related to the intolerance you've encountered. If we can't even be nice to the people on our own side when we disagree with them on one or two things, how ever are we supposed to start getting along with those whose worldviews are vastly different? I feel like, with the proliferation of Internet news and blogs and 24-hour news channels, we are subjecting ourselves to so much information that we have to be more selective than in the past, and many of us are winnowing out any information that doesn't mesh with our own ideology.
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Today's the last day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month and some bloggers are arguing that the ubiquitous "pink-ribbon" approach has gone too far. (See the second panel.) Over at The Assertive Cancer Patient you can find a critique of the relentless "awareness" approach: Sather is giving out awards to readers who nominated the tackiest and most trivial products sold in the name of breast-cancer. The prime offender?
Grand Prize: to the blogger Dubutant, for her entry: Jingle Jugs for Life
Jingle Jugs sells life-size boobs, or "racks," that bounce in time to the song "Titties and Beer." Its market? Frat boys.
From the Jingle Jugs Web site: "Our newest version of Jingle Jugs comes with a pre-recorded breast cancer message. A second re-recordable chip allows the user to record a message of his or her own choice, such as a favorite song, your favorite team's fight song, a romantic message, a political commentary . . . all to which the Jugs will dance and move in synch." (http://www.jinglejugsforlife.com/)
Debutaunt's comment, in a letter to Komen: "... Honestly, I can't see in any good conscience how you can justify accepting money from this vulgar company. They sell a product that is so putrid and heinous, but are justifying it since they donate a ‘percentage' to breast cancer organizations -- then show proudly their giant check to Komen."
Now, the original Jingle Jugs product sounds totally ridiculous, and this "Jugs Across America" tour is juvenile at best. (Traveling Breast Museum? Please.) But the vilification of the company's breast cancer product raises some questions in my mind: Is it really all that bad for the makers of this yucky product to preach a philanthropic message to their customers, however self-serving it may be? Is this product purely a shameless attempt to win some easy PC-points? Or is it indicative of the fact that we now live in a hard-headed post-feminist age where we accept that the objectification of women will always exist, but ensure that at least now people who buy gag items like this know (or are reminded) that women aren't just objects, they're people who can get sick too? I lean toward thinking the latter. But I can imagine that if I had breast cancer I'd be grossed out.
Check out Sather's write-up of the worst pink-ribbon products here.
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On Obama-bama-bama ...
Apropos of your great post on Hillary and toughness last night, Meghan, it’s worth contrasting the whole “manly-girl = scary-girl” Hillary narrative with the other big campaign story this week: Barack Obama needs to stop being such a wuss. Here’s just a smattering of the recent suggestions to that effect.
I was at the huge rally for Obama in Charlottesville, Va., Monday night. Organizers claim it was the largest paid crowd he’s drawn anywhere as a presidential candidate, and close to 5,000 people showed up. Excellent local coverage here, here, and here. I confess to being less certain than my colleagues that the speech really lifted off. It was good, but it didn’t soar, and I have seen Obama soar. I think where he wobbled was at the moments where he tried to do outrage: He’s pacing the stage, giggling at his own jokes, calling back to the people in the crowd who yell “I love you!” and then he takes on this mask of aggression? Why?
The moments at which he did lift off were vintage Obama: telling the crowd that he needed them to feel powerful enough believe in their government again. He is pitch perfect when he reminds us that government is fixable; that the missteps and lawlessness of the past seven years can be turned around; that democracy itself will lance the wound. Maybe I’m wrong, but if America is one-tenth as sick of the hissing and snarling that passes for political discourse as I am, the whole anger-as-theater thing is not the way to campaign. Don’t get me wrong. I am angry, too. But I have seen what seven years of unhinged political rage achieves. I want less of that, not more.
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about the Dutch-Somali politician and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, best known for her outspoken defense of the rights of Muslim women. Among other things, I noted that the Dutch parliament was about to vote on whether to extend a promise some of its members made in 2002: to pay the bills for Hirsi Ali's personal security, which are hefty. (To repeat: In 2004, Theo Van Gogh, co-director of a film she and he made about women in Islam—titled Submission—was murdered by a fanatic. The murderer pinned a death threat to Van Gogh's chest, claiming Hirsi Ali would be the next victim. After being in hiding for some time, Hirsi Ali eventually moved to the United States, since Holland had become a far too dangerous place for her to live. Nevertheless, she remains a Dutch citizen, endangered by the peculiarites of the Dutch political situation, largely threatened by fanatics resident in Holland.)
In response to this piece of writing, I received an astonishing quantity of email, mostly from Holland. Some claimed that Hirsi Ali is rich, now that she's written a best-selling memoir, and can pay for her own security (not true); some said they felt embarrassed that their government was reneging on its promise; some complained about my use of the word "Holland" to describe a country called "the Netherlands" (to which the only answer is that we don't complain when the French call our country "Les Etats-Unis"); some wanted to know what they could do to help. None of it mattered much, because the Dutch parliament voted "No," and now Hirsi Ali, possibly the greatest women's rights activist of our generation, is fund raising. She is being helped by a variety of sources at the moment, including some bits of the U.S. government, some American sympathizers, and others. But we all hope she will live to an extremely old age; and security is expensive. So for those who wrote and asked how to contribute, here is the information, directly from her office:
The preferred and most immediate way to assist Ms. Hirsi Ali in the financing of her private security protection is through the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust. This private trust fund can accept non-tax deductible donations from within the United States and internationally, and is entirely dedicated to financing Ms. Hirsi Ali's security.
Checks should be made payable to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust and sent to:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust, Bank of Georgetown, 1054 31st Street, N.W. Suite 18, Washington, DC 20007. Ayaan Hirsi Ali Trust Tax Identification Number: 75-6826872
For more information please contact: John Matteo (jmatteo@jackscamp.com) or
Mackenzie McNaughton (mmcnaughton@jackscamp.com), representatives for Ms. Hirsi Ali.
I hope that answers that question.
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If we need any reminder that it's not easy to be the first popular female candidate for the American presidency, it arrived Monday in the form of an announcement by the AP that Hillary Clinton was leading in yet another poll. This one? The candidate likely to make the "scariest" Halloween costume. Some 37% of the respondents to the survey chose Hillary as their front-runner. (Giuliani was second, with 14%. More key details here.)
The fright-mask news arrives roughly a month after it was announced that Clinton had led in a Pew poll asking respondents about the relative "toughness" of the various candidates: In it, some 67% of Democratic-leaning voters said that Hillary was the first candidate who came to mind when they heard the word "tough." By comparison, only 39% of Republican-leaning voters thought of Giuliani when they heard the word "tough." (Yet he was considered the "toughest" Republican candidate.) All this might seem to be good news for Clinton: after all, over the past year, she has labored hard to burnish her "tough" persona, so as to stave off the perception that a woman--and a Democrat, to boot!--would prove soft on matters of foreign policy. It'd be easy to think that it had finally paid off.
But I've been wondering all this time whether a "tough" backlash was on its way (maybe just because I've been reading Susan Faludi's flawed but sometimes piercingly insightful The Terror Dream). And just last Friday a crucial American institution paved the way for said backlash. In a segment entitled, "Is it OK for women to cry" -- pegged to Ellen DeGeneres' on-air breakdown--the Today Show broadcast images of Clinton giving a speech and shaking hands and confidently pronounced that many people think "that she is too stoic, that she doesn't reveal enough of herself"--on its way to elaborating on the communicative benefits of crying in public. If media coverage of the last election was filled with accusations about girlie-men, will this one be full of talk about manly-girls? Let's hope not. In the meantime, here's an article that briefly discusses the latter group (scroll down); apparently we see them as "pretenders." Sound like a familiar critique of Clinton?
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Hillary jumps the same way as Obama:
"I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey’s continued unwillingness to clearly state his views on torture and unchecked Executive power.
The Attorney General is the chief defender of the rule of law in our country. After Alberto Gonzales's troubled tenure, we cannot send a signal that the next Attorney General in any way condones torture or believes that the President is unconstrained by law. When we leave any doubt about our nation’s policy on torture, we send a terrible message to the rest of the world. Judge Mukasey has been given ample opportunity – both at his confirmation hearings and in his subsequent submission to the Judiciary Committee – to clarify his answers and categorically oppose the unacceptable interrogation techniques employed by this Administration. His failure to do so leaves me no choice but to oppose his nomination."
Meanwhile, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee await Mukasey's answers to the questions they've asked him.
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OK, XX Team, most of you are solid supporters of choice, so please help me out here. After my piece on Michelle and Barack Obama’s marriage ran yesterday, a lot of the reaction I saw on the Web boiled down to: I’m not interested in anything that woman might write, because I disagree with her on abortion. Even though the Obama piece contained not a word on that subject; why would it? And even though my actual views in that regard are somewhat less thrilling than advertised. My question: Has it really come to the point that we only listen to people pre-certified as in agreement with us on all crucial matters? And if so, what does that cost us?
For months, I’ve been in John Kerry mode, thinking that nothing could possibly be gained by answering people who are too mad to listen. (Who, me, thin-skinned? Let it go.) But is this What Hillary Would Do? Think again, caballeras.
So, belatedly: Contrary to the provocative headline on my mild but reviled June op-ed in the New York Times, I never posited that “Pro-Choice is a Bad Choice for Democrats.’’ In fact, on the sheer politics of the abortion issue, I’ve said just the opposite.
What the piece argued instead is that pro-choice should not be the only choice for Democrats in good standing. And that Democrats are losing voters they don’t have to lose by out-and-out insulting any who dare differ on this one matter.
These are not classic single-issue voters, in other words, but otherwise liberal pro-lifers who just want to be able to attend a party function without hearing themselves described as extremists. But even the modest proposal that we make more room at the table was shouted down, perhaps in part because so few readers were in possession of their temper by the time they’d finished scanning the headline.
The fact that the paper’s normally judicious headline writers – not exactly grab-the-reader-by-the-lapel types, in my experience – saw an argument for self-interested tolerance as indistinguishable from a call to overturn Roe was only one indication that when it comes to this subject, subtlety is out of the question, and middle ground very hard to stand on.
When some of the women I interviewed for my book about what women want in a president first spoke about feeling unwanted in the Democratic Party as dissenters on abortion rights, I thought that was interesting, but not something I had ever experienced personally.
The over-the-top reaction to the op-ed changed that, though; Google me now and you’ll come away convinced that I spend off-hours throwing rocks at pregnant teenagers. Though none of my critics on either side – the National Right to Life took exception, too – seemed to have gone to the extreme of cracking open the book the op-ed was based on, its pages are actually filled with women expressing all points of view. (Because, perhaps poignantly, the object was never to come up with six easy ways to win the women’s vote; it was to help us understand one another a little better, and maybe even see that, as Barack Obama says, there really is more that unites us than divides us. Or so I’d like to think.)
Among those I met along the way were opponents of choice who said they’d never be happy Republicans, but found it hard to stick around and subject themselves to abuse from fellow Democrats. And in my new life as an abortion concern troll, I now know what they were talking about.
Yes, I am Catholic, and try to hang in there with my church – except when I don’t. Or won’t. So I happen to oppose abortion, same as I do the death penalty and the war in Iraq and the truly immoral disregard for the already born. (And while we’re obsessing over Roe, isn’t the Supreme Court busy overturning everything else we thought was nailed down?) After 35 years at the barricades, it’s clear that this is an issue that will never be solved by either the Congress or the courts. Or that most politicians even want to be shed of, since it has been so darned good for business in both parties.
I sympathize with those on both sides of this debate, and rue that we are so busy doubting each other’s motives and calling each other names that the mothers and children we all say we care about end up quite beside the point.
As far as I can see, the only actual result of the whole baby-killers-versus-women-haters craziness is that it keeps those who genuinely fear for the health and safety of women and those who genuinely see “termination’’ as an Orwellian name for a thrown-away child -- considered less than human just as slaves once were -- from ever working together to help anybody, other than those who raise cash whenever we clash.
Which is why I have long since had it with the leaders on both sides of this electric fence; they carry right on fighting and raising vast sums on the backs of women in trouble, while the abortion rate remains ridiculously high – whether you see it this way or this.
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In a press release today, Obama said of Mukasey: “While his legal credentials are strong, his views on two critical and related matters are, in my view, disqualifying. We don't need another attorney general who believes that the President enjoys an unwritten right to secretly ignore any law or abridge our constitutional freedoms simply by invoking national security. And we don't need another attorney general who looks the other way on issues as profound as torture. Judge Mukasey's professed ignorance of the debate over the propriety of practices like “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, as a means of interrogation, was appalling."
Now what? Do other Democrats--among them Hillary Clinton--jump the same way? Or do they (ie some of the senators on the Judiciary Committee) keep trying to look like they're pressing Mukasey while planning to wave him through?
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Wow, I take a couple days off and all heck breaks loose on the teen sex front. I have to agree with Melinda that there is a vast middle ground that is being missed up in Portland, Maine. What have they got against parents up there, anyhow?
One thing that I find interesting from reviewing the posts on the subject is that all of us who support the idea of calling parents at least sometimes are … parents. For better or worse, having children changes your perspective. When I was in high school and college, I always said, “I’m going to be one of the cool parents. If my kids want to drink, I’ll let them do it at home. And I’ll give them birth control, and …” you get the picture. Now that I have children, I’m trying to figure out where I can snap up some GPS-enabled ski jackets. (And they certainly won’t be going to summer camp.)
Just kidding on the ski jackets. But it raises an interesting point. On the one hand, we're better able to keep track of our kids with cell phones and other gadgets, and the concern is we're not letting kids be kids. On the other hand, they're not acting much like children if they're having sex at age 12. But I suspect that some parents use "helicoptering"—knowing where kids are at every moment, signing them up for every activity under the sun to keep them busy and then attending every practice—as a substitute for actual involved parenting. Why, who needs to talk to Suze and Johnny about sex when you know they're not having it, because their RFID tag tells you they're at the mall like they said they would be. (Too bad that unless you're Jack Bauer and can upload the mall schematics to your cell phone, you won't know if they're at the movies or in the broom closet.)
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In answer to your question, Emily, no, I don’t think it would be good if 12 became the new 16, and suddenly preteen sex seemed perfectly normal or even yawn-worthy. That said, I think we as a culture do too much gnashing of teeth over the preservation of virginity. Few of my precocious friends regret their early encounters, and none of them seem emotionally stunted or scarred.
In contrast, I think it can be harmful to wait too long. I had a couple friends in college (OK, they were girls) who had a fairy tale view of sex and kept delaying the act. They waited and waited until suddenly all their potential partners had lots of experience while they had none. That’s not a great state of affairs.
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I think Juliet is right: We do worry more about girls and sex, as I've argued here and here in Slate. Although I share Emily's impression that my teenage peers most confused about their sexuality were girls, I don't think we should rely on anecdotal evidence or our personal histories to try to understand the broader realities of teen sexuality today. After all, one of the reasons girls can seem more confused about sex than boys is that our cultural rhetoric routinely casts them as victims rather than lusty conquerors. Of course there's another good reason girls might be more confused: They bear the consequences of unprotected sex (i.e., pregnancy) in ways that boys just don't and never will. But being alarmist on their behalf doesn't serve a clear purpose; yet you see this kind of scare-mongering over and over in the media (especially the conservative media). The American Family Association Journal spotlights an alarming statistic about girls and sex ("46% of teen girls become infected with an STD during their first sexual encounter") next to a supposedly gender-neutral 2003 piece about teen sexuality; there's no comparable stat for boys.
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If early sex isn't necessarily bad sex, could we agree that it's usually a bad idea? I'm agnostic about calling parents, because it seems so case by case to me, in terms of the kids and the parental relationships involved. And I'm all for the release of a 17-year-old like Genarlow Wilson, whose case exemplifies the worst intersection of adult prudishness and prurience. I also remember from my middle school years a couple of cases of kids having sex at 13 or 14 that didn't seem harmful. But I also remember other kids who seemed confused or taken advantage of, and yes, they were girls. Juliet, do we really want to veer closer toward a norm that sweeps up young teens? You were in 8th grade a lot more recently than I was--what in your experience makes you think differently than I do?
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This weekend, a friend showed me artist Edina Tokodi’s incredible moss
graffiti, which features moss in the form of animals like rabbits and deer
and abstract compositions mounted on walls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tokodi’s
work is a whimsical surprise, green and playful. But I think moss will be creeping up on us more and more.
Last week, the New York Times announced it was installing an
“open-air birch and moss garden” in the lobby of its new building. It was about
to import seven ginormous birch trees and “several tons of moss” from New
Jersey, according to incredulous accounts from NY
Mag and Gawker.
Moss has also shown up in designs for green rooftops. And a few years ago, a
“moss laboratory” was created in a shed at a minimum-security prison
(because working with plants is apparently good for inmates and moss
cultivation does not require sharp objects.)
Where else will moss spread? I’m betting yoga studios, table
arrangements, and fancy facial cleansers. Maybe moss is the new lemongrass. Still, tooling around the web, I realized its new uses couldn’t possibly be more creative
than its traditional ones: some kinds of moss were included in wound dressings because
of their antibacterial properties. Some were even used as diapers because they
can absorb up to ten times their weight in liquid. Any takers?
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Given that this is a women’s blog, I can’t help but point out that the last couple posts on preteen sex haven’t been gender neutral – they’ve focused primarily on girls engaging in “risky” behavior. Torie, though you start out discussing any person 13 or younger fooling around, you go on to specify that it’s disturbing when “a 13, 12, or 11 year old girl” has sex. And Melinda, in your vivid anecdote about your friend who caught two kids making out and then had to call the parents, you mention what it was like for your friend to rat out the girl, but not the boy.
Is this because we find it ickier when girls are sexually precocious than when boys are? That the thought of reporting a 12-year-old girl to her parents/guardian/the cops is a no-brainer, but that reporting a boy is a bit murkier? Or am I way off?
Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to call the cops or a kid’s parents. Maybe a phone call’s in order if the kid shows lack of judgment in general, or if the kid’s making out as a way to act out. But from my perspective early sex is not necessarily dangerous sex.
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Torie, I agree that there’s no need to call the D.A.’s office on teenagers messing around, but I do think the parents of middle schoolers have a right to know the score, so to speak. I don’t what’s up in Portland, Maine, but they seem to be having trouble locating the vast expanse of middle ground between initially refusing to let the parents of 11-year-olds know they were handing them birth control – and now promising that they will report every sexually active kid to the cops.
Has anybody else seen that Disney movie where Goofy follows his son off to college because he misses him so much? That is going to be me in a few years, moving in across the street from West Point, just like Douglas MacArthur’s mommy. As a warm-up, a couple of summers ago, I had the bright idea that I would accompany my children to a camp for 9- to 18-year-olds, where I would teach a little writing class and get loads of work done.
One of the reasons that loads of work thing didn’t happen is that I had other duties at this camp, too – patrolling the rec center to bust up late-night make-out sessions, for instance. Some of the other teachers were assigned an even more onerous job, on a detail known as the Bush Patrol. (My then-9-year-old son was happy to hear that the staff was on the lookout, making sure the president was nowhere in evidence.) But no, what this assignment really involved was whizzing around the far reaches of the campus in a golf cart, armed with a whistle and flashlight, interrupting couples at play in the bushes. If you broke up anything serious, you were supposed to call the parents and report exactly what you had seen.
I swore I would never do anything of the sort, but some of my friends felt otherwise, and one said she already had made such a call -- and had even provided details when the dad on the other end of the line refused to believe her: “Sorry, sir, but your daughter’s head was moving up and down.’’
Bad as it was for this friend who had to make that call, getting it must have been many times worse. Yet still not as bad as not getting it might have been, you know? There is just too much at stake to keep parents of the loop.
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Following the kerfuffle over birth control for the Hanna Montana set, health officials in Portland, Maine, have agreed to report “all illegal sexual activity involving minors as required by law,” according to an article from a Maine newspaper. That includes any time someone 13 or younger has sex, even if it’s consensual. What this does is basically nullify the idea of providing oral contraceptives for the middle schoolers.
But as Slate’s William Saletan has noted recently, consent laws are particularly tricky now that girls are reaching puberty earlier. Of course it’s disturbing to think of a 13, 12, or 11 year old girl having sex (whether we’re talking full-on intercourse or “fooling around” that includes other behaviors, like oral sex). But I’m even more disturbed by the decision to force health-care professionals to report consensual activity among teens. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a parent and, as a 23 year old, I vividly remember middle school, in all its oily-skinned, awkward glory. I knew girls who were having oral sex as 13-year-olds. I was fairly grossed by that idea, even at the time. But I was also relieved that at every physical, my doctor would assure me that I could talk to her in confidence about anything. There was nothing to tell—any romantic life I had at the time was strictly in the fantasy category. But it was a relief to hear it and helped me have some trust for her. If the 13-year-olds know that their doctor has to report any sexual contact, are they really going to be truthful during check-ups? Probably not. And if I’ve learned anything from watching House, M.D., it’s that being honest with your doctor is the most important thing you can do.
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Sam Brownback feels reassured about Giuliani's stance on abortion. No surprise there--in addition to whatever Giuliani said to Brownback in private, he has made it clear that he will appoint Supreme Court justices in the overturn-Roe mold. When does he go from being a pro-choice candidate to a pro-life one, in terms of the impact he would have as president and the way in which voters should evaluate him? Are we already there?
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If Mukasey does say now that waterboarding is torture, should that be enough for the Democrats to wave him through? What about his testimony on the presidents power to act outside statutory boundaries with regard to interrogation and wiretapping? And even if Mukasey were to change his tune now on all these fronts, what does that really mean, since his previous statements allign so closely with his record as a judge and his writings? The Democrats were awfully quick to say that his confirmation was virtually assured. Now that's not looking so wise.
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After Phil and I wracked our brains to understand why Michael Mukasey wouldn’t just admit that waterboarding is torture, and in light of Rudy Giuliani’s weaselly parsing of the same question, it’s heartening to read this morning – via the AP -- that some of the Senate Democrats seem willing to use that as the basis for a no vote on Mukasey.
Good to hear. There is just no good reason to call this an open question, a matter of interpretation, or something too secret to discuss rationally. In the same regard see this great new piece on Rudy and executive powers by Rachel Morris. Talk about things that make you go hmmmmmm.
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Here's what Giuliani has to say about waterboarding, in reponse to a question about AG-choice Mukasey's refusal to say that the tactic amounts to torture: “Well, I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is.”
Whaaa? The descriptions of waterboarding are clear and unrefuted. They come from inside the CIA. Here's a short video reenactment. As Dahlia points out to me, Giuliani's hemming and shuffling is like the senators who didn't bother to find out how the Guantanamo detainees were treated before voting on John McCain's anti-torture provision in the Detainee Treatment Act. If you don't know what's happening, you can keep going along with it.
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Opening statements in the Darren Mack trial yesterday revealed some sort of crazy quilt defense strategy that seems to involve tossing out at least 12 alternative theories and hoping one of them resonates with each the jurors. Of course the blame-the-victim prong involves painting Mack’s estranged wife, Charla, as a violent, sexually voracious (and deviant) “terrorist” and the judge as lifelong a man-hater. I guess this explains why the jury questionnaires were all so focused on the prospective jury’s histories of violence, abuse, and marital discord. The plan was to seat a jury that was already steamed up about gender equality, ugly divorces, physical violence, then appeal to every single one of those grievances.
This odd split defense – the first murder was self defense and the shooting of the judge was insanity -- was pursued over defense counsel’s objections. It’s all something of a mess, but laced though it are strong defense claims that the unfairness faced by fathers in family court are pervasive and unbearable, and that the injustices of Mack’s divorce were like those of the American colonists fighting the British – only worse. Glenn Sacks calls this the “Mary Winkler” defense and cautions that it “only works for women.”
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Good catch, Melinda, on how Rudy wants to help the "worst people" in our society as long as they are his pals—and surely Rudy considers child-molesting priests worse than squeegee men. This article describes Giuliani's friendship with the defrocked priest who now works at his firm. It goes back to childhood and the former priest, Alan Placa, presided over two of Giuliani's weddings (and the annulment of the first marriage, over the objection of Giuliani's first wife). Yes, Rudy's big on loyalty, but to a point. Witness his friendship with his former police and corrections commissioner—and crook—Bernie Kerik. Giuliani pushed for Kerik to become head of Homeland Security in the Bush administration, but the guy was such a sleazeball that the nomination had to be withdrawn almost immediately. The embarrassment, and Kerik's subsequent conviction for taking illegal gifts while serving in the Giuliani administration, ended the friendship. But surely Rudy—Mr. Crime Fighter—knew who Kerik really was all along, just as he knows now who Placa is. So why is he so close to such men—and what do they know about him? And won't Rudy soon be forced to rid himself of this troublesome priest?
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Hillary as Scarlett at Twelve Oaks does not work for me, with or without bosoms showing. But what has my big-girl panties in a twist today is Rudy’s regard for a man removed from his job as a priest over multiple allegations of sex abuse. After the church fired Monsignor Alan Placa, he went to work for Giuliani Partners. Where his new boss, the former prosecutor, shows him the kind of compassion he never had for turnstile jumpers: “I know the man,’’ Giuliani told reporters. “I know who he is, so I support him. We give some of the worst people in our society the benefit of the doubt. And of course I’m going to give it to one of my closest friends.’’ Of course; we are all law and order guys until the perp is a pal.
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Parody site of the day, via feministing: Guns for girls. "My Little Carbine" takes the cake for its pastiche of My Little Ponies with assault weapons. It's startling to me how perniciously traditional many children's TV ads still are. We didn't have a TV when I was a kid, and I sometimes think that one reason I didn't realize I was supposed to behave like a "girl" was that I never was held captive by ads like this stunner or this.
Sadly, the Disney Princess Poison Ring seems all too realistic a talisman, at least among eighth-graders; I'm fairly sure I must have worn one, metaphorically speaking, at some point.
via Feministing.
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Emily, I think you are right that Hillary uses the language of “choice” in a really fascinating way. When I covered her Senate race against Rick Lazio in 2000, I was immediately struck by the way she used that word to explain everything from her position on abortion to her decisions about parenting, her marriage, religion, and policy preferences. I think it was one of the central features of her rhetoric then, and it still offers a rather amazing contrast to the language of the Nancy Pelosi's and Laura Bush’s – who tend to say they were chosen for public service but not that it was their own choice.
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A new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll finds that 42 percent of Democrats believe Hillary Clinton was right to stay with Bill after the Lewinsky affair. Just 5 percent say she made the wrong choice. Meanwhile, Hillary talks about her marriage in the new issue of Essence. "Now obviously we've had challenges as everybody in the world knows. But I never doubted that it was a marriage worth investing in even in the midst of those challenges and I'm really happy that I made that decision. Again, not a decision for everybody. And I think it's so important for women to stand up for the right of women to make a decision that is best for them."
In other words, it's all about supporting a woman's right to choose. That's familiar from the abortion context, of course, and also from the debate over women who decide not to work. Does it work here?
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I must confess to a more than passing obsession with the Darren Mack trial, which gets under way today in Las Vegas. Mack stands accused of fatally stabbing his estranged wife Charla with their 7-year-old daughter upstairs in the home, then shooting – sniper style – at the family court judge who was presiding over their divorce and custody dispute. Of course part of my fascination is that I knew Darren and Charla quite well, back when I clerked at a Reno divorce firm.
The current jury pool offers a snapshot of everything weird and wonderful about Vegas, including, at present, a former go-go dancer who has been married three times, a veteran trapeze performer, as well as a floor supervisor for a local casino who’s studied martial arts since he was 5. But I am mostly curious to see whether the defense will indeed be styled as a referendum on father’s rights and their alleged unequal treatment in family courts. After the shooting, Mack left a message on his cousin’s answering machine asking, “If anything happens to me, please make sure that the true story about the injustices that are going on in that courtroom get out to the media and the public.” I guess he’ll finally get his wish.
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"I'm well aware that my opponents on both sides are paying a lot more attention to me," Hillary Clinton said. "I'm reminded by some of my friends that when you get to be my age, having so many men paying attention to you is kind of flattering." I like this--it's relaxed, undefensive, self-deprecating--a good example of putting on your big-girl panties, as Melinda would have it. And a welcome respite from some of the horrified reaction to the Hillary cleavage story, which I found overly sanctimonious. She's the first female candidate. Like it or not, her femininity is at issue. And when she can pull it off, disarming will usually work better than huffy or stern. Or am I skimming over what are really murkier waters?
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Australia is also in the midst of an election season, though theirs has big two advantages over ours right now.
1. Their parliament election, which will determine whether John Howard remains prime minister or has to move aside in favor of opposition candidate Kevin Rudd, is just a month away.
2. The most embarrassing YouTube video to surface in their election so far features Rudd idly picking at his earwax and then licking his finger. (Watch it here.)
The etiquette breach occurs while one of Rudd’s fellow members of Parliament is droning on something to do with permanent residents. Rudd’s not the only one bored stiff—the redhead sitting in front of him appears to be fighting off sleep, and the woman to his left looks mighty fidgety.
I’m confused, though, about how Aussie blogs and newspapers are reacting. The footage is apparently a few years old and has been on YouTube for months, but it’s only now become an issue. A news site says the 30-second clip “could do more damage to Kevin Rudd's election chances than any policy blitz.” Blogs call it Rudd’s “macaca moment.” Really? I’d be relieved if I saw footage of Barack Obama caught picking his nose, or John McCain trying to surreptitiously rid himself of a wedgie. It’s gross and it’s bad manners, but there’s something endearing about catching politicians in those off-guard, embarrassing moments.
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The good news in the study Meghan writes about is that both men and women reported feeling more comfortable in professional groups that included more women. Does this mean that men, too, find predominantly male groups more intimidating? Or less interesting? I was in one of the first co-ed classes at the University of Notre Dame and the reaction we got all the time was, “Five guys for every girl; that must be great!” I knew no one who looked at it that way, but it was not all that harrowing, either. We were feminists who wore knee socks and loved the Virgin Mary, and about the craziest it ever got was at football games, some people would sing, “as our loyal sons and daughters march on to victory.’’ And some not.
When Domers of more recent vintage ask what it was like being a pioneer, I know they want horror stories and maybe the recipe for hoecakes, but all I’ve got for them is that on rare occasions, some stressed-out defender of the old order would lash out—most memorably when one of the few men in my Women in the Bible class stormed out shouting, “Mary Magdalene was a whore, and that’s all there is to it!” A far bigger issue for me was that only a handful of our tenured professors were female. But that, too, has long since changed, and nearly half of all undergraduates are women these days. So what would I tell those aspiring young scientists who see no one like themselves at the conference? In the immortal words of Margaret Spellings, put on your big-girl panties. And go anyway.
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Two articles about the latest surveillance technology available to the modern family-- you can read here in the Guardian about a new jacket with a GPS chip in it, and here in the New York Times about new GPS-equipped cell phones—have left me feeling more spooked than such stories usually do. My nostalgic reflex is to feel sorry for kids. In the constant struggle for independence, today’s teenagers have it so much harder than we did, boomers often sigh. They’ve got helicopter parents in thrall to an ethos of hypervigilance and tempted by all kinds of gizmos, who feel any youthful misstep should be preventable—and if not, is somehow partly their fault. We had parents who worried, sure, but from a distance. They couldn’t track our whereabouts on weekend evenings, and the tacit ethos was that minimal information probably was better for all concerned. But the Times story suggests a more oppressive development: At this point, kids may have only themselves to blame. It seems we have a market of non-stop networking students, unable to bear being out of the social loop for a minute, to thank for the latest surge in tracking technology. Don’t they see how they’ll come to regret this? It's grist for, what else, yet more self-blaming angst on the part of parents: Look at what our hovering has produced—a generation at risk of undervaluing autonomy.
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Tying the two previous posts together -- female self-doubt, and Hillary's canny use of Drudge -- I see a lesson here for those who study how non-nurturing environments undermine young women. Tell these girls to just keep swinging. That's what Hillary has done. She didn't wait for there to be an equal number of female presidential candidates before she ran; she may still consider Drudge part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, but she's cleverly using him to her advantage. While we're rooting out sexism, isn't it important to teach girls who feel less welcome in majority-male environments that they need to overcome their discomfort and speak up? Law and medicine were once almost closed to women, now enrollment is these professional schools is near 50-50. Veterinary medicine was once almost exclusively male; today enrollment is about 80 percent female.
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More on women, science, and stereotype threat: A new study published by Psychological Science of undergraduate women majoring in math, science, and engineering found fresh evidence that cues of gender-imbalance negatively affect not only women's performance but their desire to perform. (The study was conducted by Claude Steele and others.) In the study, some women watched a gender-balanced video about an upcoming conference in their field, while others watched a similar video in which male speakers outnumbered female. The participants who watched the latter video "reported a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate in the conference, than did women who viewed the gender-balanced video." (Men who watched the videos didn't report any differences in their sense of belonging--but those who watched the video with more women expressed more desire to participate in the conference.) Interestingly, the women experiencing stereotype threat also demonstrated more "cognitive vigilance"--that is, they remembered more about the video and the room in which they saw it than did the first group. More analysis here at Inside Higher Ed (scroll down).
I suppose it hardly bolsters the case for (or against) an all-women's blog--but it may have some bearing on the perennial discussions of why there are more male bloggers than female bloggers in fields like politics.
Via Inside Higher Ed.
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This morning’s NYT reports on how skilled Hillary Clinton’s team has been in wringing favorable coverage out of the Drudge Report— and praises her maturity in “a development that has surprised much of the political world: Mrs. Clinton is learning to play nice with the Drudge Report and the powerful, elusive and conservative-leaning man behind it.’’ Hillary Clinton, pragmatic? Much of the political world is more easily surprised than I thought.
Matt Drudge’s willingness to be played is even less mysterious. Maybe, like other “conservative-leaning’’ folk, he considers the Clinton candidacy a dream come true. Or maybe he just remembers how good the Clinton years were for him. When Drudge says, “I need Hillary Clinton. You don’t get it. … That’s my bank,” I don’t doubt his sincerity at all.
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Alas, Dahlia, if you’re looking for a good argument for allowing condoms and not prescription birth control, I’m bound to disappoint. I somehow missed the info that the district has been passing out condoms for so long. At the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy (but to avoid being sexist) allow me to clarify: I’m not in favor of ANY school-sponsored birth control for 10- or 11-year-olds, for either boys or girls. Schools should not be condoning sex between middle-schoolers. Here’s a question: If a 12-year-old gets a prescription for the pill so she can have sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend, is the school contributing to statutory rape? And the flip side: If a school-provided condom breaks and a 12-year-old boy gets his girlfriend pregnant, is the school responsible? I smell lawsuit …
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Emily, you genius! Now that is the way to warm Hillary up for the true swing voter: get her out there single again, dating, and vulnerable. (I could see her with Mitt Romney, but never mind.) She would lose none of benefit of having been Mrs. Bill Clinton, and all those women who think she’s too calculating would have to admit that even such a well-deserved midlife reinvention in midcampaign is bold.
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I have been gaga over the Sarkozys and I love the idea that Cecelia is a role model. We shouldn't demand more from our first spouses. We should demand less. Or nothing at all.
A Hillary question from Rudy Giuliani. He said:
"Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city, she's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people. So I'm trying to figure out where the experience is here. It would seem to me that in a time of difficult problems and war we don't want on the job training for an executive..."
A fair criticism of most senators running for president, it seems to me. But isn't Hillary a solid exception to that rule, given her experience in the White House?
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The National Women’s Law Center and the Oregon Health & Science University released a truly grim report on Wednesday. Women’s health care in the U.S. is unsatisfactory overall, and no state earned a “satisfactory” grade for women’s health.
The two groups measured women’s health in all 50 states and D.C. by using 27 benchmarks (ranging from rates of obesity to routine breast cancer screening) designated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2010 campaign. Only three of the benchmarks were met – women receiving regular dental, colorectal cancer screening for women over 50, and the percentage of women 40 and older getting mammograms. Among the 24 unmet goals: rates of obesity and diabetes are way up. In Mississippi (which was ranked last for women’s health overall), the report states that 31.5 percent of women are obese.
It's also discouraging that results varied significantly by race. The report found that 85.7 percent of white women received prenatal care, compared with 75.9 percent of blacks.
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Rachael, your post on the decision of a Portland, Maine, middle school to allow students to get prescription birth control without parental notification was prescient. Everyone’s gone bonkers toady and O’Reilly is hardly even the most unhinged. (Best line from O’Reilly’s post today “It is ironic that the week my book "Cultural Warrior" comes out in paperback, intense culture battles erupt across the country.”) Imagine, Bill’s book comes out in paperback and culture battles happen in America!!!
I agree with you Rachael that there is something ick-inducing about giving birth control pill to 10-year-olds. But I am still not hearing any good argument for how this differs from handing out condoms – something the school had been doing for eight years. Is it the difference between providing birth control to girls instead of boys? Is it O’Reilly’s distinction that condoms prevent disease whereas pills prevent “only” pregnancy? Or is there something about offering someone else’s child a pill that makes the Portland scheme more intrusive?
Largely agree with Anne and Ms. Thatcher, but a quick note on yesterday’s blog criticism: It’s bizarre to me to hear that Slate is somehow better for the “Feminist Project” without a women’s blog than with it. It’s even harder to fathom how our women writers are better “feminists” if they avoid discussing women’s issues. Is this some new half-starved Beverly Hills feminism: Do everything you can to present yourself as less of a person than you actually are?
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Regarding the quick dissolution of the Sarkozy marriage, a several decade melodrama -- this seems like something Hillary should be contemplating. When people really start envisioning both Clintons back in the White House, wouldn't it be better if instead Bill just went away, saying he, like Cecelia Sarkozy, preferred "jogging in Central Park" to being First Spouse? It's almost Elizabethan to imagine a President Hillary dating Nicholas Sarkozy. (I'd prefer to see her with the ultimate boomer dream date, Paul McCartney.)
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Or at least appears to be, I guess that makes things easier for the Creation Museum. Now they only have to choose between Tancredo and Huckabee for their '08 endorsement.
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Personally, I try to follow the example of a very famous woman in politics, Margaret Thatcher, who never read what newspapers wrote about her, ever, in principle. Which was just as well, because it was usually nasty. My only objection in the early reviews was the word "feminist." I don't see it anywhere in the tag "slate women blog about politics, etc". While I'm happy to use the word about myself some of the time, I'm not at all happy with much of the baggage that comes with it. And I don't see why a bunch of women talking to one another is necessarily a "feminist" project. I had assumed it would be more like the all-women dinner parties I started giving a few years ago, when I realized how much fun they were.
Now, on to what everybody in my neck of the woods is talking about: the Sarkozy divorce. Cecelia Sarkozy has shown so little enthusiasm for being the wife of the president of France that it warms my heart: Asked by one interviewer what she saw herself doing in ten years, she replied "I see myself ... jogging in Central Park." Implying, of course, that she doesn't even fancy living in Paris, let alone being French First Lady. It's hard to tell whether the lack of enthusiasm was for the job or for the husband - both she and he have had very public affairs, he with a well-known journalist (unthinkable in most countries, no?). But even if they are no longer married, I still like the precedent being set here. At last, the wife of a very senior Western politician who chose to play no public role whatsoever: no tree-planting, no campaigning, no hostessing, no health-care-policy-writing! The only comparable spouse is the husband of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who gets on with his job in molecular chemistry and doesn't appear on TV. That's what I call a truly independent, liberated spouse.
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The early reviews of XX Factor are in, and they’re ambivalent, to put it nicely. The complaint is mostly the concept. At Tapped, Dana Goldstein is "discouraged that another mainstream publication has put its feminist blogging in a separate space." At Huffington Post, Jessica Wakeman writes, "I still wish for the day when women-on-politics blogs don't exist anymore." Here’s a meaner take from Gawker.
I don’t really wish for the end of women-only spaces to discuss politics, or culture, or current events (the "etc" in our tag line is supposed to stand for all of that). I like those conversations. I work in a mostly male office (Slate DC, that is, not Slate as a whole). I like that space, too. I also like to read legal blogs. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of content or discussion belongs where.
My basic defense of a women’s blog is this: A bunch of smart women mulling over various issues that interest us together—what's wrong with that? We started the blog in part because we thought women might be more likely to read women writing about politics. I don’t think women-only conversations somehow hold back the larger project of integrating women into other discussions. If anything, it might embolden them.
Some of our (also smart critics) object to the personal element in our posts. That’s one kind of blogging gestalt—there are plenty of male bloggers who inject the same informal note. Nor does XX mean that any of us will stop writing longer, less off-the-cuff commentary. Yes, as Jessica W. says, it should be a given for the media to be filled with smart women writing about politics and everything else. We’re all part of that Slate-wide, whoever-wide conversation. Now we’re having this one, too. Hey, we’re multitaskers: We can try on different hats.
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Soon after reading Amanda’s post on Susan Orr’s appointment to head the Office of Population Affairs—the office in the Health and Human Services Department that oversees family planning—I read that the school board in Portland, Maine, has—by an astounding (to me) 10-2 vote—decided to allow middle-students to get prescription birth control without parental notification.
Putting the two stories alongside each other demonstrates what a disheartening divide we still have on the topic of birth control, without even bringing up abortion. I might be the only person writing here who wishes abortion weren’t legal, but I’m a pragmatic pro-lifer: Birth control is a wonderful thing. Condoms, the pill, sponges—the more, the better. It’s beyond ridiculous to tell women that they shouldn’t have abortions and then oppose any means by which they can prevent pregnancy.
At least, I like to think I’m pragmatic on this issue. But when I read that people want to put 12-year-old girls on the pill and not notify parents, I’m horrified. Sure, you can throw up your hands and say, “They’re having sex anyway. Shouldn’t we do what we can?” But once you do that, where do you draw the line? Is there even a line left to draw? William Saletan had an interesting piece a few weeks ago that discussed how difficult it is to come up with an appropriate “age of consent.” One line from that piece (and I’m not trying to take Will out of context—his article dealt largely with statutory rape) seems relevant to this discussion: “Consent implies competence, and 12-year-olds don't really have that.”
I know the statistics show that offering birth control to teenagers doesn’t increase sexual activity. But so many people—parents, educators, volunteers—are working hard to help girls create build self-esteem and create the positive self-images that encourage them to say no to sex. Measures like this one seem to undercut those efforts. And isn’t one of the problems with education today that parents aren’t involved enough? By removing the parents from the equation here, you’re not doing anything to foster the strong family relationships that our children need.
(As an aside, I also find it odd that some schools have such a zero-tolerance policy for drugs that they will suspend a girl for taking a Motrin for PMS; yet in other places schools will help girls get the pill.)
After all that, I guess my question is this: Will we ever reach a middle ground, where we can agree that it’s stupid to say “abstinence rules,” yet still think it’s a pretty damn bad idea to give 12-year-olds the pill behind their parents’ back?
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The beleaguered federal office that oversees family planning
services just got another boss hostile
to birth control.
Among the depressing details: Susan
Orr, the new appointee, was formerly a Senior Director at the Family Research
Council, a group that disparages condom use and claims that abstinence is the
only healthy choice to make about sex prior to marriage. In 2001, when the Bush
administration wanted to stop requiring health plans for federal employees to
pay for a broad range of contraceptives, Orr told the Washington Post: “We’re
quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity
that you have it.”
Orr is not as floridly insane as Eric Keroack, whom the Bush
administration appointed in 2006 to head the same office (and who left in March
to address allegations against his private practice.). Keroack championed the
bizarre idea that premarital sex wreaks havoc on brain chemistry, creating a
physiological barrier to love and commitment later on. Orr won’t inspire
mocking editorials long after her appointment. She’s likely to slip from public view. Which to me makes her a whole lot scarier.
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At today's confirmaton hearing for Michael Mukasey, Bush's pick for attorney general, Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked questions about a disturbing ruling Mukasey made as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. Here are the facts (I just looked them up): In 1983, a woman police officer was sexually assaulted. She later testified that the attack took place over six hours and was by a fellow officer. But when she initially reported the assault, she said she'd been attacked by a man she'd met at a laundromat instead of naming her assailant. A few days later, she named the male officer. He denied the accusation and passed a lie dectector test. So did she. Still, she was charged criminally for having falsely stated that she didn't know the man who'd attacked her. She was also suspended from the NYPD without pay, and eventually fired. Her alleged rapist retired with his police pension intact.
Two years later, the woman brought a sex discrimination suit. Judge Mukasey ruled that she couldn't bring her case to a jury because there wasn't enough evidence to support it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, saying that it was the jury's job to decide whether the allegations were true and "whether the discipline meted out to [the woman officer] was unlawfully disparate to that received by her male fellow officer." A trial followed. The jury ruled for the woman and awarded her more than $260,000 in damages. (Her name is in the record, but somehow I don't feel right about publishing it here--a whole different issue.) For a second time, Mukasey thwarted the woman's claim, this time by setting aside the jury's verdict. Mukasey said that "no reasonable jury could infer an unconstituional pattern or practice of gender discrimination" from the facts. (I'm quoting the Second Circuit again.) And he ordered a new trial. Also for a second time, the Second Circuit reversed. It held that Mukasey's grant of a new trial was an abuse of discretion.
Feinstein wanted to know if Mukasey considered this an "unusual" case. Mukasey said that to call it unusual was "a stark euphemism." And then he talked about all the women law clerks he has hired--"each of them hired on the merits, on the merits." He also talked about his effort to get a woman admitted to an all-male club he used to belong to, and leaving the club when he failed.
But his handling of the sex discrimination case seems awfully rigid, doesn't it? He got knocked down by the Second Circuit, and he insisted he was right, at this woman's expense. Trial judges aren't often that stubborn. I wonder what was going on here.
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Women may be underrepresented in the sciences at the highest academic levels, but through high school, female students perform much better than their male counterparts. Ironically, one of the first journalists to draw attention to this fact is Hoff Sommers, who wrote an article titled The War Against Boys for the Atlantic in May 2000 (subscription required).
Boys are about a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing, and are less likely to go to college. The Department of Education reported recently that 57 percent of college students are female, and that college student bodies will be 60-40 female by 2010.
When boys performed better – about a generation ago – many journalists, scientists, and casual observers argued that boys were naturally more intelligent. And as Meghan noted, people are quick to suggest that brain differences account for women’s under-representation in college science departments. Of course now that the tables have turned, educators talk of cultural or behavioral differences between the sexes rather than genetic predispositions.
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College kids, I would say, are pretty thrilled to have controversial speakers, like Summers, who get useful debates going (and Dahlia, as you say, little kids love daddy playmates, and ignore puttering mothers). But at the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm—hey, this is the XX Factor—I’d like to tsk tsk about school reform for a minute. I can’t help feeling sometimes when I read about NCLB that educational reformers should ask themselves now and then, What kind of message does our flailing send to students? Of course, the most important currency of school reform is concrete results: better schools for kids. But the Bush administration’s overhaul is also aimed at changing cultural attitudes toward education, specifically transforming an insidious, fatalistic ethos of low expectations. A dispiriting story in the New York Times on Tuesday about failing LA schools is a reminder that impossibly high expectations, and unrealistic consequences, can be, if anything, even more pernicious.
The No Child Left Behind legislation names 2014 as the deadline by which suddenly schools across the U.S. are supposed to boast universal proficiency in reading and math, and it stipulates a set of increasingly severe penalties for chronically failing schools, culminating in state takeover or radical restructuring. But the 2014 goal is surreal: Universal proficiency is an obvious pipedream. And there’s scant sign, as Diane Ravitch has pointed out, that state takeovers are effective and little evidence as to which massive overhauls work.
Hence California, which finds itself overwhelmed with chronically failing schools and at sea, unable simply to close schools and unsure who might fix them, or how. As one person put it, it “taxes the whole school change industry.” As a model for kids—who are supposed to be in the student change industry, right?--it’s exactly the wrong one, as any decent teacher would tell them. And it doesn’t seem merely rhetorical to point that out. Kids may blow off homework, but they tend to keep a sharp eye out for the hypocrisy and delinquency of their elders.
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Speaking of speaking out loud about gender differences, I wanted to post briefly on Emily’s terrific piece last week about playing with our kids. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon ‘round here: My husband can easily spend 90 straight minutes on the floor with our boys, building with Leggo. Whereas in the same situation, I tend to sit on the floor next to them, folding laundry, separating broken crayons from their paper wrappers, and tidying the playroom. (Is this what’s known as parallel play Ann???) I sometimes fear that if I truly forced myself to build with Leggo in that time, I might produce a teensy little ironing board and travel steamer.
Emily your story reminded me of one of my central parenting theories: I may not refer to it as “my kitchen,” but I have definitely observed anecdotally that the husbands somehow manage to sit down, eat their breakfasts and read the papers each morning while the moms tend to make pancakes, slice pears, pack lunches, and wipe spills. Maybe this is my corollary to the Tickle Monster theory: Our husbands are better at focused play because they are better at focused everything, when it comes to parenting. They certainly can and do pack lunches and wipe spills. But when they are eating they eat and when they are playing they play. They somehow find time to take care of their own stuff and they don’t maniacally multitask while doing it. Not sure what this has to do with our math performance in college. But last week my 4 year old observed, as I sat down next to him at breakfast with a piece of toast, “But mamma you don’t eat breakfast. You eat coffee.”
If our kids think we exist on air and live only to fold small t-shirts, I’m not all that surprised they don’t want to vote for the girls.
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I agree that it’s foolish for UC Davis to rescind its invitation to Summers to speak—even if his comments were foolish and ill-informed, as I argued two years ago.
But the problem with Christina Hoff Sommers’ piece—and the reason I don’t find it all that interesting—is that it does what has become a by now familiar two-step: First, it paints those who criticize Summers as suppressors of free speech, and invites us to think, erroneously, that it’s somehow taboo to talk in the sciences about biological basis for difference. In fact, Simon Baron-Cohen is quite well-regarded. (And if I recall correctly, at least one of the original scientists criticizing Summers’ comments herself studied the biological basis for sex differences.) Second, Hoff Sommers goes on to invoke a common-sense look at the world around us as evidence that OF COURSE brain differences explain the fact that women are nurses and men are pilots. What could we have been thinking all this time!
In doing so, Hoff Sommers gives no credence to the fact that the project of disentangling nature and nurture is extremely complicated. What makes these issues so hard to sort out is that the project of gender socialization begins almost the day a baby is born. I don’t say that to whitewash any “deeper” truths; I completely believe in the reality of biological differences, and I acknowledge that there are different distribution curves by gender. I just think we don’t know all that much about how they work yet—and yet we’re awfully quick to point to hard-wired biology as the underlying reason for all sorts of social discrepancies that can also be explained, at least in part, by discrimination and how we construct gender. (Megan McArdle had a good post a while back on this.) And there is plenty of contradictory evidence about just what “innate” might mean. If biology explains why our world is the way it is, as Hoff Sommers suggests, then why are women almost six times as likely today to get PhDs in physics than they were in the 1970s? Is it just that now all discrimination is gone? France has more female physicists than America does; are French women more “innately” interested in physics?
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But surely this was Sommers' point: How will we ever be able to talk about sex differences in an interesting way if we're not allowed to study them? If the subject is an academic taboo, then the same old cliches will just live on for another generation. Or ten generations.
And the Ahmadinejad comparison is actually quite interesting. I hated the fact that Columbia invited him, hated the accompanying self-important blather about free speech in America - the real subject should have been free speech in Iran - hated the Iranian president's transparently political motives for being there. On the other hand, when he did actually speak, he sounded so utterly ridiculous - "there are no homosexuals in my country" - that he mortally damaged his own "I'm-the-real- democrat-here" propaganda.
By the same token, open discussion of intellectual differences between men and women might well prevent the idea of a naturally scientific male brain from scaring off brilliant young female scientists. If any of them are actually scared, which I very much doubt.
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Yes, Larry Summers should be able to speak at Davis. He's done his time (and lost his job). But I'm not ready to says he's a hero for telling it like it is about women and the sciences, which is what Sommers implies. During the fracas over his remarks in 2005, Meghan O'Rourke wrote this good piece for Slate. Her point was that when a university president--with all the cachet that job entails--talks about biological sex differences, he better do it with intellectual rigor and tact. Summers had neither really.
Of course, he's not alone. We all tend to degenerate into generalization and flippancy when we talk about sex differences. This morning one of my co-workers was worrying about a conversation he'd had with a mother at his daughter's school, who'd tried to talk to him about rearranging a playdate for his kid and hers. He hadn't known anything about the arrangement in the first place, and I said that most moms would know not to try to talk playdate with a dad. Which didn't exactly give him credit for trying to sort it all out, or encourage him to try again next time. This is why when my husband chides me for referring to "my kitchen," I say I'm sorry. At least I think I do.
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Christina Hoff Sommers has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ today
about the academic struggles ignited over former Harvard President Larry Summers remarks about why women are not better represented in the hard sciences. On one hand an invitation for Summers to speak at U.C.-Davis was rescinded because, a faculty petition said, he "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice." (Can we agree it's outrageous that Ahmadinejad is allowed to speak at Columbia but Summers can't speak at Davis?) On the other, researchers in brain science are actively exploring how male and female brain differ.
The other day I was talking to my sixth-grade daughter about school and I asked her who the smartest kids in her class were. She listed a bunch of boys. "What about the girls?" I asked. "There are lots of smart girls, but they're not the smartest. But most of the kids who at the bottom are also boys." This is exactly one of the observations -- males are over-represented at the lowest and highest ends -- that got Summers in trouble. (Of course I told her she could forget becoming president of Harvard.) Discouragingly, she also told me that while the majority of candidates for class office were girls, the boys got more votes for class president. This is because, she explained, "Girls will vote for a boy. But boys would never vote for a girl." (I will not extrapolate from her class to the nation.)
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It's almost as good as NASCAR for girls. (Via Feministing)
It seems the war between the genders is about to be resolved by the opening of Her Depot. Honest to God: It's Home Depot for women! Super-duper clean and no belt sanders or socketwrenches. It's just curtain ties and more curtain ties as far as the eye can see.
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For what it's worth, I think everyone will be heading over to a NASCAR race, but only after they get their immunizations.
We can only wonder what other cliches we'll be subjected to. How long before someone visits the Second Wives' Club to see if the gals are voting for Giuliani or Thompson?
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On Sunday, the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post went to the hair salon. Because this is where black women hang out--in particular, black women who vote in South Carolina. As both papers tell us once they've gotten past the scene setting, African American women make up 29 percent of the state's Democratic primary voters. Which makes them "a crucial constituency" in this early primary state (NYT). "Seriously, we have to go where the voters are." (WaPo, quoting Clinton's state director).
There's nothing wrong with this, exactly--cliches are cliches because they have some truth to them. So is it just the double coverage that makes the pieces seem sudsy? To be sure, there's a serious and sad theme in both of them: Black women are reluctant to support Obama because they doubt that a black man could become president, and because they fear for his safety if he were to be elected. That may help explain why Hillary is polling ahead of Obama among black women, at least according to the Washington Post. (The Post article, by Krissa Williams, cites a recent Post-ABC poll showing black women supporting Clinton over Obama 54 percent to 35 percent. The Times article, by Katherine Seelye, cites a poly sci professor who says that black women are equally divided between the two, and that a third are still undecided. My conclusion: It's early yet, the numbers are shifting around, and no one really knows.)
Here's what bothers me, even though it seems inevitable: In both articles, the central question is whether black women will vote their gender or their race. As Williams puts it explicitly, "Do you identify with Obama because he's black or Clinton because she's a woman?" This framing I find depressing. I know, I know, race and gender matter in politics. And I also know that this is the first presidential election in which a woman and a black man have a real crack at winning the nomination. And yet it irks me that no one is going to head over to the cliche place in South Carolina where white men hang out (the gym? Home Depot? a NASCAR race?) and ask them whether they're voting for Clinton because she's white or Obama because he's a man. The essentializing only applies selectively.
Or maybe it's all about the thrill of hot irons and hair weaves.