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So the American public has sounded off—and the stank-face has it! The "angry" Michelle Obama is oddly compelling to some of the average men and women surveyed—the counterintuitive, apparently gender-neutral enjoyment of a spanking speaking. I can't help but have many opinions on Michelle Obama, which range from praise for her double-dipping in home life and work life, her evasion of ready-made racial categories for black women (Mammy or Jezebel?) to distaste for her meta-modeling of a White House victory garden. But oh man does Stanley Crouch have an opinion. From his piece on The Root today:
Michelle Obama is much more than the superficial assessment of being a “real” sister or “too real,” which is usually attached to some sense of pathology and deprivation. Every background contains stupidity and evil, and no one seeking to understand the troubles and the mysterious aspects of human beings should ever forget those facts of life. It is quite clear that this is not a bitter woman, and it is just as evident that she has forgotten nothing. She embodies that quality of deep Americana essential to what got us through slavery and all of the tribulations that followed it until the votes were counted on Nov. 4, 2008.
She is both brilliant and down home, free of the solitary confinement of ethnic nationalism and low expectations for the nation. Like her husband, Michelle Obama embraced the deathless presence of the bitter and the sweet in both human life and our national history. That embrace retooled American patriotism and established a maturity that was not expected in our time of protracted adolescence and overstatement.
Above all else, the first lady has done everything exactly her way, never seeming to hide her heart behind a pit bull exterior, which is the crucifix of the contemporary female for whom respect arrives with far more regularity when the tool used to beckon it is a cold, cold bark.
OK, get through it. Now: I like Crouch’s embrace of Obama’s embrace of the sweet and sour, the contradictions that come with making it to the middle class in a place where the black middle class came to make it; of going to a great school (and enjoying every advantage that comes with it) at a time when faces like hers were few and far between; and of being the closest thing America has to a real-life princess at the same time that Disney is getting around to its ragin’ Cajun version.
I accept that the global public is coming around to the “pit bull exterior” they so disliked during the 2008 campaign—but am convinced that there is a meaningful difference between affection and respect. A barking woman (and let's not forget, bitches bark) may be respected, but she doesn’t elicit the warm sentiments Crouch feels toward Michelle. Rather, I think that public adoration of Obama (rather like the self-styled “fighter” Hillary Clinton) is still leavened with a little bit of fear. Would Obama prefer pure affection? Perhaps—though fear is good for the eat-your-vegetables business of being FLOTUS.
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Hanna, the counterpart to your post about the dangers of prostate screening appeared in today's New York Times—a story about whether annual mammograms may be doing more harm than good. This isn't the first piece I've read that questions the mammogram orthodoxy. There's no argument that finding a potentially fatal breast cancer can save a life. But the skeptics say that many, many woman who have indolent cancers that would never progress are forced into surgery and chemotherapy. The problem is that medicine cannot sort the dangerous tumors from the relatively benign ones (and who'd have thought we'd hear that some cancers are better just left alone?). The piece ends with an expert in health risk saying having mammograms or not having mammograms are both reasonable choices for women to make. That's helpful!
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Madonna wants to adopt another Malawian child. And according to news reports, she's picked Mercy James—or maybe she was offered the little girl by a country grateful for the millions Madonna donates to care for other needy children.
Here's the problem: Mercy's grandmother wants to bring her home too, according to the London Times, which reports:
Lucy Chekechiwa, 61, Mercy's grandmother, described Madonna's interest in her granddaughter as "stealing". "Why doesn't this singer pick other children? It is stealing. I want to go to court, I won't let her go," she said. Mercy has been living in an orphanage and Mrs Chekechiwa claimed it had been agreed the child would go to her when she reaches the age of six. Mercy's 18-year-old mother died five days after her birth, according to The Sun.
Orphanage is the confusing word here. Few Westerners understand that in much of Africa and Asia, what we call "orphanages" are actually boarding schools for poor children—places where extremely poor families in temporary distress drop their children off for food, education, and shelter, and then they bring the children home when things get better. Offering to house these children temporarily and then selling them for international adoption (er, "accepting donations" in exchange for adoption) is one of the common ways of defrauding poor birth families out of their children. (Need I say that not all internationally adopted children are illicitly acquired? But hundreds, and more likely thousands, are—and however large or small the proportion of the total, it's too many. Find more documentation on the extent of the problem here.)
Is it OK to swoop into a country and take someone else's child just because you're rich? Is wealth all it takes to have a "better life" ... or might it matter that you get to stay with the family you already know and love? Madonna's not alone in what she's doing, although she is unusual in knowing there's a family that wants Mercy back. Save the Children and other human rights groups want her to back off. She is setting a dangerous example, leading more Westerners into a "humanitarian" mission that is anything but.
Ethica, an American nonprofit that advocates for ethics in adoption, has launched a fundraising campaign to help Mercy stay home with her family. According to Ethica, Malawi's average annual income is $160. Ethica's goal is to raise $2,240—an annual salary for her grandmother until Mercy reaches adulthood—so that she can stay home. You can donate here.
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A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe:
I have to disagree with you, Jessica, on the idea that college admission boards favoring rich kids is not a problem. There are already plenty of ways in which the children of deep-pocketed parents have a leg up on their less-privileged counterparts. Starting as early as pre-K, wealthy families have the option of sending their kids to swanky private schools, where the combination of stellar faculty, name recognition, and powerful alumni networks paves the way for admission to top-notch colleges.
College students from wealthy families can also take unpaid internships in New York City and Washington, D.C., while their not-so-wealthy counterparts spend summers working jobs to cover living expenses that might not be so résumé-boosting. (I'll openly admit to being one of the former; I get to intern for the XX Factor this semester while many of my classmates must dedicate those out-of-class hours to paying gigs.) There's also the more extreme example of some parents buying internships for their kids, a phenomenon Slate's Tim Noah discussed here.
Jess, you ask in your post: "Is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?" But the recession's impact isn't limited to the biggest and best private schools. It's hitting everyone, from the Ivies to the smallest liberal-arts colleges. That means students in need of financial aid will have trouble getting into any school where money is tight—and that's every school. Sure, it would be great for the next wave of coeds not to have huge student loans to pay back when they enter the workforce. But if the alternative is no college degree at all, a few thousand dollars' worth of debt doesn't sound so bad.
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Meghan McCain. Bless her heart. From the side ponytail to the fake catfight, she had us all fooled. We thought she was a dingbat. In reality, she's clever like a fox. Writing a column for the Daily Beast? Everyone scratched their heads. She's so ... vapid. So ... devoid of ideas. Was there something we were missing? After her weak attempt to draw Ann Coulter into a "debate" that even Coulter wouldn't stoop to partake in, McCain has finally made her writerly mission clear. She's looking to get laid!
This week's installment reads like a masturbatory reverie in homage to (gasp!) our youngest (swoon!) congressman, Aaron Schock (insert "shocker" joke). Mr. Illinois is Mini-McCain's "GOP's House Hottie"! ZOMG, Megs, I am, like, so with you on this one! Frankly, the Schockster had me at that photo of him greased up by the pool, browner than fried pig fat, basking in the shade of a faceless young woman's hot pink ta-tas, but Meghan closed the deal with her 1,500-word essay on how he's, like, totally smart, and also supergreat, which is, like, superawesome for the GOP!!! Yay! Schock in 2012. Or whatever.
According to McCain, who only figured out who Schock is because those half-naked shots of him appeared on TMZ, Schock is, well, interesting. As she puts it: "Schock’s rapid rise to the national level is, if nothing else, interesting, especially given the serious soul-searching the Republican Party is experiencing." So, he's interesting because he's ... interesting? I am intrigued.
Apparently, McCain likes Schock because: a) he's young, and her dad was old and that was bad, so Schock being young is good, b) he's not a radical, just like Meghan!, which is good, because the Republican Party needs all the help it can get at this point, c) he totally understands the power of the Internet (see: half-naked photos), which can be bad, but which can also be good, or, as Schock opines of the American people with an eloquence that suggests McCain may have found her intellectual match: "They watch pop culture, but they are also voters." Obvs.
Clearly, I hadn't given Meghan McCain enough credit. It never occurred to me to use my platform here on The XX Factor to get laid by some guy in Congress. I'll have to work on that.
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Today the Washington Post published the results of a survey on Michelle Obama. Two months ago, people questioned her patriotism and said she looked angry a lot. Now, they love her. Her favorability ratings are at 76 percent, up 28 points since the summer. "The number of people who view her negatively has plummetted," Lois Romano writes. That's great, right? We like Michelle, and we're glad other people do too. And it should count as some species of miracle that America (not to mention the world) is in love with a strong black woman. So why is this survey making me uneasy? More specifically, why is it making me feel like I live in 1967? (the year Guess Who's Coming to Dinner came out?)
Maybe it's these individual testimonies Romano pulls out of the survey. From a 34-year-old white woman:
She definitely has this black woman's attitude. ... White girls have more insecurities, which is why they care more about being ingratiating. I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- I like that about her -- but she's just a very strong woman and that can come off as condescending.
Or from a Colorado independent:
I don't see the angry Michelle anymore.
Or is it the feeling I have that Michelle is putting on a show? Or that America can only handle one specific kind of black woman? Any ideas, ladies?
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Willa, you bring up a great point about the attempts and failures by movies and TV shows to capture courtship and romance as it actually exists in 2009, in all its technological glory. That Drew Barrymore speech from He's Just Not That Into You annoyed me, too, because it's Just Not That accurately getting at the issue. For me, the problem isn't fear of rejection via "different portals." When a conversation meanders from Facebook to e-mails to texts to phone calls, I'm not really all that conscious that the portal is shifting. The problem is that, because of all the portals, the bar for rejection has gone from pole vault to hurdle to metal beam lying on the ground. We've come to expect constant communication and instant responses, which means that five minutes of waiting for a reply from a guy (via whatever) can be agonizing. The other day, I actually instructed gchat never to show my boyfriend in my list of friends, because I couldn't handle seeing that green "available" ball next to his name without wondering why he wasn't responding to that e-mail I'd sent him a few hours earlier. (After a few minutes I realized I was being crazy. But you see my point.)
If these new movies and shows don't capture the way love has changed in the era of smartphones, are there better examples out there? Surely not the early attempts like You've Got Mail (does anyone actually read IMs aloud while typing them?). Quarterlife and Gossip Girl seem to understand how people actually use their computers and cell phones, but both treat all things social as if they are tied to a single Web presence, which isn't quite right either. The stars of One Tree Hill
are too incestuous to bother with dating sites and too up in one another's faces to need cell phones or e-mail. And on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs they're still using pagers!
Has anyone actually seen a movie or TV show that does this well—shows people meeting and communicating online or by cell in a way that doesn't make you cringe? Accepting nominations in The Fray!
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Willa, if you think dating in the Internet age is hard, try dating while autistic. This is a snippet from the autobiography of Quinn Bradlee, son of Washington royalty Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. (Here is a fuller excerpt.) The book is very moving on the subject of his troubles navigating relationships with women, particularly his powerhouse of a mother, and the average potential date. It's written through the eye of a mildly autistic person but speaks to the Everykid:
I seem to have the worst luck with women no matter how hard I try. I feel they're picking up some vibe from me that says I can't handle a relationship, or I'm not mature enough to be in a relationship. Whatever it is, I am apparently doing something wrong. I've taken and followed all of the advice my friends and my parents have given me about dating, but it hasn't quite worked out for me yet.
I have trouble with reading cues and I can never tell if girls like me sexually. If you're having an intimate friendly conversation and a woman is smiling and you're making her laugh, then you think that maybe it's possible to take it to the next level. But, typically, the day after that kind of thing would happen with a girl, I wouldn't hear back from her.
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A guest post from intern Margaret Johnson:
A few thoughts came to mind when I saw the video demonstration of Esquire's May "Mix 'N' Match" cover, which, according to AdAge, is "perforated to split into a flip book that will let readers play mix and match with the facial features of President Barack Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake." First of all, a video demonstration? I thought the point of Esquire was to teach men how not to look desperate. More importantly, is Esquire demeaning the president by making his facial features interchangeable with those of an actor and a pop musician? (Not that you aren't Obama-dreamy, George and Justin.) Or is this a claim that we need to focus on the man behind the image, which can be so easily sliced and reassembled to please or amuse the beholder?
And what's with the physical format of the flip book? This is the magazine whose October 2008 issue featured a digital cover. Those build-a-man flaps on the new cover seem decidedly analog to me. The gimmick is, of course, aimed at boosting newstand sales, which every magazine needs right now, but the editors of Esquire know that even October's über-gimmick didn't sell as many copies as Angelina Jolie did on the July 2007 cover or Johnny Depp did this January. Do the folks at Esquire think our attention spans have decreased to the point that we need our magazines to "do something" besides provide a good read? Are they afraid their stories alone are no longer enough to engage us? If so, is that about the quality of the stories, the quality of the readers, or just the fact that to sell anything in this economy you have to throw in some bells and whistles? The video demonstration is pasted below—does it make you want to buy the fancy flip book and play along?
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Though some have speculated that the recession might create more equality in the domestic sphere, apparently the recession means less of an even playing field when it comes to college admissions. According to the New York Times, in this time of plummeting endowments, colleges may be looking more favorably on students who can afford tuition without financial aid.
Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.
I wonder if this is such a terrible thing. Even without the recession, my generation is crippled with staggering debt, mostly from higher education. If there's no guaranteed reward of a moderately well-paying job at the other end, is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?
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Does dating ever change? That's the question hovering around ABC's newest dramedy Cupid, about a man who's either the god of love or a delusional crazy who thinks he is. The show, which premieres tonight, stars Bobby Cannavale as Trevor, the maybe-god on a mission to match 100 couples, and Sarah Paulson as Claire, the supremely grounded love interest/celebrity shrink/court appointed guardian with whom he trades witty banter, heartfelt epiphanies and mixed drinks. The show's central tension isn't whether Trevor's really Cupid (he's probably Cupid), but whether Trevor's faith in the big romantic gesture and love at first sight is a better—more powerful, more helpful, more successful—approach to relationships than Claire's level-headed belief in mutual respect and taking it slow. In other words, does a guy schooled on love and dating 3,000 years ago know more about matchmaking than an MD schooled by the Ivy League and Oprah? The show's answer is usually yes: Claire really needs to lighten up.
But dating has changed—not just in, erhm, the last 3,000 years, but in the 11 years since Cupid first aired. Fourteen episodes of the series, with Jeremy Piven (so charming once!) and Paula Marshall in the lead roles were broadcast in 1998 (you can watch them here). Except for a new cast and a move from Chicago to New York, Cupid has weathered its hiatus more or less intact—and that's too bad, because this little thing called the Internet took off in the interim and it really shook up how lovelorn strangers meet and interact with one another.
In both the original and current series, Claire runs a singles group where Trevor finds the heartsick men and women he eventually pairs off. In the old series that was an acceptable narrative trick. Now it's implausible. If Cupid were a mortal he wouldn't be bothering with small-fry gatherings, he'd be running a dating site. Maybe one called something like... Okcupid.com?
The cloying speech Drew Barrymore gave in He's Just Not That Into You ("I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my blackberry so I texted to his cell, so now you have to go around checking all these different portals to get rejected. It's exhausting") irked, but it was onto something. Technology has made dating, and the manners of dating, newly strange. Cupid gives all this fresh weirdness a pass because it's shackled to 1998, a not-so-distant past that's long gone. Cupid's not lacking all charm (it's made by the same guy who wrote Veronica Mars after all), but it's not nearly as interesting, or relevant, as it could be.
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Hanna, I can't get too hot and bothered about the Choose Life license plates in Virginia either. There's a confusing legal fight over whether these plates like these violate the First Amendment right to free speech, which as Dahlia explained way back in 2003, comes down to this:
To understand the free speech issue, it's important to clarify whether specialty license plates represent government speech or private citizens' speech. Why? Because there is no question that the government may speak in a partisan manner without violating the Constitution. The First Amendment applies only to government efforts to restrict private speech; it doesn't apply back to the state itself. This is why the state is perfectly free to tell you to stay in school, or drive sober, without having to broadcast the opposing viewpoint. States may have preferences for all sorts of messages. But if, on the other hand, the government opens a forum for private speakers—if it creates a park or builds a street where you and I are free to talk—it cannot be in the business of censoring some viewpoints while permitting others. This is the core of the First Amendment.
Lesson: If you don't like the Choose Life message, come up with a pro-choice one of your own to propose to Gov. Kaine and the Virginia legislature. If they nix it, then maybe you have grounds to sue. There's something odd about a government-issued Choose Life plate, but then there's something odd about zipping around with OPNWDE on the back of your car too, as the guys on You Look Nice Today have pointed out.
About the Kansas ultrasound law: It sounds like this one merely requires abortion providers to give women the option of seeing an ultrasound before the procedure. If so, ok. Most clinics do ultrasounds before an abortion anyway, to make sure they know how many weeks along the pregnancy is. Ten other states, by my count, have laws like this one in Kansas, and as Will Saletan has argued in Slate, why should women be shielded from accurate scientific information, which is what an ultrasound is?
But there's another kind of ultrasound law that's quite different in my mind. Under this sort of statute, which is the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, the state requires women to review the results of an ultrasound even when the patients expressly say they do not want to. This is creepy and invasive paternalism. The Oklahoma statute went so far as to provide that a woman could avert her eyes from the image on the screen. A law that has to grant such permission doth protest too much. More here.
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Jess, I one-up your post about Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius approving the ultrasound law with this one. Virginia Gov. and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine signed a bill that allows the state to sell "Choose Life" license plates and give some of the revenue over to "crisis pregnancy centers." These centers have always driven pro-choice groups crazy. In their eyes, these are places that draw in innocent pregnant teens and convince them to keep their babies. NARAL, for example, is furious at Kaine. But supporting the centers is not the equivalent of restricting the right to abortion. These are private groups that sprung up to counteract places like Planned Parenthood. Fair play, it seems to me. Secondly, there is a rich irony here in the wrath toward Kaine. A devout Catholic, he was one of the first to show that Democrats too could use their faith to win elections. He became a party hero when he was elected governor in a Southern state in 2005, and paved the way for the party's return. Now when the left realizes he wasn't kidding—he actually IS a Catholic. Well, we can't have that, can we?
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Last week Miss Universe visited Gitmo, and blogged about it here. This is not a joke. I highlighted my favorite bits.
This week, Guantanamo!!! It was an incredible experience.
We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big lunch and then we visited one of the bars they have in the base. We talked about Gitmo and what is was like living there. The next days we had a wonderful time, this truly was a memorable trip! We hung out with the guys from the East Coast and they showed us the boat inside and out, how they work and what they do, we took a ride around the land and it was a loooot of fun!
We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the Army were amazing with us.
We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting.
We took a ride with the Marines around the land to see the division of Gitmo and Cuba while they were informed us with a little bit of history.
The water in Guantanamo Bay is soooo beautiful! It was unbelievable, we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour. We went to the glass beach, and realized the name of it comes from the little pieces of broken glass from hundred of years ago. It is pretty to see all the colors shining with the sun. That day we met a beautiful lady named Rebeca who does wonders with the glasses from the beach. She creates jewelry with it and of course I bought a necklace from her that will remind me off Guantanamo Bay :)
I didn't want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.
I was back in NY on Wednesday and on Thursday I did some paper work at the office and went out for dinner. On Friday I flew to Miami for the weekend because I had a photo shoot for the magazine People en Espanol. So hopefully I might be a little lucky and have some time off to take the sun for a while :)
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Are the Republicans lining up for their first Obama filibuster? Dawn Johnsen, the president's pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, was supposed to come up for a confirmation vote in the Senate today. Instead, as Scott Horton alerts us, the vote was put on hold. This comes after every Republican on the Senate judiciary committee voted against her, except for Arlen Specter, who abstained. The Office of Legal Counsel is the sensitive branch of DoJ that advises the president on what's legal and what's not--past home to John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and the infamous Bush torture memos. What's at issue in Dawn's nomination—disclosure: She is a former Slate contributor and a friend—is her opposition to that past record and her determination to change it. If the right is going to go after her as they have, then the Obama administration and the left will have to step up in her defense. The NYT ran an editorial supporting her last week; now that seems like the opening drum roll in what will be a longer campaign.
Meanwhile, similar opponents seem to be testing the waters on going after Harold Koh, nominated to be Hillary Clinton's chief legal adviser in the State Department. Disclosure on this one, too: I have a fellowship at Yale Law School this year, where Harold was the dean until he went to D.C. last week for this appointment. The opening salvo against Harold is an attack by former Bush speech writer Meghan Clyne in the New York Post that's full of wild-eyed distortion. Perhaps the silliest but also sensational claim—and thus the one that Clyne leads with—is that Harold thinks that "sharia law could apply to disputes in U.S. courts." This supposedly comes from what one lawyer thinks he heard Dean Koh say to the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007. Honestly, this is the best they can come up with—one guy's account of Islamic takeover after drinks and golf? Let's get behind these lawyers, Obama and the left, and stop the trouble before it really starts.
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Earlier this month, Abby wrote about a Texas bill that would require doctors to give ultrasounds before performing abortions, and now pro-choice Kansas Gov. (and potential Health and Human Services head) Kathleen Sebelius has signed a similar bill into law. According to the New York Times, "The measure, which the governor signed on Friday, requires abortion providers who use ultrasound or monitor fetal heartbeats to give their patients access to the images or sound at least 30 minutes before an abortion."
The Times also quotes Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri CEO Peter Brownlie, who says that the Overland Park location of Planned Parenthood "already allowed women to see ultrasound images, but that few accepted the offer." Somehow I am unmoved by this legislation. I think that most women who are confident in their reproductive choices will not want to see the ultrasound and that giving them the option won't deter them from their conviction. What do you think, Slate women? Is this really a defeat for pro-choicers?
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Newsweek’s big lady-baiting package this week offers a detour from the catfighting between Princeton Nobelist Paul Krugman and the White House (What? You can call it that when boys do it, too!) in order to focus on the creeping “diva-ization” of America’s young women:
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that's got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras" look ordinary. "My daughter is 8, and she's like, so into this stuff it's unbelievable," says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. "From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities."
Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading.
The article’s premise, essentially, is that women will spend a lot of money (see infographic) on things that are judged by enlightened society to be feckless and unnecessary. Yet these imposed norms about beauty get less play than the footage of hens-in-waiting clucking about lip gloss.
Perhaps the sensationalism arises because the pressures on women are so timeless. While gamely revealing her own, er, elaborate, grooming habits, author Jessica Bennett makes the fair point that TV shows like My Super Sweet 16 “raise the bar for what's considered over the top.”
But I don’t think girls are any any more worried about sprouting crow's feet than they used to be. Rather, the 21st century has amplified the traditional idea that appearance can be perfected via externalities. Leaps in technological capacity—regarding both products and the marketing thereof—have increased the pressure on us all. Suddenly, young women can learn where to get liposuction, and Botox (themselves improvements over the Ice Age techniques of never eating and never aging) via text message, or Web advertisement. They can compare themselves to schoolmates and celebrities instantly on Facebook. When I was a 'tween, you had to wait for YM magazine to come in the mail before you felt bad about yourself.
As usual, the immensely talented Sarah Haskins nails the convergence of stupidity and modernity better than I do: “Products that use pictures of science” are clearly the culprit.
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This post comes from Tim Noah, a Slate-ster of the XY variety who has written extensively on health care in the United States, in response to our conversation about Natasha Richardson and socialized medicine:
The Great Debate about whether socialism (in the form of Canada's single-payer health care system) killed actress Natasha Richardson turns largely on the availability of CT scans. In the March 26 New York Post, a stateside physician named Cory Franklin wrote:
Richardson's evaluation required an immediate CT scan for diagnosis-followed by either a complete removal of accumulated blood by a neurosurgeon or a procedure by a trauma surgeon or emergency physician to relieve the pressure and allow her to be transported.
But Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts is a town of 9,000 people. Its hospital doesn't have specialized neurology or trauma services. It hasn't been reported whether the hospital has a CT scanner, but CT scanners are less common in Canada.
Two days later Max Harrold, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, acting on a hunch that at the very least Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts has telephones, phoned the radiology department of the hospital in that remote town to which the actress was taken after she complained of a headache. Do they have a CT scanner? They do.
I take Rachael's point that the United States has almost five times as many MRI machines per person as Canada, and about 1.5 times as many CT scanners. But this is not an unmixed blessing. In her excellent book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, Shannon Brownlee writes, "In cases involving a head injury, giving a patient an unnecessary CT can be almost as bad as not ordering a test and missing a brain bleed" because a CT scan can render a false negative and/or cause unnecessary delay in treatment. A common complaint about contemporary medicine is that doctors are so fretful about malpractice lawsuits and so enamored of medical technology generally that they over-rely on high-tech imaging at the expense of more reliable diagnostic methods. British doctor/blogger John Crippen writes:
These days, and particularly in the medico-legal climate prevalent in North America, it would be a brave doctor indeed who did not wait for the CT scan before drilling the burr holes. It would be a career making or career breaking decision. Few American doctors are brave. Defensive medicine is the order of the day. You cannot have a migraine in the USA without someone ordering an MRI scan.
Had this accident happened at base camp on Everest in a helicopter-blocking snowstorm, a doctor would likely have drilled. Had this accident happened in a ski resort forty years ago, before CT Scanners had been invented, a doctor would likely have drilled. Then a subdural/epidural haemorrhage was a clinical diagnosis. Apparently minor head injury, lucid interval, headache, sudden deterioration in consciousness, a dilated pupil ... all adds up to an obvious diagnosis.
Medical technology has deskilled doctors.
Also, she really should have worn a helmet.
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Here's my culture question of the week: Is it possible to put on a good production of Hedda Gabler in an era when women have so many choices available to them? Hedda, after all, is one of Ibsen's great female characters, a restless housewife with an existential streak; she roams the rooms of her villa wondering how to achieve freedom. (A much more interesting version of the Betty character on Mad Men.)
I ask because on Saturday I saw the Roundabout Theater Company's new production of Hedda Gabler, starring Mary-Louise Parker. And I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since, because Parker's interpretation of Hedda is at once incoherent and fascinating. She plays Hedda with a detached, ironic anomie that illuminates the play's dry humor but makes it hard to understand the character's motivations (particularly her choice at the very end of the play). Afterward, I was reading about the play on the Web and saw that David Edelstein asks a version of this question is his sharp New York review of the Parker production. He's on to something interesting: Today, I think, contemporary movies, plays, and art are much more likely to depict trapped women in one of two distinct ways: Either they are trapped by social circumstances, trapped in a non-progressive society (think Betty in Mad Men) or they suffer from some existential ennui. (Think, I don't know, something like 4.48 Psychose.) But you rarely see a female character in which these two issues are blended together... Or do you? In any case, I think it gets to part of what makes Hedda so difficult to produce today.
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Eve,
It makes me uncomfortable when individual medical cases become fodder for national debate, from Terri Schiavo to Natasha Richardson. It seems macabre to turn a family's private grief into a public debate. But since you brought it up ...
You make a valid point about helicopters: They are perhaps overused here. I certainly wouldn't want to use one in the event of non-life-threatening injuries.
But I had a different takeaway about what makes Natasha Richardson's death the fault of socialized medicine. The New York Post's article on this matter suggested that the first hospital that Richardson went to might not have had a CT scanner and that by the time she got to a hospital with one, it was too late. This blog post says that she did have a CT scan at the local hospital, but that she wasn't transferred to a larger hospital with a trauma center for another three hours.
Either way, it sent me a-Googling for numbers comparing the United States with Canada. During a conversation with a friend who'd just had an MRI, my friend told me that the MRI tech had told her there are more MRI scanners in Orange County, Calif., than there are in Canada. If that's inadmissible as hearsay, there is this: Canada in 2007 had 419 CT scanners and 222 MRI scanners. We have more than 10,000 MRI scanners in the United States and more than 6,000 CT scanners. Even if you account for the population difference (33 million people in Canada vs. 300 million in the United States), this country is outfitted better with high-tech life-saving medical equipment.
Did socialized medicine kill Natasha Richardson? I don't think we can say one way or the other, and I hope that her family is able to ignore the hubbub and grieve in peace. Health care in this country is far from perfect. But even with all the problems we have, this is just one reason that I'll take my chances in the United States over Canada any day.
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For months, or maybe it's years by now, critics of the Bush administration's wrong turn into torture have been musing that the officials behind it might soon be forced to stop traveling abroad. Behind this fond hope or fear, depending on where you stand, lies the threat of prosecution abroad for war crimes. And now the Spanish may oblige, courtesy of prosecutor Baltasar Garzon, who made his name going after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Garzon’s list of six high-level American officials is in line with much of the reporting, including ours at Slate, on who knew about and approved coercive interrogation—Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Jay Bybee, Doug Feith, and John Yoo. You can’t fault the Spanish for settling for the low-level bad apples, as the Abu Ghraib prosecutions here in the United States did. Though missing from the list are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush—suggesting that Garzon is bold, but not crazy bold.
Losing the freedom to travel abroad isn’t the more serious curtailment of freedom that some critics of the administration might wish upon these men. But it’s not nothing, either. It’s an embarrassment. It pushes these former officials off the world stage—now they’ll have to think twice about defending themselves before a European audience, even if they want to. The threat of prosecution is also, of course, a challenge to American dominance. At home, it will fuel the criticism of international treaties and institutions that in any way purport to give foreign courts jurisdiction over Americans. Abroad, this news from Spain is of a piece with international defiance of the United States over the financial crisis leading into the Group of 20 meeting this week. How has the United States lost its moral authority abroad? Let us count the ways.
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Pixies bassist, Breeders front woman, former high-school cheerleader and all-around indie rock icon Kim Deal was on NPR's Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me yesterday morning, because the show was broadcasting out of her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Superficially, Kim is a cautionary tale: She is a seminal figure in indie rock who even had a good deal of commercial success with the Breeders in the early '90s, only to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction and end up living with her parents back in Ohio. But listening to her girlish Midwestern twang on the radio yesterday, it's clear that Kim is not some pathetic example. She charmingly answered questions about squid sex and seemed in general good spirits. It's more proof that Cool as Kim Deal is a state of mind and not about the trappings of rock stardom. For you '90s-rock aficionados, here's a clip of the Breeders' biggest hit, "Cannonball."
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During the brief period when I wanted to be a photographer, Helen Levitt, who died Sunday, was my muse. She was the slightly underappreciated member of the great '40s generation of photographers; profiles always mention that she was "friends" with James Agee and Walker Evans, as if she couldn't stand alone. She always said, girlishly, that she was too shy and tech-phobic to be a photojournalist, although that's essentially what she was. She roamed the poorer neighborhoods of New York and captured what I always think of as the theater of hanging out. She loved to photograph people on the stoop wearing exaggerated expressions—crying or laughing so hard they look like they're faking it. Often "props" appear in her photos—a cardboard cutout of the president or a strange figure drawn on the street in chalk. Her many photos of children had none of the poster cuteness of Henri Cartier-Bresson's—something I imagine she tried hard to avoid because she was a woman. The effect is of New York as one giant improv, with a huge cast of characters, human and otherwise, and alternating moments of hilarity and grimness.
One thing she did better than any of the male masters is transition to color photography. Her contemporaries seemed scared off by bursts of street color they couldn't control but she just got better and better. In every photo in her book, Slide Show, it's hard to believe she didn't place that red balloon or those aqua shorts just so, but of course she never did. Unlike the men, she was happy to submit to the randomness.
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Sometimes in politics a sudden spewing of bile means that the target of the nastiness is doing something right—at least that’s how the negative attention recently directed Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party feels to me. Last Friday, a Daily Telegraph columnist referred to “the monument to absurdity that is Harriet Harman.”
Harman has been an MP since 1982, serving in a number of Cabinet positions since Labor took power in 1997. She has always come in for scorn: She’s a serious person whose earnest demeanor doesn’t win her points in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the House of Commons. A civil rights lawyer before she went into Parliament, she’s done a lot of work on social-justice issues that, outside the writings of Dahlia Lithwick, rarely lend themselves to laughs.
In the last month or so, though, the anti-Harman murmurs have become a clamor. With Gordon Brown traveling the world, she twice substituted for him at Prime Minister’s Question Time and was mocked and bullied both times. Of course, mockery and bullying are the prevailing tone of PMQ, largely because of the old boy’s club atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament. In his (not terribly kind to Harman) Guardian review of her March 4 PMQ appearance, Simon Hoggart described the Tory opposition acting like “playground bullies [who] had caught the whiff of [Harman’s] victimhood.”
Harman is certainly not blameless—she made some unwise populist comments about banker Sir Fred Goodwin, whose remarkably generous pension plan is more or less the British equivalent of the AIG bonuses—but I suspect the negativity has more to do with Gordon Brown’s sinking popularity. The bookies have Harman as the favorite to succeed him, so, for the ambitious members of her party she is now a serious rival. Apparently, she tends not to brief against her parliamentary colleagues, which means she’s no favorite of political journalists.
But take a look at the video of the March 4 PMQ. When William Hague, her main opponent for the day, brought up Harman’s political ambitions, the Guardian’s Hoggart described her zinger-less response to Hague’s taunting as being made “in the tone of a girl reprimanding her little brother for saying ‘poo.’ ” It’s true that after sitting stone-faced while her fellow MPs indulge in shoulder-shaking laughter at her expense, she simply stands up and launches into a rather dull description of the government’s ideas about “mortgage support.” But these days, isn’t helping people stay in their homes more important to most people than political infighting? When ordinary voters see videos like this, I suspect they’ll relate more closely to earnest Harman than to an entertaining bully like Hague.
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Last night I went to the pharmacy to see if I could pin down something that would speak to Abby's worry that Plan B might change teenage sexual behavior if/when it becomes available OTC to 17-year-olds. That would be the price. I knew the morning-after pill was expensive, and it's been my assumption that a contraceptive for which teenagers have to shell out a lot of money is not a contraceptive that is going to radically change teenage lifestyles. Turned out it is even more expensive than I thought: $49.50, according to the CVS pharmacist leaning discreetly toward me at the "consulting" alcove. "For a single dose?" I kept asking, my voice getting louder so that the man in the other alcove began to look alarmed. One might argue that the real danger of the morning-after-pill is that, at half the price of a pair of Uggs—OK, a third the price—teenagers won't use it at all. It's a little less expensive in some other stores, I think, but not much.
I've always thought Plan B is an important addition to the contraceptive array, because it does something no other pill or device does: contracept after the fact, rather than before. It's the only contraceptive that can stave off unintended pregnancy after a mishap has occurred, forestalling a lot of difficult decisions. This seems distinctive and invaluable—maybe especially for teenagers. The younger a girl is when she has sex, the more likely the sex is coercive rather than consensual, so younger teenagers might have particular need of this. If they can get that kind of money.
But I should also say that the pharmacist provided a gloss that might revive Abby's concerns. When I told her I was writing about girls younger than 18 having easier access, she said, "I think a lot of them are already getting it." She said she sees a number of males 18 and over buying it for their younger girlfriends, "sometimes more regularly than I would like." She thought it would be better if the girls got a prescription for the pill. When I voiced surprise that young men would pay $50 over and over for emergency contraception, she said maybe they were old enough that it didn't seem so much. I am way older than they are, and that sticker price certainly gives me pause. I think it would be interesting to report out how the price affects use.
As for Gardasil, like Megan I am bemused by the fact that sex educators and public health experts worry less about promiscuity among boys. In a way, boys have always seemed to me more vulnerable than girls. If a girl gets unintentionally pregnant, she, at least, has some control over the outcome. If a boy gets a girl unintentionally pregnant, he has none. I'm not saying he should have control, but the consequences, for him, are profound. Maybe that's why those 18-year-old boys are paying big bucks for those pills.
In answer to Jessica's question, I'm not sure whether Gardasil should be mandatory. I am not yet convinced that it should. I do have a problem making it mandatory too young. And I think that doctors who administer it should have some training in how to talk to the really still quite young children they are thinking about administering it to. As the parent of kids who have just recently survived their yearly dose of Family Life Education, I have always believed in erring on the side of too much information: When they come home looking shellshocked I listen, explain, correct, commiserate, whatever. But my frankness is nothing compared to the gory detail that one pediatrician went into when my daughter, who was barely older than 12, went for her last checkup. The doctor brought up the topic of Gardasil and when my daughter asked what it was, I was prepared to say simply that it is a shot that can prevent cervical cancer, which seemed to me, as her parent, really all she needed to know just then. But helpful Doc took this opportunity to go into an excruciating level of detail about genital warts, multiple sex partners, and how it would be good if you were always monogamous, but we all know how things work in reality, and my daughter's eyes kept getting bigger and more horrified, and I wanted to take one of those vaudeville crooks to TMI Doc's neck. I kept expecting the good doctor to add something like, "And then there are the nights when you get so drunk you don't even remember his name in the morning."
It's true that all these good innovations do have unforeseen consequences, in the case of Gardasil the possibility that young girls given the vaccine may end up scarred, in other ways, even as they're being protected. Their mothers, too.
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Jess, I'm glad you brought up the Gardasil news. I'm amazed (if not surprised) by how different the rhetoric surrounding boys getting it is. A while back, I wrote about the totally bizarre idea that an HPV vaccine for girls would somehow promote promiscuity. As you may remember, this was the conservative critique opponents of the HPV vaccine: Having one would turn girls into sluts, and even allowing your teen daughter to getone somehow besmirched her purity. Never mind that according to the National Cancer Institute nearly 3700 women die a year of cervical cancer, which sometimes develops from the HPV virus; implicit in the opponents' critique was the idea that it was only "loose" girls who got HPV. (And I guess they don't matter as much. Or, serves them right.)
What was so strange was how the conservative firestorm somehow ignited another kind of anxiety, one more typically associated with crunchy liberal types: namely, vaccine anxiety. When Gardasil began to be administered, there were widespread reports of group fainting fits among the girls who received it. And so even liberals began to wary about the drug. I can't help but feel that the liberal anxiety grew out of the conservative one, partly because teenage girls, so quick to internalize external cues, were picking up on the fact that this particular vaccine had...drama at the heart of it. Every vaccine produces a few adverse reactions in those to whom it's administered; but in this case, those adverse reactions were being magnified, it seems, by the reactions of parents primed to be nervous about the vaccine, and by suggestible teenage girls who (in some cases, at least) had more of a psychosomatic response than a purely physical one.
The libertarian in me at times resists the idea of making any vaccine mandatory. But this vaccine will save women's lives. Cancer is not pretty. And it would be awful if our collective squeamishness about female adolescent sexuality meant that this vaccine never became as effective as it could be. To me, the great irony is this: We have been trying to come up with vaccines for cancer for decades. We have spent millions of dollars doing so. Now we found one. And no one wants to use it. Is teen sexuality that scary?
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Has anybody else been picking up on the effort to create a comparative health care storyline out of the Natasha Richardson tragedy? A friend mentioned a couple of days ago that she wondered if Richardson's death from "talk and die" syndrome would have been prevented had she fallen sick in the United States, and then today, this PR e-mail from a think tank that promotes health savings accounts arrived in my inbox:
NEWS REPORTS REVEAL NATASHA RICHARDSON’S DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN PREVENTED WITH U.S. HEALTHCARE
Lack of Equipment Under Government-Run System Delayed Lifesaving Measures
Washington, DC – News reports of the skiing accident, medical treatment and eventual death of actress Natasha Richardson last week shed new light on the limits of the Canadian health care. The timeline of the afternoon’s events indicate that the lack of medical equipment—a trauma helicopter and basic CT scanning equipment at the local hospital—delayed the treatment that may have saved her life.
Well, it's certainly possible. But I'd hope the Natasha Richardson Proof—the Canadian health care system didn't work perfectly for Richardson, ergo it sucks—doesn't become some major PR tactic during a health care debate, because it's a serious case of missing the forest for one tree.
A trauma helicopter might have helped Richardson, but on the flip side, in the United States such helicopters are generally way overused, in part because they're profit makers and because the burden of their costs is distributed in such a way that it isn't appropriately felt: This past September, a Medevac chopper crashed in Maryland, killing three personnel (including one ambulance volunteer, a gig I've done) and one of the two wounded girls it was transporting from the scene of a car crash. Both girls originally had non-life-threatening injuries. "We've just gotten into a situation here in the United States where we think that the helicopters are a panacea," an emergency medicine researcher told the press after the accident. The September crash, sort of the reverse image of the Richardson incident, could be considered an event in which the overabundance of medical equipment killed.
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I can't really say how I came to be reading a recent journal article on "discourses between physical, legal and linguistic frameworks impacting on the New Zealand public toilet." As it turns out, the culture surrounding illegal sex in New Zealand's public bathrooms—known as "bogs"—is full of terrific linguistic subterfuge. Here's a work-safe bit of "bogspeak" from midcentury:
A lockable door was known as a brandy latch, but the door itself was called a trade curtain. A nanti bog was one that was ineffective for cruising. Nochy and sparkle bogs described public toilets that were cruised at night or in the daylight respectively. A bog that had its lights broken to provide some security of darkness at night was called a nochy bog.
"Sparkle bog" sounds like it ought to be the name of a literary magazine. Bogspeak has since evolved into textese (n2 str8 act blks), and the Internet has encouraged the emergence of a written language alongside the older oral locutions.
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There's an interesting profile in this weekend's New York Times Magazine (it's not online yet) of playwright/screenwriter Neil LaBute. You get the impression that press-wary LaBute resigned himself to being interviewed because his latest play, reasons to be pretty, debuts next week, yet the resulting piece is, well, creepy. I'm sure many find LaBute and his work to be creepy already, but I've been a fan. I loved In the Company of Men, a heartless tale of two men who trick and seduce a woman, not for its cruelty but because its fundamental truth was about cruelty, something that seemed to escape the scores of viewers and critics who dismissed it by deeming it misogynistic. I've found his depictions of manhood, how complicated it is to be a man, some of the best discourses on the subject. Your Friends and Neighbors took his vivisections of relationships one step further; in LaBute's reality, nobody wins—regardless of gender, we're screwed equally. In the Times profile, though, LaBute comes across as a strange mix of one-note and enigmatic. First, he appears to be elusive about his Mormon upbringing, his maybe divorce, his estrangment from his children. When his profiler attempts to go deeper, LaBute balks at telling his own truth.
Then LaBute stopped. ‘‘I don’t want to talk about that,’’ he said. ‘‘And I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’’ (Later, LaBute e-mailed me through a publicist and said that if I didn’t mention his wife or kids or religion or misogyny that he’d tell me ‘‘a doozy of a childhood (personal) story that nobody knows about.’’) LaBute stood up and said: ‘‘I have to go. I’m tired of answering questions."
In the end, we never get LaBute's personal story. And maybe that's for the best, leaving us to experience reasons, "a love story about the impossibility of love," at face value, minus the psychobiography of its creator. Or maybe LaBute has something to hide. Reasons director Terry Kinney suggests LaBute is equal parts the misogynist men of which he writes and the deaf girl from In the Company of Men, their brokenhearted victim.
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With all this talk about OTC birth control, we've ignored another recent story about reproductive health: the news that Merck is trying to peddle Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, to boys. According to the Washington Post, when Gardasil was initially recommended for girls as young as 9, the argument against it focused on promiscuity and whether or not the vaccine would encourage girls to have sex. "Now the vaccine's maker is trying to get approval to sell the vaccine for boys," according to the WaPo, "and the debate is focusing on something else entirely: Is it worth the money, and is it safe and effective enough?"
It makes sense to give boys the vaccine as long as its safe, as they are carriers of HPV even though it primarily affects women's health. However, Merck is also lobbying for Gardasil to become mandatory for school attendance for girls—something that gives conservative organizations like the Family Research Council palpitations. "We do not oppose the development or distribution of the vaccine," the FRC's Peter S. Sprigg tells the WaPo. "The only concern we have is about proposals to make vaccination mandatory for school attendance. It's a parental rights issue." So I ask you ladies, should the administration of the vaccine be left to the parents? Or is HPV a public health nuisance on the level of measles and should Gardasil be mandatory?
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A trailer (see below) for the upcoming film of Where the Wild Things Are is out on the Web, and while I know the world has bigger problems, watching it infuriated me. I don't want a real-life Max, who goes to school and has a backstory! I especially don't want to see his face while he peers at his parents kissing in their bedroom! Nor am I moved by the 2009 special-effects version of Maurice Sendak's 1963 monster illustrations. Why did Hollywood have to come for this short poem of a children's book, which I'II bet many of us know by heart?
The magic of children's literature is the magic of imagination, of making up the visual renderings and actions of the characters for yourself. I know that some books are filmmaking candy, and to the inevitable screen version of Harry Potter I am resigned. I'll even concede that once in a while the movie or TV version of a kids' book augments the original, though for me these exceptions are usually cartoons, like The Hobbit. (And no I am not pleased that there seems to be a real-life version of that one in the works.) But do the imagination thieves in Hollywood really have to rob me of Max? All I want from him are the few words Sendak gives him. No more.
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Vampires have been done to—undeath?—this year, and most people have probably quenched their neck-blood thirst with True Blood, Twilight, and Let the Right One In. But as a longtime Buffy fan and a lover of all things CW, I can't wait for the new drama Vampire Diaries, which I just read some buzz about. As vampireophiles know, all mortal actors get about 50 times hotter when playing a vampire. (Was anyone else shocked to see James Marsters looking all drawn and old in P.S. I Love You—a mere shell of the sexy, leather-clad non-man he was as Spike?) So the combination of Ian Somerhalder (blue-eyed Boone from Lost) and Zach Roerig (sexy cowboy from Friday Night Lights) is almost too sizzling to imagine. Willa, do you have any inside info on what to expect?
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In all the XX Factor rejoicing of making Plan B available to 17-year-olds, no one has mentioned one peep about any of the possible consequences this change could bring about to high school sexual culture—we are talking about juniors and seniors in high school here, not adults, after all. Judge Korman's ruling is certainly a triumph of "science"—in the sense that there's no known greater physiological harm to 17-year-olds vs. 18-year-olds taking the drug. And from the research I've done, I haven't been able to find any distinct scientific reason that the limit is 17 and not 16 or 18—in fact, Judge Korman implied that the drug should be available to even younger women.
By definition, most of the legal age limits the government imposes are arbitrary in a scientific sense, but less arbitrary from a cultural sense. Why 16 to get your driver's license? Why 21 to drink? Why 65 to qualify for Medicare? Sure, there are basic principles that dictate the ballpark age-range for laws, but there's nothing usually medically or psychologically magical about any of those numbers. To me they're more a reflection of our cultural expectations and traditional chapters of American life.
So in this case we're talking about a law that takes control away from parents' rights to be involved in the lives of their not-yet-legal-age children. How you want to live your life once you're an adult is one thing, but laws like these make sex something completely private and of little physical consequence for high schoolers! I get that there's nothing "scientifically" wrong with this—but science is hardly the final promoter of happiness and mental health. So while Emily and Kerry seem to think the Plan B ruling is something to celebrate, I can't help but think that having easy access to this drug is going to have a serious impact in high school culture—and not necessarily in a way that empowers and encourages teenage girls to become confident and successful women down the road.
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In her first trip to Mexico as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton put some of the blame on us for the drug violence that is ravaging Mexican society and now spilling over the border. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," she said. Ain't that the truth. I wish this meant that the Obama administration was going to consider decriminalization as the most obvious solution to this failed drug war. You'd think we would have learned from Prohibition that making illegal the human desire to take the edge off is bound to fail. You'd think the billions of dollars spent on this war and all the lives lost to violence and incarceration would have taught us that. But I'm sure there is no political will to change the institutionalized insanity of our drug laws, whose perverse incentive has been to create these criminal cartels.
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Emily, thanks for the link to that meta-analysis in cautious support of over-the-counter birth control. For what it's worth, I certainly didn't mean to imply that annual cancer screenings are a waste of time. I am arguing that doctor's visits made solely for the purpose of obtaining permission to access a relatively safe form of contraception are pointlessly and harmfully burdensome. I've had to make quite a few such visits, in part because I move frequently and am incapable of getting an overworked doctor on the phone with an understaffed pharmacy. It's possible that I am overgeneralizing from my own deeply annoying experiences.
I've lived in countries where the pill is kept behind the counter and would be more than happy with such a compromise. But the FDA, unlike its counterpart agencies in England and Canada, only very rarely considers this third option due to complex regulatory barriers. (When the FDA rejected OTC status for Merck's Mevacor, for instance, several panelists said they'd be comfortable with the drug as it is sold in British pharmacies; in other words, behind the counter. They weren't given such an option, so the panel overwhelmingly voted down the application.) It's not clear that the FDA even has the authority to create a third class of drugs. But thanks in small part to Plan B, it looks like our binary classification system might be changing.
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Today is a bad one for the lipstick level: first is news that despite its reputation for trendy cheapness, H&M profits fell 12 percent this quarter. According to Women's Wear Daily, H&M blames the profit plunge on "currency fluctuations."
Even worse is this human interest story from CNN, about a recently married woman who moved in with her ex-husband to make ends meet. It sounds like a nightmare on paper, but CNN makes Nicole Thompson-Arce's relationship with her ex, Craig, actually sound sort of sweet: "The ex-husband hasn't dated since the divorce. He said it's because he's been focused on work and taking care of the kids. Thompson-Arce, however, said that she and her husband are forever trying to get Thompson on the dating scene and want him to meet someone special."
One silver lining is that weekly jobless claims fell more than expected last week, to 646,000 from 658,000 the week before that. However, claims are still at their highest since October 1982.
This week's lipstick level is 15. Things are pretty bleak when shantytowns start making a comeback.
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Just when you thought it was safe to channel surf, it turns out HBO is making a movie out of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal of yesteryear. The title? The Special Relationship. Special, indeed. The casting is just plain odd. Dennis Quaid is Wild Bill. Hillary Clinton? Julianne Moore. Apparently, the film focuses less on Slick Willy's hijinks and more on the president's relationship with Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen), which devolved purportedly due to the sex scandal. Peter Morgan, who scored with Frost/Nixon, wrote the screenplay and is set to direct. Supposedly, Quaid beat out some actual A-listers for the role—Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins. I wonder if he truly eclipsed them or if the actors were steered away from taking the part of a man tasked with running the country who couldn't keep his hands off the help. Who'll play Lewinsky? Mia Kirshner? Megan Fox? Jessica Simpson? Nope. "Morgan has decided to use only archive footage of her culled from TV news bulletins and video of her closed-door testimony to Congress." Well, maybe the real Lewinsky will sell a few handbags out of it.
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An answer from Slate medical columnist Amanda Schaffer to my question about why the Pill is a prescription drug. Amanda supports, with caveats, Kerry's argument that oral contraceptives should be sold over the counter:
The downside risks of the pill (strokes, breast cancer) are pretty small, especially with newer formulations. And the upside of reducing ovarian cancer risk (as well as preventing unwanted pregnancy, of course), has led some researchers to argue for over-the-counter access; in fact, a meta-analysis in the Lancet from last year had an accompanying editorial making this case. The counterargument is that women who smoke or get migraines should not be on the pill, and a doctor's involvement might prevent that from happening. Plus, since women stay on oral contraceptives for long periods of time, it may be wise to have more medical oversight.
Amanda and I disagree with you, Kerry, that annual visits to the gynecologist are a waste of time. Breast exams, pelvic exams—that's trouble-catching time.
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Meghan, thank you for writing something about the death of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who killed himself earlier this week at the age of 47. I've been unsettled by this news all week but unable to think of anything to say besides: how horribly and irredeemably sad. To readers who grew up on the myth of Sylvia and Ted (and if readers have a tendency to mythologize Sylvia Plath, it's also because she mythologized herself, with maddening narcissism and consummate literary skill, in her poems and journals), Nicholas will always be the baby of Plath's brilliant final poems, the one whose "clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing." "I want to fill it with color and ducks/ The zoo of the new," she wrote in the poem "Child." Instead, her legacy to him was a lifelong struggle with depression, what the last lines of that poem call "this dark/ Ceiling without a star." "The pain you wake to is not your own," she assured her then-9-month-old in "Nick and the Candlestick." But, of course, it was: Our mother's pain is always our own. While there's no way of knowing whether Nicholas' depression was the result of nature, nurture, or both, it's difficult to imagine a more painful early childhood: Assia Wevill, the woman Ted Hughes left Plath for and who would raise Nicholas and his sister for six years after their mother died, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter in a grotesque copycat suicide/murder six years after Plath's death.
Like you, I found the New York Times' roundup of tributes to Plath surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous (including, for me, Elaine Showalter's, which argues for Plath's inclusion in the "they-died-too-young" literary pantheon alongside Keats without giving a sense of what her contribution to 20th-century poetry actually was). I've always thought that, had Plath lived, she might have become one of the great poets of motherhood. Her poems about pregnancy are delightful (and unexpectedly playful for a poet we associate with suicide and despair), and her description of the experience of childbirth in her journals, which you mentioned in a post some time back, is the least sentimentalized and most gripping I've ever read. The awful news of her son's death seals the deal: The poet who could have been the bard of maternity (among the most under-represented of all human experiences in literature) will now be remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of maternal depression.
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Condi Rice appeared on the Tonight Show last night as her first post-White House event (click here to watch), and the always affable Jay Leno asked her some semi-political questions. Leno inquired about George Bush's historical legacy ("History has a long arc, and what is popular today and today’s headlines are rarely the same as history’s judgments") and whether or not she'd be giving the Obama administration public advice ("We owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it"). Rice gave an utterly dignified and commendable interview for a general interest show. Of course, Leno's not pressing her on the torture meted out at Gitmo, but that's not really his job.
"I am so happy to get up in the morning, read the newspaper, and not think I have to do anything about what’s in it," Condi said last night. But as details of the torture tactics continue to emerge, reading the newspaper may not be so pleasurable, and history's judgment may not be so benign.
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I love studies that unravel the mysterious predilections of children. Especially when they remind us that young minds aren't mini versions of older ones. This new study, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, explains why when you tell your preschooler 10 times to put on his coat before he goes outside, he won't, and then he'll complain that he's cold. The previous assumption, the researchers said, was that kids were doing what adults do—listen, take in information, use it to plan—and just doing it badly. But this study suggests that they're doing something different. They listen, store what they hear, and then only use it after an experience (like being cold) triggers them to. Eureka. The problem isn't "in one ear, out the other." It's in one ear and stored up for later. Like a squirrel.
The finding even comes with advice for parents about how to hound their kids more effectively. From Science Daily, quoting lead researcher and psychology professor Yuko Munakata:
"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom.' "
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I imagine a lot of you saw that a few days ago, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide. Today, the New York Times has devoted a short commentary section to answering the question "Why the Plath Legacy Lives." To answer that question, they've wrangled short pieces from smart commentators like Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). Of them all, only Elaine Showalter begins to answer the question by really addressing Plath's work.
Certainly Plath's honesty about suicide helps create a mythology about her, but it's hardly the whole reason readers are drawn in. Plath made being a woman an equal subject for the imagination as being a man, and she did it (mostly) without being didactic or ideological, unlike many of her peers. Plath's poetry is astonishing for its musical insistence; she was inspired by nursery rhymes (which she was reading to her children) to explore hard, repetitive rhymes as a way of creating meaning. Her poems about motherhood, particularly "Morning Song," capture the ambivalence of the mind that has been tangled up in the bodily reality of motherhood. In that poem, she speaks of standing "cow-heavy" in her floral nightgown looking down at her child, whose "moth-breath" has tickled "the flat pink roses" of the wallpaper. And she records an impermissible thought:
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
I have written about Plath for Slate here and here, and for Poetry magazine here, and I continue to think that Ariel, her posthumous book of poems, is one of the most important books of English-language poetry of the 20th century.
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Speaking of the silly, I think the fact that this story from today—about the popularity of candy shops during a recession—is the most e-mailed article at the New York Times Web site says more about public appetites for absurdist, sometimes funny, mostly groan-inducing trend stories during a recession than it does about candy’s allure in times of trouble. I, recessionista, myself bought some sweets recently—but not because pink Peeps make me remember the days when the Dow topped 11,000, but because it’s almost Easter, and man is that stuff on sale. (Also, just as a nod to an actual policy discussion: Corn syrup, subsidized, even/especially in a recession, is still cheap.) Back to the media criticism: Perhaps consumers are trying to escape by eating more junk food—but they're certainly reading more of the equivalent, too.
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On the occasion of daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful's 22nd anniversary (the little-recognized molybdenum anniversary) Entertainment Weekly has a slide show counting up super-couple Ridge and Brooke's many jaunts down the aisle. It's not necessary to know who Ridge and Brooke are to enjoy this list, since it perfectly encapsulates soaps' semi-heroic insistence on remaining absurd with or without prior knowledge of BRidge. Since 1990, the two have been the bride or groom in 19 weddings. For some of these weddings they married each other. For some they married each other's relatives. Some were completed, some were interrupted (by presumed dead wives and other inconveniences), and some took place on beaches. Ridge was shirtless for one, unless a lei counts as a top. All but the most recent (which took place in January 2009) have ended, usually in a divorce. (Sometimes you get married because you think you're carrying one guy's baby, but then it turns out to be his brother's, OK?)
Soaps are the television that time forgot. While the networks and, especially, basic and premium cable are churning out better and better shows, soap operas remain fundamentally the same. There have been some technological advances—Guiding Light shoots digitally now—but the plots are still overdramatic and ridiculous—a dead girl's doppelgänger just showed up on General Hospital. (Please don't ask me how I know this.) The form is hemorrhaging viewers because younger audiences just aren’t interested. I have a hard time imagining what soaps would have to do to attract new viewers in large numbers (not pretending marriage No. 12 is perfect and going to last forever and ever might be a start) and so suspect they won't be on daytime TV indefinitely. Laugh while you can.
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The Observer has an admiring piece on Eliot Spitzer's phoenix-like public image "resurrection." First came the Slate column. This week, there's a Newsweek byline, an interview, and a Nation nomination for treasury secretary. "[H]e says what he thinks!" Slate editor David Plotz crows. "[I]t's back-to-square-one time, and Mr. Spitzer seems to be bringing all of his Sisyphean strength to bear on the project," the Observer admires. "At rare moments, I’ll do my best to add to the public conversation," Spitzer demurs. What struck me as interesting was less this latest installment of a fallen politician's return from a sex scandal (yawn) but the contrast with the media's portrayal of his wife, Silda. The March issue of Vogue makes it more than clear how we're expected to see Mrs. Spitzer a year later: as a victim. "The survivor," the headline slapped next to her reads. I guess, in the end, it's all pretty typical. The public's initial stance of scorn at Spitzer's sexual transgression was just that—a show, designed by a public that wishes to perceive itself as above the very behaviors that its members partake in regularly. Meanwhile, Silda gets stuck in the victim rut, where America will keep her, if it has its way. If we had to perceive her any other way, we'd have to ask ourselves if we would do the same thing that she did—and, if we did so, if we were right in doing so.
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Hah, Jessica, thank you for posting that Meghan-McCain-as-goth-Betty-Boop TV clip. The thing I find the weirdest about McCain is that even as she flaunts her next-gen cred (telling Larry King she likes it when Republicans in their 40s and 50s bash her and encouraging the GOP to get with the 21st-century program), she's fashioning a personal image for herself that's oddly retro: the cute, bubbly, vintage-fashion-dudded (she's got a bit of a Felicity Shagwell look going) girl who can barely add and is all-over sweetly clueless about book-smart things. It's kind of political pundit meets I Dream of Jeannie.
Am I too harsh? It's funny how this whole persona was a lot more charming when it represented McCain's rebellion from being just another rigid, scripted, all-too-professional-and-poised candidate's child, like in this from-the-trail blog post I still remember from last summer:
On our way home we met a police officer whose last name was “McNutt.” It reminded me of "McLovin" in the movie, “Superbad.” It still makes me laugh!
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Emily and Torie, my grasp of the regulatory issues is imperfect, but it’s my understanding that a drug company would have to apply for over-the-counter status through the FDA. (I've never heard a single plausible medical justification for keeping birth control prescription-only.) There are various reasons why drug companies would not want to attempt this; the most obvious being that pharmaceutical companies can charge much higher prices for prescription drugs covered by insurance. Companies would also see resistance from gynecologists, who rely on their prescription powers to keep women coming back for annual appointments.
Torie, I understand your concern about insurance refusing to pay for OTC drugs, but it seems to me that your logic applies to every single drug that has gone over-the-counter, from Prilosec to Nicoderm. Keeping birth control prescription-only actually raises the cost for the poorest women—those without insurance who must pay retail at that the pharmacy counter and pay out of pocket for the doctor’s appointment required to get the prescription. When drugs go OTC the price plummets, so the cost to the consumer without insurance falls. Here's a blurb from a 2006 survey by the Pharmacy Access Partnership, a group that advocates for wider emergency contraception access:
Women said convenience, simplicity and affordability were their highest considerations when choosing their current contraceptive. Fifty-four percent of women also chose their method because it did not require a prescription. African-Americans (65%) were more likely to choose a method because it did not need a prescription, compared to Caucasians (51%) and Latinas (54%). Importantly, 20% of women said the cost of a visit to the doctor was an obstacle in obtaining a prescription contraceptive. Overall, 28% of women have had problems with obtaining a prescription for contraception, filling the prescription or getting to their supplies when they needed them. Women who had fewer resources to manage an unintended pregnancy (uninsured women, single women and younger women) were more likely to have experienced problems with obtaining a prescription for contraception.
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I, too, applaud the move to make Plan B available over the counter for 17-year-olds, but, Kerry, I have to raise one problem that could accompany making hormonal birth control OTC: insurance. Many insurance plans don't cover OTC medication, unless it's a special program intended to keep costs down, like providing an incentive for people to use a specific OTC heartburn medication instead of an expensive prescription drug that's not more effective. Insurance companies like the checks and balances of going through a doctor and a pharmacist before shelling out. Yaz, which you mention, costs about $60 per month retail, I believe, depending on the store, the state, etc. Planned Parenthood and other resources might step in to help, but those of us who already have high copays on birth control would feel the hit if we had to start paying full price. Considering the battles waged over getting insurance companies to pay for birth control, I can't imagine that many plans would be willing to alter their OTC policies to cover the an over-the-counter pill.
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Kerry, interesting point about making regular birth-control available without a prescription. I wonder what the medical reasons for classifying it as a prescription drug are—do you know?
In the meantime, I'm relishing Monday's Plan B decision as a rare fact-based inquiry and denouncement, by a federal judge, of the kind of monkeying around with science that we've long heard pervaded Bush agencies. Federal judges don't interfere with the decisions of federal agencies unless those decisions really, really have no legitimate basis—in legal-ese, they have to be deemed "arbitrary and capricious." This is what Judge Edward Korman concluded in his ruling kicking the Food and Drug Administration for its denial of access to Plan B (the morning-after pill that prevents pregnancy) to girls who are 17 as opposed to women 18 and older.
Because of the FDA's stubborn insistence on its arbitrary age-based distinction, the Plan B pill, which is not a prescription drug, had to be stocked behind the pharmacy counter rather than out on the shelves. And 17-year-olds, of course, weren't allowed to buy it at all. I hear you, Rachael, in wondering whether feminism is broad enough to include women who are pro-life. But making birth control harder to get is a whole different ball game to me. I understand that Plan B falls into a tricky in-between zone because it's post-sex, but I'd like to think we could draw the line on the side that helps the girls and women who want to take it. I only wish Judge Korman's ruling had come earlier, when it would have forced the Bush FDA to get its act together.
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Back during the ridiculous brouhaha over access to the morning-after pill, regulators compromised by making the pill available without a prescription only to women of 18 years of age or older. A federal judge, noting that this restriction is arbitrary and without medical justification, has ordered the FDA to review the policy and make Plan B available to 17-year-olds in 30 days. I imagine that the policy will change pretty quickly; you know things are looking up when the Washington Post has to go to Concerned Women for America to find some quotable pushback.
All of which allows me to climb astride an old hobby horse: Regular old birth control ought to be available without a prescription. Hormonal birth control meets all of the FDA requirements for over-the-counter access; Plan B, after all, is just a mega-dose of the pill. We've all heard stories of women being denied birth control by squeamish doctors and pharmacists; there is no reason such women shouldn't be able to grab stacks of Yaz off the shelf at Walgreens. The aggregate burden of all those pointless doctor's appointments and hourlong pharmacy waits is surely massive.
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Hanna: I was at a "cowgirl" bachelorette party in Texas this weekend, and everyone was talking about Michelle's gardening look. "Heels????" one asked, incredulously. "To hoe?" (Texas is the capital of stylish outdoor clothing: Cowboy boots and hats look good on everyone, but they're also practical.) She looked silly, I agree, but I'm with Dahlia: Let's give Michelle a break. She's gotta wear something.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure you're right the White House garden is just another instance of bourgeois locavorism. Apparently, many Americans hit by the recession are planning vegetable gardens, or so this piece reported. It noted "double-digit" growth in the number of vegetable gardens and reported that many seed catalogs "have run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers." Who knows, of course, whether those seeds will ever be planted.
I like the White House garden. And, in my eyes, it's not just another way of touting the so-called superiority of organic food you can buy at places like Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. Yuppie fetishizaton of organic food, by the by, has led to real, and dangerous, confusion of "healthy" food with "organic"—or expensive—food, according to this New York Times piece. By contrast, the garden underscores the fact that vegetables and fruit are healthy, wholesome, and available (in season) to many. Democracy at work!
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Looks like Meghan McCain is here to stay as a Republican pundit: She has a column out today in the Daily Beast, interviewing Bobby Jindal's wife, Supriya, and she was on Larry King last night talking about her party. It also looks like she's not doing anything to dispel those accusations of ditziness, as Meghan's interview of Supriya was one softball after another. First, Meghan discovers that Supriya excels at Sudoku Samurai and says in response, "Oh my gosh those are so hard! I can barely add! You do those for fun?" Then, Meghan proceeds to ask Supriya a series of questions about her early dates with Bobby, and in the intro she describes Supriya as a positive role model within the Republican Party. Couldn't Meghan have found a single positive Republican role model who was actually elected to office?
Anyway, here's a clip of McCain on Larry King last night, talking about the Republican Party's lack of leadership and her support for gay marriage while wearing a giant hair bow.
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Sometimes events occur that make me feel as though I live in a nation of strangers. My fellow citizens plunking down $24.8 million to see a Nicolas Cage movie (Def: A crummy action thriller in which the willfully hackish actor sports a thinning helmet of strange hair while simultaneously saving the world and confounding viewers who remember When Peggy Sue Got Married, Leaving Las Vegas, or even The Rock) is such an event. But that's exactly what happened this weekend when Cage's "the time capsule predicts the future!" thriller Knowing took the top spot at the box office, ahead of brotastic bromance I Love You, Man and Julia Robert's Duplicity. (Are we bummed that Newsweek guy turned out to be right or what?)
This is not the first time an obviously execrable Nicolas Cage movie has opened big (See National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets), so his success cannot be blamed entirely on the economy, which has been boosting Americans' already endless patience for shlocky films. No, some moviegoers must still really like this guy. I don't get it. He gives me the creeps. Not just minor that-person-keeps-giving-me-weird-looks creeps, but an Oh-lord-I-think-that's-half-a-cockroach-in-my-grilled-cheese creeps. In other words, Mega Creeps.
Cage, a once-serious, seriously weird, Oscar-winning thespian last gave acting the old college try in 2002's Adaptation and has since made much progress crafting a B-movie résumé Bruce Campbell would be proud of. What happened? His transformation, from caring about what he does to so obviously not caring about what he does, plus additional oddities like the hair and the fact that he named his son Kal El (Superman's birth name), adds up to a persona I find freaky and unsettling even while it's saving the world in escapist action movies. But, hey, $24.8 million don't have these same qualms. Can someone please explain?
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Emily and Jessica,
I was very interested in reading Sandra O'Connor's interview in the New York Times Magazine, and I wish she had elaborated more on why she doesn't call herself a feminist. I've never been comfortable identifying as a feminist, but neither do I like the implication that I'm anti-feminist. To me, abortion has always been something of a litmus-test on that front. If being anti-abortion means I can't be part of the club, well, so be it.
But it goes beyond that. Sure, I want women to have equal pay and equal access to education and jobs, and protection from violence and domestic abuse. Yet I still end up with the nagging feeling that feminists talk about women having more opportunities and choices available to them, but are mostly supportive only of those who make the "right" choices—having a career, for example—or focus on the right priorities. (I get a hint of this from Jessica's post, when she says that the pro-life movement and even the cardio-striptease phenomenon have "co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism.") The quest for universal day care, for example, ignores the fact that providing such programs for working families will doubtlessly punish with a higher tax burden those single-income families in which women have chosen to stay at home to raise the kids.
That does not mean I feel a need to be recruited or won over by a cadre of well-meaning feminists who want me to change my mind about how I identify myself. I'm quite content to live in not-quite-a-feminist limbo. So, Emily, to answer your question, maybe it doesn't matter.
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Emily, I've been mulling over your question all morning: Does it matter that Sandra Day O'Connor won't call herself a feminist? My gut instinct is that actions speak louder than words, and as a feminist I would vastly prefer better work policies for women than widespread embrace of the term. But I suspect that O'Connor's reticence to self-identify as a feminist is for different reasons than later generations' reaction to the word.
Though you say that Sarah Palin doesn't call herself a feminist, she actually flip-flopped on the matter: She initially called herself a feminist to Katie Couric but refused to label herself when interviewed by Brian Williams. She's even a member of a organization called Feminists for Life. I suspect that deep down, Sarah Palin does think of herself as a feminist, and that's precisely why I think women of later generations may be uncomfortable with the term: Its meaning has become completely muddled.
So many things have co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism—from the pro-life movement to cardio striptease classes—I wonder if women of generations X and Y are afraid to call themselves feminist because that self-definition is more confusing than illuminating. Sandra Day O'Connor may have been defining herself in opposition to the bra burners, but today's young women don't have such a clear-cut foil.
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Hanna and Dayo: Ouch. Imagine if Michelle Obama had been caught breaking ground on her victory garden in her mommy jeans and a plaid shirt. “What a Hag!” the headlines would read. “E-I-E-I-No!” She couldn't show arms. She couldn't wear pearls. So she opted to do what all women do when they have no good fashion choices: She wore plain, skinny, well-fitting black clothes and hoped her wardrobe would fade out behind the 23 fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School with their shovels and wheelbarrows and puffy coats. No such luck.
The Obama crop isn’t just slated to “delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries.” The plan is to send produce along to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen. This is a nice small lesson in stewardship and compassion that’s been spun as elitist and anti-feminist and inauthentic and out-of-touch because that’s how we talk about nice small gestures. Maybe there really is nothing to wear for those occasions on which one can do nothing right.
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Asked if she calls herself a feminist, Sandra Day O'Connor demurred to Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. That shouldn't surprise me—O'Connor is a rock-ribbed, ranch-girl Republican, even if she drove the right wing of her party crazy when she was on the bench. Still, her disavowal struck me as one of the more drily amusing examples of women who are pioneering, ball-busting feminist icons but not feminists. Maggie Thatcher comes to mind. Who else—Sarah Palin?
You could try to dismiss SOC's declining of the label as a generational tic brought on by the reflexive (though false) image of bra burning. But it's more likely that Justice O'Connor, ever timely, is giving voice to an enduring reluctance among moderates and conservatives to identify with the political movement to increase opportunities and equity for women, even if that's what their life's work, in fact, stands for. Is this just a tic, nonetheless—actions speak louder than words—or does it matter?
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Hanna, I agree in part with your assessment of the nation’s general judginess when it comes to feminism and FLOTUS fashion—but think it’s totally valid to critique Michelle Obama’s choice of attire when it comes to planting what’s essentially a victory garden for the nation.
In black boots, a black sweater, and the obligatorily cinched waist, Obama looked great, but absolutely unfit for the task at hand. I know plenty of women (myself included) who would rather wear a cute outfit than dungarees, especially when there are cameras around—but the posh outfit seemed only to underscore the posh surroundings and the sense that this vegetable garden was more photo op than a testament to the FLOTUS’ farming fetish.
Herbs from this garden will delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries and assorted diners at the White House. Maybe some of that lettuce will make it into the first daughters’ sandwiches. But this ain’t subsistence farming (see this intriguing NYT video essay for what a real victory garden looks like). So was the outfit a) a calculated middle finger to mores that expect a woman to have a green thumb? b) A naked push to look fab for history? Or, perhaps c) a glimpse of Obama as a model in her own public service ad campaign—dressed to the nines, as we expect mannequins to be—but selling a product she would never use? Maybe all three, but c) is anything but revolutionary.
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I've been in Britain for a week now and really should be accustomed to the idiosyncratic standards of the mainstream U.K. press, but nevertheless I was surprised to wake up Sunday morning to hear the announcement of reality-TV star Jade Goody's death lead the BBC newscast. (This on Radio 4, the Beeb's flagship "intelligent speech" channel.) A Monday-morning trip to the corner newsagent confirms that Goody has received the full Princess Diana treatment—Stephen Fry, whose connection to Goody seems to have been appearing on a chat show with her "a year or so back" provided a very convenient sound bite, calling her "a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks." All the tabloids devote their covers to the "news" of Goody's death, as do several of the broadsheets. (The Times relegated Goody to a small reefer in the margin of its front page, but it stuck with the prevailing mood of ghoulishness by splashing a photograph of Sylvia Plath with her baby son Nicholas under the headline "Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide.")
Although I grew up in a tabloid-reading British home, I'm shocked by the papers every time I come back here. The red-top tabs now seem to be pretty much devoid of news, with 95 percent of the paper devoted to stories about reality-show contestants, members of third-rate singing groups, and footballers' wives. And as the Goody treatment shows, the broadsheets are by no means immune. (Lest you dismiss the tabs as marginal nonsense, remember that the combined circulation of Britain's five "quality papers" is less than that of the Sun, the most popular tabloid.)
What seems weird, though, is that almost all the tabloid targets are female. Perhaps it's an odd corollary to the children's book phenomenon in which girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls: Male tabloid readers will happily flip through pages of fluff about pretty young female celebs, as will women readers, but readers with Y chromosomes won't hand over 30p for a paper full of stories about celebrity studs.
Of course, the American press isn't altogether immune, either. I notice that the New York Times has done more stories on Jade Goody than it has on Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that won 62 seats in the 2005 British election.
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This weekend, I sat through a couple of heated discussions about that photo on the front page of Saturday's New York Times, showing Michelle breaking ground for that vegetable garden on the South Lawn. The views divided roughly between: a) annoyed feminists, who said some version of: "enough with the happy shots of kiddies swinging and mom planting vegetables. What will they bring out next? The checkered apron? After all, in Chicago it was Michelle who wore the pants in the family." And then b) enviros, who said some verion of : "Cool! They finally got that vegetable garden on the South Lawn."
As for me, I'm mostly taken by the unspoken irony I read in the photo. Despite what readers of the New York Times think (and the White House, apparently), this urban locavore movement is something that's gospel among a small percentage of people who can afford to shop at the farmer's market (see example of excesses of movement here). Most people, I think, just go to Wal-Mart and plant pansies on the front lawn.
And while Michelle is concerned about childhood obesity, she doesn't strike me as a rip-up-the-front-lawn kind of gal. How do I know this? Look at what she's wearing. Those could be muck boots but I believe they have heels. And she's in a long sweater, fashionably belted, and all black. And her hair looks perfect. Ladybird at least put on some gardening gloves and a sun hat for the photos. Michelle looks like she's impatient to get to dinner. Between this and the sleeveless gowns, I'm beginning to think Michelle rebels against the strictures of first lady life silently, through her outfits, the sartorial equivalents of a middle finger.
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More on the permutations of parenthood: I wonder what to make of this 2005 Census table about "self-care" among children of various ages, up to 15. It seems like some indicator, however rough, of the supervisory ethos in families (though I can't figure out how much variation is encompassed by self-care-regular long stretches, shorter interludes, or what). If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to confirm Liza's hunch that there may not be a class schism between hovering-haves and hands-off-have-nots. In fact, if anything, it suggests the trend may not tend the way we think. It looks as though the more education and the higher the income a mother has, the more likely it is her 11- 14-year-old kids spend some time fending for themselves. This isn't what I would have expected. And obviously, it doesn't tell us anything about the situations of kids older than 15, among whom birth rates are creeping up (while staying steady among 11- 14-year-olds). There, too, class differences can surprise you. As Margaret Talbot's great New Yorker article "Red Sex, Blue Sex" suggests, less-educated parents who run a tight ship don't necessarily inculcate sexual self-control in kids, just as more affluent liberal parents big on youthful autonomy can produce some pretty strait-laced teenagers.
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CBS News has discovered that both the Army and the Marines have given "moral waivers" to men who have been convicted of rape and sexual assault—related felonies—despite an initial denial from the principal undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, Michael Dominguez. In the clip below, Katie Couric talks to a former military medic named Wendy who was sexually assaulted twice while serving abroad. According to CBS:
Wendy’s experience is not unusual. Since 2002, the Miles Foundation, a private non-profit that tracks sexual assault within the armed forces, has received nearly 1,200 confidential reports of sexual assaults in the Central Command Area of Responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Those reports have increased as much as 30 percent a year.
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Nina, I didn't mean to leave your post on Disney's Princess and the Frog hanging out there. (For the record, I thought hard about Lilo--was going to disqualify her for youth, but the real Pocahontas was only 14!) I think you're right that avoiding a Manichean idea of race in America is desirable (today, essentializing brown people is harder, yet more prevalent than ever). And I definitely don't have the heart for a flame war about which ethnic group deserved which princess in which order. A former editor of mine often told me of this game he'd play with his sister as a child, which went:
Of the following minority groups, which is most likely to become president first?
a) gays,
b) blacks,
c) jews,
d) women.
Needless to say his prediction was wrong. But clearly the categories must be expanded! Politics have already bent the rules; hopefully the ever-growing horseshoe of Princesses will do the same.
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I ‘ve enjoyed every word of the helicopter parents versus adventure-parents conversation, and while I am probably just echoing Liza’s great post of this morning, I’ll say that there’s a microversion of the heli-debate that isn’t about class or income or education. It goes like this: Just about every time my kids have made some huge developmental leap, it’s happened around their cousins or grandparents. Like the time I left my then-baby with my dad for a few hours while I ran to a doctor's’appointment. After about 45 minutes I dutifully called home to see how it was all going.
Me: How’s Coby?
My Dad: Oh he’s climbing up and down the stairs.
Me [flipping out]: He doesn’t know how to climb up and down the stairs
My Dad: He does now.
Like Emily B, I’ve been hugely influenced by Blessings of a Skinned Knee. It doesn’t incline me toward sending my kids out to roam the local creeks unescorted. But I am constantly aware that my boys really do have better adventures when I am waaaay out of range. That said, this Coby-stairs story is funny only because he didn't fall on his head and injure himself. Which makes me wonder whether the over-/underparenting calculus just comes down to blind luck.
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Last night I was sitting at my computer when I got a Facebook message from Kimya Dawson, the singer who became an insta-indie folk-rock heroine when her music populated the Juno soundtrack. "Cool," I thought. "I really like Kimya Dawson." This is payback for all those times I defended her when my friends said her lyrics were corny, annoying, or inscrutable or that she was perpetually stuck in freshman year of college.
Then I quickly scanned the message and saw the words, contact my lawyers. Uh-oh. Turns out she was mad that her music was used in a video that accompanied my recent Atlantic story about breast-feeding. "I don't agree with your message and I don't want to be associated with it."
So you think this means she won't friend me?
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Yesterday, the Texas state Senate debated a bill that would require doctors to perform an ultrasound before performing an abortion, but that would give the woman the choice whether or not to see the findings. The underlying motive behind the bill is to give the pregnant woman as much information as possible to make her decision.
The ACLU is fighting back, claiming that the bill assumes that women aren't well-informed already, or that it opens the door for women to be pressured and intimidated into not having an abortion. But this seems like a shallow argument to me—and one that misses the point. For one thing, there may actually be women who aren't all that well-informed about how close a fetus is to human form. Juno captured that perfectly when our uninformed protagonist was swayed by the reality that "... your baby has fingernails!" After all, the women most likely to have abortions are young and less educated. Also, the pro-choice movement has been adopting a line of moral responsibility over the years, starting with Bill Clinton's safe, legal, and rare. Why not take this to its logical conclusion, and let women absorb the full knowledge of what they're doing when they're having an abortion?
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Amy Sullivan has a great piece in Time this week about the answer to the tired old abstinence debate we are about to launch into. Everyone fights over whether or not to mention condoms, she says, when the reality is that most students get no sex ed at all. Only one state requires schools to spend any specific amount of time talking about sex ed. When schools do, they might detail a gym teacher in his or her spare time to do the job. Sullivan says we already know from the research what is the most effective program: comprehensive sex ed, sometimes known as abstinence plus. She then profiles what she considers a model program in South Carolina, where a group of educators bypassed the culture war and constructed a program tailored to the realities of teen lives.
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Dayo, you pose a good question about why women don't watch women's hoops. Commenter Tradbert from the Fray had this to say on the matter:
You
might start by asking why anyone watches sports? It's more than a little
bit odd that some people (mostly men) will literally devote the
majority of their free time and mental energy to watching other men
throwing leather balls -- a game for which non-gambling fans have
absolutely no concrete stakes in the outcome. My guess is that this has
something to do with fantasy fulfillment (this is pretty obvious with
"fantasy" leagues, with children who emulate sports starts, and I would
think it applies to other fans as well). Maybe a lot of guys like to
see themselves as quarterback, b-ball star, etc.
Perhaps women don't fantasize as much about contact competition, and
so they don't see a point in watching other people indulge in this
activity. If this is true, there is no point in hand-wringing about
female fans and female sports. Would it really be so awful if women
didn't enjoy this bizarre pastime? By all logic, this would make women
more rational.
This certainly held true for me -- I used to watch the UConn Huskies and Rebecca Lobo as a tween, but once I realized that my full adult height was going to be 5'7'', I gave up my basketball fantasies. I'm not sure that women don't watch sports because they're "more rational," but I don't know many women who enjoy picturing themselves in Sheryl Swoopes' shoes.
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The talk of teacups and helicopters has me thinking about Taken, the fourth most popular movie in America and a film engineered to play on the worst, most irrational fears of American fathers—think Babel plus white slavery. A former CIA agent played by Liam Neeson is trying to spend more quality time with his 17-year-old daughter. She announces that she is going to spend the summer in Paris with a friend. "Paris!" he exclaims, "Paris is very dangerous." (Spoiler alert!) There is much talk of a seedy Gallic underworld. She persists, and he gives in despite his better, CIA-trained instincts. When she arrives in Paris she is immediately sex-trafficked by crafty Albanians. The Parisian police are in on it; Paris, it turns out, really is an amoral anarchic sexually perverse dystopia. Leaving U.S. jurisidiction sure was a mistake!
Liam Neeson tortures and kills some non-Americans and saves his daughter before anyone can touch her virginity, the loss of which is obviously the worst thing that could ever happen to an American 17-year-old female. Morals include: 1) Never let your virgin daughters leave the soft, warm womb of the United States and 2) The CIA is an omniscient, omnipresent organization whose competence and essential goodness should never, ever be in doubt.
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Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province
alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the
country."
Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered
by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive
and digestive systems are beyond repair."
A 45-year-old widow called "L." was raped by two armed men, an attack that left her pregnant, suicidal, and an outcast.
L. gave birth to her child today. Her mother was at the hospital for
the delivery. But her father in-law refused to visit her. “The family
has rejected me,” explains L. “I cannot live with them anymore. A
neighbour has taken me in, and that’s where I stay now. I still need
support. I have been stigmatised and rejected by my family, by some of
my children and by my community. 'A widow who gives birth at her age,
it’s shameful,' that’s what they say about me."
"My two elder sons have been with the military service for a long
time. Another one lives in the street and when he heard that I was
pregnant, he sent death threats to the baby and me. He said that he
would kill both of us if I gave birth to a boy who could claim fields
for himself later on.”
Today, L. holds a little girl in her arms. She is breastfeeding her.
“This child has no problems. I must accept her, welcome her and take
care of her. My daughter is innocent and today I look at her as a
mother. We must stick together. I’ll go back to my village soon. I’ll
continue to stay with my neighbour. I’ll have to carry goods for people
to earn a bit of money because my family-in-law won’t let me work in
the fields any longer."
"I would like to have my own house one day, from where no one can drive my daughter and I.”
[Condition: Critical]
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June recently pointed out that Friday night has become TV's "butt-kicking women" night thanks to Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and, if you don't use the term butt-kicking quite so literally, Friday Night Lights, as well. With Battlestar set to go out in a blaze of glory this evening, I'd like to nominate another Friday show to take its slot on your DVR—BBC America's Mistresses, an overwrought, gripping little soap opera that's not exactly about butt-kicking women so much as bed-hopping ones.
Mistresses, like Sex and the City, is about four friends who shag and chat about it, though not while wearing designer duds and hardly ever over brunch. None of the women (a married lawyer, a single doctor, a playgirl party planner, and a 9/11 widow) are mistresses in the classic sense, though they do have more experience with adultery than good girls should. If Sex and the City is the Jane Austen take on the four-friend relationship—comedic, funny, money-minded—Mistresses is the Brontë sisters one—overly dramatic and full of secret plot twists and distraught heroines who would almost certainly be running around on the moors but for the fact that they live in London. It's also a good short-term substitute for The L Word, since it shares that Sapphic soap's overall mood and has an experimental lesbian story line to boot. Best of all, since it's British (the second season is airing there right now), all the high drama has to resolve itself in just six plot-packed episodes.
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While I enjoy March Madness for the entertainment of watching the earnest, last-gasp efforts of talented young athletes, I didn’t fill out a bracket for the men’s tournament this year. And even though I consistently watched one of my best girlfriends play hoops throughout college, I didn’t even consider filling out the women’s bracket. Martin Johnson has an interesting piece in the Root telling me why. I pretty much exhausted my knowledge of college basketball while recording our weekly podcast (give it a listen; you can tell). But I buy his analysis—that there is some weird stigma still attached to women’s basketball in particular that is not present for say, women’s tennis, or women’s swimming, or even women’s golf.
Here’s my armchair psychologist’s take: The female players are not overexposed. Call it the Imus effect? Basketball is all long shorts and sweatbands—even male athletes have only their arms (sexy!) to rope with elaborate, distinguishing tattoos. During last year’s Olympics in Beijing, there was much to-do about half-naked women athletes winning press coverage not for their high level of achievement but for their (obviously) slammin’ bodies. And anecdotal experience suggests that hot, female “on-the-court” television anchors are as much of a draw for men’s sports-watching as the games themselves. Perhaps dudes, subliminally accustomed to a little tittilation with their sports fix, take a pass on lady hoopsters, and speculation—and general spectatorship—for the female Final Four falls.
That’s not terribly well-reasoned as much as it's provocative. (Though, searching around to try to pin down how many more men watch sports than women, I found that “Since the 1999 regular season, nearly every NFL team has implemented a series of classes meant to educate female fans. NFL 101 Workshops for Women invites women to increase their understanding of football's history, offensive and defensive strategies and how to decipher game officials' signals.” Nice.) Any other theories?
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Emily Y, you're right about the large number of women who are having babies outside of marriage. In 1960, 5 percent of kids were born to unmarried mothers. Now the rate is about 40 percent. That is certainly a broad cultural shift, over a couple of generations. But unmarried doesn't necessarily mean single as in all by yourself. University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock has shown that as many as half of unmarried mothers live with the fathers of their children when those kids are born. That doesn't mean those relationships are long-term and stable—compared with marriage, they are less so. But the data paint a different picture, I think, than the one we usually see when we think single mom.
As for whether to recommend single motherhood by choice, Bonnie, this one to me is part of what I was puzzling over the other day, about audience. Most unmarried mothers are low-income and young and haven't gone to college. They're the people for whom unwed motherhood is an engine of social inequality, as Emily aptly put it. That's the main story, in terms of the numbers, and so we should have our eye on it. But then there is the much smaller—but growing much more rapidly—group of Murphy Browns: single mother by choice who have gone to college, make good money, and for one reason or another don't find husbands but in their 30s decide to have kids anyway. When I hung out with some of those moms for a magazine piece earlier this year, I was struck by their autonomy. (Their kids were adopted or sperm babies, so no dads in the picture.) I'm not suggesting we design policy around this much smaller group. But the framework for their choices is simply different from the framework of a 20-year-old who has no clear way to support herself and her kid. Whether growing up without a father, to get back to that point you raised Emily, is just as difficult no matter what other resources your family has—that's a hard and big question.
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Emily's post about whom we write for when we write about parenting raises always-worth-asking questions. But I'm not convinced that poorer parents and more affluent ones always have different concerns (I know she wasn't implying this) or even different styles of parenting.
Six years ago, when my children were younger and I wrote about them with some regularity—I still do, but not as often, since they are, in theory, old enough to write letters to the editor denying my assertions and correcting my anecdotes—I did a piece about what I realize, now, was helicopter parenting. I was looking at the way in which mothers are absent from so much children's literature and wondering whether that's because children can never have interesting adventures unless mom is out of the way.
In reporting out the heli-parenting phenomenon a bit, I talked to Kristin Moore, a researcher with the organization Child Trends. I had the notion that maybe affluent kids were the ones bottled up in houses, now, and sent to classes and constantly watched, and that poorer kids were the ones with the freedom to wander. That seems to be pretty much what Annette Lareau found, as summarized in that NYT piece by Paul Tough—that kids from poor and working-class families experience "natural growth" childhoods in which they still get to ride bikes with friends and invent games in the neighborhood. But Moore's research suggested that all parents, now, share some of the same anxieties and that all children share some of the same restrictions; she found that poor children are actually more likely to be supervised and contained. "Low-income parents are very concerned about safety, and place a lot of restrictions on their children," she said.
At that time, her research showed that 17 percent of kids aged 6-12 from families with incomes over $35,000 are latchkey kids—nobody there when they get home from school—compared with just 12 percent of kids from families whose incomes are lower. I have to say that Moore's comments rang true to me, based on anecdotal reporting experience. I'm not convinced there are many kids of any socioeconomic level out riding bikes and building forts and walking to school anymore. One of my colleagues has a relative who, when her 12-year-old was riding her bike, actually followed behind in her car.
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Hanna, your great post on the science of prostate cancer treatment reminded me of this interesting op-ed that ran in the Post a week back but that—amid the beginning simmerings of the AIG furor—didn't get much attention. The writer, an endocrinologist named David Shaywitz, suggested that we tend to treat scientific research with far too much reverence:
A lot of science, it turns out, can't withstand serious scrutiny. Thoughtful analysis by John Ioannidis suggests that more than half of published scientific research findings can't be replicated by other researchers. Part of the problem is that we've been conditioned to trust university research. It is based, after all, on the presumably lofty motives of its practitioners. What's not to like about science carried out by academics who have nobly dedicated their lives to understanding the unknown, furthering knowledge and serving humanity? ...
[But] the university is not a peaceable kingdom, and life is far more Hobbesian. ... University researchers are in a constant battle for recognition and the rewards associated with success: research space, speaking engagements, funding and autonomy. Consequently, while academic research is often described as "curiosity-driven," the reality is messier, as (curiously) many researchers tend to pursue the trendiest technologies and explore topics that happen to be associated with the most generous levels of research support.
It's a twist on the expert problem—most of us aren't scientists or doctors, and our ignorance weighs heavily on us. We feel we've just got to trust scientific or medical analysis, because we wouldn't have a clue where to begin questioning it. But we also operate from the assumption that scientific or medical researchers are an especially holy kind of expert, the intellectual ascetics sweating their lives away over petri dishes in pursuit of Truth. But maybe we should be just a little more open to treating scientific studies like we treat the bid of the mechanic who wants to fix our car.
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While we're on the subject of teen sex, I thought I'd raise this post from Constantino Diaz-Duran at the Daily Beast. He describes the case of two 17-year-olds from Sheboygan, Wisc., who were arrested for having sex with their 14-year-old significant others. Same town, same age difference, same assistant district attorney. But one of the 17-year-olds was charged with a class C felony (maximum sentence: 40 years in prison), and the other was charged with a misdemeanor (maximum sentence: nine months in jail).
Why the disparity? In one case, it was a 17-year-old guy sleeping with his 14-year-old girlfriend; in the other, the sexes were reversed.
Diaz-Duran asks if the "boy was a victim of gender bias." Certainly it seems that his gender influenced the charge. But maybe that's as it should be. Yes, a 17-year-old female is capable of causing harm to an innocent 14-year-old with her sexuality, just as is her male counterpart. But men tend to be bigger, stronger, and have more parts that they can force into you. That's a crucial difference, and one that explains to some extent why rape laws would (and should) treat the sexes differently.
Gender discrimination aside, statutory rape laws do seem problematic. Obviously we should protect youngsters from the Humbert Humberts of the world. But what about teens whose sexual relations are totally consentual, like the case of Genarlow Wilson? (And yes, I do think teenagers are emotionally capable of coming to such mutual decisions.) In those situations, it seems like the statutory rape card is just a way for angry parents to convince themselves that their own child is pure by pinning the dirty sex act on someone else. And too often, those angry parents may be reacting to something other than actual predatory behavior, such as a boyfriend they don't approve of.
I'm curious, especially in the context of yesterday's discussion about the balance of raising kids who are safe but independent, how others—especially Emily B. and Dahlia—feel about statutory rape laws. Can't there be a better way of protecting against genuine predators without ensnaring teens engaged in consentual sex?
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The Senate has just confirmed Elena Kagan to be solicitor general of the United States by a vote of 61-31. She's the first woman to be confirmed to the post.
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Ladies, you can fret about your mothering methods all you want, but you will never, never beat Big Edie Beale.
Big Edie and her daughter, Little Edie, are the stars of the 1976 cult classic Grey Gardens, a documentary madly beloved by fashionistas, feminists, and gay men the world over. In the '40s, they were glamorous relatives of Jackie O; by the '70s, the Edies were living, Tennessee Williams-style, in a squalid Hamptons manse, locked in a toxic battle of wills (not to mention a toxic fug of cat-piss fumes). On April 18, HBO is going to be airing a feature film based on the documentary, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Fans cried foul at the casting of Gertie as Edie, but the official trailer has been making the rounds this week, and gosh darn it if Drew isn't spot-on. (See the O.G. Little E here and here.) And how gorgeous are those period costumes?
I did an interview once with Doug Wright, who wrote the book for the 2006 Grey Gardens musical. As Wright described it, the whole saga of the Edies can be read as a parable about overparenting:
I'll watch the film once and think, wow, Big Edie was really a toxic narcissist who forced her daughter to live according to her rules, and in doing so undermined her daughter's entire life. ... And then I'll watch the documentary a second time and think, wow, Little Edie was really ill-equipped to live in the world; thank God her mother gave her sanctuary. And I think at the end of the day, both things are true.
Something to think about for those of us (be-childed or otherwise) planning to spend April 18 fashioning turbans out of hand towels.
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Believe me, Ellen, I probably practice better-safe-than-sorry parenting more than I preach it. I watch my oldest son the entire way if he so much as walks across the street to ask the neighbor kid to play (and we live on the world's quietest cul-de-sac). The fact that our subdivision spills out onto a windy country road is enough to make me want to move before he gets his driver's license (and I have my fingers crossed that the driving age will be 18 by the time he's 16). When you've spent nine months taking vitamins and shunning booze, sushi, and undercooked eggs so as not to harm the wee one you're carrying, when you've invested in car seats to keep them safe, and kept the baby in your room at night for months just so you can reach out and touch him to make sure he's all right when he's sleeping, you're not going to start letting him play in the street overnight.
If the last five-plus years have taught me anything, it's that parenting is actually just a series of agonizing decisions and dilemmas, from breast-feeding or formula? when the kids are infants all the way to when can they start dating? and what college can we afford and can they get in? when they're older. Some decisions come easily and some require much discussion with my husband and with friends who have kids the same age. One of the hardest things—and yet at the same time the most rewarding—is letting them take those steps toward independence: letting them play unattended in an upstairs playroom, letting them play outside by themselves. Someday soon, that will expand to visiting friends more than a few houses away and riding bikes beyond my sightline. Nobody wants their kid to be the next Etan Patz. We just had a terrible, terrible tragedy here in Cincinnati, where a 13-year-old girl was killed while jogging near her home. But, as Emily pointed out, abductions are extremely rare. Kids are far more likely to be injured in a car accident, or falling down at home, or stricken by a terrible disease. No matter what you do, there are risks. I want to foster independence in my kids, at age-appropriate levels, so that as they can grow they can make decisions that will keep them safe. For example, say I tried to shelter my kid from dating, driving a car, and any exposure to alcohol in high school. Something tells me his first trip home from college would see him driving drunk to introduce me to his pregnant girlfriend.
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Audrina Partridge, the resident brunette on MTV's loathsomely addictive love letter to the meaningfully meaningless stare, The Hills, is getting her own television show. Burning yule logs hold the camera better than Partridge, but burning yule logs have never gotten a chance to think confuddled thoughts near Hills star Lauren Conrad, lay out on chaise lounges next to Lauren Conrad, or to mistakenly accuse Lauren Conrad of making out with their greasy, manipulative on-again, off-again boyfriends. If yule logs had such opportunities, and looked as good in a bikini, one would expect yule logs to break out of the Christmas Eve type casting and land their own reality show, just like Audrina and all her Hills co-stars, including The City's Whitney Port and Bromance's Brody Jenner.
Audrina's show will be produced by Mark Burnett, the reality TV guru who created Survivor and The Apprentice. Say what you will about Burnett (like, he’s the guy who briefly resurrected Donald Trump's reputation), but he understands how reality TV works. Just like in movies and politics, a name is better than no name. Partridge doesn't have to be interesting or charismatic in the limited way of The Real World cast members or the expansive way of the hilarious loonies on The Real Housewives of New York City because we already "know" her. In a sweetly human, but incredibly undiscerning way, prior knowledge of Audrina's story is all some of us will need to care about what happens next. She can continue to be as dull and dim as a burned out light bulb and she will have an audience.
In a big leap from brow to brow, Audrina’s show got me thinking of David Foster Wallace. In the recent New Yorker piece on him, D.T. Max wrote that Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, about IRS employees, suggests that “Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment.” I wonder what DFW would make of our dependence on entertainment that is already well and truly boring.
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Emily Y is right to be concerned. Though I was one before unwed mothers were a rising statistic, I don't recommend becoming a single mother by choice. Obviously having social standing, a college education, and a loving husband all make a big difference in the large bore challenges of raising children: assuring a secure environment, good education, and culturally uplifting activities. (Not to mention equipping them with GPS navigators or latitude homing devices as Abby suggests.)
As women, however, we share many experiences not limited to members of "our own middle- and upper-middle-class world" that Emily B describes. Economic assumptions aside, young, poor mothers are just as motivated to do the best they can for their offspring as the moms with manicured lawns or doorman buildings, and a well-heeled background, sadly, doesn't mean we will always remember to speak lovingly to our children when they disappoint us (as they are bound to occasionally), even under the best circumstances.
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Fear not, Bonnie, Emily, Ellen, and Rachael! No more need to worry about whether your teenage daughter is really over at her girlfriend's house on Saturday night or if your son makes it to soccer practice on time. Google is here to save the day with its new Latitude program, launched in February. Now you can pinpoint your kids, your friends, even your kids' friends at any given moment of the day (well, almost—they still have some kinks to work out). It's creepy, useful, and sort of irresistible all at the same time. Now if I could only get my boss to sync up so that I could always beat her to the office in the mornings ...
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Today's paper has a story I knew was coming but have truly dreaded. It turns out that PSAs—the screening test for prostate cancer—may do more harm than good. Most of these cancers are very slow growing, it turns out, and may not need to be treated. Meanwhile, the operations to treat them have serious consequences. So many men have undergone the surgeries needlessly. My father had the surgery, and it really ruined his life. The idea that he may not have needed it kills me.
My takeaway from this story is that when a certain kind of science hysteria takes hold, rational risk analysis goes out the window. When you say "test" and "cancer," the rest of the qualifications and probabilities don't get heard. This is on my mind because of the reaction I've gotten to my recent Atlantic story, "The Case Against Breast-Feeding," where I challenge some of the science supporting breast-feeding.
Of course I've heard from hundreds of grateful moms, and an equal number of people telling me what an evil mother and wife I am. And I've also heard from lots of science scolds. A typical such response is this one from our sisters at Salon.
On closer inspection, we have to conclude that her reporting is biased. She cherry-picked research that suited her agenda, the research suggesting that breast milk isn't really all it's been hyped to be. Yet between us we have interviewed dozens of highly regarded researchers and pediatricians who could offer a point-counterpoint to the research Rosin highlighted.
This is really not good enough. As the latest prostate cancer study shows, it's perfectly possible for the scientific establishment to be in agreement and also wrong. This is like interviewing generals in Iraq about whether the surge is going well. They may be experts, but they are experts with a stake in the outcome. Yes, I highlighted a few studies that support my point. But mainly what I did was critique the research as a whole. And what I found was that if you say "infant" and "health" in the same sentence, no one bothers with the details.
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Hanna and Jessica, perhaps complacency that teen pregnancy rates had been successfully declining for so long, and perhaps ineffective abstinence-only education has something to do with the disturbing rise in young unwed motherhood. But my favorite theory is that such sexual behavior is culturally transmitted. While teen pregnancy rates have started to rise a little, among women ages 20 to 24 who give birth, 60 percent are having those kids of out wedlock. For a large segment of our society, it has become the normal thing to do. But if you're 22 and just had a baby, that probably means you haven't gone to college. As Kay Hymowitz has written, unwed motherhood is the greatest engine of social inequality in this country. There are actually very few Murphy Browns—college-educated professionals deciding to raise children on their own. College-educated women, as Hymowitz writes, have a life script and things follow in sequence: education, career, marriage, children. Following this order means their children will follow the same script. This has broken down for large segments of our population. There is no shame or embarrassment at out-of-wedlock birth anymore; there is often the sense this is a better way to go than getting married (as if the child's father would even entertain getting hitched) and inevitably getting divorced. The year-by-year increase in out-of-wedlock births in this country shows how self-perpetuating this is. What the statistics don't show is the suffering of children whose longing to have a father will be unmet, and who are being raised by overwhelmed mothers.
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Bonnie, your lovely, loving mea culpa raises what's for me a central conundrum of writing about parenting: audience. Do we write for our own middle- and upper-middle-class world? In which it's an easy call, to me, that helicopter parents pose a greater danger to kids than wandering the streets, or rather, the well-groomed sidewalks. Or are we writing to 22-year-old moms like your former self and to poor ones? Sometimes the message is the same. But often it's not, because the set of assumptions we're speaking to are very different. See Paul Tough's smart reporting on Annette Lareau's studies about how child-rearing differs by income. It's a split that affects this discussion we're having and a lot of other ones, I find.
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I have some convincing theories about the rise of teen pregnancy and AIDS cases, Hanna! Let's start with the increased percentage of pregnant adolescents. In an article that "XX Factor" friend Margaret Talbot wrote for The New Yorker last year called "Red Sex, Blue Sex" she quotes sociologist Mark Regnerus on teens who delay sexual activity:
They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.
Hanna, you note that the Latino population has seen a particularly notable spike in teen pregnancy, and that doesn't surprise me. As an article in Sunday's New York Times about the education of nonnative English speakers showed, there are near-impossible barriers for recent immigrants that prevent them from the "bright futures" Regnerus speaks of. The Times article quotes a 19-year-old Guatemalan woman named Amalia Raymundo, who "was a rising star in her remote village in Guatemala, the region’s beauty queen and a candidate for college scholarships." Because of her experiences in American public school, Amalia saw that her dreams of becoming a doctor were so far out of her reach, she thought about dropping out. “If I am going to end up cleaning houses with my mother ... why go to high school?”
If that's the reality for most recent immigrant women, why would they delay sex or prevent pregnancy? What's the motivation? Which brings me to my next point: I think AIDS is on the rise because condom promotion has all but disappeared and AIDS is no longer seen as a death sentence. If you don't believe you're going to die, and many think sex feels better without a condom, what's the motivation for use? In addition, as Talbot wrote in her New Yorker article, "many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease." So you have informed people who choose to take the risk because they think AIDS won't happen to them, and you have underinformed people who think that condoms don't work. Those taken together seem like enough to cause a statistical increase.
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Emily has written lovingly about her sons numerous times here on XX Factor and contributes frequently to Slate's irregular Family columns, so, just as she has demonstrated as a lawyer, journalist, Slate senior editor, and co-founding editor of Double X, I know she is a high achiever in her mommy job. Most mothers are not as accomplished. On the other end of the parenting spectrum from Emily, I had so many mishaps when my adult children were young (especially my daughter who I had, unmarried, when I was 22), I probably should have been charged with child endangerment. The thing is, raising children is a moving target and most of us, even my pediatrician friends, make it up as we go along. As much as we try to maintain policies and structure in our homes, conflicting agendas, wanting to please our children, the gravitational force of the daily grind, absent baby sitters, new friends, sick siblings, sick friends, and new siblings all impact our decisions. Although I was immature, careless, and accident prone most of my questionable parenting moves still somehow turned out OK. Although I expected too much of my little girl, she more often than not lived up to those expectations. At least twice, her lack of supervision led to panicky alarm. Once in Mexico, like the children in Babel, her whereabouts were not traceable overnight. Another time in Key West, Fla., she disappeared in a bookstore. (After police were called, she materialized from behind the chapter-book shelves where, blissfully reading, she'd lost track of the time.)
Despite these parenting accidents, at the same time, I was responsible for her values and self-worth, and on that front, I didn't renege. Stealing was ugly, lying was dirty, other people's feelings were fragile, and she was, always, very loved and cherished. The lessons we pass on to our children come from years of teachable moments. Better safe than sorry is, as Emily says, a pat homily that can't be applied to a nuanced situation. But in a complex, always-changing, child-raising obstacle course, parents need to develop our own aphorisms to guide us.
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Congress spent yesterday grilling a guy who wasn't working for AIG when the infamous bonuses were drafted. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae—an organization that has requested $15 billion in bailout cash—plans to reward some of its top executives with AIG-like bonuses. (Thomas Lund, the guy in charge of Fannie's mortgage business, is slated for precisely $1 million.) Similar bonuses, yet to be revealed, may be in line for Freddie Mac. Add to all that bonus money a $10 million executive suite in the works for Citigroup (lucky recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds—you're welcome!).
The politicization of, say, Citigroup's decision to buy a Sub-Zero refrigerator does not bode particularly well for anyone who wants a quick return to boring, predictable market outcomes. But when you accept heaps of the public's money, you agree to run your company in constant fear of what is derisively referred to as "populist outrage."
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Dayo, I, too, am eager to see Disney's awesome-to-be-beheld marketing forces plaster Tiana's face on lunchboxes and bathing suits. I remember how important the Polynesian Barbie was to me, and I'm thrilled to have cheesy fantasy avatars available to little girls of all colors. But I've never really understood this line of argument:
the Mickey Mousers have cycled through the Middle Eastern, Chinese, Native American, and Hawaiian princesses, not to mention six kinds of white—why not black? Compounding the frustration is the distinct lack of “live action” roles for black actors and actresses, which makes any perception of Hollywood bias smart a bit more.
I understand that Disney probably has more to redress vis-à-vis the African-American community, and obviously roles are limited for performers of color. But Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Native American actors get even less screen time than black actors. (Does the Hawaiian Lilo count as a princess?) I'll admit it right here: I cried when I saw Mulan. In fact, I still cry whenever I see it. I don't think this is or should be a racial pissing contest, but those intervening films are important, too.
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Nina, I think you’re right on about the silliness of hating the light-skinned Prince Naveen character in Disney’s forthcoming Princess and the Frog movie. He’s clearly black—and for a film set in New Orleans, his creolized look is pretty accurate.
But the increased sensitivities are totally understandable—it’s taken how long exactly for the Disney marketers to come up with a black princess? I wrote on this movie as a leap forward for beauty politics back in December 2007; the Mickey Mousers have cycled through the Middle Eastern, Chinese, Native American, and Hawaiian princesses, not to mention six kinds of white—why not black? Compounding the frustration is the distinct lack of “live action” roles for black actors and actresses, which makes any perception of Hollywood bias smart a bit more.
I’ll keep my powder dry because I plan to write a longer piece on the topic soon, but I think this debate is most productive when seen as an issue of branding: Now that Princess Tiana will join Jasmine, Belle, and Ariel on lunchboxes, stickers, and sleeping bags—and will, presumably, have her own doll—shouldn’t we be cheering the crossover potential of this flick? Much like the kerfuffle surrounding stuffed likenesses of Malia and Sasha Obama, I think it’s never bad, and in fact, deliciously ironic, that little white girls might soon be toting black dolls around town.
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Today's news brings us a few dispatches from the land of reckless teendom. Here we have some high schoolers in the Bronx who, upon viewing a picture of pop singer Rihanna's bruised face, remarked "She probably made him mad for him to react like that"—him being her still-boyfriend, Chris Brown. More importantly, we have the latest stats on the Bristol Palin constituency. Teen birth rates among 15- to 19-year-olds have been creeping up for a few years, "putting one of the nation's most successful social and public health campaigns in jeopardy," writes the Washington Post. Given the Obama administration's latest pledge to take politics out of science, we will likely be treated now to fierce debate on the morning talk shows about the effectiveness of abstinence education. True, those programs have been much less effective than the Bush administration lets on. And I would love to put the blame all on them. But I imagine the causes are much more complicated than that. For one thing, it can't be a coincidence that the AIDS virus is also increasing. Condom vigilance waxes and wanes, and we are probably coming out of a lazy period. Also, check out the list of which states have the highest increases. Many are places with relatively recent waves of immigration. The most interesting sub trend is about young Latino rates of teen pregnancy, which are now the highest in the country.
Anybody know any other convincing theories?
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Better safe than sorry: It's unassailably pat. But that's not the real framing of the choice. Actually, there are always nuances: How old is your child, what kind of neighborhood are you letting her walk alone in, at what time of day? And what's the cost of never letting her out of your sight? Because there is one. Wendy Mogel, psychologist and author of Blessing of a Skinned Knee, who I've written about before, calls overprotected kids "teacups" and "krispies." They get to college and they can't fend for themselves because their parents never gave them breathing room.
Maybe the risk you took was too high, Bonnie, because the vacant lot your daughter walked through was trashy and isolated. The story of Etan Patz, which I know, is undeniably and stupendously awful. Beyond the paradigmatic parent's worst nightmare. But a friend of mine whose pediatric practice consists largely of helping abused kids reminds us that child abduction in this country is extremely rare. Almost all of the time, harm comes to kids from adults they know, not ones they don't. We're so transfixed by the worst nightmare scenario that we miss the more mundane but prevalent risks. Or we snatch from our kids any semblance of independence. My friend whose kid went to the store on the corner by himself e-mailed yesterday to say she hopes he can go to the park by himself—or with my older son—in a year or two, or sooner. I hope so, too.
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Rachael and Emily, like Bonnie, I am of the better-safe-than-sorry school of parenting.
First, I should say, Rachael has two-plus young children, Emily has two, Bonnie's are grown (correct me if I am mistaken), and I am childless by choice.
I am a bit older than Rachael and remember well the freedom of my childhood. I grew up in a semi-rural suburb of Boston, where we used to take off in the morning, go play on the catwalks (yes, the ones that led to the power lines!), go tramping through tick-infested ponds and swamps, trolling for frogs and salamanders, climb sap-covered trees, and come home right before dark with our white socks soaking wet with swamp muck and our hair matted.
We played baseball and softball in the streets until our parents rang bells out their front doors to call us home for dinner. We sought out an adult only when something went wrong: Kevin is stuck in a tree and is too scared to climb down! Kay has a giant bloody tick on her head! Paul smacked Ellen in the leg with a Whiffleball bat and now she's crying!
It was awesome.
But it was only awesome because no one was seriously maimed, abducted, or otherwise traumatized. And this was pure luck.
I do wonder and worry about these poor kids today, who have to be so constantly supervised: strapped into car seats, unable to wander or take off for an afternoon walk to find someone to play with. No more can they just stroll up to a neighbor's house, ring the bell, and say, "Can Kay come out and play?" It's all prescheduled, prearranged, and it's even called a date!
While Rachael says the kid in the story knew where he was going, had a cell phone, and his mom would be at the soccer field a few minutes after him so would know if he had arrived safely, what would she have done if he hadn't arrived safely? What could she have done?
Since I don't have children, maybe I have an unrealistic idea of what could happen, fueled by too many news stories, movies, and my own parents' paranoia (yes, even they who let me run wild as a child were terrified of crazy things). I have no doubt that the kid was capable, self-reliant, knew where he was going, etc., but his abilities are not at issue. Could not someone have driven up and pulled him into a car and driven off? Or is that just my imagination running wild?
I agree with Bonnie: Better safe than sorry.
The only thing I can compare it to is my dog. I now live in the city, in a neighborhood where the park is in one direction and the street on which you can do all your errands is in another. And so it is a constant dilemma for dog owners: walk the dog and then do errands or take the dog on errands even though it will mean having to tie her up outside? (Is it true or an urban legend that people steal dogs and sell them for science experiments?)
I try to never tie her up outside. If I have to, it will only be at stores that I need to run into for less than a minute with glass fronts so I can see her the whole time. Once I did have to run into the bank to get some quarters for laundry and parking, and I tied her up. I had to wait in a slow-moving line and I was a nervous wreck. Why was I doing this? Would $10 worth of quarters be worth losing her over? How would I explain it to my husband if someone took her? And would I ever forgive myself?
Granted, a dog is not a child: She is not my flesh and blood, not human, and I don't have to worry about guiding her toward independence so I can send her off to college and to become a self-sufficient adult.
But if she were taken, if that kid were taken, wouldn't the parent do anything to get back that moment and make a different decision? I know I would.
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Rachael, you are the same age as my daughter, making me among the lead-paint-exposing, tummy-down-crib-placing cohort of child neglectors whose Gen X children narrowly survived. In fact, I was probably among the worst of the loosey-goosey caretakers of the era, taking risks with my first-grade child that, in retrospect, should have brought the police. The cop who scolded the Mississippi soccer mom for letting her 10-year-old walk a few blocks to the playing field may have over-reacted, but, belatedly embracing my geezer curmudgeon, I say, better safe than sorry. When I was a young single mother in 1978, we lived in the unrenovated Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. My little girl's public school was about nine blocks west on Calvert Street from the city bus stop nearest our rented row house. Where a park would form a few years later, my 6-year-old cut daily through a vacant lot strewn with old tires to get to the 40 line stop. I walked with her to the bus stop the first few days of the school year, but after she knew the way, I let my self-sufficient grade-school child set out alone every a.m. with a bus token and a peanut butter sandwich. My daughter survived my cavalier and inexperienced parenting and took her independence with her when she moved to Manhattan for college. As so many of you Generation X achievement goddesses, she grew up fearless at facing her professional and personal challenges. The self-reliance forged in childhood has served her well. That said, I was a nitwit who acted as if the innocent were immune. My neighbors should have blown the whistle on me. That spring, another child the same age as my daughter, destined perhaps for a similar happy future, wasn't as lucky. A set of well-intentioned but naive New York City parents heard a wakeup bell that reverberates today in Mississippi; Washington; New Haven, Conn.; and Ohio. The boy's parents, Julie and Stan Patz, were loving caretakers who, like me, failed to estimate the risk of allowing their 6-year-old to walk two blocks from his apartment door to his school bus. I've just finished reading a new release, After Etan, by my former ABC News colleague Lisa Cohen (who now teaches journalism at Columbia). Lisa's book is a disturbing and harrowing dissection of the unsolved Etan Patz missing child case that "held America captive" for days, weeks, and years after his disappearance. I'm certain that National Missing Children's Day, observed every year on the anniversary of their son's kidnapping, offers little comfort to his parents.
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Yesterday's "Well" column in the New York Times links to a quiz to determine what kind of cook you are. The story explores the idea that the family's healthfulness is determined not by the food preferences of family members but by the "nutritional gatekeeper"—mother, father, nanny, grandparent—whoever does the shopping and cooking. Although the piece praises healthy cooks, they come out in the quiz as the ones you'd least like to have dinner with: They use fresh ingredients but don't care about taste. (Reminds me of something Julia Child once said about vegetarians: "Do they ever enjoy a meal?") The "methodical" and "competitive" don't seem all that fun either. I rated "innovative" (translation: erratic). I can live with that.
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Disney's newest animated film won't be released for another nine months, but The Princess and the Frog—Disney's first to feature an African-American princess—is already being scrutinized. First it got knocked because the heroine was a black chambermaid working for a rich white woman, then because one of the animal sidekicks was a toothless, seemingly redneck Cajun firefly. Plus there were plenty of people who were peeved that it took Disney so long to feature an African-American princess in the first place. (Dodai at Jezebel has been tracking the fracas; scroll down to see more links.)
Now, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail, bloggers are up in arms because Princess Tiana— reimagined as a young woman living in Jazz Age New Orleans—falls in love with a guy who isn't black. Prince Naveen (an Indian name, I'll note) is heir to the throne of "Maldonia," and is voiced by a Brazilian actor. I'm not quite sure he's white, let alone "the whitest frat boy dickhead you can find," as one commenter put it, but he's definitely much lighter-skinned than Tiana. I think he looks sort of Mediterranean, myself.
I'm not surprised that people are pre-emptively monitoring this film's sensitivity levels, but I honestly can't tell if this tweaks my sensors. On one hand, it sucks that little African-American boys won't get to see a black prince, and I don't like the equation of lighter skin with desirability, either. But on the other hand, I'm all for seeing more mixed-race couples in the popular media—how annoying is it that, in most movies and TV shows, minorities are always getting paired with partners of the same race? I've been watching old episodes of Firefly lately, and the Gina Torres/Alan Tudyk pairing still seems really fresh to me. I'm going to try to reserve judgment till I actually see the film, but what do you ladies think?
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Rachael, I'm also thoroughly depressed over the story of the cops getting called on the mom who let her 10-year-old walk one-third of a mile to soccer practice alone. Not just because of my own childhood walk to school, over several blocks in Philadelphia that added up to more than a mile (woo hoo). But also because kids need to be able to go places alone for their own sanity. In the New Haven neighborhood I live in now, there's a beloved Italian grocer down the street. My parent friends and I have debated when our kids can go there by themselves, and then lo and behold, one of the dads went ahead and sent his 8-year-old over. Bless him. The next hurdle is the park three blocks away. You have to cross two busy streets to get there, and a couple of years ago a babysitter was raped in the woods that border it. So it's not an easy call—we don't live in a big city, but it's still a city. But I really hope that as my kids turn 10 and then 11 and 12, they can have some sense of the power of their own mobility. When you walk alone, you get to think your own thoughts and make your own choices. Even if it's just when to jump over a crack in the sidewalk or watch a cat curl up on a porch, it matters.
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:
I was perusing the Simon & Schuster children’s book catalog to see what the kids are reading these days, and I came across a picture book written by none other than Meghan McCain, whose recent cat-fighting Dahlia rightfully skewered in her great piece in Slate today. That’s right, folks, your favorite daddy’s-girl blogopundit and mine is an author, too. My Dad, John McCain, came out last September, midcampaign, and features lots of lovely, nostalgia-inducing illustrations of father and daughter by the guy who drew Felicity and Samantha for the American Girl books. And to think, all Cate Edwards wrote about her dad’s campaign was her Princeton thesis.
Here’s the blurb from the catalog:
Born with a commitment to serve his country, Senator John McCain was destined to run for president one day. In this picture book, written by his daughter Meghan, young readers will learn all of the fascinating and sometimes dangerous events that helped shape the senator and prepared him for the race for the White House. From perilous wartime service to a twenty-year plus career in the Senate, this book will give readers an inside look at a man who has devoted his life to his country. The publisher shall donate one percent of its net proceeds from the sale of this book through regular U.S. trade channels to Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. (Net proceeds are the gross amounts received by the publisher less shipping, mailing, and insurance costs or charges and taxes.) Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund is an organization that aids military personnel and veterans who have suffered severe traumatic brain injuries while serving our nation.
Has the Candidate’s Daughter become a stock character in our political narratives, and if so, what’s that about? And does anyone think 1 percent is a pretty pathetic donation to brain-damaged veterans, especially for a book by a woman who brags in its pages that her “ancestors have fought for their country in every American war since the Revolution”?
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The Fairfield Weekly has an interesting piece on the public's enduring fascination with Sarah Palin: "The Porn Identity." It opens in a strip club where adult film star Lisa Ann, who played Palin in Hustler's XXX-homage to the once aspiring VP, "Who's Nailin' Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF," takes the stage dressed as Palin to perform a striptease. Acccording to Hustler Video, "Who's Nailin' Paylin" is one of their all-time best-sellers, proving so popular they're producing a follow-up this spring, "Hollywood's Nailin' Paylin," which "will parody Palin's imagined new career as book author and talk-show host and, of course, put her in bed with a bunch of spoofed celebrities." Hustler says there's just something about Sarah:
"There aren't many franchises in the adult world. It's a one-trick pony," [Hustler Director of Operations Jeff] Thill says. "It's really different with her. She's not really in the news right now and yet we can't keep the title in stock. Assuming the second one goes well, we'll continue on forever if we can get away with it."
In an interview, the Weekly asked her impersonator about Palin's sexual mystique. The woman who's walked a mile in stripper shoes as Palin responded: "It's a distraction from politics. I hope people wouldn't be swayed either way by sex appeal. People vote for all the wrong reasons anyway, but if we throw sex appeal into the mix we'll have [a disaster]." But is she right? Months after Palin's disastrous run, we're still intrigued. She's the anti-Hillary who won't go away, and judging by her stickiness, I can't help but wonder if Palin has some strange hope in her rumored possible run for the presidency in 2012. Maybe Palin's sublimated-yet-paraded brand of sexuality is the key to her success—and the farthest thing from a disaster.
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In today's installment of "Wow, I feel like a geezer" ... I'm feeling like the stereotypical old man who grouses to his grandkids that when he was a kid, "We had to walk five miles to school, uphill each way, in three feet of snow."
BoingBoing picked up this post from a blog called Free-Range Kids. Turns out a mom let her 10-year-old walk one-third of a mile to soccer practice ... wait for it ... by himself. Kind of. He had a cell phone, and anyhow Mom had to be at the soccer field a few minutes after he got there, so she would find out quickly if he arrived safely. Alas, the poor kid got only three blocks before a cop stopped him. When the cop found the mom at the soccer field, he explained that they'd received "hundreds" of calls to 911 and said she could be charged with child endangerment. (I somehow doubt that this small town in Mississippi has the population density to lead to "hundreds of calls.")
I know that my generation (X, if you must know) likes to joke about how it's amazing we survived childhood, without five-point-harness car seats and cribs that had lead paint and parents who let us sleep on our tummies. Of course we can joke about it, because we survived. There's no doubt that improved safety guidelines for children's products and better advice from pediatricians have indeed made us safer. But when I was a kid, I walked to kindergarten by myself. Sure, there were other kids in the neighborhood and we'd walk together when we saw one another, but I knew where I was going and how to stop at the stop signs and look for cars and not talk to strangers. At the pool we swam at every summer, every kid looked forward to turning 10 because that's when you could start going without your parents. (Yes, there were lifeguards.)
I don't know if neighborhoods are safer or more dangerous today than when I was growing up. As with most things, it probably depends on where you live. And no doubt, people are influenced by a 24-hour news cycle filled with accounts of missing Caylees and Elizabeths. But parents need to be able to take reasonable steps to foster independence in their children, free from the meddling of nosy neighbors.
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I've never been a huge fan of Ellen Degeneres. I always thought she was funny enough, but maybe I was just a little resentful because she made the name famous before I ever could.
Yet somehow, even though I have a day job, I've managed to become a fan of The Ellen Degeneres Show. I watched it once when I was home sick and started TiVo-ing it after that. I certainly don't watch every show from cover to cover. I just dip in now and again (now that I have time after getting sick of Oprah).
The show is good enough. It's got a light, fun feeling to it