Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - Posts
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"I'm well aware that my opponents on both sides are paying a lot more attention to me," Hillary Clinton said. "I'm reminded by some of my friends that when you get to be my age, having so many men paying attention to you is kind of flattering." I like this--it's relaxed, undefensive, self-deprecating--a good example of putting on your big-girl panties, as Melinda would have it. And a welcome respite from some of the horrified reaction to the Hillary cleavage story, which I found overly sanctimonious. She's the first female candidate. Like it or not, her femininity is at issue. And when she can pull it off, disarming will usually work better than huffy or stern. Or am I skimming over what are really murkier waters?
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Australia is also in the midst of an election season, though theirs has big two advantages over ours right now.
1. Their parliament election, which will determine whether John Howard remains prime minister or has to move aside in favor of opposition candidate Kevin Rudd, is just a month away.
2. The most embarrassing YouTube video to surface in their election so far features Rudd idly picking at his earwax and then licking his finger. (Watch it here.)
The etiquette breach occurs while one of Rudd’s fellow members of Parliament is droning on something to do with permanent residents. Rudd’s not the only one bored stiff—the redhead sitting in front of him appears to be fighting off sleep, and the woman to his left looks mighty fidgety.
I’m confused, though, about how Aussie blogs and newspapers are reacting. The footage is apparently a few years old and has been on YouTube for months, but it’s only now become an issue. A news site says the 30-second clip “could do more damage to Kevin Rudd's election chances than any policy blitz.” Blogs call it Rudd’s “macaca moment.” Really? I’d be relieved if I saw footage of Barack Obama caught picking his nose, or John McCain trying to surreptitiously rid himself of a wedgie. It’s gross and it’s bad manners, but there’s something endearing about catching politicians in those off-guard, embarrassing moments.
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The good news in the study Meghan writes about is that both men and women reported feeling more comfortable in professional groups that included more women. Does this mean that men, too, find predominantly male groups more intimidating? Or less interesting? I was in one of the first co-ed classes at the University of Notre Dame and the reaction we got all the time was, “Five guys for every girl; that must be great!” I knew no one who looked at it that way, but it was not all that harrowing, either. We were feminists who wore knee socks and loved the Virgin Mary, and about the craziest it ever got was at football games, some people would sing, “as our loyal sons and daughters march on to victory.’’ And some not.
When Domers of more recent vintage ask what it was like being a pioneer, I know they want horror stories and maybe the recipe for hoecakes, but all I’ve got for them is that on rare occasions, some stressed-out defender of the old order would lash out—most memorably when one of the few men in my Women in the Bible class stormed out shouting, “Mary Magdalene was a whore, and that’s all there is to it!” A far bigger issue for me was that only a handful of our tenured professors were female. But that, too, has long since changed, and nearly half of all undergraduates are women these days. So what would I tell those aspiring young scientists who see no one like themselves at the conference? In the immortal words of Margaret Spellings, put on your big-girl panties. And go anyway.
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Two articles about the latest surveillance technology available to the modern family-- you can read here in the Guardian about a new jacket with a GPS chip in it, and here in the New York Times about new GPS-equipped cell phones—have left me feeling more spooked than such stories usually do. My nostalgic reflex is to feel sorry for kids. In the constant struggle for independence, today’s teenagers have it so much harder than we did, boomers often sigh. They’ve got helicopter parents in thrall to an ethos of hypervigilance and tempted by all kinds of gizmos, who feel any youthful misstep should be preventable—and if not, is somehow partly their fault. We had parents who worried, sure, but from a distance. They couldn’t track our whereabouts on weekend evenings, and the tacit ethos was that minimal information probably was better for all concerned. But the Times story suggests a more oppressive development: At this point, kids may have only themselves to blame. It seems we have a market of non-stop networking students, unable to bear being out of the social loop for a minute, to thank for the latest surge in tracking technology. Don’t they see how they’ll come to regret this? It's grist for, what else, yet more self-blaming angst on the part of parents: Look at what our hovering has produced—a generation at risk of undervaluing autonomy.
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