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The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...
April 2008 - Posts
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David Brooks raises an excellent question in his column today about demographics and the Democrats: I understand why affluent, college educated voters are drawn to Barack Obama, but how did Hillary Clinton become the candidate of the working class voter? Read More...
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Depressing findings from the Chronicle of Higher Education : Even though well-off colleges say they're trying hard to recruit low-income students, the numbers are going in the wrong direction. At the 75 schools with endowments over $500 million, the share Read More...
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I sympathize with Hanna's request that Miley Cyrus put on a robe , but I have lower expectations for magic in the Magic Kingdom. With no children or grandchildren in the Miley Cyrus target demographic, I nearly missed the Hannah Montana phenomenon except Read More...
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I am about to enter into the realm I never imagined I'd find myself, the parental equivalent of the liberal being mugged. In this case, the mugger is Miley Cyrus, or maybe Disney, or Vanity Fair —whoever is most responsible for that photo of a topless Read More...
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OK, I'm going to wade into the hornet's nest on the equal - pay bill. Before I begin, let me say that I actually tried to read the Senate bill and have now decided to give up my dream of running for legislative office someday, because it's hard to decipher Read More...
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Over on "Convictions," Richard Ford elaborates on our objections to McCain's opposition to the Equal Pay Bill. Here's the full post . He concludes: I have to say it’s hard for me to believe that anyone who is really committed to equal pay would oppose Read More...
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I want to say amen to your excellent post about McCain and equal pay, Emily. The only thing I'd add is this: I found McCain's comments about the bill particularly dismaying because he invoked an old canard—that women are less qualified than their male Read More...
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I've got more to complain about: Last night, Senate Republicans killed the Equal Pay Bill, which would have undone the Supreme Court's bad deed in a case last term called Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co . Lily Ledbetter sued Goodyear for sex Read More...
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A couple of years ago, my son remarked that President Bush seemed to think every day was Opposites Day, which would explain how he always wound up listening to the wrong people and giving the best ideas the boot. That's how I feel now, listening to Hillary's Read More...
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Ann, a question triggered by your great post this morning : What is the opposite of hope and civility? Is it honesty and candor about the toughness of this race, as you suggest? Is it being “mean and irrational” as Gail Collins argues ? Or is it specificity Read More...
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Ann, your smart post tees me up to protest one particular pander: the candidates' unwillingess to speak the scientific truth that there is no evidence of a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. McCain is the worst on this. From the Washington Post Read More...
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Here's my two-days-after two-cents. Obama may be feeling weary, but it seems to me he should be feeling he's been remarkably successful at changing the standards of conduct for campaigning, if not yet for governing. But won't it be ironic if the norm-shift Read More...
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Melinda, your observations last night seem to have foreshadowed much of today’s postmorteming: Everyone now agrees it’s all about the bitterness. The only point of contention is whether all this spluttering rage indeed motivates voters — as you suggest Read More...
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The most important split among Democratic voters this year may not be based on race, gender, age, or even whether or not you think bitter is a bad word; I look at the exit polling tonight and wonder if the defining difference isn't one of temperament, Read More...
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Here’s a thoughtful piece from Courtney E. Martin at the American Prospect responding to Linda Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece from last Friday about the ways in which young feminists resent Hillary Clinton out of a semi-Freudian need to destroy their mothers. Read More...
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After we toast Danica, let's raise a glass (of milk, in case anyone's watching) to welcome Cynthia Sommer home from jail. As far as I can tell, Sommer spent 2½ years in lockup for getting breast implants and hanging out in bars. A San Diego jury heard Read More...
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Emily, your exegesis of Obama as Joshua to MLK's Moses, leading the people to the promised land, was inspiring, but it would have been laughed off the table at a Seder I attended this past weekend—also in the Philadelphia area—where three separate attendees Read More...
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Speaking of Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, at our family seder in Philadelphia over the weekend, my mother pointed out that just as 40 years elapsed before the Israelites made it to the Promised Land, so 40 years have passed since the assassination of Read More...
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I've been to only a handful of car races in my life, all on a two-bit track in Manasses, so I shouldn't have much of a stake in the triumph of Danica Patrick . This weekend, the 26-year-old became the first woman to win an Indy car race, defeating a two-time Read More...
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Well, I probably should have known that something was fishy when the Yale Daily News reported that “[f]ew people outside of Yale's undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts' exhibition.” Yale’s not a big campus: When I was there, we all knew Read More...
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Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slate ster sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced Read More...
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OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive Read More...
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Bloggers are expressing shock, disgust , and outrage at this Yale Daily News article, which describes one Aliza Shvarts’ senior art project: “a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ Read More...
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On today's episode of Hey, a Girl Can Dream , my man Benedict decides that as long as he's in the neighborhood, he should stroll on over to the Supreme Court and spend a couple of minutes protesting the death penalty, by lethal injection or otherwise. Read More...
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So of course I plugged my stats into the handy-dandy wage gap calculator that Trailhead mentioned , which the Clinton campaign has posted on its Web site in honor of Equal Pay Day (April 22, in case you haven't pencilled it in yet) and the results were Read More...
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A guest post from Barbara Ehrenreich : I spent an hour yesterday trying to persuade Tom Frank, author of What's the Mater with Kansas? and the apparent intellectual source of Obama's remark on white working class "bitterness," to weigh in with an op-ed Read More...
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Rachael , I wholly agree with 50 percent of what you say. Obama’s message about our tendency to hunker down behind extreme identity differences (religious, ideological, racial) would have been better delivered directly to the group he was addressing. Read More...
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Until he walked into a manhole with his remarks about bitter bumpkins, the genius of the Obama campaign was in throwing away the playbook. He regularly violated the time-honored wisdom of Rules #1 (Treat voters like idiots at all times.) and #2 (When Read More...
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Dahlia , I think there's one important difference between Rush and Barack (well, one difference relevant to this conversation): location, location, location. Rush Limbaugh might be a kajillionaire immune to any economic downturn, but he's gotten that Read More...
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Just to be clear then: When Barack Obama dares ponder the sources of small-town America’s bitterness, he’s an elitist snob. But when Rush Limbaugh devotes his every waking breath to ranting about it, well, he’s speaking truth to power. I’m not saying Read More...
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This "cling" flap just keeps getting worse. I was expecting some Obama redemption at the Christian school forum last night in Grantham , where each of the candidates had the chance to talk about their faith. Maybe not as moving as the Jeremiah Wright Read More...
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Great framing, Rachael , and evidence that the real beneficiary of Obama's comment will be not Hillary but McCain, for whom it is a bag of bonbons to be snacked on all fall. Part of what's prompting the wincing and deep doubts, I think, is that Obama Read More...
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Wow, Melinda , I don't think I could have put it any better. Like you, I hail from a small town whose most vibrant days are well in the past. Downtown was on life support long before Wal-Mart came to town seven or eight years ago; the schools aren't what Read More...
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Yes, it is galling to be tagged as out of touch by Hillary "Is that sniper fire I hear?' Clinton. Only, she happens to be right: Barack Obama's suggestion that economically suffering small-town Americans are haters who cling to God and guns out of bitterness Read More...
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Sorry to be so late to the party on Slate V's Bonk ing , but oh my, what's next on Slate After Hours ? (Or our spinoff site, Slate Blue ?) OK, maybe aspirations of primness run in my family; my dad took that Kinsey class at Indiana University where they Read More...
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Two items today that should go to the top of the "Clinton fatigue" greatest hits. First is Hillary laughing at a reporter's question about Bill getting paid $800,000 to speak at a group that supports the Colombia free-trade agreement (that the Democrats Read More...
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Emily , I agree with you that Mark Gimein's " eligible bachelor " theory, while intriguing to contemplate, doesn't quite explain the end result of who ends up with whom—and who ends up alone. It just seems too pat. I switched from my intended economics Read More...
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This excessive Botoxing and retouching has something to do with the collapse of the classes, or at least the shifting in what used to define the super-rich. "The 'luxury' experience has become thoroughly middle-class, even prole (two words: 'Gucci T-shirt')," Read More...
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I'm afraid that blogging on "women's content" might bring out the bitch in me. After a Fray poster linked to the wowowow.com Web site in response to Rachael's Shine comments earlier this week, I cattily e-mailed my fellow XXers about Wowowow's co-founder Read More...
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Ah, yes, the unsolicited-Botox pitch. My experience wasn't nearly so harrowing or prolonged as Melinda's, but a couple of years ago I went to a dermatologist for a small, straightforward medical matter. It was hard not to notice the large photo on his Read More...
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Elsewhere on Slate , Mark Gimein offers an intriguing theory to explain the seeming shortage of attractive, socially adept, well-employed, single, thirtysomething men—the class eligible-bachelor problem. The gist is that decisive women in their 20s snap Read More...
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Will's excellent tale of nip and tuck —about those poor plastic surgeons whose business in butt-lifts was not quite as recession-proof as they thought—has made my day, mean thing that I am. And if these lean times force a few more of these specialists Read More...
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Two things dominated my psyche yesterday: that excruciating Max Moseley video showing the famous son of Nazis engaging in some concentration camp orgy, and Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens , which I am currently reading. Coll's book is like an epic Russian Read More...
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Reading about the current trial of civil rights leader James Bevel , I am experiencing the same conundrum I've always felt about Bill Clinton's piggish behavior toward his wife. Bevel was a companion of Martin Luther King and helped organize the Freedom Read More...
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Actually, Emily — didn't Hillary get the idea that it would be OK to complain about her hair from none other than Mike Kinsley himself? Last week, he pointed out (in his Slate column , of course) that male candidates can sleep a whole extra half-hour Read More...
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While everyone has been busy analyzing the campaign of the first viable female presidential candidate and gossiping about rumors of a possible female vice presidential candidate ; while we've got women running the House of Representatives and telling Read More...
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I realize this isn't up there with Tuzla and utter delusion , but am I picking on Hillary to bring up this self-pitying joke she made, at a town hall meeting in Missoula, Mont., about her looks and her hair? From CNN's political blog , "And that is another Read More...
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As we look to November, surely we can agree that the last thing we need in the Oval Office is another escapee from the reality-based community . The various misstatements each of the presidential candidates has made lately are instructive and ought not Read More...
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Wow, Liza, fully a third of women make more than their husbands? That's way higher than I would have guessed and especially impressive given how many young women are unsalaried while their kids are little. When you factor in all the older women who never Read More...
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Also appropos of prominent women and the men who love them, or leave them, or both: The Wall Street Journal had a revealing piece this week about how more men not only are taking alimony from their higher-earning ex-wives but are willing to admit it. Read More...
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Speaking of overshadowed men, and going back Hanna’s interest in pols who don’t cheat, I’d been wondering today whether Obama was perhaps squirming a little, and his staffers might be casting about for a way to cultivate at least a bit of a bad boy image. Read More...
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When Brad and Jen broke up, I started finding US Weekly around the house. Finally, mystery solved: My husband, as is turns out, just cannot read enough about Angelina's humanitarian efforts on behalf of children around the world! ( Here , included in Read More...
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Hillary Clinton has another "It's 3:00 a.m and your children are safe and asleep, but there's a phone ringing in the White House" ad . This time, it's not about national security, but housing foreclosures, and Clinton is awake and fresh-looking, taking Read More...
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I hear you, Hanna , and I've sometimes thought about the downside of success for Hollywood women when their marriages fall apart. Cases in point: Hilary Swank wins an Oscar. She and her husband break up. Reese Witherspoon wins an Oscar. She and her husband Read More...
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So here's a question to the men out there: Do we think this story will get less play because of an undercurrent of pity for Thomas Athans; i.e., Men who are married to more powerful women are justified in their straying, to satisfy their sense of manhood? Read More...
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No, not the politicians' spouses who can't keep away from prostitutes .... Before it gets forgotten in a flood of Big Beaver jokes, I wanted to pick up on what Juliet wrote: I saw that BBC poll about world-perceptions-of-America too, and reckoned it was Read More...
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The good news is, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow did not hold a news conference to say she was sticking by her hubby of five years after he confessed to police that he'd been with a prostitute. On the contrary, after the news came out, Stabenow didn't Read More...
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From Cullen Seltzer, a lawyer in Richmond, Va., who has written for Slate , on the tenacious hold of the billable hour: Here's the rub and why the billable hour will always be a relevant factor in legal work: The only thing lawyers have to sell is their Read More...
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I thought this factoid from the article was striking, too, and sad. Of the 20-year-old prostitute: "She told police she had only been working as a prostitute for about a week and didn’t know how many men had visited her the day she was arrested , according
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