Thursday, January 17, 2008 - Posts
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That's funny Ann, the one thing that never occurred to me was that Megan Meier's parents had struck an impossible bargain with her over MySpace. Perhaps because my kids still believe that Dora the Explorer actually lives inside my laptop I haven't yet thought through what a parent should be doing about monitoring social-networking sites. One of the ironies of the Meier story, beyond those we've already mentioned is that all these parents are simultaneously described as over-involved "helicopter" people and tragically checked-out.
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Dahlia, I'd say one of the most poignant lines in the New Yorker article-and there were plenty of them-comes from Mrs. Meier, Megan's mother, maturely drawing stark age distinctions. She feels for the teenagers who posted messages posing as "Josh Evans," the fake boyfriend. "If you don't think that child wishes she could go back and change that . . . It could easily have been Megan doing that." It's the adult involvement that she cannot forgive, not just her neighbor's but, I suspect, her own as well: she gave into her daughter's pleas for an account, imposing a rule she knew she couldn't enforce-that Megan never be on MySpace without a parent present. Part of what is so disturbing about this story, I think, is the image of a world ensnared by social networking technology, making middle schoolers of us all: needy, insecure, anxiously voyeuristic, socially hypervulnerable creatures for whom being alone, ever, is insupportable-is death.
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Emily, I agree with your Clintonian sentiment re abortion (fewer = better), but perhaps only in theory. The new report on the falling abortion rate didn't provide a reason for the decline. Maybe I'm being cynical, but could this have something to do with the dwindling number of clinics?
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Just read Lauren Collins piece on the Megan Meier MySpace/Suicide story. We haven’t really covered this story at Slate, largely because it’s virtually impossible to wrap your head around it all. Collins doesn’t try to make sense of it all either, just sort of lays it out there in a read-it-and-weep piece that paints the kids involved as somehow old beyond their years and the parents as young beyond theirs.
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Per our discussion about Juno and abortion earlier this week, the Guttmacher Institute announced today that the U.S. abortion rate has declined to its lowest level since 1974—the year after Roe v. Wade was decided. In 2005, the rate was 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The absolute number has gone down as well, to 1.2 millon abortions in 2005, which is 25 percent fewer than the high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990. This, I think we can agree, is unvarnished good news. I hope that it speaks to the spreading of the birth control, birth control mantra that Melinda was wisely intoning. The Guttmacher Institute notes, however, that more than one in five pregnancies still ended in abortion in 2005, so we've got a ways to go.
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The National Women's Studies Association just completed a survey on women's studies programs. Here are some stats, via Feministing: There are 652 women's and gender studies programs in the United States; undergrad women's studies courses enrolled nearly 89,000 students in 2005-06; and 30.4 percent of women's studies faculty are faculty of color, versus 19 percent of faculty nationally.
The ladies over at Feministing seem pretty happy about this academic boom, but I'm not sure what to make of it. In college, I steered clear of the fringe, identity-focused courses. I figured I could learn about feminism or African-American history through conscientious professors in mainstream departments. Plus, it bothered me that gender and/or women's studies classes were populated entirely by women and gay men, and Af Am classes almost entirely by black students. The demographics seemed like an admission of defeat - the world at large doesn't care, but at least we can preach to our own!
The last stat I mentioned - on faculty of color - also worries me, because it brings home the fact that fringe departments help universities massage their numbers. Department by department there are far more men, and far more whites, but Af Am and women's studies make the total breakdown seem a little less egregious.
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