Thursday, March 26, 2009 - Posts
-
sponsorship
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?
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
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.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?