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Our own Emily Bazelon discusses the Dating a Banker Anonymous fracas, shifting gender roles during the recession, and the pay gap with Salon's Rebecca Traister on Bloggingheads.tv. See video below.
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Speaking of John Updike, did anyone else catch his review of the John Cheever biography in this week's New Yorker? I found it a little morbid and more than a little sad that to think of Updike commenting on his compatriot in WASP-angst from beyond the grave. Cheever's life was also more than a little sad. According to Cheever's son, Federico:
“He was always at sea. He didn’t understand how the world worked. He
was forever being cheated by tradesmen. . . . He had no profession.
He’d spent his entire career as a writer.” Federico, known in the
family as Fred, insisted, “No one, absolutely no one, shared his life
with him. There was no one from whom he could get honest advice.”
The Updike piece also notes that Cheever is rarely taught in academia these days, and though he is a dead white male, I think that's a shame. I always found his portrayal of suburban "darkness, corruption, and confusion," to be deeply moving and familiar. I hope Blake Bailey's biography brings Cheever back into fashion, because, as Updike put it, "a tormented man’s daily struggle with himself," will always be good reading.
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Margaret, I'm looking forward to reading the Susie Orbach interview (and the actual book) myself. A couple thoughts --
[Orbach's book] examines the spreading belief, no longer confined to the West, that our bodies are badly in need of altering. In the Times interview, Orbach cites as an example young South Korean women who, with their parents’ full support, have plastic surgery to Westernize their eyelids. “They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots,” Orbach says. “They see it as a chance at modernity.”
Non-Western societies have a looong history of extreme body alternation all their own. Foot binding? Neck rings? Force-feeding? The West did not invent the idea that bodies can be pulled and prodded into perfection. (Women in other countries feeling pressured to specifically look more Western, well, that's a separate discussion.) Also:
... thanks to Orbach and many others who have written about the cultural forces encouraging us to dislike our bodies, we, unlike those young Korean women, know that our bodies are not the problem, or the solution.
I think most young South Korean women would beg to differ with the idea that they're somehow less self-aware about their choices than we Westerners are. When we try to change our bodies, aren't we also participating in an "active, if unfortunate, attempt to get ahead"?
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Is anyone else nursing a total girl crush on Erin Karpluk, the star of the new show Being Erica? She plays a smart, pretty 32-year-old with a master's degree who just hasn't turned into the success story she knows everyone expected her to be. Instead, she's wandering the streets in her dorky green PJs, struggling to snag a job or a man she really loves and obsessing over the choices she's (possibly incorrectly) made.
That's the gist. Now, the top three reasons you should watch it tonight at 10 p.m. on the Soap Network:
3. Time travel! That's how she gets to revisit all those bad choices. It may sound cheesy, but just think how often that combination of melodrama and sci-fi has done us right: Lost, Heroes, Buffy, the last season of Felicity. OK, maybe not the last season of Felicity.
2. Erica doesn't always fix her mistakes when she relives them. That would be dumb. And this show is not dumb.
1. Revisiting Erica's past means revisiting the music of the '90s. Four Non-Blondes, the Spin Doctors, Blind Melon. Beautiful.
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:
Those interested in the crazy things we do to our bodies might want to look at Deborah Solomon’s interview with British psychoanalyst Susie Orbach running in this week’s issue of the New York Times Magazine (not online yet). For fellow children of the '80s not familiar with Orbach, her best-selling 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue argued that women’s struggles with food and weight were linked to their still subordinate status in a male world. The book, which Orbach refers to in the interview by the not so feminist acronym “Fifi”—I think of a French poodle or some Eva Gabor-type toddling around in kitten heels—got women questioning how much of their negative attitudes toward their bodies they had absorbed from the society around them.
Orbach’s latest book, Bodies, came out this week, ironically published as part of Picador paperback’s “Big Ideas, Small Books” series—apparently we want even our books to be thin. It examines the spreading belief, no longer confined to the West, that our bodies are badly in need of altering. In the Times interview, Orbach cites as an example young South Korean women who, with their parents’ full support, have plastic surgery to Westernize their eyelids. “They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots,” Orbach says. “They see it as a chance at modernity.”
While I’m not sure it’s fair to call the Korean girls “passive" if they genuinely believe that the procedure will give them a better chance of success in the larger world. If they do, the surgery seems like an active, if unfortunate, attempt to get ahead. But why in the West do people with no shortage of opportunity obsessively revise their bodies? I suspect it's to avoid confronting what is imperfect about the way we live. Instead of addressing bad relationships, unfulfilling jobs, unhealthy behavior, or the helplessness we feel in the face of events we can’t change—death, crime, recession—we make our bodies into all-consuming projects, convincing ourselves that reshaping our bodies will somehow reshape our lives. And thanks to Orbach and many others who have written about the cultural forces encouraging us to dislike our bodies, we, unlike those young Korean women, know that our bodies are not the problem, or the solution. So what’s keeping us from acting on that knowledge? What will it take to ditch the diets and the botox and deal with the issues for which there is no cosmetic fix?
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Meghan, Sam, how embarrassing to be caught mixing up Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden! Clearly, it's time to revoke my poetic license. But Meghan, I did understand perfectly well that "making nothing happen" was intended as a declaration of importance; the Buddha declares nothing to be of supreme importance. And it is, in the inner world—but not necessarily in the outer world. I used to have, over my poetry-writing desk, Shelley's declaration that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. It took me years to recognize how utterly silly that was. I'm not saying literature is worthless, by any means. I'm saying its worth is, quite naturally, overstated by the literarily inclined who believe that everyone is affected by their discipline and passion as much as they are. It's just not so.
Still, all of you have beaten me into a slight retreat from my tongue-in-cheek stance that I just don't care anymore about the "great women writers" debates. Of course, it does matter that men acknowledge female writers. Yes, of course, money, prizes, jobs, opportunities to write, and other kinds of influence (influence on the literary-minded, if no one else) are distributed based on such recognition. I guess I'm suggesting that we knock the men down to size by pointing out that they're not as all-important as some of them like to think and that it's ridiculous to declare that men and women will necessarily appreciate imaginative renderings of one another's worlds in equal measure. For instance, I would pick Alice Munro as a greater writer than John Updike, hands down. And David Foster Wallace never did anything to me that even came close to what Jhumpa Lahiri can do (although I would drop just about anything else to read Dave Eggers). The Orange Prize has helped knock the importance of the (Man) Booker Prize down to size. If women and men had two equal sets of writing awards, wouldn't it help us all acknowledge that men's writing is necessarily limited by their maleness?
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I love this "We Can Do It!" T-shirt featuring Michelle Obama. The original star of J. Howard Miller's iconic poster has been widely misidentified as Rosie the Riveter; in fact, it was Geraldine Doyle. In any case, the first lady makes a suitable replacement as the 21st-century woman who has it all: brains, beauty, and brawn.
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An interesting thing is happening over the nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. Pro-life groups are calling her "one of the most divisive elected officials in the United States," in the words of the Family Research Council. They complain about her "anti-woman" record: a term of art used by the right to attribute feminist motives to the pro-life movement. She does, in fact, have a classic pro-choice record, protecting clinics and resisting parental-notice and late-term abortion bills. In other times, she would be easy bait for conservatives, especially at a moment when the nation is looking to overhaul health care. Indeed, the right is yelling and waving its hands and so far ... nothing. Not a single protest yet from any Republican congressmen. This, and Dobson. Makes you wonder. Whither the movement?
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Juliet, I loved your take on Battlestar Galactica. I'm in deep denial that we're in the show's End Days. For one thing, I love the way the Friday-night schedule looks right now. Traditionally, Friday night is where TV programmers shove their underperforming shows, but it's also women's night. Back in 2006, Friday night was God night (just another way of saying women's night; shows like Joan of Arcadia, Ghost Whisperer, and The Book of Daniel were not aimed at Y-chromosome-bearing viewers); now it's all about butt-kicking women: BSG, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and, of course, Gwen Ifill on Washington Week.
I have but one cavil (geddit!). You're right that Cally was a terrible character—"detrimental to progress" as we used to say back in the day—but because of what she says about humankind. Let's say there are about 40,000 humans left in the BSG universe (it always kills me that they pay so little attention to that statistic). Maybe 25 are characters whose names we know. Cally was supposed to represent the other 39,975 people who aren't charismatic or brave or smart or pretty. But like the air-brained women who dote on Baltar, she was unlikable—unstable, jealous, generally mediocre. If that's humanity, let's just put the sexy characters we know and love on a Raptor and let the rest rot in space. (One other minor disagreement: I don't think Cally's attempt to kill her baby along with herself was a sign of postpartum depression but rather a sign of how much she hated Cylons. In the last few weeks, we learned Tyrol* wasn't the father of her child, but that was a completely unconvincing plot twist.)
*This blog post originally misspelled Tyrol's name.
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This coming weekend's Sunday Times Magazine has a very entertaining story called "Share My Ride" by Mark Levine. (Not linkable yet.) The story is basically a history of the car-sharing movement, which originates with enviro-geeks from the Pacific Northwest and extends to the now-ubiquitous Zipcar. The story opens with a sketch of Levine's Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighbor, Joe, a guy with the "means and the mind-set to wade fearlessly into the waters of certain Next Big Things." Well, my humble neighborhood in D.C. is no Park Slope, but for what it's worth, I am its Joe. About six months ago, I decided to share a car with some friends, not even knowing it was some kind of movement. They have three kids and so do we, and neither of us wanted a minivan. So instead we decided to share one. So cool and mellow was my friend Meri about the whole thing that when it came time to decide whose insurance, she casually ponied up her card. Well, about two days later, one of us lost control of the car in my sloping driveway. The car smashed into the house, wrecking its main beam, collapsing our garage doors, and choking the neighborhood in smoke. My house had a big orange "CONDEMNED" sign on it, and I became familiar with something called the "D.C. Cave-in Squad." Now, my insurer is suing Meri's insurer for damages. Otherwise, car sharing is a great idea!
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On his blog, Will Saletan pointed out that Obama's gray hairs probably aren't a result of stress, but rather of his ripe age of 47. Saletan comfortingly cites a study that found no correlation between going prematurely gray and dying young. (In fact, for the males in the study, the mean age of death was slightly higher among the early grayers.) So it looks like the only real conclusion we can draw from reports on Obama's salt-and-pepper locks is Bonnie's: His barber is disturbingly chatty.
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And now, an answer to the question we asked once upon a time: Did Sarah Palin's sex appeal help or hurt her as a VP candidate?
Hurt, psychologists Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg find in a new paper. Summary below from Miller-McCune magazine:
[the researchers] took a group of 133 undergraduates and assigned them to write a few lines about one of two celebrities: Palin or actress Angelina Jolie. Half of the participants in each category were asked to write “your thoughts and feelings about this person,” while the other half were asked to write “your thoughts and feelings about this person’s appearance.”
The participants were then asked to rate their subject (Palin or Jolie) in terms of various attributes, including competence. Finally, they were asked who they intended to vote for in the upcoming election.
Those who wrote about Palin’s appearance were more positive in their assessments than those who assessed her qualities as a person. But they rated her far lower in terms of competence, intelligence and capability, and were far less likely to indicate they planned to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.
This is Republicans and Independents making this judgment, according to the researchers. Apparently they didn't want a Sexy Puritan a step away from the White House. More proof that Palin helped sink the GOP ticket. As if we needed it.
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I know, Hanna. When I saw Obama's graying hair on both important newspaper's front pages today, I assumed that Zariff's press agent had pulled a high-level public relations double whammy. It looks to me like the Chicago barber, who accompanied his famous client to the White House, is hoping to upgrade his razor for a racier profile. Celebrities often ask service providers to sign nondisclosure agreements. I realize the Obamas are very egalitarian, but don't you think the president should emphasize discretion with the folks in their orbit?
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H Plus, my very favorite transhumanist quarterly, has just released its spring issue. You'll all be very interested to read about the coming spray-on female nano condom (or some such) detailed on Page 14. I'm just as excited about subcutaneous digital nano tattoos:
Among the uses envisioned for the "nano skins" are facial or hand displays. These displays would be synched to a WPAn, or Wireless Personal Area network. There would be a display driver implanted to receive signals and allow you and others to communicate wirelessly. This would allow you to send information about remembering things instantly or communicate to someone else discreetly, receiving a friend's text to your hand instead of your phone. You could also have the option to communicate back to your friend your mood. That way, they won't have to ask how you are doing; they can just take one quick look and know.
I envision a texting set-up similar to my computer's calendar. A timed notice would appear conveniently on my hand saying "15 min till you have to call so- and-so" or "1 day till you need to bring work cupcakes."
Dare to dream!
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I don't know if this counts as Grup or not, because They Might Be Giants is an adult band that also records children's music. But Emily, your post explains the popularity of a song called "Supertaster," that begins:
When I was 39 years old, I heard a story. I found out that there [are] people walking among us who have superpowers. These people are called Supertasters. To a Supertaster, bitter fruits taste far more bitter, and sweets far more sweet. Then, just a few months ago, I had the chance to meet a real, live Supertaster named John Lee.
And this is his true story:
Nothing tastes the same (nothing tastes the same)
To a Supertaster (Supertaster)
When he tastes a pear (tastes a pear)
It's like a hundred pears (it's like a million pears)
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These few words from a BBC News story speak volumes:
US psychologists found wives in tense marriages were prone to risk factors for heart disease, stroke and diabetes. In comparison, husbands seemed relatively immune from such problems.
Heart disease, of course, is the No. 1 killer of women. The AHA counsels prevention through exercise and good nutrition, and, now, divorce. Not really, of course, but this suggests that beneath all those TV sitcoms on which the wife looks fit and healthy and the husband seems fat and winded lurks a murkier truth.
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Hanna, the line I quoted from Regina Schrambling's piece this morning to my husband, another food Nazi when it comes to patrolling our children's ever-disappointing eating habits, was "children do have taste buds that adults do not—inside their cheeks and on their palates rather than only on the tongue." My kids often complain that oranges are too orange-like, tomatoes too tomato. They object to some fruits and vegetables for their intensity. I remember feeling that way as a kid myself. Who knew it was because kids' mouths explode with taste buds?
In our house, there are no kid foodies, only kid-food whiplash. We despair when they refuse spicey takeout (Thai curry outrage) but then scrape the onions and garlic off their chicken when we are desperate to get some protein down their throats. Pathetic. At least now I know the science behind why they'll evolve. I hope.
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How is it that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have stories today about Obama going gray? Is 44 days a magic number? Or is that barber Zariff, who sounds so straight edge in print, actually a salon gossip?
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New York magazine has done a great job chronicling the collapse of the generation gap, whereby certain urban hipster parents refuse to grow up and behave very much like their own children. They wear the same jeans, have the same haircuts, and insist their 2-year-olds love the Ramones, or even better, the Hives, a more obscure Swedish fivesome. In Slate today, Regina Schrambling extends this phenomenon one step further in writing about the child foodie movement. She does not call this the latest grub trend, but that's clearly what it is: green market zealots insisting their child invented that asparagus walnut recipe. In the story, Schrambling makes the critical distinction between children cooking for children and children cooking for other adults. In my son's school, they cook once a week. But the aim is to teach them a little math and fine motor skills; they make ant rolls (celery, cream cheese, raisins), not souffle. My favorite part of the piece is the evolutionary digression, to which I hope my food Nazi husband pays special attention:
Studies at the center have also determined that children favor sweet to savory more than adults (this may be an evolutionary issue–children need more energy because they are active and growing, and sweet foods generally have more calories), and they tend to reject vegetables (possibly because they're unfamiliar, partly because of their individual genetic makeup) and, often, meat.