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When I lived in Southeast Asia a few years back, a couple of European expats asked me why gay Americans were "so obsessed with getting married." It struck them as a fundamentally conservative impulse for a group not beholden to traditionalist social norms. Sociologist Andrew Cherlin has just written a book on America's weird relationship to the institution of marriage, and he has answers for baffled non-Americans:
Same-sex marriage has been more of a battleground in the United States than in most other countries because marriage is more important to Americans than to people in other countries... In some European countries, gay and lesbian activists are asking instead: why, at this late date, should we buy into the oppressive, archaic institution of marriage? But in the United States many advocates say that only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship. And they are right, because marriage matters more here than elsewhere.
It has always seemed to me that the logically compelling arguments against same-sex marriage come not from the Christian right from but the secular left. If Cherlin is right—if marriage in America is, as he says, "the capstone of personal achievement," "the ultimate badge" and the key to "first-class citizenship"—gay Americans have more reason than many of their European counterparts to want access to the institution. But the arguments against "buying in" are also that much stronger, because the norm is that much more pervasive. (To be clear: I have bought in, and I think other adults should be able to buy in if they so choose. Or not.)
Cherlin's interview is full of interesting data-driven tidbits and well worth a read.
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The Justice Department has finally released four long-awaited torture memos. I've read one of them so far, the Aug. 1, 2002 memo (by then-Office of Legal Counsel lawyer Steven Bradbury. (Correction: OLC lawyer Jay Bybee wrote the 2002 memo. Bradbury wrote three additional memos in 2005.) I understand why the CIA and Bush officials fought hard against its release.
The memo is chilling for the pain and violence it portrays, and more than that for its efforts to minimize that pain and violence so as to make believe that it did not amount to torture and thus wasn't outlawed by the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture—treaties that bind the United States (except that obviously they do not). Bradbury recounts 10 techniques interrogators wanted to use against Abu Zubaydah, a high-value detainee they were confident they'd extract big al-Qaida information from. Water-boarding is among them. So is "walling," which means slamming a man's head against a wall while he's wearing a collar so he won't be brain dead from whiplash. Also sleep deprivation and shutting Zubaydah into a small box with an insect, which he'd be made to believe would sting. (The interrogators thought he had a particular insect phobia.)
According to Bradbury's analysis, these techniques are just no big deal. Really? Eleven days of sleep deprivation, the max the CIA asked for? No worries, a night or two of rest and you're back to normal. This is not what historians write about torture. And so the memo doesn't cite them. Instead it relies on officials from the military's SERE school, which teaches resistance to torture, and on stats showing that most SERE students don't actually lose their minds.
Down to many of the last details, the memos confirm the Red Cross report on the experience of Zubaydah and 13 other high-value detainees, made public last month by journalist Mark Danner. And they show us for the first time exactly how the Bush OLC lawyers played doctor and psychiatrist to wave away the reality of what they gave legal approval for. President Obama released the memos today with a promise not to prosecute anyone in the government who relied on them. That was inevitable. It may also be fair. But it won't be the last word. Whether by truth commission or congressional committee, there are more skeletons to be pulled from the government's closets, and much more thinking about them to do, once we can see them.
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Via a well-informed
Trinidadian, today's top billing at the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, on the occasion of
President Barack Obama’s trip to Port
of Spain for the fifth Summit of the Americas:
“Michelle
Obama Not Coming.”
Having missed out on Barack’s goodwill
op-ed, which ran in a rival paper today, the local Guardian—which, I’m told, fancies
itself as being “highbrow”—instead went with the FLOTUS scoop: Michelle is home
with Bo.
(cross-posted at The Browntable)
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Yes, Dahlia, you're right; I misread you. Perhaps Susan Boyle does look like a "real" 47 year old, pre-media-consciousness. But I wasn't talking about Westchester- or Alexandria-based suburban "babes"; I was talking about the women I see in the gritty working town of Worcester, Mass., or in train stations or at bus stops in various parts of the country: The plucking, colorizing, and gym-going isn't necessarily done in a sophisticated manner. (I really do mean over-plucking; skinny and abruptly abbreviated eyebrows of the Jennifer Garner variety are among my perhaps, um, excessively long list of pet peeves, right up there with the misuse of "reticent" to mean "reluctant.") These women don't necessarily look great. They certainly don't look like Madonna or Sheryl Crow. But they do look as if they've been watching too much TV and idling too long in the drugstore cosmetics aisle—as Susan Boyle doesn't.
As for Susan Boyle herself, our heroine of the day: The Mirror says here that she was oxygen-deprived at birth, learning-disabled as a result, and sang to escape her childhood bullies. I don't think she'll be looking polished any time soon—and thank goodness for that. Susan, fight off those tweezers at all costs!
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E.J., I think the only disagreement between us was that you thought I said Susan Boyle looks like an ordinary suburban women, where I in fact said she looks like a normal 47-year-old. At least where I live, a lot of 47-year-olds look more like Susan Boyle than the plucked, processed, creamed and lacquered suburban babes you describe. But when I wrote “normal 47-year-old” I was also thinking more about the natural aging process that has upended itself in recent years. I suspect that until a few decades ago most 47-year-olds looked more like Ms. Boyle than Paula Abdul, Marcia Cross and Sheryl Crow and the rest of the cohort of ’62-ers that—as you note—look closer to 29. I just can’t tell whether Susan Boyle doesn’t notice or care about her appearance. Even if she didn’t she probably does now.
I imagine if we see her at next year's Golden Globes in a sleek blonde blowout and a size 2 Reem Acra dress, we will have our answer.
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The femblogosphere is a-chatter over the latest issue of French Elle, which features a series of stars—Monica Bellucci, Eva Herzigova, Charlotte Rampling among them—sans fards—in other words, without makeup. Shine's Jennifer Romolini crows "Yay!" of the Photoshopping and retouching-free issue. It's a call to arms, as she sees it, to U.S. editors in love with images of women that have been airbrushed to death: "So American magazine editors, I plead to you: It's time to step
up your game." Feministing agrees, as if a woman who dares wear no makeup has come to embody the ultimate feminist act.
In contrast, Matthew Yglesias sees beyond the smoke and mirrors art of the stunt magazine spectacle that European editors have mastered as of late. These "untouched" images are no more "real" than they are "feminist."
"Obviously, artifice hasn’t, in fact, been done away with here. The
lighting, the attire, etc. is all being professionally done; vast
quantities of film is being shot and only the very best images
selected; and the 'stars' being presented 'sans fards' are extreme
outliers in the genetic lottery. All of which is no worse than
conventional magazine cover art, but it’s not really any better. And
just at a time when public awareness of the fakeness of magazine covers
is growing, we get a new artifice presented as unadorned reality."
And he is absolutely right. All of which seems to point out what a strange charade 21st century feminism has become, a so-called "movement" in which being "feminist" means carping about milk ads and empowerment is found in staged fashion magazine layouts.
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Well, Dahlia, I disagree: Susan Boyle doesn't look at all like an ordinary suburban woman. I'm as in love with her video as everyone else, and yes, appalled by the condescension with which she's being treated. But I think I understand it. In our era, ordinary suburban women overpluck their eyebrows, overdose their with hair with coloring and cream conditioner, and worry about when they can get to the gym. They don't confess to being 47-year-old virgins on international television. Susan Boyle looks like a throwback to a pre-modern era, a WWI Scottish villager, before 24-hour television, before self-improvement magazines, before the onslaught of the cosmetics and body improvement industries. She's astonishingly innocent of all that hyper-self-consciousness that a generation of para-feminists have been discussing, Naomi Wolf, Susie Orbach, and all the rest who wring their hands publicly about Barbie and absurdly slim models and adolescent bulimia in the Marshall Islands, about the vaunted pressure on girls to be perfect—gorgeous, brilliant, athletic, charming, and sexy all at once. Most human beings are sensitive to how we are perceived—and for many, that has become hypersensitivity in our media-tized world.
Susan Boyle seems like a kind of miracle: immune to, even innocent of, all that—and yet with a extraordinarily developed and sophisticated voice hidden in her extraordinarily unsophisticated package. It's that contradiction, I think, that has made her a huge hit. Most people would have been afraid and ashamed to appear on stage with an appearance that's so in conflict with how contemporary women are expected to present themselves. How refreshing to see someone who doesn't appear even to notice her appearance—and yet who is proud to carry that fabulous gift!
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Bonnie—thanks so much for posting on Susan Boyle yesterday. I have to confess I’ve watched her twice, and may well do so daily going forward, or at least whenever I feel the need to smile and cry at the same time. I think you are right to pick up on the fact that the shock of Boyle’s performance brought out a weird vicious honesty in the judges. Even after she had blown them away, they felt comfortable saying—because after all she still looked like Susan Boyle—that she was just too goofy-looking to sing that beautifully.
Now here’s the team from CBS’s Early Show this morning (clip below), insulting her again: Maggie Rodriguez’s patronizing “you look lovely, Susan” starts the interview—the way you might talk to a small child in clown shoes, and she then repeats the question about how Boyle managed to perform “even though everyone was laughing at you?” Co-host Harry Smith, fearing perhaps that Boyle is too provincial to have any cognitive abilities at all, presses her, “Do you understand that? Do you understand what a big deal this is?”
The reason everyone seems to feel the need to insult Susan Boyle to her face all the time is that she looks like a normal 47-year-old woman, and not like Stacey Anderson from The Cougar. That it’s OK to laugh at her for that, and to assume that she should be laughing along with us, makes me want to cry too.
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Dahlia has a piece in Slate today about how April tends to be the bloodiest month of the year, and while she focuses on mass killings perpetrated by men, there have been several murderous women in the news this month as well: notably Melissa Huckaby, who has been arrested for the murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, and Casey Anthony, who allegedly murdered her daughter Caylee, and against whom prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
ABC News quotes criminologist James Alan Fox, who says, "When a murder is committed by a female, it's more likely to be self-defense or can reflect some sort of mental illness." In addition, they have a forensic psychologist who implies the same thing—that only mentally ill women kill—"destruction and the ability ... [to] use power to knock someone down is so tied into a masculine identity," says Dr. Michael Welner.
Dahlia debunked the sexist notion that female killers are "insane" while male killers are violent criminals in a Slate piece from 2002. She talked specifically about mothers who kill their own children, like Casey Anthony, who are much more likely to enter mental institutions in lieu of jail than fathers who kill their offspring:
Even taking into account that some small fraction of the mental illnesses associated with maternal filicide—most notably postpartum depression—are triggered by the births themselves, the illness theory doesn't explain why mothers suffering from other mental illnesses, or who aren't ill at all, act out with their own children rather than strangers. The illness theory doesn't explain why we don't consider fathers who kill their children to be sick. Pulling murderous mothers out of the field of ordinary criminology and viewing them as fundamentally different raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps murderous mothers are no crazier than fathers. Perhaps murderous fathers are even crazier than mothers. Either way, the failure to view these crimes as morally or legally equivalent reflects a more central legal truth: We still view children as the mother's property. Since destroying one's own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else's property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals, who go to jail or the electric chair.
If Casey Anthony is sent to jail rather than the bin, it might mean that legally, things are shifting toward viewing children as entities separate from their mothers. It's a bit different in the case of Melissa Huckaby: Even though she is the mother of a 5-year-old girl, the child that she allegedly killed was not her own. Former O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark is arguing on the Daily Beast that Huckaby will likely plead insanity—but that it won't work, because Huckaby is also accused of raping Sandra Cantu before killing her. "There is nothing that could make a jury understand or forget the hideous fact, if proven, she defiled a little girl," according to Clark.