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io9, the Gawker empire's science/sci-fi blog, is wrapping up its weeklong "Spring Mating Season"
series, and it's pretty awesome. If you find that you need a break this
weekend from those repeat Susan Boyle viewings, I highly suggest checking it out. The io9 editors
highlight sex-related science news—such as a potential end to menopause and the discovery of the world's first all-female ant species*—and they've also put together some awesome top-ten lists, like this not-entirely-safe-for-work one about the all-time most embarrassing alien mating moments. (I vividly, unhappily, remember that Klingon one from when I was 11.) I especially recommend Takashi Murakami's creepy-sweet Inochi videos, about a prepubescent love-sick robot who looks like Eric Stoltz from Mask, and has similar girl problems. Happy Pon Farr, everyone!
*Correction, April 21, 2009: the original post said "all-female species," but the Mycocepurus smithii is actually the world's first all female ant species. Other all-female, non-ant species exist.
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Reading this much-e-mailed New York Times story on the joys of traveling through the five
boroughs on a stylish, yet inertial Dutch bicycle, I was struck by how
gender-specific all of the counsel seemed to be. To wit:
Can the bicycle, the urban answer to the wild mustang, slow
down and put fenders on? Can the urban cyclist, he of the ragtag renegade
clothes or shiny spandex, grow up and put on a tie?
Good question—but “Yes, she can” was clearly not the answer
that was intended. And later:
How should you dress to bike to work? Which bike has an
acceptable level of manliness? These are tricky questions. As the parade of
10-speeds, mountain bikes and, more recently, fixed-gear designs knocked the
upright, old-school bicycle off the road, accouterments like fenders and chain
guards came to be seen—by men, at least—as eccentric. If a guy is going to
get on a bike, he wants to imagine he’s Lance Armstrong, not Pee-wee
Herman.
No doubt. But, in the forward-thinking Netherlands,
where 27 percent of the public rides a bike (it’s only one percent of all trips
made in the U.S.
annually), surely women ride, too? And as someone who has personally struggled
with finding outfits to wear that won’t billow and bunch and flash passersby as
I two-wheel it to work (save pencil skirt
and rainy days), I know I could have used some tips, too.
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At a pro-life event in Indiana last night, Sarah Palin seemed to be telling the audience that for a moment, she considered aborting Trig:
There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know.
Of course, anyone who's ever been to a certain kind of church knows that this is a lead-in to a personal narrative, known as a testimony. The testimony follows an established formula, similar to a VH1 Behind the Music special: First things are going well, and then a moment comes when the subject flirts with sin, and their faith is tested. In the end the person triumphs and their faith is redeemed.
So in some sense it's "true" that Sarah Palin thought about it, but also true that there was no other possible outcome than she was going to ultimately decide to "walk the walk" and not just "talk the talk," or she wouldnt be telling the story.
What struck me is how her journey from regret to difficulty to acceptance sounds remarkably similar to the plot of 17 Again (as described by Willa and Dana here).
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This from an interview by Joni Evans on wowowow.com with Gloria Steinem, 75:
wOw: In your wonderful book, Outrageous Acts,
you advocate that we should do something outrageous every day. Your
quote: "Once I began to listen to my own authentic voice—or at least
to realize I had one—I discovered a new answer to my earlier
rhetorical question: How much more rebellious could I get? The answer
was: a lot." Are you still doing outrageous acts? What did you do on
your birthday?
Steinem: ... I’m thinking of having a tattoo for my birthday. I like the art
nouveau-looking ones that I see on women’s backs just below their jeans—it’s rebelliously known as a tramp stamp—but if it hurts, I won’t
do it. My real birthday present to myself is going back to Zambia to
live with elephants for a few days.
I can't decide if I'm more surprised that Steinem is considering getting a tramp stamp or that she doesn't know that tattoos hurt.
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Emily, thank you for your post of last night about
the torture memos. It's much easier to discuss singer-prodigies and puppy adoption
than to think about the fact that the very highest levels of my government authorized—no,
oversaw and urged—torture. The latter
makes me deeply ashamed.
But having my current government release the evidence is a strange kind of relief, sunlight coming out of the clouds. A few weeks
ago, I attended a panel on the the executive response to 9/11. Ann Compton, the
only reporter on Air Force One on 9/11 (after My Pet Goat), moderated Andrew Card, Michael
Chertoff, Douglas Feith, Tim Flanigan, and Ari Fleischer—all of whom had been intimately
involved in the response to the bombings. (John
Yoo was in the audience.) Let me say that
it was agony remembering 9/11, feeling again that scorched and distraught feeling we all had from being attacked. I was awestruck as they told what 9/11 had felt like from the inside—believing
that there were more planes in the air, ready to hit, and not knowing what to
do to prevent more attacks. They told unanimously about being given a single policy directive:
This must never happen again. Stop another attack at any cost. There was no
countervailing interest.
But that scorched feeling inside me quickly worsened into feeling
almost too sick to listen, knowing how that prime directive had forced my
country far off course, away from morality. We were a small audience of
journalists selected for our interest in constitutional law, and so we were soon drilling
them about the constitutionality of their responses. How could the administration
have authorized and implemented torture, indefinite detention, the suspension
of habeas corpus, the destruction not just of the Taliban but of Afghanistan itself
(that last a paraphrase of an Afghani journalist's question)?
My question: How they could have been so certain that anyone they
picked up on the battlefield had to be guilty? Why should citizens be expected
to believe that our government was omniscient, knowing in advance who should never
see daylight again? Chertoff answered that on a battlefield, they would have
been permitted to kill anyone there; where should the line be drawn between what
was permitted in battle and what was permitted to people picked up in battle? Then Flanigan looked directly into my eyes and said, essentially: We were the
lawyers. We did what we were asked to do. If you want to hold someone responsible,
look to the policymakers.
That disavowal took my breath away. (As did the moment Feith looked
straight into the eyes of the Afghani journalist and said: Our goal was to
prevent an another attack on the U.S. We were successful. In other
words, your country = not my problem.) Afterward, law professor Sherilynn
Ifill, who was sitting next to me, said: If I were to convene a truth
commission, Flanigan is the first one I'd call. He's ready to name names.
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Willa, I haven’t yet seen 17 Again, but after reading you on it, I want to. Not because the movie looks particularly enticing (the mere notion of Zac Efron aging into Matthew Perry is depressing beyond belief), but because I'm interested in the way it folds time travel and body-switching into a narrative of teen pregnancy. Time-travel plots are, of course, always about the fantasy of going back and changing the present by doing things differently in the past. It's worth noting, too, that those fantasies often involve motherhood or the possibility of a child: Keep Sarah Connor alive so her unborn son can lead the revolution! Ew, Marty McFly, don’t make out with your own future mom!
Yet even though this movie explicitly sets up the fact that Zac’s character is unhappy in his adult life because of the choices he made as a teen (ie, unprotected sex, having the child, marrying the girl), it sounds like those choices are ultimately affirmed in a feel-good ending. Even if he had the power to turn back time, Zac loves his family so much he wouldn’t have donned that condom. Everyone who’s already a parent gets the paradox of that logic: Once your child exists, it's hard to imagine a world without him. But for crushed-out adolescent girls not long on foresight, there’s a thin line between “Now that my unplanned-for child is here, I’d do anything for her,” and “Woo hoo, let’s make babies with Zac Efron!” The fuzzy-brained hypocrisy of the scene you describe, in which the body-switched Zac recommends abstinence over condoms to a group of high-schoolers including his own daughter, makes Bristol Palin sound like a savvy life coach by comparison. In her words: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”
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17 Again, a film about a 38-year-old named Mike with a sucky life who gets to go back to being 17, when he looked like Tiger Beat pin-up Zac Efron, opens today. ("What is Zac Efron?" Manohla Dargis wonders in in today's Times. He does have a space-alien quality—those vacant, kewpie doll eyes—but he's just the newest model in an old line of cars that go fast, for a short period of time. Think David Cassidy, Kirk Cameron, The Backstreet Boys). Why does Mike's life suck? Well, he just lost a promotion and quit his job, he's getting a divorce and his kids hate him—but the more fundamental reason that his life stinks is that Mike chose to become a teen father.
See, when Mike was 17, and a star basketball player with a bright future, his pretty girlfriend informed him she was with child. He decided to do the "right thing" (as EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum says, "Levi Johnston, consider yourself schooled.") and happily married his sweetheart. But 20 years later, Mike's decision has had unpleasant consequences. Mike never went to college, so he's been overlooked time and time again for a promotion. He's also spent the last two decades bitterly resenting his wife and kids for the sacrifices he made to be with them. Sacrifices that have kept him from the life he thinks he should have, and could have, had. So Mike wishes he could be 17 again, before he gave up his future for his family.
Unsurprisingly, the film goes out of its way to neutralize this message—that teen parenthood might require enormous, painful sacrifices that don't always pay off—by having Mike "realize," thanks to his repeat performance as a 17-year-old, that his wife and kids are the most important thing in his life and he really ought to appreciate them more.
The movie is schizophrenic about teenagers, sex and responsibility in other ways as well. When Mike returns to high school and condoms are being distributed in his health class he makes an impassioned plea for abstinence. This is played for laughs—Mike's daughter is in his class, and of course he doesn't want her having sex-—but since we know Mike was having sex in high school, and obviously without condoms, it's unfathomably short sighted. Wouldn't this man, of all men, know the importance of protection? Probably, but then he'd have to advocate condom usage—and God forbid a film intended for real teenagers do anything like that.
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Oprah started twittering this morning, in what might become the ultimate realization of the personal branding medium. Just one hour after her first tweet ("HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY ) she's approaching 100,000 followers-and gained about a thousand in the two minutes that I clicked away from her page and then refreshed. She could type gibberish, and the collective American consciousness would still be amazed that it was gibberish straight from her golden fingertips (cf: Shaq.) She might have shared an O cover, but surely Twitter's follower count was tailor-made to pump Oprah back up to her stratospheric personal sea level. How long will it take her to overtake Barack Obama? Ashton Kutcher? Can she top CNN? And how large of an Oprah bump will Twitter get? There's an increasingly symbiotic relationship between old and new media, but good old-fashioned red-blooded American television still has the upper hand-I think. Does Twitter need Oprah more for its brand, or does she need it more to keep hers relevant?
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
I was deeply moved by the sight of Afghan women marching in Kabul this week to protest the so-called “rape law,” which requires a woman to “preen for her husband” whenever he desires it, not to leave the house without his permission and to have sex with him on demand. The law affects Shias, and news photos showed the faces of female protesters from the Hazara ethnic group, Afghanistan’s beleaguered Shia minority, some smiling, some firmly set—and all uncovered. In their cultural weight, the pictures reminded me of another image, printed in Unveiled, photographer Harriet Logan’s book on Afghan women, of a Kabul street protest in 1972. In it, a young woman with uncovered hair stands amid a sea of teenagers. The woman—little more than a girl—reads aloud from a notebook, one hand cupped at her waist in a dramatic gesture. The banners behind her call for peace, democracy and social progress, yet how distant those goals would seem just a few years on, as the Russians rolled in, and later, when rival Afghan warlords tore the country apart, giving rise to the stringent, chastening dispensation known as Taliban rule.
What’s heartbreaking about these 1970s photos, taken during the reign of the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, is that the advances they document, as well as those under communist rule, were later used to drive Afghan women beneath the folds of burqas. The Russian invasion created a hierarchy of Islamic purity, with the corrupted, secular communist at the lowest level and the pure servant of God—as the mujaheddin leaders, and later Mullah Omar purported to be—at the top. Islam became an excuse for anything, a sheltering veil beneath which every kind of violence and immorality hid. Advances adopted by the admittedly flawed king, the Afghan communists and the Russian-installed puppet governments were condemned as un-Islamic, from the spread of secular education to the expansion of women’s rights. It would be ungenerous to say that we shouldn’t avidly support Afghan women’s protests against the so-called “rape law,” but when commentators talk about backlash, this is what they mean. Anything that looks like an import, like the hand of the west reaching too boldly into Afghanistan, will be furiously repulsed. It’s this outrage at foreign intrusion, regardless of its potential benefits, that’s already building in many parts of the country, and that feeds the Taliban resurgence. How else could insurgents slaughter Afghans and still win a measure of support, if they didn’t claim to be doing it in the name of Islam, which trumps all else? As a cleric who witnessed this week’s protest against the so-called “rape law” told the Times: “We Afghans don’t want a bunch of NATO commanders and foreign ministers telling us what to do.”
It’s frustrating, as a western woman, to be relegated to such a quiet supporting role in Afghan women’s struggle, but perhaps understanding the complexity of their situation counts for something. It might help explain, for example, an arresting NPR report about rising drug abuse among Afghan women (and men). Opium, Afghanistan’s main cash crop, is first and foremost a pain-reliever, and I’ve seen few places where pain is as dominant a part of memory and experience as it is in Afghanistan. Putting aside the horrors of 30 years of war, the inexorable rhythms of hope and disappointment that have characterized the lives of Afghan women—the fresh-faced girl speaking at a street protest and later, a muffled, cloaked women being publicly beaten for showing her ankles in the bazaar—are enough to make anyone crave opiates.
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Jess posted yesterday about the minds of female killers. What about the minds of female gamblers? I spent a few hours at an off-track betting site in Manhattan last week (you can watch my exploits here), and was struck by how few females passed through the doors. I only saw three, compared to, oh, 150 or so men. Why the disparity? Is there some physiological difference in the way women react to gambling? Scientists have determined that the "pleasure center" of the brain lights up among compulsive gamblers winning money the same way it does for a cocaine addict taking a hit. Are women less likely to experience that betting-induced high?
Not necessarily, but the gambling rush may not kick in until later in life. According to a few studies on gender differences in gambling (all of which, I'll admit, draw on fairly small samples), women gamblers tend to be older when they get started. But they catch up fast, progressing faster than the boys toward a stage of problem gambling. Another interesting finding: Among gamblers seeking treatment, females are more likely than males to be depressed.
Maybe the gender imbalance at the betting parlor I visited was less a matter of how women react to gambling, and more how they feel in that particular place. The woman I interviewed there chalks it up to the "unsavory" vibe. I can see that. The first time I went, I was uncomfortably aware of being in a dress, and in breaks between races, the lone woman in the room subs in as the next best thing to watch and comment on. I wonder if the observed correlation between female gamblers and depression might also be relevant in explaining the lack of ladies. The betting parlor I went to (where, I might add, I won my first and only bet!), "unsavory" though it may be, has a rowdy, social feel that I doubt would appeal to gamblers dealing with depression.
But before I draw too many conclusions, I think I'll check out one of the ladies nights that the district director of NYC off-track betting kept inviting me to. Any XXers fond of life's less savory pleasures want to join?
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As the entire world knows, the Obamas recently got a
six-month-old Portuguese water puppy named Bo. In an exclusive, I've learned that this might be only because Michelle is a stay-at-home mom.
A friend of mine—who adopted an infant a few years ago,
as a working mom—yesterday received this email when she applied to
adopt a puppy:
Thank you for your interest in Good Dog Rescue.
I'm afraid that our organization's policy on puppy adoptions is very stringent
due to the exceptional needs of the pups. They wish for a stay-at-home mom
that can help the pup grow. They feel you would qualify for one of our
older dogs at least 18 months or older. I'm very sorry to disappoint you,
but I hope you understand.
Remember—social workers approved my friend to adopt an
infant human. Apparently policies for
puppies are stricter. One concludes that, had Michelle O. held a
job, Malia and Sasha would have been denied their puppy.
Would a working dad have received this email? Inquiring
minds want to know.
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To me Susan Boyle seems like the anti-Octomom. Her homespun Scottish village upbringing, in her mother's sweet cottage, produced a 47-year-old single lady comfortable in her own stolid skin. I hope Emily's prediction about Boyle inevitably being seduced by a well-tweezed reflection is wrong. That she will not succumb to hair and make-up upgrades nor agree to strappy shoes and blingy accessories to enhance her image. I am rooting for the guileless churchwoman, seemingly without pretense or affectation, who told CBS Morning News, "you have to take yourself seriously." She strikes me as confident that her clear strong voice is all she needs to "rock the house."
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A post from Slate's Emily Yoffe:
Like Dahlia and Bonnie and E.J. I am enchanted by Susan Boyle and her angelic voice. However, I have seen enough makeover shows to know that after "they" get a hold of her and do her hair, pluck her eyebrows, put lipstick and mascara on her, and get her some flattering clothes, when she sees herself in the mirror she'll cry at how pretty she looks and how much she likes looking pretty. As she said in the Mirror story E.J. mentions, "I had my hair curled especially for the show and wore a dress I'd bought a few months back for my nephew's wedding." In other words, like just about everyone else, she'd like to look her best. This doesn't mean she had to submit herself to knives and injections. But now that she seems on the verge of what could be a big performing career, not plucking those eyebrows would eventually just be an affectation.