Thursday, June 18, 2009 - Posts
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
There's something a little different about the State Department's most recent annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released Tuesday. Under former Secretary Rice, the reports’ introductions cast the U.S. as a crusader against the evils of human trafficking. "President George W. Bush has committed the United States Government to lead in combating this serious 21st century challenge," she wrote in 2007. But Secretary Clinton admits that America has its own “struggle with modern day slavery”... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently,” writes Double X contributor Anna Balkrishna, who goes into great detail about her mother’s exuberant attempt at happiness in an ultimately doomed second marriage. “In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover,” she writes. Balkrishna shares her Modern Love-style tale of a second chance gone predictably wrong, titled "My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal." The author tells us that 13 years ago, when she was launching her college life, her mother, now in her 50s, “would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret” to send to the mother’s inmate boyfriend, and of her own resentment of the mother who emotionally abandoned her in favor of the unworthy new love... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The talking point about Obama’s memo on domestic partnerships is that “It’s a first step.” Obama said it, and John Berry, the openly gay head of the Office of Personnel Management, has been repeating it all day. The implication is that the administration is ready to march proudly down the path of ever more gay freedom and equality. This strikes me as only half believable, as Emily pointed out yesterday. All the administration did was scan the existing law and see where they could apply it without violating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). That counts as barely a step at all... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Generally, I try to avoid advertiser-created viral videos like the plague. Created by corporations, they tend to make me feel duped into watching them, whether they're any good or not. But I found a new series of viral videos by Tampax to be unusually amusing and surprisingly endearing.
At Zack16.com, 16-year-old Zack Johnson wakes up to find his penis has disappeared and been replaced by a vagina. Quelle horror!... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Kerry: Returning to Tsing Loh, for a sec, I want to second your point: It is odd to describe a 20-year-old relationship that produced two kids and a lot of domestic support as a "failure" just because it doesn’t last until death do us part and all that. Like you, I find it troubling that we routinely describe marriages and relationships that end with this evaluative language. “They had a failed marriage,” we say; or, “He had a failed relationship with a ballet dancer.”
But some—maybe even many—of these relationships are not “failed” at all... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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