Slate Blogs

Is the GOP the Real Party of Women?

2012-05-16T18:27:52Z

In this election year, there’s no doubt that women are a hot property—like the Boardwalk in Monopoly hot. Both the Democrats and Republicans are falling all over themselves to claim the title “party of women,” while accusing the other of being a charlatan. Politico hosted the latest rejoinder yesterday, when a group of 14 House GOP women (including Michele Bachmann) wrote an op-ed arguing that their “big tent” is where all the ladies want to be.

But of course, neither party is the truly the “party of women.” Or better put, each party serves the interests of different types of women. So while the piece fails to convince in universal terms, it does present a fascinating profile of exactly who the Republicans think they’re representing.

Let’s just start with the lede:

There’s an old joke about a married couple that’s asked about their hobbies and interests. The husband says he’s focused on “important things”—like the federal budget, health care reform and peace in the Middle East. The wife says she’s focused on the “small things”—like their household budget, their children’s health care and keeping peace within their family.

There’s an important truth here. The things that women focus on and the decisions they make are often unappreciated—but they’re the foundation of our society.

Huh. So controlling their husband and/or children’s intractable spending and bellicose interactions is so preoccupying that women can’t be bothered to think about “important things” like the Middle East? Does that strike anyone else as being almost comically retrograde? Darling, you know I just get lost when you boys start talking business; let me refresh your drink. It’s absurd, and moreover, the rest of the piece, which details all the “important” issues on which the GOP supposedly trumps the Democrats, is even more unhinged since the straw women in question should be too distracted by making sandwiches or whatever to care. If I were a real Republican woman, I’d find all this very condescending … but I digress.

Beyond this initial fumble, the op-ed traffics in the traditional conservative rhetoric of by-your-own-bootstraps capitalism. “We want an equal chance to succeed—no special favors and no glass ceilings,” the congresswomen write. Obviously we’re all against glass ceilings, but what do Bachmann and company mean by “special favors”? Based on their bashing of our new friend “Julia,” it’s any government program that’s designed to help make up for the structural inequality in our society that still places many women at a large disadvantage, especially economically. It takes little critical thinking to realize that “social issues” like reproductive health are fundamentally tied to economic success and that the popular conservative idea of achieving wealth or middle class stability or what-have-you by one’s “own initiative” is inextricably wrapped up in class, gender, and dare I say it, racial privilege.

And in the final analysis, privilege (not a favorite word of mine due to its overuse, but unavoidable here) is the perennial Republican blind spot. No one wants to depend on the government for much of anything; we lack the European gene for that. But many women—due to the quicksand of historical injustice, unequal education, institutional sexism, a lack of inherited money or financial literacy and a hundred other factors—need the government at least to extend a branch to help pull them forward.

Unlike the hypothetical “Republican woman,” these ladies do not have the luxury to be unaware of the “important things”; but then again, it’s clear they’re not really invited to the party of women anyway.

Campaign Love Notes: The Ballad of Lilly Ledbetter

2012-05-15T20:36:09Z

Remember Lilly Ledbetter, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. manager who sued her employer for unequal pay after 19 years of work only to have her claim denied under a statute of limitations? Well if you don’t, President Obama will be happy to remind you.

According to Bloomberg, Obama mentioned Ledbetter and her namesake piece of legislation in eight of his last 18 campaign events before May 13, and his invocation of the act at yesterday’s Barnard College commencement adds another tick mark to the list. The president is understandably deploying Ledbetter in his attempt to court women (she is an awesome lady), but is his constant touting of the 2009 Ledbetter Act a touch overblown?

After all, the legislation doesn’t end unequal pay, but merely extends the time frame in which an employee could file suit for such discrimination. In fact, Bloomberg reports that in 2010, women were only receiving 77.4 percent of the salary paid to professionally equal men, which is actually down a few decimal points from pre-recession numbers. As Ledbetter herself has pointed out, women are still only pocketing 77 cents to a man’s dollar.

Intent: As Obama’s first piece of legislation after taking office, the Ledbetter Act definitely demonstrates his commitment to women’s issues, making it a fine and fair campaign tool. But one wonders if the confusion between “helping” to end pay inequality by adjusting a legal technicality and ending it outright isn’t somewhat by design.

Execution: While the campaign’s promotion of Ledbetter is a great way to remind voters that the president is committed to the issue of equal pay, I’m beginning to wonder if the act itself should take such a high-profile position. It might be better to highlight the administration’s work on issues the measure didn’t solve—like the opacity of pay scales in many companies. That would raise more comprehensive awareness of the issue and give Mrs. Ledbetter a break.

Relatability: All of that being said, I'lll admit that fair pay and the Ledbetter Act are good material for Obama. The message hits close to home and the solution doesn’t seem as intractable as other messier social issues. I suspect even some moderate-to-right-leaning women resonate with this particular accomplishment, so I guess you can count me smitten.

Swoon Factor: 8

Why TLC’s My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding Doesn’t Represent the Romani

2012-05-15T18:35:00Z

Editor's Note: This is a response to Torie Bosch's recent DoubleX article on the TLC show My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, which was very controversial within the Romani community. Oksana Marafioti is the author of American Gypsy: A Memoir.

The first time I heard that TLC was planning an American version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (then unnamed), I was thrilled. Though not particularly fond of the British series (its content had very little to do with Romani culture), I had hopes for this new show. I was in the middle of working on my book and thought the show’s creators might benefit from my personal experience. My literary agent contacted the show, and after a prompt, enthusiastic response from the producers, I flew out to meet one of them in L.A., excited to be a part of something this important and extraordinary. Here was an opportunity to dispense with the silly outdated notions that we all live in trailers and marry off our tween daughters, that Romani women prefer cleaning baseboards to getting an education, that our men drink more than they work.

When I met the producer, I was pleased to hear he was still working on the show’s angle. But as we talked, he seemed to become increasingly disappointed with my profile. As a college graduate, a classically trained pianist, and member of the film industry, I did not fit the bill of the “real gypsies” he was interested in meeting; everyone he had been interviewing resembled me far more than the tambourine-jangling caricature he had in mind. At this, warning bells went off. I suggested staying away from stereotypes if possible, but when he asked if I planned on attending any “old-fashioned gypsy weddings or birthday parties” in the future, I felt so dismayed I wanted to cry.

Having worked in the industry, I know that producers are entertainers first and foremost. They’re in the business of making money, a business which employs many hard-working people and supports countless families. However, a show like this can harm a group of people already under scrutiny, people who also have families to watch over. Being a Romani isn’t a way of life or a cult. We aren’t Gypsy by choice or calling. No one can decide to become a Gypsy one day. We are a race of close to 10 million, with a culture that spans centuries and across continents. It is one thing to present a willing group of people in a negative light, but quite another to represent an entire race of people as a niche stereotype. This is particularly dangerous since people know so little about us and yet think they know so much.

Once home from the meeting, I wrote the producer this email:

Hi John,

On the way home I've thought about our conversation more and I do have a few suggestions.

The Romani always remember their roots, but that doesn’t mean they don't break out and try to find bigger ways to express who they are. THIS diversity is who we are. Although some Romani live more traditionally, there’s an overwhelming number who have accomplished great things while still holding on to their identity. These people make up the majority of Romani, but are rarely talked about. Maybe if they’re shown, their stories told, the audience can relate in more profound ways than ever. After all, we all strive to prove our worth in this world without losing who we are, where we came from.

You may find a Romani painter who perhaps doesn't celebrate birthdays Gypsy style, yet is meticulously developing a Rromanes alphabet so that the language isn’t forgotten and our stories can be recorded. Or, you may come across a Romani woman who never cuts her hair and often wears skirts and cooks for her family, all after working as a lawyer all day. This kind of juxtaposition might be an angle to consider in addition to the old-fashioned celebrations, because it’ll showcase us as so much more than vagabonds with no care in the world. It will show our connection to the rest of the society, our true face.

I think to show the Romani in this balance instead of a narrow viewpoint, would produce a breakthrough project like no other!

Sorry for the rant. I'm simply enthusiastic about what you’re doing. This show has so much potential. Good luck!

Best,

Oksana

He never answered.

The Plight of the Lady Quiz-Bowler

2012-05-14T21:16:09Z

Reading Alan Siegel’s story on quiz bowl, I was thrilled to recognize so many facets of my own college quiz bowl years: the desk-slapping of frustrated players, the never-ending crusade to balance in-depth knowledge and rote memorization, and even Yale team member Kevin Koai, a friend of mine from when we were both on the Stanford team as undergraduates. But there was one key part of my experience Siegel didn’t cover: what it was like to be a female quiz bowler in an overwhelmingly male setting.

As a girl, you’re never just answering trivia questions about canonical literature and scientific principles. You always have something to prove—when men mess up, it’s perceived as an individual failure, but when women mess up, it reflects badly on their entire gender. I got a 5—the highest possible score—on the Calculus BC AP test in high school, but when a math question came up in quiz bowl, I wouldn’t even listen to it for fear that I’d answer it wrong and reinforce stereotypes about female innumeracy.

Once, when I got a middling individual score at a competition, a teammate tried to encourage me by telling me I’d done well “for a girl.” He wasn’t being condescending; in fact, he was being accurate. I had gotten a higher score than most other female players, though it was unimpressive overall. Why didn’t more girls perform better that weekend? And why are female players so underrepresented on greatest-players lists like the one Siegel linked?

Well, that’s another problem with being a lady quiz bowler: societal anxiety surrounding gender and intelligence. Girls have hewn out the cultural space to be smart—as has been amply documented and sometimes fretted about, they’re now outperforming boys academically—but they’re not yet allowed to brag about it. It’s not uncommon to see girls (and women) pretending to know less than they do in order to, say, smooth over a disagreement about what actor was in which movie. If you’ve been raised not to show off how much you know, you might find it uncomfortable to play a game whose entire ridiculous point is to show off how much you know.

Plus, like any other male-dominated sphere, quiz bowl can occasionally get downright hostile toward women. When the Rape of the Sabine Women came up in a question one practice, a guy argued that it shouldn’t be called a rape, because the Romans married the women they abducted, and it doesn’t really count as rape if a husband does it to a wife.

“Even when your husband kidnapped you and married you against your will?” I asked.

“Look, women were property back then,” he said. “Your postmodern ideas about humanity don’t apply.”

Clearly, intelligent and well-meaning as they may be, men in predominantly male environments have fewer opportunities to learn about and become sensitive to, uh, “postmodern ideas of humanity.” And that makes it a tricky thing to be a woman in quiz bowl.

I’d be lying, though, if I said that being the only girl wasn’t also the easiest part of quiz bowl. You get a lot of attention, because all you have to do to be unique and memorable is show up. The flipside of the idea that girls can’t be good at trivia is that when you are, you’re considered special, maybe a little cooler than other girls. For me—and for many of the nerdy sort of girls quiz bowl attracts—this was a revelation, the first time being a socially maladroit know-it-all turned out well. Still, the lack of female energy leaves something to be desired, which is why, you’re more likely to find me at pub trivia these days, a land where free booze flows for correct answers and there are usually plenty of women around.

The Mental Illness That Gets Little Sympathy

2012-05-14T18:53:30Z

In the New York Times Magazine this weekend, Jennifer Kahn took a hard look at a mental disorder so disturbing that dealing with it honestly is incredibly rare: psychopathy. Many people probably aren't even aware that "psychopath" isn't just a term for someone with a crappy personality, but is a disorder that's believed to be biological in origin, where the sufferer just basically can't feel empathy. Kahn focused on the parents of fledgling psychopaths, parents whose situation should cause extreme sympathy, since attempts to treat this condition have largely been fruitless.

In the piece, Kahn compares psychopathy to autism, not because the two disorders are similar in their manifestation, but because psychologists believe they're both neurological disorders, i.e. based in the brain and really something that the sufferer can't help. This caused me to note on Twitter that even though the conditions are similar in this way, autism garners sympathy and psychopathy doesn't. In fact, most social discourse around psychopathy is still demonizing and utterly unsympathetic to the parents, who are often blamed for the condition. It struck me as an interesting logic hole in our cultural narrative around mental illness, since the usual assumption is that sympathy for mental illness is directly correlated with inability to control your problems. Psychopaths give lie to that narrative. Turns out that we sympathize more with austistic people than psychopaths because we feel empathy for the struggles of autism, but psychopaths just make us angry. There's no logic or rationality in play, just pure emotional reasoning, and the parents of psychopaths are the victims.

Of course, you couldn't design a better system for sniffing out irrationalities in our cultural narratives than Twitter. The size of a logic hole is directly proportionaly to the amount of umbrage you'll get for pointing it out, as I quickly discovered. Parents of autistic children were upset with me for daring to compare their plight to that of psychopaths, which only makes sense if you see those others as beneath you. Others cast around looking for a "good" reason that we care about autistics but not psychopaths. Others attached themselves to irrelevant details; that the exact brain chemistry is different in psychopaths and autistics should be obvious, but to the larger point, it's irrelevant. I was just interested in the fact that there's no relationship between how much we care about those with a mental disorder and how much those with it can help having it. Turns out that a lot of people are willing to expend a lot of effort at defending the greater levels of sympathy we have for autistics and their parents over psychopaths and their parents, even though both groups of people are in similar situations of facing a biological disorder that manifests as a mental illness for which no real cure is available. That there's better treatment options for autism only makes this cultural calculation more chilling; for parents of psychopaths, there isn't much hope at all.

The whole situation is deeply depressing, but ever the optimist, I'm going to pull out a silver lining. Even though the initial reaction to Kahn's piece is a whole bunch of predictable shunning and demonizing of psychopaths, aided by claims that people with other biological mental illnesses are somehow more deserving, maybe it will open up a cultural conversation about how our society still has a long way to go when it comes to mental illness. We still tend to rank the sufferers according to how they make us feel, and end up shunning people who need our sympathy because they make us incredibly uncomfortable. Exposing the logic hole is hopefully the first step towards fixing it.

Girls on Girls: Why Don’t We Ever See Marnie’s Breasts?

2012-05-14T02:45:00Z

Hanna Rosin: The Slate boys—Dan Kois, more specifically, was thrilled by that final Adam masturbation scene in which Hannah "takes charge," as he put it. And by the narrative arc of the scene, we were pulled along to feel that. Hannah actually "finds her voice," as Carol Gilligan might say. She banishes the hesitant, ironic Cabbage-Patch girl-hooker of fantasies past and taps into her inner dominatrix. It was thrilling to hear that bossy voice come out of her mouth ... and so it took me a couple of days to ask myself, thrilling why, exactly? What did Hannah get out of that encounter? A couple of scenes earlier she was telling people Adam was her boyfriend. And now here she was again, locked into a bit role in his show. I wish Meghan were with us this week to tell me how narrow minded I am, but what do the rest of you say?

June Thomas: I think that final interaction, when Hannah found her inner dominatrix, is less problematic if you think of Adam (and before him Elijah) as a training boyfriend. In the five episodes we've seen so far, Hannah has learned a few things—when not to rehearse OkCupid-type relationship talking points, how best to shed your tights when you're lying in a prone position—and she's lost a bit of the desperation that at first seemed so much a part of her relationship with Adam. She's figuring things out, and while I don't think she's ever going to get what she really wants and needs from Adam, at least there's some evolution happening. The other relationships we saw this week seem horribly stuck in the same patterns and habits they developed at their very beginnings: Charlie taking care of Marnie and her resenting it, Jessa and the dude with the Victorian weightlifter's mustache having nothing to say to each other but, "Unh, unh, yeah."

L.V. Anderson: I found the final scene less definitively empowering for Hannah (which is one of the reasons I loved that scene; it was one of the most extraordinary bits of television I've ever seen). The power dynamics were always shifting, and it was impossible to tell who was in charge at any given moment. Recall that when Hannah moves to pull up her dress, Adam says, "Pull your shit down. That's not what this is." Adam is driving the scene—like they say, it's the subs who are really in control—and though Hannah is much defter as a sexual humiliator than a sexual humiliatee, some of her attempts are still hilariously bad. ("Twenty dollars. Thirty, because I also want pizza and gum.")

However, I thought the last line—"Shake my hand"—was perhaps meant to be an indication that Adam thinks of Hannah as an equal, now that she's shown a propensity for dominating. What did you guys make of that?

Dana Stevens: Laura, you so beautifully describe the roller-coaster power dynamics of the final Hannah/Adam scene that I have nothing to add—except that Adam's last line before Hanna heads to the bathroom to cry—"That’s on you, kid. I'm done growing"—sounded painfully right. Dunham was a guest on Fresh Air this week—a really excellent interview, with Terry Gross in unusually lively, almost mischievous form—and she mentioned that the Adam storyline is closely based on a particular college boyfriend of hers (obviously the whole show comes from her life, but she seemed to imply that Adam, in particular, is a roman a clef-style copy of a real guy.) Some of the details and dialogue in their scenes together have such a painful specificity they have to have come straight from her journals of those years. I know Adam is all wrong for Hannah, and a selfish pervert, and more damaged than we probably realized from previous episodes, but as played by Adam Driver, I'm half in love with him too.

I have to say #5 was the episode in which Girls grabbed me by the lapel and pulled me into its arms, like Adam did to Hannah last week (though not, it turns out, with the intentions she attributed to him). As of this week’s show, I am officially in love with Girls—not entirely without reservations (no great love is), but I'm so impressed with this show's humor and intelligence and ability to remain surprising. There are two scenes where we see Hannah mess with men's heads in this episode—her attempted seduction-turned-threat-turned-extortion of her boss and her at least partly successful extortion of Adam (she does get $100 for her cab, pizza, and gum.) Both scenes, I thought, were jaw-droppingly well-written, alternately shocking and hilarious. In them we see a new side of Hannah, someone who might grow up to be not just a writer but an actress (as the real-life Dunham did)—not just an awkward, disaster-prone schmo (though she's always also that) but a weirdly brave performance artist who messes with men's heads just, as she puts it to Adam, "to be an asshole."

Rosin: Really, Dana? I felt like while there were incredibly memorable lines and visual set-ups (Hanna uselessly trying to flatten the box, for example) I could see the gears turning on this one. Let's dissect her scene with the boss for a moment. Clearly this was a practice scene for her later encounter with Adam, right? The education of a dominatrix. But I just couldn't quite go along with it. A character that says something as funny as "because I am gross and so are you" cannot with a straight face also offer herself to dirty Santa Claus to be fucked.

Is the answer that Hannah/Lena Dunham does everything for the experience, for, "you know, the story," as Adam puts it?

Anderson: I could barely watch the scene between Hannah and Rich without putting my hands over my eyes. That scene made me realize how little critical distance I have from the show: I had gotten so used to identifying and empathizing with Hannah that once she did something I disapprove of (proposition her boss), I felt far more personally disappointed than anyone should ever feel about a television show. I've basically been watching the show with my nose pressed up against the TV screen—but I'm going to try to back off a few inches at least.

Hanna, I like the idea of the scene as a "practice scene." Both with Rich and with Adam, we're supposed to believe that Hannah feels powerless and taken advantage of, right? As cringe-inducing as her come-on to Rich was (complete with hilarious attempt at talking like Joan from Mad Men: "Those files you requested, Rich?"), it makes more emotional sense to me as an attempt at regaining control of her life than as a strained grab at "a story."

Stevens: Any way I can convince you all that the attempted seduction/extortion of Richard Masur was brilliant precisely because it was so off the rails, so different from what we've seen on the show so far? Until a good 2/3 of the way through that scene I thought it might be a fantasy or a dream sequence (which we haven't seen on the show so far—maybe now that we've had a flashback, an exploration of Hannah's dream life is next?). I started laughing when Hannah dropped the files on his desk with a coy "Plop!" and was on the floor by the time placed his hand on her breast with that breathy "I'm gross, and so are you" (a line that would have worked like a charm on Adam). And her parting line about writing about him one day under his own name harked back to a running theme of the show: How Hannah is determined to turn her own life into art, and how often that gets her in trouble with the people around her.

Rosin: I could almost go all the way with you there, Dana. That scene was very much about Hannah's misunderstanding of all sorts of porny conventions (the ones which Joan from Mad Men, for example, understands perfectly), and also her misunderstanding of the desires of men. It was so absurd that you have to believe it was intentionally absurd. But still, her reading of social cues was so off the mark as to be autistic. I will reconcile myself to the scene if in later episodes we get similar, off the wall behavior.

Thomas: Hanna, she's 25! It's as though office life (weird office life, admittedly) is a really difficult piece of music. She's learned a few of the notes and most of the notation, but she can't quite piece it all together yet. As Rich says, she's got potential, but for the moment some of her attempts to play are resulting in sounds that are hilariously discordant. She probably shouldn't be playing in public just yet.

Rosin: Fair point, June. I just had a flashback to the skirt I wore regularly to my first job and it was, ahem, workplace discordant.

Stevens: The failed workplace seduction reminded me of something Louis CK's character might try on Louie—totally unexpected, wildly inappropriate, and funny as hell.

Anderson: Maybe I just can't see the workplace-seduction storyline clearly because I've never been loved this much.

Thomas: BTW, was anyone else surprised to see Jessa in the college flashback? I had assumed that she had traveled the world rather than spending four years (or three if she'd stayed at home in Britain) in college. (And yes, Hanna, it's more of my immigration obsession. I mean, was she there on an F-1 visa or as a tourist with a waiver? It changes everything.)

Stevens: Let's discuss the flashback! A new stylistic shift for the show (though for me, unlike for David Haglund over in the boys' room, not an unwelcome one). Did you all like seeing the girls at Oberlin's Galactic Safe Sex party in 2007, Marnie in bangs and a headband, frozen to a pole by pot-brownie paranoia? I appreciated the specificity of what this scene accomplished: a demonstration that the dynamic of Marnie and Charlie's relationship had been in place from its very first moments (heartbreakingly echoed in the last words he repeats to her before she realizes she has to dump him once and for all: "I'm right here. I'm right here. I’m right here"). And the pathos of the shot of him with his arms around her, comfortingly patting that graffiti-covered pole!

Rosin: I know I am being dense here, but what exactly was the significance of him patting the pole?

Stevens: No real significance, just a nice visual pun for how all of Charlie's consolingness never quite lands in the right place.

Anderson: Charlie tries to be compassionate, but his attempts at embracing Marnie's humanity are met with cold metal, not warm flesh!

Rosin: Why do all flashbacks look like they are happening in the '80's? I half expected Cyndi Lauper to saunter by.

Thomas: That rule is in the same law that says all emails that appear in books have to be in Courier 10.

Rosin: What about the the sex scene between Marnie and Charlie? That’s the one I found hardest to watch. He was like Hannah as an abandoned cat, talking, talking, suffocating the moment with his talking. That said, it was one of the most powerful scenes about female desire I've ever scene. Almost always—in movies, in porn, wherever, women get swept away by the moment, even when every hot-blooded woman watching knows that she wouldn't be. But here, you could watch the desire flicker for one moment in Marnie's eyes and then drain away. The camera stayed close in until she banged her head. The only equivalent I could think of was in Annie Hall, when Annie is super bored during sex until she smokes pot.

Anderson: Hanna, I agree about the Charlie/Marnie sex scene. Charlie's frantic repetition of the word "Stay" would send me running, too. Sexual domination: You're doing it wrong. (More evidence that the Charlie/Marnie sex scenes and the Adam/Hannah sex scenes always play off each other in some way.)

Incidentally, and not particularly relevantly, a male friend pointed out to me that Allison Williams is always clothed—or at least brassiered—during her sex scenes, whereas Lena Dunham's breasts tend to be bare. He said that this inconsistency interfered with the believability of the show.

Stevens: About Marnie's lack of nudity on the show (she has makeup sex in a bra and her don’t-break-up-with-me "party dress"!): that may be something that Allison Williams stipulated in her contract, as many actresses do. I don't mind it as it seems to gibe with her character's preppy restraint. Of course Hannah is naked more! Hannah is an exhibitionist!

Anderson: Oh, I definitely assumed as much, Dana, although I'm amazed that anyone got a no-nudity clause for a show in which people bone like clockwork.

Rosin: Right, Allison Williams has her dad to think about, handing out National Magazine Awards while everyone is thinking about his daughter hiking up her dress and ....

Thomas: In this episode, someone (Charlie, perhaps?) said, "People do outgrow each other," and I was struck again by how amazing it is that Lena Dunham is making this show while she really is 25 rather than 10 or 25 years later looking back on this time of life. I have friends who, 25 years after they were 25, still don't really understand that. She gets it while she's living it—and she's bringing it to the screen in a fun, funny way.

Rosin: June, it was Adam who said that, and he was full of shit, and that's the amazing thing about Lena Dunham, to have the clarity about the life you're living and also the confusion, to be definitive and full of shit at the same time.

Stevens: Oh also, if it wasn't obvious from the fact I haven't mentioned her so far: I'm kind of over the Jessa storyline. Her flirtation with the babysitting dad isn't terrible—in a lesser show, it would count as well-written, but when we cut away from Marnie and Hannah's struggles to hers, I toy with the idea of going to the kitchen for a snack.

Thomas: Yeah, I can't deal with Jessa until her immigration status is clarified.

Rosin: True about Jessa, except that "Unsmotable" could be the title of the porn movie Hannah is trying to star in.

Read what the guys of Slate thought of this episode over at Brow Beat.

Is Baby Hair a New Front in the Mommy Wars?

2012-05-13T04:00:00Z

We often think of mothers as selfless, nurturing givers. But as this week's Time magazine cover suggested, some mothers may be a little too comfortable in that kind of role. Are mothers really only good for extraction, nutritional or otherwise? Slate's Holly Allen thinks not, and in the images above, she and her husband used their adorable twin babies and Photoshop to extract some entertainment of their own from parenthood.

Happy Mother's Day!

Bachmann Accused of "Treason" for Swiss Citizenship

2012-05-11T21:36:02Z

Michele Bachmann’s short-lived experiment as a Swiss citizen ended awkwardly this week, when her beloved philosophy of American exceptionalism came back to bite her in the tushy. It turns out the far right concluded that her brief bout of dual citizenship made her anti-American. Remember that this is the congresswoman who skyrocketed to fame on an accusation that Barack Obama was anti-American. Oh, the irony!

A little background for anyone who tuned out of Bachmann’s adventures after she dropped out of the presidential race in January. Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, he of the alleged pray-gays-straight therapeutic philosophy, was born to Swiss immigrants, which made him, the congresswoman, and their children eligible for dual citizenship, Politico reports. In March, according to reporting by Politico and a Swiss reporter, and seemingly confirmed by a Bachmann spokeswoman, Marcus, Michele and three of her children decided to add Swiss citizenship to their American citizenship. (More recently, Bachmann’s famously disorganized office changed this account, claiming that she’s actually been a dual citizen since she married Marcus in 1978, and that it happened “automatically,” as if without her consent. Whatever.) In any case, news that Bachmann had opted to become a “Swiss miss,” as Politico delightfully termed her, upset pundits on the right wing, who called her dual citizenship “an insult to both countries,” “political bigamy,” career-ending,” “egregious,” and tantamount to “treason.”

All which appears to be why she announced Thursday that she would withdraw her Swiss citizenship. “I am proud of my allegiance to the greatest nation the world has ever known,” she said in a statement. How awkward for the Republican from Minnesota, who waxed on and on about her reverence for the Constitution and has said that God created our government.

How can you go on and on about how America is the very best nation in the world and then reveal yourself to have divided loyalties? How did this terrible mistake happen? Politico, take it away:

A former Bachmann congressional staffer told POLITICO that the congresswoman sometimes acts “impulsively” and suggests that she must have registered for citizenship without considering all consequences.

You don’t say.

NARAL President Steps Aside, Wants More Young Leaders

2012-05-11T14:26:18Z

The big story isn't that Nancy Keenan, the head of NARAL, has stepped down. It's an important story, sure, but the nature of big organizations is that they endure leadership changes pretty frequently. No, the amazing part of this story is why Keenan made the decision she did. According to an interview with Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post, Keenan decided to step down in order to prevent the further graying of the pro-choice movement, a problem she had come to symbolize and a problem she is bravely trying to fix. Keenan believes the movement will continue to lose ground unless young women are promoted out of the anonymous grunt work positions and into leadership positions, and hopes her resignation will create that opportunity.

Lamenting the dominance of what Keenan calls the "postmenopausal militia" is to the pro-choice movement like lamenting the filibuster is to electoral politics. Everyone sees it as a problem and hates it, but no one really knows what to do about it. While it's an easy problem to personalize, the reality is that it's a structural issue. When the abortion-rights movement was young and grassroots-y, it made sense that young people took the leadership positions. Once it became institutionalized, however, it meant that it had to work by the same rules of the nonprofit world, which is similiar to the business world. You spend your youth gradually working up the food chain, and by the time you reach a leadership role, you're middle-aged.

With the pro-choice movement, however, two factors make the dominance of graying heads a problem. First is the problem of having the most prominent advocates for a right be people who have no personal use for that right, at least they don't any longer. Keenan herself believes that one reason it's hard to activate ordinary young men and women on this issue is because they have trouble connecting their own very personal struggles with reproductive health care with older women who don't have these struggles. Any doubts that a young woman speaking out prominently on these issues carries weight were likely put to rest after Sandra Fluke testified for a special Congressional hearing about contraception access. Yes, she was derided as a "slut" and has to endure having her sexuality questioned on a near daily basis, but that's the point. Having a woman of reproductive age speaking about reproductive rights in the national eye is galvanizing and powerful. Her likely fertility shouldn't matter, but because since fertility is the issue, it does.

The other reason is that the dominance of older women in leadership tends to erase the hard work of younger women to protect reproductive rights. A couple of years ago, Newsweek published an article that set off a firestorm in pro-choice circles, because Keenan herself came across as implying that the anti-choice side had all the youthful energy. (It's really more that while young people are strongly pro-choice, they don't really think that their rights are in danger, though perhaps recent events are changing some minds on that.) Jessica Valenti shot back with a powerful post where she demanded that the work of young women get respect:

Where would NARAL Pro-Choice America or NOW be without the work done by younger women?

Who would do their outreach? Who would volunteer? Who would take unpaid internships? Who would carry their action items on blogs and forward them by email, Facebook and Twitter? Who would Blog for Choice?

The post resonated strongly, because while those young women don't go on cable news shows and often don't even get to sit on panels about abortion rights at conferences, they are, for a lot of us, what the pro-choice movement actually looks like. If you call a Planned Parenthood or go to a NARAL event, the people doing all the work and representing the organization are almost all women of reproductive age. But the public at large doesn't know this, because all they see of the pro-choice movement is postmenopausal women. Who are awesome, don't get me wrong. But when speaking for women of reproductive age, as the Fluke situation shows, it helps to have at least some of those very women in visible roles. It helps everyone remember who the pro-choice movement is actually fighting for. So kudos to Keenan for taking brave steps to fix the situation.

Why Obama’s Motivations for Supporting Gay Marriage Don’t Matter

2012-05-10T20:41:04Z

Amanda, your point that many Americans are increasingly apathetic about gay rights (in a good way!) is wonderfully incisive. The risk posed to the president’s re-election campaign by his speaking in support of gay marriage yesterday is minimal; anyone who is going to have a hissy fit about the issue had already consigned Obama to the pro-marriage-equality side anyway. And as Linda Hirshman wrote in Slate, even the black community—which has been held in suspicion regarding gay rights since the accusation that they facilitated the passage of Proposition 8 in California—isn’t likely to abandon the “miracle of Grant Park” over this “evolution” of heart. In light of these basic political considerations, it could be tempting to dismiss yesterday’s announcement as little more than a Biden-forced outing of a pre-polled position or, perhaps worse, a mere fundraising ploy.

But, listening to Obama's words yesterday afternoon, I didn’t care about his motivations.

Despite the great strides toward LGBT acceptance that our society has made over the past few decades, being gay in America can still be an anxiety-filled existence. Even in a gay mecca like New York City, I find myself almost constantly self-aware: I’m an expert at policing my posture, my clothes (too colorful for this neighborhood?), my mannerisms, my depth of voice. The proximity of my thigh to my partner’s on the subway is cause for complicated internal debates: Is that guy glaring at us? Should I care? Should we change cars? Screw him! Avoid eye contact. Don’t share headphones. Maybe it’s safer to pretend to be straight friends …

When you’ve been verbally assaulted and poked up your drag-for-Halloween skirt with a walking stick in Chelsea (!), you get paranoid. Maybe all those people who are “cool with gays” are just a drink or two away from manifesting a hostile collective unconscious that’s still simmering just below the surface.

And these kinds of quotidian concerns don’t even begin to broach larger issues of equality—the right to marry being only one—that are denied to queer partners under current law. In this context, hearing an authority figure like Obama speak thoughtfully, humbly, and candidly about not just marriage, but, by extension, my basic humanity, means a great deal indeed.

Nathaniel Frank wrote in these pages yesterday of the gay community’s tendency in the past to seek privacy from society and the law—you don’t have to like us, but at least leave us our bars, our ghettos, preferred industries, special sensibilities—and part of me revels in that shadow land. But the truth is, not everyone can (or should even want to) migrate there anymore. The closet has been wrenched open by science, pop culture, the media, consumerism, and other forces, allowing many gay people to come out to both themselves and others at earlier ages than ever before. But a 13-year-old living in Mississippi doesn’t have the resources to remake herself in San Francisco; with the ability to “be oneself” comes an intense pressure, too, and that, met with a lack of larger cultural support, can breed depression, or worse.

But here's the president of the United States—a straight family-man who plays pick-up basketball and is not a radical queer activist—saying you’re all right. At a time in his career when it might have been easier to keep silent, he acknowledges you, your desires, your daydreams, your worthiness to love and be loved. Of course, we can debate how brave this action actually was, just as we can debate the merits of a inherently conservative institution like marriage and the perhaps too-giddy rush of much of the gay movement to assimilate through it.

But there’s no quibbling with the fact that having the Commander-in-Chief on your side makes dealing with the bullies—whether they’re at school, on the Internet, at Thanksgiving dinner, or on a darkened street in Chelsea—a hell of a lot easier.

Why Is This Attractive Woman Breast-Feeding This Giant Child?

2012-05-10T15:35:00Z

Newsweek ties women down with black silk scarves. Time does it with overgrown babies. This image of hot California mom (who looks a little like Kathryn Hahn) live-breast-feeding her almost 4-year-old will surely make Tina wish she’d thought of it first.* There are many aspects to its genius: The mom and son’s twin impassive expressions, with just the teeniest hint of So What? Fuck You. The mom’s blond highlights and skinny jeans, an urban packaging meant to prove once and for all that home schooling and breast-feeding a kid even though he’s old enough to make his own breakfast is not just for the yahoos who can’t afford milk. (Tina did this story on urban attachment freaks first, by the way, she just didn’t think of the image.) The image is the natural next step in the hot naked-mama photos that have become an obligatory part of a celebrity career path, (Claudia Schiffer, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson) and makes Angelina Jolie, who allowed herself to be photographed breast-feeding a mere infant, look like a wimp. Then there is the Game of Thrones aspect to the photo, which we have been debating over on Slate email chains. Bounty of milk, mother “love,” incest, it’s all lurking in there.

The mom is not a model but one Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26-year-old who lives in L.A. with her two sons and writes the blog I Am Not the Babysitter. Grumet assures us in this Q-and-A that she is not interested in judging anyone but her blog’s name alone is so obnoxious that I don’t care to delve further. I will just pull out a few choice sentences from the Q-and-A, so you get a sense of what demographic sandbox we are playing in:

"My husband is so great—he would bring the equipment in and actually do the pumping while I was asleep. It was a full family effort."

"My mother breast-fed me until I was six years old until I self-weaned."

I have rehearsed my objections to the breast-feeding cult at great length in the past, in my Atlantic story, "The Case Against Breast-Feeding,” and more broadly against attachment parenting in a recent Slate discussion of Elisabeth Badinter’s book, The Conflict. There is the very basic objection that it is virtually impossible to do what the advocates say is best for your baby and have a job, which the vast majority of American mothers have these days. In the Time magazine story, which is largely a profile of attachment guru William Sears, he answers this objection by arguing that attachment parenting is perfect for working mothers because as soon as they get home they can instantly rebond with their babies by strapping them up in a sling and then sleeping with them the whole night. Voila! Instant maternal bliss!

But this leads to my second and more profound problem with it. Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. So, it’s not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience “breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.” And it’s not enough to snuggle—you have to snuggle enough to achieve a spiritual high. As Badinter has said, once women were just expected to tolerate their babies, Betty Draper style, but now they are expected to experience “jouissance,” loosely translated as “orgasm.” And this is what makes the movement truly oppressive.

Clarification: This post originally stated that the child on the Time cover is 4-years-old. In fact, he is currently 3, but according to a Q&A with mother Jamie Lynne Grumet, his birthday is in June.

Obama Won't Lose Voters Over Gay Marriage

2012-05-10T15:14:46Z

President Obama's announcement yesterday that he personally supports same-sex marriage immediately launched a thousand wishing-makes-it-true political analysis stories arguing that the president just killed his re-election chances by supporting a position over half the country holds. Politico was particularly excited to doomsay on this question, arguing that gay marriage is going to kill Obama's chances in prominent swing states and taking the dubious position that black voters could abandon the first black president and decades of strong Democratic affiliation to stick it to the gays. Of course, writer Joseph Williams admits in the article that black opposition to same-sex marriage isn't meaningfully higher than opposition in general, calling into question why such an article even needed to be written.

But the polling data isn't even the biggest problem with arguments that this can or will hurt Obama's chances at re-election. You can get a lot of people to tell a pollster that they're against gay marriage or even think it's a sin, but that doesn't really tell you much about how those opinions will affect their vote. Those polls don't measure how high the issue ranks in a voter's priority list, and as far as I can tell, few, if any polls adequately measure how much any social position difference with a candidate hurts a voter's opinion of him. People, especially inconsistent or swing voters, tend to evaluate a candidate like they do people in their lives. For voters who otherwise have a good opinion of Obama but disagree with him on this issue, it's likely to be rationalized away the same way we do with people in our lives. I hardly think many or most of the voters who voted against gay marriage would reject a friend or loved one for differing with them on this issue, and so supporting a politician they otherwise like despite this isn't really a big leap.

Obama can also count on voter apathy around gay rights. With the gay rights issue, the don't-care factor is rising rapidly alongside the open support for same-sex marriage. Which is to say that a lot of people who oppose gay marriage do so in a softer way than before. They will hold on to their belief, but they also see the writing on the wall and are adjusting their commitment to this issue accordingly. They'll vote against gay marriage in a special election, sure, but they've also decided they're not going to lose any sleep if the courts declare same-sex marriage a right. As Christian writer Rachel Held Evans argues, the sense that this fight isn't worth it any longer is growing in Christian circles. It's hard to imagine that weariness getting turned around enough to cause otherwise pro-Obama voters to switch to Romney, or even to stay home rather than vote in an election that is roundly seen as a major milestone in our country's economic future.

Introducing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

2012-05-08T19:51:26Z

As all mothers-to-be can attest, being pregnant doesn’t necessarily relegate you to bed-rest, but it does generally require a certain amount of accommodation, especially at work. As our former colleague KJ Dell’Antonia reports over on the New York Times Motherloade blog today, a new proposed bill in the House of Representatives would require employers to make those accommodations as a matter of law.

Federal legislation to be introduced Tuesday by House members from New York and California (including Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney) is intended to ensure that no woman has to make [the choice not to work because of pregnancy]. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, says Mr. Nadler, will “require an employer to make a reasonable accommodation for pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, unless this creates an undue hardship on the employer.”

The legislation would also prevent employers from using a worker’s pregnancy to deny her opportunities on the job, force her to take an accommodation that she does not want or need, or force her onto leave when another reasonable accommodation could help keep her on the job—all rules that should already be familiar to employers, thanks to the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Currently, women cannot be discriminated against for being pregnant, but companies are not required to make any adjustments to work-load or type; and, as Dell’Antonia points out, while many companies have voluntarily allowed for the necessary changes, some women have been fired for “infractions” as minor as carrying a water bottle on the job.

While most employers ought to find this measure reasonable, I suspect we’ll be hearing about how making basic accommodations for pregnant women is an assault on the free-market or something very soon. Stay tuned.

Are Women Too Stupid To Understand Abortion?

2012-05-08T16:11:20Z

One of the great things about living in the age of research is that the scientific method can be applied to so many questions, with my favorite being those in which the answer was obvious before the research ever began. In this week's news, researchers applied themselves to the question of whether or not women, by virtue of being female, are terminally stupid, or what. Common sense says no, based on a quick survey of all the things women do that they couldn't if they were terminally stupid: drive cars, feed themselves, hold jobs, read and process information. Sadly, however, old-fashioned bigotry trumps common sense all the time, which is why Republican legislatures across the country are passing laws---mandatory ultrasounds, anti-choice lectures, and waiting periods---based on the premise that women who are seeking abortions are literally too stupid to understand that doing this means they don't get to have a baby in the next six to nine months.

But are women as stupid as conservatives believe? Research published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health suggests that common sense wins this one, and conservative bias is wrong. Researchers looked at the precounseling needs assessment of over 5,000 women in abortion clinics and found that, in direct contrast with the assumptions of these anti-abortion restrictions, women seeking abortion did know what abortion is and what the results (a baby) would be if they didn't get one. Turns out that they were getting abortions because they wanted to avoid the results of not doing so! Which would suggest that lecturing them about how they're not going to get a baby if they do this is probably not going to affect their decisions. Eighty-seven percent of women assessed were what the researchers characterized as "highly confident" about their decision.

I wouldn't get too excited that the remaining 13 percent of women reinforces the belief that women are stupid and fickle and need a bunch of Bible-thumping old white men to write lectures about how abortions prevent babies and make them suffer unnecessary ultrasounds. The markers of ambivalence suggest that it's usually a lot more complicated than women being unaware that they have a deep need to have a baby at any point in time no matter what. More important: All these feelings were recorded in the counseling sessions offered by the clinics voluntarily. Anti-choice propaganda would have you believe that women are marched through abortion clinics, strapped to tables, and subjected to abortions without anyone asking them a question, much less explaining what's going on. In reality, women get counseling beforehand, where they talk about why they want an abortion and are given information about what's going to happen and what options they have. Unlike mandatory ultrasounds and tone-deaf lectures, individualized counseling is about making sure a woman makes the decision that's right for her, based on her personal circumstances. Ambivalent women therefore can have a chance to work through that ambivalence and decide if abortion is really what they want. Contrary to what anti-choicers think, many of them decide on their own to go through with it, because they know better than anyone else if they're simply not in a place to have a baby.

Not that I think the facts will dissuade anti-choicers from sticking with the "women are stupid" philosophy underpinning so much recent legislation. Bigotry isn't known to bend to reality; bigots tend to reject uncomfortable facts with claims that those facts are made up by a conspiracy to hide the truth about Hated Group X. This research is coming out as it's being discovered that a favorite guest of Sean Hannity's has been out there literally preaching that women are too stupid to be allowed to vote, much less hold power. If the overwhelming evidence against that contention is so easily discarded, we can't expect any better when it comes to the facts about abortion and women's understanding of it.

What Do Where the Wild Things Are and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” Have in Common?

2012-05-08T15:33:07Z

Also in Slate, see Emily Bazelon’s tribute to Maurice Sendak’s particular type of genius. Katie Roiphe admires how Sendak understood that children need to be terrified.

I don’t write for children. I write. And someone says, that’s for children.

When Yeats died, Auden wrote that his poetry “survives/ In the valley of its making.”* That’s what I feel about Maurice Sendak; his words and drawing survive in a valley of their own making, and I am sometimes lucky enough to get invited there. You feel that if Sendak visited your house for a while all the chairs would start developing their own (quiet, amicable but distinct) rules about where they would sit in the kitchen. And that maybe your dog and cat and 4-year-old would have organized a small club that met out in the backyard and had its own flag and its own cosmological constant.

Every time you stumble on a new Sendak book, you find the world getting remade according to some completely brilliant but unparaphrasable set of rules. Not only in Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There, but even in the books that are not so well read anymore. The sweet savagery of the griffin in the The Griffin and the Minor Canon has been with me almost 40 years now. (How can that book be out of print?) It makes perfect sense to me that Sendak said his gods were Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: crazed worldmakers all.

Sure, you could do a plausible genealogy of Sendak. His ancestors might include The Wind in the Willows and Narnia (aren’t the fussy badgers and neurotic horses so much more appealing than Lewis’ human beings?). And you could point out some family resemblances to the amazing William Steig, whose mice and whales (Amos and Boris, Abel’s Island) are moving around in a world that is not quite our own, but that has its own perfectly clear rules for doing business.

Still, Sendak is wilder at heart than his peers (his raunchy illustrations for Melville’s Pierre and the grim beauty of the pictures he drew for Randall Jarrell’s The Bat Poet are proof of that). And yet his impossible worlds never tip into the antic Dada chaos that makes Dr. Seuss zany—or succumb to the nudge-nudge wink-wink steampunk Victorianness of Edward Gorey and Lemony Snicket.

Johan Huzinga proposed in Homo Ludens that at heart humans are serious players. What makes us human, according to Huizinga, is the capacity to dream up spaces where we can be creative without falling out of bounds. True creativity consists of pushing at the very edges of the space we’ve set up—like a football player tiptoeing down the sidelines to the end zone. Sendak’s books are rule-bound in just that way. And, in the way that the best books always do, Sendak’s stories somehow make their readers do the most exciting sideline tiptoeing themselves.

It’s in the spirit of expressing my awe at Sendak’s worldmaking, finally, that I risk a possibly heretical comparison: What do Where the Wild Things Are and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” have in common? Both offered a new way to make sense of the same old world that we’ve always shared with one another. And both took only 10 sentences to do it.

*Correction, April 8, 2012: The blog post originally misquoted Auden, leaving out a word (“the”) that did belong and adding a word (“own”) that didn’t.

"They're Worse Than Bears, They're Children!": The Genius of Maurice Sendak

2012-05-08T14:31:00Z

Also in Slate, Katie Roiphe admires how Maurice Sendak understood that children need to be terrified. John Plotz explains how Sendak was a creator of crazy worlds.

No writer has given me more delight than Maurice Sendak, who died today at the age of 83. Max's visit to the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are—and his eventual journey home to his soup, which was still hot—was totemic for me and especially one of my sisters. So we memorized the book and learned poetry from its cadences. Since we didn't have brothers, the nakedness of Mickey, star of In the Night Kitchen, was helpfully instructive. We had the dollhouse-sized volumes of The Nutshell Library, with their green and white paper covers, and thanks to Carole King's Really Rosie, we could sing Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup With Rice, One Was Johnny, and Pierre. Especially Pierre, my favorite Sendak character, cross and obstinate and triumphant. How many times do you get to shout the forbidden sentiment "I don't care!" as you read or sing that book aloud? As a daily ritual of childhood defiance, what could be more exhilarating?

I've read all these books with my kids, along with Brundibar, Sendak's haunting collaboration with Tony Kushner, which was based on a 1938 opera performed by children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Brundibar is scarier than Sendak's other books. "No milk for Mommy oh no what to do?" one of the book's small main characters asks. It's on him and his sister to come up with the answer. When they sing to collect coins for the precious milk, the wicked organ grinder Brundibar steals their audience. The children try to chase him away by turning into bears, but Brundibar unmasks them with the finger-pointing line, "They're worse than bears, they're chlidren!"

When the brother and sister at the heart of the story take their revenge, it's with the help of many more children ("We don't mind skipping school") and a pack of fierce black crows conjured by a semi-disturbing lullaby. This is not the Sendak book I wanted my kids to read over and over again. It's vengeful and a little lurid. But Sendak understood, much better than me and many other parents, that kids need literature that makes adults uncomfortable. They need books that reflect their chaotic and dark worlds, in which sometimes children do have to feed their mothers.

A few months ago, my sons and I listened to Terry Gross interview Sendak on Fresh Air. I was mesmerized. They were outraged by this quote:

I would infinitely prefer a daughter. If I had a son, I would leave him at the A&P or some other big advertising place where somebody who needs a kid would find him and he would be all right. ... A daughter would be drawn to me. A daughter would want to help me. Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men. And there's no doubt about that. We just don't like to think about it. Certainly the men don't like to think about it. I have lived my whole life with a dream daughter.

I agreed that this seemed a little reductionist. But I wanted them to appreciate the moment when Sendak talked about the "creative insanity" that characterized his relationship with his brother Jack. Listening to the interview again, it seems exactly right that this is the subject of the last Sendak work, My Brother’s Book, which will be published in February. Sendak told Terry Gross, "I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again." Also, "There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

Biden's Comments and North Carolina's Amendment 1 Intensify Gay Marriage Debate

2012-05-07T22:35:00Z

It’s only Monday, but already this appears to be a big week for gay marriage.

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden sounded a pick-up note with the nebulous comment that he is “absolutely comfortable” with all manner of wedding cake topper configurations. Political parsers and gay advocates immediately began debating what the famously gut-speaking VP could have meant: Was the Obama administration communicating a more definite statement about marriage equality? Is the President done “evolving”? Did Biden just have a little word-vomit?

Here’s the actual statement in question:

BIDEN: Look, I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction -- beyond that.

Howard Kurtz over at the Daily Beast read the rambling as old-fashioned political calculation, and I’m inclined to agree. As Kurtz points out, it’s highly likely that Biden was deployed at precisely this moment to “mollify” gay rights activists who have been disappointed with the President’s reticence on the marriage issue, especially in light of his controversial—and frankly, baffling—decision last month not to sign an executive order banning sexual orientation discrimination among federal contractors.

Obama is undoubtedly hedging his bets this election year; reigniting the culture wars (as some commentators have suggested he risks doing by coming out wholesale for marriage equality) would probably not be useful going into November.

However, at some point this kind of political prevarication is going to have to give way to principle. Though the cultural mood in this country regarding homosexuality has been morphing in the right direction for a number of years now, waiting for the zeitgeist or generational turn-over to solve everything isn’t going to help those citizens affected in the meantime by dangerously reactionary legislation.

Take, for example, North Carolina’s Amendment 1.

Citizens of that state will be voting tomorrow on an amendment to their constitution that would not only prohibit same-sex marriage and civil unions, but that also has the potential to legally delegitimize any family—gay or straight—that doesn’t adhere to the limited definition of heterosexual marriage it proscribes. The measure is so shoddily (or craftily, depending on your level of cynicism) written that a large percentage of voters don’t even understand the full extent of its reach. Yet, polling predicts that the amendment will pass smoothly tomorrow, and if it does, North Carolina will become hostile, drive-around territory for gay couples and many others.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that Obama could single-handedly stop this nasty legislation—that’s not how our system works. But having the most important leader in the country come out not just against this measure (as he has done), but in favor of true self-determination and equal protection in matters of marriage, sex and love would go a long way toward accelerating the cultural shift.

With the Biden comments and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan voicing his support of gay marriage earlier today, the pressure has increased on the president, and rightfully so—I hope he’s up to the challenge.

Is There Ever a Good Reason for Child Marriage?

2012-05-07T19:23:00Z

Editor's Note: This is a guest post from members of the advocacy group Girls Not Brides—a coalition of groups that work to end child marriage around the world—written in response to a previous DoubleX piece on the practice in India. You can learn more about the organization on their website.

As activists and researchers who have worked for many years to support and protect girls across India, we were dismayed to read a recent DoubleX article describing a mass wedding and betrothal ceremony of underage girls and boys as a “welcome event.” The article went on to compare child marriage to the prostitution of girls, describing child marriage as “the lesser of two evils."

In "The Only Good Reason to Have a Mass Wedding of Child Brides," Jen Swanson described a mass betrothal and wedding ceremony in the Indian state of Gujarat. The author assessed that many of the “fresh-faced” participants in the ceremony were aged from about 10 to 14. One girl was just 8 years old.

According to the author, participants in the ceremony belonged to the Saraniya community, the women of which, for a lack of work and other livelihood opportunities, often have little option but prostitution. The ceremony was justified on the grounds that marriage would protect girls and prevent them from falling into that trap.

What a shameful rationalization! How can child marriage provide a safe alternative for girls when child brides are more likely to suffer domestic abuse than women who marry later? How can child marriage be safe when married girls too are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases? How can we justify child marriage when child brides face a high risk of injury and death during pregnancy and childbirth? Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.

And, in any case, child marriage does not even guarantee that girls and women will not resort to prostitution. In India, prostitution takes many forms, from street-based to home-based sex work. Many women who turn to prostitution are in monogamous marriages, but poverty has pushed them to seek an additional income through sex work.

The mass marriage in Gujarat is a sad indictment of the situation faced by too many girls in India. Practices like child marriage, dowry, and child prostitution abound because girls are deemed a burden. Boys are valued over girls and parents make choices accordingly. For families who live in poverty, fewer children at home means fewer to feed and clothe. And the younger they marry off their daughters, the smaller the dowry they are obliged to pay a groom.

This is the kind of thinking that needs to be changed. Nongovernmental organizations should be persuading parents and communities of the dangers of child marriage, not actively facilitating it.

Just look what can happen when a girl is supported and empowered: Last month an Indian girl called Laxmi made the international headlines when she took a stand against her child marriage. At 18 years, Laxmi was shocked to find out that her family had married her off when she was just 1. When the time came to go and live with her husband, she turned to a local welfare organization for help. With their support, Laxmi found the courage to take her case to court and annul her marriage.

To change long-held cultural attitudes, groups like the Saraniya community must be offered sound alternatives to early marriage and prostitution, including quality education. And when influential leaders – from the local to the national and international level – are prepared to speak out against it, child marriage will increasingly be seen as unacceptable.

The truth is that by stating that child marriage is a better alternative than prostitution, we are rationalizing what is profoundly wrong. Traditions can change. It starts with people like Laxmi who have the courage to stand up and say enough is enough; it is time to end child marriage.

Rema Nanda of Pathfinder India, and R. Venkat Reddy of the MV Foundation India, and Ann Warner of International Center for Research on Women are all members of Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage.

Girls on Girls: Did Adam Jerk Off to Her Picture or Didn’t He?

2012-05-07T02:45:01Z

Hanna Rosin: I had this crazy thought this morning that this episode is structured like a long and awkward session of sex. It starts with dick pix and fondling. It stumbles into a series of failures to complete (Hannah fails to end it with Adam, Jessa fails to lose her job, Shoshanna fails to have sex). And then it finally gets its release with that angry song, “Hannah’s Diary,” which culminates with Marnie throwing a drink (i.e., ejaculating) on Hannah’s face. I’m not really expecting any of you to address that. Just thought I’d throw it out there.

Why don’t we start with Hannah’s attempted breakup? I stopped the action several times to scrutinize her expression during that transformation in the doorway, when her quivering resolve disappears and she allows herself to get pulled inside. It’s a great moment, perfectly acted by both of them. They go from frozen to electric in seconds. But I wasn’t sure whether to groan or cheer. What did you all make of it?

L.V. Anderson: I loved the attempted break-up scene. Hannah's speech—especially her half-tragic, half-comic inability to finish her damn sentence and walk back down the stairs—was the truest-feeling part of an episode that otherwise veered dangerously into sitcom territory. The content of the speech was one of those moments of triumph we talked about last week, but we could see her waiting for Adam to give her any excuse at all to stay—and finally, nonverbally, he gave her one. Adam began as a punchline—a Dan Savage nightmare, to paraphrase our male colleagues—but the development of the understanding and chemistry that connect Hannah and Adam is becoming the most compelling part of the show. I'm beginning to think of the Hannah/Adam relationship as an unconventional but not necessarily unhealthy bond that a conformist world can't understand. Like Romeo and Juliet, only kinkier.

June Thomas: In general I thought this episode verged closer to Portlandia-style satire than any of the earlier episodes (not necessarily a bad thing, but not, I think, what Lena Dunham is going for), but I loved the doorway scene with Adam. For someone whose expressions of what she wants from life have thus far been either unrealistic or completely deluded, her announcement that "I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, and thinks I'm the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with just me" seems utterly clear and reasonable. And it turns Adam on! And judging from her affect when she gets to the club (or whatever nightmare of a venue that is), things went better than they had in previous episodes.

Rosin: Also, like all great breakup speeches, she was effectively having this one with herself. Adam said about as much during that "conversation" as a Freudian psychoanalyst, a groan or two, a deflective, what do you want. But Hannah was having a robust debate with Hannah: "You're very, very charming, and I really care about you and I don't want to anymore because it feels too shitty for me so I'm going to leave."

One last question before we move on: Did he jerk off to her picture or didn't he?

Thomas: In my version of Adam's life off-camera, I see him in an endless wankathon. Adam jerks off to any stimulus that's provided, including Hannah's self-portrait. (And confidential to HH: You gots to use the forward-facing camera when taking sexting snaps.) And then he refreshes himself with orange Gatorade.

Dana Stevens: I have no idea whether he jerked off to the picture or lied and said he did or lied about taking it back—that double-fakeout was part of the mysterious charm of Adam (who I feared for one terrible moment in that attempted-breakup scene was going to disappear from the show as a character.) But I loved her line, "I can't take a serious naked picture of myself, OK?" Seemed like a comment on Dunham's own casual, self-mocking exhibitionism (the way she casually yanked up her shirt to take that phone picture was a million miles away from HBO softcore nudity, and all the sexier for that).

Anderson: Right. I loved that part of the opening scene. Hannah's impulsive self-confidence in ripping off her shirt was delightfully out of sync with the "Oh my God, he sent me a cock pic, what do I do?!" conversation that preceded it.

Rosin: Also, a lot of her energy in the shirt rip-off seemed to come from the fuck-you to Marnie aspect of it. In fact, by the end of this episode I began to feel sorry for Marnie. Unlike Hannah, who finally articulated what she wanted, Marnie's reaction in the last scene proved her to be the most confused. She wasn't sad, or embarrassed, or even relieved. She was furious. At Hannah.

Stevens: Except for Hannah stealing the hotel maid's tip at the end of the first episode, I don't know that anyone on the show has done anything worse than Charlie and Ray's turning Hannah's diary into an emo auto-da-fé, an act of public humiliation that may have destroyed their relationship and the girls' friendship in one fell swoop. When they first discover the diary and Ray, after reading some parts aloud, starts to run around the apartment hiding it from Charlie, I thought it was an act of kindness on his part, but as it turns out Ray is every bit the soulless hipster douchebag he appears to be (and Alex Karpovsky, who plays him, is a master at portraying soulless hipster douchebaggery—he played a similar character, the "Nietschean [sic] cowboy," in Dunham's film Tiny Furniture.)

Rosin: Dana, that's an excellent point about Ray. I was thinking he was put on the show to make Adam look authentic and deep. Although he did have that one moment of contrition, and in fact tenderness for Charlie. In fact wasn't it Charlie who ultimately stole the diary and blew it all up?

Anderson: Everyone's anger seemed to be misplaced in that scene: Charlie was mad at Marnie (even though it was Hannah who maligned his masculinity); Marnie was mad at Hannah (even though Charlie had snooped and then publicly humiliated both of them). I rolled my eyes while watching it—is no one here capable of reasonable emotional reactions?—but perhaps the over-the-top nature of that scene was intended to show us how out of touch Marnie and Charlie are with themselves. (I must point out, though, that Ray's body percussion during "Hannah's Diary" made it all worthwhile.)

Thomas: My "in what world would that happen?" siren sounded at Charlie and Ray's gig. I admit "In your Keds" is on a loop inside my brain right now, but this is Brooklyn--those two losers couldn't take the stage of any venue hoping to stay in business until the end of the night in the smallest town in America. Even on open-mic night.

Rosin: So what was too sitcom-y for all of you? I definitely laughed out loud at some of Shoshanna's sex faces.

Anderson: Agreed: for me the highlight of the episode was Shoshanna's quickly stifled giggle while on the receiving end of Matt "I Freakin' Love It" Kornstein’s cunnilingus.

What made this episode too sitcom-y for me was that the stereotypes came out in full force: Women—especially working-class women (both Hannah's colleagues and Jessa's new friends at the playground) were stupid gold-diggers; men were hostage to their animalistic urges, from the awful groping Rich to the snooping, misogynistic Ray to the wounded-and-dangerous Charlie.

Stevens: I guess I just like sitcom-y? The Jessa story I agree is feeling a little familiar—between the almost-abortion (oh, those convenient TV miscarriages!) and the vague references to a tragic childhood, it's more like something from a network drama than a sitcom. Though I very much like how the mother character, played by Kathryn Hahn, isn't being made a target for broad "look at the frumpy sexless mom" satire—she actually wants to get it on with James Le Gros! (Gross.)

Shoshanna's fuchsia satin pushup bra and matching skimpy panties were a great touch in the almost-sex-scene with her cunnilingus-loving summer-camp buddy—of course an uptight virgin Sex and the City fan would wear exactly that underwear. (Compare with Ray's discovery of Hannah's undies as he's snooping in her room with Charlie--at first he's excited they're the sexy crotchless kind, till he realizes with dismay they're just ... old and full of holes.)

Thomas: I kind of loved the scene at the playground, where Jessa got all Norma Rae with the other nannies. Some parts of it were standard-issue—the platitudes about organizing, Jessa's blindness to her privilege ("I'm just like you," or whatever the line was), and the whole "the kids disappeared while we were complaining instead of taking care of business" plot—but I had an unexpected reaction when another nanny pointed out that Jessa's charges had disappeared. I thought that the nannies of color had scarpered because they didn't want to talk to the police because of immigration issues (not that Jessa's papers are in order, I'm sure), but no, they were leaping into action to find the girls. I felt like a heel for jumping to that conclusion, but I love that the show could pull off that bluff and provoke that emotion.

Rosin: June, I think you have immigration on the mind. To me that was the false note—that ethnic nanny knows best moment, the immigrant equivalent of what my husband has called the "magical negro moment." You white girls can talk all you want about your politics but we ethnics have our eye on the real truths.

Thomas: You're absolutely right—the resolution was much too on the nose, but I still award points for the misdirection.

Anderson: It was in this episode that Girls' race and class problems became more apparent than ever. From Hannah's black colleague (who doesn't care about showing up to work on time, puts up with sexual harassment for the financial benefits, and can't even draw on eyebrows correctly) to the apparently Southeast Asian nanny on the playground (who hates her boyfriend but stays with him because he works at the Verizon Store), the people of color depicted in this episode were really offensively drawn. The cherry on the top was Adam's comment on Hannah's ridiculous eyebrows: "You look like a Mexican teenager." This show might be able to get away with a line like that if it actually contained any Mexican teenagers—or any nonwhite characters who didn't conform to pernicious stereotypes—but in this episode, it was over the line.

Thomas: Or is it all a rumination on what people will put up with? Hannah and Marnie are each putting up with imperfect relationships. The working-class women also put up with things (sexual harassment for the office-workers, low wages and loser boyfriends for the nannies). Also I wondered if the bargain with Rich—let him rub your shoulders and touch your breasts through your shirt in exchange for putting up with your ineptitude with Windows; put up with it long enough and he might even cover your insurance or buy you an iPod Nano—was an oblique reference to Hannah's bargain with her parents. She's not mooching off mom and dad anymore, but the world of work that they so wanted her to enter doesn't seem all that different.

Anderson: But isn't there an implicit value judgment there? I think most people value human connection as a higher good than money (or iPods, or cellphone service).

Thomas: But you need money (and maybe a good phone plan though definitely not an iPod) to survive. You can live without human connection.

Rosin: I liked Shoshana’s version of what she could put up with. Blood, even without human connection: "It's amazing. I'm like totally not an attached bleeder."

Thomas: I just hope that someone somewhere is making a Tumblr of assholes wearing friendship bracelets. That was Hannah's line of the week.

Anderson: I hope someone somewhere is making a Tumblr of people with a leg in each kayak!

Are the guys of Slate wearing friendship bracelets ... anywhere? Find out by reading their take on this episode over on Brow Beat.

Super Thin and Super Out of a Job

2012-05-04T21:35:46Z

Vogue magazine’s new policy banning underage and underfed women is a triumph not just for what it does, but for what it represents. Conde Nast International announced Thursday that the June issues of its 19 international editions will no longer carry photographs of models younger than 16 or models who “appear to have an eating disorder.” The company promised to encourage making “healthy food options” available to models backstage, and to ask designers to refrain from sending “unrealistically small sample sizes of their clothing, which limits the range of women who can be photographed in their clothes.”

How exactly this plays out matters a lot. Judging the “look” of an eating disorder is subjective; many of us would consider the majority of models in Vogue excuciatingly thin, but we’re not in charge of who gets eliminated. No doubt there’s a high bar to qualify as too thin in this particular industry.

But what’s remarkable about this announcement, even in the absence of seeing the June issue of Vogue, is that it represents a portion of the fashion industry taking responsibility for its power. It amounts to an acknowledgement that fashion editors are influential not just for their assessments of what shoes are beautiful, but for their assessments of what bodies should look like. This is rare. In her book, “Pricing Beauty,” model-turned-sociologist Ashley Mears wrote about the routine buck-passing that goes on in the fashion industry when questions about size and ethnic diversity come up. Bookers and editors and designers all blame each other for deciding what kind of female beauty is the right kind of female beauty.

“Designers want them to look a certain way,” one magazine editor tells Mears, blaming them for making models so skinny.

“We take who the agencies give us,” a designer explains, passing the buck along to booking agencies. “If they only choose that kind of waif, tall figure that that’s what we’ve got to choose from.”

“34-24-34 is the ideal size,” a booker says. “I have no idea where that came from. Of course I don’t like that.”

And round and round it goes, and the quest for edginess pushes the “look” to ever bonier extremes, and no one is willing to step forward and say, “Enough.” Amazingly, this week, Vogue did just that.