The XX Factor

On Monday Vice Magazine published a photo spread that depicted seven woman writers before, during, or after their suicides. By Tuesday morning, it was taken down, amid outrage. But the images of models dressed like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, the Taiwanese author Sanmao, Iris Chang, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elise Cowen and Dorothy Parker posed with the instruments of their deaths (a gun, an oven, a chloroform handkerchief) live on around the web, where writers have been wrestling, some more seriously than others, with whether it’s ever OK to depict suicide in art.

Before we get to that question, though, a quick note about where it is not OK to depict suicide: a fashion spread. Using the personal tragedies of real people to sell clothes would be foul even if it didn’t require Vice to glamorize suffering or enforce a connection between beauty and frailty or reduce literary icons to how they looked when they died. Vice Magazine, please find a different way to be edgy.

Interestingly (predictably) Vice did not frame their decision to run the images as a commercial one. In the statement accompanying the removal of the spread, they invoked the Cause of Art.

The fashion spreads in VICE magazine are always unconventional and approached with an art editorial point-of-view rather than a typical fashion photo-editorial one. Our main goal is to create artful images, with the fashion message following, rather than leading.

Which, as flimsy as it sounds as justification, does prompt the question: Under what circumstances are we comfortable with representations of suicide? In a beautiful piece for New York Magazine’s The Cut, Michelle Dean argues that artistic portrayals of the act are more than OK—they’re necessary. Authors like Woolf and Plath endure in part for their unflinching honesty about what it is to face the dark. These writers break “social codes about depression and self-destructiveness,” showing us that women needn’t always be “quiet, demure, and obedient,” that their problems don’t always have tasteful resolutions.

Fine. Amen. But if Vice wished to shatter the guilty hush surrounding suicide, it could have been a lot more thoughtful about it. (Dean concurs.) Instead the magazine chose to aestheticize self-destruction, inviting us to sigh over these lovely, doomed creatures, rather than take steps to address depression as a mental health issue.

Dean defends the Vice photos on the grounds that “they don’t ‘glamorize’ anything. They are bland, anaesthetized, boring.” I wish I agreed. But the models are lithe and attractive, in stylized postures. Some, like the image of Sanmao pulling a noose of stockings around her neck, even look sexy. Add to this the fact that magazine photography in general is so tied to feminine aspiration, and you can’t escape a kind of fetishization of the subject matter. Sure, one could argue the images have an ironic cast—they are commenting on the objectification of woman writers and the romanticization of their problems—but that seems like a copout: I didn’t see any irony in the snapshots. I just see famous authors turned into beautiful, violated bodies: an exploitative impulse reproduced seven times and wrapped in fancy clothes.

Thirty years ago today, Sally Ride became the first American woman to travel into space. When Ride died in 2012, Laura Helmuth paid tribute to her by asking what the hell took so long. Her post is reprinted below.

Don’t get me wrong. Sally Ride, rest her soul, absolutely rocked. She was smart and courageous, unabashedly a feminist, and she called out sexism before, during, and after her time as an astronaut. She was a great advocate for science and math education, especially for girls; she wrote science books for kids, and her organization runs science camps and fairs and trains science teachers.

The first American woman in space, Ride flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. A few years later she helped identify the systematic failures that led to that shuttle’s explosion. When the Columbia disaster killed another batch of astronauts, she served on an accident investigation board again (Ride was the only person to serve on both boards, which must have been incredibly grueling), and then she helped write NASA’s plans for the future of human spaceflight. She arguably contributed more to NASA, and probably the world, than any other ex-astronaut. She was the Jimmy Carter of ex-astronauts, especially compared with Buzz “Show Me The Money” Aldrin or Harrison “Don’t Fret Climate Change” Schmitt. She dedicated her career to science, space, safety, and girls’ education, and I was crushed to hear of her death.

But back in 1983, when Ride made her historic trip into space, it was already too late. Judging by Google query completions, a lot of people think Sally Ride was the first woman in space. But that was cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who was also the first civilian in space. Do you remember how many years the Soviets beat us by in this particular race? Twenty. Tereshkova piloted the Vostok 6 into space in 1963. The first woman to walk in space was Svetlana Savitskaya, in 1982.

By the time Ride got there, we already had a lot of female “firsts,” which made some of the attention lavished on her—what an amazing feat for a woman!—feel a little condescending to, say, a 14-year-old girl in Indiana. Sandra Day O’Connor had just been named to the Supreme Court in 1981—also sadly overdue. Janet Guthrie raced in the Indy 500—one of the most macho, daredevil, balls-scratching sports—in 1977, for crying out loud. And never mind that Amelia Earhart got her pilot’s license exactly 60 years before Ride’s flight.

The fact that it took until 1983 to have a female astronaut just emphasized NASA’s nasty history of sexism. The United States could have sent the first woman into space much, much earlier. The Mercury program trained 13 women starting in 1961. They performed well, but despite their skills (or perhaps because of them), the program was eventually canceled. NASA redefined its astronaut prerequisites to include jet fighter experience, thereby ruling out any possibility of female candidates.

As much as I admire Sally Ride the person, do you know who should have been the first woman astronaut? One of the Mercury 13, definitely—all of whom by the way were honored guests in 2005 when shuttle commander Eileen Collins led the first shuttle flight after the Columbia disaster. But if not them, it could have been Janet Guthrie. She applied to an astronaut training program in 1964 and would have raced circles around those other guys.

Most people with siblings can remember an instance where their arguments escalated to inappropriate levels. I recall slamming my older brother’s door so hard when we were teenagers that I splintered the door frame. Though some sparring is normal, aggression between siblings can have lasting negative effects—so says a new study in the July issue of the journal Pediatrics.  According to the New York Times, one-third of the children in a study of more than 3,000 said they were victimized by a sibling at some point in the past year, and the victimized children reported higher levels of anxiety, depression, and anger.

Other studies have shown that sibling conflict occurs every day for 50 percent of young children, and 80 percent of siblings ages 3-17 reported experiencing at least one violent episode with their sister or brother in the year that study evaluated. So what are parents supposed to do? And how do we know what’s detrimental bullying versus just regular sibling bickering? I asked Slate’s resident bullying expert Emily Bazelon, the author of Sticks and Stones, and she said that the way to figure out if fighting between siblings is reaching the level of bullying is to see if there’s a pattern.

According to Bazelon, you should ask yourself, “Is one kid (or group of kids) on a campaign to make another kid miserable? Is the aggression chronic, and one-way, as opposed to mutual, where the power shifts back and forth?” If the answer is yes, then it’s important to talk as a family about what’s going on—because it’s a whole family dynamic. “It’s not about just focusing on the bully or the victim,” Bazelon says.

While this study should certainly inspire parents to keep an eye on the dynamics at play among their children, Bazelon cautions that most kids recover from sibling aggression. “These studies show that there’s a risk of depression and other negative psychological consequences. That means a higher rate, not that everyone experiences it,” she says. “Fortunately, most kids do bounce back. But it’s important to look out for the kids who have a harder time doing that.” So: No need to freak out. Look out for your more psychologically fragile offspring, but don’t break up every argument over Legos.  

Last week, Frank Bruni devoted his New York Times opinion column to the “puzzling stamina” of sexism in the United States and “all the recent reminders of how often women are still victimized, how potently they’re still resented and how tenaciously a musty male chauvinism endures.” He covered gender imbalances in the military, the Senate, corporate America, film, television, pro sports, and finally, books. “Even in the putatively high-minded realm of literature, there’s a gender gap, with male authors accorded the lion’s share of prominent reviews, as the annual VIDA survey documents,” Bruni wrote. “Reflecting on that in Salon last week, the critic Laura Miller acutely noted: ‘There’s a grandiose self-presentation, a swagger, that goes along with advancing your book as a Great American Novel that many women find impossible or silly.’ ”

Naturally, Jonathan Franzen was moved to respond.

“There may still be gender imbalances in the world of books, but very strong numbers of women are writing, editing, publishing and reviewing novels,” Franzen wrote in a letter to the editor. “The world most glaringly dominated by male sexism is one that Mr. Bruni neglects to mention: New York City theater.” A note below his byline clarified that—lest we confuse him with some lesser Jonathan Franzen—“the writer is the novelist.”

I’m wondering why the novelist—according to Time, the Great American Novelist—would be moved to file this limp non sequitur of an argument in the paper of record. (Franzen famously refuses to tweet all the half-baked thoughts that pass through his brain; apparently he prints them out and mails them to the New York Times instead.) If Franzen wanted to administer a sweet burn to Frank Bruni for calling out sexism in his profession, he could have criticized the male-dominated field of New York City restaurants. (Bruni served for years as the Times' chief food critic.) He could have dug into the demographics of the Times opinion page, where 10 of its 12 op-ed columnists are men. Instead, Franzen laid into theater with bizarre specificity. Why? I can only conclude that this was a conspicuously ineffective letter from a man considered one of the greatest writers alive. Or else it was a gay joke.

Frank Bruni is gay; Broadway is one of the few American industries that is perceived to be dominated by gay men. Franzen is smart enough not to explicitly chide Bruni for failing to singlehandedly resolve sexism in the gay community before speaking out against chauvinism in all other corners of the United States, but he may be just self-important enough to imply it. Then again, not everyone picked up on Franzen’s subtext. “I applaud Jonathan Franzen for casting a spotlight on sexism in theater,” Jenny Lyn Bader, a member of the executive board of the League of Professional Theater Women, wrote to the Times this week. In light of Franzen’s little note, “maybe the public will finally take note hearing it from a man, who cannot be accused of speaking out of self-interest.”

I'm not clapping. Instead of leveraging his clout to recognize gender imbalances in his own field (“there may still be, but” is an impressive hedge, but it does not count), Franzen deflected responsibility for resolving gender inequality onto gay men. Or maybe he just wrote a terrible letter that makes no sense. I'm not sure which accusation would bother the novelist more.

Later Tuesday the House will vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a GOP-sponsored bill that aims to ban abortion after 22 weeks. As painful as the ongoing Republican battle to restrict access to abortion is, at least it's creating multiple opportunities for conservative legislators to share with the larger world their rather strange views. The latest politician to cause one to wonder what it is they're teaching in medical school is doctor-turned-Rep. Michael Burgess from (naturally) Texas, who trotted out a novel argument during a hearing on the GOP's proposed ban. Burgess argued that abortion needs to be banned even earlier, at 15 or 16 weeks, because:

Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?

The bill is expected to pass the House but has no chance in the Senate or with the president, which means that perhaps after this one dies, Burgess will be the inspiration for the next bill: Masturbation-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which under the Burgess "making it up as you go along" scientific standard will only apply to male fetuses, as female fetuses are definitely too modest to even consider such filthy behavior. (Scary side note: Burgess was actually a gynecologist before he decided to go into politics.) 

Of course, what all this debate over pain and masturbation is meant to distract from is the very real, utterly indisputable fact that women feel pain: the pain of being so poor that you couldn't get the money together until 20 weeks for an abortion, the pain of being in denial about being raped and pregnant, the pain of discovering at 20 weeks that your fetus has serious birth defects. Also, if we're going be doling out human rights based on who touches themselves to feel good, let's start with actual born women. 

The shocking case of Ariel Castro, who kidnapped three young women and held them for years as rape and torture objects, fascinated the nation when it broke last month. But Cleveland has had a problem with residents living in fear of sexual predators for a while now. As Phillip Morris of the Plain Dealer reported in April, the discovery of serial killer Anthony Sowell's collection of corpses in 2009 created a climate of fear that only escalated as other serial rapists terrorized residents. Clevelanders have been repeatedly reminded of how many monsters live among us, attacking women under the radar, and understandably they are worried. 

But there is one item of good news: Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is located, has decided to go Eliot Ness on rapists. The Plain Dealer reports:

Cuyahoga County prosecutors and investigators are revisiting decades-old unsolved rape cases, using DNA evidence to connect serial rapes, tracking down victims and sending cases to grand juries for indictment—often racing against a 20-year statute of limitations.

The Plain Dealer rightfully takes credit for this, having turned the pressure up for years on authorities. Efforts escalated in 2011 at the request of Ohio's Republican attorney general Mike DeWine, and the result has been a factory line of indictments, often against men who are accused of spending decades attacking women without facing any repercussions for it. Now the newspaper has created a clearinghouse page so readers can follow the stream of indictments since March, as well as other stories about the DNA testing, in one place. (The above screenshot is only part of the page—I couldn't get the entire thing into one screen—but gives you an idea of how many cold cases are being turned into indictments with this move.)

Many of these indictments open up multiple cold cases at once, which is to be expected, as most rapists are serial rapists. Cleveland set aside about 3,000 untouched rape kits to be processed, which is a massive amount of work, but it's hard to argue with results like this. Law enforcement nationwide has been responding to pressure to process their backlogged rape kits, often with mixed results due to poor handling of the kits in the first place. The relative success in Cleveland should serve as a reminder of how effective rape kits can be in getting justice for victims, but only if they're handled properly and law enforcement bothers to use them.

Grab your hankies: To help kids coping with a parent in prison, Sesame Street created a Muppet whose father can't play with him because he's in jail. 

Sesame Street has always made it part of its larger mission to address all children, not just the ones with traditional families or easily digestible experiences. In the latest move toward that goal, the popular children's program created an online toolkit, titled "Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration," for those struggling to raise a child who has an incarcerated parent. Released just in time to help kids in need get through Father's Day, the toolkit has its detractors. Alex Jones naturally went into full-blown conspiracy theory mode, calling it a "propaganda program designed to help children accept the fact that daddy is in jail" by dangerously telling kids that "all you have to do is talk about your feelings, draw a few pictures, write letters to your dad, and toddle off to visit him in jail every now and then and everything will be all rainbows and lollipops." (Better to tell them ... what?) Mike Riggs at Reason was also angry, though not at Sesame Street but at the U.S. government for incarcerating so many people that these kinds of materials are necessary. He points out that nearly 7 million people are under correctional supervision in this country, writing, "congratulations, America, on making it almost normal to have a parent in prison or jail."

Obviously, Sesame Street can't do anything about the growth of the police state or the war on drugs that has resulted in the massive incarceration numbers in this country. The show is just trying to help innocent children deal with the repercussions. But Riggs is absolutely right: That this even has to exist in the first place shows how much pointless damage our prison system does not just to people who are caught up in the overly punitive, often racially biased justice system, but also to their families. As Jill Filipovic writes in the Guardian:

Since 1980, the US prison population has grown by 790%. We have the largest prison population of any nation in the history of the world. One in three African-American men will go to jail at some point in his life. Imprisoning that many people, most of them for non-violent offenses, doesn't come cheap, especially when you're paying private contractors. The United States now spends $50bn on our corrections system every year.

Sesame Street isn't the problem, but hopefully the very existence of this video and online toolkit can help wake people up to the way that excessive incarceration is destroying families and hurting the most vulnerable children.