The XX Factor

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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. 

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. 

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.