Kay Steiger

Programming Note, Part 2

2011-07-11T10:32:00.000-04:00

Kaysteiger.com now redirects you to my new Wordpress site.

Programming Note

2011-06-14T17:44:00.004-04:00

I've been testing out a Wordpress blog instead of this Blogger format. I've moved my work over to kaysteiger.wordpress.com, ignoring all wisdom gleaned from Matt Drudge. Redirect on kaysteiger.com coming shortly. Please update your RSS feeds accordingly.

What Kay's Doing

2011-05-12T10:17:00.000-04:00

Wow. Hey, guys. I've been out of the posting game for a little while. Sorry about that. Mainly I've been busy because I quit my job and started a new one since my last blog post. I'm no longer the editor at CampusProgress.org (and if you know anyone who wants my old job, send them here).

Instead, I'm now the online managing editor at Washingtonian magazine. I'm just getting going there, but if you're really desperate to read some stuff written by me, you can read some morning roundups and daily questions I've put together over there.

But if you want to see me in real life, you should swing by the Women's Information Network offices tonight at 6:30 for me to present with some other folks on "Finding Your Voice Online: Political Blogging 101."

Why Are There So Few Female Characters Overcoming Disabilities?

2011-04-16T10:49:00.007-04:00

(Miramax Films)

I recently got around to watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a beautiful film about former Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's struggle with the aftermath of a massively debilitating stroke. Though not super common, stories about a protagonist overcoming the complications of a disability are getting some attention, what with the Oscar-winning The King's Speech. Even the most recent season of Breaking Bad depicts DEA agent Hank Schrader working through physical therapy after a near-deadly shooting. These stories are part of a niche sub-genre of characters coming to terms with a disability.

But what you don't see in these types of stories are female protagonists. An obvious candidate for a story like this would be a biopic of deaf-and-dumb heroine Hellen Keller, but no such major film adaptation has been done, save a documentary about her released in 1954.

In fact, women are rarely portrayed with disabilities of any kind in film or television in recent years. The last major actress with a disability I can recall is deaf actress Marlee Matlin, who won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and four Emmy nominations. Much has been written about the lack of interesting roles for women, including something Tad Friend touched on in a piece in a recent issue of the New Yorker on female comedians. But rare as interesting roles are for women, roles for women with disabilities are even rarer.

If a stuttering king is worthy of an Oscar, maybe Hollywood can consider writing such a role for a woman.

Addendum: So many people have pointed out that I have forgotten The Miracle Worker, a 1962 film starring Patty Duke. Though it still doesn't change the fact that far more movies get made about men overcoming disabilities far more often than ones about women do. Commenter Sayantani writes,

As someone who teaches illness and disability memoirs - I've been convinced that it's because disability (or illness) brings masculinity into crisis and these narratives are all struggling with that point of social/cultural crisis.

Since Western masculinity is constructed as autonomous, with bodily control, physically powerful, etc. Lots of great things have been written about the hypermasculine disability narrative (or the male disability narrative struggling with masculinity/virility).

My knowledge of film history is nowhere near comprehensive, but I think the original point I raised is still a valid one.

Friday Links: Emancipation Day Edition

2011-04-15T13:30:00.002-04:00

Washington, D.C.'s African American Civil War Memorial. (Flickr/wallyg)

Folks in Washington, D.C., are celebrating Emancipation Day, or the day when we as a country decided it was probably a bad call to let humans own other humans. Somehow, this is not recognized as a federal holiday and we'll take a day of for ~~Imperialism~~ Columbus Day instead. [Washington City Paper]
Is our business students learning? [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Mumford and Sons have a new song. [Paste]
Wow, Peggy Ornstein is right. This gendering our children thing is starting at a younger and younger age. Now they have parties for your gender when you're still in the womb. [The Awl]
Men should wear wedding rings, Hugo argues. [Good Men Project]
After Congress negotiated away the District of Columbia's right to spend its own taxpayer money on abortion, private donations flooded in to make up the lack of Medicare payments. They raised $25,000, but still fall short. [Amanda Hess]
Do you need something, anything cute to look at? [Cute Roulette]

Misplaced Protest at Walgreen's?

2011-04-14T12:24:00.004-04:00

Jill at Feministe links to a protest planned this weekend based on Stephen Colbert's really hilarious sketch on a Fox and Friends misunderstanding of what kids of things you can actually obtain at Walgreen's.

FLASH MOB ALERT!!!

FOX & Friends thinks we don’t need Planned Parenthood because women can just get their breast exams and pap smears at Walgreens (which is not true). Let’s prove them wrong by demanding these health services at Walgreens across the country and seeing what happens.

Here’s what to do this Saturday at 12 PM:

1) Pick your favorite local Walgreens
2) Get a group of friends together or connect with people via this event page.
3) Go try to get your pap smear!
4) Don’t forget to bring your video cameras and share your footage on YouTube!

View the Colbert Report’s take on Planned Parenthood: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/381282/april-11-2011/pap-smears-at-walgreens

PLANNED LOCATIONS:

New York City: 1471 Broadway, between 42nd and 43rd street http://tinyurl.com/4xpc3kz

DC: 1217 22nd Street NW, between M and N Streets.

Madison, WI: 15 E. Main Street (on the Square)

Jill calls it brilliant, but I'm not so sure. No offense to the organizers, because I think their heart was in the right place, but it seems to me that this protest at best will be ignored and ineffective and at its worst could turn people against the cause who previously had no stake in the debate. But then, I wasn't involved in the planning of the debate. Thoughts?

Dating Tall Men

2011-04-13T11:49:00.004-04:00

(Flickr/kightp)

This post on Very Smart Brothas asks why women always seem to be biased against short men. Granted, this is completely anecdotal, but I hear women say things all the time like, "I just can't date a guy that's shorter than me." Warning: I am about to take a very controversial opinion on this: Women who discount men because they are short are, well, kind of bigots.

People get really offended when I say that, so if you're interested in my rationale. I recommend you continue reading. Otherwise, you can just skip to the comments section and tell me I'm a horrible human.

Despite the fact that I've never dated anyone shorter than me (I'm 5' 6") and my current boyfriend is closer to 7 feet than he is to 6, I've never really understood women's bias against short men. Not all women are guilty of this, but I've noticed a lot of women say this, and given the reaction I've had from men and women on Twitter, people feel strongly about this.

Height discrimination seems to be one of the last socially accepted irrational dating biases. If you're short, there's literally nothing you can do about that. When I say that I think women who refuse to date a man simply because of his height I usually get a litany of reasons defending this position—pretty much all of which are irrational.

I'm just not attracted to short men.

Fine. I don't really get why you'd eliminate an entire population simply based on height, but there is some evolutionary psychology to back up the idea that women tend to be attracted to greater height. But if we're totally being honest, there are tons of "evolutionary" romantic biases that modern people work around pretty effectively: People tend to be attracted to people that look most like them, women are "attracted" to wealthier men, or that women evolutionarily want to be more submissive to men. Why we adhere to the height "evolution" reason and tend to reject others as biased is beyond me.

Short men have a "Napoleon" complex.

I don't have any scientific data to back this up or anything, but I'm pretty sure Napoleonism isn't a universal trait among men under a certain height. What women mean when they say this is they once dated a short guy who was an asshole and so they've taken to assuming all short men are assholes.

It's "logistically difficult" to date a short men.

Women tend to bring this up a lot, hinting that height affects performance in bed. It's also usually followed up with "well, granted, there were other issues in the relationship." Do you think possibly these "other issues" were why you weren't having such a great time in the sack? Maybe? Possibly? I mentioned at the beginning of this post, there's an extreme height differential between me and my current significant other—yet somehow we manage to work around it. Why women can't work out a hight difference going the other way is, again, beyond me.

I really like to wear heels, and that makes me way taller than a short guy.

I'm sorry, what? No. Your fashion choices don't let you get to justify an irrational preference. Wear flats. Or better yet, wear heals and don't give a shit about how tall they make you.

The thing is, people are ready with all kind of irrational reasons why it might be justifiable to judge someone based on height alone, but it's really weird. Why do they do that?

Probably because the thing that makes them uncomfortable about all of this is that when they say they don't like short guys, what they're really saying is they are passing judgement on men about their masculinity based on a trait these men cannot help. And saying it in those terms makes people uncomfortable, so instead they will come up with strange defenses of this bias to make it seem like this is what's going on.

We perpetuate stereotypes about masculinity because dating is the one aspect in our lives where we're still allowed to be biased. People can't argue with you if you're not attracted to someone. But if they point out that this is rooted in ideas about masculinity and societal expectations, that becomes more uncomfortable for women. They're reminded how society demands they lose weight, look a certain way, act a certain way, or even be a certain skin tone.

Let's just call a spade a spade. If you look at a great guy who's attractive, smart, interesting, funny, and kind—and he's too short for you—you've given in to an irrational bias. That's fine, but just accept you're buying into reductive ideas about masculinity.

Graph of the Day: Female Faculty Pay Still Lags Behind Male Peers

2011-04-11T13:24:00.003-04:00

A new story in the Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes some data put forth by the American Association of University Professors shows that female faculty are still making less than their male peers on average.

Saturday Links: The Misogyny-Free Pickup Artist and Comix Journalism

2011-04-09T11:04:00.003-04:00

Sylvia Plath on her typewriter (Flavorwire)

Famous authors and the typewriters they wrote on. [Flavorwire]
How to pick up women, misogyny-free. [Good Men Project]
I guess you're not surprised to learn the budget battle wasn't about money; it was about taking money away from "welfare sluts," Amanda Marcotte writes. [The Guardian]
How Ayn Rand ruined one woman's life. [Salon]
A new project on merging graphic art and journalism. [Graphic Journos]
A graphic history of the Honduran coup. [Archcomix]

How 'Lights Out' Is All Too Real on Athlete Bankruptcy

2011-04-05T14:35:00.006-04:00

(FX Networks)

Tonight FX will air its final episode of Lights Out, a show about former heavyweight champion Patrick Leary (Holt McCallany) who faces getting back in the ring at age 40 or financial ruin.

Though the storyline about how Leary and his family are on the brink of bankruptcy mainly exists to facilitate Leary's ultimate showdown with "Death Row" Reynolds (Billy Brown), the challenges of tax audits and looming bankruptcy that Leary faces in the series are all to real for most former athletes.

In 2009, Sports Illustrated ran a feature article about why so many athletes go for broke. In it, the author, Pablo Torre, notes that "the closest analogy to a pro athlete is not a white-collar executive. It's a lottery winner—who's often in his early twenties."

The odds seem stacked against former athletes, since Torre noted that 78 percent of former NFL players go bankrupt or are under financial stress after two year of retirement. In that same amount of time, 60 percent of former NBA athletes face the same challenges. Even MLB players, with their cap-less salaries, aren't immune from this reality and several former big leaguers have gone broke after their retirement.

Torre's article doesn't touch on former boxers, but given that boxing is a tightly controlled industry with a few major players betting on the boxing skills of mostly poor and minority athletes, it wouldn't be surprising if they fare the same or worse as the more mainstream athletes. The BBC profiled former boxer Evander Holyfield after he filed for bankruptcy on his 109-room home in the suburbs of Atlanta and noted Holyfied's situation is common among former boxers.

Going through the reasons Torre offers for why athletes go broke so quickly, the fictional Leary story seems to hit on every one.

The Lure of the Tangible

Leary and his brother decide to invest in commercial development project, but as the housing market crumbled, so did their investment. The Leary family also live in a self-built sprawling suburban home in New Jersey, send their daughters to a private Catholic school, hold onto a private boxing gym, and promise to make generous donation to their church's relief efforts in Haiti. They never mention stocks, mutual funds, or bonds.

True, Leary invests in his wife Theresa's medical school (Catherine McCormack), something that could put the family back on track to financial balance, but it seems much of what Leary invested his money in is what Torre called "the thrill of tangibility." Torre wrote, "Financial advisors have come to call it 'the problem of the $20,000 Rolex.' If a 22-year-old spends $22,000 on a watch or a big night out at a nightclub, that money is either depreciating or gone."

Misplaced Trust

This is a big plot point in Lights Out, especially early on in the series. Leary places ultimate trust in his brother, Johnny (Pablo Schreiber), who promptly whittles Leary's earnings away with poorly placed gambling bets and bad financial management. It's Johnny's tax evasion that lands the Learys in trouble with the IRS.

Torre writes that it is often poorly qualified friends or family members that are charged with managing an athlete's money, and they often mis-manage it. Even when it isn't family members who are charged with finances, it's often someone else of emotional importance in the player's life—in one case, it was an NBA player who gave that power to his former Amateur Athletic Union coach. Again, this problem is widespread. Torre wrote, "In fact, according to the NFL Players Association, at least 78 players lost a total of more than $42 million between 1999 and 2002 because they trusted money to financial advisers with questionable backgrounds."

Family Matters

The financial strain also creates a rift between Leary and his wife, and they even separate for a time on the show. Though Leary and his wife eventually make up, it's clear that such a separation would be financially—as well as emotionally— devastating.

According to Torre's reporting, a survey conducted in 2008 by a financial services firm found that more than 80 percent of 178 athletes they polled reported they were concerned about potential lawsuits or divorce dealings. "By common estimates among athletes and agents, the divorce rate for a pro athlete ranges from 60 percent to 80 percent," Torre wrote.

Great Expectations

Leary is the sole supporter for his large and demanding family. Not only is his erstwhile fortune expected to pay for his family's house and expenses while his wife gets through medical school, but he has three daughters who are all planning to attend college, a gym to keep his father—and former coach—busy in retirement, and a diner he owns but his sister runs. Leary's new coach, Ed Romeo (Eamonn Walker), stares at Leary in amazement as he explains how he's supporting his wife, children, father, brother, and sister. The family pushes Romeo out through some manipulation of Leary.

Again, this problem seems widespread, with new and old faces showing up to get a cut of the athlete's earnings. "As soon as an athlete goes pro, people in search of handouts tend to stretch the definitions of family and friends." The large promised donation to the church in Haiti wasn't just volunteered out of the blue by the Learys; the church sought them out as potentially wealth members of the congregation even as they faced a costly IRS audit.

Though Lights Out wasn't a perfect show, often mimicking the plotlines of the Oscar-nominated film The Fighter so closely I still sometimes confuse the two, but I'll be sad to see it go. In an era where Hollywood is trying to capitalize on putting the realities of the recession in various ways on television shows, it's nice to see a show take on a very real and complicated issue like disappearing athlete finances.

The Challenges of Raising Cinderella

2011-04-04T10:13:00.005-04:00

It wasn't until I read Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture that I truly became terrified of the idea of someday giving birth to (or adopting) a pair of X chromosomes. The main question Orenstein tries to answer is how do feminist (or at least, non-misogynist) mothers deal with the explosion of gendered children's culture? It turns out that the answer to that question is far from easy.

Orentsein describes her journey through confronting the new girlie-girl culture with her own daughter. Princess culture, it seems is rather new to childhood, and was mostly just dreamed up by a Disney executive who couldn't stand to see little girls twirling about in homemade princess costumes. Now, lots of marketers have caught onto this trend and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find gender-neutral toys. This point seems pretty obvious when you view this breakdown from Sociological Images of a Christmas toy catalog: While you occasionally see marketers place girls with gender-neutral or even "boy" toys, you never see boys playing with "girl" toys. Today Sociological Images ran competing word clouds of marketing language in commercials for boys' and girls' toys. It seems you no longer have children; you have boys and you have girls.

Determined not to have her daughter grow up with the mindset of girlie-girl culture, Orenstein did her best to protect her daughter from the tyranny of the princesses. She failed. As much as she didn't like it, it wasn't long before her daughter was demanding tiaras and tutus.

The problem Orenstein ran into is that rejecting girlie-girl culture sends a message that's almost as bad as embracing it: If things that girls like are bad, that diminishes the value of girls in our culture. Telling little girls that they shouldn't like the tutus and princess wands they might be attracted to through a combination of marketing, peer pressure, and even a bit of "nature" tells them that girlie equals bad and that they only have value if they like "boy" things.

It seems parents who want to raise their girls in a way that doesn't reject girl culture but still pushes girls to explore "boy" interests—anything from toy trucks to light sabers—leaves them in a difficult position. After all, just because a girl wears a tiara in childhood doesn't mean she can't go on to become a Ph.D.'s in astrophysics. But it's also true that increased emphasis on "pretty" girls can have adverse effects on body image, self-esteem, and ambition. The notion of trying to navigate these waters is terrifying.

Though Orentsein's work is fascinating, I'm left wondering how parents can raise their girls in such a culture—and, furthermore, how they can raise their boys. After all, if we suspect girlie-girl culture that there's a risk in girlie-girl culture for girls, imagine what it might do to boys who are taught to resist engaging with it.

How to Use the D.C. Library (Almost) Like Netflix

2011-04-03T16:51:00.003-04:00

(Flickr/evoque)

I recently read this story about the Newport Beach library that's might get rid of its physical location and convert to a "Netflix-like" system in which patrons would pick up their books, DVDs, and other materials from lockers.

What you may not know is that the public library already works a lot like Netflix. Thanks to most municipal inter-library loan systems, you can request most books, television shows, and other forms of media (including comic books!) for free. Here's how you navigate this system in the District of Columbia—though I'd bet your local system works pretty much the same way:

Step one: Get a library card.
This is pretty essential to the whole process. You can go to this page to fill out a form for a provisional library card that they'll email to you, and they'll mail you a real one eventually. You can also just show up at your local branch and fill the form out there. All you need is a D.C., Maryland, or Virginia driver's license. If you don't have that, just show up in person to the MLK library downtown and pay $20 a year. (If you request a half-dozen things a year, it's probably worth it.)

Step two: Order books.
This seems confusing sometimes because what they call it at the library is "placing a hold" on an item. Say you want to read Live Wire by Harlan Coben, which is currently at the top of the New York Times fiction best sellers list. Go to the DC Library search page and search for "Live Wire." It'll bring up the item listing in the library catalog. In the top right corner of the item listing (next to some of the social media links) there's a link that says "place hold." It'll ask you to put in you library card number as your "user ID," which you should have had emailed to you—or handed to you if you went to the library in person—and your PIN number. For some reason, the library system just uses the last four digits of your library card number as your PIN. Then it will ask you where you want to pick it up. You can choose a library near your home or work—just be sure to check the hours, since most libraries are only open late a couple nights a week and most aren't open Sundays—and pick the one that works best for you. Click "send."

Step three: Wait.
Unfortunately the library system isn't quite as instantaneous as Netflix or Amazon Prime—sometimes you have to wait a few weeks for your hold to show up at the library where you requested it. If time is of the essence for what you're requesting, you'll probably have to pay for that. Sometimes, though, you'll be surprised at how quickly it's ready.

Step four: Pick up your items.
When your items are ready, you'll get an email telling you your hold is available. Just be sure to get there within a week—if you don't show up to get it before then, they'll route the item to the next person on the list. Go to the library and ask them where they keep their holds. Your item should be waiting there in alphabetical order under your last name. Check it out. Read it within three weeks or renew it if you're not done with it.

Easy, right?

2011 Reading So Far

2011-04-02T10:04:00.002-04:00

Sadly, not my bookshelf. (Flickr/Ben Oh)

I read a lot. I'm lucky I have enough free time to read so much, but I have to say, my recent addition to the library's inter-loan system has motivated me to finish books more quickly than when I purchased them. What can I say? I'm deadline-oriented. Keep in mind the post ahead is going to be a fully indulgent bunch of stats about me and my reading habits. If that's not your style, it's probably best to move on.

The end of March means I'm about a fourth of the way through the year, and I've read 22 books so far this year (You can look at my full selection of books for the year so far here). Last year I read 62 books, so if I keep up this pace, I'm on track to top the number of books I read last year. Granted, some of these "books" include comic books. Take that as you will. Of the 23 books I've read so far, 13 of them are by women. I've read 14 novels, 6 non-fiction books, and 3 comic books.

Best novel I've read so far this year: This was a tough call since I've ready so many great ones, but I think my favorite one so far was Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. It's a beautifully written book.

Best non-fiction book I've read so far this year: This seems a bit unfair since I've read so little non-fiction, but I think my favorite thus far was the slim work A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz. This is, in part, because I really enjoy reading about feminism; others who are less steeped in it might enjoy Michael Lewis' The Big Short more.

Best comic book/graphic novel: Again, a bit unfair since I've fallen down on my comics reading so far this year, but I'm going to go with Moving Pictures by Kathryn Immonen. It's a beautiful and haunting story about two people in the middle of World War II.

Worst book I read this year: Sadly I think Franklin & Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage was the most disappointing book I read this year. It's hard to tell the story of the marriage without also relating much of the history of FDR's presidency, and Rowley had to breathlessly rush thorough much of it to keep her book a manageable length. In the end, I think I'd rather have read a substantial FDR biography.

Books published in 2011 that I read in 2011: Just two, A Strange Stirring and T.C. Boyle's When the Killing's Done.

The oldest book I read this year: Easy. Jane Eyre.

The longest book I've read this year: Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion.

Shortest book I read this year: The Walking Dead, vol. 13 wins. Ironically the tome of the first 10 volumes was the longest book I read last year.

Reading goals for the rest of the year: Read more non-fiction; I'm especially into historical biographies. Any recommendations?

Friday Links: Bloody Marys and Graphic Journalism

2011-04-01T16:01:00.003-04:00

(Flickr/Kenn Wilson)

Cool story on the chemistry of bloody marys, but where's the Old Bay? [NPR]
The lovely Tracy Clark-Flory takes on America's obsession with "porn for women." [Salon]
Reading Sinclair Lewis decades later. [Shani O. Hilton]
Rants against girl gamers are so tired, you could play BINGO. [Feminist Fatale]
The four main ways of thinking about motherhood. [Sociological Images]
What is graphic journalism? Erin Polgreen, the raddest of comic ladies, takes this question on. [The Hooded Utilitarian]
Sandra Lee, terrible as she is, is pretty feminist. [TAPPED]
An Indiana state legislator delivers an emotional speech defending victims of rape, drawing on her six years of experience as a sex crimes investigator. [Think Progress]
Tipping seems to reward flirting, not actual good service. [Smart Money]

Re-imagining Jane Eyre

2011-03-29T14:45:00.006-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Amanda Hess tweeted, "Is there a more unappealing romantic lead than Mr. Rochester?" It's a really good question. And the answer is, there probably aren't many male romantic leads more unappealing than the jerky Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre, the iconic novel by Charlotte Brontë has been recently re-adapted for the screen starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. We are once again presented with the story of a girl who fell in love with a rather unlikable man. The film has even inspired a challenge from The Hairpin that Jane Eyre, while a genuinely excellent book, pales in comparison to Brontë's work in Villette.

I recently re-read the book and watched the new film. I should note, this is the only film adaptation I've seen of the book. Spoilers ahead (though c'mon, the book was published more than 150 years ago).

The new remake takes care to pluck some of the more feminist-themed language from the novel and depict some of the key scenes that transcend the relationship from fairy tale to realistically complicated relationship. Freedom is a key theme in Jane Eyre, and much of it has to do with the freedom of women in this time.

For Jane, the titular character in the novel, she finds freedom through love. But it is love with a twist; Brontë makes the simple point that love—and ultimately marriage—should be between equals.

The power of this notion might be lost on modern women, who enjoy many freedoms women didn't in the era during which Jane Eyre is set, but the power to choose one's partner—as an equal—was a rather radical notion back in the day. Fans of Jane Austin's work note that much of her satire revolves around women jockeying for partners who will improve their status in live, and that status-changing partner isn't always chosen because of love. Generally women who loved the men they married in this time felt they lucked out. The radical notion of marriage between equals is what makes Jane Eyre a feminist (or, some might say, pre-feminist) story.

But much as this book is about gender, it is also about the freedom that comes with class. At the beginning of the book, Jane is poor. But though Jane is poor, it's clear she ranks above servants in the book. She works, but she is better educated than servants and had the freedom to leave her job if she wanted to. And much as Jane seems to genuinely in love with Rochester, he also represents the freedom that comes with money. Just because Jane Eyre is more earnest than Jane Austin's work doesn't mean the motivation to obtain a status-changing marriage disappears. In the end, Jane and Rochester only marry once their status has evened out a bit—after Jane has inherited a substantial sum of money.

It is possibly his financial status that, in part, makes Rochester more appealing to Jane. The character is imperfect: We witness him as dishonest, exhibit vaguely stalker-ish qualities, and speak in a manner that is quite rude. But Jane herself is a flawed character: She's awkward, defiant, and loves someone as imperfect as herself. In my mind, the idea that Rochester is unappealing is kind of the point of Jane Eyre. After all, it might be even more annoying if he were perfect.

Today, the idea of marriages between equals isn't so radical. Stephanie Coontz, in her most recent book, A Strange Stirring, in which she examines the effects of The Feminine Mystique, notes that bringing attention to gender inequality may have initially resulted in more divorces and declines in marriage happiness. But now that the idea that American marriages should be partnership between equals is considered a good thing. As a result, men and women are reporting happier marriages than they were before feminism arrived on the scene. Life partnerships need to be built on mutual respect, and that notion isn't so radical today.

For the most part, Jane Eyre is a window into the past. It depicts a time when women had few freedoms and women with little means had even fewer, but that window into the past reminds us of how far we have come today.

Student Parents Need Child Care to Increase Retention

2011-03-28T10:26:00.005-04:00

Today I have a piece in The American Prospect on student parents. Check it out:

Each morning, Sherita Rooney wakes up around 6 a.m. She gets her 14-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son ready for the day. She makes breakfast and gets her children to school before driving an hour to West Chester University outside of Philadelphia, where she recently transferred after graduating from Montgomery County Community College.

Every day is difficult, but Tuesdays are especially so. She works from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. before class from 2 to 7. She picks up her kids, then brings them home and puts them to bed. As a math education major, she takes challenging classes that keep her up late studying. She goes to sleep around 2 a.m. each night. The next day, she gets up and does it over again.

Without the child care scholarship she found through the Philadelphia-based nonprofit, Family Care Solutions, Inc., Rooney says, she's not sure what she would do. She'll find out this summer, when she's signed up for classes but won't have the scholarship.

Student parents like Rooney make up about a quarter of all postsecondary students in the United States, according to a new report released by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. The report estimates that of the total of 3.9 million student parents in the country, more than half are low-income. About 12 percent of all undergraduate students in the United States are single parents, and of those more than three quarters are low-income. The vast majority of them are women.

Read the whole thing.

How MIT (Sorta) Solved Its Gender Problem

2011-03-22T13:26:00.005-04:00

(Flickr/Infinitely Curious)

As Monica Potts notes at The American Prospect, there have been a number of stories about women's leadership this week:

No fewer than three news articles this week detail how hard it is for women, both students and professors, at elite campuses. The New York Times reports that MIT, which made an effort some years ago to correct for a lack of female professors on campus, has made gains in recruiting and honoring female professors. But that's created a weird dynamic in which women who win accolades question whether their gender plays a role and feel they have to navigate gender stereotypes on campus. The Daily Beast writes about a study that shows women trail men in campus leadership positions as students, and another Beast article interviews the presidents of UPenn and Brown, both women, about how there's a similar leadership gap at their colleges.

Though the Times story Monica links to leads with the remaining problems of cultural sexism, what I think is interesting about the MIT situation is this: MIT story is that the school found a problem, studied it, and made steps to correct it. And it worked! MIT made significant gains in female representation among professors. It even has a female president, Susan Hockfield. It's a very MIT way of going about it, when you think about it.

Of course, that didn't eliminate all problems of women in academia. As the Times reported, problems remain: there's still a perceived problem that women are unfairly favored (even though MIT took steps to ensure qualified candidates would be hired), and the school still struggles (like all higher ed institutions do) accommodating academic couples.

What this illustrates is that schools really get down to business and recognize that institutional sexism is a problem that needs fixing, there are steps they can take to get there. And recognizing that there's a problem is an important first step.

Women's Occupy Just 27% of Leadership Jobs in Media

2011-03-22T13:02:00.004-04:00

Joyce Slocum is the interim CEO at NPR.

Via Bloomberg:

Women represent less than one third of the main decision makers at news companies worldwide as gender inequality leaves top management and governance dominated by males, the International Women’s Media Foundation said.
Women occupy about 27 percent of the leading managerial jobs such as chief executive officer and about 26 percent of governing board positions, according to a survey of 522 newspaper, radio and television companies by the Washington-based advocacy group. Women hold 39 percent of the senior management positions that include managing editor and bureau chief, the two-year study released today shows.

This taps into tons of earlier discussions about women's representation in media. Still, it's startling to see the numbers.

Bad News of the Day: One in Five Air Force Women Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted

2011-03-21T16:34:00.004-04:00

(Flickr/Official U.S. Air Force)

Ugh. The Christian Science Monitor reported last week:

In a quiet push to more honestly address sexual crimes within the military, the Air Force will release a survey later this week that finds 1 in 5 women say they have been sexually assaulted since joining the service.

One of the most comprehensive studies undertaken by the US military to assess sexual assaults within its ranks, it could become a model for how the military as a whole begins to address the problem, defense officials say.

Unfortunately, we're finding that sexual assault rates in the military are higher than rates among the general population. As horrible as this news is, it's encouraging the military is actually reporting the assaults. It's the first step in addressing the problem.

I'll Shut Up After 'Congrats' If You Do Too (At Least a Little)

2011-03-21T15:13:00.009-04:00

(Flickr/Maggiejumps)

The Hairpin ran this really great piece on what to say when your friends get engaged. I personally found it rather helpful because I tend to be really bad at shutting up after I say "congratulations" to my friends when they tell me they're getting married. For every eye roll that came with an announcement of upcoming nuptials, I apologize.

But. Here's the thing.

If the conversation about a wedding announcement went something like this:

"Hey I'm getting married!"

"Oh wow, that's great! Congratulations! I'm super happy for you."

and that was the end of the story, everything would be fantastic. It'd be like when your friends get a new job or an apartment or something.

Except it's generally considered rude to change the subject to talking about this week's basketball game or what you had for dinner yesterday. You're often expected to offer follow up questions that include—but aren't limited to—the following:

"Can I see the ring?" (I have virtually no opinions on rings or jewelry that costs more than $30, which probably means my only opinion is that you spent too much money on it.)

"Where/when will the wedding taking place?"

"Where are you going on your honeymoon?"

"Is your mom/dad acting really annoying about the whole thing?" (Most often, the answer seems to be yes.)

"What color are your bridesmaid dresses going to be?"

"Who are your bridesmaids going to be?" (It's really OK if I'm not one of them. Don't worry. I won't freak out.)

"What kind of cake will you get?"

"What's going to be your wedding favor?"

"Are you going to hand-address your invitations? My Aunt Edna said it's rude not to." (By the way, why do old people believe this? It's as if they really want you to waste a lot of time or pay someone else to waste a lot of time. They have computers now that address envelopes for you. Geez.)

"Do you have a tiny relative to carry rings or flowers to you during the ceremony?"

The answers to these questions are often not very concise. Which—I get it—this is totally the most important thing happening in the engaged couple's lives at the moment. But let's remember that weddings are becoming increasingly expensive, so therefore the pressure to dissect every single detail is, well, pretty strong. After all, these couples are blowing a lot of money on the Big Day.

But as a friend, I feel that my role should be limited to the following:

1) Say "congrats."

2) Show up on the day of the wedding if invited. (Also, totally not a big deal if you don't want to blow $100 on feeding me. I understand.)

3) Bring a gift.

4) Get drunk and dance at the reception.

These all seem like totally acceptable ways to help a couple celebrate their One Special Day. Until then, however, I'd rather talk about television or sports or really anything other than what flavor your cake frosting is going to be. Seriously people, just let me be surprised.

The reason folks who get engaged might be experiencing some, uh, somewhat less than glowing congratulatory statements might be because a lot of people have really complicated feelings about weddings. And that might be hard for some people because friends are expected to care a lot about the details of these things.

Granted, this doesn't include everyone. I also have friends that keep wedding talk to a minimum. To those, I thank you. And hey, I'm not trying to be mean. Like I said, engaged folks should know that their friends really are happy for them. It's just that said friends maybe don't want to talk about the wedding as much as the engaged folks tend to think about it.

So let me make a deal: If we all agree to abide by the rules presented in The Hairpin piece, maybe that means the engaged can spare us some of details about the wedding. That's all I ask.

What Will It Take To Make a Consistent Sexual Assault Policy on Campuses Nationwide?

2011-03-21T10:34:00.005-04:00

T-shirts San Francisco Women Against Rape created for a 2009 Walk Against Rape. (Flickr/Steve Rhodes)

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education has a really excellent piece on the current debate over sexual assault policies on campus. (Unfortunately, the story is behind a paywall, but I'll discuss some of the relevant bits below and for further context, you should read this really great series from the Center for Public Integrity on the problems with many campus sexual assault policies.)

It seems that whether a victim will receive justice for her assault (the vast majority of victims are women, though they aren't the only ones) depends greatly on where she attends school. Part of this stems from confusion over the law itself:

Federal civil-rights law requires [colleges and universities] to resolve all reported offenses. And increasingly, public pressure bears down just as powerfully. [...] The watchdog group Security on Campus proposed broader federal legislation, even a requirement that colleges use the relatively low standard of evidence "more likely than not." And at Dickinson College this month, students occupied an administration building and demanded that expulsion be the only available penalty for rape.

Meanwhile, confusion over existing law persists. The U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights recently found that two institutions, Eastern Michigan University and Notre Dame College, in Ohio, did not adequately consider the rights of sexual-assault victims. Observers expect the office to release more guidance this spring on how cases should proceed, apart from general campus-conduct systems.

What this ultimately reveals is that sexual assault policies vary widely by campus, depending on university policy, interpretation of the law, and campus culture. These factors all leave a great deal of sexual assault policy up to the discretion of individuals. Though it's sometimes helpful to have room for special circumstances—especially since rape cases sometimes are thin on provable evidence—but ultimately what campuses need is a consistent best practices approach to dealing with sexual assault.

And figuring out what such a policy might be is difficult. The Chronicle article points out:

For cases that are reported, single sanctions may decrease findings of responsibility. "If the hearing panel has any doubt at all, they're going to acquit," says Gary M. Pavela, a consultant to colleges on legal issues and a former director of student judicial programs at the University of Maryland at College Park. Technical explanations of standards of evidence don't matter, he says: "Your eyes glaze over and you do ultimately what you think is right."

Finding a balance between investigating cases fairly and providing strong support for potential victims is tricky, but, as Dickson college found, being precise and providing a range of offenses as well as clear definitions is helpful. The school was awarded a $300,000 federal grant administered by the Department of Justice designed to encourage individual institutions to implement a comprehensive and fair sexual assault policy on campuses for its implementation of mandatory prevention education programs.

The grant program is a good incentive, but it also means that schools that already care about this problem are the ones most likely to be the leaders on creating good sexual assault policies. Until best practices can be agreed upon, many victims will simply exist in a legal limbo until schools can figure out what to do with them.

The Center for Public Integrity report revealed that sexual assault victims they followed were sometimes more likely to drop out of school than their assailants were to be suspended while they waited to pursue university appeals processes. For the sake of these young people, here's hoping schools will adopt a precise, fair, and universal sexual assault policy.

Big Love's Experimentation with Feminism

2011-03-21T10:01:00.002-04:00

If you watched the series finale of Big Love last night and if you're not ready to give up on Big Love, be sure to read my piece that ran in The Atlantic over the weekend in anticipation of the finale:

The hallmark of Big Love is its ability to dive into modern social issues that are seemingly beyond the scope of the Utah polygamist family at its center. One of the show's creators said on a HBO featurette about the series, "There was something almost a little bit retro, you know, '50s American suburban family about the Henricksons and I think we were turning that idea on its head a little bit."

Keep reading ...

Spoilers ahead with some final brief thoughts on the finale.

The series ended more or less with the same themes they'd established throughout the show. I thought the way they did away with Bill's character was a bit cheap, but it seemed obvious that Bill couldn't continue in his role as the patriarch of the family. This whole season demonstrated that he was slowly losing control over the life he had built for himself. Eventually everything gradually slipped away -- the casino, the state senate seat, Home Plus, his wives, and finally his life. Each of the women began to express desires for something beyond the family (which I talk about in my Atlantic piece).

I agree with Aileen at Vulture, in that Nicki clearly had the least satisfactory resolution. Though I really loved many of her lines in the series, she was by far the least complex character, often reduced to a stereotype of the bitchy, jealous wife.

Still, the final message of the show really did demonstrate the show's major theme: that the bond between the sister wives is strong. They things they'd been through together would bring them together for life, even as they start down their diverging paths.

Friday Links: SPACE FOR WOMEN

2011-03-18T15:58:00.004-04:00

(Flickr/AGeekMom)

Can mainstream media ever responsibly cover race? Cord Jefferson takes on the question. [The American Prospect]
Ann Friedman on late-20s girl genius. [On This Recording]
Ever wonder what happens when the president or the first lady decide they're going to eat at your fancy restaurant? Now you know. [The Washington Post]
Byron Hurt, a wonderful male anti-violence activist, explains why he's a black male feminist and why more men should pick up the f-word. [The Root]
Here's kind of a neat info graphic by artist Kate Hersch. Did you know that 4 in 10 mothers are unmarried? [Pop Jolly]
Did you know Neko Case registered as a Republican when she lived in Arizona? [GOOD]
Via the hairpin, Caterina Fake examines how the "fear of missing out" is amplified in the age of social media. All I can say is, been there. [Caterina]
SPACE FOR WOMEN. [Wherever You Go, There You Are]
A woman in Iowa was jailed because she told a nurse she was thinking about having an abortion. [The Frisky]

Update: You should also read G.D.'s thoughtful piece over at Post Bourgie that responds to Hurt's post.

Exceptions to Abortion Bans Are Near-Universal Bans in Practice

2011-03-18T15:14:00.004-04:00

(Flickr/muzik_note)

Today Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reports more on the disastrous anti-choice bill Congress is debating, HR 3, or the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.). See, since the legislation deals with how tax breaks can and can't be used (they can't be used for insurance that covers anything but ~~forcible~~ rape), it mostly means that they're making it much more invasive to apply tax law.

In some cases, the law would forbid using tax benefits—like credits or deductions—to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.

[...]

[Chair of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committe Thomas] Barthold replied that the taxpayer would have to prove that she had complied with all applicable abortion laws. Under standard audit procedure, a woman would have to provide evidence to corroborate facts about abortions, rapes, and cases of incest, says Marcus Owens, an accountant and former longtime IRS official. If a taxpayer received a deduction or tax credit for abortion costs related to a case of rape or incest, or because her life was endangered, then "on audit [she] would have to demonstrate or prove, ideally by contemporaneous written documentation, that it was incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger," Owens says. "It would be fairly intrusive for the woman."

In other words, it suddenly becomes the IRS' business whether your abortion was the "right" kind of abortion. If it wasn't here's hoping you saved your police report in which you reported your rape or a doctor's note to prove your life was actually in danger.

Banning abortion (or in this case, banning tax credits for abortion) is unpopular on its face because withholding them from victims of rape or incest or women whose lives are in danger seems cruel. The way to popularize this position is to add exceptions in which women are "victims" of the pregnancy. The idea, then, is that you're "punishing" women who seek elective abortions, presumably because they're sluts who should have just kept their legs closed (channeling Amanda Marcotte, there).

Adding exceptions for rape or incest sounds really good to moderates, but, as I argued before, in practice it simply restricts access to abortion for all women. Victims of rape or incest report these crimes to the police a very small percentage of the time. Especially sense the perpetrators of these crimes are most often known to the victims, it makes reporting them uncomfortable. (For those that doubt such a thing might occur, I highly recommend going back to listen to journalist David Holthouse's account on This American Life of how he came to terms decades later with getting raped in childhood by a family friend.) The "exceptions" route to abortion bans of any kind is simply a way of getting moderate people to support a radical policy.

The reality of HR 3, if passed, would lead to IRS agents asking uncomfortable questions of women about how, exactly, that tax credit was used. In many ways, it reminds me of some of the accounts in Before Roe v. Wade. Before the Supreme Court legalized abortion, women had to seek permission from her doctors in some states in hopes of obtaining a mental health exception to obtain a legal abortion. Women generally said that having a child (or another child) would be too difficult for them, often exaggerating or lying about depression. This lead to pro-choice activists saying they wanted "abortion on demand," not when a doctor said it was okay. Oddly, this phrase has been usurped by the anti-choice movement.

The reality is that it's difficult to apply abortion exceptions to abortion bans in practice, so even if conservatives say they only intend to target elective abortions, the reality is that victims of rape and incest and women whose lives are in danger will also be caught in this trap. But then, I suppose, that's probably the point.

Giving Context to The Feminine Mystique

2011-03-18T09:56:00.001-04:00

I finally got around to reading Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, the book that examines, in retrospect, Betty Fridan's most famous work. The slim volume deftly takes on the importance of The Feminine Mystique in the 1960s, but Coontz's examination is not without nuance or critique. Fridan's work was both vitally important and not quite the mythic ignition to the modern feminist movement that it has become.

Coontz surveys 188 women who read The Feminine Mystique and recounts how the work impacted these women. But she also places the work in the historical position that it belongs. The early chapters on the feminist and suffragist movements before Friedan published her work place the frustration women so felt with their roles as wives in important context. Coontz notes that these early women's movements had an impact on public opinion:

In a 1938 poll conducted by the Ladies' Home Journal, 60 percent of the female respondents disliked having the word "obey" in marriage vows, 75 percent favored joint decision-making between husband and wife, and a whopping 80 percent felt that an unemployed husband should keep house for his wife if she were working.

Coontz is sure to note that in some ways, women's equality was backsliding:

From 1951 to 1955, female full-time workers earned 63.9 percent of what male full-time workers earned. By 1963, women's pay had fallen to less than 59 percent of men's Meanwhile the proportion of of women in high-prestige jobs declined: Fewer than 6 percent of woerking women held executive jobs in the 1950s.

This means that the era in which Friedan was putting forth her message about women pursuing work they found fulfilling was happening in the midst of a social backlash to significant advancements in women's involvement in public life. Much of this backlash had to do with externalizes; women's work was viewed as less important during the Great Depression, when many were struggling to find work at all, and women who had advanced in the working world during the war were called on to give their jobs back to veterans—sometimes whether they wanted to or not.

Still, some of the things women faced in this era are somewhat shocking to read from the perspective of today (or at least, they were to me):

Even when a wife lived apart from her husband she could seldom rent or buy a home on her own. In 1972, the New York Times carried a story about a woman who could not rent an apartment until her husband, a patient in a mental hospital, signed the lease.

In many states, a woman was obliged to take her husband's surname. In some, she could not return to her maiden name after divorce unless under the fault-based divorce system, she had proven that he was "at fault." A woman who did not change the name on her driver's license or voter registration upon marriage could have it revoked until she did.

And it is perhaps this context that I found so valuable about Coontz's work and what makes her such an important academic. Her previous book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, provided a clear and honest history of an institution about which many make mythic claims about its history. She does the same thing with A Strange Stirring, providing both mythbusting and context to an important cultural touchstone of women's rights in the last century. Since I can only read about that time in books, this was an important book for me to read.

Update: Yesterday Jill Brooke over at HuffPo's "Divorce" page (that's kinda weird the page is called that, no?) interviews Coontz. In it, Brooke notes that Phyllis Shlafly (!) says feminism is the cause of divorce. Coontz actually touches on this in her book, saying that at first economic independence did cause more women to walk away from their marriages but now women who embrace feminist ideas about gender equality tend to have happier marriages in the long run. Here's how she responds to Brooke's question.

Feminism didn't make good marriages go bad. But feminist reforms gave women the opportunity to get out of unhappy or unfair marriages, and in that sense feminism was the catalyst for many divorces in the 1970s and 1980s. When women no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce, many women whose marriages had been bad for years found it more possible to get a divorce. Before feminist-inspired reforms, for example, there were 42 states where a homemaker who could not prove fault in divorce (and often the criteria for fault were very stringent), had no claim at all on anything her husband had earned during the marriage, even if her housekeeping and child-raising had enabled his career. Furthermore, once feminist reforms gained women access to better jobs and outlawed discrimination in pay, hiring, and promotions, women who were unhappy in their marriages no longer had to stay married out of dire economic necessity.

You can read the whole interview here.

Top 100 Female Characters in Film Surprisingly Undiverse

2011-03-17T16:12:00.004-04:00

Via Kevin Fallon at The Atlantic, Total Film has a list of the 100 greatest female characters of all time. Like any list, it's inevitably going to be incomplete and biased in various ways. It was, however, startling to see this flaw:

Only two characters of color are ranked—both played by Pam Grier and both corrupted by drugs. Furthermore, only one character based on a real person is on the list, Bonnie Parker from Bonnie and Clyde, and even that's a highly romanticized version of the historical figure.

Emphasis added. This is, in many ways, reflective of Hollywood's bigger problems with offering up few roles for women of color or needlessly casting white actors in the roles of characters that are marked as people of color in the source content. The recent casting call for Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the popular young adult fiction series Hunger Games asked for an "underfed" Caucasian.

Hollywood's color problem is highly discussed, but often only among feminist and race blogs. Part of me wonders if there's any prodding on the part of executives and directors to diversify their films. Much in the same way editors are getting shamed for not diversifying their bylines enough, Hollywood executives need to feel pressure for continually casting white actors in films. (Television, for various reasons, tends to be slightly more diverse.)

After all, it would've been nice to see some great female characters of color make the list: Penelope Cruz' performance in Volver is supposed to be excellent, Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique were lauded for their performances in Precious, and let's not forget the many excellent performances in The Color Purple. I also really enjoyed Sydney Tamiia Poitier in Death Proof (even if lots of folks thought that film was the lesser of the Grindhouse double feature). And those are just films that come to mind without thinking very hard.

Maybe we need a Graphic Ladies or a Lady Journos for actresses of color.

Killing the 'Literary Wife' Memoir Subgnere

2011-03-16T16:11:00.005-04:00

(Flickr/UK Pictures)

I recently listened to Marueen Corrigan's review of feminist writer Anne Roiphe's new memoir, Art and Madness. I haven't read any of Roiphe's work—not even her highly acclaimed second novel, Up the Sandbox, which has been hailed as a "feminist classic"—but Corrigan's review certainly piqued my interest to read it. What I found most fascinating about Corrigan's review, though, was her thoughts on where Roiphe's new book fell in the sea of literature:

Art and Madness is a particularly hard-boiled addition to a distinct subgenre of female autobiography — memoirs written by women who came of age in the 1950s and who sublimated their own ambitions by attaching themselves to literary men. I'm thinking of testaments like How I Became Hettie Jones by the eponymous former wife of LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka; Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell; and the especially magnificent Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, onetime girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Educated at Seven Sisters colleges or their like, these young women wanted to live for Art — which, in the 1950s translated into living for a man who thought of himself as an artist. They found a place for themselves in the New York boho scene of the time, pouring drinks or tending to the other appetites of the resident drunken geniuses.

Roiphe is, after all, the erstwhile wife of Jack Richardson, a playwright who during the 1960s was called one of the most promising playwrights of his generation. But Roiphe clearly resents this connection, and, according to Corrigan's take on the book, is ruthless in her depiction of her younger self. She admonishes her former self for attaching to someone else's genius rather than exploring her own.

Though women today might feel more liberated to pursue their own craft and careers, Roiphe's critique clearly speaks to a perception about how men and women's work is perceived differently—and that's a sentiment that still remains true today.

Writers, like all people, are attracted to people like themselves. A 1993 American Journalism Review article addressed the question of married journalists and pointed to some prominent (at the time) examples:

[...] former Washington Post Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee and Sally Quinn, an erstwhile Style staffer at that paper. Or Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn of the New York Times, who shared a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on China. Or Ann Devroy of the Washington Post and Mark Matthews of Baltimore's Sun, married competitors. Merrill McLoughlin and Michael Ruby, who are married, are co-editors of U.S. News & World Report.

Of the couples called out in the AJR article, the male journalists are arguably more famous an influential than their partners. It's hard to say how literary couples of today, many of whom are still young and coming up in their journalistic and literary careers, will turn out. They will either challenge this paradigm or reinforce it.

After thinking through the many journalistic couples I know of today (an admittedly unscientific sample), I could name just one in which the female partner far outpaced her partner or husband: Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. (Please, if you know of any other couples that might be in this category, leave them in comments.)

And it's no wonder. One need only briefly glance at the much-discussed Vida graphs to understand there's a dearth of female bylines to suss out why so many male journalists might be outpacing their partners in prestige.

Of course, we still have the potential to turn that idea—that "literary wives" will live in the shadows of their husbands or partners—on its head. Today in her farewell post at Feministing, Ann Friedman, in her tireless campaign to get more women to win at the literary prestige game, wrote about how women need to be more encouraging to other women. Such a message would be powerful if it especially came from a male partner.

Perhaps someday women will no longer be accessories to the "resident drunken geniuses" Corrigan described in this subgenre of memoir. Indeed, let's make sure the "literary wife" memoir is one that will be written about the past.

Friday Links: Star Trek, Socialism, and Unions

2011-03-11T17:35:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/esthereggy)

What Star Trek teaches us about socialism. [Yglesias]
I bet you'd be really shocked to learn that Gov. Scott Walker is also anti-contraception. [RH Reality Check]
Latoya Peterson wants to stop being feminism's Ms. Nigga. I don't blame her. I'm also really glad she agreed to speak on the panel I helped organize. [Racialicious]
Fetal pain laws are bad. Like, really, really bad. [The American Prospect]
Shirley Sherrod has some thoughts on the modern era of racism. And they're as interesting as you'd think they are. [The American Prospect]
This was kind of a neat little corporate video celebrating International Women's Day. [YouTube]
Remember those "Choose Life" license plates proceeds that weren't actually going to support pregnant women? Yeah, now they just want to blatantly fund the anti-choice movement. Points for honesty? [The American Independent]
Turns out attacking unions is also bad for the black middle class (and everyone else). [The Root]
I'm sorry, this Kate Middleton doll is creepy. [The Frisky]
So excited that Clarissa Explains It All is going to be back on the air! [Entertainment Weekly]
Hey, so maybe when we write about rape, can we not include the pornographic descriptions? [Columbia Journalism Review (PDF)]
Dolly Parton has a cookbook. [Dolly's Dixie Fixin's]

18 (OK, 20) Fearless Female Journalists, Past and Present

2011-03-11T16:16:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/ccbarr)

There’s been a lot of discussion about the dearth of female bylines in major intellectual magazines. It was the cause of inspiration for Ann Friedman to start her project, Lady Journos, which allows her to highlight some of the great reporting and writing women are doing. But it’s worth pointing out that women have been doing phenomenal, life-changing journalism for a long time. Here are just a few women—past and present—who have been exposing injustices with their fearless journalism.

1. Ida Tarbell

This lady journo often ranks among the most famous of historical muckraking journalists in the Progressive Era, during which a combination of investigative journalism and social activism sought to expose injustice. Her investigation of the Standard Oil trust was published in McClure's Magazine, which she later turned into a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. Her portrayal was damning to the tactics and practices of big business at the time

2. Ida B. Wells

Wells was a journalist and early leader in the civil rights movement. She fearlessly documented lynching, which she published in Free Speech and Headlight, an anti-segregationist newspaper her husband owned and she edited. She later founded the National Association of Colored Women and the National Afro-American Council,an organization we know now as the NAACP.

3. Rachel Carson

Though Carson got her start as a marine biologist and nature writer, it was her expose of the effects of the pesticide DDT’s effects on animals, published in her book The Silent Spring, that spurred a generation of environmental activists. She is largely credited with the United States’ reversal on a policy of using dangerous pesticides.

4. Nellie Bly

When you talk about embedding yourself into a story, you can’t get much deeper than Bly did when she faked a mental illness to expose the horrific conditions women underwent at the mental institution on Blackwell’s Island. She later wrote a book on her experience, Ten Days in a Madhouse. Her work not only drastically increased funding and quality of care at the institution, but pushed such asylums to adopt policies to ensure committed patients were actually mentally ill.

5. Gloria Steinem

Though we now think of Steinem as the quintessential second-wave feminist activist, some forget that part of her work started in journalism, when she embedded herself as a Playboy bunny in the New York Playboy Club. Her report detailed working conditions at the club, and she later went on to found Ms. Magazine, one of the first overtly feminist women’s magazines.

6. Nancy Hicks Maynard

Maynard was the first African American journalist at The New York Times, where she covered vital issues like the race riots at Columbia and Cornell universities. She later went on to cover health care, including important Medicaid issues. She and her husband went on to found the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, which is based in Oakland, Calif.

7. Ethel Payne

Known as “the First Lady of the Black Press,” Payne helped define advocacy journalism. She covered issues important to the civil rights movement, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, desegregation at the University of Alabama, and the 1963 March on Washington.

8. Anna Politkovskaya

This Russian journalist opposed the Second Chechen War and the actions of then-Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her work exposing human rights violations was published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and earned her death threats. She even experienced a mock execution when arrested by the Chechen military. Politkovskaya was ultimately murdered under mysterious circumstances in 2006.

9. Margaret Fuller

Fuller was a feminist and author who became the first female full-time book reviewer in American history at the New York Tribune in 1844. Her book, Women in the Nineteenth Century, is a major feminist work. She later became the first female foreign correspondent in England and Italy for the Tribune.

10. Jane Mayer

Mayer is an investigative reporter for The New Yorker, writing major pieces on the right-wing Koch family, the bin Laden family, and the United States’ controversial policy on extraordinary rendition. She was the Wall Street Journal’s first female White House correspondent and in 2008 won the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for the investigative reporting that was later published in The Dark Side.

11. Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

The co-editors of Mother Jones have done an excellent job of leading a longstanding investigative publication into a new era of online journalism. Bauerlein was formerly the magazine’s investigative editor and once covered the negotiations to end the first Gulf War. Jaffery came to Mother Jones from Harper’s Magazine, where she was a senior editor. She edited six National Magazine Award nominees, including Barbara Ehrenreich’s magazine feature that later became Nickel and Dimed. Under the supervision of these two editors, the magazine has increased circulation and web traffic when many publications have laid off reporters and editors. Read Campus Progress’ interview with Bauerlein and Jaffery.

12. Isabel Wilkerson

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her writing at the New York Times, Wilkerson won for her coverage of Midwestern floods in 1993 and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings. She is the author of the highly acclaimed 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which tracks the Great Migration of African Americans following the Civil War to Northern cities. Read Campus Progress’ interview with Wilkerson.

13. Katie Couric

Love her or hate her, Couric made history when she became the first female anchor of the CBS Evening News. Her interview with vice presidential candidate Sarah Plain won her the Walter Cronkite Award for Journalism Excellence.

14. Christiane Amanpour

The daughter of an Iranian father and a British mother, Amanpour did serious foreign coverage for CNN for decades, covering the Iraq-Iran War and the end of the Cold War. Last year, Amanpour moved to ABC News’ This Week one of the Sunday morning talk shows.

15. Gail Shister

Shister is widely regarded as the first “out” journalist in mainstream news. She joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as its first female sports writer in 1979. Her sports writing broke the same barrier at The New Orleans States-Item and the Buffalo Evening News in the 1970s.

16. Alexandra Pelosi

The daughter of the first female speaker of the house, Pelosi is breaking some barriers of her own. She started as a television producer at NBC covering George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. She’s created numerous award-winning documentaries, including Journeys with George, Diary of a Political Tourist, Sneaking into the Flying Circus, Friends of God, The Trials of Ted Haggard, and Right America: Feeling Wronged.

17. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg

These two documentary filmmakers have been pushing important stories. They co-directed The Devil Came on Horseback, which helped expose the genocide in Darfur and won seven festival awards. They also co-directed and produced The Trials of Darryl Hunt, a story about a man who spent 20 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn’t commit.

18. Lisa Ling

She may have really hit it big on Channel One News and The View, but Ling is a serious journalist who now does many investigative pieces for her show on the Oprah Winfrey Network. On her show, she’s reported on bride burning in India, gang rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Cross posted, and co-bylined with David Spett.

Pew Poll: Millennials View Parenting As Super Important, Good Marriage, Less So

2011-03-09T17:15:00.004-05:00

Pew Research finds that, among Millennials, 52 percent say being a good parent is "one of the most important things" in life, while only 30 percent said the same of having a good marriage. Here's a helpful graph:

It's worth noting that Millennials seem to have a more positive outlook on good parenting than Gen Xers do, but as I've written before, marriage rates for young people are falling. People are getting married later in life. Getting married young just isn't as important to this generation. Jill Filipovic at Feministe has some good reasons for this (hint: It's not that men are emotional infants).

In fact, this later part of the Pew article is important to look at:

Even though their generation has been slow to marry and have children, most Millennials look forward to doing both. Among 18- to 29-year-olds who are not currently married and have no children, 70% say they want to marry and 74% say they want to have children.

Millennials aren't opposed to marriage and look forward to having kids. They don't, however, think the two go hand-in-hand. I think much of this has to do with the fact that Millennials are of a generation that doesn't find divorce strange. I knew tons of people growing up whose parents were divorced, and though it certainly still drew judgmental whispers, it certainly was a normal part of life.

Perhaps as divorce seems less scary, Millennials are beginning to examine life in a slightly different way: You can -- and should -- still be a good parent even if your marriage doesn't work out. And if it doesn't work out, that's OK. Plenty of people are happier out of their bad marriages. That's not to say that striving for a good relationship isn't a good goal, but fewer Millennials see it so tightly tied with parenthood:

About a third of Millennials (34%) think that more unmarried couples raising children is a bad thing for society, compared with 45% of those ages 30 and older.

Oddly, though, Millennials, like the rest of society, still think that single mothers are bad news. Over 60 percent disapproved of single motherhood. That's less than those in the 30-and-over category, who disapprove at a rate of just over 70 percent.

I'm sure this round of polling will bait lengthly blog posts about how selfish young people these days are -- that they're turning from marriage and making huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that Millennials view marriage and children as separate endeavors. They are, after all, two very different things.

Happy 100th Birthday, International Women's Day!

2011-03-08T14:54:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/Downing Street)

Today is International Women's Day—the 100th such one, in fact. There are two things that strike me about this day. First, that women around the world are in a much, much better place than they were 100 years ago. The second is that women have a long way to go in terms of gender equality, feminism, gender justice—whatever you want to call it.

After all, women are still making leaps and bounds in breaking into predominately male industries and challenging what's "masculine" and "feminine" all the time. But despite all that, women still routinely make less than their male peers, women are the minority of political leaders, and women are still the minority voice among opinion makers. Not to mention some of the really horrendous human rights violations that are happening against women throughout the world.

It gets really exhausting for the women who fight to correct these injustices day after day. And that is, perhaps, why the lie that we don't "need" feminism anymore or that we've already reached gender equality. It's much easier to accept that where we are is the best we'll ever get than it is to correct these problems.

The world is a really bad place sometimes, but it is especially a bad place for a lot of women around the world. That, I think, is the takeaway is from a day like today. We should never forget that, and we should keep fighting for what women deserve: equality.

Graphic Ladies, Or Women Make and Write About Comics Too

2011-03-08T09:25:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/Loren Javier)

Props to Erin Polgreen on making Graphic Ladies, a new blog that highlights the work of female comics and critics. Here's what Erin has to say about why she started it:

The Los Angeles Times debuted a new book award for graphic literature—but only one woman, C. Tyler, was nominated. The judges were all men. Last summer, Fantagraphics released an anthology of the Best American Comics Criticism—but only one woman writer was featured. Now, The Comics Journal, arguably the leading chronicle of the industry, just relaunched, and the number of female contributors is not encouraging. Only one lady author was published at the time of launch, with plans for 6 women (of 29 mentioned authors) to contribute at later dates.

Taking a cue from Ann Friedman's project Lady Journos, which highlights the great work of female journalists to show there's no excuse for a lack of women writers in highbrow literary magazines, Erin started Graphic Ladies to show that women both make comics and write comic criticism, and that there's really no excuse for such pitiful gender ratios.

So follow her on Twitter and Tumblr. Do it. You'll feel better about yourself.

Gender + Zombies in an Upcoming Anthology

2011-03-07T20:27:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/Med's Photo)

Did you like my post on weird racism and sexism that got added to The Walking Dead's television series? I'll be contributing to an anthology on The Walking Dead called Triumph of The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman's Zombie Epic on Page and Screen and it'll come out in November of this year (but you can, of course, pre-order now by following the link).

I have to admit, I'm in esteemed company. Here's a preliminary list of contributors:

Kyle William Bishop
Southern Utah University English professor, author (American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture)

Arnold Blumberg
Instructor University of Baltimore, author (Zombiemania: 80 Movies To Die For, The Big Big Little Book Book: An Overstreet Photo-Journal Guide)

Jay Bonansinga, author (The Black Mariah, Frozen, co-author with Robert Kirkman of upcoming Walking Dead novels)

Brendan Deneen, editor, film producer, publisher (former Director of Production & Development for the The Weinstein Company, editor on the Walking Dead novel trilogy for Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press)

Craig Fischer, professor at Appalachian State, comic scholar (The Comics Journal, The International Journal of Comic Art)

Kenneth Hite, game designer, writer (Zombies 101: Knowledge Is Survival, Trail of Cthulhu)

David Hopkins
Educator, comic book author, essayist (Karma Incorporated, Emily Edison, Webslinger: SF and Comic Writers on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man)

Del Howison
Author, editor, actor (Dark Delicacies, When Werewolves Attack)

Scott Kenemore
Author (The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead, Z.E.O.: How to Get A(Head) in Business, The Art of Zombie Warfare: How to Kick Ass Like the Walking Dead)

Jonathan Maberry
New York Times bestselling author (Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel, Dead of Night, Rot & Ruin)

Lisa Morton, author, screenwriter (The Castle of Los Angeles, The Lucid Dreaming, A Hallowe'en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writers over the Centuries)

Kim Paffenroth, professor of Religious Studies, zombie scholar (Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth, History Is Dead: A Zombie Anthology, Dying to Live series)

Brendan Riley, professor Columbia College Chicago, author (Journal of Popular Culture, The Amazing Transforming Superhero)

Steven Schlozman, M.D., assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Lecturer in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, author (The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse, Psychology Today)

Kay Steiger, editor of Campus Progress, author (The Atlantic, Bitch Magazine, In These Times)

Ned Vizzini, young adult author (It's Kind of a Funny Story, Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah . . .)

COVER by Rafael Kayanan, artist Conan, Star Wars, Amazing Spider-Man, The Immortals

EDITED by James Lowder, editor, author (Curse of the Full Moon: A Werewolf Anthology; Prince of Lies (Forgotten Realms: The Avatar); Books of Flesh series: Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, The Book of Final Flesh (All Flesh Must Be Eaten), The Best of All Flesh: Zombie Anthology)

D.C. History: Lewis Wentworth Giles, Architect

2011-03-05T13:34:00.004-05:00

(From the collection of Lewis W. Giles, Jr., courtesy Cultural Tourism DC)

Today I attended a free class put on by the D.C. Humanities Council in collaboration with the D.C. Public Library and the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., that taught you how to research the home in which you live. I discovered my home was designed by Lewis Wentworth Giles, a prolific and prominent African American architect in D.C.

According to the African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary 1865-1945, which has an excerpt of Giles' biography online, he was born near Richmond, Va. His family moved to D.C. when he was young, and his father became one of the city's first African American police officers in the city. He graduated from Armstrong Technical High School and attended college at the the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied architecture. But before he could graduate, he was drafted in 1917 to serve in the U.S. Army during World War I. After his dishonorable discharge, he moved back to Washington, D.C., where he apprenticed with Isaiah Truman Hatton. He married in 1920 to Gladys Wheatley, who he met while attending the University of Illinois. Giles was under suspicion for his mentor's death in 1921:

Hatton died May 21 under mysterious circumstances, and Giles as his only employee came under suspicion. He was arrested and spent several nights in jail. No charges were filed and Giles was released three days after his arrest.

After Hatton's death, Giles opened his own architecture firm in a building at 1200 U Street NW, which is now home to the Public Welfare Foundation Inc. and the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. In 1929, he moved his firm to the home he designed and built at 4428 Hunt Place. He and his wife Gladys had two children, Lewis W. Giles, Jr. and Julian Giles. His namesake followed in his footsteps and became an architect and Juilan went on to become a physician. He worked from his home on Hunt Place until his death in 1974.

Lewis' role as a trained architect served him well, since the D.C. government began requiring architects to be professionally trained in 1924. It's difficult to track down exactly how many building Giles designed over the course of his career; one source says "over 1,000" and another says "hundreds of houses, apartments, and churches here and across the city." According to a pamphlet created by the DC Community Heritage Project, "He had a reputation for creating such accurate drawings that he had little trouble getting approval from the city's permit division."

Incidentally, Giles worked with Randolph Dodd to build my apartment building, another highly successful and prolific builder in the city. He build many of Giles' designs, including many on the 1000 block of 49th Street in Deanwood. He also worked often with his brother, Jacob. They likely got a lot of work because their construction was cheap and reliable, according to one pamphlet, "To save money, the Dodds installed windows only in the front and back of the houses. Owners sometimes cut side windows later."

It's all pretty fascinating stuff, and now I learned some more skills in how to research the property databases and old city directories. If you ever get an opportunity to take such a class again, I'd highly recommend taking it.

Friday Links: Lady Gaga and Zombies

2011-03-04T14:37:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/Kerry Burnout)

Apparently Lady Gaga's songs present problems for sign language interpreters. How do you translate disco stick? [Washington Post]
Last week, I highlighted Sarah Jaffe's series on anti-choice Democrasts, but it's also worth highlighting some great pro-choicers. [Keep Your Boehner Out Of My Uterus]
"Americans are so used to the fact that women are capable of doing anything that we hardly ever discuss it." [Gail Collins]
These awesome ladies (and men) are protesting to change bad sexual assault policies. [Penn Live]
Why do environmentalists hate the Easy-Bake Oven? [Food & Think]
"It took me a long time of standing still and being quiet to figure out what in retrospect appears to be a pretty simple lesson: writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing." [Fuck Yeah Lady Writers]
Are you sure you're rooting for the right baseball team? [YFSF]
Only about 20 percent of plays are written and produced by women. [Female Playwrights Initiative]
We're becoming the United States of Zombieland. [AlterNet]
The super-awesome Anna Holmes takes on Charlie Sheen and his horrible misogyny. [New York Times]

Top Chef All Star Gets For-Profit College Issue Wrong

2011-03-04T14:33:00.002-05:00

(Flickr/Rep. Virginia Foxx)

Tiffany Derry, of Top Chef All-Stars, has written an opinion piece for The Hill this week publicly fighting the “gainful employment” regulation proposed by the Department of Education. Derry says this proposed rule is bad because, “The proposed regulation is going to hurt students who need help the most: students who are considered at-risk, minority and low-income or older students who may be raising a family by themselves.”

Her op-ed was accompanied by lobby visits to Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus this week about the regulation.

The proposed regulation will look at default rates and debt-to-earnings ratios, but her conclusion that the regulation would “limit federal aid to students” is flat-out wrong. Under this regulation, it isn’t the student who won’t get funding; it is specific programs at schools that risk getting their funding pulled because too many of their students end up with overwhelming debt. Students are welcome to get financial aid for programs that provide better educational value.

The Friday List-down: 10 Challenges Women Around the World Still Face

2011-03-04T14:26:00.002-05:00

(Flickr/JIGGS IMAGES)

March is Women’s History Month, so this month the Friday List-downs will focus on women. Tuesday is International Women’s Day, which celebrates 100 years this year. The Asia Society has invited prominent feminist Gloria Steinem to participate in a conversation about the challenges women face in Asia. Check on events near you here. There are certainly lots of challenges that women face around the world. Here are some startling facts on women’s place in an increasingly global economy.

Iceland ranks number one in the World Economic Forum’s 2010 survey of the gender gap worldwide, followed closely by Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The survey takes into account various factors, including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. Yemen comes in last place, preceded by Chad and Pakistan.

Josina Machel of the International Women’s Health Coalition spoke [PDF] at the recent Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights, saying, “Seventy-six percent of people living with HIV and AIDS are women, and one-third of all these women are between the ages of 15 and 24.”

In a recent Guttmacher Institute report [PDF] on women’s health in Ethiopia, they learned 71 percent of Ethiopian women have an unmet need for contraception.

In a comprehensive World Health Organization study published in 2005, between 15 and 71 percent of women experience some combination of physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner over the course of their lifetimes. Women in Japan were the least likely to experience such violence, while women in more “provincial” countries were the most likely to experience intimate partner violence: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru, and the United Republic of Tanzania.

The United Nations notes that rape is still used as a weapon in war. A government study of Liberia, which has undergone a 13-year civil war, found that 92 percent of the 1,600 women interviewed had experienced sexual violence.

A study put forth by the John F. Kennedy School of Government [PDF] found that women were more than twice as likely to be elected in countries that used proportional representation, or systems that divide up seats in multi-member districts by the proportion of votes received and distribute them to various parties or groups who choose a list of candidates, than they do under majoritarian electoral systems.

The focus on women’s economic security has led to the idea of micro-lending, small loans given to people in developing countries to start small businesses or help make ends meet offered at low interest rates. The World Bank found that, as of June 2010, women borrowers account for 67 percent of these types of loans [PDF].

According to 2007 Goldman Sachs findings cited by the State Department, closing the gender pay gap could have a significant impact on GDP growth. It could boost the United States GDP by 9 percent, Europe’s by 13 percent, and Japan’s by 16 percent.

As information technology is a growing field in India, so is women’s participation. Women’s participation in the industry grew from 10 percent in 1993 to 35 percent in 2005 [PDF].

Women endured the global economic crisis slightly worse than men. The International Labour Office found that the global unemployment rate for men was 6 percent in their 2011 report [PDF], whereas for women it was 6.5 percent.

Check out last week’s List-down here.

Cross posted.

The Bright Girl List

2011-03-02T11:22:00.005-05:00

Via Sadie at Jezebel, Heidi Grant has a theory about Bright Girls:

Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

[...]

Are there things you decided long ago that you could never be good at? Skills you believed you would never possess? If the list is a long one, you were probably one of the Bright Girls.

Ugh, I really hate it when theories explaining sexism or gender differences ring totally true to my own experience. Therefore, here's a list of things I gave up on being good at pretty early in life.

Playing piano. (Let's face it. I really hated practicing.)
Playing clarinet. (Same reason.)
Playing alto saxophone. (Don't worry, I'm getting to non-musical related things soon.)
Math. Like tons of other girls, I was really good at math throughout high school, but then when I fit my three years of requirements, I stopped instead of going for pre-calc even though my geometry teacher encouraged me to pursue a career in math. I guess I believed the stereotypes.
Cooking. Well, at least this was true for a long time. Because cooking was something that women were supposed to be good at it, I stayed away for a long time.
Video games. I always got really frustrated that I wasn't good at these right away. I guess I missed that you have to spend hours and hours on this to get better at it.
Fashion. Same with shopping. I hated it as a kid and have only gotten to like it marginally more as I get older, thanks mostly to online shopping. I find going to stores tiresome and I'm not particularly fashionable.
Economics. It took one class in college to convince me I was no good at this. Do I get points for listening to the Planet Money podcast?

This list could be much longer, but I'm going to avoid going down that ego-stripping path. The point is, women seem to judge themselves much more harshly than men do. Or at least, I find that anecdotally true.

The Worst Thing I Read Today, Or Adventures In Slut-Shaming

2011-03-01T14:05:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/umfi1)

Well if this isn't the worst piece of slut-shaming garbage I have ever read, it's at least a close second. Possibly to this other really terrible thing Mark Regnerus wrote. Today he asserts the following:

When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn't so bad. This isn't to say that all men direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don't. But what many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these things is occurring. Not one. The terms of contemporary sexual relationships favor men and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it's all thanks to supply and demand.
To better understand what's going on, it's worth a crash course in "sexual economics," an approach best articulated by social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. As Baumeister, Vohs, and others have repeatedly shown, on average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University's campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes. I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it. As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships therefore commences only when women decide it does.

So aside from the fact that there are probably very good reasons why women approached by a stranger, even an attractive one, Regnerus also makes the extremely original point that boys will be boys! And he also repeats the idea that women don't actually want sex, they just go along with it. Ugh.

Regnerus also cites the work of the really awful Catherine Hakim, who, as I explained once before, is at the UK equivalent of the Heritage Foundation. So that pretty much destroys his credibility right there.

Let's for a moment remember that Regnerus believes it's a huge problem people aren't getting married until later in life. Instead, as I've noted many times, this is merely what happens when we as a country get richer, weddings get more expensive, and more people are focused on establishing their careers first (thanks, in part, to the United States' pretty atrocious work/life balance).

So, when people delay marriage, they might engage in some casual sex or temporarily monogamous relationships to fill the sexual needs in that gap. It might seem inconceivable to Regnerus that women might want to engage in that, but believe it or not, it happens! But Regnerus asserts that that never happens, so therefore if you're a woman who has casual sex, you're just giving in to men who want sex. You slut.

This doesn't mean that men "hold all the power," it just means that men are willing to say yes more. There are a lot of factors that go into whether women decide to engage in casual sex, and let's not forget that personal safety might be among them. This might be just one reason why women are more willing to be up for casual sex less than men. Others? Slut-shaming, double standards, and the fact that there are a lot of undesirable sexual partners out there. Those are just a few. But I do not believe, as Regnerus does, that the fact that young people engage in casual sex is some kind of crisis. What is a crisis is access to safe and affordable sexual health care.

Geez, Slate, try not to assign articles to someone so terrible next time.

Adventures in Entertainment for the Rich

2011-02-28T16:51:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/dogwelder)

Ever since funding for (wo)manned space flights became public policy, we knew that space travel would only move forward if private investors wanted it badly enough. Luckily! The New York Times is totally all over this:

If all goes as planned, within a couple of years, tourists will be rocketing into space aboard a Virgin Galactic space plane — paying $200,000 for about four minutes of weightlessness — before coming back down for a landing on a New Mexico runway.

Holy cow! Only $200,000! What a steal! Granted, the Times notes it's "prohibitively expensive ... except for a small slice of the wealthy" but the obvious point is this: Early adaptations of technology are very expensive, and tend to have early adopters among the wealthy. But as technologies get cheaper, they filter to the masses. (Ahem, jet packs.)

Still, Star Trek fans who remember how egalitarian (or you could say utopian) that future world was painted, space travel, at least for now, is for the rich.

Friday Links: Team Katniss!

2011-02-25T17:18:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/Makena G)

I, too, devoured the Hunger Games series in a short period of time. Team Katniss! [Feminist Fatale]
What would a world without Planned Parenthood look like for black women? Bad. Really bad (via Amanda Marcotte). [The Root]
Disney princesses as snarky hipsters. Thanks to Laura McGann for nominating me to be Ariel. [Vulture]
A girl's guide to the boy's club (featuring photos of Mad Men). [This Recording]
What major magazine editors have to say about the dearth of female bylines in their magazines. [The Jewish Daily Forward]
If you haven't yet, you should really check out Sarah Jaffe's phenomenal series on the "HR 3 Ten," the ten Democratic congressmen who voted in favor of the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act." [RH Reality Check]
Tracy Clark-Flory does some great reporting on a kind of silly study on casual sex. [Salon]

Having Red Hair Is a Way of Life

2011-02-25T17:07:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/ visibleducts)

Sadie Stan writes a post over at Jezebel about how odd it is that women want to dye their hair red. She says:

The rest of us don't really know about any of that: we just know it looks cool. And because it's unusual, becomes a way of standing out — without the baggage actual redheads have to deal with, either in childhood or historically speaking. But the irony is that most of our redheaded icons — Christina Hendricks, Cynthia Nixon, Lucille Ball, Amy Adams, Gillian Anderson — are actually blondes. Rita Hayworth, meanwhile, was a brunette. All of these people have chosen red hair — and in the process, maybe, helped cement its rep for chic beauty — but without any of the context.

I would just like to point out that some of us (ahem) look cool without having to dye our hair red. That is all.

Chatting with Jocelyn Elders

2011-02-25T17:01:00.004-05:00

(Photo courtesy Ripon College)

Bitch magazine's poll of women we miss now that they're gone reminded me that I did an interview with former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders a couple years back. She's a pretty rad lady—and as far as I know still kickin'. You should go check it out.

We Need More Feminists Like Anthony Weiner

2011-02-24T16:52:00.002-05:00

That is all. (h/t Shani)

Advertising Company Agrees to Pull Ad Campaign That Says Black Women's Wombs Are Dangerous

2011-02-24T16:00:00.004-05:00

Black women, why are your wombs so dangerous? Good news, though. Lamar Outdoor Advertising has agreed to pull the ad.

Also, here's some data from Guttmacher data [PDF] refuting the idea that abortion clinics are primarily found in black neighborhoods. Way to come off as racist, anti-choice movement.

Update: Hey, also maybe they should check with the mother of the child photographed before using her for their political message. #gross

New State Legislator Strategy: Protecting Terrorists Like Scott Roeder

2011-02-24T13:44:00.005-05:00

Imagine for a moment that some state legislators were trying to pass legislation would offer special legal protections for terrorists. And that these legislators are Republicans. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine that because that's actually happening in America today.

Thankfully, the South Dakota bill that outlined killing abortion providers as "justifiable homicide" is indefinitely shelved, but there are new bills introduced in two states: Iowa and Nebraska. The fantastic American Independent News Network's Lynda Waddington reports that two bills proposed in Iowa would drastically change both abortion and criminal law for those accused of murdering abortion providers:

Currently, abortion is also settled law in Iowa. But House File 153, sponsored by 28 Republicans, challenges it. Under that bill, the state would be mandated to recognize and protect “life” from the moment of conception until “natural death” with the full force of the law and state and federal constitutions. Essentially, the bill declares that from the moment a male sperm and a female ovum join to create a fertilized egg that a person exists.

House File 7, which has been sponsored by 29 GOP House members, seeks to expand state law regarding use of reasonable force, including deadly force. Current state laws provide that citizens are not required to retreat from their dwelling or place of business if they or a third party are threatened. The proposal would significantly expand this to state that citizens are not required to retreat from “any place at which the person has a right to be present,” and that in such instances, the citizen has the right to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to protect himself or a third party from serious injury or death or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

And Nick Baumann and Daniel Schulman at Mother Jones report that similar steps to protect those who kill abortion providers are being taken by Nebraska legislators:

The legislation, LB 232, was introduced by state Sen. Mark Christensen, a devout Christian and die-hard abortion foe who is opposed to the prodedure even in the case of rape. Unlike its South Dakota counterpart, which would have allowed only a pregnant woman, her husband, her parents, or her children to commit "justifiable homicide" in defense of her fetus, the Nebraska bill would apply to any third party.

This means that elected officials in this country are seeking to increase protections -- essentially providing "get out of jail free" cards for terrorists like Scott Roeder who target abortion providers. And, in case you forgot, killing abortion providers is terrorism.

Because abortion is considered divisive, people in America tend to think there are two sides of equal weight to just about every debate surrounding it. But here, we're actually talking about people who, by targeting people who have a certain profession for murder, are intimidating doctors from entering that profession. Yet it's almost certain cable news networks will treat this as yet another "two sides to the abortion debate" issue.

These are actually the two sides: One side that thinks that people who murder people should be tried as murderers, and another side that thinks that murdering people is somehow "justified" based on the kind of work that they do. But killing abortion doctors isn't "justifiable homicide." It's just not.

If pro-choicers were smart, they'd try to relabel each of these bills as the "Terrorists Get Out of Jail Free Act."

Quote of the Day: Boehner on DOMA

2011-02-24T12:58:00.004-05:00

House Speaker John Boehner (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Flickr/TalkMediaNews)

Via Ben Smith:

"While Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending, the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation."

–Statement from House Speaker John Boehner's office on Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that the Obama administration will no longer enforce the Defense of Marriage Act.

Um, if that's not the pot calling the kettle black, I don't know what is.

Why I'll Never Be a Stay-At-Home Girlfriend

2011-02-23T16:54:00.007-05:00

(Flickr/mrrobertwade (wadey))

The "Stay At Home Girlfriend" (I guess the "SAHG" acronym was intentional since it was in the headline, but something pronounced "sag" -- really?) piece on Brokelyn caused a lot of ladyblogs to protest and mock it.

Edith Zimmerman in her quintessentially concise way, just said, "LOL, is this a joke?"

Jessica Wakeman, bless her heart, defended the piece, "I don’t think there’s any shame in being a 'stay-at-home'-anything, so long as it works for both partners. A homemaker can still be a feminist. My mother stayed at home and raised five children; she quit her job when she married my widower father, adopted his three daughters from a previous marriage, and stayed at home to raise them so they no longer had to be taken care of by babysitters and relatives."

Sadie Stein over at Jezebel had a thoughtful response, saying that though she would also defend the right of a stay-at-home anything as a legitimate choice, "let's face it: the tone of this is ... troubling."

The piece, written by Quiana Stokes—who, if this is her on LinkedIn, worked at JP Morgan and went to Wesleyan—says this is definitely an unexpected situation and, for all we know, she views this as a temporary excursion into domestic bliss. But I have to agree with Stein. This is troubling. Much of it seems to be pulled directly out of the stuff that Betty Friedan criticized in the Feminine Mystique—right down to the ideas of presenting your man with beer when he arrives at home and keeping "yourself up." (Fun fact: This book was the first ever feminist book I read and I recommend it; I found it all-too-relevant despite the fact it was published nearly half a century ago.)

Like Jessica and Stein, I'll admit that there's no shame in staying at home, but I will say that women feel a unique pressure to stay at home when possible (even though few women could possibly ever afford to do so—ahem, "two-bedroom Greenpoint apartment" that Stokes and her unnamed boyfriend seem to be able to afford on one income), but here are the reasons I'll probably won't ever stay at home while my partner works. If Stokes can lay out tips defending her position, I can lay out some reasons why I'm not likely to jump at the chance to be a SAHG.

Retirement

While retirement seems a loooong way off when you're in your 20s or 30s, all the time you spend not working is time that you're probably also not contributing (or having your employer contribute) to your IRA or 401K—let alone Social Security. This has a serious long-term impact on what you will be able to afford when you're older. Since men generally don't live as long as women, you can't necessarily expect to be supported into the sunset years of your life. You're better off squirreling away for the future now.

Your partner could stop being your partner

This is an uncomfortable and sometimes painful thing to think through for a lot of women. It's awfully sweet to think you'll be with your current boyfriend, husband, or partner (or girlfriend/wife) forever, but the reality is that bad stuff happens. People break up. People get divorced. And, as awful as it is to imagine, people die. My mother was widowed when I was seven, and I've been eternally grateful my mom had her own income to raise us on. If any of those things happen when you're a stay-at-home wife/mom/girlfriend, you are in a much more financially precarious situation. I will continue to be haunted by this Salon essay by a divorced stay-at-home mom lamenting her financial situation now that she doesn't have the income she once shared with her ex-husband.

Diminished long-term earning potential

Let's face it, taking time out of the working world, as the long-term unemployed in this recession could tell you, has a real cost. If you ever need to jump back into the workforce, as the writer for Salon discovered, gaps on your resume look really unappealing to potential employers, especially if you don't have an illness or disability to explain it. Is that unfair to homemakers? Absolutely. It's also something that's really hard to counteract. Staying employed in some capacity is almost always better than just stopping work for long periods of time.

Achieving gender equity in housework

The bits Stokes adds about cleaning and cooking every day so her boyfriend doesn't have to—"I’d much rather pick up behind him"—makes me a little ill when I think about the giant picture of women and housework. Though there isn't much data out there for unmarried partners living together, a well-publicized 2008 study shows married women do a staggering 7 extra hours of housework a week. You don't have to make your personal relationship a battleground for women everywhere, but fair is fair, and it makes sense to split household chores evenly. Or at least as evenly as you can. It's really easy to say women are "better" at housework than men, but you know how you get better? You do it.

Boredom

Granted, Washington, D.C., is filled with lots of semi-employed and and freelance people so if I ever ended up as a stay-at-home something I'd probably have plenty of company. Still, if I was really not working—not even blogging or, I guess writing pieces for Brokelyn—I'd probably end up bored. Eventually I'd start to feel like I do when I haven't left the house for several hours on Saturday because I was too busy watching television. Socialization is good, even if we sometimes have aggravating moments at our jobs.

The problem that has no name

I'm going to go ahead and cite Friedan again. Studies show that stay-at-home wives and mothers tend to be at higher risk of depression than working women. This is something Friedan talked about in the Feminine Mystique at length. Careers stress us out, but they're also good for our overall happiness.

I can't afford not to work

For a lot of women who work, this is the big reason. It'd be wonderful to stay at home with the kids to aid in their learning development or read a novel a day, but lots of us can't afford to not work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that despite recent trend pieces on highly educated women "opting out," this isn't really true. So many families are struggling to make ends meet, even on two incomes, and the recession is leaving a lot more people out of work than before. An even better reason to hang on to the job you've got.

To be sure, this isn't an attack on those that do choose to stay at home. I'm not saying feminism and staying home are mutually exclusive. But for I had to remind myself of the reasons it's not for me. God willing I'm not laid off tomorrow.

Update: I'm not sure why I didn't put this in my original post—probably because it's too obvious—but I should also add this last point:

Men don't sit around and talk about how awesome staying at home is

This is another big reason why I'd never do the stay-at-home thing. Men don't think about this. They just don't. True, some men think about what they'd do if they were really wealthy and didn't have to work, but because we live in a culture that's so imbued with the male breadwinner mentality that women are by default the ones that think about not working or staying home. Women just seem to make this "choice" a lot more than men do. And women are often in a compromised bargaining position—women still often make less than their male peers, women face hard choices about career and children, and women aren't usually promoted as quickly as men. I have a hard time with entertaining the notion of stay-at-homeness when it seems to be taken on disproportionately by women.

SXSW's Comedy Gender Gap

2011-02-22T19:00:00.003-05:00

Rita Houston and Margaret Cho (right) at SXSW last year. (Flickr/wfuv)

Hey, you should read Andrea Grimes on the kerfuffle over the lack of female comics at SXSW. She's funny and totally angry about it. Maybe next time they'll see fit to put her on the bill.

'Shoe Leather Reporting'

2011-02-22T18:36:00.005-05:00

(Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things)

When will I understand that Muslims are evil and I should be wary of friendly sounding organizations like the Muslim Student Association, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations?, asks Accuracy in Academia. Other things that are wrong with this piece:

They do not understand blockquoting. I know, guys, HTML is hard.
They brutally misspelled my co-author's name. For the record, it's Katie Andriulli. C'mon, guys. It's right there in the story.

I think I should also refer them to this Tumblr if they haven't seen it.

'The Next Rush Limbaugh': Conservatives Pumping Right-Wing Young People into Media Jobs

2011-02-22T18:33:00.001-05:00

Hey guys, I have a piece on conservative journalism training found at CPAC over at AlterNet.

This year at the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington, D.C., there were a number of targeted media trainings and journalism-oriented panels. A panel titled “Shining Light into Dark Places” sought to stress the importance of investigative journalism. Others included “Freelance Writing for Freedom,” “So You Want to be a Columnist” and “Want to be the Next Rush Limbaugh?”

Despite Sarah Palin's invectives against the "lamestream media," conservatives seem eager to fill its ranks with right-wing young people.

Check it out.

Modern America Is Overrun With Child-Men Who Will Never Marry You, Conservative Writer Says

2011-02-22T13:24:00.007-05:00

(AllMoviePhoto)

Kay Hymowitz and I might share a first name, but there seems to be little else that we share. She's written about dating and marriage in the past, saying, "By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him."

To Hymowitz, this appears to be an enormous problem. I recall refuting her in an essay for Campus Progress.

Now, she's back at it again. This time, in the Wall Street Journal promoting her new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, she covers a lot of things—from the changing scientific ideas about early adulthood development, which is now starting to be considered a whole different psychological phase from the rest of adulthood, to the transition to an information-based economy rather than a goods-based manufacturing one—but here's the crux of what's making everyone mad:

Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.

[...]

American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.

In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular "lad" magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.

It seems modern American culture has made men into puerile, selfish creatures that only want to look at porn all day, or at least, that's what Hymowitz wants you to believe. Unfortunately, I haven't met too many of these men, since I also know lots of mature, emotionally stable, and considerate men who are excited about marrying the partners their with when they're both emotionally and financially ready for marriage.

But Hymowitz's ideas fit neatly into stereotypes, so she runs with it. These notions of immature child-men is a problem. It is also, presumably, the direct cause of dropping marriage rates for young people and the rising number of folks who are getting married later (or never).

Jill Filipovic, Matt Yglesias, and Monica Potts all have great takedowns of Hymowitz's piece, but I would just add that these concerns about getting married by a certain age are becoming increasingly classist.

As Jessica Grose pointed out when Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough caused the Internet to explode:

About 80 percent of female college grads ages 30-44 have been married at some point, compared with 71 percent of women who did not graduate from high school, according to the latest Pew research. The marriages of college grads are also increasingly stable. From the 1970s to the '90s, rates of divorce fell by almost half among college-educated women, but they remained high among women with less than a four-year degree. If there's a crisis in marriage, it's because the least educated and poorest women are no longer getting married.

Emphasis mine. The fact that Hymowitz is focusing mostly on middle-class, upwardly mobile, mostly white men and women seems to be something she's vaguely aware of, since she ends her piece with this passage:

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

They might as well just have another beer.

But in a study of Match.com's users that's consistent with the general population, lots of people are less gung ho on committing (pun intended) to marriage—not just those Playboy-reading nincompoops that Hymowitz described. The survey found that just 62 percent of users definitely wanted to get married and 29 percent just aren't sure. This is likely, as Jill pointed out, that it's because people are less likely to be in a tight economic spot for longer than they used to be:

More people generally — not just more women — are going to college. One’s first job (or one’s second or third or fourth job) is very rarely one’s life-long career. People without higher education face new hurdles now that manufacturing jobs are drying up and well-paying blue-collar work is increasingly difficult to find. That’s a very different economy from the one my grandparents and parents faced. Toss an economic recession into the mix and it’s not hard to see why people aren’t chomping at the bit to make life-long financial commitments to another person when they can barely support themselves — especially in a culture where conservative views on marriage demand that the man is the breadwinner, and that he can support a wife and children.

I'm not convinced that there's a dating or a marriage crisis. Hymowitz is just giving voice to the tired old Sex-and-the-City stereotype of the successful single woman struggling to find a datable man. But just because something rings true to stereotype doesn't make it true.

Girls Just Wanna Have Guns. Then All the Rape Will Stop, Right?

2011-02-16T20:20:00.003-05:00

(Breitbart)

Remember Hannah Giles? Well, her sister, Regis Giles, is getting a new show about her shooting guns. Also, apparently she doesn't believe men and women should be equal. Read my interview with her on Campus Progress from when I tracked her down at CPAC last week.

Regis Giles, who spoke on the student activism panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, comes from a family of conserative activists. You've most likely heard of her sister, Hannah Giles, who partnered with James O'Keefe in videos that helped bring down ACORN. Her father, Doug Giles, is the host of Clash Radio and spokesperson for "family values." But Regis is branching out on her own, with a new television show in the works called "Primal Urge" in the works on the Pursuit Channel. Campus Progress caught up with Regis to talk aobut her current project, GirlsJustWannaHaveGuns.com, her upcoming television show, and why she doesn't identify as a feminist.

Tell me a little bit about your website [Girlsjustwannahaveguns.com].

My website has my logo on it. In my speech you know, it's also, my company's main objective is self defense. You've seen in the news where women have been jumped and you see the security cameras where they can't do anything. You see them shoved in their cars, ducking down. If they had a gun on them. That would've been a little bit different. If they would've had a gun on them, their life would've been a lot different. They wouldn't have that horrible experience of actually being raped or abducted or even killed. That's what my company stands for.

Attacks on Women From All Directions

2011-02-16T19:50:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/Claus Rebler)

K, so sorry guys. I totally dropped the ball on blogging this week. But that's because there's crazy shit going down! And it seemed really overwhelming to point out all the effed up stuff that's happening in the world this week. So, for you're benefit, I've put it all together in one place:

Legislators in Fredrick County, Maryland are justifying cutting of funding for Head Start because, apparently, women should be at home with their kids.
South Dakota wants to kill its one abortion provider. Though the state legislator, Phil Jensen, who introduced the bill insisted this is about killing a fetus in a domestic violence situation because evidently current homicide law that just covers the killing a woman isn't enough.
Florida is trying to pass a bill that bans fetal pain, something that isn't even actual science.
And there's all kinds of other crazy anti-choice legislation in lots of states.
Oh yeah, and Republicans want to cut family planning funding. In DC alone, more than 35,000 women needed Title X funding. See how family planning funding is spent in your state.
ALSO, Justin Bieber doesn't believe in abortion. Probably because he'll never have to have one. Teen pop star FAIL.

Weeks like this make me mad that I know about all this awful stuff that's happening in the world. What else made you mad this week?

What Daymar College Tells Us About the Gainful Employment Rule

2011-02-16T16:42:00.001-05:00

I have a piece up on Campus Progress on a school called Daymar College, which shows some of what's wrong with the for-profit education industry. Check it out:

Welcome to Daymar College, located in Owensboro, Ky. Students at Daymar pay $36,979 per year to attend the institution, and 97 percent of its students receive some type of financial aid. Pell grants, which go to low-income U.S. students, are distributed to 73 percent of those attending Daymar.

The most popular program at Daymar is its 12-18 month program to train pharmacy technicians/assistants, a job that, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, pays a median salary of $13.32 an hour. At that rate, assuming a graduate of the program can get full-time employment as a pharmacy technician and work 40 hours a week, he or she will make $27,705 a year.

But that’s just for students who actually graduate. Daymar College’s overall graduation rate is just 38 percent, according to its own self-reported data provided to the Department of Education. That means that means that just four in ten students have completed a one-year program in 18 months.

CPAC

2011-02-11T09:27:00.002-05:00

Hey guys, I'm going to be busy reporting from CPAC for Campus Progress today and tomorrow. Check out what I'm posting here.

Natalie Portman's 'Zigzag' Career

2011-02-09T16:59:00.006-05:00

(Flickr/Mira (on the wall))

Yesterday Slate ran this long and thoughtful piece by Nathan Heller that speculated on Natalie Portman's rather zig-zaggy career.

Five-foot-three, credentialed at Harvard, and equipped with a smile so startlingly intimate it seems to call for special MPAA mention, Portman cuts a strange path through the field of Hollywood celebrity. It's not because of her biography per se: A lot of movie actors go to fancy schools, and even more wear many hats over the course of their public lives. What sets Portman apart is her puzzling ambitions. Though she's spent nearly 20 years under klieg lights, the career she has been reaching for is a mystery. During a single visit to Cannes a few years back, Portman promoted both Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith and Free Zone, a tiny bilingual Amos Gitai production shot in Israel and Jordan on a shoestring budget. Her public taste and personality flickers between a celebrity's glib superficiality and an artist's sedulousness. (Asked once for some books that influenced her in O: The Oprah Magazine, she directed readers to a midcareer Robert Hass poetry collection.) In an industry that rests in large part on the strength of public image, it remains unclear whether Portman is a daughter of the red carpet, striking a pose of highbrow devotion, or a cerebral small-film artist who got dragged into the blockbuster machine.
In fact, this difficulty in pinning down Portman's goals is the key to understanding her career. Although she's often said to carry the anachronistic charms of Audrey Hepburn, Portman is, almost more than anyone else, a star born of this moment. The zigzags and juxtapositions of her work echo her generation's unsettled aspirations; their resonance across the board is crucial to her image both on-screen and in the mainstream eye. Widely driven but impossible to pin down, Portman has brought a new style of ambition into public stardom.
[...]
Confusion about where Portman stands in her ambitions isn't, in fact, just a function of her own path. It's an ambiguity extending through the upper strata of her generation. Portman's peers make up a demographic widely perceived as a legion of overdriven dilettantes, a group of young people alternately pushed to wild multispecialization by some unknown inner fire and stunted by an incapacity to choose among those paths. The demographic archetypes are well-known: bleary students working well past midnight at the college newspaper, then rising before dawn for sports; thirtysomething strivers who have changed careers three times trying to find their gold-paved boulevard and forestalled adult life as a result. The trouble here is not ambition (that's a given) but committing to a goal for that drive: Is the point to hit virtuoso's stride in art, in influence, in public service? If many of us feel a closer affinity to Portman than we do to other movie stars, it's not purely because she seems to drink less deeply of the Hollywood well. She is a public figure whose attempts to be all things while committing her soul to none—to draw millions at the box office, to be a fearless small-film artist, to turn her education toward social good—echoes the conflict in our own ambitious drives, our need to keep every iron burning hot for fear of losing our glow. She's replaced an older form of movie-star restlessness (the kind that zoomed toward nothing but the spotlight and that made a mess of lives) with a new one.

It's not that Heller attributes such qualities to Portman's generation, per se. It's more that he seems to miss some analysis. While Portman's over achievement and sporadic goals is certainly a product of her generation (of which I probably classify as a part), it's that she's under the additional pressure of being a woman in this generation.

Much has been made of the high-achieving young woman, who simply wants to be the best and will work extremely hard to achieve it. Courtney Martin wrote a book about how this pressure among teenage girls can result in eating disorders. Liz Funk also interviewed women she classified as "super girls," over-achieving young women who sought to be the best at whatever they could be, for her book on the subject. I don't know a ton about Natalie Portman's personal life since I don't follow her career super closely ("No Strings Attached"? No thank you.), but she pretty neatly fits into this trope.

Though I generally thing this phenomenon is a tad oversold -- and when it does exist it tends to be among a certain class of young women -- there's little doubt that many of today's young women are under astonishing pressure. The pressure is incredible for young women to be smart, beautiful, deferential, organized, and any number of other things. But they're expected to be the best at each of them. At least -- that's the stereotype that's presented, and stereotypes are powerful, too.

Portman seems to have adjusted more or less all right -- what with the Oscar nomination and all -- but it's worth asking why these young women exist and why they feel such pressure. So long as young women are expected to achieve at everything, they will have the "zigzag" careers that Portman does.

And perhaps it's OK that Portman's career is "unfocused." I suspect if Portman were a man, she'd be lauded for exploring new characters and career paths.

Libertarian Bob Barr Pushes to Keep Higher Education Subsidies

2011-02-08T17:32:00.000-05:00

Last week Politico published an op-ed from 2008 Libertarian Party presidential candidate and former congressman Bob Barr on the proposed gainful employment regulations proposed by the Department of Education. But Barr’s support of subsidies to for-profit schools is less surprising in light of reporting by Salon’s Justin Elliott, which noted that Barr is a law professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, a for-profit educational institution. The connection is something Barr has neglected to disclose in his writings in support of the industry.

In lockstep with other opponents of the proposed regulations in recent days, Barr criticized attacked Campus Progress’ advocacy work to support greater accountability of for-profit schools.

In the Politico op-ed, Barr also attacks a report released by the Government Accountability Office last year that found some for-profit schools were deceiving students in their recruitment process. Barr zeros in on the fact that GAO released “revisions” to the report. But while GAO made revisions to the report, a spokesperson also insists they don’t change the overall findings of the report.

GAO spokesman Chuck Young wrote in an e-mail that the office issues revisions when "additional information comes to light and provides additional context to our already published work." Of the roughly 1,000 reports issued in the last fiscal year, about 12 received later revisions, he said. He added that the office reviewed more than 80 hours of audio from the investigation before it released the revision on the for-profit college report.
"Nothing changed with the overall message of the report, and nothing changed with any of our findings," Young wrote.

But because the GAO made revisions, many for-profit lobbyists are seizing upon this as means of discrediting the entire report.

At its base, the “gainful employment” regulations issue is about curbing wasteful spending – the regulations promise to cut federal funding from programs that leave students with high default rates or too much debt compared with their earnings. While Campus Progress has been focused on eliminating spending for bad programs to ensure more aid to successful programs, curbing government subsidies more generally is something libertarians normally get behind. In fact, in 2005 the libertarian think tank Cato Institute released a study in which they argue, “Rather than expand the current system, Congress should consider a phase-out of federal assistance to higher education over a 12-year time frame.”

Barr seems to have abandoned his libertarian ideas in this case, where the interests of his employer are at stake.

Cross posted.

Survey of Match.com Users Says Feminism Is Working

2011-02-07T20:05:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/ZakVTA)

According to an article in LiveScience, a new survey of Match.com users finds some counter-intuitive responses from the men and women surveyed. Among its findings:

Among people who didn't already have a child, 24 percent of men wanted to have children compared to 15 percent of women;
When asked whether women should be the primary caregivers of children in a family, 49 percent of women said no while 38 percent of men said the same;
Among singles ages 21 to 34, 62 percent said they wanted to get married, 9 percent definitely didn't want to get married, and 29 percent aren't sure.

According to article author Stephanie Pappas, "echo[s] earlier national surveys that reveal ambivalence toward marriage." I think this is generally due to an overall trend toward finding a the right partner for a marriage rather than simply placing sole emphasis on tying the knot. It's a hard attitude to shake -- and many women still feel the pressure to settle down with someone with less emphasis on finding a supportive long-term partnership.

The article even quotes Stephanie Coontz, who wrote Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage and a new book on the effects of Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, called A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (which, by the way, I can't wait to read). Coontz credits the de-stigmatization of singlehood.

Though the survey is far from hard-hitting science, since it relies on a self-selected sample of users of one particular dating service, it does suggest some changing attitudes among people who are interested in dating. The fact that more men and women are both indicating shifting attitudes from what was standard in the 1950s and '60s means that at least to some degree, the idea of gender equality -- also known as feminism -- is working. True, we haven't yet reached the point at which all men and women agree child rearing isn't mainly the responsibility of the woman, but we are at a point where nearly half of women believe that and a significant portion of men do.

Many times when various individuals offer dating advice, one of the key things they point out is that you should be on the same page about major life decisions or it will ultimately end up as a difficult -- or even bad -- partnership. The point about whose responsibility child rearing is seems like an important thing to be on the same page about.

Friday Links: What Can We Learn from the Gosnell Case?

2011-02-04T16:42:00.006-05:00

A counter protester outside Richmond Women's Medical Center in 2007. (Flickr/taberandrew)

The author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us -- an excellent book if you haven't read it -- has a take on the Gosnell case. [Beacon Broadside]
Yoga = pretty. Right? [Feminist Fatale]
Pema Levy agues that efforts by conservatives to stop abortion will only hurt poor women the most. [The American Prospect]
Only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors are women. [NY Times]
New pickup line: "What's your Myers-Briggs?" [PiLOLZophy]
How to be a high school feminist. (Hint: It probably doesn't include joining the cheerleader squad.) [Ms. Blog]
Why don't men initiate divorce more? [The Good Men Project]
The father of the individual mandate was a Republican. [Ezra Klein]
Women were totally in the Civil War too! [NY Times]
Meet the girl who helped start the revolution in Egypt. [Bust]
Sudhir Venkatesh, the guy who wrote Gang Leader for a Day, is now talking to prostitutes in New York City. [Wired]
Why aren't there more women in local office in D.C. ? [Amanda Hess]

Obama Flip-Flops on The Family at National Prayer Breakfast

2011-02-04T16:37:00.003-05:00

Today I have a piece up over at Religion Dispatches on the National Prayer Breakfast since Obama seems to have forgotten it's run by the Fellowship Foundation, an organization with shadowy connections to anti-gay legislation in Uganda.

At last year’s National Prayer Breakfast, the President Obama used his platform to slam the event’s organizers, the Fellowship Foundation, or “The Family,” for its alleged involvement in lobbying for virulently anti-gay legislation in Uganda. “We may disagree about gay marriage,” said the president, “but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are—whether it’s here in the United States or, as Hillary [Clinton] mentioned, more extremely in odious laws that are being proposed most recently in Uganda.”
At yesterday’s Breakfast, however, Obama’s speech was notable not for what he said, since he focused much on his personal faith journey, a theme of bipartisanship, and reiteration of his faith as a Christian. Instead, the speech was interesting for what he didn’t say. Some pro-LGBT activists were surprised to see that he attended the breakfast again at all after the previous year’s criticism of the organizers; but not only did Obama attend this year’s event but he made no mention of the ongoing controversies surrounding the event’s organizers whose involvement in Uganda has once again entered headlines after the killing of Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato.
The assailant admitted to killing Kato with a hammer after he agreed to accept money in exchange for sex. Uganda has been debating a piece of legislation that, if passed, would increase the severity of the punishment for homosexuality to death or life imprisonment, which some say has been introduced by at least one member of the Fellowship.

Birth Control Coverage May Soon Come Without a Co-Pay

2011-02-03T08:07:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/brains the head)

Today the New York Times reports that things are looking up for pro-choice advocates who hope to have birth control classified as preventative care under the Affordable Care Act.

Administration officials said they expected the list to include contraception and family planning because a large body of scientific evidence showed the effectiveness of those services. But the officials said they preferred to have the panel of independent experts make the initial recommendations so the public would see them as based on science, not politics.

Making birth control more affordable (that is, without a co-pay under the Affordable Care Act) makes sense when you consider how insurance companies have been putting financial pressure on women:

Brand-name versions of oral contraceptives can cost $45 to $60 a month or more, not including the cost of a doctor visit for a prescription. In recent years, many health plans have increased co-payments for prescription drugs, so even women with insurance may end up paying half the cost of birth-control pills.

While there has been some anticipation among pro-choice advocates that birth control would be classified as such, the push to classify birth control as preventative care has generated some controversy -- mostly in the form of protests from extreme anti-choice groups like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (prominent lobbyists favoring the Stupak amendment) and the Family Research Council (which has recently been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center).

But much as these groups have managed to use their influence on issues of abortion, birth control may be an issue that they've already lost on.

According to Guttmacher Institute data, more than 99 percent of all women ages 15-44 who have had sex use at least one form of contraception. The data also estimates that only 7 percent of women are at risk of unintended pregnancy but aren't using some form of contraception. Additionally, 63 percent of sexually active women use some form of what is called temporary birth control (hormonal contraceptions like the pill, the patch, or the NuvaRing, as well as an IUD or condoms). More than 30 percent rely on some form of sterilization.

The number of women actively using some form of birth control while sexually active is so great that the notion of opposing birth control seems crazy or outlandish. And it is. Allowing women to have more control over their bodies through family planning is better for maternal and child health. Pretending otherwise is simply ignoring what's good public policy and good science.

Lila Rose's Video Is Part of a Long-Running Campaign to De-fund Planned Parenthood

2011-02-02T13:29:00.002-05:00

(Flickr/Pro-Life Unity)

Lila Rose is a 22-year-old planned anti-choice activist for the group Live Action, and she's been getting much attention for some recent videos that supposedly "expose" Planned Parenthood as an organization that will do nothing to stop human trafficking (presumably because they're so busy forcing abortions on women).

This particular anti-choice attack starts with a post on Big Government, Andrew Breitbart's most prominent site that has a history of posting videos that allege wrongdoing by progressive organizations but usually end up proven false, in which Rose posted a heavily edited video in which "undercover investigators" dressed up as a prostitute and a pimp (sound familiar?) enter a Planned Parenthood facility and ask for advice on sexual health. The implication of Rose's video is that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization that will help others in the exploitation of women. But after Rose's story broke, it was revealed that Planned Parenthood had a record of reporting the suspected traffickers to the FBI, which Rose's video alleges never happened.

As Jason Linkins writes:

Planned Parenthood may have a single staffer whose actions need to be called into question. And so, that staffer is being called to accounts. Other than that, Planned Parenthood is an organization that, if it catches a whiff of some illegal activity, gets the FBI involved as quickly as possible, even when they suspect that they are being subjected to a hoax.

Planned Parenthood released a statement that said, "Phyllis Kinsler, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey (PPCNJ), has stated that, ‘the behavior of our employee, as portrayed on the video, if accurate, violates PPCNJ policies, as well as our core values of protecting the welfare of minors and complying with the law, and appropriate action is being taken.’"

But what is important to understand is that Rose's video is part of a longstanding effort by anti-choice activists to defund Planned Parenthood. Because Planned Parenthood is the most well-known name among women for family planning and abortion services, anti-choice activists figure that shutting down the organization will somehow stop abortions (it won't).

And what's so horrifying about this strategy is that it has been reasonably effective. Planned Parenthood has been pushing to increase Title X family planning funding. But though President Barack Obama's 2011 budget includes an increase of $19.2 million in family planning funding, "funding has not kept pace with inflation, and more than 17 million women are in need of publicly funded family planning services," a Planned Parenthood statement on the proposed 2010 budget reads.

But what anti-choicers like Rose may not realize is that their biggest enemy, Planned Parenthood, exists largely due to the effects of some of the policies for which they advocate. As anti-choicers pass legislation that further cripples regular doctors from providing abortion and other family planning services (as well as adds stigma and threats to abortion providers [PDF]), Planned Parenthood becomes what many women think of as the sole resource for family planning -- and often basic health care.

For many women, Planned Parenthood may be the only place they can turn to for help with family planning and other forms of health care. According to a 2003 study, nearly 40 percent of women use a visit to the ob-gyn as their primary care. Nine percent listed no primary care physician. A survey conducted in November showed [PDF] that 71 percent of voters oppose cutting funding for Planned Parenthood. Granted, Planned Parenthood isn't perfect -- such a large organization will inevitably have some bad actors, but for many women their local Planned Parenthood is their only option for accessing birth control, abortion, and basic health care.

PETA Sucks Yet Again

2011-02-01T16:14:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/Antoon's Foobar)

People who have read feminist blogs are aware that PETA sucks. Like, really sucks. Every so often, they release another marketing campaign that does some combination of the following:

objectifies women,
somehow suggests animals are more valuable than people (specifically women), and/or
lacks any substantive discussion of what good food policy might be.

This year's PETA ad they're trying to air during the Superbowl is no different. As Jill at Feministe pointed out, women are more likely to be vegetarian than men, so it's unclear why PETA is working so hard to alienate women.

It's no secret that PETA engages in these tactics because they hope to generate free press -- i.e. news articles about the controversy -- to get their name out because they, like other nonprofits have a limited budget. They probably pat themselves on the back when an ad campaign generates an enraged post on Feministing or Feministe. Still, I honestly tire of this debate. Maybe if they offered up reasonable alternatives to meat -- or approached adults as, well, adults, they'd have better traction to their message.

Honestly, ads like this make me want to help myself to a pork chop.

Joining the #dearjohn Campaign

2011-02-01T16:02:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/vmiramontes)

Last week I wrote about how terrible the proposed "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" bill is. Sady at Tiger Beatdown has a nice bulleted list of all the awful things the bill would do.

Granted, it's unlikely to make its way to the Senate or President Barack Obama's desk, but for those who want to raise a stink about how terrible it is that the sponsors of this bill are interested in redefining the word to include "forced rape" only, Deanna Zant has a wonderful guide on getting involved in an online campaign:

Tweets with the #dearjohn hashtag should convey one or more of the following:

A sense of urgency about sexual assault and reproductive rights.
A personal story–storytelling is what gets to people, not isolated facts and figures.
Deep conviction. You don’t have to tell your story to be authentic, but your words should be your own.

The thing here is that redefining what rape means -- by using a phrase that doesn't appear anywhere in the criminal code -- is bad public policy. Regardless of your specific feelings on abortion, passing a law in which a woman must have the shit beaten out of her for it to count as rape isn't good for anyone.

Superman -- the Most Famous Illegal Alien Ever?

2011-01-31T18:00:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/Dunechaser)

News comes that the title character of the new Superman reboot will be played by British actor Henry Cavill, star of the Showtime series The Tudors. In fact, of the three major reboots of major comic book characters in the works, all of the title characters will be played by Brits.

The reaction among some comic fans has been aghast, especially since Superman is generally considered the quintessentially American superhero (that is, considered that way generally by white, male comic book characters who look pretty demographically similar to Superman himself). In fact, if you have some time, you should read this award-winning student paper (PDF) on how comic books in the stretch between the Great Depression and the Cold War change to adapt to American ideals that are popular at the time.

But it's important to remember that Superman, while very representative of Americans in certain ways, might be even more representative than you might think: After all, Superman was an illegal immigrant -- one of the 9.3 million estimated to be living in the United States today. These days, he wouldn't even qualify for in-state tuition.

Update/Correction: The illustrious Dara Lind, who knows a lot more about immigration than I do, points out that the number of undocumented folks I grabbed is from 2004. The actual number these days is closer to 11 million.

Friday Links: Stop Sitting on Your Fortune!

2011-01-28T14:19:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/J. Star)

Are Italian women literally sitting on their fortunes? No. Also, stop being so gross, Italian newspaper. [Bust]
A documentary shown at Sundance this year cribs inspiration from Rebecca Traister's work on women in politics. Miss Representation is a film about the objectification of women in media and political activism. [LA Times]
The doggie bag traces back to ancient Rome. [Food & Think]
Via Dara Lind, the account of a woman who decided to have an abortion after her husband had been deported. [The Asylumist]
Props to Jessica Wakeman for documenting the painful experience of moving out after a breakup. [The Frisky]
Pema Levy tells us that there might be a small chance the Equal Rights Amendment can still pass. Maybe. [The American Prospect]
Why aren't there more women in comedy? This writer for CollegeHumor.com argues that not enough women try. [Split Sider]
Stop. Are you pregnant? Are you pre-pregnant? Are you sure? [Ms. Blog]
Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota, but I could not stop laughing while reading this parody of the Tiger Mother column. [The Hairpin]

Why You Can't Prove 'Forced Rape' Easily

2011-01-28T13:51:00.005-05:00

I have a post over at TAPPED today in which I talk about Nick Baumann's reporting on the GOP's efforts to redefine rape as "forced rape" in the proposed "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" bill.

I'll just add that rape has never really been a good "reason" for abortion anyway. The idea behind exceptions to banning abortion in various ways (or, in this case banning federal funds from going anywhere near abortion care) is somewhat bogus anyway, and really seeks to get folks who otherwise would oppose such bans to support them. It's really nice to think that women who are raped, victims of incest, or women whose health is in danger will still have access to abortion (or in this case, funding for abortion), but the reality is that most women wouldn't have access to abortion even if these circumstances did apply to them.

If you're petitioning to get funding for abortion because you fall under the list of exceptions, you have to prove in some way that you've been a victim of rape -- a high barrier already, since RAINN estimates that over 60 percent of all rapes are never reported to the police. Furthermore, simply reporting a rape doesn't necessarily mean that it would be weighed as strong enough evidence, and just 6 percent of all rapists ever serve time in jail.

Now, with the GOP seeking to redefine rape as "forced rape" -- a term that doesn't exist in any legal code whatsoever and is more on the level of Whoopi Goldberg's term "rape rape" -- and, should the bill ever pass (though hopefully the Senate and President Barack Obama have the good sense to block such an absurd piece of legislation) women would have to prove not only that a rape took place but that she was forcibly raped. How, exactly, is a woman supposed to prove that? And meanwhile, while a woman is busy trying to prove she was "forcibly raped," the pregnancy carries further along, making it more dangerous to end.

Either abortion is legal, or abortion isn't legal. The rest is moral judgments up to individuals to decide. Just because "exceptions" to an abortion funding ban exist doesn't mean they won't work out in the worst possible way for women in practice.

Abortion Doesn't Hurt Women's Mental Health, But Babies Might

2011-01-27T17:35:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/JKönig)

The anti-choice movement has been putting forth this notion that abortion is difficult or emotionally traumatizing for women. This has become the "abortion hurts women" line of argument among the anti-choice community, and one that has been thoroughly debunked by Reva Segal and Sarah Blustain in a 2006 American Prospect piece (as well as a more recent piece in the Jan/Feb issue of Mother Jones by Blustain, which isn't yet online).

A recent study written about by the Associated Press today not only confirms that abortion doesn't result in mental problems, but suggests that having a baby actually might.

The Danish study included 365,550 teenagers and women who had an abortion or first-time delivery between 1995 and 2007. None had a history of psychiatric problems that required hospitalization. Through various national registries, researchers were able to track mental health counseling at a hospital or outpatient facility before and after an abortion or delivery.

During the study period, 84,620 had an abortion while 280,930 gave birth.

Researchers compared the rate of mental health treatment among women before and after a first abortion. Within the first year after an abortion, 15 per 1,000 women needed psychiatric counseling – similar to the rate seeking help nine months before an abortion.

Researchers say women who seek abortions come from a demographic group more likely to have emotional problems to begin with. Statistics show that a large percentage struggle economically and they have above-average rates of unintended pregnancies.

While first-time mothers had a lower rate of mental problems overall, the proportion of those seeking help after giving birth was dramatically higher. About 7 per 1,000 women got mental health help within a year of giving birth compared with 4 per 1,000 women pre-delivery.

Much of this doesn't surprise me. After all, having a baby is hard. One's body changes dramatically over the course of the pregnancy and, unless you give the child up for adoption, you're likely to encounter increased mental, emotional, and financial stress that compounds as you care for a newborn child.

This isn't to knock motherhood inherently. Most women find the undertaking extraordinarily rewarding and remarkable. But it's hard to deny that having children increases stress. Instead of caring for oneself, you' have to care for an additional (and quite helpless) human being. It is not something one should undertake lightly. There are real effects that motherhood has on your mental and physical health.

So let's drop the "abortion hurts women" narrative. The science just isn't there.

Guest Blogging at TAPPED This Week

2011-01-26T10:09:00.002-05:00

Hey, I'm guest blogging at TAPPED this week! Check out what I've written so far:

Medicaid expansion programs that offer more women contraception are good public policy.
A Texas voter ID bill is pretty much just blatant voter suppression to help Republicans.
Women are in a worse position in the economic recovery than men.
We should make the Pell grant an entitlement program if we really want to "win the future."

Stay tuned.

The Factors of an Unintended Pregnancy

2011-01-25T14:12:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/carmen_seaby)

The journal Sexual Health recently published a study on unintended pregnancy. According to the study's abstract, 51 percent of women who reported an unintended pregnancy went on to experience at least one other unintended pregnancy.

Other factors also contributed to multiple unintended pregnancies: one's race (women who are black or Hispanic are more likely to experience multiple unintended pregnancies), having been born to a mother who was under 18 when she gave birth, and young age of first sexual experience (whether consensual or not).

The abstract didn't disclose whether any of these factors coincided with income or insurance coverage. I'd be interested to see how those factors stack up.

'The Kids Are All Right' and Missed Opportunities

2011-01-25T11:01:00.004-05:00

(Focus Features)

It seems the Oscar nominations are out today. I've seen seven of the 10 nominees thus far, including The Kids Are All Right, which I had a chance to finally watch last night. (No spoilers except what you've seen in the trailer.)

I was ultimately disappointed by this film, which is I suppose what happens when you see a film that's been hyped for as Oscar-bait so long after it's been out. My main complaint with the film was that all of the characters felt like flat stereotypes to me -- except for Mark Ruffalo's character, Paul. Paul was, in many ways, the character with the most depth, whereas both Julianne Moore and Annette Bening's characters came of mostly as stereotypes of a lesbians (the exchange about the Joni Mitchell record is what did it for me). Bening's character comes off as a villain for much of the film, and Moore's character, while at first we feel sorry for her, she does ultimately betray her entire family.

But even though Ruffalo has the most interesting role to play, the film offers little in the way of resolution for his character. Instead, his character feels like a red herring, and we're actually supposed to focus on the family portrayed, which would work, expect there's been little in the way of realistic character development with any of them.

Ultimately, this film to me felt like a missed opportunity. It's not uncommon for couples -- especially lesbian couples, since women's sexuality sometimes fluctuates over time (keep in mind I'm not saying this is true of all women) -- to begin to want and need different things sexually over the course of the relationship. After all, sexuality is complex and long-term relationships go through changes over time. The combination of those two things in the film's setup should have made for a fascinating means for delving into those ideas. But the way Moore's character went about that exploration, through betrayal rather than an open discussion with her partner, instead makes the show more like a traditional story about a family that goes through an affair.

The movie didn't quite do it for me. But it's still great to see a film about an LGBT family nominated for an Oscar.

The Impossiblity of Legislating Morality in the Wake of the Kermit Gosnell Case

2011-01-24T15:23:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/flequi)

When I first learned of the alleged actions of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the doctor accused of causing the death of a woman and illegally performing late-term procedures that induced labor and killed the fetus, my heart sank. Not only did I feel for the women who encountered these allegedly horrifying procedures (which are illegal even in states with laws friendlier to late-term abortions), but I knew such a sensational news story would renew the vigor of the anti-choice movement, and nudge even moderate people (and there are many when it comes to abortion, despite what the devisive rhetoric might lead you to believe) toward putting limitations on abortion in the final trimester.

Will Saletan is one such moderate person. In a piece today in Slate, he acknowledges many of the points pro-choice advocates have made in response to his horror at the Gosnell case. These things -- that early abortion is better than late abortion, that efforts to delay abortions only result in women more desperate to seek abortion -- are all true, he says, but he ends with a question:

Contraception or abstinence is best, emergency contraception is next best, early abortion is next best, and we should make these options more accessible, not less. But we'll still be left with some women who, for no medical reason, have run out the clock, even to the point of viability. Should their abortion requests be granted anyway?

Pema Levy over at TAPPED puts up an excellent defense, noting that the ultimately trusts women to make those imporant decisions.

I agree with Levy, but I would only add that the question Saletan is asking is a moral one. It is, of course, a very important one for individuals to discuss and think about, especially when considering his or her own views on the complex issue of abortion, but it is a hard question to incorporate into a policy debate. While Saletan might feel personally that 29 weeks is the limit for women to obtain an abortion, an equally reasonable person might come to a different moral conclusion. So who's point of view do we use to decide policy?

Any time you attempt to legislate morality, it seems to backfire in the worst possible ways, and abortion is no exception. The very best thing one can do is legislate policy that do the least harm to the most number of people while still aligning with society's general guidelines for what is acceptable. This is yet another difficult standard, but if you focus on doing the least amount of harm, then the best policy is to make abortions -- a medical procedure that is dangerous when done improperly -- as safe and as accessible as possible throughout a pregnancy.

As Levy writes:

If a woman decides to have a late-term abortion, which often means traveling across state lines and spending a lot of money to have it done or submitting to a complicated procedure at a shady clinic like Dr. Gosnell's patients did, then they are obviously making a very serious decision because they feel having an abortion is what they need. Maybe their decision is financial, maybe their marriage has become abusive, and maybe she's a bad, fickle person. But being pro-choice means having the strong belief that women's bodies should not be used in any way against their will.

To do otherwise is to encourage the existance of pracitces like Gosnell's.

On the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

2011-01-22T18:53:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/afagen)

Today is the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. Some may not have realized at the time, but the years following that decision saw the safest and most accessible abortion America would ever see. Today, we have the Hyde amendment, which leaves millions of poor women with limited choices; state laws that continue to chip away at access; and now, Congress has proposed a law that seeks to further limit funding for abortion.

In many ways women are more equal and free than they were in those days following the Roe decision. But when it comes to access to abortion, in many ways, women are still embroiled in a political battle for their rights.

Friday Links: The Swanson Pyramid of Greatness

2011-01-21T10:47:00.003-05:00

Do romance novels hurt women? [Bitch Magazine]
Amanda Terkel reports that a high-level military panel says the ban on women in combat is discriminatory. [Huffington Post]
DIY abortions are becoming more popular. [Slate]
Living with an STD certainly comes with stigma, but as this author writes, you can get through it. [Salon]
Via Jill at Feministe, this in-depth piece on the foreskin restoration movement is fascinating. [The Good Men Project Magazine]
An imagined conversation in which Robyn converts Katy Perry to feminism. [Ann Friedman]
The way people argue on Facebook. [Shakesville]
Foodies are everywhere these days, but is that a good thing? Lisa Bramen argues it is. [Food & Think]
Parks and Rec is back. Here's the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness. You're welcome. [Anywhere But Nowhere]

Anti-Choice Legislation in the States

2011-01-21T10:03:00.002-05:00

I have an interview with Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, over at The American Prospect today on upcoming anti-choice state legislation. Check it out.

Do For-Profit Schools Help in the Health Care Industry?

2011-01-20T16:11:00.000-05:00

(Flickr/cheesepuppet)

Today Campus Progress’ parent organization, the Center for American Progress, released a report (PDF) and held a panel discussion that examined the needs of the job market in the growing health care industry and its relationship to for-profit schools that offer programs to train students for this industry. The report carefully examined some of the needs of the health care industry and how for-profit schools could help fill that need. But the report found that the for-profit industry falls short of fulfilling the greatest needs in health care.

Most notably, nursing is an extremely high-demand industry. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections of job openings in the health care industry, registered nurses will have the highest demand in the next ten years, with a need for more than 1 million new registered nurses projected. Two factors contribute to the increase in the number of jobs needed in the nursing industry: the Affordable Care Act will increase coverage for an estimated 30 million Americans, requiring more medical professionals overall; and aging baby boomers who need more medical care will require more labor-intensive nursing care over time.

“But for-profit schools contribute relatively few nursing graduates to the field,” the report says. For profits graduated roughly 150,000 students in registered nursing (RN), but this supply is still only 7 percent of the total number of degrees awarded in nursing. A licensed practical nurse or (LPN) or nursing aid might be a good candidate for advancing through an RN program, but for-profits also only graduate a small proportion of LPN students. Non-profit schools still supply the vast majority of both LPN (80 percent) and nursing aid (89 percent) students.

This could be because nursing is a highly intensive and expensive training program and many for-profit schools, with an eye on the bottom line, target more online-only and less labor intensive programs. In fact, in the medical industry, for-profit schools graduate the highest number of students in the medical assistant field, training nearly 88 percent of medical assistants in this country. These are entry-level administrative jobs that have a relatively low demand in health care job projections when compared with high-need fields of nursing and home health care.

The second highest number of health related for-profit students, 10 percent, participate in massage therapy programs, a low demand profession.

But the bigger issue with for-profit schools isn’t just a mismatch between the programs for-profits offer and the demands of the growing health care industry. There’s some evidence to suggest that some schools advertise their programs with promises of high salary, career advancement, and flexible training schedules.

But while some for-profit schools do a good job of helping graduates advance professionally, students sometimes discover only after completing a program that their training wasn’t properly accredited and they are therefore unable to sit for the required licensing exam. Other students take on far more debt than they can realistically pay back on a medical assistant salary, which is typically in the neighborhood of $30,000 to $35,000. Job advancement is less certain, usually based more on on-the-job experience and willingness to pursue more higher education. Furthermore, some training programs require clinical training, which is less flexible and doesn’t lend itself to distance learning. [Full disclosure: Campus Progress’ advocacy arm supports regulations that would increase accountability of for-profit programs. In addition, this author has written pieces critical of the for-profit education industry in the past.]

The CAP report offers several recommendations, including offering more incentives to for-profit schools to offer high-demand career training. Federal grants intended to incentivize training in science and technology should also include incentives for training high-need health care fields, the report recommends.

The report also advises for-profit schools to offer better career counseling so students are aware of which industries are in highest demand; as well as to provide students with statistical information about the quality of the program (like default rates on loans and job placement) at least 10 days before a student enrolls in classes. But providing good information so students can make better choices may not be enough.

“I always get wary when we talk about student choice,” said Kevin Kinser, a professor at the University of Albany who studies for-profit and career college programs, at the CAP event. “For most students there isn’t much of a choice.” He mentioned that students are often choosing between one or two schools in the geographic area that offer programs they are interested in.

There are, of course, ways that for-profit schools are in a good position to provide needs in the health care industry. Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, pointed out that for-profits might have the flexibility to offer re-training and on-the-job credentialing instruction. As the health care industry becomes more regulated, he says, there will be a greater need for employees keeping licenses up to date. “People need to take certification tests again and again,” Strohl said. For profit schools could help fill that need.

Still, the report makes clear that there are challenges that the for-profit industry and the regulators at the Department of Education need to meet to align students more closely with the demands of a growing industry. Students need not just good information, but good programs to make appropriate choices about higher education.

Cross posted.

‘Portlandia’ Edges into ‘Stuff White People Like’ Territory

2011-01-19T13:17:00.002-05:00

(IFC)

If Stuff White People Like were a television show, it would be Portlandia. The show, which stars former Saturday Night Live comedian Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney-co-founder-turned-music-commentator Carrie Brownstein, is airing on the Independent Film Channel and is set in—you guessed it—Portland. And what better place to set a series that mocks mostly white, urban, liberal culture than one of the whitest cities in America?

There’s been much debate about what, if anything, constitutes white culture. But it does seem clear that there is just as much a stereotype of white liberal culture as there is of white conservative culture. As much as we imagine the average white social conservative to be an SUV-driving, megachurch-attending, McDonald’s-eating, GOP-voting, Wal-Mart-shopping white person, we also imagine the average social liberal to be a yoga-doing, farmers-market-shopping, arugula-eating, library-card-holding, bike-riding, latte-sipping, liberal-blog-reading white person. [Full disclosure: This last weekend I attended a yoga class, checked books out form my local library, and stopped in at a store that specializes in local meat and dairy. I also have been known to occasionally nibble on arugula and pursue the occasional liberal blog.]

The shorthand for this stereotype is often “hipster” or “aging hipster”—someone with enough time and money to update a Tumblr and form opinions about the latest indie rock band while Tweeting about it incessantly. If you need further help on this concept, feel free to browse the archive of the New York Times style section. Of course, there are urban liberals that are non-white (incidentally an idea the Times style section also delved into). The reality is, of course, much more complex than that: Not all that partake in hipster culture are white; not all whites are hipsters. But for all of the complexities, these stereotypes still exist—the culture typified in Portlandia is indeed predominantly white.

And Portlandia isn’t afraid to mock such culture. The pilot episode, which has been getting some love from sites such as Videogum (itself highly beloved among hipsters), features a musical number titled “The Dream of the ‘90s Is Alive in Portlandia” that skewers urban white liberals who seem to never work. This is perhaps a bit of a sore spot since unemployment is 9.4 percent nationally and Oregon’s is slightly above that, at 10.5 percent. One skit even features a cameo from Boardwalk Empire star Steve Buscemi (which also features issues of Bitch magazine in the background). Urban liberals might find some of the actions of the characters uncomfortably familiar.

Of course, the show, for all its comedic gems, opens up larger questions about what kind of race-based mockery is acceptable. Indeed, people had issues with Stuff White People Like for that very reason. Even mocking white people on the basis of race is still problematic because it more mocked a specific subset of urban culture and class than it did white people specifically. Portlandia suffers from many of the same problems. It is written by, produced by, and stars white people of a certain class. There are a few non-whites in the ensemble scenes and they may bring in non-white comedians/comediennes down the road, but by and large, Portlandia is a show made for white people by white people. That’s not to say non-whites can’t or don’t watch the show and enjoy it, but the show definitely comes from a specific perspective of urban, white, middle-class/upper-middle-class, liberal culture.

Ultimately the show is a savvy exploration of self-mockery of a subset of lefty culture. Sometimes it’s good to take a moment to laugh at the absurdity of a culture taken to an extreme. It’s a medicine arugula-eating liberals might be happy to take.

Cross posted.

Birthday Song

2011-01-19T10:36:00.001-05:00

It's true. Today is my birthday. I used this nifty Billboard #1 song finder to discover what was the top song on the day I was born. Here it is.

Oh boy, am I ever a child of the 1980s. I also apparently share a birthday with Dolly Parton. Huh.

'Big Love' is Back

2011-01-18T14:28:00.000-05:00

(HBO)

This Sunday the HBO series "Big Love" returned for its fifth and final season. There's no question the quality of the show has declined significantly over time -- so much so that one of the show's stars, Chloe Sevigny called last season "awful" "as far as I'm concerned." Still, I'm hooked on the show and couldn't help but tune in.

In some ways, the success of "Big Love" is curious. The fictional drama is focused on a tiny sliver of a tiny minority: Mormon polygamists. Mormons, according to the most recent census estimates, at 3,158,000 self-identified individuals make up just over 1 percent of the total U.S. population. Yet Mormons are surprisingly prevalent in public life. The U.S. Senate is the workplace of six men who self-identify as Mormon (an impressive representation considering there is currently no African American member of the U.S. Senate), including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the U.S. House of Representatives has 15 Mormon members. Obviously the representation is concentrated in the Southwest region of the United States. But though the presence of Mormonism in public life is prevalent, the focus on polygamous Mormons seems almost absurdly outsized. (The Church of Latter Day Saints officially ceased the practice of plural marriages in 1890.)

"Big Love" is also a sliver of the wealth of pop culture out there about polygamist Mormons these days. Last year saw young adult novels Keep Sweet,The Chosen One: A Novel, and Sister Wife as well as the more grownup novel Hidden Wives. (I read a meta review of these books in the last issue of Bitch magazine, so I can't attest to their quality individually.) TLC also started airing its reality show "Sister Wives" last fall.

Last season, "Big Love" definitely tapped into the fascination with Mormons in public life with its main story arc. The show seemed to be exploring the question, what would happen if someone, in this case Bill, were elected to office while keeping the secret that he is a polygamist under wraps? Because it would be nearly impossible for this to happen on a national level (although you never know), it seemed obvious to turn to state office, something the press pays little to no attention to.

At the end of last season (spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it), Bill publicly acknowledges the fact that he is in a plural marriage, to the disgust of many of his supporters and employees. The premise for this season seems to be dealing with the aftermath of that. If you think living in a secret plural marriage is hard, the show seems to be concluding, living in a public one is infinitely harder.

Big Love will end this season, but it doesn't look like the fixation on polygamy or plural marriages will end anytime soon -- after all, TLC's "Sister Wives" has been renewed for a second season. In this way, popular representations of polygamy has become a way of exploring alternative sexuality, family, and gender issues in a community that typically adheres to the very traditional "family values" nature of conservative Christianity. Popular culture will continue to look for skeletons in the closet of Mormonism, whether they're fictional or not.

Friday Links: Long Weekend Edition

2011-01-14T13:29:00.002-05:00

(Flickr/jdlasica)

Ashton Kutcher doesn't understand why sex ed doesn't focus more on sexual pleasure for women. [The Frisky]
An ugly reminder that your health has a lot more to do with racial inequality than we'd all like to admit. [New York Times]
Ever tried closing your eyes and walking in a straight line? Can't do it, can you? [NPR]
As I suspected, assassins almost always have three names to prevent mistaken identities. [Slate]
Marshmallow is a plant. Really. [Food & Think]
Maybe those widely accepted stages of grief aren't all they're cracked up to be. [Brainiac]
Turns out when you elect a bunch of anti-choice state legislators, you get the possibility for some serious anti-choice legislation. [Women's eNews]
Beer batter is the best. Obviously. [Food & Think]
Long Read: This is mad old, but Zadie Smith's review of The Social Network is a really beautiful piece of writing. [New York Review of Books]

When Women Run for Office

2011-01-13T12:21:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/jypsygen)

Via Andrea Grimes, this analysis from the Dallas Morning News of possible candidates to replace Dallas mayor Tome Leppert is fascinating. Can you spot the sexism?

POSSIBLE CANDIDATES
ANGELA HUNT
Dallas City Council member, Dallas lawyer

Pros: High name recognition and ability to get votes across the city. Could be dangerous if matched up against the right candidate.

Cons: Considered the enemy of some in the business elite. Ability to run an aggressive campaign could be affected by her new family. Can she raise enough money to compete? [emphasis added]

JIM MOORE
Defense attorney

Pros: As the only announced candidate in the mayor's race, he has an opportunity to get some early momentum.

Cons: He has to build recognition as he is virtually unknown throughout the city.

RON NATINSKY
Dallas City Council member, Dallas businessman

Pros: Got out the gate early and appears to be in position to get support from various Dallas business leaders. With consultant Carol Reed already on board, Natinsky has access to campaign dollars.

Cons: Could have difficulty getting southern Dallas support. Some business leaders looking for an alternative.

MIKE RAWLINGS
Park Board president, former homeless czar

Pros: Long considered to be a viable successor to Leppert. Strong ties to city's business elite and could get votes in the south.

Cons: Does he really want it? Has no campaign experience.

BRINT RYAN
Dallas businessman

Pros: Has enough money to self-finance his campaign and attract solid consultants. Could be appealing to those looking for a pro-business candidate.

Cons: Still relatively unknown to much of the city. Has to overcome being known as the guy who spent $1 million on an unsuccessful council race.

Hm, one of the female candidates seems to have a con that the male candidates don't.

My Birthday Books

2011-01-12T15:56:00.005-05:00

Via the Awl, there is apparently a website that tells you what books were bestsellers on the day you were born. Mine are below (non-fiction first, followed by fiction):

Uh, I know my birthday is coming up next week and all, but no need to commemorate the day with either of these books. What's yours?

Women Spend Less Time on Research in Academia

2011-01-12T10:09:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/Marshall Astor - Food Pornographer)

Via Inside Higher Ed, Academe is publishing a new study that finds women in academia are routinely given more departmental service duties -- duties that often aren't considered when considering promotions. The study examined 350 faculty members at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and found:

Although associate professors of both sexes worked similar amounts of time overall—about sixty-four hours a week—the distribution of work time varied considerably. Men spent seven and a half hours more a week on their research than did women. Even if these differences in research time occurred only during semesters, not during summer or holiday breaks, this would mean that men spent in excess of two hundred more hours on their research each year than women. On the other hand, women associate professors taught an hour more each week than men, mentored an additional two hours a week, and spent nearly five hours more a week on service. This translates to women spending roughly 220 more hours on teaching, mentoring, and service over two semesters than men at that rank.

In other words, when it comes to promotion in academia it's research that matters -- and men are getting to spend more time on research than women. In many ways, it's the equivalent of the housework paradox; women spend just enough more time on household duties than men often translating into less time working those extra hours that might get you promoted.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but this study just confirms what I learned anecdotally from women I've interviewed in academia. Women are often assigned to more administrative and teaching duties while their male peers are left to do more research and publish more studies. It will take some serious cultural changes to alter this pattern.

No Wonder Woman TV Show

2011-01-12T10:05:00.003-05:00

(Flickr/jooleeah_stahkey)

Alyssa Rosenberg writes on the fact that it seems clear we're not going to be getting a Wonder Woman TV show. Alyssa covers many of the practical reasons why such a show might not be good, but I'm still a bit bummed at the news. Truth be told, I haven't read too many of the Wonder Woman comics, and plenty of feminists have mixed feelings about Wonder Woman. (See this piece by Shelby Knox on why Wonder Woman's recent "modernization" isn't such a win for feminists.)

But the reason I'm bummed about the lack of of a Wonder Woman TV show has a lot to do with why it took me so long to come around to comics in the first place: The fact that female characters in comic books tend to be either an afterthought, a supporting character, or -- if she is given her own title -- generally seen as less good than the male superhero giants like Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman.

Wonder Woman, though not a perfect superhero, is the first female one. She also possesses strength that is on par with her male peers. And though her costume is certainly sexy, her powers aren't sexual -- she's intelligent and powerful in her own right.

It's true that the major comic publishers are making more efforts to highlight female characters and run titles with female leads, but it will be a while before those those characters are considered on par with the big male characters -- if they ever are. Television producers have certainly been more willing to produce TV shows that feature male leads (i.e. Smallville) than they have been to experiment with female leads.

And for what it's worth, many girls who read comics enjoy reading stories about male characters, as Okazu noted. But it'd be nice if we didn't have to be second banana to the boys.

Stagnation in Abortion Rates, Says Guttmacher

2011-01-11T15:28:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/ClinicEscort)

Today the Guttmacher Institute reported that abortion rates, after decades of decline, are holding steady. Guttmacher found that there were 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women for women in 2005. That number is nearly on par with the 2008 rate of 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women.

Overall the abortion rate has been on a steady decline since 1981, when the rate was 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women. That has all been due to greater access to health insurance, birth control, better information about unplanned pregnancies, and more options for contraception.

But typically in tough economic times, experts that follow abortion rates usually see an increase in abortion. Women typically have less access to regular health care -- and therefore less access to contraception -- and that means that women are more likely to have an unintended pregnancy. It seems the stagnation in the drop in teen pregnancies is also part of this trend. In tough economic times, a woman who already faces a tight financial situation might decide to end the pregnancy rather than putting her family through greater hardship. And this is often the case for women who choose abortion; the typical woman who has an abortion is a woman who already has other children.

Ideally no woman would face an unwanted pregnancy. But for obvious reasons, that's unrealistic. The pro- and anti-choice movements are both expressing concern about a stagnation in the of the abortion rate -- and even worry that that poor economic conditions could even cause a the number of abortions to tick upward. If anything, this should be yet another reason to make contraception part of preventative care under the new health care law.

How 'Life Before Man' Beats 'Blue Valentine' on the End of Relationships

2011-01-11T15:25:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I finished reading Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man, which is about the end of a marriage in the 1970s (the book was first published in 1979). Though the book has nothing to do with the Ryan Gosling/Michelle Williams film Blue Valentine, I can't help but make the comparison since they've coincided in my media consumption.

While Blue Valentine certainly tried to be "real" about the end of a relationship, there are ways that a film is limiting. For one, the fact that the film tries to condense enough significant scenes into a two-hour film is challenging. Many relationships that crumble do so over the span of months or, most often, years.

This is where Life Before Man has the depiction Blue Valentine tried to create beat. The book covers the four main people in a relationship: the husband, Nate; the wife, Elizabeth; the mistress, Lesje; and the man the mistress leaves for the husband, William. In Life Before Man, no one is innocent, but no one is exactly a villain, either. Both Nate and Elizabeth are unfaithful to each other, but they approach their infidelity in a way a way that is both mature and destructive.

Like the characters in Blue Valentine, they feel an obligation to make the relationship work on some level for the children. But Life Before Man takes the complexity to a higher level. The characters are sometimes selfish, often tortured, and always elegantly written. Perhaps the character that's depicted as the most selfish and vengeful, Elizabeth, is not entirely unsympathetic. After all, she's trapped in an unhappy marriage and is suffering from the loss of a former lover. She also faces extreme pressure to be a good mother, an accomplished employee, and a woman in her late 30s who is still desirable. She is certainly not perfect and not always likable, but I think that might be why I like her so much.

In any case, it's an excellent book and I highly recommend reading it.

The Problem With 'Like a Man' Articles

2011-01-10T13:44:00.008-05:00

(Flickr/Chris_J)

Today the Wall Street Journal has some advice on what women can learn about dressing well. The solution, it seems, is to "shop like a man." The piece itself offers some advice on looking for quality and comfort over labels and style -- something that my mother who sewed many of her own clothes over the years would likely raise her eyebrows at the idea that these are "masculine" qualities.

See, there's a problem with the "like a man" genre of article -- and there's no shortage of them. Women are frequently told to ask for a raise like a man, Date Like a Man, and even pee like a man. But the problem here is that "like a man" is often synonymous with "do it better." When women are given advice on asking for raises "like a man" it's because women are often paid less than men, and it's often thought that the solution is to simply mimic men's behaviors to receive the best results. Same goes for dating and peeing -- the idea is that men somehow do it better. The way to fix that seems to be to tell women how to be more like men.

There's a reason there isn't a genre of "like a woman" articles for men. (Except for this Daily ~~Fail~~ Mail article on a man who spent a week "living like a woman.") See, the idea is that men would never want to be "like a woman" because women are generally considered inferior, even though if you replace "like a woman" with "better," you could write articles on how men should drive like a woman, how to multitask like a woman, or how to fly a fighter jet like a woman.

But you don't see articles like that -- or at least, not nearly to the frequency with which you see "like a man" articles.

In the case of the WSJ article, it was talking about ways that men and women's clothing industries differ. But while women's clothing is often made, marketed, and sold in ways that are different than men's clothing, it's a shame to write the article in a way that assumes all women go for more cheap clothing over men, who buy fewer quality pieces. After all, there are plenty of women who don't like to buy shirts with mismatched stripes, spend time looking at quality over labels, and refuse to buy fabrics that aren't comfortable. Let's stop with the gender essentialism.

On the Shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and Violent Political Rhetoric

2011-01-10T10:19:00.005-05:00

(Flickr/kevin.asher)

As the country tries to digest the violent shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) that left six dead and 14 others wounded, the language around political discourse has come under scrutiny. Giffords is believed to be the first female American politician that has undergone an assassination attempt. Giffords is still in critical condition as of this writing.

Victims in the shooting included Judge John Roll, a 63-year-old state appeals court judge who had recently received death threats for a ruling that found ranchers holding people at gunpoint upon crossing the boarder were acting illegally, and Christina-Taylor Green, a 9-year-old girl who was born on 9/11 and already showed promise as a potential leader since she was recently elected president of her class. The alleged shooter, Jared L. Loughner, is in custody and faces federal charges for an assassination attempt.

Shortly after news of the shooting broke, material from Sarah Palin's PAC revealed Giffords had been one of the electoral "targets," and the campaign materials used gun sights as imagery. Jessica Valenti published a piece in The Guardian that notes that Palin's PAC may have used such imagery thanks to a surge of "man up" rhetoric in politics recently:

In a country that sees masculinity – especially violent masculinity – as the ideal, it's no wonder that this type of language resonates. But it's a sad state of affairs when women in politics have to resort to using the same gendered stereotypes that kept all women out of public service for so long.

Discussions following the violent shooting on Saturday left those on the right reiterating that there was no connection between violent rhetoric and the actions of one mentally ill individual (Jill did a great job of explaining why simply blaming mental illness is bad). Those on the left insisted that violent rhetoric put forth by the Tea Party and others is creating a culture that deranged individuals might tap into.

This reminds me, oddly of the debate that came after the fatal shooting of Dr. George Tiller, a late-term abortion provider in Kansas who was shot to death in his church by Scott Roeder. Many of Tiller's colleagues noted the sustained and repeated harassment they and Tiller received over the years. Tiller's name was a rallying cry for the anti-choice right. Many were shocked that those on the right claimed that their often violent rhetoric toward Tiller wasn't connected to Roeder's actions.

The causes of violence are complex. The truth is we really don't know what makes someone attempt violence of this nature on another person. I'm not ready to blame Palin or others on the right personally, especially as details of the shooting are still getting sorted out. But would it hurt to make our political rhetoric more civilized and less violent? Definitely not.

Kentucky Steps Up Scrutiny of For-Profit Schools

2011-01-10T10:15:00.001-05:00

Kentucky has been stepping up its scrutiny of for-profit schools in the state. Now, state legislators are proposing legislation that would increase accountability and oversight of for profit schools, and the state’s attorney general, Jack Conway, is opening up an investigation into the practices of the industry.

A joint education committee meeting between the state’s house and senate convened last fall to hear from students of for-profit schools. In an interview with Campus Progress, Rep. Reginald Meeks (D), the sponsor of the proposed legislation, described the testimony of students at the hearing. Students testified said that some of the state’s for-profit colleges were leaving them with high loads of debt and sometimes unemployable. Some students testified that they didn’t realize their schools weren’t accredited and some schools were dishonest in the claims they made when students were recruited, Meeks says.

Unfortunately, such stories aren’t uncommon. Last year the Government Accountability Office released an undercover video and report that documented for-profit recruiters making false claims about the school’s programs and encouraging students to lie on Federal Aid applications. A Bloomberg investigation reported last year that some for-profits were recruiting students from homeless shelters. (This video from Campus Progress summarizes abuses found in those and other investigations.)

Currently for-profit students account for about just 10 percent of all students, yet they account for about a quarter of federally subsidized student aid and nearly half of all loan defaults. Some for-profit schools have alarmingly high default rates for their students; a recent Senate committee report found 12 for-profit schools they examined had default rates higher than 50 percent.

After hearing testimony from students, Kentucky legislators asked to hear from the then-chairman of the State Board of Proprietary Education (SBPE), Mark Gabis. (Kentucky is one of few states that has such an oversight board.). But Meeks said Gabis’ testimony “raised more questions and concerns than it answered.”

Gabis is also the president of Owensboro-based Daymar College, a college that is currently the defendant in a lawsuit brought forth by former students that alleges that the school left them unprepared for the job market. Gabis has since stepped down as chairman of the SBPE.

Meeks noted that Gabis admitted the board hadn’t done an internal audit and hadn’t responded to students’ requests for help from the state’s $500,000 Student Protection Fund.

Kentucky’s Attorney General Jack Conway (D) announced an investigation into industry practices on Dec. 15 for potentially violating the state’s consumer protection law. Conway issued six subpoenas to for-profit schools, but declined to list the schools that are under investigation. Rep. Meeks also requested an audit of the SBPE from Kentucky’s state auditor, Crit Luallen, on Dec. 29.

Meeks is proposing legislation that aims to provide greater oversight to these for-profit schools. It would place them under the authority of the state’s council on postsecondary education, bringing the schools under scrutiny similar to that of other state-funded institutions. Right now, the State Board of Proprietary Education is dominated by individuals with financial or other ties to proprietary schools.

“There’s a sense that the fox is guarding the henhouse,” Meeks says. “The decisions [the board] have made protect the schools more than the citizens of the commonwealth of Kentucky.”

The groups that work on behalf of the for-profit schools in Kentucky say they are reserving their judgment on the legislation. "We are still processing the substantive provisions of Rep. Meeks' bill, but we will be happy to work with him and his colleagues toward a mutually acceptable solution," says Brenda L. Gargano, Executive Director of Kentucky Association of Career Colleges & Schools.

Still, Meeks says he recognizes that for-profit schools serve a purpose, and there are some that have close affiliations with other non-profit institutions or with industries that are doing a good job of preparing students. But others he says “may not offer the panacea that they claim they do.”

Cross posted.

Blue Valentine and Choice

2011-01-08T15:40:00.000-05:00

(Publicity still for Blue Valentine)

I watched Blue Valentine this weekend. (Spoilers ahead, though the film isn't so much driven by plot.) Though I kept hearing the film was so depressing since it was about the end of a heterosexual relationship, I didn't really come out of it feeling that devastated.

The film is ultimately about people more or less trapped by circumstances. Both of the main characters, played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, are working class people who have potential. Williams' character, Cindy, says she'd really love to go to medical school and be a doctor. Gosling's character is more content with his life in manual labor though apparently has some skill as a musician and an artist.

We see the characters in two parallel story lines, one in which they are falling in love and the other in which they are falling out of love. When the two meet, Cindy is in the midst of a breakup with another boyfriend who we witness having sex with her and coming in her without her consent. The act ultimately destroys her relationship with the previous boyfriend. She then meets Gosling's character, and the beginning of their relationship coincides with the messy end of another. The scenes in which the two characters fall asleep are touching, making the contrast with the second storyline a sharp one.

It seems clear throughout the film that Williams isn't on birth control in that first storyline. Her partners also don't seem to use condoms. When she discovers she's pregnant, she can't say for sure that Gosling's character is the father. But contraception isn't discussed in the film by any of the characters.

The film then includes a scene in an abortion clinic, in which Williams' character gets to the point of receiving anesthesia and then asks to stop the procedure. We don't know why Williams' character decides she doesn't want an abortion, but the film leads us to believe that it is he pain and discomfort of the procedure that causes her to change her mind. (I'd be interested to hear from women who have undergone the experience to examine how realistic the discomfort is depicted.) Afterward, they decide to stay together and "be a family," as Gosling says, the scene is tragic because we've been watching end of their relationship at the same time in the parallel storyline.

Still, I didn't come away from the movie feeling sad. Their relationship ran a natural course. It is just because of circumstances that they were tied together by a chil, an adorable girl named Frankied. But because it seems that they would each honestly be happier apart than they would be together, and it seems that they ultimately love and care for Frankie.

Would the characters been happier had Williams' character not gotten pregnant? Maybe. It's certainly true that the end of the relationship might not have been as fraught with consideration for a child and they possibly may not have rushed into getting married so quickly. But in the end, these were the choices they made. That's the thing about giving women the choice of having an abortion. She might choose not to have one. Sometimes that's the better choice and sometimes it isn't. It's unclear how we're supposed to feel about Williams' characters choice. Some may come out of the movie thinking so, others may come out of it thinking she made the right one. But ultimately it's important that she's allowed to make that decision.

Friday Links: 'Math Is Hard. Let's Go Shopping.'

2011-01-07T14:43:00.004-05:00

(Flickr/Bindaas Madhavi)

This is a really fantastic slideshow that refutes the "men are just better at math" idea. My favorite quote? "Math is hard. Let's go shopping." [Geek Feminism Blog]
Most sports reporters are white (and, I might add, male) and it's hurting sports coverage. [Colorlines]
Miller Lite runs a sexist ad campaign. Again. [Bitch Blogs]
Planned Parenthood Arizona does some good work, but this writer thinks it's still firmly entrenched in the white "mainstream." [The Feminist Wire]
As the comic industry hems and haws about what their female readers want, one blogger took it upon herself to ask a bunch of women who read comics what they want. [Okazu]
Boardwalk Empire has brought prostitutes to premium cable again, and this blogger interviews an extra who played one. [Abortion Gang]
London was once the home of a ruthless all-female gang called Forty Elephants in the 18th century. [The Guardian]
A stay-at-home mom can't sleep because she's given up decades of earning power. [Salon]
New Yorker's fiction writers are mostly male. [The Millions]