quotable

"Needing approval is a cultural female disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing." Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

quotable

"How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone." - Coco Chanel

quotable

“Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.” -Stephen King

homophobic chilean anti-domestic violence campaign

In societies where masculinity equals power and femininity is equated with weakness, it's no wonder that gay men and women are marginalized. It's frustrating to see women internalize that message and turn it against their gay bretheren. It's also not surprising in a culture where machismo dominates everything and everyone.

A recent Chilean ad has me deeply conflicted -- it's one step forward, two giant steps backward in dealing with societal attitudes about domestic violence. On the one hand, it's a campaign condemning violence against women, which is great and a huge step forward in a society where, on average, women wait 7 years to file a police report about domestic violence and 73% of women who die of domestic violence never even file a police report.

On the other hand, it's advocating calling men who are violent against women by a slur that demeans them as weak -- 'maricón' means 'faggot'. The rationale is that a man who demeans a woman is "poco hombre" -- barely a man.

"¿Es más macho el que maltrata, golpea o denigra a una mujer? La respuesta es clara: el que maltrata a una mujer es poco hombre", agregó la Ministra.

Gay groups are (justifably) pissed now backing the campaign. Clearly, a larger conversation needs to take place about what it means to be powerful and attitudes that marginalize the powerless.

En Chile llaman 'maricón' al que maltrate a una mujer
www.eltiempo.com
29 de Octubre del 2010
Es una campaña del Ministerio de la Mujer para reducir los índices de violencia contra ellas.

La ministra del Servicio Nacional de la Mujer, Carolina Schmidt Zaldívar, anunció que en Chile casi 2 millones de mujeres sufren violencia intrafamiliar y que una mujer es asesinada a la semana por su pareja o ex pareja.

La campaña, denominada 'Maricón es el que maltrata a una mujer', insiste en que la violencia intrafamiliar es un delito, pero invita a los agresores a informarse y a pedir ayuda.

"Esta campaña está dirigida al hombre. Es una campaña fuerte, potente, con una mirada nueva, habla claro y de manera frontal", dijo la Ministra al explicar que la violencia de género en Chile se basa en el abuso de poder y en una mala comprensión de la verdadera masculinidad.

"¿Es más macho el que maltrata, golpea o denigra a una mujer? La respuesta es clara: el que maltrata a una mujer es poco hombre", agregó la Ministra.

La campaña contará con los rostros del fotógrafo y presentador de televisión Jordi Castell, quien ha reconocido públicamente su condición homosexual.

"Cientos de veces me han gritado maricón y maricón es el que maltrata a una mujer. Digámoslo al que se lo merece", enfatizó Castell. De hecho, las organizaciones de homosexuales respaldaron la campaña.

La presentación de esta iniciativa coincidió con la entrada de la Ley de Femicidio, que tipifica el delito e impone mayores sanciones.

En Chile una mujer tarda, en promedio, 7 años en denunciar a su agresor y el 73 por ciento de las chilenas que murieron por violencia familiar nunca pusieron una denuncia.

SANTIAGO
Efe

the princess problem

I'm decidedly anti-princess. Hopefully, I'll never have a daughter who lives for Disney.

Enough With the Princesses! Forget about whether the new Disney princess is black or white. The problem is with princesses. Period.
By: Monique Fields
Posted: June 2, 2009 at 6:59 AM

There was Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan.

Tiana arrives this fall in the first Disney film featuring a black American princess.

Set in 1920s New Orleans, The Princess and the Frog tells the story of a young waitress and gifted chef who dreams of following her father’s lead and owning a restaurant. The trailer can be viewed online [1] or on the big screen in the previews of Disney Pixar’s Up, which opened May 29.

Tiana’s creation has been lauded as a milestone. She is a first in a long succession of Disney princesses, which began more than 70 years ago. The toys she inspires will acknowledge the beauty of young black women as children of all colors identify with Tiana.

Still, as the mother of two young girls, I fear I will be doing damage control for years after the credits roll.

In a recent New York Times article, critics railed on whether or not Tiana conquers racial stereotypes [2]. Forget about all that. The problem is with the princess mentality.

The princess mentality is pervasive in our society. Everything from baby bibs to bicycles is scrawled with the P-word. A mother has to shop long and hard to find clothing that isn’t glittery or pierced with rhinestones. Just when you think you’ve defeated the princess marketing monster, someone else shows up on your doorstep with the cutest thing ever.

I’m not the wicked stepmother when it comes to princesses. I just want a dash of reality thrown into my daughter’s entertainment from time to time.

Unlike princesses, my daughters, 4 and 2, will be disappointed. They will want something my husband and I can’t afford, or they will miss the mark for some achievement. There will be no magic wand to go poof and make their dreams come true.

While I’d like for them to run away with a prince and live happily ever after, they had better get college degrees first. All princesses need to have their own money.

Sure, they can dress up for dance recitals, prom and other events, but I’ll be sure to warn them that outward superficialities like glitter and makeup will not compensate for any deeper flaws some women try to hide.

Disney and other toymakers are selling a fantasy, pure and simple. What is troubling is when fantasy mingles with reality. Some little girls are telling anyone who will listen that they want to be princesses when they grow up. If nothing else, I expect a more ambitious and attainable goal from children who haven’t yet learned to read or write. Their goals don’t have to be engraved in their scrapbooks, but thoughts of becoming lawyers, doctors or entrepreneurs is a start.

A princess? Whatever in the world do princesses do? More importantly, how do they get paid? Real life is not a fairy tale, and few folks live happily ever after. So just what are we telling our girls when we dress them up in frilly dresses, dust them with makeup and put glitter in their hair before they really know who they are? We’re telling them outward beauty is more valuable than being responsible, trustworthy citizens who don’t always get what they want. If we aren’t clear what’s acceptable now, we’re setting them up for a time in the not-too-distant future when they want something they can’t have and have no way of dealing with rejection.

Consider this: Simone is my oldest child, and a few days ago, she rushed up to a dress in a department store and cooed, “Oooh, sparkles.”

I have what is called a girly girl—a child who only wants to wear dresses or what she calls big tutus. These days she even casts aside skirts, known to her as little tutus. Shorts and pants aren’t even part of her wardrobe. So she spotted this big tutu from afar, and it looked a lot like, well, a wedding dress—and she wanted it.

“We’re not buying today,” I told her. I distracted her with some more modest dresses, and then we walked away.

Not two minutes later, she scampered up to a counter. “Ooh, sparkles.”

This time she was in the jewelry department.

When the salesman asked if there was anything he could show me, as I arrived a good five paces behind Simone, I informed him we weren’t in the market for engagement rings and wedding bands.

Simone gladly skipped off to the next thing. She didn’t ask for or expect anything. But I shot my husband a concerned look. If she does this at 4, what is she going to be like at 14, when she may not be as easily distracted? Many girls grow out of the princess fascination, while others request the star treatment from their parents and friends for the rest of their lives.

I’m not going to wait around to find out, especially with a black princess making her debut later this year. As soon as I see an opening, the evil stepmother in me is going to pull Simone aside and tell her that princesses don’t make any money.

Monique Fields is a regular contributor to The Root.

tramp stamp barbie

I've officially seen it all.

At 50, Barbie's shaking things up. First, there was the awesome cougar Barbie parody. Then, I saw this picture, and thought "there's no way that Mattel would greenlight that -- it must be a parody," but some (undoubtedly now-unemployed) marketing hack did greenlight the Totally Stylin' Tattoo Barbie, complete with a heart-shaped "Ken" license plate. In China, she's getting anime eyes, a rounder face, and a softer (whatever that means) complexion.

TOYS: At 50 years old, Barbie gets tattoos -- and a megastore in China
By Tiffany Hsu and Don Lee
March 6, 2009
Reporting from Shanghai and Los Angeles -- Barbie turns 50 this month, and to shake off a midlife crisis she's getting tattooed and opening the doors to her first megastore in China.

The developments are causing a stir on two continents, not bad for a plaything whose global cachet has been sagging of late.

We begin in Southern California, where, just in time for spring, Mattel Inc. has released Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie. The doll comes with a set of more than 40 tiny tattoo stickers that can be placed on her body. Also included is a faux tattoo gun with wash-off tats that kids can use to ink themselves.

A spokeswoman for the El Segundo toy maker said it was a great way for youngsters to be creative with their pint-sized gal pal. But some parents are horrified by this body-art Barbie, labeling her the "tramp stamp" queen of playtime.

On her parenting blog, Telling It Like It Is, Texas mother Lin Burress sarcastically predicted that "Totally Pierced Barbie" would be the next to roll off the assembly line. Readers commenting on the blog chimed in with their own fictional "Divorce Barbie," who would take possession of Ken's accessories.

Burress, a 46-year-old mother of six, said she was fed up with companies pushing racy fare to kids to make a profit.

"It's just one more thing being added to the pile of junk, like push-up bras and Bratz dolls, being marketed to these ridiculously young kids," she said. "These so-called toys just create a sense of rebellion."

This isn't the first time Barbie has had some eyebrow-raising accessories. The Butterfly Art Barbie from 1999 had a permanent tattoo on her stomach. In 2002, Mattel released a pregnant doll -- not Barbie but her friend, Midge -- replete with an infant that could be removed from her midsection. Consumer outcry chased the product off shelves.

Mattel said the new tattooed Barbie, priced online at about $20 and up, was selling better than expected. There are no plans to discontinue the doll.

Meanwhile, Mattel this weekend will unveil the House of Barbie in Shanghai.

The six-story retail emporium is the brand's first stand-alone store in China. It's a multimillion-dollar bet that its 11 1/2 -inch plastic toy will appeal to Shanghai's material girls, even in this horrible economy.

"There's no reason why in five to 10 years, China shouldn't be the biggest market in the world for us," said Richard Dickson, Barbie's general manager, sitting on a lattice boudoir bench on the store's fourth floor, where girls can design their own dolls.

The store also contains a salon where moms and daughters can get facials and manicures. There's a restaurant and bar. Naturally it offers thousands of Barbie products, from branded chocolate bars that cost a buck or two to an adult-sized Vera Wang-designed wedding dress for $10,000.

Mattel is one of many Western retailers flocking to China to tap its growing middle class. Apple Inc. and Adidas opened their China superstores in Beijing before the Olympics last summer. Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and others have beefed up their investments, even as piracy and tougher local competition have cut into their business.

At the moment, Asia accounts for less than 5% of Barbie's global sales. The doll has been showing its age in recent years; Barbie sales worldwide were off 9% in 2008, hurt by the recession and competition from rivals.

Whether China can give Barbie new life remains to be seen. Mattel's recently opened store in Buenos Aires has been drawing crowds. But there are plenty of doubters who point out that you need only go into a Chinese home. You won't find many girls playing with dolls, let alone dolls with blond hair and blue eyes.

Dickson concedes that China's slowing economy will be a challenge, but to appeal to local sensibilities, Mattel has come up with a Shanghai Barbie -- with bigger eyes, a rounder face and a softer complexion. The price: about $36. The doll has no tattoos.

speaking of outrageous double standards ...

Jon Stewart on the Sarah Palin Gender Card

second-place citizens

Like many Americans, I've slapped an Obama '08 sticker on the back of my car. He's our only hope in the Obi-Wan sense -- our country just can't afford another four years of the GOP, and McCain will literally be business as usual. Sure, Obama's inspiring. Sure, he chose a running mate with great credentials. Sure, he's change we can believe in. But he wasn't my first choice for the job.

I got goosebumps when I heard that Barack, a black man, had enough votes to win the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. It made me proud to think that our country had come this far and the message that his nomination sent to American children and, indeed, the world.

But knowing that you can be a black man and be President isn't enough. Despite the 18 million cracks made in the glass ceiling, women are still taking a back seat to men. And that also sends a very powerful message to American children and the world.

Excerpted from Second-Place Citizens
Op-Ed Contributor
By SUSAN FALUDI
Published: August 25, 2008
For all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “breakthrough” candidacy and other recent successes for women, progress on important fronts has stalled.

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

As it turns out, they won’t have one. But they will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?

“I am sorry for you young women who have to carry on the work in the next 10 years, for suffrage was a symbol, and you have lost your symbol,” the suffragist Anna Howard Shaw said in 1920. “There is nothing for women to rally around.” As they rally around their candidate tonight, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters will have to decide if they are mollified — or even more aggrieved — by the history she evokes.

sauteeing and spying

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- Julia Child was a total badass.

She's one of my heroes because she broke all sorts of gender barriers and taught me, my mom, and most of this country how to cook French food. Now, there's one more reason to have her at my dream dinner table -- she was a spy and it would be interesting to hear about her time with the OSS.

Chef Julia Child, others part of WWII spy network - CNN.com
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

While Julia Child was cooking pheasants, she was also part of an international spy ring during World War II.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.

Some of those on the list have been identified previously as having worked for the OSS, but their personnel records never have been available before. Those records would show why they were hired, jobs they were assigned to and perhaps even missions they pursued while working for the agency.

Among the more than 35,000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President Kennedy; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather"; and Thomas Braden, an author whose "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s television series.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.

The release of the OSS personnel files uncloaks one of the last secrets from the short-lived wartime intelligence agency, which for the most part later was folded into the CIA after President Truman disbanded it in 1945.

"I think it's terrific," said Elizabeth McIntosh, 93, a former OSS agent now living in Woodbridge, Va. "They've finally, after all these years, they've gotten the names out. All of these people had been told never to mention they were with the OSS."

The CIA had resisted releasing OSS records for decades. But former CIA Director William Casey, himself an OSS veteran, cleared the way for transfer of millions of OSS documents to the National Archives when he took over the agency in 1981. The personnel files are the latest to be made public.

Information about OSS involvement was so guarded that relatives often couldn't confirm a family member's work with the group.

Walter Mess, who handled covert OSS operations in Poland and North Africa, said he kept quiet for more than 50 years, only recently telling his wife of 62 years about his OSS activity.

"I was told to keep my mouth shut," said Mess, now 93 and living in Falls Church, Va.

The files will offer new information even for those most familiar with the agency. Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society created by former OSS agents and their relatives, said the nearly 24,000 employees included in the archives far exceeds previous estimates of 13,000.

The newly released documents will clarify these and other issues, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

"We're saying the OSS was a lot bigger than they were saying," Cunliffe said.

do you wear nail polish? dress for breakfast?

I routinely put my ice-cold, candy apple red-painted toes on Leo to warm them up.

Clearly, that explains why I'm not marriage material according to this marital suitability rating scale.

attire for the thinking woman

I hate the trampy-is-trendy look because I think it's ho-rrific.

Working on a college campus means that I get an eyeful of the latest in women's undergarment fashion on a daily basis. I see the color, outline, and (often) the detailing on the thong, panty, or g-string du jour ... I'm a complete stranger and these girls have all of their wares out on display. It makes me very uncomfortable -- not because I'm a prude, but because I wonder if they're even thinking about what it is that they're literally buying into.

I'm also not a fan of the color pink (the infantilization of women -- especially by women -- pisses me off), and I've hated the Victoria's Secret "PINK" line (and Juicy Couture) since, well forever. It's not just that butts are used as billboards by teens and twenty-somethings, it's that PINK is slang for vagina. Say it with me, people: va-gi-na. That just doesn't have the same marketing ring now, does it?

Attire for the thinking woman
Aaryn Belfer
March 1st, 2008

Every time I see a thirteen year old girl clunking through an airport or a mall in Ugg boots and a matching velour tracksuit with the word PINK embroidered across her tender young buttocks in collegiate-style lettering, I can’t help but think there is something distastefully wrong with the message. So, I had a good guffaw-coffee-through-the-nose-hole moment today when I read that the CEO of Victoria’s Secret feels that her company has “gotten off our heritage” (wha…?…the woman needs to look up the definition of the word) by becoming “too sexy.”

The company, according to her, needs a return to their intended ideal of ultra-feminine and I have to agree, since there are a lot of things more feminine than women (of all ages) browsing the aisles of Costco, clad in Victoria’s Secret PUSSY PINK line? When I see that young girl obliviously advertising her vagina across her backside as she boards a Southwest flight to Scottsdale, smacking her bubble gum, holding her In Style magazine and squeezing the oversized teddy bear tucked under her arm, I don’t instantly associate her with ultra-feminine. Of course, it could be that the Uggs cancel out the feminine quota of the tush lettering.

In aiming for the über-femme, I think the CEO should take a more direct approach; a more educational, empowering, PSA sort of angle. I suggest she go straight-up blatant on the consumer with her ass-messages and begin offering a line with choices like LABIA, MONS, PUBIS, VULVA and CLITORIS. Maybe that’s too clinical for some, but I’d wear those pants long before I ever shook my milkshake with a euphemism for my lady bits plastered on it. Because those other words? Those words are ultra-feminine.

HPV and boys

Gardasil is the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. It's approved for use in girls and boys in Mexico, Australia, and the EU. (But not in the U.S.)

Of course it's controversial in this country -- if this were a vaccine to prevent breast, prostate, colon ... or any other cancer, I suspect that this would be a no-brainer to most parents. But because cervical cancer is the consequence of sex ... and affects women only ... it's not as important to most parents. (This, despite the fact that HPV can cause penile, anal, and certain types of head and neck cancers.)

Vaccinating Boys for Girls’ Sake?
By JAN HOFFMAN
February 24, 2008
HOW cool are those Gardasil Girls? Riding horses, flinging softballs, bashing away on drum sets: on the television commercials, they are pugnacious and utterly winning. They want to be “One Less,” they chant — one less victim of cervical cancer. Get vaccinated with Gardasil, they urge their sisters. Protect yourselves against the human papillomavirus, or H.P.V., which causes cervical cancer.

But someone’s missing from this grrlpower tableau.

Ah, that would be Gardasil Boy.

Gardasil Girl’s cancer-related virus? Sexually transmitted. She almost certainly got it from him.

So far, Gardasil is approved just for girls. They can be vaccinated when they are as young as 9, although it’s recommended for 11- and 12-year-olds, before they are sexually active.

As the commercials show, the pitch to Gardasil Girl’s parents doesn’t need to address sex: it’s about protecting their daughter from a cancer.

By 2009, the vaccine could be approved for boys as well. Although Gardasil also protects against genital warts, which are not life-threatening, the primary reason to extend approval to boys would be to slow the rates of cervical cancer. Public health folks charmlessly call this “herd immunity.”

Will parents of sons consent to a three-shot regimen that has been marketed as benefiting girls? How do you pitch that to Gardasil Boy’s parents?

Think altruism. Responsibility. Chivalry, even? Oh, and yes: some explicit details about genital warts and sexual transmission.

Madeline Cattell, an interior design consultant in Beverly, Mass., and the mother of two boys, ages 8 and 12, never paid much attention to Gardasil, assuming it was a gender-specific vaccine for a gender-specific disease. She was surprised that her boys might be offered it one day.

“You don’t want to say it’s just the girls’ problem,” Mrs. Cattell said hesitantly. “But my sons won’t contract cervical cancer. And genital warts are treatable. I’m very skeptical. What risks will I expose them to?”

Gardasil got off to a rocky start. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2006, for girls and young women, ages 9 to 26, it came under attack for its high cost. Conservative groups feared it would encourage promiscuity. But buoyed by recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Merck has distributed 13 million doses in the United States alone; insurance picked up much of the tab. In 2007, worldwide sales of Gardasil brought in $1.5 billion.

Gardasil protects against four types of H.P.V. Two have been found in 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. The other two types account for 90 percent of genital warts, which affect both men and women. Immunization gives protection for five years.

Sometime this year, Merck will submit data to the F.D.A. seeking approval to give Gardasil to boys. In Australia, Mexico and countries in the European Union, the vaccine is approved for boys.

“We have a very clear benefit that we offer to men,” said Dr. Richard M. Haupt, Merck’s executive director of clinical research, referring to the warts, “even if they don’t feel they need to have an altruistic reason to get the vaccine.”

Of course, many parents will automatically dismiss Gardasil. They view Big Pharma in general and new vaccines in particular with suspicion. Barbara Goodstein, a Manhattan insurance executive, who has a daughter, 10, and a son, 12, plans to refuse the vaccine for both. “I wouldn’t give children that young a shot without multiple generations of research,” she said.

A competing vaccine, developed by GlaxoSmithKline to protect females between the ages of 10 and 55, is being reviewed by the F.D.A. The company is studying its vaccine, Cervarix, in boys as well as girls in Finland. Cervarix does not protect against genital warts. Boys are being included in the trial to see whether vaccinating them will help eradicate cervical cancer.

That’s good enough for some mothers. “If there was a vaccine I could take that would get rid of prostate cancer, why wouldn’t I?” said Lisa Lippman, a Manhattan real estate broker with three sons. “If there was a vaccine that sons could get that would get rid of breast cancer, most parents wouldn’t hesitate. But cervical cancer is the ‘sex cancer.’ ”

A few reports show that American parents generally favor the Big Idea that Gardasil be made available to both boys and girls. But few surveys discern whether parents would consider the vaccine specifically for their own sons. In 2003, Dr. Elyse Olshen Kharbanda interviewed Boston-area parents.

“They didn’t see it as having much benefit for their sons,” said Dr. Kharbanda, now an adolescent specialist at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. “It was smart of Merck to get people excited about it for the girls, but now they’re stuck with that perception.”

Cervical cancer, which kills a quarter-million women a year worldwide, has long been a subject of urgent research. In the United States, about 3,700 women die from it each year; screenings like Pap smears have greatly lowered mortality rates here. But H.P.V. also causes a host of precancerous conditions: a study put the annual cost of cervical H.P.V.-related disease at $2.25 billion to $4.6 billion.

H.P.V. is the most common sexually transmitted infection. There are estimates of six million new infections in the United States each year. Yet, of more than 100 types of H.P.V., only a handful may result in disease. Most people who are infected have no symptoms and can transmit it unknowingly.

At least a half-million Americans each year develop genital warts, which can reoccur. But is Gardasil’s protection against warts enough for parents of sons?

“It’s not life-threatening, but it’s very stressful,” said Susan L. Rosenthal, a specialist in adolescent psychology at the University of Texas at Galveston and an adviser to Merck. “Genital warts are a really yucky disease and they make you feel bad about an important, sensitive body part. Psychologically, it’s not an insignificant infection.”

Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon, thinks that older boys may see a mix of benefits in Gardasil. “Being able to say to a girl, casually, that you had the shots, boys might think, ‘If I can slip that into the conversation, it makes me less of a risk and seem like more of a humanitarian,’ ” Dr. Fischhoff said. “So the self-interested and altruistic motives could actually support each other.”

Some doctors even envisioned college kids, gay and straight, insisting partners get vaccinated.

Down the road, the vaccine may have other benefits. H.P.V. also causes anal and penile cancers, which are relatively rare, and some head and neck cancers.

The burden of explaining genital warts to fifth-grade boys and their parents, as well as spelling out how boys could give girls a virus that could lead to cancer, will largely fall on pediatricians.

Dr. Evelyn Hurvitz, a pediatrician in Tonawanda, N.Y., is beginning to map out those Gardasil discussions. “If you have an 11-year-old boy in your office,” she mused, “the last thing he’s thinking about is having sex with a girl. He’s still thinking about getting past talking to a girl.”

Tough sell.

“Then you have the parent of a 15-year-old boy who might be sexually active,” Dr. Hurvitz continued. “And so I would say, ‘This is a disease he could give to a loved one.’ And then I’ll hear, ‘But our son isn’t sexually active.’ And he’ll be squirming. So I’ll say, ‘Maybe not, but eventually he will be.’ ”

Dr. Hurvitz wishes that Gardasil had been available for boys and girls from the outset: “It would have been easier to get across the idea that this is a vaccine to prevent transmission of H.P.V.,” she said.

A few prescient pediatricians are already laying a foundation. The other day, during Cathy Anderson’s 11-year-old son’s annual check-up, the pediatrician mentioned that Gardasil might become available for boys.

“He talked about taking responsibility for controlling a communicable disease,” said Mrs. Anderson, a stay-at-home mother in West Lafayette, Ind. “My first reaction was: ‘Well, that makes sense.’ Then I told my son he wouldn’t have to worry about the disease, because he wouldn’t be having sex until he’d been married for a long time.”

lead in your lipstick?

I've been following the beauty industry and its use of phthalates and other ingredients that are known carcinogens and hormone disrupters in cosmetics for awhile now. What floors me is how little mainstream attention is being focused on this issue -- I understand that Vogue and other women's magazines aren't about to kick their advertisers in the teeth by calling their ingredients into question ... it's the silence of the rest of the media that gets me.

Yesterday, a fellow grad student was re-applying her lipgloss, so I asked to see it. After reading the ingredients, I gave it back to her and told her about the campaign for safe cosmetics and the environmental working group's efforts to have manufacturers stop using certain ingredients and to disclose all ingredients used. She'd never heard of either.

Today, I stumbled on this recent article in the Washington Post. It's nice to see a mainstream paper giving ink to this issue.

Can Beauty Be Dangerous?
By Suzanne D'Amato
The Washington Post
January 27, 2008

Lipstick tainted with lead. Mascara that contains mercury. A hair-straightening treatment that slicks your tresses with protein...and formaldehyde? As three recent controversies show, sometimes the world of beauty can be downright ugly.

Take the lipstick debate. Last fall, a study gave women reason to worry about their war paint: The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics tested 33 lipsticks for lead, from Burt's Bees Lip Shimmer to L'Oreal Colour Riche. They found that 61 percent of the lipsticks tested contained a detectable amount of the contaminant. In fact, several lipsticks exceeded the Food and Drug Administration's lead limit for candy. (The study used candy as a benchmark not only because women ingest both candy and lipstick -- albeit in vastly different amounts -- but also because the FDA does not set lead standards for lipstick.)

Even a minuscule amount of lead is a big problem, says Campaign for Safe Cosmetics spokeswoman Stacy Malkan. "What the companies will often say is, 'There's a little toxin in one product and you can't say it causes harm,' " she says. "But none of us uses just one product." Lead is a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body over time, which is why tiny amounts ingested regularly (or in the case of lipstick, multiple times per day) could be hazardous.

Not everyone sees lead in lipstick as quite the issue Malkan does. "Lead is in our environment, even without all the industrial production of chemicals," says John Bailey, chief scientist for the Personal Care Products Council, a D.C.-based trade association. "It's part of the earth...I don't think it really warrants these alarmist conclusions."

Right now, concerned lipstick lovers don't have a lot of options. "The only way to find out if your lipstick has lead is to send it to a lab and pay $150," Malkan says. "I think that's ridiculous, to expect consumers to do that."

It's considerably easier to find out if your mascara contains mercury. Traditionally added as a preservative, the substance is rare in cosmetics these days. When it exists, it's generally in cake mascaras, such as those made by Paula Dorf and La Femme, rather than wand versions. You may see it listed as "thimerosal," a mercury-based compound.

In eye-area cosmetics, the FDA allows mercury if no other effective preservative is available. The concentration can be up to 65 parts per million. That may not sound like much, but the presence of mercury in any amount worries some people. This month, Minnesota imposed a ban on many products containing the substance, including thermostats, medical devices and, yes, mascara.

"It's a potent neurotoxin that can cause brain damage in developing fetuses," Malkan says. "Many women get mercury from fish and other sources. We don't need any more."

Bailey says that the FDA uses a voluntary reporting program for cosmetics ingredients; the program has no current registrations that report mercury being used in the eye area, he says. "We certainly can't count on a voluntary reporting program," Malkan says. "We need a real reporting system." To see whether any products you use contain mercury or other potentially hazardous ingredients, she recommends the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Web site (http://www.cosmeticdatabase.com), which lists information on more than 27,000 cosmetics and personal-care products. That may seem like a high number, but it's a small fraction of what's on the market, Malkan says.

The Skin Deep site is a useful resource: It gives each product a 1-to-10 "hazard score" and offers detailed information on its ingredients. But the site analyzes only over-the-counter products. Salon treatments are not examined -- and for controversial ones such as the Brazilian Keratin treatment, that's unfortunate. The BKT, as it's known, is a hair-straightening process that has smitten women in search of silky, frizz-free tresses. It also contains formaldehyde, a carcinogen.

"It is really, truly what I consider the miracle cure for hair," says Dennis Roche, who offers the treatment at his two Roche salons in the District. Roche says his salons use a formulation that contains "under 2 percent" formaldehyde. But he says the percent concentration is irrelevant -- what matters is the amount of formaldehyde that gets released as fumes when heat is applied. Roche says he minimizes that amount by using cool-air hair dryers and flat irons wrapped in heat-protectant tape.

"I'm going to continue doing this because I see the benefits from it, and I don't believe there's any health risk -- nothing more than hair color or fake nails or anything else," Roche says. "I don't think a little hair color is going to hurt anybody."

The issue, of course, is that it's hard to know. Beauty products and treatments don't have to get FDA approval before hitting store shelves; the FDA mandates such approval only for color additives in cosmetics. Sure, most people probably would agree that you shouldn't eat your lipstick or put mascara on a baby. But beyond that, the definition of "dangerous" comes down to different people's ideas about the effects of accumulated toxins. How much is too much? If experts can't agree, consumers can't be confident either.

"I love the way my hair looks. I'm so happy with it," says Roche client Lauren Stempler, who lives in the District and has gotten the Brazilian Keratin treatment twice. "But it's a hard choice....There is that nagging feeling in me that it might not be worth it."

femmes d'un certain âge

Reason #4,239,159 that I plan to grow old abroad.

French Women Don't Get Fat and Do Get Lucky
By Pamela Druckerman
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B02

PARIS

If I have to get old, I want to do it in Paris.

It's not because of the dank weather, the constant personal snubs or a fetish for unpasteurized cheese. It's because, quite frankly, I'd like to keep having sex.

In the United States, my odds would be grim. Through our 40s, we American women manage to arrange romps on a fairly regular basis. But the latest national statistics show that by our 50s, a third of us haven't had sex in the last year. By our 60s, nearly half have gone sexless in the previous year. Once we hit our 70s, most of us might as well hang up an "out of business" sign. (Needless to say, men fare much better.)

So much for the gym-bodied baby boomers who promised to make 60 the new 40, using Botox as an aphrodisiac. Among today's 50-plus women, the problem of sexlessness is as bad or worse than it was for older women two decades ago.

But not in France. Frenchwomen simply don't suffer from the same dramatic, post-40s slide into sexual obsolescence. Just 15 percent of Frenchwomen in their 50s and 27 percent in their 60s haven't had any sex in the past year, according to a 2004 national survey by France's Regional Health Observatory. Another national survey being released next month will report that cohabiting Frenchwomen over 50 are having more sex now than they did in the early 1990s.

Try not to hate them: Frenchwomen don't get fat, and they do get lucky.

The idea that older women are desirable goes right to the top. Before Nicolas Sarkozy hooked up with his new bride, 40-year-old Carla Bruni, a French magazine suggested some matches for the newly divorced president, including 50-ish TV presenters, writers and an extremely buff sailing champion. After all, Sarkozy, 53, had just been dumped by his then 49-year-old wife Cecilia, who had famously obsessed him and who had had no trouble finding other suitors.

This post-menopausal sexiness is palpable here. In the lingerie section of an upscale department store, I recently watched a gray-haired man earnestly inspecting the black lace bra and panties that his similarly aged companion had just picked out. "That's just what's needed," he clucked, handing his credit card to the clerk.

So why are older American women sitting around feeling bad about their necks, while their sisters across the ocean -- craggy necks or not -- are off being seduced?

For starters, Frenchwomen d'un certain âge have much better role models. Sure, Hollywood still employs a handful of preternaturally preserved actresses in their 50s and above. But even these women, such as Susan Sarandon, tend to be famous precisely because they've defied the laws of aging. And they're mostly denied unfiltered close-ups and romantic leads.

French cinema, however, is in the throes of a revival for 50-ish actresses, many of whom got their starts as fresh-faced teenagers in the early 1970s. These women aren't all airbrushed versions of their former selves, nor does the interest in them seem to be mostly nostalgic. "They have roles not as old women but as women. Which means they're still considered to be desirable," says Danièle Laufer, author of the book "50 Ans? Vous Ne Les Faites Pas" ("50 Years Old? You Don't Look It"). "Fifteen or 20 years ago, you wouldn't have seen this. I think they refuse to give up power."

The actress Nathalie Baye, who's 59 and looks it, has made some 20 films in the past decade, including romantic roles. She told an interviewer that at the 2003 César awards (France's version of the Oscars), Meryl Streep asked her whether "things were as difficult in France as in the U.S. for actresses of a certain age. I told her that thankfully, French cinema is very faithful to its women."

These French actresses are products of the generation of '68, France's sexual and social revolution. But in the French version, women weren't expected to forgo high heels and chivalry in exchange for equality. So it's not surprising here when successful women retain their charms. In the United States, the two can seem mutually exclusive. The right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh felt free to question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy in December by sneering, "Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?"

Of course, things aren't all rosy in French bedrooms. France has its share of lonely widows and divorcees. All the Frenchwomen I spoke to also stressed that older women must keep up their looks to stay appealing. Liftees are becoming a more frequent sight.

In the United States, men tend to treat older women who've done age-erasing work with either horrific awe or chaste respect. France is more sanguine. Last year, Paris Match magazine put a photo on its cover of a topless 50-something Arielle Dombasle -- looking like a reengineered 16- year-old -- to celebrate her new cabaret act.

American women seem to have internalized the message that wrinkles aren't sexy. A 2006 study called "Sex After 40?" led by Laura Carpenter at Vanderbilt University concludes that middle-aged women who live alone have trouble seeing themselves -- and others -- as potential sex partners. And then there's the famous demographic bottleneck: Men die sooner, and many of the ones left standing prefer younger women. Impotence can leave even married couples sexless.

All that happens in France, too, of course. But when the French writer Elisabeth Weissman interviewed dozens of older Frenchmen for the book "Un Âge Nommé Désir" ("An Age Named Desire"), she found that "they see in maturity a form of eroticism." French Playboy's photo spread on the 43-year-old Juliette Binoche in November carried text that gushed, "The more time passes, the more her inner beauty glows." Wisdom -- combined with regular exfoliation -- is sexy here.

Another reason older Frenchwomen have an easier time is that they're apparently less choosy about their bedmates. A study of older Americans published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 88 percent of sexually inactive women ages 57 to 64 had actually met a willing partner. But about half the women said that they hadn't met the right person.

This isn't just a matter of taste. The Vanderbilt study also found that middle-aged, unmarried men and women in the United States suffer from "sexual conservatism," even if they've been married before. For many women, the study notes, "disapproval of sex before marriage applies to every marriage."

Older Frenchwomen seem open not just to non-marital sex but also to the extramarital variety. Overall self-reported levels of infidelity are practically identical in France and the United States. But because the taboo on cheating is weaker in France, what would be guilty flings in the United States can blossom into long love affairs over here. "When [French] people have multiple partners, they have stable partners, and not one-night stands. This is not the case in the U.S.," says the French researcher Alain Giami, who co-authored a paper on French and American sexual habits.

None of the Frenchwomen I spoke to thought that married men made ideal companions. But all of them said that they could be a reasonable compromise until the "right" fellow comes along. "It saves your life, you live like a woman," says Nathalie Samson, 50, who dated a married man for six years until she met her current boyfriend. (He was single.)

Samson, who co-owns a boutique in Paris, isn't the lithe Frenchwoman of the American imagination. But she's wearing a stretchy black dress with a plunging neckline and flipping through pictures from her recent birthday party, in which her 52-year-old boyfriend gazes at her with obvious rapture. She describes this period of her life -- post-divorce, her three kids out of the house -- as her most uncomplicatedly sexy one. "Now there's just the seduction between a man and a woman," she says.

Older women in Paris don't actually look any better than the ones in New York. The difference is that the French typically don't see sex as a privilege for the young and beautiful. They see it as one of life's most basic pleasures -- something women or men would not give up without a fight . . . or in my case, perhaps a second passport.

Pamela Druckerman is the author of "Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity From Tokyo to Tennessee."
Via Leo

girls will be girls

An older, wiser friend once confessed that she was relieved to be the mother of two boys. She went on to explain why: a very complicated relationship with her mother, her ongoing battle to be comfortable in her own skin, and her conclusion that boys were "just easier" to raise than girls. (Her boys happened to be exceptional in every positive way back then and continue to amaze me from afar.)

Years later, the conversation is still with me. As much as I'd like to think that I'd raise a daughter or son in the same way, I know that won't quite be how things play out. The differences between the world in which we live and the world we'd like to create are very real. That's not to say that I won't encourage my children (regardless of gender) to dream big (and bigger), and to treat all individuals with respect. But there are certain warnings I'd give my daughters (or sons) about our society before encouraging each to keep the best of this world, toss the stuff that really doesn't make sense, and make their own realities.

The Way We Live Now: Girls Will Be Girls
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
Published: February 10, 2008

Hillary Clinton isn’t the only woman struggling to find an ideal mix of feminism and femininity, one that allows a woman to behave both like and unlike a man without being penalized either way. Mothers of daughters, even if they don’t support the former first lady, feel, if not her pain, at least her conflict. You need only look at the staggering success, in a publishing industry gone soft, of two advice manuals for young women, “The Daring Book for Girls” and “The Girls’ Book: How to Be the Best at Everything.”

Those volumes were inspired by “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” a gilt-embossed paean to old-school adventure that has nearly two million copies in print and caused a furor among the mothers of daughters who resented the implicit “Girls Keep Out” sign nailed to its cover. Aren’t today’s young women as eager — and as able — as boys to build a treehouse or shoot marbles?

They missed the point. The tantalizing chapters on building a go-cart and making secret ink from (presumably your own) pee were designed not so much for boys themselves but to induce nostalgia among fathers — who are typically the ones purchasing the book — for their own Huckleberry childhoods, those halcyon days before cable, Wii, Facebook and cellphones.

The girls’ books, which have a combined 1.6 million in print, do something entirely different: rather than hark back to — heaven forbid! — bygone days, they evoke nostalgia for a time that has yet to be: a girlhood that we mothers may wish we’d had but didn’t, one that we hope will prepare our daughters to be the kind of women we’re not sure we were fully able to become. Each book reflects a different vision of feminism, femininity and girlhood, but at its heart is a desire — or perhaps the fervent hope — for girls to have it both ways: to be able to paint their nails and break them too; to embrace whatever it might be that makes them girls in a way that will sustain rather than constrain them.

For decades now, girls have been told that “you can do anything.” “How to Be the Best at Everything,” originally published in England, might as well add “ . . . in heels and lipstick.” It promises lessons on how to “act like a celebrity,” “make your own luxury bubble bath” and “give yourself a perfect manicure.” This is the “I am woman, see me shop” strain of feminism, the one that’s given rise to mother-daughter spa packages and endless reruns of “Sex and the City.” Perhaps the shift from purchasing power to purchase empowerment was inevitable: once marriage and motherhood ceased to be the bulwarks of female identity, what remained to distinguish us from men beyond our God-given ability to accessorize?

“The Daring Book for Girls,” commissioned by the publishers of “The Dangerous Book for Boys” as a companion volume, seems to take its cues more from “relational” feminism, which argues that while girls’ psychological development, moral reasoning and “ways of knowing” may overlap with that of boys, they are also distinct and should be valued as such. “Daring” makes the case for a separate-but-equal female culture of play that, like its male counterpart, deserves resurrection and preservation. Any former girl — read: current mom — will find its chapters on jacks and hand-clap games irresistible. Yet the fact is that today’s girls won’t spend their lives in a separate sphere. As a nod to that, as well as acknowledgment that “different” can quickly be tagged as lesser, the book provides tutorials on “How to Negotiate a Salary” and “Finance: Interest, Stocks and Bonds.” Useful skills, but ones that probably will appeal primarily to mothers. Girls themselves, I’d wager, will see them as the equivalent of a granola bar in the Halloween bag.

And what of the girls, anyway? Which of these visions will they embrace? That’s hard to say. According to a study of how children ages 5 to 13 spend their time, by Isabelle Cherney and Kamala London, psychologists at Creighton University and the University of Toledo, respectively, and published in the journal Sex Roles, girls tend to become less stereotypical in their play as they age — choosing more neutral toys, sports and computer games — while boys remain emphatically masculine in theirs. There was one exception to that trend: television-watching. The viewing habits of girls become strikingly more feminine in their tween years.

Whether girlie or girlist, girls, because they’re allowed more latitude in their identities, can still be girls: Boys, on the other hand, must be boys — unless no one is watching. In another study of younger children, Cherney and London found that if ushered alone into a room and told they could play with anything, nearly half the boys chose “feminine” toys as often as “masculine” ones, provided they believed nobody, especially their fathers, would find out. That made me question whether any more expansive vision of girlhood can survive without a similar overhaul of boyhood, which, apparently, is not in the offing. Learning to “create an amazing dance routine” (as suggested by “Everything”) is still far more Dangerous for boys than, as their own volume suggests, learning to juggle.

As for me, I wonder whether my own 4-year-old girl will some day become hamstrung by the paradoxes of growing up female or will revel in them. Maybe, when the time comes, I’ll rip the covers off all of the books and let her make her own. That way, she can choose for herself what the new girl should be.

Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine and author of a memoir “Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother.”
Via Dana

know your place

Leo stumbled on this Uruguayan photoblog and there's quite a bit of good stuff here.

all you need is hate

With the California primary only a day away, most of my Dem friends are very split. More than a few have been spitting acid over the campaign. Some are hardcore Obama fans, others are all about Hillary.

If I were voting my values, it would be for Kucinich, who was never electable in this country, and who has long been out of the race. In the end, I'll support whichever candidate the Dems float against the GOP. It's the only sane thing to do.

Meanwhile, I found this article quite interesting. Hillary Clinton is a polarizing force. After seeing her speak last Friday, I'm all the more fascinated by the bizarre phenomenon that follows in her wake -- what Stanley Fish describes as Hillary-hating.

All You Need Is Hate
By: Stanley Fish
February 3, 2008, 8:02 pm
I have been thinking about writing this column for some time, but I have hesitated because of a fear that it would advance the agenda that is its target. That is the agenda of Hillary Clinton-hating.

Its existence is hardly news — it is routinely referred to by commentators on the present campaign and it has been documented in essays and books — but the details of it can still startle when you encounter them up close. In the January issue of GQ, Jason Horowitz described the world of Hillary haters, many of whom he has interviewed. Horowitz finds that the hostile characterizations of Clinton do not add up to a coherent account of her hatefulness. She is vilified for being a feminist and for not being one, for being an extreme leftist and for being a “warmongering hawk,” for being godless and for being “frighteningly fundamentalist,” for being the victim of her husband’s peccadilloes and for enabling them. “She is,” Horowitz concludes, “an empty vessel into which [her detractors] can pour everything they detest.” (In this she is the counterpart of George W. Bush, who serves much the same function for many liberals.)

This is not to say that there are no rational, well-considered reasons for opposing Clinton’s candidacy. You may dislike her policies (which she has not been reluctant to explain in great detail). You may not be able to get past her vote to authorize the Iraq war. You may think her personality unsuited to the tasks of inspiring and uniting the American people. You may believe that if this is truly a change election, she is not the one to bring about real change.

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.

Horowitz warns that as the campaign heats up, this “type of discourse will likely not stay on the fringes for long,” and he predicts that some of it will be made use of by Republican operatives. But he is behind the curve, for the spirit informing it has already made its way into mainstream media. Respected political commentators devote precious network time to deep analyses of her laugh. Everyone blames her for what her husband does or for what he doesn’t do. (This is what the compound “Billary” is all about.) If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.

None of those who say and write these things is an official Hillary Clinton-hater (some profess to like and admire her), but they are surely doing the group’s work.

One almost prefers an up-front hater (although he tells Horowitz that he doesn’t like the word) like Dick Morris, who writes in a recent New York Post op-ed of the Clintons’ “reprehensible politics of personal destruction” (does he think he’s throwing bouquets?), and accuses them of invading the privacy of opponents, of blackmailing and threatening women, and of “whatever slimy tactics they felt they needed.” Morris calls Harold Ickes, a Clinton aide, a “hit man” for the president, and he calls the president “Hillary’s hit man.”

This is exactly the language of the most vicious anti-Hillary Web sites, and here it is baptized by its appearance in a major newspaper.

Horowitz observes that there is an “inexhaustible fertile market of Clinton hostility,” but that “the search for a unifying theory of what drives Hillary’s most fanatical opponents is a futile one.” The reason is that nothing drives it; it is that most sought-after thing, a self-replenishing, perpetual-energy machine.

The closest analogy is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay.

the future of marriage

It's interesting to see the institution evolve. And encouraging to learn that mutual respect and egalitarian views, coupled with postponing the event until age 35, lead to higher marital quality and fewer marital problems.

Today, men rank intelligence and education way above cooking and housekeeping as a desirable trait in a partner. A recent study by Paul Amato et al. found that the chance of divorce recedes with each year that a woman postpones marriage, with the least divorce-prone marriages being those where the couples got married at age 35 or higher. Educated and high-earning women are now less likely to divorce than other women. When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views.

For those looking to understand it all, the entire article is available below, courtesy of the Cato Institute (yes, that Cato Institute, the conservative/ libertarian thinktank.)

Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » The Future of Marriage
by Stephanie Coontz
January 14th, 2008

Any serious discussion of the future of marriage requires a clear understanding of how marriage evolved over the ages, along with the causes of its most recent transformations. Many people who hope to “re-institutionalize” marriage misunderstand the reasons that marriage was once more stable and played a stronger role in regulating social life.

For most of history, marriage was more about getting the right in-laws than picking the right partner to love and live with. In the small-scale, band-level societies of our distant ancestors, marriage alliances turned strangers into relatives, creating interdependencies among groups that might otherwise meet as enemies. But as large wealth and status differentials developed in the ancient world, marriage became more exclusionary and coercive. People maneuvered to orchestrate advantageous marriage connections with some families and avoid incurring obligations to others. Marriage became the main way that the upper classes consolidated wealth, forged military coalitions, finalized peace treaties, and bolstered claims to social status or political authority. Getting “well-connected” in-laws was a preoccupation of the middle classes as well, while the dowry a man received at marriage was often the biggest economic stake he would acquire before his parents died. Peasants, farmers, and craftsmen acquired new workers for the family enterprise and forged cooperative bonds with neighbors through their marriages.

Because of marriage’s vital economic and political functions, few societies in history believed that individuals should freely choose their own marriage partners, especially on such fragile grounds as love. Indeed, for millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission. In Anglo-American law, a child born outside an approved marriage was a “fillius nullius” - a child of no one, entitled to nothing. In fact, through most of history, the precondition for maintaining a strong institution of marriage was the existence of an equally strong institution of illegitimacy, which denied such children any claim on their families.

Even legally-recognized wives and children received few of the protections we now associate with marriage. Until the late 19th century, European and American husbands had the right to physically restrain, imprison, or “punish” their wives and children. Marriage gave husbands sole ownership over all property a wife brought to the marriage and any income she earned afterward. Parents put their children to work to accumulate resources for their own old age, enforcing obedience by periodic beatings.

Many people managed to develop loving families over the ages despite these laws and customs, but until very recently, this was not the main point of entering or staying in a union. It was just 250 years ago, when the Enlightenment challenged the right of the older generation and the state to dictate to the young, that free choice based on love and compatibility emerged as the social ideal for mate selection. Only in the early 19th century did the success of a marriage begin to be defined by how well it cared for its members, both adults and children.

These new marital ideals appalled many social conservatives of the day. “How will we get the right people to marry each other, if they can refuse on such trivial grounds as lack of love?” they asked. “Just as important, how will we prevent the wrong ones, such as paupers and servants, from marrying?” What would compel people to stay in marriages where love had died? What would prevent wives from challenging their husbands’ authority?

They were right to worry. In the late 18th century, new ideas about the “pursuit of happiness” led many countries to make divorce more accessible, and some even repealed the penalties for homosexual love. The French revolutionaries abolished the legal category of illegitimacy, according a “love child” equal rights with a “legal” one. In the mid-19th century, women challenged husbands’ sole ownership of wives’ property, earnings, and behavior. Moralists predicted that such female economic independence would “destroy domestic tranquility,” producing “infidelity in the marriage bed, a high rate of divorce, and increased female criminality.” And in some regards, they seemed correct. Divorce rates rose so steadily that in 1891 a Cornell University professor predicted, with stunning accuracy, that if divorce continued rising at its current rate, more marriages would end in divorce than death by the 1980s.

But until the late 1960s, most of the destabilizing aspects of the love revolution were held in check by several forces that prevented people from building successful lives outside marriage: the continued legal subordination of women to men; the ability of local elites to penalize employees and other community members for then-stigmatized behaviors such as remaining single, cohabiting, or getting a divorce; the unreliability of birth control, combined with the harsh treatment of illegitimate children; and above all, the dependence of women upon men’s wage earning.

In the 1970s, however, these constraints were swept away or seriously eroded. The result has been to create a paradox with which many Americans have yet to come to terms. Today, when a marriage works, it delivers more benefits to its members — adults and children — than ever before. A good marriage is fairer and more fulfilling for both men and women than couples of the past could ever have imagined. Domestic violence and sexual coercion have fallen sharply. More couples share decision-making and housework than ever before. Parents devote unprecedented time and resources to their children. And men in stable marriages are far less likely to cheat on their wives than in the past.

But the same things that have made so many modern marriages more intimate, fair, and protective have simultaneously made marriage itself more optional and more contingent on successful negotiation. They have also made marriage seem less bearable when it doesn’t live up to its potential. The forces that have strengthened marriage as a personal relationship between freely-consenting adults have weakened marriage as a regulatory social institution.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the collapse of the conditions that had forced most people to get and stay married led to dramatic - and often traumatic - upheavals in marriage. This was exacerbated by an economic climate that made the 1950s ideal of the male breadwinner unattainable for many families. Divorce rates soared. Unwed teen motherhood shot up. Since then, some of these destabilizing trends have leveled off or receded. The divorce rate has fallen, especially for college-educated couples, over the past 20 years. When divorce does occur, more couples work to resolve it amicably, and fewer men walk away from contact with their children. Although there was a small uptick in teen births last year, they are still almost 30 percent lower than in 1991.

Still, there is no chance that we can restore marriage to its former supremacy in coordinating social and interpersonal relationships. Even as the divorce rate has dropped, the incidence of cohabitation, delayed marriage and non-marriage has risen steadily. With half of all Americans aged 25-29 unmarried, marriage no longer organizes the transition into regular sexual activity or long-term partnerships the way it used to. Although teen births are lower than a decade ago, births to unwed mothers aged 25 and older continue to climb. Almost 40 percent of America’s children are born to unmarried parents. And gay and lesbian families are permanently out of the closet.

Massive social changes combine to ensure that a substantial percentage of people will continue to explore alternatives to marriage. These include women’s economic independence, the abolition of legal penalties for illegitimacy, the expansion of consumer products that make single life easier for both men and women, and the steady decline in the state’s coercive power over personal life. Add to this mix the continuing rise in the age of marriage, a trend that increases the stability of marriages once they are contracted but also increases the percentage of unwed adults in the population. Stir in the reproductive revolution, which has made it possible for couples who would once have been condemned to childlessness to have the kids they want, but impossible to prevent single women or gay and lesbian couples from having children. Top it off with changes in gender roles that have increased the payoffs of marriage for educated, financially-secure women but increased its risks for low-income women whose potential partners are less likely to hold egalitarian values, earn good wages, or even count on a regular job. Taken together, this is a recipe for a world where the social weight of marriage has been fundamentally and irreversibly reduced.

The decline in marriage’s dominating role in organizing social and personal life is not unique to America. It is occurring across the industrial world, even in countries with less “permissive” values and laws. In predominantly Catholic Ireland, where polls in the 1980s found near-universal disapproval of premarital sex, one child in three today is born outside marriage. China’s divorce rate has soared more than 700 percent since 1980. Until 2005, Chile was the only country in the Western Hemisphere that still prohibited divorce. But in today’s world, prohibiting divorce has very different consequences than in the past, because people no longer feel compelled to marry in the first place. Between 1990 and 2003, the number of marriages in Chile fell from 100,000 to 60,000 a year, and nearly half of all children born in Chile in the early years of the 21st century were born to unmarried couples.

In Italy, Singapore, and Japan, divorce, cohabitation, and out-of wedlock births remain low by American standards, but a much larger percentage of women avoid marriage and childbearing altogether. This suggests that we are experiencing a massive historical current that, if blocked in one area, simply flows over traditional paths of family life at a different spot.

The late 20th-century revolution in the role and function of marriage has been as far-reaching — and as wrenching — as the replacement of local craft production and exchange by wage labor and industrialization. Like the Industrial Revolution, the family diversity revolution has undercut old ways of organizing work, leisure, caregiving, and redistribution to dependents. It has liberated some people from restrictive, socially-imposed statuses, but stripped others of customary support systems and rules for behavior, without putting clearly defined new ones in place. There have been winners and losers in the marriage revolution, just as there were in the Industrial Revolution. But we will not meet the challenges of this transformation by trying to turn back the clock. Instead we must take two lessons away from these historical changes.

First, marriage is not on the verge of extinction. Most cohabiting couples eventually do get married, either to each other or to someone else. New groups, such as gays and lesbians, are now demanding access to marriage — a demand that many pro-marriage advocates oddly interpret as an attack on the institution. And a well-functioning marriage is still an especially useful and effective method of organizing interpersonal commitments and improving people’s well-being. But in today’s climate of gender equality and personal choice, we must realize that successful marriages require different traits, skills, and behaviors than in the past.

Marriages used to depend upon a clear division of labor and authority, and couples who rejected those rules had less stable marriages than those who abided by them. In the 1950s, a woman’s best bet for a lasting marriage was to marry a man who believed firmly in the male breadwinner ideal. Women who wanted a “MRS degree” were often advised to avoid the “bachelor’s” degree, since as late as 1967 men told pollsters they valued a woman’s cooking and housekeeping skills above her intelligence or education. Women who hadn’t married by age 25 were less likely to ever marry than their more traditional counterparts, and studies in the 1960s suggested that if they did marry at an older age than average they were more likely to divorce. When a wife took a job outside the home, this raised the risk of marital dissolution.

All that has changed today. Today, men rank intelligence and education way above cooking and housekeeping as a desirable trait in a partner. A recent study by Paul Amato et al. found that the chance of divorce recedes with each year that a woman postpones marriage, with the least divorce-prone marriages being those where the couples got married at age 35 or higher. Educated and high-earning women are now less likely to divorce than other women. When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views.

So there is no reason to give up on building successful marriages — but we won’t do it by giving people outdated advice about gender roles. We may be able to bring the divorce rate down a little further — but since one method of doing that is to get more people to delay marriage, this will probably lead to more cohabitation. We may also be able to reverse last year’s uptick in teen births and return to the downward course of the late 1990s and first few years of the 21st century — but not by teaching abstinence-only to young people who if they do delay marriage are almost certainly going to have sex beforehand.

The second lesson of history is that the time has passed when we can construct our social policies, work schedules, health insurance systems, sex education programs — or even our moral and ethical beliefs about who owes what to whom — on the assumption that all long-term commitments and care-giving obligations should or can be organized through marriage. Of course we must seek ways to make marriage more possible for couples and to strengthen the marriages they contract. But we must be equally concerned to help couples who don’t marry become better co-parents, to help single parents and cohabiting couples meet their obligations, and to teach divorced parents how to minimize their conflicts and improve their parenting.

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more successfully?” Much recent hysteria to the contrary, we know a lot about how to do that. We should devote more of our energies to getting that research out and less to fantasizing about a return to a mythical Golden Age of marriage of the past.

—

Stephanie Coontz teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families (www.contemporaryfamilies.org). Her most recent book is Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.

looking for a first

Via TIME

how a UNICEF photo makes the west's heart ache

I am thankful each and every day that I was born in the time, place, and class that I was. Each give me choices (freedoms, if you will) that I would not have otherwise. I don't take those for granted and cannot sit in silence when I learn about injustice.

Case in point: it's hard to stomach this child bride and the circumstances that led to her wedding and the inevitable (?) outcome for her life. Call me judgemental if you must. But that won't keep me from being outraged and encouraging others to take action, too.

This sobering image, showing a 40-year-old groom sitting beside his 11-year-old
future bride in Afghanistan, brought Stephanie Sinclair top honors in the annual
Photo of the Year contest sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund
(UNICEF).

Opinion: How a UNICEF Photo Makes the West's Heart Ache
SPIEGEL ONLINE - December 20, 2007, 05:03 PM
An 11-year-old child bride sits next to her 40-year-old fiance. For UNICEF, this was the Photo of the Year. Dutch writer Leon de Winter laments the perversity of this wedding picture and the frightening relativism of the West.

There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual -- without disgust, nausea and rage. We are beholding the fiercest barbarism imaginable. But a carefree cultural relativism -- which this age has donned as its outward manifestation of decadent indifference -- allows many to simply look away. They turn away from the sight of an 11-year-old girl, who is about to be raped by the man sitting next to her.

PHOTO GALLERY: UNICEF PHOTOS OF THE YEAR 2007

The girl was sold by her parents, even if they probably wouldn't use that word. The caption that came with the photo quoted the parents as saying that they "needed the money."

The girl's soon-to-be husband promised to send his 11-year-old bride to school, but the women living there in the village of Damarda in Afghanistan's Ghor province don't believe this fairytale. They predict that the girl will bear children soon. "Our men don't need educated women," they point out.

A dowry was paid for the girl. The dowry is part of the cultural fabric of the clan-based society. As producers of newborns, women are valuable possessions. A woman can bear sons and fighters, who will defend the family and its honor. Men are only charged with protecting them against kidnappers and thieves, and women need only accept the power of the male members of the family -- "for their own benefit."

Love Is a Word from the Decadent West
It is likely that all of the female forebears of the girl in the photograph were likewise sold -- and the girl, no doubt, saw it as her fate. At the same time, she realizes that what is happening to her is not right. She might think it is "natural" for a young girl to be sold, but she also knows that it's neither good nor legitimate for her to spend the rest of her life as this man's slave. It is a type of knowledge that has little to do with experience. Rather, it is knowledge that is rooted in humanity, and in the hopes and dreams of a little girl.

The man in the image is oblivious of his wrongdoing. He's only doing what his forefathers did. Sticking to traditions increases the chances of survival. His seed will create a new person and strengthen the clan. He will impregnate this girl without love and without regret, since love is a word from far-off stories and songs, a word from the decadent West, where people have no comprehension of the harshness of life in the desert and of war without end, which is the essence of life in this part of the world.
What we witness in this photograph is an unadorned view of humanity's collective past, of the horror of our brutal nature. Love, tenderness, beauty, individuality and respect are all phenomena that we have imposed upon our nature. Since time immemorial, this nature has allowed only the strongest to survive. In our Western consciousness, we have suppressed this nature with conviction and success. This image shows a small, everyday moment that wouldn't surprise anyone in the Taliban -- but looks quite different to our eyes.

A Bold Statement in the Era of Political Correctness
Our eyes behold an abomination. Our eyes have learned to see the world from the perspective of a slowly acquired sense for humanity. And although more and more voices tell us that we -- the former colonialists and imperialists -- have lost the right to judge other cultures, we know just as well as this girl that this marriage is wrong.

I believe that there are regressive cultures. In an era of political correctness, this is a tricky statement. But there is no other statement that can be made about this image. We behold a regressive man, who is taking what he has purchased.

Many of us in the West are convinced that our presence in Afghanistan cannot be justified, that our troops should withdraw and that Afghanistan should be left to the Afghans. They ask themselves: Who are we to believe that it is inhumane to sell an 11-year-old girl? Who are we to impose our values so vehemently on the Afghans, on this man and on this girl?

I don't have a clue who we are. But I know that this universe is not only a universe of iPods, Disneylands, CO2 penalties, tax write-offs, and New Year's sales in our department stores. No, I know that this is also a universe of human rights. I know that this universe is deeply shaken -- right down to its core -- by the suffering of this lonely, lonely little girl.
Via Leo