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Halloween is a "yes" holiday—one day a year when I want to say "Sure!" and "Why not?" to all of the things I'd usually put the kibosh on, and one of those things is candy. Want to eat it while you're trick-or-treating? Fine. Want to taste that pack of red-hots I know you won't like? Here, let me open the box.
What started as just a holiday free-for-all turned out to have some unexpected benefits. Stopping to appreciate a really exciting piece of candy means the goal of trick-or-treating is to enjoy the candy, not to accumulate as much of it as possible. And opening up every piece at home, just to see it—a favorite activity of preschoolers—just means that's what's opened and uneaten can be thrown away.
I asked my dentist about the annual candy binge, and he shrugged it off. It's better to eat it all at once than every day, he said, and CNN found other dentists who agree. As far as cavities are concerned, it's not how much sugar you eat, it's how often.
The surprising result of our open-bag candy policy over the past six years has been kids who really don't eat that much candy. It's fun on Halloween. It's fabulous the next day. But as the pumpkins are packed up and the candy bags start looking bedraggled, they're more than willing to move on.
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In the New York Times last week, Joanne Lipman declared that women's progress has stalled because "we've focused primarily on numbers at the expense of attitudes." She tells one story with a precise tally: "In my time as an editor," she writes, "many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion? I'll tell you. Exactly ... zero." Reluctance to ask for a raise is, in Lipman's eyes, a problem of the prevalence of trying to be a "passive 'good girl.'"
Is she right that women don't ask for raises? Amanda Fortini, writing a response to Lipman on Salon, skewers the idea as "antiquated" and offers a counterexample: "My mother, who runs a marketing company, tells me her female employees do in fact ask for promotions and raises, often with a greater sense of entitlement than the men."
Who is right, in this sample-of-one face-off? Linda Babcock, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, has done research on this question. In her book Women Don't Ask, Babcock and co-author Sara Laschever discuss studies and experiments they've conducted, which suggest there is, in fact, a pretty noticeable discrepancy between men and women's propensity to negotiate for a raise.
One study compared the starting salaries of students graduating with master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon, and found that men's starting salaries exceeded women's by an average of almost $4,000. Because these salaries were set before the men or women had started working, Babcock looked at the process for negotiating salaries and found something startling: while Carnegie Mellon's Career Services department strongly advised all students to negotiate for their starting pay, only 7 percent of women had asked for more money than their initial offer. In contrast, 57 percent of men—8 times as many—asked for more money. Moreover, Babcock calculated that the starting salary difference for those who negotiated was on average $4,053 higher than those who did not. That number—almost the exact discrepancy between the starting salary of men and women in general—suggested that if women had simply negotiated for higher starting offers the pay gap would have narrowed dramatically.
Babcock and her colleagues followed this finding with a laboratory experiment designed to test women's willingness to ask for more. The researchers asked students to play the game Boggle and told them they would receive between three and 10 dollars. After four rounds of playing, the game ended and a researcher would give the subject three dollars, saying "Here's three dollars. Is three dollars OK?" If the subject asked for more money, the experimenter would give him or her 10 dollars.
The result? Nine times more men than women asked for more money—a discrepancy similar to the one in the study on starting salary. The women in the study rated their own performance at Boggle as highly as men did, and complained as much about the low $3 rate. The only difference between them and the men was that the men were much more likely to ask for more pay. So Lipman was on to something.
Photograph of stacks of money by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images.
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Jodi Kantor’s wonderful and voyeuristic reported treatise on the Obama marriage runs in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It’s absolutely worth the time to delve into the personal insights (and funny audio!) Kantor squeezes out of interviews with friends and associates of the Obamas, many of whom are now co-workers of the world-famous couple. My favorite: senior adviser Valerie Jarrett channeling a frazzled, midnight-grocery-shopping Barack, on the phone with a put-out Michelle, chanting “‘I’ll make it work ... We can make it work. I’ll do more.’”
Having had time to read, re-read, and digest the substance of Kantor's reporting, a few key themes stand out. The one involves the sacrifices Michelle Obama has made on the road to her husband’s presidency. Emily flagged the anecdote about bringing little Sasha Obama into a stroller to a job interview. But how about this?
... I asked how any couple can have a truly equal partnership when one member is president.
Michelle Obama gave what sounded like a small, sharp “mmphf” of recognition, and the fluid teamwork of their answers momentarily came to a halt. “Well, first of all ...” the president started. His wife peered at him, looking curious as to how he might answer the question. “She’s got ...” he began, but then stopped again.
“Well, let me be careful about this,” he said, pausing once more.
“My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think,” he finally said, to laughter around the room.
The question still unanswered, his wife stepped back in: “Clearly Barack’s career decisions are leading us. They’re not mine; that’s obvious. I’m married to the president of the United States. I don’t have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that—you can’t even measure that.”
What seems fairly awesome about the Obama partnership is the extent to which Michelle Obama both knows and vocalizes exactly what she has given up to be an unpaid figurehead in the East Wing of the White House—and, what’s more, how she maintains a sort of “you ain’t so great” affect when it comes to her powerful partner. No doubt much of this needling comes from the familiarity of 20 years’ acquaintance. But perhaps some of this comes from being a truly successful woman herself. In By the People, the soon-to-be-aired HBO documentary about the Obama campaign, Michelle ticks off her list of demands before embarking on Obama campaign number four—perhaps average for a political spouse, but still draining:
I had a lot of practical questions that I needed answers to before I could say definitively that this is something that I could handle. How is this going to work? What would be the schedule? How often is Barack going to be on the road? What would be expected of me as a spokesperson and campaigner? How would we structure our time to ensure that our girls would not be pulled out of their lives? How much would it cost us as a family? How were we going to handle financially me reducing my hours at work to be able to participate? What would the campaign do if anything about security?
We obviously got all those questions answered to my satisfaction and as a result we are now running for president.
One can easily imagine Barack, like Don Draper in the most recent episode of Mad Men, being lawyered at by Michelle before finally getting his way. So, while the first lady projects a traditionally domestic “mom-in-chief” image, she is acquainted enough with contemporary assessments of achievement and status to know that as a Princeton grad and Harvard-trained lawyer turned hospital executive and main breadwinner, she’s pretty hot shit as well. This is encapsulated in her adolescent confidence that she, too, could do Princeton, and continued by the game of asking Barack “What are you doing?” behind the desk in the Oval Office. What’s also lovely is that the president knows this, too. “She can puncture the balloon of this,” he admits.
The second interesting theme involves Kantor’s prediction for how the marriage dynamics will change once Barack leaves office.
[I]n three or seven years, the president’s political career will end. There will be no more offices to win or hold, and the Obamas will most likely renegotiate their compact once more — this time, perhaps more on Michelle Obama’s terms.
What an interesting presumption. There will be foundations and speeches, for both, for sure—but also lots of downtime. So what do Michelle’s terms look like?
Here I’ll point out that the story leans heavily on the ghosts of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in part, one senses, because the marriage is freshest in mind as a modern political pairing (Laura who?). One can’t very well compare the Obamas to Brad and Angelina, Bogart and Bacall, or Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, for that matter—as politicians, and as black Americans, their marriage is freighted with much more than celebrity. But Kantor’s subliminal use of the Clintons as backdrop (“theirs is by no means a co-presidency”; “The first lady may have learned from Hillary Clinton’s example the perils of appearing too involved with policy”) is not really fair.
Of course, the Clintons’ pathbreaking embrace of “two for one” democratic rule is the template; all else, including the Roosevelts, is prehistory. But the Clinton-shaped shadow also necessarily invokes the discomfort Hillary Clinton seemed to feel in her role as ambassador to the cookie-baking masses. Even in the hotshot, shoulder-padded 1990s, Hillary Clinton operated under gendered political constraints that Michelle Obama does not have. Though, like Michelle, Hillary was very lucid about the assets she brought to the adminisration (hint: not baking), the country rejected her assertiveness in what by all accounts was a stunning, hurtful surprise. By contrast, Michelle, "elected" in 2008, has been able to choose her own adventure as first lady, again, with a surer command of its pitfalls and potential upside.
To wit: Last week, I watched the first lady grin, bear it, and leap over hurdles and under ropes and through hoops in service of a larger aim—health and fitness for women and children across the country. It was a shrewd and yes, political manipulation of her celebrity—and the first lady seemed to have no problem being instrumentalized in this way. In fact, as Kantor reports, she is slowly embracing the cultural authority that can spark push-up wars and clear a dress from stores in an instant.
Yet, she told Kantor: “Why would I want to be in politics? I have never in my life ever wanted to sit on the policy side of this thing.” This suggests that her post-persidential "terms" may be very different from her democratic predecessor, who by virtue of being denied authority seemed all the more eager to seize it, with spectacular and inspiring results.
The White House aides and associates I have spoken with confirm that Michelle Obama has “zero” interest in a political career. But I’m still pleased that Kantor included a detail that suggests Barack thinks differently. As Michelle avers to have no political ambitions, “the president [had] faced forward, even leaning a bit away from his wife, but now he uncrossed his legs, swiveled and studied her, looking amused.”
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Were any of you uncomfortable as I was seeing the photo of Hillary Clinton in Pakistan wearing a scarf over her hair? I know given the magnitude of what she has to deal with there, that this a small, possibly trivial issue. But on the other hand, whenever I see an American female official (and this has been true of Democrats and Republicans) in a Muslim country with her head covered, I feel that this is not sending a message of respect for their values but failing to take an opportunity to show ours. It’s one thing to enter a house of worship and abide by the rules of attire. And there are also cultural norms of dress that should be observed anywhere—I don’t think you wear flip-flops to the White House, for example. But why should a non-Muslim woman visiting a Muslim country have to cover her head while going about her business? In Obama’s Cairo speech he explicitly cited his support for the right of women to wear the hijab. But as commentators have pointed out, the real issue is that often women have no right not to wear the hijab. In many Muslim countries women who are not “properly” covered are putting themselves in life-threatening situations. I would much prefer to see our female representatives give the tacit message that it’s a woman’s right to choose whether to cover herself or not .
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This week, I am attending the trial of Raymond Merrill Jessop, a member of a polygamous Mormon sect in West Texas, accused of sexually assaulting a child. You will no doubt remember the photos from 2008 of Texas Rangers storming the compound and carting off hundreds of children, from toddlers to teenagers. Since then, the members of Yearning for Zion have allowed select photographers onto the compound to capture innocent moments – feeding babies, slicing bananas and being generally wholesome, as a way to win over public opinion. Today, the trial created another opportunity to contemplate the power of images to manufacture a truth.
The prosecution is trying to establish that Jessop had a baby with a girl who was then 16; sexual relations with a girl that age is illegal in Texas, and although she is his “wife” their marriage is not recognized in the state. As evidence, the prosecution submitted several photos of the girl and her baby. In all – including the one on her drivers license – she looks calm, confident, extremely happy. Her maternal gestures with the baby seem utterly natural. There is one exception, and it will stay with me forever. Someone from the attorney general’s office came to take a DNA swab from the baby’s cheek. In the photo, he is on his knees, wearing white gloves, looking sternly at what seems to be a needle (it’s a Q-tip). The baby, then 4, looks terrified, and is gripping her mother’s skirt and back. The mother’s head is cut out of the shot, so you can’t tell her age.
The prosecution was using these photos to build their case but the impression they leave is exactly the opposite: Here was a woman, beaming and carefree, until a man from the state showed up at her front door, with a medical instrument. Visually, they confirm what Willie Jessop, the spokesman for the sect, keeps repeating. “There is no victim here. The state is trying to create one.”
Whether or not the girl consented is irrelevant to this case. Because of her age, the sex was illegal. And what does consent mean anyway for a girl who was completely sheltered and raised to think that being a teenage mother was the highest honor? That said, the state has had several of these girls away from the compound in their custody for months, and has not been able to convince any of them that they were coerced. She is now 21 and still a hostile witness. So at what point, for the older girls at least, does yes means yes?
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As far as Halloween costumes go, my results always seem to fall into the category “lazy but soignée.” (I long to invest in made-to-measure pearl-white silicone mask. I’d pair it a satin robe so that each year I could go as Christiane Génessier (played by Edith Scob), the once-beautiful faceless captive daughter of a plastic surgeon in Les Yeux Sans Visage, one of my favorite films.)
Anyhow, last night I decided I was going to lazily costume myself as a 19th-century amazone, basically a snooty horseback rider. The idea came from watching Coco before Chanel. The sentimental biopic didn’t inspire me, exactly. But it did reminded me that I had a 19th-century riding top hat somewhere deep in my closet. The costume would require minimal effort for maximum grown-up sex appeal: some glittery Shu Uemura false eyelashes, lace leggings, a whip, a cape, and some Nat Sherman gold-papered cigarettes. Who knows, maybe I could score some horse tranquilizer and store it in my chatelaine? Kidding.
But when I tried on the costume and looked in the mirror I started wondering about Chanel’s age at various biographical milestones. (At 34, you start wondering about the age of the female personalities: By when did they achieve X? What about Y?) With the help of Axel Madsen’s biography, I did a little math. For starters, Coco was born in 1883. Her first Little Black Dress appeared in Vogue in 1926—she was 43! This seems at odds with the popular Coco Before Chanel conception of her as some kind of savvy, jersey-loving orphan, doesn't it? Coco Chanel was certainly no wunderkind. In fact, we may even want to think of her as a late bloomer.
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Here's my favorite part of Jodi Kantor's really interesting portrait of the Obama marriage in this Sunday's NYT magazine:
When she interviewed for a job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, her baby sitter canceled at the last moment, and so Michelle strapped a newborn Sasha into a stroller, and the two rolled off together to meet the hospital president. “She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,” recalls Susan Sher, who became her boss at the hospital and is now her chief of staff.
Ah yes, the moment of bringing the baby where she doesn't belong. What I love about this story is that Michelle presumably got the job. Though, come to think of it, marriage and policy-wise, the "Be invincible!" message is not actually helpful. You could imagine Barack Obama concluding that his wife is managing fine, just as he was counting on.
More broadly, Jodi's piece made me think that Michelle has her footing as a First Lady who can handle the constricted role without being defined by it. Rebecca Traister and I went back and forth last November about whether Michelle was letting herself be "momm-ified," in Rebecca's phrasing. I held out then for Michelle's feminist cred. And I do think that when your husband is president, the rules are different. Yes, your power comes from him. But you have so much of it! Michelle impresses me in this new NYT interview by showing us how well she recognizes the tension. When Jodi asks whether it's possible to be married to the president and have a "true and equal partnership," Barack starts to answer and then subsides. Michelle, meanwhile, makes "a small, sharp 'mmphf' of recognition" and then says:
Clearly Barack’s career decisions are leading us. They’re not mine; that’s obvious. I’m married to the president of the United States. I don’t have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that — you can’t even measure that.
No, you can't. But she may be able to measure the impact she has as spokeswoman in the administration's effort to combat childhood obesity, her next project.
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For a giggle, and further proof that gold lamé leggings don’t look good on anyone, I direct you to “Male Prima Donna,” a spoof video dreamed up by the writers of The Office and performed by Subtle Sexuality, a girl group comprised of two Office regulars, the incisively ditzy Kelly Kapoor and new receptionist Erin Hannon. Like all great spoof videos, from Weird Al to Lonely Island’s “I’m on a Boat" to my personal favorite, “Let Me Smell Yo Dick” (which, OK, may not be an intentional spoof), this sounds like it could be a real pop song, from the vocal effects to some of the lyrics: “What you got, ADD? Add it up, don’t equal you and me."
The other lyrics are, of course, sillier (“You're cute but you think you’re blazing hot/ You're short and you think you’re not”), but do capture the central dilemma of being Kelly Kapoor. As played by Office writer Mindy Kaling, Kelly is a blissfully clueless mean girl, a pop-culture-obsessed ditz, who is bossy, self-important, and unkind (see that the song is performed by the “beautiful and mysterious” Kelly Kapoor and just “the pretty” Erin Hannon, because Kelly Kapoor totally designed the band’s website), but she’s constantly getting played by her on-again-off again nonboyfriend Ryan (who shows up as Mr. Understood in the video, the “OG Prima Donna, my rhymes bite like piranha”). If Kelly's a snotty brat, Ryan's worse, and she loves him for it. The song is about him, and the lyrics speak for themselves: “You’re the Male Prima Donna, but I can’t help but want ya/ I’m an independent diva, but I still kinda need you.”
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I have been stuck on a country road twice in my life—once in mud, once in snow. Both times were in the same Honda Civic, with the same fiancé at the wheel, on the same patch of the same road. This road is in Iowa. There is a sign before it that reads something like “Road Impassable During Inclement Weather.” You would think that my fiancé and I would avoid this road after seeing the sign in inclement weather. You would think that my fiancé and I, having gotten stuck once and having had to beg some farmers to pull us out, would thus avoid this road and avoid a second disaster. But the situation was out of our hands. The little green dot said to go down that road. We suspend all judgment before GPS. And as Alex Hutchinson explains in his solid article in The Walrus, GPS really does make you stupid.
Cognitive mapping is a skill that develops with practice and apparently atrophies with lack of use. The kind of spatial information relevant to navigating is stored in the hippocampus. London taxi drivers have famously large hippocampi. Cabbies who have been driving for a long time have larger hippocampi than those who have just started; the size is responsive to the frequency with which navigational skills are called up. Presumably, Mongolian nomads and Inuit hunters have hippocampi to die for. And people who stare at the green dot? According to Hutchinson:
The increase in gps use has meant that people spend less time learning details about their neighbourhoods. British researchers testing cognitive map formation in drivers found that those using gps formed less detailed and accurate maps of their routes than those using paper maps. Similarly, a University of Tokyo study found that pedestrians using gps-enabled cellphones had a harder time figuring out where they were and where they had come from. Their navigational aids, in other words, had allowed them to turn off their hippocampi.
When cognitive mapping skills go undeveloped, we switch to a stimuli-and-response model, which may be part of the reason I find it so hard to disobey my GPS-enabled phone. But none of this necessarily implies that we were better off with the badly folded maps tucked into the backseat pocket. Hutchinson ends the piece with a paean to the pleasures of getting lost. People who love to travel treasure that feeling of disorientation. In strange way that’s an argument for the technology; once you’re totally dependent on GPS to have any sense of your location, you can just turn it off and be blissfully lost wherever you are.
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When Mexico City decriminalized abortion in 2007, pro-choicers took it as a sign of great things to come, possibly including a nationwide liberalizing of abortion laws. Unfortunately, as Mary Cuddehe reports in the Atlantic, the Catholic Church and general sexist establishment reacted with outrage and doubled down on the war against women who want to control when they have children. Since then, 14 Mexican states have passed laws defining personhood as starting at conception, with some even going so far as to ban IUDs while they were at it. The result is that women have been going to jail for obtaining illegal abortions.
Though the anti-choice lobby in Mexico is as adept at affecting a love of fetal life as the anti-choice lobby in the United States, the largely anti-sex, misogynist underpinnings of anti-choice beliefs speak loudly through the laws. As Cuddehe reports, the state of Jalisco even adjusts a woman's sentence for abortion depending on her reputation and whether or not she had sex outside of marriage. And just like in the United States, anti-choicers dance around the issue of what to do with women who do abort. Officials in Guanajuato claim no woman has gone to jail for abortion, but pro-choice activists in the state say dozens have. It also seems that women who spontaneously miscarry also run into danger from suspicious doctors. Already a Mayan woman in Quintana Roo has been brought up on homicide charges for a termination she claims was spontaneous.
Complications and even death from illegal abortion in Mexico are a serious public health concern, and 62 percent of Mexicans believe that abortion should be legal. So why is this even happening? Much to most of the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the Catholic Church, which has chosen Latin America in general as the major front in their war against women. As Michelle Goldberg noted in my podcast interview with her, the Catholic Church has decided the best way to keep the flock faithful is to go after the abortion issue like a rabid dog. When you hear cases like the 9-year-old rape victim in Brazil seeking abortion, it's often because the Church seeks these extreme cases out and makes a stink out of forcing the girl in question to give birth. These cases work to show the extremes the Church is willing to go in its beliefs about mandatory childbirth, even as the rest of the world stands by and says, "Really? A 9-year-old?"
And in Mexico, women are learning how eager the Church is to run over them to prove its patriarchal bona fides. All the sentimental rhapsodizing about fetal life hasn't stopped an estimated 875,000 a year from seeking abortion (in a country with a third of our population). Off-label and black market use of the ulcer medication Cytotec is a popular method, since its main ingredient misoprostol can induce abortion. The problem is that using the drug this way can cause severe bleeding and uterine rupture, and indeed, 18 percent of the women seeking abortion in 2006 in Mexico were hospitalized for complications. But as the women of Mexico are learning, their health and well-being don't amount to much when their bodies can be used as a battleground for the war against modernity.
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