In Your Comeback today, Emma Gilbey Keller asks for stories from women who out-earn their mates. We know you’re out there; one in three married women is in such a position today, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you’re racking in the cash while your husband pursues his low-paying dream, spends time with the kids, rebounds from a layoff, or works as your executive assistant, Emma wants to hear about it. E-mail her at emma@thecomebackbook.com, and she may post your response.

Tags: recession, salaries, work

Here’s something I’m keeping an eye on. Abby Johnson resigned as the director of the Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, after viewing an ultrasound of an abortion. The impact of ultrasound on abortion is interesting—Slate’s Will Saletan has written about it before—but what has me intrigued is that Johnson says she became conflicted because “she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions,” and that the organization was “changing it's business model from one that pushed prevention, to one that focused on abortion.”

If Johnson is right, that would be troubling but not surprising. While the number of abortions performed in the United States has been steadily declining, the number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood has been increasing. As a pro-lifer, I am conflicted about Planned Parenthood myself. The clinics offer lower-cost birth control to women who might not otherwise be able to afford it, which is a good thing for all of us who are interested in reducing abortions, not punishing people for having sex. But it’s also the nation’s largest abortion provider. If Planned Parenthood IS emphasizing abortion over birth control to help its financial situation, expect the right to be up in arms, and expect cries for the group to lose its federal funding to grow louder. (Rep. Mike Pence has introduced a bill in the House to do just that.)

What’s mysterious to me about this whole story, though, is that Planned Parenthood got restraining orders against Johnson and the pro-life group with which she is now working. The order says that “Planned Parenthood would be irreparably harmed by the disclosure of certain information, but does not bar Johnson or Coalition For Life volunteers from the premises.” Is Planned Parenthood going to such lengths to keep Johnson from discussing its “business model”? I don't want to jump to conclusions. But I will be watching.

Tags: Abby Johnson, abortion, birth control, planned parenthood

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HBO’s critically acclaimed show about the gritty, druggy streets of Baltimore just received some lofty Ivy League accolades. Next year, Harvard University is planning to offer a class on The Wire, which, according to Harvard professor William J. Wilson, “has done more to enhance our understanding of the systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the poor than any published study.”

I imagine some parents balking at the idea of shelling out $40,000 a year to fund a semester of TV-watching, but I’m all for televisual learning, especially when it comes to The Wire. Specifically because the show seems deliberately set up to be as much urban poverty screed as it is entertainment: It offers a broad, realistic view of urban detriment without turning the dark underbelly of Body-more, Murdaland into your everyday, sensationalist crime porn (ahem, CSI, Law & Order). The criminal characters are as complex as any of the detectives, and more often than not the real perp is the larger system that sucks up the poor and spews them out as ground-level pawns in an impossible-to-climb crime pyramid. The good guys, too, are imperfect; McNulty is essentially a human metaphor for pyrrhic victory, simultaneously drowning himself in whiskey as he wins battles against the infinite criminal network.

The Crimson article announcing the new course also points out that Sonja Sohn, the actress who plays Kima on the show, has set up a nonprofit organization called ReWired for Change intended to educate and offer options to underprivileged Baltimore youth. This fact gets at what is probably the show’s greatest success—and definitely a reason why it's worth studying—it has intentionally, and with impressive finesse, pushed urban poverty, an issue that no one could bother themselves to be concerned about five years ago, back into the limelight.

Tags: Harvard, HBO, The Wire, urban poverty

Emily Nussbaum, who has been suspiciously circling Courtney Cox’s new sitcom Cougar Town for weeks, finally makes the essay-length case against the show in this week’s New York: Cox’s Jules Cobb is no Samantha Jones.

The Samantha Jones iconography has gone retro, regressing to a Cathy cartoon in heels. Jules Cobb, the divorced ninny played by Cox, might date younger men but she’s no cougar. Instead, she is a prisoner of Cosmo (or maybe just L.A.), shrieking so relentlessly about her body’s disintegration you’d think the woman’s face was falling off in chunks à la Poltergeist. Samantha Jones might have been a cartoon, but she was a cartoon who loved pleasure. When Cougar Town talks dirty, it’s not really about sex. Or rather, it’s about sex as a measuring stick: proof you’re hot enough to make men want to have sex with you.

But comparing Jules to Samantha is like comparing a mealy apple to a juicy orange: Yes, one is better, but that still doesn’t make them the same fruit.

Nussbaum is right about so much about Cougar Town. (Although in her focused attack she glosses over the fact that the show can be very funny—loose, zany, silly—not always thanks to Cox, who is in full screechy Monica mode, aiming for big laughs in the cheap seats with every single over-the-top line reading). She’s right that the actresses’ very obvious, real-life plastic surgeries are the liposuctioned elephants in the room. (Christa Miller, who appeared on The Drew Carey Show and Scrubs, and plays Cox’s fortysomething bestie, appeared so altered in the pilot she was hard to look at. Her husband, Bill Lawrence, is the show’s creator. Yikes.) Nussbaum’s right that jokes about not eating in front of your girlfriends aren’t funny. She’s right that Jules’ rule about not having sex with a guy for 10 dates is bizarre, nonsensical, and belittling.

Mostly, she’s right that Jules is no cougar. But I don’t think that’s the insult that Nussbaum means it to be, whatever the title of the show. No, Jules isn’t a cougar and that’s the whole point—she’s a wannabe. Samantha Jones may well be, as Nussbaum says, “the greatest TV cougar of our time,” but she was also a superhero. “It wasn’t her sex drive that was appealing so much as her lunatic self-confidence,” Nussbaum incisively observes. “She was so breezily self-assured in her desires that she redefined narcissism as something positive.” Samantha’s total lack of insecurity made her a heroine, but it also made her not-quite-human: There may be some women (and men) walking around with Sam’s uncanny self-confidence, but they are few and far between, and none of them are the chicks self-identifying as cougars. All the women who enjoy that title, the Real Housewives who “love the term,” as Nussbaum says, are fascinating because their self-professed confidence jars with their constant need to identify themselves as part of a trend, their obsession with appearance and youth, and a sexual ethos modeled on the unattractive behavior of crisis-ridden middle-aged men and immature twentysomethings.

In other words, in the "wild" and not on Sex and The City, being a cougar isn’t about being confident and cool and Samantha Jones-y, it’s about aspiring to be all of those things. Jules Cobb, with her shrieking insecurity, her unwillingness to nibble on cookies in front of her lifelong friends, her interest in sex, but also her interest in being deemed hot and her desire to loosen up by creating more rules, is nothing if not aspiring, and it can be uncomfortable and annoying to watch, both because it’s supposed to be, and because the show isn’t hitting all of its marks. If and when Cougar Town turns into the best show it could be, Jules won’t do nonsensical things like waiting 10 dates to have sex, but she still won’t be anything like Samantha.

Tags: cougar town, Courtney Cox, Television

I usually love Charles Pierce's writing, but this recent piece in which he tries to allocate some of the blame for the surge in right-wing paranoia simply fails to make its point, and veers ever so slightly into the victim-blaming arena. It's tempting to suggest that if Obama made better choices, especially with regard to his appointments, then this whole right-wing freak-out wouldn't be so bad, but it simply isn't true.

The assertion that Obama stirred right-wing populism by combining Big Business with Big Government particularly rings false for two major reasons. One, this so-called "populist" movement coming from the right—while envigorated by old-fashioned racism, sexism, and conservative Christianity—loves capitalism and worships Big Business nearly as much as Misogynist Blue-Eyed Jesus. The bailouts aren't popular, but I suspect that's in part because the right-wing pundits are more interested in getting Obama out than saving the economy, and so they'll oppose any move Obama makes, whether it's wise or not. Certainly the people playing deficit hawk right now were absolutely silent when Bush started the astoundingly expensive Iraq War.

Two, outside of the bank and car-industry bailouts, I don't really believe that most of the paranoid right-wingers actually have any real understanding of what Obama's policies even are. Take the health care reform process. Pierce points to the way insurance companies have controlled the whole thing, and to the fact that the teabaggers have made resisting health care reform their main activity, and wrongly concludes that teabaggers object to the insurance companies' part in this. The problem with this is that the teabaggers have made it clear that they are protesting "socialized" medicine, and they seem to be under the impression that the health care bill would essentially start an American version of the U.K.'s National Health Services, where doctors tend to work under exclusive contract with the NHS. Republicans and even folks like Joe Lieberman have gone out of their way to confuse the issue, implying that the public option is basically a form of NHS-style free health care. (I wish.)

No, I'd say health care reform has become a focal point for the paranoid right because they see it as they see all social spending as an attempt by "them" to take money from "us." Health care reform is the 21st century version of Reagan's Cadillac-driving welfare queen. The elderly people worried about losing their Medicare show us exactly what the belief is—that Obama is going to handsomely finance Cadillac health care for young, poor, and nonwhite people, and will take money from elderly white people to do so. We can't use reality to determine what motivates the right-wing freak-outs, because the right-wing nuts don't care about the facts.

As for the question of appointments, the track record shows that far from targeting people with unsavory ties to Big Business, the right-wing paranoids are more interested in taking out people who fit into the traditional right-wing enemies list: environmentalists (double points for being black), supporters of the arts, and gay people.

I'm not sure how Charles Pierce thinks that we can crack down on the paranoid right-wingers to keep this from spiraling out of control. He cites the case in which a Fredricktown, Ohio parade organizer blocked a couple from running a float built around their anti-Obama conspiracy theories, and suggests that the administration take notes. But the FBI is already following right-wing extremists, and the Secret Service has already asked for more funding to keep up with the death threats against Obama. There's not much else you can do. We should remember how the Clinton administration decided to take a hard line with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the result was not only the loss of 76 lives, but also gave the hard right a group of martyrs to gather around. I'd hope that Obama is wise enough to learn from Clinton's mistake and take a softer hand.

Tags: health care reform, Obama, right wing nuts