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- 40
As someone who waited tables throughout college, I was pretty annoyed with Bruce Buschel’s two-part list of 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do, which has been slowly creeping its way up the New York Times' top e-mailed items. The most obvious qualm: I’m fairly positive that no minimum wage job should ever require a list of 100 Don’ts. Of course a waiter should be courteous and timely, but more than half the tips Buschel proffers seem unnecessarily priggish, as if the act of taking someone’s order should be infused with the formality of aristocratic-era servitude. Take No. 43, for example: Never mention what your favorite dessert is. It’s irrelevant. Or No. 7: Do not announce your name. The insinuation being: Do not deign to think you matter, lowly servant. Apparently a $14 bowl of pasta buys you the right to act like a Rockefeller?
Moreover, there are maybe 20 worthwhile rules on the two-part 100 rule list. The others are either flat-out insulting (see above) or so absurdly obvious they’re insulting, like No. 33. Do not bang into chair or tables when passing by. God, how those silly waiters love crashing into things just for fun! Someone should warn them that’s not very nice.
How about a list of Don'ts for restaurant patrons? The first rule being something like: Paying for a meal does not automatically make you master of the universe.
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- 3
Over the summer, Sara Morishige Williams, the wife of the CEO of Twitter, tweeted while giving birth. A Minnesota woman named Lynsee has taken the natal overshare to the next level: She broadcast a video of herself giving birth on a local social networking site called MomsLikeMe and interacted with viewers while she was in labor. 23-year-old Lynsee, who would not give out her last name in order to protect her privacy (which apparently was not an issue when she decided to push out a person in front of thousands of other people), told ABCNews.com, "If I were in a classroom, I'd be teaching about development. It was a way for me to teach ... A way for me to use myself as a textbook."
Of course, there are actual textbooks and myriad shows on television that show the wonder of natural childbirth (see TLC's Birth Day and MTV's 16 and Pregnant). What bothers me about ABCNews' framing of Lynsee's story is that it assumes that she is merely a product of Generation Y, and that her contemporaries would see nothing wrong with broadcasting their births for anyone with an Internet connection to see. The article quotes Julie Taylor from the website MomLogic, who says of twentysomething moms, "For them, they've video-taped most of their lives anyway and they've grown up on reality TV. So maybe it's an old-fashioned notion to think twice." No, it's not an old fashioned notion. Most people of any generation don't want to be talking to curious strangers in the minutes between contractions.
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- 28
Emily and Meredith, you’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that I greeted the passage of the Stupak amendment with more of a cheer than a groan. However unfair it might be that well-off women have more access to abortion than low-income women, the solution should not be to compel those who are morally opposed to abortion to pay for them with their tax dollars. Just because the government recognizes a right to something does not mean that the government must also provide for it. If you can indulge me for a moment in a mildly absurd thought experiment (with emphasis on absurd and thought experiment), how would you feel about a program that provided guns to those who cannot afford them?
When this topic came up in August, Meredith wrote an article for Slate proposing a private fund to cover the cost of abortion for poor women. Citing data from the Guttmacher Institute, she wrote that it would cost $311 million a year to pay for abortions for low-income women. Compared with the numbers that are getting tossed around in the House and the Senate in the health care debate, that’s not that much money. If those who support abortion rights are unwilling to pay to help poor women have better access, why should those who are opposed be forced to pony up?
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- 6
For the past two weeks, I’ve been camped out in a west Texas courtroom watching the trial of fundamentalist Mormon polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop unfold. Sentencing begins today, and Jessop could face up to 20 years in prison for impregnating his underage “celestial” wife in 2004. The victim, 16 at the time of the sexual assault, never took the stand, and all the evidence in the case seemed to indicate that she was Jessop’s willing bride. But what does that even mean in an environment where girls are conditioned from birth to believe that marrying an older, powerful man is the highest honor?
In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, girls are taught that being a plural wife and mother is the only way to reach the highest rung of heaven. In this atmosphere, getting married at 14 or 15 becomes the next logical step in a girl’s life. They are into placed in marriages—"sealed for time and all eternity"—whenever the sect’s prophet deems them worthy, regardless of their age, according to the testimony of former FLDS member Rebecca Musser. Once married, girls must show perfect obedience to their husbands, who are viewed as their only connection to God.
Raymond Jessop, the son of the ranch’s leader Merril Jessop, is a man with considerable clout within the church, making him a desirable prospective husband. Now 38, Jessop has one legal wife, eight spiritual wives, and a sizable brood of 22 children and stepchildren. (And it’s worth noting that four of his wives were teenagers when he married them.) Things get more complicated when considering that the victim in the case was spiritually married at 14 to Jessop’s brother Ernest in Utah. A year later, FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs excommunicated Ernest Jessop and reassigned his three wives to Raymond.
This victim’s personal photo album, which the prosecutor used to prove that she lived with Jessop, spans both marriages but does not even take note of her husband swap. In the photos, she looks like a happy young girl as she interacts with her sister wives’ young children and helps out with the chores. It almost could be any teenager’s album but for the prairie dresses. In a later picture, she beams in a light blue dress as she clutches her own tow-headed toddler, looking every bit the devoted young mother. It is easy to imagine the defense returning to these images during sentencing, using them to suggest the state overreached and is now tearing up a happy family.
Others in the sect are convinced the state of Texas has had it in for them since their arrival in 2003, when the fundamentalist Mormons bought up a parcel of land twice the size of Central Park on the outskirts of Eldorado. Once Texas legislators discovered this, they voted to raise the state’s legal marriage age from 14 to 16 and tweaked the bigamy statute. Willie Jessop, the church’s folksy, baby-faced spokesman, saw these targeted changes as evidence of persecution. “Why would the legislature change the law to specifically target us?” he asked during the trial. “The government decided they didn’t like me but I’m not a criminal—so they decide to change the law so I am a criminal.” However, the FLDS formally renounced underage marriages a year after the raid at the YFZ ranch, perhaps in an attempt to ward off further scrutiny.
Photograph of two girls in Hildale, Utah, one location of Warren Jeff's sect of polygamist Mormons, by George Frey/Getty Images.
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- 1
Meredith Shiner and Glenn Thrush at Politico ask the question: Why does the GOP have a "woman problem"—i.e., a problem recruiting female candidates? This should be one of those simple answers to stupid questions situations, because the easy answer is that the Republican party has become the clearinghouse for straight white men angry that they have to share a little power with everyone else. Running too many women, especially women who don't play sexpot or crazed right-wing shill (Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, respectively), would send the skittish angry white men of the party fleeing, hands over their ever-vulnerable man parts.
Unsurprisingly, the Politico writers don't simply write, "Because the Republican party is run by people like Rush Limbaugh, duh," and call it a day. Not that they don't have a few examples of tone-deaf Republicans—such as Pete Sessions, who suggested that women should accept higher insurance premiums, like smokers do—but they balance that out with soft-pedaling remarks from GOP representatives using stereotypes about women being soft or pragmatic in order to explain this situation away. It's more pleasing to Republican egos to think of it in those terms, but if they're serious about recruiting more women, they need to look at certain cold, hard realities.
They could start by admitting it's not just that some Republican men are tone-deaf sexists, but many leaders are open misogynists with serious masculinity anxiety. Maybe they could admit that it's not helpful when Limbaugh uses the term "girl" as an insult, or suggests that power-sharing with women is the equivalent of castration. It might not be wise, if one wants to recruit women, to have your main propaganda network pander for ratings by sexually objectifying women while simultaneously raising the alarm about how female sexuality is ruining our nation. When the Republican base suggests that women should get cervical cancer as a warning to others who might consider becoming sexually active, that sends a signal that women are not only not respected, but openly hated.
But even if you rein in the rhetorical misogyny, you still have to contend with the policy issue. Rep. Deborah Pryce suggests women avoid the GOP because they have "a more practical, less ideological way of approaching life and, therefore, approaching politics," which is a nice way of saying that many female Republican politicians don't enjoy the way that the right wing of their party campaigns on Fear of the Vagina. Call in the Sandra Day O'Connor dilemma: When faced with an "ideological" law requiring that women get their husbands' permission before getting an abortion, O'Connor "pragmatically" rejected the belief that women are the property of their husbands. Not having your full human rights does create practical problems for many women, true—O'Connor herself faced that many times when she was denied job advancement after law school strictly because of her gender.
But don't expect much more from Republicans beyond a little public hand-wringing and some mild recruitment efforts. If they actually made the reforms necessary to attract more female candidates, they'd alienate the "God, guns, and gays" crowd that votes their masculine anxieties, and fears female liberation, gay rights, and someone taking away their phallic symbols above all other things. Without the angry white male vote, the GOP has nothing. It may not even have the female voters it does have now, who are much more likely to be married than Democratic female voters, probably in no small part because women relinquish their voting independence alongside their maiden names when they marry. But if the Republicans can't attract the angry white male voter, they'll probably also lose their wives. And all they'll have left are a handful of hardline racists and people who believe they can repeal the income tax with a well-placed lawsuit, enough to win perhaps 10 percent of the vote if they're lucky.
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- 3
Since the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which barred federally funded Medicaid from paying for abortions, the whittling-away of reproductive rights has almost always affected poor women much more than better-off women. We have in this country a right to abortion that’s relatively easy to access if 1) you can pay for it, and 2) you live outside the large mostly rural swaths of fly-over country where abortion clinics are vanishingly rare. The geographic gaps (here's a map) come back to affordability, too. If you have the money to travel hundreds of miles and stay overnight, then you can exercise your right to have an abortion mo matter where you live. If not, then not.
And now in this same dreary tradition we have the Stupak amendment in the House health care bill, which, as Meredith explained, will prevent health insurers from offering abortion coverage if they participate in the new exchange that’s supposed to insure people who don’t have employer-based coverage. Stupak extends the ban on public funding for abortion from poor women on Medicaid to those who are self-employed or work for small businesses or who otherwise aren't covered and make up to $88,000 a year for a family of four, according to the New York Times. Luckier, more affluent women with employer-based care won’t be directly affected. This is the price we paid for the bill to squeak through the House: More division of women between haves and have-nots. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg foreshaded such an outcome when I interviewed her last summer:
Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.
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