It hardly seems possible that, more than five years after Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, the highest court in the land is still deliberating the question of how outraged we as a nation should be by that long-ago glimpse of pop-singer flesh. Today, the Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to consider reinstating the $550,000 FCC fine on CBS, which was thrown out last year on the grounds that the boob flash (which lasted nine-sixteenths of a second) was protected by CBS’ rule allowing for “fleeting” instances of obscenity.

To the extent that I ever had an opinion on this by now absurdly musty controversy, I would have been on CBS’s side. It’s the nature of live television coverage that things (Bono's F-bombs, Janet's nips) slip out, and the constant threat of fines could have a dampening effect on networks' freedom to broadcast live, amounting to a kind of pre-emptive censorship. But given the drop in the bucket that a half-million dollar represents in the context of the bank bailout, what if we as a nation just pick up the tab for CBS’s fine so we never have to talk about this again? Here’s a litmus-test tip for President Obama as he begins his SCOTUS deliberations: Man or woman, “contructionist” or “activist,” just please, in the name of God, appoint a Supreme Court justice who does not give a prawn about Janet Jackson’s right nipple.

Tags: FCC, Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Super Bowl, Supreme Court

As of Friday, Britain has its first female poet laureate: Carol Ann Duffy. She is a writer who favors plain language arranged "complexly" rather than what she has called "Seamus Heaney words" like "plash." She is also openly bisexual and much has been made of that in the press. Coincidentally or not, America's poet laureate, Kay Ryan, is a gay woman who favors plain language arranged complexly too. Women are coming into their own, it would seem; just this weekend, I was talking with a poet friend who felt very powerfully that women were about to become a major part of the next generation of poetry here and abroad; she's a teacher, and she felt the power and range of her female students was extraordinary and, somehow, new.
Britain's poet laureates hold the job for a term of 10 years, unlike American poet laureates. They also have to write poems to honor royal occasions, unlike American poets. It'll be interesting to see what Duffy, with her slyness, does with those moments. Here's a poem of hers called "Words, Wide Night":

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Tags: carol ann duffy, poet laureate, poetry

I did a dumb thing over the weekend: I went to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I have excuses—it was raining, a soft spot for Matthew McConaughey—but they are insufficient. I don't think I've ever seen a movie for women that is so disdainful of women, and I've seen He's Just Not That Into You. Ghosts assumes that we're all so predictable and pliable that every single one of us—from the 16-year-old to the MILF (duh, this movie has a MILF), from the desperate-to-get-laid bridesmaids (are they any other kind?) to the heroine—would want to shag a man with no redeemable qualities except that he looks like Matthew McConaughey. Bongo McC is a handsome guy, but I remain stalwart in my belief that at least some of us could resist a sleazy, cheesy, untrustworthy, commitment-phobic, game-playing cad who says things like "Every night I swim in a lake of sex." Ew.

How does a film such as this, a chick flick that doesn't understand or even like women, come to be? I blame Judd Apatow, the director/writer/producer responsible for the ongoing bonanza in dick flicks, romantic comedies with male protagonists. (Thanks to New York's Vulture for noting that this particular rom-com sub genre needed a name.) These movies aren't a new phenomenon—Annie Hall, Say Anything, There's Something About Mary all qualify— but thanks to the success of Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, they're more popular than ever, with at least four similar films coming out this summer.

Now, it's not really Apatow's fault that some of the movies copycatting him suck—his movies don't suck—but Ghosts sucks so hard because it has taken a subtle flaw in Apatow's oeuvre and blown it into a whole movie. Meghan wrote in an incisive critique Knocked Up:
If Apatow tries to suggest that guys need to grow up a bit to meet women's high expectations, he, like his own characters, doesn't seem to get that maybe there's a lot more to women than these expectations.You might say his critique is muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women.
Apatow's male characters may have to learn a thing or two, but they still have richer inner lives, more imagination, and more spark than his female characters. His women are less interesting and less fun than his men. And in lesser hands than Apatow's, these lesser-than female characters become totally cardboard, as they do in Ghosts, and we're left with a dick flick masquerading as a chick flick that no woman or man could possibly enjoy.

Tags: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Judd Apatow, Matthew McConaughey, Romantic Comedy

Etan Patz vanished from the streets of New York City 30 years ago this month. He is not living in an alternative universe as a 36-year-old man who grew up on Prince Street in Soho, the middle child of a school teacher and a photographer who then went to Brown or Reed and became a journalist or documentary maker married to his college sweetheart with a 7-year-old little girl and a boy, nearly 5. He doesn't live in Tribeca near his wife's former office at the Department of Homeless Services. The man Etan would have been, if a very bad person hadn't stolen his future, doesn't exist. The 6-year-old tow head did not grow into a handsome sandy-haired man with an open smile. Along with his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, who weathered an unspeakable loss, the world was robbed of an independent spirit full of curiosity and joy.

I've written before about After Etan, Lisa Cohen's riveting book on the effect of the boy's disappearance on his family and the community, which is excerpted in New York Magazine this week. Etan was detoured by something terribly evil along the two blocks from his front door to his school bus stop at West Broadway in Soho in 1979 and was never seen again. The primary suspect for Etan's murder (the first-grader's small body was never found), Jose Ramos, currently imprisoned for molesting another child, was not charged for the crime. "Stan and Julie recognized at some indefinable moment that their son was never coming home, no matter what they said, so they stopped saying anything, turning away from the spotlight," Lisa writes. But, as long-serving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau prepares to retire, the victim's father has renewed demands for Ramos' indictment. With the 30th anniversary of his kidnapping approaching, it's worth reminding ourselves how the child who never grew up changed society's perception of danger to unsupervised children, adding a vigilance and parental fear that was, and sadly remains, all too necessary.

Tags: After Etan, Etan Patz, Lisa Cohen, missing children, Robert Morgenthau

One further—and purely speculative—thought about the conversation between Emily, Bonnie, and E.J. about the need for a woman justice to replace David Souter. And this one is based on conversations I have had over the years. I have heard at least a few powerful women lawyers who could be in the running for this type of gig say without reservation that they would never, under any circumstances, put themselves through the nasty, personal, and hate-filled confirmation process that has become almost unavoidable. (I keep thinking of Justice Alito’s wife bolting from her husband’s hearing in tears a few years back). One woman judge bluntly told me she could never do that to her family, no matter what the prize. Others have said they just wouldn’t want to go through something that was almost designed to make them look ridiculous or awful for all time. Just reflecting on the abuse that’s recently been heaped on Dawn Johnsen—Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel—I can see why. I’m not quite prepared to assert here that women have thinner skin than men when it comes to being called the Spawn of the Devil on national television. I’m sure many of the women on the so-called short list have endured far worse. But it’s a good time to recall the rumors that there were several highly qualified women ahead of Harriet Miers on President Bush’s short list, who all evidently took themselves out of the running for some of these reasons.

Tags: David Souter, Supreme Court, women