A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:

There's something a little different about the State Department's most recent annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released Tuesday. Under former Secretary Rice, the reports’ introductions cast the U.S. as a crusader against the evils of human trafficking. "President George W. Bush has committed the United States Government to lead in combating this serious 21st century challenge," she wrote in 2007. But Secretary Clinton admits that America has its own “struggle with modern day slavery.” Indeed, on the same day that the report was released, an Atlanta-based coalition was at the Georgia Capitol, arguing that we have to pay attention to “what's happening under our own noses with our own children." In Georgia and throughout the U.S., runaway children are routinely reeled in by people who pose as friends but quickly reveal themselves as pimps, the group argues. Internet recruiters look for vulnerable kids online and entice them to join prostitution rings.

In Georgia alone, 200 to 300 girls are pimped out to adult men every month. The Atlanta group is fighting to change a law that allows minors who have been forced into prostitution to be treated like criminals. Now, a 15-year-old girl who had been forced into prostitution could be arrested as a criminal rather than being referred to a social services organization. Victims' advocates say that if the law is changed, law enforcement officers will be able to arrest the pimps and johns who are exploiting children and take the girls to a place that can offer shelter and support.

Tags: human trafficking

“My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently,” writes Double X contributor Anna Balkrishna, who goes into great detail about her mother’s exuberant attempt at happiness in an ultimately doomed second marriage. “In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover,” she writes. Balkrishna shares her Modern Love-style tale of a second chance gone predictably wrong, titled "My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal." The author tells us that 13 years ago, when she was launching her college life, her mother, now in her 50s, “would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret” to send to the mother’s inmate boyfriend, and of her own resentment of the mother who emotionally abandoned her in favor of the unworthy new love. Balkrishna also chronicles her now-twice divorced parent’s emotional recovery: “My mother is back in her house and currently renovating all traces of him away.”

I feel great sympathy for both the mother and the daughter in this story and admire my young colleague’s efforts to examine the painful semi-estrangement she describes. (“We have reached a stalemate, sometimes respectful, sometimes not.”)

It is the nature of families to know details and maintain strongly held perspectives on other member’s most personal foibles. Loving but dysfunctional relationships are practically the definition of family, and traditional roles shift as children become independent. I wrote about my son a year and a half ago in a personal essay that was published in Slate. Even though he read the final draft, and not only gave me permission to submit it, but suggested edits (sub in: “he thought his parents would disown him” for “... were going to kill him”), when it published, six pages of reader remarks, nearly universally negative (yes, I read them all), in Slate's "The Fray" suggested I had been offensively invasive of my college-age son’s privacy. I wondered if I had broken some unwritten rule of family discretion.

If there is such a commandment (thou shalt portray relatives only in the most favorable light), many essayists are guilty of breaking it. Emily B. wrote here about the fuzzy boundaries of the parent-child confidentiality rule. In the reaction to my article, one Fray poster suggested I was actually trying to send my young son a disciplinary message that I had been unable to convey more privately. I don’t agree but I admit it gave me pause. As for Anna, I hope she will able to get past whatever compelled her to write so disapprovingly about her lonely mother and can find her way to visit her for a heart-to-heart talk.

Tags: modern love column, prison, relationships

The talking point about Obama’s memo on domestic partnerships is that “It’s a first step.” Obama said it, and John Berry, the openly gay head of the Office of Personnel Management, has been repeating it all day. The implication is that the administration is ready to march proudly down the path of ever more gay freedom and equality. This strikes me as only half believable, as Emily pointed out yesterday. All the administration did was scan the existing law and see where they could apply it without violating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). That counts as barely a step at all. The next “step,” Berry said on the radio today, is the hate crimes law, which, as Andrew Sullivan often points out, is mostly symbolic and makes very little difference in anyone’s life. And as gay rights advocates say, the administration went beyond the call of duty in its brief taking on a challenge to DOMA. They defended the essence of the act, calling heterosexual marriage the “traditionally and universally recognized form” (not true, see California, Iowa, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut) and arguably lumping gay marriage with incest.

My suspicion is that despite his campaign promise, Obama is genuinely conflicted about DOMA. In California, the fight against gay marriage was led by black churches, and Obama must have been exposed to that sentiment over the years. This is why this feels like the first instance of Obama behaving in a disingenuous way. More honest would be to treat gay rights as he treated race and abortion, and give a full throttled speech about strong convictions on all sides, which would surface the contradictions. Instead, he is uncharacteristically mumbling his way through this one, putting forth the chipper gay bureaucrat to do his talking for him.

Tags: defense of marriage act, gay rights, same sex domestic partnerships

Generally, I try to avoid advertiser-created viral videos like the plague. Created by corporations, they tend to make me feel duped into watching them, whether they're any good or not. But I found a new series of viral videos by Tampax to be unusually amusing and surprisingly endearing.

At Zack16.com, 16-year-old Zack Johnson wakes up to find his penis has disappeared and been replaced by a vagina. Quelle horror! I'm sure some PhD candidate would have a fine time unpacking the constellation of Freudian issues therein—oh, the anxieties of being a man in the 21st century!—but as entertainment, it's amusing, even adorable to watch Zack struggle with the mysteries of his new genitalia, find out how boys act through his new eyes as a sort-of-girl, and struggle through the surprise of getting his period for the first time.

Some of the gender issues Zack encounters reminded me of a documentary I once saw on women who were transitioning into men. They inhabited this unique double-consciousness: Am I man? Or a woman? Or something in between? Sometimes, puberty is like that, too.

Sure, I guess this makes me one more sucker for Tampax's latest stealth campaign, but watching a teen boy do the oh-my-god-I-got-my-period-in-class shuffle made me laugh.

Tags: ads, advertising, health, internet, tampax, zack16.com

Kerry: Returning to Tsing Loh, for a sec, I want to second your point: It is odd to describe a 20-year-old relationship that produced two kids and a lot of domestic support as a "failure" just because it doesn’t last until death do us part and all that. Like you, I find it troubling that we routinely describe marriages and relationships that end with this evaluative language. “They had a failed marriage,” we say; or, “He had a failed relationship with a ballet dancer.”

But some—maybe even many—of these relationships are not “failed” at all. They are relationships that worked well for a period of time, until, say, one partner changed, or needed something new (passion, in Tsing Loh's case). You may leave such a relationship with warm memories, nostalgia, feelings of love, and, sure, regrets. Yet this rhetoric of failure, it seems to me, has the funny effect of robbing us of the experience of our own lives, because in America we tend to think of failures as something to hide, reject, put behind us.

By contrast, consider this startling (or actually, utterly predictable) statistic from a new survey by AOL Living and Women’s Day about women and marriage: 72 percent of women surveyed say they have considered leaving their husbands. Does that mean everyone who stayed with hubby in the end is in a “successful” marriage? Hardly. That’s why this rhetoric is absurd; we'd be better off thinking about love more holistically as something that evolves, changes us, teaches us about our selves, and may or may not last "forever."

Tags: divorce, sandra tsing loh, the atlantic