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On Monday Double X published an excerpt from Lizzie Skurnick's new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I've since found myself paging back through my own copy of her ode to the young adult novel. In the office earlier today, Noreen and I were discussing what the book suggests about why women read. We thought others might want to chime in here.
Skurnick's thesis, which she defends with her usual contagious exuberance, is that books like Daughters of Eve, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Jacob Have I Loved are important, that their companionship can be the thing that keeps you from dissolving into a pool of self-doubt before you ever get to kiss someone or get your own apartment or write a book. What she never explicitly acknowledges is that the authors and protagonists of most of the novels she discusses are female, and that she is writing specifically about how these books shape their readers as women. Certainly many male writers have reflected in print on the books that shaped them as thinkers, writers, and human beings. Do we have an example, though, of a man talking about the stories that showed him how to make it as a man? Which once again raises the larger question: Do men think of their maleness as being a distinct, challenging aspect of their humanity, as women must to at least some degree (see the prehistoric maxi-pad-with-belt in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret) regard being female?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Torie, you wondered whether MTV's show 16 and Pregnant will encourage teenage moms-to-be to consider adoption. At least one pro-life group hopes so: Lifeline Adoption oversees several pro-adoption websites, including the fortuitously-named 16andpregnant.com. Fans of the show who type in that URL won't get a site about the show. They'll get one aimed at girls who are precisely that: 16 and pregnant. At first glance it's a relatively generic, "We know you're scared, here are your options," sort of site, but it quickly becomes it clear that the site designers really only have one option in mind.
The support hotline girls are encouraged to call is the National Adoption Answer Line. In the "My Options" section of the site, girls are told that parenting a child, "is a life-long commitment. When you feel like your whole life may be ruined by your pregnancy, it is even harder to look at parenting as a positive choice." Abortion carries "physical and emotional risks." But adoption provides a better life for you and your baby. Children who are adopted "grow up knowing that they are loved by both their adopted parents and the parents who gave them life." A link to "more about your pregnancy choices" leads to another site that purports to answer questions like "How much does it cost to raise a child?" and "Is he daddy material?" (Answer: No.)
The ladies at Feministing came down pretty hard on 16andpregnant.com, calling it "completely inaccurate and dangerous." I haven't found the inaccurate or dangerous parts yet—abortion does carry physical and emotional risks, and parenting as a teenager is difficult. But I wonder whether teenage girls will find the site compelling, accurate or not. The cheesy stock art of teenagers in various stages of shock or sadness is off-putting. The supposed "stories" from pregnant teenagers fall too neatly into certain categories. ("Parenting is hard." "Abortion is traumatic.") I can't imagine that today's tech-savvy teens aren't going to realize that this is a site that's selling something.
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This year marks the 10th Anniversary of Putumayo Playground, the series of albums from the famed world music compilers created especially for kids. Fans credit it with being part of a revolution in kids' music which, along with artists like Dan Zanes and Laurie Berkner, turned what had been a wasteland of painful ditties into music kids and parents could enjoy together. Indeed, there's some catchy stuff out there, but you won't hear it playing in my car. What's wrong with Bruce Springsteen? If ABBA isn't kids music, what is? Is there anyone out there whose kid doesn't rock out to Flo Rida's "Jump?"
With my first kid, I played kid music in the car, but after three years of "hello, everybody, so glad to see you!" (again! again!), I gathered the remnants of my brain, poured it back into my head and put an end to it. I won't be able to get them to listen to what I want to listen to for long, but for now, I'm in charge, and that means saying "no" to the CD someone gave us featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Do you play kid music for your kids? Did you grow up on "Free to Be You and Me," or did your parents (like mine) subject you to Barry Manilow? Are our kids missing out if we give "Picnic Playground" a miss?
Photograph by Digital Vision/Getty Images.
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Abortion didn't get much air time during the Sotomayor hearings, but it's become a flashpoint in the fight over Obama's health care legislation. Conservatives are saying that the various bills Congress is considering would increase access to abortion and subsidize the procedure with government funding. Meanwhile, a separate bill with support from both the pro-choice and pro-life sides designed to prevent unwanted pregnancy, with more money for contraception, could get caught in the crossfire. That bill, sponsored by House Democrats Tim Ryan of Ohio (pro-life) and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut (pro-choice) was trying to stay clear of controversy; it includes no money for the morning-after pill, for example. But conservative groups are now coming out against it.
The Washington Post has a helpful overview. At the American Prospect, Dana Goldstein smartly goes at the conservative claims that health care reform will become a vehicle for government funding of abortion. She correctly points out that Congress barred Medicaid from funding abortion way back in 1976, in passing the Hyde Amendment. And she writes:
Far from cackling as they sneakily lobby for "abortion-on-demand" legislation, women's health advocates are actually rather anxious. In the Senate, anti-choice Republicans say they will oppose any health reform plan that subsidizes abortion coverage or even includes, in the proposed health insurance exchanges, private insurers that cover abortion. Currently, 87 percent of health plans offer some abortion services. That means if Democrats capitulate, the majority of women who currently have abortion coverage could lose it. The result would be a near-blanket restriction on women's access to insurance-subsidized abortion, one far more radical than the Hyde Amendment.
Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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There's an amazing feature in the Wall Street Journal that's ostensibly about interior decoration, but which actually brings hope that mankind—OK, make the womankind—might find a way to live in peace. Thia Breen is a top executive with Estée Lauder, and Laurie Dowley is a top executive with Elizabeth Arden. The women have been a couple for 28 years—and for those decades each has risen in the ranks of a company that is the other's arch-nemesis.
Can you imagine top executives from Apple and Microsoft living together? Coke and Pepsi? I know there's Mary Matalin and James Carville—but they've turned their political differences into income-generating shtick. Lauder and Arden are a real rivalry. How does their relationship work? Each morning there is Breen putting on her Estee Lauder Hydra Lustre lipstick in Tender Mauve, and Dowley applying her Elizabeth Arden Color Intrique Effects in Geranium Shimmer. They take the elevator down, kiss goodbye (creating the shade Mauve Geranium), and go to the office where they try to corporately bash each other's brains in. Yet they look perfectly content in their apartment (which is a little too fussy grandma for my taste).
Forget Mars and Venus. This Venusian couple should write a book on unlocking the secret of how we all can get along.
Photograph by Digital Vision/Getty Images.
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That's a really upsetting litany of stories, Marjorie, about the cops accosting you and your relatives. The confluence of Skip Gates' arrest and the Obama presidency are making white people, at least some of us, take in these stories differently. We've heard them before, but now maybe we're absorbing them. Obama's election has both raised expectations of a post-racial America and given us a lens through which to see clearly how we still fall short. I chewed over some of this with the writer Farai Chideya on bloggingheads earlier this week. And Richard Thompson Ford has a piece in Slate that really made me think anew when I was editing it on Thursday. Rich urges us to get past the stock phrases "racial profiling" and "playing the race card" in analyzing what happened and why. His clear-eyed takeaway:
We need to ask why so many police officers of all races suspect the worst of racial minorities. (I wonder what the black Cambridge police officer pictured in the photo along with Gates after his arrest would say about all of this if he could speak candidly.) Decades of blatant and pervasive racial discrimination, poor urban planning, and failed labor policy have left blacks disproportionately jobless and trapped in poor ghettos across the United States. Faced with few opportunities and few positive role models, a disturbing number of people in those neighborhoods turn to gangs and crime for money, protection, and esteem.
Rather than improve those neighborhoods and help the people who live in them join the prosperous mainstream, we as a society have given police the dirty job of quarantining them. Frankly, we should expect that a disproportionate number of power-hungry bigots would find such a mandate attractive. And an otherwise decent and fair-minded officer, faced with the day-to-day task of controlling society's most isolated, desperate, and angry population, might develop some ugly racial generalizations and carry them even to plush and leafy neighborhoods such as those surrounding Harvard Yard. Yet when the inevitable racial scandal surfaces we, like Capt. Renault in Casablanca, are shocked, shocked to find racial bias in law enforcement and quick to blame individual police officers, rather than ourselves.
Photograph of Skip Gates by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.
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Last night was the annual Planned Parenthood-sponsored “Summer Sex & Spirits” night at the Museum of Sex in New York, which I somehow have failed to visit until now. There was plenty of the expected—some porno flicks, some stylish anal plugs, even a hands-on display of rubber sex dolls with rubbery vaginal openings. But the real gem is the exhibit on the sex lives of animals. Here are a few highlights to share at your weekend BBQs. And Miriam, please chime in with any other fun animal sex factoids for this summer Friday.
Gay Giraffe Necking: An entire wall is dedicated to homosexuality in nature: lions humping, mane on mane; female bonobos practicing “G-G” (genito-genital) rubbing; and best of all, male giraffes “necking.” Apparently they’ll rub necks for up to an hour (here's a hot giraffe necking session set to cheesy music), culminating in the secretion of some sort of fluid that scientists assume to be semen. (Miriam, any idea why they'd be unsure? Seems easy enough to determine, no?)
Kinky Dolphins: A 3-D model of Amazon River dolphins shows the sweetly smiling darlings of the sea engaged in one of their favorite three kinds of sex. Not vaginal. Not anal. Blowhole!
The Female Penis: Perhaps most amazing was the female spotted hyena, whose vulva looks like testicles and clitoris like a penis, which gets erect when she’s excited. Realizing a childhood fantasy of mine, they pee standing up from their psuedopenis, and also, in a less enviable feat, give birth through it.
Update: Read Miriam's response, with her favorite strange sex facts about invertebrates, which I carelessly left off the list. (But I assure you, the museum included the spineless, too.)
Photograph by Anup Shah/Getty Images.
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Via Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward we learn that New Jersey legislators, in “recognizing that teenagers who e-mail nude or sexually suggestive photos of themselves to friends aren't really child pornographers,” are proposing an alternative to prosecution. If the bill passes, charged sexters will merely be forced to attend a “course focusing on the consequences of such acts.” I fear for any 13-year old girl forced to attend a Jersey-led course justifying the criminalization of her own image, but I guess it’s better than, as the bill’s author puts it, “hauling them off to jail.”
Photograph by George Doyle/Getty Images.
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