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I've spent a crazy week in New York City covering the United Nations General Assembly and the accompanying intense crush of foreign languages, traffic jams, and foreign policy. At the fifth annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York, former president Bill Clinton was kind enough to sit for a lengthy, far-reaching private interview with a few bloggers, during which he discussed the role of women and girls in his administration and in his new nongovernmental role. I wanted to share the meat of his response to a question from a mom-blogger whose name I now unfortunately forget. Below, his response to her question about regrets about action on women's rights during his term, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's commitment to the development of women around the world:
Well, you’ve got a Secretary of State that thinks it’s the most important thing going. When president Obama talked to her about taking this job, she said "I want to help you, and I feel duty bound—no one has the right to say no to you. But if I’m going to give up a job that I love, I hope that you’re going to let me do this, because it’s really important to me." …
I want the NGO community to complement whatever the United States does on this, and I want them to do what they do best to move quicker and faster into the gaps—to prove that this is worth doing and it can be done.
Julia Ormond once said I was insufficiently aware of women’s rights. [Good for her!] That there is more sexual violence and human trafficking than I was aware of. She was right. A lot of young women are being abused and used for sexual trafficking. And increasingly today, young boys are also being sold into sexual slavery. So in addition to the education and health issues [facing women] there is also the trafficking.
Clinton then launched into a profound, consensus-building argument about the rights of women that seemed to attempt to fly above the abortion wars:
With all the fights in the world about abortion rights and choice and family planning and all that there is only one proven strategy that is not opposed by religious authorities—except some fanatics and cultural authorities—that slows the birthrate and raises per capita income. The only proven strategy is to put all the girls in the world in school. And a marjority of the people who go to substandard schools with no teachers and training materials are women. So if you put all the girls in world in school and give young women access to labor market, it slows the birthrate and stabilizes civil society.
We’ve seen the rates of women in college go up in the U.S. There are now more women than men in school in Saudi Arabia—even there [shakes head].
It was a smart and remarkably honest assessment. And Hillary Clinton has indeed made these hybrid reproductive and economic advancements a centerpiece of her agenda as Secretary of State. In Democracy Journal, I’ve penned a review of Michelle Goldberg’s fantastic new book on the topic, The Means of Reproduction. Goldberg picks up where both Clintons leave off, establishing a similar causality on economic development in emerging markets. She clearly backs up the thesis: The best way to empower women around the world is to educate them and give them reproductive choices. She also probes the factions in international law that are moving toward a theory of women’s rights as human rights:
It was not until the late 1970s, several years after Roe, that the population control alliance fractured, and the Protestant right began to agitate against the freedoms that 1960s cooperation had helped normalize. Goldberg, author of 2005’s Kingdom Coming, a book probing the rise of Christian nationalism in America, is well matched to the task of reporting the unique aggression of religious groups in this battle. She argues convincingly that the rise of the religious right, as well as the advent of globalization, began the outsourcing of the domestic culture wars. Suddenly, religious conservatism was not all prayer and sloganeering; American Protestant groups, as well as the Catholic Church, began to play a strong hand in the law and diplomacy surrounding access to contraception and abortion. The so-called "global gag" on abortion providers is the classic example. The Christianist Ronald Reagan coalition could not shake Roe, so it picked the lower-hanging fruit: withholding assistance to clinics abroad where doctors even whispered about abortion. Goldberg describes the seismic shift:
As the global women’s movement fought to make reproductive rights universal, conservatives from around the world joined hands across theological divides in opposition to what seemed the ultimate in aggressive cosmopolitanism. United Nations meetings and conferences would become forums for seemingly obscure but often intense and consequential struggles between universal rights and religious and cultural tradition, between the liberties due each individual and the power of groups–nations, villages, families–to regulate their members.
Photograph of Bill Clinton by Marvi Lacar/Getty Images for Meet the Press.
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Via The Australian, about a woman who was pushed off a cliff by an avenging primate: "A monkey allegedly flew into a rage when the woman refused to hand over the bag of monkey food which her tour guide recommended she buy." The article also provides the following life advice: "If you show fear a monkey will bully you."
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
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In today's utterly-unsurprising-but-still-necessary news, the Guttmacher Institute has released a report detailing how women living in households making less than $75,000 a year are responding to the recession by losing the desire to have a baby anytime in the near future. (PDF of the report here.) To be specific, 44 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce or delay their childbearing in response to the recession. Unfortunately, the lowered desire to get pregnant doesn't necessarily translate to better contraception use for women. In many cases, in fact, economic hard times make it all the much easier to get pregnant on accident.
The report also found, for instance, that 8 percent of the surveyed women were skimping on contraception in order to save money, and 18 percent of pill users were taking pills inconsistently to save money, usually by skipping a month or delaying refilling their pills. And as Lauren Sandler wrote in The Big Money back in May, the recession can negatively impact contraception use in other ways. This recession has created more upheaval in people's lives—more job changes, more moving around for work, more stress in general—and all that makes it much harder to remember to take your pill on a regular basis, or to keep a box of condoms on hand. I suppose it's easy to tell yourself you can just lay off sex until you can afford you have more money for contraception, but that kind of planning rarely works out the way we hope it will. Let's face it: In hard times, staying in and having sex to entertain yourself becomes even more alluring, because it's relatively cheap.
You'd think that more people would make contraception a priority, since most of us know that abortion costs a lot of money, and babies exponentially more so, but it's long been observed in the sexpert world that most people feel guilty about spending real money on sex. People who will spend $100 a month on cable won't spend $100 on a sex toy they'll use all the time and will last forever.
Unfortunately, this short-changing can be tragic when it comes to contraception. Back in July, I interviewed Heather Busby of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and she confirmed that they've received an explosion in requests for abortion funding from desperate women since the economic crash last fall. All of which should confirm the pressing need for national health care reform that would make sure more women have the insurance coverage they need to afford regular access to contraception.
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If all this talk about the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz has you thinking, “Gee, I wonder what would happen if Dorothy Gale were a corn-fed nymphomaniac with deviant tendencies,” have I got the graphic novel for you.
The mammoth, landmark Lost Girls—first published as a pricey three-volume set in 2006 and finally released in an affordable single volume this summer—is the product of 16 years of collaboration between comics legend Alan Moore (writer of Watchmen) and artist Melinda Gebbie.
The setup: Dorothy, Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan are all adults now, and they all happen to be staying in the same charming Swiss hotel. With World War I looming in the distance, the three women become fast friends, largely by sharing stories of their childhoods. But the stories the women tell aren’t the ones you and I know—Lost Girls’ primary conceit is that those familiar, beloved tales are actually fantastical metaphors for three very real girls’ very real sexual awakenings.
Oh, and then all the women sleep with one another. And with a lot of other people. And we see all of it. Because Lost Girls isn’t just a Freudian exploration of Golden Era kiddie lit—it’s also a bountiful cornucopia of Grade-A smut. The book contains just about every shocking kind of sex act you can imagine, and often treads highly taboo territory. That’s all part of Moore and Gebbie’s plan: In an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, Moore said, “I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful.”
I’ve been mulling over this book for weeks, and I'm still not sure what to make of it. Sometimes I’m on board with the project, and sometimes I’m just, well, bored. Any DoubleX-ers who’ve read Lost Girls, please weigh in with your verdict: Fancy-pants Tijuana bible, or profound meditation on the connection between art, arousal, and innocence?
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Via my buddy Megan Carpentier at Air America, Jenny Sanford is writing a book—an "inspirational memoir"—that sounds remarkably similar to Elizabeth Edwards' memory of coming back from a public humiliation, Resilience. Sanford's book will even be published by the same publisher, Random House. Jenny Sanford has always comported herself with dignity, and she seems like a smart enough, nice enough lady. But does she have anything to teach the world that Elizabeth didn't already cover? From her perspective, is it just about cashing in her hefty advance so that she can support her family?
In any event, Megan has the best zinger about the whole sordid situation: "Apparently, Edwards' book did well enough that Random House ordered the sequel."
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In response to my article about Rielle Hunter's chances of having a baby at 43, a reader asks how researchers determine a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant each month, especially when they don’t know when or how frequently she is having intercourse. Since a woman is only fertile about three days a month, the stat assumes she’s had sex during this window. About two weeks into a woman’s menstrual cycle, her ovaries release an egg into one of her fallopian tubes during the process of ovulation. The egg must be fertilized within 24 hours to result in a pregnancy. Here’s how the reproductive ballet becomes more complicated: Sperm can live in a woman’s reproductive tract (in the cervical mucus, specifically) for at least two days and wait for the egg to be released. Dr. Richard Paulson, a fertility specialist at the University of Southern California Medical School, advises his patients trying to conceive naturally to have sex on the day of ovulation or the two days prior.
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Hanna, I don't think legal rights are what Rielle Hunter's after. (Although I can tell you that the relationship between the child and John Edwards may be covered under North Carolina General Statutes Chapter 49: Bastardy.) Even if John Edwards were to die intestate, an acknowledgement wouldn't change much. Given the circumstances, I'd imagine any probate court would agree to DNA testing in the unlikely event the Edwards estate were to need to be divided up according to the intestacy rules, or that another person made an unclear reference—to, say "the children of John Edwards" in a will. Beyond inheritance, it's hard to see what the child gains—the right to be in on a decision about whether to pull the plug on John Edwards, if circumstances required? The right to pen a tell-all memoir without fear of legal repercussions?
I agree with Emily that what Rielle Hunter seems to be after is less legal than societal. We could give her the benefit of the doubt, now that her daughter is getting older, and suggest that she's trying to normalize the situation for the girl as best as she can. After all, a baby can seem like a pawn—easy to move around and produce at opportune moments. An eighteen-month-old is sitting up, grabbing at things, and probably saying a few words. Maybe Ms. Hunter is looking ahead to the questions her daughter will ask, and hoping that proximity to John Edwards--if he is the baby's father--and his family might mean that the girl can grow up with her unusual parentage no more than just another fact of her life, at least for a while.
Or maybe she just wants to stick it to him.
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