Broadsheet
Broadsheet, out
It's a Salon holiday, and your Broadsheet writers are taking the day off. In lieu of our usual critiques and repartee, we offer you this video, which you have most likely already seen five times, of a man dancing around the world. We say, why not make it a sixth time? The video makes us smile. Nothing wrong with that.
But since you're here, why not tell us in the comments section what videos or sites make you smile? Hey, it's the end of the week. We could all use a little random joy.
All hail Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan, America's new poet laureate (a post appointed annually by the Library of Congress), has been called an "outsider," despite the fact that she publishes in the New Yorker, won a Guggenheim fellowship and the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and was lauded by (ahem) this publication as far back as 1996. Yet it's true that Ryan doesn't quite fit. She's neither folksy and ultra-accessible like the popular Billy Collins nor mandarin and imperious like the critical darling Louise Glück. Her poems aren't personal or confessional, and it's hard to imagine anyone reading them aloud in that solemn, incantatory, singsong voice well known to the unfortunate attendees of poetry readings. Instead, Ryan's verse is short, brainy, wry and (most of the time) very funny. (I recommend "Elephant Rocks," but any of her books will do, including the most recent, "The Niagara River.")
Twice married (both times to the same woman, in accordance with California's ever-mutating marriage laws), the daughter of an oil driller and a veteran of many years of toiling in the flinty vineyard of verse, Ryan also has a knack for talking about her art that should come in handy for whatever duties she decides to take on in this new role. "Poetry is the most beautiful sport," she told me when I interviewed her over a decade ago. This week, she told the Washington Post that she aimed to write verse that seems to be "rising, entering the air. I want it to make us feel like we're taking in more oxygen when we breathe." Her mock-grandiose plans for her tenure as poet laureate (as reported to various news organizations) include issuing library cards to everyone and taking it upon herself to "prevent all bad poetry from being published during my reign." Now that would be a Herculean task, indeed.
Is a black princess that hard to imagine?
It has been over 40 years since the heyday of the civil rights movement, and in that time, the Walt Disney Co. has made more princess movies than I care to remember. But not once has the company -- whose long history of racism includes such highlights as "Song of the South" -- released a film featuring a black princess. I'm sure market concerns (like those that have kept black models out of fashion magazines) play a bigger part in that decision than bigotry, but it's still lamentable that, for so many years, Disney ignored the legions of African-American girls who might enjoy a heroine whose skin wasn't as white as snow.
The race trouble hasn't ended now that Disney finally has a black princess movie in the works. Apparently, it had to trash the original storyboard for "The Frog Princess" amid criticism that the film was baldly racist. Its heroine, a girl named Maddy, was a chambermaid for a cruel white debutante in 1920s New Orleans. And because all Cinderellas need fairy godmothers, Maddy's happened to be a voodoo priestess. Uh, whoa. Call me crazy, but last I checked, a voodoo-wielding servant was a pretty goddamn horrifying stereotype.
Though I'm glad to hear that Disney has done a massive revision, I'm worried that it's focusing on minor details and neglecting the big picture. "The Frog Princess" will now be called "The Princess and the Frog: An American Fairytale" because of worries that the original title contained a slur. But first of all, isn't "frog" supposed to be an anti-French, not anti-black, slur? And does this mean we have to go back and rename the classic "Frog Prince" story, too? Can't the word "frog" still be used to refer to a small green amphibian? Disney has also changed the named of its protagonist to Tiana, because Maddy sounded uncomfortably close to "Mammy." Really? When I hear "Maddy," I don't think "Mammy." I -- and, I suspect, most people -- think "Madeleine." Nothing I've read about the new version has mentioned what has become of the voodoo or the servitude, but hey, now that Disney's gotten the title and main character's name under control, I'm sure we have nothing to worry about.
(Via Jezebel.)
"Ugh" of the day
A few minutes ago, I received a press release in my in box from the Nation announcing a new sex column by JoAnn Wypikewski exploring "the intersections of sex and politics." The e-mail announced that the first column is on Barack and Michelle Obama's sex appeal and how the nation's alleged sexual attraction to the pair reflects our "desire for change." Despite being massively skeptical of that argument, I clicked through to the article. But I came to a screeching halt after reading the lead sentence: "In politics as in pop, legions of little girls jumping out of their panties can't be wrong."
Little girls jumping out of their panties? Well, she actually means teenage girls -- still, ugh. Are pubescent hormones really political predictors?
Amanda Peet: "Sorry about that 'parasites' thing"
On Tuesday, Katharine Mieszkowski wrote about the conflict between Amanda Peet and Jenny McCarthy over childhood vaccinations, quoting Peet's inflammatory comment to Cookie magazine: "Frankly, I feel that parents who don't vaccinate their children are parasites." Today, Peet issued an apology on Cookie's Web site, admitting that she regrets her choice of words but elaborating on the point behind them.
"I believe in my heart that my use of the word "parasites" was mean and divisive ... For this I am truly sorry," she writes. She goes on, however, to offer exactly what Katharine noted was missing from the original Cookie article: details about how Peet came to be a strong advocate for vaccinating children before age 2. After reading this cogent, compelling outline of her position, I declare Amanda Peet the clear winner of the celebrity vaccination smackdown -- and I say that as the aunt of a lovely autistic boy.
"I know a lot of parents who secretly use as a justification, 'Well, enough other people are vaccinating, so therefore, we don't have to,'" writes Peet. And that right there is the thing. Regardless of whether a link between vaccines and autism can be proved (and Peet has a lot to say about that), refusing vaccinations only works as a strategy for protecting your child's health in a society that still has "herd immunity" -- an effect that occurs when such a large proportion of a community is immune to a disease, even those who are not remain protected. According to Kevin M. Malone and Alan R. Hinman's "Vaccination Mandates: The Public Health Imperative and Individual Rights," a report available on the CDC Web site, as few as 10 percent of children going unvaccinated could begin to break down our herd immunity for diseases like measles. "When a community has a high level of vaccination, an individual might decide to not be vaccinated to avoid the small risk for adverse events while benefitting from the vaccination of others," they write. "Of course, if a sufficient number of individuals make this decision, the protection levels in the community decline, the herd immunity effect is lost, and the risk of transmission rises."
Parents who refuse vaccinations because of the fear of a risk of autism or other disorders, then, are still relying on everyone else to expose their own kids to that risk. "Parasites" might be a "mean and divisive" term for people who make such a choice, but it's not all that far off the mark. Perhaps "dangerously shortsighted" would be a touch more accurate and charitable. As Peet says in her apology letter, "It's so hard to appreciate vaccines now that so few children are dying from preventable diseases today, but that could all change if we're not vigilant." Or if too large a proportion of the population takes medical advice from the wrong celebrity.
The bikini theory
Here's your frivolous news for the day: Helen Mirren, nearly 63 years old and looking hot, is making waves for her recent appearance on the beach in a smoking red bikini. Yes, yes, it's crazy that we live in a world where a woman's choice of swimwear can be headline news (OK, women and Barack Obama) -- but I'd far rather see this kind of coverage, as it were, than blogs devoted to celebrity cellulite.
It also makes me question one of my long-held beliefs, which I call "The Bikini Theory" -- namely, that you should spend as much time as possible in a bikini right now, lest you look back at a photograph of yourself 10 or 20 years from now and harbor regret over letting body insecurity limit your choice of swimwear. (To put it a different way, there is no way I'm ever going to have less cellulite than I do now, so why not celebrate the present?) But then Helen Mirren comes along and I start thinking that it's actually possible to get hotter with age. Nice work, Dame Helen.
What really makes me happy, though, is the juxtaposition -- provided via the Huffington Post -- of Helen Mirren in a bikini and Helen Mirren as the queen of England. If I had more time and more Photoshop skills, these could make for an amazing mash-up.
Toilet talk
I have never understood what goes on in ladies rooms. As someone who prides herself on the speed with which she can use a porta-potty (secret: unbutton your pants before you get inside), I once wanted to write an article in which I would time how long women spent in a particular restaurant's bathroom and then, once they'd emerged, interview them about what they'd been doing in there.
But an article in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal called "Not Just a Ladies' Room" makes me wonder if I've been missing out -- at least when the bathroom isn't a single-stall affair. Author Carol Hymowitz makes it sound like her office's ladies room is the equivalent of a men's golf club -- an informal gathering where pretenses are dropped along with pantyhose, and real communication takes place.
"For me," writes Hymowitz, "ladies' room banter is an endless source of wisdom and comfort. My ladies' room crowd includes a fashion maven, a globetrotter who knows every good cheap restaurant in Paris, Berkeley and Hong Kong, a marriage counselor, several cancer survivors and a bevy of super-moms. They've guided me about how to survive pre-school interviews and college tours and which internist to choose in my health-care plan. They've advised me about where to get the best cocktail dress, haircut and beach house that won't break my budget. The time I've saved shopping, searching for doctors and worrying about my daughter because of advice gleaned in my office ladies' room has added up to months of work for my company and saved me from numerous multitask meltdowns."
Really? The way she describes the bathroom, I'm surprised no one has yet come up with a lavatory-themed reality television show or prime-time drama. ("Up next ... Secrets of the Stall!") I guess part of my problem is that I work at home, which makes it difficult to do any business other than my own. (Also, how does one form a "ladies room crowd"? Is it like a knitting circle?) I'm wondering if any of you readers have had similar experiences. Ladies, do you find that you've had life-altering talks while washing your hands? Men, does this ever happen in the guys room? And going back to my previous question, when the bathroom is a single-person affair, what, exactly, takes so goddamn long?
Are breast self-exams worth it?
You know those questions from folks in white coats -- "How often do you floss?" "How much exercise do you get?" "How often do you brush your dog's teeth?" -- that always seem to make you feel guilty for not doing enough, no matter what your answer is? For women, "Do you do regular breast self-exams?" can be right up there. So I was relieved to see Debbie Saslow, director of breast and gynecological cancer for the American Cancer Society, offering absolution in Time magazine: "Women who don't want to do breast self-exams shouldn't feel guilty about it," she says. Hallelujah!
After reviewing two previously published studies on the effectiveness of breast self-examination, researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that self-exams provide no measurable benefit and may even do more harm than good. Women who died of breast cancer over the course of the study were just as likely to have done self-exams as not, but among all the women studied, those who did self-exams were nearly twice as likely to have undergone biopsies with benign results -- i.e., ultimately unnecessary procedures.
This would seem like pretty strong evidence that breast self-exams aren't worth the effort, if not for other studies that show a large number of breast cancer patients -- 35 percent, in one study -- discovered their own lumps. That research doesn't tell us whether they found the lumps during the course of proper self-exams or by accident, but it still makes a good argument for a better-safe-than-sorry approach. Isn't risking an unnecessary biopsy preferable to missing a malignancy? Maybe, maybe not. "Dr. Peter Gotzsche, director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark and a co-author of the [Cochrane Collaboration] review, says biopsies are often the first step on the path toward further testing and increasingly invasive diagnostic tests. The report cites studies suggesting that women who travel that route often emerge with scars, breast deformities and emotional wounds." Those might seem like small sacrifices if your vigilance eventually turns up a malignant tumor at an early stage, but what if it never does?
Thus the American Cancer Society's recommendation that women do self-exams if they want to and ditch the guilt if they don't. The best available research simply can't tell us whether self-exams are more likely to lead to spotting cancer early or to a series of invasive, potentially disfiguring medical procedures and ongoing jacked-up anxiety. On second thought, scratch that "Hallelujah."
"WTF" of the day
Feministing brings us news of an exciting new product: liquid virgin drops. It's like a do-it-yourself hymenoplasty. A few squirts of this, and maybe he'll finally love you!
Used women are like used cars?
Copyranter alerted us to a print advertisement featuring a beautiful young woman -- presumably naked and lying in bed -- wearing a come-hither look and a crown of blond curls. In small print scrawled across her bare shoulder, it reads: "You know you're not the first." As your eyes drift to the bottom of the advertisement -- and the top of her chest -- you learn that it's an advertisement for BMW's premium selection of used cars. Used cars, used women -- get it?! And, finally, there's BMW's slogan in the bottom right-hand corner, which takes on a whole new meaning: "Sheer Driving Pleasure."
Plenty of delightful messages are implied: Used BMWs are like soiled sexpots -- dirty but fun to drive. Or: A used BMW won't tell you to go faster or slower. It lets you drive. Maybe even: Driving a used car doesn't require protection!
You stay classy, BMW.
Workin' 9 to 5 -- on Broadway!
Who doesn't love "9 to 5"? The mere fact that Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin shared the screen is enough for me, but their collaboration on a hilarious movie that skewers sexism in the workplace is almost too good to be true. The scene that shows all three women fantasizing about killing their sleazy boss? Perfect! And then when they've got him all tied up in his house? Genius! If I didn't own it on DVD, I would hardly believe it was real.
Now, 28 years after the cult classic's premiere, "9 to 5" is coming to Broadway. And -- thank God! -- it's bringing Dolly along for the ride. Though she won't be playing Doralee Rhodes, cinema's bustiest, nerviest secretary, she has written more than 20 songs for the show. "9 to 5: The Musical" is set to open in New York on April 23, 2009, with a promising cast that includes "The West Wing's" Allison Janney.
Why the revival? "The movie had lasted so long and touched so many people," Parton told the Daily News. "And my song had done so well through the years. It's my biggest number on stage. When I start singing '9 to 5' the crowd always goes crazy and they know every word because they've seen the movie. And I thought, 'Yeah, well, if they like that, wait'll they get a load of this!'"
While I'll admit that I'm most excited to hear what Parton's come up with and experience the movie's campy fun in person, I feel compelled to add that he message of "9 to 5" is just as relevant now as it was in 1980. As Lisa Chamberlain points out in her fantastic new book, "Slackonomics," women were earning 74.7 cents to men's dollar as recently as 2005, making the current wage gap even more significant than it was in the '80s. You said it, Dolly -- what a way to make a living!
"You don't feel like it, but you do it for him"
Australian law says it's rape when there's no consent. Some married women raped by their husbands -- and the husbands themselves -- are not so sure, at least until they're informed by health workers that forced sex in marriage is not "just part of the compromise," it's a crime. That's according to two years of research among victims, community workers and police in Australia's state of Victoria, described in Tuesday's the Age. "The community doesn't recognize that partner rape exists," the study's author told the paper. Read the researchers' preliminary conclusions if you like, safe in the knowledge that no one here would ever think such a thing.
Teen pregnancy: "Rational long-term economic choice"?
While some of us may stop short of actively mocking pregnant teenagers, current attitudes toward "the problem of teen pregnancy" are in fact stigmatizing and therefore counterproductive. So says sociologist Mike Males (now a researcher for YouthFacts.org, dedicated to reality-checking "the latest teen terror du jour") in this week's Los Angeles Times. "In truth, social- and health-policy discussions in this country would profit from abandoning the stigmatizing, prejudicial concept of 'teenage pregnancy' altogether," he writes.
OK, I'll bite. How come? The term itself "perpetuates pre-1950s sexist misnomers," he says, noting that according to state and national birth tabulations, a majority of male partners involved "are not the high school boys frequently blamed" (Wait, "blamed"? "Frequently"? In Bizarro World?) but men age 20 and older. "So, instead of criticizing the 'high rate of teenage pregnancy' in the U.S., shouldn't we be condemning the 'high rate of adults impregnating teens'?" And: "Why is a 19-year-old woman knocked up by a 22-year-old man stigmatized as part of the 'social problem of teenage pregnancy,' but a 22-year-old woman impregnated by a 19-year-old man isn't? Isn't the real problem, regardless of the mothers' ages, fathers who fail to support their kids?"
Then Males really gets medieval on conventional wisdom, suggesting that "teen motherhood may be a viable strategy for poorer and minority groups in the U.S. and other countries to maximize the survival of their offspring." Why? "Because poorer groups tend to die younger, having babies early in life may ensure that grandparents and extended family members will be alive and healthy enough to help raise children." It's not just evolutionary biology; it's economics, he says, citing a 2005 finding that former teen moms -- freed from child-raising duties by their late 20s and early 30s to pursue employment -- had, by age 35, "earned more in income, paid more in taxes, were substantially less likely to live in poverty and collected less in public assistance than similarly poor women who waited until their 20s to have babies." An earlier federally commissioned report, he says, reached -- but buried -- a similar conclusion: "Adolescent childbearers fare slightly better than later-childbearing counterparts in terms of their overall economic welfare." In that context, he argues, "teenage motherhood may represent a rational long-term economic choice for poorer women." (Not, he adds, "what activist groups that invoke the 'social costs' of teen pregnancy [want] to hear.")
Speaking of whom, Males also takes a bit of the shine off victories claimed by organizations seeking to reduce teen pregnancy. Citing data from the National Center of Health Statistics, he writes: "The decline in births by teen mothers since 1990 consisted of 100,000 fewer births by married teens and their generally adult-aged husbands -- hardly the group teen-pregnancy prevention organizations had targeted."
He concludes: "If Planned Parenthood, the Family Research Council and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy really want to reduce unwanted teen pregnancies, they should study such factors as poverty, the older ages of male partners, the advantages having children afford poorer young women and the plunge in births among married teens and adults, among other realities. That would be easier if the stigmatizing concept of 'teenage pregnancy' was not part of our health-policy deliberations." I'm not convinced that those organizations, except maybe the one that rhymes with "Ramily Bleesearch Douncil," do not have those realities on their radar, that they aren't aware, say, of the big poverty picture. Or that there aren't "social costs" that come along with those "advantages." And I'd like to have seen an example or two of what such deliberations would look like without stigma at the table. Not to mention a mention of access to full reproductive health options. But still, unconventional wisdom is almost always welcome. Your thoughts?
Bush: Birth control = abortion
At this point, the only way I can experience optimism about the Bush administration's approach to reproductive health is to misread, mishear and misinterpret. So when I read the first paragraph of a New York Times report on the administration's new reproductive health proposal, my unconscious became a conjurer of good news, lifting unfavorable words from the page and inserting desired ones. Thus, possessed by a Panglossian spirit, I read that the administration is fighting to ensure that health providers who perform abortions or distribute birth control are not discriminated against. Fantastic!
But the article actually reads: "The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control." It is worth restating: The administration wants to ensure that recipients of federal health funding -- including women's clinics -- cannot deny employment based on a refusal to perform abortions or distribute birth control. Blogger Lazy Circles (via Feministing) summarizes the implications succinctly:
So, the inner city women's clinic employee who refuses to talk to patients about birth control? Can't touch her. The hospital pharmacist who refuses to fill prescriptions for birth control? She can't be fired or disciplined. The doctor who refuses to give emergency contraception to a rape victim for "religious reasons"? Give that man a promotion.
It gets worse. The proposal could potentially redefine birth control as abortion. The proposal classifies abortion as "any of the various procedures -- including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation." That last part is critical because some argue that hormonal birth control and emergency contraception can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.
In other words, as Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards explains in a press release Tuesday, the draft rule redefines "some of the most common and effective methods of birth control" as abortion. Richards adds, "As a result, women's ability to manage their own health care is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology."
So much for my happy ending
Tango magazine has a story this week about "happy ending" massages for women -- just in case you thought men (and "Sex and the City" characters) were the only ones having all the icky, anonymous sex along with their Enya and incense.
Says one veteran: "Initially [the masseur] kept it very clean, but I was really turned on, and I let him know it by moaning and saying how good it felt. He started slowly touching my thigh, then going higher, and it turned into a game of how far each of us would take it. One thing led to another and he ended up finishing me off, which was great."
Did it just get really Penthouse forum in here or what? Tango even sends one eager beaver into the field to report on the trend. She shoots, and she scores: "I considered giving him a blow job, but then I was like, 'I'm paying for this!'" Yah! And massages aren't cheap! (Sheesh, last time I checked, a pocket rocket cost $13. Seems like the more affordable option, no?)
Normally I really don't care where people get their zipless fucks, as long as they're not impinging on anyone else, but something about this skeevs me out. I guess it's because I've had friends over the years return from massages semi-traumatized that their massage therapist was getting a little too intimate. So I hate to be a buzzkill, but listening to women say things like, "My nipples got erect, so that must have sent him a signal," is kind of horrifying. I mean, sheesh, it can get drafty in there!
