feminist blogs

So, what is it? Only white men are important? While I don’t regularly read the obituary section of any newspaper, it was pointed out to me (by my mother nonetheless) that the obits are mostly written about white men. While I wasn’t surprised by this observation, I wanted to see it for myself. So I first [...]

Would some charitable individual just fuck Ross Douthat of the NY Times already and spare us the boredom of his weekly "I-hate-everybody-who-has-sex-because-I-haven't-been-getting-any-for-the-past-decade" opinion column? As spring is approaching, Douthat is getting into his public fits of hysteria over other people's sex lives more and more often. Not surprising, since he so obviously has none of his own.

Today's column is dedicated to Douthat gushing with admiration (the only thing he's been gushing with for oh, so long) over the tabloids' prurient interest in the sex lives of famous people. Oh, how much the sex-deprived Douthat would love to dedicate his life to going through the dirty underwear of politicians, actors, and athletes. Revealing who slept with whom when and in what position has an important social purpose. Besides giving Douthat an outlet for his unrequited sexuality, that is. According to Douthat,

there’s a case for erring on the side of prurience. Some private acts should be publicly disqualifying, and the media need to be willing to go digging for them.

You can just imagine Douthat foaming at the mouth with his enthusiasm for digging for the information on the sex acts of others.

As usual, the "why-are-the-Democrats-incapable of-bipartisanship" Douthat cannot refrain from showing us his blatant use of double standards. (Of course, he would gladly show us something else, but nobody is willing to look.) Where McCain has a

complicated relationship with a female lobbyist

Bill Clinton engages in "philandering". Douthat's attempts to attract attention to the sex scandals within the Democratic Party (which even by the most modest calculations never come close to the staggering numbers of sex scandals among the sex-starved Republicans) lead him to pronouncements that are nothing short of shameless:

If the supermarket tabloid’s reporters hadn’t gone digging where other journalists declined to even tread, we might never have learned how close the Democratic Party came to nominating a truly disgraceful character for the presidency.

Imagine that, a disgraceful character as a presidential nominee, or possibly even as the President. But wait, that's nothing new. We'd had a really disgraceful character as our president for 8 endless years. And his crimes were kind of a little more serious than having a child out of wedlock. Like lying to the American people in order to start an illegitimate unnecessary war that would bring death to thousands. Or authorizing torture. Or taking away our constitutional freedoms. or destroying the middle class.

But why would a NY Times journalist care about all those things when he can gasp over the real horror of an extramarital affair.

There’s an editorial today in the New York Times, summarizing a recent study that seems to have favorable findings for abstinence-only education. The study focused on 622 African-American middle schoolers, and found that those who received abstinence-only teachings were less likely to have had sex in the follow-up period than those who received more comprehensive lesson plans.

The NYT article is appropriately skeptical about absintence-only groups using this information as proof that their argument is correct. A key difference between the approach tested and the Bush Administration agenda, is that morality and marriage is left out of the equation. The students in this study weren’t taught to wait for marriage, specifically, just to wait until they’re more ‘mature.’ And the focus was on avoiding pregnancy and STDs, not about morals, or virginity for some religious reason.

Furthermore, I have doubts about the the findings being completely reliable. For one, is this replicable across other demographics? Secondly, there’s no hard evidence – only self reports about sexual activity. It doesn’t seem wholly implausible for those in the abstinence group to have a lower rate of reported sexual intercourse. If kids in this group were told to abstain, they may feel less comfortable with reporting otherwise.

But most importantly, the study focuses on delayed behaviors– not safer ones. Nowhere in the NYT article does the author call in to question whether the goal of sex education should be to delay sex, or teach healthy, safe methods? Is this about not having sex early, or not having sex dangerously?

Ultimately, what are we trying to achieve? A world in which teenagers suppress urges until some arbitrarily defined moment of maturity? Or a world in which young people have the greatest amount of information and access to safe practices, and thus a much lower rate of unplanned pregnancies, or STDs? If you ask my opinion, it’s the latter. And though the two may not be mutually exclusive, the abstinence-only side of this debate seems to paint it this way. In comprehensive sex education, ideally abstinence should be explored, as an option. But abstinence-only is just that– it leaves no room for information about being safe and healthy and sexually active. My theory is: Sex is eventually going to happen, and when it does, I believe that the important question to answer is: will people be equipped with the proper knowledge to make the healthiest choices?

At the end of the day, I believe in choice. It’s why I’m pro-choice and pro-comprehensive sex education. Withholding options and information from people won’t make their lives better. But being honest with them, and trusting them just might.

Damn it.

I'm honestly getting to the end of my rope with The New York Times. Every single time I have opened this paper in the past couple of months, I have seen something annoying and weird.

Today's opinion column, for example, has revealed to me that the person to blame for the fact that more and more Americans get deeper and deeper into debt is . . . me. And other people like me. In the article "Is the American Dream Over?", David Brooks suggests that people "who can manipulate ideas and abstractions," who have "unique mental skills," and who are highly educated are to blame for the growth of the uncontrollable culture of consumption that drives people into debt. At a first glance, this point of view seems completely bizarre. When you read Brooks's line of reasoning that led him to this strange conclusion, however, you realize that, in terms of bizarre, you truly ain't seen nothing yet.

These highly educated people, says Brooks, "have tremendous cultural influence" and "unwittingly set the norms everybody else must live up to." Television networks, for example, fall over themselves to depict our upper middle-class, highly educated lifestyles. For Brooks, these educated cultured lifestyles consist of having "the bigger house (which now seems normal) or the multiple cars or the flat screen." People who don't have our high educational levels and the same sophisticated set of skills try to catch up with this lifestyle that we, the educated people, uphold and advertise. However, since they don't have the same set of skills, they go into debt, and "the consumption merry-go-round will begin again."

As a university professor with five degrees from extremely prestigious schools, I have to say that Brooks's vision of how educated people with "tremendous cultural capital" live is extremely strange and evidently inspired by silly TV shows. My current house is big, but it is rented, as I have no interest whatsoever in buying real estate ever. I don't drive, so there is no question of a single car, let alone multiple ones. And my TV is tiny and cost $260. The last time I shopped for clothes was May. And not because I don't like clothes, but because shopping is very boring to me. Over 20% of my income goes towards buying books. Otherwise, you have to possess a really wild imagination to see me as participating in the "the consumption merry-go-round."

Honestly, I'd love to have more influence on setting the cultural standards. I sincerely believe that everybody would win if we spent more money on books and less on cars, gas, expensive huge TV sets, and silly crap like that. Somehow, however, I don't feel that my high education has turned me into a cultural icon. A lot more people are influenced by the lifestyles of Paris Hilton and the like than by the way of life of even the most prestigious thinkers and philosophers.

The conservatives' favorite bugbear is the "educated elites" who have supposedly colonized mass culture and tell everyone how to live and what to do. (Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America talks about it beautifuly and hilariously.) This article is one more attempt to present people with high degree of education as hateful, superficial, and bad. If you take Brooks's argument to its logical conclusion, it seems that the best way to repair the US economy and cure people from consumerism would be to remove the educated people altogether, or at least to reduce our number significantly. This hatred of the educated people by the conservatives is very logical on their part. Anybody who is even marginally acquainted with what it means to think for yourself would be incapable of buying into any single item on the Conservative agenda. They need mindless drones, who would produce and shut up. Anybody with a mind of their own is potentially dangerous and should be silenced.

It is still curious to see, however, how far some people go in their desire to blame the educated people for every single of the world's ills.

Thanksgiving is upon us and once again mothers and wives are being targeted as overbearing naggers. Despite the fact that women perform most of the tasks involved in throwing a holiday celebration, women are seen as the enemy.

One New York Times article, Food, Kin and Tension at Thanksgiving, described a variety of family members that scold, ridicule, and badger at holiday gatherings.  

As families gather around the country this week to celebrate Thanksgiving, many of them are bracing for the intense emotions of the holiday meal. The combination of food and family often brings out longstanding tensions, criticism and battles for control.

 Food, Mothers, and Tension would have been a better name for the article. Out of the seven scenarios featured five were about mothers/mother-in-laws, one about a sister-in-law and the lone story about a father. These family members would protest if you ate too many cookies, cooked with too much butter or were not eating enough. However, I think the father’s actions were the most heinous. He tried to stop people from enjoying chocolate! The nerve of that man!

The truth is that women are considered the causes of holiday tension more often then men. Perhaps, these control and “nagging” issues are result of an imbalance in work related to cooking, cleaning and general holiday festivities. 

My mother would get home from work and as soon as she sat down her second shift would begin with my father and I beckoning for food. I remember having numerous conversations with her about how we just assume she will take care of dinner.

It wasn’t fair to make that assumption, my father and I could have taken more of the food responsibility. However, at the time I was just hungry and didn’t know what else to do. (If anyone knows me, I’m not easy to get along with when I’m hungry.)

I distinctly remember Thanksgiving meals with the extended family when I was very young. After the meal, the women would gather in the kitchen to do dishes, clean tables and gossip. The men would be watching TV or sleeping in the living room. Even at nine years old, I saw this as unfair and would refuse to do dishes unless the boys helped too.

So why do women still do all of these crazy preparations, cleaning and decorating for holiday dinners? If women didn’t do it then a lot wouldn’t get done. No food, no decorating, no decided meeting time and no clean-up would make for a very boring holiday. Women want to enjoy the holidays and share time with family and friends, so we make it to happen!

This year, women and men need to pitch in and take ownership of the holiday parties. Yes, I realize that sometimes women expect perfection from their parties. Unfortunately, I am no exception to this stereotype so I’ll make you all a deal. If you take a breath, delegate responsibilities and leave dishes until Friday…I’ll do the same!

Photo Credit: www.BirdsofOklamhoma.net

The New York Times has published a very interesting article discussing the influence parental fears have on their children's independence. The article makes a very important point that parents who don't let their children walk a couple of blocks to school and prefer to drive them there instead actually put their children in a  lot more danger than letting them walk by themselves ever would: "Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents." 

I wish the article discussed the psychological consequences of helicopter-style parenting, but still it's a good, thoughtful piece that discusses a very important issue. That's why it's so surprising that the New York Times placed it in the "Fashion and Style" section. The logic behind this placement of the article is difficult to fathom. Do the newspaper's editors watch too much reports about the lives of Britney Spears and the like, which makes them believe that children are a fashion accessory? Do they consider parenting to be as trivial an issue as fashion? Do they think that parenting is by definition a "female" topic and has to be relegated to the "female" section of the paper?

It's funny how the New York Times offers pride of place to Ross Douthat's weekly inanities but relegates a truly interesting piece to the depths of a secondary section that concentrates on mere trivialities.

In July, I wrote a post about Nicholas D. Kristof’s announcing a “special issue” of the New York Times Sunday Magazine that would cover women in the developing world. Well, that issue is now available online, and will be arriving to the doorsteps of NYT subscribers in a few days. While this issue would have [...]