Playing Poker with Our Economy

A friend of mine published this marvelous letter to the editor in yesterday's Athens News, the local free, independent paper. You have to imagine it read out loud in a rich Scottish brogue:

To the Editor:

I would like to share with you a letter I mailed to Treasury Secretary Henry, aka Hank, Paulson. I am sure that I will receive a reply in due course, reflecting the honest generosity of the man when it comes to doling out taxpayer dollars to the fiscally distressed.

“Dear Secretary Paulson: Or can I just call you Hank? You seem like a decent sort of chap. I see from the news that you are seeking to help your cronies after they made some bad bets. I am hoping you can help me out, too.

On Friday night, I had a straight to the five in a five-card poker game. I stoked the pot as best I could, but incredibly my opponent had a straight to the Queen (God bless her and all her heirs). I took a significant hit with this malinvestment. I assure you I was not at all at fault; it was just the way the cards were dealt.

I see that some of your old cronies have gotten into the same position with some unfortunate bets, and you’ve been funneling them some of Dr. Bernanke’s freshly inflated dollars. Luckily, I did not have time to leverage my bet prior to it going down, as I’d then have been in the hole for much more – like what happened with your chums. My tin of coins is, however, much lighter than it was, and for the next game I am facing a liquidity crunch. I was wondering if it could be arranged for my toxic investment to be sold as an illiquid asset to the taxpayer?

Your obedient servant, etc.”

I am awaiting the check in the mail once our gutless Congress again caves.

David Young
Albany

Yes. We're waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

As for David's poker losses: I can confirm they're not just a literary device. We talked about his Black Friday Night at the after-school pickup. Luckily for us taxpayers who'll bail him out, David's losses are still in the two-digit range.

The disheartening thing is that it's Hank and his cronies who are holding all the cards.

Photo by Flickr user Fabio, used under a Creative Commons license.

A Birthday Overshadowed

It's my birthday but I'm feeling too sad right now to say much. My sister had to put her eight-month-old puppy to sleep today due to a mysterious and painful paralysis. I know how miserable she's feeling tonight, so I can't really feel celebratory either. Most of my family loves their pets beyond all measure and reason.

Chickie Bunny (my niece and nephew named her after her Easter arrival) was a sweet and funny yellow lab. She loved the water, kids, and especially my sister's family. This is her at my mom's house in California last July. She's about to jump into the pool. I want to remember her like this.

Not Such a Quick Study after All

When Sarah Palin was first chosen as the Republican VP pick, I wasn't exactly easy on her, but I did give her the benefit of the doubt when it comes to her intelligence. I still think she must have some degree of political savvy, or she wouldn't have captured the governorship. I'm also fed up with the assumption that a pretty woman can't be smart, too.

As for the rest? If you saw her Katie Couric interviews last week, you'll forgive me for saying I just don't think Palin is very sharp. She repeats phrases almost meaninglessly, as if they were popping out of a Random Talking Points Generator. I'm getting nostalgic for Dan Quayle. (Glenn Greenwald came to the same conclusion a few days ago, though more elegantly.)

No wonder the McCain camp was desperately trying to postpone the vice presidential debates.

Yet another scary thing about Palin's Couric interview: It barely needed to be tweaked for Tina Fey to lampoon it ferociously. (If you still need evidence that beauty doesn't rule out brains, Tina Fey would be Exhibit A.) Enjoy ... and then go back and view excerpts from the originals.

Caturday! B & W & Grey Kitty

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

That kitteh in back looks so like Grey Kitty. Actually, they all do, right down to their elegant saggy bellies.

Ten Reasons Why I, Sungold, Am Qualified to Be Vice President

Underneath the seemingly mild-mannered surface of Sungold the professor is a cauldron of seething ambition. I think John McCain is already regretting he didn't cross party lines - not for Joe Lieberman, but to pick me as his running mate. Here's why I would be ultra-qualified to become vice president:

1. I'm from an even smaller state than Sarah Palin! According to Wikipedia, Alaska ranks 47th with 683,478 residents, while North Dakota is in 48th place with 639,715. She's got me beat when it comes to low population density, though.

2. My state of origin borders a foreign country, too! Granted, I couldn't see Canada from my window, but as a teenager, while Palin was sharpening her barracuda teeth on the basketball court, I spent a few of my summers attending the International Music Camp at the International Peace Garden, which straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Palin now touts her proximity to Russian airspace; I can claim to have shared a cabin with actual Canadians.

Oh, and besides having spent a decade in Germany, I sleep next to an actual foreigner every night. That makes me at least this prepared to face down Putin:



3. Curiosity: I has it! It might be hazardous to cats, but in political leaders, it's generally considered a Good Thing. Unless, of course, your only mission is to memorize talking points at Joe Lieberman's School of Foreign Relations.

4. Like Palin, I too had a perm in the mid-1980s! Unlike hers, at no point during the 1980s was my hair easily mistaken for a mullet.

Collage from cityrag, who I hope won't mind my borrowing it; go there for more.

5. I too am 44 years old, which appears to be exactly the very bestest, most optimalest age for a vice presidential candidate! You're old enough to have some experience (see point 2, above) but still young enough to be hot hot hot. Okay, so most days I'm merely lukewarm. No amount of silicon could ever put my boobs in the same league as the gubernatorial mammaries. But I'm still way cuter than John McCain. Why, I'm sexier than Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney combined!

6. I took some economics classes in college! And so I understand not just the human but also the economic rationale for coupling any Wall Street bailout with an effort to slow housing foreclosures. That is, if all these bad mortgages can be rendered less-than-worthless, the mortgage-backed securities that are currently tanking Wall Street will also be worth something again. Of course, I can't roll as many garbled talking points into my explanation as she did:




7. I only went to one college, not five, but I've still spent my whole adult life in universities!

8. During my first pregnancy I flew from California to Germany while so bulky I couldn't flip the tray table into a fully horizontal position! That's way farther than from Dallas to Wasilla. This oughtta prove my chick-cojones ... even if I wasn't leaking amniotic fluid along the way.

9. I love me my lipstick!

That's me, Sungold. No pit bull here, just feline cunning.

10. I too can hide my inner viciousness behind perkiness - yay exclamation points!

Update September 27, 1 p.m.: When I posted this I meant to ask about your qualifications for the vice presidency, dear readers. Then I hit "publish" precipitously because the debate was starting. So: If you want to turn this into a meme, as Heather at Knitting Clio has threatened to do, please leave a comment linking to your list of awesome qualifications!

The Wheel Is Turning and You Can't Slow Down

Blogging has been thin lately because this is my life:

LOLcat by Flickr user wotthe7734, used under a Creative Commons license.

I'm teaching three classes (plus helping with a fourth) and chairing a committee (for the first time, which is new enough to be cool). Then there's herding cats (uh, kids) to playdates, several hours of soccer each week, and music class. There's my very modest volunteer work for the Obama campaign. And like most of you I spent my free moments this week trying to figure out WTF is going on the economy. Not that anyone is likely to ask me for a solution. But hey, when they do, I'll be ready.

And now I'd better dash to pick up the kids from school before they start to wonder what happened to their mama.

I'll try to get a real post written in the next day or two.

Prince Chunk Has Found a Home

Remember the 44-pound cat that was abandoned in New Jersey last summer? Prince Chunk has found a home. (No, not Princess Chunk, as previously reported - I guess sex is hard to determine through so much fat and fur.)

Warning: Seeing the other kitties who need a home in this video made me teary, wishing my mate didn't have an allergy problem that rules out adopting another cat. (He developed asthma back when Grey Kitty was still alive.) But maybe someone who watches this has room for (another) cat in their home?

The Dominoes Start to Fall in Our New Economy

Photo by Flickr user Mirko Macari, used under a Creative Commons license.

Today my university announced a hiring freeze in response to the mess on Wall Street. No new searches will be authorized for either faculty or staff, though open searches will be allowed to continue. From our president's memo:

Over the past two weeks, the news about the evolving economic situation at the state and federal level has intensified. These events underscore the importance of being prepared so we can continue to foster academic excellence and remain a strong institution, now and in the long run.

For that reason, the most responsible step we can take at this time is to institute a hiring freeze, effective immediately. This initiative will allow us to preserve funds so that we can strategically respond to potential future state budget cuts or other negative effects caused by external economic factors.

No word on whether this will affect our president's whopping 29% pay raise that he received this summer, which gave him an $85,000 bump to a total annual salary of $385,000.

Translated: What the prez is getting for his raise alone would finance a couple of instructors like me in my current incarnation, or six of me at my old adjunct level (not counting the cost of benefits.) Not that I'm saying this place needs clones of me; one is probably plenty.

But even so. Who generates academic excellence? Administrators? Or the people who do the actual teaching and research?

At any rate, it's interesting (in that Chinese-curse sense) to see how upward redistribution functions beautifully even at the local level.

Redistributing Redistribution

Photo by Flickr user jonnystiles, used under a Creative Commons license.

In yesterday's post on Sarah Palin and Hugo Chavez, I implied that redistribution of wealth runs contrary to Republican principles. As the past few days have shown, there's one massive exception to that: when redistribution all goes up the food chain instead of down it.

The whole mess is complicated and I don't pretend to understand all of it. Basically, though, it's clear that Wall Street fat cats gambled with their money, and those of us who are very small kittens by comparison will now be forced to cover their losses. Scandalously, the Bush Administration's plan does not provide for any oversight, re-regulation of the banking industry, or restrictions on the compensation of executives in these high-flying financial companies.

We do need some sort of a bailout, I think, because the alternative would risk economic collapse. But any bailout should enforce accountability on these people who have not shown themselves to be trustworthy. Also, if we taxpayers are forced to make what amounts to a massive involuntary investment in these highly risky companies, we should at least gain a serious equity stake in return! That is, as investors we should partake in any future profits.

Ideally, the Wall Street bailout should be coupled with relief for homeowners facing foreclosure. I don't know if this is politically feasible right now, but justice demands it. So does economic good sense: Our economy depends, after all, on consumers being financially healthy enough to actually consume.

Glenn Greenwald has a great analysis that puts the radical magnitude of the problem - and its proposed solution - into perspective.

The headline in the largest Brazilian newspaper this week was: "Capitalist Socialism??" and articles all week have questioned -- with alarm -- whether what the U.S. Government did has just radically and permanently altered the world economic system and ushered in some perverse form of "socialism" where industries are nationalized and massive debt imposed on workers in order to protect the wealthiest. If Latin America is shocked at the degree of nationalization and government-mandated transfer of wealth, that is a pretty compelling reflection of how extreme -- unprecedented -- it all is.

Yeah. Funny how it's only "socialism" when the little guys are getting help. This sort of redistribution? It's just hard-nosed capitalism. Help me out - can somebody please explain that to me again??

The Democrats are as panicked as anyone about this, and I'm afraid they are going to just go along with the bailout sans accountability unless we hold their feet to the fire. We're talking about at least $700 billion and maybe upwards of a trillion dollars that our children and grandchildren will still be financing. It's time for the Democrats to grow a pair.

I don't often urge my readers to take some specific political action, but I really think this warrants a call to your representatives in Washington. I called Senators Sherrod Brown and George Voinivich today, along with Rep. Charlie Wilson. If you don't know your representatives' numbers, the Capitol switchboard is at (202) 224- 3121. Please let me know in comments what you think ought to be done about the mess - and what you're doing about it.

Update, 9/24/08: Here's another reason why we can't give the fat cats a blank check without any accountability. The FBI is investigating AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehmann Brothers on possible fraud charges.

Hugo Chavez with Lipstick

Photo by Flickr user Christina007, used under a Creative Commons license.

I'm trying to figure out how Sarah Palin's approach to redistributing oil wealth differs from the approach Hugo Chavez has taken in Venezuela. Here's Palin's philosophy on this, according to an Alaskan reader of Andrew Sullivan:

If you want to dig more deeply into Sarah Palin's economic theory -- or lack thereof -- I think you will find that while she espouses the free market, she has adopted a quasi-socialist and populist belief in the commons. One of her champions is former Gov. Walter Hickel, who has argued that commonly owned resources should be developed for the maximum benefit of the people -- and that this system of economic organization represents a new paradigm for states and nations. ...

In Alaska's case, that means no individual ownership of mineral rights, which has led to the idea that government surpluses should be distributed to "the people" as direct handouts. Hence the recent $1,200 "energy dividend" given to all Alaskans. It has also resulted in the Permanent Fund Dividend, the direct payout to Alaskans every year from what was originally conceived as a rainy day account set aside for when Alaska's oil wealth runs out.

I'll grant there's one real difference between Palin's policy and "twenty-first-century socialism" as practiced by Chavez. While he has invested petrodollars in education and programs to combat poverty, Palin put the money directly into people's pockets.

But it's still redistribution. It's still extracting money from corporations and transferring wealth to citizens. It's still a universe removed from the rampant free markets that right-wing Republicans normally espouse. I personally think redistribution is important in a just society; I'm just pointing out that on this point, Palin is out of step with her party. She's closer to Hugo Chavez than to Grover Norquist.

Palin is also not so dissimilar to Chavez in her approach to governance. They're both self-styled reformers with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. They both seem allergic to scrutiny and criticism. They both claim transparency while achieving just the opposite. They both consolidate their party by intimidating their opponents.

So why is only Chavez accused of being an anti-democratic communist? Granted, Palin's a lot prettier than him. But here you see him embracing a fashion point that Palin has long known: Holding a small child as an accessary can really soften that autocratic look.

Photo posted on Flickr by Presidencia de la Republica del Ecuador, used under a Creative Commons license.

Now Chavez just needs to learn how to pick a flattering shade of lipstick.

White Privilege and the Republican Ticket

This week we discussed white privilege in my intro to women's and gender studies class. By coincidence, earlier this week Tim Wise published a nice list of thirteen ways John McCain and Sarah Palin have benefited from white privilege. Here are a few of my favorites:

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at 17 like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay. ...

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action. ...

White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

Go read the rest of it. The whole thing is pretty good. I just wish I could figure out a way to use it in my class without being perceived as overtly partisan. (In the interests of disclosure, I've told my students I support Obama, but I'm careful to be even-handed when it comes to partisan politics, making sure Republicans don't feel squelched and criticizing Democrats on such points as Bill Clinton's complicity with the Defense of Marriage Act.) Maybe one could ask how Joe Biden, too, has benefited from white privilege?

Anyway, what's missing for me in Wise's list is a serious attempt at intersectional analysis. While he rightly skewers white privilege, he doesn't attempt to address how it intersects with class privilege and male privilege. No, I don't expect him to throw around academese like "intersectionality" in the popular press. I would expect him to incorporate it implicitly into his analysis.

For example, the last paragraph quoted above shows how Michelle Obama was criticized as a black American for not fulfilling a public role - but as a black woman, she would be equally vulnerable to charges of bad mothering. This puts her in a double bind; she had no "right" choice in that situation.

More significantly, Wise almost seems to assume that white privilege negates the effects of sexism for white women:

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women and made them give your party a "second look."

As I wrote a few days ago, women have waited a long time to vote for a female presidential candidate. Some still yearn for it in this election cycle (even if the female candidate is only running for VP). Of course, unless they're conservative fundamentalists, they'd be loony to vote for McCain-Palin. But some of these women definitely are giving Palin a second look due to her sex. Luckily, they also seem to be giving her a third look, and what they're learning about her positions so far explains why her favorables are plummeting.

I'm sure some white women will vote for Palin simply because they feel they can identify with her. The same may be true for a fraction of black men who vote for Obama. But would we attribute their choice solely to male privilege if they vote for Obama even though they mostly disagree with him on the issues? That's basically the move Wise makes for white women. Or can we empathize with the thrill that members of historically oppressed groups might feel - even to the point of irrational voting decisions - just to see someone like them who's running?

This isn't rocket science. But it's a point you can miss if you overlook the fact that racism doesn't operate independently of sexism, classism, and all those other charming -isms.

Good Thing the Tiger Has a Hard Noggin

Political blogging will resume tomorrow, I hope, but this evening I'm pretty wrung out. Tonight at the Bear's soccer practice, while the younger siblings were playing on the sidelines, a six-year-old threw a rock at the Tiger and hit him in the head. Hard. I wasn't there, but I heard all about it from the rest of the family.

The Tiger proved once again that scalp injuries bleed like crazy. He'll be okay, but he arrived home looking like a refugee from one of those scary movies I haven't watched since my high school days.

It was a deep cut and hurt like hell, but worse, the incident wasn't an accident. It was deliberate and unprovoked. The child's father didn't say a word to my husband. Not cool.

It's hard to know how to handle this; the family is new to this team. I'm not one to hold grudges, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect an apology from the parents, or at least a word of concern. (The dad did insist his son apologize.) I'd also like some reassurance that in the future, they'll keep an eye on both of their children, especially if their younger son has a history of aggression.


Here's what the Tiger's noggin looked like up 'til a few hours ago, before it got bloodied and then shaved like a big bullseye around the wound. (Out of privacy concerns, I don't normally post pictures of my kids, but this one doesn't reveal his identity.)

Update 9/20/08: The mom of the other little boy sent us an apologetic email earlier today. That made me feel a lot better. Kids stand so much better a chance of getting it if their parents do, too. Although I really don't know these parents, I sort of suspect they may have a division of labor where the wife is charge of dealing with social situations, including the touchy ones.

What's Bad for America Is Great for Comedy

"OMG It's Tina Fey and Amy Poehler!!"

- Caption and photo from Flicker user Zadi Diaz, used under a Creative Commons license.

What she said.

"I Just Wanted to Vote for a Woman"

I'm starting to think that if John McCain had picked a female VP candidate who was slightly less wingnutty, he'd have picked up a slew of disenchanted Democratic women.

While making my volunteer phone calls for the Obama campaign today, I spoke with a woman who firmly said yes, she was supporting Obama in the general election, and yes, she'd definitely vote. When I followed up by asking if she might be interested in volunteering with the campaign, she just as firmly said, "Definitely not! I was a Hillary supporter and it just about broke my heart. I've been waiting to vote for a woman my whole life."

I made a few sympathetic noises about feeling the same way since sixth grade and appreciating Clinton's candidacy. (I left out the fact that in sixth grade, *I* wanted to be that woman running for the presidency. My, how things change.)

This unleashed a torrent of words that came so fast I may be misquoting, but the gist was: "Oh, when Sarah Palin was announced, I thought YES! I wanted to vote for her so bad. I just wanted to vote for a woman." But then she looked into Palin's positions and couldn't quite stomach them, being a good Democrat and feminist.

Two things I took away from this: One, while we might wish Obama were still running against John McCain, de facto he's running against Palin. She's getting roughly three times as many Google hits as McCain. At McCain rallies this week in Cedar Rapids and Youngstown, audience members began streaming out during McCain's speech; Palin had already spoken and they'd gotten what they came for.

Even the candidate herself may have started to believe she's heading the ticket, if this clip is any indication (via the HuffPost):



The second thing I learned from my short chat with one of Hillary's mourners is that there really are two basically different conceptions of feminism afoot in this land, and this is what the McCain campaign failed to exploit.

I think many self-identified feminists still see working for women's advancement as the purpose of feminism. That's obviously very central to it, but to my mind that can't be the whole story. I like bell hooks' definition of feminism as a struggle against sexism. If you take that as your standard, it's immediately evident that women can uphold sexism, too, and you don't have any obligation to support them. It's equally clear that men can be excellent allies. And it's glaringly obvious that no feminist should support a wingnut, no matter how many X chromosomes said wingnut might carry.

My Bloggy Purity Redeemed

After I got that NC-17 rating a few weeks ago, I figured I'd joined the ranks of the disreputable. Since I'm feeling burnt out on politics tonight, I took the Cuss-O-Meter test and at first glance I still look pretty skanky:



Uff da. I thought I was really restraining myself - I can be a whole lot saltier but you never know when your students, current or former, might read your blog. Or your mom, the retired church secretary. (Okay, I do remember using the F-word recently, but my goodness, I meant it literally as a verb - that's gotta count for something.)

But wait! It's more complicated. The results page tells me:

Around 22.2% of the pages on your website contain cussing. This is 92% LESS than other websites who took this test.

Um, hello? I'm not sure if that's a percentile ranking or a percentage of other people's average scores. Or maybe something else entirely. But "High," it's not.

Go here and let me know how you ranked, okay?

That said, the Cuss-O-Meter has no scientific pretensions. The entry page announces:

Average Cuss Level: 269%

The average percentage of pages that contain cussing for all the websites that have taken the Cuss-O-Meter is 269%.

Uh huh. No mathematical pretensions, either.

I think the Cuss-O-Meter would make an excellent Republican presidential candidate.

Is Porn Virtual Adultery?

Does viewing Internet porn amount to adultery? In his column at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat says yes, it does. Basically, Douthat argues that hard-core porn is not fantasy and that the privacy offered by the Internet allows a degree of intense and personalized interaction that could not happen in the good old days when men stashed a magazine or two under their mattress:

Over the past three decades, the VCR, on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up. ...

Masturbating to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model (like Christie Brinkley, once upon a time) or a Playboy centerfold is a one-way street: the images are intended to provoke fantasies, not to embody reality, since the women pictured aren’t having sex for the viewer’s gratification. Even strippers, for all their flesh-and-blood appeal, are essentially fantasy objects—depending on how you respond to a lap dance, of course. But hard-core pornography is real sex by definition, and the two sexual acts involved—the on-camera copulation, and the masturbation it enables—are interdependent: neither would happen without the other. The whole point of a centerfold is her unattainability, but with hard-core porn, it’s precisely the reverse: the star isn’t just attainable, she’s already being attained, and the user gets to be in on the action.

I'm not convinced. I have other problems with porn. Most of it objectifies women while being trite and frankly not very sexy, in my opinion. I'd have a problem if a partner neglected me in favor of a tete-a-tete with his computer. I would definitely be squicked if a partner was into barely-legal porn, or fetishes that would gross me out in real life, or the gonzo stuff that implies women get great pleasure from men destroying their orifices. But even then, while it might be represent a serious problem for our compatibility, it would fall far short of what I'd consider adultery.

To my mind, sex by any reasonable definition has to involve more than one person. It has to involve some sort of reciprocal interaction. Otherwise, masturbation would be cheating - and that's just silly.

By this definition, yes, it's possible to have sex online. But Douthat is not talking about cybersex, or phone sex, or any sort of interactive encounter. In porn, the only people interacting are on screen. The guy (or gal) at home is still a viewer. It's not like he's giving the actors direction. It's not like he can say, "Mmm, move a little to the right so I can get a better view." All he can do is open another browser window if the images aren't doing him right. No interaction - no sex.

I don't think porn is adultery. I don't even think it's virtual adultery. Porn is just porn.

I'm curious what you think. Are there any instances where porn would amount to adultery in your book? Please tell me in comments.

Sex and the Over-50 Male

Alternet has a well-meant but frustratingly stereotypical article on why sex is better with men over age 50. Written by a sex educator who works with older people, Katherine Anne Forsythe, the piece suggests that a 25-year-old may have six-pack abs and stamina, but he's also apt to be a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am kind of guy. Older men, she says, take time to smell the roses.

Well, it's laudable that Forsythe acknowledges that people's sex life doesn't and shouldn't end when they turn 30 and cease to be hawt. It's also great that she argues there's more to sex than just bonking.

But it's annoying that this piece still traffics in so many stereotypes. First, there's the hunky but insensitive young man:

The whole scene, start to finish, took twenty minutes, max. Fortunately, he is resilient. He has a brief recovery time-out, and you start all over again. This time, if you are lucky, he thinks about you and your orgasm. If you are in a typical situation, you may reach orgasm or you might feel pressure to fake it. Of course, he thinks you are loving it. And, why wouldn't he? You are telling him so, over and over, as we are taught to do as women.

Hmm ... how can the poor guy know he's doing it wrong if no woman is willing to diplomatically guide him? Sure, women are socialized to please men, but that doesn't let us off the hook. Even when I was in my early twenties, half a lifetime ago, I knew enough not to fake it unless I wanted to write off the real thing.

Also, twenty years ago, very few men had six-pack abs. We young women agreed that Schwarzeneggar and his ilk were ridiculous. Back then, young men were under less pressure to conform to a rigid ideal. I don't know that sex was better or worse for that, but I for one have never seen the appeal of absurdly hard bellies. Rigidity and hardness are better placed elsewhere.

Most of all, it's a gross distortion to say that for a young man, sex is all about him. For some guys, sure. Others care very much about pleasing their partners. I'm not at all convinced that this basic attitude shifts dramatically over time.

Forsythe seems to think that men almost automatically become selfless lovers, just due to time and experience:

Older men have a quiet confidence and patience that allows enjoyment of the entire sexual experience, yours and his. The mellowness of having been "around the block" with age -- and, most likely, a high number of partners -- permits him to let go of having to rush, and prove, and perform.

Yeah, experience counts. Confidence is good.

I'm waiting for an article explaining why age and experience make women irresistible.

But if a guy was self-centered in his twenties, that basic personality trait probably won't reverse itself. While a man may indeed feel he has less to prove, he may also have a thicker sense of entitlement. There are plenty of middle-aged men who still think it's all about them. We've no shortage of male politicians illustrating this point. I don't know whether Elliot Spitzer or John Edwards are selfish in the sack, but their public sense of entitlement - as reflected in their assumption that they could get away with extramarital dalliances - isn't exactly a turn-on.

Or take Philip Weiss. (If you can stand to - I sure won't fight you for him.) He's over 50. His douchebaggery is not improving with age. Again, I would never get as far as sexual intercourse with him because the social intercourse would be so painful. (Forsythe is definitely right when she says sex also includes the teasing and mutual seduction. This does not include admitting that you'd be "as lost as plankton" without your wife organizing your life for you. Nor does is it very seductive to insist that men have needs - women, not so much.)

Look. Men over 50 are great. I don't much notice men younger than myself, and if you round people's ages up to the nearest decade, that puts me very much in Forsythe's demographic.

Experience is a wonderful thing - but only if the guy is wonderful to start with.

Aging does bring real challenges for most people. It's frustrating that Forsythe plays them down to the extent of disregarding real pain and losses. She acknowledges that ED becomes increasingly common. At the same time, she blames ED drugs for making men dependent on them and thus robbing them of confidence. This is way too simple. Most guys are so reluctant to ask a doctor for help that they won't do it unless they've got a serious, ongoing problem with ED - and even then they may balk at it. In fact, doctors sometimes use ED drugs to help rebuild confidence when they believe ED has psychosomatic causes.

This brings up (if you'll pardon the awful pun) a final set of stereotypes that permeate Forsythe's article: that women really don't get much out of intercourse. This assumption is tangled up with a set of questions that are basically really good ones:

What if we took the emphasis off erections, and off intercourse, and off orgasm? What a concept! What if we decided that having sex was about pleasuring each other, taking time to explore bodies, building up passion intentionally, gradually, bit by bit, savoring each move? What if intercourse became just one option on a menu of lots of options?

Yes, by all means, let's expand our definition of sex. Let's not be performance driven. Let's enjoy the ride and not just the destination. If you want to carry on Forsythe's food metaphor, let's nibble from a smorgasbord of delicacies.

But when aging, illness, relationship problems, or other issues take some of the options off the menu altogether, that's a real loss. This loss goes beyond "male ego" or the social construction of masculinity. I know from my involvement in the prostate cancer community that - while it's true that ED causes a real blow to men's self-image - men are at least as concerned that their partners are suffering. Their female partners - while grateful for the efforts their mates make to become more creative lovers - often mourn the loss of plain old vanilla intercourse. If they don't, they probably didn't much enjoy intercourse in the first place, but that's a separate issue.

Forsythe seems to assume that women just don't care much about sex, only about intimacy. It's possible to find new paths to intimacy, and I appreciate Forsythe's effort to provide a map. But darn it, sometimes girls just want to fuck. Even when those "girls" are themselves over 50.

Behind the intimacy assumption is the idea that all women are shortchanged in intercourse. This is an incredibly reductive view of the variety of women's experiences. It also suggests that men are "always and only interested in erections for own pleasure," as figleaf puts it. This insults men, denies the pleasure that women may find in their partners' reponses, and overlooks the link that many people - men and women - feel between intercourse and intimacy. (Clearly, they're both "innies.")

The forms taken by sexuality and intimacy have to change, by necessity, when our bodies change. Creativity is essential if you want to keep sexual pleasure in your life and not just give up, as I think too many people do, when aging slows our responses. (Okay, creativity is great at any age!) But doesn't creativity have to start with us giving up stale gender stereotypes about selfish men and sexless women?

Oh, and that article about women growing sexier with experience? Do let me know when that one comes out.

Volunteering: The Poor Woman's Ambien

I've been sleeping very restlessly lately, and I think my slow-motion freakout over Palin is partly to blame. So this evening, I went to an organizational meeting for the other guys. It's not like I really have a lot of free time these days, but I keep saying how this election is a major historical turning point.

I don't know if I'll really sleep better tonight, but it felt wonderful to be with other people who also see what's at stake. More wonderful yet, several of them are my friends and neighbors. We didn't plan to find each other there - we just all showed up.

Ohio could go either way. I'm not going to be the one person who sways the state into Obama's column. But I also don't want to be the person who failed to act if we wake up on November 5 to find McCain and Palin measuring the Oval Office for new drapes.

As Monk might say: Living in a battleground state: it's a blessing ... and a curse.

Today's heavy-handed gardening metaphor for hope against the odds: I grew these wave petunias from seed and they survived a hot, dry Ohio summer without irrigation while I was away in Germany for five weeks.

Echoes of Dubya in the Alaskan Wilderness

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Quick follow-up to my last post on Tina Fey's wonderful Sarah Palin send-up (and also my earlier fretting on what seems to be her willful ignorance of foreign policy).

James Fallows at the Atlantic cogently analyzes why Palin is clueless about the Bush Doctrine and why this should rob us of our sleep:

How could she not know this? For the same reason I don't know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era.

A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was:

1) Ignorance
2) Lack of curiosity
3) "Decisiveness"

That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness.

We don't know for sure about #2 for Palin yet -- she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3. Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role.

(My emphasis. Read his whole commentary here.)

Now, I did follow European soccer when I lived in Germany, and it's great fun - but only if you're willing and able to invest some effort in it. Otherwise, you're left with a sea of furrin names that don't mean much. Same for furrin policy. But darn it, virtually everyone I know who's involved in local politics has more of a clue about the Bush Doctrine than Sarah Palin does.

That, to me, is pretty strong evidence that Palin suffers from congenital lack of curiosity about foreign affairs. Seems to me that Fallows really underplays his second point. His third point - about "decisiveness" - is pretty well illustrated by Palin's approach to preterm labor. If you object that this was a "personal" arena and thus no predictor of how "resolute" she'd be as president, please recall her "I did not blink" mantra in the Charlie Gibson interview.

Fallows could've also added a fourth similarity to GW Bush: Palin's penchant for cronyism, secrecy, and intimidation, as reported in the New York Times. Apparently her attempt to fire the Wasilla public librarian was only her warm-up act. And Troopergate is only the most publicized manifestation of her Nixonian qualities.

All of this adds up to someone who I wouldn't want on my local school board, much less a heartberat away from being Leader of the Free World. The only person I trust less, at this point, is the guy who picked her.

Palin, Impaled (Brilliantly, by Tina Fey)

This is what Tina Fey nailed last night on Saturday Night Live: Sarah Palin's incuriosity. Her flirtatious way of finessing her ignorance of the issues. Her provinciality - and I don't mean just her odd vowels, although Fey was pitch perfect on them, too.

(WTF is up with those vowels, anyway? I know a few people from Alaska, and none of them ever spoke like that. They almost have a North Dakotan ring to them. I say this with some authority, since my own vowels still have a slight Dakotan/Minnesotan cast.)

I don't know if comedy can steer the course of an election. I don't know if it should. I do know that I get better TV news from Jon Stewart than from any of the "news" channels. And that Darrell Hammond's impersonation of Al Gore and his "lockbox" on SNL in 2000 is still with me, much clearer in my memory than the actual presidential debates.

If comedy should function as a kingmaker (or a queen-breaker?), then Tina Fey is the gal I want in charge. The only part of her impersonation that didn't quite convince me? The laughing intelligence in her eyes that Fey can't quite hide, no matter whose glasses she's wearing.

Alaskan Women: Color Them Unimpressed

My friend, reader, and frequent co-conspirator, Chris, sent me a link to a wonderful set of photos from yesterday's Alaskan Women Reject Palin rally. Here are a few of my favorites. I hope the blogger who posted them, Laura, won't mind me reprinting them. They're really meant as bait for you to check out the rest of her set.

It's refreshing to see that skepticism is alive and well even in Sarah Palin's backyard - almost as refreshing as the sight of demonstrators in fall jackets. (We are sweltering in unseasonable 93-degree mugginess here in southeast Ohio.)

Enjoy - and then go visit Laura at her place. Her blog also features some grand pictures of Alaskan scenery that lifted my politically-depressed spirits.

Parenting in the Shadows of Atrocity

Pictures from a few hours ago:

We're in the mountains. The sky is preternaturally blue. Maybe I'm in Colorado.

An airplane approaches, too low. It breaks into two pieces. There's no fire, smoke, or explosion. The fuselage just snaps in two, breaking right behind the wings. It goes down instantly, silently.

In the dream, everyone knows it's September 12. Oddly, I'm the only one who immediately realizes that this isn't just a technical malfunction.

I wake up. Sometimes, commemoration doesn't involve flag pins or pious moments of silence. Sometimes, it's neurotic and lonely and feels as real as the rubble of history.

********

We haven't yet told our kids about the 9/11 attacks. Each year, we keep the news off the TV and radio so that the Bear won't pick up on the story. I realize he needs to hear about it from us before he hears about it from other kids; I know that time is running out on our policy of avoidance. He was not quite two in 2001. It was easy to shield him, then, and he was too young to ask why my eyes were so red-rimmed.

Now, as he approaches his ninth birthday, he's a very sensitive kid - so much so that he asks me to turn off NPR if a report about the Iraq War comes on. He understands that war is not a game, that it's about death and destruction. I've never discouraged him from gun-play because it's never really come up; he's scared of guns, plain and simple.

He's familiar with the word "terrorist." He knows about the shoe bomber. We fly regularly and he hates taking off his shoes for security. I explained that a bad guy tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane in his shoes, and that it won't happen now because the TSA is watching for it. I believe this is true. Something else will happen, but it won't be a shoe bomb.

It's much easier to provide reassurances about those attacks that never happened.

How do I explain falling buildings? How do I make sense of the kind of zealotry that guides a plane into a skyscraper? How do I assure him that we can still get on a plane without fear?

I'm not looking for advice. Legions of child psychologists dished out tips on managing our children's fears after 9/11. None of it struck me as very helpful. These are questions without an answer, and I know it.

Maybe I'm overprotective. I think it's more complicated than that.

********

I'm a historian. I don't understand how people can be "history buffs." History is not a hobby. History is a chronicle of atrocity, disaster, and horror. Every once in a while the archives give you a glimpse of love or heroism or honor. Mostly, it's war, plague, oppression, and one child in five dying as an infant.

I am as thin-skinned as my Bear. I cried the first time I saw Night and Fog - not discreet, dignified tears, but big gulping sobs. My doctoral adviser was sitting right next to me. I was afraid she'd conclude that if I lost it while watching a documentary on the Holocaust, I wasn't tough enough to study German history professionally. Instead, she kindly told me: There would be something wrong with you if this left you untouched. Once I'd calmed down, I realized she was right.

It's possible to be that thin-skinned and still stare down history without blinking. I want that for my children. I don't want them to become impervious.

Given that my kids are half German, they'll have to live with the legacy of the Holocaust. From me, their American mother, they inherit the legacy of slavery and the persecution of American Indians. We've talked about this things in age-appropriate ways. The Bear knows about slavery, Martin Luther King, and Huckleberry Finn. He knows Germany had a very bad ruler who was mean to the Jews and started a huge war when his Oma was a little girl. There's time enough for the harsh details when he's old enough put them into context: A great-grandfather who made his peace with the Nazis. A great-grandmother who was killed in an air raid while his Oma was buried alive. The deportations and the death camps.

Is it ever possible, really, to put such stories into context? Or do we just learn to hold ourselves at an ostensibly safe distance?

********

I also don't want my children to be ruled by fear, which is surely what will happen if they're exposed young to all the world's dangers. We have become a nation of cowards that specializes in saber-rattling. We are "governed" by chickenhawks who think invading Iraq worked out so well, we might as well take on Iran and Russia next. I don't want to raise my sons with the sort of false bravado that becomes a defense against otherwise unmanageable fears.

The same people who peddle fear promise to deliver us from it. Vote for them, and they'll snuff out the evildoers all around the globe. Give them power, and we'll be freed of the stuff of our nightmares.

I don't want that freedom, bought with the blood of innocents. I want a leader who will say yes, there is evil in the world, and I can't make all your bad dreams go away. I want to hear that even when the world bristles with real threats, we can be brave without being belligerent.

I want to be told that it's our job to be the grown-ups.

Preemptive Ignorance

I don't know if it's just the weather or if it's the wretched political climate, but I'm feeling too droopy to write anything. By now you've probably heard that in her ABC interview last night, Sarah Palin showed she didn't know WTF the "Bush Doctrine" refers to. Here she is, displaying her ignorance.



The problem is, you can hardly go after a candidate for their ignorance without a nasty bumerang effect. Too many Americans are ignorant, themselves, and they'll identify and sympathize. It seems to make no difference that John McCain can't tell Shiite from Sunni. And Palin's cluelessness about the Bush Doctrine's "justification" of preemptive warfare is unlikely to bother anyone except nerds like me who weren't going to vote for her anyway.

Penis Spam, Not Even Close to Barely Legal Edition

This, in my junk mail box:

Miley Cyrus was shocked at the size of my tool when we started getting it on ...

Eeeeeeeeeeew.

My Gender-Confused Blog

Photo by Flicker user andycarvin, used under a Creative Commons license.

It's just like the anti-feminists always said: Flirt too much with this crazy idea of equality between the sexes, and you'll end up with a world full of people with gender-identity issues.

Which have now, tragically, struck me and my blog. I put the Kittywampus archive for August through the Gender Genie, an algorithm that purports to predict the gender of an author.

I came out of the Gender Genie ... a boy.

So I tried July's posts. Then June's. Boy oh boy!

There's no shortage of irony here - me, who teaches and researches and writes on gender issues! who's been an academic feminist for nearly half my life! who's been a gal for all my life! (Or so I thought!?)

So much for l'écriture feminine; I've apparently gone over to the phallogocentric dark side.

I'm curious how my reader stack up. (If you're not a blogger, you can also put any non-fiction text through their wacky algorithm - oddly, it looks mostly at tiny, super-common words.) Please let me know in comments, or leave a link there.

(Hat tip to my husband for the Gender Genie link.)

Glazed Doughnuts: Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

Doughnut photo by Flickr user aprilandrandy, used under a Creative Commons license.

I've been such a doomsayer lately, I desperately need to lighten up. And so ate up every word of this post by Latoya at Feministe: Five Reasons I Love Cosmo.

The number one reason?

It is like The Onion, for feminists.

But let's be honest, we all read Cosmo for the sex tips. The ones Latoya reprinted are outstanding, if slightly obsessed with one basic technique:

* When fondling your man’s penis, slip a hair scrunchy around the base of it. The tight scrunchy combined with your touch creates an amazing sensation. ...

*Mak[e] a tight ring with your thumb and forefinger around the base of his penis, for[m] a second ring around the head, and then g[o] up with one hand and down with the other. ...

*Slip a glazed doughnut around his penis and nibble it off.

Someone needs to tell the poor writers at Cosmo that there's a handy device that does all this at once without leaving crumbs in the bed. (Psst! It's called a cock ring! It makes the dude's "package" girthier and his erection more stable - without disturbing your hairdo or making you fat right before bikini season!)

What's with this "package" terminology, anyway, so beloved of Cosmo editors? For me it conjures up all kinds of mental images, none of them remotely erotic. A beaten-up box delivered by UPS. A Christmas gift tied up in a shiny red bow.

Hmm, one guess where you're supposed to wrap that red ribbon - nice and tight?

The Math of Distraction

While burning some grilled cheese sandwiches for tonight's dinner, I heard an NPR report on the presidential candidates' day. The reports on Obama and McCain were roughly equal in length. They had quite a few sound bites from Obama. At least half of them addressed the "lipstick on a pig" non-issue.**

Virtually the entire report on McCain foregrounded Republican outrage over the "lipstick on a pig" comment.

So: One-half of Obama's report was devoted to this distraction, as was all of McCain's, or

(1/2 x 1/2) + (1 x 1/2) = 3/4.

This is how Rove and his minions get three-quarters of the news coverage to focus on utter crap!

This kind of politics doesn't add up to democracy.

Nor does this kind of media. Especially when the supposedly liberal reporters at NPR frame the day's event as Obama being put "on the defensive" in their lead-in comments.


** Here's Obama's remarks in context, as reported by the L.A. Times:

Obama compared the policies of McCain to those of President Bush.

"John McCain says he is about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is: 'Watch out George Bush, except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics, we're really going to shake things up in Washington.' That's not change. That's just calling the same thing something different.

"You can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

I'm Not En-Raptured

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

A few days ago, I raised questions about Sarah Palin's religious beliefs. I basically consider people's faith a private matter - unless it impinges significantly on how they would shape policy. So Joe Biden personally believes life begins at conception; he personally has serious qualms about abortion; yet he wouldn't stop others from choosing abortion. I'm fine with that. When making policy, he keeps his convictions in the personal realm, recognizing the religious pluralism of American society.

Sarah Palin is on record as believing that God favors certain pipeline projects (not to mention certain wars in Mesopotamia). She sees direct her faith as directly applicable to the public realm.

This isn't surprising in light of reports that came out this week about Palin's home church. Now, people aren't responsible for everything their pastor says. I'm not going to apply a totally different standard to her than I did to Barack Obama when his former pastor, Reverend Wright, made some highly impolitic remarks.

I do think Palin needs to respond to this, however. Writing in Alternet, Bruce Wilson reports:

Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world.

Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin's extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate.

Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday."

At the latter event, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins whose sermons espouse such theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family "curses". Palin has also been blessed, or "anointed", by an African cleric, prominent in the Third Wave movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a "spirit of witchcraft."

(See also this version at the Huffington Post.)

Again, none of this indicates directly what Palin herself believes. Even her appearance on stage at her home church doesn't mean she agrees with every particular of Reverend Kalnins' theology. (I'll admit that seeing video Wilson provides of them sharing a stage is pretty suggestive, however.)

Everything Wilson writes about the Third Wave is consistent with scholarship that I'm intimately familiar with. (I translated a 15,000-word book chapter on the Pentecostal movement a few months back.) Spiritual Warfare is a real and growing movement. Lots of Pentecostal and Charismatic worshipers sincerely believe in the efficacy of demons, curses, and exorcisms. While blending these ideas with a belief in witchcraft is particularly common in Africa, the difference between witches and demons is mighty slender.

I, for one, would prefer political leaders who don't fear demons. Who can separate the secular from the sacred. Who haven't bought stock in Armageddon. And who don't believe in the Basement Cat.

Palin, Clinton, and the PUMAs: What My Students Taught Me Today

Discussing Sarah Palin in class today challenged my belief that the support for McCain among former Clintonistas is mostly a media mirage.

Several of my students reported family members or friends shifting their support from Clinton to McCain. And they said McCain's choice of Palin really cemented this shift. It's mostly women who are migrating to McCain, though not exclusively so: one student's grandfather wants to vote for a strong woman, and to heck with her policies! (Oooh, a Freudian could have some fun with that!)

I am PUMA, hear me roar. Gosh, I wish this were just a phantasm of the media. Or a Daily Show sketch.

No, this isn't an actual puma, it's just a wonderful she-lion at the Berlin zoo. She was having a great time toying with that rope. Photo by me, Sungold.

Meet the New Prof - Same as the Old Prof

Except not entirely. Today was my first day teaching as an "assistant visiting professor." Never mind the "visiting" part of it; I still felt a lot less tenuous than I did as an adjunct. I know what I'm doing through early June, and that feels wonderful.

I also seem to have a wonderful group of students in my feminist theory class. It's a small group, and they seem curious, lively, and glad to be there. Funny thing - that's how I felt about it, too.

Soon enough, I'll be grading papers and exams, and I'll be a little less jubilant. For now, I just want to celebrate. There's time enough for politics again tomorrow. (Well, okay, we talked about Palin in class today, but that, too, can wait.)

Criminality versus Dumb Decisions

Earlier this week Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, published an open letter to Sarah Palin in Alternet, asking her to reconsider her position on abortion:

According to press reports your water broke while you were giving a keynote speech in Texas at the Republican Governors' Energy Conference. You did not immediately go to the hospital – instead you gave your speech and then waited at least 11 hours to get to a hospital. You evaluated the risks, made a choice, and were able to carry on your life without state interference. Texas Governor Rick Perry worried about your pregnancy but didn’t stop you from speaking or take you into custody to protect the rights of the fetus.

After, Ayesha Madyun’s water broke, she went to the hospital where she hoped and planned to have a vaginal birth. When she didn’t give birth in a time-frame comfortable to her doctors, they argued that she should have a C-section. The doctors asserted that the fetus faced a 50-75 percent chance of infection if not delivered surgically. (Risks of infection are believed by some health care providers to increase with each hour after a woman’s water has broken and she hasn’t delivered).

The court, believing, like you that fetuses have a right to life, said, "[a]ll that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was put simply, a doctor's scalpel." With that, the court granted the order and the scalpel sliced through Ms. Madyun's flesh, the muscles of her abdominal wall, and her uterus. The core principle justifying an end to legal abortion in the US provided the same grounds used to deprive this pregnant and laboring woman of her rights to due process, bodily integrity, and physical liberty. When the procedure was done, there was no evidence of infection.

(Read the whole thing here.)

Paltrow doesn't specify how many hours passed before Madyun's doctors pressed for a c-section. An old New York Times article says she'd been in labor for two days and in the hospital for 18 hours. Rachel Roth's excellent study Making Women Pay: The Hidden Costs of Fetal Rights states it had been 48 hours since her water broke. That's long enough that Madyun's decision starts to look fairly foolish by my standards and by most medical guidelines.

But here's the thing: People do lots of things that are stupid, risky, macho, or otherwise blameworthy. Some of these risk other people's lives as well as their own. Not all of these things are illegal. One example would be driving while very sleepy or distracted.

This is naturally true for childbearing, as well. Some people choose unassisted home birth, where the father catches the baby and no midwife or other trained assistant is present. Many of the people who propagandize for unassisted birth believe that birth, like sex, should only involve the couple; some of them also subscribe to right-wing religious ideologies. This is loony and irresponsible, in my view. (Not to mention it's asking a hell of a lot of the father!) Still, it's not illegal. Nor should it be. Imagine the mess if every baby born after a precipitous labor triggered a court case.

Another example Paltrow cites is of a woman who insisted on a VBAC at home. There are good reasons that no reputable doctor should condone this. If you give birth vaginally after a cesarean, there's a heightened chance of uterine rupture, which endangers the mother's life as well as the child's. If that occurred at home, odds are great that you'd bleed out before you could get help.

This woman, too, was forced by court order to have a c-section. This goes against our law on medical treatment in every other instance. A person cannot be forced to have surgery or undergo radiation even if they would surely die without the treatment. No one can be forced to donate a kidney - even if he or she is the parent of the patient needing a transplant.

If you believe humans have a right to bodily integrity and autonomy, you cannot legislate women's childbearing decisions. You certainly can argue that these people have an ethical obligation to make wise decisions and that some decisions are so irresponsible as to be unethical. However, unless you want to reduce the woman to an incubator and deprive her of basic rights of personhood, the law has no place intruding on ethics.

This is a long-winded way of saying that it's possible to fully agree with Paltrow's arguments and still maintain that Sarah Palin's choice to board a plane while she was at astronomical risk of going into active labor was a foolish decision. She wasn't taken to task for it legally, nor should she be. Her privilege protected her from any legal action. (Women subjected to forced childbearing decisions have been disproportionately young, poor, unmarried, and non-white.) If we trust women to make their own reproductive decisions, we have to acknowledge that while most women are remarkably altruistic and sensible, there will always be some who make decisions that we personally would never countenance.

But Palin's privilege shouldn't stop us from regarding her choice as 1) reckless and 2) completely hypocritical for someone who preaches the sanctity of fetal life. What's legal - and should remain legal - is not always ethical in every situation. We have a right to demand leaders that understand this distinction.

Palin, the Object of Our Obsession

I know it's time to move on from Sarah Palin. Somehow, we have to shift everyone's focus off of her and back to Obama's promise of - well, not salvation, maybe not even transformation, but at least starting to remedy the fuck-ups of this country that I love.

So why am I having trouble shifting focus, myself? Yeah, I'm scared because she's a wingnut who could too easily become President. But I'm not normally this obsessed about any individual 'winger. Huckabee alarmed me, too, but you didn't see me blogging about him for ten days straight.

I think I've finally figured it out after reading this post by Jessica at Jezebel:

When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. ...

And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." ...

I think what Ms. Warner is dancing around, but not saying outright, is that for a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ("I never really set out to be in public affairs, much less to run for this office," the Governor has said.) We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter. ...

I think the correct high school stereotype is of the homecoming queen. For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What's infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys' game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen's mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

(I've excerpted a lot of it but the whole post is worth reading.)

You know, I don't have any real issues with Palin's beauty queen past. I'm not a great beauty, myself, but I'm also not hideous. I don't know what it's like to have men drool en masse over me, but I've always been attractive enough for nearly all of the men who interested me. So I don't have jealousy issues about beauty. Nor do I discount the intelligence of women who happen to be conventionally beautiful. In high school, I even got along just fine with the homecoming queen, who was the band's drum major.

(In fact, in an odd chapter of my past life - which I'd forgotten until very recently - my band friends nominated me for "basketball homecoming queen" my senior year of high school, a very obscure honor indeed. It was mostly of a joke, and I was sort of an anti-candidate. I so didn't fit the type and I was never "popular" but I did have plenty of friends. I vaguely recall coming in second.)

But the cheerleaders! A few of them had this slightly simpering, dumbed-down way of dealing with boys. They weren't dumb, they just played the part. They hung out with the girls who were "popular," which - as in most high schools - was not at all the same as being well-liked. They acted just slightly frosty to the rest of us, enough to register with the girls but pass under the boys' radar. (Just to be clear, I have a couple of friends who were cheerleaders in high school. I'm not casting aspersions on all cheerleaders, just a select few from my high school.)

To this day, I have a real allergy to that sort of woman. Sarah Palin strikes me as one of them - as a woman who will fake and flirt and cajole and act stupid to please the menz - and then turn around and stab women in the back, individually and collectively.

Patriarchal systems have always required women like these. Every era has had its Anita Bryants and Phyllis Schaflys. Madame Bitch at Open Salon suggests that far from being the target of sexism, Palin is the very apogee of playing by the patriarchal rules:

What are the ways in which Palin embodies these sexist rules?

• She's number 2, not the top of the ticket.
• Her very appointment is a testament to the paucity of women leaders in the GOP -- had there been more choices, perhaps McCain would have chosen someone with fewer drawbacks.
• She's a mother of 5 children, so her "woman" credentials cannot be challenged.
• She constantly downplays her ambition and her accomplishments, even though the ambition is oozing out of her ears.
• She dumbs herself down.
• She embraces the frantic mommy role, both literally, and figuratively for her leadership roles.

To me, Palin seems not like a trailblazing, hard-charging battering ram, but a gray fascimile of that ideal, and one that is neatly confined into the small allowed space for her to exist, completely controlled for the comfort of the men who created those rules.

(Read the rest here.)

Palin is quite literally being controlled by the men, at least for now. She's being groomed and prepped and the press is not being allowed access to her - although word came out today that she'll grant an interview to Charlie Gibson later in the week. It reminds me a little of Old Testament descriptions of girls being prepared for entrance to the king's harem. The Book of Esther recounts how they spent a full year being beautified with oils and perfumes and makeup before they ever had a private audience with the king.

Palin has her beauty routine down pat, but the patriarchal grooming is no less intense for being focused on the names of foreign leaders and the pros and cons of privatizing Social Security. (I'm not suggesting that these are in any way "patriarchal" subjects. It's only the GOP take on them that's steeped in patriarchal assumptions.) My hunch is she's a quick study, judging from her convention performance. She seems to be smart and very, very tough. If Palin were transported back to the Old Testament, she wouldn't be a girl in the harem. She would be the woman who runs it. (For those of you who've read The Handmaid's Tale: Palin would be Aunt Lydia.)

Palin's experience in beauty pageants is not irrelevant; pageants teach and reward poise, self-possession, and smooth performances. So does cheerleading. I say this sincerely, not snarkily. These are good life skills for anyone. They're invaluable if you're a politician.

I'd like to think we're all beyond knee-jerk high-school emotions, despite the results of the past two elections. But I can't help thinking of another memory, this one from the back of the school bus, where my friend Kate and I were using our halting French skills to disparage the cheerleaders in what we assumed was our secret language. Eventually, one of them - a platinum-blonde named Mary - turned around and glared at us. We'd forgotten that Mary was in third-year French. Oops.

We underestimate the cheerleaders at our peril.

The Leathered Look

I'm sort of fried tonight because I just finished photocopying the syllabus for my new course on feminist theory. It's an existing course in the program but my first time teaching it; expect me to spout off about it for the next ten weeks. It starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends up with Judith Butler and intersectionality. It will kick my students' asses - and probably mine, too. Karmic justice.

But since I'm fried, I'm only good for a brief rant. Driving to the office at 9:30 p.m., after the kids were tucked in, was an obstacle course. With human bodies as the obstacles. Two days before classes begin, my little college town is a bacchanalia of late-summer partying. The college boys saunter along in their baggy shorts. The college girls teeter along, clad in strategically placed scraps of fabric. By the hundreds, they're tripping off the edge of the sidewalk or walking down the middle of the street.

Yeah, the dress code is pretty sexist. But that's not what got my dander up. I was struck, again, by how tan the young women are. I can appreciate the slenderizing value of a good tan. On the rare occasions when I've managed to get some color on my thighs, they seemed to shrink three sizes.

But as a pasty-faced native of North Dakota, I've rarely been tan. Best case: People stop asking why I'm so pale. If I live long enough, maybe my freckles will merge.

You know what? That's okay. I'm 44 now, and while no one will mistake me for 20 anymore, I'm holding up reasonably well. I'd be nothing but a mass of misplaced origami folds by now, had I visited the tanning salon as often as my young female students do. The demand to be tan has escalated dramatically since I was their age.

There are lots of things to criticize about the beauty ideal, but the imperative to be tan is particularly evil because it imposes a double bind with a time lag. What makes you "sexy" at age 20 will make you look haggard and old 20 years later. (I realize I'm leaving skin cancer out of the equation. Clearly, if you're having to undergo surgery and chemo, that won't make you prettier, either.) My students realize that tanning will lead to wrinkles later on, yet it all seems abstract. For them, aging is still something that happens to other people. I thought the same thing at age 20.

I wish there were a way to get this across to young women. I joke about it and my point sails right past them. I don't know how to discuss it seriously without sounding like an old scold. I suppose I could tell them that they'll still want to appear sexy and desirable in 20 or 30 years - but that's probably a little too close to hearing that your mother still wants to get off.

LOLcat in a bind from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Choice, Schmoice

Because I'm still trying to perk up, here's Samantha Bee at the Republican Convention, tormenting the poor delegates with the oxymoron of "choosing" in an anti-choice party.



(h/t Feministing)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

One striking aspect of John McCain's nomination acceptance speech last night was his attempt to define himself as all about change.

On the surface, this appears foolish. Not only did Barack Obama stake out the "change" mantra months ago, it's really hard to appear credible as a change agent when you've voted with the Current Occupant 90% of the time. (I love that Obama commercial that features McCain himself making the 90% claim!) The Obama campaign and a slew of pundits repeated this point almost endlessly today.

But maybe McCain isn't trying to out-change Obama. Maybe it's not necessary to beat him at the change game.

Maybe all McCain needs is to distance himself from the Bush administration enough to reclaim the "maverick" mantle. He then lets Sarah Palin bait us into yet another skirmish in the dreary a culture wars. And if this election becomes all about latté sipping elistists versus caribou-hunting small-town patriots, the Republicans have a real chance.

Hmmm. The only real change in that formula is the caribou.

As an antidote to my gloom, here's a video cleverly lampooning the change theme during those halcyon early days of the primaries - back when the Republican clown car was full to bursting and none of us had a clue how to pronounce "Rielle."

The Neediness of Special Needs Kids

Blue Gal has come right out and said, "Sarah Palin is a bad mother." Her main point is that a child with special needs can't just dispense with hands-on parental care:

As the mother of a special needs kid, I can tell you that at the time of his diagnosis I would have cut off my own limb before taking ANY job that took me away from his care.

I was lucky at that time that I did not need to work. I feel horrible for parents who must work outside the home to pay for the care of a special needs child.

But Christ, she's got a Down's Syndrome baby. She has no idea if the baby has any Mental Retardation issues at this point. Special needs babies are ALL CONSUMING and SHOULD BE. It's like the only issue she had was making political points from not aborting. And then it's right back to work? Not even the standard six weeks maternity leave? Are you kidding me? To hell with her.

(Read the rest here.)

Now, whether you consider this relevant to Palin's fitness for office is your call. I'm disinclined to disqualify a candidate on this basis. Plenty of solid public servants have been crappy parents and spouses.

Palin herself seems to differ. Her speech Wednesday night put her family members front and center. In fact, that's the only positive I remember (along with her invocation of McCain's POWness) in her stew of snark and sarcasm. But since she considers motherhood one of her qualifications to be VP - perhaps the main qualification - I'm not going to tell you not to judge her on that.

Instead, I'd like to back away from electoral politics for a moment and discuss the nitty gritty of parenting a child with special needs. In the past few days, I've heard it repeated over and over that Palin's child will automatically get the best possible care due to her privileged status, and thus it doesn't matter if she and her husband delegate Trig's care to others. This is a pernicious lie.

I have a little experience with a developmental delay - and I mean a true delay, not a permanent disability. My younger son, the Tiger, had a significant speech delay. He's doing great now. Between the ages of two and three, we went to speech therapy for an hour each week. For part of that time, we also had weekly home visits from an Early Intervention specialist.

I suppose a nanny could have kept the Tiger company at all those appointments. But would a nanny have stepped in when a young speech therapist used techniques that were obviously doomed? For instance, she tried to elicit words by withholding toys from the Tiger. This was a huge success - in pissing him off. I knew how stubborn I was. I knew she was only setting everyone up for failure. So I gently but firmly insisted she try to harness his natural goofiness and sense of humor instead. This not only kept the weekly sessions from becoming a nightmare of tears and refusal, it also worked way better.

The Early Intervention specialists had better instincts. However, if I hadn't pressed for an evaluation sooner rather than later, the bureaucratic wheels turn so slowly in this county that he would have turned three - and aged out of eligibility - before services even began. I think this is a reflection of the lack of funding for such services, locally; social workers are stretched thin, and this becomes a form of de facto rationing.

Maybe a nanny would have been just as assertive. More likely, though, she would not have known my child in the same depth as I did. She would not have felt as deep an investment. She might have felt that negotiating with the professionals and insisting on a partnership with them was above her pay grade.

What I also learned is yes, you need the professionals, but you also need the whole family to be on board with teaching speech at home. I scoured the Web for helpful advice and we all became better communicators. Instead of speaking in full paragraphs with tons of subordinate clauses like I do here at Kittywampus - hey, it worked fine with my first kid! - I learned we needed to start with individual words and work our way up, matching the Tiger at the level he was at. This led to scintillating exchanges where he would say "car" and I would go "red car" and words like "scintillating" were banned altogether. But it paid off big time. Today, you'd notice some quirks in the Tiger's usage (and that would be worth a whole 'nother post) but you'd never call him disabled.

So my experience was really with "developmental delay lite," and yet it was tremendously helpful that I was only working part time. I'm not arguing that one parent must therefore stay at home, only that if both parents' jobs are all-consuming, a special needs child will pay the price. I'm also not assuming that the mother has to take the lead. The crucial thing is that both parents are connected and tuned in to their child's unique needs and strengths, and that at least one of them has adequate time and energy to devote to that child's extra needs for nurturance. (For a perspective on how much harder this quest is when a child has Down syndrome, see this post by Mother Who Thinks in Salon's comment section.)

No one except the parents will know that child's temperament, personality, and needs inside and out. No one else will love that child as deeply. No one else will be as fierce an advocate. That is what you can't outsource, no matter how wealthy you are.

And now I'm off to see the Tiger play the Gingerbread Man in his kindergarten play. (He's one of several G-Men.) I'm already teary-eyed at the thought of it.

Update 9/5/08: Since I dashed off to school before I had a chance to re-read this post, I realize I should come back to the Palins. I want to emphasize that I don't think mothers have a unique responsibility to their kids apart from the gestating and breastfeeding. Todd Palin could absolutely step up and be his baby son's number one advocate - as long as that doesn't contradict the religious-wingnut ideology of male headship of the family. So far, I've mostly seen Trig in Bristol's arms, and his long-term welfare is seriously not her job.

Since I bumbled that one, here's a photo that shows why I was in such a hurry to get to the play. This was the Tiger's costume. Please note the green face on the Gingerbread Man; the Tiger is not into realism. The kid attached to it was equally funny.

Maybe I'm a Wimp ...

... but I'm just so dispirited at the fact that Obama is not leading McCain in the polls 65% to 35%, I'm struck dumb.

I can't believe how much time McCain devoted to his POW saga in his convention speech. I thought that was mostly a job for surrogates. How wrong I was. How ironic that the original chicken-hawk party finally touts its war experience now, five-and-a-half years after we first invaded Iraq.

I can't believe how little the playbook has changed since 1980. Big government Democrats blah blah blah, we're the real patriots blah blah blah, we want to give YOU the choice (unless you choose abortion) blah blah blah.

Add 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and stir.

No amount of "Governor Palin is my soulmate" will change that script.

I think Chris Matthews just coughed up a hairball. If I'm not wrong, I think Keith Olbermann just called the RNC festivities "the political equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese." No wonder I'm cringing.

Photo by Flickr user Brian Toad Photography, used under a Creative Commons license.

Y'know, I used to own a 1974 Ford Maverick. Four doors, a V-8 engine, metallic copper paint. Bumpers that put up with my incompetent parking skills. It blew up on the freeway near Hercules, California, in 1988 with Grey Kitty in the backseat, unconfined. (This taught me the virtues of a cat carrier.) I thought it spontaneously combusted, but no, it was just the radiator. The blow-up was nonetheless fatal - to the Mav, that is. GK and I survived.

If the American public is about to invest in a "Maverick" (or two), we deserve whatever blow-up we get.

Update 9/5/08: I just fixed the typo in the first line so the percentages no longer read 6% to 35%. I'm discouraged, yes, but I'm not quite that math-challenged. Phooey!

Free Rice, Now in New Flavors

Photo of rice terraces in the Philippines by Flickr user ~MVI~, used under a Creative Commons license.

I've mentioned before that I've had some fun with Free Rice, a procrastination vocabulary-game site, which donates a few grains of rice to hungry people for each answer you get right. By now, they've donated some 42 billion grains. I have no idea how much this translates into in terms of satisfied tummies. I think its main service is publicizing the hunger problem as well as the failure of the United States to join other wealthy nations in pledging to donate 0.7% of GDP toward solving the world hunger problem. Indeed, we ranked dead last in OECD figures for 22 developed countries in 2007.

Anyway, just in time for school starting, Free Rice has now expanded way beyond its original vocabulary game. I was excited about the multiplication facts. No, I haven't forgotten that much of my education; the Bear is in third grade, and I'm thinking this might help him learn to multiply with less nagging (me) and stubbornness (him).

Some of the other subject areas are diverting for grow-mutts. There are Famous Paintings (which gets hard fast, and I guessed cleverly) and World Capitals (ditto, except I totally embarrassed myself). In foreign languages I aced the German and the French, which tells you it's easy. My French is pretty rudimentary, and I bailed as soon as I hit level 10 of 10. I got to level 8 with my Dora the Explorer Spanish plus a few cognates. There are also Italian, chemical symbols and English grammar, which I didn't try yet.

Happy procrastination!

Watching the Words Go 'Round

You don't often get to see the puppet-strings on TV:


To be fair, we don't much see the strings that hold up the Democrats, either. Maybe MSNBC was trying to kick some Republican ass. But my, it's hard to attack your opponent credibly for being "only words" - which is what Sarah Palin was doing in this portion of the speech - when you're so evidently wedded to the teleprompter.

Other than standing up for disability rights (and good for her on that, although Pat Buchanan just referred to it as "Down syndromes," in the plural): Did we hear any tangible policy positions tonight?

Also to Palin's credit: Someone coached her not to say "nucular" again. I hope that sticks. I hope it won't matter beyond November 4.

Photo credits: Me and my DVR.

Palinofeminism

So much for my foray into reporting gossip. I stand by my judgments of the past few days, but my usual mode is analytical, not judgmental. And if I weren't still so frozen with fear that Sarah Palin could actually become our president if McCain wins and dies, I'd write on something warm and fuzzy. Instead, I'm gusting uneasily alongside the Angelus Novus.

And so you get one more post on Palin while I await her speech at the convention.

It's occurred to me that Palin's ill-advised plane flight is - in a curious way - a stepchild of feminism. In her own way, Palin is a feminist. Seen through this prism, Palin's membership in Feminists for Life is actually a pretty accurate description of her politics. She believes women can work and wield power while raising a family. So do I. Her nomination illustrates the breadth of the consensus on women rising to the highest ranks of politics.

Exhibit A for this consensus: Rudy Giuliani just asked his convention - to thundering applause: "How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to be with her children and be vice president? How dare thay do that? When do they ever ask a man this question?" Not only Phyllis Schlafly but a host of evangelical women see no problem with Palin combining motherhood and presidential campaigning.

But because Palinofeminism is so superficial, it falls immediately into the hoary trap of equality versus difference that has plagued feminism ever since the Woman Question emerged. Historically, European feminists have tended to emphasize differences between men and women while agitating for a society in which those differences - especially childbearing - would not relegate women to second-class status. Anglo-American feminists, by contrast, have put more stress on the equality of men and women.

This historical divergence is schematic, of course, and you can find individual figures who departed from the main current of feminism in their countries. Still, the distinction is real enough that it helps explain why Germany and France and Sweden accommodate motherhood with generous legally-mandated paid maternity leave - and the United States does not.

Now, present-day American feminists are no longer so naive as to believe that a little suffrage and a pinch of formal legal equality will produce actual equality in society. The work of Joan Williams, for instance, shows how further progress toward gender equality will be blocked as long as the American economy demands "ideal workers" with no domestic responsibilities. As long as we deny that care-giving and mothering are profoundly gendered in both idea and fact, women will be systematically disadvantaged in the workplace and public life.

But the many, many American women who pursue a career despite otherwise conservative ideals aren't much aware of these more nuanced approaches. They're usually ignorant of the history of the equality versus difference debates. And so they're condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. They compete with men on men's terms. If the job calls for them to be manly, they'll be downright macho - no matter how feminine their face or figure.

They don't see that women can never win on men's terms. They don't realize that we have to change the standards and definitions to reflect the importance of reproduction and care-work - or we'll never succeed in the public sphere. This is more than a little ironic because the same folks often trumpet the sanctity of the traditional family and male headship of the family, never mind that the economy (far more than feminism) has totally undermined both.

Of course, we can't know exactly why Sarah Palin chose to fly home after her water broke. We do know she was determined to give her speech regardless, come hell or broken water. We know she revealed her pregnancy only in the seventh month. We know she announced her return to work when baby Trig was just three days old. Through this arc of events, Palin showed she wouldn't let maternity interfere with her public duties for more than 48 hours.

Former Massuchusetts Governor Jane Swift, the first governor to give birth in office and the only one before Palin, followed a similar trajectory during her pregnancy with twins. She too worked during their infancy - and got in trouble for misusing government workers as her personal babysitters. She decided against running for reelection because of the subsequent bad publicity. Her career foundered on maternity - in part because she felt obliged to carry on as if nothing had changed.

The press has bandied about the Thomas Eagleton comparison in the past few days - and who knows, perhaps Palin too will be forced to withdraw (although the way the Republicans are rallying tonight, I doubt it). But I think the stronger analogy is to Swift's story. Swift herself sees the parallels between Palin's situation and her own.

Seen through the lens of Palinofeminism, both these women's choices make a lot of sense. I'm not snarking here; I'm sincerely trying to understand. If you feel you must compete on men's turf and on masculine terms, then you don't acknowledge the changes a pregnancy brings. Yes, most women can do their usual work throughout pregnancy. (I finished grading exams about five days before the Tiger was born.) Yes, many of us balance full-time work with an infant, though it's often a psychotically sleep-deprived time.

But most women make some some compromises with our schedules, demand some concessions from our bosses, and make space in our lives for that small but needy new human. If you're a hard-driving ambition woman, your compromises will likely be smaller. If you're a high-powered Republican woman - much less one in the macho state of Alaska! - there's precious little latitude for even imagining compromise. Things aren't a whole lot easier for high-powered Democratic women; but it's probably significant that women like Hillary Clinton deferred their political ambitions until their children were no longer little.

The people who pay most for Palinofeminism are the women themselves who try to do it all. Sure, it helps set an impossible standard for the rest of us, and so it harms women as a class, too. But really, it's those unreconstructed 1980s-style superwomen - and their families - who pay the price.

And yes - when men try to do it all at once - they, too, pay by not ever really knowing their children. But feminists have been saying that for a couple generations now.

The Rubble of History

Watching the Republican National Convention, the image that keeps haunting me is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. This is the figure that Walter Benjamin called the angel of history - blown ever forward by the winds of time, face turned perpetually toward the past, watching the rubble of human "progress" pile up behind him:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," cited in Wikipedia - yeah, I'm that lazy. Wikipedia claims fair use of this reproduction of Klee's Angelus Novus, and so do I.)

Of course, it's not the convention itself that calls forth the angel of history. It's the repeated references to danger and terror and 9/11. It's the memory of the avoidable human wreckage piled upon the ruins of the Twin Towers in the seven years since. And it's the very real fear that we as a country might not be wise enough to recognize the rubble for which we're culpable, nor strong enough to turn and face forward into the wind.

Peggy Noonan, Unplugged

While discussing Sarah Palin - and thinking the mikes were off - Peggy Noonan says what she really thinks of McCain's VP pick: "political bullshit."

Lovely to hear after all those years of Noonan generating it.



Thanks to Molly for tipping me off to this. As Molly says: "Watch it before it disappears!"

Why the GOP *Needs* Roe

Yeah, we all know that overturning Roe v. Wade is so firmly anchored in the GOP platform by now, the party's edifice would collapse without it.

But here are three reasons why the Republicans desperately need Roe to remain in force:

1. Legal abortion mobilizes the Religious Right like perhaps no other single issue. It forges activists and brings voters to the polls. (Gay marriage has served them well, too, but it doesn't resonate as well with young evangelicals, who are more inclined than their elders to live and let live.)

2. If Roe were overturned, you'd see a backlash against the backlash. Suddenly most American women (and many of the men) would recoil against stories of 12-year-olds forced to carry to term or women bleeding out after taking RU-486 without supervision. They might also realize that Roe protected their own right to self-determination and didn't just enable the loose morals of that slut down the street.

3. Without Roe, the 'wingers couldn't crow about the morals of conservative women like Sarah Palin who "choose life" or "decide not to abort." Oodles of commentators have noted the hypocrisy of this. If choice were illegal, the opportunity to show one's superior virtue would evaporate.

I'm not foolhardy enough to say "bring it on" - the short-term human costs of overturning Roe would be unacceptable. I'm just saying that the Republicans benefit from a synergy that relies on abortion remaining legal, safe - and not especially rare.

Palin's Cowboy Judgment, Confirmed

By now we've all heard that Bristol Palin wasn't pregnant last winter, but she's pregnant now. There's no room for schadenfreude. She shouldn't be made the poster child for the failure of abstinence-only approaches to teenage sexuality; we have too many such poster children already. She's going to face the difficulties of early motherhood with the added burden of publicity. She'll also find deep joy in her baby, I'm sure - a point too rarely mentioned for all the moralizing about "teenage mothers." She's embarking on an amazing adventure in one of the hardest ways possible. I wish her well.

But as I wrote yesterday, it's Sarah Palin's conduct that's at issue. We now have no reason to doubt that after her water broke, Palin first delivered a speech in Dallas and then traveled all the way back to her hometown. Yes, she beat the odds by not going into labor. It was a foolhardy maneuver, just the same.

Here's what eMedicine says about premature rupture of membranes (ROM, or "yikes, my water just broke!"):

Most patients (90%) enter spontaneous labor within 24 hours when they experience ROM at term. ...

All patients with ROM should be asked to come to the hospital to ensure fetal well being.

(For a solid discussion of this issue in laywoman's terms, see this article at drspock.com.)

In other words, this is not a situation where there are two reasonable alternatives, such as accepting or refusing pain relief in labor. (Yeah, I know some people will condemn epidurals, but I'm not willing to go there in this post.)

After one's water has broken, the major risks to the fetus are infection (which remains fairly modest within the first 24 hours) and a prolapsed cord (which can occur if the fetal head is not securely engaged, thus blocking the cervix). Cord prolapse is less likely in second and subsequent deliveries because the head is usually engaged during the last few weeks, covering the cervix as it begins to dilate. Since Sarah Palin was only at 36 weeks, it would have been prudent to be checked by a doctor, since cord prolapse can threaten the baby's life.

The very great risk in Palin's case was that she'd deliver the baby on the plane. As I wrote in yesterday's post, the time between her water breaking and her arrival at the medical center in Wasilla appears to have been about 16 hours. Afterward, she said she was confident it was safe to travel due to her previous pregnancies. As far as I've gathered, none of them involved a child with congenital anomalies or premature labor. I assume she didn't take to the air with those pregnancies, either, after her water broke. As much as I respect women's body-knowledge, there were too many known unknowns here.

She played chicken with delivering her baby in the air - and won. If she hadn't gotten so lucky, an Alaska Airlines attendant might well have caught her baby. This happens occasionally, and mother and baby are usually just fine. But this was a risky call with a baby four weeks premature and known to have Down syndrome, thus at high risk of heart defects and other physical problems.

You can say this was a personal decision about her body and her baby. Yes, it was. I'm not suggesting Sarah Palin be treated as a criminal like those expectant mothers who've been subjected to court-ordered cesarean sections or who've been jailed in South Carolina for admitting crack cocaine use. I'm only suggesting we consider what this publicly-performed instance of private decision-making says about her judgment and temperament.

I'm not even saying she should be held to a much higher standard just because she has presented herself as a paragon of Christian motherhood. (The hypocrisy of being "pro-life" but then risking your baby's life just to get home is so manifest, I'll spare you my sermonizing.)

I'm just saying that this incident shows reckless behavior more befitting a cowboy than a national leader. We've already had eight years of cowboy governance. We know what comes from arrogance and ignorance of risks.

And if Palin's judgment looks pretty poor here, it's topped by John McCain's in choosing a candidate whose main qualification is her appeal to the Christian Dominionist wing of the Republican Party.