Is Fruitful Sexy?

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

Men get turned on by women who look fertile. Fruitful is sexy. Or at least that's the story we get from the popularized versions of evolutionary psychology: Men like large, firm breasts, a narrow waist, and curvy hips because it's this combo of traits that signals high fertility.

Okay. I know plenty of men who like smaller breasts just fine. That fact alone exposes the simplemindedness of this theory.

But let's grant the above premise. Even so, I poked a couple more gaping holes in this theory just in the time I needed to take a shower this morning. (I do my best thinking in the shower - maybe because the spray wakes up my brain, or maybe just because the kids usually leave me alone for five minutes. Too bad I can't take my laptop in there.)

So ... if fertility really determines sexual attractiveness ... then:

1. Why is menstruation almost universally subject to taboos? After all, it's a necessary precondition for fertility, and as such it ought to be celebrated! Men ought to consider it sexy! And yet - it's not just seen as totally un-sexy, we women often feel less feminine during our period.
2. Why the heck would anyone consider a supermodel attractive? The theory requires curves. Most supermodels don't have 'em - at least not lower than their ribcage.
3. Why have men historically preferred virgins? Why not prefer women who've already shown they can conceive and bear a child? Yes, I know that popularized ev psych paints men as competitors who want to avoid supporting another man's spawn. But assuming a man just refuses to do that, why wouldn't he prefer to try to impregnate a woman who's proven her reproductive "fitness"?

Hmmm ... maybe that last point explains the MILF phenomenon?

Yeah, I realize these are slightly goofy arguments. That's what comes from accepting a goofy premise. That's the penalty for taking seriously ideas that aren't fruitful; they're just plain fruity.

Protecting Girls in Egypt

Sometimes I think I should stop reading medical journals and start studying, oh, maybe the history of gardening. (Hmm - that might not be any cheerier. Think pestilence. Think famine.)

Last week, this sad, disturbing, depressing item appeared in the British Medical Journal:

Egypt has announced that it is imposing a complete ban on female genital mutilation. The ban was imposed last week by the Ministry of Health after a public outcry over the death of a 12 year old girl, Budour Ahmad Shaker, who died from an overdose of anaesthetic while being circumcised.

After the much publicised death of the girl, the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights appealed to the government for a law that would criminalise the practice and that would "punish doctors who commit this crime, and close clinics and hospital that continue to practise it." The doctor who had carried out the circumcision on the girl has been arrested, and the clinic where it took place has been closed down.

In Egypt 75% of female genital mutilation is carried out by doctors and nurses, and 25% are carried out by birth attendants, or "dayas," most of whom are poorly qualified. Subsequent death from various causes, including bleeding and infections, is common.

On the one hand, there appears to be a kernel of good news in this. Egypt appears to be cracking down on a brutal practice, right? And more importantly, at least one feminist group strongly backs the new law?

But not so fast. Since I don't know much about feminism in Egypt, I thought I'd better dig a little deeper. The practice is still widespread in Egypt. And so it stands to reason: if the hospitals are totally boxed, won't the dayas' business explode?

Umm, yeah. A Reuters article that includes the voice of actual girls hints at why the new law may indeed backfire, putting girls at greater risk than before:

The death of the 11-year-old schoolgirl at a private clinic in the Egyptian village Mughagha in June prompted the government to outlaw the custom of female genital mutilation, which is so widespread in Egypt that 95 percent of the country's women are estimated to have undergone the procedure.

But the ban may be hard to enforce and activists fear the practise may go underground as the vast majority of Egyptian families still view circumcision as necessary to protect girls' chastity. Most girls are cut by the time they reach puberty.

Even in Mughagha, a village of low rise houses hemming the Nile, many women and girls say they want the procedure to be allowed but under more stringent medical supervision.

"If a girl is not purified, she will just go hook up with men. This protects women's honour. Otherwise it will become just like America here and girls will go with guys," said Asma Said, a 16-year-old secondary school student.

"Those who say it doesn't happen are lying 100 percent. There is not one person here not circumcised, and it will continue."

She like many of the schoolgirls in Maghagha who spoke to Reuters said they supported the practice, even if they were frightened of having it done.

The only girl who spoke against the practice was shouted down by her classmates until she conceded that genital cutting was a necessity.

"No one can get married without it," said the girl.

So it comes down to patriarchy. I don't often say that. But what real choice do these girls have? How else should we understand this, when even the girls themselves see cutting as a form of male control over female sexuality? Of course they know they'll be social outcasts if they remain intact. And so, as long as a girl's access to marriage, children, security, and social adulthood hinges on it, she's unlikely to protest.

I'm reluctant to prescribe a better solution because as an outsider, I just don't know enough. I only know that we have to be cautious about assuming that any crackdown on genital cutting will automatically improve women's lives. And that new laws often don't matter worth a darn if they're not matched by new attitudes.

Men, Feminism, and the Curious Case of Kyle Payne

A young man named Kyle Payne - an über-douche of a blogger who calls himself a feminist - has just plead guilty to photographing and filming a young woman's breasts without her consent. Belledame, Renegade Evolution, and many others (see their blogs for a long list of links) have exposed all the sordid details of this. I won't rehash it here in detail.

The short version is that this guy was an RA at a college in the Midwest, and he was also a sexual assault survivors' advocate. He exploited his positions of trust to violate a young woman's privacy and right to bodily self-determination. The charges he copped to are lesser than an actual assault charge, but no one seems to be disputing the facts.

The astonishing thing is that this dude has kept blogging as though nothing happened. Really, you gotta follow the links above.

The little piece that I'd like to address here is what this means for men in feminism. And frankly, I think it matters not a hoot. Guest-blogging at Feministe, PhysioProf writes:

First, what the fuck is up with men calling themselves feminists?

I don’t call myself a feminist, because it’s not my call whether I am or not. It’s women’s call. I try not to be a fucking misogynist asshole and do what I can to reduce gender inequity in my professional and personal life, which includes trying to call out myself and other men on misogynist shit.

Making a big melodramatic display of tagging oneself with the “feminist” label seems like transparent male cookie-seeking at best, and cover for some seriously nefarious wackaloon shit at worst, as in the case of our male feminist sex criminal friend Payne. (Of course, maybe tagging myself with the “I don’t call myself a feminist” label is just more subtle cookie-seeking! HAHAHAH!)

Y'now, this is just not a relevant lens. Consider this: I knew a guy in college who seemed as painfully milque-toast as he was shy. Several years after graduation, while he was working as a grade-school teacher, he got busted for circulating child porn on the Internet. (He served several years in prison and actually showed up at a reunion I attended last fall - creepy.)

Does he represent all teachers? Does his story lead anyone to wonder whether all male teachers are potential child abusers? Of course not! (Well, actually it's not all that long ago, some 30 or 40 years, since that fear lurked among American parents. But I think we're past that by now.) Maybe my acquaintance chose his occupation to gain closer access to kids. But there's no reason to overgeneralize.

As for Mr. Kyle Payne, as soon as he violated that woman's trust, he burned his feminist credentials forever. He is not a feminist. Maybe he chose his causes out of conscious desire to fool women and gain their trust. Maybe it was more complex and he wasn't aware of the nasty soup of aggression and desire that drove his supposed politics.

Whatever the truth about Kyle Payne's motives, he never was a feminist. He was a total phony. And his case says nothing - nothing! - about men in feminism, or what men should call themselves - whether allies, pro-feminists, or just plain feminists - if they sympathize with feminist causes.

I think it's still difficult for sympathetic men to figure out how to place themselves with respect to feminism. I remember debates about this all through the 1980s (and clearly the issue goes back longer than my adult political memory, to the feminist-separatist scuffles of the 1970s and beyond). Even today, my best-intentioned students seem to struggle the most with how they fit into a women's studies classroom.

Calling yourself a feminist is risky enough for women, who fear being marginalized as ugly, lesbian, man-hating, humorless, etc. For men, it means putting their masculinity on the line. That's ironic, since risk-taking and courage are both hallmarks of conventional masculinity. But I really respect any man who's willing to claim the label for himself - as long as he's doing it in good faith.

Any man who treads into this territory is going to hits some speed bumps. Women are still rightly concerned about men co-opting the movement or the debate. I've written about how that can occasionally happen in women's studies classes when men reach near-parity in terms of sheer numbers. The same is true for any manifestation of feminism, not just its academic flavors. Some men still have a really hard time letting women take the lead. (Of course, some women don't play well with others, either - this is obviously not only gendered.)

Men also face a double bind when it comes to their motivations. Figleaf discusses how men who approach feminism with a rescue mentality can put women right back up on the good ol' pedestal. He argues that men may be wiser to ask what's in it for them - namely, better relationships with everyone they love and freedom from roles that constrain men as well as women. I think he's right, in general - and yet, anyone who suspects bad faith in his position can easily say, well, this is just making everything all about the menz again.

I start from the assumption that the vast majority of men who call themselves feminists are coming from a good place - that they, too, care about humanity and justice and kindness and fairness. Sometimes I may disagree with them, just as I disagree with quite a few women who are feminists. Sometimes their style may annoy me - ditto, too, for some of the women. But I tend to impute good faith until I see strong evidence to the contrary.

Clearly, photographing a passed-out drunken woman's breasts is evidence enough. But let's not turn Kyle Payne into a symbol of anything other than sexual violence.

Dog Days Lazy Sunday Blogging

The Smirking Cat has crossed over to the dark side by taking the "What Common Breed of Dog Are You" quiz! And she dragged me along with her. I came out a Labrador, which is sort of funny, because both of my siblings have labs.

The spirit of Grey Kitty is sneering disdainfully at this. She loved her Labrador cousins so dearly, she hid under the nearest bed whenever they came to visit. She should be glad I at least didn't come out a Pomeranian.

If you share your breed of dog in comments, try to keep down the drool and pawprints, please, or GK will be one pissed kitty.

A Glimpse at a Post-Roe World

When discussing abortion in the classroom, I often ask my students what it would take for Roe to be overturned (answer: one more anti-Roe justice on the Supreme Court) and what a post-Roe world would look like. They often assume that we'd just revert to the pre-Roe situation: Women who could afford it would travel to states where abortion remained legal. Those who couldn't would reach for a coat hanger or knitting needle.

Only the first half of this scenario is plausible. The second half doesn't even accurately reflect history. Most abortions performed before abortion's legalization involved a doctor, midwife, or other black-market provider. Many of these abortionists were medically competent, and some were even caring. Only a minority of illegal abortions were self-induced, and by no means did they all involve sharp instruments. Other common techniques included poisoning oneself just enough to expel the fetus (eating match heads was one way to do it), inflicting blows to the abdomen, or trying to overheat/overcool one's body. Obviously, the more effective of these methods carried their own risks: The line between poisoning the fetus and fatally poisoning oneself was thin and treacherous.

In a world without Roe, women would not simply revert to the old methods. Most of them would turn to the Internet for help. Just as many senior citizens now import their Lipitor from Canada and ED patients order those little blue pills from India, unwillingly pregnant women would get their RU-486 online.

This is already happening in countries where abortion is harshly restricted, as Kate Harding reports on Salon's Broadsheet, relying on a BBC story. Among the more reliable services providing medical abortions is one called Women on Web:

Women on Web will send abortifacient drugs to women less than nine weeks pregnant in countries "where abortion is heavily restricted" -- also providing proper instructions, paperwork signed by a doctor and e-mail support. Audrey Simpson, director of the Family Planning Association of Northern Ireland, calls the site "very helpful and reputable" -- while being careful to add that her organization doesn't encourage breaking Irish law.

Unfortunately, at-home abortions are not without risks, even when they don't involve the proverbial rusty coat hanger. Besides Women on Web, there are rogue sites out there, sending "unmarked bottles with no instructions or paperwork," according to one woman who eventually used WoW. ... And the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology recently published a survey that found even among Women on Web clients, almost 11 percent had required a surgical follow-up.

This shows a real parallel to women's historical experiences in those countries that now have relatively liberal abortion laws. Incomplete abortions were a fairly common event in the illegal era. But once an abortion was in progress, a doctor would be obligated to help the woman, even if he knew or suspected that she wasn't just suffering a spontaneous miscarriage.

I'm not entirely sanguine about any of this. Liberal abortion laws save women's lives. Period. But I think that we proponents of reproductive justice serve our cause poorly if we don't recognize how a post-Roe world would differ from the pre-Roe situation. These differences - and not just historical amnesia - may help explain why the coat-hanger symbol is losing its resonance among young women. And I think we also need to recognize how resourceful women can be when faced with sharp restrictions on abortion rights.

Healed It on the Grapevine

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

Following up on yesterday's gambling post, I'll admit there's one vice (other than coffee) that I do occasionally indulge. But science is increasingly casting doubt on how much of a vice wine actually is, and there's more good news about the red stuff this week. Note, though, that this is only preliminary research that hasn’t yet been tested out in actual female wine lovers:

New research from the University of Nebraska Medical Center shows that resveratrol, a natural substance found in red wine and red grapes, can suppress the formation of estrogen DNA adducts.

Although breast cancer formation involves a multitude of steps, most are fueled by increased estrogen. It collects and reacts with DNA molecules. Resveratrol, which is also sold in extract as a dietary supplement, prevents the formation of the adducts. It also suppressed two other known risk factors for breast cancer.

“We believe this could stop the whole progression that leads to breast cancer down the road,” said the study’s lead author Eleanor G. Rogan, Ph.D.

The amount of resveratrol found in one glass of red wine is enough to suppress the DNA adducts. The study was conduced in laboratory cultures and will need to be confirmed in larger human trials.

(Source: Ivanhoe)

Now, I’m sure the media will cloak this study in the usual caveats: The researchers said one glass, not one bottle. They only found helpful effects from red wine – not white wine, not martinis (more’s the pity). If you burn out your liver, avoiding cancer is kind of a moot point. I think most of us get that - and those who don't, generally aren't very susceptible to reasoned arguments anyway.

But these findings are interesting – and surprising – in light of recent research that showed even moderate drinkers to be at higher risk for breast cancer, regardless of the type of alcohol consumed. This effect appeared only for those cancers that feed off of estrogen - the same types that resveratrol promises to possibly interrupt. I’d like to know whether the beneficial effect of resveratrol outweighs the deleterious effect of the wine’s alcohol – a question that can only be answered in human trials.

The study that implicated alcohol as possibly promoting breast cancer did look at actual human beings, but it doesn't seem to have analyzed red wine separately. An earlier study that did so found that red wine offered no advantages. But adding to the confusion, red wine consumption has consistently been found to correlate with lower cardiovascular risks. A problem for all such studies is that it's hard to separate out other lifestyle factors, though it's reasonable to assume that a moderate wine drinker may have other habits that are healthier than someone who prefers mostly hard alcohol. Also, most of these studies can only prove correlation, not causation.

Such questions are hard for us laypeople to sort out because the American media still tilt puritan when it comes to drinking, especially where women are concerned. Reports on the health benefits of red wine are always spiked with warnings, as if the reader might otherwise proceed directly to the nearest liquor store – article in hand – and thence to the gutter. Similar research findings are treated more even-handedly in the German media, for instance – but that’s a culture where women aren't presumptively sluts and bad mothers if they have a drink, and where even obstetricians allow an occasional glass of wine in late pregnancy.

Until the implications of this latest study are clarified, I think the take-home message is the same as it’s been for quite a while: Moderate drinking – especially of red wine – has some benefits. It also carries some risks. If you don’t enjoy red wine, you shouldn’t choke it down. If you do, then here’s to your health. After all, pleasure is a huge part of living a healthy and good life.

Gambling, Explained

On my trip home yesterday, we connected through Las Vegas, an airport I'd never visited. The terminal featured a prime view of the sphinx-and-pyramid casino (whichever one that is) and a bunch of 25-cent slot machines.

Of course, the kids wanted to play the slots, and so I had to try to explain the concept of gambling to them. The best analogy I could cook up was those crane games - those big glass cases where you use a joystick to maneuver a claw and pick up a stuffed toy, only to see it drop out of your grasp, again and again. You know, the games that small children periodically get stuck inside.

Crane game photo by Flickr user Paul Pellerito, used under a Creative Commons license.

I was going to demonstrate the equal futility of playing the slots, but the machines wouldn't take my quarters! You can see how long it's been since I gambled; I didn't realize that the minimum amount of cash a quarter machine would accept is actually - a dollar. There I was, with $6.25 in quarters, a very big stake by my standards, and nowhere to burn them.

In other words, I needed a machine more like this one, and none was to be found.

Photo by Flickr user cobalt123, used under a Creative Commons license.

Then the attendant chased us away because at ages 5 and 8, the boys really don't pass for old enough to "loiter" around the machines, as the warning signs so charmingly put it.

Still, it was an easy, uneventful trip: We had an extra seat for each kid, they both slept on the long flight, and our plane arrived a half hour early, which I thought violated some unwritten law these days. And now it's great to be home.

Up in the Air

I'm about to leave hot, smoky California, so I may miss a day before posting again. (How hot? The air conditioning can't keep up with it. Ohio's surplus of thunderstorms is sounding wonderfully refreshing.)

In the meantime, here's an out-of-season picture from my garden. I guess I'm indulging in wishful thinking about temperatures cool enough to please my fragrant hyacinth.

Obama's Inner Bookworm

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

Do books matter? Does it matter what books our leaders care about? I think the answer to both these questions is a resounding yes, but then, I’m an incurable bookworm who's spent half her life inhabiting fictional worlds.

So I was fascinated by Laura Miller’s profile in today’s Salon of Barack Obama’s reading tastes. She cites Nietzsche as a major influence on him – which frankly I don’t see – and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom she portrays as a political chameleon. I'm not convinced that this sheds much light on Obama’s politics and character. I'm also not sure how she selected his non-fiction "favorites" nor whether they're really representative of his reading habits.

What intrigued me, though, was Obama’s relationship to fiction. Miller writes:

If Obama is elected, he'll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory. Although his boyhood and youth in Hawaii and Indonesia were not especially bookish, Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. "I had tons of books," he told his biographer, David Mendell ("Obama: From Promise to Power"), about this time in his life. "I read everything. I think that was the period when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth." Even after he left New York to work as a community organizer in Chicago, Mendell reports, Obama lived so much like a retiring writer -- spending many hours holed up in a spartan apartment with volumes of "philosophy and literature" -- that some of his colleagues assumed he was gathering material for a novel.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he'd given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

Okay, I'm no huge fan of Philip Roth, and I'll confess I never finished Moby Dick. Weak, I know. But that's beside the point. I think the fact that he cares about serious fiction matters. Here's why.

Some months ago, back before the presidential herd had been thinned, USA Today asked the candidates a bunch of questions intended to reveal them as actual human beings. When asked what work of fiction they'd last read, most of the candidates either named something escapist (both Chris Dodd and Joe Biden mentioned John Grisham potboilers) or flip (Bill Richardson cited the administration's energy plan). Hillary Clinton inexplicably named a non-fiction book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Barack Obama? He'd just read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. This practically clinched my vote. I'd just finished it, myself, by a funny coincidence. But mostly, I loved Obama's response because it pandered to no one except maybe my personal demographic (surely less than 1% of the population!). Gilead is the story of a retired minister looking back on his life. It's a pleasurable read because the prose is so graceful. It's just a beautiful book that lovingly portrays ordinary events, shades of gray, tensions between faith and desires, family dynamics, and the often-cruel passage of time. While all of this adds up to a surprisingly compelling story, you couldn't rightly call it escapist. It's not flashy, it hasn't been made into a Hollywood movie, and it's not a household word that most voters will instantly relate to.

I'm not a snob. I've read a few Grishams in my time, too, along with an embarrassing number of romances - but as part of a varied literary diet. At the risk of sounding like the schoolmarm that I actually am, I think literary variety isn't just good for the brain; it nurtures the soul, too.

Obama's embrace of serious fiction - of books like Gilead - signals something far more important than the actual list of his favorite titles. It means he's not just tolerant of ambiguity, he actually enjoys it and appreciates it. His voracious reading habits matter, too, because they express an insatiable and wide-ranging curiosity.

These are both unlikely qualities in a politician. Lately, our leaders have insisted the world ought to be black and white. Obama refutes this not just through his very identity and family tree but also through his choice of books. And the fact that he chooses to read in the first place, rather than, say, clearing brush? Well, curiosity has been sorely lacking in the Oval Office over the past eight years. If curiosity and the life of the mind are elitist, then the world needs a lot more elitism.

I'm still deeply, deeply uneasy about Obama's tack to the center. But I hope that Obama's inner bookworm will protect him - and us - from the worst of what Adrianna Huffington rightly calls not realpolitik - but "realstupidpolitik."

The Melody of Language

I've been interested in language acquisition ever since my first baby started to talk. In keeping with the theme of this blog, one of his very first words was "mau," referring to Grey Kitty. In fact, "mau" predated "mama." I didn't care bit. I thought watching him learn language was one of the coolest parts of parenthood.

That changed with my second son. I was just as excited about him learning to talk - but it didn't happen for a very long time. Worry displaced joy. At age two, when most kids are combining three words into crude sentences, the Tiger had just a handful of words. He didn't even say "no." Now, three years later, he's mostly caught up, following a little speech therapy, a lot of terrific help from a support group online, and the simple passage of time. And believe me - he has learned to say no!

So I was fascinated when Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily (Science Blogs) reported recently that music apparently helps in language learning. A research team headed by Daniele Schön had students learn a set of six nonsense words; it took them 20 minutes to learn where one word ended and the next began. Schön's team then mapped each of the six words onto a unique pitch. They found that the musical association dramatically increased learning. (Their abstract is here; since the full text of their article is not accessible on the Web, the following graphs are courtesy of Dave Munger's post.) The graphs show the test subjects' accuracy after seven minutes of hearing the nonsense words paired with a unique musical note:

Munger observes:

The dotted line in each graph represents the average score for all listeners, and each square is the average score for an individual listener. As you can see, in the speech-only experiment, listeners did no better than chance. But in the second experiment, nearly everyone did better than chance, and the average score was 64 percent correct -- significantly better than chance performance. Simply associating each syllable with a musical note improved performance.

But in real songs, syllables aren't always matched with the same notes. Sometimes different syllables get the same note, and sometimes the same syllable is sung with a different note. In a third experiment, Schön's team allowed the notes to vary with each syllable. Again, listeners could identify words at a rate better than chance (though they weren't as good as in the second experiment).

Schön and her colleagues don't go so far as to argue that music is a requirement for learning language, but they do make the case that the extra information provided in music can facilitate language learning. They also suggest that other information, like gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language.

But there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Language and music are both associated with emotions. And of course, we know that children -- especially small children -- really like music. This study offers another bit of evidence that the link between language and music may be a fundamental one.

The cool thing about this, from my totally anecdotal persepctive, is that I saw exactly this in the Tiger's language development. (I should be embarrassed that every time I cite something from Science Blogs, I end up sullying it with non-scientific thinking. I guess I'm not embarrassed enough to desist.)

The first time I heard my Tiger utter multiple words, he was singing "Ring around the Rosie." He'd hum the first part, then repeat the last line over and over:

Ash-ah! Ash-ah! Da da dow!!

Granted, that's the sort of phrase that only a parent can appreciate - especially when it's on endless repeat. But the cool thing is that the tune helped him put the syllables together when he couldn't otherwise get beyond single-syllable utterances. He was maybe two-and-a-half at the time. Equally great, I was able to understand him, thanks to the melody. (He has a great natural ear for music, and that was apparent long before he was talking.)

All fired up, I took this information to our speech therapists. Oddly, frustratingly, they didn't know what to do with it. Now, it seems to me that Schön's research suggests fruitful new approaches. Though I'm no longer in the trenches with late-talking, and I'm not a scientific expert by any means, I am a tuned-in mother who learned a lot about how to encourage language. And I'm guessing that late talkers could really benefit from the therapist using more music - not just prerecorded songs, but melodies sung aloud to help kids acquire new vocabulary.

The photo shows my piano; that's me making noise at it.

Watermelon and Fireworks

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

Yesterday, I waxed downright sanctimonious about the deeper meanings of the Fourth of July. But let's be honest: For most of us - me too! - the Fourth is about fireworks and food, not FISA and fear (no matter how much fun it is to indulge in silly alliteration).

Last night, we got to see the big display of fireworks in town - the only legal one, since I'm still in California and El Dorado County outlaws freelance fireworks. This policy predates the recent wave of wildfires since much of the county is a forest fire waiting to happen. Given how dry California is, the prohibition ought to apply to the whole state.

Since it doesn't, though, we had a big family celebration on the third at my brother's house (he lives in a county where fireworks are legal) and that's the show we'll all remember. As fireworks displays go, this one had a real kinship with the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Nothing was allowed to go airborne. But my brother-in-law provided hilarious patter and the kids loved waving sparklers in the air. The show's grand finale was something called the "Dixie Delight," which whistled, sprayed multicolored sparks skyward, and then seceded from the Union. (I'm not sure if this name is a bizarre marketing ploy or some Chinese manufacturer's notion of what Americans want. For all I know, it is what many Americans want.)

As for food, we had the usual American fare, including vast amounts of watermelon. You may have heard that watermelon was in the news a few days ago, with scientists at Texas A&M claiming it may have Viagra-like effects.

Beneficial ingredients in watermelon and other fruits and vegetables are known as phyto-nutrients, naturally occurring compounds that are bioactive, or able to react with the human body to trigger healthy reactions, [Dr. Bhimu] Patil said.

In watermelons, these include lycopene, beta carotene and the rising star among its phyto-nutrients – citrulline – whose beneficial functions are now being unraveled. Among them is the ability to relax blood vessels, much like Viagra does.

Scientists know that when watermelon is consumed, citrulline is converted to arginine through certain enzymes. Arginine is an amino acid that works wonders on the heart and circulation system and maintains a good immune system, Patil said.

"The citrulline-arginine relationship helps heart health, the immune system and may prove to be very helpful for those who suffer from obesity and type 2 diabetes," said Patil. "Arginine boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent it."

While there are many psychological and physiological problems that can cause impotence, extra nitric oxide could help those who need increased blood flow, which would also help treat angina, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems.

"Watermelon may not be as organ specific as Viagra," Patil said, "but it's a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side-effects."

(Source: Texas A&M press release via Eurekalert)

Revere at Science Blogs' Effect Measure debunks this claim by noting that Viagra and its chemical cousins (Cialis and Levitra) don't just dilate blood vessels, they keep them open by interfering with an enzyme, phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5), that normally counteracts the effects of nitric oxide, causing the vessels to constrict again. Revere says:

Watermelon isn't a PDE5 ihibitor. It has a an ingredient that participates in the formation of NO (nitric oxide). So does pornography. It would have been more accurate to say that watermelon may have a pornography-like effect than that it has a Viagra-like effect.

But hey, that's no small thing! Finding a substance that enhances libido and eases arousal has been the holy grail of research on a "female Viagra" for women whose sexual responsiveness is flagging. This is both medically and politically tricky, as I discussed a few months ago. But imagine if one's libido could be amplified something as innocuous as watermelon - which won't cause headaches or blue vision, like Viagra does. You wouldn't need a prescription and you wouldn't have to order it from shady online pharmacies; you could just visit your local farmer's market.

Anyway, I think it is our patriotic duty this weekend - when we'll be eating lots of watermelon anyway - to test out this hypothesis, in the least scientific ways possible. Who knows? Maybe watermelon isn't just a preliminary to the fireworks; maybe it can help bring them on.

P.S. Notice to all PDE-5 spammers: Your comments will be deleted. Watermelon farmers are welcome to respond, however.

FISA and Fearmongering

If the Fourth of July has any meaning for me, it's not feeling "proud to be an American." It's reflecting on the importance of our constitutional liberties. And so it's an ugly irony that on this Fourth, Barack Obama is taking a lot of well-deserved heat for going along with the evil FISA bill that passed the House and is now headed for the Senate, from whence it will corrode our liberties.

Sure, Obama is saying on his website that he’s as committed as ever to constitutional protections and the rule of law. He’s insisting he’ll work in the Senate to improve the bill. Among its many problematic provisions, the bill will exempt telecom companies from civil liability for violations of the law they may have committed, ostensibly in the name of national security.

Obama says he opposes telecom immunity, but he will vote for the bill regardless. There's no way the Senate can muster enough votes to weed out this corrupt provision (which also nicely protects the Bush Administration from fact-finding). His willingness to vote for the bill anyway blatantly contradicts his earlier position and undermines his credibility as a defender of the Constitution.

Now, I think Dawn Teo at the Huffington Post is right that on the pragmatic level, those of us who are enthusiastic (or reluctant) Obama supporters just have to swallow this, though that doesn't make it okay:

The real quandary for Obama is that he has to win the "low-information voters" in November in order to win the election, but he needs the "high-information voters" now in order to field his grassroots operations leading up to November. Low-information voters are never going to understand FISA. It is a subject that takes time and energy to master. Low-information voters look at FISA and only see the ability or inability of the government to investigate potential terrorists. Yet a large number of high-information voters in both the left and right wing of politics understand that this is much more than an issue about national security -- it's an issue of balancing national security and individual rights. At the same time, most low-information voters only understand that FISA relates to national security. In other words, low-information voters are susceptible to fear mongering on this issue. ...

After eight years of George Bush treating the law as his own personal wiki, an Obama presidency would be a welcome change even with his imperfections.

I can see that triangulation and pandering may sometimes be necessary to win elections. But I am appalled that Obama caved on this issue. He won my loyalty by promising a different kind of politics where hope would outweigh fear and principle would trump pandering. I'm not at all convinced that Obama's FISA position has anything to do with principle. From here, it sure looks like he's surrendered to the merchants of fear.

I'm not going to start agitating against Obama or threatening to withhold future donations. But I'm not willing to make excuses for him on this, either. Glenn Greenwald lays out the case much better than I ever could for exactly why it's inexcusable. I won't rehash it here except to say that there are no substantive national security reasons for Obama's spineless flip-flop on the FISA bill. This is all about not being painted as soft on terror.

This is different in kind than the Obama's other betrayals of progressive principles, which today's New York Times lays out in a painfully well-argued editorial. Consider, for instance, Obama's problematic embrace of faith-based programs. That, too, may constitute pandering, but it does not bow to the politics of fear. If Obama still has any plan to usher in a new kind of politics, one driven by hope rather than fear, he needs to start standing up for hope again.

And so, if Obama doesn't revise his FISA position (and his statement today gave no indication that he will), his rock-bottom minimum obligation is to speak out against fearmongering. If he votes for this bill, he needs to start speaking out again against the right wing's obvious manipulation of terrorism - which is a form of terrorism in its own right, if you think about it. He needs to say, look, I voted for this bill as a stopgap, but we need to chart a course where we can keep people safe without gutting our Constitution.

If he fails to do so, it won't just be a moral collapse. It will be political suicide. Because when the terrorists win - when fear rules our polity - so do the Republicans.

As for the rest of us, we too have a choice. We can be adult citizens who rely on reason in our political lives. Or we can be ... scaredy cats.

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Sex for Gas: Selective Perception

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

Salon’s Broadsheet reports:

Now you can tell your grandchildren you lived through a time when oil prices were so high that some women resorted to trading their virtue for gas.

According to the Smoking Gun, a Kentucky woman is currently facing prostitution charges for doing just that, providing sex to a gas station customer in exchange for $100 paid on his Speedway card, or about 25 gallons' worth of gasoline.

Well, okay. I’m not disputing that this actually happened - not at all. But I'm not at all convinced that this story is a real shocker.

In the course of history, women have exchanged sex for just about anything and everything. And while I don’t have proof - statistics on the sex for gas racket are hard to come by - I'm pretty certain this isn't the first time women have swapped favors for gas (or a ride, or a meal, or protection, or jewelry, or ...)

So the only reason the media is even registering this story is selective perception. At the subsistence level of prostitution, there are tens and hundreds of thousands of women who are this desperate every day. Their desperation isn't new.

The only reason this poor woman's arrest made news is that gas is over $4 a gallon. I don't want to be too curmudgeonly, but it seems to me that high gas prices outrank low-paid prostitutes just about any day in America.

California Burning

I’m sure you’ve all been hearing about the wildfires blazing in California – some 1400 of them, last I heard.

Here’s what I didn’t realize until I arrived: The smoke is unruly. It wafts all over the state. You can be hundreds of miles from the actual fires but if the wind blows the wrong way, you’ll still be smoked out.

Last week, the air was miserable even where I’m vacationing in the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento, though nary a fire burned nearby. The mountains apparently trapped the smoke. It was so thick that my nephew’s day camp had to keep the kids inside. You can imagine how much they loved that. But particulate levels were two or three times the maximum compatible with health, so the kids stayed locked up.

Here’s what the smoke looked like, hanging over the hills as we drove west from Sacramento yesterday on I-80. My sister snapped these photos through the windshield:




That’s not a second line of hills behind the first. That’s the smoke.

Today the whole family is blinking and tearing a lot, having spent yesterday inside that brown cloud during our trip to Discovery Kingdom. It seems that unless your lungs are seriously impaired, your eyes serve as a warning system.

I know there’s not really a political solution to this. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has dispatched the National Guard to help fight the fires. There's not much more to be done (though arguably the Guard should have been deployed sooner). The fires result from a combo of dry conditions and hundreds of lightning strikes. For once, this is a problem that has little to do with human stupidity.

And yet, I can’t help thinking of the Governator’s immortal words: “Vere zere’s smoke, zere’s fire.” Oh, wait – Ahnold was talking about the sexual harassment allegations leveled at him during his gubernatorial campaign back in 2003. In fact, even though he then ‘fessed up to groping numerous women, that particular smokestorm blew over. Maybe he could repeat the trick?

All A-Flutter

Since I'm still in California and completely fried from a translating job I just finished and from the sunburn I got today, here are a few pretty pictures in lieu of my usual blather. (Yep, I used sunblock. No, I'm not capable of leaving all my work behind on my vacation.)

Let it never be said that Kittywampus is all doom and gloom - or even all politics and sex.

These butterflies were at Discovery Kingdom, a former dolphin exhibit in Vallejo that has morphed into an odd but cool combination between a zoo, a marine park, and a general amusement park. They still have dolphins but the butterflies are a heck of a lot easier to photograph.










All of these pictures are mine except for the last one, which my husband took.

Sex in the (Industrializing) City

Figleaf is asking how the heck people managed to have sex in the past in one-room abodes, and how they do it today.

So I'm starting to wonder how much of modern Western sexual progress has coincided with modern Western "bourgeoise" trends in housing.

Historically, many people just had no choice about where and when to do it. In premodern times, people's sensibilities were quite frank, and sex was not nearly as private. The whole notion of "privacy," for that matter, is quite modern. People did try to be somewhat secretive about their activities, which meant that sex would often be rather furtive and fast, but no one expected sex to be wholly hidden.

This changed with the advent of the bourgeoisie and the birth of modern notions of privacy. The more prosperous classes promoted an idea of sexual discretion, and they had enough space to conform to it. Parents and children slept in separate rooms, and the idea of shielding kids from their parents' sex lives became prevalent enough that Freud could write of a child viewing the "primal scene" as a traumatic event.

But space remained at a premium for the poor, and their housing actually grew worse as industrialization advanced and poor people flocked to the cities in hope of work. The urban working class often suffered much worse crowding than rural people did. In 1918, half of the apartments in Berlin, Germany, had just one room. The situation was worse in some other European cities. Poor women commonly rented out (part of) a bed to unrelated tenants, which meant that the family's young daughters might share a bed with a young, unmarried man. About a third of 5000 poor housewives surveyed in Berlin in the early 1930s had sublet arrangements with boarders.

I know a little about this issue from my research on the history of childbirth. As you might imagine, the lack of space and privacy also became an issue at the other end of the pipe, so to speak. A one-room apartment doesn't allow for a hygienic home birth by modern standards. Nor does it facilitate the sort of privacy that doctors and midwives increasingly saw as morally necessary in childbirth. This was a big factor driving women's choice to give birth in hospitals.

The key term here is "bourgeois," both morally and materially. In the 1920s, middle-class housing reformers pushed for better apartments for the poor - not necessarily larger but chopped into fewer rooms - partly because they saw morality endangered by the lack of privacy. This seems to have been a much bigger deal for the middle-class do-gooders than for the working classes, which continued to embrace bawdier morals. (Poor people did want better housing, just not necessarily for the same reasons that reformers saw it as desirable.)

But it's a nice little irony that the birth of privacy, which initially cast sex as something to hide from the world, actually created a space where sex could ultimately become less furtive. Sexual variety needs time and space to flourish, and those buttoned-down reformers inadvertently created just that.

The consequences of privacy for female pleasure are particularly profound, since "fast and furtive" just doesn’t cut it for most of us women, most of the time. In addition, young women had more sexual autonomy when they didn't have to fend off the advances of a tenant; the reformers were right that such tenants could pose a threat to women's bodily integrity. So even if the reformers were interested in protecting women's purity, in the end they did much more to facilitate women's sexual self-determination.

I'm still left wondering how people cope in Tokyo or Moscow, as figleaf asks. Many of them still live in conditions similar to early-twentieth-century crowding, with whole families in a single room, but they're subject to modern ideas about privacy and sexual propriety. I'd be very curious to know how they manage the resulting clash.

Breast and Prostate Cancer: Build the Pie Higher

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

I've previously lamented the tendency for prostate cancer and breast cancer to be pitted against each other. It's understandable - and completely appropriate - that prostate cancer sufferers would resent the miserly treatment of their disease when it comes to both research and treatment. Considering that one in five American men will get the disease and that current treatments typically leave men with an unacceptable side effect - permanent erectile dysfunction - it's disgracefully underfunded.

The solution, though, is not for the two diseases to compete for the same scarce resources. We shouldn't view this as a zero-sum game. Men afflicted by prostate cancer, and their partners who lives are also deeply affected, need to build a strong lobby. There are millions of prostate cancer survivors in the United States alone, yet the petition to increase government spending on it has not even gathered 10,000 signatures. (So go here and sign it!)

Another possible tactic is for the prostate and breast cancer lobbies to join hands. They're natural allies. While I don't want to deny the obvious differences between them, the similarities between these two cancers are also pretty striking. Both diseases were once too taboo to discuss (and to a great extent, that's still true for prostate cancer). Both are extremely common diseases. Both strike mostly older people but also a very significant number of people in midlife. And both intrude cruelly on people's sexuality, albeit in substantially different ways.

Now comes a small but significant scientific breakthrough that shows there's even an affinity on the biological level, as well:

A faulty gene closely associated with breast cancer is also responsible for a particularly dangerous form of prostate cancer, research has confirmed.

A University of Toronto team found prostate cancer patients carrying the BRCA2 gene lived on average for four years after diagnosis.

The average survival time for a man with prostate cancer is 12 years. ...

The latest study - based on 301 patients - examined two closely related faulty genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, both of which greatly increase a woman's risk of breast cancer, and are linked to ovarian cancer.

Both genes cut average survival times in men with prostate cancer who carried them - for men carrying BRCA1 the average survival time was eight years after diagnosis.

BRCA2 has already been linked to deadly prostate cancer, with an Icelandic study recording an average survival time among prostate cancer patients carrying the gene of just 2.1 years. ...

Lead researcher Dr Steven Narod said: "We know that carrying a faulty BRCA2 gene increases a man's risk of getting prostate cancer, and our study shows that it also affects how long he will survive a diagnosis of the disease."

(Source: BBC News)

I don't know why this would be so; I'm not an expert, and it seems like even the real experts don't understand the mechanisms. It's intriguing that the BRCA2 mutation is the nastier of the two in prostate cancer, while BRCA1 is worse when it comes to breast cancer.

But on the policy level, there might be some real synergies in funding further research into these mutations. One of the fascinating trends in cancer research is that we're beginning to recognize how many different flavors a "single" disease such as breast cancer can have, depending on whether it's estrogen-sensitive, HER-positive, etc. At the same time, scientists are finding cross-linkages between apparently disparate forms of cancer, as this BRCA study shows.

So instead of fighting over an ostensibly limited pie, I'd love to see the boys and girls together and lobby jointly to "build the pie higher," to quote one of the best Bushisms ever.

The Wages of Sex, According to Rod Parsley

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

The Columbus Dispatch reports that Rod Parsley’s world-domination enterprise, aka his “church,” has established an anti-abortion counseling center in Columbus, located conveniently just across from a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Parsley's center looks like a doctor's office, though there is just one medical professional employed there, a registered nurse. Other nurses and doctors will volunteer their services there, [director Debbie] Stacy said. …

It will offer free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to encourage women to give birth, Stacy said. It also will make referrals for other medical services, but not for abortions.

(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

This is nothing new, of course. Such “crisis pregnancy centers” exist all over the United States. But the Dispatch report offered this one truly telling detail:

Inside, women will find a portable ultrasound machine and pamphlets about sexually transmitted infections, RU-486, sometimes called the "abortion pill," and how to say no to unwanted sex. The reading material all focuses on abstinence. The center does not distribute information about birth control.
(my emphasis)

And this too, is nothing new. It's just one more piece of proof that for doctrinaire opponents of reproductive justice, the point is not saving "unborn lives." It's making sure that if you do indulge in sex, you'll be penalized for it - with a baby.

I'm sure the resulting babies will be thrilled to know that they were their mom's punishment for bonking without a license.

Men in the WS Classroom, Part 2: The Guys' Views

So I’ve already explained why I welcome men taking my women’s and gender studies classes, and why I’m glad they’re no longer a teensy minority. But my more interesting contribution to the NWSA panel on men in the WS classroom came not from me, but from the guys themselves.

I’ll readily admit that this was probably the most unscientific survey ever. I asked a number of my former male students for their views on the opportunities and difficulties for men in women’s studies. I emailed a bunch of guys who did well in my classes because I wanted bright, thoughtful, informed opinions. They did well partly because they seemed to enjoy the class, and they enjoyed the class partly because they did well in it. So, in other words, I totally cherry-picked my sample.

The guys’ comments covered three main themes: experience, marginalization, and gender. Though they addressed the classroom situation, I think their responses are valuable to anyone interested in men’s relation to feminism (and not just in academia).

Experience is a central category for women’s studies. It’s the foundation for both the academic field and feminist activism. But experience is a vexed category for my male students. They believe they can’t enter into women’s lived experience, so they may feel shut out of the discussion or alienated from the course material. Some men react to personal essays on the syllabus as being less scientific than other academic material, and thus less convincing or authoritative. Many men are less comfortable than women when it comes to “body talk,” and this has broad ramifications for their classroom situation. One student in a mid-level class on “gendered bodies” with only about 20 percent men wrote:

I just felt awkward commenting on certain issues knowing that 75% of the class were women. Sometimes I would feel embarrassed, and others I felt like I might offend someone. For example, I just didn't feel comfortable commenting on male sexual insecurity knowing that most of the people listening are of the opposite sex. However, I know there's not really much you can do about that until more guys sign up for the class.

But encountering strange experiences can have a huge upside as well. Open-minded individuals can learn a lot from new and unfamiliar perspectives (and I assume that the women in my classes learn equally from the men). Best of all, exchanging experiences can spark empathy, which - as Patricia Hill Collins and others have argued - is the necessary basis for building alliances:

I felt this was a very useful class for learning future skills for how to be a better husband and parent and just a more considerate person to others. … It just makes guys think a little about what others feel, and it helped me, in particular, understand why women sometimes act the way they do in certain situations. (Here, I'm thinking about our discussions about walking on campus at night and related topics.) So...it is very useful, and I think that it makes guys into better people to learn how the girls feel about things.

A discussion format, my students agreed, is essential to this process. I don’t lecture more than I absolutely have to, but even so, these guys reminded me that there are times when the instructor just needs to make room for the students’ dialogue:

I do not see any problems with men being in women studies courses, instead just the opposite. This is good for both women and men in the classroom because they offer each other the opposite sex’s opinions and thoughts where they wouldn’t receive anywhere else outside the classroom to gain a better understanding of each other.

One wrinkle in this, of course, is that the desire for discussion can collide with men’s sense of marginalization. If the men feel too alienated, it can shut down discussion even if they’re not hiding behind a trenchcoat or baseball cap. Typically, men enter the classroom on the first day feeling nervous that the women will pounce on them. I suspect it’s the men of good will who fret most about this:

I think the main problem for men is just a worry that it's going to be the stereotype that people try to put on it ... that all of the women will gang up on the guys, and they will be in a hostile environment where they don't feel like they can learn. I obviously can't speak for all Women's Studies classes, but it was clearly not the case in our class. I guess I was very careful about what I said, though, because I did not want to put myself in a situation where I was saying something that would unintentionally be seen as insulting to the majority of the class.

But a sense of marginalization can also be a valuable experience if someone has rarely been in that position; it too can create empathy. It can help relatively privileged individuals get a taste of what their world would be like, were they much less privileged. This is something I think I need to spend more time addressing explicitly in class.

So dealing with marginalization as tricking. Male students see the instructor’s stance as decisive in whether they will speak freely. But when does this go too far? I get compliments on not being a feminazi. But on the flip side, I think it’s also possible to be too conciliatory, watering down the material and failing to challenge my students.

Two keys to striking a balance seem to be respect and humor. At least, these are themes the guys mentioned repeatedly. One commented:

Both of you [me and a colleague of mine] were very inviting and non-judgmental, and I felt comfortable participating in most of the discussions. Also, neither of you were afraid to crack a joke, and laughter definitely helps alleviate some of the tension that comes with many of those topics. All in all, both of you made me feel like a valued part of the class rather than someone to be criticized.

Pardon me if I’m seemingly tooting my horn by quoting this; I’m sure I also have former students who’d beg to differ. But the point is that when the classroom dynamics work well, both respect and humor have to be part of the mix.

Finally, male students appreciate a broad focus on gender and not just on women. I’m convinced this is good for everyone. You can’t hope to understand femininity as a social construct unless you devote roughly equal time to masculinity. This is something I’m already committed to, but it’s good to be reminded:

It really seems like there are three types of guys that take Women's Studies. The first type is a guy that thinks maybe he'll learn something new and understand people better after it, the second is a guy that thinks the class will be funny and controversial and wants to see if there are any crazy women to make fun of, and the third is someone who just fit it into their schedule. So ... I guess you can't do much about that second group, and the first group just needs to find a couple worthwhile things to make them think the class is worth it. The third group seems like the one that should be a focus. If somehow you can figure out a way to make them feel the class was worthwhile, then more guys will recommend it to others and it will grow. How do you do that? It's tough to tell. I feel Women's Studies is on the right path, though. For a class that was probably started by focusing on the female struggle, there really is a strong focus on men's problem, such as gender, stereotypes and parenting.

Agreed, that WS instructors and feminists in general shouldn’t just be preaching to the choir. And yet, I’m actually really interested in that first group, too: the guys that start off open-minded. I think they bring the most to the classroom, and they stand to gain the most from the course.

I have a feeling that all the men who generously responded to my informal little survey fell into that first group from day one, and I’m grateful for their feedback, advice, criticism, and appreciation. (So thanks, guys!) They are proof positive that the opportunities opened by including men in the classroom far outweigh the greater complexity in guiding classroom dynamics. For them, taking a course women’s studies is rapidly becoming a totally “normal” thing to do. And so I’ll let one of the guys have the final word (but I happen to agree with him completely):

Women[‘s] studies is just like another school subject such as history or math and broadening anyone’s knowledge in this area is a good thing.

The Face in the Mirror and the Origami of Time

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

I don’t think I’m an exceptionally vain person, but I’m also not immune to wanting to look younger than I actually am. Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of time leaving its tracks on my face. This happened most memorably a couple years ago when I was rushing between classes and was ambushed by the view in a bathroom mirror. Looking sidelong, I thought: oh my goodness, it’s my grandma!

Now, matters could be worse. Yes, it’s true that my dad’s mother got rather jowly late in life, not quite Nixon-esque but still quite noticable, and I see the contours of that future in my own chin. Yes, her eyelids sagged by the time she was in her eighties, and instead of getting them fixed, she held them in place with tape. (Why she never pursued surgery remains a mystery.)

But Grandma also remained vibrant and attractive well into her middle years. She adored being the queen bee of Republican politics in North Dakota. Virtually the only woman on the scene, she basked in the admiration of all those men. Incipient jowls apparently didn’t deter them. And conversely, she appreciated an attractive man well into her nineties, pretty much up to the point when she lost her marbles.

So yes, things could be a whole lot worse. And yet, when I read this passage in a Stephen McCauley novel a few days ago, I thought, whoa, he got it exactly right:

I was barely awake when the doorbell rang at eleven the next morning. I glanced in my bureau mirror on my way to the stairs, amazed at how increasingly unkind sleep was as I got older, as if someone came in every night to practice origami on my face while I slept.
(Stephen McCauley, The Man of the House, 140.)

McCauley is recounting the very particular woes of a gay man around 40 who’s single but would prefer to be paired. But even if you’re not hunting for a mate, that morning tracery can be merciless. My one really noticeable wrinkle is a line near my jaw where I know my chin gets squished against the pillow. I suppose I could sleep on my back, but then I’d never sleep, and that wouldn’t exactly enhance my looks, either.

This isn't just vanity. It's also not merely a slavish response to the beauty ideal, as a unidimensional feminist analysis might suggest. It's partly a fear of mortality. It's also anxiety - as McCauley's anti-hero displays - that no one will want to have sex with you beyond a certain point of decrepitude.

Most interestingly, it's a sense of alienation from oneself, as philosopher Diana Tietjens Meyers has argued. In her book Gender in the Mirror, Meyers says when we look at our aging selves in the mirror, we no longer see our familiar, long-known selves. Our face appears as "not-self." It's no longer the image that is invested with and in our relationships. In this interpretation, the desire to look younger, be it through surgery, cosmetics, or merely the approving eyes of another, is an effort to recover what we perceive as our true selves.

Meyers presents this as a gendered phenomenon. It's true that women's social worth is still bound up with our appearance more than men's. I think Meyers may also be right that women's aging faces become a sort of proxy for everyone's horror of mortality. This was likely one strike against Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign.

But that loss of the familiar self is not necessarily gendered. The face with origami folds - and the resulting sense of unfamiliarity - can be male just as easily as female.

In some ways, recognizing myself as my grandma was a moment of pure alienation and unfamiliarity. I literally saw someone other than myself in the mirror. But if I have to morph into someone else, I could do worse. When Grandma died, she was just a few days short of 103. So if I get her jowls, I’ll hope to inherit her robustness, too. Certainly I got my ornery streak partly from her. But I promise: If my eyelids start to sag, I will get them fixed.

McCain on His Wife Cindy: Rhymes with Punt

I wasn't going to post this because I thought it's redundant. I believed everyone I know had already heard about the misogynist slur Senator McCain spewed - years ago - not against a female political opponent but against his own wife. In public. After Cindy McCain's wealth financed his budding political career.

How wrong I was. Although such blogtopic luminaries as The Political Cat have reported on this story, not a single one of my colleagues had heard about it. Nor had my mate.

And so I am going to breach the usual standard of Kittywampus decorum (low as that standard may be) and post a really rude (but searingly funny) video on what McCain thinks of his wife. Or at least how he speaks of her. (Did I mention this was in public? In front of reporters?)

First he called her a trollop for wearing too much makeup. And then he called her ... well, watch the video:


Yeah, it rhymes with "punt," Which is what McCain would've done here with his political career, if he weren't a conservative and thus above moral reproach, by definition, no matter what he actually does.

I'm all for reclaiming and defanging nasty words. Somehow, I don't think that was McCain's intent. This story needs to reach every woman who's even flirted with voting for McCain.

And y'know, it's not just the misogyny that troubles me. It's the lack of self-control. It's the inability to edit one's public ejaculations. What if the next woman he graces with a similar epithet is not Cindy McCain but, say, Angela Merkel?

The Paradox of Men in Women’s Studies

Now that I’m done conferencing (though still on the road), you can expect a few posts on my mental fallout from the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting. The presentations I enjoyed at the Berks were stronger, on the whole, but the NWSA still got me thinking.

My own panel at the NWSA addressed the question of men in the classroom. I was part of this discussion because my university has relatively robust enrollments of men in our women’s and gender studies classes, thanks to a business school requirement that funnels lots of male undergrads in our direction.

Let me just say I really like having men in the classroom. I think it adds a dimension to the discussion that wouldn’t otherwise be present. I recognize that there’s a trade-off: in an all-female space, women will talk more freely about certain issues than with men present. But all it takes is one male to completely change the dynamic - without, however, much immediate gain.

So here’s the paradox: If a classroom is going to be mixed-gender, you’re much better off teaching a bunch of men, not just a token or two.

In my own student days, WS classes tended to be all-female, and any man who ventured to join us was probably on a quest to understand his own non-normative sexuality. He was likely gay or bi or questioning. By the time I taught my first WS in 2002, this was starting to change. I had two male students, both evidently heterosexual, neither quite sure why he was there. One was bright but hid behind his baseball cap, too shy to speak. The other wore a trenchcoat and expressed a certain sympathy for the Columbine shooters.

By now my colleagues and I commonly have 30 to 40 percent men in our courses. This is terrific in that men no longer feel like they’re mere tokens; they’re much more likely to speak up. It’s a great opportunity to broaden the discussion, in my view, and to widen people’s horizons. By this I don’t mean that I get to indoctrinate the guys; try that, and you’ve lost them on day one. The same is just as true for the women, by the way. But I do believe that good ideas will tend to win people over at the end of the day.

Above 35 to 40 percent, the men can actually start to dominate the conversation, so this can be a mixed blessing, as one of my fellow panelists observed. At his university, however, the WS classes are bristling with football players! I have to admit I’m grateful that I don’t get classes where a full third of the students play on the same team, sit in the same corner, and disrupt the conversation. Yikes! I’m glad I’m not dealing with big blocs of jocks. But another presenter who spoke about this sees it as an opportunity to reach the macho guys and maybe help reduce sexual violence, and so she deals with the discipline issues by working with the coaches.

So the emerging women’s studies classroom is a far cry from the all-female environments that early feminists nurtured and Mary Daly famously decreed. Myself, I’ll gladly deal with the difficulty of balancing male and female participation in exchange for change to discuss not just women but men – and thus gender as a relational system.

Not least, when men reach a certain critical mass, they challenge each other, they take the class more seriously, and they turn in better work. A few years ago, I still saw some serious slackerdom among the men; now, they're performing just as well as the gals. And that makes my job a whole lot more fun.

Flakiness Alert

My little globetrotter self is off on another trip, this time just for fun. I'll be visiting family in Northern California for the next two weeks. I'll try to post when I can; I still have lots to say about all the thoughts swirling in my head after my last conference. But if I go a day or two without posts, just know it's because my mom's house is equipped with a dialup connection of the sort we all enjoyed back in 1999.

In the meantime, enjoy my giant allium, which finished blooming a couple of weeks ago already.