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Girl in the Locker Room!
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Sunday, January 29, 2006 |
A new biography of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly is reviewed in today's NYTimes. But reviewer Judith Warner says the book doesn't answer that basic, exasperating question of why an accomplished, financially independent, politically engaged and arguably, professional essayist, author and politician, would spend all her energies on preserving a woman's "right" to economic and social dependence on men. Seeing photos of Schlafly with the Stop ERA button always makes me furious. Could you see a black person wearing an "Up with Jim Crow" button? How/why did she get co-opted? Maybe it was the mansion and the servants? Anyway, the biography by Donald T. Critchlow apparently doesn't deal with this question.
 Bettmann/CorbisNYTimes
Meanwhile, Schlafly at 80-plus, is still trucking along. You can visit her misguided Eagle Forum site and see for yourself.
-RH
12:26:28 PM 
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Saturday, January 28, 2006 |
I'm stealing from our friend EJ Graff here, but she's summed up why we LOVE the annual WAM conference (Women, Action & Media) coming up March 31 - April 2. Best annual conference I've ever been to -- energizing, inspiring, great contacts. But the early registration discount deadline is Feb. 1. So sign up now!
Here's what EJ says:
For a few years now I've been involved with WAM! (Women, Action, & Media), a conference of progressive women journalists, authors, advocates, academics, bloggers, students, and fed-up TV-viewers. I've been involved for one reason: I was tired of sitting alone in my room fuming about how few progressive women I saw in the media: op-ed bylines, expert sources, you name it, we weren't there. So we (by "we," I mean the Center for New Words--I've brainstormed but they do the work!) launched a thrilling series of conferences. WAMmers are developing into a lively community (online and off) of media-concerned and -involved women bothered by our country's direction. It's better to be mad with friends than mad alone.
This year, our third year, has an amazing lineup: keynoters and panelists include Maria Hinojosa, Farai Chideya, Caryl Rivers, Lakshmi Chaudhry, Rebecca Traister, Cynthia Enloe, Liza Featherstone, Betsy Reed, Robin Herman, Jill Nelson, Julianne Malveaux, Jessica Valenti--basically, it rocks. Come.
The early registration fee expires Tuesday. Sign up now. See you there.
I'll see you there too!
(It's at the very cool/askew Stata Center by Frank Gehry at MIT)
-RH
 image nimbustier.net
12:17:38 PM
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Thursday, January 26, 2006 |
From the New York Times editorial page re the upcoming Senate vote on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito:
As it stands, it is indefensible for Mr. Specter or any other senator who has promised constituents to protect a woman's right to an abortion to turn around and hand Judge Alito a potent vote to undermine or even end it.
But portraying the Alito nomination as just another volley in the culture wars vastly underestimates its significance. The judge's record strongly suggests that he is an eager lieutenant in the ranks of the conservative theorists who ignore our system of checks and balances, elevating the presidency over everything else. He has expressed little enthusiasm for restrictions on presidential power and has espoused the peculiar argument that a president's intent in signing a bill is just as important as the intent of Congress in writing it. This would be worrisome at any time, but it takes on far more significance now, when the Bush administration seems determined to use the cover of the "war on terror" and presidential privilege to ignore every restraint, from the Constitution to Congressional demands for information.
Ignoring of Constitutional restraint is not theoretical. It came right into my town, my neighborhood, my library last week. There was a bomb scare e-mailed in to Brandeis University and when, some hours later, after building evacuations, the e-mail was traced back to a computer at the Newton Free Library, eager FBI and local police rushed to the library and tried to confiscate equipment in the second floor computer lab. But the library director Kathy Glick-Weil, joined by our Mayor David Cohen, stood their ground and refused, reminding the police that they NEEDED A WARRANT. After much fumphing around, the FBI produced a warrant about 10 hours later.
My question, what makes our good Newton police suddenly feel they can blithely carry out warrantless seizures? Could it be the contagious post-911, terrorism-is-justification mode of the FBI, following the warrantless domestic wiretapping mode of the White House?
Senators need to find the same spine as ordinary citizens Ms. Glick-Weil and Mayor Cohen and refuse the Alito nomination and the undemocratic extension of presidential privilege. A filibuster is warranted even if it ultimately does not succeed.
-RH
9:05:36 PM
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Friday, January 20, 2006 |
 AP
What's the connection between Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and Brokeback Mountain? Mark Morford, SF Chronicle online columnist tells us. Check it out. Really.
-RH
7:09:36 AM
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Thursday, January 19, 2006 |
Since I know some of you rely on me to provide you all things Princeton/Alito, read Kid Oakland's deconstruction of the Supreme Court nominee's remarks about our alma mater during his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Alito said:
[I was an undergraduate at Princeton] in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.
I attended Princeton the same time as Alito and did not witness irresponsibility but instead experienced vigorous, open debate among students and faculty, inspired oration, thoughtful, effective anti-war protest and real-world, real-time intellectual engagement at a level far beyond the classroom. I learned more about history/politics/government/law in the tumultuous spring protests of 1970 than I did in the remainder of my four years.
-RH
7:16:13 AM
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006 |
The "Saving Our Democracy" conference in NYC this Saturday sponsored by The Nation Institute and The New Democracy Project is hardly offering a democratic-looking profile of speakers. Just two of 25 are women. And we're not into gender ratios just for show. Being inclusive of gender, racial and ethnic citizens is what creates democratic ideas, values and goals. Senior Editor at The American Prospect Online, Garance Franke-Ruta, outlines why the speaker list is so disappointing and unacceptable from a progressive organization and offers a blogroll of articulate and politically-minded women who agree including Nation columnist Katha Pollitt who observes "even Congress--even the Supreme Court! -- has a better male-female ratio than that."
-RH
8:41:35 PM
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Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
The entertaining, clever and often misguided Caitlin Flanagan has an essay in The Atlantic that will get people talking-- it's about teen girls and oral sex. Problem is, her thesis doesn't hold up all that well as she's not looked carefully at the numbers. She says a quarter of teen girls are giving oral sex with nothing much in return, and away she goes from there, analyzing the hell out of the trend with fun references like Archie's dilemma over whether to choose sexy Veronica or pal Betty.
Oliver over at the music/culture site Poplicks has a good counter-analysis and takes the predictable umbrage over Flanagan's characterization of rap music as "spoken-word, hard-core pornography" that can be blamed in part for the oral sex trend. Oliver points us (as I would have myself had Oliver not gotten to it first) to the original National Center for Health Statistics survey that underpins the argument. It shows CLEARLY that teen girls are getting as well as giving at about the same percentages. But what I also take from the survey, looking further into the stats, is that the teens (both boys and girls) who are into oral sex are the same teens who have experience with intercourse. The virgins are mostly staying away from oral activity -- from sexual activity--- altogether. So it's not so much an oral sex trend as a casual sex trend in general. I think the greater prevalence of oral sex (or at least the talking and bragging and singing about it) is a kind of fad, like tattoos or belly button piercings that will fade back into a more quiet private activity sometime soon.
Still, Flanagan makes some very good and sad points about the village we live in and its failure to protect adolescence. That it's left to individual households to fend off the extremes and intrusions of sexualized consumerism. I recommend the essay. Not too many people are as willing as Flanagan to touch PC social topics and with verve and style.
Your comments?
-RH.
9:45:05 PM
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Monday, January 16, 2006 |
The dearth of male local TV news anchors is described in yesterday's Boston Globe. While this could be seen as the ascendancy of women in the profession, what's really going on here is that the job pays poorly and men are turning it down. Women are moving into the job vacuum (and into college broadcast journalism programs while young men go into more economically promising training programs). It's part of a kind of chicken and egg paradox where jobs that once held prestige stagnate in pay and even lose prestige as they become perceived as a woman's profession. Journalism, education, medicine (as opposed to medical research) may be going this way....
Here's the salient excerpt from the Globe story:
Yet experts say young men are backing off from the low-pay scale that awaits them upon graduation. Typically, neophytes start in small towns like Bangor, Maine, or Wilmington, N.C. They work as reporters first and then, sometimes, become anchors before moving on to bigger markets where the process is repeated.
According to the Radio-Television News Directors Association, a professional group that represents local and network news executives, the average annual salary for an anchor in a small market such as Bangor is about $20,000.
And speaking of tv and anchor desks and prestige, when is the NFL going to elevate deserving women broadcasters from the windswept sidelines of the game into the broadcast booth where the hair stays put, the room is warm and the pay is great? I love my Superbowl playoffs, but I grind my teeth every time I see a big-haired, pink-outfitted woman down on the field trying to shout a few lines of commentary over the fray.
-RH
9:08:13 AM
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Saturday, January 14, 2006 |
Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL, identifies one of the most disturbing aspects of Samuel Alito's testimony and previous rulings -- the lack of any indication that he was concerned with or had a feeling for the impact of his rulings on the lives of real people --- and his non-concern for their personal privacy. The New York Times has this excerpt from Michelman's testimony at the confirmation hearings yesterday:
A woman's right to choose is a powerful manifestation of privacy, but it is one right among many and all of them should concern us. There is no sense in Judge Alito's writings or rulings that privacy is a fundamental constitutional right. In his record, not only are individuals often powerless against the prerogatives of the state, individuals are more often than not simply absent altogether.
In many ways, what Judge Alito has written is less disturbing that what he omits, any sense of how his legal rulings bear on real people whose lives are shaped by his decisions. When he ruled that a Pennsylvania law requiring women to notify their husbands before obtaining an abortion was not, quote, an undue burden, there was no sense that a woman like me ever existed or even mattered. When he wrote that commonly used methods of birth control could be classified as methods of abortion, there was no indication he considered the women who would be forced into unwanted pregnancies.
The Washington Post has this video of Michelman's compelling testimony.
And for one last go-round about Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), the ultra-conservative group that Alito cited as a reference for a job promotion in the Reagan Justice Dept., here's Bruce Reed (Princeton '82) writing in Slate about the grumpy old men's club that CAP was and that the Supreme Court is.
-RH
8:03:07 AM
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Friday, January 13, 2006 |
I like Kid Oakland's "12 Commonsense Reasons to Oppose Alito"
I like that Sweden has invented the world's first female crash-test dummies. (did you know that women get whiplash more easily than men?)
I like my ambitious lineup for the holiday weekend Capote/A History of Violence/Tom Brady and the Patriots/Brokeback Mountain/'24'/King Kong
I like Annick Goutal's Eau d' Hadrien perfume. I just re-upped.
-RH
6:43:47 PM
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Thursday, January 12, 2006 |
Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, the four-term NY Congresswoman who sat on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment proceedings, makes a very straightforward argument in The Nation for impeaching George W. Bush. It's the cover story. She writes:
But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.
As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.
Bob Herbert in his New York Times column today "The Lawbreaker in the Oval Office." is quite blunt:
No one expects very much from Mr. Bush. He's currently breaking the law by spying on Americans in America without getting warrants, but for a lot of people that's just George being George.
Tragically for us, Sen. Specter's promised hearings on Bush's illegal spying will come after the Alito hearings, leaving us with a law-breaking president's judicial legacy.
-RH
9:56:15 PM
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
Senator Kennedy did a good job today in pressing Alito on his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton and outlining the group's anti-women, anti-minority stances and pronouncements. Here's the transcript of the exchange.
A sample of Kennedy's remarks and Alito's claim not to remember anything about CAP though he cited his membership as a conservative credential in a 1985 job application to the Reagan Administration Justice Department:
KENNEDY: And did you read a letter from CAP mailed in 1984 -- this is the year before you put CAP on your application -- to every living alumni -- to every living alumni, so I assume you received it -- which declared: "Princeton is no longer the university you knew it to be."
As evidence, among other reasons, it cited the fact that admission rates for African-Americans and Hispanics were on the rise, while those of alumni children were failing and Princeton's president at a time urged that the then all-male eating clubs to admit females.
And in December 1984, President William Bowen responded by sending his own letter. This is the president of Princeton responded by sending his own letter to all of the alumni in which he called CAP's letter "callous and outrageous."
This letter was the subject of a January 1985 Wall Street Journal editorial congratulating President Bowen for engaging his critics in a free and open debate.
This would be right about the time that you told Senator Kyl you probably joined the organization.
Did you receive the Bowen letter or did you read the Wall Street Journal, which was pretty familiar reading for certainly a lot of people that were in the Reagan administration?
ALITO: Senator, I've testified to everything that I can recall relating to this, and I do not recall knowing any of these things about the organization. And many of the things that you've mentioned are things that I have always stood against.
10:11:18 PM
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Sunday, January 08, 2006 |
 msnbc
With confirmation hearings opening tomorrow for Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, I thought I'd reprint my blog entry of Nov. 27 (see below) about Alito's connection to the offensive and discriminatory organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) that arose in opposition to the coeducation of my alma mater and other integrating trends of the 1970s. An opinion column by Senator Edward Kennedy in yesterday's Washington Post "Alito's Credibility Problem" also neatly summarizes the lousy history of this group.
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Do Not Bring Back the Old Princeton
Because I went to Princeton in its first class of women (class of '73) and was there at the same time as Samuel Alito '72, people have been asking me about the Supreme Court nominee and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) a conservative alumni organization that he referenced as part of a job promotion application to the Justice Department in 1985. The NYTimes today has a good long front page story about the organization and the Alito connection.
All I can add is that, from its inception in 1972, CAP was an affront to fellow Princetonians who now happened to be female. Members of CAP (from crusty, rich old alums to prep school undergraduates with roman numerals after their names) were folks who couldn't accept that the times were a changin', who felt personally undermined and who had retro beliefs about women's capabilities and PLACE. That they were still trying to turn back the clock on coeducation long after Princeton had successfully integrated only showed that they were well worth leaving behind. The fact that Alito (whom I did not know personally) would tout his membership in this organization 16 years after coeducation began is a completely valid indicator of his personal beliefs.
[To CAP's prediction that the gender and racial integration of Princeton would vitiate the institution, one need only look at today's PrU, rated the top college in the nation in popular polls, with a huge endowment supported by an unsurpassed percentage of alumni who donate (61%) and headed by a female president with a 50/50 undergraduate gender split. Minority racial representation could be a whole lot better, but we're working on that.]
Do not doubt that CAP was a lousy organization. In a post today to the DailyKos website, blogger QuickSilver, who attended Princeton in the 1980s, recalls perhaps the most infamous of CAP's capers, having to do with Princeton's health services and one female undergraduate's private sex life. The incident was described in only partial detail in the NYTimes account. Here's what QuickSilver recalls:
you have no idea how crazy CAP was
Concerned Alumni of Princeton printed the name of a student who was having sex with another student and slipped it under the door of every single student on campus! Her crime? She was having a relationship against her mother's wishes. Her real crime? She apparently had access to birth control through McCosh, the on-campus infirmary. The article was quite explicit about all of it.
It was an extraordinary violation of an undergraduate's privacy. The article, which appeared in the Prospect (CAP's publication), appeared (if memory serves) some time during my Freshman year (1983-1984) -- probably in the spring of 1984, but I may be wrong. I was absolutely shocked by it at the time -- and am still shocked, remembering it. I even called up Dinesh D'Souza, whom I have never met, and berated him over the phone. [issue was March 1984 -RH]
But apparently, Alito continued to give money to CAP even after this debacle! If he's bragging about it in 1985, questions definitely must be asked. Believe me, when Alito says he opposes Griswold v. Connecticut (1967), the decision which permitted married couples access to birth control, he should be taken at his word.
This guy is extremely dangerous.
"[I]n all due respect to your profession [journalism], you do a very good job of protecting the leakers." -- George W. Bush on Oct 7, 2003
by QuickSilver on Sat Nov 26, 2005 at 08:37:35 PM PDT
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-RH
10:52:35 AM
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Friday, January 06, 2006 |
Find it hard to imagine a society where all abortion is illegal and contraception is reserved for married couples only ?? eg the ideal to which the right wing of the Republican party aspires, the ideal it would like to hasten through Supreme Court appointments? You don't have to imagine. Just read this overview in the New York Times of the current situation in Latin America, where social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception and where 5,000 women die each year from illegal abortions with hundreds of thousands more hospitalized from botched amateur or self-administered procedures. This is partly a Bush Administration triumph -- its global gag rule keeps family planning groups concerned with maternal health from educating women about abortion -- and even the dangers of illegal abortion -- if they want to keep their clinics open with American funds. The world is screwed up in so many ways.
-RH
10:35:32 PM
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Thursday, January 05, 2006 |
I see William Saletan at Slate noticed what I did too when the news came out about the South Korean scientist's fabrication of his cloning success. The same realization that made me want to retch.
At first the guy had said he'd been able to produce 11 cloned stem cell lines using on average only 17 human eggs per line -- the previous year he'd reported needing 248 human eggs to make a single cloned line. He also said the eggs had been offered voluntarily, and were not paid for. Then it came out that he'd paid for the eggs, that he'd gotten them from research employees who presumably had little leverage to refuse. Then, of course, it turned out he had no clones at all...
But I was stuck thinking back on the 248 eggs number -- that the lower ratio of 17 was most certainly a lie -- and did the mutiplication, and that meant he'd been experimenting using maybe more than 2,000 eggs in the past couple years. So how many women were involved, and how many times were they coerced into taking fertility hormones to make them superovulate and produce a dozen or so eggs at a pop?
And suddenly I was thrown back into the dark days of my 30s when I was undergoing fertility treatment, back when they didn't know how to do it too well. But I was a desperate pioneer, and this one clinic pumped me so full of hormones that my ovaries blew up to the size of oranges, and I remember one night in particular, writhing in pain, convinced I was going to simply burst and die, while the bland doctor told me over the phone it was all a normal part of the process and not to worry, and I had a full-fledged hyperventilating panic attack that my husband talked me back from. And once they'd aspirated the eggs out of me and I felt safe again, I quit the clinic and since have tried, without total success, to banish the memory from my mind. But it sticks there, parked in some neural circuit right next to the Nazi documentary I regrettably happened upon when I was about 12 describing the experiments they did, without anesthesia, on women's reproductive organs, including gluing the fallopian tubes shut.
Yeah, Saletan and I noticed the same thing. I just remembered what it felt like.
-RH
8:53:29 PM
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Hey, I'm back up north, my highlights bleached so clown-orange by the Rio sun I had to run over to the salon yesterday to get "lowlights." And my bikini tan line looks like it was lasered on, that Southern Hemisphere light is so amped.
Alas, from watching beach volleyball, and marveling at the peculiar Rio no-hands game called "volleyfoot" it's back to the NFL and NBA.
Now you know I used to be a sportswriter back in the day; hence the name of this blog. But I haven't written up a game in decades. I just get to read other people's columns. But I usually leave dissatisfied.
I'm not big into the statistical recitations that pass for analysis these days. What I want is to hear about the people and the beauty and how they pulled it off in such and such an impossible situation. Sometimes someone will do it for me -- maybe George Vecsey in the Times, or Frank Deford on radio when he's not feeling his usual curmudeon-like self. And sometimes, when she turns her literary blog to her love affair with basketball, I get the satisfying read from Danyel over at Naked Cartwheels.
She's not a sportswriter, just an accomplished novelist who happens to be a basketball fan, but she writes sports the way I'd like to read it, and this week she's got this rollicking fun rundown of the NBA teams and who she likes and who you should watch and what you should watch and that includes the whole spectacle of "soap opera, fashion show, beauty pageant and the Olympics "as she describes it.
Read her and tell her to do us all a favor and go get a job that gives her courtside press seats. She'd be just great.
-RH
8:17:37 PM
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