January 2007 – Page 11

Feminist Bloggers Take Over the World

The fabulous Ms. Jessica Valenti, one of my favorite feminist bloggers, Real Hot 100 founder, freelance writer, and an all-around feminist hero of mine, is now writing for UN Dispatch and the Daou Report, in addition to her usual great work at Feministing and getting her book out this spring.

Big congrats to Jessica. There couldn’t be a more intelligent, interesting, and generally fantastic woman for the job. Be sure to check out her great work all around the blogosphere — and if you need somewhere to start, I’d suggest this post on malaria prevention.

I got an A in Phallus 101

I wish.

I love the conservative hand-wringing about what those crazy college kids are learning. I’m in law school, and I suspect that Charlotte Allen would fall over clutching her pearls if she were to take a look at my schedule, which includes classes like “Sexuality and the Law” and “Race and Legal Scholarship” and “Feminist Jurisprudence.” Oh, the horror of taking classes with some of the best faculty in the country at a top-five law school if those classes recognize things like race and gender and sex. What in the world could those issues have to do with the law, or life in general?

Allen bemoans the fact that students can get the same number of credits for taking a class on, say, Marxism as they can on the Greek Tragedies. She writes:

Nipping at UCLA’s heels was Amherst, with “Taking Marx Seriously.” The first sentence of the course description is: “Should Marx be given another chance?” With 100 million dead in various gulags and related charnel houses, I don’t think so.

Well, if the number of people who die for an ideology is indicative of how seriously it should be taken, then we should probably rid ourselves of the Abrahamic religions, no? (And yes, Charlotte, that does include Christianity).

The conservative knee-jerk response to the words “Marxism” or “Socialism” or “Communism” is always good for a laugh. In Charlotte’s world, there is absolutely no possible use for a course which examines Marxism beyond concluding “it’s totally stupid” — despite the fact that, if you bother to venture outside of your front yard, Marx’s theories have had quite an effect world-wide, from Yugoslavia to Iran. According to Wikipedia, Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Kerala and West Bengal have all at least nominally adhered to Marxism There are a whole lot of people who have thought that Marx should, in fact, be taken seriously. We can shake out heads at what a dummy he was, but that doesn’t make it so — and that doesn’t make him any less influential. Asking “Should Marx be given another chance?” allows students to critique and question his ideologies in light of modern philosophy, economics, and social structures. Sounds exactly like what students at institutions of higher learning should be doing.

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Obesity Report Cards and Eating Disorders

In the unlikely event that you attend a public school, are overweight, and had no idea, now you’ll get a note sent home evaluating your BMI and letting your parents know whether or not your weight is “normal” — despite the fact that BMI is a seriously flawed standard, and all the experts seem to agree that this new report card system will put more students at risk for eating disorders.

But who cares about health when we have a war on fat to fight?

Six-year-old Karlind Dunbar barely touched her dinner, but not for time-honored 6-year-old reasons. The pasta was not the wrong shape. She did not have an urgent date with her dolls.

The problem was the letter Karlind discovered, tucked inside her report card, saying that she had a body mass index in the 80th percentile. The first grader did not know what “index” or “percentile” meant, or that children scoring in the 5th through 85th percentiles are considered normal, while those scoring higher are at risk of being or already overweight.

Yet she became convinced that her teachers were chastising her for overeating.

Since the letter arrived, “my 2-year-old eats more than she does,” said Georgeanna Dunbar, Karlind’s mother, who complained to the school and is trying to help her confused child. “She’s afraid she’s going to get in trouble,” Ms. Dunbar said.

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The Hyde Amendment

Women’s eNews has a great article about the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, and pro-choice efforts to dismantle it now that Hyde has left Congress.

A quick 101 for those who aren’t familiar with the Hyde Amendment: Passed in the late 1970s, the Hyde Amendment blocks federal Medicaid funding from paying for abortion. So if you’re a low-income woman who depends on government aid for your healthcare, your options are limited based on anti-choice ideology. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment in 1980, arguing that while abortion must be legal in the United States, the federal government is not required to pay for it. On the coattails of Hyde, most states have also barred their Medicaid funds from paying for abortion (New York is a notable exception). Further, under the “it has to be legal but we don’t have to pay for it” theory supported by the Supreme Court, the federal government has refused to provide certain reproductive healthcare services for women in the military, women who depend on Indian Health Services for their healthcare, some federal employees, federal prisoners, Peace Corps volunteers, and women on disability insurance.

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Just What the Hell is Going On Here?

Seriously, people. It’s January, I live in New York, and I just returned from a trip to the store in which I wore a t-shirt and flip-flops.*

Just a little winter, that’s all I ask. I don’t think I’ve worn a coat since November.

UPDATE: I think I’ve found our snow.

* For some odd reason, I feel compelled to mention that I also wore pants. I did eventually rescue them from the washer.

Friday Cat Blogging — Henry

djw of Lawyers, Guns and Money lost his beloved cat Henry on New Year’s Eve — just before djw’s party, which he couldn’t enjoy, because all he wanted to do was lock himself in the bathroom and mourn his cat, who’d died in his arms so recently.

Here’s to 2007. I’m currently hiding in my room, neglecting my hosting duties at my own New Years party, of which I am a host. Here’s a miserable way to end a miserable year–host a New Year’s party that begins 15 minutes after your beloved cat dies in your arms. It’s quite an experience. I’m now officially drunk enough to cope, more or less. I must rejoin my party shortly–Rob, if you see this, you should post a picture. Tomorrow, I’ll properly eulogize Henry. Onward to 2007–I’ve had enough of this year.

About a month ago, Henry got sick–it turned out it was her kidneys. She’s unusually young for kidney failure, and it’s possible she injested some toxins. Hoping the kidney failure was chronic and not acute, we hyrdrated her, took care of her, and hoped for the best. The last month of her life she was weak and inactive, but still enjoyed human attention and companionship. At six o’clock on December 31st, just after a feeding and some medicine, she left us. She was a wonderful, intriguing companion and the house feels empty without her.

Here’s to Henry.

Thank God They Saved The Embryos So More White Babies Could Be Born

Attaturk had this little tidbit from the news:

Their embryos, along with those belonging to hundreds of other couples, were kept at the Fertility Institute’s laboratory at the hospital. Two days before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, the clinic took steps to protect the embryos by topping off all its tanks with liquid nitrogen and moving them to the third floor.

But Katrina’s eight feet of water knocked out the electricity, and the temperature climbed. A freshly topped-off tank is safe for three to four weeks in an air-conditioned room, but “I’m sure the temperature was over 100 degrees in that hospital,” Dr. Belinda “Sissy” Sartor, a fertility expert for the institute.

Fearing the embryos would be ruined, she contacted a state lawmaker, who called Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and on Sept. 11, Illinois officers on loan to Louisiana set out in National Guard trucks, towing flat-bottomed boats.

A flat surface was essential: The 35- and 40-liter nitrogen tanks, which weigh 75 and 90 pounds, had to stay upright. If one tipped over, the nitrogen would spill.

In the hospital parking lot, the boats puttered past cars still flooded almost up to their windows. The boats were taken through the flooded halls, and the embryos were floated out. They were taken across town to a hospital that had not flooded.

The embryos, which are kept in separate labeled vials inside the tanks, were undamaged, doctors said.

Well, isn’t that interesting.

I posted recently about an episode of Dirty Jobs involving house gutters in St. Bernard Parish, where I did my volunteer stint. The host asked the house gutters about the mark that appears on nearly every house in the area, a spray-painted X with certain information in each quadrant. The top quadrant is the date the house was searched, and the left quadrant contains the ID of the search unit. I don’t have the episode saved on my TiFaux anymore, but I do remember that the mark on the house indicated that the house had been searched on Sept. 12 or so by the Illinois National Guard. So before the Illinois Guard units were searching houses in badly-flood-damaged St. Bernard Parish for survivors — you know, actual, existing people — or bodies, they were rescuing frozen embryos from a private fertility clinic at the behest of the governor so that couples who can afford to throw down $12 grand for an attempted pregnancy wouldn’t have to start over again:

But if the embryos had thawed, each woman who wanted another baby would have had to undergo another expensive round of fertility drugs, egg harvesting, and in vitro fertilization. Markham estimated her first pregnancy cost $12,000; the second $2,000. Her husband’s insurance covered that, but had a lifetime cap of $15,000.

When I visited the Lower Ninth Ward, I noticed that the dates in the top quadrant were from the end of September. The dates in St. Bernard — a much more affluent community — were from the week of 9/12 – 9/17. So if the Guard units were dispatched to affluent communities sooner than to poor communities, what does it say that embryos trumped the affluent communities?

UPDATE: The episode is on now, and the date was indeed 9/12. Beth has a point in comments that the dates had something to do with accessibility of neighborhoods rather than affluence; still, the very idea that military units would be dispatched to save frozen embryos before searching homes for bodies and/or survivors (who, after all, could have used the fresh water at that point) is just horrifying.

Friday Random Ten – the “I just dragged two 50lb bags up a sixth-floor walk-up and now I cannot move” edition

Back in New York. Dog-blogging and Seattle-blogging below the fold.

1. Sufjan Stevens – They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black
2. Aimee Mann – Sliding Doors
3. The Decemberists – California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade
4. Death Cab for Cutie – No Joy in Mudville
5. Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker – Live
6. Beyonce – Irreplaceable
7. PJ Harvey – I Think I’m a Mother
8. Justin Timberlake – Losing my Way
9. Wu Tang Clan – Clan in da Front
10. The Fugees – How Many Mics

Friday Bonus Video: What diseases are in your underwear? Via Feministing, which reminds us that your tax dollars are paying for this.

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The Singular Woman

Well this is quite the review of Dawn Eden’s book. It sums up a lot of what Dawn writes, so that people like me don’t have to suffer through actually reading a self-help mantra for 30-somethings who are willing to do just about anything to get hitched. To copy something Amanda said, the book essentially comes down to, “All single women are like Dawn. Except Dawn.”

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Cyborg Beauty

From the New York Times Style section:

Shifts of taste and style are trivialities, of course, without any serious meaning. But they do perform one important function, as Proust pointed out: they notch our hours and moments and decades and leave us with visual mnemonics, clues by which to remember where and in which dress and what jeans (and wearing what cologne) one was at a particular time. Tracking the way styles evolve gives us insight, too, into the forms of beauty we choose to idealize.

Models who were vacant optimistic cheerleader types prevailed in the politically clueless 1970s (Christie Brinkley, Patti Hansen, Shelley Hack); brooding brunettes took over during the Age of Reagan (Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Yasmeen Ghauri); and off-kilter aristocratic types (Guinevere van Seenus, Stella Tennant, Erin O’Connor), emblematic of upper class women, came to the fore during the second Bush imperium.

What fashion now prefers as a beauty ideal is another type, the robot, personified by the stunning Raquel Zimmerman, a blond Brazilian of German heritage whose physical proportions are so symmetrical that many designers use her body as a template. That Ms. Zimmerman also has a kind of vacant cyborg aspect cannot be altogether incidental. Possibly this is the reason why Louis Vuitton hired her for a new ad campaign in which her face has been made up and manipulated so aggressively as to render her less humanly expressive than Lara Croft.

Elsewhere in the article, the author discusses the latest trends for men: unshaven faces, casual sweater-vests and no-name thrift-shop jeans. Just compare the impages on page 1 and page 2 (I would upload them now, but I’m on a dreadfully slow computer).

They get to be chic in beards, long frizzy hair, potbellies, and $2 jeans. We’re fashionable when we look like less-than-human, perfectly symmetrical (and perfectly put together) cyborgs. They get musicians, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Allen Ginsberg, India. We get robots and Louis Vuitton.

They define music, art, travel — and get to draw from all of these things in their physical exhibition of their complex identities. The beards, the Chucks, the skinny jeans, the $50 vintage t-shirt — these aren’t frivolities when the dudes do it, it’s part of hipster culture. It’s meaningful in a way that’s separate from simple consumerism, that isn’t about these men’s bodies being used as showcases — these men are the whole show, baby. Their fashion represents them, and they are the artists, the movers and shakers, the writers, the creative types, the people who set the standards and whose cool the fashion industry tries to catch on to (and they totally don’t care about fashion). They don’t stand in to represent a generation; they are the generation.

We get pigeonholed by decade, our faces and bodies spoken about as defining objects, as if Linda Evangelista is kind of like a piece of the Berlin wall. The dumb happy blonde, the serious brunette, the unstable and indulged debutante: How better to visually demonstrate political cluelessness, oppressive conservatism, and imperialist wars waged on behalf of big oil companies?

But I’ll stop while I’m ahead. I need to go practice my vacant cyborg look in the mirror.