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Bonnie Goldstein just posted a great "Hot Document"—the police report filed by the mom in Port St. Lucie, Fla., whose 5-year-old son was "voted out" of his kindergarten class by his teacher and classmates because he was disruptive. I was grateful to read the police report because my reaction to the initial story was, "There's GOT to be more to this." Alas, the only thing the complaint clarified for me was that the teacher meant for the little boy to be dismissed from the class for the day, not forever. But how is a 5-year-old, especially an autistic 5-year-old, supposed to figure that out?
It does seem that the little boy was a distraction to his classmates, and the fact he was "in the process of being diagnosed with autism," as the article says, would explain that. I would hope that, had the voting-off incident not happened, the school and his parents would have worked hard to find the right classroom situation for him, whether special needs or some combination of special needs and time in a "typical" classroom. No child deserves to be humiliated like that. Kindergarten is not a reality show. But more importantly, kindergarten is not a democracy. Sure, let the 5-year-olds vote on what story they read or whether to have cookies or crackers for a snack. But if a child is causing a problem in class, the teacher needs to be a grown-up and deal with it.
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Ellen, that is one gutsy post, and a public service, too. (Maybe Prudie has some suggestions on ways to get the "Clooney it up a little bit'' message out?) No way the big-screen Sex and the City could match last night's Daily Show spoof, in which Jason Jones, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and Aasif Mandvi stir their cosmos with cigars and drink a toast to herpes. And anyone on the lookout for something quieter and sturdier—an anti-SATC, set on the Upper West Side—might like to check out the DVD I saw last weekend, Starting Out in the Evening, a movie so carefully made it feels hand-stitched. Frank Langella completely inhabits the role of Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist with writer's block who feels time is running out. When this know-it-all grad student, Lauren Ambrose, barges into his life, full of plans to make her name by resuscitating his career, you keep thinking you know what's coming—will it be this or will it be that? But then you don't, and it isn't, in a way that restores faith in the kind of writing the lead character demands of himself. (And every writerly kid who says he or she just loves to sit down at the keyboard should see this, too; what a brutal life filling blank pages with fiction is.) The closest it gets to cliché is that it's Lili Taylor (beautifully) playing Leonard's Lili Taylor-like daughter; she fears her most (re)productive years are slipping away as well, while her boyfriend, Adrian Lester, who in my one quibble seems not to have heard of the blogosphere, pours all his energy into starting an online magazine, so his friends will have a place to kick around ideas. Not that we all have the same taste in movies any more than we do in candidates, but I hadn't heard much about this one, and don't know when I've been so floored by a film.
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Somebody please stop me, but I'm afraid I have more to say on the subject that Tim Noah challenged us to: "What makes married women want to have affairs?"
I ran into Meghan in the ladies' room, and we both scoffed at the notion that "You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex."
I will agree with you on one point. Yeah, you don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. (In the same way they don't call and don't tell you they want to break up—they just disappear—or so the stereotype goes.) You do, or at least I do, hear stories from women about how their husbands have stopped having sex with them. For years.
Here's just one example that I found quickly. OK, the guy is depressed; maybe he is atypical. But, as a woman with female friends and relatives, I hear many stories like this.
I don't think the apt question is why do women want to cheat? I think the question is, why don't women cheat more?
And at the risk of embarrassing myself yet again, I will venture an answer with no research to back it up whatsoever except for my own little opinions and anecdotes.
First, a caveat. I sort of hate to talk about this stuff in this way. I hate to get into the gross generalizations of "all men always do this" and "all women always do that." So could we just stipulate that when I say "men" I mean "some men, sometimes" and ditto for "women"?
A male acquaintance once said to me, "I want to have sex with every woman I see." This sentence troubled me for a long time. Did he really want to have sex with every woman he saw?
I decided that the problematic word wasn't every. It was see. I assumed he simply didn't see women he didn't find attractive. That was upsetting in its own way, but at least that meant he didn't want to have sex with every woman in his purview.
I told him I'd heard that men think about sex something like 10 times a day. He told me that figure was way too low. It was more like 50 or 100 times a day ("or 1,000 or 1,000,000," other men chimed in—if this is true, how do men get anything done?). We hear statistics like that a lot; turns out they are all bunk. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: How many times a day did I think about sex? How many men did I see that I wanted to have sex with?
I decided to do some observation and experimentation. Turns out the amount of time I think about sex is quite variable. Sometimes it can be a lot in one day. Sometimes it can be not for days or even weeks.
As for the experiment, I played a little game with myself: I decided that when I was on the subway I would ask myself, "If I had to have sex with someone in this car, who would it be?"
Granted, I don't often ride the subway at the height of rush hour when there are a lot more people to choose from, and that fluorescent lighting is pretty harsh, but I have to tell you, some days it was pretty hard to find anyone at all (of course choosing someone solely based on appearance is not the only way to become interested in someone). The conclusion: It's pretty rare that I see a man I want to have sex with. (In real life, anyway, on movie and television screens is a different story.) So rare, in fact, that when I do find myself attracted to someone it is a very powerful feeling.
Now, I am happily married, so perhaps that partially explains this rarity. (Though when I think back to before I was married, I think I was always a one-crush-at-a-time kind of girl. Or, wait, maybe two. Or three. Or four. Well, maybe five at the most. But there was always a reason, albeit shallow, that I liked someone—I thought he was cute or I liked his voice or something he had said or his personality, or the way he played guitar turned me on. It wasn't solely because he had the right equipment between his legs.)
Perhaps women are just more picky. While men are looking for quantity, maybe women are looking for quality.
On the other hand, guys, maybe you need to do something about the way you look. Clooney it up a little bit, for god's sake. Do some push-ups every day at the very least.
(True, I am no Angelina Jolie, but I am not actually on the prowl, either.)
And, now, an even touchier subject. Why do some women stop having sex with their husbands?
This may sting a little. I have no delicate way to put it. Once again, it's a question of quality.
Bad sex. Obviously, sexless marriage is a deeper issue that involves more relationship conflicts than just the physical. But, speaking as a woman, all I can tell you is that if she knew she was going to have a good time, she would want to do it. Often.
As for men, I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who said, "Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's pretty good."
Not so for women.
Best-case scenario, bad sex is like being stuck in a traffic jam when you have a million other things you'd rather be doing, places you'd rather be.
Worst-case scenario, well, ask the Austrian woman whose father locked her in a basement for 24 years, raping and impregnating her repeatedly.
Now, it's not all you. It takes two to tango, and both parties need to "bring it" (or, in the case of the incestuous Austrian rapist, "leave it"), but all I can say is, guys, it wouldn't hurt for you to work on your skills.
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Tim: Last week you challenged us to reveal the reasons women cheat (or want to) in response to our posts about this Philip Weiss article. I'm late to the party. But first I wanted to second Ellen's no-nonsense answer: For the same reasons men do. Desire, selfishness, the thrill of novelty, love, boredom, a boost to the ego—the list goes on.
Second, though: You second Weiss in suggesting that the female sex drive is, in the aggregate, less "pronounced," as you put it. And you write that you hear stories about women who don't want to have sex with their partners, but "[y]ou don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex." But in fact, you do-at least, you do if you're a woman. I've heard this very complaint from female friends whose husbands/partners are too busy or stressed or distracted for sex. And according to some reports, like this one in Psychology Today, low male libido is reportedly on the rise, affecting some 20 percent to 25 percent of men. Meanwhile, several couples therapists—most notably Michele Weiner-Davis, author of The Sex-Starved Marriage—have suggested that male sexual apathy can powerfully affect marriages and long-term relationships. On a Yahoo Answers thread about low male libido, you'll see a post from a woman bemoaning that her male partner would rather "snuggle" and "bond" than have sex.
Now, low male libido probably has cultural and environmental causes. (Anti-depressants, estrogens, etc.) And so yeah, there may be real underlying differences in male and female sex drives in the aggregate, as you argue. But I think most women who've spent much time talking openly to other women would say that the desire for sexual novelty within a long-term relationship hardly seems to be the exclusive province of the Y chromosome. On second thought, though, maybe it's better for everyone if men still think it is.
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About Clinton I have nothing to say. But I do want to give a shout out to my girl, Marjorie and say this: I've got your back! Anyone brave enough to write about the fallout from the gender wars for Newsweek, that magazine of Middle America, is going to need it. I mean, even conservative poster girl Condi Rice gets the smack-down when she dares to discuss the reality of race in America. (Thanks to The Root's Jimi Izrael for pointing me to this gem!) But don't worry, Marjorie. I'm pretty sure I can take Lou Dobbs if he comes sniffing for trouble. He looks a little soft around both the middle and the head.
On a different and more interesting note, I've been wondering around the meaning of this report by a nonprofit adoption-advocacy group that concluded that a decade of de-emphasizing race in adoptions might not have been such a win-win idea. The report examines the impact of the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, and finds that although there has been a small increase (17 percent to 20 percent) in transracial adoptions since the law went into effect, many of these children end up struggling with being "different" and face major challenges in their quest to develop strong identities. Meanwhile their well-intentioned parents have not been prepared by social workers for the racial and cultural challenges they are likely to face because the social workers fear violating the law.
Having covered the foster care system for the New York Times, I can tell you this much: It sucks. No child should be left to linger there one minute longer than absolutely necessary. Yet even with the law, African-American children are still disproportionally represented in foster care and remain there longer than children of other ethnicities. It seems to make only common sense not to discourage any qualified and loving family who wants to adopt a child from doing so. The problem is that, once again, we can't seem to find a middle ground on these issues. Either we insist on only matching like to like, and children suffer. Or we shove these families together, then close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears and shout, "Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind!" until whoever is saying something we don't want to hear gives up and goes away.
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Not to beat a not-quite-yet dead horse but I agree with Emily and Melinda about Hillary Clinton's assassination comments. Clinton knew exactly what she was saying. That's why she repeated the comments after having already made the same point to Time magazine in March. How can she say her comments were prompted in part by Kennedy's cancer diagnosis when she had already said the same thing a few months ago when there was no talk of Kennedy having cancer? Perhaps the fact that her original comments did not get wide notice explains why she wanted to re-telegraph those sentiments to a wider audience. She seems too smart and calculating to be making so many subtle and not-so-subtle racially tinged remarks by mistake. Does anyone believe that it's not more effective to send these signals out and then say, "Oops. So sorry. Never mind," than it is to not say them at all? Once she has sown doubts, raised fears, and planted ideas in the minds of people who have racial fears and animosities, she has effectively turned those people against her opponent. In Obama's case, the threat of assassination has real resonance in the black community.
On another front, the racial overtones of some of Clinton's comments overall are further eroding relations between black women who support Obama and white women who support her. The extent to which these two groups will now see themselves as having shared political agendas is highly in doubt. Judging by the strong reactions of diehard Clinton and Obama supporters to a piece I wrote on this subject in Newsweek this week, it will be a very long time before we see strong black/white feminist coalitions being formed. My feeling is that by criticizing black women's support for a black male candidate over a white female candidate, white Clinton supporters are ignoring the duality of black women's identity and alienating them by expecting them to choose between their gender and their race. This is a luxury that black women just don't have.
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It's interesting that Ruth and Rachael both used the word evil—as in, what Hillary said about RFK's assassination was unfortunate but not evil. Now, I wouldn't use that particular word to describe Clinton or what she said about Bobby Kennedy, either. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever described anyone on this side of—let's give Adolf the day off—Idi Amin that way, at least in part because it brings to mind Margo Channing's wonderful mocking of "Eve Evil, little Eve Evil,'' in All About Eve, and you shouldn't say that word and grin. But another way in which we in the media have not learned all we might have from the fiasco of 2000 is in our peculiarly American determination to see strategery everywhere but no evil, ever.
Which is why we bat down any impugning of motives with that sobering word: To question intent at all is to ascribe evil, and only nuts go that far. Paul Krugman did this just yesterday when he explained that Clinton's invocation of RFK's assassination is actually Obama's problem: "One more trumped-up scandal won't persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along.'' So, there is nothing in between A-OK and ... that word he said? What an odd paradox in which we assume we are always being played—but never with really bad intentions. Especially since it was fear of appearing to be too hard on Junior that got us this president in the first place. And, as even his former press secretary Scott McClellan says outright in his new memoir, that's also how we marched off to his purposeless war. The assumption was that Bush (and even more to the point, Colin Powell) would never have told us the war was necessary if that weren't the case -- because who would do that? No one we'd put in charge. Just as Hillary would never have stirred the pot on purpose—because that would be evil and she isn't evil, thus she couldn't have done it. For a bunch of skeptics, we really have a weirdly high opinion of human nature.
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Great answers in "The Fray" to Timothy Noah's question about why women cheat:
Desire takes many forms.
Laura Kipnis’ Against Love answered Tim’s question!
It’s about body image.
My “open marriage” was really a lousy marriage in disguise.
Why I cheat.
Why women cheat with women.
I’m a man, and I don’t fantasize about having an affair.
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Faulkner was right, and that's what makes HBO's Recount so hard to sit through: It isn't that we know how it's going to end. It's that it hasn't ended, and isn't past, for our asthmatic planet or our military families or our still wholly unreformed electoral process.
On the electoral front, Dahlia, your point about sagging voter confidence being self-fulfilling is dead right. But do we boost that confidence by telling African-American Ohioans who waited for hours in the rain to vote in 2004—because Franklin County redistributed voting machines from inner-city polling places where they were in short supply to rural areas where there were too many—that their concerns are "idiotic'' or that voter suppression is all in their heads? Every study of electronic voting machines suggests they're hackable, prone to glitches and easy to upgrade—for a price. (And if ATMs were half as unreliable, wouldn't we have solved the problem before you could say, "Katherine Harris actually wore that?'') The real question is how much voter confidence is worth to us, since solutions on the cheap haven't worked that well.
After the train wreck of the 2000 recount, Florida's Sarasota County purchased electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software, the same company that produced the ballots of hanging-chad fame. (This despite the fact that, as this barely seen but excellent Dan Rather documentary argues, ES&S was having a hard time marketing its touch-screen voting machines until it decided to cut back on the quality of paper used to make the ballots that wound up dimpled and hanging in 2000. The company's own quality-control folks refused to sign off on the change and warned their bosses that if they went with the cheaper paper, it would expand in the Florida humidity and be a big old mess by Election Day. They were ignored, but they were right. And when their predictions came true, their company was rewarded with contracts for the shiny new electronic voting machines they'd been having trouble unloading. Whee!)
OK, so now it's 2006, and those same ES& Smachines work their magic in Sarasota County, where thousands of people sign affidavits that they had trouble casting ballots in just one race, for Democratic Congressional candidate Christine Jennings, who according to the machine tally lost by fewer than 400 votes. Golly, can't let that happen again, so the super magnanimous Charlie Crist, the state's new Republican governor, says let's do away with those touch-screen machines that leave no paper trail. Only, tucked into the wildly popular bill that did away with paperless ballots was ... the provision that moved up the date of the state's presidential primary and led to the current fight over what to do about Florida's delegates to this summer's Democratic National Convention. Republicans in the state "knew exactly what they were doing,'' says Christine Jennings, who is still running against Vern Buchanan. Only, he's an incumbent now. That the solutions just keep making things worse makes you wonder how seriously we take the problem. And as long as we put the need for voting reform on a par with taking on little green men, 2000 won't ever be over.
P.S. to Ruth: A blog virgin, who knew? I agree she didn't mean TO say it. But that's not the same as not meaning what she said.
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Our colleague Ruth Marcus weighs in on the RFK controversy:
Ok, I’m feeling the need to weigh in on assasin-gate and disagree with my friends Emily, Rosa and Melinda about how bad Hillary Clinton’s comments were. This is my first blog post, ever, so I hope there are extra points for a trifecta of disagreement.
Emily is right, of course, about Clinton’s bad grasp of history. Her husband had effectively sewn up the nomination in March actually, even earlier than Emily argues. Not only was the New Hampshire primary held on March 12 in 1968—not this year’s Jan. 8, which would make April the new June, but Bobby Kennedy only announced his candidacy after New Hampshire. I agree with Emily, too, about both the ugly prevalence of “gotcha” politics and the “string of offensive statements” that have come from Sen. Clinton of late.
Also, summoning the memory of RFK’s assassination in the context of her campaign was a pretty stupid thing to say—especially given her opponent, and especially given the unfortunate timing.
But it’s the fundamental stupidity of Clinton’s comment—when was the last time anyone named Clinton apologized so fast?—convinces me that she did not have a sinister motive or message, and that her emphasis was on when (June) not the what (assassination.) What could she have had to gain politically by the ensuing firestorm? The fact that she said it before—and no one much noticed—isn’t evidence to me of her evil intent (it does give the lie to the Kennedys-on-the-brain argument) as much as it is that she didn’t really understand to what extent this was an unfortunate thing to say.
To me, what this shows is that if you mix up enough exhaustion with enough self-pity (“They’re trying to elbow me out”), and there are plenty of both in the Clinton campaign these days, you end up with dumb comments like this. And I thought John Harris made a strong argument in Politico, that this one was hyped beyond all reason.
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So this is what it's come to: the Lone Gunman strategy. It's no secret that Hillary Clinton has been hoping for a colossal misstep by Barack Obama, or a damaging revelation, to end his candidacy, leaving her the last woman standing. But the satisfying irony would be that Clinton has made the ultimate in political blunders by voicing the possibility of the assassination of her opponent. It's chilling, the cool, uninflected way she casually brings up what she calls the "historic fact" that Bobby Kennedy was murdered in June—before the end of the primary season, so thank goodness Hubert Humphrey hadn't withdrawn prematurely! Later, when forced to apologize, she explained that long primary seasons often run into June, as her own husband's did, and anyway the Kennedys have been on her mind because of the brain tumor diagnosis of Ted Kennedy (take note: Voodoo dolls really do work). This is garbage both as history and self-explanation. In 1968 the presidential primaries started in March; and in his first presidential race, Bill Clinton had effectively won the nomination in April. As for the Kennedy-on-the-mind excuse, Hillary made the same assassination argument to Time magazine in March, before Sen. Kennedy's diagnosis (isn't it funny that this wasn't picked up then).
I don't like the game of gotcha, in which every ill-phrased remark is grounds for ending a candidacy. But recently Clinton has been making a string of offensive statements, from saying "hardworking white Americans" support her and not Obama, to comparing her effort to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan to the civil-rights marchers beaten in Selma, Ala. But calling forth the forces of madness to give her the presidency—please, let her end the madness of her campaign.
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XXer Rosa Brooks sends this one in:
I think we know exactly what Hillary meant:
"Nice nominee you got there ... sure would be a shame if anything happened to him."
Awfully big-hearted of her to be willing to stick around through August, just in case ...
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I'm not saying she literally hopes he dies soon. (Plus, she's apologized, so case closed, right?) But Hillary didn't mean what she said this time just like she wasn't exactly shouting out to hardworking white people, and Bill didn't quite say Jesse equals Barack, and her surrogates never meant to push the whole image of him as a druggie in the 'hood, and she never meant to reanimate the whole highly racial Jeremiah Wright hoo-ha by saying—gosh darn the timing, just as things were dying down—that he woulda never been her pick for pastor. But either Hillary Clinton is one smart, savvy, and occasionally even on-message politician—in which case she is well aware of what it means to reference the possible assassination of a black leader in this country—or she isn't and doesn't. It can't be both.
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I admit I watched Sex and the City, the series, pretty religiously. I missed the beginning. And after watching my first episode, I hated it. I hated the way they talked: the faux fabulousness. But it was oddly addictive. It was like a train wreck I couldn't stop staring at.
And then I started to genuinely like it. While still hating it. Sort of.
But the end, the end, it drove me mad.
I was never a fan of Mr. Big. I thought he was miscast. I thought he was downright abusive to Carrie. I have dated men like this. They want to spend time with you, on their terms, only in private, and will never acknowledge their relationship with you in public. For years, they might introduce you as their "friend." They come and go as they please. Then suddenly they marry someone else. Yet they still call you. They string you along with scant moments of tenderness.
Anyway, it seemed a relationship for a 20-year-old, not a wise, powerful thirtysomething woman.
And this was my main gripe with the show. It promised to be about wise, powerful, independent women. Women who can fuck around like men, but at the end of the week, they always show up for brunch with their girlfiriends. But in the end, it was just about four single women who wanted to find Prince Charming.
Jane Austen with fornication!
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Melinda,
I admit this is a new one for me, defending Hillary, but I don't think that's quite what she meant. My take on it (and some of our Slate colleagues seem to concur) is that she was referring to the fact that it's only May, so it's too soon for her to think about dropping out (which ignores the reality that she can't possibly get enough delegates to pass Obama).
It's unfortunate and a little odd that she chose to cite RFK's assassination as an example of primaries that last past May, especially given all the uncomfortable attention given to the idea that Obama, as an African-American, is at risk for being assassinated himself.
It's interesting, though, that you raise the idea of Hillary becoming vice president, as there's a lot of discussion about that today in the blogosphere, and her chief fundraiser is making veiled threats about the consequences of not putting her on the ticket.
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Sorry to get distracted from sex and HBO for a minute, but just when I thought Hillary Clinton could no longer surprise me, did she really just say hey, he could always get shot? Which raises the question: In the unlikely event of a "dream ticket,'' who do we see for White House taster?
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Oh gosh. Can I hide in a closet for the next two weeks, until, like a bad skin peel, this movie flakes off and goes away? For the first five or six or 20 seasons that it was on, I avoided the show, out of principal. What principal, I'm not sure—just the commercials about it on HBO made me twitchy with disdain. Then I realized that it was hardly fair to judge a show without ever having actually watched it. So I did, catching maybe six or eight episodes in a row. It was, I admit, oddly addictive. Still, I stopped when I realized I was missing half the scenes because my eyes were rolling so hard in my head. Also, I got a headache. I disliked much about the show, including the blatant, smug narcissism of all the characters. (The last show I watched was the one in which none of them even knew where they were supposed to vote, because they never bothered. After that, I was done.) I realize that was the point, in part; I just didn't like it. But my major problem was the total and complete absence of black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc. etc. etc., people in that fairy-tale New York. Not just in starring roles— because, let's face it, most people in America, even in urban areas, lead fairly segregated lives—but even in background scenes! Except, of course, for Blair Underwood, Hollywood's designated black man. It was as if a plague had descended on the NYC that I know and love, wiping out only the dark-skinned and unfabulous. Someone must have painted the blood of a lamb over Underwood's door so that he alone was spared.
I preferred Girlfriends. Equally ridiculous in many ways, but five times funnier.
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I was going to say I watched that show sort of like I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom as a kid. But that's wrong, because on the other side of the earth, there really are wildebeests leaving the herd. Whereas nowhere in nature are there women who talk (and walk around NYC in 4-inch heels) like Carrie and her crew, who, except for Miranda, I could never see her being friends with. It seemed like sexed-up Disney to me, still all about the prince and the shoes. Mr. Big was appealing, though, I thought. And when I saw his portrayer once, flirting with a plus-size cashier in an airport, that made me like him even more.
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As every mom and single woman in my corner of the universe knows, Sex and the City opens as a movie next weekend. So, with the critical distance born of many years of reruns, are you lovers or haters? Me, I only really discovered the show last summer, after I had a car accident and my sister sent me a season to keep me company while I recuperated in the hospital. (Yes, once I am out of date, I like to be a good decade out of date.) Against my instincts, I was hooked. I loved the relationships between the women, and that counted for more than my annoyance with flibberty gibbet Mr. Big. I thought the writing got sharper and wittier as the show progressed. And I felt like certain episodes (like the one in which Carrie loses her shoes at a baby shower and the mom host is ogre-ish about it) made me sit up and think about how annoying all the kid and baby obsession I've come to take for granted is to women my age and younger who aren't mothers. Plenty of flaws, too, I realize—jump in?
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Tim and Ellen, the few married women I know who've come right out and said they were having affairs all wound up divorcing the hubby and marrying the "other man.'' Only, those are just the ones who talked about it. One of my most gorgeous married friends once complained she wouldn't even know how to get something new started, so that one in three still seems high to me. But then, I am someone who missed her own fling: One night maybe 10 years ago, I get home from work and my husband says nonchalantly, oh, nearly forgot, there's a message for you I saved. (Which should have been a red flag right there, because how many times in our marriage has he said that?) OK, who was it? Dunno, cough, cough, didn't listen. Turns out, the message is from some guy I never heard of saying hey Melinda, LOVED our super-great time together in Chicago and just found out I'm going to be in D.C. on such-and-such a date and sure would like to see you again, pant, pant; call me! So not only did somebody pretending to be me have a big old night out—but she was enough of a woman with a plan to use my name from the get-go, and hand out my unlisted home number, too. I half suspected a certain bony, bitter (see, it is never a nice word) officemate—who I'd bet my life believes Hillary wuz robbed. But I still don't know how (whether?) this love story began or ended—or maybe it's still going on.
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Catherine Price's Broadsheet post about a recent article on honor killings has been haunting me all week, not because the subject is new but because, like her, I can't get past the idea of a father stomping, stabbing and suffocating his 17 year-old daughter to death, with the help of his sons, and of her uncles then spitting on her grave in disgust. Why? Because the girl had a crush on and spoke to a British soldier in Basra.
I know many of us have heard these horrific stories before. Still, i never cease to be amazed, and repulsed, at the level of violence toward women and girls that is tolerated in countries across Africa and the Arab world, in East Asia and Eastern Europe, in China and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yes, we have plenty of violence against women at home, but I think it's safe to say that the level of violence against women and girls here, doesn't even compare to what takes place overseas. In many cases it is not only tolerated, or ignored, it is officially sanctioned by governments that claim they can do nothing to stop violent practices that occur mostly in tradition-bound enclaves ruled by male elders, or taking place in war-torn countries in states of perpetual anarchy.
Gang rapes, revenge rape, war rapes, punishment rapes, beatings, honor killings, genital mutilation, forced prostitution, the sale and marriage of little girls to grizzled old perverts. It's enough to turn the stomach. As American women we can march and speak out, we can give money to organizations working hard to prevent and hopefully end these ugly practices, and it will still continue unless the international community comes together to address it head on. We need formal, international treaties that attach sanctions and penalties against countries that tolerate this form of gender terrorism.
Too bad the United Nations can't take the lead. Its credibility on this issue is very comprised given that hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers working in troubled countries have been implicated in shameful sexual abuse scandals involving coerced sex with girls as young as eight in exchange for food and empty promises of jobs, or payments of a single dollar. Some of the U.N. workers are from the very countries where violence against women is an ingrained part of the culture. How sad that they are importing the worst of their values rather than their best, spreading disease and despair instead of the goodwill the UN is supposed to foster.
I know these traditions date back to past generations and are culturally institutionalized. I know too that the perpetrators are not usually enlightened or educated men, but barbaric and backward—yes backward—men. Still, this doesn't mean the larger society has to accept it. Nor do official government leaders who are usually educated men who know better.
How ironic that the term "honor killing" even exists. There is certainly no honor when men attack the most defenseless, least respected, less protected members of their society. And there's definitely no honor when world leaders, like the U.S., that are not shy about imposing their values on other countries in other ways, do so little about it.
The first sign of societal breakdown is when the male members of a society turn on their women and children. Seems to me that the affected countries were broken long ago.
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All right, Tim Noah, I will bite.
"What makes married women want to have affairs?" you ask?
The same things that make married men want to have affairs (excepting, of course, the desire to "spread seed").
Monogamy is hard. For all of us. It's unrealistic for people who live as long as humans do today. We, too, crave variety. We, too, have fantasies. We, too, are busy, overworked, have too many responsibilities, and want to blow off some steam. Some of us are neglected, abused, oppressed, unloved, ignored, deprived of affection, unhappy, unfulfilled. Some of us are just bored. Some of us are just horny. Some of us are getting old and we want to feel young and sexy again.
Some of us have been brainwashed by the Jane Austen fantasy, and we are still looking for Mr. Darcy.
Some of us love our husbands, but, well, we are married, not dead. There are a lot of hot, tempting women in the world, but there are a lot of hot, tempting men, as well, and we are exposed to their hot, tempting images everywhere, every day, all the time. (Note to Jonathan Rhys Meyers: Call me!)
I suspect there are as many reasons women want to have affairs as there are women having affairs.
I find it curious that so many people still buy into the myth that pairing off and staying together forever is the only model of a successful relationship. It's hard not to acquiesce to this religion-enforced, society-sanctioned, government-rewarded "lifestyle."
But as our rates of infidelity and divorce suggest, it's not realistic. This is not to say that we should live in a sexual free-for-all. There are great rewards that come with being in an emotionally, as well as sexually, intimate relationship. We do seem to naturally pair off, for a while, and have relationships this way—but serially. I think serial monogamy is perhaps more realistic, though it is also more complicated.
The problem is, how long is "for a while"? How long should it be? Seven minutes or 70 years?
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A guest post (or rather a challenge) from Slate's Tim Noah:
May I put in a good word for Philip Weiss?
Before proceeding, let me stipulate that I know Phil and have edited him in the past. It would be a stretch to call him a friend (we've exchanged perhaps five sentences over the past 20 years), but we hung out a bit during the 1980s and I remain fond of him.
One thing I've always admired about Phil is his personal courage as a writer of nonfiction, even at the risk of appearing foolish. Certainly he displays courage in his New York magazine piece, "What Makes Married Men Want To Have Affairs?" The article is an attempt to take something we already know—duh, males crave sexual variety—and explore what can be done about it without adopting the familiar posture of the locker-room raconteur, on the one hand, or the prim scold, on the other. To achieve this, it is necessary to engage men and women in a conversation with one another. Phil hints strongly that he himself has strayed, or (less likely, I think) that he has come so close to straying that it "jolted my marriage." Phil has discussed this "over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and therapist, they're all men." Which obviously didn't get him very far. Here, he's proposing something new. A topic seldom discussed in mixed company—indeed, the very topic that probably occasioned the invention of that idiotic phrase "mixed company" in the first place—is to be discussed with both men and women present.
The trouble with Phil's piece, as various XXers have pointed out, is that the female libido is scarcely heard from. Phil portrays women mostly as enforcers of monogamy and domesticity, and men as caged libertines who daydream about boffing the nearest Hooters' waitress and on occasion actually do. Phil acknowledges that married women have affairs, too—15 percent to men's 25 percent. But while the promiscuous men Phil writes about come off as mainstream humanists—regular guys—the promiscuous women Phil writes about are all exotic creatures—sex researchers, sex counselors, free-love bohemians, and prostitutes. The only "normal" woman willing to consider promiscuity, even for a moment, is his wife. She shuts down Phil's campaign to establish whoopee utopia by pointing out that if he wanted to be unfaithful, he'd have to accomodate her infidelity, too. Of course he backs down immediately—and realizes life and love are more complicated than his desire is willing to acknowledge.
The default female response to Phil's piece is to clobber him for being such a, you know, guy. Instead, I'd like to see a woman take up Phil's invitation to converse about the uneasy truce between monogamy and sexual desire. What makes married women want to have affairs?
I'll readily grant that taking up this topic requires considerably more daring from a woman than it took from Phil, because our society is a lot less tolerant of female infidelity, or even female daydreams about infidelity. In that stupid Stanley Kubrick movie, Eyes Wide Shut, hubby Tom Cruise plunges into a rococo sexual odyssey because wifey Nicole Kidman says merely that she experienced unrequited lust for another man. In older movies, whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck. The political world is even more retrograde. There's a reason why you'll never hear presidential candidate Hillary Clinton say, as Jimmy Carter said in 1976, that she's experienced lust in her heart. If she ever let us find out she'd acted on it, as Bill did, her political career would never survive, as Bill's did. So, yes: This is hard stuff for a woman to talk about it. But talking about it seems more constructive, not to mention more interesting, than finger-wagging.
So how about it, XXers? You probably didn't need Phil Weiss to tell you why men have affairs, or at least fantasize about having affairs: They crave sexual variety, they long to recapture lost youth, blah blah blah. Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they're easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin' Plato's Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women's desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.
So, what's it all about?
Please don't refer me to The Erotic Silence of the American Wife and the groaning bookshelf of similar titles out there. My bad, I haven't read them. But let's face it: Those books were written for and by women, not for men and women. They're the equivalent of a ladies' lunch. Let's have a mixer instead. Why do women want to cheat?
Two ground rules:
1.) No diversions into what's cultural and what's "hard-wired" about women's sexuality. Once you fall down that rabbit hole, there's no coming back. Just talk about what is, and skip the warring evolutionary and behaviorist theories as to why this should be so.
2.) No bad-mouthing your husbands, or the male sex in general. Phil managed to write without bad-mouthing his wife, or women in general (except perhaps by implication). Even if men really are unregenerate shitheads, dwelling on this will just turn this back into a discussion about men.
Anyone game?
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Agree entirely, D, that Clinton doesn't get to reduce her loss to sexism. But what's the evidence that she has? She made that one "demeaning to millions of women" comment this week. Bill Clinton apparently mentioned it. (Not sure that counts, since I remain convinced that he is half-engaged in sabotage.) There was the "iron my shirts" moment (a real instance). There was the pile-on comment after the Philadelphia debate. Maybe there are several more instances, and I'm just forgetting. Or is it more that we all notice and remark upon it when she plays the gender card than that she plays it often? This is a woman who has spoken several times a day, for 15 or so minutes, over 15 months. She has said a lot of things a lot more frequently than "poor me I'm a victim." Hasn't she?
The Linda Hirshman thing also seems to me overblown and overstated. Not that it's entirely or even mostly wrong, just that to argue that all powerful women are portrayed as harpies all the time is no more true and useful than any other universal catchall. I buy that it's often hard to be a powerful woman—and harder than it is to be a powerful man, because there are fewer safe and familiar moves to make. OK. But I think Clinton has pulled it off more than most, and more than she has screwed it up. She is not Blanche DuBois! [insert here second and third Tennessee William examples that I am too illiterate to think of.] That's part of why so many women keep voting for her. I think.
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The ailing Ted Kennedy has said that he would like the successor to his seat be his wife, Vicki. Isn’t this rather richly ironic since Kennedy has done all he can to stop the Clintons from extending their White House dynasty by opposing Hillary’s election to the presidency? Ted’s Senate seat has been in his family for more than 50 years. (It was previously JFK’s.) I’m from Massachusetts, so I know that voters there are reluctant to accept that they have free will when it comes to the political ambitions of Kennedys, but it’s unseemly and un-American for this clan to think it has a permanent claim on any office. XX’s own Rosa Brooks pointed out that the late Benazir Bhutto, seen in this country as a champion of democracy, named her son as her successor in her will. Brooks wrote, “To Bhutto, political power was something one could inherit, something to be passed along from spouse to spouse and from parent to child. … That's dynastic politics, not democratic politics.” Dynastic politics hasn’t worked out very well for us lately. If a candidate is a member of a political family and is also by all measures worthy of being elected to office, fine. But let’s stop choosing our elected officials because they’re married to, or children of, officeholders.
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Anyone else catch yesterday’s ripped-from-the-headlines Law & Order finale? About a New York governor who hires expensive young hookers (and some strange, tangentially related murder)? Anyone else notice that the single biggest difference between the Spitzer narrative and L&O’s—aside from the fact that the fictional governor gets away with it—was the craven legal meddling by the ruthlessly ambitious Silda character? Just checkin’.
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