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Michelle "Bombshell" McGee's name is all over the Internet today because the tabloid In Touch claims that she is having an affair with Oscar winner Sandra Bullock's husband, Jesse James. This news comes just a few days after reports the end of about fellow Academy Award-winner Kate Winslet's marriage to director Sam Mendes, and lots of blogs are talking about the so-called "Oscar Curse": If you win the Oscar for best actress, it's curtains for your long-term relationship. Needless to say, the notion of a such a curse is a load of bull.
The implicit (sexist) idea behind the "curse" is that men are so uncomfortable with their wives and girlfriends' mega-success, they are driven to cheat or flee. But if you take one look at the list of best actor nominees and winners, you'll see that their relationship track-records are not much better: 2008 winner Sean Penn's relationship with Robin Wright broke up about seven times; when Russell Crowe won in 2000, he was busy breaking up Meg Ryan's marriage to Dennis Quaid. Though he's never won, George Clooney's love life is pretty checkered—ditto fellow best actor nominees Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke. Hollywood relationships are notoriously hard to maintain independent of Oscar wins, and the notion that Sandra Bullock's success is related to her husband's alleged affair is pure, gross speculation.
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I find many uses of the word patriarchy grating, but it's pretty hard to describe the Catholic Church without it. Which is why it's so stunning that today, nearly 60,000 nuns signed a letter supporting the passage of Barack Obama's health care plan—the same plan the Catholic bishops have done their best to stonewall because of language concerning abortion. It's been a dispiriting week for anyone who's Catholic, but at least for me, this was a much-needed moment of hope.
From the nuns' statement, via the AP: " 'Despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions.' The letter says the legislation also will help support pregnant women and 'this is the real pro-life stance.' "
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Jessica, I am a sports fan who’s always liked Tiger far more for his killer instinct and his ability to hit magical shots under pressure and provide drama to an otherwise mundane sport than for his squeaky clean image. So I agree with you that real golf fans don’t give a whit as to whether Elin is in the crowd. (I would guess that she won’t be—it will be circus enough without her there.) And you can bet that with Augusta National having so much sway over the broadcast that the cameras, if Elin is indeed there, won’t be panning from Tiger to Elin and back again as he hovers over a putt or makes a bad shot. (At least not more than once, that is.)
I think I know why Janice "If the wife can forgive, then America can forgive" Min and Mike Lupica had such different notions about the necessity of Elin’s presence. Tiger wasn’t the only one caught with his pants down by the tabloids. Mainstream news outlets were dutifully reporting that “alcohol was not a factor in the crash” without reporting what actually might have been a factor (as if Tiger might have been making a quick run to the store for diapers at 2 a.m. on a holiday weekend) while TMZ had jumped ahead to making Rachel Uchitel a household name. As with the National Enquirer and John Edwards, the tabloid media has shown that it can break important news that the “real” media ignores. That doesn’t mean the gossip rags are ready to cover health care reform, foreign policy, or even the Masters. The tabs have taught the "MSM" a thing or two. But they still have much to learn.
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Sarah Gilbert at AOL’s Daily Finance has decided that the paucity of females on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people is a cause for celebration, not dismay. “Enormous wealth is not a mark of honor, but an indictment,” Gilbert writes. “It is proof that, instead of working to better the lives of employees and consumers who are 'stakeholders' of your business enterprises, you have instead extracted vast wealth.” She helpfully adds that she can see how those who created this list might have trouble with the findings: “No doubt in their worldview, this list represents power.”
Uh, yeah. Any list that leads off with Carlos Slim, followed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, can be said to represent quite a bit of power.
For the record, the Forbes list contains 922 men and 89 women. When it comes to self-made women who did not inherit the bucks, the number of females gets even smaller—there are a mere 14 of them represented in this counting. In the United States, they include Oprah Winfrey (No. 400) and Meg Whitman (No. 773), who made her money running eBay.
There’s an entire school of thought that argues that women have a different mindset when it comes to finances. We’re kinder, we’re gentler, and we choose to earn less money. Most of this, frankly, is baloney. Women earn less money than men because they are discriminated against. (Why, again, do newly minted female MBAs earn $4,600 less than equivalent males?) They are also significantly more likely to be responsible for the infamous second shift. Single mothers file for bankruptcy at much higher rates than their married counterparts. In retirement, women are more likely to live in poverty than men.
All of these facts do not represent a different female financial voice. They demonstrate a lack of female power. And there’s no amount of feel-good talk that can take the sting of that away.
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I don’t have much interest in Reille Hunter. I am, however, quite interested in the story of Constance McMillen, the out, lesbian high-school senior from Fulton, Miss., who wanted to take her girlfriend to the prom. When her school got wind of her plans, they forbade her to attend. She called the ACLU, which then contacted her school. At this point, the school said the whole thing was such a distraction that they would cancel the prom altogether but are encouraging private citizens to hold their own prom, because as a government entity, the school can’t legally discriminate, but private citizens can. The school system itself is the one who blew the whole thing up into such a distraction in the first place.
A groundswell of support is rising around McMillen. Dan Savage discussed her plight on his sex-advice podcast, where he also offers contact information for the principal and superintendent of the Fulton school system, and a fan group appeared on Facebook called, “Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!”
Constance McMillen is an incredibly admirable person. To be out as a lesbian in high school is an amazing feat. The fact that her high school is not in a progressive city but a clearly backward-thinking town in rural Mississippi makes it all the more impressive. To be secure enough to have a girlfriend and be public about it enough to want to take her to the prom is another incredible accomplishment. But what I find most impressive about McMillen is that instead of being intimidated by the adults she is supposed to obey, she had the guts to call the ACLU when her rights were violated. Good for her.
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Yesterday my aunt sent me Dana Jennings’s latest moving piece about his experience of prostate cancer. She, like my mother, had had cancer; both of them hated the term “battling cancer.” Jennings agrees. The metaphor of “battling” cancer, and the ancillary vocabulary we use to describe those with cancer (“victims,” “survivors,” “brave,” “fighters”) make him cringe. The majority of the commenters on Jennings’ piece agree. Why then do we continue to use this vocabulary, if the very people who have the disease (and may most need to describe it) hate it so?
Clearly the language of war is the language of fear. If someone can “battle” cancer, the disease is framed in the old American terms of hard work and make-it-or-break-it hustle. It implies that we have some control over our diseases, when, so often, we don’t. Clearly, too, the battle vocabulary derives from the larger social-political thinking about cancer: Richard Nixon declared “the war on cancer” in 1971, and even if we periodically read pieces about rethinking that war, clearly the narrative of forays, skirmishes, advances, battles, and defeats has been well-established.
Susan Sontag counseled us to beware of turning illness into metaphor, yet we can’t help doing so—especially, I’d argue, with chronic illnesses that take place inside our bodies. We can’t see what’s happening, so we can’t develop an accurate descriptive language; we’re stuck using scientific language like “mass” and “node” and “hematoma,” which simply doesn’t cut it in the American vernacular. And so to describe cancer we fall back on the impoverished “war” vocabulary, an awkward artifact of political posturing. But we should examine our metaphors. In fact, thinking about what we’re saying and why we’re saying it may be our largest obligation to one another in the face of illness and death. As I’ve written about in The New Yorker, death, dying, and grief have been metaphorically silenced in this country in the 20th century, leaving us with a bankrupt idiom for expressing concern and love. Too often, friends or colleagues—out of generosity, perhaps, but perhaps just as often out of fear or discomfort—just want to make the ill (or mourning) person feel better, rather than really listen.
I know. I was one of them, staring at my mother on the couch, wishing I could do something, thinking my job was to make her talk about what she really felt. Finally I realized the only thing I could do was be near her when she wanted nearness, talk when she wanted talk, and crack jokes when she wanted to laugh. As Jennings, my aunt, and so many of Jennings’s commenters point out, those with cancer live with it. They get by, day to day. Until perhaps one day they do not. Cancer is hard, but the language of war seems only to make it harder (and more isolating) for many.
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Martin Amis' sexism is so constant and absurd that it's almost not worth cataloging, but his latest insult to womankind rehashes two of his more spectacular claims: that sexual freedom is dangerous for women, and that Islam is the solution. This week the British novelist told Abu Dhabi's The National that he thinks his sister, Sally Amis, who struggled with alcoholism and died in 2000, could have survived if she had converted to Islam instead of Catholicism:
"She might still be alive because of ... the austerity, the demands it makes on you. ... She was such an uncontrollable girl ... she needed a really tight structure, an ésprit de corps of shared belief. ... Islam in its way gives you that, a collectivity that she could have been a part of, which incidentally forbade alcohol and premarital sex."
It's true that cohesion and self-control are not hallmarks of the Catholic Church at the moment. Maybe the abstemious community Islam can offer would provide stability to a depressed alcoholic. But I doubt filial concern inspired Amis' speculation.
Ever since his 2006 pronouncement that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order," Amis has not been a favorite in the Islamic world. Now he's trying to smooth things over. How? By lauding the restrictions Islam places on women, especially on women's sexuality. In the process he publicizes his deceased sister's troubled personal life—again. Last year in front of an audience of book festival attendees, he blamed the sexual revolution for his sister's "pathological promiscuity" and alleged that Sally Amis "would have needed the Taliban to protect her" from the consequences of her own sexual freedom.
His statements in The National this week are just a continuation of this attempt to make amends with Muslims at the expense of women. In jointly praising Islam's prohibitions against alcohol and premarital sex, Amis suggests that his "uncontrollable" sister's sexual behavior was as destructive as her alcoholism. Maybe it was. But Amis seems to think that Western female sexuality as a whole deserves controlled-substance status, which he would like nothing better than to see Muslims police. (I mean, it's not like you can depend on Catholics to put a disobedient woman in her place ... ) As for ingratiating himself with Muslims, Amis is essentially congratulating Islam on being the ultimate school for wayward girls. Which is almost as condescending as the remark that got him in trouble in the first place.
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—A report released yesterday by the Department of Defense indicates an 11 percent increase in reports of sexual assault in the military and a 16 percent increase in combat areas. The Pentagon attributes this jump to a higher number of victims reporting incidents and not necessarily an increase in the incidents themselves. In recent years the military has adopted a more progressive attitude toward sexual assault prevention and treatment. [New York Times]
—Continuing her work on childhood obesity, Michelle Obama urged corporate food-makers like Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Kraft Foods to "entirely rethink the products your offering ... and how you market those products to our children." [The Washington Post]
—New York gossip columns have been ablaze this past week with reports of fashion photographer Terry Richardson's perverted misadventures with young female models. 19-year-old model Jamie Peck claims Richardson told her to call him "Uncle Terry," asked to play with her tampon, and pressured her to give him a hand job in the studio. In fact, Richardson has been a notorious sexual libertine for years, documenting his exploits in books and gallery shows. [New York Post, Jezebel, The Daily Beast]
—In the past week, a man defending his marijuana crop in Orting, Wash., was beaten to death by robbers. On Monday, a leading medical-marijuana activist shot an armed man breaking into his Seattle home. This recent violence in Washington has prompted police and marijuana activists to demand a rethinking of state policy. [New York Times]
—After government research revealed that 12- to 14-year-olds do not engage in safe sexual practices, Switzerland has released a small condom for preteen genitals with hopes of expanding the market into the U.K. [Telegraph]
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Pundits are speculating about whether Tiger Woods' wife, Elin, will be in the crowd when he returns to golf at the Masters in Augusta, Ga., in three weeks. There was similar chatter last month when Tiger held a press conference to apologize for his numerous affairs. Elin was not in the audience for that one, though Tiger's mom was. On the Today Show this morning, former Us Weekly editor Janice Min argued that Elin's appearance at the Masters—if not at the event, at least discreetly supporting Tiger down in Georgia—is pivotal for Tiger's image rehabilitation. "If the wife can forgive, then America can forgive," Janice said. "If they can think that he is able to convince this wronged woman that he is a different person," then he can also convince the public.
I disagree with Min entirely. As I said in the run-up to Tiger's presser in February, most big golf fans don't give a fig about Tiger's affairs. They only care about his performance on the course. People who cared about Tiger's manicured family-man image—especially women—will never look at him the same way. And it doesn't matter, since those enthralled with Tiger the product probably never cared much about his golf game in the first place.
The Daily News' Mike Lupica was also on the Today Show this morning discussing Tiger's comeback. Like me, Lupica doesn't think it matters if Elin is by Tiger's side at the Masters. It only matters if Tiger wins, Lupica said on the show and in his column: "If he wins as big as he did before, he will be big all over again." But Lupica fears that again the public will be blinded by Tiger's skill, and they'll "confuse athletic character with real character, the way we have in sports since the beginning of time." This is probably true in the case of Tiger's core fan base. As Min points out in the clip below, in his first public appearance after he was accused of rape, Kobe Bryant got a standing ovation.
Photograph of Elin and Tiger Woods by Harry How/Getty Images.
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Over at the Daily Beast, Pamela Redmond Satran has written what’s being billed as “The Elite’s Top 50 Baby Names.” Actually, it’s just a list of names that users have been searching for on Satran’s Web site, nameberry, which the author—if she does say so herself—calls “the high-quality, intelligent source for stylish names” for “discerning parents.” I’m not quite sure how she’s defining “elite”—it seems to be some combination of cultural savvy, wealth, and not going to Applebee’s—or how we’re supposed to know that her users fall into this particular demographic.
But at the very least, these are names I could easily imagine being yelled over the Putumayo jams at the hip-mom cafes of brownstone Brooklyn—names like Sophia, Atticus, Milo, and Imogen (a name that elicited many wistful sighs here in the DoubleX cubicle pod). Satran definitely puts her finger on the way that, for some parents, picking out a baby name is like curating the perfect bookshelf or outfit—it should telegraph refinement without snobbishness, exclusivity without gaucheness, uniqueness without declassé wackiness. (DoubleXer Noreen notes that her sister complains about non-Irish parents who give their kids Gaelic-ish names, like Finnegan, perhaps because they’re “exotic” while still being “white”—or what I like to call the Tory Burch effect.)
Satran then took her top 50 list and compared it with the Social Security Administration’s list of popular baby names from around the country. A few conclusions that seemed worth pulling out:
In a reversal of the naming habits of the general population. Elite parents are more likely to give their sons non-traditional names than they are their daughters. … Rich boys can get away with a quirky name like Quinn or Phineas, while upscale girls are more often given conventional, non-hoochie names such as Caroline and Jane.
Names on the Elite boys’ list more often have soft sounds—Asher, Silas—and vowel endings—Kai, Milo—which telegraph a greater acceptance of an unconventional style of masculinity.
Obviously, Satran hasn’t done a robust study here, but what do you think of these hypotheses—are “elite” boys really allowed to be zanier than their sisters? And are “nonelite” boys’ names really that much more macho—or are we just more used to them? (After all, five of the top 10 boys names in the United States have “soft sounds.”)
While you’re pondering, I leave you with this little gem of weirdness from the A/V department of the Social Security Administration:
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