Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass always had polysexual tendencies in Cecily von Ziegesar’s YA book series, but it took the CW until the third season to indulge us just a simple kiss with a man. But when it finally happened last night, it was splendid.

It was swift, it was sexy, it was, most importantly, not a big deal. On last night’s episode, devious Blair comes up with a scheme to snag a spot on the speakers list for the well-attended freshman dinner. Unbeknownst to Chuck, Blair tells gay alumnus Mr. Ellis that he can smooch her boyfriend in exchange for a toasting opportunity. Mr. Ellis goes for it (OK, small concession: The idea that all it takes to sway a gay is a promised kiss by a nubile young thing is maybe mildly offensive). But Chuck, as it turns out, doesn’t mind at all. As he later tells Blair: "I'm upset because I kissed somebody that wasn't you. Do you really think I've never kissed a guy before?" An unexpected gay man-to-“straightish” man kiss goes down on network TV with nary a protest. I loved it.

Another interesting angle on the kiss: Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz is a big fan of meta-play in his shows. As writer Martin Mulkeen points out, The O.C., back in the day, was the pinnacle of tongue-in-cheek self-references. When tabloids dubbed O.C. actor Benjamin McKenzie a Russell Crowe look-alike, The O.C. scripted a scene in which Marissa and Ryan catch a Russell Crowe movie and Marissa ends up saying: “People say he’s good-looking, but he just doesn’t do it for me.” It could be that the man-man kiss on Gossip Girl last night was a response to the never-dying Internet rumor about Ed Westwick’s supposed gayness. There’s nothing better at disarming gossip than turning it into a fictionalized meta-joke.

Photograph of Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick by Giovanni Rufino/The CW © 2009 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Tags: chuck bass, Ed Westwick, gay, gossip girl

“Poor kid” is right, Emily. The Heenes are not only spectacularly bad parents, but they might soon become inmates in Colorado state prison. In the span of one short weekend, the Balloon Boy drama has turned out to be just that—an elaborate one-act theatrical work put on by the Heene Family Players, staged on television stations and computer screens across the country. We now know that the Heenes' ordeal was just one more attention-grabbing stunt in what appears to be an agonizingly protracted audition for a TLC-style reality television show—the last act in a series of questionable parenting moves.

In response, the state has decided to press felony criminal charges. According to authorities, “among the charges being considered are three felonies: conspiracy between the husband and the wife to commit a crime, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and an attempt to influence a public servant, the last of which carries a prison term of six years.”

Sure, it’s not terribly responsible to lie to the police and whip hundreds of rescue workers into a frenzy, not to mention jerk with the emotions of untold numbers of viewers at home. But do the Heenes really deserve to be put behind bars?

According to the Colorado Criminal Code, a Class Four felony such as this one requires a sentence of two to six years imprisonment. The crucial elements of the most serious offense are “(1) an attempt to influence a public servant (2) by means of deceit ... (3) with the intent to alter or affect the public servant's decision,” where “deceit” is defined as in Webster’s Dictionary as “any trick, collusion, contrivance, false representation, or underhand practice used to defraud another.”

Under this statute, the Heenes’ statements and actions seem to qualify as unlawful deceit. Their hoax conned Colorado police officers, firemen, and naval helicopter pilots, to name a few.

But if this was all an intricate piece of performance art, then couldn’t the Heenes' stunt qualify as constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment’s Freedom of Speech Clause?

Yes and no.

In Schad v. Borough of Mount Ephraim, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment protects “motion pictures, programs broadcast by radio and television, and live entertainment, such as musical and dramatic works.” So if the Heenes admit they were merely acting, can these master thespians avoid the slammer? Probably not. The First Amendment protects against censorship, not criminal prosecution. They have the right to perform their twisted audition, but the performance may still run afoul of criminal statutes. You may, for instance, perjure yourself before a jury without being silenced but would still be liable for prosecution. The Heenes’ motivation—whether artistic expression, malice, delusions of grandeur, or perhaps all three—is irrelevant so long as the behavior is criminally proscribed. At this point, their best chance of avoiding jail time is to seek leniency for being first-time offenders.

Instead of a family-friendly TLC reality show, it looks like Richard and Mayumi are headed for a guest appearance on MSNBC’s Lockup. I sure hope they’re not “pussified.”

Tags: balloon boy, balloon hoax, crime, free speech, Heene family, law, parenting, prison

The news of the hour is a new vote in Afghanistan. This is good news for Peter Galbraith, a United Nations representative in Afghanistan who had been fired from the U.N. team for blasting Afghanistan's “tainted vote” in public. This new Washington- and Kabul-sanctioned runoff election, to be held on Nov. 7, may well delay an official White House announcement on more troop levels for “the good war.” But when discussing the Afghan crisis, which Daily Show co-creator Liz Winstead has taken to calling “Noplanistan”—the plight of women in the feudal, fractured, straight-dangerous nation should spring to mind. This wasn’t always so. I’ve been slowly digesting Ghost Wars, Steve Coll’s indispensable treatise on Afghanistan from the end of the Carter years until the 9/11. A passage about Bill Clinton’s administration (pp. 362-3) caught my eye:

By the autumn of 1997 persistent lobbying against the Taliban by the Feminist Majority had influenced the two most important women in the Clinton administration, Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton. When Albright visited a refugee camp in Peshawar that November, she departed from her prepared script and denounced the Taliban’s policies toward women as “despicable.” It was the first time a Clinton Cabinet member had made such a forceful statement about Taliban human rights violations. A few weeks later Hillary Clinton used a major speech about human rights at the United Nations to single out the Taliban. “Even now the Taliban in Afghanistan are blocking girls from attending schools,” Clinton said. The Taliban were harassing those “who would speak out against this injustice.” It was the first time that either of the Clintons had seriously criticized the Taliban in public.

It wouldn’t be the last time—Albright and Clinton were early movers in what has since been an avalanche of censure for the Taliban’s record on women’s issues. Coll also writes about what caused Afghanistan to breach Clinton’s radar: networks of feminist organizers who remained vigilant even in what seemed like boom times for women’s rights. He continues:

The impetus had come from old friends of Albright and Hillary Clinton in the feminist policy networks of the Democratic Party. These were accomplished, professional women of the baby boomer generation now stepping into powerful positions that women had not held in Washington before, at least not in these numbers. They kept in touch with one another and worked on each others’ issues. The Taliban had now slipped onto the agenda of their fax machine network. Sitting cross-legged in their barren ministries thousands of miles away in Kandahar, the Taliban’s leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out. When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said “this is God’s law,” recalled the State Department’s Leonard Scensny. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Leave us alone.”

The upcoming election may or may not present an opportunity for women’s advancement. (In August, “a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.”) But 12 years after the fact, it’s heartening to see the maturation of this network, moved from faxes to the Internet!

No doubt the old network or those like it included Melanne Verveer, chief-of-staff-to-Hillary-turned-American-ambassador-at-large for women’s issues, and Carol Browner, a mid-level climate specialist, now energy czar. Pentagon brass, like Michele Flournoy, and protégés of Albright, like North Korea adviser Wendy Sherman and Indonesia specialist Karen Brooks, were likewise not at the apex of their authority then. These networks were instrumental in fighting for reproductive rights, as well as education and career opportunities abroad. They remain interested in the happenings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some are key decisionmakers. Events like the Darfur policy change announcement yesterday, run by Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice—in 1997, a first lady and an assistant secretary of state for African Affairs*—really bring home the leaps and bounds that American women have made during the time that the Taliban bas been busy bullying and oppressing and so forth.

*Fixed!

Tags: Afghan elections, afghan women, afghanistan, Ghost Wars, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, women in government

I’m more of an etiquette snob than self-proclaimed etiquette expert Anna Post. Or so it seemed at yesterday’s “Mobile Etiquette Tea,” where she and Intel’s Dr. Geneveive Bell discussed what’s socially acceptable use of cell phones, smart phones, lap tops, and e-mail.

Over finger sandwiches and a tower of cupcakes at the Russian Tea Room, a woman posed a hypothetical for Anna, the granddaughter of Emily Post: Who is ruder, the person jabbering away on her cell phone on the bus while everyone around her grows increasingly annoyed, or the annoyed seatmates who spent 10 minutes rolling their eyes and harrumphing and generally trying to make it passive aggressively clear to her that she should shut up? Anna said that, as with someone who spills red wine all over a dinner table, the proper way to deal with the “accidental offender” is to keep your annoyance to yourself so the situation can be smoothed over as quickly as possible.

What? Someone screaming about last night’s sexual exploits into her phone in a closed space is as blameless as the klutz whose elbow knocked the wine? I think not. The reason you move on from the dinner table gaffe is that the person responsible already feels horrible. The phone offender doesn’t. She’s not an “accidental offender”; she’s just oblivious.

Another woman at the event who called herself “an authority in afternoon tea” (yet wore her coat, giant fur hat, and matching fur scarf at the table, and said she wasn’t shaking hands because of the swine flu, yet had her mitts and nose all over the plate of tea bags that we were sharing—go figure) stressed that etiquette is borne out of practicality, citing the example of table settings at tea. (She is horrified, for the record, that Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t set a table properly.) Anna agreed, adding that a standard place setting also makes people comfortable, which is the goal of etiquette rules.

I dunno about that. Seems like you could have the best intentions for the comfort of your tea guest, but just not know which direction a knife should face. But that’s not the case with cell phones. There are no rules to memorize. It’s just about awareness. You either think about the comfort of the person sitting next to you on the bus trying to read, or the feelings of the lunch companion you’re all but ignoring as your furiously respond to e-mails that could easily wait another 20 minutes (what’s the worst that happens—your boss thinks you eat lunch?), or you don’t.

So I say, harrumph away. Do your best public shaming for blatant misconduct when it comes to cell phones. Maybe that’s what it takes to carve out some standards for mobile etiquette that will actually stick.

Tags: cell phones, etiquette

I’m glad you found some redeeming bits of wisdom in “The Shriver Report,” Amanda, because I find the whole thing cringe-inducing in a post-recovery-balloon-boy sort of way. It’s not just that it’s some kind Maria Shriver vanity project masquerading as a progress report on less notable women. (Or maybe a progress report masquerading as a vanity project? Hard to tell, but do check out Shriver’s blurb of her own report, complete with headshot.) And it’s not just meaning-challenged banalities like “the torch is being passed ... to a new gender.” It’s that the report, ostensibly aimed at women, is so smothered in saccharine anecdote that I can’t even locate the data. I’m sure it’s there. I just lost the energy to look for it somewhere between “the battle of the sexes is over“ and “the footprint of today’s American worker is as likely to be a heel as a boot.“ (Women don’t wear boots? Boots don’t have heels?)

The report has a sad way of repeatedly attempting to justify its existence. “This is a report about how women becoming half of workers changes everything for men, women, and their families,” we learn, and “now for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers,” and “quite simply, women as half of all workers changes everything.” Really? Everything? It seems odd to get so worked up about the shift from 49 to 50 percent, given that it’s neither a surprise nor a sign that we’ve achieved perfect equity. Woman are 51 percent of Americans. Will there be another report when we’re proportionally represented?

That sounds obnoxiously niggling, I know, but this study drops more condescension in a paragraph than I could manage in a lifetime of blog posts. One of the nice things about living in an age of equity is that even women can read graphs and get excited about social science. We don’t need a Center for American Progress study presented to us as if it were a Redbook photo spread with second-rate copy. But here’s the kind of hard, deep sociological profile Maria Shriver thinks will interest you, women of America, courtesy of report contributor Jamal Simmons:

When it comes to American women, men are a gender full of question marks. Ask 10 men to explain what women want or what is expected of men in a relationship today and in response you will get 10 more questions ... . But it may be impossible for men to know what women want because the question presumes there is a uniform answer. Instead, it appears different women answer the question differently at various points in their lives.

Yes, America, it may surprise you to learn that any given woman may have her own individual preferences. But dear God, I hope not.

Photograph of Maria Shriver in 2006 by Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Maria Shriver, working women