Willa, it’s funny that you view the Jenny-David relationship in An Education as unskeevy because she’s precocious. When I tried to understand why I wasn’t bothered by the 16-year-old dating a man twice her age, I came away with sort of the opposite answer.

This is one of those things I’ve tried to float in conversation before and it always ends with people silently avoiding eye contact (for the shy ones) or telling me I’m a perv (for the more outgoing), but I’ll try again: I kind of like the idea of the older, knowledgeable tutor type sleeping with his young, eager acolyte. When I learned in college about the relationships men like Socrates had with their attractive young male followers, I had a sense of—what? Nostalgia? It’s not envy; I certainly don’t want to sleep with every man who can teach me something. But I envy the relationship those Greeks had, back when terms like “statutory rape” didn’t exist. It strikes me as so perfectly symbiotic: The beautiful blank slate of a student takes knowledge from his wise and wizened mentor, and in exchange gives the joy of fresh enthusiasm. And sex. I won’t be so flip as to ask “What’s wrong with that?” (Obviously, there are many unpleasant examples of the Socrates figure taking advantage of someone vulnerable and non-consenting.) But I will say that, in its idealized form, doesn’t that sound kind of nice?

Tags: An Education, movies, Rape

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Would you let your child walk to school alone?

Hanna Rosin: Next year [fall 2010], my daughter will be in fourth grade, and her school is in a new location. The rational thing would be to let her walk there alone or with friends. But it’s in an urban neighborhood, and the idea fills me with terror. She's a girl and, well, you never see kids walking alone anymore. I’m not usually a paranoid type, but I’m secretly plotting to follow behind her in my car. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with us parents?

KJ Dell’Antonia: I allow—expect, demand—my 8-year-old to walk alone from the bus stop to my husband’s office, to bike the 3/4-mile to one friend’s house and walk the shorter distance to another. He needs these limited opportunities to take responsibility for himself so that we both see that he can do it. Admittedly, we live in a small town that feels safe, but the kind of random violence that parents fear can happen anywhere. Letting your child walk to school is less about safety than it is about letting go and trusting the kid you raised to look both ways.

Jessica Grose: I'm about two years younger than Jaycee Dugard, but since I grew up across the country, she never entered my consciousness. I started walking to school when I was in fourth grade. I met my best friend at the corner of my block and we would eventually pick up three or four other friends by the time we got to school. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of long walks home from Dows Lane Elementary, jumping in piles of leaves along the way. By the time we reached junior high, my best friend had become my major crush and he wheeled alongside me on his skateboard. I can't remember a single moment of fear or unease.

Samantha Henig: I treasured my walks to and from school with my best friend, but we weren't allowed to do it sans escort until middle school. Even then we once had an old lady in a car creepily slow beside us and firmly ask us to get in so she could give us a ride. (We refused.)

My request for those parents brave enough to send your kids off unsupervised: Don't send them on the subway. For all the quaint and peaceful images of children bonding and reflecting during idyllic walks to school, subway rides offer a horrifying contrast. Unsupervised kids and teens take the crowded train cars as their stage in a cuteness contest, with high points given to those who are loudest and crassest. Here, they are the predators, and those of us who want a peaceful commute are the victims. I don't care if they walk or you drive them, just get them off the B train!

Rachael Larimore: Once I got used to walking the four blocks or so to kindergarten, my mom let me walk to and from school without her, though usually in the company of neighbor kids. One day, in first grade, I was walking by myself and I came upon a car getting ready to pull out of its driveway. Having no understanding of brake lights, I thought when the red lights flashed at me that the driver was telling me to go. So I kept walking, going directly behind the car as she pulled out. In my infinite 6-year-old wisdom, I thought if I pushed on the car's back end that I could get her to get out of my way. I got knocked to the ground—I can still see the car's undercarriage rolling over me—but was unharmed. The woman drove off, not realizing what had happened.

I went to school and started crying when I realized my Cracker Jack lunchbox had been flattened by the car's tire. Teacher called my mom, who came and got me. We tracked down the old lady who ran me over, and she was mortified. And she bought me a new lunchbox.

We live two miles from my son's elementary school, down a windy country road and over some railroad tracks. As long as we live here, it's the bus for him. I do have fond memories of walking back and forth to school, but needless to say I'm aware of the dangers. And frankly, I don't see us returning to a time in which we let kids walk by themselves. We can mourn the passing, while finding other ways to foster independence in our kids.

Emily Yoffe: I started walking the half mile to school in kindergarten, a month before my 5th birthday. I do remember there were days when I was distracted on my journey by picking up fall leaves or making patterns in the ice. There were several ways to get to school and I liked to surprise myself by deciding different paths. Sometimes I met up with friends, but often I walked alone.

From kindergarten through third grade I walked my daughter the four blocks to her school and back because it required her to cross a busy street and there are so many crazy drivers on cell phones. Anyway, the notion that a 5-year-old would walk to school alone was unthinkable. (She did start walking with friends in 4th grade.) I sometimes wonder if she would have liked to meander on the way, or do experiments with rocks and ice.

Liza Mundy: A friend of mine, who grew up in the Midwest, says that on his first day of kindergarten, his mother opened the front door and wished him luck.

For me, my quandary is whether to let my kids walk home from the bus stop. They are 11 and 13, so I do. They usually walk in a group with other kids. But in the past two weeks, since school started, we have gotten three—count them, three—e-mail alerts about a man who has been approaching and, in at least one case, assaulting young women in our area. So I have to confess I am thinking twice.
When they were younger, the main impediment to letting them walk to elementary school was, as Emily says, a very busy highway between our house and the school. People do run the stoplight. And the school doesn't have safety patrols manning intersections, I guess because ...  what's the point, since no one lets kids walk to school?

Like Emily, I loved walking the three blocks to school, and back. We also walked home for lunch. And sometimes made ourselves grilled cheeses. Imagine that.

Tags: children walking to school

Sam, I was not particularly skeeved by the relationship between the 16-year old protagonist of An Education and her older man. I’m still not, even in light of Roman Polanski, but he does make me think a little harder about why I’m not skeeved. The central question, to me, seems to be one of precociousness: Is precociousness always a put on? Or is it possible that some precocious kids, while certainly not as worldly as they seem to be, are as mature as they seem to be?

I think An Education wants us to believe the latter: Jenny, for all of her schooling, is unschooled about many aspects of adult life (sex and culture being the two big ones), but her preternatural self-possession is not just a put on. The girl’s all there. (When Jenny fights with her elders, particularly her teachers, she is simultaneously bratty and asking searing, hard questions. She is never a trifle.) David, the older man, provides her with the life experiences (sex seems to be almost the least of these—the others being Paris, music, night clubs, heartbreak) to match her precocity. An Education argues that a precocious girl who gains life experience becomes, in fact, a woman. I found this, at least in the specific case of the movie, to be persuasive.

The problem is just that the “life experiences,” in this film, come at no great price. Jenny is almost ruined, but she is not. Her path to Oxford took an enriching detour—it was not derailed. And this, well, lucky break allows us to overlook the flaw in Jenny’s precocity: However clever, well read, hard-working, and charming she is, she is also a hideous judge of character. David is a cad.

The movie makes a very simple move to make this flaw, the ultimate proof that Jenny really is a child, seem irrelevant: It makes all the adults having to do with the film, both Jenny’s parents and the audience, equally hideous at judging. Her parents are as taken with David as Jenny is. Jenny's falling for a charming, thieving, cheating liar is not a youthful mistake because it could just as easily have been an adult one. And if the audience is never quite as charmed by him, we are so taken with Jenny, with her intelligence and spunk, that we stop sizing up her mistakes. I think it's a credit to An Education that I wasn't skeeved. It didn't want me to be. But, if this movie were real life, I'd like to think I would be.

Tags: An Education, movies, Rape

So, Mark Penn writes in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that “heyday of the soccer mom is passing.” Darn. Here we are just completing our first season of soccer, and already I’m uncool. Or so I thought until I actually read the article. What we have here is what my Slate colleague Jack Shafer would call a “bogus trend story.”

Unlike some articles that allegedly highlight a new “trend” but are actually vaguely worded pieces based on anecdotal evidence that make you think the author just talked to a few friends, Penn’s piece has actual numbers. But the numbers are largely meaningless. And he carefully crafts his definition of “soccer mom” to fit his theory of what those meaningless numbers mean. His lede, under the headline of “The Declining Soccer Mom”:

Married, middle-class but working suburban moms whose primary concern is how to enrich their children while they are away at work are declining in numbers, in influence and even as a key swing vote.

Got that? To be a soccer mom, you have to be married, live only in the suburbs, and have a job. Oh, and you have to drive a minivan. Seriously. Penn cites as evidence of the decline of soccer mom-ism that minivan sales peaked in 2000, “replaced by SUVs, new crossovers, and a resurgence in just plain old cars.” So if you traded in your Chrysler Town & Country for a Chrysler Pacifica, because it schleps the kids around just as well as the boxy minivan, you’re out. Has he been to a soccer complex in the last 10 years?

The most ridiculous notion? To be a soccer mom, you also have to long for the days of Family Ties or Home Improvement or The Cosby Show. He writes: “And on TV fewer top-rated shows are about family life, as more and more focus on crime ...  ABC's new comedy "Modern Family"—a mockumentary of new family life—didn't make it to the top 10.” Like Mad Men? Dexter? God forbid, Weeds? Sorry, you’re out.

Penn might be correct that the political influence of suburban women with kids is on the wane. (I don’t get the impression that suburban families who spend their weeknights and weekends racing between school and sports and activities are going to wither anytime soon.) But I’m not sure why that warrants a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Our politics, and our society, are constantly evolving. Only when we look at his statistics about the decline of households with children do we see the direction in which Penn thinks we’re headed. He notes that only 30.7 percent of households have “their own” children under the age of 18 living with them, down from 48.9 percent in 1960. 1960? We didn’t talk about soccer moms in 1960! As this exhaustive Wikipedia entry demonstrates, the soccer-mom meme started in the mid-‘90s and became an annoying buzz word during the 1996 presidential election. Why is Penn using numbers from his 1960?

Because what he really wants to say, and what he gets to at the end, is that Americans are becoming less about their kids and more about themselves. We’re abandoning the suburbs for the hipster life in the city. We’re waiting longer to get married, having fewer kids, and, once we kick them out, staying home and cruising the Internet. So we’re becoming more selfish and more isolated. Is that supposed to be a good thing? Is that the lifestyle that our politicians should be catering to?

I feel embarrassed for my fellow journalist class that it’s already become the counterintuitive position to say that our president deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. I woke up to the collective “Huh?” in my inbox: He hasn’t done anything yet. He’s a trophy collector. A prodigy who disappoints. But come on! Can’t the first African American president, who is working hard to reverse eight years of a destroyed American reputation, collect this essentially meaningless prize? Yasser Arafat won the thing for God’s sake. How important can it be?

Barack Obama did not win the prize, as Slate’s John Dickerson argues this morning, because he gives good speeches. He won it because he has the genuine potential to end the stalemate that has existed between us and Europe, and us and the Middle East over the last eight years. His Cairo speech was the best step in that direction so far. Compared to that, the supposed snub in Copenhagen is meaningless. Who really cares about the Olympics? And you can’t argue both that the Olympic snub is important and the Peace Prize is a joke. They are both symbolic acts, of limited importance.

Most of what’s been said on this subject seems monumentally petty to me. Rush Limbaugh says he is being rewarded for “emasculating America.” This is the same logic that got us into Iraq. The essential argument is: Whatever the Europeans want, we do the opposite, because we are not sissies. Ann Althouse quotes a tweeter who says “they are handing him the Nobel peace Prize because he is not George Bush.” She means this as an insult. It seems perfectly logical to me, or at least in keeping with the logic of the prize, which is for the person who shall have done the best work to further fraternity of nations.

“Shall have done” is the problem, as Dickerson points out. Unlike the literature prize, which is for a lifetime of achievement, the peace prize comes in the middle of a crusade, and is meant to prod someone along. Sometimes—Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin—the crusade fails, or sputters, and the prize looks wrong in retrospect. At least the committee, often mocked for its obscurity, is taking a risk.

Of course, Obama should not turn down the prize, as Mickey Kaus argues. It’s not his fault that they awarded it to him exactly during the week when the honeymoon has officially been declared over, when health care reform is being picked apart, when even Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live are starting to pick him apart, when everyone is totally sick of the schoolkids sing happy songs to Obama routines. He should take it as encouragement, and keep up the good work.

Tags: Nobel Peace Prize, Obama and Nobel, Obama and Nobel peace Prize, Obama and Peace Prize

An Education, which hits theatres today, is either really lucky or really unlucky about its release date. Coming on the heels of the Roman Polanski arrest, which stirred discussion over whether sex with a minor is ever OK, the movie’s plot line is particularly fraught. An absolutely adorable Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a 16-going-on-17-year-old student in 1961 England, who is courted by the much-older David, played by Peter Sarsgaard.

A piece about the film on ABC News today asks whether sex with a minor can be consensual, and pulls out a line Jenny’s teacher delivers to her, toward the end of the film: “You’re just a child.” It’s a line that screenwriter Nick Hornby now regrets, according to Mulligan, given the shadow the Polanski arrest has cast on the film. (Jenny and David do it, rather matter-of-factly, on her 17th birthday.)

But what was so powerful to me about An Education was how little you thought about the age difference between Jenny and David. She's legally a child, perhaps, but she fits in better intellectually and emotionally with David's crew than her peers. Her relationship with David was complex and totally messed up in a lot of ways, but age wasn’t the one that mattered—not to me, and not to any of the characters. For Jenny’s parents, it was enough that she be married and taken care of by a man with (bogus, as it turns out) hoity-toity academic credentials and money to spend on pampering their daughter—and, less nobly, them. For Jenny’s teachers, David was a threat solely based on how he’d affect her decisions about pursuing her own education. But that struggle between staying in school to work toward a meaningful career and letting herself be the darling accessory to her jet-setting man could just as easily have taken place were David a rich boy of her own age.

I saw a screening of the film before Polanski’s arrest had brought questions of statutory rape to the forefront of the news, so I wonder how seeing it now will color the way viewers judge Jenny and David’s relationship, particularly the sexual side. Will it still succeed in maintaining that Lolita-style distance that leaves you slightly skeeved out by how little you mind an older man is preying on a younger woman? Noreen and Willa, you saw it at the same time I did. Were you similarly un-skeeved?

Tags: movies, Rape

Ordinary Injustice, by writer and Stanford law graduate Amy Bach, is one of the best portrayals I've read of the everyday, mundane, and yet utterly paralyzing weaknesses of state criminal justice systems. It's not about the hot murder trial of the week. It's about the plea to a misdemeanor count for petty theft that destabilizes a single mom and her kids. As Anthony Lewis highlights in his review for the New York Review of Books, 47 million Americans have criminal records, many because of misdemeanor pleas that "can wreak havoc on a defendant's life," as Amy (whom I know) writes. Her rendition of havoc unfolding manages to be both substantive and dramatic—not an easy double trick to pull off.

I especially admire how Ordinary Justice resists the easy urge to single out for blame one of the usual suspects: a lazy prosecutor, overworked defense attorney, or careless judge. Instead, Amy shows how the repeat-player nature of a local courthouse is itself culpable. Because lawyers, judges, and court staff will be back the next day, each has a reason to look the other way when one of their number screws up, even if that person is a supposed adversary. It's a system that often serves the people who collect a paycheck from it at the expense of defendants and victims. This is the book that will make you understand how a lawyer could be allowed to sleep through a death penalty trial or process hundreds of clients without knowing their names. Sobering, and important.

Tags: amy bach, criminal justice system, ordinary justice

In September, Guinean soldiers burst into a stadium full of government protestors, raped some untold number of women, and killed an estimated 157 people. About 30 rape victims have come out so far; according to witnesses, women were specifically targeted for public humiliation. The current government is responsible for the attack, and, despite graphic cell phone pictures now circulating, says the women are lying. Confronted with evidence that dozens of women in his country were violated with rifle butts in broad daylight, the health minister just says that no one complaining of rape showed up at the hospitals.

I don’t claim to understand rape as a weapon of war, but a concept I’ve found useful in talking about immigration involves women as “boundary markers,” their bodies broadly symbolic of group identity. Political scientist Laura Sjoberg, blogging about the attack in Guinea, argues that women, “the producers/reproducers of the nation,” are “the thing that a belligerent's soldiers fight for and without whom war has no justification.” In humiliating women, a government can diminish its opponents’ will to fight. And as far as weapons go, rape is cheap.

Tags: Guinea, Rape

When Roman Polanski was arrested late last month, I thought the press surrounding the incident would last a few days at most. After all, Polanksi's crimes had already been rehashed several times in the past year, first with the release of the mostly pro-Polanski documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, in 2008, and then subsequently with Polanski's attempts to get the case against him dismissed that were filed by lawyers in the first half of 2009.

But the story has threads of so many sensational issues—rape, celebrity, privilege, art, American attitudes towards Europeans—that almost two weeks after the director's arrest in Switzerland, there are still daily headlines, and the people who publicly support Polanski have been dragged into the morass themselves. First there's the culture minister of France, Frédéric Mitterrand, who is being lambasted for a memoir he wrote in 2005, in which he admitted to paying for sex with Thai "boys."

In The Bad Life, Mitterand wrote, "All the rituals of this market of youths, this slave market, excite me enormously. The light is bad, the music gets on your nerves, the shows sinister. But it pleases me beyond reason. The profusion of attractive and immediately available boys puts me into a state of desire that I no longer need to hide or check." This was not a scandal when Mitterand was chosen as a cabinet minister. Now French right wingers like Marine Le Pen, daughter of Nazi sympathizer Jean-Marie Le Pen, are calling for his head, and Mitterand is spinning furiously. According to the New York Daily News, Mitterand says that all the prostitutes he had sex with were of age, and furthermore, "I condemn sexual tourism, which is a disgrace. I condemn pedophilia, which I have never in any way participated in."

Mitterand's not the only one facing pitchforks for supporting Polanski. According to Salon's Judy Berman, an organization called "Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment (PAVE) calling for a boycott of all films made by the director's 'Hollywood supporters'—that is, those who signed the controversial petition calling for his release." Like Berman, I think this is pretty extreme. She notes, "It's clear that many who signed the petition know Polanski personally'—and personal connections can't help but cloud even the most black-and-white situations."

It's almost starting to feel like supporting Polanski is like having attended a Communist Party mixer in the '50s. Yes, what Polanski did was unforgivably awful, and I fully believe he should be extradited and brought to trial. But persecuting his supporters is besides the point—that Polanski raped a 13-year-old—a fact I fear will get lost in the noise.

Photo of Roman Polanski by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.

Tags: frédéric mitterrand, roman polanski, roman polanski wanted and desired

Here's a regular statistic, and then a shocking one: Every month, a large percentage of the world's adult population menstruates. But in emerging markets, that group can scarcely afford the protection. Women worldwide are no longer exiled to tents and deemed "unclean"—but according to the She28 Campaign, a fledgling advocacy group, many thousands are still forced to exit their daily lives and livelihoods during their monthly periods. Watch:

I am not sure that the execution of this video campaign is the most compelling—but this strikes me as a totally underreported reality. Women in developed nations take for granted the drugstores and Costcos in which tampons are readily available, but perhaps ignore the Herculean struggle to manage one's monthly flow in resource-poor regions of the world.

From a holistic policy perspective, marrying the education of girls and women with the provision of sanitary napkins seems like the right move. Public schools worldwide should support young women who might otherwise miss crucial elements of their education or career by offering pads and tampons free of charge. Certainly this basic commodity should be treated as integral to female development—as important to U.S. aid policy as maize and malaria nets. As we know, educating women and offering them a means to understand and regulate their fertility is a key component of economic progress in developing nations.

Perhaps we could use some of that money that the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee recently appropriated for abstinence-only education?

Tags: abstinence education, development, emerging markets, foreign aid, menstrual periods, She28