In the age of Juno and Jamie Lynn Spears, it is apparently quite shocking to some teen girls that getting knocked up in high school has negative consequences beyond stretching out their favorite knit blouse. Despite the sympathetic treatment most media outlets have been giving her, former high-school volleyball player—and expectant mother—Mackenzie McCollum represents an affront to all legitimate Title IX claimants.

Motivated by her lifelong battle against gender discrimination, Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink penned Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972 to prevent women from being excluded, denied the benefits of, or otherwise "subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." An institution can demonstrate compliance by meeting any one of the following three criteria: providing opportunities for participation that are proportional to the composition of the student body, continually expanding athletic opportunities for members of an underrepresented sex, or fully accommodating the "interest and ability" of members of an underrepresented sex.

Although certain regulations concerning the condition of pregnancy are a convenient cipher for gender discrimination, this is not one of them. The school already satisfied the three-prong test by having a competitive girls volleyball team. It's true that the goal of Title IX was to prevent schools from making assumptions about women's "innate" aptitude for certain academic subjects or athletic activities, but barring pregnant people from playing a rough, physically demanding sport is not based on a patriarchal fantasy of keeping women barefoot by the hearth. It's just common sense and a reasonable response to the realities of biology. Fortunately, the United States has progressed well past the era when pregnancy required a "state of confinement," but that doesn't mean its physiological implications should be entirely excluded from consideration of one's fitness for intensive athletic involvement. There must be a middle ground that calls for some limited activity, and perhaps in volleyball, that means being cut from the team.

More practically, however, the combination of school sports and any kind of physical vulnerability is a recipe for litigation. If the school had permitted McCollum to remain on the team, and she had miscarried or sustained damage to the fetus, either from an injury or some unrelated idiopathic process, she would have sued the district. The volleyball coach was merely playing on the defensive and taking the same precaution that any reasonably prudent doctor would have prescribed had he actually seen McCollum in action, diving uterus-first onto the gymnasium floor and having hard leather balls continually hurled at her abdomen.

For now, it looks like the school district has wilted under the media spotlight and allowed McCollum back on the team. While some have hailed this as a victory for feminism and civil rights, it is certainly a defeat for teenage girls, who should learn that high-risk behavior and stupid decisions have consequences that you can't always self-righteously sue your way out of.

Tags: Bristol Palin, pregnancy, teen pregnancy, title IX, women's sports

Women are defying the beauty backlash, as Amanda writes, and there are men who prefer the curvy and sneakered to the waxed and plastic. But there is still an epidemic of disordered eating and surgical self-improvement that correlates exactly with women’s growing power, as Naomi Wolf outlines in her 1991 book The Beauty Myth.

Dieting came into vogue around 1920, when women received the vote. Voluptuousness regained popularity in the socially regressive 1950s, but this reversed as women’s influence grew. Between 1960 and 1969 the number of high school girls who considered themselves overweight increased from 50 percent to 80 percent.

As the female mental domain expanded from hair curlers and casseroles to dollars and digits, it was overwhelmed at the same time from the pressures of the exploding media industry. By 1984, in a Glamour poll, losing 15 pounds beat out romantic and career success as women’s greatest goal. A 1997 survey showed that young girls indicated were more afraid of being overweight than of cancer, nuclear war, or the death of their parents.

Ingrained in elementary school, these expectations help secure the status quo of male power. A 2006 survey by UK magazine Grazia found that the average woman today worries about the size and shape of her body every 15 minutes. Twenty-nine percent said they worry about their body every waking moment. Seven out of 10 women can look at a plate of food and tell you exactly how many calories are in it. It’s hard for a woman to succeed as much and demand as much as a man when every 15 minutes she is distracted by the chafing in the hip of her jeans. It's hard for a woman to have as much sexual agency as a man if she can't have an orgasm without sucking in her stomach.

Michelle Goldberg writes in the American Prospect: “Almost twenty years later, the period Wolf was writing in seems like a prelapsarian paradise of female self-acceptance.” The measures today are more extreme, like remaking breasts or unmaking labia, but the bare numbers are also more striking. An article published yesterday in the Telegraph found that 10 percent of women have an eating disorder. As women from more privileged backgrounds suffer anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating in much higher proportions, the most empowered population to smash the glass ceiling is also the most mentally distracted, consumed, and sick.

The epidemic of mental illness among American women fails to unite us into a defiant community, beyond Dove commercials and the feminist blogosphere. I hear women comment with a hint of jealousy: “Oh, she’s too skinny” or “She’s lost so much weight.” We have internalized these beauty standards and reel at the possibility of another woman, an adversary, increasing her beauty status. Women are isolated and mutually threatening, poisoned by our own insecurities.

The woman who best denies herself, who most suffers, is society’s new female ideal. Wolf writes: “The gaunt, youthful model [has] supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood.” Brittany Murphy’s cause of death is yet unknown, but her bathroom cabinet was filled with Ativan, Klonopin and other anxiety, pain and depression meds. Possibly it was her home pharmacy or, as the media assumed, self-starvation that placed the excessive strain on the 32-year-old’s heart. In Clueless (1995) and Girl Interrupted (1999), Murphy’s two most cultishly beloved films, she had an average figure and above-average talent. Murphy clearly crash-dieted for her 2000s oeuvre, including 8 Mile (2002), Just Married (2003) and Uptown Girls (2003). She seemed underweight to me in these films, but not to men’s magazines FHM and Maxim, who in 2006 named her on their 100 Sexiest Women List and Hot 100 List, respectively. If disordered eating and drug abuse led to the actress’ untimely death, perhaps the greatest tragedy is that three years earlier men in the media held her up as the picture of female beauty.

Tags: anti-feminist backlash, beauty standards, dieting, Naomi Wolf

On Vanity Fair's Web site Rebecca Keegan makes the case that James Cameron is Hollywood’s closet feminist, pointing out that he loves his strong, female characters (as well as his wife and his mother, if that counts for anything):

The women of Avatar are just the latest in a long line of this director’s alpha females. Ever since he left the fate of the world in the hands of diner waitress Sarah Connor in The Terminator in 1984, Cameron has given women more power, authority, and strength than any other mainstream director has been able to get away with. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which made $520 million worldwide in 1991, a sinewy Linda Hamilton broke out of a mental hospital with a paper clip to save not only her kid but humanity as well, perhaps the best cinematic metaphor for the ingenuity of single moms. Cameron’s heroines aren’t just Rambos in drag, either—in movies like The Abyss and True Lies, his female characters are given emotional journeys of their own to travel.

It’s true that Sigourney Weaver as an ultra-sharp scientist and Zoe Saldana as the gorgeous Na’vi princess Naytiri are both strong characters in Avatar. But ultimately, the success of their struggles is entirely dependent on a male—Jake Sully, the paraplegic jarhead who comes into their land, learns their ways (better than the Na’vi even—he becomes the first Na’vi warrior in generations to tame the dragon bird), ends up leading their war, and mating with their princess. The male is still the chosen one in Avatar, just as John Connor is the chosen one in Terminator. And Sarah Connor’s strength—and Naytiri’s strength in Avatar, for that matter—lies in doing what mothers are supposed to do best—protect their children (Naytiri’s loyalty to her land is positioned as a relationship—the defining feature of their world is its Mother Earth vibe, or, I suppose, in this case it should be dubbed Mother Pandora.) Meaning: They're not exactly rocking the gender stereotype boat, they’re just good, developed characters.

I guess it comes down to this question: What exactly makes a movie feminist? Should featuring developed female characters in one’s movies be a feminist boon, or should it simply be status quo—and should a movie with one-dimensional female characters be considered just a bad film?

Tags: avatar, feminism, James Cameron, Vanity Fair

Are escalating beauty standards a response to women's growing political and economic power? Michelle Goldberg asks this in The American Prospect, and her answer, unsurprisingly, is, "Quite probably." It's hard not to be stunned at the exponentially growing number of procedures that women are expected to submit to, and exponentially growing number of flaws we're expected to worry about and attend to. I'm in my early 30s, and in just the years since I graduated college, the list of beauty treatments that went from unheard of to seemingly mandatory is shocking. And "mandatory" is no exaggeration. Female friends even a few years younger than I seem to think the Brazilian wax is as much a given as I grew up thinking pit-shaving was. There's a whole generation of men and women who think seeing a pubic hair on a vulva is as weird as seeing a face tattoo.

But is there a steady trend over time? I adore the show Mad Men for many reasons, but one of them is that it reminds me that in many ways, beauty standards relaxed significantly between my grandmother's generation and mine. In the '50s and '60s, you had the frequent beauty parlor trips, the sleeping in rollers and otherwise spending at least an hour on your hair, and the elaborate underwear and clothing requirements just to be acceptable to be seen in polite company. Many women who submit to having all their pubic hair yanked out by its roots recoil at the idea of a bullet bra and a corset, which shows how awful and invasive those items really were.

And even when I was young, I recall that the pressure to spend a great deal of time on your looks was higher, at least in our rural community that was at least a decade behind the times. I often wonder at how the women in my family would have to take so long to get ready to do something simple like go shopping or go to work. Every day, it was at least an hour and a half of make-up application, hair-doing, perfume application, and probably some steps I'm forgetting, since my idea of a minimum standard to leave the house is a shower, combed hair, and deodorant.

Of course, one could point out that all these older beauty standards have been turned into newer, more oppressive ones that require you to take all the artifice of old and make it your actual body. Those padded underwire bras that haunted my adolescence have given way to breast implants, which basically put the padding and lifting into your chest. Hated pantyhose has turned into complete body deforestation. Piling on make-up may not be required anymore, but only because you're expected to have a glowing, perfect face rolling out of bed. And while I'm completely out of the loop on what are considered minimum standards for hair, I'm sure that there's some massive amount of work many women feel they have to put into having naturally beautiful hair to replace the curlers of old.

But honestly, the only reason that we feel that beauty standards are escalating is that for a long time, they were declining. Those of us who came of age in the '90s apparently grew up in a feminist paradise in which you could totally be considered hot while not being on the brink of starvation. Body hair was only considered a problem if directly visible (and even then, armpit hair made a small comeback), comfortable clothes were the norm, make-up was applied sparingly and for artfulness rather than deceit, and natural hair became completely normal. The slovenliness of the grunge era has given way to sharp dressing, but it's still done with a minimum of discomfort. And I swear to you that by applying a relaxed beauty norm, we were able to train the men of my generation to be sexually aroused by women who didn't need to show suffering for beauty. Indeed, many men I know in their 30s and 40s recoil at the idea of finding waxed anorexics with plastic parts to be sexier than someone unafraid to wear a pair of sneakers on the right occasion. Or perhaps they're flattering me for reasons I don't understand, though their choices in partners tend to uphold their claims.

All of which tells me that we're in a backlash period, much like the 80s as described by Susan Faludi. Which means that the oppressive beauty standards are a response to feminism, but also that we don't have to give up hope. Perhaps this economic decline will represent a new era, where women's contributions to society are genuinely respected instead of undermined at every turn by the cellulite patrol. We can all play a role. I'm trying to do my part—by refusing to dye my hair even as it turns gray—and what's awesome is this rebellion is the easiest in the world. How often do you get to rebel by creating more leisure time for yourself?

Tags: anti-feminist backlash, beauty standards