Does anyone out there feel sorry for Richard and Mayumi Heene, who will do short jail stints for their Balloon Boy hoax? It's hard to squeeze out a drop of sympathy for these exploitative parents. But it does seems as if the judge decided to make an example of them by sending them to jail, and I wonder how the interests of their kids are served by these 30 and 20-day sentences behind bars. Far more fitting was the judge's stipulation that "Mr. Heene is in fact prohibited from receiving any form of financial benefit—whether it be media, a book, an article he writes—anything of that kind that stems from this incident." Mayumi Heene can't sell her story for four years and she has to write a letter of apology. Those are the punishments that satisfy in a crazy, publicity-hounding case like this: zero profit plus a tablespoon of shame.

Photograph of Richard and Mayumi Heene by Chris Schneider/Getty Images.

Tags: balloon boy hoax, mayumi heene, richard heene

An amazing archaeological find in Israel shows that before even modern humans emerged, our hominid ancestors created separate zones in their living spaces for cooking and tool making. This New York Times article explains the site, an astounding 800,000 years old, indicates that there was an area for eating and food preparation (an eat-in kitchen!), and another, 25 feet away, for making stone tools (a workshop!).  I hate that my mind automatically conjures up an image of a Homo erectus female saying, “How many times have I asked you to keep your flint-napping flakes out of my pantry.” There is also something deeply moving about the discovery that the desire to organize a sensible home runs so deep within us it predates even our becoming Homo sapiens.

Tags: archaeology, kitchens, organizing a home

In yesterday’s Guardian, Naomi Wolf laid down the feminist case for Sex and the City (then Tracy Clark-Flory did an excellent job disseminating it over at Broadsheet.) Wolf exalts the ladies of Sex and the City as feminist icons mainly because the show centers on female friendships and it's brutally honest in depicting how even professional females are still entirely obsessed with men.

Sounds...uh, feminist?

I still can’t fathom how Sex and the City became an anthem for the modern woman. Was it the shoes? The constant rhyming puns? It’s worth noting a 2006 UCSC animal linguistics study found that nonhuman primates use rhyme schemes in nearly all their daily communications. Surely we deserve something further up the evolutionary ladder?

It’s not that I’m totally above the joys of low-brow titillation. Sex And The City had plenty of it: fashion horrors, emotionally pornographic plot lines, and lots of full-frontal graphic sex—a common denominator-type enjoyment. But SATC wasn’t treated like trivial entertainment, instead it was often exalted by the media and the show’s own creators as some sort of signifier of fourth-wave consumer-happy feminism: The sexually liberated women exists and is thriving! And boy does she like to shop!

Liberation, indeed—two of the main ladies, Carrie and Charlotte, admittedly want to land a rich husband who can finance their extravagant purchasing habits (in the SATC movie, Carrie makes louder moans of joy upon being reunited with her promised walk-in closet than she does with Mr. Big) and, Samantha, the token slut who sleeps around “like a man”, is cosmically punished with cancer during the last season of the HBO series run. The ladies are so clichéd and one-dimensional hailing them as feminist icons is like arguing that Beavis and Butthead define manhood in all its robust glory.

And yet, despite the shallowness of the female leads, the SATC enterprise has somehow extended itself into identity politics.The show has spawned thousands of “What Sex And The City Character Are You?” Facebook quizzes, college girls all over the nation proudly identifying with their Fendi-obsessed female brethren. Their choices? The materialistic sex columnist (who is actually a really boring lay), the prudish gold digger, the emotionally reclusive smart woman, and the kinky slut who refutes relationships. But only pick one ladies, it’s not like you could be so complicated as to love kinky sex and be a high-powered lawyer. That’s just ludicrous.

Tags: feminism, Naomi Wolf, sex and the city

When I first read this item at Jezebel about a book called Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid getting made into a sitcom pilot, I'll confess that it didn't quite register what they were saying. On some level, I assumed that the title they gave was some hyperbolic satire of the title of the actual book, and that the actual book must have a slightly more sane-sounding title. But then I clicked the link and discovered that no, it was in fact possible that a book titled Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid was not only published, but popular enough to get a sitcom pilot.

To make things even worse, it appears that this book is a self-help manual, and not even a work of fiction or maybe even comedy, the natural narratives for sitcom development. (Though it does try---and from what I could tell from the excerpt linked, fails---to be funny.) This makes it at least the second self-help manual out there to be turned into narrative fiction, the first being the ill-advised movie version of He's Just Not That Into You.

Reading this excerpt provided, the immediate question that pops into my mind is, well, "I need an antacid to deal with this." But after that, I had to ask why so many people get pleasure out of pushing this view of men as morons and women as shrews. It's a completely nonsensical view of gender relations, for a simple reason: If men and women are really as awful as they imply, then why bother giving advice on how to cope with it and live together? Wouldn't it be more sensible---if our differences are so intractable that nothing but a lifelong battle of daily struggle will make them survivable---just to go our separate ways? We could still have sex, you know. It's still legal to sleep with someone you aren't married to or living with. Books like these have a big hole in their premise. They argue that men and women are completely opposite, that they're natural enemies, and that they need to struggle to live together, but they never explain why. It can't be that it's that we've always done it that way. We've been able to stop washing our clothes by hand and crapping in the bushes, so surely we could stop living together, if it's that miserable. It's certainly a better solution than making really awful sitcoms as a coping mechanism.

Not that I'm saying that men and women shouldn't live together. I have my argument for why I, as a straight woman, should live with a man: Because actually, I like him. I don't think he's stupid, and I'm not being driven mad slowly through hatred for his maleness. Of course, he's not one to pretend that he's biologically incapable of treating women like they're human beings. Not hating someone makes it much easier to justify living with them.

Like all books of this sort, the ideological agenda of arguing that sexism is here to stay is never far from the surface. I quote:

But modern male stupidity as it applies specifically to women is far more interesting and relevant to our purposes. It actually has its roots in the playgrounds of our youth. It was there that we first became aware of girls. It was also there that we first realized that we liked these strange creatures. They made us feel funny. But good funny. A kind of warm and gushy funny. Of course in those early years it wasn't acceptable to talk about these new feelings with our peers for fear we'd get rightly harangued about the dangers of cooties. But still, we wanted this five-year-old ponytailed goddess to know that we had a thing for her. So what did we do?

 

Or pushed her into the mud and laughed at her. (I'm so sorry, Susan Freyberg.)

And here our stupidity begins.

But how could it be any other way? We never had a chance. The hit and the shove (and once again, I apologize, Susie) were the only ways we knew to express ourselves! They were our way of saying, "Hey, I know it's not cool for us to be hanging out 'cause of the whole cooties thing, but I dig you."

I don't disagree that a lot of male mistreatment of women is due to the struggle between their desires for women and their absorption of the belief that women are inferiors with disgusting bodies, but what caught my eyes was the idea that it has to be this way. Why do men have to loathe women? Why do boys have to loath girls? Wouldn't it be easier if they just liked them? Or is it because the authors are suggesting that girls really do have cooties, and therefore male disgust is inevitable? I'm guessing yes, which is why their whole act about blaming men first for this state of affairs is so disingenuous.

Tags: self-help books, sitcoms

A California appellate court would not dismiss the child rape case against Roman Polanski altogether yesterday—but it will allow the case to move forward without forcing Polanski to return to the United States. To recap: Polanski was arrested for the drugging and rape of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer (née Gailey) in 1977, and went on trial for the crime in 1978. Polanski fled the country that year because he felt there was prosecutorial and judicial misconduct and that he would not be given a fair sentence. According to Harriet Ryan at the L.A. Times, the appellate court, "outlined a way that could end the long-running case without Polanski serving more time behind bars or returning to the American justice system he fled three decades ago." The court was unanimous in its ruling, and it seemed to want to bring the case to a close quickly, not because they are enthralled by Polanski's fame, but because they want to end Samantha Geimer's suffering:

The passage of more time before this case's final resolution will further hamper the search for truth and the delivery of any appropriate relief, and it will also prolong the agony that the lack of finality in this matter continues to cause Samantha Geimer.

Geimer has had health problems and fears she may lose her job over the renewed media frenzy. She asked for the case to be dismissed back in October. A couple of months ago I asked Susan Estrich, who is a law professor at USC and on the board of directors of the Victim Rights Law Center what she thought about the Polanski case from the victim's rights perspective. "I don't blame [Geimer]" for wanting the case dismissed, Estrich wrote to me in an e-mail, "I don’t think [the dismissal] speaks to whether Polanski deserves punishment—in fact, the continued pain that the discussion seems to bring for her, in my mind, proves just the opposite." Estrich adds that it's technically a crime against the state, not the victim, but many have pointed out that cash-strapped California has much bigger problems than Polanski. Though some commentators, like Salon's Kate Harding, think Polanski will be getting off too easy if the case is quickly resolved after 30 years and he does not face more jail time, at this point we have to ask if the costs of his prosecution outweigh the benefits.

Photograph of Roman Polanski by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images.

Tags: child rape, roman polanski, samantha geimer

Last night I piled the Santa gifts up on the bed—snipping tags, pulling off labels and generally making sure everything looked straight from the North Pole. With the loot all piled together like that: wood-carving tools and cars for the boys, doll paraphernalia for the girls—a trend was suddenly clear. Santa Claus is sexist, and I'm the elf with the wallet.

I'd like to offer the excuse that I was just granting wishes—gender preferences in toys are well documented, and even male and female monkeys have been shown differ in their toy selections, suggesting that something about the preference is innate. But I wasn't. Santa (as in the mall version upon whose lap you sit and wish for presents) didn't make it into our world this year, for one reason or another, and three of the four kids have actually made no specific requests. This was just me, buying stuff I thought they'd like, and pandering to the easy wow factor under the tree.

It's not the toys themselves that are the issue, but the activities that the toys encourage. If my household is any example, millions of girls will spend Christmas day cuddling and nurturing while millions of boys spend it driving and building, all under the auspices of mom, dad and Santa. No one has proven that those toy selections change lives and career choices, but on some level, they must. A girl who doesn't spend part of her childhood building models and putting together Legos (even model doll furniture and Lego houses) is a girl who's built up fewer spatial skills than her brother, and spent less time with sandpaper and glue. She won't move on to Lego robotics or welding because she's had nowhere to move on from. It's fine to choose not to do those things, less fine to "choose" not to because you simply don't know how, and not fine at all to have the choice made for you. Especially not by your mother, thoughtlessly shopping for the man with the beard.

Tags: elf, holidays, santa