At what age can a child refuse medical treatment—and do his reasons for doing so matter? Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old Minnesota boy suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma, went through one course of chemo before he and his parents decided to reject standard cancer treatment in favor of alternative medicine. They've said that their practices reflect their religious beliefs as followers of the Nemenhah Band, a group led by Phillip "Cloudpiler" Landis that encourages natural remedies. (They also attend a Catholic church.) Last week, a judge ruled that Daniel's parents were "medically neglecting" him by refusing to continue to treat him using conventional medicine. The family was supposed to appear in court today to discuss the results of a chest X-ray and determine a course of treatment, but Daniel and his mother didn't appear. (It sounds all too close to Miriam's Well by Lois Ruby, a YA novel I cherished as a young teen, but I doubt it'll have the same happy ending.) Now an arrest warrant has been issued for Colleen Hauser. His father says that he hasn't seen them since last night and doesn't know where they are—convenient. He's gravely ill and recently told a doctor that he had pain that was "10 out of 10" in his chest, but that pain apparently hasn't convinced him to submit to an oncologist's will. He even threatened to punch and kick any doctors who tried to treat him.

It sounds as though Daniel is simply trying to adhere to his faith, but he might just be scared to undergo treatment. The blogger at Respectful Insolence, a scientist/surgeon, asked last week whether the Hausers are just using religion as an excuse. Daniel underwent one course of chemo—the first of a recommended six—in February, and he and his family were alarmed by the complications; he is also reportedly haunted by the fact that an aunt died while undergoing chemo when he was 5.

If this is a case of rejecting the side effects rather than the idea of medical treatment, it's tough to tell who led whom down this path—did Daniel himself balk first, or did his parents? Thirteen seems far too young to be able to decide to treat or not to treat, and Daniel himself reportedly can't read and has demonstrated poor understanding of his illness. That makes it a pretty open-and-shut case, as far as I can tell—find the kid, if child protective services can find him before it's too late, and make him undergo if his cancer is still treatable. (Do the legal eagles among us think differently?)

I can't help but wonder, though, how this would play out if it were a highly mature 17-year-old who rejected faith healing, alternative medicine, and conventional treatment. If he wanted to forgo treatment in favor of dying just because he hated chemo, would we force him?

Tags: compelling medical treatment, daniel hauser

No longer the home of hits like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire, HBO is looking to replace its sex-and-violence lineup of yesteryear with ... more sex. Last spring, the network issued a somewhat mysterious announcement about Hung, a dramatic comedy that debuts this summer. According to Variety, Hung's storyline follows "a well-endowed man who figures out a way to take advantage of his physical gift." I was expecting a show about an oversexed superhero with superhuman sexual powers, but I guess that was me projecting. Later, Alexander Payne, of Sideways fame, signed on to direct the pilot, Thomas Jane was cast in the role of Ray Drecker, the well-endowed lead, and Anne Heche landed the role of the ex-wife.

Now the series trailer is online, and after all the hype it looks a bit cheesy. Apparently, it takes the wacky! kooky! crazy! approach to the subject of sex, and posits the super-hung main character as a loser who realizes that he could make milllions, or something like it, selling rides on his most significant physical attribute. Don't think they left out the postfeminist hijinks, though. Guess who this male prostitute's pimp is? A woman! Will wonders never cease?! It's all rather silly. "You just keep on using me until you use me up," the soundtrack croons in the background.

Too bad a show that takes on male sexuality looks to be little more than a protracted dick joke. In recent years, Mad Men, The Sopranos, and even Entourage have taken on the subject of what it really means to be a man. This time around, I guess the joke's on men.

Tags: HBO, Hung, penis humor

In seven seasons of 24, I've never given much thought to its gender politics. For one, I've mostly tuned in for the escapism of watching Jack Bauer save the world. For another, it's always had enough strong female characters—villains, heads of CTU, and the ass-kicking-yet-socially-awkward Chloe—to make up for the damsels in distress. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Kim Bauer.)

But two sequences at the end of last night's finale jumped out at me for their portrayal of the women. (Warning, if you have the finale waiting on your TiVo: Spoilers ahead.) To wrap one storyline, President Allison Taylor has to decide whether to turn in her daughter for having one of this season's baddies murdered. Given that one of the themes of this season was the Taylor administration's opposition to torture and lawlessness (usually), it was not at all shocking to me when Taylor handed her daughter over to the Justice Department. But what was remarkable was the scene that followed. Taylor stands weeping in the hallway, sagging under the weight of a decision that likely cost her her daughter and her husband. She allows herself a good 20 to 30 seconds of sorrow, is briefly consoled by an adviser, and then straightens herself up and continues crisply down the hallway, fully in charge and ready to take on the day. She's the president, damn it, and she's not going to let any womanly emotions or maternal guilt get in the way of her job. The scene told you everything you needed to know about the character.

I'm still chewing over the other scene, not sure what to make of it. The FBI has übervillain Alan Wilson—who's apparently been behind at least three seasons' worth of mischief—in custody. Agent Renee Walker has him in an interrogation room, and she's ready to go all Jack Bauer on him. She deactivates the surveillance cameras and handcuffs Janeane Garofalo's character to keep her from interfering. (Oh, why couldn't someone have done that by, say, Hour 3?) But Janis talks her down, and Walker comes to her senses. This comes not long after Jack had explained to Walker that he usually knew in his mind that the laws he was breaking were more important than the lives he saved, but that his heart wouldn't let him not act. So, was Agent Walker repudiating Jack and his reluctant torture? Were the writers trying to say that women are less likely to torture than men? The problem for me is that the scene was not done especially well—even by 24's low-believability standards, it kind of came out of nowhere—and it's not a perfect parallel. Jack Bauer's torture has usually been of the "imminent threat" variety: If someone knows a bomb is supposed to go off in an hour, can you torture him to find out where it is? In this case, the threat is over and the bad guy is under lock and key. It doesn't quite add up.

Are there any 24 watchers out there? What did you think? And do you agree that this was the most "feminist" season of 24 yet? Not only did we have our first female president and Jack's first female sidekick (well, besides Chloe, who's usually stuck in front of a computer), but Kim Bauer not only DIDN'T get kidnapped, she saved her dad's life. Twice.

Tags: 24, 24 season finale, jack bauer

Like Slate's Jack Shafer, I'm curious to see whether Maureen Dowd uses her next Times column to address the mini-plagiarism scandal surrounding her last one (Dowd admitted to unintentionally lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall, blaming the confusion on a conversation with a friend who quoted the passage to her without attribution.) But I can't agree with Shafer that Dowd's explanation sounds "plausible—if a tad incomplete." Her account of how Marshall's observation found its way into her column is patently absurd. Unless the friends in question are HAL-9000 computers, who sits around over coffee transmitting published paragraphs word for word and comma for comma? And if the "conversation" in question took place via e-mail, why not say that in the first place and forward the relevant e-mails to her editor and the press?

The lift itself seems like an understandable, if sloppy, cut-and-paste error that could have, and probably nearly has, happened to anyone who makes a living cranking out copy on tight deadlines: Dowd cut a quote from TPM as part of her research, dumped it in a Word file, and by the time she finished her column, she'd forgotten what came from where. But why not simply admit as much? By conjuring the conversation with that "friend" possessed of total recall for everything except the Web address of Talking Points Memo, Dowd made herself look defensive, unprofessional, and guilty.

Even as I goggle at Dowd's bad judgment, though, I can kind of identify. Everybody's had a moment like that, if not in their professional life, then in their personal one: You unintentionally do something really stupid, then, in a flurry of shame, make up a ridiculous explanation that you then have to stick by no matter how bad it makes you look. That's why for me the takeaway from this dustup has less to do with journalism than with personal responsibility. When you make a fool of yourself in public, no matter how tempting it is to come up with a flattering spin, the best explanation is the simplest one: I screwed up and I'm sorry. In another line from the disputed column—a line she presumably wrote herself—Dowd describes Nancy Pelosi's reaction to recent Republican shenanigans in language that's inadvertently prescient: "[Pelosi] acted like a stammering child caught red-handed, refusing to admit any fault and pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat."

Tags: Josh Marshall, maureen dowd, new york times, plagiarism, Talking Points Memo

New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews wrote a doozy of a story in a recent issue of the paper’s magazine, about how he went from a beaming homeowner and newlywed to an anxious debtor who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on his mortgage. He described the trials and headaches of borrowing and, throughout the story, a basic disbelief that he, a reporter who covers economics, could have been caught up in the same overzealous swindling and poor decision-making that he wrote about for the Times.

His story may have been cause for a lot of rubbernecking and tsk-ing among readers, but Dana Goldstein and Megan McArdle have perhaps hit on the real reason why Andrews had such a hard time: chicks.

Over at TAPPED, Goldstein writes:

The precipitating cause of Andrews' financial problems were a divorce and a rather hasty second marriage, to a woman named Patty. Andrews and Patty dated bi-coastally for one year before Patty and her 10-year old daughter moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The couple merged their households and bought a half-million-dollar suburban home immediately, despite the fact that Andrews was paying his first wife $4,000 each month in alimony and child support. That left him with just $2,777 in take-home pay—and with a new wife who hadn't held a full-time job since the early 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, at first, Patty was unable to secure a middle-income job. When she finally did, she was fired less than a year later. Patty's ex, meanwhile, was in arrears on his $700/month in child support. That meant Andrews was attempting to support two women and four children, essentially maintaining two totally separate households.

Megan's interpretation is that Andrews "couldn't afford to get married. At all." In fact, what Andrews couldn't afford was to marry women unprepared to participate in the work force.

Goldstein and McArdle make fabulous, if slightly divergent points. And this is as good a cautionary tale as any—but is it for men or for women? Goldsten calls this “A Good Argument Against Opting Out”—meaning women opting out of the workplace—but I tend to think the real “told you so” goes for the brothers.

Sure, I believe women should seek meaningful breadwinning opportunities, even if they don’t necessarily have to work. But shouldn’t men like Andrews steer clear of the trophy wives? I recall an article from the Wall Street Journal just after the fall 2008 collapse of the housing market about men who were having to give up their mistresses. (And who could forget the DABA women?) I don’t mean to call Andrews’ former and current wives gold-diggers, but maybe recession stories like his will cause an unintended and welcome consequence—the demise of arm candy.

Andrews' story also seems to have a second dose of spinach for its readers, male or female. Recall that even on his own, Andrews made a comfortable $120,000 annual salary, more money than the majority of American families could dream of, which placed him squarely in the upper middle class. So shouldn't his true-life fable teach us to live within our means?

Tags: family, finance, foreclosure, mortgages, new york times, stay-home moms, working families

Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts. (I'm paraphrasing here, but not as much as I wish I were.) Latoya Peterson responded by rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The Internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All to Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.

Missing from this entire kerfuffle is one crucial point. Women aren't raped because they're being sexual in public or private, and they're not raped because they're drunk. Women are raped because they're women.

Statistics vary, but we know that the vast majority of rapists aren't the men we randomly meet in bars one night—they're the ones we already know. The idea that women are more likely to be raped while they're being "bad" is a nasty myth created to keep women in our places. Rape has never been an act of sexual incontinence committed because we’re just too darn available and tempting, and being “smart” or “good” isn’t going to keep us safe.

Sure, men rape women in drunken party atmospheres. They also rape women on quiet nights in, but we get no warnings about the dangers of playing Trivial Pursuit in mixed company. Yes, rape risk increases when alcohol is involved, but if someone is drunk during a rape, it's more likely to have been the attacker than the victim. And yet where is the public service message warning men against the dangers of drinking and raping?

I'm not a big Jezebel defender on this subject, precisely because of the type of posts that Hirshman and the Observer point out. They excuse rapists' behavior and perpetuate the myth that if a woman was drinking or being sexual, she is in some way responsible for another person assaulting her. But Hirshman's complaints about Jezebel fall into the exact same—very dangerous—trap. If it's possible for women who are raped to deserve it as a "consequence of their own acts," as Hirshman says, then you can hardly blame the rapist for that act, now, can you?

This controversy isn't about "choice feminism"—dressing in skimpy clothing, drinking, and having casual sex aren't inherently feminist choices any more than wearing billowy skirts and Birkenstocks, drinking herbal tea, and being celibate are. But our approach to rape prevention is a feminist choice. We need to face the fact that focusing on the consequences of women’s actions instead of on the actions of rapists has done precious little to reduce the incidence of rape.

You know what else is a feminist choice? Refusing to do the work of the patriarchy. So if refusing to police my own sexuality and blaming rapists for rape in all circumstances makes me a slut, then I wear the name proudly.

Tags: Jezebel, Linda Hirshman, Rape

Meghan McCain was on The Colbert Report last night and despite some giggles and a hideous, huge, Bedazzled ring, she acquitted herself admirably. When is someone going to give this self-identified "24-year-old, pro-sex woman" and Republican her own television show? Young and Republican In America, hosted by Meghan McCain, running on one of the cable news networks twice a week? I'd watch.

Colbert tries his best to throw his guests off their talking points, but McCain could recite hers in a coma. She was not to be derailed. While defending her core position—the Republican Party needs to appeal to younger voters, and it can only do so by getting liberal on social issues—she told Colbert the following:

"President Obama said he was going to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell and I think me and a lot of people are still waiting for that."

"If you go to the basic beliefs of the Republican party, keeping the government out of your life, why can't that include marriage?"

"I think it's not realistic for this generation to be just plain abstinent, I think we need to have sex education with condoms and birth control... I would never practice anything I didn't preach. My father's gonna watch that, God!"

"I don't believe twittering is going to make anyone think that the Republican party is cooler."

That last one, about twitter, is not a policy position, it's just funny. And true. All the rest sound good to me, but that's because they sound like something a Democrat would say. Or maybe a Libertarian. Socially conservative Republicans are probably a smidge less amused.

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Tags: Meghan McCain, Pro-Sex, Republican Party, Stephen Colbert

My husband has been in love with Bruce Springsteen longer than he's been in love with me. Bruce's lyrics were the soundtrack for our courtship (I came for you, for you, I came for you), our long-overdue wedding (So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore), the many years of our marriage (This life, this life and then the next, with you I have been blessed), and his own work (sick of sitting round here trying to write this book). He rarely misses a Springsteen concert and can recite tracks, covers, and lyrics for any occasion. It was no surprise to me then that he came home from last night's D.C. show pumped and happy as a schoolboy. At the Verizon Center, he'd run into many similarly infatuated friends trading stories of set lists, the E Street Café, and who got to hang out with the band (Rahm Emanuel back stage with Bruce and Patty!). I love my husband but this is a facination we do not share. Though I am fond of The Boss, I don't go to concerts. I can't deal with the crowds, the late hours, or the intense middle-aged hetero man crush of the audience. I was not born to run. Disappointed when I told him several years ago I was done shouting lyrics at a tiny figure on a far-away stage, my husband recovered quickly and now happily scrambles to score a single ticket for every tour. I go to bed early and he goes out dancing in the dark.

Tags: bruce springsteen

The Preakness Stakes is not a particularly gender-neutral event. The second leg of the Triple Crown is, in fact, one of the last places where men dress like men of a certain era (waistcoats, wingtips, fedoras), and women dress like women as we grew up imagining them: in crisp yet feminine suits, low-cut, brightly colored dresses and high, high heels. I’ve been to the Preakness three years running, and I gave up on the dress-and-heels approach long ago. (Unless you book a limo to and from your box seat, the amount of walking and stair climbing required by Pimlico’s layout demands comfortable footwear.) On Saturday, I noted with empathy the strained expressions on the faces of some of the gorgeously decked-out women as they teetered on the arms of their fast-walking male companions.

In the infield, women usually seem to fare worst, maybe because they’re physically smaller. I usually see them after the races, most in their teens and early 20s, their flip-flopped feet and calves coated in muck as they stumble drunkenly along Baltimore’s not-so-friendly streets in their tiny tank tops and shorts. But this year, there were far fewer of them—the economic downturn and new restrictions on racegoers bringing their own liquor emptied the infield—and as I screamed my head off watching Rachel Alexandra outrun a scrum of male challengers, it seemed that, for whatever reason, much was changing in Pimlico and the world. “We have a black president,” a friend remarked after the race, “and now a girl wins the Preakness.” And what a girl! A gorgeous, eager, big-hearted horse with a princessy name, who seemed to genuinely enjoy her run along the storied track where only five fillies have raced since the last female Preakness winner, the perfectly named-for-her-era Nellie Morse, in 1924.

The next day, I gobbled up news stories about the race, savoring the admiring comments from other jockeys as they gave the winner her due. Then there was her owner, Jess Jackson, comparing Rachel Alexandra in notably human terms to Curlin, who won the Preakness in 2007 and whom Jackson called “a big, strong strapping boy.” Jackson sounded like a proud father when he said of Rachel Alexandra: “She just wants to run. Gender doesn’t matter. A thoroughbred wants to run, and if a filly is as good as the colts, they ought to compete.” I was particularly struck, after reading Meghan’s post on Rachel Alexandra, by the contrast between Jackson's words and the language with which Ruffian, another champion filly, was slighted and dismissed in 1975. Some troubling conventions, like the expectation that female racegoers will stick out a long day in mile-high hot pink heels, are still with us. But watching Rachel Alexandra reminded me what it feels like to take off your shoes and run as fast as you can. It was a great day to be a woman at the races.

Tags: gender, preakness stakes, rachel alexandra, sports

Agreed, Dahlia, that Justice Ginsburg is carefully applying the law as she sees it in her dissent in AT&T v. Hulteen. Her problem is a bad old ruling that haunts this case and that all but one of her male colleagues refused to banish. In General Electric Co. v. Gilbert in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on pregnancy is not discrimination based on sex, because some women (the nonpregnant ones) won't be discriminated against. By ignoring how "societal attitudes about prengancy and motherhood severely impeded women's employment opportunities," as Ginsburg puts it, Gilbert deeply frustrated women's rights lawyers at the time, notably among them one Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Congress thought Gilbert was bad law too, and overturned it by passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978. That statute requires employers to give pregnant women the same benefits they give everyone else.

But the PDA didn't instruct employers to go back and fix previous discrimination, and so the pension benefits that the women who sued in Hulteen were denied more than three decades ago stayed on the books. Ginsburg's theory is that Congress did protect women "against repetition or continuation of pregnancy-based disadvantageous treatment." Thus the court should read the law to redress the continuing effect of AT&T's long-ago refusal to grant benefits, which continued to matter for these women employees. But seven members of the court took a narrower, time-bound view of the case. They ruled against the women who sued, much as a majority of the court in 2007 ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, because they refused to see the smaller paycheck she got for years, as compared with her male peers, as a pattern of discrimination that continued to affect her long after the first time she received it. And so, Ginsburg writes, "Congress interred Gilbert more than 30 years ago, but the Court today allows that wrong decision still to hold sway." One of the most infuriating decisions of the 1970s, from a women's rights perspective, resurrected by Ginsburg's own court. Consolation, maybe: Congress could get it together to side with her, as it did in reversing her colleagues' Ledbetter decision this year.

Tags: AT&T v. Hulteen, empathy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg