A guest post from Linda Hirshman: 

In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I "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." 

Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never used the word slut in anything I have ever written, and, after a lifetime of advocating and defending feminism, hope I never would. And far from accepting the possibility of rape, I urge all women to resist it, including by invoking the power of criminal law enforcement to punish rape and protect other women. I understand that it is not feel-good news to point out the vulnerability of freedom and the ineluctable fact of nature that women are, on the whole, smaller, weaker, and vulnerable in the course of childbirth and nursing and therefore vulnerable to larger, stronger men, much less that they have a responsibility to one another’s safety. I am prepared to defend what I say. But not what I don’t say. No matter how angry you are, there is no reason to groundlessly accuse a woman with 40 years in the feminist movement of calling a whole group of women sluts.

Tags: Jezebel, Linda Hirshman, Rape

On May 12, the New York Times ran a photograph featuring a soldier in his underpants. The photo was eye-catching—I know it caught my eye—and appeared above the fold on the front page. The photo was taken by David Guttenfelder for the Associated Press, and its subject was Spc. Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas. But what made it a standout was that it was taken in Afghanistan, and Boyd was in his Army gear and brandishing a weapon but doing so in pink underwear. A few days later, an IT guy at the Times noticed that site visitors were searching for the usual subjects—"Obama," "India," and "cancer" among them—but there was something new, too: "pink boxers." As it turned out, they were looking for Boyd.

Lens, a wonderful new photojournalism blog the Times launched recently, has the story behind the photo that spawned the pink boxers searches.

"It had an impact on me immediately," [Times editor Michele McNally] said. "Your first reaction is: 'What? What’s going on?' Because you are smiling—and then you realize its meaning. War never stops, look how intense it could get. You understand then that he is fighting out of uniform, in underwear which reads "I Love NY," in the midst of really rough terrain in a remote region so very far from home. And New York.

"And yet again, it calls up what mom said, 'Always wear clean underwear, you never know.' "

Tags: new york times, photography, war

Here's a really interesting study showing that proximity to women appears to shape male views on policy. I recently wrote about a study showing the influence of female judges on their male counterparts in gender discrimination cases. Courtesy of FiveThirtyEight, here's a bunch of fascinating studies showing that fathers of daughters tend to support more liberal programs, ranging from reproductive rights to affirmative action to working families' flexibility and tax-free education. It's not all that surprising that men who invest a lot of time and energy in raising daughters will come to support programs that help women succeed. But I'll score this one as yet more evidence for the manly virtues of "empathy."

Tags: feminism; fathers; empathy

The Palin family's message machine seems to have gone haywire of late. Gov. Sarah has plastered on her serious face, forswearing this month's White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington to concentrate on the recession in Alaska. She sent her husband to D.C. instead to hang with Greta Van Susteren but say nothing to the cameras. At one WHCA post-party, former Palin running-mate-in-law Meghan McCain seemed confused about how to deal with the wildly unpredictable, suddenly high-profile family. "Oh man, there's Todd Palin," she told a group of young reporters. "Do I have to go say hi?"

Yes—and if you're walking down any supermarket shopping aisle, you're going to have to enjoy Bristol Palin's graduation photos in People magazine (she's the class of 2009), which accompany shots of her young son and an exclusive interview with penetrating insights like:

"If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex," says Bristol, sitting at her parents' lakeside patio table. "Trust me. Nobody."

Is that the best that she could come up with? Someone needs to prep this child on how to be a responsible steward of the public platform she enjoys, even if as a result of a now-admitted mistake. This comment is patronizing to women—did her boyfriend, Levi, not get the whole "you might have a baby" component when they switched from heavy petting to something more? And it is also fundamentally empty. Bristol, who claims "her near future will include advocating for teen-pregnancy prevention," might have enumerated some of the consequences or any of the myriad ways to avoid her predicament. Instead, she resorts to a half-hearted scare tactic. ("Really. NO one.")

We've gone back and forth about Bristol Palin's ability to advocate for safe and smart teen sexuality (some think she's pretty good), but this most recent statement is certainly a reason not to "trust her." Maybe she's been hijacked by abstinence-only advocates, but the younger girls in a recent New York profile on Jane Addams' High—a school for pregnant teens—seem to better grasp the stakes and statistics they encounter or now represent.

Tags: bristol, levi, People Magazine, teen pregnancy

Over at Seed, Josh Rosenau describes his organization's long, failed attempt to get the Texas School Board to adopt evolution-friendly standards for the state's textbooks. Much as I'd like to, I cannot get exercised over this issue; my own public, and later parochial, elementary education was full of so much misinformation (America will run out of landfills by the year 1990! Marijuana kills! New York City is the capital of New York!) that my expectations remain unflappably low.

What I find more interesting is how such a narrow group of political actors effectively controls a wide swath of the the textbook market. Given the size of the state, publishers are likely to tailor their books to conform to the standards set by Texas; the same books are then sold to smaller states, so millions of non-Texan kids read what Texas tells them to read. Or, more precisely, what the 15 people on the Texas School Board tell them to read. Seven of those 15 are creationists, one of whom was moved to shout, during recent hearings, "Someone's got to stand up to the experts!" Mission accomplished.

Tags: evolution, public schools, Texas

The Irish government has released a report detailing the vicious beatings, rape, and emotional abuse inflicted on tens of thousands children entrusted to the care of Catholic orphanages for 60 years, until the 1990s. The Times pulls out this description: “Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks ... burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods ... beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs ..." Not to mention relentless sexual assault. In response to the report, the Vatican is silent, and the government names none of the abusers—a result of Church pressure and lawsuits. An apology and some cash is what is being offered to the victims. But how is it the perpetrators get to decide they will not be prosecuted? And how can this chapter be closed until every rapist and sadist still alive is tracked down and tried?

Tags: Abuse, Catholic Church, Irish orphans

It turns out Adam Lambert was too weird to win American Idol. Possibly gay, possibly Jewish (here's a video of him singing in Hebrew!), definitely wearing nail polish, Lambert was too much of a challenge, as they say politely, to American notions of masculinity. There was no way he could stand up to cutie Kris Allen, a missionary with a crooked grin and a passel of blond relatives who all look like Reese Witherspoon.

One is tempted to grumble about homophobic Americans who can't handle the new bi/queer/transgender reality. But here's the kicker: "Guy next door" and "Guy-liner," as they call them on the show, spent the whole finale loving on each other, swearing the other one should win, and promising to buy each other's albums. When the winner was announced, Allen himself couldn't believe it. "Adam deserves this," he said, and gave him a big hug. Remember when Obama, in his Notre Dame speech, mentioned the gay activist and the evangelical preacher who just couldn't bridge the cultural divide? They were enemies, but the radical thing was putting them in the same sentence, and so close together. Same thing last night.

There they stood, arm in arm, as enemies and friends. Allen looked tiny and wimpy and drained of confidence. Lambert looked like a graphic novel hero with his jet black anime hair and his big imposing figure in black leather and chains. It wasn't in the end clear who was more manly, but it was clear that in that last hug there was no room for a cultural divide. National metaphor, maybe?

Tags: adam lambert, american idol, gay, kris allen

This week, Hanna, Meghan, and I inaugurated the Double X weekly podcast, called the "XX Gabfest" in tribute to some of our Slate offerings, the "Political Gabfest" and the "Culture Gabfest." We hashed out our thoughts about Obama's speech on abortion at Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi's troubles, and this spring's slew of mommy and daddy books. Like everything else about our dear beta site, we're feeling our way, but you can check out our first effort, or subscribe to the podcast RSS feed, or sign up for it on iTunes. And tell us what you think.

Illustration by Deanna Staffo

Tags: abortion, Ayelet Waldman, Michael Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Obama

You know, it's funny, Hanna: I listened to Adam Davidson duking it out with Elizabeth Warren on Planet Money (love that podcast) and came away filled with satisfaction. That's partly because I like a good argument. But it was also because Davidson and Warren were having a substantive, heated disagreement about economic policy, and they trusted each other enough to argue both rationally and with real emotion seeping into their voices. The flap over his referrals to "senior statesmen" seems like a canard. I don't think he meant that she wasn't senior or statesmanlike. He made it clear that he thinks her views aren't mainstream enough for her role overseeing the bailout, and that's fair game—she's a policymaker with power; he's the kind of journalist who covers his sources and also forms and shares opinions about them. Especially because she was so clearly capable of defending herself and fighting back to show that her concerns about family really should be at the heart of the bailout. And after they played the tape of the fight, Davidson and his colleagues on the show talked about how overwrought he'd gotten, and how it had taken him hours to calm down, and that played to me like a very human sign of how seriously he took the exchange, too.

Tags: adam davidson, elizabeth warren, planet money