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For women in Muslim countries with sharia-based government, gains are of a one-step forward, eight-steps back nature. CNN checked in with Nujood Ali, the Yemeni girl who became famous at the age of 10 after escaping her husband and making her way to court, where the judge who discovered her took her home to play with his children. Glamour honored her as woman of the year and brought her to New York for the awards ceremony.
But poor Nujood has not gotten her happy ending, as the CNN.com article demonstrates. Perhaps most offensive of all? Nujood was granted the divorce she sought, but:
her husband was compensated, not prosecuted. Nujood was ordered to pay him more than $200—a huge amount in a country where the United Nations Development Programme says 15.7 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day.
That’s right. The man who beat and raped her, and who went to jail because Yemen law sets the age for marriage at 15, got what amounts to spousal support from a little girl.
Image is a screenshot from a video about Nujood's story.
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Jaycee Dugard has apparently defied the face-on-the-milk-carton narrative: On Wednesday, she walked into a police station and announced that she was the 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., in 1991 while she walked to her school bus stop as her stepfather looked on. A DNA test confirming her identity is pending, but police and Dugard’s family are declaring that she is who she says she is. (Already this differs from a similar case from earlier this summer, when a man announced that he was the little boy from New York kidnapped as a 2-year-old in 1955; DNA tests demonstrated that his claim—based largely on the fact that he never felt like he fit in with his family—was false. ) A man and a woman have been charged in connection with the case.
Unless Dugard was kept under lock and key for the entire 18 years of her captivity, over the next few days, certainly there will be an abundance of pieces about Stockholm syndrome and wondering why she didn't ask for help before. If Dugard’s captors gave her any freedom, locals will start piping up about how she went to the grocery store or to the park, suggesting that she could have fled at any time. That’s the pattern that emerged after kidnapped children Elizabeth Smart and Shawn Hornbeck reappeared after most had written them off for dead; Smart initially denied her identity when confronted by police, and Hornbeck apparently was allowed, after some time had passed, to socialize with kids his captor’s neighborhood and even have a girlfriend. Hornbeck’s story was even turned into an episode of Law & Order, in which the fictionalized version of Hornbeck not only chose to stay with his kidnapped but actually killed a young boy who threatened his place.
I have a difficult time conceptualizing the psychological torture that would lead a child to stay with her tormentor. Fear of the kidnapper hurting her if she’s caught in an escape attempt? Fear of reprisal to her true family? A defensive response to the sexual, physical, and emotional trauma of the most restrictive phase of captivity? Brainwashing that her family no longer wants her, that this is how life must be from now on? Might children’s natural ability to adapt, the same thing that allows them to remain cheerful in the face of more mundane family strife or even learn a new language rapidly, keep them tethered to an abuser? Unfairly, Dugard will be asked a lot of questions about her behavior in coming days; perhaps it will even be difficult for her family, including a 19-year-old sister she barely knew, to keep the suspicions from their minds. But at least they’ve been reunited.
Image is a screenshot from a video about Jaycee Dugard's disappearance.
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This week I stepped blindly into the circumcision debate, which, lately, seems to generate as much fervor as abortion. I am guest blogging at the Daily Dish, and wrote in favor of the CDC's proposal to recommend more circumcisions as a protection against HIV and STDs. My posts drew dozens of e-mails that ranged from vile to condescending. "You're a typical woman," began one, and went downhill from there.
Always a sensitive topic, it's gotten even more so during the health care debate. Conservatives have lately taken it up as the symbol of what Obama plans to do to them. Gabriel Winant of Salon writes a very funny piece on the subject, quoting Rush Limbaugh: "It is President Obama who wants [to] mandate circumcision. ... And that means, if we need to save our penises from anybody, it's Obama."
Since most of my responses came from outraged men, I want to poll lady DoubleX readers on the topic: Are you outraged by circumcision? If so, please write and tell us about it.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Here’s one other take on Katie Roiphe’s addiction to her newborn: In addition to the mistake of assuming that all or most “feminists” think X, I think Roiphe has fallen prey to the error of conflating what happens when a woman stops working with the magical experience of having a baby. Which is just to say that the professional experience she’s describing here—of fearing the return to work, of the soggy cognitive skills, of cutting short professional commitments, and of her complete lack of enthusiasm for the impending return to “the great world where people talk and think and write” is precisely what I experienced on my own maternity leaves. But it’s also what I’ve just experienced in the days after my recent vacation to Israel.
Whether you take time off to have a baby, to undergo surgery, or to remodel your house, the act of dropping out of the work world for a while has very real consequences; chief among them being that you just stop caring about work so much. I can look at my own muzzy-headed disinclination to rejoin the world of Big Ideas this week as a consequence of “falling in love”—with the sunsets over Jerusalem; with my family there; with the experience of again caring, full-time, for my sons for a few weeks. And all those things really did happen. But what also happened is what happens to every woman to takes a time-out from a consuming career: perspective. Suddenly the deadlines and the bylines don’t feel all that important. And as mothers we have to learn somehow to toggle back and forth between thinking that work is the only thing that matters, and believing our babies are the only things that matter. On a good day, that only happens about 13 times per hour.
At the risk of suggesting that “feminism” means X, I always thought it meant balancing and juggling a life that may seem to have shrunk down to the size of a onesie, but which is actually much bigger than the life we knew before.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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On the Daily Dish, Hanna waded into fearsome waters when she suggested that the reaction to the CDC's consideration of promoting routine circumcision for babies in the United States has been hysterical. I generally find the anti-circumcision advocates to be on the crazy and rabid side, too. I have two circumcised boys, and I thought at the time that getting snipped bothered my kids a little more than their newborn vaccines and a little less than the spinal tap my older son had when he was a few days old. Plus, I'm prone to be defensive of this ancient Jewish carnal practice.
But on scientific grounds, I still think neutrality on circumcision is the way to go. Yes, the results of circumcising adult men in South Africa were stunning, in terms of HIV prevention. But as I wrote when those findings came out:
Circumcision is a lot trickier to implement widely than other preventive measures like vaccines. This is surgery, after all, which when done on adult men involves weeks of recovery. If the South African findings are borne out, says Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, it may make sense to mount a public-health campaign to circumcise as many men as possible in places like South Africa where AIDS is rampant. But that says little about the United States, where the risk of contracting HIV is low for most people. Which is why the American circumcision debate probably will never be settled by science.
For babies, of course, there are no weeks of recovery (just ineradicable trauma, the antis would retort!) And so the CDC doctors who want to raise declining circumcision rates in the U.S. talk about this as one more "tool in the toolbox" of AIDS prevention. If it's a harmless enough intervention, why not? That rationale works for me, personally. But I don't think it really makes sense as medical policy. The CDC shouldn't push circumcision on American parents who don't want it until the agency has a better answer than, hey, it might help here, too—it just might.
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There’s a slim hope ventured by some in today’s articles about Senator Kennedy that perhaps his death might somehow help improve the prospects of health care reform by briefly relieving the partisan acrimony and serving as a reminder of the urgency of his signature legislative cause, which is, after all, about people’s lives and deaths. But no one is counting on it. And when you think about it, the ailing Kennedy’s own end-of-life decisions seem like every American’s ideal, hardly an advertisement for overhauling a system that makes such options possible. First, he got to choose the intensive treatment he wanted—surgery, chemo, and radiation—although his tumor was judged inoperable and lethal, and although he was diagnosed at 76. And then he got to die a dignified death, not trapped in a hospital, but saying farewell to family, friends, and dogs on Cape Cod. No one would dream of begrudging him his “good ending,” as the Times called it; it is inspiring. But perhaps the Senator wouldn’t mind if, as we pay tribute to the valiant close to an impressive career, we also note how much his “prudently aggressive” medical approach must have cost, and how unusually lucky he was in the way it played out.
Photograph of Ted Kennedy by Jim Rogash/Getty Images.
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A guest post from Amy Bloom:
I'm glad that Katie Roiphe is crazy about her baby. I was crazy about my babies, too. Even better, I am still crazy about my children, now that they are adults. I don't fault her for the headline, as I'm sure that was chosen for her. What baffles me is her claim that somehow feminists have failed to acknowledge, in writing, that many lucky mothers love their babies. (We do understand that that is a gift, right? That many mothers find themselves unable to experience that lovely, dopey, mind-altering attachment?) Really? No word on this from Grace Paley, Tillie Olson, Adrienne Rich, Ursula LeGuin, Bronwen Wallace? This seems to be an odd, blank spot in Ms. Roiphe's reading. But not so odd, I guess, if one prefers to read Rebecca West and Virgina Woolf. It is true that there is not so much in literature on the glorious romance with the baby, for the same reason that happy marriages, conflict-free lives, and blissful vacations figure so rarely in literature.
I'm pretty sure that some feminists were keen to point out (since there had been so many thousand years of silence on the subject) that motherhood was harder than lots of nonmothers thought. I'm equally sure that many feminists did—and do—adore their children, and many even wrote about it in the past and blog about it now, for better and worse.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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As a lover of crime writing, I am mourning the passing of Dominick Dunne, one of the best practitioners of the genre. Dunne wrote about the degenerate side of the wealthy, and even though he had an eye for debauched detail, he always kept his sympathies with the victim, because of his way into the subject: the murder of his daughter Dominique. Dominique was a 22-year-old emerging actress when she was strangled to death on the lawn of her Los Angeles home by her abusive ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney. If you have not read Dominick Dunne's account of his daughter's trial, published in Vanity Fair in 1984, go right now and read the entire thing (via The Awl). It is an impressive piece of work. Not just because of the quality of the writing (magazine prose of the best kind), but also because Dunne was able to function at all after the horror of his daughter's trial. Dunne had been a successful movie producer, but after a divorce and a series of flops, he became an unemployed alcoholic. He was just beginning to forge a new career as a novelist and magazine writer when Dominique was killed. As Graydon Carter wrote in his tribute to Dunne, it was a thrilling second act.
Photograph of Dominick Dunne by Katy Winn/Getty Images for IMG.
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