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Lauren, I agree with your take on the New York Observer's trend piece about New York women seeking, as you put it, "natural commitment-phile" European men. The women who were profiled were indeed young. Like you, my friends who are paired off but not married are not waiting for the guy to pop the question. It's an annoying article.
I want to emphasize something about the difference between the state of affairs for women in America and in the rest of the civilized world. The competitiveness people bring to "dating" and "closing the deal" here is underpinned by intense economic competition and the desire—increasingly, the necessity—for basic social and physical security. There is a secret amongst the Canadian and European women living in the Big Apple. I know this because I am Canadian and my closest girlfriend is French, and when we resident aliens get together we really tear up this country and how it treats its women. (Our dating lives are fine and always have been.) When we talk about dating or the possibility of having family, with a man or on our own or with—gasp!—a coven of like-minded women (why not?), the conversation is framed entirely by the fact that we can count on our native countries to look after us should we—for whatever reason—not be able to make ends meet stateside. Now, we should be able to secure decent futures for ourselves, with or without male partners: We have Ivy League degrees, speak multiple languages, are savvy and entrepreneurial. We are also a lot more calm about dating and mating than the American women we know, who seem plagued by contradictory forces.
The New York Observer article briefly mentions the benefits of social democracies:
But what makes the European hunks so commitment-happy—a phase that typically takes many New York men until their 40s to reach? ... Maybe it’s the surplus of E.U. benefits—free day care, health care, and tax benefits even for unmarried couples—that makes the possibility of contented ménage a more realistic proposition at an earlier age.
I'm always baffled that women here don't demand the same benefits on which we Canadian and European women rely. It would make dating and mating a lot easier, that's for certain. American family values? Where are they?
The calculus of long-term committment is just different when your country guarantees the basic necessities of an advanced civilization. When your government provides you, as they do in Canada and in Europe, with health care that is unlinked to a job or "productivity," subsidized prescription drugs, child care, free education through graduate school, and, finally, old-age pensions with visiting nurses if you need them to retain your health and a modicum of dignity. Marriage, ultimately, is about family, however you shape it. I sometimes don't blame men here for being lame or commitment-phobic. They're probably terrified of failing as providers or co-providers.
Photograph of Halle Berry and French husband Gabriel Aubrey by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images.
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Amanda, I absolutely agree with you that it will be a disaster if Barbara Fisher's lawsuit against Wired magazine, Dr. Offit, and Amy Wallace succeeds in court. Happily, it's not likely—our libel laws grow out of a very different legal philosophy from those in the U.K., and if anything, it looks like Britain might be changing. What worries me is that the lawsuit might succeed in silencing the debate regardless of the verdict, and that's why I think Fisher—whether she means well or not—should, as one commenter said, "regret opening this Pandora's box."
There are three kinds of people interested in the discussion over the safety of vaccinations: those who feel strongly one way or the other already (that would be, I believe, the airhead zealots and the scare-tactic wielding minions of Uncle Sam) and those who—because they have very young children, because they're about to have very young children or for other reasons, are trying to make a decision. What helps? Articles like the Wired piece that's the subject of this lawsuit, Time magazine's debate between their science editor and Jenny McCarthy, or CBS News' look at who funds the most commonly quoted vaccination advocates. What doesn't help? Lawsuits.
In all honesty, I probably bent over backwards trying not to promote a flame war so that we could talk about the lawsuit, not vaccinations. (Full disclosure: Not only are all of my kids fully vaccinated, but we went in for flu and H1N1 shots too, and if it were up to me, everybody else would too. Vaccinations don't cause autism. But after Vioxx and thalidomide, I'd never argue that the FDA and pharmaceutical companies are enough to keep drugs safe and I want Fisher to be heard, too.)
You picked up an important point: Why is Fisher bothering, and who has enough financial interest to support her in making this case? But I don't think we know the answer. I have copped before to being willing to think well of people and I want to think Fisher and her lawyer are true believers with the best interest of children at heart. Plus, I can't find any sign of either of them being involved, as commenter ZoeCat suggested, in making money off anti-vaccination products. But without some motive I can't see, I don't get this. Fisher needs the likes of Paul Offit and Wired to add fuel to her fire, and she needs mainstream media to cover this issue, so using that Brit tactic is bound to backfire for her.
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This wisdom goes back to the Bible: The power is in the hair. Poor Samson did not have weave technology to rescue him from doom and destruction, but Kate Gosselin does. She held out so much longer than Susan Boyle for her makeover, but finally she has come around and gotten rid of that hair that was only good for superlatives and creative metaphors ("bizarrely unattractive soccer-mom hair helmet," "lawnmower-sliced," "half-shaved poodle," etc.). She may still be a monster but she actually looks human and, dare I say, pretty.
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Could 2010 be the year that shakes the foundation of the global warming "consensus"? A new study shows that climate models may have overstated the amount of carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere as a result of industrialization. According to the findings, “This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.” This study follows the Climategate (I prefer the more felicitous “Warmergate”) e-mails. These leaked exchanges by top climate scientists show a disturbing pattern of cherry-picking and manipulating data in order to make the most alarming case possible for global warming.
Not only have the e-mails raised questions about the certainty of the science, there was also the farcical nature of much of the Copenhagen conference (Hugo Chavez railing against capitalism; mass murderer Robert Mugabe invited to speak). And now here we are, with vast swaths of the planet breaking historical records for cold and snow. Of course, anyone who points that out that it’s cold outside is told it’s moronic to cite weather as evidence that warming predictions have been overstated (Al Gore warned here that if we don’t control our carbon output Earth could end up having the average temperature of Venus: 867 degrees). The climate scientists say the cold and lack of continued warming for the past decade—in defiance of their computer models—is just a natural variation that has no meaning for the overall warming trend. But any time a heat record is broken, those same scientists cite weather conditions as proof of our doom.
Just think what a benefit to humanity it would be if it turned out the case for global warming is weak. We could stop remaking the world’s economy at a cost of trillions, and poor people in developing countries could enjoy the myriad comforts and benefits of carbon-based modern life.
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Hanna, though you mentioned that Rassmussen poll last week that said Michelle Obama's favorability rating was down, according to Robin Givhan in the Washington Post, Obama's "approval" rating is up. It's also not entirely clear that Obama's favorability is down, either: This Marist poll says Michelle is as well-liked as ever. Favorability is about how much Americans like her, while the approval rating measures whether people think Obama is doing a good job as first lady. I don't know how Americans have really formed opinions on Michelle either way, because there hasn't been much coverage of her in recent months.
Givhan says Obama hasn't received much press because she isn't advocating for a single cause, the way Laura Bush advocated for literacy or Lady Bird Johnson supported environmentalism. Even so, Givhan observes that Michelle's approval rating is up because she's been behaving the way Americans think a first lady should behave: sticking to her scripts, speaking formally behind podiums and observing the customary rituals. Hanna, you said in your last post that if people approve of a first lady, it means they don't take her seriously. I disagree. Americans seem to take the office of First Lady very seriously, and they don't like it when a first lady shows too much spunk or deviates from their fixed notions of appropriateness—at Jezebel, Latoya Peterson brings up this summer's "shorts-gate" as an example of the upset that Michelle Obama caused when people believe she is not observing the proper decorum.
All of this brings me to Michelle Obama's appearance on the Food Network show Iron Chef America on Sunday night. She was advocating for one of her several causes by showing off the White House garden. The chefs participating in the competition all had to use food from the garden in the meals they cooked, and one of the challengers was the head White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford. Obama was somewhat wooden and heavily scripted. Her considerable charm was not on display. She was wearing a brightly-colored version of the '50s "New Look": a dress with a very full skirt and a prim cardigan. She looked polished, formal, and thoroughly unobjectionable. Appearances like these will help her approval rating continue to rise. After all, food is nonpartisan.
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I really like the advice below from reader Sarah Natividad about how to deal with not sharing your kid's passionate interest in a subject. She sent it to me after I wrote about how I don't care about astronomy, which my kids love. Sarah is speaking as the mother of a child with Asperger's syndrome. But her tips are for all of us bemused parents, I think. From Sarah:
1. Study up, there will be a quiz later. Just pretend like you're in college again and there's this one class you have to take to fulfill some requirement. You don't have to learn in as much depth as your child does, but you should at least learn enough that you can follow the conversation. You can also ask your child to teach you; this makes children feel extremely important and grown-up, and it takes you off the hook for not having in-depth knowledge of the topic.
2. You don't have to love the topic, but you do have to love your child enough to care about his interest in his topic. Just like you would for your husband. If your husband worked at a widget factory, you might not like to work there, but you'd know that widgets are made of unobtainium and the Hyphenduphenator breaks easily and needs its flux capacitors replaced, and that if you want anything done you have to be on Pam in HR's good side. Well, play is a kid's work. So I suck it up and listen for my kid's sake; I owe it to him to at least not hold it against him that he likes something I don't.
3. Knit while you listen. Or some other thing you can do with your hands that will take up the part of your attention that would otherwise be wandering over to, "Why the hell do I have to sit here and listen to this? I have important things to do! I am boooooooored out of my frickin' skull!" Say nothing more than the occasional "Uh huh," "Really," or "That's fascinating." (Of course, having a kid with AS makes this trick much easier to pull off; as long as you keep making conversational type noises, they think you're still interested.)
4. Don't obsess over the kid's obsession. While you don't have a right to only hear things in which you are intensely interested, you DO have a need to not spend all your waking hours pretending you like Bionicles or know something about land speeders. Set aside time for both stuff you like and for stuff your kid likes. Read your fascinating article on companionate marriages—but not during "kid time."
5. Teach your kid how to get his own answers when he has questions about his topic, so that he's not constantly coming to you for answers you don't have. My kids are Wikipedia fiends. My son has literally checked out every book in the Salt Lake City Public Library on the topics of Legos and origami (though not all at once; the library cards have limits).
Photograph of child by Ryan McVay/Digital Vision/Getty Images.
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The New York Observer today has a new trend piece up about New York women, fed up with dating the man-children of the Big Apple, who are taking to Europe, or at least foreign-grad-student hangouts, to snag themselves a natural commitment-phile: the European man. Of course, by "trend piece," I mean "story about three women in New York."
The piece opens with a fresh-out-of-New York 25-year-old grad student, Lisa, who, after years of dating men who went commitment-limp on her, met a Danish man at a barbeque in September and is now engaged to be married. She says:
“I think in New York you could get to a certain stage with someone and then they turn things around on you, like you imagined this whole thing when you know you didn’t imagine it, and they just freak out and disappear ... I always felt like you could never raise those [marriage] questions, but my boyfriend now is just so certain about our relationship, and he doesn’t get scared when you bring this stuff up.”
A few more tales of New York-dating dissatisfaction follow, all resolved by the eventual fairy-tale ending in the arms of some European charmer. The women meet said romantic savior at a bus station in Berlin or at a grad student gathering in the States or on a train across Europe. The romance is immediate and intense. They're engaged to be married within a few months. And this is a good thing, apparently? The article seems to insist we ladies should all run to Europe right now. It's like the Gold Rush, only this time the gold is ring-shaped. Oh, and pay no attention to the actual statistics—that American men, on average, get married about four years earlier than the men of most European nations.
Sure, the American commitment-phobic male is a well-known trope, probably popularized for the most part by Sex and the City. Girl spends eight years cohabiting with boy, and then he decides not to marry her and up and leaves. As my grandmother often and frequently sums it up for me: "They won't buy the cow if they get the milk for free." (I think I'm the cow in this scenario.) Or as Beyonce puts it: "If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it." But contrary to the "Own me! Own me!" view of commitment, all of the New York women I know lingering in lasting long-term but nonconjugal unions are doing so because they're not ready to get married, not because they're anxiously biding time until their boyfriends decide to pop the question.
It'd be nice to see an article that depicts women as the well-rounded, rational beings that they are. You know, people who have multidimensional thoughts about marriage and don't morph into rom-com cliches the minute the word is dangled before their faces. I'm not the only one who finds the prospect of marrying someone you've known for three months, let alone someone you met at a bus depot, totally terrifying. So why am I always reading about it like it's some sort of female fantasy come true? Besides, most of the ladies interviewed for this article are only 25, 26, 27 years old. How much terrible dating could they have endured?
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The New York Observer has published a profile of Lisa Carnoy, the Bank of America executive who pulled off a stock sale that raised $19 billion for BoA and allowed the company to pay back its TARP loans from the government. Carnoy sounds like a fascinating businesswoman and anecdotes from the piece—like the one about how she once wooed Lululemon Athletica with tales of her team’s yoga and fitness habits—hint that she brings a different perspective, one that is influenced by her gender. Nothing wrong with that—instead, I see it as something to celebrate.
But I’d like to juxtapose that article with the piece that Hanna mentioned yesterday, the profile of Rahm Emanuel from the Daily Beast. Rebecca Dana writes that “He is a doting father, with an office so full of family photographs it struck filmmaker Karen Price, who made HouseQuake, a documentary about the 2006 elections, as ‘unusual,’ even for an elected official.”
We are told that Lisa Carnoy is an incredible businesswoman despite being a mother of four. And we are told that Rahm Emanuel is an incredible father despite his demanding career. I guess we have a ways to go, don’t we?
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Who needs a National Ambassador for Young People's Literature? We do, if only because "read more" has been gradually replaced over the last decade with "watch less." I was a passionate kid reader, the one with her "nose in a book," but my only child of reading age shows no signs of following in my footsteps, and I'm not the only parent, teacher, or librarian convinced that more reading (not just less screen time) makes a better, happier, more resilient kid.
Katherine Paterson (best known for Bridge to Terabithia) will spend the next two years essentially continuing the work she's being honored for—encouraging readers and nonreaders alike to pick up more books. She replaces Jon Scieszka, famed for The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, and both have been enjoying the contrast, agreeing that one key to getting kids to read is giving them a variety of different books from which to choose.
As for other advice, what Paterson says isn't new, but it's worth repeating: Read out loud, early and often, and don't stop just because your kids can read to themselves. Donalyn Miller, in a recent guest blog post for the Washington Post's Education section, has a few more suggestions: Give kids time to read, let them choose their material, set a good example, give them access to plenty of books. I look at our lives and our schedules, and I see that although I think we do those things, we probably don't do them enough. Maybe the point of a reading ambassador is to usher adults back into the worlds we loved as kids—from Terabithia to Narnia to the India of the Just So Stories and the Utah of The Great Brain—and remind us to make sure our kids get ample opportunities and encouragement to make those same trips.
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KJ, your post on Barbara Loe Fisher's lawsuit against Amy Wallace and Dr. Paul Offit sent chills down my spine. That's because various quacks and medical charlatans have been using libel lawsuits in order to intimidate and silence critics for years now in England. Since they don't have the facts on their side, they have no other choice but to use the threat of financial ruin to shut down those who do have the facts. It's quite a bit like the way that creationists in the United States try to shut down presentations of evolutionary theory in biology classes in public schools, either through direct censorship or by making it so miserable to teach it that schools give up altogether. But since the United States has a higher standard of proof for libel than the U.K., I honestly never thought that the tactic of silencing critics through legal harassment would take off. It seems Fisher is floating a test case that, if successful, could have huge ramifications for proponents of science-based medicine and therefore huge effects on the public health.
Some background is available on a recent Skepchick podcast about the way that the pro-science, pro-skepticism movement has helped kickstart an effort aimed at libel law reform in England. The Coalition for Libel Reform has documented many cases in which England's overly loose libel laws have been used to silence journalists and activists—journalists have suffered expensive, atrocious lawsuits for exposing organized crime, terrorism funding, and the backstory behind the Rwandan genocide. But for our purposes, what's interesting is how pro-science activists and journalists have suffered an intimidation campaign through the courts to prevent them from speaking out about various suspicious medical claims. Simon Singh is still battling an expensive libel case against him because he aggressively questioned chiropractors who claim they can cure various childhood illnesses, and Ben Goldacre and the Guardian faced a lawsuit from a supplement manufacturer because Goldacre wrote an article denouncing the manufacturer for claiming AIDS drugs don't work but his supplements do. The Guardian won the lawsuit, but the award of £200,000 falls well below the £500,000 they spent defending themselves.
Obviously, the idea behind these lawsuits is to make it prohibitively expensive to promote good science, particularly if it hits the pocketbooks of those promoting "alternative" medicine. But supposedly this tactic won't work in the United States, which has a higher burden of proof for libel. That Fisher is trying it concerns me. I'm also unclear on what the anti-vaccination folks get out of this whole thing. In the lawsuits I mention above, there's a clear financial incentive for chiropractors and supplement salesmen when it comes to silencing critics. But as far as I know, anti-vaccination proponents aren't promoting some lucrative alternative. But that they're adopting this tactic should set off a million alarm bells, knowing what we know about how this has shaken out in the U.K.
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
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