After a few days of media attention, the accusations of domestic violence against New York Gov. David Paterson's aide dropped off the radar. Aide David Johnson says he'll be vindicated; so far, he hasn't even been charged. Now that it's clear that Gov. Paterson won't immediately resign as a result of the accusations that he encouraged his aide and friend's accuser not to pursue the matter, few people are still interested. But there's at least one subset of men and women who are still tuned in.

David Johnson's live-in partner at the time, Sherr-una Booker, told the Bronx family court that Johnson choked her, pushed her into a piece of furniture and took her phone so that she couldn't call the police. Choking is a common form of domestic abuse—it's what Chris Brown is said to have done to Rihanna, and Charlie Sheen is accused of doing to his wife—and it's also considered a warning sign of more serious violence. But under New York law, choking is barely considered a misdemeanor (which would carry a maximum sentence of one year in jail), because it leaves little or no sign of serious injury. The officers who responded to Booker's eventual call apparently thought the incident she described didn't even reach that level; they wrote a report for the violation "harassment," which could—but rarely does—result in a 15-day sentence. Advocates are working to change this (choking in a domestic context has been specifically designated as a felony in several states)—but that 15-day maximum penalty (with a $250 fine) doesn't stand out as much of a deterrent, or as much of an incentive for a victim of violence to involve the legal system in the first place.

When I prosecuted domestic violence cases in Manhattan, I met many victims, both of serious assaults and of those the law regards as trivial, who were convinced that the courts couldn't help. The Bronx District Attorney's Office may be investigating or awaiting the results of Special Counsel Judith Kaye's investigation into Paterson's conduct. There may be excellent, but unrevealed, reasons not to pursue the accusations against Johnson (although what's often referred to as Booker's "failure to press charges" should not be one of them, as New York state has a policy of pursuing domestic violence cases without regard to the wishes of the accuser). But to a victim of domestic violence, the fact that David Johnson seems unscathed is one more reason not to pick up the phone.

Tags: david johnson, david paterson, domestic violence, Sherr-una Booker

Last year when data first emerged about how men were experiencing job losses at far greater rates than women, some feminists wondered if it might mean more gender fluidity for men, who might be more willing to be stay-at-home fathers. In a piece about how the recession affects family relationships published in Slate last February, Emily Bazelon didn't think that men would be so quick to relinquish their gender roles, quoting a study that showed that unemployed men "spend more time sleeping, watching TV, and looking for a job," rather than helping out around the house or with child care. In today's New York Observer, Irina Aleksander offers a peek into a New Jersey-based group for men who lost high-paying jobs in finance and accounting, founded by a life coach named Paul Anovick, called Men in Transition. Her article confirms Emily's earlier suspicions.

These men still define themselves through work, or lackthereof. One group member, Steve, 44, a former director of business development at a marketing firm, says he was reluctant to join the group. "I didn’t want to come at first. ... I guess it’s a guy thing. I originally called it ‘miserable men,’ because I thought that’s what Men in Transition was: a bunch of guys who were talking about how miserable they were. I didn’t want to be with a bunch of losers. Nothing personal." To be unemployed and talking about your feelings means you're a loser, Steve is saying. Nothing personal! Aleksander is sympathetic to these men—it's impossible not to be; they're going through a rough time. But if they were able to define for themselves what being a man means, they might not need a life coach to tell them about how to properly "brand" themselves.

Tags: family, men in transition, new york observer, recession

—Iran has the highest rates of rhinoplasties in the world. In China, surgical leg lengthening becomes increasingly popular. Extreme beautification goes global. [The New York Times]

—More schoolchildren are committing suicide or require reconstructive surgery, as U.S. bullying culture expands and intensifies. Both in the classroom and on the Internet, children's cruelty is becoming more violent and sexualized. [NY Daily News]

—Exercising for 60 minutes a day won't actually prevent middle-age weight gain. [Harvard Science, The Daily Beast]

—The real life morality play of Tiger Woods gets some new twists: $30,000-per-hand gambling stints with Michael Jordan, the cheap seduction of his mistresses, and an inner circle of enablers. [Opinionator Blog, Vanity Fair]

—A transgender woman is found dead and naked in her destroyed Queens apartment. [NY Daily News]

Tags: Bullying, china, cosmetic surgery, cyber-bullying, exercise, iran, Michael Jordan, tiger woods, transgender, weight gain, what we're talking about

I flunked David Brooks’ test today on whether, if I were Sandra Bullock, I'd rather have that Oscar or have my husband back. I immediately went for the Oscar, which means, according to Brooks, I am “absolutely crazy.” He says an Oscar may signal having arrived at the top of one’s profession, but everyone knows a successful marriage translates into deep, enduring happiness. The reason I chose the Oscar is that if I actually were Sandra Bullock, it would mean that I had chosen to marry a sleazeball. Given that, it would be inevitable he would cheat, so the Oscar seemed more enduring. I agree with Brooks that our relationships are a key to long-term happiness. But he sets up a professional success vs. personal success dichotomy that is as useless as the nature vs. nurture one. Human relations are hard; if they weren’t, all marriages would be blissful. For many people work is a haven from personal difficulties, not just because of the money, but because it provides a sense of identity and accomplishment—also crucial human needs. It used to be that American women were given practically no roles in life except as the nurturers of relationships. But it’s not just a need to pay the bills that has sent us streaming into the workplace. Multigenerational living used to be mankind’s default mode. But financial independence has allowed us to run screaming from that model. Brooks mentions a study (I do wish on the Times’ Web site that he would have linked to the studies he characterizes) that found that joining a group that meets once a month produces the same happiness as doubling one’s income. That must be some book club! But I am dubious.

Tags: David Brooks, sandra bullock

Emily, I would like to believe that the health care bill won’t lead to federal funding of abortion. And I think you are right that the Hyde Amendment isn’t going anywhere. The health care debate alerted many people, I’m sure, to the fact that the amendment isn’t long-standing law but a rider that must be renewed each year and that applies only to the HHS/Labor/Education appropriations, not all federal funding.

But, like Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post, I’m not as optimistic that we won’t eventually see federal dollars going toward abortion. We’re already seeing that the spirit of the bill is differing from the letter of the law. Children with pre-existing conditions were supposed to be able to get insurance coverage from Day 1, but the bill was written so clumsily that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebilius has to issue regulations to make it happen. On another front, the bill provides for $10 billion to hire new IRS agents to make sure citizens are complying with the mandates, but as Tyler Cowen points out (and Megan McArdle provides good analysis), the Joint Committee on Taxation has stated that “non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties.” So people are supposed to be buying insurance but there’s no way to enforce it, and we’re still spending $10 billion on new IRS agents.

What do the pre-existing conditions snafu and enforcement questions have to do with abortion? Nothing.  But we’re less than a week into the implementation of health care reform, and we’re already seeing the differences between the product that was advertised and the product that we received. A pinky-swear from President Obama not to fund abortion doesn’t exactly make me rest easy.

Tags: abortion, health care reform, hyde amendment

Because by some weird clause in the American Redneck handbook nearly naked men pinning each other to the ground before a jeering crowd has never been considered gay, it’s a big deal that last night on Spike TV Total Nonstop Action wrestling debuted the first-ever openly bisexual pro wrestler, Orlando Jordan. At his first match, Jordan, a 6-foot-4, 250-pound guy, entered the TNA arena flanked by hot escorts, crawled through the ring, and sat down in front of a tri-colored bisexual pride flag. Then he fake-kicked the fake-crap out of some dudes, as pro wrestlers do. No problems here.

Apparently there have been a few “gay” characters for the benefit of pro-wrestling theatrics before: Gorgeous George and “Exotic” Adrian Street, both of whome were played by straight guys performing as flamboyant, over-the-top “stereotypical” gay men in the ring. But according to one blog, TNA and Spike weren’t happy with they way Jordan’s real-life boyfriend rubbed his crotch pre-game. Note to wrestlers: It’s only OK if you’re pretending to like the crotch rub!

Tags: gay, TNA, wrestling

The most alarming detail about Monday’s bombings in Moscow is that they may have been committed by female terrorists. The Black Widows, female avengers from the war with Chechnya, have been around for more than a decade. They made up over half the bombers in the 2002 attack on the Moscow theater. Still, their existence has the power to shock. The maternal instinct and resistance to violence are assumed to be so hardwired into women, that despite their growth in the ranks of the suicide bomber, we still can’t get used to the idea.

Of course, the way the press unlocks this brain freeze is by grafting extreme domestic tragedies onto the bombers to explain their aberrant behavior. News stories always describe the Black Widows in the terms of a Greek tragedy, as women so burned up and denatured by personal loss that they set themselves to Medusa-level violence as a form of revenge. In today’s New York Times, an attorney describes a Chechen female bomber as "emotionally distressed after her husband was murdered in what appeared to be a business dispute." These girls, said Natalya V. Yevlapova "are just pushed into a corner."

The first female suicide bomber was a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who drove a truck into an Israeli convoy in Lebanon in 1985. News reports at first described her as pregnant, and then depressed, but it turns out that neither of those were true. Since then explanations of the motives of female suicide bombers have stuck to a few female friendly tropes: Young and psychologically disturbed, revenge seeking, or naïve and under the sway of charismatic male influence (Said Buryatsky in the case of the latest Chechen women). But researchers who study female suicide bombers have found that none of those are true, or any more true than they are for men.

"There is precious little evidence of uniquely feminine motivations driving women’s attacks," wrote Lindsey O’Rourke, a researcher who wrote a dissertation on female suicide bombers for the University of Chicago. Like men, the women have a range of motivations. They may have, say, lost a family member in an attack, but so have most male suicide bombers. In the broad view, the great majority—95 percent—carry out attacks as part of a military operation against an occupying force. What motivates them is loyalty to a cause, and some grievance, in about the same proportion as it motivates men.

Instead the rise of the female suicide bomber has been motivated by something else entirely: They are remarkably effective. In her dissertation O’Rourke discovered that their attacks were almost twice as lethal as the attacks of men. A female suicide bomber is more likely to be successful, and kill 9 victims, as opposed to 5.5 for a man. They have the advantage of surprise, and societal norms often prevent security officers from searching them thoroughly. Also, as British agencies discovered, women in Muslim societies can hide 12 pounds of explosives under a chadora. Women, it turns out, make excellent terrorists, and recruiters have not failed to notice that.

Does this count as some kind of twisted feminist progress? In the case of some terrorist groups, maybe. Female suicide bombers started out in terrorist groups that were secular but still very male dominated. These secular groups used an aggressive equality idiom to recruit women. A secular Palestinian group described a suicide mission as a way for a woman to escape "the box of a weeping, wailing creature always crying for help.” When the Tamil Tigers set out to assassinate the Indian prime minister they gave the honor to their sister group, the Birds of Paradise.

But in most cases, equality does not seem the driving force. Hamas leaders are still very reluctant to use female bombers, and often require them to have chaperones, or get permission from their husbands or fathers. As a reward they are offered not male virgins but a form of domestic bliss—extreme beauty and a husband who is pure.

O’Rourke proposes an interesting theory that many female suicide bombers are in fact operating out of very traditional instincts. They want to restore gender norms that they have somehow violated. They are, she writes, "women who realize they have deviated, intentionally or unintentionally, from the gender behavior norms of their society and may feel pressure to reaffirm a connection to it." They have lost their rightful place by being raped, or divorced, or infertile, or failing to get married, and bombing restores them to a place of honor in their community. Female suicide bombers, for example, tend to be a few years older than their male counterparts, and past marrying age. One failed Palestinian bomber O’Rourke profiles, for example, is 35 and tomboy-ish, maybe even transgendered. When asked what motivated her, she said, "Who would want to marry someone like me?"

Tags: black widows, female suicide bomber, moscow bombing

The most amusing part of this Jezebel post asking what makes a feminist rock star has got to be the link to Tim Cavanaugh sniffily mansplaining to the women writing about women in music that their work is very cute, if missing a critical economic analysis that supposedly is the master mover of all musical trends, a theory that requires him to pretend America as a whole embraced bands like Huggy Bear and Excuse 17 that worked in a boom time.  But I should give him and Anna N. of Jezebel credit for at least asking what conditions we'll accept before we call someone a feminist rock star. As a feminist and music fan, it's an issue that I obsess over to no small degree.

Anna suggested that female musicians who want to be stars nowadays have to accept a persona of starved, sexually available, and cookie-cutter cute, offering Beth Ditto as the exception that proves the rule. I sat down and made a list of female musicians I think escape this trap with grace and style, but I had to throw it out because outside of Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, none were contemporary or popular enough to really offer a counterbalance. I'm forced to conclude sadly that we do live in a backlash era of music, when the most powerful female pop music icons are Beyoncé singing songs of wedding-ring desperation and Lady Gaga, with her rapidly shrinking thighs.

But let's face it; I don't see a whole lot of feminists doing the work of pushing back. Feminist icons aren't handed to you on a silver platter. You have to follow their careers, go to their shows, and buy their records. Instead, I see a lot of feminist bloggers obsess over Lady Gaga's latest video that does have admittedly campy humor, but also plays it way too safe both music-wise and image-wise to really be as subversive as we hoped it would be. Lady Gaga has a remarkable ability to suck all the oxygen out of the room, but that's because everyone lets her do it.

I went to South by Southwest this year, as I try to do every year, and I promise you there was no shortage of badass women rocking out in exactly the ways that feminists would like to see. I saw bands reminiscent of foxcore, ones that channeled Le Tigre's wry sense of dance pop humor, bands recapturing the Cyndi Lauper-esque '80s sound,  garage rock,  post-punk, and artsy queercore. No one was trying to win the audience over by being non-hreatening, no one looked like she was about to pass out from hunger, and I didn't hear a single song lyric trying to imply that women are born desperate for male validation.

Tim Cavanaugh would have you believe that the interest in female-heavy and even feminist music is simply a product of economic tides, but I'd argue that it's the result of actual women knowing what they like and going after it. Pop music in the '90s became feminist-friendly because it had to—the labels were trying to poach the pro-feminist audience that was carefully built by alternative rock acts like L7, the Breeders, and Sonic Youth that incorporated feminist themes and female musicians. Even Beth Ditto didn't fall out of the sky into people's laps but was supported in the underground by fans buying the many Gossip albums that came out before they hit it big. Few things illustrate the Gandhi maxim "Be the change you seek" better than music. If we wait around for a male-dominated music industry to hand it to us, we'll be waiting for a very long time.

Tags: beth ditto, beyonce, feminist music, lady gaga, riot grrrl

Nevada legalized male prostitution in December of last year by making a simple "housekeeping" change to the wording of the law, which had previously required prostitutes to undergo cervical testing for sexually transmitted diseases and now allows for urethral exams as well. But the first male prostitute himself, a gap-toothed young man who compared himself with Rosa Parks in an interview with Details, quit yesterday after receiving fewer than 10 customers. The proprietors of the Shady Lady said they'd had requests for a straight male's services for threesomes and thought he might bring in other female business, but they apparently overestimated the market, even for a guy who promised to love a woman "for a whole hour" and help her leave feeling "empowered."

Tags: male prostition

Following the appalling revelations about child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests that have filled the papers recently, one question has started to nag at me: What about the girls? So many of the news stories focus on priests taking advantage of their position to rape and otherwise sexually traumatize boys and young men. Now, I have no way of knowing this for sure, but I’ll bet that thousands of girls the world over were similarly abused. Is anyone else wondering if young women have been left out of this story, and if there’s some agenda that’s driving that absence?

Tags: Catholic Church, child sexual abuse, priests