Yes, Nancy Pelosi is turning into the new villain of choice, as Irin Carmon at Jezebel writes. Protesters this weekend had pictures of her—not Obama—with a Pinocchio nose growing out of her face. The Republican party has turned her into their fundraising demon—almost literally—in this Photoshopped picture that places her in the pit of hell. And this photo in the New York Times today, which makes her look unbearably smug and unattractive, does not help matters.

The question I can’t answer yet is: Is this sexist or is it a sign of feminist progress? The fact that there is a casual assumption on the part of the American right that a woman was pulling all the strings seems like forward movement. Feminists could do worse than have a woman stand in as the next Ted Kennedy. But it might be, if you dig a little deeper, that you’ll find some Salem lady-hatred under the surface, some notion that beneath the mask of controlled perfection there lurks some kind of witch.

Tags: Nancy Pelosi, Pelosi demonized

The New York Times' Room for Debate blog asks contributors to debate the question of quotas for female board members at publicly listed companies. Norway demands that 40 percent of board members be womenfolk; Spain and the Netherlands have quotas as well. Companies that implement the quotas apparently take a hit, as people with more ovaries but less experience end up in charge. Linda Hirshman responds:

The Norwegian plan mandates assignment of board seats to females. The German plan rests on enhanced maternity leave and the like. Maternity leave plus quotas equals less experienced women perceived as lightweights in the boardroom.

The real glass ceiling is at home.

I think that gets near to why such policies strike me as falling short of progress. There is something deeply regressive about the combination of never-ending maternity leave and boardroom quotas, something that suggests the world is not changing but rather bending to accomodate men and women at their most traditional. Enshrining moronic binaries into law is, if nothing else, silly. And in the combination of pregnancy packages and affirmative action there is the suggestion that we are making exceptions for women not just because they're discriminated against, but also because they're dominated by their own fertility. The capacity to regulate pregnancy before and after conception is the reason women can even dream of such jobs, can expect to be defined by something other than their capacity to reproduce. Plenty of items on the progressive wish-list, like universal day care, do not diminish that sense of control over biology. Giving women easy access to top jobs just because they are women somehow does.

Jess, I love the vision of myself putting away margaritas on the porch all summer while my four children entertain themselves in the yard, catching frogs, digging in the mud, and lighting things (not the frogs) on fire, as country kids do, and I feel that Elisabeth Badinter (author of Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère [The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother]) might put down her cigarette and approve. I have no interest in spending more than 20 hours a week driving children to activities to get them into top private schools and colleges, as those U. of C.-San Diego economists found women doing, and I'm certainly not about to quit working to do it (you can add a laptop into that vision of me with the margarita). But articles like this one in the Harvard alumni magazine give me pause. Even while I'm laughing at the new additions to the taxonomy of vehicular parenting, the one unifying element in every story of "snowplow" parenting and the astonishingly overachieving, overscheduled kids it has produced is this: It worked.

Not that I equate parenting success with Harvard admissions—far from it. (It's probably worth noting here that I don't officially receive the Harvard alumni magazine.) But we don't read stories about a dad calling up his kid's employer to suggest that the kid get moved from the fry station to the drive-through, and if there are Osprey parents parachuting supplies in to the local community colleges, the NYT and the WSJ haven't covered it. Nope—those young athlete-concert-musician-music producer-chefs have been snowplowed right into Harvard, and although the Harvard admissions professionals and other staff quoted in the article purport to disapprove of the "nonstop" schedules of students accustomed to being shuttled from activity to activity, they seem to have supported the results of the "rug-rat-race." Perhaps the students and their parents should indeed—as the dean of freshmen proposes—spend more time "paying attention to the things they love" rather than on what the study authors call the "wasteful overinvestment"of parental time and energy. But in this context, that message is a little hard to hear.

I'd prefer to listen to Badinter. The ever-increasing requirements of perfectionist parenting—from the rejection of the "powdered milk, jars of baby food and disposable nappies" that were "all stages in the liberation of women" to a world in which kids who aren't provided with a parental chauffeur and scheduling service are doomed to compete with the legions of kids who are—absolutely make parenting feel like an oppressive, all-encompassing endeavor. But even though my personal metaphorical parenting transport is probably a Prius, I'm leery of taking my laissez-faire parenting advice from the wealthy heir to an advertising fortune who lives in a country with a strong social safety net and vastly different ideas concerning class mobility. I agree that taking it easier is almost always better for me. I struggle with whether it's really better for my daughters and sons, too.

Tags: children, helicopter parenting, parenting

Sarah Palin is supposedly nearing a deal with Discovery for her reality show, in which " 'Planet Earth' meets Alaska meets her family," which will appear on camera as part of the program. Compare that to Marisa's YouTube friends JuicyStar07 and Beautycakez, with their "haul videos" showing off finds from stores like Forever 21. Sarah Palin is, by many accounts, a strong outdoorswoman with a real attachment to Alaska; Blair (aka JuicyStar07) appears to be a strong shopper with a powerful attachment to her mall. Both want to share.

I don't agree with Sarah Palin politically, but I find her choices regarding what to do with her celebrity entertaining and somehow depressingly familiar. She wrote a book defending herself (with little of the usual grunt work associated with actually writing a book). She tried stand-up comedy, she quit her bothersome actual job, and now, she'll set up a nice, controlled reveal of everything she actually wants people to see about her home turf. Every detail will be as carefully curated as Blair's hair and the fedora hanging on the rack behind her as Palin draws the bits of Alaska she wants to carry with her out of her great big shopping bag. Palin's audience is larger than most people's, but her reaction to having been catapulted from a moderate-to-high degree of career success into beyond-your-wildest-dreams status remains as narrowly focused as Beautycakez's selection of nail polish: It's still all about Sarah Palin. Which makes me think that, yes, we can all admit we like Nancy Pelosi now.

Tags: haul videos, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin reality show

The Times of London has a rollicking interview with Elisabeth Badinter, the French philosopher and author of Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother). Badinter, a mother of three and grandmother of "loads" of grandchildren, argues that in the past few decades motherhood has become a "threat to women's liberation" because women have become so wrapped up in raising perfect children that they sublimate their own identities and desires. (Katie Roiphe made a somewhat similar argument in a DoubleX piece on mothers and Facebook.) "We've always been mediocre mothers [in France]," Badinter says, and goes on to say, "Today, we’re told we’re not allowed to smoke, to eat unpasteurised cheese or seafood or even to a drink a glass of wine when we are pregnant. It’s time to stop all that.” Of course, she says this as she chain-smokes Stuyvesants.

Badinter's views are expressed in a way that is meant to maximally enrage her readers, but perhaps there is something to her thesis. A new study from economists at UC-San Diego shows that since the '90s, women from all levels of education have been spending more and more hours with their teenagers as part of the "rug-rat race"—the attempt to get their children into top-notch colleges. Mothers do this even though they find child care less enjoyable than cooking or housework. According to ScienceDaily:

On average, the amount of time college-educated women spent on childcare went up from 13 to 22 hours per week since the mid-1990s. By contrast, the amount went up from 11 to 16 hours for women without a college education. ... Most of the increases came from time spent with older, school-age children—and especially from time spent on taking the kids from one activity to the next.

Researchers noted that this happened at the same time that college admissions became hypercompetitive and college graduates started making a lot more money than noncollege grads. The authors of the study say that a lot of this time is "wasteful overinvestment." Both parents and children would probably benefit from a little more unstructured time—though maybe not from smoking Stuyvesants during gestation.

Tags: elisabeth badinter, mommy wars, motherhood, oppression

I was happy to see that the Wall Street Journal published an article that's largely sympathetic to male victims of sexual harassment. Claims have gone up due to the recession, probably because when it's hard to find another job, you're more likely to stay on and sue, or quit and sue for compensation. Unfortunately, the WSJ buries an extremely important detail that should be at the top of the story: Most male victims of sexual harassment were harassed by other men.

That information isn't baldly stated until the 10th paragraph, and that's after the writer quotes a legal expert in a way that implies most of their cases are female-on-male, which I'm sure the legal expert did not intend to imply. You could easily read this story down halfway and walk away with the incorrect impression that male victims simply suffered from female colleagues who come on too strong, which both erases the sexism that drives sexual harassment and implies that the victims are just oversensitive.

The reality is that men get sexually harassed for the same reason women do—male colleagues find them threatening for whatever reason, and they use sexual humiliation to bully them. A quick moment with Google, and I found some relevant research done at the University of Minnesota looking into the specifics of harassment cases. A quote from the researchers:

All women are at some risk of sexual harassment, but males are also likely to be targeted if they seem vulnerable and appear to reject the male stereotype,” reports researcher and University of Minnesota Professor Christopher Uggen. “If a man refuses to go along with sexual joking, wears an earring to the workplace, or is financially vulnerable, he could be targeted. We even found a correlation between a man’s likelihood of being harassed and the amount of housework they reported doing—an activity typically attributed to women.

Sexual harassment happens when men who are hung up about strict gender roles encounter colleagues who threaten their prejudices. Women can do this merely by working—or at least working in an environment the harasser considers boys only. But men can easily face it if they break what the harasser considers the man code. (To be fair, some women are so invested in sexism they could do this, too, but it's rare.) This shouldn't be surprising to anyone; the image of nerdy or gay or even just nonmisogynist young men getting whipped in the locker room with towels is a cultural icon. It's also a major social problem that shouldn't be ignored.

Tags: male victims, sexual harassment

— According to Politico, "the abortion issue is poised to make a political comeback" now that House has passed the health care bill. Meaning a comeback from the back seat Democrats made pro-choice women take for the team? [Politico, The Nation]

— More men have sued for sexual harassment since the start of the recession, despite the stigma against doing so. Lawyers note that litigation spikes when jobs are scarce. [Wall Street Journal]

— A new study by two U.C.-San Diego economists shows how much more time college-educated moms are putting into getting their children into elite colleges than they did in the 1990s. [Science Daily]

—Congressman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) made a statement apologizing for yelling "baby killer" in the House during the speech Bart Stupak made Sunday. Majority Whip Jim Clyburn says Neugebauer should have to apologize during a formal House session. [Politico]

—Can employing a nanny turn your son into a womanizer? In his new book An Unsolicited Gift, psychiatrist Dennis Friedman says yes. [London Times Online]

Tags: abortion, Bart stupak, college admissions, dennis friedman, health care bill, house of representatives, jim clyburn, nannies, randy neugebauer, rug rat race, sexual harassment, womanizer

Halliburton/KBR yesterday dropped its Supreme Court appeal seeking to block the lawsuit filed by Jamie Leigh Jones, the former military contractor who alleges that she was raped by co-workers in Iraq in 2005. Jones had signed a mandatory arbitration clause, and so Halliburton wanted her to settle the rape dispute through arbitration—a process that would be more favorable to them. But the Fifth Circuit agreed with Jones that some of her claims could be litigated in a civil court, because, as it reasoned, the rape was in no way connected to her employment.

This past winter Al Franken shepherded through some new federal legislation that withholds defense contracts from companies that "restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." Senate Republicans went bonkers. And Haliburton tried to block the Jones lawsuit claiming that the new legislation didn't impact on the appeal. Weirdly, Halliburton said yesterday that it withdrew the appeal to avoid the risk of violating the law it called "very broad and vague."

Jones will still have to endure a difficult assault trial. A trial date has been set for May of 2011. The fact that this is the good news shows just how screwy Halliburton’s efforts to keep her out of court really were.

Photograph of Jamie Leigh Jones by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: contractors, halliburton, Iraq, jamie leigh jones, kbr, Rape