Jessica, I agree with you that the videos of the “eerily composed” self-promotiing Justin Bieber teenaged fan (AKA “missvideo28”) were troubling, and not just because of her grating self-awareness and casual threats of violence. I also found them sad. Her faux air of maturity, the gratuitous cursing, her desperate need for attention and her seeming willingness to do anything “that’s kind of interesting” to keep her audience watching, all point to this attitude I’ve noticed in many teenaged girls who want to be famous for the sake of being famous and not because they’ve done something particularly impressive, or positive, or noteworthy.

In this video she’s pleading for people to watch her while simultaneously trying to maintain her sophisticated cool composure. She says one viewer wrote in and requested that she smash a shaving cream pie into her own face, and says matter-of-factly that she will oblige.

“What else you want me to do that’s kind of interesting, shall be done,” she says. “I’m up for anything, really I am.”

On the other hand, the girls in the Sydney Dalton video that prompted missvideo28’s mean threats, are clearly having some harmless fun being silly and cracking up as they rip the Justin Beiber posters to shreds. They actually seem more like normal (healthy?) teenagers. They don’t threathen to hurt anyone, or hurl insults and they even sort of apologetically warn true Beliebers in advance that they may not like the video, and even make a point of saying they mean no offense to diehard fans. Their good-natured fun compared to missvideo28’s mean-spirited diss of Sydney and “her stupid f--king fat ass friends” speaks volumes about the state of mind of  certain teenage girls who seem more like jaded, unfulfilled older women who’ve lost all their innocence and whose best days are behind them rather than young people with lives still ahead of them. What's really sad is that this increasingly seems to be  the norm. 

Tags: Justin Bieber fans, meaness online, teen narcissim, YouTube videos

Today’s Wall Street Journal has the latest in a series of articles I’ve been reading the past few years about the bizarre, emotionally stunted lives of Japanese men. In this story, young, romantically inclined Japanese men go for the weekend to what formerly was a popular honeymoon resort, only these guys show up with hand-held devices which contain their virtual girlfriends. This follows the story about the Japanese men who don’t date actual woman, but instead are in love with body-length pillows with images of women printed on them. And the story about Japanese men who wear bras because it makes them feel calmer. And the story about Japanese men who have given up all together and refuse to come out of their childhood bedrooms. In Japan, metrosexuals are called “grasseaters.” These are young men who have turned away from the work-consumed, hard-drinking lives of their distant fathers for something more feminine, more oriented toward personal grooming. That could be fine, except what seems to be missing is the ability to connect with actual females. Japan’s marriage and birth rates continue to plummet, and the country faces demographic doom. (Although there may not be as many old people in Japan as we used to think, since many of them have disappeared or been mummified.)

I wonder if all this has something to do with the lack of a robust feminist movement in Japan. Yes, women get educations and enter the workforce, but then they are supposed to bow out when they marry and have children. Japanese men are expected to put their energy into the office, not help with changing diapers. Young women conclude that staying in the work force provides more satisfaction and independence than becoming a traditional housewife. So the sexes drift apart, and the men fall in love with their pillows.

Tags: japanese demographic doom, japense men

As far as tell-alls go, Meghan McCain’s new campaign memoir, Dirty Sexy Politics, isn’t so shocking—especially coming from a woman who’s known for oversharing. The perplexing back cover, which has a very Def Leppard-consults-for-the-GOP vibe and features a wet-haired McCain in reptilian black boots perched atop a gold-flecked elephant, is about the most outré thing about it. The Washington Post highlights some of the “juiciest” bits, which include a night of too many beers in Nashville, a White House snub from an elegantly coiffed Jenna Bush while Meghan is dressed inappropriately in glitter heels and cornrows, and some Xanax-induced passing out on Election Day. Ostensibly the most provocative part is when Meghan discusses how she was asked to leave the main campaign after some notable media missteps, including an unflattering GQ profile (though she then got her own tour bus—not exactly cruel and unusual punishment).

But more than anything, DSP is YA nonfiction, another rather canny sally in McCain’s ongoing mission to make her version of conservatism—a Republicanism that embraces gay marriage and technology—appealing to young people. Her favorite descriptors include “lame” and “dorky”; she and her campaign buddies pull pranks like leaving hardboiled eggs outside the hotel room of a mean staffer and posting to her blog “crappy pictures of people and journalists we didn’t like”; she makes catty comments about Giuliani’s tan and Romney’s hair; she describes a moment of extreme embarrassment, resembling nothing so much as a mild Cosmo Confession, in which her suitcase spills to reveal her underwear.

Many of her descriptions of her own feelings of inadequacy and her relationship with her parents have an adolescent tinge to them, as well—she throws a sobbing fit over not being told about the Palin decision beforehand. (“To make matters worse, my dad clearly had a hand in the decision to cut me out too.”) She's got a method for vaulting past any self-doubt, constructing an alter ego modeled after Beyoncé's Sasha Fierce: "Meggie Mac," McCain confides, is the cheerful, lively version of herself who shows up for interviews and PR events. Political terms like “caucus” are explained without using any big words, clearly aimed at an audience that perhaps hasn’t reached that part of the civics curriculum quite yet.

One of the themes of the book is that adviser Steve Schmidt and a coterie of other old Republican men with poor hygiene—really, she says that!—have it in for young, blond Meghan, whom they accuse of having Brooke Hogan stripper hair. She’s forced to submit to the inevitable makeover, pressed into slimming black pantsuits, and given media/voice coaching. In an effort to dispel any image of her as a spoiled rich brat, McCain notes several times that her internships were paid and that she paid her own way on the bus—the poor girl had to drain her inheritance from her (beer baron) grandfather to do so. It’s a winning pose to strike, and McCain handles it fairly adroitly, flipping the script on herself from “attention-seeker” to “scrappy lovable outsider”—in the midst of a massive attention-grab.

Coverage of McCain’s book has tended to focus on her mostly indirect criticism of Sarah Palin as a choice of running mate—and she does question the very public position Palin put her pregnant daughter in, and her choice to drag her 7-year-old on the campaign bus. What’s more, she calls Palin the “Time Bomb” and asks the reader innocently, “She wasn’t much of a team player, was she?”

But some of the more insightful parts of the book, in fact, come from McCain's parsing of the focus on women’s appearance that Palin’s selection brought: “Two makeup artists had been installed to glam up everybody. And I mean everybody. There was nothing more important, suddenly, than how we looked.” I’ve followed McCain’s personal brand-building for a couple of years now, sometimes writing quite critically about her image construction—and so I cringed when she described how hurt she was by the press’s focus on her appearance, and how she scrolled through so many of the Internet comments about her looks and her ditziness, and makes the point that men aren't subjected to the same sort of scrutiny writers like me have given her.

McCain is also sympathetic to Hillary Clinton, writing, “I couldn’t help but wonder about all the parts of herself she had deep-sixed just to keep herself attractive to voters.” And about that GQ profile, McCain writes—“If you track down the piece on the Internet now, it won’t seem shocking or make me appear to be as maniacally stupid as it did at the time. That alone is a lesson in context.” Palin’s certainly been part of that context shift. Of course, in true YA heroine fashion, after all the campaign pruning and coaching, Meghan goes back to a modified version of her original look and learns an important lesson about being herself, just a girl who’s not afraid to bleach her hair, wrap herself in an elephant snout, and tell us more than we wanted to know.

Tags: dirty sexy politics, Meghan McCain, meghan mccain sarah palin criticism, meghan mccain twitter

­­This past weekend, the New York Times Magazine published a piece about the push to diagnose depression in preschool-age children, highlighting the work of Joan Luby, a professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The article concluded by demonstrating the uses of a cognitive technique Luby, a pioneer in the arena of depression in the smallest among us, recommends called "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy" (PCIT). The therapy teaches unhappy little ones and their parents how to work through stress, guilt, anxiety, and misery, as well as demonstrating how to manage their emotional lives more effectively.

Then I discovered the one detail the NYT neglected to mention: Luby has a long-documented history of receiving money from the pharmaceutical industry. Kudos to Jim Edwards, the former managing editor of AdWeek and current BNET blogger, who pointed out that Luby has taken funds from "Johnson & Johnson, Shire and AstraZeneca to study using atypical antipsychotics in young children."

When I contacted article author Pamela Paul (disclosure: I’d describe her as a friendly acquaintance) to ask why there was no reference in the piece of Luby’s previous affiliations, she said she believed that the disclosure was not necessary because the doctor did not take the money for this specific research and that raising the issue would distract from the main focus of the article which she described as: "Is diagnosing preschoolers with depression possible?" adding that "the medication issue … has been covered to death elsewhere."

To be sure, most scientific research is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, and that doesn’t mean it’s automatically tainted, but it needs to be acknowledged. And while I respect Paul and her work enormously (she is, among other things, the author of The Starter Marriage, Pornified, and Parenting, Inc.), there have been any number of depressing scandals in this world where Big Pharma meets academia in the past few years. Like when Harvard’s renowned child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman neglected to mention well over $1 million in payments from Big Pharma to his bosses, a fact uncovered only after, as the NYT put it in a 2008 article, his work "helped fuel a fortyfold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder and a rapid rise in the use of powerful, risky and expensive antipsychotic medicines in children."

What’s the harm in making the disclosure that Luby has taken funds from Big Pharma in the past?  After all, what happens when the insurance companies refuse to pay for "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy?" What’s Luby going to recommend then? Let Luby address these issues—perhaps she’s had a change of heart about meds, maybe some preschoolers truly need them, and perhaps the issue doesn’t really matter at all.

But if you don’t let the readers make the call, it seems as if you are hiding something—like, for example, just how many depressed preschoolers there really are out there. I don’t mean to make light of the problem. I don’t doubt the roots of depression go back to childhood, and I do believe that it’s quite possible the techniques Luby is promoting have enormous potential to head off future woes.  However, the children in Paul’s article might indeed be clinically depressed—or they might be suffering, based on the descriptions offered, from any number of conditions including things that could be dubbed "sibling arrival syndrome" and "depressed parent syndrome." This is something acknowledged by Paul, but all too briefly. As one nameless child psychologist told Paul about the pharmaceutical reps he’s met, "They want to give these kids medicines, but we can’t figure out the diagnoses." Thanks to Luby and the New York Times, now they have one.

Tags: preschool depression

Jessica, the opening anecdote of Vanity Fair’s latest Sarah Palin takedown, in which little Piper is forcibly ushered onstage for a public display of maternal affection, didn’t do much for me either. I can’t imagine any political road show operates any differently. The kid is backstage playing with friends or dolls, and then the kid is pushed onstage to wave and look cute. Malia and Sasha have done it a hundred times.

Is it sexist to get on Palin’s case for her bad mothering? A 2007 New York Times profile of John Edwards showed him practically twisting little Jack’s arm to make him talk to a reporter, so it’s not just women in the spotlight. Although I imagine as more women run for office, we will get increasing scrutiny of the effects of their campaigns on their children. In Palin’s case, I do think it’s fair game, since she has lately distilled her public image into the title “Mama Grizzly,” so it’s perfectly natural to wonder about what happens to the actual cubs.

That said, I don’t think the accusations of hypocrisy— that she now neglects little Trig, hires an army of nannies, that Todd does most of the domestic work, that the kids are spoiled brats—will make any difference: Author Michael Joseph Gross sums up his findings this way: “Anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.” People said essentially the same thing about Ronald Reagan. He was  a prop of his controlling wife, and his own children can’t stand him. But this only made the public love him more. Palin is almost pre-ordained to fill this role of dubious icon for whom the growing gap between her private life and her public image is somehow beside the point.

Tags: Sarah Palin, Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin

Despite the fact that writer Michael Joseph Gross could not get anyone close to Sarah Palin to talk to him, he went ahead with this story in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, which depicts the former Alaska governor as "a closed book and a constant noisemaker," someone with a hairtrigger temper whose relationship with the truth is iffy. Gross does a good job of pointing out Palin's various dishonesties. She tells an audience that before she had her son Trig, who has Down syndrome, "I had never really been around a baby with special needs." This is a lie. Gross points out that Palin has an autistic nephew, which she discusses in her book, Going Rogue.

But I find the opening anecdote about Palin's young daughter Piper troubling. Gross depicts Piper backstage at a speech her mother is giving in Independence, Mo. Piper is playing with the other kids, like any normal child, "until she gets the signal to do her job: march to the podium, pick up Palin’s speech, and allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection. On cue, Piper parts the curtain. As the child appears, a loud and doting 'Awww' melts through the crowd."

While I don't agree with the way Palin uses her children as political props, I also don't like the underhanded way Gross uses Palin's motherhood to indict her character. It's not just the opening anecdote that rankled. He writes:

[A]t least since the start of the 2008 campaign, Todd has been shouldering the bulk of the parenting and ... Sarah’s relationship with her children has grown more distant. The children did not, as Sarah has claimed, have a chance to weigh in on her decision to run for vice president. She did not even deliver the news to them personally; as has been reported, she asked McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, to do it for her. Todd reportedly told Sarah that, if the children spent too much time on the campaign trail, they would pay a price: grades would tumble and discipline would fall apart. When she agreed to serve as McCain’s running mate, one of her children was already failing in school, according to campaign aides. But Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone. An aide overheard conversations between Sarah and Todd in which Sarah tried to make a self-serving argument sound selfless, holding that the campaign was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that she could not deny the children. 'I don’t care what it costs,' she said. 'I want them here.' Although the couple hired a nanny to help the children with their homework, little homework got done.

I would wager that Michelle Obama has "shouldered the bulk of the parenting" since the start of the 2008 campaign as well, and yet, this is pretty much never mentioned in an article about the president. I'd wager that Cindy McCain has been doing the bulk of the parenting in her household, well, forever, as her husband spends much of his time in Washington while Cindy remains in Arizona. I applaud Gross for calling Sarah Palin out on her endless fibbing. But don't use the fact that she has an egalitarian household to make her look like a bad mother.

Tags: motherhood, piper palin, Sarah Palin, sarah palin vanity fair, todd palin, Vanity Fair

—Vanity Fair peers inside the increasingly strange and secretive universe of Sarah Palin and her traveling political circus. [Vanity Fair]

—Why did President Obama decide to redecorate the Oval Office in the midst of a recession? [New York Times]

—The Women’s Media Center skewers cable news anchormen and their casual sexism. [Salon]

—Authorities in Sweden have reopened the rape case against WikiLeaks founder and international man of mystery Julian Assange. [CNN]

—As Alaska finishes counting absentee ballots from last Tuesday’s senatorial primary, incumbent Lisa Murkowski concedes the race to Palin-supported upstart Joe Miller. [Washington Post]

Tags: we're talking about

August is a slow news month, hard on increasingly desperate journalists who don't get to spend it at the beach. But I'm still annoyed by this ginned-up story (on the first day of September, when news ought to be making a comeback!) from ABC News, " 'The Town' Poster's Nun with a Gun: Too Sacrilegious?: Ben Affleck's New Movie's Poster May Offend Catholics." Italics mine, because the reporter calls the Catholic League and heads to a couple of very conservative Catholic universities for the bulk of her quotes, which are predictably outraged about the image, featuring two "nuns" with horror-movie faces robbing a truck. This is a little like conducting interviews on one block of Hasidic Williamsburg and and saying the sentiments expressed represent the American Jewish opinion, or asking a deacon at New Life Church to explain the American Protestant reaction to something. The reporter buries waaaay down quotes from a Wesleyan film professor and a retired priest at Jesuit Fordham University, who reasonably explains, "At a certain point, nuns' habits stopped having a religious mystique. The only people who might possibly be offended by the poster are Catholics who are religiously conservative and who have memories of nuns wearing habits." The writer throws in a few instances of other pop-cultural nun portrayals for good measure (Troy Patterson's amazing history of the naughty nun trope is far superior and ought to be revisited in light of Lindsay Lohan's upcoming movie), but even the Vatican isn't offended by Hollywood's often less-than-reverant portrayal of nuns: Earlier this year, it officially declared The Blues Brothers, which features "The Penguin," a ruler-wielding nun caricature, to be a Catholic classic.

Tags: blues brothers, fake trends, nuns