I was struck by one detail about conservative activist James O’Keefe’s jilted plan to film a “faux” seduction of a CNN reporter—his group’s misogynist justification for the stunt. The backstory, for anyone who missed it: CNN reported that O’Keefe, the “pimp” from those undercover ACORN videos (which, as it turned out, were heavily edited) tried to turn the tables on Abbie Boudreau, who was reporting on young conservative activists and wanted permission to attend a music video shoot O’Keefe was going to be in. He got Boudreau to agree to fly down to Maryland so they could discuss her request—but his real plan, according to documents and a female colleague of O’Keefe’s, was to lure Boudreau onto a boat that was studded with hidden cameras and sex paraphernalia. (According to a planning document for the so-called “CNN Caper,” music by Marvin Gaye was dismissed as “too cliché,” but “fuzzy handcuffs” and a ceiling mirror were just fine. Strange.)

The plan was foiled when Boudreau was tipped off, and in the days since, O'Keefe has tried to distance himself from his group's planning document. Meanwhile, his colleague, Ben Wetmore, who apparently authored the document, did an interview with Esquire.com. Told that he was being accused of "misogyny and worse," Wetmore responded that the scenario was supposed to be played out in an "awkward" rather than "sexually aggressive" fashion, and that it's hard to tell from from a script just how hilarious it would have been. "When you dissect and sterilize a joke, it's not funny anymore," he said.

This is true. Wetmore is learning, as the ACORN workers did, what happens when you strip something of its context. Sadly, we will never get to see this piece of comedic brilliance realized. But we do get to read about how Wetmore proposed he and O'Keefe could do damage control if the stunt had succeeded.

“Make sure to emphasize Abbie's name and overall status to help burden her career with this video, incident and her bad judgment in pursuing you so aggressively,” the planning document reads. “If they go on the attack, you should point out the hypocrisy in CNN using the inherent sexuality of these women to sell viewers and for ratings, passing up more esteemed and respectable journalists who aren't bubble-headed bleach blondes …"

“Aggressive” is what reporters must and should be—but paired with the document’s description of Boudreau’s looks, the implication of this adjective is clear. If she is attractive and aggressive, she’s asking for it, right? O'Keefe and Wetmore would no doubt say they wanted to use humor to make a political point, and that the means was incidental. But context—which these political pranksters have proved so adept at altering—is key. The documents reveal a classic blame-the-victim defense, an attempt to justify the sexual humiliation of a female journalist who had the audacity to pursue a story.

Photograph of James O'Keefe by Win McNamee for Getty Images.

Tags: Abbie Boudreau, cnn, James O'Keefe, misogyny, Project Veritas

The death of director Arthur Penn, who early in his career directed The Miracle Worker, the story of the early life of Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, made me wonder if young people today even know, in more than just a glancing way, who Keller was. She and Anne Frank were two pole stars of my youth—girls who made something extraordinary out of the worst life had to offer. Keller lost her sight and hearing as an infant and with the help of Sullivan, was drawn out of almost complete isolation to become one of the most celebrated figures of the 20th century. I know that Anne Frank—the brilliant young writer killed by the Nazis—is still known by young people today. Her book is required reading at many schools. I was lucky enough to read it on my own, so her diary was not a burdensome assignment, but a blazing, wrenching work I read past my bedtime with a flashlight.  I’m worried, however, that Keller is being forgotten, reduced to an “uplifting” figure of another era. Read her stirring autobiography, and if  you haven’t ever seen it, rent The Miracle Worker. This is no sappy melodrama, but an emotionally bruising look at bringing someone out of mental and emotional darkness. Pay particular attention to the virtually wordless dining-room fight scene between Helen and Annie. As staged by Penn, it is one of the most rousing pieces of choreography on film.

Photograph of Helen Keller's statue by Karen Bleier for Getty Images.

Tags: anne frank, arthur penn, helen keller, the miracle worker

The Smart Girl Summit is a gathering of Tea Party women taking place in Washington this week. I am there today and having a powerful flashback to my days covering the conservative Christian homeschooling movement. Only here is the crucial difference: As I wrote in my dialogue with Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick last week, “Decoding Christine O’Donnell,” the Tea Party types seem to have substituted the word Constitution in every spot where, 10 years ago, you would have heard the word Bible. They talk about their “conversions” to the movement and their “calling” and the many ways you can “plant the seed.”

Dana Loesch, a blogger and radio personality who is the brunette’s answer to Ann Coulter (skinny, fearless, shiny high heel boots, tattoo, husband with a leather cuff and earring), told a story of some activists who were being teased by guys playing basketball. The activists left them some pocket Constitutions. When the activists came back around, the boys were sitting on their basketballs, head bowed, reading the Constitutions.

I’m not sure how this came about, but the result, at this summit, is a fiercer kind of conservative feminism. In years past, conservative feminists were always hampered by both reproductive issues and Christian teachings about the proper role of a woman. A very conservative woman could only go so far in a culture that fundamentally believed women should submit to their husbands. But this time, that’s off the table. In one of the sessions, someone asked about abortion. “No one cares about that,” a speaker responded. And the Christian talk, while here, is sublimated.

This has produced a crew of women who can use their domestic competence as mothers and family accountants as a direct route to political power. In a world where only taxes and big government count, women can speak up just as loudly.

Tags: dana loesch, smart girl summit

As Paris Fashion Week kicks off, the New York Times caught up with Vogue Paris Editor-in-Chief Carine Roitfeld about the magazine's upcoming 90th-anniversary issue. The new issue features Crystal Renn stuffing her face with food, and previous spreads, such as one with white models wearing blackface and another giving the finger to anti-fur advocates, have caused controversy. Here's what Roitfeld had to say about her provocative mag:

We have to fight to keep this un-politically correct attitude of French Vogue, but it’s more and more difficult to be able do that. You cannot smoke, you cannot show arms, you cannot show little girls, because everyone now is very anxious not to have problems with the law. Everything we do now is like walking in high heels on the ice, but we keep trying to do it.

This post originally appeared on TresSugar.

Tags: carine roitfeld, crystal renn, paris fashion week, tressugar, vogue paris

My heart goes out to the friends and family of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman who killed himself on Sept. 22. And if his roommate and another student taped Tyler kissing a guy on a webcam without his permission and streamed it on iChat, as it looks like, then I’m all for going after the two 18-year-olds for invasion of privacy. It's vile and indecent to videotape another person in an intimate moment without his or her permission. And the roommate, Dharun Ravi, sounds loathsomely giddy with homophobia and juvenile idiocy in this tweet: "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to join me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again."

But can we stop for a moment before we blame Dharun and Molly Wei, the other student who allegedly participated in the taping, for Tyler's suicide? Yes, I know, I've said this before, in the cases of Phoebe Prince (the 15-year-old South Hadley student who hanged herself last January) and Kevin Morrissey (the 52-year-old managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review who shot himself in July). I'm a broken record. And the conduct of the other students here is appalling and indefensible. But. Read these posts by cit2mo on justusboys.com, which Gawker found and, for good reason, thinks Tyler wrote, because the timing of the posts is exactly right and the content fits perfectly too: The subject line for the thread is "college roommate spying..."

As my colleague William Saletan points out, there is a huge gap between the relatively unemotional tone of these posts and the act of suicide. On Sept. 19, the day that Dharun taped Tyler for the first of two times, cit2mo described such an incident and wrote of his roommate: "I'm kinda pissed at him (rightfully so I think, no?)" cit2mo isn't confident that the school will rush to his aid (though since he just arrived as a freshman, it's hard to imagine he has reason to know that): "I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out." But then cit2mo/Tyler, says of roommate/Dharun: "I mean aside from being an asshole from time to time, he's a pretty decent roommate." Two hours later, cit2mo wrote again to say he'd filled out the roommate change form. "I feel like it was 'look at what a fag my roommate is,' " he said. He talks about the homophobia of other students, who asked on the roommate's profile whether he was ok, not Tyler. It's starting to sink in how gross this all is: "unsettling to say the least," cit2mo writes.

Then when cit2mo wants to invite the guy he likes over again, he posted in the wee hours of Sept. 22 (the day Tyler died) to say that he asked his roommate for permission to use the room—and then saw that the roommate had turned the webcam on and pointed it toward his bed; cit2mo writes that he went to to tell his resident adviser. Also, "meanwhile I turned off an unplugged his computer, went crazy looking for other hidden cams... and then had a great time." His last post, from 6:17 a.m. on the Sept. 22 says of the R.A.: "he seemed to take it seriously... he asked me to email him a written paragraph about exactly what happened. I emailed it to him, and to two people above him..."

That's it. It appears that Tyler jumped off the George Washington Bridge at about 9 p.m. that night. Maybe the aftermath of the taping took a turn for the more horrible during the day that connects it to his unraveling. Or maybe something entirely unrelated prompted Tyler to choose this moment to make his awful jump. We don't know. And until we do, however tempting it is to blame his jerky homophobe roommate, the matter-of-fact voice of cit2mo should make us hesitate to think we have any but the shallowest understanding of what happened here.

Photograph of laptop by Gflores for Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: suicide at rutgers, tyler clementi, webcam and suicide

Finally an enhanced product for those who’ve always complained their undergarments just don’t do quite enough: the Emergency Bra. Created by Dr. Elena Bodnar and inspired by the disaster photographs of “9/11 victims running through the ash with rags over their faces,” the Emergency Bra can be used as a gas mask in the event of an airborne attack (in addition to being “sexy and supportive” during terror-free times!). You simply detach a cup and secure it around your nose and mouth and tighten to fit using the straps. Of course this means you’ll be running sans bra during an airborne attack, so maybe carry a good ole regular bra around for back-up support.

Currently the bra is selling for $29.95 on ebbra.com and is “available just in B and C-cup sizes” so the A-cups and Joan Holloways of the world are left defenseless. So are men, I suppose. For those unlucky ones, there are these strikingly mundane government-certified masks for sale at Walgreens.

Photograph of the emergency bra from its official website: ebbra.com.

Tags: bra, daily news, Emergency Bra, gas mask

News broke this week that police in Lehi, Utah, are looking into prosecuting the Brown family, stars of TLC's new reality show Sister Wives, for being bigamists. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah code "defines bigamy through cohabitation, not just through legal marriage contracts." As Sister Wives portrays the happily polygamist relationship of the aggressively cheerful Kody Brown and his wives Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn, it's not surprising that local cops don't appreciate the show—it not only celebrates an illegal relationship taking place in their town; it's also been receiving positive publicity from national publications.

And the program does show this polygamist family in a pretty glowing—and mesmerizing—way. Sister Wives is edited to make a four-wife household seem not only normal and relatable, but the wives also use the language of choice to make clear that their lifestyle is a conscious, wise decision—they're not being coerced into sharing one man.

In terms of how they normalize their unusual family structure, anyone who has watched other reality shows about large families (Kate Plus 8; 19 and Counting) will recognize the domestic scenes in Sister Wives: Watch them cook breakfast—just like you do, but supersized, with obligatory shots of enormous condiment containers! Watch them do yard work as a merry, laughing team! Listen to them talk about the nitty-gritty details of their family arrangement in a way that is familiar and appealing!

On this last point, I was especially struck by Janelle's narrative. Janelle is the second wife, and the only one who did not grow up in a polygamist family. (She grew up Mormon—the show is careful in distinguishing Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, who practice polygamy, from mainstream Mormons.) She works long hours outside the home, and she loves her job. "I get to be the mom but I don't have to do the cooking or the chauffeuring," Janelle explains—she has five kids of her own, out of 13 total, and while she is away, the third wife, Christine, takes care of them. Kody and the first wife, Meri, also work outside the home, and Christine looks after Meri's teenage daughter as needed.

Their arrangement sounded blissful, and dare I say, almost strangely wonderful in a bizarro fantasy world kind of way. It is the sort of situation that Sandra Tsing-Loh described in a New York Times op-ed from January, in which she said she wanted a wife: "A loyal helpmeet who keeps the home fires burning and offers uncritical emotional support when I, the gladiator, return exhausted from the arena." Maybe what Sandra really needs is not a wife; it's a sister-wife.

But back to actual life, in which I am a critically thinking person who realizes that reality shows are not real and that sharing one's husband is not tenable or desirable. (Watch the sister wives describe how they negotiate sex in the below clip.) It's worth noting that two out of the three wives featured in the first episode (Kody Brown tells his family he is bringing on the fourth wife at the end of that episode) were raised by polygamists. The editors go out of their way to show that the decision to be in this union was a conscious, thought-out, even empowered choice by all the wives—they were not forced into it. However, one has to wonder how much of a "choice" it was for the women raised in polyg families, who have never known any other sort of relationship.

The well-oiled machine of the Brown household is thrown into some turmoil when Kody decides to take on a fourth wife. Meri and Janelle are accepting—but the third wife, Christine, is clearly pissed about it. "[The fourth wife] just has to be absolutely amazing, or it might be a little difficult," Christine says while screwing up her face. Though two of the wives say they are fine with the new addition, they're not happy about the time Kody has been taking away from the family to court her. Robyn, the soon-to-be fourth, lives four hours away, and Kody is shown taking her on dates. "Jealousy is something I can overcome," Meri says, stoically. Of course, you don't hear much from Kody about the difficulty of changing his life to accommodate a new wife and three new step-kids. He merely says, "Love should be multiplied, not divided." Even though the wives say they entered into the polygamist lifestyle by their own volition, it seems like many other major decisions aren't theirs to make.

Sister Wives promotional shot courtesy of TLC/Bryant Livingston

Tags: bigamy, christine brown, janelle brown, kody brown, meri brown, polygamy, robyn brown, sister wives, tlc

—Hollywood icon Tony Curtis died Wednesday of cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas-area home. He was 85. [New York Times]

—Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, apparently committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate streamed his sexual encounter with another male classmate on the Internet. [New York Times]

—Faced with allegations of hiring an undocumented worker and then firing her when she came for help with her legal status, Meg Whitman’s camp now suggests that this was nothing more than a political smear campaign set up by the Democrats. See Hanna Rosin's post about the Whitman kerfuffle here. [The Daily Beast]

—On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart came out swinging with his strongest anti-Obama segment to date. [Gawker]

—Chelsea Handler's unapologetic stance on sleeping around and drinking has made her the bad girl's de facto self-help guru. [Variety]

Photograph of Tony Curtis by Valerie Macon for Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: chelsea handler, cyber bullying, Jon Stewart, Meg Whitman and maid, teen suicide, tony curtis