As Meghan O’Rourke writes on Slate, VIDA's new count of magazine contributors by gender is distressing. Or maybe it’s simply depressing. I suppose it depends on how optimistic you were before you glimpsed the numbers. (Disclosure: I recently became a member of VIDA, though I did not orchestrate the study.)

VIDA tallied the number of writers appearing in both general interest magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic and at literary magazines such as Granta, The Paris Review and Tin House. And as Meghan notes, the literary magazines tended to have slightly more equitable gender ratios than the others. Even so, according to VIDA’s count, women make up only a fraction of the contributors to some of the country's most prominent literary magazines. Some may be tempted to ask whether this really matters. Who reads these magazines, anyway? Aren't women out there in droves buying books by female authors for their book groups, literary journals be damned? Isn't there Oprah? (Actually, no: Even Oprah’s book club has been short of lady writers lately.)

Literary magazines matter a great deal. Let's begin where most aspiring writers begin: with a manuscript. If this manuscript gets accepted by, say, The Paris Review, our writer will not only be blessed with new readers, he will be eligible for such honors as the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Voices. He might get a fellowship or a residency at a famous colony where he might work surrounded by mentors and peers. He might get an agent, and later, a book contract. This book might then get reviewed, win prizes, and provide him with rich soil from which to grow.

If this writer is female and cannot get her work published by magazines (because magazines are—unconsciously or not—privileging male writers), she won't be on the radar for fellowships, prizes, agents, publishers, and yes, reviews. Of course, there are other avenues; many successful novelists don't publish in literary magazines. But short story writers and poets simply must.

Literary magazines editors work tirelessly, often for little compensation. What they do is truly an act of altruism and love. May they all be blessed with large subscription bases so they can continue to keep literary culture alive. But why are their gender ratios so terrible? Why is one prestigious literary magazine publishing fiction by women at a ratio of one to five? (Yes, it's actually that bad.) Do men simply write better? As someone who avidly reads and reviews, I really don't think so.

Is it possible, instead, that we're so deep into this cycle of recognition and reward that we simply see writing by men as more literary? And if so, is it only out of habit or is something more insidious at play?  Might the problem start the minute we see a male name on a manuscript, or read about a male protagonist? A novelist friend of mine once told me that she fears writing a female narrator for this reason, so she never has. Are men covering territory that editors have come to see as more worthy, more culturally important? Not all women write fiction about family, and not all men write stories about the wilderness, but there might be a kernel of truth buried in these generalizations.

My own rough count of fiction editors at prominent publications reveals that the majority of final decision-makers are men. Is a bit of mirror-gazing occurring? Are male editors more likely to see their own concerns in men’s writing? If so, this bias may cut both ways: My work has frequently been championed by female editors. But for now, the gatekeepers of literary culture—at least at magazines—are still primarily male.

Tags: female reporters, female writers, VIDA

Read more of Slate's coverage of the Egyptian protests.

“I’d rather have Mubarak than an Islamic government,” a woman in the street wearing a full black niqab told NOS, a Dutch news service yesterday. Seeing the fear in her eyes makes it hard for me to feel excited for the revolution. Though there has been footage of women in the streets, looking through most recent photos from Cairo, I see an ocean of men. (Read more on women in the Egyptian protests in Slate.) Women appear to be almost completely absent from any wide-angle shot you see of the protests at this point, and those I do see are often in Western clothes, speaking to the cameras with American and English accents. They are not representative of the majority of Egypt's women, who are working class and in hijab.

Though Mubarak has been in power for too long, and violated the human rights of his people, for the average Egyptian woman, there is the potential for things to get far worse. The position of women in Egypt has already declined in the past two decades.

You could blame it on the stagnant economy, which could of course be blamed on Mubarak’s bad policies. On even a normal day, thousands of men loiter in the streets of downtown Cairo. Young and unemployed, most have never had a normal sexual partner. This kind of young, male frustration manifests itself in religious devotion, aggressive sexual harassment, or both. The Egyptian streets have become increasingly conservative, and women, in turn, have covered up.

Look at photos from 20 years ago and you’ll see women in skirts that show their calves, their hair and make-up done. These days, the women’s car (I dare you to ride in the men’s section during rush hour) on the Cairo subway smells from the sweat trapped by layers of black polyester. Subway reading material of choice is the Koran, held open and aloft by black-gloved hands, read through eye-obscuring lenses. And 85 percent of Egyptian women have had their clitorises removed, a practice that Suzanne Mubarak campaigned to end, citing its African, rather than Islamic origins.

Once Mubarak is gone, the climate of the country will still be frustrated and devout. The real will of the common Egyptian could be dangerous to women. A recent public opinion survey in Egypt showed that 80 percent of men think it is OK for a husband to beat his wife for speaking to another man, one-third of men and women believe that it is OK to resort to violence if a woman refuses sex. Acid attacks and honor killings are already far too commonplace, but they have been condemned by the current administration. A new government could turn a blind eye to domestic abuse or even worse. The new government will have to actively engage women in the political process in the increasingly hard-line country to keep their oppression from seeming democratically sanctioned. Revolutions have begun like this in other countries—Iranian women certainly thought they were getting something far different for themselves when they took to the streets to depose the corrupt Shah—only to leave women suffering and invisible behind metaphorical and literal curtains when the dust settled.

Tags: egyptian protests and women, hosni mubarak and women, suzanne mubarak

Over at Motherlode, Lisa Belkin highlights a British survey which found that "working parents have 90 minutes" of spare time, each day, to themselves. The study for some reason was done by a supermarket chain--perhaps wanting to know how much time busy customers have for food-shopping and cooking. Or maybe the store just wanted to perform a public service. Maybe some parent in management was curious. Who knows?

Anyway, 90 minutes sounds generous to me, unless you count things like feeding the cats or taking out the recycling as "spare" time. But the piece got me thinking about how the time and place of parental free time changes as kids' needs evolve. When my children were very little, and being at home meant for me (or my husband) that some small body was constantly needing to be lifted or put down or herded or rescued or fed or bathed or clothed or ferried, the only place I remember experiencing free time was in the shower of the public indoor swimming pool near our house. I would slip out to do some laps, then luxuriate in that crummy collective shower, where there was no privacy and the water was never quite warm enough, but on the other hand, there was nobody who needed anything and I could just stand there and exist, amongst strangers and running water, without any limbs being tugged. Showers in general are one place I think parents often escape for a small window of free time, though even there, if you are at home, you are never safe. I know one woman who--on a particularly excruciating day when her 5-year-old son was following her around the house singing some kindergarten song at the top of his voice while she tried to get her house ready for a dinner party--attempted to lock herself in the bathroom for a quick shower and some peace and quiet. Her son picked the lock with a hairpin, flung open the door, and announced "Great news! I am here!"

In fact, so little free time does one have, when the kids are little, that I remember going on work trips and feeling that a quiet hotel room was so overwhelmingly luxurious that it was all I could do not to stay in there for two days, order room service and watch television. Working on a work trip seemed so unjust.

Once my kids got older, I can't remember having much in the way of free time at all, except maybe on the commute to and from work. No wonder women are from time to time pulled over for applying mascara at stoplights; it's their only opportunity to do so. I know one working mother who has long nursed a "broken ankle" fantasy: She would step off a curb and get hit by a bus, but not badly, enabling her to stay in a hospital room for a while with her leg up, chatting on the phone to her friends, enjoying sick leave, and someone else would have to do the housework and take care of everything. When you are the mother of active elementary-age schoolchildren, a minor hospital stay qualifies as "me" time.

Now that my children are teenagers, or nearly so, my main role in their lives has become that of chauffeur, as well as exhorter, cook, personal shopper and executive assistant. My longest stints of free time occur in the car--often in traffic--driving to pick them up or returning from dropping them off. This life-stage has allowed me to spend a great deal of quality time with the voice of Kai Ryssdal, whose Marketplace show is aired around the time my daughter and a friend are picked up from school. But here's the thing: one day in the not-too-distant future, even this stage will be past, and my kids will be away from home living independent lives, and I will have way more than 20 or even 90 minutes of personal time a day. Time to wake up, luxuriate over a second cup of coffee, organize the bills and other household papers, apply makeup calmly and well, watch 10 years' worth of movies, go to museums, work very very very hard at my job, perhaps finally take up yoga, and wonder, all day long, how their lives are going and what they are doing. The closer that time comes, the more I dread it. So to the parents who marvel over that study, compare it to their own lives, and find that the total is not nearly 90 minutes: enjoy it while you can. Someday we'll have all the time in the world, and I have a feeling that when it happens, it will be the last thing we will really want.

Tags: free time, Lisa Belkin, Motherlode, parenting

I will be very blunt: I don’t like Planned Parenthood. I don’t like that they are the nation’s largest abortion provider. I don’t like that staffers have been caught giving terribly inaccurate information medical information to undercover “patients.” I especially don’t like that the purpose of that woefully wrong information (sorry, folks, there is no difference between a  “heart tone” and a "heart beat"* and the baby has a real live heart beat much closer to 17 days than 17 weeks, as one staffer tells a patient) seems geared toward encouraging a woman to have an abortion rather than consider other options for her pregnancy.

And Planned Parenthood doesn’t come off much better in today’s expose from Live Action, which is headed by Lila Rose and which is responsible for the previous sting videos.  In the video released today, a man and a woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute visit a New Jersey Planned Parenthood office, where the office manager offers them advice for how to get the allegedly 14- and 15-year-old girls in their employ access to birth control, physical exams, and abortions.

Two scenes jumped out at me. The manager on the tape described one of the nurses who did exams—and who asked a lot of questions, to make sure that girls weren’t being preyed on by older men—as a “fu*&ing c*nt.” The other one is where the manager, when the “pimp” asks about getting abortions for 14-year-olds, gets all secretive and gives them the location of a clinic that will do such abortions. (Planned Parenthood has fired the manager in the video.)

It’s one thing entirely to give birth-control pills to 16-year-old girls without their mother’s consent. It’s entirely another to have a conversation with a man “admitting” to be a pimp about what kind of sexual activity his “workers” can engage in during the two weeks after an abortion when they can’t have sexual intercourse (“Waist up,” says the manager).  That shows an actual disregard for the well-being of young women.

BUT, and here is where I’m going to lose a bunch of my pro-life friends, trying to get Planned Parenthood defunded—as Live Action and other pro-life groups are trying to do using this video as the launch of their campaign—is the wrong step to take. There is no better way to prevent abortion, as Amanda points out, than to make sure women have access to affordable contraception. Whatever feelings I have about Planned Parenthood’s uglier side, one thing the organization does damn well is to provide cheap birth control and medical exams.

I don’t know how many bad eggs there are within Planned Parenthood, those who will tell a woman that her 10-week-old fetus doesn’t have a heartbeat, or hand over the address for an unscrupulous clinic that will perform illegal abortions. But it’s either more prevalent than most would like to admit or Lila Rose, who is profiled in this post by Libby Copeland, has an incredible knack for finding them.

Still, defunding is not the answer. Planned Parenthood should be responsible for the actions of its employees. It should at least be held to the same standards that the left wants crisis-pregnancy centers held to—no false advertising, no erroneous medical information. But it’s extremely unlikely that there are multitudes of men walking into Planned Parenthood trying to get cheap abortions for their sex workers. And the young women who count on the group’s cheap birth control will be the ones who are harmed if Planned Parenthood loses its federal funding.

*Clarification, Feb. 2: When I first published this post, I wrote that there is no such thing as a "heart tone." Of course, a "heart tone" is just a synonym for heart beat. What I was referring to was a Live Action sting video in which a Planned Parenthood staffer told a woman that at 10 weeks, her fetus didn't have a heart beat, "it only had a heart tone." There is no precursor to the heart beat called a "heart tone," which is what I was trying to say, but it came out wrong. I apologize for any confusion.

Photograph by David McNew for Getty Images.

Tags: lila rose, planned parenthood, pro-choice, pro-life

I have a feeling we're just beginning to hear from Lila Rose, the 22-year-old anti-abortion activist and wannabe actress whose James O’Keefe-styled “creative extremism” has yielded heavily edited videos from inside Planned Parenthood clinics. Most recently, Live Action, the group Rose founded at 15, is helping spearhead the anti-Planned Parenthood campaign that Amanda just wrote about. As part of this, Rose has released a video that purports to show a clinic employee “advising a sex trafficker how to get medical care for prostitutes as young as 14,” reports the New York Times. Planned Parenthood has said it reported the visit by the pretend pimp and prostitute to authorities after it happened, and that it’s investigating the employee’s conduct.

Rose calls herself a “student activist” at UCLA. A 2009 profile in the Los Angeles Times, in which she answered questions by email, reveals that she’s from San Jose, Calif., is the third of eight children, and was partly home-schooled. She has been interviewed by Bill O’Reilly and makes speeches on her anti-abortion crusade, in one instance being introduced as “a young Sarah Palin.” "We will work to de-fund them in every state wherever it is possible," she has said of Planned Parenthood, "to de-license them and to expose them." In one appearance, she suggested that so long as abortions are legal they should “be done in the public square.” (Eventually, she explained, the nation would become “so sick and tired of seeing them that we would do away with the injustice altogether. … Maybe then we might hear angels singing when we ponder the glory of conception.”)

In the past, Rose has worked with O’Keefe, the pretend “pimp” from the ACORN videos and many other renegade adventures. In 2008, as part of an effort to mobilize black anti-abortion activists (and to disparage Planned Parenthood), she released a recording of O’Keefe trying to make a donation to that organization specifically on behalf of black women’s abortions. (In the recording, according to the New York Times, O’Keefe is heard saying, “You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better.” The employee on the other end replies, “Understandable, understandable.” Planned Parenthood apologized.)

Rose takes her inspiration from all over the political spectrum. “The world is in dire need of creative extremists,” she says at one point in a CNN profile from last year, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.  Both she and O’Keefe were inspired by left-wing grassroots organizer Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Rose is perfect for TV – her glamour and her baby-voiced delivery temper her political extremism and questionable tactics. In the CNN interview, she reveals she might like to be an actress. We watch her clearly enjoying getting into character as a gum-cracking, reticent, abortion-seeking 15-year-old. (In the series of undercover forays we get to see, she is pretending to be pregnant by a much older boyfriend; the set-up is to see whether abortion clinics report the statutory rape.) We watch her getting her hair dyed so she won’t be recognized by Planned Parenthood staffers. “This is a great adventure,” she says, looking in the mirror. “I never had blond hair before.”

After she gets out of the clinic, she lifts a hidden tape recorder out of her T-shirt and examines it. “This baby is still recording. Praise God! Praise God!”

If we as a nation have gotten better at having adult conversations about abortion, at looking for compromise on an issue in which the common ground may consist of just a few feet -- maybe only a few inches -- Lila Rose takes us in the other direction. She is the face of divisiveness. She is the face of all-out war.

Tags: James O'Keefe, lila rose, live action

Politico reports a new, coordinated push by anti-choice activists to demolish access to contraception and cancer screening for millions of young and low-income women.  By using abortion as a scare tactic, the anti-choicers hope to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding, with an eye toward making sure that the venerable organization can stop preventing unintended pregnancies---and therefore abortions---as soon as possible.  In a reasonable world, we wouldn't call people who are actually taking action to raise the abortion rate "anti-abortion," but sadly, that's how confused our landscape is around reproductive rights in this age of tip-toeing around the easily hurt feelings of right wing extremists.

I successfully avoided abortion during my five years using Planned Parenthood's excellent services (before switching to private doctors).  You would think that "anti-abortion" folks would be happy about this, but that's only if you really buy the line that they're in this to stop fetuses from being killed, instead of trying to create a world where sexual activity has what they tend to call "consequences," but what I like to call "punishment," to reflect the intentions behind those who wish to restrict access.

How do people who wish to restrict access to the number one prevention method of abortions (contraception) reconcile this with their facetious claims to care about fetuses?  Well, it depends on the audience.  For mainstream audiences, the strategy is to attack Planned Parenthood for using non-federal funds for the 3 percent of its services that are abortion and claim that this somehow wipes out the 97 percent of the services that either save lives (cancer screenings, STD treatment) or prevent abortion.  And we're expected to buy that they'd rather see the number of fetuses killed rise dramatically than allow federal funds to even touch the same office buildings where abortions are provided, which means they're more worried about symbolic contamination than actual fetal lives.

But that head-scratcher of an argument sounds almost logical, when compared to what anti-choice activists tell each other in their own spaces.  As this article from Life News demonstrates, the argument within their own circles is that contraception actually causes abortion by convincing women they don't have to marry the first guy they sleep with:

Rather, in the altered sex and marriage markets made possible by contraception and legal abortion, more and more women engage in non-marital sex without any “shotgun marriage” guarantee in the event of pregnancy. This leads (ironically) to more non-marital pregnancies, more non-marital births, more sexually transmitted diseases, and (irony of ironies) more abortions.

In the end, I believe this is the real argument behind this push from anti-choice groups: that Planned Parenthood is wrong because it convinces women they have a right to own their own lives and to make their own decisions.  They openly ask for a world where women get pregnant as young as possible, and either luck out by having an impregnator who will make an honest woman of them, or are marshalled into maternity homes, where they're punished by having their babies taken from them.  Certainly, it's not a world where women will have the same options for education and employment, but it definitely is a world where men can be more assured that women don't really have the option to reject them after having sex. And that apparently matters more than all the well-being of women, girls, children, and yes, even fetuses.  Because contrary to the yapping of anti-choice writers like this, abortion was quite common prior to Roe v. Wade.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan for Getty Images.

Tags: contraception, planned parenthood, pro-choice, pro-life, roe v wade