I was 10 when I began to despise my mane of curly brown hair. “You know,” remarked Karen, a classmate, one day as we were waiting for our moms to grab us after school, "You would be the prettiest girl in the fifth grade if you didn’t have braces or glasses and your hair was straight." Wow, thanks Karen! I remember gushing enthusiastically. And then her words sunk in. Eventually, my braces would come off. And a couple years later, I’d spend at least an hour each morning furiously poking my eyeballs with new contacts. But that still left my hair.

If only Pixar’s new movie, Brave, had come out back then. The trailer, which premiered in theaters with Cars 2 on June 24, tells the story of a princess (Merida) who shuns her royal roots and attempts to become an archer. Her hair—an effervescent mess of red curls—appears to be an asset, not a hindrance, to her character. But the tantalizing trailer left me wondering what part the curls might play in her identity. How important will they be?  It certainly looks like the animators intended them to stand out against the sepulchral, hazy grayness of the Highlands of Scotland, the story’s backdrop:

Growing up, curly-haired heroines (and dolls) seemed scarce. I had very few, if any, voluminous role models. And movies exacerbated my plight: Generally, a heroine cast with naturally curly hair was a bookish nerd with about as much control over her life as she had over frizz on a humid day in August.  I was told by more than one person that I looked like Anne Hathaway in the Princess Diaries before the makeover. Like Hathaway’s fake locks, my real ones snapped combs and brushes, ensnared hair ties and sent my stylist into a cold sweat. Eventually, Hathaway is transformed into a sleek, glossy goddess. She emanates confidence, standing up to a malicious Mandy Moore and eventually snagging the cute guy.

I fear that Pixar may follow the formula of the Princess Diaries: Will they straighten Princess Merida’s hair in the final scene to depict her ultimate triumph over the unruliness of her world, as Disney did with Hathaway? Or will the unruliness of her hair be part of that triumph?

If it’s the latter, perhaps Brave will help the next generation of curly-girls to feel less like outcasts, as I did, and more like part of an exclusive club. At least, it may be the next best thing to triumphant return of 80s hair, a day that every curly girl secretly dreams about.

Tags: brave, brave movie, curly hair, pixar's brave

During his interview of Michele Bachmann last night, Chris Wallace pointedly asked the presidential hopeful, “Are you a flake?” Bachmann was visibly offended. “I think that would be insulting to say something like that,” she shot back, “because I'm a serious person.” Shortly after the interview, the Fox News Sunday Facebook page was flooded with accusations of sexism on Wallace’s part. Politico and the Washington Post speculated today that the interview might enhance Bachmann’s appeal among female voters who’ll now take a sympathetic posture towards her.

In response to the growing chorus of criticism, Wallace issued a video apology this afternoon. “I messed up,” he said, “I didn’t mean any disrespect.” Bachmann quickly implied that she would not accept the apology. She may be justified in her refusal—this isn’t the first time the Fox reporter has used the term to describe her. In fact, Wallace also told Bachmann in an interview this April that she had a reputation for saying “some—forgive me—flaky things.”

Wallace has plenty of material to work with. In the April interview, he confronted Bachmann with footage of two of her more outrageous assertions: that the Revolutionary War began in New Hampshire, and that the federal government presently owns 51 percent of the private economy. Last night, he pointed out that she’d alleged NATO airstrikes had killed 30,000 civilians and also accused members of Congress of being anti-American. As those (and many, many other) statements illustrate, Bachmann is a flawed candidate, and it is well within the media’s rights to point that out. Still, like passive and hysterical, flaky is a term that strikes a chord when levied against a woman, particularly when she is vying for a position of authority. Male candidates may often be critiqued as unrealistic, incompetent, or unappealing, but they are rarely framed as unserious or child-like, as the word flaky implies.

It’s interesting to note that “flaky women” is used as a Google search term more than twice as often as “flaky men.” The term itself, however, doesn’t seem to have a specifically gendered history, according to Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary. In fact, while “the precise inspiration” for the word “has never been satisfactorily explained,” it seems to have a masculine origin: Flaking out was used in military circles in the 1940s to mean “to go to sleep or pass out,” particularly from exhaustion. The current, colloquial use of the terms flake and flaky arose during the 1950s.

As with much questionable language usage, Wallace’s tone was crucial: His use of the word last night was inextricable from his belittling attitude toward Bachmann. In the April interview, Wallace began his conversation with the representative by noting that it “may surprise some people” to learn that she is a tax attorney. As others have pointed out, his tone last night was similarly more like a doubtful high school counselor than a journalist conducting an interview with a public figure. ("Do you recognize,” he asked her, “that now that you are in the spotlight in a way that you weren't before that you have to be careful and not say what some regard as flaky things?”) It’s hard to imagine an interview with a male politician opening with the “surprising” news of his professional career, or him being condescendingly reminded that he needs to choose his words carefully. In his apology today, Wallace offered a mea culpa to his viewers for upsetting them. But he ought to be apologizing directly to Bachmann—and offering extra words of contrition to his female viewers.

Photograph of Michele Bachmann by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Tags: chris wallace, etymology, flake, Michele Bachmann

The credit for New York’s gay-marriage legislation that passed late Friday night should go to Gov. Cuomo, the many Democrats in the New York State Assembly and State Senate who worked on the bill, and the untold number of activists who have been fighting for equality for years. So I don’t want to make too much of a hero out of Mark Grisanti, a Republican who formerly opposed gay marriage but whose vote helped the bill garner passage. But I do want to shine extra attention on the comments he made in hopes that he can be an example to others.  “A man can be wiser today than yesterday, but there can be no respect for that man if he has failed to do his duty," he said.

Republican opponents of gay marriage, you might want to keep that phrasing tucked away somewhere, so you can pull it out and use it when you finally face reality. Because if you haven’t already, it’s time. New York will be the sixth state (plus D.C.) to recognize gay marriage. Supporters believe it will pave the way for other states to follow suit and help change public opinion.

Half of Americans now support same-sex marriage, and support is much more common among young people. It’s not just for liberals! President Bush’s daughter Barbara made a video in support of marriage equality, and Meghan McCain (love her or hate her), has spoken out. And it’s not just for the young! Ted Olson, solicitor general in the Bush administration, has worked to overturn California’s Prop 8.

There is almost nothing for Republicans to gain by withholding support for gay marriage. Yes, religious conservatives and old folks will be cranky, but where are they going to go? To the Democrats who are more actively pushing the issue? (And I’m looking at the big picture, not individual races where a conservative Democrat could run to the right of someone on marriage.) And there is plenty to lose. Younger voters, and your pride. Because some day gay marriage is going to be a complete non-issue, and there will still be YouTube videos of you saying that “That connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law.” (That’s a quote from a court decision upholding an interracial marriage ban, by the way.) Or you’ll be remembered as fondly as Jesse Helms when he died.  Let’s face it: It’s time to throw in the towel and pick up the rainbow flag.

Tags: conservatives for gay marriage, gay marriage, Mark Grisanti, New York gay marriage bill

There’s a strange story in the New York Times today about the lunch Dominique Strauss-Kahn had with his daughter following the attack he allegedly committed on the maid in his hotel suite.  Both side are looking for witnesses and security tapes to show Strauss-Kahn’s demeanor in the hours following the encounter with the maid for clues as to whether he engaged in a violent rape (the assertion by the prosecutors) or a brief, consensual rendezvous (the version apparently the defense is going to use). But all this studying of Strauss-Kahn’s behavior for clues to his guilt or innocence is bizarre. The Times writes of the lunch between Strauss-Kahn and his daughter: “It could bolster the defense case if they laugh or appear to share a leisurely meal; it could support the prosecution if it shows the 62-year-old white-haired Frenchman looking distracted or upset.”

This tells me law school students should be required to take a class in abnormal psychology. Looking to see whether he’s happy or upset for clues as to whether he just attempted rape is posited on the notion that Strauss-Kahn is a normal person. But as Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom writes in an essay on two new books on psychopaths, the hallmark of this disorder is the absence of empathy.  Psychopaths and sociopaths can persistently commit terrible acts because they don’t care how other people feel. Actually, humiliating other people, causing them physical or psychological pain can be pleasurable for those who don’t have a conscience.  It could be that a laughing, relaxed Strauss-Kahn makes a better case for the prosecution – this man is so callous he has no remorse for what he just did.

Tags: dominique strauss-kahn, psychopaths, sociopaths

The movie critic Stephanie Zacharek thinks that the level of jerkdom that Cameron Diaz reaches as the heroine of the comedy Bad Teacher is "revolutionary," because she's the rare female comic lead who's never the butt of a joke. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis concurs, delighting in the fact that Diaz reveals her "inner thug." But not all the female critics believe Diaz's performance as the boozingest, meanest, most conniving middle school teacher on film is a win for women. Karina Longworth, writing in L.A. Weekly, strongly disagrees with Zacharek and Dargis:

The general argument holds that because studios produce so few films built around strong lady protagonists, Hollywood must hate women. But be careful what you wish for. Here, a “strong woman” means a lazy, lying, scheming, slutty, and obstinately materialistic one, whose sole redeeming virtue is her hard body (which the camera shamelessly ogles, as if the men watching need their hand held to look at an actress’s ass), who is so delusional that she thinks her ostentatious assholery is rock-star sexy, and whose delusions are essentially validated by narrative resolution.

Longworth is right in that there are still not enough films built around lady protagonists—but I'd argue that we shouldn't be using every single one as a feminist litmus test. There was so much chatter around Bridesmaids, casting it as some sort of feminist victory because it had complex women characters doing gross things for laughs. But with comedy especially, the question we should be asking is was the movie actually funny. With Bridesmaids, my answer would be a resounding yes; with Bad Teacher*, not so much (I agree with Dana Stevens' review in Slate; the redemption of Diaz's character felt unearned.)

Though I won't evaluate Bad Teacher on whether it has some sort of arbitrary feminist bona fides, I will say that I did agree with Zacharek on one point. It was refreshing to see a female comedic lead where the laughs weren't coming because she humiliates herself. "Even in a supposedly game-changing woman-centric comedy like Bridesmaids, you can’t just be a crude and funny Kristen Wiig," Zacharek writes. "You also have to be a little pathetic, a loser at dating with a recently failed baking business in your past." You also, more poignantly, have to shit yourself on screen. 30 Rock ekes humor from the same place—the show revels in the various humiliations of Liz Lemon. What we need, though, is not to insist Tina Fey make Liz Lemon less of a loser. We need there to be enough women leads that each one doesn't have to carry so much meaning.

Correction, June 28, 2011: The original version of this post referred to Bad Teacher as Hot Teacher.

Tags: Bad Teacher, bad teacher cameron diaz, karina longworth bad teacher review

Emily, I hate homework. Last year, my fourth-grader had easily 45-60 minutes a night (and on one glorious evening when he had forgotten both of two long term assignments, five hours). My first-grader had ten or fifteen. For my son, the homework often meant that he went from school to sport to homework to bed with no break. For my daughter, with her lighter load, it wasn't the homework itself (which took next to no time and which she sometimes persuaded her 4-year-old brother to do for her), it was getting her to sit down and do it. And it was exactly that process of pushing her to sit down every night and get through that worksheet that reminds me of why she had the homework in the first place.

In fourth grade, my son's homework represented some of the most valuable work he did all year. It came in two forms: the math practice sheet (at-home practice of concepts covered in school) and thinking and writing assignments that really aren't best done in the classroom. His teachers explained the goal at the beginning of the year: Students arrive in fourth grade able to write a single paragraph on a topic. They need to leave able to write three paragraphs, so that they can, as they progress through school, begin to write the longer papers that will be required. Yes, I was often stuck working with him one-on-one as he learned to read the material he needed to write about, isolate his topic, and create a response to a question, but I knew it was work that mattered (and had I been unable to help him, the teacher had a system set up to allow her to work with a child and a first draft to show him where to improve). That's worthwhile homework, and the reason we could do it without a lot of stress, except over the amount of time required, was that we had already been through the process of just getting him to sit down in the first place, in his case in second grade. My daughter has homework so she can learn to do homework, and I have come to see the value in that. Is that turning our nights at home into a "second shift" for parents?

I think most of the complaining parents in these "too much homework" articles have already done that for ourselves. If your kids are coming home at 3 p.m., or from after-school programs at 5 p.m., even an hour of homework isn't that arduous (and even the toughest homework shouldn't require your physical presence at a child's elbow the entire time). Most after school programs designed for working parents help kids to get the homework done in any case. It's the other activities that make homework so painful, and that's true in our family as well. Homework is fine on the nights when there is no hockey, or skiing, or piano lessons. If I object to homework because we can't fit it into a schedule filled with that sort of folderol, what am I saying to my son, or to his teachers, about what's really important? As for kids with parents who aren't capable of giving the kind of at-home help necessary (and that could be kids with immigrant or multiple-shift-working parents, or it could be my son if given a particular kind of math problem to solve and then explain in writing, because the sad truth is that several times this year I could not help), the answer isn't to rule out homework; it's to offer the ability to get the help they need elsewhere. As I said, the school my two oldest kids attend offers it, but let's not kid ourselves. It's an "independent school." So maybe I believe in homework because, in effect, I'm paying for it. (As a public school graduate, I hate that.) But now that I have seen the carefully thought out plans the school has in place to get kids to come out of each year with both the knowledge and the skills they need to move on, I don't see how they're going to get there without homework. Granted, not all the homework you're describing sounds like it's worth it, but that's not about having less homework; it's about having the right homework. I'd like to read more about that.

The passage of the same-sex marriage bill in New York brings an opportunity to scrutinize the arguments of the opposition. Senator Ruben Diaz of the Bronx, who now holds the distinction of casting the lone Democratic vote against marriage equality, said it was “unbelievable” that the Republican Party, “the party that always defended family values,” had allowed the bill to pass. He explained his position as follows:

“God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.”

Setting aside the oddity of Diaz’s choice in tenses, and the fact that the Supreme Court changed the definition of marriage not long ago with Loving v. Virginia, I find it rather shocking that a family-values type would attack U.S. law so brazenly by advocating the Bible’s take on marriage, which after all includes polygamy. Lamech had two wives and so did Jacob, Esau had three, David had lots more, Solomon had hundreds. Or was Diaz thinking of that charming bit from Deuteronomy, which specifies that if a man rapes a virgin not yet spoken for, and he’s discovered, he must marry his victim and pay her father fifty silver shekels?

With that kind of depravity, I have no choice but to root for Albany over God.

Tags: gay marriage; gay marriage NY; New York gay marriage: gay marriage legal New York; Albany gay marriage; Ruben Diaz

Why have Catherine Greig, the girlfriend of mobster Whitey Bulger, and Anne Sinclair, the wife of accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, stood by their men? I’m going to play amateur psychiatrist and declare both men appear to be sociopaths. There’s not much doubt with Bulger, who is allegedly behind at least 19 murders and even by the standards of professional criminals was considered to be particularly vicious. Granted, Strauss-Kahn, until his recent indictment on rape charges, was a highly successful international bureaucrat possibly on his way to becoming president of France. Yet his wife surely knew about his obsessive, compulsive philandering. Did she never hear word that the Great Seducer sometimes forced himself on the unwilling?  She certainly now knows that the night he spent in the Sofitel he propositioned two female employees, who rebuffed him, before his encounter with the maid. If the press leaks are accurate, his defense against the rape charge may be that the sexual encounter with the woman who came to clean his room was consensual. Yet it is Sinclair’s money which is making his defense possible. Given the costs of his luxurious house arrest, his security, his lawyers, his investigators, she could be sinking $1 million a month into trying to clear a husband whose treatment of women is pathological. Sinclair, who has brains, beauty, ambition, and money, stepped aside from her successful career as a journalist to help Strauss-Kahn’s rise. I imagine, now that she is in her 60s, she loathes the idea of a future as an aging single woman, left off the guest list for the best parties. But at what point do you stop defending the indefensible?

Greig was a dental hygienist who was in her 40s when, 16 years ago, she went on the lam with Bulger, who was in his 60s. Did she imagine a glamorous life on the Riviera under assumed names? These Bostonians did end up near the beach, pretending to be a married couple, living in a fairly modest rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica filled with cash, guns, and false identity papers. Greig used to be obsessed with her looks, but had let her blonde hair turn gray. Why not, as the life of a fugitive meant there was nowhere for her to go. Apparently Bulger, described by another tenant as a “rageaholic,” objected when she spent too much time chatting with the neighbors. She covered for his behavior by saying her “husband” had dementia. The two took daily walks on the beach, but he spent most of his time on the couch, watching television. It was the dull life of a reclusive, retired couple. Did she ever want to flee but fear that if she tried she’d end up a corpse like many of those who crossed Whitey? Did she regret the seemingly irreversible choice she’d made long ago to give up the chance at a normal life in order to grocery shop for a murderer?

Photograph of Catherine Greig taken in 1990/FBI

Tags: anne Sinclair, capture of whitey bulger, catherine greig, dominique strauss-kahn, sociopaths, whitey bulger

I now know I do not actually want to be happy. "Happy," as per Martin Seligman, author of Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, isn't really enough to make me happy. Regular, casual happy can come from a donut or a sunny day or a night off on the couch with a bag of chips, but those things, as Seligman himself puts it, can leave us feeling like we're "merely fidgeting until we die." There's no engagement, meaning, or accomplishment in a bag of chips, and without those things, we might tick off "happy" on a survey of life satisfaction at any given moment, but our long-term well-being hasn't improved at all.

A great deal of that is semantics, and those semantics absorb the first few chapters of Flourish. You could, of course, define "happy" to include feeling engaged, accomplished, or as though your life holds meaning, but Seligman fears that we just don't. We think of happiness as rainbows and smiley faces and ordinary good cheer, and so we're missing out, as individuals and as a society, on giving the proper value to the things that make us really happy (or as Seligman prefers, the things that help our well-being flourish). Parents respond to a survey indicating less life satisfaction than non-parents, and we argue for hours over why anyone would have children if they don't make you happy. The redefined version of "happy" as "well-being" makes the answer simple: Children engage us and add to our sense that our life has meaning, even if, from a purely hedonistic point of view, a donut might offer more value.

It's largely after Seligman is finished explaining why his field of "positive psychology" is about something more than "that awful yellow smiley face" that Flourish becomes engrossing and engaging. Seligman writes that as individuals, parents, educators and citizens, we're losing something when we focus on happiness (or mock the value of "happiness") at the expense of considering well-being. He explains why drugs and traditional therapy may make a depressed individual feel better, but will never help that individual to actually be better, and offers concrete, tested alternatives—in essence, exercises that bypass the need for feeling cheerful and move on towards increasing a sense of those other elements of meaning, engagement and accomplishment.

But Flourish is far more than a self-help manual (in fact, its self-help elements feel largely incidental). Seligman is spinning with ideas, and he's packed so many of them into this book that it's like a primer on how just about everything to do with well-being could be done better. He takes that individual advice and expands it, applying it to everything from preparing a psychologically fit army, helping soldiers (and their families) move past the wounds and stress of war, to the psychology of illness and how governments should consider well-being before GDP.  If you're the kind of reader who likes to worry about whether the tide's gonna reach your chair with one part of your mind while stretching the other around ways to improve and change your life and the lives of the people around you, then Flourish is the beach book for you.

Tags: Flourish, martin seligman, positive psychology

The Supreme Court ruled this morning that the estate of tragic tabloid queen Anna Nicole Smith will not cash in on the $475 million that a California bankruptcy court awarded her in 2002.* Smith’s lawyers claimed she was entitled to the money because it was a gift from now-deceased J. Howard Marshall, the 89-year-old billionaire who Smith famously wed at 26. The written opinion issued today was rather bland (nothing like Dahlia’s original hopes for a spicier exchange between the justices): It was primarily a discussion of whether a 1984 law was unconstitutional in allowing bankruptcy judges to rule on questions of state law. The Court ruled that the law had, in fact, given those judges too much power—which is fairly significant for people who care about bankruptcy courts. But for Smith’s estate, the only real member of which is her 3 ½-year old daughter, Dannielynn, it means they get zilch. Pierce Marshall, J. Howard’s son, takes all of the $1.6 billion (though neither Smith nor Marshall, who began their legal battle in 1994, is alive to see its resolution today).

The complicated constitutional issues in the 38-page opinion heavily overshadow the Shakespearean betrayals and Harlequin romance drama simmering beneath. Smith, in fact, was mentioned only once at the oral argument. In the written opinion, she is dryly referred to by her legal name, Vickie Lynn Marshall. The closest the Justice’s get to the theatrical underpinnings is when Justice Roberts compares the procedural history to Dickens’s Bleak House.*

Indeed, the Dickensian circus surrounding Anna Nicole Smith not only clogged the media; it arguably clogged the courts. This is the second time that the Supreme Court, which declines to hear thousands of cases per year, has given floor time to Smith’s estate. The case saw four courthouses before it first made its way to the high court in 2006, when it was sent back to a lower court to be sorted out. This term, it again won the coveted ears of The Nine. (Meanwhile, the Court just declined to consider the case of a Guantanamo inmate challenging rendition to a country where he would likely be tortured and the case of a death row inmate in Georgia whose conviction was based on the testimony of witnesses who have since recanted.)

Four years after the end of her sad life, Smith somehow continues to lose. She’s lost J. Howard’s millions. Her 17-year-old son, Daniel, overdosed and died in 2006. Months later, Smith herself overdosed. Let’s hope Dannielynn, who has already been the subject of a widely publicized paternity case, is able to find peace—out of the courts and out of the tabloids.

Correction, June 24, 2011: This post originally misattributed the Bleak House comparison to Justice Kennedy; it was Chief Justice Roberts who threw in the literary flair. In addition, the bankruptcy court that was overturned in the case was in California, not Texas. Ms. Smith filed her original claim against Pierce Marshall in Texas, but filed for bankruptcy in California.

Tags: anna nicole smith trial, supreme court anna nicole