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On last night's Colbert Report, Slate's (and the XX Factor's) own Dahlia Lithwick discussed Elena Kagan with Stephen. "She has this magical ability to make you love her," Dahlia said, to which Stephen replied, "Is she a leprechaun?" The takeaway from Dahlia's segment, embedded below, was that the Kagan hearings will be mostly about her lack of judicial experience—not her sexuality or her potential leprechaun status.
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On the subject of food allergies, there are two major camps: The skeptics who believe it's all in your head, and the believers who get wildly defensive when they come across skeptics, reminding everyone in sight that food allergies are a very big deal. (Don't forget that horrible episode of Freaks and Geeks!) Skeptics can't help but notice that a few years ago, no one had even heard of gluten-free food, much less started restaurants dedicated solely to selling it. Believers swear up and down that they or their loved ones' health improved tremendously when the loathed food was finally singled out and shunned. The two camps are polarized in a way that makes modern politics seem like a tea party, and so there's not a lot of room for those of us who consider ourselves moderates in the debate—people who believe that food allergies are a very big deal, but also that they're way overdiagnosed by both doctors and people who wake up one day and blame gluten for all their problems.
This New York Times article gives the moderates a boost. Dr. Marc Riedl, an immunologist from UCLA, has released a report indicating that food allergies are real, but wildly overreported—5 percent of adults actually have them, but 30 percent of adults believe they do. No mention of how many adults don't claim food allergies, but still avoid eating gluten because they assume something must be wrong with it because of all the attention it gets. Riedl argues that people call themselves "allergic" to food that simply gives them indigestion, something that will no doubt cheer many skeptics.
However, Riedl also rolls up people who have legitimate intolerances into the "not a food allergy" category, which seems a little unfair. Many people simply don't know the difference, but that doesn't mean that their negative reactions to lactose or sulfites aren't real. It's an innocent mistake, and perhaps educating people about the very real differences between common intolerances and genuine food allergies would make the latter easier to spot.
In the meantime, I'm sure drug companies that sell antacids and gas pills will be heartened to hear that perhaps most people who think they have food allergies would be better off reaching for a bottle of these common medications.
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If they can just get men past the words "a blast of ultrasound to the testes," researchers at the University of North Carolina may have finally hit on a method of birth control that's most appealing to the people it's meant to interest: men. That ultrasound blast is quick, painless and effective for up to six months, and would free both men who might actually have the opportunity to accidentally father a child and men who only hope things go that well from worrying about whether they've accidentally hit the bull's eye. The ultrasound treatment also sounds great for couples in between kids or as a back-up plan.
What it wouldn't do, of course, is prevent diseases or offer any real reassurance to the girl who's willing to risk an STD but not pregnancy. But then, no form of birth control other than condoms offers full protection to both parties without taking anything on trust. If researchers can get ultrasound birth control out of clinical trials and approved for the masses, the big question will be the same old, same old ask. Women are willing to subject ourselves to various indignities and procedures in order to keep from bearing children; men, historically, have been somewhat less willing to shoulder the burden of not fathering them. Can even the simplest technology change that?
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The AP reports that in 1997, when she was in the White House's domestic policy office, Elena Kagan advised President Bill Clinton to support a compromise proposal that would have banned late-term abortions, post-viability. I've been getting e-mails from feminist friends wondering how worried they should be. Not that much, I think (though I do have a bone to pick with Kagan’s fusion of her lawyer and political selves).
First of all, after viability is the key phrase here: Most people would agree that once a fetus can live outside the womb, the whole calculus changes. (This is after at least 22 weeks of pregnancy or, in some cases, after 24 weeks.) Second, the compromise, proposed by then Sen. Tom Daschle, made an exception if continuing the abortion would “risk grievous injury to [a woman’s] physical health,” as well as to her life. The health exception is all-important, abortion providers I trust tell me.
The other thing that matters here is context. At the time, Clinton had vetoed one bill that would have banned so-called partial-birth abortion with an exception only for the life of the mother. The president went on to veto a second such bill, sponsored by then-Sen. Rick Santorum. The right fielded these bills, of course, to focus the conversation about abortion on gruesome-sounding late-term procedures—even though 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester, then and now, and only a small number take place after 22 weeks. Daschle was trying to take partial-birth abortion off the table. His proposal actually would have banned more abortions than Santorum’s. The ACLU opposed it. But Santorum did too, calling the bill a sham, according to the Chicago Tribune. And so it died, like most efforts to defuse abortion as divisive and explosive.
In light of this, as well as Kagan’s statement to the Senate last year during her confirmation for solicitor general, that she would respect existing laws and precedent on abortion rights, I don’t think this is a pro-life smoking gun. Yes, it reflects pragmatism, not purity, but we knew that about Kagan already. And in this context, it looks pretty worthwhile. For the pro-choice side, the world would be a better place with Daschle’s bill and without the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion that eventually did pass, and which the Supreme Court upheld. Imagine if the moderate left had been able to take this issue away from the right.
It does bother me, though, that in counseling Clinton to support Daschle’s compromise, Kagan noted that the Justice Department thought it was unconstitutional. It seems oddly unlawerly—fast and loose. On the other hand, she was a White House staffer, which is different from her current job or another one in DoJ. And given where the court came out, it was hardly a slam-dunk call. I should mention that Kagan was working at the time for Bruce Reed, who is a Slate contributor.
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MTV has a new scripted show set to debut after the MTV Movie Awards next month, and it's about an unpopular high schooler with an abnormally large penis who gets a shot at the girl of his dreams once everyone learns about his asset. It's called The Hard Times of RJ Berger, and Vulture terms it the "teenage version of Hung"—the HBO show about an unemployed man with an abnormally large penis who becomes an escort in order to support his family. While superficially the Hung comparison seems accurate, beyond the bulging similarity (sorry), there are fairly notable differences.
As Willa Paskin noted in a DoubleX piece from last summer, Hung is a "serious drama about male anxiety" in which the protagonist Ray Drecker's only asset—literally, he is homeless and living in a tent—is his package. From the looks of the RJ Berger trailer (embedded below), the main character's large penis is pretty exclusively a comic device, and his anxiety is not so much male as it is teen: He wants popular people to like him and he wants to nab the prettiest girl in school. As RJ Berger co-creator told the L.A. Times earlier this year, "It's just a noisy way to do a story about growing up." Still, it's worth noting that the notion of a large penis leading to redemption is lurking behind both of these television shows. What does that say about the state of American masculinity?
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Amanda, I’ve read and reread Ross Douthat’s column from yesterday, and I just can’t see where he’s taking a potshot at “yuppie abortion sluts.” And I hardly think he’s trying to “wave off the statistical reality that blue families are more stable.”
As much as I loathe any “red” vs.”blue” conversation, since most people I know are at least a little bit purple, I do think Douthat’s take on Red Families v. Blue Families is similar to the take I would have if I ever get a chance to sit down and read it. Namely: There’s a lot of data in there that should make a lot of people uncomfortable.
It’s impossible to look at the numbers and completely discount the effect that abortion might be having. In fact, I believe that Douthat is only emphasizing a point that the authors themselves bring up. (To quote him: “Cahn and Carbone also acknowledge one of the more polarizing aspects of the ‘blue family’ model. Conservative states may have more teen births and more divorces, but liberal states have many more abortions.”) And it’s unfair to claim that the dearth of abortion clinics in Red America is causing teenage girls to be frog-marched down the aisle, leading to early divorce and broken families without acknowledging that the statistical reality of higher abortion rates in Blue America might have at least something to do with more stable families. (I believe that wing nut Douthat said the blue-state model “may depend on abortion to succeed.” Crazy talk!)
There are lots of ugly truths for all of us to confront. If conservative values that lead to earlier marriage—and to shotgun weddings or young single-parent families—are subsequently leading to broken families, yes, we have to ask ourselves what price we want to pay for our opposition to abortion. But if a “successful” family model relies in part on the availability of abortion to succeed—and it’s a fair question to raise—well, that’s a pretty high price to pay, too.
What this book affords is the opportunity for an important conversation. And we as a society can have that conversation, or we can just retire to “Rightwingnuttersville” and “Leftwingcrazytown” and take shots at one another.
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—David Brooks dubs Elena Kagan a full-grown "Organization Kid," uninterested in "the contest of ideas." Others claim that her elite academic background has left Kagan disconnected from the "real world." Still others try to sniff out her positions on abortion and gay marriage. [New York Times, Politico, Washington Post, AP/Yahoo News, Salon]
—A German study provides evidence that the pill and other kinds of hormonal contraception increase young women's risk for sexual dysfunction. Injections and birth control patches were most linked to issues like difficulty reaching orgasm and pain during sex. [New York Times]
—Why are women especially pressured to find supreme contentment in an often unsatisfying world? Rebecca Traister argues that there's more to life than the pursuit of happiness. [Salon]
—Is the capacity for monogamy really biological? Recent studies that a "commitment gene" may be partially involved. No word on whether the new drugstore genetic testing kits will detect that one. [New York Times, Washington Post]
—On behalf of younger voters, Meghan McCain calls for more civility in politics. [The Daily Beast]
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The New York Times on Sunday had one of the most intriguing wedding announcements I’d seen in years. Avery Willis, a Stanford grad with a Ph.D. in classical languages and literature from Oxford married Matthew Hoffman, a New York city sanitation worker. In addition to crossing class lines, she’s black and he’s white. I had to know—how did this couple find each other? Fortunately, the Times' Web site has a video that tells the story of their romance. Three years ago, Avery, who’s a theater director, got on a crowded F train to Brooklyn. The only seat available had a coat on it. She sat on the coat, and Matthew said, “Excuse me, you’re sitting on my coat.” They started talking, and by the time they got to her stop, he was smitten and asked her out for a drink. As they began seeing each other, he was worried that a woman with a Ph.D. dating a garbage man was too big a chasm, but said that she kept telling all her friends how great he was and what stories he had about the amazing stuff other people threw out. They are both Scrabble fanatics, and one night he asked her to get a glass of wine for him. He put the letters “Marry Me” on the board. Thank you, Avery and Matthew, for your cheering, inspiring love story about two people who know what's really valuable.
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Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott announces the beginning of the “onset of the Generation X mid-life crisis.” His evidence: Sam Lipsyte’s recent comic novel The Ask, and the films Hot Tub Time Machine and Greenberg, all of which feature older male GenXers trying to come to grips with how their youthful dreams somehow didn’t pan out and they are leading lives of ... well, will you forgive me if I say ironic desperation?
As an older GenXer myself, I can certainly relate, as can any number of women of my acquaintance. But in Scott’s world, we don’t count. The midlife crisis, it seems, only happens to men. Scott is unaware of the fact that female Gen X writers and social critics have been wrestling with the collision of what might have been with the reality of our lives for several years.
More than a few female GenXers have seen their dreams—no matter how ironic or heartfelt or, well, whatever—vanish in a haze of sleepless nights, overworked days, and the constant pressure to look and seem perfect in every aspect of our lives. Sam Lipsyte’s less caustic female counterpart might well be Leah Stewart, whose novel Husband and Wife was published this month. Stewart’s lead protagonist? An overeducated female poet turned academic-office manager and mother of two, resentfully handling an unfaithful husband, pining for an ex-boyfriend, and wondering for what, exactly, she gave up her literary ambitions.
When our concerns do manage to seep into the public consciousness, they are often dismissed as narcissistic whining. When lead Gen X female writer Elizabeth Wurtzel (born a year before Lipsyte, in 1967) ruminated in Elle last year about fading looks and what she could have/should have done differently, saying “people who say they have no regrets, that they don’t look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse,” Amy Benfer, writing at Salon, deemed the essay “bizarre.” Similar words were said about two essays published about marriage and midlife last year as well, Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” in the Atlantic and Elizabeth Weil’s “Married (Happily) With Issues,” in the New York Times Magazine.
Of course, it could be argued that they are at least receiving attention, no matter how negative. It’s not clear that anyone besides A.O. Scott gives much of a damn about the male Gen X mid-life crisis. As Scott, a Gen X male, points out, Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine are not considered particularly successful movies. But, then again, why no Scott mention of Lisa Cholodenko’s (who was born in 1964) film The Kids Are All Right—which has been getting rave reviews on the festival circuit—about a midlife lesbian couple examining their lives?
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Like many others, I was thrilled with Betty White’s turn on SNL this weekend; there’s nothing I like better than a sharp-as-a-tack old broad proving to the world that she’s still got it (cue multiple viewings of Elaine Stritch’s 2004 Emmy-winning speech). And while the jokes were predictable enough (standard elder-sploitation gags: a sailor mouth, an attempt to dance in time to salsa music, references to one’s “muffin,” the suggestion of grandmotherly incest, repetitive utterings of the world “lesbian”), the show was a real triumph for SNL, which has been needing an infusion of new life for many months.
Though Betty was ascendant, the episode was as much about the return of some of SNL’s best women cast-members—Molly Shannon, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, and, of course, Tina Fey—as it was about the little-old-woman-who-could. In bringing back these women and their iconic sketches both on-air and online (the NPR women, Sally O’Malley, the “Joyologist,” Debbie Downer, the Lawrence Welk absurdity, Amy and Tina back at the Update desk), the show was tipping its hat to how funny its women have been over time.
In provoking nostalgia and cultural memory about its female cast-members, SNL accomplished a great thing; it made viewers long to have these women back in their lives on a weekly basis. The inclusion of Poehler and Fey in Weekend Update (clip embedded below) showed just how stale the segment has been without a female co-anchor, and allowing Shannon and Gasteyer to reprise their earthy, kooky, innuendo-filled NPR segment left me craving those kinds of goofball women-run sketches again.
For the last few years, SNL has been a bit of a late-night frat house; Andy Samberg and his digital shorts have become the main reason for appointment viewing of the show, and most would argue that Will Forte and Bill Hader are the cast’s strongest players—though Kristen Wiig steals every scene she is in and has created several iconic characters, she often acts alone, and cannot single-handedly overpower the boys’ club. The attempt to bring in new women to the show has been difficult. The group of young comediennes in the featured cast this year is promising, but without many chances to create characters or dominate episodes, Abby Elliot, Jenny Slate, and Nasim Pedrad risk meeting the same fate as two other female cast members before them, who only lasted a year.
What this week’s episode showed, besides the fact that an 88-year-old woman can beat the comedic timing of a cast several decades her junior, is that SNL is sometimes best when the women run the show. If only we could get more of this each week, the battle that we keep fighting might cease to be an issue at all.
Photograph of Betty White by Theo Wargo/Getty Images.
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