The XX Factor

Researchers at Harvard University published a study this week showing that babies whose weight-to-height ratio jumps two percentile groups before the age of 2 are more likely to be obese later in childhood, according to an AP article making the rounds.

The results of the study are both strikingly obvious—if your baby gains weight more quickly than other babies, he is more likely to be fat later on—and fairly inconclusive. The supposed upshot of the doctors’ research, conducted by parsing the growth charts of 45,000 Boston-area children over the course of 18 years, is that infants who gain weight rapidly are at a higher risk of childhood obesity. However, only 12 percent of the infants in the authors’ designated high-risk group were obese by the age of 5, which—considering that 10 percent of all preschool-aged children are obese—means that the authors’ suggested predictive tool isn’t really all that predictive.

So why has the national press enthusiastically picked up on a study that’s neither surprising nor particularly convincing? Could it just maybe be that obesity is such a reliably hot-button topic that newspapers and magazines will publish virtually any ostensibly scientific information on it?

The new study, which was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (alongside an editorial criticizing its suggestions), is a link-bait double whammy, since its conclusions stoke parenting fears just as much as body-image anxieties. And the AP article lays out the impossible tightrope parents feel pressured to walk when it comes to their children’s health: If your baby's gaining weight too quickly, she'll probably be obese later on, but if you put her on a diet, you'll set her up for a lifetime of unhealthy eating patterns.

This paradox arises from the assumption—which goes unchallenged in virtually all mainstream reporting of obesity—that only thin (but not too thin!) people can be healthy. In reality, healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes, as do unhealthy bodies, and no single ideal size applies to everyone (even to all babies). But researchers would get a lot less funding, science journalists would get a lot fewer assignments, and the diet industry would make a lot less profit if people started believing that.

Today states are tabulating votes and activists on either side of various issues are celebrating or rending their clothes. Without taking a vote, however, I think we can safely declare the Best Robocall for the Year, and perhaps for eternity, courtesy of a group calling itself Citizens for Honesty and Sound Marriage in Iowa. Iowa voters lucky enough to receive this robocall were treated to this bit of daily uplift: "Homosexual marriage obviously involves homosexual sex. So before you support Liz Mathis, call her at 319-899-0628 and ask her which homosexual sex acts she endorses." The group presumably hoped to help the Republican candidate defeat Mathis, with an eye toward a legislative repeal of the recent court decision in Iowa legalizing gay marriage.

The true source of the robocalls, as is custom, is being concealed, with the most likely parties issuing denials replete with feigned outrage. But this mystery is the least in a series of questions provoked by this call. The most prominent that comes to my mind is, "What are these homosexual-specific sex acts that Citizens wants us to imagine?" Granted, I'm writing this without having undergone my complete morning coffee regime, but I'm truly drawing a blank in imagining what kind of stuff gay people do in bed that straight people don't do. I can think of one sex act that you really can't perform unless you're working with an innie and an outie, but in all my years of listening to the Savage Lovecast, I can't say that I've heard a single gay caller mention an act reserved only for gay people. Frottage, mutual masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, and even just a little making out? Maybe Citizens didn't get the message, but straight people can do all those things, and generally take full advantage.

Which leads me to my second question: How many people had to sign off on this robocall? Did not a single one of them realize that straight, married people can do it in the butt (which is the "homosexual sex act" that I suspect obsesses the homophobic activists behind this)? Maybe this robocall is a cry for help. Maybe a generous donor can mail Citizens some copies of The Guide to Getting It On, so they can see that you don't have to be gay to venture beyond a foreplay-free missionary-position encounter performed in five minutes in the dark.

The third question that occured to me probably should have been the first: Do the people behind this call know you don't have to be married to have sex? Not even in Iowa. Not even in the butt. The number of "homosexual sex acts" prevented by banning gay marriage probably hovers around zero. Even if you accept the bizarre premise that stomping out "homosexual sex acts" is a project worth your time, you're not going to accomplish it by banning gay marriage. 

For the past few weeks, PBS has been screening Women, War and Peace, a multi-part documentary concerned both with the hugely disproportional affect war has on women as compared to men as well as the novel methods of peace-making that women can offer in the aftermath of fighting. If you haven’t been watching this gripping and timely series, tonight’s finale is a fine occasion to start.

“War Redefined,” the fifth and final installment of the documentary, explores the ways in which the nature of conflict has changed since the cessation of the Cold War; specifically, from global battles in which large, state-aligned armies fight according to agreed upon “rules” to more localized, militia-based campaigns in which actors are much more erratically violent, especially toward civilians. The film’s key point is that, tragically, “civilian” all too often means “woman.”

In the course of the episode, we learn about the “small arms” race that fueled many atrocities like those in Bosnia and Rwanda. According to the film, there are 875 million guns in circulation around the world, 650 million of which are in the hands of civilians—and enough bullets to kill everyone on the planet twice. Frightening stuff, but fortunately, women are well-positioned to assist with disarmament (since it is their sons and husbands who have the guns); the men in control just need to start asking for help.  

And they do want to help, as Leymah Gbowee, one of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners, points out. The women’s peace movement that she founded in Liberia to end that country’s civil war in 2003 proves that, when they band together, women can wield a great deal of power in influencing the decisions of their larger societies.

Overall, “War Redefined” presents a bracing and at times encouraging portrait of women’s changing position in armed conflict. The images of horrific oppression, rape and broken communities are tempered with tales of perseverance and successful activism, leaving one with the feeling that though women are increasingly the target of war-related violence, they may also be the best hope for finding new paths toward peace.

“War Redefined” airs tonight at 10:00pm on most PBS stations. You can watch the previous four episodes here.

Jill Lepore's New Yorker piece about the past and future of Planned Parenthood packs a large amount of detailed information into 12 pages, and reads like butter, giving no one an excuse to skip it. It's hard to pick out what parts I found the most interesting. Was it how she swiftly dismantled the legend that Margaret Sanger was motivated by a love of eugenics? (In reality, Sanger was motivated by her desire to empower women and aligned herself with eugenics to gain credibility for her birth control movement.) Lepore's nifty portrayal of the subculture of Texas feminism that gave birth to Ann and Cecile Richards? The clarity with which she lays out how reproductive rights, along with black empowerment, changed from being a complex issue crossing party lines to the source of our current partisan divide?

All of this is great, but what I really enjoyed was Lepore's depiction of the midcentury struggle between the feminist radicals and the moderate social conservatives that populated the movement to make contraception access more wildly available. The struggle was over explaining "why contraception?" and the debate, as is custom, took the form of quibbling over semantics. Sanger, holding down the fort for the feminists, argued for the term "birth control," whereas those who had a more conservative view of the natural relations between men and women preferred the term "family planning." My preference falls with Sanger's. "Birth control" conjures up the image of an individual woman taking control of her fertility, and having the final say on what is done with her uterus. "Family planning" evokes the image of a couple coming together to make decisions about how many children they have, which is good and well for people in stable and traditional relationships that likely involve marriage and children but erases the huge percentage of women who require contraception but don't have that living arrangement. (After all, a slight majority of adult American women live without a husband at home.) The reasoning of the more conservative faction is obvious enough in retrospect; they clearly thought that by framing contraception as a male prerogative, it would seem less of a threat to the traditional order.

History proved both sides right. Early victories for contraception were, in fact, won by framing contraception as a matter for married men making choices about how to arrange their home lives. The first Supreme Court decision regarding reproductive rights, Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, extended the right to use contraception only to married couples. It wasn't until 1972 that the right to use contraception was extended directly to women, with Eisenstadt v. Baird. However, Sanger's preferred terminology of "birth control" has become the colloquial preference. The conservatives of the contraception movement may have seen it in terms of population control, but ordinary people engaging with contraception on the ground see it primarily as a way to take control over their own sex and family lives.

Of course, neither the midcentury feminists nor their more socially conservative colleagues could have imagined the blunt phrase "safe sex," a term that evolved in response to the AIDS crisis but has become a catch-all phrase for taking precautions about both disease and unintended pregnancy. It does, after all, get straight to the whole point that had to be swaddled in euphemism in more conservative times. That said, I have to imagine that if Sanger had been around to hear the phrase "safe sex" bandied about, she would have been delighted. 

Well, that didn’t take long. When the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain were lodged anonymously, the pro-Cain defense was that there’s no such thing as sexual harassment. Now that Sharon Bialek, a fourth accuser, has come forward to make her name and the details of one alleged incident public, the most desperate and least scrupulous are unveiling a new defense: Bialek is a money-grubbing slut. There needn’t be actual evidence that she’s a money-grubbing slut; rather, the fact that she’s leveling these accusations is the evidence. Everything else is then filtered through that lens. Like the fact that “celebrity lawyer” Gloria Allred is representing her. Like her hair, which some have deemed too long and blonde and in-her-face. That  hairstyle is “white trash,” a blogger comments, implying that she must be poor and easily bought. Bialek “Laugh[ed] About Her Hair at Presser,” Foxnew.com reports, implying that any woman who comments, when asked, that she just got her hair done must be frivolous and lying. “Nuts and sluts,” a commenter on freerepublic.com writes. “Drag $100 bill through a trailer park and see what you get.”

Rush Limbaugh is the most creative at this; little surprise there. He reports on his show that he’s been pronouncing Bialek’s name incorrectly. “Gloria Allred says her name is Buy-A-Lick, as in [slurp, slurp] Buy-A-Lick,” Limbaugh says, as captured by mediamatters.org. “There’s no 'R' in the name so you can’t say it’s Rent-A-Lick.”

The New York Times reported today that, according to a study by the nonprofit research organization the American Association of University Women, nearly half of students in grades 7-through-12 complained of being sexually harassed during the last school year. The survey polled 1,965 students from around the country, finding that girls were somewhat more subject to harassment both in person and virtually than boys and that, in the large majority of cases, students experienced ill-effects such as “absenteeism, poor sleep and stomachaches” as a result.

While I certainly don’t recall middle school being the most pleasant place, the severity of these numbers is truly shocking. If this survey is correct, we have a serious epidemic of sexual harassment going on in our schools. But reading further in the article, the question of just what counts as an offense becomes murky. The researcher’s basic definition—“unwelcome sexual behavior that takes place in person or electronically”—seems reasonable enough at first glance, but taken literally, it constitutes a very wide net, particularly in an extraordinarily charged environment in which teenagers are just beginning to confront sexuality, adult sociality and true accountability for their actions. Should immaturity along the lines of calling someone “gay” or “slut” be counted on the same level as unwanted touching?

Just to be clear, I’m not excusing bullying with some kind of “kids will be kids” wave of the hand. Obviously, name-calling and other forms of aggressive teasing are dangerous—the recent tragic deaths of many teens who were viciously taunted for their perceived sexuality are evidence enough of that—and moves to address bullying through education and legislation are absolutely necessary. However, do we really want to lump those kinds of youthful mistakes in with actual sexual violation? The risk of equalizing everything, as I see it, is to undermine the gravity of acts that are truly more egregious than others and that, consequently, deserve different treatment, whether by parents, school adminstrators or in the courts. Calling a gender-nonconforming boy “gay” out of adolescent ignorance is not the same thing as beating the crap out of him behind the baseball field. Nor is writing on Facebook that a girl is a "whore" (because she has a lot of male friends) equivalent to molesting her at a party for some skewed perception of easiness. All of these actions are undoubtedly bad, but they’re also just not on the same order of magnitude.

Of course, in the adult world of the workplace, most of the corresponding forms of harassment would be treated similarly, as besmirched GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain is currently learning. A salacious joke is just as inappropriate as an uninvited come-on. However, do we really think that 14-year-olds should be held to the same exacting standards as a fully wizened adult? Maybe that’s where we’re headed, but then, under that rightly unforgiving rubric, I suspect that most of us were guilty of “sexual harassment” at some time in our youth.

Were we really that unenlightened before, or is this a definition that simply doesn’t apply at all points in space and time? Do you think there’s a line?

Poetry is supposed to be a lot of things: dark, indulgent, indecipherable—like wine labels or post-modern art. Certainly not the kind of thing you’d pass from friend to friend to friend; not the kind of thing you devour guiltily on the subway; not the kind of thing that reminds you of late night AIM sessions, the note left in a locker, the Moleskine hieroglyphics you perfected as an undergraduate, the words you agree with but never said out loud.

“It bothers me,” writes Ariana Reines, “That you cut out / American Apparel advertisements / And tape them to your bedroom wall.” It is this stinging wit coupled with vulnerability, that make Reines’ long-form epistolary poem about a messy love affair, Coeur de Lion, unique.  “I never got good / At affecting the expression / Of truly contemporary beauty,” she writes with language that is spare, quixotic, and refreshingly honest.

As a reader you cannot help but admire Reines’ willingness to wade into this insecurity; to make public the things that most people obscure from view. “Brokeness is not exactly honesty,” she writes, “But sometimes it gets close.” Sure this is a tale of a relationship gone wrong, but it illuminates something, connects something, even two people fall apart.

At its heart, Coeur de Lion is a reminder of the way we were before we became what we are. Contrary to the “businesslike bodies” cultivated at yoga studios, the constantly ringing Blackberry, the non-IKEA furniture, we aren’t, as Lady Gaga might posit, born this way. At one time or another we were sloppy, fragile and young enough to entertain the masochism of unrequited affection. It is only from our present vantage point, Reines reminds us in 95 breathless pages, that you know what the real thing feels like.

The Atlantic Wire reported yesterday that Dan Savage, the prominent sex-advice columnist and LGBT rights activist, was “glitter-bombed” at a recent taping of his new MTV show, Savage U, at the University of Oregon at Eugene. An operative from a group of activists calling themselves the “Dan Savage Welcome Committee” rushed the stage and doused Savage in the shiny stuff—mimicking a protest technique previously reserved for anti-LGBT conservative politicians—for being, in their view, transphobic:

Dan Savage is a transphobic and generally oppressive rich white cis gay man who came to Eugene, OR on Halloween weekend. The Dan Savage Welcoming Committee let him know that he can't be a douche with impunity.

This is not a new criticism of Savage. Listeners of his popular podcast, Savage Love, know that he often takes heat for his less-than-refined statements on issues like the existence of male bisexuality, the responsibility of asexuals to “come out” before dating, and, indeed, certain issues surrounding transgenderism. He has also been known to use words like “tranny” and “shemale” offhandedly, terms which some members of the LGBT community view as offensive. While he hasn’t yet responded to this particular incident, Savage addressed the bias accusations in a recent interview with The New Civil Rights Movement, noting that his sensitivity towards transgender issues have been evolving over time:

I certainly have had a journey in the last 20 years — as have we all — on trans issues. When I started writing Savage Love 20 years ago, and you can yank quotes 15, 18 years ago and flat them up today and say, ‘You know, that’s transphobic,’ I’d probably agree with you. 15 years ago I didn’t know as much as I know now — nor did anybody.

When I read about the “attack,” my first response was defensive: I do not think the man is really transphobic. If anything, he’s just honest about the struggle it takes to understand and appreciate ways of living and being that are different from our own—only the most naive or ungenerous person would be unable to recognize that such a process is rife with opportunities to position one’s foot squarely in one’s mouth.

But I don’t want to write a defense of Savage as being a shining, all-encompassing paragon of LGBT activism, because, well, he’s not. Depending on your taste, Savage is an amazing sex advisor; his witty, biting, hard-headed opinions, tempered as they thankfully are with moments of self-effacement, make for great entertainment and sometimes even sound information. He’s a born performer. But the limitations of his position as some kind of LGBT spokesperson have always seemed obvious to me. As the glitter guerillas rightly point out, Savage really is just a white gay dude; his understanding of the complex issues affecting people who exist outside of that very small category will necessarily be less-than-nuanced. So why expect him to be an infallible expert (an impossibly heavy mantle that he never claimed)? And why be so upset when he messes up?

The answer, clearly, is that Savage has created a style of activism that is successful, where many more politically correct models have failed. To be fair, his being white and male and good-looking (what his critics would call “privileged”) matters, but his success is about more than that. Savage’s implicit message that one can be an ally to the LGBT community without necessarily getting all the ever-changing words right is understandably appealing to straight people, and his willingness to use a variety of different, sometimes flawed, tools to make even a little progress appeals to LGBT people who feel paralyzed by the absurdly non-confrontational “safe space” fragility instilled in college groups and other bubble-like retreats from reality.  

Sure, Savage’s “It Gets Better” project probably depends on classist assumptions that all kids can (or even should) move to big gay-friendly cities for college. But it also provides a modicum of hope and a sense of connection for a lot of kids around the country who had none before. And sure, Savage’s jab at former Sen. Rick Santorum (in which he equated the politician’s last name with the sometimes messy results of anal sex) could probably be considered violent or bully-like. But it also reduced a virulent, hateful opponent of the mere idea of LGBT existence to a public laughingstock.

These methods, while surely not perfect, are also better than nothing. Nor do they preclude the glitter-bombers and other critics of Savage creating their own equally imperfect strategies. What does stifle progress, though, is insisting that one man speak for all (only to judge him when he necessarily fails) instead of finding creative, savvy, engaging ways of speaking for oneself.

Herman Cain and the Cain supporters attempting to distract from the sexual harassment allegations against him would have us all believe that the contemporary workplace is just filled with hyper-sensitive, humorless, axe-grinding feminists waiting to misconstrue a kindly compliment as sexual harassment. They’d have us believe these women are, as Amanda put it in her fine, fine post yesterday, “just sensitive babies.” (How this portrait of women deemed attractive enough to harass – erm, compliment – squares with the popular reactionary caricature of feminists as ugly and mannish, I cannot say. But then, cultural caricatures don’t need to be logical in order to be potent.)

I don't know what Cain did or didn't do. Innocent till proven guilty? Absolutely. But let's stop reinforcing the stereotype of women who complain about sexual harassment as hysterical and slightly dim. If Cain was guilty of anything, this lame argument goes, it was of having a sense of humor and misreading someone else’s. As Cain himself put it to Sean Hannity yesterday, he’s not in the business of complimenting female colleagues “unless I am really, really comfortable with a fellow employee, unless I know them well enough to know they won’t take it the wrong way.”

The notion that there's a certain kind of working woman who is eager to miscontrue friendliness and to complain ignores the reality of what sexual harassment accusers face. The New York Times has a story out about one of the women who has said Cain harassed her at the National Restaurant Association. According to people familiar with her story, after the much-younger woman turned down Cain's repeated advances, she finally complained to her bosses.

She then came to feel that there was a “change of attitude,” from her bosses toward her, they said, adding to her discomfort and leading her to finally decide it would be best to leave.

She got a lawyer and in the end received a severance package of $35,000, or about one year’s salary.

For those who would suggest the woman was a mere opportunist, $35,000 isn’t exactly rolling in it, even 13 or so years ago, and consider what she likely faced: a reputation among colleagues as a whiner and a trouble-maker, the suspicion of her bosses, the likely loss of her job without the guarantee of another, and a fractured relationship with the very people from whom she would no doubt be seeking references.

The accusations of ill-will, lack of humor, and oversensitivity against women who claim to have been sexually harassed are a strait-jacket, and they’re meant to be: If the very act of complaining about harassment marks a woman out as possessing poor judgment or, worse, bad intentions, her accusations are suspect from the very start, and her very motives are tainted. This is why women who suffer sexual harassment often don’t complain. The notion that we're all sitting around waiting for our male boss to make a lame joke so we can cash in at his expense -- that's a really lame joke.

A few days ago, I noted that as much as I wanted to condemn the non-vaccinating parents of my acquaintance, I knew them to be not idiots, but thoughtful, concerned people who wanted to do the right thing by their kids (even if I wholeheartedly disagreed with their interpretation of "the right thing"). I thought I might try politely raising the question with them again, or at least making my views known.

But these parents—I challenge you to convince me that idiot is not an excellent choice of descriptive term. An Arizona television news station is reporting that non-vaccinating parents who despair of finding a way to infect their children with chicken pox (intended to create natural immunity) are joining Facebook groups to acquire the virus through the mail.

According to the report, which included screenshots from the Facebook page for the group "Find a Pox Party in Your Area" (a closed group, but you can see pictures of its several hundred members), parents "post where they live and ask if anyone with a child who has the chicken pox would be willing to send saliva, infected lollipops or clothing through the mail."

A Facebook post reads, "I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit."  Another woman warns, "This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion."

Another woman answers, "Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope :) Don't put anything identifying it as pox."

Let's try this sentence on for size: "I just gave my kid a pre-licked lollipop sent to me by a stranger I met on the Internet!" I suspect the "outing" of this practice by the media will also mark its public end. I'm sure we're talking about a very, very small number of people here. But if chicken-pox-by-mail sounds like a good idea to you, then I'm going to have to abandon the polite conversation and bring out the verbal two-by-fours.