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Did you know that teens are more likely to face a sexual predator on the job than on the Internet (a "danger" that's been exposed as mostly hype)? This Friday, Feb. 20, at 8:30 p.m., PBS's public-affairs show NOW will broadcast a collaboration with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University (where I work), investigating the sexual harassment of teens in their after-school, weekend, and summer jobs. Here's a preview. The show is eye-opening—and (despite the fact that I'm in it) well worth watching for anyone whose young son or daughter might someday get a job.
Many people think "sexual harassment" refers to aggressive flirting or sexual horseplay on the job. But to get into court, harassment has to be intrusive, aggressive, and nearly endless—predatory or nearly so. And few teens (girls or boys) know what to do when a supervisor begins to talk ceaselessly and intimately about their bodies and lives, discussing sex acts in detail, propositioning mercilessly, pinning them in a car or stockroom, and groping, grabbing, stalking, threatening, or sexually assaulting them.
The collaboration grows out of research I did a few years ago, which resulted in a Good Housekeeping article with this blog post's title. Maria Hinojosa, PBS NOW senior correspondent, takes that research and runs with it, talking to young women who were unprepared for what they faced at work. The show tracks these young women's legal journeys, and examines how sexual harassment affects an estimated hundreds of thousands of teens across the country—many of whom don't know how to report workplace abuse, or even how to recognize when their bosses cross the line.
I hope you all will watch ... and we can discuss. (Especially you, Susannah, since you and I had an exchange about the subject back in January. I would love to know what you think.)
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For those of you still suffering from post-holiday doldrums, or recovering from sticker shock over post-holiday credit card bills, or already thinking about Christmas 2009—even if in a post-economic meltdown mindset—here's a gift idea to file away for your Xmas shopping list under "practical" or "unique" or even "exclusive yet affordable." A simple yet elegantly titled book called Selected Speeches by Michael Chertoff, our former homeland security chief, is now available for only a select few in Washington.
In it, Chertoff, who was not known for possessing soaring Obama-style oratory skills or for being a dynamic speaker who engages his audiences, regales readers with various speeches he made during his tenure. It includes such stunningly beautiful prose as:
If we are going to arrive at a day when terrorism no longer casts a dark cloud over the civilized world, we have to be prepared to advance international cooperation to hitherto unseen heights. And that's because ... terrorism is also spreading its ideology of hatred and intolerance around the world, and we have to match it in geographic location point by point.
A Washington Post writer suggests the book would be a perfect gift for the sleep-challenged, and as a shameless and unreformed Ambien user, I agree. I imagine keeping SS by my bedside at the ready for when the countless sheep keep sleep at bay, picking it up and turning a page or two and falling into a deep slumber in a matter of minutes—without having to worry about dangerous side effects like sleepwalking, sleep-driving, or horror of horrors, sleep-eating.
I can get my ZZZs in, minus the calories, and wake up refreshed and more enlightened about the security of our homeland. Fat brain without the fat ass. Sweet! Thanks Mike, you've done a heck of a job.
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Emily, I can't reconcile the conflict your freshly minted Generation Y (is it Gen Z now?) has embraced of eschewing privacy, which you all seem happy to do, yet expecting, even demanding as you wrote, "complete control over the private information we make public." The uncomfortable truth is you can never remove all traces of the past. That said, your general forthrightness and candor about your own lives shows a trust and wonder missing during my cohort's coming of age. My pre-alphabet age group of former flower children thought ourselves bold and experimental, but we only flirted with the openness and lovely acceptance members of your on-beyond-zebra generation typically show one another. Each of you inhabits her own skin so comfortably and displays such cheerful self-confidence, it does your elders proud. We third- and fourth-wave Facebook users now crowding your playground are grateful for your gracious reception, but Emily, you are also at the age when you come to realize we can't control what people know about us. We live in a public environment and people like to observe one another. You can't hold a megaphone and then tell people not to listen, nor take pictures of yourselves, post them, and expect the images to remain unseen. Despite the harsh trade-off, I say, go for it. Create as many online personae as you wish to, express yourselves honestly and sincerely, and enjoy the marvelous digital era you were lucky to be born into. Although you do not control who sees what you post nor what they do with it, remember, you will always have absolute power over what you say next.
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This guest post comes to us from Lisa Lerer, a staff writer for Politico.com.
BBC correspondent Katty Kay has an interesting piece up on the Daily Beast complaining about the use of sports metaphors by pundits and politicians:
Because women feel excluded from these sports discussions, our normally confident voices are subdued. To turn the tables, imagine if these public conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to fashion, or yoga. It's as if Dana Perino had compared getting out of Iraq to extracting yourself from pigeon pose, or tracking Osama to finding vintage Pucci on eBay. But she didn't. She's a woman and more inclusive than that.
As a non-fan, I frequently have to ask for a translation when the stock metaphors come out on the trail and in the briefing room. Some of my female political journalist friends make a practice of routinely reading sports pages just to be more conversant.
But I think Kay is getting at a larger problem here: The Beltway can be an incredibly chauvinistic, macho place—a fact that won't change even if the pundits and pols drop all their sports clichés. What we really need to improve political discourse is a deeper bar of up-and-coming female politicians. To that end, it’s heartening to see this article from Alexandra Starr in the New Republic about Kirsten Gillibrand and other female career politicians.
The fact that women like Gillibrand don't feel obligated to speak about how they entered politics because of their work on behalf of kids, not to mention having to toil for years as local volunteers, shows that the landscape has changed. Gillibrand's aggressiveness may have engendered Tracy Flick snickers, but her rapid political rise used to be the exclusive province of men.
But back to the baseball diamond: I know sports metaphors are common not only in politics but business and other fields. Do they annoy you, XXFactors, as much as they annoy me? And, do they cut women out of the conversation?
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Dahlia's recent article on "sexting" asked whether it makes sense to charge teens who exchanged naked photos with producing or possessing child pornography. Apparently, that's not the only cell phone behavior that can leave a kid in cuffs. According to this report from the Smoking Gun, a 14-year-old high-school student in Wisconsin was arrested for disorderly contact for texting during class. Long story short: A teacher called a "student resources officer" after the girl refused to hand in her phone. She denied not only texting in class but also having a phone at all; a female police officer searched her and uncovered the Samsung Cricket in her "buttocks area." The person she was texting during class? Her father.
It must be maddening for teachers to deal with students texting during class. But arresting a kid for disorderly conduct? Wouldn't a suspension be a better approach than arresting and strip-searching a 14-year-old for a cell phone?
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was supposed to give the keynote address last week at a conference on women's equality and the law, at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. She couldn't make it, because of her recent cancer-related surgery. But she called, en route from leaving the hospital, to wish the conference goers well and to announce that she was on the mend and feeling good. Justice Ginsburg was clearly sending a message of strength—one that, as Dahlia pointed out, is entirely in line with the forceful approach she took to denouncing the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter pay discrimination case.
The Rutgers conference reminded me of an earlier era of Ginsburg as tireless tigress: In the 1970s, she was an early and forceful litigator for women's rights. It's a story well told by Fred Strebeigh in his new book, Equal: Women Reshape American Law. Fred was my undergraduate writing teacher; this book is an incredibly industrious reporting effort that takes full advantage of his access to Ginsburg's litigation files. A revealing how-far-we've-come moment from 1970: One of Ginsburg's clients, Nora Simon, was a former Army nurse who was barred from further work in the military because she had been pregnant. "Under Army regulations a discharge for pregnancy renders a person ineligible for re-enlistment," Fred reports of the rules then. For Ginsburg, Simon's plight was personal. Five years earlier, as a professor at Rutgers without tenure, Ginsburg herself had gotten pregnant over the winter. Worried about whether her contract would be renewed, she said nothing about her pregnancy all spring, had her baby son in early September, and went right back to work. Tireless, indeed.
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A second post from guest blogger Abigail Pilgrim:
I have a hard enough time determining where Bristol and other teens fall on the spectrum of helpless kid to responsible adult. But regardless, it's hard to think that sexually active kids and teens will benefit if David Ogden, Obama's nomination for deputy attorney general, gets approved by the Senate later this month. Ogden's resume reads like a who's who of the porn industry, with a special emphasis on defending child porn. There's no doubt there will be plenty of other issues for Ogden to deal with as deputy attorney general beyond the lucrative sex realm, and I'm sure he's qualified to address them. But I can't get over how creepy some of his past brief statements read. Things like: videos aren't child porn unless "the genitals or pubic area exhibited" were "somewhat visible or discernible through the child's clothing." [David Ogden in Knox v. U.S., (1993)]. It seems like child porn is only going to become a bigger and bigger issue as the lines of consent get blurrier. Tech-savvy kids are doing a good enough job exploiting themselves—as Dahlia just wrote in her story about "sexting." The last thing they need is the government giving a helping hand to all of Ogden's past clients. Anyone else have a reaction to Ogden? I'd especially love to hear some parents weigh in, although being a parent doesn't necessarily make you against child pornography, as Ogden's three kids testify.
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Another early test for Obama and the Democratic Congress on the war on terror front: The D.C. Circuit just stopped the release of the poor beleagured Uighurs, 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees whom the Bush administration admitted posed no threat but refused to let go. A district court had ruled in favor of releasing the men, saying that the president had no legal basis for detaining them. No threat, no detention—seems right. The problem is that it's not clear where the Uighurs should go. They're from a remote northwestern area of China. They're not fans of the Chinese government, and the government hates them right back. Which means they're at risk of torture if we send them home, according to both the government and their lawyers. That means that our government either has to look for another country to bear the brunt of China's anger by agreeing to take them—a deal that apparently hasn't gone well for Albania, which took five other Uighur detainees three years ago—or release them inside the United States.
Why not repatriate the Uighurs here, if the government has determined they're not dangerous? Today's court decision doesn't argue against doing that. Instead, it's about separation of powers. The D.C. Circuit said that a district court can't order the release of an alien from Gitmo without authorizing legislation from Congress. OK, Congress, are you going to move on this? And will the Obama administration support such a bill?
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Reading "Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm," I had to laugh. Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske used an MRI to scan the brains of men as they were shown a variety of images: clothed and unclothed women and men. Upon eyeballing the images featuring scantily clad women, the portion of the male brain dedicated to "tool use" lit up like a Christmas tree. Meanwhile, the portion of the brain devoted to recognizing the subject as human didn't react at all in some subjects. Fiske notes: "The only other time we have seen this is when people look at pictures of the homeless or of drug addicts. ... "
Men objectify women! Color me shocked. Apparently, Fiske was "shocked" at the results. It sounds like she didn't enter into the study entirely objectively either. When the idea for the study was suggested to Fiske by Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who predicted the "tool use" effect: “I said, ‘Oh, Jennifer, that’s disgusting. I can’t believe you’re predicting that.' ” I am fascinated to know what bubble it is these people live in. Or maybe they just never leave the lab.
Of course, feminist bloggers are having a field day with the results, although they can't quite seem to decide if it's male biology that's the culprit here or that infernal patriarchal society they're always talking about overthrowing. Feministing: "I think this argument proves that despite some pre-historic desire for men to get horny over scantily clad women and for women to want rich husbands that provide security and ability to nest (this is what evolutionary psychologists would argue), most of this desire comes from cultural conditioning." Thank you for clearing that up for me. (See Tracy Clark-Flory for a more rational response.)
What's being overlooked here is twofold. One: Fiske et al. studied a whopping 21 men. Who were all college students. To leap to grand generalizations based on such a limited pool seems foolish, at best. Two: Why do the results of this limited study have to lead to the conclusion that men are somehow "bad"? Can't they just be, well, men?
And everyone seems to be happy to overlook the fact that when asked if women view scantily clad men the same way, Fiske responded that women tend to privilege the bank balance and age of a man over his looks. How's that for objectification?
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Hi Abby, and welcome! You asked if I thought Bristol Palin "was going to present some kind of five-step plan outlining the ‘details of abstinence or safe sex' " in her interview with Greta Van Susteren. I never had any expectations of Bristol presenting any particular plans on anything—that is, until she explicitly told Van Susteren that she wants to be "an advocate against teen pregnancy." If she wants to take on this issue, then yes, I do think she needs to put forward some thoughts about how, exactly, to go about preventing the thing she's supposedly advocating against. You also asked, Abby, whether her mistake was "the sex part, the getting pregnant part, [or] the having the baby part." That's the same question I have of Bristol! I criticized Bristol earlier for her vague statement that she wished this had happened in 10 years. As Tina Morrison at the Kansas City Star astutely points out, "Pregnancy doesn't just ‘happen.' ... There are things leading up to it. Things you can control, such as how much wine you have with dinner, if your pants stay zipped, or whether or not to use a condom!" Right. So what, exactly, does Bristol wish she had waited on? Sex? Unprotected sex?
Lauren B.'s essay on abortion that Rachael found so appalling may have been a bit crass, but at least it made a point. Which is good: As a writer, she has a responsibility to say something substantive in her piece. As an 18-year-old mother—even one with a celebrity mom—Bristol has no such responsibility. She can go about motherhood as quietly as the media outlets allow (and they have been pretty quiet since Tripp's birth), and the public would have no right to demand that she use her situation to promote safe sex or abstinence education or a pro-life or pro-choice agenda. But Bristol made the decision to call herself an advocate. At that point, I think it's fair to expect a little more.
So what was her mistake? Saying she wants to be an advocate against teen pregnancy but dodging questions about abstinence and safe sex. Well, that and the obvious mistake, if it's true that she wants to break out from the shadow of her domineering mother: naming her child Tripp.
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A guest post from our Slate V intern, Lindsey Hough:
The onslaught against obesity continues in New York City. A federal appeals court yesterday rejected a challenge to a 2007 city regulation requiring large chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus. According to the NYT, the New York State Restaurant
Association contended that the requirement that they display calorie information violated their rights, including those protected under the First Amendment. City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden called the ruling against the Restaurant Association good news for all: “Nearly all chain restaurants are now complying with the law. Consumers are learning more about the food before they order, and the market for healthier alternatives is growing.”
But maybe not everyone stands to gain when calories are posted. While this information may help foster a health-conscious environment and alert those who routinely underestimate their caloric intake, posting nutritional values can actually be very harmful in communities in which food obsession cuts the opposite way. I’m thinking here of college campuses, where anorexia and bulimia are often huge problems. In December, for instance, Harvard removed the nutritional information from their dining halls after students voiced concerns that it lead to or worsened eating disorders. Same discussion surfaced at my school, Notre Dame recently for the same reasons, with the school eventually resorting to creating an online nutritional database rather than tacking information directly to the buffet lines.
Many universities have long-standing issues with women and eating disorders, and you can be sure these young women who will be tuning into the newly posted information, for the wrong reasons. These food-labeling rules assume that the only problem facing Americans is that we are obese. But there are many young women who very wrongly think they’re obese when they weigh 97 pounds, and they are starving themselves to death.
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Bristol, Bristol, Bristol—can we talk about Sarah Palin for a second, the public figure with whom we'll have to live for at least the next four years?
I thought her drop-in to Bristol's instant-classic Fox interview was creepy, domineering, and inappropriate. Greta Van Susteren established that doing the interview was Bristol's decision, and that she pointedly made it on her own: She didn't even tell Mom about it until the day before it happened. Agreeing to the interview—her first post-birth sit-down on national TV—had to be one of those major moments in late-adolescent life when a kid breaks off from his parents and dramatically establishes his authority to run on his own steam and do it alone. When I was 19, I unilaterally decided to move to Brussels and, for a reason I couldn't identify at the time, didn't tell my mother until after the plans were set in stone. She was upset, but she didn't buy a plane ticket and announce she was crashing my trip. That's what Sarah did by horning in on her daughter's interview. Even if Van Susteren asked Mom to come, she shouldn't have shown up.
And the way she showed up. Ick. Fast-forward to 8:20 in this segment. Sarah lumbers right into Bristol's frame and doesn't even sit down but rather hovers weirdly over Bristol, wearing a heavy coat, a bit like a subtly threatening mafia don. Obviously, any publicity Bristol gets complicates Sarah's already complex political image. But her responsibility as a mother was to stay clear of Bristol's moment, even if, as a (notoriously controlling) politician, she felt desperate to do damage control.
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A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe:
Bonnie, your take on the Facebook information uproar is interesting, though I wonder if you're overlooking a key part of the issue: that most Facebook users don't actually care about privacy. As a longtime Facebook user (I joined in 2005, back when membership was still limited to college students), I have to say that I don't think privacy was ever a big concern for the first (or second, or third) wave of Facebook users. During a lecture I attended given by Harvey Rishikof, the national security expert suggested that my generation is the first group of Americans that puts almost no value on our privacy, and I tend to believe it.
Starting with the ancient AOL member profile and extending now into the detailed personal information sections on sites like Facebook and MySpace, the concept of publicizing private information on the Web has always seemed natural for the cybergeneration. We see that with personal blogs, too: People will put all kinds of detailed information about themselves and their lives on the Internet without much thought for the safety or security of doing so. There has been controversy about Facebook's privacy standards before, and it never seemed to cause this much of a stir. Even the rumblings in early February about Zuckerberg's intent to sell off personal information on the site as the biggest microtargeting tool ever didn't garner as much attention as the Consumerist article (which was met with enough protest to make Zuckerberg change his mind).
So why are Facebook users suddenly worried about the security of their information? In part, I think it's because Facebook isn't just for co-eds anymore; people of all ages are jumping on social networks now, and with them come their concerns about free and open information-sharing. But I also think the issue is not one of privacy but of control. While my generation may not mind broadcasting intimate details and photos, we've always felt we had complete control over the private information we make public. The sudden realization that we might not have the power to remove all traces of ourselves from our electronic playground is what is giving users the heebie-jeebies. It's that lack of power, not privacy, that's making these information exhibitionists suddenly try to cover up.
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Jessica, I don't think we're quite "piling on" Bristol Palin for either her interview or her teen pregnancy, but I do see quite a difference between Bristol and Rachael's examples of Lauren B. and Amy Richards. Lauren B. is a writer and Richards is an abortion rights advocate, and they both decided to make their stories public. Bristol, on the other hand, was thrust into the spotlight—had her mother not been running for vice president, the news that the governor of a noncontiguous state had a pregnant 17-year-old daughter likely would have escaped notice altogether or been acknowledged only in short news items. Bristol chose to do this interview, but she didn't choose to become a poster child for teen momhood in the first place. I applaud Richards and Lauren for frankly discussing their experiences with abortion, but, as I'm sure they would both agree, they offered themselves up for discussion and criticism—two things Bristol has certainly been subjected to without having the same opportunity to tell her story herself first.
I don't know what her primary motivation for the interview was—to fight misconceptions about being an uneducated high-school dropout, to piss off her mother, or to warn other girls against unprotected sex (her "abstinence or whatever" comment seemed to me like a veiled attempt to advocate for contraception without speaking the words). Perhaps she merely wanted an excuse to put on makeup and do something a little exciting after six weeks of mothering a newborn.
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I think Bristol's insistence that her pregnancy was her own choice is entirely consistent with the notion that her interview was a tacit rebellion, despite what Rachael thinks. Bristol was further asserting her independence by saying: "It doesn't matter what my mom's views are on it. It was my decision. And I wish people would realize that, too." As Rebecca Traister at Salon cannily points out, regardless of what Bristol's views on abortion are (and those are still unknown, thanks to Greta Van Susteren's softest of softball interviews), she's using the language of choice to describe her decisions. As Traister puts it, "Bristol's ability to make her own decision, without regard to her mom's views on the issue, is precisely the freedom for which reproductive rights activists fight, trying to ensure that no daughters surrender control of their bodies to their mothers or fathers or husbands or clergymen or governments."
And to Abby (hi Abby!)—I think choosing to do an interview on national TV was Bristol's only mistake. She had sex, she got pregnant, she dealt with the consequences. Seventeen-year-olds have been doing the same thing for eons. The idea that we're "piling on" Bristol by commenting on her nationally televised appearance is ridiculous. She's legally a grown woman and a mother. If Rachael can so harshly judge Lauren B. and Amy Richards for sharing the personal stories of their reproductive choices, I don't understand why we should be treating Bristol Palin with such a delicate hand.
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Just when you think everything having to do with Jane Austen that can be invented has been invented, another twisted take on Pride and Prejudice comes along to prove otherwise. A few weeks ago, news of a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies broke on the Internet, became a viral smash, and rose to No. 181 on Amazon's sales rankings (it will be released in the next few months). The book "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action," but I am hoping for some dialogue like this:
"You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason for my journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience must tell you why I come."
"Mmmnuuuuhhhh"
"This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?"
"MNNNNUUUUUHHHHH"
"Ms. Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such language as this."
"BRAAAIII ..."
"I will not be interrupted! Do you not consider that a connection with you, must disgrace him in the eyes ..."
"BRRRAINNNNS!"
After all, if any one deserves to be eaten by zombies, it is Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
But that's not it for fresh, absurdist Austen adaptations. Sam Mendes, aka Mr. Kate Winslet, is producing a movie version of Lost in Austen, a nicely silly British miniseries about a present day Pride and Prejudice obsessive who magically switches places with Elizabeth Bennett and lands Darcy.
Even better, Elton John's production company plans to make Pride and Predator, which, according to Variety, "veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about." Wow. Between this and the zombies, a whole new sub-genre is being born: the Merchant Ivory horror flick. Coming soon to a theater near you? A Room With A View of Monsters, Sense and Sabertooth Tigers, Brideshead Decapitated.