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There's a gender drama of Olympic proportions being staged by the Canadian women's ski jumpers team. (The girls also made headlines earlier this year when
their chairperson Brent Morrice claimed they could all afford to lose
20 pounds. Too much Tim Horton's, maybe?) Since men's ski jumping is
already a recognized Olympic sport, the
ladies are demanding that there's no reason to leave girls out in
the cold and thus the team is suing the host of the 2010 games, the
Vancouver Organizing Committee, to allow them to compete.
In the Beijing Olympics, 42 percent of the competitors were women and 58
percent were men. And that number even included softball, which has now
been dropped from the Olympic line-up, thanks to a fluke vote where
International Olympic Committee members thought they were voting to get
rid of baseball.
Any
thoughts from you XX ladies on whether Olympic policy should require sports be split 50-50
between men or women? Or should other factors come into play, like
history and TV ratings? I certainly don't pretend to understand why
certain things become Olympic sports. I mean, ping-pong? Seriously? My
personal solution in this case would be to balance out the gender line-up and
bring women's ski jumping into the arena as a Olympic sport and trade
out men's figure skating, which (Scott Hamilton aside) seriously should
not be allowed to exist.
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Liza, thanks for the great insight on strip searches and female jurists. I am more and more persuaded that we need more women judges, not because their brains are somehow wired differently, but because they have lived and experienced life as a woman, and that still means something when they decide certain cases. I wrote about a study showing that male judges will look at gender disputes quite differently if there is a female judge hearing the case alongside them. Hopefully, Liza, by the time your daughter takes her seat at the high court, we’ll have moved past the need to patiently explain why being asked to show your breasts to a school official is nothing like suiting up for volleyball.
Emily Y, to your point about “zero tolerance,” I got a great note yesterday from Joshua Lanning, an attorney who has litigated several strip search cases who suggested, along with many readers, that schools have zero tolerance policies because they don’t trust the faculty to use their judgment anymore. Or as Lanning put it, “It's as if the Court believes all government officials are so perilously close to being ineffective at their jobs that any burden from the Constitution would render them unable to perform their public functions.” Zero tolerance implies that our teachers aren’t smart enough to differentiate between the dangerousness of ibuprofen and crack. And so to defend against that we institute a strip search policy that keeps them from having to differentiate between searching through students' backpacks and peeking into their bras.
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Like you, Emily, I was particularly interested to read Ali Soufan’s OpEd column in the Times today about the ongoing debates over the torture memos. Two things leapt out at me. First, the quote you already cited about traditional interrogation methods being as effective as water boarding. Second, and just as troubling, was this: Soufan contends that the CIA’s use of these techniques actually made it less likely that it could work with the FBI to stop another attack. As Soufan put it:
One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the CIA and FBI, similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.
If this is true, it’s ironic, since as you noted, Emily, some have argued that Soufan himself might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, had the CIA not prevented him. The whole torture question strikes me as the inverse Gordian knot, those “intractable problems” that are solved with a “bold stroke,” as per the myth of Alexander the Great. Torture looked like the bold stroke, but if you accept Soufan’s points—as I’m inclined to—it just tangled us up in more knots.
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Alaska's most famous heartthrob was down in the lower 48 last night, talking to Larry King about his association with the Palin family. Even though Sarah Palin, through her press agents, has repeatedly denounced Levi and his family's fame-whoring ways, she should actually be thanking him, and here's why.
First of all, he's keeping her name in the press, and not in an entirely negative way. On Larry King, Levi said, "[The Palins] always treated me like a son. They were real nice to me. And I thought of her [Sarah Palin] as like my second mother. You know, Todd was always a great guy and helped me out with a lot of things." Though Levi says that he is not allowed to see his son, Tripp, from his family's appearance on the Tyra Banks Show, it is clear that the problem is with Levi's bratty sister and not necessarily with Bristol, Sarah, or anyone else in the Palin camp.
Secondly, the self-proclaimed red neck and his publicly embarrassing mishaps help place Sarah Palin firmly in the pantheon of American politics. Let me explain: There is a long and storied history of political figures with completely humiliating, ne'er-do-well relatives. From Roger Clinton, Bill's hapless half-brother, to Billy Carter, who bragged about smoking pot at the White House, our century's political lights have almost always come with baggage. My favorite tale of political-relative embarrassment was told by Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan in her excellent memoir, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. Buchanan happened upon Sam Johnson, LBJ's "problem drinker" brother, while he was holed up in a Miami hotel with a platinum blond.
He and the blonde were delighted to have photos taken. Then he insisted that I pose with him. She helped him to a bedside chair and took my camera. I sat beside him. She found us in the lens. I said, "cheese." He lunged, grabbed me around the neck, and planted a big mushy kiss on my cheek. Then he tumbled back onto the bed, rolled over, and went to sleep in one violent motion.
When the story ran, it did not include any of these hilarious details—Buchanan said her editors decided to run it as a "perfectly straight interview with the president's brother." And that's the big difference between Levi's public speaking tour and the hijinks of previous political relatives: If that happened today, TMZ would have plastered photos of drunken Levi with a blonde as soon as they had been taken. In our current media environment, Levi has the power to take control of his own story, but even this "redneck" is smart enough to know he shouldn't be spotted out doing anything even remotely licentious. And that's the third reason Sarah Palin should be grateful for Levi: She could have it so much worse.
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In the debate raging over whether the Bush administration's torture
practices produced valuable intelligence, the voice I'm most interested
in, so far, is that of Ali Soufan. He is the FBI detective whom the CIA may have blocked from stopping 9/11,
one of the few Arab speakers in the bureau, the guy who was getting
Salim Hamdan to talk, according to Jonathan Mahler's book, The Challenge—and then had to relinquish Hamdan in frustration
when the government decided to prosecute him. He's an intelligence
officer who was close to but not part of the CIA interrogations of Abu
Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Today Soufan tells us, in a New York Times op-ed, that torturing Abu Zubaydah got us nada. Soufan writes:
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced
interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have
been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these
alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few
occasions—all of which are still classified. The short sightedness
behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the
methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of
the terrorists, and due process.
And then he takes apart specific claims for intelligence gains, much as Tim did about the supposed busting of the Liberty Tower plot in L.A., by showing that the timelines don't work. The key information was gleaned by traditional methods before the torture began, or at least before it was approved in the DoJ memos. What now, Marc Thiessen and Dick Cheney? Ball in your court.
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I was riveted by Dahlia's vivid description of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing of the Savana Redding case, which has been followed with interest in my household. Like Redding when she was summarily hustled into a school nurse's office and ordered to disrobe under the scrutiny of school administrators, my daughter is 13 and in public middle school. She immediately got what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also got: To be asked to strip to your underwear, and then shake out your bra and panties, exposing your private parts so that bureaucrats may look to see if you have extra-strength ibuprofen in your underwear, all because some ex-BFF wrongly ratted you out as a drug dealer, is, as Ginsburg put it, "humiliating."
Facebook pages and sexting notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that there is still no more modest creature on earth than the average adolescent girl. This is the age when the bedroom door is closed almost all the time, and girls in locker rooms develop elaborate, chrysalis-like methods of wriggling out of their clothes and into bathing suits or gym suits without exposing anything. That the male justices on the highest court in the land did not seem to get how Redding felt (an honors student, she left the school permanently after this episode) is dismaying enough; that they took the opportunity to reminisce about their own towel-thwacking locker room youth is hard to believe. Maybe they were so unnerved by frequent repetition of the word "underwear" that they started saying anything that came to mind. One wonders what Redding, now 19, thought as she listened; having hoped to have her situation taken seriously, she instead was obliged to listen to Justice Clarence Thomas guffawing as Justice Stephen Breyer recalled boys in the locker room sticking things into his underwear, or theirs, or whatever, exactly, happened. (But wouldn't even they, as boys, have been embarrassed if whatever was going on had gone on while school officials were intently watching?)
Thinking about this, I realized that the Redding exchange, and E.J.'s post yesterday deploring the tiny representation of women in the Mirror awards for media coverage, are really about the same thing: They are about the need for a proportional representation of women in important places, and the frequent, puzzling absence of same. That there is only one woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, in this day and time, is also hard to believe; if there were a lone male justice among eight females, it seems safe to say that many people would regard this as an unacceptable suborning of the natural order, but the reverse situation never seems to inspire much in the way of widespread objection. I think there have been discussions on this blog in the past about the question of whether female jurists rule differently than male jurists do. I am no expert, but it seems likely to me that in most cases they do not, but that sometimes, crucially, they may. That Ginsburg was the only judge who seemed to understand what Redding went through is a stark reminder that judging also involves reacting as a human being, and that this is why we need women human beings as judges. I don't mean to suggest that no man could have seen the situation as she did; I was chatting with a former criminal defense attorney—and father—who said that even given the special mission of school officials to protect students from drugs and other dangers, he would have ruled this an invasion of privacy. The only bright spot about the Redding case is that it has offered more evidence to my own children, boy and girl, about why women need to be in the workplace and, by analogy, why mom works. My daughter talks now about wanting to be a judge. I think we could use her.
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Nina, I hadn't heard that archaeologists may be on the verge of discovering Cleopatra's tomb until I read your post this morning. By coincidence, last night I was reading a chapter about Cleopatra in Christina Nehring's forthcoming book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. Nehring's contrarian argument complements Schiff's essay nicely. She argues that in domesticating love into egalitarian marriages, by emphasizing equality and intimacy rather than power-differentials and erotic distance, we've lost that special sizzle. Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Antony constitute one of her prime examples of a love match that really works, a love match filled with games and drama:
Convinced that docility in the life of the affections is the road to dreariness, Cleopatra offers Antony a smorgasbord of strategic contradictions. When Antony wishes to ignore a messenger, she orders him to pay attention; when he wishes to lounge in her arms, she reports herself missing; when he desires to go to sea-battle against his enemy Octavius Caesar, she accompanies him, only to flee at the worst moment possible, prompting him to withdraw his ships after her own, and humiliating him before the military world.
As he acknowledges to her after, "My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,/ and thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit/Thy full supremacy thou knew'st."
It's The Rules, the Nile Edition. Except that somehow in Cleopatra's case, the game-playing does seem like a form of strength rather than passivity scripted to look like authority. As you point out, Nina, we see Cleopatra as powerful, sexual, and forward. I can't think of all that many contemporary cultural figures who share her traits. I'm curious: Do you, like Nehring, think that her capriciousness is a crucial part of her appeal?
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Finally, the study I've been waiting for: "Is Breastfeeding Really Free: The Economic Consequences of Breastfeeding for Mothers." Two researchers looked into the effects of breast-feeding on a mother's work life. "Because of the massive push in the public health community to get mothers to breastfeed, understanding the economic consequences of breast-feeding on women's lives is essential," write Phyllis L. F. Rippeyoung from Acadia University and Mary Noonan from the University of Iowa. This should be an obvious question, but none of the breast-feeding literature addresses it. In most studies, the question is relegated to a footnote, in which authors assert that breast-fed babies are sick less so mothers have to stay home from work less.
The researchers surveyed 2,484 women each year for 10 years before and after childbearing. The mothers who chose to breast-feed initially earned more income than the formula feeders, worked more hours, were more likely to be married and part of the professional class.
One year later the picture starts to change dramatically. The breast-feeders divide into short duration (fewer than six months) and long duration (longer than six months). The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends six months of exclusive breast-feeding, and then continuing for at least a year while introducing solids. According to the study:
Although, at two years before birth, both breastfeeding groups earned statistically significantly higher incomes than the formula feeders, by year 10 this advantage has disappeared—formula feeders and short-duration breastfeeders do not have significantly different incomes, and long-duration breastfeeders earn significantly less than formula feeders.
This is a very important observation. It doesn't mean that women shouldn't choose to breast-feed, of course. But it does mean that we should stop talking about breast-feeding as if it only affects an infant's health, and not the woman's life or position in her family, and her workplace. It also means that breast-feeding now loses its free pass into the feminist cause.