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Jess, Dayo: Mark Regnerus may usefully point out that some women wish it were more acceptable to get married young. But the larger thrust of his article is characterized by that depressing narrow-mindedness that older male writers always bring to the task when they begin bemoaning the sad state of young women's sexual, romantic, and reproductive lives. (And somehow it's always the young women's lives they're bemoaning, as I noted here for Slate some years back.) Regnerus can't seem to make up his mind. On the one hand, he acknowledges the well-known fact that getting married young means you're more likely to get divorced than getting married when you're older. (According to the National Marriage Project,getting married after 25 significantly reduces the chance of divorce.) Yet he states confidently that "Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed." Hmm? That may be his experience, but he doesn't have many facts to back him up. After all, marriage can be a deformative institution too, as all those divorces would suggest.
The most pernicious element of the article, though, is its didactic, implicit assumption that women heading into their 30s need to pay attention to their "market value," as if we were cows with no identity or worth beyond our saleability on the sexual market. Every young woman today has had it drilled into her head that her fertility diminishes "radically" at 35; reciting all the reasons that we should be terrified about our relative decline in sexual value is just another tired old form of what Susan Faludi so rightly named a "backlash" to feminism. For some reason, these men worry even more than we do about our futures. Leaving me to wonder what I always wonder: Isn't it time for them to stop reading studies that affirm what everyone already implicitly knows, and attend to their own affairs? Life isn't fair, as my mother always used to say, but marrying the wrong guy at 25 isn't necessarily the best solution to the problem.
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Steven Waldman, the editor of Beliefnet, makes an excellent case here for a new space in the abortion wars. He begins with this odd statistic: "Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe abortion is the 'taking of a human life,' but 72 percent believe it should be legal." So what does this actually mean? Most Americans think there are "gradations of life." They are more comfortable with abortions the earlier they happen. But policies on both the right and the left work against this. Pro-lifers oppose Plan B, or emergency contraception, but many of those women who fail to take it end up getting abortions later, according to studies he cites. Pro-choicers, meanwhile, focus on the absolute right, or the numbers of abortions, Waldman argues that much like in Europe, both sides should compromise by pushing for abortions to happen as early as possible.
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Jessica, thanks for your post on the Taliban’s latest
critique of the U.S.
military. It would be hard to overstate the seriousness of the Taliban’s
advances in Pakistan
these last few days, yet I think the significance is lost on most of us. In
fact, the Taliban’s conquest of Swat and (briefly) Buner is possibly the worst
news to come out of the region since we began paying serious attention to it on
Sept. 11, 2001.
Imagine there’s some bloodthirsty Christian fundamentalist
sect from Canada,
whose mission is to force the entire world to join a doomsday cult—and if you
refuse, you get your throat cut. This sect is based in Canada, and Americans generally don’t know or
care much about what goes on in Canada,
and besides, those people are Christians like most of us, so we ignore it and
go about our coupon-clipping, job-searching lives. But the baddies are slowly
moving south, first into the small towns of northern Maine
and New York, and then into the Buffalo
suburbs. More local police are getting killed as they try to fight the
invaders, but the news is relegated to the Nation Briefs section of the Times, and to many decision-makers in
urban America,
these places are the boonies. They’re probably already full of fundamentalists
with dubious ideas, so this newest enthusiasm causes little alarm. Slowly,
quietly, the sect gains strength. People in small towns and suburbs of New York
and Boston start to worry, but the police are busy with other crimes and
everyone is distracted by the heart-pounding daily drama of the Dow Jones until
one day we wake up and realize that these people are not just on the borders
anymore. They’re in Queens, they’re on the outskirts of Boston and millions of
people who never wanted to join them have been forced to go along. The police
aren’t strong enough to stop them, and when the president calls in the National
Guard, they fade into the landscape. They look just like the rest of us when
they’re not preaching or cutting throats.
That’s a version of what’s happened in Pakistan over
the last year or two, but instead of simply being distracted, the situation for
Pakistanis is much worse. Many have lost track of what their country stands for
and why it’s worth defending. Is Pakistan
the country established at the time of the British Partition as a refuge for
the subcontinent’s Muslims, many of whom have managed to live just as well or
better in democratic India? Is it the place where politicians get endlessly richer and more corrupt while ordinary people cope with day-long power outages and soaring food prices? A
place where a young man with a college degree feels lucky to get a job as a
waiter, serving sandwiches and tea to rich Pakistanis and foreigners? Where
children are kidnapped and bombs go off and people are found hanging from
lampposts, and no one really thinks that the government or the army can or will
do much to stop it?
Buner has a story. It has been told in part, but the whole bitter thing should be required
reading for anyone frustrated by the hesitation among Afghans and Pakistanis to
stand up to the Taliban. In Buner last summer, the Taliban executed a handful
of police. The men of the village of Shalbandi raised a
local defense force to avenge the slaying. This was seen as a model strategy
for Pakistan—local people fighting the militants with their own hands on their own
terrain, far more effectively than the police or the army could. The men of
Shalbandi fought hard, and they killed six Taliban. But it didn’t end there. In
revenge, the Taliban kidnapped two young sons of the defense force leaders, and
in December, a car packed with explosives exploded outside a local polling place,
killing more than 30 people who were lining up to vote. After that, the Taliban
promised to wipe out everyone in Shalbandi. The police, who are vastly
under-resourced, and the government, which is monumentally distracted, did
little to resolve the situation in Buner before the Taliban took it over last
week. Instead, when the Taliban rolled in, the people of Shalbandi were left
alone with their tormentors. On Sunday, the Times revisited the story, reporting that one of the posse’s organizers had tried
yet again to fight the Taliban, only to have his businesses, his house and
those of his relatives taken over by the militants while he fled to Karachi.
This is the point at which people usually bring up the fact
that Pakistan has a nuclear weapon, and how horrible would it be if the Taliban got a hold of
it. But I’m not sure we can afford to wait until they do. Is Pakistan’s
nuclear technology all that much safer in the hands of a government that can’t
control its territory or protect its people?
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Jess, I was honestly shocked yesterday morning when I opened my paper copy of the New York Times and saw Bea Arthur referred to—in print!!—as a "Battle-Ax." Who the heck was on the copy desk, and how is it possible he hasn't yet retired? I hadn't even heard that term for decades; didn't it go out with "spinster?" Here's a better view of Bea to cheer us all up.
Dayo, Emily, how do you think Regnerus would feel about young women marrying other young women? As I think I've mentioned here before, I've long thought there should be a two-year waiting period when two women apply for a marriage license; if they can make it past the U-Haul months, let 'em get hitched. (Note: this is a joke. This is only a joke.) I want my girls to Slow. It. Down. But for those who aren't gonna wait—or who've already been together a lifetime, or a decade, and can at long last make it legal in the cornbelt, here's a map (updated hourly) showing which Iowa counties have been issued licenses to same-sex pairs. Mazel tov to this week's Iowa newlyweds!
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Wait a sec, Hanna, you're not a conservative because the Buckleys were self-absorbed, screwy parents? What does that have to do with Pat Buckley's "appalling scenes," as her son Christopher put it? I can think of plenty of liberals who are equally appalling in their dealings with their children. This one is about fame and notoriety and narcissism I think, not politics.
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Emily, I am reluctant to excuse Pat Buckley's behavior as a mother on the grounds of her generation. If she'd been a writer, or actress or astronaut, instead of the devoted wife of William Buckley, she likely would have tortured her colleagues instead of her family. She certainly would have been less famous than she was. I found the excerpt of Christopher Buckley's memoir such an interesting psychological portrait of family, more so for being only partially digested. Christopher Buckley wanted so much to eulogize her as a great woman, and was almost apologetic about condemning her. But the condemnations overshadow. A young friend of her granddaughter's, a Kennedy relative, comes over for dinner, and Pat Buckley tortures her at the table with made-up stories about Michael Skakel, the murderer in the Kennedy family. The good news for feminists is, dad doesn't sound come off all that much better, failing to visit his 11-year-old son in the hospital, skipping out of his son's graduation because he was bored. My takeaway from the story: this is why I'm not a conservative.
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Jess, Bea Arthur's death makes me think about another thing, besides abortion, that's missing from network television: grown ups. I was a kid when The Golden Girls aired, but it was a favorite show of my grandmother's and I watched some of it at her house in Florida, on a set of coral sheets, a few miles from where the Girls supposedly lived. Dorothy, the character Arthur played, was the commanding, scathing, tall one—the straight woman in a house full of lovable wackadoos. Dorothy was extremely, continuously, witheringly judgmental. And though this word has come to be used as an insult ("Don't be so judgey!"), it was this quality, one Arthur oozed, and one that Dorothy shared with Maude, that made those two characters both indelible and admirable, if more than occasionally insufferable.
Maude and Dorothy had opinions. They had opinions about everything. If society, or one's roommates, was behaving badly, it was a person's duty to tell them so even if they didn't want to hear it. Perhaps it wasn't a person's duty to dispatch friends and neighbors quite as scathingly as Maude and Dorothy often did, but then, being right, doing right, was more important than being nice. Niceness was not one of their major concerns. They cared too much to be nice. They cared too much to modulate their judgment.
Looking over the TV landscape, it's hard to find a character, male or female, with this kind of conviction, and certainly not in a comedy. (It's hard to find anyone who even looks like Arthur, who got to be famous when she was already gray, a trick since pulled off by George Clooney and Anderson Cooper, but not by another woman). The socially conscious Norman Lear sitcoms that dominated the 1970s (Maude, All in The Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and more) by grappling with racism, sexism, class and most other -isms have disappeared and, with them, the fully engaged bleeding hearts, bigots and pioneers they starred. Since Golden Girls went off the air, there have been few shows about middle aged people, almost none about senior citizens. Sex and The City, the series that spawned a thousand copycats (SATC with black women, SATC with dudes, SATC for network TV, SATC with three), is really just a copy of Golden Girls (sexually adventurous Blanche is Samantha, sweet naive Rose is Charlotte, etc. etc.) i.e. Golden Girls with 30-somethings. On TV right now, there's nowhere Maude or Dorothy would fit in.
That's not to say either Maude or the Golden Girls is perfect television. Certain old movies momentarily make me feel like the space-time continuum has collapsed. Any notion that we have advanced, become smarter, more modern, more knowing, evaporates upon watching Casablanca—the only thing we know now that we didn't know then is how to film in color. Neither Maude nor the Golden Girls gives me that sense. They're dated, they're earnest, they're not always funny (though, sometimes, happily, they are), the laugh track grates. Yet in both of these shows there's at least person I'd really like to see more of—and maybe not just on TV. She's smart, she's imperious, she doesn't suffer fools, she's engaged with the larger world, she's engaged with her friends, she has opinions she will share, that she will advocate for, that she believes in, and if you banged your head and ended up in the hospital you'd be happy if she was the person they called. She's an adult. She's Bea Arthur.
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Dayo, let's play devil's advocate about Mark Regnerus's article, shall we? As women in our 20s, let's say we take his column about marriage as gospel, and try to get married as quickly as possible lest our eggs dry up and our "market value" plummets. How are we meant to go about this? As Regnerus points out, "Marriage will be there for men when they're ready. And most do get there.
Eventually." So I suppose we should only date older men, who may or may not be ready to marry us, even if our market value is premium.
I would argue that women getting married later and later has as much to do with us getting our "MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs" as it has to do with men who are continuously sent the message that marriage will be there for them whenever they want it.
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Here is a question I would pose to Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethicist (and I'm hoping all of you will stand in for him). The U.S. has declared a public health emergency over swine flu, having detected 20 cases. The president says not to panic, but the European Union advises its citizens not to travel here. A pamphlet quoted by the New York Times, raises this question: "What if there is lawlessness. I need to protect my family and myself. What are essential safety items to have?"
Well, Tamiflu, for one. And while news stories assure us there is ample supply, this is could be government P.R. designed to keep us from storming the pharmacy. I have friends and relatives who are doctors who can prescribe Tamiflu for me and my family. They are reluctant, and they should be. This is a public health epidemic, and giving prescriptions out to perfectly healthy people is detrimental to public health, because it risks cleaning out local pharmacies. Also, having a doctor friend do you a favor is a privilege of the upper classes.
Here's what makes it trickier. You are supposed to wait until there is a reasonable risk, meaning you are surrounded by sick people, or feel the symptoms yourself. But Tamiflu is only effective 48 hours after you are infected. Any later, and it doesn't work. So what's the right thing to do? Beg the doctor friend, or not?
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Dayo, you say the article in the Washington Post “conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.” Modern reality is exploding the connection between these two events, much to the disservice of the now 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers in this country. And there is no getting around the fact that women putting off marriage and childbearing until well into their thirties raises the risks of compromised fertility. I am the result of an early marriage—my mother was 19 and father 20 when they got married, and I was born a year later. Theirs was a thoroughly disastrous union and both my parents urged me not to get married, or if I had to, not to do it young. I grew up thinking that a major part of what made their marriage so bitter was they both felt it had robbed them of their youth. In an overreaction, I didn't marry until I was 38. Because of my own experience, I used to think it was crazy to get married early. Now I'm not so sure (although I'm not talking about teen marriage). I used to think marrying your high school or college sweetheart led inevitably to feeling a desperate desire for a fresh partner when you're 40. But maybe finding early love and making it permanent might be a beneficial thing for many people. It certainly saves on the years of heartache, dead ends, and wondering if you'll find someone while you can still have children.
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In the excerpt of his memoir that ran in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Christopher Buckley says of his mother:
She would have made a fantastic spy. Really, she would have made a fantastic
anything. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman
I have ever known...She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself,
heart, soul and body, to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)
Christopher the son doesn't link his mother's roads not taken to her "serial misbehavior," as he calls her bitter upbraiding of dinner guests and anyone else who stumbled into her lair at the wrong moment. But to me, the connection makes itself. We all know women of Pat Buckley's generation—she had Christopher in the 1950s—who poured themselves into their marriages instead of their careers. And who were ever frustrated, on some level, as a result. Because despite that reassuring "A full-time job," was it really, in a satisfying way?
And does that whole debate belong to the past, or will we see a similar pattern, in decades to come, from educated women my age (thirtysomethings) who opt out of work to raise their kids? (Without entering into the fight about whether their numbers are growing or shrinking or in any way represent a revolution, I'm stipulating that there are some.) If you're a full-time Mrs. today, you are choosing from among a set of alternatives that Pat Buckley didn't really have? Maybe that changes the calculus in the future as well as the present. Or maybe not. Thoughts?
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Bea Arthur, the irrepressible star of classic sitcoms Golden Girls and Maude, died on Saturday at the age of 86. The New York Times coverage of Arthur's death was notable for two reasons. First, when the Times initially put up the obituary, the headline was "Bea Arthur, TV Battle-ax, Dies at 86." Certainly the characters Arthur played—the titular Maude and Dorothy Zbornack on Golden Girls—were outspoken women, but to paint them with the "battle-ax" brush seems unwarranted and sexist. No wonder the headline was switched to "Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86"
And speaking of Maude's outspokenness, the Times also focused on the controversy surrounding the character's choice to have an abortion:
The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.
“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”
What's remarkable to me is that since this very special episode of Maude aired, the incidence of abortion on TV has been nearly nonexistent. The only semi-realistic abortion I can remember on TV happened on HBO's Six Feet Under. I have started referring to this phenomenon as "reverse-quicksand." You see movie and television characters get stuck in quicksand all the damn time, though death by quicksand is nearly impossible. Abortion, however, is something that 35 percent of American women will experience before the age of 45, and yet it is almost absent from our popular culture. Why has Hollywood, that bastion of supposed liberalism, kowtowed so completely to the far right on depicting this issue in fiction?
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Mark Regnerus has a piece in the weekend Washington Post that is crying out for young people to get married. That’s a fine argument to make, and he does it no extreme disservice—emphasizing, however, that early marriage has suddenly become stigmatized among young women:
[M]any women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they're at least in their late 20s. If you're seeking a mate in college, you're considered a pariah, someone after her "MRS degree." Actively considering marriage when you're 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it—it's that scandalous.
Firstly, the article’s catalogue of the dynamics between women in my peer group seems oversold (one female college student likens talk of marriage to “staging a rebellion.” What happened to lower back tattoos?). No one is forcing anyone to stay unhitched; this analysis seems a back door into yet another tale of women judging one another in some sort of endless, catty bride war, searching for “scandalous” behavior—whereas for the 19, 20, and 21-year-old men asking for these maiden hands in marriage, there is no such rush to judgment.
Regnerus then flagellates the parents of the young holdouts, and by consequence himself, for obscuring the many cultural virtues of early marriage:
How did we get here? The fault lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents. Our own ideas about marriage changed as we climbed toward career success. Many of us got our MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs. Now we advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent. We caution that depending on another person is weak and fragile. We don't want them to rush into a relationship. We won't help you with college tuition anymore, we threaten. Don't repeat our mistakes, we warn.
Yes, there are advantages—obvious ones—to getting married. I don’t think kids today are unaware that it’s a financially preferable arrangement. But this “our children” angle seems disingenuous. In fact, the whole piece seems targeted not at “indecisive young people” and their enablers, but at young women in particular. Maybe I’m as out of touch with shifting social conventions as the author, but I don’t sense coequal lecturing of men about the ills of dependence. (In my head, men receive more of a "wild oats" conversation.) Not to speak of withholding tuition!
I suppose Regnerus’ argument troubles me most where it suggests—with little proof—that a conservative, gendered norm is returning to what had been his generation’s wayward adventure into higher education and marriages “with math on their side.” Further, it’s hard to tell of what he complains: Does Regnerus want more marriages, younger marriages or more stable marriages?
If he had made the point that marrying early and then continuing the 20s and 30s trajectory of college, bars, apartments, mistakes, MBAs, JDs, MDs, and PhDs, that would suggest his flacking for marriage were based on some theory of economics and companionship. But his nagging is targeted at the women who have collectively embraced third wave feminist cake-eating because then they won’t procreate. Men who wait and wait for the ring “get there,” he says—whereas women must “beg, pray, borrow and pay” to reclaim fertility later in life. In other words, Regnerus conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.