Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - Posts
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In The Supremes Edition of our XX Gabfest this week, Hanna and Meghan
and I talk about (of course) Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, Judge
Sonia Sotomayor. Also a new study showing that women are more unhappy,
not less, 30 years after the sexual revolution, and why Terminator
Salvation has such lame female action stars... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Alongside all the finger pointing about bank failures and the collapse
of the US housing bubble has come the slow puncturing of the legend of
consequence-free 1990s economic growth. Peter Baker's fantastic New York Times Magazine piece takes a good, hard look at the maker of that world: Bill Clinton. Like Hanna,
I find the portrait both honest and poignant. The meat of the
article—which follows Clinton on various travels, speeches, meetings,
and duties related to the Clinton foundation—is naturally the
substantive, frank, and reflective conversation between Bill and Baker
with respect to the Clintonian economy. David Leonhardt, also of the Times, parses the back and forth, wherein Bill admits that he "should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California.
Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist,
but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday
so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be
forced to comment on the gay marriage ban... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action
may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think,
is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential
primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity
politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama)
v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much
racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic
of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or
skin color than with their respective ages... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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We spend so much time dissecting First Ladies living in the shadow of their husbands that this portrait of Bill Clinton as First Man is startling, and so poignant. New York Times
reporter Peter Baker addresses how little access Clinton has in the
Obama administration, but the story succeeds mainly as a character
sketch. Clinton is a Philip Roth character somewhat restrained, trying
to explain his outbursts during the campaign, coming to terms with the
indignities of aging, and of being eclipsed by a younger, more vibrant
man... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh just called
Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor "reverse racists." He is referring to
the controversy over Sotomayor's line, from a speech given in 2002,
that she believed a Latina woman would make a better decision than a
white man. Limbaugh might have ground to stand on had Sotomayor been
making a blanket reference to the inherent superiority of Latina women
to white men. But she wasn't. As Hanna pointed out yesterday,
Sotomayor was talking about sex discrimination cases, about which there
is evidence that having female judges leads to outcomes that appear to
be fairer for women. She was not being a reverse racist; she was being
a pragmatist, and perhaps, a wee bit of an activist in that moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I agree with Dahlia that humility is rare in Sonia Sotomayor's professional circle, but I do hope this self-effacing quality helps her in the very humbling confirmation hearings coming up. In the context of introducing herself to the American public, however, I doubt, as Samantha wonders, that the judge was downplaying her achievements
to counter critics who consider powerful women "bitchy." (But as an
aside, I'd add a little self-deprecation in the face of such dazzling
glory is certainly not "harmful to the rest.") Although modesty is
encouraged in immigrant families, in fact, in the nominee's
biographical statement, "ordinary" was an apt comparison to the
odds-overcoming determination of her extraordinary mother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dahlia, I agree—the more I digest Sotomayor's Berkeley speech, the more I also appreciate it.
Where Sandra Day O'Connor was too macho to admit that being a woman on
the high court made her different, and where Ruth Bader Ginsburg is
still hesitant to step too far from that party line, Sotomayor is frank
and full-throated... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers
to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of
night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of
the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions
of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire
as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this
ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence
of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When it opens this weekend, I hope a lot of XXers will go see Drag Me to Hell,
the new Sam Raimi horror movie, so we can discuss it here. In addition
to being (I thought) a satisfying two hours' worth of alternating
laughs and screams, it's a very rich text about female power. So rich,
in fact, that I'm not sure yet exactly how to read it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sam, I had the exact opposite reaction to Sotomayor’s claims of ordinariness
yesterday. My thought was, “How refreshing. Instead of making multiple
earnest claims about her vast personal humility, here we finally have a
nominee who actually is humble.” Or at least appreciates that she
didn’t make it this far on her own steam... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Back in January, a bunch of copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight arrived
in the Philippines, and a customs official demanded an import duty.
It’s illegal to tax books in the Philippines—no such duty had been
levied in 50 years—but the Twilight importer paid up. The Bureau of
Customs, apparently facing a budget shortfall, began to demand the
impromptu tax for every new air shipment of books. Importers refused to
pay, so huge numbers of textbooks and novels waited in warehouses. For
months, virtually no imported books got past the blockade... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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f Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, six out of nine Supreme Court justices will be Catholic.
Barbara Perry, a professor of government at Sweetbriar College who is
writing a book about Catholic justices went on CNN radio to discuss
Sotomayor's nomination. She was joined by Catholic League President
Bill Donohue.
Perry claims that "in our politics, religion doesn't matter
anymore," but then she added, "I don't think our politics are ready for
an Islamic justice at this point"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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