Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - Posts
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Over at Slate, Johann Hari has a fascinating essay on The East, the West, and Sex, the "strange new book"—Hari's words—by journalist Richard Bernstein, which details the centuries-old history of Western men seeking out a little strange in the East ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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There are many things that I find deeply upsetting about Sarah Palin. But in the new Vanity Fair assessment of Palin's
current place in the political universe, the most disturbing thing Todd
Purdum reveals is her inability to discern or care about the truth:
At one point, trying out a debating point that she
believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin
told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their
marriage had been unable to ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From On High.
At every public appearance I make, someone raises his hand and says
something like, “It’s much harder to be a tall woman than a tall man,
right?” This point of view was echoed in the current issue of The New Yorker:
A story about the director Nora Ephron opens with a quote about being
tall from Meryl Streep, who is playing 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the
forthcoming movie Julie & Julia. "I mean, it's like having club foot ... it was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born," Streep says.
Yes, being tall has its challenges. I know, I'm 6-foot-3. But at its
heart, the constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be
public, the constant sense of walking around with a spotlight on you.
There's no place to hide, and that's genderless. Tall men are every bit
as self-conscious as tall women.
Tall women’s struggles are more subtle. You’re not aware of this
unless you’re tall, but there’s a vortex of silence around tall female
public figures, and a total dearth of tall female role models. Sure,
there are lots of very successful tall women out there. But you
probably don’t know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I agree with you, Dahlia, about the pole dance of grief in Away We Go: The amateur night performance of barren Melanie Lynskey (Munch Garnett), while riveting and poignant, indeed seemed like it belonged in a different movie. Like Dana,
I thought the quirky, uneven road movie had some great moments along
the hapless, mapless, trip of expecting parents seeking their adult
selves. For example, Maya Rudoph was a pitch perfect Verona, asking her
goofy but loveable boyfriend, Burt (John Krasinki), “Are we fuck-ups?”
(My husband, who usually is a good sport about chick flicks, audibly
conceded that indeed they could be.)
When miscarriage and profound disappointment were added to the
narrative, though, the couple’s journey became about more than simply
growing up the hard way. Perhaps director Sam Mendes ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Reading Hanna's and Dana's
posts about a Swedish couple's attempts to raise a gender-free child,
I’m struck by how pointless it is for parents to try to program their
children.
Of course, I think it's awesome and essential that parents make a
conscious effort to raise open-minded kids (by discussing the sort of
issues that Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson addressed in their piece
about childrens' responses to Obama becoming president, for example),
but there are some things you just can't control—like how other people
respond to your child.
I'm sure my parents were less than thrilled that strangers referred to me as ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Minnesota Supreme Court just ruled
5-0 that Al Franken is the winner of the contested 2008 Minnesota
Senate race, by 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast. Finally, right?
Minnesota has been down one senator for almost half a year. That's
already too long. The state shouldn't have to half sit out the summer's
big business on Capitol Hill: health care, the energy bill, and the
confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor.
But there's one avenue left for Norm Coleman, Franken's Republican
opponent, and that's a federal lawsuit. From a legal standpoint, such a
suit would be ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Hanna’s post about the Swedish couple who are attempting to raise their child “gender-free” (not
telling anyone its birth sex or permitting the genitals to be seen by
anyone but a select few intimates) has had me thinking all day about
the chicken-and-egg problem of gender identification. Do I think the
category of gender is more constructed than the dominant culture gives
it credit for? Definitely. Does the parenting of this couple horrify
me? Completely.
Hanna, your analogy (to a “militant feminist friend” who tried
unsuccessfully to make her daughter play with trucks) doesn’t quite
hold up; in terms of the violence visited on the kid’s sense of self,
the Swedish family’s choice to conceal the fact of gender altogether seems infinitely worse. Being told by your parents that you should ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)