|
|
The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...
-
Meghan, I checked out that T-shirt sniffing study you flagged, and, well, it hardly implies a crisis for pill-users – or a pink slip for novelists.
To recap: The researchers asked women to rate the smells of T-shirts worn by different men. For each woman, they chose three men who were more genetically similar (in terms of a specific set of genes) and three men who were less similar. The genes in question were part of the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, which plays a crucial role in immune function and is also linked to body odor (possibly because of interactions between the immune system and skin bacteria). The researchers found that when women began taking birth control pills, their smell preferences shifted somewhat toward men with more similar MHC profiles, though the difference was not huge.
Why might this matter? In the past, some research found that women tended to prefer the smell of men whose MHC makeup differed more extensively from their own. That result remains controversial, but from an evolutionary perspective, it makes for a good story. When women mate with less similar men, their kids may have more robust immune systems that can better fend off a wide range of diseases. In theory at least, that advantage may have helped to shape women’s tastes over time. As for the pill, if it were to skew preferences toward MHC similarity, women might smile on less genetically favorable partners, leading to problems in the long run. When women stop taking the pill, for instance, their tastes might shift again, resulting in “the breakdown of relationships," as one researcher speculated. Hence the maelstrom about women choosing the “wrong” men.
Strikingly, however, the current study fails to confirm the premise of that whole story. When women smelled men's T-shirts at the outset, before any of them took the pill, they showed no preference for men with more MHC difference. That is, they did not exhibit the supposed tendency that the pill supposedly disrupts. What’s more, when women taking the pill smelled the T-shirts again, they showed no preference for men with more MHC similarity. Yes, the pill-takers tended to rate the smell of MHC-similar men more favorably than they had before. But to repeat: They still didn’t prefer the similar guys overall. Despite the hype, then, this study’s findings are limited – and pretty messy.
Of course smell can play a role in romance. And the scent of MHC difference could turn out to be one factor – of many – that influences women’s choices. But really, when it comes to searing insight into longing and romantic crisis, T-shirt sniffing has nothing on Flaubert.
-
 I admit, I was as enthralled as the next person with Michael Phelps' amazing run for eight golds at the Beijing Olympics, perhaps more so. I watched the races live, yelling at the TV; I rewatched them on the Internet (have you seen the 4 x 100 relay underwater view? Go watch!); and I started letting my 4-year-old stay up until 10:30 p.m. so he could glimpse history for himself. (And now you should see him try to swim butterfly.)
But if there was anything that disappointed me about the Olympics swimming coverage, it's that Natalie Coughlin's own remarkable feat—winning six medals in six events for the U.S. women—went comparably unnoticed by NBC's commentators. Granted, her haul of one gold, two silvers, and three bronzes wasn't as impressive as Phelps', but she swam an ambitious program and has never finished out of the medals in 11 Olympic events (she also swam in 2004).
Swimming has always been my favorite Olympic sport. I was a less-than-mediocre age-group swimmer growing up, and I still fondly remember coming home from swim practice each day, making a sandwich, and plopping down in front of the TV to watch the 1984 Olympics. What made the swimming in those Games so fun to watch was that the women's team had just as much success and enjoyed just as much attention as the men. Tracy Caulkins, Carrie Steinseifer, and Mary T. Meagher (and Dara Torres, of course) were just as famous for those two weeks as Rowdy Gaines, Rick Carey, and Steve Lundquist. And from then up through the 2000 Games, the U.S. swimming medal count has been roughly divided between the men's and women's teams. In the last two Olympics, though, our men's teams have been considerably more successful than the women, even if you adjust for Phelps' out-of-this world performances. I can't know the cause, and it might be an anomaly. But here's my suggestion: Speedo, it's great that you rewarded Michael Phelps with a $1 million bonus for his eight golds. But how about ponying up an equal amount to USA Swimming to further develop our talented young female swimmers?
-
For now, the whole discussion about Hillary supporters and which way they'll jump feels to me like a giant exercise in conjecture. There's Melinda's still-bitter friend, and PUMA (John Dickerson translation: Party Unity My Ass). And then there's this Friend of Hillary with her "Yes We Can" pin. We'll know something more when we see a good poll of women in Ohio or Virginia, I suppose (though to really answer the question, the poll would have to zero in on Democratic women who voted in the primaries). And of course, we won't really know how this plays out until November. But whatever former Clinton supporters actually decide, in whatever numbers, the idea that you don't vote for Obama because he's the popular guy who stole the election from the diligent gal makes sense only if you don't care what that guy, compared with his opponent, would do once in office. Maybe that's fine for student body president. But for the real deal? As the Friend of Hillary above says, "There is not a hair's breadth of difference between Hillary's position on the issues I care about most deeply and Obama's." Agree. Disagree. But don't change the subject, at least for more than 10 minutes, in Denver or in your living room.
-
Meghan, I'm curious about that T-shirt sniffing, too, and am trying to get hold of the actual paper. In the meantime, I confess, I've been riveted by another tale that features some modicum of science but also five puppies, a Mormon sex slave, and (possibly) a three-legged horse. So, turning for a moment from birth control to copious reproduction ...
 Last week, a woman named Bernann McKinney received five puppies that had been cloned from her dear, departed pit bull, Booger. This was apparently the first time a canine had been cloned for commercial purposes, and McKinney was photographed frolicking on the floor, hugging and squeezing one of the pups (whom she called "mini-Boogers"), and telling them, "Yes, I know you! You know me, too!"
Unfortunately for her, someone watching the spectacle also recognized her as a fugitive whose real name was Joyce. According to the Associated Press, in 1977, Joyce McKinney "became a British tabloid sensation over a kidnapping case. She faced charges of unlawful imprisonment after she was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave. She jumped bail and was never brought to justice." Another account, which likens McKinney (weirdly) to John Edwards, features velvet handcuffs and has her posing "as a deaf-mute actor to escape to Canada."
McKinney is also wanted in Tennessee, it turns out, for "criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary" in 2004. "Authorities there said she instructed a 15-year-old boy to break into a house," the AP reports. Her attorney explains she "needed the money to help her three-legged horse." She wished to buy the horse (seriously) a fake leg.
So where is McKinney now? Is she on the lam with five puppies and a four-legged horse? Will she ever explain what insatiable drive led her to buy five clones of a beloved pet (let alone one)?
The South Korean company that did the cloning, meanwhile, is not backing down and seems, in fact, to sense opportunity. The head of the company says "criminal records will not disqualify future customers." Indeed, "cloned animals could even help them find stability and thus prevent crimes." I'll gladly stay tuned.
-
Has anyone been reading about this new U.K. study examining how the birth control pill affects women's choice of sexual partners? As one CBS headline crudely puts it, women on the pill allegedly choose "the wrong partner." That's because, as the authors of the study argue, women NOT on the pill are generally "attracted to men whose genetic makeup differs from their own" which "increases the chances for a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby," as CBS put it. But women on the pill seem to choose partners who are genetically similar to themselves. I can't quite tell how they've determined this, but it has to do with something called MHC genes, which affect immune responses, and smelling T-shirts. As CBS puts it: "In laboratory studies, women who sniff men's sweaty T-shirts find them more attractive when they come from men whose MHC genes don't match theirs. It's not that certain MHC genes smell better to women -- it's the difference that counts."
On the pill, however, this seems to change, and it has, according to a number of scientists, a lot of implications for relationships going forward, because apparently women who are with men who have similar genetic material get dissatisfed quickly and search for new sex partners. (It's not your hair, honey, or the fact that you don't do the dishes, it's your MHC genes.) But do these kind of studies really tell us very much? Are our sex and romantic lives really so genetically deterministic that we can make predictions based on smelling a man's T-shirt? (God, that would have saved a lot of novelists some trouble.) I'd love to know what some of our more scientifically trained XXFactor bloggers have to say, because the study and the conclusions being drawn raised all sorts of questions for me. It's times like these when you wish more journalists understood biology, because the pieces I've read on this story seem, in general, very crude.
-
I’m with Melinda on this one Emily. I’ve always believed that "closure" and "catharsis" are pretty much just empty words one generally uses to justify sleeping with ex-boyfriends after the fifth glass of wine. The mere fact that Clinton insists this roll call will be cathartic, just as Obama asserts that’s not the point at all, highlights the deep disconnect here. Not all symbolism is empty. But symbolism is not always enough, either.
That said, I found myself longing for a strong shot of Hillary as the first swiftboats were launched this week. As Tim Noah has pointed out, watching the conservative imprints of reputable publishing houses float "books" comprised of lies braided to racial and religious stereotype and innuendo is like being dragged back to the wretched Groundhog Day of 2004. And watching the media sputter "But ... these books aren’t true!" is almost worse. I can’t help but feel that Clinton would have matched kidney punch for kidney punch with Corsi and his ilk. She knows better than anyone that there just no “rising above it” to be done, when there’s no depth to which your opponents won’t sink.
-
Fiddle faddle, Emily; placing Hillary's name in nomination at the Democratic National Convention will not lead to the "catharsis'' she keeps talking about, and I'm not positive that catharsis is the goal.
Long ago and far away, I rode a bus to Tlacotalpan, in Veracruz, Mexico, for their winter Candelaria Festival, primarily to dance all night and see the running of the bulls. But the most memorable thing about the trip was the yearly ritual in which the townspeople carry a crowned and silk-gowned statue of the Virgin Mary (the Candelaria Virgin) out of the church and through the streets on a little platform, as a huge and completely frenzied crowd cheers, waves at the statue, reaches out and runs after her. They throw flowers, too, and when they put her on a barge to take her for her annual ride up and down the river, some people fall into the water while trying to lay hands on her hem. And yes, what I'm saying is: They could carry Hillary Rodham Clinton into Denver like that and still not satisfy those supporters who have decided to stay mad.
Case in point (and why I was already thinking so Virgin-ally about all this): I run into a Hillary supporter I know in the drug store the other day, and she tells me she still hasn't taken down the Hillary shrine "complete with votive candles'' that she has in her house. Ha ha, I say, but no, she says, she is not kidding. Now, first of all, I love that this gal gives enough of a hoot about our country to get emotionally involved on that level; she worked her heart out for her candidate, and good for her. Clearly, we'd be better off if more people gave of themselves so passionately. When I ask what Obama would have to do to win her over, what she says first is that he'd have to adopt Hillary's health care plan. But by the end of the conversation, we get to the real bottom line, which is that she just doesn't like Obama, sees him as a total poser and nothing-burger who swooped in from nowhere and stole the thing, and all the health care reform in the world is not going to change that. At this point, she's thinking seriously about staying home on Election Day. She is not going to wake up the morning after Hillary's name is placed in nomination and have a whole new lease on Obama. And my guess is, Hillary knows that.
-
 When the idea of a roll call for Hillary's delegates at the Democratic convention was first raised last spring, I thought it sounded silly—all empty symbolism and no gain. But last weekend, when I read Michelle Cottle's op-ed arguing in favor, I found myself convinced. The threat of revolt is over. Why not recognize Hillary's backers by giving her supporters their moment in Denver to flex her political muscles and demonstrate the support she amassed? Now the NYT is reporting that's the plan. I hope it makes HIllary supporters feel like they've given her a parting loyalty gift. And I confess this is one scripted moment I want to watch unfold, too, as all those people raise their hands or voices or however it works when a woman's name is called for the presidential nomination. Symbolic doesn't actually have to mean empty.
-
Summer tourists complaining of passport troubles can gain some perspective by reading a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on the legal challenges currently facing thousands of Texans. Because they were issued by midwives, these people's birth certificates have recently been rejected as proof of U.S. citizenship.
In the 1990s, a number of Texan midwives were convicted of selling up to 15,000 fraudulent birth certificates dating back as far as the 1960s. The State Department now doubts the validity of any birth certificate issued by a midwife in Texas, and lack of a recognized birth certificate makes it practically impossible to provide the proof of citizenship that is required of passport applicants. The more stringent legal requirements also make life harder for midwives still in practice and could harm the women and children that they treat. The Journal mentions the potential for racial discrimination in this case (low-income Hispanics make up the primary client base for midwives along the border) but fails to mention the health risk posed by threatening the continuation of border midwifery.
The presence of an experienced attendant at childbirth is the single most effective way to reduce maternal death, but unaffordable medical bills, lack of health insurance, and fears of deportation can deter soon-to-be moms from seeking professional care. Among rural and immigrant communities, midwives (some of whom have assisted thousands of births) have kept maternal, neonatal, and infant mortality down by providing an accessible care alternative. For many undocumented pregnant women, the choice in delivery method is not between midwifery and hospital aid but between midwifery and unattended birth.
A loss of midwives' perceived legitimacy could jeopardize the practice by providing more ammunition to midwifery's detractors. Despite debates about the safety of at-home vs. hospital births, few would argue that unattended births are safer than midwife-assisted deliveries, one of the reasons why such deliveries are still prevalent in southern Texas (in 2004, midwives delivered 6.6 percent of all Texas children). Fueling the "turf war" over prenatal care furthers efforts to criminalize midwifery and could pose a bigger threat than frustrations at the border if it places midwives' livelihood, and the lives of their future clients, at risk.
-
I agree with Rachael and think that unequal hush installments were not only sexist, the distributions were too small. Don't you think $15,000 and $20,000 a month seems measley for the sacrifice Hunter and Young's family were making in their personal lives? Were the payments to go on indefinitely, one wonders, or simply until Hunter would be eligible to become the second Mrs. de Winter?
-
 Rielle Hunter had to spend nine months pregnant and an unreported number of hours in labor before she could milk John Edwards' supporters for $15,000 a month (allegedly).
If the New York Post is to be believed (and why not, at this point?), all Andrew Young had to do before he could milk John Edwards' supporters was claim he fathered little Frances Quinn. And he's getting $20,000 (allegedly).
Ladies, what do we have to do to break the political-scandal glass ceiling?
(hat tip: InstaPundit)
-
Go, Ruth! In her column in the Post this morning, she says there isn't a wife in the world who doesn't want to slap "99 percent'' Honest John Edwards silly right about now. And on account of the senator's perfidy, are husbands across the land enduring conversations about what kind of dumb you'd have to be to fall for that "in my eyes, you are Gandhi'' silliness? But here's a question: Do we really know anything about John Edwards' vanity, hubris, and self-indulgence now that we didn't know after the $400 haircut he expensed to his campaign? I still say every canyon in Bill Clinton's moral landscape was mapped out in the New Yorker piece on how he let a mentally disabled man—so uncomprehending he saved the cherry pie from his last meal for later—be executed to prove how tough he was and distract from revelations about Gennifer Flowers. And was there any question at all about George W. Bush's capacity for empathy that was not answered by Tucker Carlson's piece about him having a good old time imitating Carla Faye Tucker's pleas that he spare her life? There are plenty of unsexy windows into virtue, too: When I spent some time around Kofi Annan for a profile, the detail that spoke to me most clearly about his character was that he was exactly the same with waiters and clerks as with heads of state. People tell us who they are every day, often even when fully clothed.
-
Meghan, maybe you're right that we should turn away—but not quite yet! First we get to trounce him a bit. Here's Kerry Howell of Reason magazine and me agreeing with Mickey about covering the story. And now I agree with Hanna that Elizabeth doesn't get to call off the bloodhounds when she feels like it. I know, this is six shades of awful for her. But she knew about the affair and went along with him continuing to run for president. That was a lot of potential risk loading onto the Democratic Party.
-
Meghan, I couldn’t agree more about how depressing the “I’m suffering!” political apology has become. Elizabeth Edwards has terminal cancer; John Edwards has terminal narcissism. Let’s call it a tie? But the more we pick at the threads of rampant narcissism here, the sadder the whole story gets. Melinda points to the weird Newsweek account by Jonathan Darman in which Rielle Hunter emerges as a patchwork of reality show clichés: part actress, part “spiritual adviser,” “New York party girl,” screenwriter, part married, and part divorced.
Her “webisodes,” in which John Edwards drones on and on about John Edwards, manage to be all about Rielle.
The most astonishing part of the Darman piece is Hunter’s disclosure that “she and novelist Jay McInerney were working on a ‘genius' idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them.” She apparently “wanted to pitch this idea to Darren Star, creator of ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ ” Betcha $15,000 it’s in production by September.
-
XX Factor blogger Melinda Henneberger will be chatting online at Washingtonpost.com today at 2 p.m. Send her a question. We'll post a link to the transcript here when she's done.
Melinda wrote about the Edwardses' marriage for Slate back in December, in advance of the primaries. (Also the Obamas, the Huckabees, and, yep, the Clintons.) She's a frequent contributor here at the XX Factor, and you can read a previous chat transcript here.
-
This is rich: Now Hillary Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson, who might as well have an "Is it 2012 yet?'' bumper sticker, is undermining Obama's candidacy by complaining to ABCNews.com that if only John Edwards' affair had come out sooner, Clinton woulda been the nominee. Only, is he really so sure that had that happened, nobody woulda then jumped out of Bill Clinton's post-presidential closet? Guess what this quote from Wolfson really means is that his boss has been told we're not going to get a text message from Obama announcing that it's Hillary for V.P.
-
It's been hard to feel much shock about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter: Every other month, it seems, we receive the revelation that a powerful politician has risked his career to get a bit on the side. Edwards would almost seem to be the norm rather than the radical exception. But the literary critic in me is interested by one new-ish element: the plea of "narcissism." Whereas political mea culpas have often been cast in the language of sin and redemption, this one was explicitly cast in the language of disease and recovery. On Friday, Edwards told Bob Woodruff on ABC's Nightline that he "went from being a young senator" to "running for president ... becoming a national public figure, all of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want; you're invincible."
From one perspective, it was a perfectly spun rationale for our recovery-story ridden age, filtering Machiavelli through Freud, so that what we end up with is the idea that power doesn't just corrupt, it makes us narcissists. (We are all patients now.) From another perspective, though, it's a flop of an excuse: You can't forgive narcissists, you can only learn to live with them—or not. Do we really need to know whether Hunter's child is his? Do we really need to wax on about the harm Edwards would have caused if he had been elected and the affair had come out? No, we already know that he is a narcissist. that he had an inflated sense of self-importance that obscures the worth of those around him—campaign staffers, donors, volunteers. And so in a sense the perfect retort to Edwards would be to respond to him as one might to a clinically diagnosed patient: You thrive on attention and drama. So we're not going to be your enablers anymore; we're just going to turn away.
-
 John Edwards is reminding me more and more of poor Henry Cisneros, who was on his way to becoming the Latino Obama before he cheated on his saintly wife, Mary Alice, while she was pregnant with their third child, a son born with no spleen and a malformed heart and stomach. Bill Clinton asked Cisneros to serve as his housing secretary anyway, a few years later, and by then, the affair was such old news that it never even came up during his confirmation hearings. Yet in the course of his background check for the cabinet post, Cisneros lied to the FBI—not about whether he was supporting his former mistress, but about the amount he paid her—and as a result, was subjected to a four-year investigation by a special prosecutor, a probe that cost taxpayers $9 million. Heck of a public servant, Henry, so big-hearted and capable; watching him work a crowd in San Antonio back in the day, you'd have sworn you were looking at the future. But at some point after he stopped paying Linda Medlar, she started taping their phone calls, and triggered the investigation. When the judge who presided over his trial finally asked Cisneros why he'd lied in the first place, he explained that while he wasn't positive himself about the amount he'd paid Medlar, he was positive he didn't want his wife to know how high that figure was. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and when he left public life, we all lost out. So, what's the relevance?
First, it's that scary as we wives can be, federal investigators are scarier, and if any of the $15,000 a month that's being paid to Edwards' ex-girlfriend came from campaign funds, I cannot overemphasize how seldom fudging the facts with the Feds works out. Second, what do Monica Lewinsky, Linda Medlar, and Rielle Hunter have in common? All were employees, and world-class blabbermouths. (You never really hear about the guys who get involved with the quiet types, do you?) It's silly to say we don't care if politicians fool around as long as they don't lie about it; how is that supposed to work? (Though if we replaced those one-minute morning speeches they give in Congress with a daily adultery roll call, CSPAN would definitely do some box office.) And until we figure it out, we're stuck pretending these people are perfect and then, when we find out otherwise, pretending we're surprised.
As it is, we're so perplexed about how to treat this stuff I can't even tell what this first-person Newsweek piece is trying to say. In it, reporter Jonathan Darman tells about his own adventures with Rielle Hunter, a woman so fascinating that after meeting her on a trip to Iowa with Edwards in 2006, Darman spends weeks trying to track her down and months getting to know her. After concluding she's an unreliable source, he keeps in touch anyway: "I continued to see her. ... I liked Rielle'' and "let her do my astrological chart.'' From the way he describes their boozy first lunch, I can't tell if he suspected she and Edwards were carrying on or not: Is the tone confessional because he missed the story, because he had the story and sat on it, or because he fell for the "I can tell you're an old soul'' hoodoo himself? (The last guy I knew who talked like that wound up blowing town with the life savings of several women who each thought they were going to marry him and start an ashram.) Hunter told Darman that in this incarnation, she wanted to help Edwards become a transformational figure on a par with Gandhi or MLK; better luck next time?
-
I find this Elizabeth Edwards post on Daily Kos excruciating. We are supposed to ride with this couple through her cancer diagnosis and relapse, through their son's death, their fertility treatments, and the rededication of their marriage, but then we are supposed to butt the hell out when the story line veers from the tragedy and heroics. If you believe in a system, you have to live and die by it. Elizabeth Edwards buys into the culture of overconfession. She is an obsessive blogger, for God's sake. You can't just get suddenly pissed off because the confessional culture came back to bite you. A "string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication"??? Well, some were lies and some weren't right. As for that baby, that's an easy one. DNA test.
-
I am incredibly annoyed that we have to waste any air, print, or pixel time on this. Why do I care about some dude's marriage and marital problems—unless he did something that in any way abuses public power? Comstockery, as I wrote in CJR once upon a time. Celebtainment and domestic voyeurism disguised as politics.
I just don't care what politicians do with their zippers, so long as their policies and votes are in order. By nature, national politicians are people who want power and want to be admired, even adored, to an absurd degree. (Not my fabulous mom, the township trustee and former Beavercreek, Ohio, mayor! But small-town politics—zoning, sewage, 32,000 citizens—is quite different from national politics.) Really, what emotionally healthy person would run for president of the United States? You have to have some ego issues to even imagine it might be possible.
Some large proportion of them will mess around. I. Do. Not. Care.
Was there any abuse of power—sexual harassment, assault, coercion? Did anyone get pinned up against the wall and groped against her or his will? Any abuse of public funds? Any manipulation to get a lover or family member a public job? Any payment to use someone else's body, which I find more and more appalling the more I learn about the sex trade? Then I have the emotional energy to be outraged.
But private dalliances, seductions, and oversize sexual appetites? Eh. Not my problem. Leave the poor family alone.
| | S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 1 | 2 | | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | | 31 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article?
|
|
|