The good news: California's 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected Roman Polanski's most recent request for dismissal of all that unpleasant business about his raping a kid and fleeing sentencing. The bad news: The court also spelled out just what Polanski needs to do to really make this all go away. If his team of lawyers would just quit pushing for dismissal and ask instead that the 76-year-old director be sentenced in absentia, the justices "are confident that the trial court could fashion a legal sentence that results in no further incarceration for Polanski." (Polanski, you'll recall, is currently confined to his three-story chalet in Gstaad, which sits on a 19,000 square foot property "nestled along a private road with a view of the surrounding countryside and snow-capped mountains," according to ABC News. He's spending this dark time hanging out with his family, entertaining guests and editing his latest movie, poor thing.)
The justices seem particularly concerned, says Harriet Ryan in the L.A. Times, with sorting out "Polanski's allegations of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in the original handling of the case" -- memorably conveyed to the public in the 2008 documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" -- "enough so that they took the unusual step of injecting themselves into the details of a specific case." They wrote: "We exhort all participants in this extended drama to place the integrity of the criminal justice system above the desire to punish any one individual, whether for his offense or for his flight." I guess a justice system that punishes both crooked judges and fugitive child rapists is too much to hope for?
Polanski's lawyers haven't said whether they'll be taking the judges' advice, but Loyola Law professor Laurie Levenson told Ryan, "It's a pretty darn good solution for Polanski. This could all go away and we would all kinda scratch our heads and wonder what has taken 30 years."
On Monday evening, one of the most respected, highly experienced journalists in television, a reporter who has won nearly every award the industry has to offer, took over the anchor desk at ABC's World News. And boy did it Tom Shales hot and bothered.
Diane Sawyer's debut as an evening news anchor was, by most accounts, a quiet success. The network didn't build up to her ascension to the throne with the fanfare that CBS did when Katie Couric became their evening anchor three years ago. Instead, on the day before her 64th birthday, she slipped into her new role with exactly the same brand of authoritative cool she's known for. She aired a pre-taped interview she'd done with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, welcomed her Good Morning America successor George Stephanopoulos to discuss healthcare, and rebounded promptly when a teaser about Brittany Murphy showed a shot of Ahmadinejad instead.
The reaction to her first night was likewise generally subdued. "The Baltimore Sun's" critic David Zurawik noted Sawyer's "poise" and "strong presence," while the notoriously error-prone "New York Times'" Alessandra Stanley praised Sawyer's "twinkly warmth," which is like praising Oprah Winfrey's for her restraint. And across the Web this morning, little has been made of the new anchor's gender – perhaps because her credentials and performance speak for themselves.
But in "The Washington Post," the stalwart Tom Shales couldn't hold back, getting right to business in the first sentence. "Ideally, the gorgeousness of Diane Sawyer should not be a factor in assessing her performance," he wrote, which is a dead giveaway to what's coming next. Shales then continued to dance around our "leading lady's looks" under the pretense of commenting on the show's numerous close-ups of her. Yet it seems a journalistic stretch to note Sawyer's lack of a brand new set by saying, "even Cleopatra needed a barge." He then went on to compare the graciousness of Ms. Sawyer to that of Grace Kelly, Meryl Streep and Cary Grant. And when he suggested that ABC 's cameras could confidently pull back from their "wonder woman," he explained Sawyer can "hold us captive without seeming to sit in our veritable laps." Still, based on his slavish, get-a-room-already appreciation, we can't help suspecting that Shales would be quite content with the former beauty queen on his lap, whispering sweet headlines.
Knocked-up teenager? Check. Conservative locale? Yes, ma'am. A pregnancy maybe, possibly in danger? Mhmm.
It's official: We have another momtroversy on our hands.
Meet Mackenzie McCollum, a 17-year-old high school volleyball player who was kicked off the court for being pregnant and has since launched a federal lawsuit against her school in Fort Worth, Texas. When the school administration discovered that the starting setter was pregnant, she was benched and asked to bring in a doctor's note giving her permission to play. She did.
Only, the doctor's note made two stipulations: She was to have her heart-rate monitored during play to make sure it didn't rise above 140 beats per minute and to be restricted to "no-contact" sports. The school said it wasn't able to "accommodate" the heart monitoring. As for the issue of no contact, the school was like: Dude, have you ever watched volleyball? But McCollum's doctor didn't mean "contact" in the literal sense; he was thinking of games that require helmets, pads and head-on collisions. In his mind, volleyball was a "no contact" sport." In addition, he suggested the heart-monitoring based on a medical recommendation that was invalidated decades ago but still remains popular folklore among doctors. So, the doc eventually scrubbed the additional requirements from his note and McCollum was back on the court the next day.
Still, McCollum says that her coach, Jack Warren, violated her privacy by revealing her pregnancy to the team without her permission. She also claims that she was unfairly forced to miss critical court time during college recruiting season and that Warren ultimately reduced her time on the court after she was allowed to return. More recently, the high schooler's suit was expanded to take issue with teachers at her school showing an ESPN segment about her legal fight in wholly unrelated classes, which she says led to harassment in the halls. McCollum's legal team argues that these are all violations of Title IX, which is best known for outlawing sexual inequity in athletics but also specifically bans schools from discriminating against pregnant students. The National Women's Law Center explains that the federal law requires schools to "give all students who might be, are or have been pregnant ... equal access to school programs and extracurricular activities."
Requiring a pregnant student to get a doctor's permission to play on a sports team is considered discriminatory -- unless the school requires the same "from all students who have conditions that require medical care," and McCollum's school reportedly does. A spokesperson for the high school told ABC that it was "standard policy at Arlington Heights High School and throughout the district to require students who get injured or develop a medical condition to get a written release from a doctor before they can return to the team." If that turns out to be true, the time McCollum spent on the bench is unfortunate but hardly seems discriminatory. The other claims are separate issues, and all of these allegations will simply have to play out in court.
In the meantime, the vitriol this case has inspired is fascinating. A crowd of McCollum detractors are frothing at the mouth in a manner all too familiar with cases involving sex, young women and motherhood. There is copious amounts of mommy-shaming on display: "What kind of idiot would want to play volleyball while pregnant anyway," exclaimed a member of a Facebook group in support of McCollum's coach. Never mind the opinion of her doctor and other medical experts that it was safe for her to continue playing. There's also plenty slut-shaming to be seen: The Facebook group "tired of Mackenzie McCollum" displays the following mission statement: "ITS HER FAULT NO ONE ELSES!!" Apparently she reproduced asexually, which should really be the news story here, no?
It's reasonable to have a visceral response to the idea of a pregnant woman engaged in an aggressive activity of any sort; a little hand-wringing is only human. Now, arrogantly telling a pregnant woman that neither she nor her doctor knows what is best for her, though? That isn't reasonable -- but it is the status quo.
Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor of sociology at Occidental College, recently put up a quick post at the always enlightening blog Sociological Images, about how some toy websites' "gift finders" will demand that you specify whether you're looking for a boy or a girl before you begin browsing. (Heaven forbid you confuse your three-year-old nephew with pastel-colored building blocks!) Today, she followed up by finding out what happens when you click one or the other at Toys R Us, the largest U.S. toy chain. The results she got were "rather fascinating."
First, you're asked to pick a "personality type," and somewhat surprisingly, the options are almost the same for boys and girls -- "adventurous," "creative," "sporty," "techie," "smarty pants," and "outdoorsy" -- although "glamour girl" is an extra category for the young ladies. The serious overthinker will note from the illustrations that paddling translates to "adventurous" for girls and merely "outdoorsy" for boys, while adventurous boys are into space travel and outdoorsy girls are into backyard swingsets. Of course. Also, "creative" girls paint butterflies while their male counterparts paint giraffes, and -- just to get in a little extra early stereotyping -- the "techies" are a cute blond female and an Asian male. But I digress. We are not even at the disturbing part yet! Next, you're asked to choose the child's interests from categories that, as Wade notes, are exactly the same ("animals & nature," "cars, trucks, trains, planes," "music," "building" and "gaming") for both boys and girls. "So, why even ask about gender?" Wade wondered. She plugged in "techie" and "building" for both gender options, ages 12-14, and found out.
"Someone somewhere observed that when it came to technology, there was a stereotype that men were the engineers and designers and women were the consumers and users," she writes. "Well, that's essentially what Toys R Us told me." The top results for boy techie-builders were "13 building/engineering games (like Lego and KNEX), 3 ipod accessories, 4 portable DVD players, 2 MP3 players, and a few other things." For girls, the first results included "Seven ipod accessories, 5 portable DVD players, 4 MP3 players, 3 laptop computers, 3 cameras, and one building/engineering game. One." (I'd also like to note that a full 25 percent of the offerings for girls are pink.) "Sure enough," Wade concludes, "Toys R Us confirms that girls may like technology, but boys build it."
I couldn't resist running my own experiment -- this time using the same ages, but plugging in "adventurous" and "gaming." The top results in that case appear far more similar, I'll give them that -- except that the search returns 85 "boy" items and only 56 "girl" ones. (And one of the 56 is a real thing called "Jenga Pink Girl Talk.") How about 8-11 years old, "sporty," and into "cars, trucks, planes and trains"? 311 items for boys, 48 for girls! Next up: ages 8-11, "creative," into "animals and nature." That yields only 37 items for boys but 86 for girls. Among the first 24 results for each, one group has: eight items from the Barbie "Fashion Fever" collection, a bunch of adorable stuffed animals, two easels, and a "Playmobil Egypt playset," whatever that is. The other has one easel, two swords, one gun, two things involving bugs, five things involving dinosaurs, police officer and firefighter uniforms, a telescope, and some other crap. I'll let you go ahead and guess which is which.
Yes, it's only one website, and no, there's nothing stopping consumers from buying a firefighter costume for a girl or a Dream Dazzler So Chic! Salon Stylist belt for a boy. Still, the segregation reinforces not only a false and restrictive gender binary but the impression that, as Wade wrote in an earlier post:
Femininity is just for chicks. When men do feminine things, they are debasing themselves. Masculinity is awesome and for everyone. When women do masculine things, they're awesome. This is sexism: Masculinity rules, femininity drools. Men are encouraged to stay away from femininity, so their individual choices are constrained, but they also are staying away from something debasing. In contrast, women are required to do a least some femininity, so women are required to debase themselves, at least a little bit, even as they are given more options.
So at least sporty girls who like motorized vehicles do get their 48 options, but the boys who'd most accurately be described as "glamour girls" -- and the kids who don't feel comfortable fulfilling either of the expected gender roles -- are completely S.O.L.
Making matters worse, kids who are socialized to accept strict gender roles often grow up to be parents who enforce them -- and although girls acting masculine are still generally seen as cooler (or at least less debased) than boys acting feminine, there's resistance to the former as well. In comments on another recent Sociological Images post, someone claiming to work in marketing for a toy company writes, "A lot of toys I see as gender neutral, we are marketing towards boys and then we discuss making a girls version -- which inevitably ends up being something to groom girls into being housewives, like a shopping cart vs. a boat or something. The issue is, this is what a lot of mothers want for their daughters too, and they won't buy 'boy toys' for their girls. So when we do make an effort to produce something for both boys and girls, we don't see any return on that." And the cycle continues.
I'm not saying, of course, that gendered toys by themselves will automatically turn kids into gender-policing adults, or that every kid should only play with wooden blocks and chemistry sets, or that pink toys should be outlawed; I was a dress-wearing, unicorn-loving girly-girl who grew up to be a humorless feminist blogger, and I don't think a Barbie will necessarily make a girl self-loathing and submissive any more than my Easy Bake Oven made me a good cook. (And yes, by the way, I've heard the "boys will make a stick into a gun and girls will make a rock into a baby doll" argument about 5 million times.) Toys are only one element of gender socialization, and there are plenty of more disturbing ones out there. But I am saying that well over 30 years after William had to beg his sexist parents for a doll in "Free to Be... You and Me," it seems like we should have made a little more progress.
We were intriuged this morning by the pronouncement that Tennis Fanhouse deemed Venus Williams -- and not her showier sister Serena -- the Female Player of the Decade. Coming soon after the Associated Press's crowning of Tiger Woods as Athlete of the Decade, with Lance Armstrong, Roger Federer, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady and Usain Bolt bringing up the rear, we wondered, what other female figures of note would be remembered for their contributions to sports this decade? Dara Torres? Candace Parker? Marta Viera? There's more to women in sports than the Williams siblings, right?
Sure there is. Women in sports equals hotness in sports!
A quick Google of "female athlete of the decade" and even "best female athlete of the decade" brings us this. Lots and lots of Alizee Paradis, "model." Want ESPN's "Hottest female athletes?" Want the women who "defined" the era with their hotness? Want more news about Tiger Woods? Easy peasy. Just search for female athletes. Want to read about women playing sports? Good luck. A little digging, however, does reveal Sports Illustrated's choices. It is, naturally, a photo spread.
In an article about the ban on military abortions that Broadsheet covered last week, Kathryn Joyce describes what it was like for a Marine named Amy when she became pregnant in Iraq: "Amy knew that if her pregnancy were discovered, she would be sent back to her home base at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune... She also knew she could face reprimands from her commanding officers for having had sex in Iraq (part of a broader prohibition on sex in war zones), and that she might not be promoted as a result: a potentially career-ending situation in the Marines, where failure to obtain regular promotions results in being discharged. Moreover, as a woman in the military, accustomed to proving herself to her male peers over her six-year career, Amy was wary of appearing a 'weak female.'"
Other pregnant service members have faced similar dilemmas, and now, for women serving under Army Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo in northern Iraq, pregnancy itself will be a punishable offense. Cucolo told the BBC the threat of a court martial for pregnant soldiers is intended to be a deterrent to unprotected sex. The policy will apply to both the man and woman involved in a pregnancy, even if they're married. "I've got a mission to do, I'm given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them," Cucolo said. "So I'm going to take every measure I can to keep them all strong, fit and with me for the twelve months we are in the combat zone."
Unfortunately, this isn't just a matter of making sure married couples or consenting partners remember to use a condom. For starters, birth control occasionally fails. Then there's the fact that even if Cucolo claims men and women will both be punished for pregnancies, only one gender can plausibly deny any involvement in a given pregnancy; if a man swears he's not the father, what happens next? According to the American Pregnancy Association, "Paternity testing from an accredited laboratory typically costs between $400.00 and $2,000.00" -- who picks up the tab? -- and if testing is to be done before a baby is born, the woman will likely have to undergo an invasive procedure.
Most troubling, though, is the thought that women who, as Amy says she did, become pregnant by rape, will be court-martialed for it. As California Congresswoman Jane Harman wrote in the L.A. Times in 2008, "Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq." During a visit to a veteran's hospital, writes Harman, "My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service." And "at the heart of this crisis," she says, "is an apparent inability or unwillingness to prosecute rapists in the ranks. According to DOD statistics, only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial, the equivalent of a criminal prosecution in the military."
That's when the rapes are reported. As Helen Benedict wrote in Salon in 2007, they often aren't. "Military platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a rape has no realistic chance of remaining anonymous. She will have to face her assailant day after day, and put up with rumors, resentment and blame from other soldiers. Furthermore, she runs the risk of being punished by her assailant if he is her superior."
So a woman who becomes pregnant after being raped faces serious personal and professional risks if she reports the pregnancy or the assault, let alone both; if the pregnancy is discovered, she'll be sent home; if she wants an abortion, she probably can't get one; and now, on top of all that, she might face a court-martial -- which her rapist, if reported, may or may not. And if the man responsible won't admit it, she'll have to go to further lengths to prove his paternity if he's to be eligible even for the same punishment she got.
If General Cucolo really means to keep all of his soldiers "strong, fit and with [him]," in the combat zone, then instead of cracking down on pregnancies, he should consider taking measures that might more seriously deter rapists from raping, or maybe even advocate for female soldiers to have access to abortion services. But I won't hold my breath. "Gen Cucolo told the BBC it was a 'black and white' issue for him." It's just a shame pregnant soldiers don't have the luxury of seeing things in such simplistic terms.
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