Broadsheet
Slipped through the cracks
For women, McCain makes all the wrong moves: Kate Sheppard's scathing analysis of McCain's anti-feminist politics isn't just revealing -- it's scary, including McCain's desire to reverse Roe v. Wade and his ignorance about pay equity. It's not that McCain doesn't want change. It's just that, for him, change is going back to the good old days when he was a fighter pilot dating an exotic dancer named "Flame of Florida."
They'll ask, but don't tell: It's a crime to be gay in Iraq, where homosexuals are subjected to horrific treatment. Armed Islamic groups and militias frequently target gay men and women who live under a constant fear: coming out is a death sentence. Two gay men speak about the brutal abuse they endured after being kidnapped. "I would rather commit suicide than allow my family to find out I am gay," said one.
Today, in totally bizarre news: Scientists are trying to explain reports from the U.S. Air Force base in Thule, Greenland, where only girls are being born. They believe organic chemicals like pesticides that enter the food chain through the blubber of marine animals and then spread to the human bloodstream are to blame. And it's not just northern Greenland that's seeing this baffling trend. According to recent studies, the gender ratio is unbalanced in other areas with indigenous people who depend heavily on marine animals for food.
Stripping down to the virtual essentials: Video game ladies need underwear, too; it just isn't always so functional. The Top 10 Most Ridiculous Undergarments Worn by Women in Video Games have been announced. A metal thong may have won, but surely it won't be long before Victoria's Secret rolls out its own gravity-defying tube top.
Putting the change in your changing room: It's about time dressing rooms stepped into the 21st century. Bloomingdale's New York is one of the first American stores to experiment with new fitting-room technology, which includes an interactive mirror and webcam, a touch screen that allows shoppers to invite friends, and a site that suggests recommendations. Privacy is so last year: You'll never have to be alone in the dressing room again.
2 + 2 = duh
Hey, Lawrence Summers, take a look at this! A recent study proves (yet again) that girls are just as good at math as boys. Broadsheet has written about studies that came to similar conclusions not once but twice. This latest study has a very simple hypothesis about why people continue to be surprised by the data: They're just not willing to believe it. The study suggests that bias from parents and teachers may influence girls to work less to succeed in math and science classes, in that they have been taught that they cannot, even though they are able to, and that testing methods have inaccurately portrayed a disparity between the abilities of children of different genders when, in fact, a girl can deal with sines and cosines as well as a boy.
Math has never been my strong suit. But as a woman whose godmother is an economist, and as someone who has benefited from the help of several wonderful female math teachers and tutors, not to mention female classmates who explained theorems to me again and again, I'm gratified to see women's mathematical capabilities affirmed. Women who excel at math are not flukes or anomalies or unfeminine. Math ability is a talent, one that should be nurtured in both genders.
What's in a bat-crap-crazy name?
Everyone loves a good ludicrous baby name. Half the reason the culture goes so nuts over celebrity pregnancies is because we can't wait to see if the new parents can top Moxie Crimefighter, Audio Science and Pilot Inspektor. The problem is, actual children have to grow up with these names, and when those actual children are not blessed with preternaturally beautiful parents and/or gobs of money, that's a hell of a cross to bear. Hence a New Zealand family court judge's decision to make a 9-year-old girl a ward of the court long enough to change her birth name of -- wait for it -- Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii.
Under New Zealand law, names that might "cause offense to a reasonable person" can be blocked before they make it onto a birth certificate, which has saved some kids from "creative" names like Yeah Detroit, Cinderella Beauty Blossom, Sex Fruit and Hitler. But Talula Does the Hula made it through that first check on parental judgment, as did Benson and Hedges (twins), Violence and -- wait for it -- Number 16 Bus Shelter. That right there is the problem with such a law: Whether a name is offensive is almost entirely subjective.
Personally, I wouldn't name my kids anything on the list of banned or permitted names, but I certainly don't understand why Midnight Chardonnay got through and Cinderella Beauty Blossom didn't. (At least the latter could go by Cindy or Ella.) People naming their kids after a brand of cigarettes is indeed disturbing, but the individual names Benson and Hedges actually fit right in with the whole trend toward WASP-y surnames as first names. And although Talula (or any variant spelling thereof) has never been a popular name, according to the Baby Name Wizard, Talia has been skyrocketing in the U.S. in recent years, and Lula was quite popular in the late 19th century, which makes it ripe for a revival. (Check out the graphs for "Emma," "Grace" and any permutation of "Lil" if that trend isn't obvious to you.) If she went by Tallie or Lula and never, ever told anyone her middle names, I dare say that child would have an easier time of it than poor little Number 16 Bus Shelter.
I'm glad for her sake that Talula Does the Hula got a less embarrassing name, and frankly, I think her parents deserved the swift kick. But I don't know how I feel about government intervention into baby naming -- especially when the government OKs "Violence." Readers, how about it? Are bully-magnet names a form of child abuse? Should the state step in? Let us know what you think -- and tell us the worst baby names you've heard -- in comments. (Note: Oranjello and Lemonjello, Chlamydia, Eczema, Vagina, etc. are racist and classist urban legends. Don't even bother.)
UPDATE, WE HAVE A WINNER: A terrific comments thread included such excellent questions as, why "don't we see more little girls and teens named Oprah?," a father who accidentally named his child Brittany Spears (ooops! He did it five years before she hit), gripes about kr8tive spellyng, and several votes in favor of out-of-the ordinary names. But we wanted to choose a winner. And Leeandra Nolting, you get points for volume AND style. Please email broadsheet@salon.com so we can send you a special prize. Below, LN's entry for the worst baby names she's heard gets props as our letter of the day:
Dejoneria -- This was the unfortunate name of a very nice girl in one of my freshman comp. classes. It was pronounced de-zhan-AIR-e-a, but at first glance the girl appeared to be named after a cross between mustard and VD.
Tequila Yeager -- a little girl in one of my mother's preschool classes. "Yeager" is a very common last name in my hometown and there's not much you can do about that, but it is still a bad idea to name your child after what you were drinking when she was conceived.
Strawberri--This is the name of the very nice girl behind the counter at the McDonald's on Canal and Royal in New Orleans.
Quo Vadis--There were several students at the University of New Orleans named misspelled variations of this.
Beatle -- The unfortunate name of a little girl in a friend's third grade class. Yes, her parents were Beatles fans. Apparently, Paula/Pauline/Paulette, Georgia/Georgine/Georgette, the many female variations of "John," and Eleanor, Pam, Penny, Julia, Martha, Rita, Prudence, Lucy, etc. were all considered unsuitable tributes to the Fab Four. -- Leeandra Nolting
Many women have a low sex drive. Or not
It's true, you guys: A lot of ladies don't like the sex! According to a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 36.2 percent of ladies don't. What ever can we do about this? Well, Procter and Gamble thinks a testosterone patch it's already selling in Europe might help American women get their grooves back, which is why it funded the study. Oh. You know, I applaud Judith Graham for pointing that out in her blog post about it at the Chicago Tribune's Web site -- so often, obvious conflicts of interest go unreported -- but once we know the study was carried out with an eye to selling libido boosters, why are we still taking it seriously?
Because rigorously conducted research is possible regardless of who funds it, you say? OK, let's take a look at what else we know about this shocking new information. First, the study looked at women ages 18 to 70. Now, I would never suggest that post-menopausal women aren't sexual (go see "Mamma Mia!" if you have any doubts about that), but I'm thinking they might not be as horny as 18-year-olds, generally speaking. Indeed, Graham says the study also showed that "of women who entered menopause naturally as a result of aging, 52.4 percent confirmed low levels of desire. By contrast, 26.7 percent of women still getting their periods and 39.7 percent of women in menopause because of surgical interventions (removal of the ovaries) found themselves without sexual urges." Even 26.7 percent is a pretty big number, but what are we actually talking about here? How do you define or measure "low levels of desire"? Graham doesn't tell us, but she does mention that the study consisted of a phone survey. Oh, hey, self-reported data coming from women who wouldn't blow off a stranger calling to ask about their sex lives! That sounds totally reliable!
If all that's not enough to make you doubt the study's findings, try this on for size: "Only one-quarter of the women who said they weren't inclined toward sex were disturbed by their lack of feeling." So wait, all these women have desperately low libidos, but only 25 percent of them care? Ooh, I bet there's some evolutionary psychology coming up next! "[Edward] Laumann of the University of Chicago has a theory why that may be so: It could be low sexual desire is hard-wired into women through evolution." Ding ding ding! What do I win? "If women were like men and wanted sex all the time, they'd be pregnant more often," says Laumann, which means our bodies would go through a lot more stress, which means no sex for you! Sure, that sounds sort of logical, except I missed the study demonstrating that men ages 18-70 "want sex all the time." And what about the 63.8 percent of women who don't have a low sex drive? How come only a little over a third of us are hard-wired to want to protect our bodies? And why do we become less interested in sex once the threat of pregnancy is gone?
So basically, what this study found is that -- hmm, 36 divided by 4 -- 9 percent of women surveyed had a problematically low sex drive. Well, crap, that's not going to sell testosterone patches. Good thing a bunch of self-reported answers to vague questions, in concert with stereotypes about the female libido, can make this sound like a much bigger problem that only modern medicine can fix! Whew!
Quote of the day
Actors give notoriously bad interviews. They stick to the script about their love life (So happy! Not telling!). They offer canned answers about their costars (Loved working with him! Every day was a gift!). They gush about a film even when they know in their hearts it's a steaming coil of shit because, let's face it, that's their job. They sell a product, and often, that product is themselves.
Not so Teri Garr. Some combination of age, wisdom, health problems (she has long struggled with multiple sclerosis and two years ago suffered a brain aneurysm) and general kick-ass attitude has made her magnificently uncensored. Like, she is wacky, folks. And in an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, the star of such beloved '80s classics as "Mr. Mom," "Tootsie" and "Young Frankenstein" recently uncorked for that all-too-rare of beasts: a compelling celebrity interview. She calls late director Sydney Pollack sexist ("He just wanted the beautiful, blond, cute, shiksa girls to be nice and shut the fuck up!"). She dogs even her own films and holds forth on Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and others. The whole interview is a marvel, but one exchange about the kind of roles she played is getting special coronation as our quote of the day:
AVC: 'Mr. Mom' is yet another role where your character is described as 'long-suffering.' Why do you think you've always been called upon to play that type?
TG: Oh God. Because I'm a long-suffering doormat in my own life, I guess. That's why I was always cast as that. And because they only write those parts for women. If there's ever a woman who's smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don't write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life."
Rebecca Traister's recent article on Dana Scully of "The X-Files" suggests this isn't always the case, but certainly smart, strong roles are as rare as these kinds of honest interviews. And frankly, I am not going to argue with Teri Garr.
CNN's "Black in America"
CNN has been throwing serious ad time and media sizzle behind its "Black in America" series. If I had to watch the ads one more time -- Soledad O'Brien and that muscular theme music -- I was gonna personally track down "the best political team on television" and give them all wedgies. But last night, something crazy happened: The first episode finally aired!
I didn't rejoice long; the show, focused on black women and families, was pretty bleak. In fact, it might more accurately have been titled "Bad News for Blacks in America."
Some highlights: AIDS is the No. 1 killer of black women, 25-34, and among women recently diagnosed with HIV, a whopping two-thirds are black. If you're single and looking for a partner, ladies, get ready to face down more grim statistics: 45 percent of black women have never been married -- twice the percentage of white women. The black single woman is also the subject of a tie-in story on today's CNN, subtitled "Is Marriage Really for White People?" (Spoiler alert: Umm, no.)
The most appalling news, however, came from the portion on black children in public schools. "A black kid in America scores below any other developing country," one Harvard professor explained. "We might as well take them out of Brooklyn and put them in Turkey." Gah! The former English teacher in me weeps tears of frustration. By the way, the Harvard professor runs an experimental program in which he actually pays inner-city kids to go to school. I couldn't figure out what was more depressing: that such a program exists, or that for a second, even a die-hard idealist like me thought it sounded like a plan.
Tonight: Bad news for black men in America.
Breaking: Boobs need support
Thursday, Fox News, the Daily Mail and the Sun report breaking news in the breast jiggle department: Research shows most women wear sports bras that offer insufficient support and could be irreparably damaging their breasts.
Except ... we already knew that. Nearly a year ago, researchers at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth -- the same folks behind today's announcement -- found that despite most bras being designed to limit up-and-down bounce, breasts typically move in a figure-8 pattern. Up, down, in, out and sideways -- you name it, they do it. The only news here is that researchers say they have a solution: they've partnered with QP Sports to create "high-impact" support that will go on sale later this summer. Perhaps a Broadsheet product test panel is in order.
Could the buzz over harmful breast jiggle portend the comeback of the (potentially NSFW) "Bounce-ometer"?
Sex advice for Barack
Politicos are speculating wildly about what a Barack Obama administration might look like. As they hypothesize on how the candidate might handle the war in Iraq or our floundering economy, few have been talking about the way Obama should approach a lower-profile domestic crisis -- abstinence-only sex education. New research by the British government suggests that parents need to talk frankly with children as young as 11 years old about sex. If they wait until teens reach the age of 15, the conversation is unlikely to make any impact. So, with abstinence-only programs widely shown to be misinformed and ineffectual, it's crucial that our next president ensures preteens get realistic, accurate sex education while they're still young.
Fortunately, sex writer Violet Blue -- who is convinced Obama will win the election -- has put together a set of suggestions to help the senator improve the sorry state of sex ed in America. Pointing to promising programs in Australia and the U.K., Blue doesn't mince words. "Kill the abstinence programs. Period," she writes. "Fire the f--- out of anyone with a religious agenda in a position of power in relation to public health. We are a nation of many faiths -- most of which are not being served with this nonsense." Funny how such an irreligious statement makes me want to scream, "Amen to that!"
Blue's sane, practical guidelines include creating age-appropriate sex and relationship programs for kids as young as 5, requiring that schools hire federally funded teen sex ed counselors, and disseminating "practical information about reproduction (including a woman's right to choose and male responsibilities of parenthood), contraception, STDs and STIs, sexual pleasure, masturbation, consent, homosexuality, sexual tolerance, and gender identity." My favorite suggestion of all is that Obama put together a task force to develop educational programs on current sex issues like "the Gardasil vaccination (HPV shot), presentations on transgender issues, workshops on sexual consent, rape prevention and self-defense for girls, age-appropriate sex ed books, religious faith and sexuality, and sexual questions around -- yes -- political scandals." As wonderful as that would be for 'tweens, I know plenty of adults who would be happy to sit in on those lessons, too.
"WTF" of the day: Botox bridal parties
The New York Times reports that instead of just getting the girls together for some prenuptial mani-pedi action, some brides are dictating more than the color of their bridesmaids' dresses. One woman reported on by the Times asked her bridesmaids -- not to mention her own mother and, yes, mother-in-law -- to join her at the aesthetician's for a beauty assessment and treatment plan, including chemical peels, wrinkle-filler injections and a multi-month series of Fraxel laser treatments to remove age spots. (The women also had mimosas and cupcakes, of course.) To quote the Times:
"For Ms. Knauer ... cosmetic interventions for herself and her entourage are as vital as the centerpieces or food. 'If I were 25 or 26 and getting married, a bracelet, necklace or matching earrings would be fine,' said Knauer, who is 35. But 'giving them something for themselves -- as opposed to something that they'll never wear again -- is more meaningful.'"
I personally don't think I'd want to prepare for a friend's marriage by having my beauty flaws pointed out to me by a trained professional -- but if the bridesmaids are excited about spending an evening sipping mimosas as Botox is injected into their foreheads, I guess that's their call. The really crazy stuff starts happening when a bride suggests that bridesmaids go under the knife. As the Times reports:
"Becky Lee ... declined when a friend asked her -- and five other attendants -- to have their breasts enhanced. 'We're all Asian and didn't have a whole lot of cleavage, and she found a doctor in L.A. who was willing to do four for the price of two,' said Ms. Lee, who wore a push-up bra instead."
It takes a piglet
In 1989, a Californian woman named Olga Murray was volunteering in Nepal, helping abandoned and disabled children get educations, when she learned about something shocking: In a southern Nepalese district, some Tharu farming families were so financially desperate that they were selling their daughters as domestic slaves to Kathmandu families for between $35 and $75.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Murray (now 83) and her colleague, Som Paneru, came up with a solution, one that was so successful that Murray is a "philanthropic legend" in the area and has been honored by the Dalai Lama. The secret weapon?
Piglets.
Murray and Paneru understood that pork was a prized meat in Nepal and that many families were selling their daughters because they couldn't feed the rest of their families. So they began approaching village fathers with a proposal: If they promised to keep their daughters and to send them to school instead of selling them, the organization Murray and Paneru worked for, the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, would give them a piglet to raise -- a piglet that would fetch the same amount of money at market as one of their daughters. What's more, the NYOF would pay for the girls' schooling and provide families with a kerosene lamp and 2 liters of kerosene a month. The result? Of the 37 families they approached the first year, 32 said yes. (The Chronicle notes that "some asked for and received a goat instead of a pig" -- proving that even in the most absurd situations, it's good to be flexible.)
The craziest part: Since the beginning of the program, Murray and her colleagues have helped to save 3,000 girls from slavery and, says the Chronicle, to "all but eradicate the long-held tradition of indentured servitude in the Tharu village."
For more uplifting details, check out the article itself. And if you want to find out more or help support NYOF, visit the group's Web site (or read more about this particular program here).
"The View" from here? Bleak
You've likely heard that Sherri Shepherd, co-host on ABC's "The View," was recently quoted in a black Christian publication, Precious Times, talking about her abortions:
I was in a very physically abusive relationship. I was sleeping with a lot of guys and had more abortions than I would like to count. I had very low self-esteem and just wanted to die. I felt if someone killed me, it wouldn't make a difference.
After a relative uproar ensured, Wednesday Shepherd clarified her remarks about her abortions on the show, saying:
I like to inspire women who go through a lot of shame and guilt about having abortions that I, too, went through it myself. She didn't print the entire quote, so all it said was I've had more abortions than I can count. What the full quote was was I had suffered from a lot of shame and guilt and I didn't know how to forgive myself. And a wonderful woman at one of the women's conferences that I speak at came to me and said, "Sherri, you know when you get to heaven, all your babies are going to be there saying, 'Hi, mama,'" and it just freed me and I knew Jesus had forgiven me ... I wasn't being flippant about abortions, I wasn't glamorizing [it]. I want people to know not everybody's perfect.
That's nice and all, but the shorter amount of time this "View" gabber has her name in the headlines next to the word "abortion," perpetuating the idea that aborted fetuses are babies old enough to talk, the better. It's a tactic of the religious right to frame fetuses, even ones only weeks old and thoroughly incapable of life outside the womb, as the "pre-born." They're given names, the ability to talk and to love, and the desire not to be aborted. I'm not saying Shepherd has been planted by makers of "The Silent Scream"; I'm saying her cavalier choice of words is irresponsible.
Shepherd is notorious for her dopey antiscience beliefs. She's the country bumpkin of "The View," who once earnestly claimed that she didn't know if the world was flat and thought Jesus came before the use of the letters "B.C." Something about this latest Sherri moment feels like another stunt serving to make all women who choose to terminate a pregnancy look bad.
Can't a celebrity who's a bit less willfully ignorant be the public face of abortion?
The disappearing movie critic
Martha M. Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, has just released a study revealing that most of the film criticism appearing in the nation's top newspapers is written by men. In the fall of 2007, Lauzen's study notes, men wrote 70 percent of all film reviews in those papers; women wrote 30 percent. Moreover, 47 percent of those publications had no reviews written by female critics (either full-time writers or freelancers).
I'm not surprised by Lauzen's findings, and I doubt that anyone is, at least among those who pay even the remotest amount of attention to film criticism. Every January, when I get together with my colleagues in the National Society of Film Critics, there are certainly more men than women around the table. (There are 55 men and 10 women in the NSFC.)
But I've stopped asking myself why there are so few women film critics. Forget the gender breakdown: The bigger crisis is that film criticism, as a viable profession, is dying. The big news isn't that daily newspapers aren't hiring women as critics; it's that many of them have ceased caring whether they have a full-time movie critic at all. Over the past five years, daily newspapers have been letting longtime, experienced (and thus expensive) critics go and either failing to replace them or filling their jobs with freelancers or less experienced newcomers. I don't believe film criticism overall is dying -- it thrives, in many different forms and at many different levels of quality, on the Web. But the chances of being able to make a living at it are growing increasingly slim.
As far as the male-female breakdown goes, I offer these two small nuggets of anecdotal evidence: In the years since I've been working for Salon, I've been courted by two major daily newspapers looking to hire me as a full-time film critic. The first paper actually offered me a job, but I declined because the salary was so laughably low. The editor who interviewed me for that job had made no secret that the paper wanted to hire a female critic, but clearly, what the joint really wanted was a cheap date. At the second paper, talks broke down when the organization was hit with some daunting financial problems. The paper ultimately chose a film critic -- for what it's worth, a man -- from within its own ranks.
My own experience suggests that right around the time major newspapers (other than the New York Times, which has a better track record than most in this area) began expressing a willingness to hire women critics, they also began to realize that maybe they didn't have enough money -- or enough faith in the idea of criticism, period -- to support having full-time critics of either gender. It's true that the world of working film critics, such as it is, is filled with middle-aged white guys, and supposedly, we're not supposed to feel bad when a middle-aged white guy loses a job. But in the past five years, I've had to watch too many colleagues -- male and female -- fall by the wayside, and it has been painful. The numbers in Lauzen's study don't trouble me as much as the pervasiveness of the idea that critics -- the last line of defense between moviegoers and studio-generated hype -- no longer matter. And that problem has little to do with gender bias.
Reader letter of the day
For some time, we've tossed around the idea of highlighting stand-out reader letters, and the debate in the letters thread for today's post on veiling and French values demanded that we finally kick-start this feature. So, I bring you our first reader letter of the day:
I can't help but think
If there were a country where the prevailing practice was for women to run around naked, and a woman from America tried to become a citizen, and was denied on the grounds that she insists on covering up her breasts and genitals, we would be outraged.
The veil is a *terrible* metaphor for women's submission, because if you were raised in Muslim culture, you may literally feel as if you're naked without it. I would not want to wear a micro-bikini to the grocery store or bicycle down the street in the nude; why do we expect a Muslim woman to be necessarily comfortable with exposing her face to strangers when she's been raised to feel that that is nakedness?
If she doesn't know what voting is, then France may have a point; no one should become a citizen of a democracy without being able to pass a citizenship test proving they understand how democracy works. But the veil shouldn't have anything to do with it.
-- alarajrogers
"WTF" of the day
China Shrink cream via Racy.com.
Just last week, we learned of a breakthrough in the search for a cure for the common vagina: Liquid Virgin. A couple of drops of this tightening tonic and you're a new woman -- or, rather, you appear to have not yet crossed that hymenal threshold into womanhood. Now, thanks to the American Virgin blog, we've discovered yet another alternative to paying a surgeon $9,000 to laser your labia and vagina (and don't forget that "aging perineum"): China Shrink cream. As the text on the package explains, it is "the ancient secret of Queens and concubines to please their kings ... even women who have given birth to many children can again enjoy sex life as it was in their honeymoons." Online purveyor Racy.com puts it more bluntly: "Formulated to tighten the vaginal walls. For loose vagina due to multiple childbirth and frigidity." Better yet, "the ointment also acts as an excellent disinfectant and deodorant," because loose or not, we all know vaginas are -- eewww! -- totally nasty.
Bachelor party
These days, most of the column inches devoted to the demise of the family are concerned with the much-maligned single woman. You know, the one who puts her selfish career and personal ambitions above the supposedly more worthwhile tasks of nurturing the next generation. But in this month's New English Review Christopher Orlet reminds us that, throughout history, bachelors have been saddled with their own share of scorn, prejudice and suspicion -- though, in his view, it's no accident that they also happen to include among their ranks some of the greatest thinkers and artists in Western history.
The first half of the essay opens with a bang: Taking the example of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose domestic travails allegedly ended with him strangling his wife, Orlet quotes New Yorker writer George Steiner, who wrote: "Perhaps philosophers should strangle their wives." By what moral logic? As Steiner has it: "The thinker inhabits fictions of purity, of reasoned propositions as sharp as white light. Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme. Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon." Orlet sees the judge's sentence -- three years in a psych ward as opposed to jail time -- as an endorsement of sorts that the immortality of Althusser's work was of greater value than the mortality of a simple woman who might have served as an impediment to its production.
Orlet stops short of condoning murder (Steiner, he says, is just engaging in a little good-natured satire), but he spends the next part of the essay arguing that great men of genius might be better off avoiding all that roughage and noise in the first place: "Marriage, the philosophical bachelor holds, will not only deprive him of his liberty, lighten his wallet, and suck the romance from life, but it will prove to be a lifelong hindrance." To bolster his argument, he provides a laundry list of 50-odd genius bachelors throughout history (many of these, as some critics have pointed out in the comments section, were gay and nearly all lived during a time when it was common for members of the educated class to let their servants deal with the messiness of daily life); cites the much-reported Japanese study of 280 scientists that showed the majority of them peaked in their 20s (though those who remained unmarried apparently remained productive well into their 50s); and provides a cavalcade of quotes that, on first glance, could double as a gift book labeled "Misogyny: The World's Greatest Hits" (now available at a Barnes & Noble near you!).
But while some of these guys may have become titans of Western culture, Orlet also points out that the much of the time bachelors were considered a menace to society and described in the kind of hyperbolic language reminiscent of the way some of today's conservative commentators describe, say, that amoral cougar slut Samantha in "Sex and the City." The Puritans went so far as to require those men who indulged in "the selfish art of solitary living" to live as boarders (i.e., under the moral supervision of women) and pay a bachelor tax. Hey, at least no one, to my knowledge, has proposed fining women for failure to reproduce.
Shifting to the present tense, Orlet argues that, if anything, these days it's the married guy who is viewed as a liability in the workforce ("Old dad is unable to work overtime because he has promised to run Sissy to her soccer game and Junior to his ballet class") and asserts that modern women are better at putting their "sexual and financial" independence before marriage, while guys are still "hopelessly reliant on the fairer sex." (He also invokes the research of occasional Salon contributor Stephanie Coontz, who has found, in his words, that "more men than women describe being married as their ideal state, and men who remain single fare far worse emotionally than do their female counterparts.")
Plenty of Orlet's essay, especially the inflammatory quotes from historical thinkers that dot the first half, reminds me why feminism's first and second wavers got so pissed off. But on the whole, it's an interesting reminder that, historically, discrimination against those who fail to follow the culture's dominant mode of family has hardly been confined to one gender.
More important, the idea that Orlet may seem to endorse -- that great art is best made by those who toil in isolation, far from the "roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise" of daily life -- is a prejudice that we haven't yet seemed to have shed. You could draw a through line from Orlet's bachelors to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" to Judy Syfers' 1971 essay in Ms., "Why I Want a Wife," and land smack-dab in the center of today's question of the "work-life balance." Part of the lesson may be that how best to achieve great things while maintaining a life has never been merely a question for women or feminists. But my personal question is: Why would anyone trust an artist, thinker or philosopher with no knowledge of roughage, bills, garbage disposal or noise, whether married or single? Isn't that a good part of what this thing known as life is all about?
