Salon.com > Beverly Gage

On The Pill

Thu, 05 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

| The advent of the birth control pill, as we all know, sparked the sexual revolution of the '60s. This modern-day hormonal miracle allowed women to collapse the double standard, breaking free of their reproductive shackles for the first time in history. With the pill, women took charge of their own sexuality. They swallowed the pill and stopped swallowing their emotions. They ... might have done that anyway?

According to science historian Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, the media of the '60s and '70s made a mistake when they married the concepts of sexual liberation and a "contraceptive revolution." In "On the Pill," Watkins points out that it was married women who primarily consumed the pill in its earliest years. While campus girls frolicked in the previously fenced-off fields of premarital sex, it was their wedded sisters who used the pill to transform their bodies, themselves and, along the way, the medical profession.

Kiss those Miranda rights good-bye

Thu, 24 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

The private guards who patrol San Francisco's public housing projects were supposed to help the police. Hired last year under a $1 million contract, armed guards from the security firm Personal Protective Services were charged with maintaining order, preventing trespassers and serving as the eyes and ears of the police in several of the city's most dangerous housing projects. According to the Housing Authority, the guards have fulfilled their mission well, with certain crimes dropping by as much as 60 percent in some communities.The Authority has renewed the firm's contracts through 2000.

But less than a year into the contract, the police have emerged as PPS's most vocal critics, accusing the firm of hiring convicted criminals, using excessive force against residents and supplying uniforms too similar to the cops' traditional blue. "These guys are using tactics I wouldn't allow my people to use," San Francisco Police Capt. George Stasko told the San Francisco Chronicle in July. "They are out there doing what they shouldn't be doing." PPS counters the criticism by pointing to the reductions in crime, suggesting that perhaps the police are primarily concerned with protecting their turf -- and their paychecks. "I know that there is a flavor of that involved in the whole thing," comments PPS Vice President Larry Treat.

Swimsuits — and more!

Wed, 23 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- Nicole Johnson, Miss America 1999, believes in God, perseverance and
Elizabeth Dole. According to the official pageant program, she is 24 years
old, a Roanoke, Va., native, and hopes some day to be a "national news anchor."
Her hair is brown; her "talent" is "jazz vocal." Her "best compliment" was
being told that "she has a special light that shines through her smile and
her eyes -- a light that shows her heart." As a diabetic, she hopes to use the
"power of the crown" (one of this year's pageant slogans) to raise
awareness of that disease -- making her, in the judges' estimation, the Miss
who best represents this year's pageant theme of "self-expression." She is
not, as former title winners repeatedly reminded last Saturday's television
audience, simply a bathing beauty.

Prison Writing In 20th-Century America

Tue, 01 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

"I'd rather read one page by a man who had been in Hell than all of Dante," writer Jim Tully once intoned. If any single ideal necessitates an anthology like "Prison Writing in 20th-Century America," it's this belief that personal experience inspires uniquely powerful literature. By their own accounts, each of the three dozen authors excerpted in this new collection has taken a trip to hell by way of prison -- and lived to write about it. Their vigorous and often surprising stories, essays and poems indict as well as humanize the taxpayer-funded underworld of the American criminal justice system.

Prison Writing In 20th-Century America

Tue, 01 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Civility

Fri, 15 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000

After the American Revolution, many among the middle and upper classes convinced themselves that decadence would soon destroy their fledgling republic. One primary symptom of the impending decay: sullenness and insubordination among their formerly deferential servants. This surliness, it seems, resulted from an excess of democracy -- from a damaging individualism that had replaced wartime self-sacrifice.

Now, after what he calls the "second American Revolution" of the 1960s, Yale law Professor Stephen L. Carter has joined that venerable tradition of complaining about the help. In his new book, "Civility," Carter takes to task gas station attendants who neglect to check the oil, pesky clerks "who will not address customers as Sir or Ma'am," teenage fast-food employees who get his order wrong and, of course, boys "wearing droopy pants." And that's just the first chapter. In the bad attitudes of America's service employees, politicians and urbanites, Carter has uncovered an "incivility crisis" that threatens to rend our social fabric. While he's aware that his complaints sound suspiciously like those expressed by worried elites throughout history, he maintains that "this time, we might be right." Selfishness and impertinence, he writes, have led Americans down a destructive path. Luckily for us, Carter promises that his own brand of self-sacrificing Christian morality will set things right once again.