Still, the rape stories coming out of the American workforce in Iraq blindside me every time. Last week the Nation broke another horror story about a woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted by a U.S. soldier and one of her fellow KBR employees in Iraq. Like the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, the former KBR employee who claims she was held in a shipping container after coming forward about being gang-raped by her co-workers in Iraq, the story of Dawn Leamon, contracted as a paramedic by KBR's foreign subsidiary Service Employees International Inc., is a stomach turner.

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It has been two long years since 88-pound Ana Carolina Reston died as result of anorexia -- in the fashion world that's like an ice age. Since then there has been outrage, consternation, committees, proposed legislation and a return to the status quo on a crash diet where even the likes of Elle magazine editor Nina Garcia (not exactly a candidate for a profile in Fat!So?) is saying things have "gotten worse."

So when a CBC article subtitled "The Rise of Alternative Fashion Models" landed in my in box, I couldn't help wondering: Is this for real? And it is -- there is a new breed of diverse body-typed, tattooed and even transsexual models walking the runway. The problem is that they aren't doing it in New York or Milan, Italy, but in the explicitly antiestablishment event Toronto Alternative Arts and Fashion Week (known by the mixed-up acronym FAT), which began April 9.

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Sadly, there aren't that many news stories about women like this. Or men, for that matter.

But about six years ago I heard an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian senator and presidential candidate who gave up her posh life as the wife of a French diplomat to fight corruption in Colombian politics, and her voice haunted me for months. The occasion was the publishing of her memoir in English, "Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Columbia." Her political rabble-rousing wasn't universally popular -- it led to death threats and threats on her children's lives. Those threats in turn forced her children to move to New Zealand to live with their father. Soon after her book was published, in February 2002, Betancourt was kidnapped by FARC, the Marxist guerrillas at war with the government-financed paramilitaries. Since then she's become (because of her dual French-Colombian citizenship) a French cause célèbre and the guerrillas' most valuable of an estimated 700 hostages.

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During a recent appearance in San Francisco, the radio shock jock became the latest poster child for mean grown-up of the year. First she called Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton "fucking whores," along with an inchoate tribute to Eliot Spitzer: "At least [he] spent $80,000 on women." If you must watch the drivel firsthand, get thee here.

Thursday Air America Radio announced that Rhodes had been suspended because of the comments, so good for it. Yet such suspensions won’t offer but a drop in the bucket against our wasteland of media vitriol. Forget sex and violence; I think playground cruelty is the source of the most obscenity. Have you seen the outdoor ad campaign for the new romantic comedy "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"? The black-and-white billboards proclaim: "I'm So Over You, Sarah Marshall," "You Suck Sarah Marshall," "My Mother Always Hated You, Sarah Marshall," and "You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall." It's the first time I've wanted to shield my daughter's eyes from a spectacle in the city.

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"Seat Belt Use by Pregnant Women Could Save 200 Fetuses a Year." Headline peeled from the cover of the Onion? No, it's a story about a new study from the University of Michigan and forthcoming in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The study found that pregnant women should wear seat belts, not only for their own safety but also for the safety of their fetuses.

Very well. Since there is apparently some folklore that advises pregnant women against wearing seat belts (strikes me as patently absurd), there's no harm in a scientific study proving the obvious: Seat belts save lives. Not just "regular people" but pregnant women with big vulnerable bellies.

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This study of monkey genes, reported by New Scientist, suggests that intense infant and toddler attachment may not be a matter of clingy helicopter mommies creating their own crawling, bawling excuses for Valium addiction. If rhesus macaques offer a window into human experience, the crybaby phenomenon may have biological roots.

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But the story probes a vein of the radical vegetarian movement that's -- to thoroughly mutilate my metaphors -- gotten on my nerves lately. PETA has always gone to extreme lengths to get its message out, whether it meant splashing the fur coats of celebrities with blood to illustrate the cruelty of the fur industry or photographing a seminaked model in a cage to raise awareness about pig farming practices. All is fair in love and activism. But lately, with "Skinny Bitch" books promoting veganism as the new fad diet and Vegan Vixens sexing up the airways with their soy-based song 'n' dance, the whole exploitation of women to protect animals has gotten a bit, well, obscene.

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Just thinking about how such a law would play into the tactics of pro-life clinics in America gives me the heebie-jeebies. ("I'm OK, I don't need counseling"/ "You're not OK -- let us help you deal with your inner demons -- er, doubts.")

On the other hand, having just come from a conversation with a friend who called her abortion the most "horrible, traumatic experience" of her life, I was curious about what new research might have changed these doctors' minds.

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I know there's all sorts of discomfiting science in this world, and we shouldn't take it personally, especially if it's true. But earlier this week an article about some ongoing research out of New Zealand downright infuriated me. Or perhaps I should say it raised my testosterone to levels even the Incredible Hulk might have found painful.

The article covered the new (and old) research of Valerie Grant, a reproductive scientist at the University of Auckland, who has been studying the connection between testosterone levels in women and their tendency to have boys or girls. The higher the testosterone level, her research finds, the higher the incidence of producing a male baby. Her more recent research focuses on cows: High levels of testosterone in bovine ovulatory follicles reliably predict the sex of the embryo.

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What struck me was the way Lepore recasts this historiographic discussion as a facet of literature's gendered history. She traces the simultaneous rise of academic history as a mostly male pursuit in the 18th century alongside the novel, something she defines as a predominantly female narrative form. In contrast to traditional history, with its "cult of the fact," the novel catered to a female readership with tales of female heroines often authored by women.

As a historian of American civilization at Harvard, Lepore presumably knows her way around a fact or two, so it's not as if she's spouting essentialist pabulum that women -- those private, intimate, intuitive creatures -- are more naturally drawn to fiction than men -- those public, powerful, rationalist animals. But then what is she trying to say?

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According to the story, hundreds of women staged a monthlong protest next to a highway over government plans to ship them back to Liberia with $100. The women, who demanded $1,000 or resettlement in the West, were among the 27,000 refugees who ended up in Ghana after the Liberian war, which ended in 2003. Now that Liberia is enjoying relative stability (not to mention its formidable female president), Ghana is trying to clear them out.

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Today's news about a new poll from CBS only served to confirm my suspicions. The poll attempted to get at people's biases against voting for an African-American candidate versus their biases against voting for a female candidate by asking Americans not just whom they would vote for but also whom they thought the people they knew would vote for. Unsurprisingly, most people claimed they would happily vote for a woman or a black man. Their friends, however, are much less unencumbered by prejudices.

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I've always cast a jaundiced eye on our cultural assumptions that men should be older (not to mention taller) than their wives. It seemed just another manifestation of the gender imbalances that coursed through our workplaces, government and educational system. Of course, when in love, all bets are off: My anti-age-gap theories didn't stop me from marrying a guy 11 years older. I'd always thought I was making this choice myself, but was there some deep biological impulse driving me to ignore my political analysis to find an optimal breeding partner?

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But a recent Associated Press story makes abundantly clear that sometimes those silly battles of the sexes are nothing short of radical -- especially if the woman is gaining purchase via a popular vote in a country where some citizens would happily strip women of most of their civil rights.

According the article, Lima Sahar, a young woman from the Pashtun region of Afghanistan, has emerged as one of three finalists for "Afghan Star," the country's "American Idol" copycat. There have been female contestants in the past but none have risen as far as Sahar.

Watching Sahar draped in head scarf and traditional modest (if colorful) garb, singing in a warbly complex cadence of middle Eastern "pop" with not so much as a swinging of the shoulders, much less the hips, it's hard to see the what the fuss is all about. But make no mistake -- the 18-year-old has got some serious huevos. Already her emergence as a finalist has compelled Afghanistan's conservative clerics council to complain to President Hamid Karzai.

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Wednesday CNN published an interview with parents who subjected their daughter Ashley to a series of growth-stunting therapies and surgeries to keep her forever small. Since the controversy about Ashley broke last year, this is the first interview given by the parents, who maintain their anonymity. Between 2004 and 2006, doctors at Seattle Children's Hospital removed Ashley's breast buds and performed a hysterectomy, as well as administered hormone therapies that would prevent maturation. The result was "successful": The 10-year-old with a brown pixie cut and hazel eyes has already reached her full size at 4 feet 5 inches and 63 pounds. She will never grow womanly curves or get any bigger or heavier.

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Well, watch out. According to a recent case, reported by the Associated Press, when you return to your car, there may be more than your child waiting for you. I'm not talking about a tragic accident or a kidnapper. I'm talking handcuffs and charges of endangerment.

Such was the surprise that befell Chicago mother Treffly Coyne on Dec. 8, 2007, when she returned to her car after walking her two elder daughters and one of their friends to donate coins to a Salvation Army kettle a few yards away in front of a Wal-Mart. She'd locked and alarmed the car in a loading zone in front of the store on a stormy night, when a police officer spotted her 2-year-old asleep in her car seat. Informing Coyne that she had broken the law by leaving her child unattended in the car, the police officer put Coyne in handcuffs and took the toddler into child protective custody.

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It's not that I don't have issues with Spitzer's wanton ways: The hypocrisy of hiring a prostitute and prosecuting sex rings is the unforgivable part. And if it wasn't part of a private agreement to explore other sexual vistas, you better believe that his wife has reason to have both of his heads on a platter.

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So yesterday's news that Goldman Sachs, one of the world's largest investment firms, has pledged $100 million to give 10,000 disadvantaged women business and management training deserves some celebration. According to reports, Goldman Sachs has partnered with several top-flight business schools to implement the program, which will serve women in the United States as well as the developing world.

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Not surprisingly, this nasty assumption leads her -- like many of the blaming gurus that attract a mostly female audience -- to some bizarre gender stereotyping. According to the Oprah story, she thinks millions of women are clueless about love. "Somewhere along the line, and I'm really not sure [when]," she's quoted as saying, "we lost our common sense."

It's hard to get riled up about this accusatory pablum. But some of her more specific advice did strike a particularly sour note. In a passage about what Novak calls "the pickle jar effect," she describes the pitfalls of being a self-reliant, independent woman. "We are so successful today, women. We're fabulous. We work hard. We make good money. We parent. Sometimes what happens when we spend a lot of time alone, we forget to let them open the damn pickle jar," Novak explains. "The one thing I don't think is ever going to change on this planet is men still need to feel like men. So let them open it."

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