Caryl Rivers2013-05-24T09:30:46-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=caryl-riversCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Caryl RiversGood old fashioned elbow grease.How Boston Won My Hearttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32012432013-05-02T15:49:33-04:002013-05-02T15:49:40-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
And my town is a different place than when I moved here three decades ago.
On Marathon day, I was in my Boston University office, a couple of blocks from the finish line, when my phone rang. "Where are you?" my son Steve (calling from Houston) asked me. When I told him, he said, "Don't go out," he said. "They're blowing up the Marathon."
Like everyone else, I followed the week's events with both horror and admiration for the cops, the EMTs and the other public officials. I felt it more and more in my gut; MY town.
In some way, I had regarded Boston as my second city for years. I grew up in D.C., third generation, and I loved the dazzling marble, the cherry blossoms, and even the noisy politics and the muggy summer heat. I came to Boston with my husband, the late Boston Globe columnist Alan Lupo, to his home town. I was pregnant with my first child -- Steve, the son who called me.
It was an alien place to me then. In D.C., all that mattered was whether you were black or white. In Boston, caucasian tribes glared out at each other, a reflection of what was once called Boston's "savage geography." There were conclaves of Irish, Jews, Italians, Armenians and others, who often had unkind words about each other. (They sure didn't like black folks much either).
In Boston, the ocean water was freezing, even in summer. It snowed in April. People talked funny.
My kids grew up talking funny too. Steve, now a federal agent, was for a time a cop in Texas. He was careful to talk to his radio dispatcher without the peculiar Boston r's.
But once his dad was riding with him in his cruiser, and Steve lapsed back into Boston speech. The dispatcher squawked over the radio in her Texas drawl, which sounded like, "Officer Loophole, where are you-all at? And Steve radioed, "I'm at the corner of Pahk and MacAthah." The radio squawked back, "Where the hell are you, Officer Loophole?"
My daughter Alyssa, in her years of theater training, managed to perfect an unaccented Shakespearian voice. But once, playing a lead role at the La Jolla Playhouse, she lapsed into an imitation of Revere-Dorchester speech to amuse her fellow actors. The director heard her and said. "I love it. Use it for the whole play!" Alyssa groaned. "It took me years to get of that accent."
When I arrived, I threw myself into the life of Boston. Alan and I sometimes covered the same stories -- like the busing controversy that tore the city apart. Angry whites threw stones at black kids getting off the buses in front of a school in South Boston (Southie.) I was once chairing a rally for the Equal Rights amendment in Faneuil Hall when I was shouted down by a large contingent of ROAR members -- the Southie anti-busing activists.
For a long time, race was our bête noir. For years, the city's iconic image was the Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of a Southie tough trying to spear a black city official with an American flag.
But slowly, surely we have moved on. Boston is no longer the angry place it was in the days of busing. Today it is an international city, less provincial, far more tolerant, more sophisticated than it was when I first arrived. We have an African-American governor, a thriving Haitian community, and a large Brazilian contingent. Latinos now predominate in once-Italian East Boston, and the two groups find they have much in common. Students from all over the world give the city's complexion a myriad of shades.
And all the while, also slowly but surely, I was adapting to beantown. I became a Boston driver. In my car, I try to beat other drivers to the intersection. I swear like a trooper when somebody cuts me off without bothering to turn on a signal. I only gave up rude hand gestures recently because of the fear that other drivers were armed and prone to road rage.
I became a cold water creature. Reared in the warm waters of the Chesapeake Bay, I now swim in the frigid waters of Boston harbor in June and find it bracing.
Over the years, I came to love this quirky little city almost as much as Alan did. I've seen it grow and change. Yes, Boston can be tough and gritty -- read Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) for a look at the city's dark side. ) But we all came together on that awful day. Look at the faces of the runners and the first responders; a whole globe in a tiny space.
This city has woven itself around my heartstrings over the years and for a long time, I was not even aware of the process. So much of my life has happened here, and now, those ties are way to tough to break
They are Boston Strong.
Caryl Rivers' e-novel, "Girls No More" was recently published by Diversion press.]]>Finding (Political) Redemption and Maybe Godtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31491182013-04-29T16:32:25-04:002013-04-29T16:32:34-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
Two politicians forced to resign from office due to sex scandals are back in the game. Former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has won a primary over a Republican contender in a race for congress. He had to leave the governor's mansion after cavorting in Argentina with a woman not his wife.
Democrat Anthony Weiner left Congress in disgrace after he "sexted" photos of himself in his underwear to several women via the internet.
Sanford's back, at least for a while, though a new gaffe may derail him again. And Weiner wants to get back -- perhaps to run for mayor of New York -- as he explained in an anguished apologia in the New York Times Magazine.
In decades of writing about politics, I have observed many sex scandals -- my very favorite being the Tidal Basin Follies of 1974. Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was driving drunk through Washington with his mistress, a stripper from Argentina with a name just made for headlines: Fanne Foxe. When a police officer stopped the car, Fanne tried to flee from the law by jumping fully clothed into the tidal basin, next to the Jefferson memorial.
The story became tabloid fodder, and a few weeks later, drunk as a skunk, Mills held a press conference from Fanne Foxe's dressing room in the Pilgrim Theater, a Boston burlesque house. He did not run in 1976. Fanne changed her name to the "Tidal Basin Bombshell" and increased her performance fees.
There may be some historical irony in the fact that Fanne Foxe hailed from Argentina, the home of the mistress of Mark Sanford, In June of 2009, governor Sanford turned up missing for nearly a week. His aides didn't know where he was, although he had told them he was going hiking on the Appalachian trail. In fact, he was engaging in a different sport in a quite different place entirely -- in Buenos Aires with his mistress.
He held a press conference admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife and had fallen madly in love with his mistress, and resigned. He dumped his wife, got engaged to his south-of-the- border soul mate and then ran for congress, recasting his personal saga as "Love Story," not "Body Heat."
At least he had the good sense not to run for president, get his mistress pregnant and lie about it while married to his first wife, as John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina, managed to do.
But then, Sanford pulled a stunt that may cost him the race. His ex-wife is taking him to court him for allegedly sneaking into her house in February and then exiting via the back door, using a phone for a flashlight.
Sex and politics are hardly strange bedfellows in the life of the nation. In my recently published e-book. Girls No More, about women journalists in DC, the secretary of the Interior falls totally naked out of a closet onto a female reporter looking for her coat at a chic Washington party. (The incident was loosely based on the experiences of a reporter who covered the party beat for a DC newspaper.)
But why are some political men dispatched to the scrap heap, while others find forgiveness? Finding God helps. Amazing how many politicians discover the deity after stumbling out of bed with women not their wives. Newt Gingrich left one wife when she got cancer and dumped another for a younger staff member. He converted to Catholicism and promptly ran for president. Mark Sanford, in his runoff victory speech, said, "I want to thank my God... and acknowledge the difference He has made in my life."
Anthony Weiner basically used Freud, not the Deity, in his self-lacerating explanation of his misdeeds. Maybe on the Upper East side of Manhattan, Freud trumps even God.
Bill Clinton famously got himself impeached (but acquitted) for lying about his White House trysts with intern Monica Lewinsky. Why is he still so popular among Democrats?
Hillary stood by him. The picture of Bill and Hillary, each holding Chelsea's hand as they walked together to a helicopter after he had admitted his affair, announced she was not going to desert him.
Of course, illicit sex has been part of politics for a very long time. Often it was never written about by the press, which had a basically "boys will be boys" attitude. The Washington press corps was well aware of JFK's escapades when he was in the White House. But it was not until after his death that they became public knowledge.
The women's movement of the 1970s emphasized the fact that in most scandals, power was the real issue, not just sex. Men had it and women didn't, and there wasn't much a woman could do if her boss tried to grope her by the file cabinet, except try to slither away.
For too long, sexual harassment was an unspoken problem for women in the workplace, but finally, after they broke their silence, change did happen. Now there are laws on the books against this kind of behavior.
Of course, often it takes two to tango, and some women just can't resist married men with power. So sex scandals will probably be with us for a long time. Some men will be forgiven and others will be booed out of the political arena. We won't get to equality in this area, though, until some high-placed woman politician admits to an affair, finds God, and then gets re-elected.
Don't hold your breath.
Caryl Rivers' e-book, Girls No More, was recently published by Diversion books.]]>Junking "Junk Science"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17285352012-08-01T11:17:47-04:002012-10-01T05:12:03-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
Not just to give them a leg up on the three Rs, but to counter dangerous gender stereotypes that can put kids in straitjackets, hindering their development and dimming their futures. To do this, we have to dump dangerous "junk science" pushed by powerful advocates who argue that due to vast differences between boys and girls, single-sex classrooms are needed to improve children's academic achievement.
It's not true.
More and more, researchers are agreeing that the data do not make a strong case for single-sex schooling. Eight prominent psychologists and neuroscientists authored an article in the journal Science last September, titled "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling."
They found the rationale for setting up separate classrooms for girls and boys "deeply misguided" and "often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence."
However, a small group of advocates continues to lobby hard for single-sex classrooms in public schools. Leonard Sax, the head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and best-selling author of Why Gender Matters, and Michael Gurian, the author of The Wonder of Girls, repeatedly make an argument for segregated classes based on alleged "science." Last year, Sax even called the authors of the Science article "The Angry Eight," and he continues to claim that the differing brains of girls and boys call for separate classrooms.
Here is some of the flawed science on which these claims are based:
Junk Science: The brains of girls and boys are so different that they must be parented and educated in very different ways
This claim has been soundly debunked. Lise Eliot, an associate professor in the department of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, conducted an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from childhood to adolescence. She concluded, In Pink Brain, Blue Brain, that there is "surprisingly little evidence of sex differences in children's brains."
Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist and professor at Barnard College, also rejects the idea that the differing organization of female and male brains is the key to behavior. This narrative, she says, misunderstands the complexities of biology and the dynamic nature of brain development. "As a folk tale, it's a pat answer, a curiosity killer. And the data doesn't fit the tidy male-female brain patterns anyway. Why keep trying to fit the data into a story about sex?" she asks.
Jordan-Young doesn't simply critique the "science" of sex differences; she shows how far off track it's wandered. "We've reached the end of that road -- in fact, we've gone way off the road into the woods and are now stuck in the deep mud of 'innate sex differences.'" In her thoroughly researched book Brainstorm, she concludes that although sex-linked traits play a role in human development, they do not determine most of our behavior.
Junk Science: Boys have inherently weaker verbal skills than girls. They should be given "informational texts" to read instead of the classics or any material containing emotion, which they aren't good at either.
Many teachers obviously took this idea seriously. One wrote on the National Association for Education website:
When I assign special projects, I provide my students with more "boy-friendly" options, such as a "biography box" in lieu of a book report. Students bring in a box with 10 objects connected to the person they've been researching, then write a list of the objects and a brief explanation of how the object is connected to the person. My boys prefer this option as opposed to just writing a paragraph.
But what are the facts? Overall, there are virtually no differences in verbal abilities between girls and boys. In 2005, University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde synthesized data from 165 studies on verbal ability and gender. They revealed a female superiority so slight as to be meaningless.
Boys have a just-about-equal aptitude for reading and writing, but sometimes, in actual performance, they score more poorly than girls. Why? They may shun reading because it's not a "boy thing" to do. And so, with less practice, they may actually do less well if they are not encouraged to read or are given unchallenging material. The more the news media run stories about boys not being "hardwired" for reading, the more parents and teachers will believe it.
The idea that boys can't handle emotions is another idea that's become trendy. For example, Leonard Sax suggests that literature teachers should not ask boys about characters' emotions, but should focus only on what the characters actually do.
But the notion that boys are inferior to girls in any and all areas of emotion lacks scientific evidence. Boys are naturally just as caring as girls, notes Harvard psychologist William Pollack, author of Real Boys. "They may have different patterns of behavior and learn and communicate through action, but they are as capable of being sensitive and empathic as girls are." Male infants, he says, are more emotionally expressive than baby girls, but boys, as they grow, too often learn to display a "mask of masculinity" that hides their inner feelings.
Teenage boys are as good at Social Intelligence -- recognizing emotion -- as girls. If we think that boys are not naturally attuned to feelings, that belief may lead us to limit their reading to simplistic combat or adventure stories, or to bland informational texts.
Dumbing down what boys read, leading them to believe that good literature (and writing) is "girls' turf," will be a disaster. It will deprive boys of the richness of challenging, well-written stories and steer them away from lucrative careers
Junk Science: Men and Boys are inherently better at math and science than girls and women
Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, set off a firestorm in 2005 when he suggested that an "innate" lack of aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the top jobs in the sciences and engineering. In other words, girls just don't have the right stuff to compete successfully with high-achieving males.
Many voices, including those of Sax and Gurian, echoed such claims. Michael Gurian, in fact, told an education conference in Canada that no more than 20 percent of girls could aspire to be engineers or architects, and that the structure of most girls' minds makes it too hard for them to grasp subjects like calculus and physics
What's the real story?
Large-scale testing programs in the U.S. and abroad find girls closing the gender gap in math and in some cases outscoring the boys.
U.S. girls swept the top prizes in the first Google Science Fair in 2011, and U.S. girls now perform as well as boys on standardized math tests at all grade levels. And, in 2008, a study funded by the National Science Foundation looked at the performance of the most gifted children and their ability to solve complex math problems. In every category, girls did as well as boys -- even at the higher grades, when children were taking harder courses.
Boys and girls are becoming more equal, globally, in math performance. A new study by Jonathan M. Kane and Janet E. Mertz, both of the University of Wisconsin, analyzed scores from more than half a million 4th and 8th graders from 86 countries. It found essentially no gender differences between girls and boys in math.
"We have to stop selling T-shirts to girls that say, 'I'm too pretty to do math,'" Kane said. "Our stereotypes are hurting our math education"
The students came from Western and Asian democracies and developing countries, as well as Muslim countries notable for their sex-segregated classes. But the really surprising finding was that the more equal the societies were around gender, the better everybody did in math. As the researchers conclude, "gender equity and other sociocultural factors... are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls."
Equality obviously works -- for everybody!
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett, senior scientist at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, are the co-authors of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About our Children. (Columbia University Press.)]]>Always Worrying About Boystag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16594042012-07-15T21:47:42-04:002012-09-14T05:12:02-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/ New York Times columnist David Brooks may not realize it, but when he recently bemoaned the state of American boys, he joined a long line of despairing worriers about American manhood.
James W. Chesebro, professor of communication at Ball State University, notes that "From an historical perspective, the last 145 years or so in the United States have reflected an ongoing struggle regarding the meaning and scope of masculinity, or how men have defined themselves and who they have said are manly and therefore part of their group."
In the aftermath of the civil war, industrialization changed the face of work, and the closing of the frontier ended the dream that a man could always pull up stakes and move west to a new life. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted that "The dominant fact of American life has been expansionism." As such, people worried that the end of the frontier would also mean the end of the ideal of the unfettered American man.
The Golden Age of manhood ended, and in its place arrived an enduring nostalgia for the days when men were men. As sociologist Michael Kimmel points out, before the civil war, 88 percent of American males were small farmers, tradesmen or artisans. By 1910, less than one third of men were self-employed.
And more and more people lived in cities, which came to be associated with culture, education and femininity. No less a sage than Henry James wrote in The Bostonians that "The whole generation is womanized. The masculine tone is passing out of the world. It's a feminine, nervous, chattering canting age."
David Brooks' recent column looked back to Shakespeare's warrior king Henry V as an "ideal" man. In the late 19th century, many men similarly turned to admiration of oriental warriors, as exemplars of a more idealized manhood than what they saw around them.
Of course, part of that manhood was mayhem and murderous rage. Shakespeare's Henry gave fabulous speeches -- "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" -- but the real guy turned the battlefield into a butchery. At Agincourt, thousands of the French enemy had surrendered -- so many that the British worried that they could overcome their own forces. Many British officers refused to consider disposing of the prisoners, considering it a dishonorable action towards men who had laid down their arms. So Henry dispatched some 200 archers to slaughter the hapless French prisoners.
Given the misery that bloodthirsty males have heaped on their fellow humans throughout history, why do we so pine for them when we worry about men?
Like Henry James, David Brooks worries that the masculine virtues are being lost in modern society, especially schools. He echoes the worries of earlier scribes who said that too much school was feminizing men. That's what led -- at least in part -- to the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1910.
Brooks argues that schools reward a certain type of student; one who can listen, focus, and work with others (Read: Girls). True. But who says boys can't do this?
Some people suggest that boys have very different brains from girls and have inherently weaker verbal skills. They should be given "informational texts" to read instead of the classics or any material containing emotion, which they aren't good at either. Leonard Sax, president of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, suggests that literature teachers should not ask boys about characters' emotions but should focus only on what the characters actually do.
But science is proving that none of this is true. The alleged great differences between the brains of boys and girls are a myth. Lise Eliot, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from childhood to adolescence. She reports in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain that there is "surprisingly little evidence of sex differences in children's brains."
As for boys' inability to handle emotion, that's another canard. In fact, boys have to learn to suppress emotions, and too often our culture instructs them well. Harvard psychiatrist William Pollack, the author of Real Boys, notes that our strict "boy culture" demands emotional rigidity, and by the second grade erodes the interpersonal skills that come naturally to boys. He says that boy babies are actually more expressive and vocal than girl babies. "We now have executives paying $10,000 a week to learn emotional intelligence. These [sessions] actually target skills boys were born with."
In his column, Brooks suggested that Prince Hal (The future Henry) would not do very well in American schools. Unfortunately, his column may give ammunition to those who want to set up dumbed down classrooms geared to boys' supposed weaknesses.
How much better, though, to challenge boys so that they can succeed in the new workplace in which communication, focus, determination and teamwork are key ingredients. Prince Hal could certainly learn these, were he around in 2012.
After, all, how much use is a broadsword in today's world?
Caryl Rivers is a professor of Journalism at Boston university. Her novel Virgins is being published online by Diversion press.]]>We Need More Catholic Rebelstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15872162012-06-18T10:22:08-04:002012-08-18T05:12:12-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
After all, in those days, nuns wore habits with skirts to the floor and were expected to be passive and obedient. Catholic women were never supposed to speak about contraception, even in whispers. Families were often overjoyed when a son chose the priesthood as his vocation.
Today, nuns have tossed away the habit and run their own social welfare programs. Catholic women use contraception at the same rates as other American women. And in the wake of the pedophilia scandal in the church, coupled with the Vatican's refusal to let priests marry or to admit women, the church can barely scrape up applicants for the roman collar,
But this month, as my novel is about to be re-published online, some wisps of the world I thought had vanished seem to be seeping back into the present through the permeable walls of time.
One again, nuns are being told to be quiet and obedient. The Vatican has called the sisters "radical feminists. " It has proclaimed that they are spending too much time helping the poor, the halt and the lame, and too little time battling the Vatican's demons, gay marriage and family planning.
I had imaged that contraception was a settled issue. After all, the Supreme Court legalized it in 1965 by overturning a Connecticut law against the sale of contraceptive devices on the basis of a right to privacy. In Maryland, where I grew up, condoms could be legally sold, but few Catholic women would dare go the drugstore to buy them, lest word get back to parish gossips.
When my best friend was about to marry, she and I drove to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where her Navy-officer-father had commissary privileges. We lugged huge boxes of the latex marvels back to her car. We chortled all the way, imagining the reaction of our parish priest at the sight: a dead faint, we decided.
Today, contraception is once again under fire, with a number of states debating laws allowing employers to deny women health insurance for birth control. Catholic Bishops support these laws.
With increasing decibels, the voice of the Vatican has become a roar, telling all women -- not just nuns -- to be silent and obedient. For lay Catholic women, barefoot, pregnant and mute is the condition it most seems to admire.
Rebelling is no more admired today than in was in the era when my Catholic schoolgirl heroines, Peg and Con, tested the limits of their school's restrictions. As editors of the school paper, they invented a saint, St. Leon of Skorytt, who was martyred by the forces of the Godless with a fatal blow to his head by an axe. They wrote about his life in the paper, and for a while, no one noticed that if you rearranged the letters in Skorytt, it reads "Trotsky." They had canonized communist icon Leon Trotsky -- who was indeed murdered, on the orders of rival Joseph Stalin -- but was hardly anybody's idea of a saint.
Unfortunately for the girls, the parish priest read the paper and picked the story of St. Leon as the subject for his Sunday sermon. Male clerics are outraged, and demand the girls' expulsion for this and other pranks. The principal, Sister Robert Mary, tempers justice with mercy (she secretly admires her feisty charges) and they get off with a slap on the wrist.
The real-life role models for those smart-alecky Catholic girls, myself and Clare Crawford-Mason, grew up to be journalists and mouthy broads. Clare was a Washington correspondent and NBC producer who did some of the first television reports on wife beating and sexual abuse. She now runs her own television production company, CCM. I have been a political writer covering media and politics. We're not big on silence.
What would have happened if women had real power in the church? Would there have been a cover-up of priestly pedophilia? Probably not. Women leaders would not have fallen silent on that issue. Would there be a crusade against family planning? No way. Women understand the need for family planning to prevent poverty, domestic abuse and to protect women's overall health a lot better than the Pope does. Has he ever changed a diaper or wiped away a child's tears?
Silence -- especially the enforced silence of women -- does no one any good, least of all the church. Women's voices desperately need to be heard, especially in a time when so many people seem to want to turn back the clock to a harsher, less tolerant age.
So let's hear it for the rebels.
Caryl Rivers is a professor of Journalism at Boston University. Her novel Virgins, (1984)) will be republished online this month by Diversion books.]]>Fifty Shades of S&Mtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15007722012-05-09T20:14:33-04:002012-07-09T05:12:04-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/Fifty Shades of Grey has joined the likes of Lady Chatterly's Lover and Tropic of Cancer in the annals of erotic books. It's been banned by the libraries of Brevard County, Fla. as just too dirty for the local citizenry to consume. This may only enhance the book's explosive sales -- the three volumes of the triliogy are currently number one, two and three in sales on Amazon's best seller list.
But what should we make of the fact that American women have made a huge bestseller out of a novel that might be titled Fifty Shades of S&M?
Should we cheer because women now feel free to push the boundaries of sexuality without feat of being labeled as sluts and "bad" women?
Or should we worry that a sado-masochistic novel in which a lot of violence is directed at the heroine is selling like hotcakes?
Maybe the answer is a bit of both. It may well depend on the attitude of the women readers. If they are saying to their partners "Tie me up, give me lots of pleasure and then it's your turn to do dishes," that's one thing. If they are behaving like pop star Rihanna, who allegedly tried to get back with her singer-boyfriend Chris Brown after he'd given her a brutal beating, that's quite another.
Shades of Grey reminds me a bit of Jane Eyre -- if Rochester and Jane were tying each other up in the basement while the crazy wife was sequestered in the attic. Good woman rescues tortured man and teaches him to love. That is the theme of many romantic novels, where brutal (but ravishingly handsome) men are redeemed and turned intro pussycats by the true love of a good woman,
Fifty seems to share that fantasy; the young innocent college girl who endures a cruel billionaires' kinky sexual desires thinks that she will save his tortured soul even if it means she has to put a lot of Ben Gay on her bottom.
That's quite different from the S&M classic, The Story of O, in which a French woman is brought by her lover to a creepy castle where sadistic males work out their fantasies on her body. O endures, but doesn't seem to enjoy it much, and in fact, her soul is gradually destroyed as she becomes little more than a vessel for male fantasies.
Some critics have written that women are glomming onto Fifty because in real life they are stepping out of their true nature as submissive females by getting good jobs and making money. That's an old chestnut that won't fly any more -- the notion that when women leave traditional roles, all of society goes to hell. My favorite tome in that genre is the 1947 best seller, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which decreed that when women sought good jobs, their bodies would revolt by killing their embryos. (I kid you not.) The book states: "Male emulating careerists have such anxiety about pregnancy that their glands secrete chemicals that destroy fertility." A return to a 'normal role in society would soothe ovaries that spew defective eggs.
But Fifty does raise the issue of the growing pornification of sex in our culture. Too many of the images we see in mainstream media more than hint of violence against women. Italian Vogueran a picture of Rihanna bound and, more ominously, gagged in the aftermath of her beating by Brown. In a picture in Elle, Miley Cyrus aged out of Disney wearing black S&M gear, lying on a table as if she were about to be sexually assaulted. Christina Aguilera posed bound and wearing a huge, studded gag -- a classic porn image -- silencing and immobilizing women. This theme echoes through "gangsta" rap. Eminem sings, "Slut, you think I won't choke no whore / 'Til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more?! Shut up slut, you're causin' too much chaos."
Increasingly, younger and younger girls are being sexualized. A major report on girls by the American Psychological Association found the media emphasizing young women's sexuality "to a stunning degree." It found that if girls learn that behaving like sexual objects gains approval from society and from people whose opinions they respect, they may begin to "self-sexualize; in fact, to become their own worst enemies as far as their health and well-being are concerned."
A mother I know heard her teenage daughter and her friends debating whether oral sex was really sex -- and agreeing it was not. But younger and younger girls seem to feel an obligation to give males sexual satisfaction -- without considering their own pleasure.
So I have no worries about forty-something housewives grooving on Fifty Shades of Grey, trying to put a little spark in their sex lives by getting their hubbies to tie them to the bedpost with strips of satin. (Or cut-up old sheets. )
But I worry about young girls getting the message that male fantasies and desire are paramount, even when they hurt.
Ah, for the days of the plain brown wrapper.
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Rosalind C. Barnett of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About our Children. (Columbia University Press.)]]>The Scarlet IUD?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13246332012-03-07T13:01:43-05:002012-05-07T05:12:02-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/The Scarlet Letter. Now, it seems, we have The Scarlet IUD.
If Rush Limbaugh had his way, every young woman who used birth control would be made to wear their devices or pills on a string around their neck, dyed to a shameful scarlet.
In his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the tale of Hester Prynne, a woman in Puritan Boston who has had a daughter from an adulterous affair, and will not name her lover. She is forced to wear a scarlet "A" on her chest to proclaim her sin.
If you think shaming women for sex went out with the Puritans, you haven't been listening to talk radio. As much of America knows by now, Rush Limbaugh used the words
"slut "and "prostitute" to refer to a Georgetown law student, who testified before congress about the need to fund women's reproductive health.
It's an old, old story. How do you shut women up? Call them harlots. Hester Prynne, meet Sandra Fluke.
In the latter case, the shaming didn't work. Ms. Fluke, an attractive, well-spoken young woman, may have the last laugh. A few days ago I was walking near my office and a female student thrust a flyer into my hand, which announced a meeting to be held the next day on women's reproductive rights. This may be an Anita Hill moment. The issue of sexual harassment in the workplace became a big issue after Ms. Hill testified before a senate committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had made improper advances towards her. Thomas was confirmed and Anita Hill was slimed by conservatives, but her ordeal woke up many women to the fact that sexual harassment at work was alive and well and experienced by hundreds of thousands of women.
It does surprise me that in this day and age, some men seem to get really, really upset about women having sex. Especially when they use birth control and so can't be punished by pregnancy. Limbaugh worried that young Georgetown women were having lots and lots of sex -- so much so that he wanted them to make videos that he could watch. There's any woman's dream: having Rush Limbaugh panting over your lovemaking.
Much of this prurience comes from the right, but the left is not immune. Playboy online ran a story in 2009 which contained these words: "10 Conservative Women I'd Like to Hate F--k." The author wrote, "We may despise everything these women represent, but goddammit they're hot. Let the healing begin."
The post was pulled after a flood of complaints.
Men rarely seem to be silenced after having sex, even illicit sex. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana took the floor to complain about Ms. Fluke, despite the fact that he had earlier admitted to cavorting with prostitutes supplied by a D.C. madame.
What would happen, I wonder, if people got really upset about men having sex; especially getting covered for it by their health care plans. Most health insurance plans cover Viagra prescriptions. Do you see women taking to the battlements, shouting, "By God, I am not giving my hard-earned tax dollars to some codger who ought to be playing shuffleboard pretending he's Hugh Heffner! And what about those guys who get vasectomies so they can just have lots and lots and lots of irresponsible sex? Let them pay if they want to play."
That is a scene you will never see, because most women realize that the "H" letter doesn't stand for hedonism, but for health.
Which is good for everybody.
But there is an "H" word that Rush Limbaugh should wear around his neck. Hater. When you brand a law student who is talking reasonably about women's health needs as a harlot, and you say you want to watch sex tapes of her and her friends, that's about as vile as it gets. Oh sure, Rush says he was trying to be amusing. Nobody's laughing. It rather makes me long for the old-time bigots like Father Coughlin and George Lincoln Rockwell (head of the American Nazi party), who knew they were haters and didn't even try to be comedians.
All this may have a happy ending, though; maybe Rush has indeed supplied us with another Aha! moment like Anita Hill did. One in which millions of women wake up to the fact that their freedom of choice to control their sexual lives as they see fit, not according to the dictates of conservative men, is slipping away.
Time for another feminist wave, perhaps?
Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Rosalind C. Barnett, senior scientist at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About our Children (Columbia University Press).
]]>Charles Murray's Unreal Townstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12944932012-02-29T18:01:08-05:002012-04-30T05:12:01-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/The Bell Curve ( with Richard Herrnstein), Charles Murray said that blacks are inherently dumber than whites.
In his new book, Coming Apart, Murray says that working-class whites are getting dumber and losing traditional values such as marriage, hard work and church-going.
Murray has always been the kind of guy who constructs a spine of ideology and then wraps statistics around it, like flowers on a maypole.
In his new book, he invents two fictional communities, One is "Belmont," an enclave of affluent whites, who he says, have abandoned the values of the 60's counter-culture and who stay married, work hard, earn money and spend a lot of time ensuring that their kids get good educations.
In "Fishtown," home to working class whites, men don't marry, women are having more and more illegitimate kids, and nobody goes to church anymore. This is unlike middle class neighborhoods of the past, where marriage, church-going and hard work, he says, were part of the ethos.
"Fishtown" sounds suspiciously like a poor black urban neighborhood and it illustrates a long standing narrative of the right: that if white people don't uphold strict conservative values, especially sexual ones, they will descend to the ghetto, with its range of social pathologies.
This is the subtext of Murray's argument, though he doesn't say it explicitly. Race got him into so much trouble last tine out that he's gun-shy. Serious scholars tore apart the "science " of "The Bell Curve" and accused Murray of massaging his stats to match his ideology -- which is what he's doing again.
Fishtown is a statistical construct -- but anyone who lives in or near a real blue-collar town may not recognize the portrait.
For one thing, Murray pictures working class women as falling into a deep swamp of immorality, with illegitimate pregnancies rising. Indeed, while out-of-wedlock pregnancies among these women are increasing, the numbers do not rival those of the poor inner city. Among blacks, rates of unwed motherhood are 73 percent. The total for white women as a whole is 29 percent. For white women with only a high school education, it's 44 percent.
Murray chides white working class men for not being married by age 30, but its probably women who are making the choices. With the disappearance of relatively stable and high-paying manufacturing jobs, working class women may have greater opportunities than working class men. As a result, they have also become pickier about marriage.
And working class men are not staying single because they have embraced some 60's style counter-culture hedonism. and a lack of "virtue," as Murray implies. Family scholars June Carbone of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Naomi Cahn of George Washington University Law School roll their eyes at virtue arguments. They write:
The new data confirms that the Great Recession has slowed marriage rates and earlier studies show that financial stress greatly increases the divorce rates of young and working class couples with the most traditional attitudes toward gender roles. In today's economy, these couples have become less likely to marry.
Being out of work is lethal for working class guys, the pair note.
Studies further show that while unemployed women spend more time on the home and the children, unemployed men spend more time moping, drinking, watching TV, and lashing out at those around them.
Not exactly great marriage candidates. But if you brought back the high wage blue-collar jobs of the 1950s, it's clear that marriage stability would quickly increase. "Virtue" has little to do with it.
And as for working class whites being lazy, I'd refer you to Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed," where people work long hours at two or three jobs just to get by. I know many families where grandparents, parents and kids now live together and everybody works -- and nobody's into hedonism. They're too tired.
And many working-class areas are doing OK, despite the economic stress. East Boston, virtually around the corner from where I live, has been a haven for immigrants since the early 1900s, as waves of Jews, irish and then Italians swept in. It's a blue-collar neighborhood, one of the places that should be Murray's "Fishtown." But a new wave of Hispanic immigrants is revitalizing the place, with people from El Salvador, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Brazil now living -- mostly amicably -- alongside the Italians who were the predominant group until fairly recently. Mexican, Brazilian, and Peruvian restaurants and Latin American bakeries are springing up all over and the neighborhood is becoming a Latino cultural center. You can't just talk about whites when you look at working-class neighborhoods.
So don't buy Belmont or Fishtown. They are about as real as Brigadoon, which, you may recall, appeared only once every hundred years.
Too bad Murray's books don't come out at the same rate.
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Rosalind C. Barnett of "The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About our Children." (Columbia University Press.)]]>The Atlantic's Woman Problemtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12162582012-01-19T12:40:13-05:002012-03-20T05:12:01-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/Atlantic finally deal with its women problem?
The venerable magazine regularly publishes thoughtful reporting and analysis about the Middle East, U.S. politics, the future of China, the global economy, climate change -- on and on. It's only when the publication gazes on the 50 percent of the population that is not male that it wanders off into Cloud cuckoo land.
If the proverbial Man from Mars knew about women only from reading the Atlantic, he would believe that their hormones go completely haywire at a certain age, making them unstable, unreliable creatures (The Bitch is Back) /and at the same time they are on the verge of taking over all the power in society, leading to The End of Men. They are selfish careerists destroying their children, or they have decided they really can have it all and are disdaining marriage. Or, they use other women's resentment of men to succeed.
In the December issue, the magazine suggests that the most successful female entrepreneur on the planet gained her wealth and fame by bonding with women over the cruelties and insensitivities of men.
Caitlin Flanagan writes that Oprah Winfrey, more than any other broadcaster ever, understands the ways in which men can hurt women. Men "tend to be wary of her, if not outright hostile. She's onto them."
Indeed, Oprah has spoken of her own history of abuse, and has promoted women who write about such issues, including Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. But if she's a "manogynist," she is an amazingly forgiving one. Are Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz wary of Oprah? Probably not, since she's made them superstars. She's made two movies from Mitch Albom's books. Oprah evangelizes for empowerment for everyone, not only women. She created a travel show for her new channel featuring a young man with cerebral palsy. Flanagan sees Oprah through an absurdly reductionist lens, but then, that's how she views much of the world.
Many women I know -- and not a few men -- scratch their heads over the Atlantic's fascination with Flanagan. She represents a very tiny sliver of American womanhood today. She is the wife of a very wealthy executive who can afford hot and cold running nannies, and repeatedly attacks working women as self-centered careerists who are destroying their children. She never mentions the mountain of reliable evidence that finds kids of working mothers as emotionally healthy as children of at-home mothers. (See Ellen Galinsky's "Ask the Children.")
Flanagan advocates for a very retro style of marriage. She believes husbands should be in charge and women accommodating. Indeed, wisps of Mirabel Morgan cling to her. (Remember Total Woman?) But Flanagan would never be so déclassé as to greet her husband at the door clad only in Saran Wrap, as Morgan suggests. She does, however, seem to find men who care for children a real turn off. She admits she would feel "a distinct lack of erotic feeling" if her husband interrupted his Saturday tennis game to help out with the children. (Most women I know would have the opposite reaction. They'd toss hubby on the couch for a quickie just for the suggestion.) At times, Flanagan morphs into some eerie clone of Martha Stewart, about whom she writes, rhapsodizing over artifacts from an earlier era. She says, "No woman with a beating heart and an ounce of femininity" can resist such domestic ephemera as a freshly laundered fluffy white towel or the sight of "A child's lawn pinafore draped across a painted rocking chair."
Has anybody since Edith Wharton ever even seen a lawn pinafore? Flanagan would have made a great Victorian, but the statistical odds are that she would have been one of the maids, not the lady of the house. Would she enjoy both the fluffy towel and the lawn pinafore so much if she was the one who had to iron them?" Sometimes I think Flanagan is simply writing satire and one of these days she will break into a cackle and say, "Got Ya!" But I guess that is not going to happen.
If Caitlin Flanagan represents one half of the universe of women in Atlantic's vision, the other half is occupied by Sandra Tsing Loh. And no odder odd couple could be found. Tsing Loh is a caustic, often very funny cultural critic and playwright who casts a cold eye on our current situations -- personal and political. But in 2009 she wrote a piece that was as atypical of American women as is Flanagan's Victoriana. She has decided that smart, fortyish women like her are so capable and competent in all realms of life that they don't need husbands. As Tsing Loh (who has jettisoned hers) writes, "I can pay the bills, I can refinance the house at the best reasonable rates" and, she adds, take care of all the children's needs as well. She can do it all. Alone. So why not? There are always guys out there for sex.
But how many accomplished -- and yes, feminist -- women share that view? None that I know. Women who are successful are not just busting their buttons to discard their husbands. In fact, research finds that women who earn more than their husbands have marriages just as stable as women who earn less.
Another article that the Atlantic featured by Tsing Loh, in October 2011, was called "The Bitch is Back." She had (or is having) a really, really rotten menopause, causing her to behave badly and to often despise most of those closest to her. As usual, she can be sharp and funny, but what is the message when a magazine that rarely writes about women publishes an article showing a woman In full-blown hormonal rage? (Oh My God, we knew it, they really do go crazy at midlife!)
If this piece had appeared in say, Redbook, it would have received little notice. But since it appeared in a major policy publication, it did get attention. The influential columnist David Brooks of the New York Times named it to his list of ten best magazine articles of the year. But it was the only one written by a woman. In 2011 women did wonderful journalism about Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab spring, politics and science. But why was the only one that made the "best list" about female hormonal rage?
The leitmotif of much of what the Atlantic publishes about women is that female gains are dangerous -- to children, to families, to marriages, to themselves, and to men. The "End of Men" was a 2010 cover article written by Hanna Rosen, the premise of which was that because women now outnumber men on college campuses, they will move into the jobs that lead to power in society and replace men as the power elite.
There seems scant evidence for this proposition. Women have been at near parity with men in colleges for decades; shouldn't the End of Men be well under way by now? But the gender pay gap has barely budged. And men are hardly fleeing colleges. The numbers of men who are attending college is steadily rising, even though women's upward curve is steeper. Also, who goes to which colleges is also relevant here. Much of the increase of women is accounted for by older women and by minority women, especially African Americans. This is good news, but these women are probably not on a straight upward trek to join the power elite. Even high-scoring women may not be on a fast track. Getting top grades in college does not automatically open doors for women. A Sloan foundation study "Women Lead in College but not in the Workforce" found that women's earnings have not kept up with their gains in educational attainment. If you are female, you may be the valedictorian, but you probably won't keep up in money and prestige with your top-level male classmate.
Will this narrative ever change in the Atlantic? I hope so. One day I would like to pick up the magazine and see a well-reported article about American women that's without the "What the hell are they up to now?" brand of alarm.
But I am not holding my breath.
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Rosalind C. Barnett, senior scientist at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center of "The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About our Children." (Columbia University Press.)
]]>A Counterpoint to the View From Everywheretag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10798182011-11-07T18:04:09-05:002012-01-07T05:12:01-05:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
That's the argument made by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who found some areas on which he and conservative critics could agree. He argues that transparency is the new objectivity, and that mainstream journalists ought to stop pretending they have no biases and are simply holding a mirror up to reality.
It's journalistic arrogance that often upsets the right wing, he said, because "If you're dissatisfied with their portrait [journalists say] the likely reason is that you refuse to face reality as it is, because that's what news reports from mainstream journalists do: they depict reality, not the way you see it or I see it but simply "the way it is."
On that point I'd agree with him. There is no such thing as "objectivity," outside of the double-blind study.
But Rosen calls most mainline journalism The View from Nowhere, because all journalists don't list their biases up front. He'd prefer a European model where much of journalism comes from periodicals that are aligned with a party, a movement or an ideology, and present the news from a definite and observable stance. Of course we do that here as well, in such publications as the Nation or the National Review, and many others,
The problem is that today in journalism we have the opposite of The View from Nowhere. We have The View from Everywhere. Everyone who can get near a computer terminal is blathering on about whatever strikes his or her fancy and the din is overwhelming. It makes the tower of Babel look like a library reading room. The new din may be democratic, but its also incoherent, idiotic and often just plain looney.
I, for one, appreciate a story by a journalist who has done his or her legwork, who knows the turf and can explain what's happening n in a certain arena, and present a story that tries to be balanced and fair. Can it be done? Sure. Just like a skilled debater can argue both sides of a contentious issue with skill, an experienced journalist can weigh the evidence, introduce the players, and present a pretty fair assessment of what's true. Or what's not.
It will not be perfect or totally bias-free, since none of us can erase the totality of our being and observe events like a robotic camera eye. But I much prefer an intelligent human mind trying to sift through reality and come up with some answers.
In the midst of a media universe filled with screamers, spinners, ideologues and narcissists, the so-called "View from Nowhere " can be quite calming. And informative, especially if we stop claiming that we are automatons who have no biases, and that we make no judgments and draw no conclusions. But we don't have to put all our viewpoints on the back of our shirts, like numbers on major league ballplayers.
Is there bias in the media? Of course. Lately there's a bias towards sensation and scandal, which is why sexy stories like those about Herman Cain, Anthony Weiner, Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan will continue to take up so much media space. They are red meat for the gluttonous maw of a 24-hour media that is like an angry sacrificial God who keeps chanting Feed me! Feed me!
But the true bias of the mainstream media is centrist. Politics in the U.S. is usually played near the 50 yard line -- sometimes a bit to the right, sometimes a bit to the left. Indeed, born-again creationists don't get very good treatment by the mainstream media, but neither do vegan feminist socialists.
Barry Goldwater probably would not have caused a nuclear war, as the famous (and brilliant) democratic ad suggested. Remember the cute little girl who was pulling petals off a daisy, and at, the end, the H-bomb explodes? George McGovern would not have unleashed hordes of screaming, murderous Bolsheviks to run through the streets of Peoria, but that's how he was portrayed.
While mainstream journalists can be titillated by a Donald Trump, a Michele Bachmann or a Herman Cain, they are really much more comfortable with people who know who the president of "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" is, who can memorize fifty-seven points of a policy paper and who could analyze the Bush doctrine at a press club dinner.
One reason right-wingers see so much liberal bias is that so many on the right have moved closer to the twenty-yard line than to the fifty, and they have power. There's not much left of the left. Does anyone think that MoveOn.Org is an octopus about to envelope the Republic? The tea party, however, has enormous power in the GOP, shifting the party's center of gravity far to the right.
The more that Republican centrists disappear, the more critical of the party mainstream coverage will be. Remember Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Bob Dole, Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Scranton, Bill Weld and a covey of other Republican moderates who were well-respected by the mainstream press? Remember Bill Buckley, who you'd viscerally disagree with if you were a liberal? But you had to grudgingly admire his vocabulary and his brainpower. If you are a serious journalist, it's tough to take seriously people who argue that Barack Obama is an alien shaped by the philosophy of the Mau Mau anti-colonialists of 1950s Africa, or a closet radical Muslim who hates white people and hopes to see The U.S. crumble into the sea to be replaced by a Caliphate. It is also hard for serious journalists to buy conspiracy theories from the left that George W. Bush so desperately wanted an excuse to invade Iraq that he planned the attacks on 911, and had the military and the CIA wire nearby buildings so they would collapse at the same time the towers fell.
I remember the days when I was a Washington correspondent, when you could find republicans all over the hill who could talk seriously and with knowledge about both foreign and domestic policy. Just listen to the debate between Kennedy and Nixon before the 1960 election. (Don't watch it, because Kennedy's tan and youthful appearance and Nixon's stubble and pallor will distract you.) Listen and you will hear two very smart guys talking about very complicated issues, using complex sentences and in no way assuming they were talking to a bunch of dummies who could be seduced with silly nonsense.
The morphing of politics into half-circus, half mental ward (see Glenn Beck) is not good for the Republic. Even Fox news Czar Roger Ailes appears to be tiring of the follies. He claims he is moving his network towards moderation.
Ross Douthat was on target when he recently wrote a New York Times column attacking the arrogance of the "best and the brightest" on the left, but warning that it will not help the GOP to canonize folks who seem to be vying for the title of the "worst and the dumbest."
"From Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain," he writes, "the outsiders haven't risen to the challenge. It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent. In place of reckless meritocrats, we don't need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way."
Conservatives like that would find a great deal of respect, even among the detested "liberal" media.
Boston University professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Dr. Rosalind Barnett, senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis, of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children (Columbia University Press).
]]>This Time, the White Knight Is a Womantag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10682372011-10-31T19:03:45-04:002011-12-31T05:12:01-05:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
No woman has ever been elected governor of Massachusetts. Jane Swift held the post as acting governor in 2001, but only after Paul Cellucci resigned. She was quickly dumped by the Mass. GOP when Mitt Romney said he wanted the job; Swift was put out on the doorstep with the trash.
When Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy ran for governor in 1990, pictures were published of her jogging, and much discussion ensued about her thighs. She had a fine record and wonderful policy papers. Do quads really matter in politics? Apparently, if they belong to a woman.
No woman has ever been elected senator from the Bay State. Martha Coakley was supposed to be a shoo-in for Ted Kennedy's seat, but Scott Brown showed up with his pickup truck, great looks and friendly demeanor. Coakley, a sharp prosecutor and the state's attorney general, ran a lackluster campaign. The voters apparently thought she'd rather slap cuffs on their hands then shake them.
But many Democratic women have taken heart from Elizabeth Warren's campaign. (Remember, Massachusetts was the state that hung with Hillary in the Democratic primaries when everybody else was totally smitten with Barack.)
This time, maybe it's a woman, not a guy, who comes riding in on the white charger, and for a lot of women that's a nice change. So many times, just when it seems a woman is about to reach the finish line, out of nowhere comes the white knight who scoops up the prize.
Warren is the real deal. She's riding in with top notch -- credentials. Nobody can say people are backing her just because they want a woman, and so they'll just overlook her résumé.
Come to think of it, this was what the women's movement was all about: no special pleading, no chivalry; just the chance to stand toe-to toe with the big (male) dogs to slug it out. For so long, women couldn't get to that point, because they couldn't get the degrees, the mentoring, the good first jobs, or the promotions that would move them up the line.
Elizabeth Warren didn't emerge, like Athena, fully formed and armed to the teeth, from the head of Zeus. If she wins the senate seat, Mass Dems may indeed think of her as a goddess, but she did it the hard way.
Her father was a janitor, and when he had a heart attack, she got a job as a waitress to help keep the family going. It's the kind of Horatio Alger story Americans love, but this time, Horatio (sometimes) wears high heels.
The noted scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, who writes about the hero's journey, once commented that women couldn't have a quest -- they were simply meant to be the object of the male quest, "In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she's the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she's not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male."
In that line, women hear echoes of "penis envy," "ballbreaker," "bitch," and a whole vocabulary list of words that tell women to stay in their place. And that place certainly isn't politics.
But Warren's journey does indeed fit the Campbell model. She traveled from what she calls the "ragged edge" of the middle class to the ivied walls of Harvard. One good thing about her, from a political observer's point of view, is that she brings as much Oklahoma as Harvard Square to her persona. As the New York Timesrhapsodized:
"Ms. Warren talks about the nation's growing income inequality in a way that channels the force of the Occupy Wall Street movement but makes it palatable and understandable to a far wider swath of voters. She is provocative and assertive in her critique of corporate power and the well-paid lobbyists who protect it in Washington, and eloquent in her defense of an eroding middle class."
On her Website, Warren says, in a no-nonsense style:
"Middle class families have been chipped at, at hacked at, squeezed at, hammered for a generation, and I didn't think Washington gets it. I'm going to do this. I'm going to run for the United States senate and the reason is straight forward...I grew up on the ragged edge of the middle class and I know it's hard out there. I fought all my life for working families and I've stood up to some pretty powerful interests."
That may sound like the political spin of the moment, but she's got the deeds to back up the words.
Here's another Campbellian touch. Like Athena, she's a warrior. But while the Greek goddess hurled a war cry at the heavens, Warren spoke to Congress in measured terms. She was effective as the point woman in arguing the case for the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So effective, in fact, that Barack Obama thought he couldn't appoint her to head the agency she basically created because she'd been so tough. (I wish he'd just have said, "Screw it, she's my choice, and if you don't like it, you can shove your opinions up your keester!" But that's another conversation.)
Warren will have a tough opponent in Scott Brown, who is handsome, likeable, and moderate (for a Republican.) He's no dummy. He romanced the Tea Party for a while but scratched them from his dance card once he got elected. Right wing lunacy doesn't fly in Massachusetts.
But this time, it's the woman, not the guy, who has the experience and the résumé, and, by the way, is no slouch in the cojones department.
It's been a long dry spell, but at long last, Massachusetts Democratic women think they have a winner.
Boston University professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Dr. Rosalind Barnett, of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children (Columbia University Press)]]>Blood, Marble and Dr. Kingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10139972011-10-19T16:07:00-04:002011-12-19T05:12:01-05:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
We Americans tend to turn our heroes into marble, but too often this near-beatification can erase the memories of blood, sweat, tears and death. Not too far from the King memorial, the seated Lincoln looks serene and wise, but his life was anything but. The carnage of the war he had to endure tore this nation apart. And, like Dr. King, his life was ended by a homegrown assassin.
I remember a time when Martin Luther King wasn't a statue or a national holiday. I remember when he was called "Martin Luther Coon," tossed into jail, and hated and feared by many in high places, and not just in the South. As a young reporter, I was one of a few women journalists at a press briefing in 1964 by J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI. We asked him a question about Dr. King and he said that the civil rights leader was "The most notorious liar in the country."
We reporters looked at each other, stunned, and asked if the comment was on the record. Hoover said that it was, and it became front-page news the next day.
We were all aware that Hoover thought King was a communist, or at least a tool of communists. What we didn't know was that he had agents keeping King under constant surveillance. In 1963, a month before the March on Washington, the FBI Director filed a request with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to tap King's and his associates' phones and to bug their homes and offices.
Thanks to the surveillance, Hoover was in possession of tapes of Dr. King that revealed his liaisons with white women. Hoover had voluminous files on the sex lives of many prominent Americans, which he reportedly used to keep his longtime grip on power. To this day I vividly remember Hoover's appearance as he made his statement about Dr. King. His jaw was set in a hard line; his roundish, lined face and the narrowing of his eyes gave him the appearance, I thought, of an angry bulldog.
I covered Dr. King when he met JFK at the White House, and I walked along Constitution Avenue as King and many of his associates marched to the Lincoln memorial, a bright sun and the shade of the trees dappling the procession in darks and lights. At the memorial, I soaked my tired feet in the waters of the reflecting pool as King gave his enduring, "I have a dream" speech. I remember thinking, naively, of course, that this was to be the beginning of the end of racism in America. Who could hear those soaring words and not welcome them?
Lots of people, alas. Dr. King was murdered in Memphis where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers. But the movement that he and so many others lived and died for resulted in the civil rights act, the voting rights act, the end of Jim Crow, and ultimately to the first black president of the United States
The cost of all this was high; Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway, four little black girls blown up by a bomb in a Birmingham church, three civil rights workers -- two white and one Black -- James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Michael Schwerner shot to death and their bodies buried in an old dam in Mississippi. As well, there were scores of other deaths, lynchings, brutal beatings, homes burned, children terrorized.
I often think back to that day in Hoover's office and reflect on the fact that although Dr, King was felled by an assassins' bullet, in the end, King won. I feel that quite personally. My son is an FBI agent, who works proudly beside African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians (of both sexes) in rescuing hostages taken by cartel thugs, keeping an eye out for those who would bring weapons of mass destruction to our shores or loose mayhem on law abiding citizens. It's not Hoover's FBI anymore.
But I worry that we as a society may be forgetting how hard it was to make the advances that we did in the wake of King's life and death and how far we still have to go. Our culture seems to have selective amnesia about the turmoil of those times. Recently, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour said that things weren't really all that bad in the state during the civil rights era -- that, in fact the White citizens councils kept the Klu Klux Klan in check. I covered those councils, and I can assure you, racial equality was not on their dance card. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, it was "a hate group that routinely denigrated blacks as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called gay people "perverted sodomites," accused immigrants of turning America into a "slimy brown mass of glop," and named Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, 'Patriot of the Century.'"
There is a tendency in popular culture to rewrite our history as more racially benign that it actually was. Recently, I saw the summer blockbuster Captain America and watched as heroic black American soldiers fought alongside whites to thwart the Nazi menace in Europe. I was glad that black actors got good parts, but I wonder how many kids who see the movie will ever know that the U.S. army was rigidly segregated until after the war, when president Harry Truman ended segregation in the ranks.
And while Hollywood loves World War II movies, it's odd that one of the great steps forward in our history, the civil rights movement, seems barely to exist for cinematic drama.
The best selling novel, The Help about a white woman and black maids in the South during that era has been made into a new movie. But as Nelson George writes in the New York Times, (Black and White Struggle With A Rosy Glow) "the film's candy-coated cinematography and anachronistic super-skinny southern belles are part of a strategy that buffers the era's violence. The maids tell of the risks they are taking, but the sense of physical danger that hovered over the civil rights movement is mostly absent."
I remember that sense of danger -- in the riots on the eastern shore of Maryland, in the veiled menace in the voices of Citizens Council members -- and in the steely contempt in the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover.
So I am glad that Martin Luther King stands not far from Jefferson near the Tidal Basin, in Washington. As was said about Lincoln, "Now he belongs to the ages."
But we should remember what lies beneath all the white marble. We came to racial justice in turmoil, tears, death and incredible courage. We did overcome, but the process was very, very hard, and it is not over.
We must not forget those facts, even in the midst of all the pomp and ceremony swirling around the new memorial.
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author of "The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children. "]]>Co-education Is Good Sciencetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9926552011-10-04T17:00:00-04:002012-07-23T16:26:35-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
For years, self-appointed gurus have been successfully promoting single-sex classrooms in public schools, arguing that they boost achievement and help children.
Leonard Sax, head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and best-selling author of Why Gender Matters and Michael Gurian (The Wonder of Boys) have been pushing the single-sex agenda. They speak before huge audiences of teachers, parents and school administrators and are the darlings of the media, drawing extensive coverage in which their statements about "science" are generally accepted as fact.
The single-sex movement in public schools has been growing fast. According to the New York Times, there were only two single-sex public schools in the mid-1990s; today, there are more than 500 public schools in 40 states that offer some single-sex academic classes.
They argue that "there is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students' academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism." The lead author on the piece was Professor Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College, past president of the American Psychological Association (APA).
The Science piece is right on target. For the last three years, I have been tracking this issue with Dr. Rosalind Barnett, senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis for our book, The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children.
We've looked at the claims for single-sex schools and find that many are just plain wrong. For example, both Sax and Gurian argue that the brains of boys and girls are so different that they should be parented and educated in very different ways. But research does not support such assumptions. After an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from childhood to adolescence, neuroscientist Lise Eliot found "surprisingly little evidence of sex differences in children's brains." Eliot is an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and one of the authors of the Science article. In her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Eliot accuses Sax and Gurian of pushing shoddy science.
Sax has argued that girls hear better than boys, so you have to yell at boys and speak softly to girls. Gurian claimsthat few girls have the proper brain structures to do high-level math and science. There is no credible evidence for either claim.
But schools that believe this stuff are setting up very different classrooms for boys and girls. For example, in a middle school is Alabama, teachers ask children to use highly gendered words in writing assignments. The Mobile Press Registerreported in 2008:
"Pencils in hand, the sixth-grade girls were encouraged to use as many descriptive words as possible as they wrote about their dream wedding cake. Would you like chocolate or vanilla? What colors should the icing be? Is 30 inches too big for the bottom tier?"
Down the hall, the boys in another sixth-grade class were asked one by one to give examples of action verbs used in sports. "Throw. Sack. Slam. Intercept. Applaud."
In South Carolina, girls are taught chemistry by analyzing cosmetics. And the state has set the goal of having sex-segregated classrooms available to every child within five years.
In a Seattle Times column, the reporter writes, uncritically, "In a classroom, male brains zone out easily unless teachers know how to keep them glowing. Boys need to move around; the teacher needs to be louder and more animated, for a start. "
In fact, research finds that a teacher of boys does not have to be louder and more animated than a teacher of girls, The tiny and insignificant differences between girls' and boys' hearing have no educational significance whatsoever.
It's correct that boys need to move around. But so do girls. Data from a series of recent studies by Professor Charles Hillman of the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign indicate that aerobic fitness is related to better performance on school-based achievement tests of mathematics and reading. Physical activity may increase students' ability to filter out extraneous noise and pay closer attention to the critical cues and act upon them.
We asked Dr. Hillman if there were any gender differences in his findings. He said there were not.
"We have never found sex differences in our work. We have included sex as a variable to investigate this question and never found support for it."
The Science authors cite research findings that "The strongest argument against SS education is that it reduces boys' and girls' opportunities to work together in a supervised, purposeful environment. When teachers make children's sex salient, students choose to spend less time interacting with other-sex peers."
In a world where men and women increasingly toil side by side in the workplace, getting to know and appreciate the opposite sex is important. A Canadian study found that girls in co-ed classes were more confident about expressing their views in front of male peers than girls in single-sex classrooms. And students in co-ed schools were more likely to say that their peers respected the opposite sex.
Under the Bush administration, the secretary of education relaxed provisions of the Title IX rules against unequal resources in education to allow more public single-sex classrooms. The authors of the Science article are calling on the Obama administration to rescind these changes.
Given the fact that there is little to no evidence that single-sex classrooms in public schools improve academic achievement, such a move makes sense. And, the authors add, "Funds spent on training teachers in nonexistent 'gender-specific learning styles' could be better spent on training them to teach science, mathematics, and reading, or to integrate boys and girls more completely in the learning environment."
Amen to that!
Boston University professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author, with Dr. Rosalind Barnett, senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis, of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our
Children (Columbia University Press)]]>Americans As Welfare Queens? It's a Dangerous Right-Wing Narrativetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9225882011-08-15T10:51:00-04:002011-10-15T05:12:02-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
In a recent Time essay, "One Nation, on the Dole," former New Hampshire senator John Sununu wrote, "The dirty little secret about America is that being on the dole is no longer the exception but the rule." Recipients of government programs, he says, "chuckle all the way to the bank."
It's a compelling story, and one the news media often parrot, but the data show it's a false one -- at least for American workers. The recipients of corporate welfare may be chuckling, but the rest of us are working our butts off. Over the past decade, studies have shown that American workers are on the job for more hours than their European counterparts. In 2006, Forbes reported that "[t]he average American works 25 hours a week; the average Frenchman 18; the average Italian a bit more than 16 and a half. Even the hardest-working Europeans -- the British, who put in an average of 21 and half hours -- are far more laid-back than their American cousins." If we Americans have our hands out, we're not getting much. According to a survey by the Institute for Health and Social Policy, based at McGill University, the U.S. lagged behind all high-income countries by not mandating so much as a single day of paid leave. The U.S. is the only country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. Most countries offer guaranteed paid leave for family emergencies; the U.S. offers only unpaid leave.
If you look at the U.S. budget, the bulk of our government spending other than defense goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that keep our elders and low-income citizens free from sickness and stark poverty, and our kids (and the rest of us) healthy. The Congressional Budget Office reports that more than 60 percent of the budget is spent on defense, Social Security and federal health care combined.
This wasn't always so, especially in our early days.
When Thomas Jefferson called for a nation of hardy, independent farmers and tradesmen, "heath care" was just a matter of genes and luck. In the colonial era, 50 percent of all children died before reaching adulthood, and 50 percent of children lost at least one parent. Whole families -- and whole towns -- were wiped out by infectious and parasitic diseases, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, bronchitis and gastrointestinal infections, as well as such lethal diseases as cholera, smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid fever. Women died by the thousands of "childbed fever" because those who delivered their babies didn't know what germs were and that they caused infections.
The real story is that today, we are paying for the success of our own brainpower, not for needless "frills." In Jefferson's day, government spent just about zero on health care; there wasn't much it could do, and the Grim Reaper made the decisions about people's health -- or lack of it.
It wasn't until the 19th century that government entered the picture in a major way, creating piped-in clean water and sewage systems. In 1885 the cholera organism was identified in water via the microscope and could be contained by public health officials. We finally figured out that doctors and midwives were the major killers of women simply because they didn't wash their hands. The 20th century saw mass public health campaigns, vaccinations of nearly every child and widespread use of antibiotics to control infection. We saw the proliferation of sophisticated technologies to detect disease, such as MRIs, and an ever-expanding array of drugs to control it.
In the colonial era, life expectancy for Americans ranged from the 20s to the early 40s. Today it's 78 years.
But this doesn't come cheap. Tea Partiers look back with nostalgia to the colonial era as a time of freedom and small government, but would they accept rampant cholera, whooping cough and typhoid, along with a nicely chiseled tombstone at about age 40?
The real narrative of the U.S. today is that of a hard-working, overworked people trying to cope with the stress of globalization, job loss and recession. We rely mainly on our own initiative and hustle but look to government to keep the safety net intact when we are old, out of work through no fault of our own, disabled or sick.
We have to ask if we want to go back to the Hoover era, where only the rich were secure, or if we want to battle for the more just and decent society that we have created with our new medical technology through our government. Maybe wealthy white men like John Sununu want to go back in time, but not the rest of us.
The fact is that only government has the resources to keep the modern medical miracle alive and working for all of us. New technology and, above all, better health decisions and prevention by all of us will help bring down the cost, but we are an aging society, and it will not be cheap.
Social Security and Medicare work, and hopefully the new health care system, with its pilot programs, will create new economies of scale and ways to keep costs in control.
But the right-wing narrative makes it easy to slash the safety net for "lazy, entitled" people while keeping the privileges of the rich untouched and pushing the nation's wealth ever upward into a tiny corner of the population.
Language is politics, George Orwell said, and we need to adjust the national narrative to reflect reality, not right-wing fantasy. ]]>Virtuous Political Women? Maybe Nottag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8823672011-06-22T17:19:59-04:002011-08-22T05:12:02-04:00Caryl Rivershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/
It's argued that women are more moral than men, "hardwired" not to stray from their mates. The old limerick puts it this way:
"Higamus hogamus, woman's monogamous.
Hogamus, higamus, man is polygamous."
But is it true? Not really.
Women in positions of power are not necessarily more virtuous than men -- they are just a lot more scared and careful.
Social science data tell us that women and men are more alike than different in their extramarital behavior. One major study of extramarital affairs found that, overall, 23 percent of males strayed, as compared to 12 percent of females. But for those under forty (the prime dating years), there were no differences between the sexes -- roughly three percent for each.
In a National Opinion Research Center poll at the University of Chicago of 3,432 adults, a fourth of the men and a sixth of the women had had at least one extra-marital affair -- not a major difference.
But from time immemorial, sanctions against female sexuality have been far more stringent than sanctions against straying men. Know a guy who wore The Scarlet Letter? Remember any male "chastity belts?" Did men ever have their feet bound so that women could indulge their foot fetishes?
The need to control female sexuality is powerful, explainsNew York Times science writer Natalie Angier:
Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary--if they disobey their 'natural' inclination towards a stifled libido...all the laws, customs, punishments, strictures, mystiques and anti-mystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature, the female libido.
A look at the 2008 presidential campaign is instructive. When Hillary Clinton appeared on the Senate floor with a tiny hint of cleavage, the press went wild. You'd have thought she'd done a pole dance in the chamber.
According to Media Matters for America, from 9am to 5pm ET on July 30, MSNBC gave 23 minutes and 42 seconds to segments discussing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's "cleavage." CNN devoted 3 minutes and 54 seconds to the story, while Fox News devoted none.
CNBC's John Harwood thought it was all part of some master plan. "When you look at the calculation that goes into everything that Hillary Clinton does, for her to argue that she was not aware of what she was communicating by her dress is like Barry Bonds saying he thought he was rubbing down with flaxseed oil," he said on Meet the Press.
The press seemed to regard everything that Hillary did as if she were Lucrezia Borgia, even when she was picking out her wardrobe for the Senate. Most women realized she probably downed her morning cup of coffee, walked to her closet and grabbed a top to wear under a jacket, hoping she'd look pulled-together, but hardly planning some Clausweitzean strategy.
Conservative women seem to get a bit more latitude in the glam department, but there's an underside to that as well.
As Newsweek writer Julia Baird noted, while the media seem to applaud conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann for being sexual objects, it bashes progressive women leaders for their supposed failure to do the same. Progressive figures such as Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and, of course, Hillary Clinton, faced countless sexist attacks in their rise to high profile media attention. And the "smokin' hot" conservatives are subtly put down. Baird noted:
It's odd to see how some men insist that when women start to grasp power, we should think of them primarily as playthings and provocateurs. Is this the best way to explain their success? They aren't challenging the status quo. They're being wild! They're not trying to lift the ban on offshore drilling. They're being naughty!
But can you imagine what would happen if Sarah Palin snuck away from Todd and dallied with, say, an Alaskan wilderness guide or a conservative radio host? Would she be forgiven even by her zealous fan base?
Right or left, women are cautious. Nancy Pelosi is often pictured on the web as the Wicked Witch of the West, gripping her broomstick. Could she possibly retain her seat in Congress if she had an affair, like Louisiana senator David Vitter, who got reelected after frequenting prostitutes? Newt Gingrich can dump not one but (count 'em) two ailing wives and still be considered a viable presidential candidate. No woman could ever get away with that.
Even the mildest display of something remotely sexual by a political woman draws outrage. Consider Michelle Obama wearing a sleeveless dress and displaying her well-toned bare arms. Once again, the press acted like she'd appeared in a thong. "Obama's Choice to Bare Arms Causes Uproar," gasped ABC News. The Chicago Tribuneopined, "A woman who bears her arms in front of the U.S. Congress, in winter... may well have texted an invitation to the nation to discuss her biceps." David Brooks of the New York Timessaid "She's made her point. Now she should put away Thunder and Lightning."
Women are acutely aware of a deep unease among men of the combination of female sexuality and power that stretches far back into history. The legendary Medusa caused men to drop dead at one glimpse of her face. Odysseus was so afraid of getting lured to his death by the sirens that he tied himself to the mast. Lady Macbeth combined femininity and murder, and when women practiced the healing arts, they were branded as witches. Some 400 women were burned to death in one day in medieval France.
While man is thought to be the cornerstone of what is human, rational, normal and real, and is seen clear, standing in the sunlight, woman is like the shadows in Plato's cave. She is seen through the male imagination, desired, dreaded, loved and loathed, misunderstood, puzzled over, worried about. Sigmund Freud, after all, did not ask, in a quandary: "What does a man want?"
If woman in her essence is seen as nature, in her sexuality she is seen once again through the prism of the male imagination. Critic Vivian Gornick writes:
Deeply interwoven in the fabric of this cultural cloak is the image of woman: woman, the temptress, woman the slut, woman the heartless bitch--luring men eternally towards spiritual death, making them come up against what they most fear and hate in themselves, pulling them down, down into the pit of themselves.
Or, there's a simpler fear, aptly voiced by Tucker Carlson of MSNBC when he said of Hillary Clinton, "When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs." One image that appeared often on the web was of Hillary holding a "Testicle lock box."
Political women are acutely aware that whatever they do, they will get a higher level of scrutiny and disapproval of their personal life than men do. And in this age of the Internet, where nothing seems to be personal or private, they have to be extra careful. You don't actually have to be a nun to run for office, but it doesn't hurt to behave like one.
Caryl Rivers is the co-author of the forthcoming book for Columbia University Press, The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children.]]>