Claire Gordon2013-05-22T08:16:10-04:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=claire-gordonCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Claire GordonGood old fashioned elbow grease.Gun Control Debate Amongst African-Americans Involves Complicated Historytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-18T09:21:04-04:002013-03-18T09:45:33-04:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
Roy Innis knows this all too well. Two of his sons were killed with illegal guns, one in Harlem, and one in the South Bronx.
Innis is the national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the oldest civil rights organizations. He considers the NRA a civil rights organization too, which is why he sits on its board.
"Who are the people who are the prime victims of gun violence?" he told The Huffington Post. "People in south Chicago, in Harlem, in South Bronx, in Washington D.C. But very few of these people, if any, have legal guns."
It's a striking trend, particularly since the black leadership has traditionally led the charge for gun control. The National Urban League is a member of The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and few organizations have put as much legal muscle behind the gun control fight as the NAACP. African-Americans are also less than half as likely as whites to own a gun, and they're far more likely to prioritize gun control over gun rights.
But while African-Americans on either side of the debate agree gun violence is a scourge in the inner-city, they disagree on another vital fact: whether gun control hurts more than it helps.
Guns As Black Tradition
Targeting blacks is a new turn for the gun rights movement, but the arguments they're using are not. For decades, black opponents of gun control have also been fighting their cause under the banner of civil rights, although their ranks have dwindled.
Armed self-defense had a critical role in the civil rights movement. In certain southern states, black-armed groups would guard voter drives and the homes of civil rights leaders. In her landmark reports on lynching, Ida B. Wells, a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women, wrote, "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home" for the "protection which the law refuses to give."
When Rosa Parks and her husband began organizing activist meetings in their home, she claims she had no place to put the refreshments "with the table so covered with guns." Even Martin Luther King, Jr. applied for a concealed firearm permit, after his house was firebombed.
This tradition has shaped the politics of many black gun rights advocates. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said her defense of the second amendment is rooted in memories of growing up in Birmingham, Ala., when her father and his friends would guard their streets against white terror groups.
A Good Guy With A Gun
For many blacks, gun control is an emotional issue. "When we talk about gun safety, gun violence, we say, 'My kids should have a right to go to school without being shot,'" Hilary Shelton, the Washington bureau director of the NAACP, told The Huffington Post.
It's already much harder to buy a gun legally in many black communities. In Chicago, for example, gun stores are banned, as are assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. In Washington D.C., all guns must be registered, and it's almost always illegal to carry a firearm.
But violence in the poorest parts of these cities remains stubbornly high. Gun control proponents say the laws are too limited, while gun rights advocates claim they've only further concentrated guns in the hands of criminals. Innis believes one of his children could have been saved, if an armed good Samaritan had been standing by.
"The only thing that's going to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," says Micheal Cargill, a black gun shop owner in Austin, Tex., who only applied for a concealed gun license after his grandmother, who decided to get a nursing degree at the age of 70, was mugged and raped on the way home from the library. Cargill said he faced hostility from friends and neighbors when he started his business. "It's not typical in the African American community," he said. "It's something frowned upon."
The need for self-defense is often felt more acutely in neighborhoods, where there's the sense that the police will take a long time to come, or may not come at all.
"These black people living in these hyper-ghettos feel like they're on their own," says Yale University sociology professor Elijah Anderson, author of the classic "Code of the Street," who's spent most of his adult life studying these communities.
"To protect yourself from criminals, to protect your daughter, to protect your son, you have to show this person in no uncertain terms that if the police don't deal with you, I'll deal with you. I'll kick your ass," he told The Huffington Post. "This is a decent person who goes to church. An old lady who's 65 years old, who has a gun."
Gun Rights As Citizenship
For many black gun rights activists, policies that disarm minorities eerily echo old racist claims that blacks were unfit for citizenship. Throughout the country's history, it's been harder for minorities to get their hands on firearms.
Black gun rights advocates often point this out, from the explicitly racist gun laws of our early republic, to racially suspicious laws, like bans on cheaper guns, stricter regulations in black communities, and the major 1968 gun control act, which came on the heels of several race riots.
Even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion overturning the Chicago handgun ban, detailed the long history of whites disarming blacks. Thomas' defense of gun ownership was so fervent that an op-ed in the Washington Post called it "straight from the heart of Malcolm X."
This line holds a clue as to why black pro-gun voices are so marginal today. In the 1970s, black arguments for armed self-defense were often confused with calls for black violence. In response, civil rights groups like the NAACP distanced themselves from the pro-gun wing of the movement to gain wider support with whites, according to Nicholas Johnson, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, who's writing a book on the black tradition of gun ownership.
The strategy worked, he says. And when those groups found a home in the Democratic Party, they ditched the pro-gun talk altogether. Today, race beats gender, age, geography, and politics as the most powerful predictor of whether an American owns a gun.]]>Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, 48, Retires, Suggests He's Too Old For The Jobtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-01-17T08:19:01-05:002013-01-17T08:19:10-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
That's the story we often hear. But that's not the story of Jack Ma, the 48-year-old CEO/billionaire of China's largest e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba Group, who announced Tuesday that he was stepping down in the spring and taking up the mantle of chairman.
He wrote in an email to employees:
I want to encourage our young leaders to step forward to ensure a smooth transition. At 48, I am no longer 'young' for the Internet business. The next generation of Alibaba people are better equipped to manage an Internet ecosystem like ours. I believe they understand the future better than I do.
Although he's a few years shy of 50, Ma is convinced that he no longer has sufficient pluck to steer the ship. "When I was 35, I was so energetic and fresh-thinking," he said, "I had nothing to worry about."
The news comes less than a week after Ma announced the most serious restructuring in his company's 13 years. He decided to break up the group into 25 units, to ensure that it can keep pace with the e-commerce industry. Ma emphasized that the move would keep the management team intact, reported TechCrunch, but in light of Ma's retirement plans, any manager over 50 may suddenly feel a little less than welcome.
Ma has lots of interests to fill up his post-Alibaba decades, as he told Bloomberg Businessweek: tai chi, traditional Chinese medicine, environment protection, and private equity investment, to name a few.
Of course, most Americans don't have Ma's net worth of $3.4 billion (nor do several countries). So most Americans don't have the luxury of retiring as soon as they feel their thoughts lose their freshness. Over half of adults 50 to 64 say that they may delay their retirement, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center poll, and another 16 percent said that they expect to be working until the end of their days. A Wells Fargo study found that 30 percent of middle class Americans said 80 was the new retirement age.
But Silicon Valley isn't like most of America. While younger minds might be more adaptable to the tech world's rapid flux, many in the industry also straight-out discriminate against older workers, preferring the sneaker-wearing wunderkind. It's "100 percent due to the new, young, tech startup mindset," one San Francisco employment attorney told Reuters, noting that he has received many calls from folks who feel like they're the victim of age discrimination -- who are in their early 40s.
]]>Travis Iosue, Sex Offender Appearing On 'Our America With Lisa Ling,' Tries To Restart Lifetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-08-07T17:09:22-04:002012-08-07T18:09:51-04:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
Diane admits that her son, at age 17, probably had the maturity level of a 12-year-old.
But she couldn't believe what the police in Round Rock told her when they knocked on her door on September 1, 1995. At a neighbor's house the night before, Travis had asked a 10-year-old girl to sit on his lap, and then touched her on top of her shirt "for sexual gratification," according to police records.
"I'd Rather Be Dead"
Travis accepted a plea deal -- though he claims he's innocent -- which offered him five years probation instead of a lengthy prison sentence for indecency with a child. Within a month of cutting the deal, he violated his probation, which mandated that he couldn't hang out with minors, and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars.
He was released last December, having served 16. In the show, "Our America with Lisa Ling," Ling follows Travis during his first free days as an adult, which have proven to be filled with barriers. Finding housing and a job are nearly impossible for someone who's a registered sex offender.
Travis is just one of more than 720,000 Americans who have their name, birth date, address, and an up-to-date photograph publicly listed on the sex offender registry, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In Texas alone, there are over 70,000.
Nicole Pittman, the Soros Senior Justice Advocacy Fellow at Human Rights Watch, has interviewed hundreds of registered sex offenders over the last couple years, and told The Huffington Post that the most common comment she hears is "I'd rather be dead." The second is "I'd probably have a better chance at a second chance if I'd murdered somebody."
"It's a true comment too," Pittman said.
Finding A Home And A Job
One of Travis' first challenges was finding a place to live. He wanted to move in with his mother, who for 16 years kept his childhood room perfectly preserved. But nearby, a school bus stops to pick up kids in the morning, and Travis, now 34, isn't allowed to go within 500 feet of places where children commonly gather. So Travis moved into a halfway house.
Travis was put on parole, with a GPS monitor strapped to his ankle, and only allowed outside for work, doctor's appointments, and essential shopping. All of Travis' movements -- even doing his laundry -- must be pre-approved and put on a schedule.
Finding a job is hard for any registered sex offender, especially someone like Travis, whose work experience is limited to two weeks at Taco Bell in 1994. Travis began spending four or five days a week at the Texas Employment Commission -- not the closest one, because there was a daycare there -- but one a couple extra bus rides away.
And while Travis' mental illnesses are no longer so severe, 16 years in Texas penitentiaries have created other health problems.
Inmates aren't kind to the child molesters in their midst, and Travis was a particularly vulnerable target. His nose was broken, and he can't breathe through it very well anymore. His front teeth were kicked out. His eye socket was broken, so he has a metal plate above his left eye to keep his eyeball in place. His right clavicle was broken, as was his right hand, and forearm, and shoulder. He thinks he suffers hearing loss, and memory loss too. His mother told HuffPost that she worries his heart beat is too rapid. He gets dizzy sometimes.
Innocent, Until Pleading Guilty
"Sometimes it's like chains around my knees and it hurts every time I walk," Travis told Lisa Ling about all his restrictions. "But I can't complain because it's better than prison. But I can complain because I shouldn't be here in the first place."
Travis still claims he never touched the girl. But after six months in jail awaiting trial he said was desperate to get out. His lawyer offered him a plea deal -- five years probation instead of prison time -- that sounded reasonable. Desperate to go home, 17 year-old Travis accepted against the urgings of his mother. His decision backfired, because he was in trouble again just weeks later.
He got busted for hanging out with two teens -- a violation of his probation -- even though he was underage himself.
In Pittman's survey of 200 registered sex offenders, 85.6 percent took a plea, and more than half said they weren't told that this meant a lifetime on the sex offender registry.
Diane thinks his court-appointed lawyer, Randy Lepley, was anxious to finish the case. She said he pressured her son into entering a plea, even though two kids at the scene of the alleged crime wrote signed affidavits saying they didn't see Travis do anything wrong. Lepley couldn't be reached for comment, and no longer practices law in Texas. He resigned his license in 2004, after the state Supreme Court found him guilty of professional misconduct.
It's impossible to know for sure what happened that day in 1995. Ling spoke briefly with the victim's mother, who said her daughter is still traumatized. The victim's father, however, said he believes his daughter may have grossly exaggerated what took place. He said she considered going to authorities a few years ago to change her story, but was worried she'd be arrested if she did.
Back In Prison
Travis could petition to get off the registry, but such attempts are rarely successful, according to researchers tracking sex crimes.
That's a costly option and Diane doesn't have the money to hire a lawyer. All of that will have to wait anyway, because Travis is back in prison.
He broke his parole twice in 24 hours in May. In the first violation, something triggered his ankle alarm in the middle of the night and his parole officer accused Travis of taking too long to respond to it. The following day, he broke the rules again, by having an unscheduled 20-minute birthday celebration with his family on the halfway house's grounds. He'll be serving 60 to 90 days.
"What normally happens is you get re-arrested," says Pittman, about newly released sex offenders. "In less than a few months, you're back in prison for a technical violation."
Diane is hopeful that her son will restart his life: get a job, maybe even a girlfriend. But she believes the system is stacked against her son. "I feel like these people are determined not to provide him with the tools to be successful," she says, "but to strip him and demean him so he can't be successful."
The "Labeled For Life" episode of "Our America With Lisa Ling" will air Tuesday, Aug. 7 at 10 p.m. E.T. on the Oprah Winfrey Network]]>Act Up's 25th Anniversary Offers Chance To Reflect On AIDS Activism's Evolutiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-04-26T12:37:39-04:002012-04-27T13:42:21-04:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
Veterans who had not attended the group's regular Monday meetings for a decade returned for Tuesday's demonstration, staged jointly with Occupy Wall Street. Their march through downtown Manhattan called for the creation of a tax on financial speculation, a tiny assessment on such trades that would go to health care and treatment of people with HIV or AIDS. At the rally's climax, police dragged away 19 protestors in green pointed Robin Hood hats; some had chained themselves hip to hip across Broadway by Wall Street, blocking access.
Some 20-somethings showed up, too, and the old-timers considered them a much-needed infusion of young blood into the group's graying ranks. From 2006 to 2009, the HIV infection rate spiked 48 percent for young black gay and bisexual men.
Few observers would dispute that the activists who first gathered at Manhattan's Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center in 1987, "outraged by the government's mismanagement of the AIDS crisis," swiftly built a movement that spread across the country and around the world; they helped usher in a striking number of changes in a mere quarter century: a lowering of the price of drugs, a transformation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval process for them, the inclusion of people with AIDS in drug-trial panels -- and a diminishing of the disease's stigma. As result, many people's lives were saved or dramatically lengthened.
"The reason Act Up was able to do what it did was because their demands were so targeted," Todd Gitlin, an expert on social movements at Columbia University, told the Huffington Post. "As long as they got a hearing from top government officials, they could win on the strengths of their arguments."
One member who recalls the early days, Mark Milano, was floored when he walked into a recent Manhattan meeting, slightly late because of his chemotherapy treatments.
"This is big! There are actually a lot of people here!" he told The Huffington Post. "The phoenix has risen once again! We were never dead, but we've been reinvigorated," said Milano, who was was first diagnosed with HIV in 1982 and joined Act Up in 1988.
HISTORY OF A MOVEMENT
Many of the old guard will tell you, though, that the Act Up of today isn't the Act Up of the late 1980s. That angry and focused group was fighting for drugs because people were dying.
Twenty-five years ago, gay men in New York City felt they couldn't afford not to focus. Every day a friend, lover, cousin or the guy downstairs was diagnosed; reports circulated that there was an 80 percent chance that they would all die within two years. There was no cure and no treatment. Half of Americans thought people with AIDS should be quarantined and 29 percent thought they should be tattooed, according to an Los Angeles Times survey that year.
But by the early 1990s, the group began to splinter. Some members of Act Up drifted away, engaging in more mainstream activities: They formed advocacy groups or joined government agencies. Many members died; others suffered burnout.
And then in 1996, the drug cocktail that activists had prayed for arrived, transforming HIV and AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic disease. "Drugs came along that made them feel like they could live their lives," explains Ann Northrop, who joined Act Up in 1988. "And so they went away."
AIDS and HIV was no longer a death sentence hovering over white, urban gay communities. The face of the disease in the United States increasing became black, Latino and female. Today, HIV is the third leading cause of death for black women, ages 25 to 44. In other parts of the world, millions lacked treatment and were dying from the disease; dedicated members of Act Up focused the group's energies there.
In more recent years, the group disrupted Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign so as to push the Clinton administration to stop sanctioning poor nations that produced generic HIV and AIDS drugs. In 2001, activists staged a "die-in" with cardboard tombstones at the D.C. headquarters of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and managed to pressure drug companies to sell their products in African countries at cost.
"Those people were genuine heros," says Jim Hubbard, who began filming the activities of Act Up a few months after it formed and whose documentary "United in Anger" is now being shown on a worldwide tour.
Over the years, the goals of the group have evolved to become more sweeping and varied. The chants changed from "Drugs in bodies" to "Money for AIDS" and then "Health care access." For its 20th anniversary, Act Up rallied for universal health care. This year the group championed a financial speculation focus.
THE NEW ACTIVISTS
Over the past five years, New Yorker Frank Susa, who's in his 30s, has watched as more than 10 of his friends have been diagnosed with HIV. Like many other young, talented and terrified gay men over the past two decades, he recently decided to join Act Up. In recent months he pitched in to help out with the anniversary festivities.
Soon the 15-year communications veteran become the coordinator of the communications committee. Susa had not before participated in any AIDS activist work but suddenly he was playing a key role in organizing this week's anniversary protest, which some members hoped would be the country's biggest demonstration in years.
Recently with an eye to coalition building, some Act Up members have suggested tackling an even broader range of issues, including job creation and climate change.
But others like Susa, with newly diagnosed friends, feel a global catchall approach would come at the expense of the issues he cares most about like disease prevention. "You are confusing the message," he wrote in one email to his committee. "We are a small grassroots organization and we should focus, focus, focus."
"These debates have been going on since the beginning," Hubbard says. "There have always been strong advocates for one position or another in Act Up. It's good to have that tension."
Today some veteran gay activists say that Act Up has survived long past the usual expiration date of an activist group. Indeed the group's artifacts have already been enshrined like historical relics, featured in two new documentaries (Hubbard's and "How to Survive a Plague") and two recent exhibitions of its distinctive design work.
But Act Up is still a living, breathing movement. Members like Milano who have been gathering together every Monday for a quarter century know that activism isn't a neatly laid-out program but rather a messy activity, directed by ordinary people's particular passions and limited by their manpower.
"We've been to those meetings for 25 fucking years. Do you know how much of a drag that can be?" Milano says. "And I see the same old, wonderful, crazy Act Up I've always seen for 25 years."
Below see a slideshow of classic Act Up posters and flyers.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correct the name Gay and Lesbian Service Center to be Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center. The institution has now changed its name to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center.]]>LGBT Discrimination Protection Sought: Advocates Push For Executive Ordertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-02-07T16:04:00-05:002012-02-07T16:04:54-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
Now advocates are hoping President Obama will do something similarly radical for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, and make it illegal, by executive order, for any company contracted by the federal government to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.]]>Weight Watchers Ad Reflects French Attitude Toward Dietingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12252392012-01-23T19:22:11-05:002012-03-24T05:12:01-04:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/"conquer" hunger and "show it who's boss." American viewers might be surprised, then, by the company's latest French commercial, which features models with metallic or glitter-encrusted lips gnawing on a chicken leg, french fries and even a sardine.
The ad's tagline "Treat Yourself Better" is in keeping with the Weight Watchers mantra that dieting shouldn't mean deprivation, but the imagery pushed this idea outside the comfort zone of some American viewers. One U.S. blogger called it "creepy" and "phallic" and another "Dieting Dentata," which walks "a weird line between empowering and degrading."
At the very least, it seems in line with the French philosophy towards food, as represented in and proselytized by books like "French Women Don't Get Fat." The idea is that food should never be a guilty indulgence and that maintaining a slim physique by no means involves skipping pastries and Merlot -- or, it seems, chicken legs, french fries or sardines.
Given how closely it seems to fit its national context, the new commercial suggests that the way diets are advertised in other countries might reflect those countries' specific attitudes towards dieting. Here's a look at recent diet ads in various nations and what they could be saying about how intentional weight loss is viewed in those places.
WATCH: 7 Diet Ads From Around The World
]]>Sensitive Men Found In These Ten Cities, Claims Chemistry.comtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-01-20T10:50:20-05:002012-01-20T10:51:28-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
The online dating site Chemistry.com recently attempted to answer that question. The site scanned its male users' responses to a 56-question personality test designed by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the site's chief scientific advisor and a professor at Rutgers University.
In order to compile the results, the site looked at one statement respondents were asked to confirm or deny on the test: "I am very sensitive to people's feelings and needs." All of the respondents who "strongly agreed" were then grouped by city. Ta-da! A map of where the sensitive menfolk are, or at least of menfolk who think they're sensitive. (See the results below.)
Fisher told The Huffington Post that the men who strongly affirmed their own sensitivity also tended to be "traditional, conventional. They follow the rules, they respect authority, they're meticulous and orderly." And when it comes to relationships, "They want to behave. They want to do it right," she said. "They're the least likely to go racing off on a honeymoon. They want their friends to like the person. They value the rules of courtship." These men tend to have a personality type she has dubbed "The Builder," she said, and they tend to be drawn to women with personalities similar to their own. (Another type, the Negotiator, likes to date high-testosterone Directors, and vice versa, said Fisher. That, she said, is why Hillary and Bill Clinton are well-matched. "Hillary is the tough one," said Fisher. "Bill is the squishy one.")
A characteristic several of the top 10 cities share is a high percentage of minority residents, but when asked whether more diverse cities might encourage men to be more sensitive, Fisher was skeptical. She said she believes sensitivity, like many traits, is largely genetic and so can't be created or destroyed by the demographics of a person's hometown.
"Can you make a curious person uncurious?" she said. "You can [punish] them every time they ask a question, but can you really make them less curious?"
Many of the cities on the list also sway politically liberal, in stark contrast to the areas around them. Fisher said that while Builders with their traditional values were more likely to be Republicans, they can be "cautious liberals." Using as an example a man in her own life, Fisher said, "He's a wonderful guy, He's very cautious, very traditional in the way he handles his friends. But he's a Yellow Dog Liberal."
So according to Chemistry.com, if you are seeking a mate who is a) male, b) sensitive, c) likely to enjoy ethnic diversity and d) probably a "cautious liberal" or happy living around liberals, here's where to look:
SLIDESHOW: The 10 U.S. Cities With The Most Sensitive Men
]]>Men And Women's Differences Extend To Personality, Study Claimstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-01-09T17:56:07-05:002012-01-09T17:56:39-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/Public Library of Science website saying they've found that men and women feel and behave in markedly different ways. They're almost like "different species," Paul Irwing, one of the researchers, told The Huffington Post.
The research, conducted by Marco Del Giudice of Italy's University of Turin and Irwing and Tom Booth of the UK's University of Manchester, involved getting 10,000 Americans to take a questionnaire that measured 15 different personality traits. According to their analysis, men are far more dominant, reserved, utilitarian, vigilant, rule-conscious, and emotionally stable, while women are far more deferential, warm, trusting, sensitive, and emotionally "reactive." The two sexes were roughly the same when it came to perfectionism, liveliness, and abstract versus practical thinking.
"If you translate it into the simplest terms," said Irwing, "only 18 percent of men and women match in terms of personality profiles, and that's staggeringly different from the consensus view."
The consensus view, most persuasively set out in a 2005 study by Janet Shibley Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, demonstrated through a meta-analysis of 46 other studies that men and women were actually very similar, not only in personality traits, but in other realms of supposed gender difference, like self-esteem, leadership, and math ability.
In the early 1970s, Hyde became one of the first researchers to focus on the psychology of women. "Before that, psychology had been a psychology of men," Hyde told The Huffington Post, and many theories had been developed based on entirely male samples. So she began to study women, and the differences between women and men, and was surprised at how small those differences turned out to be. "I mean, I was trying to study difference," Hyde said.
Hyde says the final figure Irwing, Del Giudice, and Booth came up with -- the "global sex difference" -- is "really uninterpretable, it doesn't mean anything."
In past studies on this topic, researchers would simply add up all the survey responses, according to Del Giudice. This led to imperfect results because of careless responses and misreadings. Through a sophisticated method called "structure equation modeling," the researchers claim they were able to remove this random error. When asked if he could translate this concept for a lay person, Irwing replied: "I teach courses on this and it takes me approximately 20 hours."
Past research also usually compared one variable at a time, Del Giudice said. He believes this method led to underestimations of the sex difference because when you actually combine all personality traits, with all their small discrepancies, the result is a much more significant difference. For example, if you were to examine the difference between men and women's body types using the traditional method, you would look at torso circumference and waist-hip ratios and torso-leg ratios, one by one. In Del Giudice's method, you would crunch all these figures into one much larger number. And that's what he did with personality.
"They kind of globbed together all these personality dimensions and said there was a big difference," Hyde said. "They're throwing together apples and oranges and dishwashers to get this thing in 15-dimensional space. We don't know what 15-dimensional space looks like."
But Del Giudice contends that his team didn't measure "a haphazard list of traits." Rather, they considered 15 facets that could offer a reasonably complete picture of a person's personality.
Irwing thinks that some researchers in the past may have been biased in their methods, in order to reduce any gender difference. "It's for totally laudable reasons," he said. "People are very concerned, or were very concerned, that women didn't get equal opportunities, and that there was a lot of bias in selection processes."
"People are afraid that studies like ours will turn the clock back," Irwing added.
Hyde is one of those people. "This huge difference is not only scientifically false," she said, "it has unfortunate consequences for places like the workplace and education and heterosexual romantic relationships."
But the authors stand by their results, and are currently drafting a lengthy response to Hyde's objections. "I think distorting science because of what you would like to believe, or because of what you think the political consequences are, is very dangerous," said Irwing.
The study doesn't speculate as to whether the alleged differences are due to nature or nurture, although Irwing points out the results are consistent with standard evolutionary theory. Even if these differences aren't indelibly printed in our genes, Hyde believes there's still cause for alarm.
If men and women have wildly different personalities, "then how can we do the same job men can, and deserve equal pay for equal work?" she asked. "A married couple have marital difficulties, and they go to the therapist, who says 'he's from Mars, you're from Venus, you'll never be able to communicate. It's hopeless.' If you have a gender similarities point of view, you just need to work on communicating." ]]>Demi Moore To Play Gloria Steinem in 'Lovelace'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11822172012-01-03T19:01:45-05:002012-03-04T05:12:01-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/Inside Deep Throat" took a look at the movie that brought skin-flicks into the mainstream. But the film failed to probe one of "Deep Throat"'s most provocative side stories: Linda Lovelace, its star, claimed her on-screen fellatio was in fact real-life rape. A new biopic "Lovelace" will now bring her version of events to the big screen, with the help of Amanda Seyfried, Sharon Stone, James Franco as Hugh Hefner, and Demi Moore as the chic black-clad icon of second wave feminism, Gloria Steinem.
Feminist activists are rarely given the Hollywood treatment, and Demi Moore is, in some ways, an unlikely woman for the job. While Steinem spent the last almost 40 years trying to break down stereotypes about women, Moore certified herself as the ultimate bad girl stereotype, the druggie, promiscuous antidote to fellow Brat Packer Molly Ringwald. Steinem went undercover as a bunny at a Playboy Club and exposed its horrendous working conditions. Moore played a single-mom-turned-erotic-dancer in the 1996 film "Striptease." The actress then took a six-year sabbatical to be a real, full-time smalltown mom, and with her marriage to Ashton Kutcher in 2005, Moore gave the not-necessarily-good-for-womankind archetype of The Cougar a very recognizable face.
But Moore has also done her part for women. When Annie Leibovitz photographed her naked and seven-months pregnant for the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair, Moore transformed late-term pregnancy from moo moo-shrouded frump into something one could proudly and sexily display. Because of her fierce demands for fair compensation, studio executives dubbed her "Gimme Moore," a type of slander familiar to many ambitious females. And after Moore returned to acting and eluded what is known for actresses in Hollywood as the post-40 curse, she began tweeting furiously about sex slavery, on behalf of her anti-trafficking foundation.
In many ways, Moore was a fitting choice to play the lone female in the Wall Street inner circle in 2011's "Margin Call." Hollywood may be the one climate more toxic to middle-aged women than the testosterone-heavy high rises of lower Manhattan, and Moore has survived the former with tenacity. After @MrsKutcher filed for divorce, some speculated that her brand might be the better for it. The boy candy kept her image young, but too young perhaps for some of the grittier parts now doled out to actresses at the edge of 50.
For Moore, the role of Steinem might be that part. It's not a leading role, but playing Steinem in a biopic would take a lot more energy and finesse than one likely has after a massive public humiliation. You can see how Moore could play the outward Steinem with relative ease -- always entering battle glamorous and poised and taking sensationally unpopular positions (her defense of Linda Lovelace among her most controversial).
This could be another case of Moore playing at feminism (see "G.I. Jane") or it could be the perfect role for Moore to come back into her own -- a more sophisticated version of it.
]]>New Year's Resolutions: Women Less Likely To Give Up Drinking, Smoking, Survey Findstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-01-01T17:20:08-05:002012-01-02T15:36:28-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
Men and women have different priorities for self-improvement, according to a survey of 230 adults conducted by The Huffington Post through the online survey services SocialSci and Mechanical Turk. Participants were asked to answer questions about their resolution-making habits, including which resolutions they have made in the past.
According to the survey, women were more likely to resolve to spend more time with friends (61 percent to 49 percent), to have more fun (69 percent to 64 percent), and to be more organized (74 percent to 66 percent). Men, on the other hand, were more likely to resolve to work harder at their jobs (73 percent to 67 percent).
The survey also showed that female participants were less likely than male participants to want to quit smoking or scale back their drinking. Men, by their own confession, succumbed to both these vices more. Fifty-eight percent of the male respondents considered themselves drinkers, and half of them reported having been at some point fairly regular smokers, compared to 46 percent and 33 percent of the women, respectively. But 63 percent of the male smokers had resolved in the past to ditch the habit, compared to 53 percent of the female smokers. And 60 percent of the men who drank had pledged to restrict their intake, which dwarfed the 14 percent of women who drank who had vowed to do the same.
It could be that men who smoke and drink consume greater quantities than smoking and drinking women and are more concerned about getting their indulgences under control. After all, in the U.S. men are twice more likely to be alcoholics than their female counterparts. Or it could be that women are just more committed to their hedonism, or are less likely to admit to themselves when they are doing something unhealthy. Alcoholism and drug addiction programs have pointed out that women are less likely to acknowledge their substance abuse problems.
The desire to get organized makes sense given the fact that women who have a child under six at home spend an average of four and a half hours a day on housework and childcare, according to a 2010 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Men in the same situation spend less than two and a half. Add it up, and women have the equivalent of an extra four months of eight-hour work days per year. It seems logical then that more women would be interested in getting organized, making their homes less chaotic and home care more efficient.
Men's greater desire to work harder may confirm the old idea of man-as-breadwinner, or it could reflect concern about their income in this economy. Twice as many men as women lost jobs in the recession (although women are losing more in the "recovery"). And while women still earn less than men on average, men have suffered a greater cut to their paychecks in the last few years. In the so-called "crisis of manhood" that has followed, it's little surprise that more men have vowed to work doggedly in the coming year.
Men and women did share some resolutions for the new year, according to the survey. For example, women were only slightly more likely to resolve to lose weight in the coming year (57 percent to 54 percent). With two thirds of adult Americans overweight or obese, the desire to lose pounds is not exclusive to one gender, particularly when you're asking people the week after a holiday that has overeating as a central theme. Significantly more women did vow, however, to up their exercise (78 percent to 70 percent), perhaps because men already exercise more (except for married men, who sweat it out less than single women).
Men and women also reported in almost equal numbers wanting to be more patient (73 percent), to spend more time with their romantic partners (60 percent for men, 61 percent for women), and to spend more time with their kids (59 percent of mothers and 57 percent of fathers).
But women made all of these resolutions more often than men, according to the survey. Sixty-three percent of the female respondents said they make resolutions every year, compared to just over half of the men. Women were also more likely to tell others about their resolutions. Ninety-three percent of the male respondents said they keep their resolutions to themselves some or all of the time, compared to 82 percent of the women. The tradition of making resolutions might serve as a collective slate-cleaning, an expression of our hopes for ourselves as men, women, and people. But it also seems to be a very private one.
RELATED VIDEO:]]>Anne Sinclair Named France's "Woman Of The Year," Reveals Different Perception Of Political Wivestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2011-12-20T11:15:31-05:002011-12-20T11:21:42-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/Larry Craig's wife, very dark sunglasses?
Here, she's a modern age tragic figure. In France, however, she is apparently a heroic one.
In a CSA poll conducted for the online women's magazine Terrafemina, the French public named Anne Sinclair, the wife of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, France's Woman of the Year.
Strauss-Kahn's scandal was as sordid as they get, although the charges were eventually dropped due to doubts about the accuser's credibility. Sinclair stood by her man more staunchly than most, as she had for years before allegations made by a Sofitel Hotel housekeeper cost him not just his post at the IMF, but also his expected nomination in the 2012 French presidential election. Before the two wed, Strauss-Kahn allegedly told Sinclair that he was "an incorrigible skirt chaser." Among Sinclair and Strauss-Kahn's social milieu, France's left-of-center elite, the IMF chief was well-known as "an aggressive and incessant groper of women."
In 2006, when a newspaper asked Sinclair if she was embarrassed about her husband's reputation, she replied: "No, I'm rather proud of it." And when the news first erupted that Strauss-Kahn had allegedly attempted to rape a hotel maid, Sinclair hopped a plane to New York, paid the $1 million bail, the $5 million bond, and bought a $50,000-a-month house in Tribeca, according to the Daily Beast. Fortunately, Sinclair's grandfather was the art dealer for Picasso, Braque and Matisse, and her inheritance is rumored at around $200 million.
Sinclair defended her husband's innocence while he sat behind bars on Rikers Island, and months later, she returned with him to Paris, the two of them wearing matching smiles. And she stood by his side in the months that followed, as he dealt with another sexual assault allegation from a young French writer, rumors that he had orgies with prostitutes, and a general consensus that he was a chronic sexual harasser.
If Sinclair were American, journalists might have tried to uncover the "simmering frustration" they saw hidden under Hillary Clinton's "choreographed tranquility," when news of Bill's philandering first emerged in 1994. Commentators might have tisked at her like they did at the poor, misguided wife of Eliot Spitzer, when she said in an interview: "The wife is supposed to take care of the sex. This is my failing; I wasn't adequate." Producers might make a hit TV drama about her.
But Sinclair isn't a woman who inspires pity -- or seems to pity herself. She doesn't appear to be the kind of woman who would ask in her memoir, "How had I failed as a wife?" as Elizabeth Edwards did in "Resilience."
Perhaps her unflappability has something to do with the fact that her popularity predates her marriage. One of France's most beloved on-screen journalists in the 1980s and 90s, Sinclair was more famous than Strauss-Kahn when she interviewed him on her show in 1989. With a natural gravitas, an easy charm, and a bright blue mohair sweater, she could coax secrets from the most high-powered men, and stole at least one of their hearts.
But Strauss-Kahn's public disgrace during the past year has skyrocketed Sinclair to far greater popularity. For the Woman of the Year honor, she beat out Christine Lagarde, who replaced Sinclair's husband at the helm of the IMF, as well as the French first lady (and singer and Woody Allen cameo actress), Carla Bruni. For Sinclair, it's perhaps a bittersweet triumph, a reminder of how close Sinclair and Strauss-Kahn were to becoming France's first Jewish couple-in-chief. Polls showed that 52 percent of the French Republic wanted them in the Elysee Palace.
The French aren't more unfaithful than Americans. In her 2007 book "Lust in Translation," Pamela Druckerman conducted dozens of interviews on infidelity in 10 different countries and found that the French may even cheat less than people elsewhere. But they are more tolerant of the idea.
A May Gallup poll that asked participants which behaviors they consider the most morally reprehensible, Americans ranked an extramarital affair at the very top (91 percent), beating out polygamy, cloning humans, abortion, andrsuicide. Another Gallup poll conducted in 2008 found that less than a third of Americans would be willing to forgive a spouse for infidelity.
In France, affairs are more widely accepted as a fact of many marriages. "Anne Sinclair is both a heroine and a kind of anti-heroine for women in France," said Terrafemina spokeswoman Veronique Morali. "Women look at the problems they face in their own lives and seem to identify with her."
Perhaps the problem they identify with is one identified by France-based American journalist Michael Johnson, who has confessed his own infatuation with Sinclair. Johnson wrote earlier this year in The American Spectator that Strauss-Kahn proved the old adage: "Show me a man who is married to a beautiful woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of sleeping with her." ]]>Christian Group Recalls Pink Bibletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2011-12-15T16:31:20-05:002011-12-15T18:23:50-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
The "Here's Hope Breast Cancer Bible," which included favorite passages from scripture, plus testimonies from breast cancer survivors, was sold at Walmart stores and other major retailers. $1 of the $24.99 spent on each bible went to Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, the largest breast cancer organization in the country and inventor of the now ubiquitous pink ribbon worn to indicate support for breast cancer patients, survivors, and research.
Last week, pro-life websites began expressing outrage over the Bible, reports The Tennessean, since some Komen for the Cure affiliates give grants to Planned Parenthood to provide breast cancer services. Planned Parenthood, as everyone in American has been told, a lot, also performs abortions.
"While it may be a tempting purchase as an inspiration gift for breast cancer sufferers, especially at the Christmas season, wrote Susan Tyrrel, the editor of LifeNews, "it's a donation to death."
LifeWay Resources, the Southern Baptist group that published the Bible, relented after receiving three dozen complaints. LifeWay president, Thomas Rainer, now says the whole thing was a blunder.
"Though we have assurances that Komen’s funds are used only for breast cancer screening and awareness, it is not in keeping with LifeWay’s core values to have even an indirect relationship with Planned Parenthood," he said in a statement.
Komen for the Cure allows its 120 affiliates across the country to provide funding to organizations in their area that provide breast cancer education, screenings, treatment and support, according to a statement. This includes 2,000 centers that serve low-income or uninsured women, 19 of which are Planned Parenthood clinics.
"Under no circumstances are Komen funds used to fund abortions or other non-breast services," the organization states. If during one of their biannual reviews, any clinic is seen to violate this policy, they would be disqualified from any more Komen for the Cure money.
LifeWay had pledged $25,000 to Komen, according to a spokesman. "I don't think it is very Christian to take money from poor women who were... receiving mammograms with that money," Darlene Jacobs, a Komen supporter, told The Tennessean.
Pro-life opposition to Komen for the Cure is nothing new. Back in 2006, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis stated that it couldn't support participation in anything that would benefit the foundation, since it endorsed embryonic stem cell research, denied studies that linked abortion to breast cancer, and of course, provided funding to Planned Parenthood.
"Donors cannot control how an organization designates its funds. Therefore, money donated for a specific service, i.e. breast health care, directly frees up funds to support other areas of an organization’s agenda, i.e. contraception services, “safe” sex education and abortion services."
This was a popular argument during this year's debate on whether to de-fund Planned Parenthood. The organization's 800 clinics receive a total of $75 million federal funds every year, which can't go towards abortion.
It's a tragedy that a good cause, which almost everyone can agree on, still has the power to divide. On the one side, passionate pro-lifers are alienated by Komen's connection to an organization that also performs abortions. On the other side, Planned Parenthood provides vital services to the women who most desperately need it.
"I don't think it is very Christian to take money from poor women who were... receiving mammograms with that money," Darlene Jacobs, a Komen supporter, told The Tennessean.
This certainly isn't the biggest controversy the Bible's ever faced. But the Good Book's evidently still got it; with just a splash of Pepto-Bismol pink, it managed to become a fault line of one of today's most bloody culture wars.
RELATED VIDEO:]]>Nerve.com Launches Algorithm-Free Online Dating Sitetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2011-12-15T11:39:44-05:002011-12-15T17:15:16-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/OkCupid knows that online dating is still a very unnatural act. You scan the stranger's profile, wittily riff off of their listed interests, insert a few choice questions, and acknowledge how weird the whole thing is (using the words "sorry," "apologize," and "awkward" in your first message ups the likelihood of reply). Nerve.com hopes to make this whole experience less stilted, and on Wednesday launched its new love portal, Nerve Dating.
It isn't Nerve.com's first foray into online matchmaking. Nerve Personals were also intended to "energize the world of online dating" over a decade ago. Rufus Griscom, who co-founded the site, told the New York Press then that on Nerve you'd "be able to go online and say, 'I'm looking for someone who loves Faulkner, hates their mother..." It was "literate smut" for the affluent and college-educated lonely heart.
But the internet has changed in the past ten years, and Nerve is apparently trying to change with it. The new site has no pleading personals, no questionnaires, no algorithms, according to the New York Times' "Bits" blog. Nerve Dating takes the hint from Twitter and Facebook, and allows potential romancers to break the ice through a flowing stream of public updates. You can go onto the page "What did you do last night?" and see if someone's yesterday strikes your fancy. In the "Opinions" section, you can check out other users' thoughts on culture, sex and dating, or other soul-stripping questions, like "The Ghostbuster I most relate to is…"
And if you want to message someone, it'll cost you $20 a month. Sean Mills, the CEO of Nerve, told the Times that the fee serves as a filter that "benefits everyone on the site."
Nerve Dating isn't the first matchmaking site to integrate social networking features. That honor in fact goes to OkCupid, which allowed users to write journal entries, create quizzes, and instant message prospective paramours. Many dating sites have followed. Zoosk, which started as a Facebook app, is run exactly like a social network, and took home $90 million last year. Heartbroker lets you set up your Facebook friends.
Many have pursued the dream of making online dating less awkward. Grouper sets up three girls and three boys with info gleaned from their Facebook profiles, based on the logic that a "social club" is less potentially horrifying than a blind date.
On Grindr, users meet each other based entirely on physical proximity. So your message doesn't communicate, "I'm really into you." It means only, "I'm here, you're here, what do you say?"
In years past, online dating sites vied for domination based on the genius of their algorithms. eHarmony bragged about its 258-question personality test, which is responsible, it claims, for nearly 120 weddings a day. A sociologist devised the algorithm for Perfectmatch.com, while Chemistry.com is founded on an algorithm designed by an anthropologist well-versed in neural chemistry.
These websites took on the role traditionally occupied by families, churches, and clubs. When it came to love, they knew better than you. But the younger set is rebelling against this top-down matchmaking and its invisible mechanizations.
That could be because the younger generation has been raised on social media, and finds the frozen profiles and secret behind-the-scenes workings of many dating sites uncomfortably old school. The majority of the users on eHarmony, on the other hand, are over 35, and are less likely to be fluent in the ways of the social web.
"The story of online dating has become about algorithms and not about having fun with people online," said Mills. "We're moving away from the algorithm era into the social era. This is a dating site that reflects how the Web has changed."
Singles in their 20s and early 30s are also often looking for good times more than "the one," and so prefer the freedom to pick their partners. If these people reach 35, and the instant messages and status updates have failed to garner a true love match, then maybe that they'll admit defeat, throw up their arms, and surrender themselves to the almighty algorithm, too. ]]>Men Are Fearful, Just Conceal It Better Than Women: Studytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2011-12-14T14:29:36-05:002011-12-16T09:39:02-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/women hide their aggression, lust, and other qualities once considered masculine in order to fulfill the feminine ideal of a chaste and gentle peacemaker. But far less work has been done on whether men conceal their feelings, perhaps because researchers assumed men had no reason to. Women repressed their sexual, violent, and power-hungry urges, the conventional wisdom went, while men let it all hang out.
Mixed martial arts is a modern day pay-per-view blood sport, and after interviewing 121 of its most ferocious competitors, and spending two years with them at gyms, weigh-ins, competitions, locker rooms, and after-parties, Vaccaro discovered that these guys are afraid. Very afraid.
Well aware of the broken bones, damaged organs, detached retinas, and, in at least two cases, fatal brain injuries, that U.S. competitors have sustained during fights, not to mention the public humiliation of losing, the men complain about "nerves" and "pre-fight jitters" before matches, and sometimes choke down the urge to throw up. One or two back out of every fight, Vaccaro found. But you'd never know any of that watching Larry, one of the fighters in the study, enter the arena pounding his fists, as "Born in the USA" roars over the speakers, and yell "I'm taking this fucker to school." But Vaccaro discovered that Larry, like the rest of his well-muscled co-competitors, has elaborate strategies for turning fear into blinding bravado.
The study suggests that contrary to stereotype, men aren't necessarily less fearful than women. They just don't express their fear openly, in much the way women may hold back their anger and agression.
But there also may be a biological element. When faced with something frightening, men's bodies actually respond more strongly: their blood pressure rises higher, their adrenaline spikes more, and they produce a little extra sweat. Women's physical reaction isn't nearly so marked.
According to the psychologist Shelley Taylor, men have an innate fight-and-flight response to threats, while women are more likely to "tend-and-befriend." Women's bodies are flooded with oxytocin (the "love hormone"), which calms any extreme adrenal freak-out. Instead, women worry about the threat, and seek out friends and family to protect them and help themselves cope.
This tendency to worry is important: instead of being more fearful than men, women may just be more anxious about being afraid. Their response is more cerebral. This may help explain why men get more of a kick out of watching horror, or entering a cage where they may be beaten violently. A burst of testosterone-adrenaline probably provides more of an enjoyable high than the anxious urge to reach out to your social network for support and safety.
Fear is known as one of the most complex human emotions -- a muddle of genes, hormones, and social norms -- but Vaccaro's study illuminates another layer: the ways in which we express or hide our fear in an attempt to embody a certain identity. Mixed martial arts competitors may appear like fearless monster-men when they enter battle, but that is because they want to appear like fearless monster-men. The terror is there -- men just put a lot of work into appearing as though it isn't.
RELATED VIDEO:]]>New York City Schools Pressed To Get Rid Of PCBstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2011-12-13T09:40:39-05:002011-12-13T16:09:43-05:00Claire Gordonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-gordon/
In New York City, 754 schools have fluorescent lights that are likely tainted with PCBs, according to the city's School Construction Authority. The substance may be leaking into the air and building up in the bodies of teachers and children. At first, city officials denied there was a health risk. Now they acknowledge that there is one, but say it will take ten years to remove all the potentially toxic lights.
"It's so scary," says Chapman. "My daughter is 10. When she's in her child-bearing years she's going to have PCBs in her system. It seems like they're choosing policy over our lives."
The Environmental Protectional Agency has recommended all of the old lights be replaced in a maximum of five years, as has New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) has said the timeframe for replacement should be two to five years. A year ago, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights firm that has worked closely with advocates to remove PCBs from schools, said it should be two years.
Parents, women's health activists, environmentalists and lawyers have been holding rallies to pressure Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to act faster. On Monday, more than a dozen elected officials gathered together with other concerned parties on the steps of City Hall. "ABCs not PCBs," they chanted, when Bloomberg made a surprise -- and brief -- appearance.
"Our plan to replace light fixtures in nearly 800 school buildings is unprecedented compared to other cities, and PCBs are a nationwide issue,” Natalie Ravitz, director of communications for the NYC Department of Education, told The Huffington Post via email.
Miranda Massie, the legal director of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, said in response, "The fact that children are being poisoned elsewhere is not a morally attractive argument."
AS BIG AS LEAD OR ASBESTOS
The problem of PCBs in schools isn't limited to New York City, but advocates there have been the most aggressive about it. The chemicals were a popular component of construction materials and electrical products made from the 1950s to 1977, when they were banned and labeled as probable carcinogens. Schools that were renovated during the period PCBs were being used likely have caulk on windows and doorframes, and ballasts, electrical devices commonly found in fluorescent lights, that contain PCBs.
"It seems like every week a new study comes out that makes the hair on your back stand up," says Massie.
The dangers of ingesting PCBs, specifically through fish, have been known for a long time. But the risks of being exposed to PCBs through air were discovered relatively recently. The fact that outdated construction in schools is endangering children gives the issue an especially tragic twist, experts say.
"You're exposing your kids to a chemical that affects their ability to learn," says David Carpenter, director of the SUNY Albany Institute for Health and the Environment, who has published dozens of studies on PCBs. "They're a little less bright, a little less attentive, a little more frustrated and angry."
The news of PCBs in schools broke quietly in the U.S. In 2004, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found PCBs in the caulk that frames windows and doors in Boston-area schools. A father in upstate New York happened upon the research, and had some scraps of caulk at his son's school tested. The PCB levels in the sample were 350 times over the federal limit of 50 parts per million. That led to the first PCB school cleanup in the country.
In 2008, the New York Daily News decided to investigate whether PCBs could be a problem in New York City too. A reporter took caulk samples from nine schools, and lab tests found unacceptably high levels of PCBs in six of them.
GETTING TESTED
After campaigning for over a year to get the city to test schools officially, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest sued in September of 2009. The city and the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to conduct a pilot study of five schools. It was the first official PCB investigation in any school system in the U.S.
The first three schools tested in summer 2010 showed dangerously high levels of PCBs. Although the inspectors were originally just looking at caulk, they discovered an unexpected culprit in an old model of lighting, known as T12 fluorescent lamps. Advocates were surprised to learn that as many as 564,000 of these fixtures -- the first ever form of fluorescent lighting technology -- were still hanging, aging, and possibly leaking over their children's heads.
"The anticipated shelf-life of these fixtures is way past due," says Massie. "They're antiques."
An EPA spokeswoman said the results were an "immediate cause for alarm," and that the lighting fixtures should be removed on an "expedited timeframe." The agency issued new recommendations last December, urging all schools to replace old PCB-leaking lights immediately.
This led to a stand-off between the EPA and the city. Then Deputy Mayor for Education Dennis Walcott, now the city's schools chancellor asked the EPA to reconsider its conclusion, writing in a letter that the "theoretical risk of health impacts is too low" to justify what would be a $1 billion undertaking with "dire consequences" for the city's schools.
"EPA does not agree with your characterization of the potential health risks," replied Judith Enck, the EPA's regional administrator. With regards to the $1 billion estimate, she wrote: "We have no understanding of how this figure was arrived at."
Over the following couple of months, the EPA effectively bypassed the city administration, taking 145 samples of leaks from seven other school buildings. Investigators found that 93 percent of the tested classrooms were contaminated. One school in Brooklyn had two samples at one million parts per million. The ballast oil was found to contain 100 percent PCBs.
A TEN-YEAR PLAN
In February, the mayor's office announced that it would allocate $708 million to replace all old T12 lights in schools over the next decade. This might seem like an impressive commitment for a city saddled with a multi-billion dollar deficit. But the Bloomberg administration has planned to replace T12s for years.
Last year, the US Department of Energy banned the production of T12 ballasts altogether. Next year, T12 lamps will meet a similar fate. A 2009 local law requires the city to perform energy audits in all public schools, and since more modern fluorescent lamps are at least 22 percent more energy efficient, T12 lamps must be replaced.
"It is always cost effective to retrofit or replace fixtures that use T12 lamps in existing applications," said a 2005 report New York Lawyers for the Public Interest sent to the New York City Department of Design and Construction. Replacing all the lights will have an impact equivalent to removing more than 40,000 cars from the road, according to a mayor's office press release.
Massie argues that news of pervasive PCB contamination has prompted no special urgency or generosity, just a "PCB gloss" on an old energy plan.
The Department of Education defended its timeframe as "an aggressive, environmentally responsible plan that will cause minimum disruption to student learning."
But New York Communities for Change, a coalition of working families from low- or moderate-income communities, the kind that can't easily send their kids off to private schools, doesn't think it's aggressive enough. Last month, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest filed a lawsuit on the coalition's behalf.
Community members and advocates no longer believe that the city will deal with the issue honestly. They complain that officials have lied about the health risks, hidden the causes, concealed the names of schools known to be contaminated and proposed a plan that looks suspiciously like something that already existed.
"I can't believe this will actually take ten years. The Department of Education is going to be very sorry," says Chapman, who has booked a CT Scan and blood tests to see if PCBs can explain her daughter's recurring illness. "We're talking about hundreds of thousands of families in these schools." ]]>