At first glance, the GawkerStalker cell phone picture of 14 year old Gossip Girl star Taylor Momsen wearing a short skirt on a subway is just creepy. I mean, can it just be possible for a girl to ride a subway without being groped, oggled or have pictures taken of her for a snarky gossip blog? And on second, third and fourth glance…it’s still really creepy. But once you get over the creepiness, or at least just accept it, this has to be one the most surreal blog posts ever. Why is it surreal and not just gross?

Taylor Momsen plays Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl. What “Gossip Girl” refers to in the show is a blog written by an annoymous sleuth who reports on gossip among Upper East Side teens. In the show, what often happens is that some teen will take a picture of one of the main characters in a compromising situations — say Serena buying pregnancy tests. The tipster sends the picture to Gossip Girl, and within minutes, the picture and an explanatory caption show up on her blog and is sent out to the cell phones of the “Upper East Side Elite.” “Gossip Girl” is basically a small scale version of Gawker for this make believe universe.

Coming back to real life, Taylor Momsen was in a compromising situation — wearing a short skirt while sitting on a subway — and a sleuth took a camera-phone picture and sent it off to the gossip blog.  The only signifigant difference between real-life and TV in this case is the name of the person involved — Taylor Momsen instead of Jenny Humphrey.  Surely Jean Baudrillard or Marshall McLuhan would have had some profound insight into this seminal moment in media cross-pollination and self reference, but I just think its weird.

I really don't want to sound insensitive about something I literally have no experience with, but is it really worth writing an entire news story about how the HPV vaccine shots hurt?  I mean, I haven't gotten the shot, but I've gotten hepatitis shots somewhat recently, and sure, the injection site was sore for about a day and for a few hours I didn't have full movement in my arm, but it wasn't anything for the AP to get all excited about. Here's how the AP describes the standard reaction to the vaccine:

The pain is short-lived, girls say; many react with little more than a grimace. But some teens say it’s uncomfortable driving with or sleeping on the injected arm for up to a day after getting the shot.

It doesn't seem like girls are having a special reaction to this shot or that it is significantly different from other vaccines. Is it really any surprise that the media would focus on the painfulness of a shot that is given nearly exclusively to teenage and pre-adolescent girls?  I think it's pretty irresponsible for the AP to breathlessly report a 180 person increase in vaccine shot related fainting among girls in the past year, especially when 100 percent of the new cases came from this new vaccine that was only mandated and prescribed this year. 

PS: Amanda Marcotte has a good cultural/feminist analysis of the entire "shots hurt" story. 

According to the New York Times, if you're a young professional woman, you spend a lot of time on the phone with your mom. Hours. Like six hours. Four times a day.

Dr. Gadsden, of the University of Pennsylvania, said that if mothers are orchestrating their daughters’ lives and regularly attempting to take away the hurt, they could be turning them into overly needy adults.

“Parents over the last 25, 30 years have been far more indulgent than they necessarily needed to be with their children,” Dr. Gadsden said. “Some problems have to be solved by yourself.”

I talk to my mom several times a week, but not everyday. And when we do talk, it's usually for at least 15 minutes or half an hour, and often much longer. My male friends have remarked that I seem particularly close to my mom. Well, yes. I'm an only child and my parents are divorced, so we have been each other's main supports for years. But I see similar relationships between many of my female friends and their mothers, regardless of family dynamics. I think our cultural assumptions about young adult's relationships to their parents have certainly shifted, so much so that one friend of mine recently said she feels uncomfortable when she tells people she doesn't feel that close to her mother.

This Times article is gender-specific, but we've seen plenty of coverage of parental "hovering" over both male and female college students via cell phones and email. Do you think it's really about delayed marriage and increased technology? Or does our generation, many of us raised by children of the sixties, really have better, closer relationships with more "with it" parents? How often do you talk to your parents?

That was the title of my panel yesterday at the Campus Progress National Student Conference, which featured Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com, Aimee Thorne-Thomsen from the Pro-Choice Education Project, economist Randy Albelda from UMass-Boston, and political scientist Jennifer Lawless from my alma mater, Brown University. There's already been some discussion of the panel here, with the critique that only one speaker (Aimee) adequately addressed the intersection of race with class and gender.

While Aimee may have sparked many of those discussions, I don't think I'm speaking only for myself when I say that as a young feminist intent on expanding our movement, I think about intersectionality (of race with gender, of class with gender, of sexuality with gender) constantly. I'm a hetero white woman though, so I'm not always the best person to talk about these issues myself. That's why I rely on other women to teach me, and that's exactly what happened yesterday.

All in all, I think the panel was one of the most vibrant and funny conversations I've seen at a conference in a long time. Here are some of my unanswered questions and thoughts as I went over the event in my mind:

1. Aimee urged us to stop using the word "choice" (since not all women have the same choices) and talk about reproductive rights and reproductive justice. Here, here. Does that mean Aimee's awesome Pro-Choice Public Education Project might change its name?

2. I was struck by how many question askers were using feminism as a form of self-help, just like Jessica writes about in Full Frontal Feminism. From boyfriends and male roommates who don't carry their weight at home to conservative families who just don't get it, everyone wanted to talk about how to bring their personal life more in line with their feminist political consciousness. Ladies, I hear you. We all struggle with this everyday.

3. Kudos to Jennifer for being the change she wanted to see in the world and running for Congress against an anti-choice Democrat. She put up a great fight, even if one guy did liken her to a "babysitter." I loved Jennifer's comment that leadership qualities aren't "male" -- but both the men and women who achieve leadership tend to have similar, go-getter qualities that have traditionally been encouraged in men and discouraged in women.

4. Thank you Randy for bringing along a presentation with some powerful statistics: 40 percent of women are earning less than $30,000 annually. Think about that number. And then think about supporting a few kids.

One of the experiences I associate most closely with puberty is the beginning of cat-calls. I can remember clearly the very first time it happened to me: I was walking home from a friend's house at dusk and a car with a few men in it slowed down to a crawl and shouted at me. I don't remember what they said. My first feeling was fear. My second thought was that this meant I was now more of a woman than a girl. While that may have been briefly exciting, it wore off fast. Ever since, I've had to accept cat-calling as an annoying, gross, and scary side effect of WWF (Walking While Female).

I want to thank Ann Friedman for this excellent post taking apart a new Washington City Paper spread on cat-calling here in DC. A coworker put the City Paper on my desk this morning and suggested I read the pieces, but I avoided doing so, knowing it would open up a can of worms. I do applaud the City Paper for tackling this topic, and yes, it will be good for men to learn that what a woman wears has little to do with how much harassment she gets on the street. But I agree with Ann that the pieces are overly sympathetic to harassers and too focused on women's choices of where to live and what to wear...

Can you imagine a person who's been robbed being barred from using the word "rob" at his assailant's trial? How can you tell a jury your wallet was stolen without using the word "steal?"

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick writes of a Nebraska judge who has banned the words "rape," "assault," "victim," "assailant," and "sexual assault kit" from a rape trial. The victim says that after sharing a few drinks with a man in a bar, she blacked out, and awoke the next morning in the midst of being raped. But the only language left for her to use in the courtroom to describe this act is "sex" or "intercourse." As Lithwick points out, these are words that imply mutual consent. Is it any surprise the trial resulted in a hung jury?

The victim in this case is Torey Bowen. She has said, "This makes women sick, especially the women who have gone through this. They know the difference between sex and rape."

Why do we treat rape victims differently from the innocent victims of any other crime? 

A reminder yesterday from Ben that all conservative cultural critiques have reactionary sexual politics at their core. Proselytizing for suburban sprawl, Reagan administration veteran Ron Utt

was once quoted in The New York Times denying that the sedentary lifestyle of suburbia contributes to obesity. Instead Utt points his finger at the washing machine, arguing, "you're fat for a lot of reasons, like the fact that you don't do laundry by hand."

It's just like a Heritage Foundation fellow to romanticize the days when soiled clothing was laboriously beaten with a paddle, scrubbed on a washboard, and then hung out to dry. It was women who did that work, both for their own families and as wage workers. And as anti-sprawl author James Howard Kunstler points out in Geography of Nowhere, it is women who so often get stuck shuttling children to and fro five times a day in our sprawling, car-dependent suburbs. The landscape of the 1950s all too often promotes the values of the 1950s.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision on pay discrimination is disastrous. Employees must file complaints within 180 days of a salary being set, which is simply outside the bounds of common sense. We all know how much secrecy surrounds pay, even in otherwise congenial workplaces. But the Court has decreed that even when there is a pattern of lower raises for women or minority groups that develops over months or years, an individual employee has no legal recourse after 180 days.

The plaintiff in the suit, Lilly Ledbetter , worked for a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, where she was the only woman out of 17 managers at her level. Although Ledbetter's starting salary was equal to that of her male colleagues, she was given smaller raises and eventually made less than even the lowest-paid man at her level, who started after her.In a characteristically withering dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg invited Congress to overturn the ruling. According to Congressional Quarterly, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and George Miller immediately signified their intent to do so.

The decision to close the schools came after a six-month study commissioned by the Education Department essentially concluded that the girls, eager to earn high school diplomas despite their pregnancies, had been relegated to a second-class tier of schools that treat them more like mothers-to-be than curious students.

The schools offer young women classes in quilt-making and breast-feeding, not in addition to academics, but instead of them. Cutting shapes for the quilt patterns is akin to lessons in "geometry," one principal told the Times. Less than half of the "p-school" students return to regular high school after the birth of their babies; the infants aren't eligible for in-school daycare until they are two months old, effectively enforcing a 2-month break from study for their mothers.

Forty New York City public high schools offer daycare services, so there's hope that once back in the regular system, young mothers can work toward diplomas without struggling to find and pay for childcare. They'll need extra help and services, including workshops on parenting skills and academic catching up. But it's good news that the city is trying to do right by young mothers. More than any other students, they immediately need knowledge and skills-based learning. They have a family to support.

Cross-posted at TAPPED.

A South Asian Long Island couple worth millions of dollars is accused of torturing and keeping enslaved their two Indonesian domestic workers for several years.  A full story as well as photographic evidence of what the workers endured (some of these pictures may be disturbing) can be found here.

J. Goodrich--AKA Echidne of the Snakes--has an excellent article about the media's obsession with mothering at The American Prospect.  We hear again and again about how when moms go to work and leave their kids in daycare, children's behavior is ever so slightly more unruly (although those kids' vocabularies are also bigger, probably because nobody was doting on them in baby-talk all day long). But bet you didn't know that toddlers are better behaved when their dads take time off from work too, right? As J. tells us, research shows stay-at-home fatherhood is just as beneficial to children. Check it out.

“The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this. ... And I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say: “You helped this happen.”

--Jerry Fallwell, 700 Club, 9/13/2001

The founder of Moral Majority, the evangelist who made hate speech profitable and established fundamentalists as a viable political force, Jerry Falwell has died at age 73.

We are facing two scary pushes from the extreme right in terms of reproductive freedom. First, as reflected in the Supreme Court's Carhart decision two weeks ago, there's a new willingness to stop short of protecting women's health and allow certain abortion procedures only in the extreme situation of a woman's life being at risk. This standard would allow states to outlaw abortions in cases (like this Irish example) in which the fetus is not viable outside the womb, forcing women to carry deeply traumatic pregnancies to term. The second push, as The American Prospect's Sarah Blustain reported on so thoroughly here, are "informed consent" laws like the one in South Dakota, which force women to hear ideologically-compromised statements on fetal pain, the sanctity of the mother-child bond, or adoption before allowing them to exercise their right to choose.

In light of these trends, the New York Times story today on the efforts of parents with Down syndrome children to dissuade others from ending Down syndrome pregnancies raises questions about how disability issues will factor into the shifting political and ethical debate on abortion. Because of new, safer testing methods, all women can now opt to screen for the disease with a simple sonogram and two blood tests in the first trimester. Ninety percent of women who receive a diagnosis of Down syndrome for their fetuses choose to abort. At some hospitals, parents of children with Down syndrome have organized programs to speak to obstetricians and genetic counselors about the joys of raising Down syndrome children, and have asked the hospital to put them in touch with expectant parents who have received a diagnosis of the disease.

As anyone who's had their life enriched by a loved one with a disability can attest, these conversations are incredibly fraught. But without judging any family's choice to either end or continue such a pregnancy, the issues remain the same -- the right to choose an abortion and the freedom from coercive pressure. Expectant parents should be given information, resources, and support as they make these complex choices. But expect the antis to boil this issue down into a talking point and portray pro-choicers as mad scientists trying to genetically manipulate the human race.

Cross-posted at TAPPED. 

The Irish government is preventing a four-month pregnant 17-year old from traveling to Britain to have an abortion, even though her fetus is missing parts of its brain and skull and will be unable to live outside her womb for more than four days.

In Ireland, abortion is legal only if the mother's life is in danger. This is the same logic the Supreme Court majority embraced in the Carhart decision, which for the first time since Roe, did not contain broad protection for "women's health." How many of us really want to live in a country where a Court has to give you permission to abort a fetus that can't live outside the womb? It's almost unthinkable. 

She vs. He. No, I'm not talking about the battle of the sexes, but how often these actual words appear on news pages. This fun Google tool can count those stats for any site. CNN.com, for instance, is 78 percent "he." CampusProgress.org is 73 percent "he." I think this reflects the gender breakdown of "newsmakers" in our society. And although I was disappointed to see CP's numbers, I'm confident that our "shes" are an impressive and substantive lot. And of course, this tool doesn't count the number of content creators who are women, which at CP is very close to 50 percent.

And speaking of women online, check out the new issue of Barnard's Scholar and Feminist magazine, which is all about women in the blogosphere. One of the co-editors is Feministing founder Jessica Valenti, who'll be speaking at the Campus Progress conference this year on my super awesome and exciting "Embedding Feminism" panel, which is about making the entire progressive movement more responsive to "women's issues." If you haven't already, sign up for the June 26 conference.

A new Amnesty International report uncovers the disturbing truth that Native American women are twice as likely to be raped as non-Native women.  One in three indigenous women in the U.S. will be the victims of sexual assault at some point in their lives (although the statistic for women in general is not much better, one in four women in the U.S. will be assaulted in their lifetimes).

And as if that weren’t horrific enough, due to the complicated relationship of tribal criminal justice systems with U.S. state, local or federal criminal justice systems, many of the survivors of assaults never see their assailants brought to justice.  Tribal police often lack the resources to quickly respond to emergencies.  And survivors are sometimes confused about where to turn to for help—do they call the local police, the tribal police, state police…?

Much lip service has been paid to the crisis of domestic violence in Native American communities.  Even the deputy director of the Office of Justice Services for the Bureau of Indian Affairs seems to look inward to the behavior of people on reservations for an explanation—“'Domestic violence is up because of methamphetamine use on Indian lands,’ Chaney said. Rape, Chaney said, ‘was a problem long before methamphetamine, but methamphetamine is making it worse.’” 

However, according to the Justice Department’s own statistics, the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults against Native women—86%—are committed by non-Native, mostly white men.  As a 1978 Supreme Court ruling stated that tribal governments have no authority over individuals who are not a part of the tribe, much of the blame lies squarely in the laps of U.S. law enforcement for failing to prevent these crimes and to pursue the perpetrators.

Sexual violence was—and obviously, still is—an arm of colonization of indigenous peoples.  Although some violence in Native communities does come from within, for Native women, white supremacy is still the greatest threat.

It’s well known that the United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world (about 6 per 1,000 births). Progressive health care wonks have long suspected that sub par Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and cuts to programs like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program are culprits. Last month, the counter-CW folks over at Slate announced that actually, babies die because wealthy American spend a lot of money on fertility drugs, prenatal care, and other newfangled treatments that save otherwise unviable pregnancies and lead to increased rates of prematurity and infant mortality.

Yesterday a must-read article on infant mortality in the South appeared in The New York Times. On this issue, at least, it seems counter-intuition will only take us so far: American infant mortality is very much a byproduct of poverty, with all the usual disturbing implications for race and gender. In Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, the infant mortality rate rose from 9.7 to 11.4 per 1,000 births in 2005. Nationwide, white Americans have an infant mortality rate of 5.7, while African Americans have a much higher rate of 14.0.

Poor black mothers are especially at risk for a variety of reasons, ranging from high rates of obesity (which can make ultrasound monitoring difficult and lead to diabetes, thus under-nourishing the fetus) to increased deaths from SIDS, accidents, and disease. Doctors are few and far between in rural counties, and local doctors report that many poor women have no prenatal care at all. In addition, the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, has raised barriers for entrance into the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

All in all, not a rosy picture.

Cross-posted at TAPPED. 

If you thought Alanis' last fine moment was when she sang about "wining, dining, and 69-ing" in the mid-1990s, think again. As Ezra and Jill note, this Alanis cover of the Black Eyed Peas hit "My Humps" is not to be missed. It's a spoof, but I actually don't think it's as funny as it is subversive. I remember watching the original "My Humps" video over and over again in the library exactly a year ago during senior thesis crunch time. Something about the performance was just so ridiculous--a female singer grinding up to men, singing about her ass (humps) and breasts (lumps) and how much expensive shit men had to buy her to get close to them. The message was so anti-feminist that I wondered if maybe it was slyly making fun of itself.

Whatever "My Humps" meant, it definitely broke the stress of writing about nineteenth century French class and gender ideologies.  

But now Alanis, with her trademark piano accompaniment and warbling vocals, deconstructs  exactly what's going on in this song and video, and finds a woman playing into every objectifying stereotype, the ugliest kind that present the female body as little more than meat. Watch both videos and then tell me, what do you think? Do you think Fergie is in on the joke? And why do you think Alanis chose this song to dissect?