Dana Goldstein

Any Ani Fans Out There?

Ani Difranco's new retrospective album, Canon, will bring you back to those formative moments when her music was just everything, you know? She's going back out on tour this fall and winter less than a year after the birth of her daughter. Way to get back out there, Ani! I'll be psyched to see her in D.C. in November.

Check out the new versions of "Both Hands" and "Overlap."

Allow Me the Indulgence of Linking to a Thomas Friedman Column

Because this line -- if by now conventional wisdom --  is really wonderful in its blunt simplicity: "9/11 has made us stupid."

Good News for Nervous Flyers

When boarding an airplane, I often have the completely irrational feeling that I'm just as likely to die in a fiery crash as to reach my final destination unharmed. But here are some comforting numbers: In 1997, there was 1 fatal accident for every 2 million plane departures. In 2007, there was one fatal accident for every 4.5 million departures. That's a 65 percent decline in fatal crashes over just 10 years.

Runway collisions are one of the biggest airplane safety threats today, experts say. So now you can be nervous while you're taxiing on the ground, instead of when you're up in the air.

Jenna Bush...Not Exactly What You'd Expect

Perusing the Washington Post this morning, I learned that Jenna Bush, the blonde twin, taught elementary school right here in my own neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant, Washington, D.C., at the Elsie Whitlow Stokes charter school. In recent days, Jenna has made herself available to the media for the first time. She's promoting her new book, Ana's Story, which tells the tale of a 17-year old HIV-positive mother in Panama who she met while working with UNICEF. Jenna is also recently engaged to Henry Hager, a GOP blue blood.

But what I found really interesting is that despite defending her dad as a good man, Jenna comes perilously close in the interview to publicly opposing his policies. Here's some of what she had to say:

On Iraq and criticism of her father: "Nobody wants war. ... Obviously, all of this breaks my heart."

On HIV prevention strategies: "Everybody knows that condoms prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS."

On the United Nations: "I'm not my dad. I can tell you that UNICEF is doing incredible work."

Visiting Elsie Whitlow with reporters from the Post and NBC, Jenna speaks frankly to the students about HIV. "Can you get HIV from holding hands?" she asks the students. "No!"

Someone call Bill Frist.

What We Think We Know About Sex

At the Prospect office yesterday, my female editors and I shared a collective gasp of shock as we navigated over to the Slate homepage and saw the photo at left. My first thought, honestly, was, "How did she get her butt to look like that?" Jessica made some much more intelligent points.

But "illustrated history of the butt" aside, I did find one of the featured articles worth responding to -- Amanda Schaffer's look back at the collection of sexual statistics in America. Because early sex researchers Alfred Kinsey and Shere Hite relied on personal interviews and often personal connections to locate subjects for their studies, their findings tended toward the sexually liberated. Hence, Kinsey thought 10 percent of people were homosexual, while Hite believed 95 percent of women could "orgasm easily." Kinsey said half of all married men had cheated on their wives.

Personally, I'm skeptical of what exactly this number counts, but newer research shows that only about 5 percent of Americans have sex with someone of their own gender. We also now know that closer to 25 percent of men and 15 percent of women are adulterers, not half of all married adults. And as many as one-third of women report having difficulty reaching orgasm.

What really strikes me is the pure staying power of some of the Kinsey numbers in our cultural consciousness, especially his statistics on homosexuality and adultery. Perhaps, as Schaffer notes, the issue is that no American sex researcher since Kinsey and Hite has courted the media the way those two did.

Only One Quarter of Teachers Are Men

That's a 40 year low, according to Newsweek. And only 9 percent of elementary school teachers are male. It's true that children -- especially many at-risk kids -- benefit from a positive male influence in their lives. I remember how exciting it was the summer before fifth grade to learn my teacher would be a "Mr." that year. But I think the Newsweek story focuses too much on fears of being seen as gay or a pedophile, and too little on how little our culture values teaching, in part because women are the majority of the people doing it:

There are several reasons many men find it difficult to enter, and stay in, the teaching profession: the starting salary for teachers is about $30,000, and less in early education. "Right now I don't have a wife, I don't have kids," says Bart Tittle, 24, a preschool teacher in Independence, Mo., who earns about $25,000 a year. "Later in life it's going to be much more challenging."

And it's challenging for working women supporting families, too. It's no coincidence that 75 percent of teachers are female and that the average salary in the profession is $47,602. Even in the wealthiest public school districts with the most highly-educated teachers, salaries tend to top out well beneath six figures. Old thinking about women's wages -- that they are supplemental instead of an integral, and often the only part of a family's income -- is a part of the problem

cross-posted at TAPPED 

Blogging in Anger

Is probably not a great idea, so I apologize to Matt Zeitlin for what he says was me misunderstanding his post yesterday on identity politics and the netroots. Matt says that when he was writing about identity politics as "narrow" and "tangential," he was adopting a tone he doesn't approve of. That wasn't clear to me initially at all, although upon re-readings, I can see what he is referring to.

Back in my old job as an editor at CampusProgress.org, I was always telling writers to be careful not to adopt the rhetoric of people they disagree with. Readers often don't get what you're trying to do, and it leaves them scratching their heads about your intent.

All that said, I continue to stand by everything I wrote yesterday, with the caveat that Matt shouldn't necessarily have been the target of it.

Gender, Race, Language, and the Netroots

Bloggers Mike Meginnis and Matt Zeitlin have responded to my assertion in this TAPPED post that male "netroots" bloggers rarely write about identity politics. They both agree I'm right, but unfortunately, choose to interpret my simple observation as an attack. To be clear: Guys like Duncan Black, Matt Stoller, and Markos do what they do very well. But journalists ought to stop using "Atrios and DailyKos" as shorthand for "liberal bloggers." There are whole communities of liberal bloggers not included in the constellation centered around those sites, and foremost among those are feminist bloggers and bloggers of color.

I'm sympathetic to what Mike and Matt describe as a fear on the part of the white, male blogger that if he writes about race or gender, he will be subject to extra scrutiny and possibly attack. But I'm wary. If "male bloggers" like "arguing" so much, as Zeitlin writes (what? and female bloggers don't?), they should welcome these back and forths, not shy away from them. The sense I got from both responses was that while Meginnis and Zeitlin relish a good "man-to-man" fight, they don't really want to engage in debate with women or people of color who practice "identity politics."

That's their prerogative, of course. I certainly don't think every blogger needs to cover my pet issues; if they did, there would be no point in me writing every day. But I'm really disturbed by the language Zeitlin uses in his lengthy critique of so-called "identity politics." Here are some of his descriptors, all direct quotes. My emphasis is in bold.

- narrow
- tangential
- pantywaist pseudo-intellectuals who didn’t have the balls to get us out of Iraq and fight a class war

About his Netroots heroes, Zeitlin writes:

The netroots - Kos, Atrios, FDL etc — was born fighting, born opposing the Bush administration and all it stood for. And you don’t fight a war, you don’t win Matt Stoller’s “bar fight primary” by being splintered over identity issues. You have to stand together to fight the baddies in the Bush administration, instead of constantly fretting over seemingly tangential issues of identity.

Note the language here. Note the language. Netroots dudes are "born fighting." They can "take on the baddies." We lady bloggers, well, we're "fretting." Our "panties" are all twisted up in a knot. This kind of rhetoric is regrettable. It prevents dialogue by marginalizing women -- it's sexist language. My point about the Netroots was that they are great at what they do, but they're narrowly focused. I'm narrowly focused too. That's okay, because being a good writer often requires specialization.

But this kind of language from Zeitlin is not okay.

As a woman, I never forget how female-ness affects (and often limits) my days, my walks home at night, my professional choices, my relationships, my politics, my visions of the future. As a white person born in the United States, I can try to imagine how blackness or accented English might similarly impact an individual's day, but I can never fully understand. People have different experiences of the world. It shouldn't surprise anybody that they might also have different focuses to their progressive activism.

So I disagree strongly with Matt Zeitlin about the role of identity in the progressive movement. It's not separate from our struggles over Iraq or poverty or inequality -- we are one movement devoted to justice. An understanding of sexual and racial politics only increases one's outrage about the Iraq war, for example. It's only since we invaded Iraq that women in that country have been forced into burkas. Or consider the plight of gay people in Iran. Or the mass rapes in Darfur. It's all connected.

Unfortunately, language like Matt's makes me want to head into a feminist corner and never come out to converse with some of my fellow progressives. It's a tempation I'm happy to fight, though.

Because I've got balls like that.

Hillary and Young Feminists

In his Baltimore Sun column today essentially predicting a Hillary Clinton win in both the primary and general election -- unless something goes terribly wrong -- Tom Schaller highlights one of the less-talked about strengths of Clinton's campaign: The grassroots organizing muscle of women's leadership group Emily's List. The National Organization of Women's PAC has also launched a major campaign for '08 called "Make History With Hillary." And Feminist Majority's PAC formally endorsed Clinton as well.

Yet many younger feminists, while not exactly surprised by the early Clinton endorsements, remain incredibly torn about this election. Obviously, we're weighing the attraction of voting for the first female, feminist president against the more progressive foreign policy and more aggressive anti-poverty platforms of John Edwards and Barack Obama. If Hillary wants to widen her lead among young female primary voters (polls last spring showed her leading Obama among young women by 6 points), she ought to deploy another one of the strengths Schaller points to -- her "platoon of staffers and top-flight wonks developing her policy papers and talking points." As Ezra argued last week, Clinton's home-run with her healthcare proposal owed a lot to John Edwards' lead. Why hasn't she met the Edwards and Obama campaigns with a detailed anti-poverty strategy or proposal focusing on urban issues or education?

Clinton's been a smashing success among young feminists when it comes to fighting for access to contraception. She's introduced legislation to close the pay gap between men and women and has been a strong voice against sex and race discrimination in the workplace. She has combatted the rising rate of sexual assault against the women serving in our military. Hillary is the clear leader on those crucial issues. But the feminist movement of 2007 is much broader than that. Maybe I'm vastly overstating the importance of policy to your average young female primary voter. Okay, I probably am. But when there is so much more Hillary Clinton can do to harness the energy of young feminist opinion leaders -- and their increasing online strength -- I do wonder why she isn't trying harder.

Some Good Abortion Rulings in the States

Earlier this month, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that doctors don't have to follow any set script when speaking to women about abortion. This week, Pennsylvania and Missouri courts make two more good decisions on choice: The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Pennsylvania reproductive health clinic did not violate the rights of a 16-year old girl's parents when they dispensed the morning-after pill to her. The parents likened the drug to abortion and said it violated their Christian beliefs, but the Court maintained that the clinic's responsibility was only to the patient. In Missouri, U.S. District Judge Ortrie Smith stayed a bill from the state legislature ordering that abortion clinics upgrade their facilities (everything from door sizes, to parking lots, to hiring more staff)  or close down. For more on the growing anti-choice tactic of attacking the physical plants where abortions are performed, check out Ann Friedman's excellent Prospect column.