The New York Times published this gem yesterday about how dresses are becoming out-of-date, in which the author makes a plea for the survival of dresses, not for the comfort or convenience for women, but for all leering men's sakes
Senate Republicans blocked a bill Wednesday that would make it easier for people to sue over pay discrimination, an effort to roll back a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that limited such cases.
Republicans complained that the bill would produce a flood of lawsuits and criticized the chamber's Democratic leaders for putting off the vote until the party's two presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, returned from the campaign trail.
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Though several Republicans joined Democrats in voting to break the filibuster, the 56-42 vote was four short of the needed 60.
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The bill, dubbed the Fair Pay Restoration Act, is a response to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that ruled a person who claims pay discrimination must file a complaint within 180 days of that discrimination taking place.
That deadline is specified in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines, and it "protects employers from the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions long past," Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in the 5-4 decision.
The bill that stalled Wednesday would have reset the clock with every paycheck, with supporters arguing that each paycheck was a discriminatory act. But Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, said the bill would allow retirees drawing pensions to sue their old companies over allegations of discrimination that happened decades ago.
"I'm hoping this chamber will stand up for fundamental fairness for women in the workplace," said Clinton, of New York. "I'm hoping you will stand up and vote to make it clear that women who get up every single day and go to work deserve to be paid equally to their male counterparts."
And Obama, of Illinois, added, "If you work hard and do a good job, you should be rewarded no matter what you look like, where you come from or what gender you are."
"They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else," McCain said. "And it's hard for them to leave their families when they don't have somebody to take care of them.
Malikah Fardon-Jones-Finney and her 12-year-old daughter glanced at the ad hanging over their heads at the top of the Red Line train wall.
The image is simple - a young woman squeezed between faceless bodies - and the message succinct: "Rub against me and I'll expose you."
"Does that happen?" Fardon-Jones-Finney asked. "How can you tell when the train is packed?"
Across the way, 23-year-old Olesia Plokhii also gave the ad a once-over and her approval.
"I guess I think it's a proactive idea," she said as she tapped out a text message on her cellphone. "Any kind of awareness around that says 'Perpetrator beware,' I think that's ultimately effective."
The ad - one of at least three posted on Red Line trains - is part of a new public service campaign by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to increase awareness of sexual harassment on public transit, and to encourage victims to report such events.
Joe Pesaturo, MBTA spokesman, declined to discuss the details of the campaign in advance of the official unveiling tomorrow at North Station. Red Line riders yesterday, however, got a preview of the ads. One shows a security camera pointed into the unknown, with the message "Flash someone and you'll be exposed." Another depicts a lone woman riding the T with the words, "I'm not the one who should be ashamed."
TLC has found one more untapped fantasy—at least for mothers. We're not talking about "The Manny." No, this is the one where you're a woman who's been home with your kids so long that you can't remember the last time you wore hard-soled shoes. Then someone (say, former sitcom star Tracey Gold) comes by and says, "Hey, you know how you always wanted to be a fashion designer, cop or chef? Well, we'll give you a week to try it out—without your family knowing. Then at the end of the week you get to choose whether to restart your career or stay home. And guess what: your kids and husband will support you either way."
Sounds dreamy, right? Well, not to everyone. If the initial reaction to the "Secret Life of a Soccer Mom," (Mondays at 10 p.m. ET) is any indication, TLC has struck one of the rawest nerves of parenting. In the show's March 3 premier Adrian Stark, a mother of three girls in suburban California, decides to go back to work full-time as a high fashion designer after 10 years at home. Stark's daughters are awestruck by the gowns she makes, and when she's offered a job, her physician husband gets teary with joy: "I'm seeing Adrian get something that I have been unable to give her, which is completeness."
This family is so sweet it makes your teeth ache. But as soon as the show aired, TLC's online message boards were jammed with comments from women outraged that Adrian would choose a career over being a stay-at-home mom (SAHM in parent lingo). The posts said the premise of the show is "sick" and Adrian is "selfish." One mom wrote, "Let's show the other side of the story … how the kids' world is going to be turned upside down by having to go to day care." Another woman goes even further: "Unless you're about to starve there is no reason for you to be at work. If you didn't want to raise your children, you should not have had them. It's child abandonment."
Adrian's wish to fill a missing creative void raised even more hackles: "Could any more feminist crap be shoved down our throats? The idea that you need a career to be complete? How about feeling complete by parenting your kids the right way?" And even if you agree with the mothers who support Adrian's choice to offer her daughters a career role model, you can see why some SAHMs might be a little miffed by a program that opens with a song whose lyrics include "time to lose the minivan..."
The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.
The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.
"Fear, fear is always there," says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. "We don't know who to be afraid of. Maybe it's a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don't know who to be afraid of."
Her fear is justified. Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year -- 79 for violation of "Islamic teachings" and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sawsan says, the situation was "the best." But now, she says, it's "the worst."
"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights. But all the things we were promised have not come true. There is only fear and horror."
...Eufrosina Cruz, 27, decided to become the first woman to run for mayor — despite the fact that women aren't allowed to attend town assemblies, much less run for office.
The all-male town board tore up ballots cast in her favor in the Nov. 4 election, arguing that as a woman, she wasn't a "citizen" of the town. "That is the custom here, that only the citizens vote, not the women," said Valeriano Lopez, the town's deputy mayor.
[T]he male leaders are refusing to budge. "We live differently here, senor, than people in the city. Here, women are dedicated to their homes, and men work the fields," Apolonio Mendoza, the secretary of the all-male town council, told a visiting reporter.
Cruz has received some support from older men, who by village law lose their political rights when they turn 60. Some younger men also say the system must change and give women more rights.
At a recent meeting of several dozen Cruz supporters, most of them voteless, women in traditional gray shawls recalled being turned down for government aid programs because they weren't accompanied by a man.
Martina Cruz Moreno, 19, said that when her widowed mother sought government-provided building materials to improve her dirt-floor, tin-roofed wooden home, village authorities told her, "Go get yourself a husband."
As a woman, Eufrosina Cruz is not only barred from being mayor, but from participating in the "community labor" that qualifies male villagers as "citizens." Those tasks include repairing roads, herding cattle, cleaning streets and raising crops.
The law states that Indian townships may "apply their own normative systems ... as long as they obey the general principles of the Constitution and respect the rights of individuals, human rights, and particularly the dignity and well-being of women."
"The congress upheld the vote out of sheer laziness, to avoid stirring up the village or causing a conflict there," said Rep. Perla Woolrich, a Oaxaca state legislator who supported Cruz's cause. "In the past, use and customs represented something positive, but by now it violates people's constitutional rights. Use and customs have to reviewed, and those practices that violate rights have to be thrown out."
SCENE: a box factory
NARRATOR: If you thought there was a small chance that a baby was hidden in a box, wouldn't you treat the box as if it held a baby, just in case?
SCENE: an ultrasound image
NARRATOR: So even if you think there's just a small chance that an unborn child is a baby, shouldn't you treat it as if it were, just in case? Something to think about.
The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by "real" humans to prehistoric climate change.
But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.
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Almost as provocatively, a husband-wife anthropological team has raised the possibility that female derring-do may have contributed to Neanderthals' demise.
The University of Arizona's Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, use archeological evidence to argue that Neanderthal females - unlike Homo sapien women of the Upper Paleolithic period - joined men in hunts at a time when stabbing giant beasts with a sharpish stone affixed to a stick represented the cutting edge of technology.
That's courageous, but probably bad practice for a population that never numbered much more than 10,000 individuals. The loss of a few males to a flailing hoof or slashing antler is no big deal, in the long run. But losing females of child-bearing age could bring doom to a hard-pressed species.
"All elements of [Neanderthal] society appear to have been involved in the main subsistence pursuit" of hunting large animals, Kuhn said. "There's not much evidence of classic female roles.
"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.
Not only would women suffer casualties, Kuhn said, their full participation in the hunt would mean they were not harvesting wild grains and other foods that could sustain their roving bands when game was scarce.
The preëminence of the female sex, only seen in certain inferior races of men, and in the infants of the higher races, marks an inferior stage of evolution.
It is the same with the equality of the sexes, which is only seen in little developed individuals, as inferior races and species, young persons, the aged, and in inferior classes of society.
On the contrary, the preëminence of the male over the female represents a superior phase of evolution, since it characterizes superior species and races, adult age and the superior classes of society.
From the moral as from the physical side, evolution appears to have progressed from a state of superiority of the female to that of the male sex; and the stage of equality represents an intermediate stage.
Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni's handling of the case was an "unforgivable miscarriage of justice," said Jane Leslie Dalton, the bar association's chancellor. "The victim has been brutalized twice in this case: first by the assailants, and now by the court."
Dalton's criticism came just 28 days after the association recommended that voters Tuesday retain Deni for a third six-year term.
That recommendation, however, came before Deni's ruling in the preliminary hearing for Dominique Gindraw, 19. Dalton's remarks yesterday were clearly aimed at voters who may not have been aware of the case.
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Dalton said Deni's ruling and comments showed that she misunderstood "what constitutes rape in Pennsylvania."
Dalton said the law permitted any woman to change her mind after consenting to sex "regardless of the circumstances. We cannot imagine any circumstances more violent or coercive than being forced to have sex with four men at gunpoint."
"In the final analysis, it is up to each individual voter, in the privacy of the voting booth, to make his or her own decision as to whether Judge Deni should continue in her present position," Dalton said.
[Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni] dropped all the sexual assault and assault charges against Dominique Gindraw, even though he stood accused of forcing a prostitute to have sex with him and three other men.
At gunpoint.
But Deni didn't let Gindraw entirely off the hook. Because he didn't pay her what he'd agreed to pay her for sex, and since she was in the business of providing sex for money, Deni let stand a charge of theft of services.Deni told me she based her decision on the fact that the prostitute consented to have sex with the defendant.
"She consented and she didn't get paid . . . I thought it was a robbery."
The prostitute, a 20-year-old single mother, agreed to $150 for an hour of oral and vaginal sex on Sept. 20, according to assistant district attorney Rich DeSipio. The arrangements were made through her posting on Craigslist.
She met the defendant, Dominique Gindraw, 19, at what she thought was his house, but which turned out to be an abandoned property in North Philadelphia.
He asked if she'd have sex with his friend, too, and she agreed for another $100.
The friend showed up without money, the gun was pulled and more men arrived.
Got that? Because she agreed to have sex with Gindraw and his friend for a set price, and because that price wasn't paid and Gindraw drew a gun and forced the complainant to have sex with not only him and his friend, but also with two other guys, that's not rape, that's robbery. Because it's the same as stealing your neighbor's cable.
Five Democratic candidates have withdrawn from Michigan's Jan. 15 presidential primary, leaving what amounts to a beauty contest for front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and a handful of lesser-knowns.
Let's face it, while any real man can wipe a kid's ass, do the dishes and the laundry, read kids bedtime stories, cook dinner, all that, moms tend to make better mothers. You know why? Because they do. Some of them are horrible failures at motherhood, and some guys are better at it than women. Some guys are horrible failures at fatherhood, and some women are better at it than men. So what. Most guys I know make better dads than moms, and its all they can do to manage that.
The first baby created from an egg matured in the lab, frozen, thawed and then fertilised, has been born.
Until now it was not known whether eggs obtained in this way could survive thawing to be fertilised.
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Canadian researchers told a fertility conference in Lyon three others were expecting babies by the same process.
The advance spares women from taking risky fertility drugs that can cause a rare, yet deadly condition - ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS).
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The findings hold particular hope for patients with cancer-related fertility problems.
Chemotherapy can cause infertility and, therefore, some women with cancer opt to have their eggs collected and frozen before they start their cancer treatment.
But not all women will want or be able to delay having chemotherapy to undergo ovarian stimulation.
Certain tumours, including some breast cancers, can grow if the woman takes drugs to stimulate the ovaries, for example.
"If you're a leader, you've got to understand your community," Heffernan, a 64-year-old senator in the center-right Liberal Party, told The Bulletin magazine in its Wednesday edition.
"One of the great understandings in a community is family and the relationship between mum, dad and a bucket of nappies," he added.
"I apologise to Julia Gillard and anyone else who was offended by my completely inappropriate remarks," Senator Heffernan told AAP.
Heffernan chastised opposition Labor MP Julia Gillard for being single and childless. "Anyone who chooses to deliberately remain barren ... they've got no idea what life's about," Heffernan said.
Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, the Prime Minister's enforcer, has again turned his sights on deputy Labor leader Julia Gillard, repeating his judgment that her "deliberately barren" state makes her unfit for leadership.
In an interview with The Bulletin, Heffernan concedes that his comments were crude but refuses to back away from them.
Leaders need to have an understanding of family, he says.
"I won't walk away from that," Heffernan says. "So rude, crude and unattractive as it was ... If you're a leader, you've got to understand your community...."
Pakistan has a new rape law that makes it easier to prosecute sexual assault cases.
President Pervez Musharraf signed the measure into law today, even though thousands of religious conservatives rallied against the changes.
A Pakistani official says the new law safeguards "the rights of women." The changes take effect immediately.
The new law allows judges to decide whether a rape case should be tried in criminal court or under the old Islamic law, which requires the testimony of four witnesses. It also drops the death penalty for sex outside of marriage.
Time magazine did one of those Evolution updates last week, "How We Became Human," on its cover. There wasn't too much new -- just how little we differ genetically from chimpanzees.
Yet there was one sentence that stood out like a lightning bolt. It has enormous implications for understanding how human societies evolved and why they sometimes find it difficult to get along with each other. Here it is:[T]he principle of gene-by-gene comparison [between species] remains a powerful one, and just a year ago geneticists got hold of a long-awaited tool for making those comparisons in bulk. Although the news was largely overshadowed by the impact of Hurricane Katrina...the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things. First they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make up both species' [i.e., humans and chimps] genomes differ by 1.23% -- a ringing confirmation of the 1970 estimates -- and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males.
Did you see that? It deserves much more attention than Time was willing to give it. Basically, the point is that, in crossing the little evolutionary distance that exists between chimps and humans, most of the changes occurred in males. In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species.
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What has changed is the role of males. Among chimps, males hang out in groups, form alliances, forage together, and do a lot of bickering over status. They do not participate at all in child rearing. By the time hunting-and-gathering tribes arrive, however, men have been folded into the family. Monogamy predominates and both parents participate in child rearing. The extraordinary innovation is "fatherhood," a role that doesn't really exist elsewhere in nature.
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The evolution of human intelligence would have been impossible without the change in male role and the adoption of monogamy. For that reason, it is not at all surprising to find that the key genetic changes have occurred on the male chromosome.
So what does all this suggest for the present? First, it says that feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution. Everywhere in the Western world, the emancipation of women has initially led to rising divorce rates and plummeting births.
