I Started a Second Blog

I’ve had some nonfiction short stories sitting around for awhile, and I finally decided to do something with them. Well, I submitted one to a story contest once, but I didn’t win anything, and entry fees rack up really quickly. So I decided that I may as well put them out in the world, and created a second blog for my narrative nonfiction.

I realize that I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about people doing terrible things, and it can definitely get a little wearing. I was somewhat bemused to discover that these stories, which I wrote months ago and then let sit in favor of developing this blog, feature strangers being exceptionally pleasant and helpful. So if you want a change of pace, you might read my first story, Once Brewed, which is about my trip to see Hadrian’s Wall.

Regrettably, I can’t guarantee that all future stories will be as cheerful.

Really? Notarized?

Today in Not Being Helpful:

A measure advancing in the North Carolina legislature would require teens to obtain notarized, written parental consent in order to access a range of health services, including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, birth control prescriptions, pregnancy care, mental health counseling, and substance abuse treatment.

Really? Notarized?

People, we’ve been over this before. Some kids have terrible parents. Some kids have physically and sexually abusive parents. Abusive parents don’t want their kids to receive medical attention, because that puts them in contact with mandatory reporters who might call the police.

The only effect of this law would be making vulnerable kids even more vulnerable and isolated. Infections will go untreated, sexually active teenagers will go without reliable contraception, pregnant girls won’t receive adequate care, and kids who need treatment for mental health and substance abuse will go without. The only people this law would protect are abusive parents.

And the notarization requirement will hassle everyone else, and possibly function as a shaming device for parents whose kids need care pertaining to sexual activity, mental health, and substance abuse. Also, doesn’t that breach doctor-patient confidentiality?

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Chris Whitmire (R), claims it will simply help prevent “problems” from being repeated by involving parents in teens’ health decisions from the beginning. Other supporters of HB 693 argue that it will help “restore parental rights and lines of communication within families.”

And what happens when those “problems” are caused by parents? Also, you really can’t legislate your way to better “lines of communication.” I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who uses the phrase “parental rights,” which apparently means that parents have total control over their kids, even at great detriment to their health and well-being (for example).

As usual, these notions aren’t borne out by reality:

Doctors and health advocates testified against HB 693 on Tuesday, pointing out that imposing obstacles to health services could ultimately dissuade youth from seeking the medical care they need. In fact, studies have shown that when adolescents are required to seek out parental consent to access birth control and STD services, teen pregnancies tend to go up and teens’ willingness to seek out STD testing tends to go down.

North Carolina legislature, please stop endangering adolescent health.

Be a Good Bystander

Jackson Katz’s Ted Talk on masculinity and violence has been making the rounds recently, and I definitely recommend that you give it a viewing. Among other things, Katz discusses the necessity of bystander intervention when witnessing harassment, violence, and abuse. More than that: the necessity of positively and continuously contributing to a culture that doesn’t tacitly excuse violence and abuse.

In other recent news, three women in Cleveland, Ohio were found alive over a decade after they were separately reported missing. One of the women, Amanda Berry, also had a daughter born during her captivity. Berry was able to reach through a back door and yell for help while their captors were out of the house. Neighbors responded and helped pry open the door and call police. One of the neighbors, Charles Ramsey, said he thought this was an incident of domestic violence.

Remarkable as this entire event is, it’s especially remarkable that Ramsey was willing to respond to domestic violence, a form of violence that has historically been treated as a “family matter” unworthy of intervention. Stephanie Coontz writes in her book Marriage, a History:

The trivialization of family violence was epitomized in a 1954 report of a Scotland Yard commander that “there are only about twenty murders a year in London and not all are serious–some are just husbands killing their wives.”

Are they any less dead? Were they any less deserving of police protection?

Good on you, Charles Ramsey and other neighbors. And good on everyone who’s worked to change a culture that tells people to turn away from violence committed inside people’s homes.

Update: It’s come to light that Ramsey has himself been convicted of domestic violence. That’s terrible for the people he abused, but it also gives me hope that people can change. That’s what we’re trying to do, right?

Marriage, a History: Prehistory

I’ve been slowly reading Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. I think it’s a good overview of changing marriage patterns, mostly in the West, but with reference to a variety of cultures.

When Coontz began researching the history of marriage, reporters and audiences asked her questions that assumed marriage was collapsing, in opposition to a supposed “Golden Age of Marriage.” She set out to write a book debunking the notion that marriage is in an unprecedented state of crisis; after all, people around the world have been lamenting the state of marriage since people began writing stuff down. (And by people, I mostly mean male people lamenting the disobedience of wives and children.) As Coontz points out, everything we’re freaking out about today–pre-marital sex! out-of-wedlock births! divorce! blended families! gay people living together!–has occurred throughout history, and has frequently been more prevalent than in modern Western society. Stepfamilies, for instance, used to be substantially more common due to high rates of early mortality and the necessity of a quick remarriage. Children were also fostered or apprenticed out to other households. The idea that the ideal family consists of children living with both biological parents until adulthood wouldn’t have even been a relevant concept for a lot of people. It’s not exactly the eternally “natural” family structure that some people want it to be. Read more →

Girls May Not Be Women, But They Can Still Get Pregnant

Oh look, Kathleen Parker is making an argument against emergency contraception accessibility for younger girls.

Fifteen-year-olds, where the Obama administration wants to set the limit, are girls, not women. And female parts do not a woman make any more than a correspondingly developed male makes the proud possessor a man.

No, but 15-year-old boys can’t get pregnant. Fifteen-year-old girls, and girls much younger than that, can and do. Their youth makes the possibility of pregnancy even more damaging. It’s an unfortunate reality that girls begin to menstruate before their bodies are fully mature and can safely support a pregnancy. They need access precisely because they are children and are the most vulnerable when facing a pregnancy.

What about the right of parents to protect their children? A 15-year-old can’t get Tylenol at school without parental permission, but we have no hesitation about children taking a far more serious drug without oversight?

So what if a child is raped by her own father, and the mother is dead or gone or complicit in the abuse? That’s a terrible situation, and hopefully a responsible adult in the child’s life is made aware of it and the police and CPS are called in to do their jobs. In the meantime, a pregnancy isn’t going to make anything better, and the clock is ticking for taking emergency contraception. If a child knows to ask for it, then let her have it.

Some people have terrible parents. In these discussions–and Parker is framing this as a parents vs. government issue–people frequently pretend that all children can count on their parents to have their best interests at heart. They can’t.

The framing of parents vs. government is off, as well. The government isn’t trying to make the decision of whether to take EC for people. The question is whether it should be available for all ages. It also won’t prevent girls who have good relationships with their parents from talking to them about it. But parental restrictions aren’t going to make bad parents better.

Also, Tylenol is more dangerous. And pregnancy is more dangerous than a dose of hormones.

The purpose of EC is to mitigate the effects of a bad situation. It’s not useful to discuss access for younger girls as if we live in a world where children are never abused, parents always advocate for their children, and girls can’t really get pregnant. And pushing for EC access doesn’t mean ignoring abuse. It just means expanding the toolkit we can use to help children.

 

Fun History Stuff: Reconstructing Renaissance Clothes

The Jamestown stuff was quite grim, so maybe it’s best to end on a more pleasant historical note. Historian Ulinka Rublack of the University of Cambridge enlisted historical dressmaker Jenny Tiramani to recreate a doublet and hose worn by a 16th century German accountant. Matthäus Schwarz was very fashion-conscious and commissioned paintings of his various outfits. They chose to recreate a bright red and yellow ensemble, which we wore to an important political event. Dr. Rublack emphasizes the political nature of clothing choices:

“The colours red and yellow are associated with happiness – and they demonstrate Schwarz’s joy at the visit of the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand of Austria. Schwarz notes that he wished ‘to please Ferdinand’ and he did so by symbolically expressing gaiety, youthful agility, pride and beauty. His was an aesthetic performance of political values through the expense and effort he had invested in such having so wonderful an outfit created,” says Dr Rublack.

You can see the outfit created in the video:

People commonly perceive the past as rather bland, but those who could afford colorful dyes wore bright colors and used colorful paints and fabrics in their homes. Men’s clothes were typically much flashier and more overtly sexualized than they are today. (Look at that codpiece!) Getting into the outfit was also quite a procedure. Zippers are certainly a useful invention.

Additional fun fact: During the same period, women bought brightly colored hairpieces in red, green, and purple to attach to their own hair.

They Look Angry! Why Aren’t They Smiling?

This morning I looked at a series of photographs by Nicholas Nixon of his wife and her three sisters, taken every year for 36 years. Unfortunately, as I was writing this post, the photographs were removed from that site, but you can see them in the MOMA archives. It’s an interesting series and documents the sisters’ aging and their closeness over the decades. So of course people are freaking out in the comments.

They look angry and unhappy! Why aren’t they smiling? They’re so expressionless. I wouldn’t want to marry into that family, that’s for sure. They look like they hate the world. I wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley!

Okay, first off, they are smiling in some of the photographs. They just aren’t toothy grinners. Their eyes and faces are also very expressive. But more importantly, why should they look cheerful? Why do we demand smiles and expressions of happiness from people, especially female people? What is it about a non-smiling female face that makes some people so profoundly uncomfortable? Why are we so perturbed when we confront the complex emotions of actual people, rather than the cheesy smile we’re expected to plaster on when we have our picture taken? (These aren’t exactly snapshots, anyway; Nixon uses large-format cameras. They’re real portraits. Criticizing them for not smiling is kind of like demanding that Mona Lisa show her teeth.)

Here’s something else to ponder: What reception do these photographs get outside the United States? Do people from other cultures get their feathers ruffled because they want everyone around them to smile all the time? It’s like people consider it a personal affront. It’s not pleasant to be miserable, but happiness isn’t the only acceptable emotion. There are legitimate reasons for anger and sadness and worry and fear. Who goes through 36 years feeling happy all the time? Insisting that they grin in every portrait is almost dehumanizing. The wonderful thing about the portraits is that they clearly love each other through it all.

And I have no idea where the idea that they hate the world comes from. Sometimes they look pretty fierce, and they all have strong, striking faces, but that doesn’t mean they hate the world. Honestly.

This is what Nixon has to say about the portraits, from MOMA’s website:

Being an only child, it was really gratifying and lovely to be embraced by this family. There’s still a ground water of affection, and support. I look back at these thirty-some pictures and it’s like they’re of my sisters. I can feel myself getting old with them. And I’m part of them; they’re part of my love.

Yes. So much anger and hate.

Terrible History Stuff: Cannibalism in Jamestown

An excavation of the early colony of Jamestown, Virginia discovered a disturbing–although perhaps unsurprising–aspect of life during the “starving time” of 1609-1610: cannibalism. Historians already knew that a man was executed for killing and eating his pregnant wife, but last year archaeologists found the skull and shinbone of a 14-year-old girl on a trash heap with the bones of slaughtered animals. Marks on her bones indicate that her flesh had been cut away, and they’d apparently made an attempt to split open her skull to eat her brain (eating animal brains was normal at the time). The fact that they cannibalized her and then didn’t even give her a proper burial is just too terribly sad. If archaeologists consider burial to be a turning point in civilization, then the discard of a person’s remains like trash is a sign of its collapse–which is what it must have felt like in the hard winter of 1609-1610. Says forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley:

“The desperation and overwhelming circumstances faced by the James Fort colonists during the winter of 1609–1610 are reflected in the postmortem treatment of this girl’s body,” said Owsley. “The recovered bone fragments have unusually patterned cuts and chops that reflect tentativeness, trial and complete lack of experience in butchering animal remains. Nevertheless, the clear intent was to dismember the body, removing the brain and flesh from the face for consumption.”

They did a facial reconstruction, of course. She looks like a ghost come back to haunt us.

Grrr.

Remember when that judge ruled that emergency contraception should be made available over the counter without restrictions, and we were all really excited because that seemed really sensible and reflective of actual research? Yeah.

Now the Food and Drug Administration has “compromised” by allowing EC to be sold over the counter, but requiring girls under the age of 15 to have a prescription. As previously discussed, EC is extremely time-sensitive, and needs to be taken as soon as possible for maximum effectiveness. It’s tough enough getting an appointment when you have a doctor, and not everyone does. Or they aren’t able to travel to the doctor, or they couldn’t afford the visit, or any number of complicating factors, all of which are compounded when you’re a poor minor. And how will stores verify age? A government issued ID? Would they have to bring their birth certificate or passport, if they even have one? Because I’m pretty sure that in most states, 15-year-olds can’t get driver’s licenses.

Young teenagers have sex. Young teenagers suffer from sexual assault and abuse. And young teenagers get pregnant, even though they haven’t fully grown into their adult bodies. If you don’t think that teenagers can handle taking a dose of hormones, then imagine how much more difficult it would be for them to make the decision to have an abortion, or go through pregnancy and childbirth with their adolescent bodies, and decide whether to raise the child or give it up for adoption. Preventing a potential pregnancy is vastly preferable.

Are some of these kids trapped in abusive situations and needful of help? Yes, sadly. But how does inhibiting their access to emergency contraception help them? It’s for emergencies. Holding back access is closing the barn door after the horse has fled. A pregnancy won’t make a terrible situation better. We can still improve screening for abuse without putting up barriers to EC. This only hurts the most vulnerable among us.

Update, via Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly:

Germany’s Catholic bishops recently dropped their opposition to the administration of Plan B to rape victims in Catholic hospitals on grounds that research shows the medication operates by inhibiting fertilization rather than implantation of a fertilized ovum in the uterine wall.

Well, that meets the bare minimum of decency! Oh, wait:

Turns out the position of the German Bishops I touted above as a significant change actually reflects the standing policy of the U.S. Bishops—and the Vatican—with this wrinkle: a rape victim in a Catholic hospital who asks for Plan B has to be tested to calculate if it’s likely she hasn’t ovulated recently before it is administered, so to avoid the possibility that the medication will interfere with uterine implantation of a fertilized ovum. Wow. I can’t imagine a system more cruelly designed to make it clear to the rape victim that she is nothing more than the vessel for reproduction.

What the what? Yet one more reason to be terrified of Catholic hospitals if you’re a person who can get pregnant.

Yeah, I’m Doing a Cute Post

I’ve always liked capybaras, seeing how they’re basically giant guinea pigs. Besides, who doesn’t like Rodents of Unusual Size? But I never knew how thoroughly relaxed they are.

Here are some capybaras hanging out in their “spa” at a Japanese zoo, because what else would they do with their time?

Take naps, that’s what! Stick around for the extra burst of cuteness at the end.

And if things get too boring, they can always pay a visit to their smaller, higher-strung relatives. Don’t worry, no one gets hurt.

All videos from fuafuacapybara.