Given the potential pitfalls of her subject matter, reporter Emily Weinstein did an admirable job with her piece in yesterday’s New York Times, titled “In Dire Need of Design: For Recently Divorced Men, A New Breed of Decorators.” Weinstein’s article does its due diligence (more than two examples, larger economic contextualization, divorce stats, etc.) in plausibly making the case that a certain group of recently-single men, despite being “alpha-male” types, can’t seem to figure out how to hang a picture on their new pad’s barren walls. These men are so helpless, in fact, that interior decorators have found it lucrative to shift their respective firms’ entire focus toward coddling them; and we’re not just talking about the taxing task of choosing upholstery—these intrepid designers will even feng shui your pantry with handpicked canned goods:

The designer’s team began by installing the man in a SoHo rental with nothing but a box spring, a chair and a TV. In short order, they had fully outfitted the apartment down to the books, dishes, sheets, towels and toys for his son. “We even found him a housekeeper,” [one decorator] said.

Everyone knows that divorce can be extremely disruptive, especially to the tempo of day-to-day life and doubly so when kids are involved. Dads understandably want to return their home lives to some semblance of normalcy as soon as possible for everyone’s sake. But the assumptions at play in this paradigm of expedited home installation are at least as troubling as some mismatched furniture.

I’m reminded of the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire in which Robin Williams’ kids visit his new apartment for the first time; it’s unfinished and a little rough around the edges, but perfectly safe. Yet, when Sally Field comes to pick up the children, she acts as if Williams is living in a trash heap, as if the kids couldn’t help but be gravely scarred by spending time outside of a Crate and Barrel photo spread. That’s the attitude at play here, too—paper over the real and profound rupture that has happened as quickly as possible so that we can pretend that it doesn't exist.

Far more healthy, in my view, would be to let children gently confront the fact that dad is having to make a new life, part of which is the process of creating a new home. Now, I have nothing against decorators, but a willingness to have one’s books, dry goods, and toy curation outsourced says something disconcerting about one’s engagement with parenting. If dad really can’t get it together to make such basic choices about his new life, he probably needs more help than a decorator is qualified to provide (and may also have an answer as to why his marriage failed).

In any case, a home is not something you can order from Amazon. The sense in Weinstein’s piece is that mom has kept the old house, a space that was presumably built over time with input from (hopefully) everyone who lived there. The movie sets described here can’t hope to capture that kind of cozy energy, and there’s nothing worse for divorced kids than to have one parent’s house be home and the other’s a hotel. Building something unique together, over time, seems like the best way to prevent this dynamic—and it’s probably not a bad way to renew a sense of family, either.

On the heels of Madonna’s glitter-nuke of a Super Bowl performance, Naomi Wolf wrote in The Guardian on Monday that Madonna-hate—which Wolf defines as “the reliable media theme [that emerges] whenever she steps out of her pretty-girl-pop-music bandwidth”—is based on a sexist rejection of an ambitious woman daring to consider herself a “serious artist.” Wolf identifies this disdain within the decidedly negative critical reaction to Madonna’s new film W.E. (which she directed and co-wrote), leading Wolf to question why such ad hominem hateration seems to be reserved especially for Madge. The answer?

Because she must be punished, for the same reason that every woman who steps out of line must be punished. Madonna is infuriating to the mainstream commentariat when she dares to extend her range because she is acting in the same way a serious, important male artist acts.

Wolf strains to portray Madonna as something she calls the “Nietzschian creative woman,” presumably an allusion to the philosopher’s sense that a “genius” should not allow his “will to power” to be constrained by the limiting morality or social expectations of the larger culture. In Wolf’s view, we gladly afford male artists the latitude to explore work (often with mediocre results) beyond their home-medium, but hold contempt for women who do the same.

While I agree with Wolf that Madonna-hate is a real and strange thing, I have to dispute her eager jump to sexism as the explanation. Not because women aren’t often judged by different rules than men in certain areas—double standards are our culture’s bread and butter; it’s just that Madonna, at least in the way that Wolf appraises her, is not a genuis in any medium.

I’m not saying anything new by pointing out that Madonna isn’t a particularly talented singer or dancer (and though I haven’t yet seen W.E., based on previous efforts I’d say that she doesn’t really shine around a camera either). But who ever said being a pop icon required actual talent? To be a superstar, all one needs—and these Madonna has in spades—is a cultural prescience and the lucrative gift of self-promotion. We don’t hate (or, for that matter, love) Madonna for her artistic genius; we’re just jealous of the fact that she’s been so successful without it.

Speaking less glowingly of artists at another point in his writing, Nietzsche contended that they are no more than the “pre-condition, the womb, the soil…from which [art] grows.” External influences use the vessel of the artist as a way of manifesting themselves in the world. To my mind, this characterization is far more accurate a description of Madonna than Wolf’s overdriven “Nietzschian creative woman.” Like Andy Warhol and others before her, Madonna is a master curator and synthesizer (a less generous word might be thief). She adapted voguing from a relatively unknown gay African-American subculture in New York and packaged it to sell, just as she has more recently channeled the latest trends in pop music into her own work via producers like Timbaland and cameos from new artists like Nicki Minaj. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear assimilated dubstep infusions on the forthcoming album MDNA.

The fact is, Madonna plays the fame game better than anyone; it’s just that her longevity has caused the internal machinations to become increasingly exposed. Certain people (including myself) get a thrill out of peeking behind the curtain—we’re riveted by the ambrosial combination of camp and connivance—while others are turned off by the lack of something romantically called authenticity. I revel in the audacity of Madonna’s ability to make millions from derivative and/or middling art, while "haters" find her gall and enduring popularity offensive.

Anyway, there’s no accounting for taste; the point is that neither perspective has much to do with gender. The underlying motivation of Madonna-hate could just as easily be directed at a man (the artist Damien Hirst comes to mind) or really anyone who refuses to let pesky little things like genuine talent or originality get in their way. As Madonna says in the song, “Every record sounds the same / gotta step into my world.” Like it or not, it’s a command, not an invitation.  

Pamela Druckerman is getting plenty of attention for her book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.  Telling anxious American parents not only that their parenting techniques are all wrong but that the French—the haughty French—should be our role models is a sure way to get yourself booked on the Today Show.

Bringing Up Bébé is based on Druckerman’s own experience raising Anglo-American children in Paris (she is American; her husband is British), and her willingness to reveal details from her family life helps ground the book.  But Druckerman might be regretting having been so open about her personal life a few years ago.

I am reading Bringing Up Bébé for a Slate book club discussion (look for it next week!), and today in the course of looking up something about Druckerman, I came across an article in which  she writes about how her husband asked her to engage in a threesome with him and another woman for his 40th birthday. “Weird,” I thought. Not what you expect to see from someone trying to sell a a parenting book. The version of the article I’d clicked on was an undated PDF, and it offered a link to the article on the Marie Claire website, which I clicked on to find out when, exactly, the article had been published.

But clicking on the link (http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/articles/threesome-sex-menage-a-trois-planning) redirects readers to the home page of the magazine’s current lifestyle features section.  Was the original, which appeared in Marie Claire in 2010, legit? There’s no reason not to think so. Jezebel blogged about it at the time (and their link redirects to the lifestyles home page as well), as did Vanessa Raphaely, who is  editor of South African Cosmo, which is published by the same company as Marie Claire. A photograph of accompanying the article sure looks a lot like the photographs of Druckerman that appeared in reviews of her book Lust in Translation,.

Did Marie Claire pull down the article at Druckerman’s request? I am trying to contact them to find out, and I will report back.  There could be a number of legitimate reasons the link doesn’t work—it’s the Internet, it happens. But, it’s easy to access other articles from 2009 and 2010 in Marie Claire’s archives. It’s understandable why Druckerman might not want that article floating around while she’s trying to sell a book about parenting. I’m personally no prude, so finding out that she took part in a threesome isn’t going to hurt her credibility in my eyes, however, that’s not likely true of her entire target demographic. But it’s almost impossible to make anything truly disappear from the Internet.

And there’s another, less obvious reason that I think the threesome article isn’t beneficial to Druckerman. In Bringing Up Bébé, she posits that American parents are overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenthood from the moment they get that positive pregnancy test, that American-style parenting requires you to plow through stacks of books and pick a parenting style and write a birthing plan and then carry on similarly throughout your parenting years.  If you read Druckerman’s article about her threesome, though, you see that it’s largely about the planning of the threesome. She and her husband rule out their friends, reject the idea of a sex club, ponder the ideal candidate. She scours the Internet, goes on lunch dates with women, primps, stresses about her clothes, and asks her husband how to talk to women.

It leaves one wondering: Regarding the overzealous reading and plotting and planning and the stress of overparenting that inspires Druckerman to write the book, is it indicative of an American style of parenting, or just the Druckmerman style of parenting?

KJ Dell’Antonia, formerly of this blog, has an interesting post up at the New York Times Motherlode, which she now helms. She’s discovered that the U.S. Census Bureau considers moms who care for their children to be the standard, whereas men who care for their children are, in essence, baby-sitting. The bureau's view of what constitutes normal family life is revealed in a report called “Who’s Minding the Kids?” When moms take care of the kids the government considers it standard, the language of the report reveals; when  dads do it, that’s called a “child care arrangement.” Which is weird because, as Dell’Antonia points out, the number of children cared for by their fathers is growing.

I stopped working for almost a year after our daughter was born, and during that time there was a sizable number of stay-at-home dads in our Bronx neighborhood. For some reason, they tended to congregate at one playground, which was my favorite. The dads were doing all the same stuff as the moms – pulling out Ziploc bags of cheerios, brokering arguments over doll strollers, filling up tiny water balloons at the fountain so their kids could throw them, leaving the ground littered with tiny bits of wet rubber. (It’s as annoying and satisfying as it sounds.) Like the moms, they weren't being paid, and like the moms, they came every day and considered this their work. Their presence there constituted parenting, not an “arrangement.” It may well be that in most American families, the mom is the “designated parent,” as the Census Bureau puts it, but in the face of demographic change, it seems time to reconsider what we label deviation from the norm.

With all the fussing going on over the Obama administration's sensible refusal to carve out huge exceptions in their new contraception rules for religious-affiliated institutions that serve the public, I fear that there are a lot of misperceptions floating about regarding what it is that Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities are really like, or how actual Catholics feel about this situation. Some numbers are helpful. Twenty-eight states already require religious-affiliated institutions that serve the public to offer equal insurance coverage as non-religious institutions offering the same services.The tragic results predicted by anti-choice hysterics have not come to pass because of this. The notion that Catholics as a group are offended by these regulations is also false; a poll run by Public Policy Polling found that 53 percent of Catholics support the administration on this, which isn't substantively different than the population at large.The group who actually opposes the ruling are evangelical Christians, as a poll from the Public Research Institute found. Only 38 percent of evangelical Christians want the coverage.

So the divide here isn't between Catholics and non-Catholics, but religious fanatics and non-fanatics. You might not realize it from all the wailing about how Obama offended the Catholics, but most Catholics aren't actually sex-phobic religious fanatics. They use contraception and have abortions at the same rate as everyone else, in fact. The hyper-conservative representatives of the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops cannot be equated with American Catholics, any more than the Branch Davidians can be considered representative of Texans as a group.

The notion that the culture of Catholic-affiliated universities and hospitals is substantively different than secular or Protestant ones, and thus deserves some kind of special dispensation from having to obey the law, is something that direct experience with these institutions should immediately disprove. I personally went to a Catholic-affiliated university, and the reason that it was a fine fit for my atheist self was that "Catholic-affiliated" is basically meaningless when it comes to the daily business of a university. Culturally, there was no real difference between my school and a secular school. We had a LGBT group, co-ed dorms, no curfews, and while I was there our school theater did a performance of The Rocky Horror Show. Half the students and staff weren't even Catholic, and of those who were, most were like self-identified Catholics everywhere, which is to say not particularly interested in the church's extremist doctrines. The cafeteria served meat on Fridays during Lent. Campus entertainment, such as free movies and parties, was exactly like at secular universites. I remember sitting on a blanket on a warm summer night watching Pulp Fiction as it was projected on a wall on campus. My friends who went to private Catholic school in high school would often joke that they had better sex ed than you get in public schools. The only thing from the secular world that the USCCB cares to take a stand on is contraception, which suggests that this isn't about religion at all, but just about controlling women. 

In the most unsurprising development so far of the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure P.R. meltdown, Karen Handel, who was appointed Komen's vice president of public policy after losing a bid as governor of Georgia, has stepped down in order to get some of the heat off the breast cancer charity. Handel was widely believed to be the force behind Komen's attempts to cater to anti-choice activists by defunding breast exams at Planned Parenthood, and while there were attempts to deny this during Komen's disastrous P.R. clean-up campaign, anonymous insiders told Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post that Handel was, in fact, the source of the pressure.

Getting rid of Handel isn't going to solve Komen's problems, however. Stepping back a bit, it's easy to see that Komen's status as a corporate-friendly, nonpartisan, untouchable charity was always untenable in the long run. Komen's strategy since its beginning was to frame breast cancer as an apolitical issue, where left and right could come together in support of women's health without all that nasty bickering over sex and who has the legal right to control women's bodies. It was an admirable goal; women's health care shouldn't be politicized and women should be free to seek whatever care they need without culture warriors riling people up about dirty ladies with their dirty lady bits.

Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where female sexuality so alarms a loud minority of our population that it insists on banning abortion, restricting contraception, keeping young women from accessing the HPV vaccine, and having anti-contraception propaganda taught in schools. Komen escaped notice while the fear-the-lady-bits brigade was mostly interested in abortion, but now that they're branching out in earnest--attacking employees of Catholic-owned hospitals and universities who want equal rights to contraception coverage as people fortunate enough to work for people who aren't religious fanatics, for instance--Komen's stance of "leave boobs out of it" wasn't going to fly anymore. Women's bodies are a fertile ground for right-wing demagoguery. Anyone who works with women's health is a target in this environment; it's just a matter of time before you're forced by anti-choice pressure to choose sides.

Komen's mistake was choosing the right when forced to make a choice. There's just no sustainable fundraising strategy for a women's health care organization that's on the books as only being for women's health care some of the time. They realize that now, thus the shedding of Handel. But I'm skeptical that it's going to solve their problems. 

The lady blogosphere seems to have turned against Sheryl Sandberg. But the more I watch her controversial speeches—at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 27, at Barnard’s commencement on May 17—the harder of a time I have criticizing her. Sunday Jezebel called out Facebook’s COO, soon to be worth $1.6 billion, for understating the external factors that may have helped her parlay her brilliance into success. Sandberg had argued at a WEC event that women suffer from an “ambition gap,” reinforced throughout their lives by the reality that achievement and likability are negatively correlated for girls. (“No one calls little boys bossy,” she quipped.) Zuckerberg’s second-in-command urged women to pour themselves into their careers for as long as they chose to work, instead of holding back out of deference to social norms, or in anticipation of “starting a family one day.”

This emphasis on personal responsibility led Jezebel to opine, “She is implying that the only impediment between the average working woman and the riches of corporate America is attitude.” And to remind us that “her path to success was paved just as much with hard work and ingenuity as it was with powerful mentors and … good fortune.” Aside from being counterproductive and slightly petty, these critiques miss the point of Sandberg’s speeches, which is not that women are to blame for the glass ceiling, but that society rewards different qualities in different genders, so business-minded women must be prepared to beat back against all kinds of negative conditioning. For Sandberg, the problem of finding child care is just another manifestation of the double standard working women need to fight. Yet Jezebel almost seems to wish this problem upon her, by snarking that she and her husband earn enough not to make affording baby-sitters a challenge.

The fact is, if women hope to hold more than 15 percent of the country’s CEO positions, they do need to fight. Sandberg calls on women (and men, for that matter) to reform the system, not defer to it. No one would deny the complexity of the dynamic that keeps women from achieving equality in the boardroom. But is it really so hard to concede that we have a role to play in our own advancement, and that part of that role consists of challenging the voices from our upbringings that insist on demure behavior?

In the wake of last week’s dust-up over the Komen Foundation’s short-lived decision to cut its funding ties with Planned Parenthood, many of us at Double X started to wonder just what the pink-ribbon organization actually does with all the money it collects. After all, though Planned Parenthood was at risk of losing about $700,000 in grants, that’s a pittance compared to Komen’s impressive income of about $400 million dollars in 2010. Where does all the rest of that cash go, and, more importantly, is it really being put to the best possible use?

I took some time to go through both Komen’s tax filings for 2009 as well as its Annual Report for 2009-10 (PDF), and the breakdown of expenditures goes like this: 12 percent for administration; 8 percent for fundraising; 7 percent for treatment; 15 percent for screening; 24 percent research; and 34 percent for education. Putting the administrative costs aside for the moment, let’s break down what each of the remaining categories actually means.

While Komen understandably touts cases in which its funds have directly subsidized individuals’ cancer treatment, such intervention only accounted for about $20 million in 2010. In terms of individual patient care, far more money goes to screening (including Planned Parenthood), which include mammograms and general clinical exams; Komen claims to have funded 625,000 of these at a cost of a little under $50 million in 2010. On the research front, the foundation provides grants totaling about $75 million to both individual researchers and organizations with specific research projects, such as a study about the efficacy of flax seed as a cancer prevention measure. Finally, Komen dropped just over $140 million on breast cancer awareness education, which they say reached 2.2 million people in 2010.

In our internal discussions, that last number—the remarkable amount of money spent on education relative to the other services—roused the most suspicion. Emily Yoffe wondered if such an intense focus on awareness was misplaced: “When Komen started 30 years ago part of its mission was 'breast cancer awareness.' They've won that war. Who's not aware of breast cancer?” And indeed, the use of “awareness” as a somewhat murky concept in the health-focused nonprofit world has come under some scrutiny as of late. How can one tell when the target audience is sufficiently saturated with awareness, and how do you measure that on an individual basis? When do awareness campaigns cross the line between honest education and organizational self-promotion?

These are not unfair questions to ask given Komen’s near-monopoly of the breast cancer advocacy stage, a status that has been controversially maintained by a rather aggressive legal policy against other charities who want to use the phrase “for the cure”  in their materials. (According their tax filings for 2009, Komen spent about $375,000 on external legal services in addition to rewarding their then general counsel, Jonathan Blum, with a total compensation package of just under $218,000.) Beyond the issue of education, the actual medical usefulness of all those mammograms—for which Komen advocates fiercely—is also worth considering. Recent studies have shown that the tests don’t actually reduce the risk of death from breast cancer by all that much, and, in some cases, the exaggeration of their relevance actually leads women to have unnecessary and invasive procedures.

The past year has seen a dramatic shift in mainstream feminist rhetoric around the ever-present question of female sexuality, as demonstrated by the loud-and-proud defense of Planned Parenthood in the wake of the attempted Komen defunding. Instead of shyly highlighting the desexualized health care Planned Parenthood offers, defenders at places such as Planned Parenthood Saved Me spoke bluntly of needing abortions, STD care, and even wanting contraception not for socially acceptable reasons such as regulating menstrual cramps, but so they could have sex without getting pregnant. Slut Walk gave women an opportunity to say they deserve to be sexual without being raped for it. Even Hollywood got in on the fun with the release of Bridesmaids, a movie based on the radical notion that women can make crass blow-job jokes, too.

I suspect that Women on Waves was thinking of all this when they decided to seize the moment by releasing a hoax-ish ad campaign that is overtly pro-sex and pro-abortion. The campaign, coordinated with the Yes Men, is called alternately Diesel for Women or Misopolis. The intention behind the ad is to both draw attention to a woman's right to abortion no matter where she lives and also to the poor working conditions for women working in clothing factories of the sort Diesel owns. To these ends, the ads show glamorized women flaunting sewing machines and measuring tapes while taking abortion pills, with slogans such as "Abortion pills, a gift from God" and "Say goodbye to coat hangers." It's a definite departure from the mainstream feminist rhetoric defending choice, where women who get abortions are often portrayed as weeping and rending their clothes at the difficulty of their decision, an obvious ploy to get more sympathy in a world where we like women better if they're suffering. These ads have the benefit of being closer to reality, as well as being more in line with in-your-face feminism. While abortion can be a difficult decision, it's rarely experienced, especially with early term abortions, as a tragedy. The most common feeling women experience after an abortion is relief, and when they do suffer, it's often more because of the stigma attached to abortion than because of the abortion itself. Ads like this that align abortion with how it is in the real world---a welcome solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy---could relieve what suffering there actually is.

All of which is why I'm sad to say that these ads don't work very well. It's not because they identify abortion as a good thing for women who need it, but because the message is muddled and confusing. The ads are both supposed to be about abortion and inhumane factory conditions, but the conflation of the two makes the ads read as if they're suggesting that abortion pills would solve the problems of women working in sweat shops. If anything, the problem of forced abortions is more of a concern for sweat shop workers, confusing the issue even further. Women on Waves should have had an ad campaign that addressed either abortion or poor working conditions in factories, but putting the two together just creates a big mess of nothing. Let's hope the next ad campaign that addresses the abortion issue with courage can also do so with coherence.

Last week, the financial-management website Mint published an estimate of how much a homemaker would earn if she were paid market prices for her work. The result—that a homemaker would earn nearly $100,000 per year—seems to vindicate lots of stay-at-home moms who think their work is undervalued.

But Mint’s study—and the other perennial attempts to quantify a homemaker’s worth—should instead be about the worth of a working mother. 
 
With women making up nearly half of the workforce and 71 percent of mothers with children under 18 working or looking for work  this emphasis on how the homemaker’s job often goes “well beyond the usual 9 to 5” seems irrelevant.  

To Mint’s credit, it keeps the discussion of the homemaker gender neutral—implying that a female or male homemaker is worth $96,261. However, considering that just 3.3 percent of married couple families have a stay-at-home father, it’s safe to assume this “study” is mostly about women. 

Mint purports that the worth of a homemaker can be calculated by adding the daily cost of a personal chef, a house cleaner, a nanny, a personal driver, a lawn maintenance crew, and a professional laundry service. But with the majority of women in the workforce, shouldn’t the article instead have been an acknowledgement of the mothers who are doing all of these high value services and paid work?

In Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective, sociologist Tanja van der Lippe writes that, in the OECD countries—that is, mostly high-income nations—if women “do not have a paid job, they spend 28 hours a week on domestic work; if they work full-time (35 hours or more weekly), they spend 17 hours on domestic work.” Even though working women are at the office for at least seven hours each day, they only spend 40 percent less time on housework than stay-at-home women. 

Furthermore, says sociologist Liana Sayer in Dividing the Domestic, marriage in the United States still means an increase in women’s housework time and a decrease in men’s. Working mothers, even more so than homemakers, are the ones working past 5 and, as Mint put it, being “taken for granted by [their] family members.”

Mint might not be wrong in its discussion of homemakers, but it is certainly dated.  Even the Washington Post’s parenting blog implicitly acknowledges this: Alongside Janice D’Arcy’s discussion of the Mint estimate is a picture of a 1950s mom vacuuming in an apron and dress, happy toddler at her side. Rather than just a vacuum, I would have instead hoped for a blog that called to mind a woman with a vacuum in one hand and briefcase in the other. 

In a book published posthumously last month, psychotherapist and author Elisabeth Young-Bruehl posits that American society has failed children to the point that prejudice against them deserves its own “ism.” That’s right, along with racism and sexism and homophobia (not a literal –ism, but a figurative one), we need to add childism.

I was skeptical, given that parents today are so likely to be scolded for overparenting—that we’re helicopter parents, that we’re too indulgent, that we keep our kids overscheduled. At the same time, I suspected that the book had to have a bit more heft than was implied by a snarky Jezebel post headlined “Not Letting Kids Have Their Way is Destroying America,” which implied that Young-Bruehl believed bedtimes are bad,  children should be given pet dinosaurs, and “everyone should ride gleaming white horses with pink manes to work instead of cars.”

But rather than advocating parents raise their kids to be Veruca Salts, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children is primarily concerned about child abuse—violence against children, sexual abuse, and neglect.

Young-Bruehl points to the social breakdowns of the 1960s and early 1970s as the advent of this –ism. I wondered, though, why Young-Bruehl targeted such a recent start date. If childism, as she puts it, happens when people “mistreat children in order to fulfill certain needs through them … or assert themselves when they feel their authority has been questioned,” if childism is when adults treat children like property, why not point to the 19th century, when slave children really were property and child laborers worked in factories during the Industrial Revolution?

Best I can tell, the answer to that question is that Richard Nixon wasn’t president back then. Young-Bruehl begins her book with a didactic, chapter-long definition of prejudice, and then tells the heart-breaking story of one of her patients, a child of divorced parents who was bounced between homes as a child and was sexually abused by an older stepbrother. Only a little bit later do we see what Young-Bruehl is getting at. If only Nixon hadn’t vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, the United States would have had universal daycare in the 1970s, which could have kept children safe from abuse by baby-sitters. Similarly, Ronald Reagan, through his tax cuts and efforts at privatization, was almost singlehandedly responsible for the 1980s’ urban decay, the de facto resegregation of inner-city schools, and an “era of frantic prison-building and incarceration—including the incarceration of youths and even children, especially African Americans.” (Wow, I don’t remember the federal government ever being efficient enough to wreak so much havoc so quickly.)

Young-Bruehl’s book is not merely a diatribe against conservative politics. She expresses disdain for the drugged-out, free-love permissiveness of the late 1960s that left some children being raised by selfish, neglectful baby boomers. And she’s no particular fan of the way that Social Security has lifted the elderly out of poverty only at the expense of future generations. But her solutions are predictable and overly simplistic: more social programs, more government involvement in the family life. Child abuse is a serious problem, and Young-Bruehl deserves credit for taking a serious look at it. But her solutions are mere wishful thinking.

After several days of blowback for the decision to pull grant money from Planned Parenthood, the founder and board of directors from the Susan G. Komen for the cure breast cancer charity has apologized and vowed to amend their rules. For those of you not following the controversy, news surfaced earlier this week that Komen pulled grants from Planned Parenthood because they were under an investigation by Congress. However, that investigation is clearly politically motivated: it is led by Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, who is deeply pro-life and a backer of anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers. Here's the language from the Komen press release about their new policy:

We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not. Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

The result is that Planned Parenthood will be eligible for future grants and the Komen foundation will fulfill existing grants. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards responded to the Komen change with her own press release in which she says:

We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers. What these past few days have demonstrated is the deep resolve all Americans share in the fight against cancer, and we honor those who are at the helm of this battle.

The question remains, though, whether or not Komen's actions have irrevocably hurt their organization. I would argue that they have. Though most people will forget the kerfuffle by Monday (We've got the Super Bowl and the GOP primary to preoccupy us), Komen has already been politicized where they were once neutral. Even post-apology, pro-choice donors may be wary of the foundation, and if they're committed to eradicating cancer, will find another organization to give to. Pro-life donors may be infuriated by the walk-back, and, the most thorough of them will find organizations that don't give a penny to Planned Parenthood if they want to make a charitable contribution. TBOGG at Firedoglake has a good explanation about how nonprofits get their donations, and they make the smart point that Komen's biggest mistake is that they've tarnished their previously untouchable image. Before, coming out against Komen could be framed as not caring about women's health (despite the many problems with the organization that have nothing to do with Planned Parenthood). With this controversy, those pink ribbons have a muddier hue.

GOP Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is often criticized for being a bit bland, so when he mounted a Minnesota campaign stage on Wednesday sporting a jaunty dash of glitter in his usually plain hair, viewers might understandably have taken the glimmers as an attempt at a livelier image and not—as was intended—an act of protest. Indeed, Romney was the most recent target of the emergent protest form known as “glitter bombing,” in which activists disrupt proceedings by showering glitter on the object of their ire. I’ve written about the tactic here before with regard to the case of sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who has been repeatedly attacked for statements that critics consider to be transphobic or otherwise un-PC. But now I’d like to take on the glitter bomb phenomenon directly: it’s time that this childish and ineffective protest stunt be permanently defused.

Most glitter historians locate the start of the “bomb” repurposing in the ambush of Newt Gingrich back in May of 2010, when an a gay rights activist hollered “Feel the rainbow, Newt!” as he doused the man in sparkles. Since then, other outspoken conservatives (as well as the very not-conservative Savage) have received similar treatment, catching the attention of the news cycle for a day or two and then dispersing into the air. Observers have quibbled over whether the bombings amount to physical assault, but thus far no victim has pursued legal action. Meanwhile, supporters of causes the activists purport to represent (gay and trans rights; with Romney, reportedly immigration reform) acknowledge the attacks with little more than a chuckle. Everyone dusts off and goes home.

Back in the beginning, I was generally supportive of the anti-homophobic glitter bombings; they appeared to be a lighthearted, drag-inflected attempt at undermining the moral seriousness of their targets. But as the trend has continued and the operatives grown more self-important, I’ve come to view glitter bombing with increasing chagrin due to its tantrum-like tenor and inability to accomplish more than minor annoyance. In a culture reawakened to the power of civil disobedience by way of Occupy Wall Street, new forms of protest are bound to proliferate; but that doesn’t mean that all deserve to survive.

In the taxonomy of protest types, glitter bombing is an odd bird. Its closest cousin is a category of actions sometimes called “tactical frivolity,” which involves using humor, wit and surrealism to protest or disrupt a politically serious mark; but given the aggressive tenor and pat humourlessness of glitter bombing, that label doesn’t quite fit. And because activists can’t usually manage to get more than a few words out during the hurried delivery of the payload, the act doesn’t reach the level of civil discourse or direct action. In other words, glitter bombing does not speak the same language as a march, occupation or even a petition—it’s just an angry tweet in comparsion to those actions’ grand manifesto.  

To be fair, not all protest gestures need aspire to the same level of impact (death by a thousand cuts is sometimes a great strategy). But this is where the actual form of glitter bombing becomes troublesome—what does glitter mean, exactly? When animal rights operatives throw fake blood on fur coats, the symbolism is clear: this life-giving fluid was spilled out of the desire for extravagant clothing. But when gay or trans people are injured by society, do they shed meaningless confetti? Glitter: a party accessory, Ke$ha’s drug of choice, the stuff children dump all over garbage-destined handicrafts; is this superfluous material really appropriate for the protest of such crucial issues?

Sure, glitter may be a chore to clean up, but the association of LGBT and other struggles with annoying specks doesn’t sound like a win to me. Glitter bombing may have been fierce for a minute, but like all protest movements (see: OWS), it must evolve and innovate or else risk irrelevance. When even fellow travelers are tiring of the antics, you know it’s time to put the shiny stuff away.

Newt Gingrich certainly has a woman problem, but it’s not clear any pundit has yet identified why. His lopsided results in Florida – Gingrich secured far more votes from men than from women, while the opposite was true for Mitt Romney – has prompted a rash of stories attempting to offer an explanation. CNN’s Jack Cafferty has speculated that growing revelations about the former speaker’s extramarital conduct disgusted women in Florida. But the accusations from the second of his three wives, Marianne, that Gingrich once requested an open marriage, broke shortly before the South Carolina primary, so if anything you’d expect it would have had an outsize effect in the Palmetto State. Instead, the gap between Gringrich’s male and female support grew from four points in South Carolina to eight points in Florida. Exit polls show that that his gender gap has been growing over the course of the primary season.

I’m not persuaded that female voters’ primary concern about Gingrich is his past behavior as a husband, though it can’t help. A poll taken in early January shows that Gingrich’s women troubles preceded Marianne Gingrich’s accusations. In that poll, in theoretical match-ups among general election voters, Barack Obama held an eight-point advantage among women against Romney and a whopping 18-point advantage among women against Gingrich. Gingrich’s weakness with women was even greater that of Ron Paul, whose candidacy revolves around the support of young men.

In the Daily Beast, Gingrich’s pollster, Kellyanne Conway, suggests that Gingrich did poorly among women in Florida because they’re late deciders who were proportionately affected by the barrage of anti-Gingrich advertising unleashed in the Sunshine State. It’s true that women are indeed late deciders, but Conway’s explanation may not tell the whole story.

The fuller context is that Gingrich had a problem with women before Florida, and it appears to be getting worse. Romney, meanwhile, consistently maintains an edge with women. Why? Some might suggest it’s because women voters generally lean more Democratic and Romney is seen as a more moderate candidate than Gingrich. But that doesn’t really hold water -- folks voting in these primaries are generally right-leaning to start with. And if Gingrich’s perceived conservatism alone put off women voters, you’d expect the same to be a true for a conservative candidate like Rick Santorum. Instead, Santorum does better with women than he does with men.

There’s something about Gingrich that acts as a repellant to women, like the electoral opposite of Axe body spray. As the Associated Press put it in analyzing the results of the Florida primary, “Some of the data from Tuesday's exit poll suggested women's votes were influenced more by a personal distaste for Gingrich than by liking Romney.” Anybody have a theory about why women don’t like Gingrich?

Rachael, I have to admit that I'm just not a fan of disingenuous manuevering, which is why arguments from anti-choicers about Planned Parenthood needing to be "investigated" for supposed ethics violations mean nothing to me. You and I both know that the movement doesn't give a hoot about making sure that Planned Parenthood is providing top-notch care for women, and that the constant and almost always unfounded complaints stem from anti-choice objections to the very existence of low-cost, pro-choice reproductive health care. At the end of the day, I prefer a clean fight. Anti-choice activists should make their arguments about the sinfulness of abortion and contraception directly. Anti-choicers turn to dirty tricks like bullying, clinic harassment, opening nuisance investigations, and shunning campaigns because they know that making their arguments directly doesn't work. I'm all for a rowdy public discourse. I just hate dirty tricks and deceit. Resorting to dirty tricks like nuisance investigations reads like an admission from anti-choice activists that they know they can't bring an end to comprehensive women's health care by persuading the public to abandon it.

This entire debacle with Komen is a perfect example of substituting dirty tricks for open and vigorous discourse. As Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic discovered, Komen has no more legitimate concerns about Planned Parenthood's ethics than the anti-choice activists that bullied Komen or Rep. Cliff Stearns, who has opened the investigation. The rule about not working with organizations under federal investigation was only created after Stearns opened up the nuisance investigation, and it's clear that it was created to give cover for Komen to abandon Planned Parenthood. It was such a transparent attempt to help destroy Planned Parenthood—and undermine women's comprehensive health care—that one top Komen official resigned over the whole thing.

The anti-choice movement's readiness to do an end run around the hard work of persuading the country to abandon not just safe, legal abortion but accessible contraception and STD prevention/treatment is one reason I take this issue so seriously. This isn't just about women's rights and women's health, though those are both important causes. I just really cannot stand disingenuous or dirty politics. The vast majority of anti-choice politicking is through misinformation campaigns and dirty tricks. Legislators who simply want to prevent women from getting abortions pass abortion restrictions while disingenuously claiming that it's being done for women's health. Contraception and STD funding are being attacked by anti-choicers claiming that it's about "abortion," even though federal funding for abortion is already prohibited. Nuisance investigations are opened on clinics, even though they almost never turn up anything. Anti-choice activists show up at clinics to harass the patients and staff while disingenuously claiming that they're providing "counseling," as if they know the first thing about that. Lies claiming that abortion causes breast cancer and mental illness and that contraception doesn't work proliferate, and often written into law or presented in the classroom. It's maddening.

The reason that people are so up in arms over this Komen situation is just this: Anti-choicers lost the argument against safe, legal abortion and accessible contraception. Instead of graciously accepting that the country doesn't agree with them about women's health care and responding with straightforward arguments for why they don't think affordable and safe reproductive health care is good, they instead use junior high school tactics of trying to isolate the victim (Planned Parenthood) in hopes they'll give up. That kind of tactic is off-putting, no matter who you are. Komen seems to realize now that they look like they're involved in dirty tricks, which is why they're running a five-alarm P.R. clean-up campaign on this. That Komen continues to dissemble and try to defend themselves with statements no one believes is only making it worse.

Michelle Obama has been making the rounds on talk show couches this week. Here she is encouraging Jay Leno to eat his veggies. Here she is deflecting questions about daughter Malia's dating life from Rachael Ray. And here she is challenging Ellen DeGeneres to a push-up competition. This is all part of a California swing the first lady is making to raise funds for her husband's reelection campaign, and what's remarkable about Michelle's consecutive appearances is how comfortable she seems with her public self.

This wasn't always the case. When Barack was first elected, it seemed like Michelle was tamping down her personality to fit into some cookie cutter role. She was desperately trying to be as inoffensive as possible, and it washed her out. While her main preoccupations remain wholesome (healthier eating; more benefits for military families), her presentation has become edgier, more authentic.

The latest wave of genuine-seeming public appearances started in early January when Michelle went on CBS's morning show to combat the portrayal of herself in Jodi Kantor's book about the Obama marriage. In that appearance, Michelle calmly fights back against the notion of herself as an "angry black woman." Though many readers found the portrayal of Michelle in Kantor's book eminently relatable, it was still a savvy, strong move for Obama to make.

In the latest round of press, Michelle Obama seems relaxed in her own skin in a way she hasn't previously. On Leno, she was easily joking with Jay about how he should be eating more vegetables. The bit, which could have been extremely awkward, ended up working because of Michelle's charm. On Rachael Ray, she wisely avoids answering the question about Malia's dating life while still making it seem like she's revealing something about her family--that her kids want their parents to be quiet. That's the oldest celebrity trick in the book.

But the Ellen appearance is the most impressive, in a way. You could frame Michelle's pet platforms as ways to bolster the image of her as homemaking mom-in-chief. But she negates that kind of framing by showing off her remarkable physical prowess. Back when pearl-wearing, perfect Barbara Bush was First Lady, could you have imagined that the First Lady would be engaging in a televised push-up competition with an out-and-proud lesbian on national TV? It's an impressive show of strength and originality. Clip of Michelle vs. Ellen below.

As someone who is mildly skeptical of Susan G. Komen for the Cure (for its history of overly  generous compensation for leaders, for its weird legal actions against other cancer groups, for the annoying ubiquity of pink ribbons on everything you buy during October) and outright distrustful of Planned Parenthood, I’ve had the chance to watch their skirmish from afar without feeling too riled one way or the other.

In the end, though, it’s clear that Planned Parenthood’s P.R. machine, well familiar by now with boycotts, is clearly stomping all over Komen, who was not ready for the backlash its received (a backlash aided, no doubt, by the overwhelming liberalness of those in the media who have the opportunity to make their outrage visible). Planned Parenthood will no doubt recoup the money it had received from Komen and it has scored some sympathy and free publicity in the process.

I wish that Komen had done a few things differently. I wish that it had come out right away and said that while it had to cut ties with Planned Parenthood, it had found a corresponding number of free clinics and gynecologists serving women in low-income areas to be the beneficiaries of its largesse. It would have illustrated that Komen was still committed to women’s health care.

And I wish that, if it were going to take the stance of not giving money to Planned Parenthood because of the congressional investigation, that they would have been a little more vocal about the concerns stemming from that investigation. Amanda, I know you referred  called it a “nuisance,” but in reading  the report put together by Americans United for Life, which helped launch the investigation, there are some legitimate concerns. Planned Parenthood offices in California, New Jersey, New York, and Washington state have at various times been audited by state and federal authorizes and discovered to have been overbilling state agencies and committing other improper billing practices. Further, Planned Parenthood has a record of not reporting instances of sexual abuse—and I’m not talking about 16-year-old girls who come in with their 19-year-old boyfriends. The AUL report documents a case in which a 13-year-old girl was raped by an older foster brother and was impregnated—twice. Planned Parenthood is required, if it wants to receive federal funds, to comply with mandatory reporting laws.

Those who are loudly denouncing Komen are getting plenty of attention today. But the Komen foundation would not have acted as it did if it had not been hearing similar complaints from pro-lifers for years. It could not have been a decision that it made lightly. I’m grateful that it listened to the concerns of men and women who told them they would not donate to Komen as long as it had a relationship with the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Because Planned Parenthood can gin up outrage from its supporters at the drop of a hat, and that it will likely come out ahead with this whole affair. It would be nice, however, if once in a while the organization could step back and ask itself why an organization like Komen would sever its ties. There are consequences, or should be, for an organization that continues  to perform more and more abortions—while treating fewer prenatal patients and making fewer adoption referrals—while the nationwide trend has been largely downward since 1990. There should be consequences for an organization whose employees are caught on tape giving inaccurate medical advice or who fail to report anything to authorities when 13- and 14-year-olds show up seeking abortions after being impregnated by men in their 30s and 40s.  About as many Americans are pro-life as are pro-choice, and we will continue to target groups that give their money to Planned Parenthood.

Nicki Minaj—the female pop-rapper known for her stuttering lyrics and wonkified fashion taste—is something of a controversial figure in the contemporary musical landscape. Some listeners revel in her playful, off-kilter style, while others find it as grating as when a video gets out of sync with its audio track. Certain, however, is the fact that Minaj’s star continues to rise: she’s been tapped to accompany Madonna in this weekend’s Superbowl halftime show, and her second proper album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, will be released later this year.  

Minaj is clearly a hot property, so it may come as a surprise that the BET network has reportedly banned the video for her song “Stupid Hoe” for being too explicit for television. But what counts as crossing the line on a network that regularly shows videos featuring nearly nude women gyrating to often objectifying and at times even degrading lyrics? Watching the video, I can’t help but wonder which element is being deemed beyond the pale (and BET isn’t telling yet). Sure, we see essentially bare butts a fair amount, and Minaj performs (rather ironically, in my opinion) the sexualized choreography required of female entertainers, but my more delicate moral sensibilities are definitely not offended. In fact, it’s the seizure-inducing quality of the editing that's really troubling.

But what of the lyrics? While no one is suggesting that “hoe” is a nice word to use in reference to women, it’s certainly common currency in genres like rap and hip-hop. And here, Minaj deploys the put-down in classic “diss” song fashion, using it to call out her female enemies—it’s a symbolic filler more than anything else. Still, BET could censor the word along with the song’s other no-nos (making it even more fantastically choppy!), but that seems overkill. And in any case, if the network has decided it’s in the business of policing sexism or explicit sexuality in its content, then censors have a ton of other cleaning up to do on male-authored tracks.

Of course, one could regret the same-sex misogyny of the thing; Slate’s Jonah Weiner did that during his participation in the magazine’s 2011 Music Club coverage:

…the single is a flashback to the tedious, dispiriting beef that began between Lil Kim and Nicki Minaj when the latter’s star was first on the rise. Women have it tough enough in hip-hop without mean-girling each other. I wish Kim had looked upon Minaj, who owes her an inarguable debt, not with spite but rather, as Missy Elliott did, with pride and excitement. And I wish Nicki Minaj (who may be trying to communicate some hardness herself after her love-song-stuffed debut album) didn’t find it necessary to perpetuate the violence.

But girl-on-girl aggression is not the issue here. If male rappers are celebrated (or at least tolerated) for presenting women as hyper-sexualized playthings, then female artists should certainly be allowed to paint the self-portrait of their choice. Perhaps Minaj’s ridiculous (even satirical?), blunt exaggeration of sexist themes (e.g. caged feline, baby doll, mannequin) makes BET executives uncomfortable. But then, double standards are always awkward.

Watch the (possibly NSFW) video below and then let us know what you think: Is BET's ban the result of sexism or prudence?

The backlash against actress Zooey Deschanel's particular brand of twee reached new heights when her hit sitcom, The New Girl, premiered last fall. The ads proclaimed the comely actress "adorkable," and Jada Yuan's New York Magazine profile of Deschanel expressed the divisive feelings towards her succinctly: "[Women] either covet her bangs or they resent her for seemingly playing into the male fantasy that women are only attractive when they act like girls. Plenty of blog posts have used Deschanel as a launchpad for this very debate."

Last night, The New Girl approached the polarizing nature of Deschanel's girlie-girlness head on in an episode called "Jess and Julia." Lizzy Caplan plays Julia, the hard-edged lawyer girlfriend of Jess's roommate, Nick. Jess sucks up to Julia because she wants Julia to help her get out of a ticket. Jess—who got the ticket because she was braking for an injured bird—plies Julia with cupcakes and cooing, and Julia does not respond kindly. They have the following exchange, with Julia acting as the greek chorus of the blogosphere:

Julia: A judge might buy into this whole thing.

Jess: What whole thing?

Julia: Your whole thing. With the cupcakes, and the braking for birds, and the whole, "Bluebirds help me dress in the morning!"

Jess: I didn’t realize I was doing a thing.

Julia: It’s a great thing! The big beautiful eyes, like a scared baby. I’m sure that gets you out of all kinds of stuff.

The pair continue to clash for most of the rest of the episode, and Julia continues to be the conduit for the criticisms that the blog world lobs at Deschanel. Julia accuses Jess of trying to mess up her relationship with Nick. "I know that I’m the mean lawyer girl who wears suits and works too much," she says. "And you, you’re the really fun teacher girl with all the colorful skirts, and you bake things. And eventually Nick is going to come running to you, and you’ll tuck him in under his blankie."

Later, Jess responds by making nearly the identical argument that the real Deschanel makes in that New York Magazine piece. To Yuan, Deschanel says, "I think the fact that people are associating being girlie with weakness, that needs to be examined. I don’t think that it undermines my power at all." The character Jess makes it funnier, but the message is the same:

"I brake for birds. I rock a lot of polka dots. I have touched glitter in the last 24 hours. I spend my entire day talking to children. And I find it fundamentally strange that you’re not a dessert person. It freaks me out.  I’m sorry that I don’t talk like Murphy Brown. And I hate your pants suit. I wish it had ribbons on it or something just to make it slightly cuter but that doesn’t mean I’m not smart and tough and strong."

That argument is completely reasonable. There shouldn't be just one acceptable way of behaving for women—and whether you're a ball busting lady lawyer with an anger management problem or a beribboned glitter pusher, you shouldn't be shamed for it.

However, that's not the message that was put forth by the end of the episode. In the last fifth of the show, Julia comes over to apologize to Jess, and it turns out that deep down, what Julia really wants is to talk about her feelings and crochet baby hats. That's what makes Julia a happier person—having girl talk about her embarrassing high school days.

Narratively, because Jess/Deschanel is the star of the show, they had to make her be more sympathetic than the Julia character. And intellectually, I understand that. But in the real world, I want those Murphy Brown-talking, pantsuit wearers to be just as acceptable and palatable as the cupcake clan.

In a shocking move Tuesday afternoon, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the country's most famous breast cancer charity, pulled its grants for breast-cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood. Komen claims that their reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation from Congress, but as it's well-understood on both the left and the right that the investigation, headed by Rep. Cliff Stearns, is a nuisance investigation that will almost surely turn up nothing, this excuse sounds lame indeed. The likelier explanation is the one offered by Planned Parenthood, that Komen caved under relentless pressure from anti-choice activists who oppose Planned Parenthood for offering abortions as well as low-cost contraception and STD prevention and treatment. In addition, Komen has a history of not playing nice with other women's health organizations. Planned Parenthood has created an emergency fund to replace the Komen grants, to keep the breast-cancer screening service from being interrupted.

The existence of breast-cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood has always been a thorn in the anti-choice side. Most of Planned Parenthood's services are related to the choice to be sexually active---contraception, STD screening and treatment, cervical cancer screening---making it easy to write off those services as unnecessary if you follow the strict abstinence-only prescription the Christian right has for women. Breast cancer, however, can strike the lifelong virgin, the married woman who only has sex for procreation, and the dirty fornicator (i.e. the vast majority of American women) alike. Because of this, anti-choicers have tried to create a rift between women's health advocates who focus on breast cancer and those who focus on reproductive health concerns below the waist. Today, they had a victory with Komen's act of cowardice.

No matter how much anti-choicers wish otherwise, it's not feasible to create an approach to women's health that separates good girl concerns from bad girl concerns. For instance, many women land in gynocologist's offices seeking contraceptive services and cervical-cancer screenings, and doctors use that opportunity to teach the art of breast self-exam. As noted in my previous post on the Santorums' pregnancy troubles, even the world of the hated abortion provider and the much-vaunted obstetrician can't be so easily separated, as the latter is often called upon to have knowledge of pregnancy termination in case of a medical emergency.

In the end, the grant money is less important than the symbolism of Komen buying into the conservative myth of good-girl health care vs. bad-girl health care. In reality, women's health care can only work if it's comprehensive health care. Komen has already been under serious scrutiny by those who argue that the organization cares more about shoring up their image than making real progress in the fight for women's health, and with this move today, they proved their critics right.