200,000 Years of Satire

I picked up this article while on vacation a few days ago and found it amusing. Until I realized they were serious.

How to Find Love in a World of Hookups
GLAMOUR (June 2010)
"It's taken womankind 200,000 years to finally be able to have no-strings, no-guilt sex. But what happens when you start wanting more? We've cracked the code to figure out how you can have your fun — and your happy ending, too."

Allow me a few questions for the author and believers of such an article:

• Do you think, perchance, that the previous 200,000 of with-strings with-guilt premarital sex might have held, I don't know, maybe one or two clues as to why it's so difficult to have your cake (hooking up) and eat it too (monogamous lifelong marriage)?

• Are we admitting that young women, ahem, actually might want more than perpetually hooking up? How does that fit with the oh-so-empowered I-don't-need-men-but-I'm-going-to-act-just-like-them superwomen of the late 20th century?
  

• Does this article match anyone's real life experience? Granted, the author quotes real life 20-somethings (most of whom seem kinda confused) but she also helpfully showcases Samantha Jones as an example of relational clarity. Not sure what to do with that.

Thoughts?

The Pill Turns 50

The Washington Post has an article today celebrating the 50th anniversary of the advent of the most famous form of birth control: The Pill. The conclusion of the article got my attention:

"But there is a bitter irony in the fact that the same pill that gave mothers the ability to combine childbearing and a career by controlling fertility has also led many women to delay childbearing so long that they jeopardize that fertility. Contraception makes it possible to postpone motherhood, but it doesn't solve the problem of how to combine caring for children with going to work. As a result, many women wait to have a child until they are financially secure enough to afford child care.

In some sense, the pill let employers and the government off the hook by giving women the means to juggle jobs and families. Sanger and Katharine McCormick hoped that the pill would allow women to control their lives, but they did not count on women being stuck with such hard choices. For while mothers' lives have changed over the past 50 years, the work world has lagged behind: Most jobs are still 9 to 5 -- or longer -- leaving little time to care for children. The cost of child care is, for many women, ruinously high. Paid parental leave is still too rare, and where it exists, usually too brief. For the most part, it is women who, aided by the pill, have adjusted to the demands of the workforce, rather than the other way around.

The pill may have been a gift to mothers. But 50 years on, it could use some new accessories. This Mother's Day, instead of jewelry, candy or flowers, how about some more novel presents: lengthy paid parental leaves, government-supported child care and flex-time."

Question: how are parental leave changes, subsidized child care or flex time going to fix the problem described?

Answer: they aren't. Such changes to benefits are only addressing the symptoms of the problem. These benefits are exactly the same as The Pill in the one sense she delineated earlier: they "let employers and the government off the hook by giving women the means to juggle jobs and families."

Which leads me to the second question: what is the real root issue here? (I have my hunches, but I'd love to know what you think!)

Bloggable bits

I've been accumulating a list of things about which to blog. In the interest of time, here's a simple list:

HBR: Am I micromanaging my work? Sadly, the answer for me is usually yes. Regardless it is an interesting thing to examine in light of the fact that most people are concerned with how micromanage-y their manager is.

Gallup: Democratic Party image drops to a record low. Now if only the Tea Party would drop off the face of the earth, conservatives could perhaps win back some political mind share.

Pew Research: In related news, no one likes Congress either. The support for smaller government has risen 5 percentage points over the past four years, and now outpaces the support for larger government by 10 percentage points. Again, conservatives seem to have made some inroads; offering some concrete solutions is the logical next step.

LOLFed. Is utterly ridiculous but makes me laugh about financial news. I feel like that is an impressive feat. Even if I still don't fully understand what a CDO is.

Gen Y and Abortion

From Gallup today:

Those aged 18-29 feel differently about abortion than their parents and, to a lesser degree, their grandparents. Oddly, they are more conservative. Of all age groups, those under 30 have the highest percentage (23%) of those who believe abortion should be illegal in all cases. Ages 30-65 have a 17% share believing that abortion should always be prohibited, and for those older than sixty-five, the percentage is 21%.

It will be interesting to see how those ideological differences play out politically and socially in the coming decades.

Defining Moment, Enter Stage Right

From today's Washington Post editorial page, Michael Gerson writes:

"Whatever the legislative fate of health reform -- now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats -- the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president's public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president's ambitions. It is quite an accomplishment. For the president, it must also be quite a shock, because he thought he was taking a reasonable, middle path on health reform."


ZING!


(Read the whole article here, and let me know if you agree with him!)

And now for something completely unrelated.

Three very unrelated but all interesting items:

• Unselfishness makes business partnerships work. Actually, it makes a lot of partnerships work. And unselfish people usually don't happen by accident.
  

• Rarely do we see the gap between reality and PhotoShop, but this article has a few brilliantly raw examples of the chasm. It makes me angry that an entire industry lives and breathes on our desire to look like that, when that doesn't actually exist. And it would be one thing if it only targeted adults, but it doesn't. The impact can be lifelong and devastating, especially for young women. And I'm not ok with that. Just saying.

• I have always sort of admired, in a weird way, the crass swashbuckling White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, and his brazen-yet-pragmatic political methods. Looks like Obama should probably start listening to him a bit more.
  

And there is Tuesday's news & tidbits roundup by Amy...enjoy!

Too Much Greece is Bad For Your Fiscal Health

The unfolding drama of the possibility that Greece will default on its debt is a harrowing and messy one. Which made me all the more appreciative that Robert J. Samuelson wrote this beautifully concise piece in today's Washington Post, on both the reasons for and meaning of the Greek fiscal tragedy.

"Almost every advanced country -- the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Belgium and others -- faces some combination of huge budget deficits, high debts, aging populations and political paralysis. It's an unstable mix. Present deficits may aid economic recovery, but the persistence of those deficits threatens long-term prosperity. The same unpleasant choices confronting Greece await most wealthy nations, even if they pretend otherwise. "

Dear Boomers, I love you. Also I hate you.

The contract that binds generations together for the purpose of caring for one another in vulnerable stages of life has persisted in formal and informal means since, roughly, the beginning of time. The assumption that parents will take care of children, who will grow up and take care of parents, keeps society from fraying at the edges in a variety of ways.

A new provocative book, however, argues that the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1945 and 1960) might put a unbearable strain on that human contract. Entitled The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took their Children’s Future—and Why They Should Give it Back, it looks like quite the read. (For starters, check out The Economist's review.)

Not only did the Boomers transform (for better or worse) everything they touched, they also lived and worked and put their kids through college and bought house(s) and cars and generally poured productivity and dollars into the American economy since the late 1960s. And now the darlings want to retire, en masse, and although they've got some savings - it's certainly not enough to last as long as they will likely live, nor at the scale most envision as "active retirement."

All of which will make for quite an interesting working life for my age cohort. I doubt that I can count on any Social Security for myself, but I might spend my working years paying for the broken wealth transfer system to Boomers. And we thought the 1960s were turbulent...

Well, that pretty much sums it up

I would write about the Tim Tebow commercial, or the firestorm surrounding it, but I'm pretty sure the Washington Post's Sally Jenkins hit this one out of the park. (Sorry had to use at least one sports metaphor, Sally.)

Tebow's Super Bowl Ad Isn't Intolerant; Its Critics Are

I think this is my favorite line: If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.

Exactly. The NARAL/NOW crowd's hold on American mindshare is actually that precarious. And that's kind of amazing.

A recent post I wrote for The Father Factor blog...

So Men Health's recently published a list of what they consider the top ten worst fathers. The line of reasoning was, "Well, even if you aren't perfect - at least you aren't this bad." The list includes everyone from Michael Lohan to David Hasselhoff to Eliot Spitzer to Woody Allen. It also includes some less well-known folks who beat up their kids' Little League coaches or produce 78 kids (to date).

This is interesting on multiple levels. First, it's good to know there is still some sort of standard for what it means to be a good father. Granted, after this list, the bar isn't too high but if you did the opposite of everything on this list (ie: care about your kids more than yourself and don't physically or emotionally harm them), you're headed in the right direction.

Secondly, I think Men's Health might have forgotten another entry on the list: the intentionally absent father. Obviously there are situations where a father cannot, for various reasons, play an active role in his children's lives. But in the majority of cases, as difficult as the father's presence might be, a father's absence certainly doesn't make for a painless childhood either. It's simply a different category of pain.

Perhaps we and Men's Health can agree on one point - fathers do need encouragement. Not perhaps from the legacy of outrageously ridiculously bad fathers, but from working on their fathering skills and knowing that their presence is an irreplaceable wonderful benefit to their children!