In “Bossy Pants?” Mr. Blow says too many children are born to single mothers, but instead of addressing the issue from a policy perspective some harp on pop culture and blame Beyoncé. Mr. Kristof takes a look at “The Unhealthy Meat Market” and says a handful of companies control what we put on the dinner table, raising concerns for the lives of humans and animals alike. Ms. Collins considers “Lunch on the Barricades” and says the basic idea of providing healthy subsidized meals for public school students used to be as universally accepted as Social Security. Not so anymore! Here’s Mr. Blow:
The same week that Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, helped start a campaign to ban the word “bossy,” so as not to discourage women from being assertive, the “Princeton Mom,” Susan Patton, who penned a widely condemned letter about why young women should focus on marriage in The Daily Princetonian, went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to flog her new book. This is what she told a group of young women working in the studio’s newsroom:
“You’re going to start looking for a husband in your mid-30’s? You’re going to be competing with girls who are 10 years younger than you. And not only can you not compete for men with women 10 years younger than you, because they are 10 years younger than you: they’re dewy-eyed, they’re fresh, they’re adorable.”
Dewy-eyed, fresh and adorable? What an anachronistic message to send to young working women — that desirable men, who presumably have their druthers, are so superficial and libido-driven that professional women can’t hold a candle to perky ones, that a woman who wishes to marry must submit herself to being chosen by the most superficial of men before the wick of her beauty burns low. This, according to Patton, apparently happens in her 30s, which could be only the first third of a woman’s life. This reinforces the most destructive gender stereotype.
Undoubtedly there’s some evolutionary-biological drive among many men and women to choose mates who are fertile and capable of protecting and caring for children, but those are only base instincts. Much of the youth-fetishizing, particularly as it relates to women, is culturally constructed and reinforced. We hyper-sexualize little girls and juvenilize grown women. Both genuine youth and seasoned maturity are sacrificed to that altar.
This is a societal disease.
And it’s no better for little boys, who are constantly admonished to suck it up, toughen up, don’t cry, be a man, and don’t run, hit or kick like a girl. We plant seeds of misogyny, often without being aware of it, while our boys are still sprouts. And then we wonder why so many men are emotionally suppressed and stunted. It’s because we’ve been telling them all their lives that emotions were effeminate and femininity was a curse.
We build zombie men and lament the dearth of “real” ones.
Yet some still bemoan our current atmosphere as “feminized” — a rhetorical construction that in and of itself is misogynistic because it establishes femininity as a lesser, undesirable expression — rather than understanding that femininity and masculinity aren’t strictly gendered and their expressions not rigidly conveyed.
Our current turn toward tolerance for sexual identities and gender expressions isn’t about more people being less of a man or woman, but about more people feeling safe to be more wholly human. And it’s about freedom — freedom of expression, freedom of self-determination and freedom of fluidity.
And still some see any acknowledgment of and respect for sexual and gender differences as an attack on nature and culture at the expense of procreative couples and traditional families.
Let’s be very clear about something: There is no shortage of hetero-normative behavior in this country, or heterosexual pairings and heterosexual sex, or pregnancies or births.
If there is an issue on which we can mostly agree it is that there are too many children born to single mothers. But there is a smart way to address this problem: increase comprehensive sex education, teach young people to better value their bodies and protect their futures, hold male behavior more fully accountable, make contraception readily available and easily affordable and make sure that all women have a full range of reproduction options, including access to abortion.
But on some of these we are just treading water and on others we’re backpedaling.
As the Guttmacher Institute has pointed out, “more abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011-2013 than in the entire previous decade.”
Instead of seriously addressing this issue from a policy perspective, people like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly would rather harp on pop culture and blame Beyoncé. O’Reilly, slammed her for her song “Partition,” in which she sings about having sex with her husband, and father of her child, calling it “exploitive garbage” that did harm to the teenage girls, “particularly girls of color,” when she knows “the devastation” of unwanted pregnancies and fractured families.
First, some facts: the phenomenon of single motherhood is becoming much more an adult issue than a teen one. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, teenage pregnancy rates have declined to historic lows, and the rate of decline in birthrates for women age 15 to 19 since 1990 was even greater among blacks than among whites and Hispanics. The numbers are still too high among teenagers, but the dimensions of the problem are contracting, not growing.
That said, whether one likes or agrees with the message of a music video is irrelevant here. Condemning artists for being provocative when politicians have proven either impotent or regressive is a tired sleight of hand. Instead of protesting a song in which Beyoncé asks her driver to close the partition, O’Reilly would be better served protesting the Republican laws forcing the closings of abortion clinics.
And in O’Reilly’s chastising, there is an undercurrent of shaming women for being too sexually expressive and not sufficiently chaste. Women shouldn’t be sexually liberated beings. Women and girls, particularly those of lesser means, must be taught to demur, resist and abstain lest they entice a wily man and suffer an unwanted pregnancy. As Ann Coulter told a crowd at CPAC last week, poor people should be told to “keep your knees together before you’re married.”
We have to see our girls and boys as more than skirts and pants, damsels and squires, child-bearers and breadwinners. We must see them as — and encourage them to express themselves as — fully realized beings. Girls must be given safe space to be assertive and boys to be vulnerable without feeling that they have failed a test of gender normativity. We must teach everyone to honor themselves fully — including their sexual selves — so that unwanted pregnancies fall in proportion to a rising sense of self.
We must allow girls and boys, men and women, to be fully free.
“Howard” from Los Angeles left a most cogent comment to Mr. Blow’s piece: “You want to stop unwanted pregnancies? Stop subsidizing Viagra, start subsidizing contraception. You want to pontificate about poor people choosing present pleasure when their lives are otherwise collapsing around them as unemployment soars? OK, but don’t call yourself either a true conservative or a true Christian.” Next up we have Mr. Kristof:
Where does our food come from? Often the answer is Tyson Foods, America’s meat factory.
Tyson, one of the nation’s 100 biggest companies, slaughters 135,000 head of cattle a week, along with 391,000 hogs and an astonishing 41 million chickens. Nearly all Americans regularly eat Tyson meat — at home, at McDonalds, at a cafeteria, at a nursing home.
“Even if Tyson did not produce a given piece of meat, the consumer is really only picking between different versions of the same commoditized beef, chicken, and pork that is produced through a system Tyson pioneered,” says Christopher Leonard, a longtime agribusiness journalist, in his new book about Tyson called “The Meat Racket.”
Leonard’s book argues that a handful of companies, led by Tyson, control our meat industry in ways that raise concerns about the impact on animals and humans alike, while tearing at the fabric of rural America. Many chicken farmers don’t even own the chickens they raise or know what’s in the feed. They just raise the poultry on contract for Tyson, and many struggle to make a living.
Concerned by the meat oligopoly’s dominance of rural America, President Obama undertook a push beginning in 2010 to strengthen antitrust oversight of the meat industry and make it easier for farmers to sue meatpackers. The aim was grand: to create a “new rural economy” to empower individual farmers.
Big Meat’s lobbyists used its friends in Congress to crush the Obama administration’s regulatory effort, which collapsed in “spectacular failure,” Leonard writes.
Factory farming has plenty of devastating consequences, but it’s only fair to acknowledge that it has benefited our pocketbooks. When President Herbert Hoover dreamed of putting “a chicken in every pot,” chicken was a luxury dish more expensive than beef. In 1930, whole dressed chicken retailed for $6.48 a pound in today’s currency, according to the National Chicken Council. By last year, partly because of Tyson, chicken retailed for an average price of $1.57 per pound — much less than beef.
Costs came down partly because scientific breeding reduced the length of time needed to raise a chicken to slaughter by more than half since 1925, even as a chicken’s weight doubled. The amount of feed required to produce a pound of chicken has also dropped sharply.
And yet.
This industrial agriculture system also has imposed enormous costs of three kinds.
First, it has been a catastrophe for animals. Chickens are bred to grow huge breasts so that as adults they topple forward and can barely breathe or stand.
“These birds are essentially bred to suffer,” says Laurie Beacham of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which argues that there’s an inherent cruelty in raising these “exploding chickens.”
Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human by the age of two months would weigh 660 pounds.
Second, factory farming endangers our health. Robert Martin of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that a farm with 10,000 hogs produces as much fecal waste as a small city with 40,000 people, but the hog operation won’t have a waste treatment plant. Indeed, the hogs in a single county in North Carolina produce half as much waste as all the people in New York City, Martin says.
Another health concern is that antibiotics are routinely fed to animals and birds to help them grow quickly in crowded, dirty conditions. This can lead to antibiotic resistant infections, which strike two million Americans annually (overuse of antibiotics on human patients is also a factor, but four-fifths of antibiotics in America go to farm animals).
Third, this industrial model has led to a hollowing out of rural America. The heartland is left with a few tycoons and a large number of people struggling at the margins.
Leonard writes in his book that in 68 percent of the counties where Tyson operates, per capita income has grown more slowly over the last four decades than the average in that state. We may think of rural America as a halcyon pastoral of red barns and the Waltons, but today it’s also a land of unemployment, poverty, despair and methamphetamines.
It’s easy to criticize the current model of industrial agriculture, far harder to outline a viable alternative. Going back to the rural structure represented by the inefficient family farm on which I grew up in Oregon isn’t a solution; then we’d be back to $6.48-a-pound chicken.
But a starting point is to recognize bluntly that our industrial food system is unhealthy. It privatizes gains but socializes the health and environmental costs. It rewards shareholders — Tyson’s stock price has quadrupled since early 2009 — but can be ghastly for the animals and humans it touches. Industrial meat has an acrid aftertaste.
Last but not least we have Ms. Collins:
Let’s consider school lunches.
Always an important topic. But to be honest, it’s only coming up right now thanks to Representative Paul Ryan, who took a strong, principled stand against school lunches in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference. (“What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.”)
Ryan’s point was that mothers who pack their children’s lunches are showing their love, while kids who get their food from the cafeteria lady will feel that nobody cares. Have you ever heard a more terrible thing to say?
Most American mothers work, and they are already guilt-ridden over everything under the sun. They are constantly hearing stories about some other woman who has six kids and manages a major corporation yet still finds time to sew a sequin-crusted mermaid costume for the 8-year-old’s Halloween parade. Most American mothers feel remarkably successful when everybody gets off to school with matching socks. Now Paul Ryan wants to tell them they’ve committed child abuse by failure to fill a brown bag.
Fortunately, the speech ended badly: Ryan included a story about a poor schoolboy begging for a home-packed lunch, which turned out to be rather fictional. But it was still an interesting window into the right’s growing antipathy toward school meals.
School lunches have always been political, in a peculiar agricultural way. The frozen food lobby takes on the fresh produce people. The tomato growers do battle with nutritionists who don’t want to count pizza as a vegetable. The anti-starch advocates versus the potato growers. (In 2011, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Udall of Colorado led a successful bipartisan drive to protect the right of potatoes to roam free across the menus of American school cafeterias.)
But the basic idea of providing healthy subsidized meals for public school students used to be universally accepted. Like Social Security, or federally funded bridge reconstruction.
No more. These days, you can find vocal opposition to any federal program that gives something to poor people. Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia, who’s running for the Republican Senate nomination, has been arguing that kids who qualify for subsidized school meals should be required to do janitorial work in order to demolish the idea “that there is such a thing as a free lunch.”
Then there’s that vision of the hand-packed meal as a symbol of Family. Every once in a while, a rumor crops up that an elementary school somewhere is prohibiting brown bags and forcing all its students to eat Obamafare. This does not actually seem to be happening. However it is true that the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the school lunch program, is wildly sensitive to any suggestions that it would ever get between a child and a homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “What the parent decides is sufficient,” said Undersecretary Kevin Concannon.
(Concannon has a picture in his office that was taken when he toured a school in New Orleans. He’s chatting over lunch with a little girl who pointed to his plate and said: “Mister, if you’re not going to finish your broccoli, I’ll finish it for you.” He has seen the future, and it is eating green vegetables.)
Finally, there’s the rancor toward the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which Congress passed in 2010 with the strong backing of Michelle Obama. Its push toward healthier school menus is a popular target with the right. In theory, this is a rejection of federal interference with local decision-making. But, mainly, I suspect, it’s an attempt to remind average Americans that the first lady gets up to work out at 4:30 a.m. and probably does not approve of some of their lifestyle choices.
Plus, it’s always easy to make fun of kale. Los Angeles schools, which were trailblazers, got no end of grief for their rather abrupt transition from chocolate milk and chicken nuggets to a menu that was heavy on things like vegetable curry and lentils. “Schoolkids in Los Angeles have blown the whistle on the east wing chef-in-chief’s healthy lunch diktats,” announced columnist Michelle Malkin triumphantly.
David Binkle of the Los Angeles Unified School District says that after a rather rocky shakedown, things are going great and student food sales are way up. “And we don’t even have pizza on the menu.” The kids are drinking more milk than ever, even without chocolate flavoring. The lentils are still there, Binkle said, but they tend to be hidden away in salads.
We’ll be hearing more complaints soon; the second phase of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act kicks in this year, and it includes bans on snacks like candy bars, Doritos, or sugary soft drinks, even in vending machines. Gone from the cafeteria forever.
Unless your mother packs them in a brown paper bag.
