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Now, this article is supposed to be about the debate as to whether or not the alleged victim is actually the person shown on the R. Kelly child pornography sex tape, but the author of it decided to go for a catchy hook line, rather than starting the story off with what it was really about: R. Kelly is a pedophile, and he got caught on camera, but nobody is certain  who the victim was. I’m not even going to go into the fact that the article should be about the fact that R. Kelly is at trial for many counts of child pornography and not the victim’s identity.

She’s been described over several weeks of testimony as a Christian singer and a point guard, a participant in three-way sex and as the goddaughter to one of the music industry’s biggest stars.

As far as opening lines go, that’s pretty catchy. Sex! Scandal! Three-ways! Christianity! And then you read the next sentence, and you start to wonder what this article is really about:

Even the family of the alleged victim in the R. Kelly child pornography trial doesn’t seem to agree about her, especially about whether she’s on a 27-minute sex tape that could send the R&B star to prison for up to 15 year if convicted.

Continuing on with the story, they make it sound like the victim is on trial, rather than a pedophile:

Prosecutors say she was as young as 13 when the tape was made. Now 23, the woman has been identified at the trial. She has not spoken publicly about the case.

Prosecutors said they would not ask the alleged victim to testify. The defense hasn’t said whether they will, though Kelly attorney Sam Adam Jr. asked jurors in opening statements why prosecutors chose not to call her.

“One answer,” he said, his voice booming. “One: It’s not her on that tape.”

Let me say this now before my head explodes: it shouldn’t matter whether or not it is her on the tape. R. Kelly is at trial for having sex with a minor, and if the prosecution can prove that without being sure of the victim’s identity, then he should be convicted.

Not once does the entire article mention the word “pedophile”, which I find extremely shocking since the alleged victim was 13 at the time the tape was made, making her just on the cusp of puberty, which in the medical sense of the word, would make R. Kelly a pedophile.

So we can call (potential) child sexual abuse victims “vixens”, but we can’t call their attackers pedophiles?

I’m going to go with a huge resounding no, but some people seem to think that feminism has convinced women that their careers are more important than children, and that women are losing out on motherhood because of it. I’m more inclined to believe this is people blaming feminism for their poor decision making skills. Rebecca Walker, child of Alice Walker, wrote the most god awful article I’ve ever seen, where she effectively blames feminism for her bad relationship with her mother, and for all the problems women are having when they try to conceive later in life:

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

Now, see, this is what bothers me. Feminism has not told women to forgo having babies in favor of their careers. It has suggested that they take their careers into consideration when planning a family - and this is not a suggestion they have made only to women, they have made their suggestion to everyone. As with many other movements, the ideal is not necessarily executed properly when practiced by the masses.

In the end, it really does come down to make a choice: taking the time off to have a baby in the middle of your career and risking the loss of promotions, etc, or waiting until you’ve reached your goal and then taking the time off, risking that you won’t be able to have a baby. No matter how equal our society becomes, this will still be an issue for women that isn’t necessarily one for men. Feminism hasn’t forced women to wait until they are 40 to have children, it has simply made them realize that children do not have to come first. Their marriage, career, or other aspect of their life can come before children, as long as they have had the common sense to plan it out ahead of time.

Of course, that’s a totally different situation than deciding to have a child at 42 when you never wanted one before.

Via Feministe.

When I was younger I was quite the reader. I liked to read because I wanted to be just like my mom (and I still do want to be just like my mom, hence the knitting and the reading) and she loved reading, too. After my brother was born, we spent a lot of time trying to prepare him for school by teaching him how to write and read (he has Asperger’s). When we started working with my brother, I started reading more because my mom began purchasing books that were shorter, quicker, and easier to read. I like books that go by quickly, even if they are 700 page bricks. But the one author I never liked was Dr. Seuss.

I was scared to death of Dr. Seuss. The rhymes, the scary pictures, the political undertones, it was all too much for little four year-old me. The only Dr. Seuss book I read was I’ll Teach My Dog 100 Words - which I probably still have memorized. And then, one day, even though she knew better, my mom brought home Horton Hears A Who!. I begrudgingly read the book, and it ended up being one of my favorite books as a child. As an adult, I even have a Horton Hears A Who! tshirt with his catch phrase “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

So this weekend I went to see the movie. I was excited for many different reasons, but the two most prominent being 1.) Horton!! and 2.) amazing new animation technologies. And I can just say, I really really do not like it when my childhood memories get hijacked by wing nuts.

From AlterNet:

Anti-choicers demonstrate at a children’s movie to claim that “a person’s a person no matter how small” — unless that person has a uterus.

The book was written in 1954, long before Roe v. Wade and the modern framework of the abortion debate. If Seuss’ simple rhymes do contain social commentary, they appear to be a condemnation of Cold War era paranoia. But context doesn’t matter to the anti-choice crowd — in fact a quick internet search reveals that there are many out there who believe that God spoke through the decidedly liberal Seuss’ pen, willing him to write this line that can now be used to justify a movement he didn’t support. They are undeterred by Seuss’ widow’s support for Planned Parenthood and an interview with Seuss Scholar Philip Nel, who said that the author threatened lawsuits against anti-choice groups: “It’s one of the ways in which Seuss has been misappropriated. He would not agree with that.” Death of the author, indeed.

This past Saturday a group of anti-abortion protestors filtered in to the Hollywood premiere of the “Horton” film, voiced by Jim Carrey, Steve Carrell and Carol Burnettt, and others. They interrupted the screening with a coordinated protest, shouting during the film and then walking around with tape over their mouths. It was a bizarre stunt, considering the fact that most of the audience was made up of children who doubtless missed their political message, and Hollywood journalists who made fun of them.

But these kinds of shenanigans, while frustrating, weren’t exactly shocking. Despite lawsuits and voiced disapproval from Dr. Seuss and his widow, the “a person’s a person no matter how small” line has snowballed and is now a de facto motto for the anti-abortion movement. Just google the line: some pro-life sites show up above Dr. Seuss.

[…] The anti-choice protesters, incidentally, were happy to ruin the afternoon of hundreds of those kids, too busy advocating on behalf of blastocysts to pay attention to real people — real “small people,” in fact. This kind of behavior sums up the hypocrisy of a movement that would give personhood to a fertilized egg while denying health care to children and physical autonomy to women.

The problem is that those who are particularly proud of saying “a person’s a person” don’t care about actual persons.

And from Seuss’s side of things:

None of this sat well with Audrey Geisel, widow of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), who attended the screening. So did Karl ZoBell, the lawyer who represents her and who has represented the interests of Dr. Seuss for some 40 years. In an interview with NPR, he said he couldn’t make out the yelling and thought maybe “some nut” was in the theater. Later, he asked the protesters what group they represented, and none would answer. Their silence didn’t seem like an accident to him, which makes sense, because ZoBell has not been bashful about sending cease-and-desist letters to those who appropriate Dr. Seuss’ material for their own purposes. And many do. (According to ZoBell, politicians love to sling the term Grinch at their rivals.)

ZoBell says it would be nice if these people came up with their own material. But if they don’t go too far—by copping the illustrations, for example—they can use a line like “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” even if it wouldn’t have pleased Dr. Seuss. And it wouldn’t have. The Geisels were opposed to using the Dr. Seuss books for any political agenda.

STOP RUINING MY CHILDHOOD, ANTI-CHOICERS! And more importantly, stop ruining the childhoods of the millions of children going to see this movie.

I understand that they are trying to make their point in as public a venue as possible, but it is a children’s movie: the primary audience is children (and families)… not exactly the kind of people that need to be converted to their cause.

If a person’s a person (no matter how small), then why is the person in my uterus more important than me?

Ridiculous! I am not that shocked that a Catholic school would cancel Dolores Huerta’s speaking engagement, but at the same time, I thought they would have enough intelligence to understand that the talk was about “her founding role in the United Farm Workers and the importance of public service” and not abortion.

Apparently, to the Catholic church, it doesn’t matter what kind of a person you are, or what type of good you have done for humanity: if you’re pro-choice, you’re out.

From the LA Times:

Huerta said that the school’s principal, Sister Eva Lujano, left a voice mail at her Bakersfield office over the weekend, informing her that she had been disinvited. Lujano was out sick Thursday and unavailable for comment, school officials said.

But the editor of California Catholic Daily, a website that published an article about Huerta’s planned appearance, took credit for scrubbing the talk. Editor Bob McPhail said that after the website’s reporter called the school and a diocese superintendent to ask about the talk, Lujano agreed to cancel the planned assembly for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.

“Her appearance would have created the impression that the school was overlooking her prominent role in promoting abortion,” he said.

Huerta, who lives in Bakersfield and runs a foundation there, said she was puzzled by the school’s action. She has been unable to reach Lujano, she said.

“I was not going to talk about reproductive rights at all,” Huerta said. “I think the parents could have asked if their child could be excused.”

Huerta said it was the second time in a month that a talk she had scheduled had been canceled due to protests. Last month, administrators at St. Thomas University in Texas called off an appearance citing her views on abortion.

I am not a fan of the Boston Globe. On top of their already biased reporting in terms of the 2008 presidential election, they printed an article titled “Want to have a baby? Now’s the time women eager to have children need to direct career drive toward mating.”

For an extremely short article, it is riddled with tons of sexist “facts” from various fields of research. The author of the article advocates getting pregnant before you’re 30 (especially if you want to have 3 kids!), because the quality of a woman’s eggs takes a “notable nose dive” in quality after the age of 35. While it has been scientifically proven that the older a woman is when she gives birth, the more likely it will be that the baby will have certain problems, it hasn’t been proven why these problems exist. Theories out there that blame aging eggs are very popular, but they are just that: theories. These can range from risky pregnancy, to still birth, to Down’s Syndrome. However, these same risks exist for any woman who gets pregnant, they are not limited to women over the age of 40.

For many young women today, they aren’t even beginning their careers until they are in their late 20s or early 30s. More women are attending medical school than ever, which is only 4 years in the classroom, but does include a lengthy residency period where you are still technically a student immediately following graduation from medical school. I myself am planning on obtaining a PhD, and if I receive that before I’m 30, it’ll be a miracle.

No generation of women has had more trouble with fertility than this generation, who received the terrible baby boomer advice, “Wait. You have time. Focus on your career first.”

But in fact, you have your whole life to get a career. Obviously, that’s not true of having a baby. If you are past your early twenties, and you’re single and want to have children, you need to find a partner now. Take that career drive and direct it toward mating - your ovaries will not last longer than your career.

The good news is that psychology research shows you will gain more happiness anyway by finding a partner than by having a good job. While you should not have to choose between a satisfying marriage or a good job, your biological clock does not care. You can control where you spend your time and energy, and you should search for your mate if you don’t want to face fertility problems.

Stephanie Trunk, the author, also says that “it’s recommended that you breast feed” your children, without offering any explanation of who is doing this recommending and based on what information. Last time I checked, breast feeding can be beneficial to the baby, but in some situations it is better for the mother to not breast feed her child. Which, again, runs you into the rhetoric of “who is more important, mother or baby?”

Of course, there is no mention of men rushing to have children in this article - the burden is placed completely upon women in their mid-to-late twenties to start reproducing. She includes two “alternatives” to having children early, one of which is good luck, hope your kid doesn’t have Down’s syndrome, and the other of which is a very judgmental spiel about freezing your eggs. Not once does she mention surrogacy or adoption.

The article is clearly targeted at women who are in my age range - just about to hit their mid-twenties - who are at my particular stage in life. She advocates for women my age to “focus on finding a partner”, but here’s the thing… if we’re so quick to find a partner just because we want to reproduce, what are the odds that we’ll actually find at a partner (when we’re 25…) that we want to be with until we’re 90? I’m going with slim.

While her ridiculously biased piece focuses on women’s careers, she completely neglects any other life experiences - including travel, experiencing different relationships, personal growth, your education, etc. Many of those things either can’t be done when you have children, or are extremely difficult.

My advice? Have a kid when you want to, not when some trumped up writer wants you to.

[Image from Getty]

The NYT has an extremely long (and boring to read) piece on single-sex education in public schools that is based on the “research” (opinion) of a family doctor based on the east coast. The doctor has become an advocate of single-sex education (not same-sex education, because that would be GAY) because during his years as a family practitioner (not a child therapist, not a psychologist, not anything remotely related to early childhood educational and mental development) he realized that boys and girls “learn differently”. Now, in psychology, gender is one of those big categories that they use to look for differences because it is (usually) easy to identify. However, many studies have come to the same conclusion: the differences within each gender are greater than those between genders. Which, of course, when you are leaving your private practice as a doctor and emerging as an advocate for single-sex education - while promoting your new book of the same vein - you are more likely to ignore the research that has proven time and time again that gender isn’t always a predictor of differences.

The killer part is, of course, the fact that this doctor has based all of his opinions on brain research. He claims that the “neglect of gender in education has done real harm” to children. When, in fact, if he looked at more than just brain research, he would see that gender has not been ignored in education or in research surrounding educational development of children. There are more factors than gender at play in terms of educational development and achievement. Breaking up children - voluntary or not - based on their sex simply assumes that all boys and girls are identical to their peers in terms of learning and educational abilities.

Gender is an arbitrary trait that has been selected because it is easy to pick on: “boys are better at math than girls” and “girls are better at reading than boys” are cultural stereotypes that are still strongly believed in our school system, and by our children’s teachers. I am not the only one who thinks gender based single-sex education is barking up the wrong tree:

In fact, many caution against trying to draw practical implications for schooling from their work. Much of what Gurian and Sax call “brain research” is still in its infancy, a long way from being able to support practical applications in education. Jay Geidd, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying brain development in children (including gender differences) cautions that gender is much too crude a tool to differentiate educational approaches: the variation within each gender is often larger than the average difference between genders, and there’s substantial overlap in the distributions.

Geidd’s caution is well worth heeding even in areas where science–not just neuroscience but also other less flashy but often more relevant fields of child development research–does show real differences in boys’ and girls’ development. There is pretty strong evidence that preschool-aged boys develop gross motor skills faster than girls do, while preschool-aged girls tend to have an advantage in language development. As a result, boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of language and motor development when they enter school. Sax and Gurian see this as one argument for separate sex, gender-based schooling. That might be reasonable if gender were the only source of variance in young children’s learning. But it’s not: Young children’s development is highly variable. Some 5-year-old girls might lag many boys in language skills, and some boys’ motor skills might lag those of their female peers. If one is really concerned about adjusting education to variations in children’s development, increased customization and multi-age groupings in early elementary school, which allow teachers to group children who are developmentally similar, regardless of age, and children to progress at their own paces, are a far better solution than simply separating children by sex.

As someone who has worked with children in different age groups and with children who have developmental disabilities, I couldn’t agree more. Gender isn’t the problem here - abilities are. We are so stuck on placing children into classrooms based on their age rather than their abilities. Getting held back or being pushed forward is an option that parents and schools are very wary of, despite the child’s needs. I was put into kindergarten a year early because of my educational abilities, and my brother was put in a year later because he has Asperger’s on top of his learning disabilities. We both benefited from our parent’s decisions to place us in school at a time that wasn’t traditional.

We also benefited because we attended a year-around school rather than a traditional school for the first 6 years of our education. The switch to traditional school was a nightmare. Traditional schooling is such an antiquated system based on the needs of an agricultural community with working children. Our society no longer functions that way, so we no longer need that school system, but the teacher’s unions and the government are so wrapped up in it that it’ll never change. But that’s an entirely different soap box.

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Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, aka Reagan 2.0, has just recently endorsed an amendment to the Colorado constitution that would consider a fetus a person.

Aside from the whole ridiculousness surrounding when a fetus becomes a person, this is a dangerous line to cross. When you consider a fetus a person with individual rights, you have to decide whose rights are more important - the mother’s or the child’s? Of course, without the mother, the child wouldn’t exist, but the anti-choice movement doesn’t care about that. They care so much about preventing abortions that they’d do anything to make them completely inaccessible to women in need.

The problem with defining life at conception is most women don’t know they’re pregnant for the first 6 to 8 weeks of their pregnancy. If you are going to a hold a woman responsible for a fetus (aka a person, according to Huckabee) from conception, you need to understand the science behind why you CAN’T.

Huckabee had a few choice words to say in support of the amendment:

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement.

“With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value,” Huckabee said. “Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”

Does this mean I can claim the fetus on my taxes before I abort it? Fab!

Even better - does this mean I can get pregnant and drive in the carpool lane legally before I abort it? Amazing!

Here I was thinking I had the right to decide what is in my body… but apparently Reagan 2.0 doesn’t think so. What’s next? If you get raped when you’re unconscious, it wasn’t really illegal?

Time magazine recently wrote about a research study that linked abortions to future occurrences of premature births and low birth weight babies, by 2 and 3, respectively. I understand that Time was trying to explain to the general population that

the study is hardly perfect; the data is more than 40 years old and doesn’t distinguish between medical abortions and ’spontaneous abortions,’ better known as miscarriages.

Even with this statement in the first paragraph of their article, the shocking headline doesn’t quite convey the same message.

They claim that the large sample size helps to increase significance, but when they sample used for the study is over 50 years old and doesn’t distinguish between medical abortions and miscarriages, I would think that sample size doesn’t matter when something this big was ignored by the researchers. While the journal it was published in is not that credible, but the general American public doesn’t know these things.

Do your part to help spread the word about bogus studies that impact a woman’s right to choose!

Find out more at Choice USA.

Maybe if Jamie Lynn Spears had received an education other than one that was focused on abstinence, she wouldn’t be three months pregnant right now. She would have learned how to use a condom properly or she would have been on birth control. Technically, legally, she shouldn’t have been having sex anyways: the age of consent in Louisiana is 17. I didn’t initially plan on vocalizing my opinion about the Spears pregnancy disaster, but I just couldn’t hold my tongue any longer.

Yes, it was her choice to have the baby and not get an abortion or give it up for adoption, but the way this story is being publicized is a bit ridiculous. Nickelodeon, the network which boosted Baby Spears to stardom with Zoey 101, released a statement in which they praised her for “taking responsibility”. With her family’s track record, I don’t think giving birth to a child at the age of 16 (or at all, really, let’s be honest) is even close to taking responsibility. Yes, Jamie Lynn is (was?) a teen role model (she might not be for long…), there’s nothing I can do about that. But there is something parents can do about it: they can stop sitting their kids in front of the television every night and bond with them and encouraging them to have healthy and safe lifestyles. Yes, Jamie Lynn is a celebrity and she’s 16, but the sad part is her life right now so sadly mirrors the life of many girls stuck in the same situation.

If Jamie Lynn was an adult who had an high school education, financial resources, and a solid home, I don’t think it would matter so much that she’s pregnant. I could care less that Lily Allen and Jessica Alba are pregnant: they are adults with solid finances and (supposedly) healthy homes. Regardless of the fact that she isn’t married, Jamie Lynn is only 16 years old. She’s barely experienced life and now she’s giving birth to a new one. You’d think she would have learned from her sister and that double disaster.

This sudden stream of celebrity pregnancies that appear to be completely unplanned and blockbuster flicks about the same can only negatively impact young women. If you see someone doing something easily (or perceive that they are doing it easily), it makes that alternative all the more desirable. Would it really be so bad if one celebrity said “you know, I was pregnant, but it’s not the right time in my career and I’m not ready for a family, so I had an abortion”?

And, by the by, has anybody bothered to mention that Jamie Lynn technically had no legal rights to consent to sex in the first place? I know in California there is a provision for age difference (as long as it is less than 2 or 3 years - don’t know which - it is allowed), but is there one in Louisiana? Now, I am not a fan of statutory rape laws (I don’t think they are necessary, especially since there are provisions solely related to child molestation on the books in every single state) but statutory rape is something that must be prosecuted if law enforcement knows about it (just like mandated reporting for child abuse). How much do you want to bet that her ex-boyfriend won’t be taken to court on statutory rape charges, even though it is mandatory to prosecute?

HELLO, DUH! Of course sex education works!

I adored Knocked Up. I thought it was a funny movie - better the first time than subsequent viewings - that put a rather serious life issue into an amusing context to help people cope with the seriousness of the plot. But as a feminist, I have a problem with it.

While I understand it was a comedy about two adults getting into an awkward situation, with one of them semi-prepared for it and the other not even close. I even get that the movie wasn’t about Katherine Heigl’s character, Allison. I totally get (and was amused by) that fact that the movie is about Seth Rogen’s character and how he comes to grow as a man and accept his impending doom role as a father.

What I don’t understand, though, is why Katherine’s character did not even consider getting an abortion. I would have been able to accept the plot more easily had she even considered the option, instead of just glossing over the somewhat sticky subject. When works in the major spotlight such as Knocked Up decide to ignore all of the options available to a woman who finds herself with a bun in the oven, it makes it more difficult for young women to discuss all of their options if something similar happens to them. Movies like Knocked Up are, essentially, taking us back to the ideal that if you get someone pregnant, you better be ready to marry them and be in it for the long haul. While the two characters didn’t get married in the movie (and Heigl’s character actually turned down Rogen’s proposal), they were involved in an intimate relationship, and the movie made it appear that they moved in together after the birth and remained together years afterwards. I feel like the film’s creators opted to not include abortion as an option in the film because they didn’t know how to balance the seriousness of the subject with light-hearted (and occasionally crude) humor, like they did with an unexpected pregnancy. I understand that abortion is a heavy topic and could have potentially caused the comedy to take a turn for the worse, but they didn’t even try.

I understand the limits of a film and I can grasp the concept that the creators of the film may not have had adequate time in the film to include this plot in the movie. Allison’s “decision” to keep the baby didn’t even feel like a decision. It felt like someone coming to terms with the fact that they were pregnant, accepting it, and moving on. There was no decision because her character wasn’t given any other options. I’m not saying she should have had an abortion (although I would have) because then there would have been no movie. What I’m saying is the creators of the film could have spent 2 minutes discussing her options and then show her character coming to the decision that she wants to have a child and that keeping it is her choice.

Keeping a baby is never a simple choice for a young and single career woman. Knocked Up made it look like a young and single career woman has no other option than keeping a baby.

The scary thing is, if the Supreme Court continues going the way it does, no woman will any options other than having the baby - or adoption. To me, Knocked Up is a frighteningly realistic perspective on what the world could look like after the end of Bush’s presidency.

(Granted, it was a very amusing movie that I opted to eventually become an owner of.)

[images via getty]