Jaycee Lee Dugard

I think that any blog about this tragedy should be focused on the inadequacies of the police departments of the world, but there is definitely something to be said about women and their intense vulnerability in this world. When someone can be kidnapped, held hostage and raped repeatedly from 1991 until the present, even after attaining adulthood, our world as women becomes a much scarier place. Will it happen to me? Will it happen to my daughter? My granddaughter? We may scoff at countries that allow their daughters to be married at age 9, yet this girl right here literally in our own backyards was raped at a similar age and bore two children while a minor. This is not just a failure of the justice system, but a failure of the social system that anyone could think they could treat a girl / woman this way in our country today, after all the progress and increases in women's rights and women's safety that has happened so far.

The Sacramento Bee's full story is here.

The Women's Crusade

That is the title of one of the most emailed items on the NYT website for the past few days. It is by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Here's an excerpt:

[I]n a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

Women and/as folksy

A couple of recent New York Times stories referring to female politicians as folksy--in headlines no less--caught my eye. The first item is Jeffrey Gettleman's Sunday Review piece on HRC's recent trip to Africa, "Hillary Clinton's Folksy Diplomacy." The second is David Kocieniewski's report on New Jersey politician Loretta Weinberg, "Corzine Running Mate Brings Folksy Pragmatism."

What, I wondered, did they mean by "folksy," especially in light of the fact that one of the women so labeled was Hillary Rodham Clinton? Now, I'm a big fan of Hillary's, and I think of myself as a bit folksy, but what is folksy about Hillary? After all, hasn't her aloofness--a seemingly opposite trait to folksiness--been more often commented upon and criticized? In short, I thought Bill was the folksy one.

Well, apparently what Gettleman saw as folksy is what he elsewhere characterizes as her being "a recovering politician, with First Lady tendencies." He suggests that it is folksy to smile a lot, which Gettleman says she did, whereas her Secretary of State forerunners like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger did not. Maybe it is folksy just to be gracious--if those to whom you are being gracious are regular folks and not just other diplomats.

Here's a quote that Gettleman says sums up Clinton's "emerging style":

She stuffed her days with what felt like a dozen events, a blur of high-level meetings, roundtable discussions and “townterviews.”

* * *

She can’t resist the rope line even when it’s in a South African housing project teaming with glassy-eyed men and her secret service agents are practically shouting into their cufflinks. Her style is to go heavy on the politics, heavy on the policy, but mix in some real people as well.

In short, I guess when you are U.S. Secretary of State, pretty much anything that puts you in touch with the hoi polloi is "folksy."

As for the Loretta Weinberg story, here's the lede:

When she signed on as Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s running mate in late July, Loretta Weinberg, a longtime state senator, introduced herself to voters as the “feisty Jewish grandmother” of New Jersey politics. Since then, she has wasted little time trying to fulfill her colorful proclamation.

And here's another excerpt:

And in a smattering of face-to-face political appearances, Ms. Weinberg, 74, has done nothing to diminish her reputation as a seasoned schmooze artist, doling out small talk and compliments as if she were serving up brisket and kugel.

I thought most politicians were schmoozers, but maybe in the context of New Jersey, it doesn't take a great deal of "common touch" to be folksy.

Some posts about folksiness, politics, and gender can be found on my Legal Ruralism Blog here, here, here, here, and here.

Women in the military

The New York Times is doing a series on women serving in combat and how recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq are bringing down barriers. The first in the series, by Lizette Alvarez, is "G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier," and the second, by Steven Lee Myers, is "Living and Fighting Alongside Men, and Fitting In."

Here's an excerpt from the first story:

Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.

But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women have repeatedly proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably along with their status in the military.

And here is one from the second:

Opponents of integrating women in combat zones long feared that sex would mean the end of American military prowess. But now birth control is available — the PX at Warhorse even sold out of condoms one day recently — reflecting a widely accepted reality that soldiers have sex at outposts across Iraq.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first in which tens of thousands of American military women have lived, worked and fought with men for prolonged periods. Wars without front lines, they have done more than just muddle the rules meant to keep women out of direct enemy contact.

They have changed the way the United States military goes to war.

The "Tide of Trivialization" that dogs Hillary Clinton

Read Judith Warner's marvelous column on Clinton's trip to Africa (Hillary Clinton's trip, that is). In it, Warner questions why Secretary Clinton's mission to "make women’s issues “central” to U.S. foreign policy, not “adjunct or auxiliary or in any way lesser” keeps getting lost in other news, including that about Bill Clinton.

The column is here.

Bob Herbert on Misogyny

Here's an excerpt on Bob Herbert's column, "Women at Risk," one of the ten most popular stories on the NYTimes website a day after it was first published.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.