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President Obama’s daughters are just thirteen and ten, but the guy just can’t stop talking about the possibility they’ll be romantically inclined someday, and about how much that fact freaks him out.
Just yesterday, when he was visiting the Master Lock factory in Wisconsin, Obama joked that the company’s industrial “super locks” might “come in handy” for him as “the father of two girls who are soon to be in high school.” For now, he added, he’s “counting on the fact that when they go to school there are men with guns with them.”
Gross.
And this isn’t the only time he’s made that kind of joke.
Two years ago, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he told the Jonas Brothers that his daughters were “huge fans.” He then warned the singing group not to “get any ideas” because he controls an arsenal of predator drones.
Last year, speaking at a Tennessee high school’s commencement, he noted that the school’s principal’s daughter had chosen to go to a different school because she “was worried that the boys would be afraid to talk to her if her mom was lurking in the hallways.” Because of this, he said, he’d decided to announce that his “next job will be principal at Sasha and Malia’s high school — and then I’ll be president of their college.”
A few months later a reporter, noting that he’d given the girls a puppy when he first won the presidency, asked what he’d get them if he won re-election. He replied that he’d “be getting them a continuation of Secret Service so that when boys want to start dating them, they are going to be surrounded by men with guns.”
These jokes are freaking creepy. Set aside the fact that Obama’s predator drones are estimated to have killed more than a hundred innocent children. Set aside the fact that Obama was joking about three men aged seventeen, twenty, and twenty-two ”getting ideas” about girls who were then eight and eleven years old. Set aside the inappropriateness of a father meddling in the romantic decisions of his college age kids. (And set aside as well the casual, ugly assertion that his daughters will be interested in, and only interested in, “boys.”)
The biggest problem with all these jokes is that at their core they’re not really jokes.
When the Obama administration overruled the FDA’s scientists and policymakers on expanding morning-after pill access for teenagers last December, he said he endorsed the decision “as the father of two daughters,” and claimed that “most parents” would agree with him. Though he claimed that the decision was based on the possibility of “a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old” being able to “buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect … alongside bubble gum or batteries,” the fact is that drugstores are filled with over-the-counter medications far more dangerous than Plan B, any one of which any ten-year-old can buy without restriction.
What makes the morning-after pill different is that it allows teenage girls to take control of their own sexual decisions and those decisions’ consequences. The mentality that says that “most parents” would want to deprive their daughters of that agency is the mentality that assumes that most parents fantasize about being the gatekeeper of who their daughters talk to in high school and college. It’s a mentality that jokes about using violence and the threat of violence to keep your daughters from becoming sexually active.
These jokes aren’t benign. With them, the president is normalizing a patriarchal, sexist, adversarial take on parenthood — and on fathering daughters specifically. (It’s not an accident that Michelle Obama doesn’t make these jokes, or that she instead jokes approvingly about her daughters’ crushes on the Secret Service agents who protect them.)
If Obama’s children were sons, he wouldn’t be talking about using industrial super locks on them when they got to high school. He wouldn’t be musing about his plans to keep his kids from talking to girls when they got to college. He wouldn’t be threatening Selena Gomez with predator drones. He just wouldn’t.
Being the father of daughters is complicated. It can be difficult. But a father’s job is to help his daughter to develop a strong, healthy sense of her own desires and her own boundaries, and the confidence to express them. A father’s job is to teach his daughter that she can and should be brave, and fearless, and take risks. A father’s job is to let his daughter know that he’s got her back. A father’s job is to let her know that what she’s going through is normal, and appropriate, and isn’t going to be a barrier to him continuing to be there for her. His job is to make it clear that his desire to protect her and keep her safe doesn’t mean that she needs to sneak around behind his back, to make it clear that she doesn’t need to stay a child forever, that she can and should and must go out and explore the world for herself.
I suspect Obama is a pretty good dad. But his blind spot on this stuff is doing real harm to other people’s daughters, and quite possibly his own.
He should cut it the hell out.
Like this:
There’s lots of important stuff in the AAUW’s new report on sexual harassment in American high schools and middle schools, but I do want to highlight one small finding that hasn’t yet drawn much attention.
The study asked students to identify which kinds of kids were at highest risk for harassment. Ranking second on the list, chosen by 41% of respondents, was “girls who are very pretty.” Fourth on the list, chosen by 32%, was “girls who are not very pretty or not very feminine.”
Yep.
Oh, and first on the list? “Girls whose bodies are really developed, more than other girls.”
Last? “Boys who are good looking.”
Sexual harassment is misogyny. That’s what it is.
Youth culture scholars Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have a thought-provoking op-ed in today’s New York Times, one that challenges a lot of the assumptions teachers and parents bring to bullying discussions.
High school students, they’ve found, rarely use the word bullying to describe even the most obvious examples of such behavior. Instead, they — particularly girls — dismiss it as “drama.”
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down.
No student wants to be identified as a victim. And so…
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
Boyd and Marwick highlight a fundamental contradiction in anti-bullying campaigns. Adult rhetoric treats bullying as serious business, but adults in positions of power in such environments rarely exercise that power in ways that back up that rhetoric.
Adults: think back to the worst example of bullying you experienced or witnessed in high school. Now imagine that behavior taking place in a workplace, an adult social setting, a college classroom. Imagine how it would be addressed in such a context. The gap between what you imagine and what you saw in high school is the gap between society’s rhetoric on bullying and students’ reality. And in most cases that gap is vast.
When the brouhaha over the Psychology Today “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women” article broke, I wrote a quick blogpost pointing out some of author Satoshi Kanazawa’s most ludicrous, obvious mistakes. But now someone with a bit more competency has gone back to look at the actual data Kanazawa used, and discovered that the problems with his “study” go much deeper.
Much, much deeper.
Basically, Kanazawa completely misrepresented the data. His source material just flatly doesn’t say what he says it says.
Here’s the deal. Kanazawa drew his conclusions on the relative attractiveness of black women from the “Add Health” study, a long-term survey of American adolescents. He claimed that the study showed — proved — that black women were less attractive than women of other races. But that’s not the case.
The attractiveness “data” is itself suspect, for one thing. It consists of the subjective judgments of interviewers who were asked to rate their interviewees’ appearance. There’s no effort in the numbers to control for the interviewers’ (unstated) ethnicity, no protocol for their judgments, no reason to believe that their conclusions are in any way representative. It’s just their opinion, and different interviewers reached dramatically different conclusions about the same interviewees’ attractiveness.
Let me underscore that last bit. According to a review of the original data, most of the difference in attractiveness between individuals in the study can be explained by different interviewers “grading” the same interviewee differently.
But it gets worse.
This study is, as I noted above, a study of American adolescents, tracked through early adulthood. And though Kanazawa portrayed his article as a study of the attractiveness of adults, the samples he used included children as young as twelve. He based the majority of his conclusions on data on the youngest two groups, who had an average age of just sixteen.
Still with me? It gets even worse.
Kanazawa admitted that the supposed difference in attractiveness was less in “Wave III” than in “Wave I” and “Wave II,” though he actively concealed the fact that Waves I and II weren’t adults at all. (He labeled the relevant charts “Wave I: Men,” “Wave II: Men,” “Wave I: Women,” and “Wave II: Women,” even though the vast majority of those subjects were teenagers and pre-teens.)
What he didn’t admit was that there’s a Wave IV.
Wave IV, it turns out, is the only wave composed entirely of adults. And an analysis of the Wave IV data shows that it doesn’t support Kanazawa’s thesis.
At all.
In Wave IV there is no difference between the perceived attractiveness of the black women and that of the other ethnic groups examined.
None.
At all.
And again, I want to underscore something. Wave IV is composed of the same interviewees as the previous waves. So what the data really shows is that some (presumptively white) interviewers thought that the black adolescent girls in the study were a little less cute than the white, Asian, or Native American girls.
But when interviewers went back and spoke to the same women as adults, that “attractiveness gap” disappeared. Completely.
This isn’t just shoddy statistics. This isn’t just crap reporting. This isn’t just incompetence. It’s scholarly malfeasance.
It’s fraud.
“The job of an actor is to play a role. The job of a cheerleader is to cheer.”
— Eugene Volokh on Doe v. Silsbee Independent School District
• • •
The Doe case, as most of my readers probably know, involves a high school cheerleader in Texas, identified in court papers as “HS,” who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for her alleged rapist. She had accused the player a few months earlier, but he had remained on the school basketball team. It was school tradition for the cheerleading squad to cheer from the sidelines when players attempted foul shots, but HS refused in the case of this player — standing silently with her arms crossed. After a warning, she was removed from the squad. (The player in question pled guilty to an assault charge some time afterward.)
HS sued the school for taking her off the squad, and lost. She appealed, and lost again. Last week her final appeal was rejected.
Eugene Volokh, a constitutional lawyer I respect, thinks the courts got this one right. If this lawsuit had prevailed, he says, “cheerleaders would be free to refuse to cheer for any reason that they think sufficient.” They could refuse to cheer for teams with gay or undocumented immigrant players, or those who “belong to a reprehensible religion, or refuse to properly support our military.”
I think HS was right to refuse to cheer her attacker, and I think the school was deeply wrong in how it handled the case. (For one blogger’s assessment of just how wrong they were, read this.) Whether by dropping her assailant from the team or suspending the practice of sideline cheers or just letting her sit those particular cheers out, the school should have found a way to accommodate HS’s reasonable desire not to cheer the name of a person who had recently sexually assaulted her.
But they didn’t. And given that they didn’t, I think the courts did the only thing they could. I just don’t see a way to craft a rule that would allow HS to refuse to cheer that wouldn’t also protect a cheerleader who shouted “slut” at a single mother on an opposing team, or an actor who changed the lines of a school play to give it a particular religious message, or a football player who wrote “I HATE FAGS” on his jersey, big enough to be seen from the stands.
It’s possible, as some commenters at Volokh’s blog suggest, that HS might have had other legal remedies. It’s been suggested that she might have had — and might still have — grounds for a lawsuit on equal protection claim, or for infliction of emotional distress. I’m not in a position to evaluate those suggestions. But as a matter of First Amendment law, I think the courts got this one right.
By the way, one other element of this case is worth mentioning — that the appeals court ruled HS’s lawsuit “frivolous,” and ordered her family to pay $45,000 in legal fees to the school district. It’s my understanding that the district has the option of waiving the collection of that judgment, and I hope they do so.
Update | The ACS Blog reaches a different First Amendment conclusion than I did, and it does so by addressing a question Volokh took as a given — whether cheerleaders are “agents” of the school, and speaking on the school’s behalf when they perform as cheerleaders. Their position is that so long as a cheerleader’s symbolic protest doesn’t substantially disrupt the school’s functioning, it’s protected speech.
I’m going to have to chew on this one. It’s not obvious to me that students have a blanket First Amendment right to Sharpie messages onto their uniforms while cheering or playing sports, or to shout obnoxious comments at opposing teams while on the field. I’m attracted to the pro-speech side of the argument — as always — but I’m not sure where I come down on this particular issue.
What do y’all think?
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