the uproar is over the photo of her back and shoulders? gosh so many things to say i don't know where to begin.

talk about a confusing cultural landscape when it comes to sexualized teenaged girls. putting on a short skirt and midriff baring top and jumping up and down with pom poms is all-american and ok. going to the beach and presumably showing far more than the shoulders and back? also ok. ads depicting women under eighteen modeling clothing made for adults, and showing more than miley cyrus: ok.

but if you're a "wholesome" role model for tweens, showing your back in a photograph taken by arguably one of the most important photographers of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, however...not ok.

the uproar, if indeed there really is any, is misplaced. instead of blaming miley cyrus and her back, perhaps we should blame ourselves for having dirty thoughts about about fifteen year old girl. after all, is it her fault if she is sexualized by the viewer by showing her BACK?

remember the article about drunkorexia--you know, the tendency of young women to deny themselves food in order to be able to drink presumably alcohol and not get fat? oh, and how bout the article on the so-called master cleanse, in which women starve themselves and only consume a mixture of lemon juice, cayenne pepepr, and maple syrup for ten days at a time to get skinny and to "cleanse" oneself of "toxins" that come from food?

articles about serious health issues such as anorexia, alcoholism, and mental illness appear to belong in the style section so long as they are portrayed as primarily affecting young women. the day that, say, an article about dementia, or prostate cancer or something is the in the style section is the day i'll feign surprise.

what i would like to see is a study on what types of parents buy these sorts of clothes and toys for their children. when articles like these come out, they invariably focus on the purveyors of adolescent sexual accessories rather than the people who actually buy it. i don't really know that we'll have a complete picture of this phenomenon until we understand who buys this stuff, why, and if they think there is a problem with it. articles dealing with this subject is almost always bereft of any information about the true consumer. after all, especially in the case of a six year old, the consumer is the parent.

nytimes too has a section for the girly news--it's called the "style section". Case in point: today an article about a world-class rower is not on the sports or even health pages, where it seems to belong; no, it's on the style pages because the rower being featured is female. articles about girly diseases (anorexia, depression) go on the style page, as often does information about dieting, mothering, work, and other types of articles that seem better suited to other sections, and probably would be in those sections, if the issues were framed otherwise.

i agree that the default business gender is male. but it seems that creating a page for women just reinforces this notion. the implication is that the rest of the wall street journal--the Serious part--is for men. it also casts issues as "women's issues" when they really are issues about everyone. there are, oftentimes, TWO parents. it's hard to believe that men don't have to balance work and parenthbood, or that men don't have baby pictures that they may consider sending to coworkers. putting articles about parenting and work in a special section just reinforces the idea that WOMEN are the only parents worth mentioning, catering to, or acommodating. i don't think that most families--or most children--would agree.

of course, "boring" is in the eye of the beholder, but, at the risk of making sweeping generalizations, i've noticed that men are more likely to talk about themselves, and to assume that the things that they do, the activities they value, and the challenges they face are worth telling and worth hearing. again, to make a broad generalization, women don't seem to regard their day to day activities in the same way. i study the Middle East and i am 99% sure that no one outside of my department wants to hear about nineteenth century Ottoman tax reform, but my male friend who works as a systems analyst will spend as long as you'll let him talking about the inane details about analyzing systems.

i don't know that men are inherently more boring than women, but men do seem to be socially conditioned to talk about themselves a lot more, and listen a lot less, and with a few notable exceptions, not much is more boring than listening to someone go on and on about himself.

ok but where are all of these republican racist hatemongers when it comes to condi, or colin powell? are they there but i don't know about it? curious...

i hear letter writers load and clear when they bemoan those who make "bad choices" and end up 300 lb diabetic heart attack victims at 50. however, it is impossible to understand how they got that way without understanding, among other things, the farm bill, the corn lobby, the sugar lobby, and big food, for a start.

the current subprime crisis. as a loan officer in some of the most notorious firms, i had a front row seat to the melt down.

the modern middle east. currently i'm in a masters program at a UC studying islam and the modern middle east.