My client, Kimberly-Clark Healthcare, has required that I learn all about healthcare associated infections (HAIs) — both how to treat them as well as how to prevent them.  There’s a renewed interest in MRSA and other super-bugs that are making people sicker than they were when they initially entered the hospital in the first place. RID and MyOptumHealth have stellar lists on what patients can do to reduce their risks before and during a hospital stay.  Most of these are perfectly normal, reasonable requests even though the hospital staff might not be readily happy to comply, they should be doing these things anyway! Also, if you’re interested in this, NPR had an amazing show on a recent Talk of the Nation called Bacterial Infections Defy Treatment that you need to listen to.

Here’s a great and comprehensive list from Betsy McCaughey over at RID

1. Ask that hospital staff clean their hands before treating you, and ask visitors to clean their hands too. This is the single most important way to protect yourself in the hospital. If you’re worried about being too aggressive, just remember your life could be at stake. All caregivers should clean their hands before treating you. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are more effective at removing most bacteria than soap and water. Do not hesitate to say: “Excuse me, but there’s an alcohol dispenser right there. Would you mind using that before you touch me, so I can see it?” Don’t be falsely assured by gloves. If caregivers have pulled on gloves without cleaning their hands first, the gloves are already contaminated before they touch you.

2. Before your doctor uses a stethoscope, ask that the diaphragm (the flat surface) be wiped with alcohol. Stethoscopes are often contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus and other dangerous bacteria, because caregivers seldom take the time to clean them in between patient use.

3. If you need a “central line” catheter, ask your doctor about the benefits of one that is antibiotic-impregnated or silver-chlorhexidine coated to reduce infections.

4. If you need surgery, choose a surgeon with a low infection rate. Surgeons know their rate of infection for various procedures. Don’t be afraid to ask for it.

5. Beginning three to five days before surgery, shower or bathe daily with chlorhexidine soap. Various brands can be bought without a prescription. It will help remove any dangerous bacteria you may be carrying on your own skin

6. Ask your surgeon to have you tested for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at least one week before you come into the hospital. The test is simple, usually just a nasal swab. If you have it, extra precautions can be taken to protect you from infection.

7. Stop smoking well in advance of your surgery. Patients who smoke are three times as likely to develop a surgical site infection as nonsmokers, and have significantly slower recoveries and longer hospital stays.

8. On the day of your operation, remind your doctor that you may need an antibiotic one hour before the first incision. For many types of surgery, a pre-surgical antibiotic is the standard of care, but it is often overlooked by busy hospital staff.

9. Ask your doctor about keeping you warm during surgery. Operating rooms are often kept cold, but for many types of surgery, patients who are kept warm resist infection better. This can be done with special blankets, hats and booties, and warmed IV liquids.

10. Do not shave the surgical site. Razors can create small nicks in the skin, through which bacteria can enter. If hair must be removed before surgery, ask that clippers be used instead of a razor.

11. Avoid touching your hands to your mouth, and do not set food or utensils on furniture or bed sheets. Germs such as “C. Diff” can live for many days on surfaces and can cause infections if they get into your mouth. All caregivers should clean their hands before treating you. About two-thirds of medical staff were unaware they should clean their hands with soap and water, because alcohol sanitizers don’t kill this superbug.

12. Ask your doctor about monitoring your glucose (sugar) levels continuously during and after surgery, especially if you are having cardiac surgery. The stress of surgery often makes glucose levels spike erratically. When blood glucose levels are tightly controlled, heart patients resist infection better. Continue monitoring even when you are discharged from the hospital, because you are not fully healed yet.

13. Avoid a urinary tract catheter if possible. It is a common cause of infection. The tube allows urine to flow from your bladder out of your body. Sometimes catheters are used when busy hospital staff don’t have time to walk patients to the bathroom. If you have a catheter, ask your caregiver to remove it as soon as possible.

14. If you must have an IV, make sure that it’s inserted and removed under clean conditions and changed every 3 to 4 days. Your skin should be cleaned at the site of insertion, and the person treating you should be wearing clean gloves. Alert hospital staff immediately if any redness appears.

15. If you are planning to have your baby by Cesarean section, follow the steps listed above as if you were having any other type of surgery.

Ideally, you would choose a hospital with a low infection rate. Good luck getting that information. It’s impossible. Many states collect data on infections that lead to serious injury or death, but nearly every state-with the exception of 6-has given into the hospital industry’s demands to keep the information secret. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also collect infection data from hospitals across the nation, but refuse to make it public. Government is too often on our backs, instead of on our side.

What’s the answer? Hospital infections report cards. Hospitals object that comparisons would be unfair because hospitals that treat sicker patients, such as AIDS, cancer, and transplant patients who have weakened immune systems, will have a higher infection rate. True, but the data can be risk adjusted to make comparisons fair. What is unfair is preventing the public from knowing which hospitals have infection epidemics. Keeping infection rates secret may help hospitals save face, but it won’t save lives.

Here’s another quite good list of things that we patients and consumers of medical care can use to do our best to keep safe, healthy, and to best survive our hospital stays without getting sick from a super bug or MRSA or any of that other stuff — at least to prevent it — via MyOptumHealth’s article Protect Yourself From Infection in the Hospital

Before you enter the hospital:

• Stop smoking. Smokers are three times more likely to develop an infection than nonsmokers.
• Have your blood sugar under control if you have diabetes.
• Ask about the hospital’s infection control program. Choose a surgeon and hospital with a low infection rate.
• Shower with chlorhexidine soap one week before surgery. This can be bought over the counter.
• Ask your doctor if you need a vaccine for flu or pneumonia.

In the hospital:

• Remind all staff and visitors to wash their hands before touching you.
• Discourage visits from people who are ill. Ask friends and relatives not to visit if they are sick.
• Avoid getting a urinary catheter if possible. Diapers or bedpans are safer. If you have a catheter, ask if it can be removed after two days. That is when the infection risk rises.
• Ask if the stethoscope was cleaned with alcohol.
• Ask for hair clippers – not a razor – to be used if hair needs to be removed before surgery.
• Make sure you receive an antibiotic within one hour of surgery.
• Move around to prevent bedsores, which can become infected.
• Call a nurse if your catheter is uncomfortable or loose.

Tell a nurse if your dressing or IV line is loose or wet, or if your gown or linens are soiled.

I was reading through my Google Reader this morning and have discovered a delicious and useful list of things I need to return to in my journey back to optimal health and fitness — becoming sexy Chris again — from Kari Henley‘s Top 10 Tips From A Personal Trainer on The Huffington Post:

1. Your mental image of yourself defines what you will work toward. What is your reason for getting out to exercise in the first place? Is it so your clothes fit better, or to be able to ski this winter without dying on the slopes? Developing a strong mental image that is specific and positive will help motivate and guide your decisions.
2. Nobody eats enough good food. This one is huge, as most of us are on a perpetual diet, and pride ourselves by not eating, or skimping along with a minimal meal in order to splurge later. Wrong! “By 1pm, you should have already eaten breakfast, a snack, lunch, and be getting ready for another small snack,” said O’Hara. “You need to take a counter intuitive approach to your diet and until you start eating, the diet cycle can trap you.”
3. Your body adapts to everything. This applies to your diet and exercise, or lack of it. If you start walking a route in your neighborhood and think you can just do that forever- wrong! Ever noticed you start on new cardio equipment at the gym and it is hard to get through 20 minutes, but after a month you are hardly out of breath? That means it is time to mix it up and do something new. Try rowing, or stairs.
4. The word “Carbs” is a misnomer for dieting. If you are taking all carbs out of your diet, you are depriving yourself of one of the four necessary nutrients for your body, as well as vital B complex vitamins and critical fiber. Complex carbs contain valuable nutrients responsible for energy production. Cut out the simple processed carbs like cookies or crackers, and replace with plenty of whole grains, oatmeal, or brown rice.
5. Memories dictate bad habits. Ever wonder why you buy the same things over and over again at the store? Do you buy chocolate Oreos because your mother did? “Time to change up the menu,” says O’Hara. “Replace those frozen waffles with homemade with fresh blueberries, or forget the top ramen and make a quick soup that is simple and delicious.”
6. Face up to your personal statistics. This one really woke me up. Rather than just knowing your weight on a scale or your size of clothes, do you know your body fat percentage, your basic heart rate or the number of maintenance calories you should be eating for your age? “For less than $100, you can hire a personal trainer one time, to help you assess exactly what you need to know,” said O’Hara. Or, for absolutely free, O’Hara steers clients to the website: sparkpeople.com to get all your info and ideas on exercises to do. Check it out and get informed!
7. All or nothing exercise gets you nowhere, (or hurt). Lots of people are like me; the pants just get WAY to tight, so we all fired up about working out again, go out and buy new sneakers, and start running everyday like we are old pros. Then after a week, shin splints kick in, and then we quit. Others may hear about a new type of exercise, and try it without building up first, and get injured. O’Hara encourages starting with a solid, organized plan that can keep your progressing and organize a workout schedule you can use for the rest of your life.
8. We are not supposed to get weak and incapacitated as we get older. It is not true that we should stop being physically active as we age, but continue with cardio, resistance training and core building for a lifetime. Tennis, swimming, golf, yoga and power walking can be done forever.
9. It’s all about PUSHUPS baby! Come on, be honest, how many “proper” pushups can you do? “If you can’t do a push up properly, it means you lack core strength,” explains O’Hara, “and that is the most important area to maintain for posture, back support, and ongoing health.” For the ultimate challenge (and one that I am going to start myself) check out the One Hundred Pushups website for a full six week program to help you reach the seemingly impossible goal of being able to do 100 consecutive pushups. Wow!
10. There is a fountain of youth! “Strength in life is the fountain of youth,” said O’Hara, “strength in keeping the muscles strong and building them, strength in what you choose to eat, strength in your character – it is the absolute secret to a long life.”

While I am officially working out and eating right for my health and longevity and to appease my doctor, the truth is I am working out a couple hours a day and running, walking, and eating right so that I can get back into this pretty carbon fiber racing shell by the guys over at Hudson Boatworks — my heavyweight single.

The picture is Gerris up in her rack. She’s getting dusty because I am afraid I would currently sink the poor baby. Wish me luck! I will be in her by Spring if not earlier.

I will let my words speak for themselves, as published in this month’s Atlantic magazine in Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough (gulp):

“Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.

“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”

Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline.”

Note: the interview was conducted over two years ago.

This Fall there will be an important Energy Bill up for vote by Congress, a Bill that will take relatively aggressive steps towards reducing our reliance on foreign oil and foreign governments while increasing our dependence on renewable energy, such as wind power and solar power. Please sign the petition to help give your member of Congress a little incentive to pass the more aggressive version of the Energy Bill legislation, undiluted by the auto or the oil industry and their lobbyists. The following post was written by Lorna Li over at her blog. Via Chris Abraham Online and Memes.org.

Why CAFE and RES Matter for 2007 New Energy Bill

Currently, Congress is debating, behind closed doors, the adoption of 2 provisions to the 2007 Energy Bill that can greatly impact our ability to make America more energy independent, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce pollution, save consumers money, create jobs and spark economic growth.

The first is the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) Standard of 35 mpg for cars and trucks by 2020. The second is the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which calls for 15% of the nation’s electricity to be generated by renewable resources by 2020.

Why support the Renewable Electricity Standard?According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, renewable energy solutions are both sustainable environmentally and economically. The RES provision has the potential to jump-start new clean energy economy and create tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs in things like wind and solar manufacturing and installation. For this reason, it has the strong support of the United Steelworkers.

RES will create thousands of megawatts of new clean renewable electricity generation, decreasing the amount of natural gas we use—lowering prices for consumers on their home heating bills and also benefiting industrial users.

Furthermore, RES is doable – two dozen states that have already put their own Renewable Electricity Standard into place. In fact, many states have moved to establish standards of 30 percent or more—demonstrating that the 15 percent plan proposed in this bill is an achievable compromise that all states can meet.

Why is supporting the 35 mpg CAFE standard important?

Supporting the 35 mpg CAFE standard will help us curb our addition to a fossil-fuel based source that is increasingly expensive, causes pollution, and is also from highly volatile areas such as the Persian Gulf. This dependence is both unstable and unsustainable.

Furthermore, improving CAFE standards to 35 mpg by 2020 – 13 years from now – will give us better gas mileage, thus, more bang for the buck. This way we can keep more money in our wallets, drive cleaner cars, and thus become less dependent on war and pollution causing oil.

According to the UCS study on Clean Vehicles and Fuel Economy, far from destroying auto jobs, CAFE would create 22,300 jobs in the auto industry alone by 2020—and a total of 170,800 jobs by 2020. The CAFE provision would also save consumers nearly $25 billion at the pump in 2020, according to UCS.

Auto-Industry Lies – Et Tu Toyota?

The Big Three automakers and Toyota are lobbying to kill the Senate version and replace it with a loophole-laden compromise called the Hill-Terry bill that calls for 32 to 35 m.p.g. by 2022. Rather than innovate their fleets to become more fuel efficient, they would rather spend $ millions in advertising to convince the public that attaining the 35 mpg standard is bad for consumers and the environment, and that CAFE kills.

While the auto industry has argued for years that fuel-efficiency would compromise public safety due to the need to build smaller, lighter vehicles, according to an October 2007 article in Scientific American, new engine and transmission technologies could enable manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency without significantly cutting vehicle weights.

In spite of the fact that Toyota currently has the technology to make cars that achieve 55 mpg, Toyota’s refusal to step up to the plate and support the 35 mpg CAFE standard has evoked the wrath of environmentalist groups like the NRDC who now question “How Green is Toyota?” That the maker of the Prius could support the Hill-Terry compromise, which according to UCS, would actually cause us to use 700,000 more barrels each day, feels like sheer betrayal.

Is the auto industry genuinely concerned about the economic well-being of American consumers and our ability to get around as cheaply as possible? Hmmm.

In 1922, General Motors dismantled mass transit across the U.S., bought up trolley systems through its subsidiary National City lines, gutted them and tore up all the tracks. GM joined tire manufacturers, construction companies, and oil companies to lobby for Congress for development of a national highway system, which has defined urban development over the last 90 years. It helped that GM’s president Charles Wilson became secretary of defense and Frances DuPont became the federal highway administrator. Thus America became a oil-addicted, nation of drivers.

With Bush and his Big Oil cohorts in power threatening veto, ordinary Americans may be up for another round of seriously getting screwed. Therefore, it’s up to us to take action and DEMAND a clean, energy future NOW.

Take Action and Support a Strong, Clean Energy Bill for 2007

Instead of making the richest companies in the world richer, this energy bill will benefit consumers and working Americans, make us less dependent on foreign oil and better global citizens. Here are simple actions you can take to lobby Congress for a cleaner, greener future:

1. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Sign this petition and pass it on: Energy Bill 2007
2. Meet other clean energy activists online: Energy Bill 2007 Group on Facebook
3. Tell Toyota, “Shame On You” and get your friends to tell Toyota to support 35 mpg now.

By lobbying Congress to adopt strong energy efficiency measures in the 2007 Energy Bill, we can lower emissions and use less energy in the years to come —saving governments, businesses, schools, and consumers money. Energy efficiency is an energy resource just like anything else and is much cheaper than even coal-fired power generation. We must look to energy efficiency as another solution for our energy needs, while at the same time ramping up the amount of electricity we get from renewables. This is our only way we can guarantee a clean, green future for ourselves and future generations.

Technorati Tags: new energy bill, energy bill 2007, cafe, cafe standard, corporate average fuel economy, renewable electricity standard, res, hill-terry, clean tech, fuel efficiency, fuel economy, global warming

I love my big car but I also love American independence more and think that we rely way too much foreign oil and don’t spend nearly enough on energy innovation. Since coal and oil is still plentiful and cheap enough, there isn’t any reason, really, to dump R&D funds into alternative and renewable fuels, energy, and electricity. We need to in-source and work on ways to stop depending so heavily on foreign oil and the whims of kings and their kingdoms.

Congress is working on passing an energy bill that contains two major provisions, one that would up a fuel economy standard to 35 mpg — Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards — and another that would evolve our energy dependence more heavily on renewable electricity to 15% — Renewable Electricity Standards (RES). Together, these would end our Nation’s security-threatening dependence on Middle East oil, stop our money from flowing to terrorists, and keep our dollars at home growing the American economy.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and PACs are working hard to tear the bill apart, rendering it impotent and incremental instead of powerful and transformative.

I am working with a coalition to make sure the energy bill doesn’t get derailed. I need your help in making sure that the final bill makes it through before we get ourselves into even more of a mess. Check out Energy Bill 2007 and sign their petition.

Congress is working on passing an energy bill that contains two major provisions, one that would up a fuel economy standard to 35 mpg and another that would evolve our energy dependence more heavily on renewable electricity to 15%. Together, these would end our Nation’s security-threatening dependence on Middle East oil, stop our money from flowing to terrorists, and keep our dollars at home growing the American economy.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and PACs are working hard to tear the bill apart, rendering it impotent and incremental instead of powerful and transformative.

There were a few people at New Media Strategies who I truly admired, one of whom was Lauren Cook. She was a pro, and admirable. She was a leader and also intensely hard-working and intellectually curious: passionate. Well, Lauren Cook is now principal of Be3, AKA Be Three, “a free daily email newsletter for all things fresh, hip and hot for your body, mind, and soul. Short, sweet and to the point, we’re all about giving you the latest on health and wellness in savvy, entertaining reads to help you Be Your Three.” Anything Lauren touches is Gold. Since I am now on a health kick to reclaim my body, mind, and soul after working like a slave to start Abraham Harrison LLC, I am sure to glean experience, hope and joy from Be3.

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Michael Bernstein popped me an IM after reading my article, The Culture of “Acting White” Anti-Intellectualism Will Kill America, with a link to Cosby, Race and Escaping The Downside, which reveals America’s dirty secret, “in America, being poor, ignorant, desperate and unable to escape your situation has absolutely nothing to do with the color of your skin. It is universal.”

Posted Sep 13, 2003 – 09:04 AM – There is a slogan I remembered this morning which brought everything together for me: fake it ’til you make it. A couple years ago I suffered from obesity, high blood pressure, weak knees, and bad habits. I decided to take this pithy slogan and pretended to be a healthy and see what would happen.

One becomes what one pretends to be. If I pretend to be a health nut, then maybe I will forget who I really am — obese, unhealthy, and unfit — and before I know it I would lose myself to this delusion, swapping the old who I am (fat) with the new who I am (fit).

Like the stereotype of a health nut, I ate chicken breasts in small portions, joined and went to the gym, took sculling classes on the Potomac, bought sports clothing, and finally started running. For well over three months, I was still obese, still unhealthy, and still suffering from some pretty bad habits, including social smoking. Well, my health nut stereotype would of course persevere, suck it up, and finish the race!

While faking health, I lost 55-pounds, started running daily, and now fit into my college clothes. And my bad habits like smoking and overeating? Well, my new healthy body rejected these things. Was it hard? Well, yes it was hard work for the health nut I pretended to be, but it wasn’t impossible for him as was for me.

When I became aware that fake it ’til you make it was such powerful magic, I started faking a lot of things. I had a hard time with trust. I started faking trust.

I knew that trust should never need to be earned and it should not be fickle, but I felt like a sucker and a dupe. I felt vulnerable, like I could be a mark for being taken advantage of. What was going on when I was not in the room? Was I being back stabbed? Was I a cuckold?

For me, it was impossible; but I was faking trust and so I was protected and could emulate trust pretty well; but, in order to really fake trust I needed to fake commitment, too.

Without being committed, there is nothing stable upon which trust can be built. In order to really fake trust and commitment, I needed to fake faith. Isn’t it easy to fake trust and commitment when things are going well and there is smooth sailing, but what happens when I am away, get spooked, or feel doubt? I need to have faith in my fake. I need to put more credence in my two-dimensional stereotypical icons of trust and commitment on which I model than who I was before, which wasn’t working for me.

So, how is it working for me? Well, I am still pretty much the jock. Although I can trust, I am still using training wheels and have to remember some simple rules: assume good intent; don’t panic; don’t react; easy does it; be trustworthy. I can fake commitment now because I have been doing so well faking trust. I have great expectations for faking faith and will let you know how it goes, but I have faith.

I am a feminist. I studied postmodern feminist theory at Uni and felt confident that the progress and passion behind feminism offered by deconstructionism — the cultural and linguistic tools a women would need to redefine her story and her self — would result in a female self-empowerment much more substantial than the hyper-sexual self-objectification of Manolo Blahnik feminism. I am not the only one asking the question, “What Ever Happened to Feminism?” Check out Body Politic by Ingrid Sischy from the T Style Magazine (yes, I read it).

“Body Politic
By INGRID SISCHY
Published: February 25, 2007Last fall I was stopped in my tracks as I walked into a show in Milan during the collections, and a male friend, who’d just witnessed the same debacle that I had, raised his eyebrows and asked, “What happened to feminism???? It’s a question that is being asked repeatedly these days, and for good reason. The only word for the fashion collection we’d just seen was “bimbo??? — clothes put out on the runway without irony, without quotation marks, without any raison d’être other than saving money on material. Over the course of the next two weeks I gave myself a little assignment. I’d watch the runways in Milan and Paris and check off those clothes that signified a throwback to the long past of objectifying women. And on the other hand I’d put a little star down when the designer seemed to be wanting to take us into the future with a view of women that reflected self-possession.

Good thing I still like swings. Of course there were exceptions, designers who were true to the present, but by and large it was backward and forward and backward and forward. Then there were the designers who left earth entirely and showed a universe of female droids and cyborgs. These were the ones who, intentionally or not, illuminated the big challenge facing women’s fashion, best described by tweaking the famous tag line from “Star Trek???: women’s fashion, the final frontier . . . to boldly go where no one has gone before.

That’s easier said than done. As Miuccia Prada said to me, “The problem with new ideas about feminism is that there has been so little public discussion of the subject.??? Well, that’s changing, big time — if not in fashion at least in the art world, which has historically been the first place where a new perspective begins. In fact, after it seemed as though the subject of feminism had been put on simmer, the art world is cooking with gas again, not just for a new generation of feminist artists but in retrospect too. The year started out with a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, once such a perfect target for feminist critics, who felt it was stuck in the Stone Age as far as the representation of women goes. Now there are bicoastal extravaganzas planned for this spring: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will stage “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution??? from March 4 to July 16, and the Brooklyn Museum opens “Global Feminisms??? on March 23. The show celebrates a new center for feminist art, anchored by the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s famous “The Dinner Party.??? How these exhibitions will loop back to fashion and the creative/commercial balancing act that designers have to do is anybody’s guess, but bets are that there will be a trickle-down effect, as there often is.

What’s interesting is that if one goes through the iconic works of the first, second and third waves of feminist writers, there is so little that actually addresses fashion. Rereading Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and so many others, I was struck by the dearth of attention to this subject, which after all has everything to do with how identity is constructed for the outside world. There’s no lack of thinking when it comes to inner life, working life, creative life and public life, but when fashion comes up, the attitude tends to be knee-jerk and programmatic. Take Greer’s climactic moment at the end of “The Female Eunuch,??? where she creates a sort of bill of rights, inciting women to: “. . . refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness.??? In fact some of the most powerful, liberated women I know choose to hobble around in the craziest skyscraper shoes. “The higher the heel,??? they say, “the better I feel.???

But the other part of Greer’s declaration — that women have the right to control their own bodies — is as resonant today as it was when she wrote it nearly 40 years ago. One can see that drama being played out in the fashion arena right now, with the debate over skinny models brought to a head by the deaths last fall of two South American catwalkers from complications of anorexia. The hysteria that resulted led to a spectacle of ignorance, hypocrisy and bureaucracy. If the issue weren’t so serious, some of the solutions proposed by bureaucrats — like models being weighed in like boxers or jockeys — would be funny. But unfortunately they don’t just infringe on everything that we are supposed to hold dear in the department of human liberties, they also display so little understanding of the disease they are trying to combat that it is frightening. So is the tendency to lump together girls who are naturally skinny with those who are sick, two very different realities. Hey, as someone who likes her fries, I’m all for bringing back a Rubenesque shape as the height of fashion, but the fact is that perceptions of beauty cannot, and will not, be dictated by laws. That’s where consciousness comes in. At the center of it all, for anorexics, but also for each of us, lies the issue of control, or as Barbara Kruger wrote in one of her most unforgettable artworks: “Your body is a battleground.??? Hopefully you win.”

Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.

I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradiction in the new feminism, in the new American woman.

I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was, “I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”

In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a hen house. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik k feminist.

The Manolo Blahnik feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care.

Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap.

We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after.

All we see is, “man that girl is fine — I’d like some of that.”

As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.

Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men.

And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape.

I have loved them, I have befriended them, and I worked through relationships with women who have survived sexual abuse and rape.

Its always an ugly story and the world is never the same. We just have not received the memo. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.

Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness.

And many men, too.

When it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?

Not I.

I am not sure if modern women have it very good. Not nearly as good as would be expected. I attended college at a high point for feminism an academia, when a woman would still identify with being a feminist.

Not any more.

Not Liberating, After All
How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh Hefner?

BY WENDY SHALIT
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?

Ms. Levy is baffled. “Why,” she wondered, “is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?” Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before the summer 2004 Games? Why did Katie Couric feel the need to point to her cleavage and gush “these are actually real!” when she guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” a couple of years ago?

Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires “everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars.” Ms. Levy describes the perfect distillation of this impulse–a social group called CAKE that hosts steamy, hooking-up parties in New York and London. CAKE makes big bucks advertising “feminism in action”–it claims to be the place where “sexual equality and feminism finally meet”–but its events are indistinguishable from those held at the Playboy Mansion.

The surface logic of such conduct is fairly simple, notes Ms. Levy. “Women had come so far,” or so the thinking went, that “we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny.” If male chauvinist pigs “regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”

Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: “Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love . . . that is not liberation.” It isn’t? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she “used to get so hurt” after a night of sex that didn’t yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: “I’m like a guy,” she brags.

How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl “resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping–sexy.” There seems to be a contradiction here.

Ms. Levy’s answer is that, after a brief and failed fight against pornography, feminism joined forces with Hef & Co. to fight for abortion rights. This is a plausible explanation, as far as it goes. Abortion has indeed assumed a primary importance in both feminist “rights” thinking and in the whole culture of soft-core libertinism: Mr. Hefner is a big fan of abortion, for obvious reasons.

But something else may be going on. Feminism grounded itself, in its early days, in the idea that there were no differences between the sexes. A girl wanting to keep her virginity was bad, for sexual reticence amounted to asserting a separate standard, a Victorian one at that. To Hef, modesty was a “hang-up,” and to the feminists it was a “patriarchal construct.” Ms. Levy believes that feminism was on the right track but then veered off-course: “What has moved into feminism’s place . . . is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles.”

But maybe feminism’s foundations were weak from the start. Everyone in Ms. Levy’s book–whether it’s middle-class girls who feel anxiety about appearing “hot” or grown women who confess to Ms. Levy that “accumulating sex for its own sake . . . is not that sexual”–shows that a woman’s experience of sex and love is very different from that of an adolescent boy or a man. Indeed, the more a woman imitates a man, the clearer these differences become.

Paris Hilton tells Rolling Stone: “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” (Ms. Levy reports that on one of the infamous videotapes she takes a cellphone call during intercourse.) Plainly, the sexual revolution has not brought fulfillment for women. Even its mascots experience boredom, and for the civilians there is distress and heartache.

It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word “modesty” within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as “backtracking,” they only help to perpetuate the “raunch culture”–even as they deplore its effects.

Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male “friends” of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say “no way!” but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.

Such a girl requires, in addition to perhaps Mace, a compelling alternative to the Female Chauvinist Pig. Otherwise she may well give in to social pressure–not to mention professorial nonsense–and then wonder what’s wrong with her when she is not happy with the pig in her bed or the pig she has become.

Ms. Shalit is author of “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” You can buy “Female Chauvinist Pigs” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

September 20, 2005

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ex=1127966400&en=3f7348e314a603ee&ei=5070&emc=eta1

By LOUISE STORY

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.

So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.

“My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.”

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

“Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all,” said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

“Men really aren’t put in that position,” she said.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.

“I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it,” said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni – both men and women – to play in society.

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: “The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word ‘leadership’ conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.’s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that.”

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: “There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities.”

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person’s expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity – a gap that was small among alumni in their 20′s but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40′s, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40′s, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40′s, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30′s and 40′s.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

“It never occurred to me,” Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. “Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time.”

Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. “People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family.”

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children.

“A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,’ ” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30′s now.”

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

“My stepmom’s very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable,” said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. “It justified it to her, that I don’t look down on her for not having a career.”

Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother’s choice to work full time the “greatest gift.”

“She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career,” Ms. Sullivan said.

Some of these women’s mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.

Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu’s roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.

Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. “I do have this bias that the parents can do it best,” she said. “I see a lot of women in their 30′s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best.”

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”

Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu’s roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.

“Parents have such an influence on their children,” Ms. Ku said. “I want to have that influence. Me!”

She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.

“I’ll have a career until I have two kids,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily matter how far you get. It’s kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do.”

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

“I accept things how they are,” she said. “I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.”

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

“It worked so well for me,” she said, “and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.”

Thanks to Carrie for sending me this article.

My dear friend commented on this part of the article, “And when it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?”

Her response was, “….Therein lies the pitfall…. Once you start tasting of that forbidden apple, the garden of romance can all too easily dissapear! This, i think, is why many parents of our generation divorced — lack of faith in love is a direct result of the “free love” movement. Someone needs to warn the young!!! They need to be made aware of the booby-traps. Otherwise we are all just walking around with broken flowers, feeling numb to the pain we don’t even realize we are entitled to have.”

I have been thinking about my top ten new years resolutions and quickly wrote them up.

Here they are: 1) run my loop every day 2) visit my gym every day* 3) twice-daily push-ups and sit ups 4) prepare and cook small portions at home 5) eat more fresh fruit and vegetables 6) eat less processed, prepared, and junk food 7) get out of Dodge (Washington) and travel more 8) learn, implement, and follow the GTD system 9) quiet Mind and meditate and review day upon waking and before sleeping 10) spend more time broadening and deepening relationships.

*Does not require working out, just going to the gym.

Last summer I was in excellent shape. Sculler and all. Well, right now I am a fright. My friends have been sparing my feelings, but it is time to make a change (insert “Eye of the Tiger” here). And I am not going to do it alone. Until I can afford a personal trainer, I shall take advantage of some of the better resources on the web. I have been searching for good PT, training, exercise, weight training, and diet blogs. There are tons. One excellent resource I have found is run by Marcela, personal trainer, aerobics instructor, and my sponsor: NoExcusesGym. I just added it to my RSS feed.

As a courier in the late 80s, when I was doored or my bike broke, WEx required me to run my runs either on foot of on metro. Since I let my bike get stolen, the only solution is to get up an hour earlier and walk-run-jog to work and then back home. I will let you know how that goes.

“People who live by themselves are at twice the risk of serious heart problems compared to those who have a partner.”

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Diane’s article, Linda Hirshman needs a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, reminded me of the article I read on the 9th, Is this really feminism? I believe that feminism is the empowerment of women in a patriarchal system with the goal of achieving a quality of choice at least equal to that of men.

A woman’s choices should include whatever she wants, including the guilt-free choice to become a mom and stay at home with her children; or, alternately, become partner, dean, president, or laureate.

If it is indeed her choice (and not the result of coercion) a woman should not feel shame (or be made to feel ashamed) for making any choice. This choice should not be multiple choice: doctor, lawyer, scholar, politician, or writer. This freedom of choice, this choice feminism, need to allow, without judgement, “dropping out” to become a “full-time mother.”

I don’t know is this bodes well with Linda Hirshman in either Homeward Bound or her new book, Get to Work : A Manifesto for Women of the World:

“What do you need to live a good life in the real world? Among other things, a real job-and changing diapers isn’t one. “Opting out” is a trade-off that is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face, sooner or later. Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work-a clarion call for stay-at-home moms to blast out of the house-is a rocket-propelled grenade aimed directly at the mommy wars, and offers a bold plan for all women to find and be able to pay for the kinds of satisfying lives that a grown-up should want to lead.”

I studied feminist theory in college (Marxist-feminism, French feminism, Postmodern Feminism, Deconstructionism) and the objective was to dismantle the master’s house without the master’s tools. Yes, the goal was to reduce the master’s house to rubble, but what I fear has been built in its place looks much the same.

As far as I could tell, the original goal of feminism was to redefine a woman’s role in society from being a man’s possession (from daughter to wife) to being an equal to men. Feminism was about tearing off the patriarchal yoke. Unfortunately, if I am reading it right, Linda Hirshman believes that one yoke should be replaced by another: feminist expectations.

In other words, as a woman, If you have the potential to rule the world and usurp men, it is your responsibility above all else so to do. Until then, the struggle must continue unabated.

This isn’t about attaining choice, this is about attaining control.

One technique of control is manipulation and Linda Hirshman and her book, Get to Work, is using shame, judgement, and disappointment in order to make empowered, first-class, wealthy, affluent, elite, a-type, pedigreed women feel bad about themselves and their choices if their choices don’t include “living up to your full potential” as defined by becoming partner, dean, president, or laureate.

And that is not choice, that is obligation: exchanging one yoke for another; one societal expectation for another.

How can you proponents of organics, organic farming, and sustainable agriculture be opposed to what is essentially a sign of success: organic food is being embraced by the mainstream. Why are you complaining? You won — now every store in America will have an affordable organic alternative. Organic farming means sustainable farming and a drastic reduction fertilizers, pesticides, and hormone use. Via Oranges to Oranges on the Boston Globe

“A critique of Al Gore’s stipulations in his climate change movie. Takes a pretty strong stance declaring that he used mostly ‘junk science’ for his allegations. In turn the column cites 4 scientists who refute that the earth, as a whole, is warming.” Agreed. Moron. Although, I do believe in pollution and NIMBY and low air quality and vog and smog and athsma-effects and unlivable microclimates, dead rivers and deoxygenated lakes.

If you need cosmetic surgery or reconstructive surgery in the form of breast augmentation, breast reconstruction after mastectomy, breast reduction, the latest breast “lifting??? techniques, facial rejuvenation, eyelid surgery, face lift, neck lift, body contouring, liposuction or a tummy tuck, you know where to go in Arlington and Reston in Northern Virginia.

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