Benjamin vs. Benjamins: is it really either-or?

So last week, NYT ran an article called:  "Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Female Empowerment".  That was the high point.


The article goes on to describe how economically successful women seem unable to "catch" men who find their financial independence sexy, describes several such relationships in which men talk about the indignities of being the lesser earner of the pair (when he checks in to the sweet hotel room that his girlfriend booked for the two of them, he's insulted that they call him by her last name).  It then goes on to give WOMEN some advice about how to get past their $$$ and find ways to avoid making men feel threatened by their success.  It has gems like "success isn't sexy" and this one:
“Men don’t want successful women, men want to be admired,” she said. “It’s important to them that the woman is full of energy at night and not playing with her BlackBerry in bed.” 

I have two chief complaints with this article.  1.) it paints this as something that is a problem for women (i.e. bank account envy is their challenge to overcome) instead of an awesome opportunity to reach a new paradigm of "romance" and good relationship, rather than requiring: "an assortment of behavioral contortions aimed at keeping the appearance of traditional gender roles intact."  Dear NYT editor, you could have spun this around and said, Guys--think about this--it's a GOOD thing if your girlfriend has a "snazzy" car, can afford to whisk you off for a fun weekend out of town, and take you out for a swank dinner.  That means you get to do more fun things!!  I fail to see the downside and am really irritated that the article chose instead to highlight whiny, insecure guys with women they don't deserve as a defense for outdated (and sexist) expectations.

 Also I think guys deserve more credit.  They are capable of defining themselves in non-monetary terms.  And in being impressed by women.  There are certainly the ones that are intimidated by money, or just raw ambition, intelligence, or toughness for that matter, but there are also the ones that like a partner that can challenge them, negotiate squarely, and approach them on equal terms.  There's a quote from Atlas Shrugged that I like a lot about this sentiment:
"A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself... The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless sl*t."

Time magazine reports that there is increasingly an expectation that both partners should be "providers", complemented by the increasing trend of married women working outside the household (or in additional to inside the household, which is still often the case).   In 40% of households, women are in fact the primary breadwinner!

NYT, please encourage women to be heroines and men (and women) to love them for it. 


Feministing's take on the article worth a read too (nice use of SomeECards as well).  They bring up the fact that there's not really any evidence that this is a trend; it's just convenience sample that makes it sound like a phenomena.  Slate's had some good articles on this recently too.  And, TIME magazine has a nice piece about the modern woman, comparing that to what the term meant in the early 1970s. 

10 Things I hope to do in Boston in 2010

And for those of you who speak binary, I mean TEN, not TWO!  Let me know if you want to join me in any of these.  For most, I certainly don't feel a need to limit myself to one.

1. Devour a JP Licks brownie sundae
2. Go to an acappella concert (thinking MIT logs on 12/10; real men can sing in harmony)
3. Run Heartbreak hill, both ways
4. Perform a Taylor Swift medley at karaoke (kidding, kind of). You're on the phone with your girlfriend . . .
5. Eat some amazing pasta in the North End
6. See the 7^th Harry Potter movie
7. Get a drink up at the top of the Prudential building, preferably for sunset
8. Eat a BLT and/or a sticky bun at Flour Bakery (upon thinking about it, this may require two trips)
9. No list would be complete without my favorite/most hated workout: running the Harvard stadiums.  Preferably in the snow to get the full effect.
10. Dine at Ten Tables

Wavin' (red) flag

 

Lahore, Pakistan

I watched the Ted x Change talk sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation earlier today.  It was exciting to see a range of diverse leaders speak to a lot of the issues that we've been wrestling with in an academic context around sustainability, moving from strategy to delivery, and the trade-offs between speed and quality.

Hans Rosling, whose ability to create amazingly illustrative visuals, kicked off and shared trend data for the whole world to show how long change can take--part of what explains the differences in child mortality rates between countries like Sweden and Sierra Leone is when they began to address the issue and create supportive infrastructure, like universal primary education.  While showing decades of data, he simultaneously stressed that breaking the data into smaller increments was critical for measuring country progress and helping countries maintain momentum in tackling health challenges.  This makes a lot of sense to me; it's really the derivative and direction of change that we should be interested in optimizing; the long-term trends will take care of themselves.  His graphs also show that we've made incredible progress over the last century, which was energizing.  It's easy to get bogged down in the remaining challenges and forget what has been accomplished.

He also ended by saying that tackling health was imperative for addressing climate change, and that as child mortality was strongly linked to fertility rates, we had to start there, and similarly make investments in education for girls. 

I had never seen Melinda Gates speak before.  She shared a lot of personal anecdotes and stressed the successes she's seen worldwide.  She discussed how coke's strategies of penetrating even the most remote villages, via real-time data utilization, identification of local entrepreneurs, and locally-sensitized marketing, offered many important lessons for global health.  She described current monitoring and evaluation strategies in global health as "bowling in the dark.  you hear the pins fall, but you don't know how you did until the game is over and you turn on the lights." Very apt, and very terrifying.  Creating adequate infrastructure for data collection and analysis is a critical challenge for global health right now, and refining funding models to allow for the freedom to make mid-course corrections will be a necessary step to realize potential gains.  It would be fantastic to see Gates as a leader here and demonstrate to other donors the value of loosening the operational controls at the right leverage points.  [Also on a more comedic note, every time Melinda mentioned that coke had helped produce songs like "I'd like to teach the world to sing" and "wavin' flag" that had made it to the top of the POP charts, I went, "duh."  Maybe people from Minnesota will get that, at least]

Dr. Mechai Vidaraiya is an unsung hero, as far as I can tell.  He's clearly weathered the many political storms of Thailand's recent history, and he shared examples of how government-sponsored public health programs can be catchy, clever and quite effective.  He showed a picture of a monk blessing birth control pills so that women would be more inclined to take them, t-shirts with slogans like "condoms are weapons of mass destruction" and "in rubber we trust".  They seem a little cheesy, but one thing that I'm starting to believe is that public health largely fails to enter the mainstream consciousness and engages in a parallel dialog that is largely ignored.  Creating fanfare and messages that resonate with the average person is going to be key if one wants to change routine behaviors, such as sexual practices.  It'd be exciting to see examples of this for other health conditions--Proctor and Gamble's work in Ghana around handwashing is one example, but the same principles can and should be applied to obesity and other conditions with causes largely attributed to lifestyle.

Graca Machel, the graceful and eloquent liberation fighter from Mozambique who has been involved in child and education issues in Africa for over 25 years.  First, what are the implications of freedom fighters moving into the public sector?  South Africa and Rwanda both share this trait as well.  I think it's fascinating and would love to see research on how that shapes a governance strategy.  Machel emphasized the need to focus on women and children, and that our current time horizon of five years (at best) is totally insufficient.  We instead need to think also about where we'll be in 30 years.  This was the other side of the coin of Rosling's talk in many ways; act now, but make sure that your compass is firmly pointed in the right direction and you've got enough gas to get you all the way there.

I've heard the argument for the "girl effect" many times, that is, that investments in women and girls produce a greater "return on investment" than investments in men.  Women are more likely to direct the resources to the family's needs, and increased in educational attainment in women results in reduced fertility rates and many other positive health benefits.  Kristof also really raises this point in his blog and in his book.  But, I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way that these findings are being construed and operationalized in global health.  I see two obvious implications of the findings--the first, invest more in women.  The second, figure out how to make investments in men go further.  As a field, we've latched onto the former and marginalized the potential of the latter.  As a field public health seems to regard male behavior as largely static (that's my gross generalization of the day), but it seems absurd to ignore the potential to ignore opportunities for behavior change in half the world's population, particularly when the result simultaneously points to that half's greater control of power and financial resources.  Just as coke can make a consumer equate a brown, fizzy beverage with happiness and community, and Captain Condom (a Harvard MBA no less) can convince Thai teenagers that a condom is "a girl's best friend", why can't similar strategies create the image of a "real man" investing in his family, prioritizing his daughter's education or health needs over tobacco/alcohol consumption?  These seem comparably achieveable to me, and it'd be great to see the field flex its creative muscles to break out of a tired paradigm of attempting change.

Finally, don't miss the tunes of Bajah + the Dry Eye Crew, who offer a welcome alternative to "Love the Way You Lie" (and Bono for that matter).  A group of musicians from Sierra Leone that's written some great pieces that focus on social issues and promote world peace and understanding.  Definitely inspired me to work harder all afternoon.

Highly recommend you check out the event when you have an hour or so: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/tedxchange/Pages/default.aspx
Another (fairly positive) perspective on the event can be found here: http://humanosphere.kplu.org/2010/09/melinda-hans-mr-condom-and-graca-on-tedxchange/ 

Tough "love"

Rihanna and Eminem have produced a hit with "Love the Way You Lie."  It's catchy; you can hardly listen to the radio for an hour without hearing it.  And it's driving me crazy to not be able to avoid it.

I'm a little disturbed that America has consumed this song so willingly.  The video portrays a relationship that combines violence with passion, and interestingly, shows both the male and female partner hitting each other, with the female often initiating the violence.   Is this an accurate depiction?  Certainly in public service announcements, there's the implication that the male is the sole perpetrator of violence. But maybe this is not always the case.

What strikes me about the song is that in Eminem's lyrics, a few things ring very true with literature on relationship violence. 

1.  The emotions are intense; even though violence is involved, and likely fear, there may also be strong feelings of love, passion, and desire.  The violence is a piece of a larger, complex relationship.  For example, one verse goes:

Now I know we said things, did things that we didn't mean
And we fall back into the same patterns, same routine
But your temper's just as bad as mine is
You're the same as me
But when it comes to love you're just as blinded
Baby, please come back
It wasn't you, baby it was me
Maybe our relationship isn't as crazy as it seems
Maybe that's what happens when a tornado meets a volcano
All I know is I love you too much to walk away though
Come inside, pick up your bags off the sidewalk
Don't you hear sincerity in my voice when I talk
I told you this is my fault
Look me in the eyeball
Next time I'm pissed, I'll aim my fist at the drywall
Next time. There won't be no next time
I apologize even though I know its lies

2.  The violence isn't consistent.  It may ebb and flow; there may be periods of peace, or lulls between episodes.  BUT,

3.  As he so "eloquently" points out at the end of the song, often the violence escalates, and many perpetrators are blinded by their need to control their partner.
Lyrics (minus the f-word),
If she ever tries to leave me again/I'm going to tie her to the bed and set the house on fire.

Almost half of all murders of women in the U.S. are committed by intimate partners.  Isn't that incredible?  That the person that women should be most afraid of is the man that they are closest to?  And we're doing what to change this?

Why do we not find this song deeply disturbing, where's the moral outrage about these issues?  How can such violent sentiments be included in a top twenty song?  I'm a little disappointed in us for not listening a little more carefully.  Relationship violence remains an "invisible" problem; as in, one that no one wants to take on.  We think that there is a fine line being loving someone so much that you do crazy things to keep the relationship, but in actuality I think that love and violence are pretty different, and anyone who sees that line as blurry probably needs to back off and do some thinking.  Love cannot be about ownership and control; it should be about respect for another person's autonomy and trust.  I don't see how these could be confused.  Of course then I listen to Taylor Swift's "The way I love you" and think that the chorus, though much less graphic, communicates some of the same message that true love should hurt:
I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain/3AM and I'm cursing your name/so in love that I acted insane/and that's the way I loved you.

I was listening to "Love the way you lie" earlier today thinking about Yeardley Love, the UVA lacrosse player who was brutally murdered by her drunk (ex?) boyfriend.  Did her friends see the danger signs?  Did Yeardley?  If so, was there a way that this could have been prevented? I had a good friend who was in a relationship that was emotionally abusive, and it was terrifying to watch how good her boyfriend was at manipulating her.  He managed to isolate her from so many of her good friends and make her dependent on him for just about everything.  When it finally ended, he couldn't handle it.  He started calling her repeatedly, at work when she would answer his cell, and just showing up at her apartment building.  It devastated her and I can still see how she's rebuilding back the confidence that he took away from her.

I've asked myself a lot if I should have done more.  I tried to point out the flaws in his logic, note that a lot of his behavior was included on any list of classic warning signs of relationship abuse, but I felt that I had to walk a fine line to avoid giving him more ammunition to use against me (he was clearly displeased that she remained friends with me).  She recently told me that she was surprised that I didn't say more--I'm not sure if that was a rebuke or just an observation.  But what I did do, and I think was the right strategy (though perhaps I wasn't proactive enough about it), was I tried to create space for her to decide to leave the relationship, and support her throughout the recovery from it, without judgment about her decisions.

Tomorrow I begin leading sexual violence risk reduction workshops for Harvard freshmen, and for the first time relationship violence will be one of the topics we cover.  I'm glad, as women 20-24 are in fact most likely to be victimized in a relationship.  But as to what advice to give these young women, I'm at a loss.  I think about the Rihanna/Eminem hit song, and I think about Yeardley Love, and I just cannot say honestly that I think that victims of relationship violence are supported.  In the absence of fundamental change in the gender dynamics of our society, which I think are needed, what I hope to communicate is that silence, in all cases, enables perpetrators to continue to own their victims, because victims know that others see the violence and don't intervene, thus creating the sense that they implicitly support it.  So any of us that consider ourselves anti-relationship violence should be speaking up whenever we see something that's inappropriate, particularly when it's a good friend who is the victim or the perpetrator (or both, in the case of a relationship that's violent both ways). 

Sorry for the rant--feels better to have it out there vs. inside.

Pearls from the Lancet Global Health Network

Kids these days have it rough--the world is becoming too sheltered.
Round hole, square peg? The Ameri­can Academy of Pediatrics has recom­mended a redesign of the humble hot dog. The fast food results in the choking-related treatment of 15 000 youngsters in the USA every year. Experts say square-shaped hot dogs could save lives. But other foods, such as grapes, also pose a risk, according to the Academy. Sadly, their redesign might prove more difficult.

Canadian health care costs less than ours, but they have money to fund this type of research?
Medical drama Canadian researchers have revealed the shocking fact that medical dramas on television are not the best source of information about first aid, especially when it comes to seizures. The researchers spent many a gruelling hour watching episodes of House MD, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and Private Practice, and found that 46% of depictions of seizure care involved inappropriate actions such as putting something into the patient’s mouth.

On a more serious note, will be interesting to see if this trend catches on in advanced economies.  Finland is quickly moving to my A-list as a result of its prominence in the BBC Wildlife Photography Competition, and now, I can claim that the trip has relevance to work!
Nurse prescribing Finnish nurses could soon be able to prescribe drugs for the specific medical conditions in which they have been trained, with authorisation from a supervising doctor. The bill, currently being con­sidered by the Finnish Parliament, is expected to improve the efficiency of services in health centres and to slow down the increasing demand for physicians.
Innovation and aggressively negotiation with donors pays off!  Can we apply to public health in the U.S.?
Pay for performance The World Bank has released the results of a study on the use of pay-for-performance (P4P) medicine in low-income countries. The study examined the effect of P4P on maternal and child health services such as facility-based childbirth and scheduled vaccination in Rwanda, and concluded that financial performance incentives are capable of improving both the quantity and quality of health services.  

In the Mississippi Delta, an Iranian health delivery model using community health works is being replicated.  Globalization at its best!   Maybe we can send sweet tea and pecan pie their way in exchange. . . .

Alternative holidays to adopt: Growlentine's Day

 Reposted from February 14, 2008.  It's still that good. The pictures are new--first one compliment of Aaron.

How do you feel about Valentine's Day? Do the looks of disgust and disdain on these animals' faces express your opinion?

You're not alone. There are a lot of V-day haters out there. And why not? It's a holiday that seems to be created to make some people spend

lots of money and other people to feel bad about themselves. It's pretentious and exclusionary. Anti-American, even!
So, I think it's time we take back February 14th from the lovers. Enough of the lovey-dovey, sickeningly sweet "You is my pookey bear" Hallmark cards. No more overpriced roses and sweeethearts with cool new messages like "text me! 143!". Honestly folks, we're better than that.
So here's my proposal. This February 14th marks the inauguration of a new age. This year, we celebrate GROWLENTINE'S DAY.

The rules are simple:
1. You must dress like a predator
2. You must growl at people (intensity of growling should be proportional to the strength of your feelings towards them--i.e. you growl loudest at those you love and hate, and more amiably at strangers and cute babies).

Beyond that, it's up to your discretion. There's no gendered expectations or norms, no need to find that special someone to spend the day with. Just an excuse to growl (which you know you secretly wish was more socially acceptable), dress up (Halloween in the spring. . .score!), and be silly. And hey, if you want to eat some chocolate and drink some wine with a saucy minx or a big, bad wolf, no one's saying that's against the rules. Bear in mind, you never know where a growl might lead you.