Upon seeing a magazine cover of Lindsay and Sam Ronson, Samuels says, "That’s the addiction to fame…I mean, I have nothing against being with a woman, but it’s the selling of the magazine cover. It’s just another thing to fill the void." What's more is that Samuels sees this behavior as above board. “He was able to go on TV and not ever cross the line when Lindsay checked into Promises. There was a total media blitz for two weeks, and you don’t get a lot of opportunities like that. He wasn’t her therapist, anyway; he’s the executive director," Samuels' assistant claims.

And Samuels is all about seizing opportunities to make cash: Wonderland is almost $60,000 a month for a single room, and of course it doens't take insurance. Unlike other famous rehabs like the Betty Ford Clinic, Wonderland patients are allowed to have cell phones and are allowed to come and go as they please. According to Fortini, "They are taken on shopping trips, and are allowed to bring their dogs. Actors are sometimes released to work on films; musicians can travel for tours."

It's basically like summer camp, except with less weed. This is rehab for the uber-wealthy exclusively, but even in this rarified environment, celebrities get special treatment. According to one Wonderland patient who was there at the same time as Hurricane Lindsay in early 2007 (before her public relapse and subsequent treatment elsewhere):

I said, ‘Well, I think some people are a little bothered that their program and their stay at Wonderland is being negatively impacted by this craziness and why rules don’t apply to her that apply to us. I mean, there is some resentment building up.’ And he said, ‘You know what, Mike, I hear you, but we have to cater our program and our treatment center to each individual to make it work for them. Because if we didn’t do that for this individual, she would have been gone on Day One.’

And who cares anyway, because, according to Samuels, himself a former addict and the son of a wealthy, politically prominent New Yorker, his plush rehab doesn't even work! "I’m not a believer that treatment centers save people’s lives," Samuels tells the New Yorker, "I think if you’ve got a really good treatment center you can go a long way toward helping a person, but at the end of the day it’s not about the treatment center. It’s about the individual, and about whether or not they’re at that place to change.”

Of course, it's true of all treatments that the individual has to want to make a change for the rehab to be successful. But, as Dr. Drew told Fortini, "The more you cater to an addict’s demands, the more you support their disease." How is a celebrity going to learn that their behavior has consequences when they're treated like deities, even in rehab?

Special Treatment [New Yorker]

While Clinton's oft-proclaimed "bitchiness" was certainly not a positive development, Fortini argues that "It was far more destructive, we would learn, for a woman to be labeled a fool." However, Fortini's premise made me wonder if, as Barack Obama defied the negative stereotypes applied to African Americans, a woman would have to defy all negative stereotypes of powerful females to get elected. Or, to put it another way: if Sarah Palin had been brilliant, we would have been in a lot of trouble.

"Here was a woman who—even if you didn’t agree with her politics—seemed to have achieved what so many of us were struggling for: an enviable balance between career and family," Fortini says. And indeed, Sarah Palin is poised and pretty and appropriately "female" in a way that is not threatening — nothing like Hillary Clinton. She defies the stereotype that women who seek power are ball breakers. However, Palin also defies notions of prissiness and weakness with her searing, borderline-cruel rhetoric and her much-touted moose killing.

Thank goodness for those of us who like our abortions legal, Palin's "blithe ignorance extended from foreign policy to the symbolic value of her candidacy. By stepping into the spotlight unprepared, Palin reinforced some of the most damaging and sexist ideas of all: that women are undisciplined in their thinking; that we are distracted by domestic concerns or frivolous pursuits like shopping; that we are not smart enough, or not serious enough, for the important jobs," Fortini explains.

However, I'm not convinced that Palin's inadequacy has set women back. Fortini quotes a study that said 69% percent of people think men and women are equally able to lead, and then follows up by noting that 60% of people thought Palin wasn't qualified to be President. To think that one woman has dismantled all the progress other women have made gives her too much credit. But, like all non-white, non-Christian males running for office, at first one must transcend stereotypes to become electable. As many have said before, if Barack Obama had been divorced, or Michelle had been a pill-popper like Cindy McCain, or if a teenage Malia Obama had turned up pregnant out of wedlock, you can be sure he would not have made it anywhere near the Oval Office. For a woman to get to break that ol' glass ceiling, she's going to have to do the same.

The 'Bitch' And The 'Ditz' [NYM]

"...In our reluctance to appear nagging, scolding, hectoring, or petty, many of us have made a practice of enduring minor affronts not realizing that a failure to decry the smaller indignities can foster blindness to the larger ones," writes Fortini, who, three paragraphs later, explains that her "first experience" with sexism occurred when she was asked by a high school debate coach to loosen the bun in her hair). "We then find ourselves shocked when one of the smartest, most qualified women ever to run for public office is called 'fishwife-y' by a female pundit on national television."

Who exactly is this "we" Fortini is talking about? Are the young, well-educated women quoted in these articles — most of them economically secure and white — really so shocked to discover that misogyny exists, even among their seemingly-sensitive male (and female) peers? You can argue that young women's failure to see the pervasiveness of sexism in this society underscores the fact that the work done by second-wave feminists in the 60s and 70s has paid off, and maybe you'd be right. But I'll go out on a limb and say the problem isn't that women are reluctant to "decry the smaller indignities" of being female, but that a lot of them seem so willfully blind to them in the first place. (Talk about the dumbing down of America.) Maybe that — not the identity politics in the race for the Democratic nomination — is a good thing for elite, solipsistic, newly-outraged Americans, female and male, to start focusing on.

The Feminist Reawakening [NY Magazine]
Hey Obama Boys: Back Off Already! [Salon]

Earlier: Some Men Who Hate Hillary Are Sexist. We Get It. Now Let's Move On
Ms. Matriarch To Daughter: When Push Comes To Shove, [Why] Can't You Vote For A Woman?

That's right, it wasn't anorexia! Turns out she had a whole bunch of Entamoeba Histolytica , tropical parasitic protozoa she'd contracted in Belize, digesting her food for her! Ewwwww!

Anyway on a side note, she describes herself as someone who worked in "fashion magazines," but when you Google her it seems like she was also once on staff at the New York Review Of Books — which is sort of the annoying part: literati dudes actually dig waify anorexic types, in my experience, more than bankers. Because they are little and not very manly and it's not as brazen as digging girls with weaves and implants and also it's cool to hate on fat people. God I hate New York!