Jezebel

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Womb Raiders

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voodoo jezenomics

Once Upon A Time, When We Still Feared Global Poverty, We Learned A Very Interesting Rice Recipe

What is it about the "Global Population, Magnitude Of" thing that so vexes the world's rich people? I'm asking in light of the food crisis and the energy crisis bringing back that old "Malthusian population crisis" fear. I'm also asking in light of my kinda recent discovery that the American rights to the RU-486 abortion pill are owned by some super-secretive subsidiary of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council. (Which is, by the way, charging too much money for it.) But mainly I'm asking because I just read this NYRB piece on two new books about the population control movement in the '50s and '60s which, among other things, taught me this about the challenge Western family planners faced in getting (and sometimes coercing) Third worlders into embracing birth control:
"You just keep having children. This is how you keep a man," Sylvia, mother of twelve, told Maternowska. "If you don't give [children] to him, he doesn't give [money] to you.... And sometimes even if you do give, you lose anyhow. Life is hard." Women would do anything to keep a man. There was a brisk trade in sexy outfits and wild rumors circulated about love potions, some from voodoo healers, some home-made, including rice and beans cooked in water in which a woman had washed her underwear.
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3:00 PM on Thu Jul 31 2008
By Moe
3,966 views, 83 comments

Latest by MsTriste: In response to Moe's comment that "...in light of my kinda recent discovery that the American rights to the RU-486 more »

womb raiders

Fertility Issues Aren't Just A Female Problem

Notorious
celebrity cads like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty seem to happily and effortlessly sire babies into their fifties and sixties, but the reality is that fertility declines after age 35 for men just as it does for women. According to a recent French study of over 12,200 couples having fertility treatments, fertility for men declines after 35 and becomes "significantly lower if [the man] is over 40," the BBC reports. "There's a common misperception — even among healthcare providers — that infertility is a female problem," Dr. Thomas Walsh of the UC San Francisco School of Medicine tells the L.A. Times, but at least 20% of infertility is due to male reproductive issues. The L.A. Times describes several different maladies that might cause a man to be infertile, but my favorite is what I like to refer to as "lazy sperm." More »

9:30 AM on Mon Jul 7 2008
3,503 views, 95 comments

Latest by borogirl: @Ruby_Slippers: I'm sorry to hear you've gone through something like that. I had a similar experience. I have more »

womb raiders

Is It About Time We Made A "Pregnancy Pact" Of Our Own?

The conventional wisdom holds that media types are biased in favor of the Theory of Evolution. So why is it all they seem to print these days are stories hellbent on convincing us that the WRONG PEOPLE are procreating?? No doubt you, too, spent more time over the past few months consuming the latest on the Duggar family and the Spears family, that mysteriously-coiffed cult of inbreds in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Pedophiles and the seventeen bored teenagers' homeless deadbeat boyfriends than you did having unprotected sex. But is that good for the future of society? The Yemeni man who sold his 8-year-old daughter to the 30-year-old child molester only did it because he had 15 other children to feed on his panhandling income. And yet three thousand miles northwest in an unspeakably gorgeous town in Italy, the week's New York Times Magazine informs us, the mayor is paying women ten thousand Euros for every baby they can make. More »

12:00 PM on Wed Jul 2 2008
By Moe
7,723 views, 173 comments

Latest by snowygal18: @andromache: I'm just happy there's another Classics major Jezzie :) more »

womb raiders

Woman Sentenced To Year In Prison For Forging Son's Knocked-Up Girlfriend's "Parental Notification" Forms

Well here is a fucking mess. Girl, 16, gets pregnant. Girl tells boyfriend, boyfriend's mom finds out by snooping through his text messages, mom has big plans for her son, mom pressures girl to get an abortion, tells her not to tell her parents, forges the required parental notification letter and pays for everythign; girl gets abortion, girl for whatever reason notifies actual parents, girl and/or girl's parents get upset and go to authorities; mom is sentenced to a year in the DeKalb County Prison, the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor crime; I think I have counted like twenty different levels on which this is fucking depressing. I mean, from the girl's perspective, probably the only thing worse than thinking your mother's boyfriend doesn't think you're good enough for him — and I'm assuming that's what she thought — is entertaining the possibility that on top of all the general misery of teenage relationships you might have just killed someone, which also, this being Georgia, is probably what she thought. And then you're her parents. Maybe they're just litigious Evangelicals. More »

1:30 PM on Thu Jun 12 2008
By Moe
7,601 views, 242 comments

Latest by jleigh: Now don't go blaming Georgia for this. While I understand the temptation everyone in the entire country has to more »

post partum

So About That Harrowing "Ring Of Fire" Story…

We've written rather extensively on the month's Elle, but there is a meta elephant in the room we've been ignoring because, well duh. It's about what happens to your vagina during childbirth, and it's called "Ring of Fire," apparently an oft-used term for what happens during those final moments before the baby's head rips through your vadge. An additional, uh, "elephant" is that the author obviously read The Rachel Papers, the requisite horrifying exchange we've excerpted after the jump. But anyway. Author claims her vadge returns to something approaching normalcy and that sex is now good. Hm. Okay, so if you want to get married and have kids, you probably believe it's possible for sex to remain good and normal and lusty years into marriage. And it is. Maybe your parents did. Maybe you know one of those women who outrageously got pregnant again, like, right after the first baby came. My grandmother had seven kids and four miscarriages. I don't think she breastfed. I wasn't fucking breast fed, but my brother and sister were, and they're the ones who got all the allergies… More »

2:30 PM on Fri Jun 6 2008
By Moe
10,377 views, 187 comments

Latest by yamish: @Diziet_Sma: fine by me. more »

spank bank

The Insane Story Of Stuart Miller's Hollywood Sperm Bank Bondage Cult

Meet Stuart Miller. You thought Dov Charney was a creepy boss? In Stuart's defense, he runs a sperm bank. But Growing Generations is a high-end sperm (and surrogate) bank catering to Hollywood agents and assorted other corporate bigwig types that was just profiled in W Magazine! So you can imagine how Miller's old marketing manager Scott Glasgow found it a little inappropriate when the Boss Man, according to a lawsuit just filed in federal court in Manhattan, emailed him this picture of himself. (There's an even more surreal — though surprisingly SFW — specimen from a company "team building" exercise after the jump.) Still, Glasgow liked his job. He made $100,000 helping gay couples "create new life"! So he had endured Miller's insistence that they share a bed on the company "Vision Cruise" even though he had no interest in actually doing him. The boss was going to make him VP! But then came all the cult classes: More »

1:00 PM on Wed May 21 2008
By Moe
14,000 views, 68 comments

Latest by louinacube: landmark is a cult, it gives self-absorbed a-holes an excuse, language and defense system to continue to be users. its more »

home economics

The Management Perils Of Having Two Or More Nannies

Yesterday's Page Six Magazine attacked the subject of mommies who find themselves needing multiple nannies. (We thought it would be challenging for them to match the pathos and capacity for conveying human suffering reached by last week's story about Wall Street traders who go to massage parlors, but they did.) We meet Yael Halaas, a 38-year-old plastic surgeon and mother of three, who calls having two nannies "the best damn thing in the world to make life function." We learn that some women find themselves needing a second nanny for basic "one is illegal and can't come to Bermuda"-type purposes, others when they want their kids to be exposed to a blend of different personality traits and/or world cuisines ("I wake up to her cooking buckwheat crepes from scratch!" cooes one) others when the first one simply proves too competent at "management" functions, such as finding a second nanny. More »

4:40 PM on Mon Apr 21 2008
By Moe
6,069 views, 100 comments

Latest by mmh: Look, some people who have two nannies are useless and lazy, some work really hard and don't have a stay-at-home more »

dear rush

Rush Limbaugh: Women Love Hillary Because They've "Had Two Or Three Abortions"

"You have to understand the mindset of a lot of these feminists and women...These women have paid their dues. They've been married two or three times; they've had two or three abortions; they've done everything that feminism asked them to do. They have cut men out of their lives; they have devoted themselves to causes and careers. And this — the candidacy of Hillary Clinton — is the culmination of all of these women's efforts." That's Hillary Clinton's friend Rush Limbaugh on his show yesterday, trying to rile the bonerkiller squad as every day. But hey, let's unpack this. Because to be quite honest, it's a slightly more nuanced portrayal than we're used to from the Right Wing Talk radio, among whom "two or three abortions" is generally code for "whore whore slut" and/or "irresponsible minority rendered incapable by the Massive Welfare State of taking accountability for her actions." No, these women have had two or three abortions because living up to the demands of feminism was some grueling war of attrition. Hm. Sometimes I think it is! Come on Rush, you're human, get inside that woman's head. She's at the clinic, paying for the second abortion she had to get because she "cut men out of her life" — which, let's just be honest, who really does that besides lesbians, Rush?
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2:00 PM on Wed Apr 2 2008
By Moe
10,669 views, 208 comments

Latest by porkchop2000: Rush Limbaugh makes me wish that natural selection were a little less natural. If I knew I was going to more »

womb raiders

When Did Baby Weight Become Just Plain Fat?

A week or two ago I glanced up from my laptop long enough to catch my first glimpse of a commercial whose audio I had heard dozens of times before. It was for Nutri-System, and the audio consisted of a woman's claim to have lost 41 pounds following the weight-loss regimen. Is that Jillian Barberie? I wondered, unaware that the morning television personality I had watched habitually for years as a resident of Los Angeles in the earlier part of this century had since changed her name to Jillian Barberie-Reynolds or, more to the point, that she had become fat. (And, mercifully, thin again.) I consulted Google: indeed, she had gained 41 pounds. And what unfortunate fate had occasioned this traumatic bloat in Jillian's trademark svelte frame? Oh, pregnancy. Hmm. Well, then. It is now a few weeks later, and I find myself mulling the merits of Lisa Marie Presley's libel lawsuit against the Daily Mail for a related phenomenon, the equation of the weight gained due to one's pregnancy with weight gained due to eating an excess of food. More »

5:00 PM on Tue Mar 11 2008
By Moe
15,980 views, 190 comments

Latest by shanaynay: Is it shallow that I have no idea what the story's about, having gone straight from Jillian to John Zimmerman more »

womb raiders

Why Can't Non-Batshit Pro-Lifers Give It Up And Accept The Abortion Pill?

This is Rep. Ray Salva, Missouri Democrat. An early supporter of John Edwards, the Catholic and lifetime Missouri resident is a member of the Optimist's Club and known to be a friend of the environment, the homeless and the eroding middle-class. But we write about him for a much more baffling reason: his addition of an amendment to a statehouse anti-methamphetamine bill. The bill was your typical "make buying Sudafed a pain in the ass" measure. But Salva's amendment would do something entirely unrelated: it would add mifepristone, the RU-486 abortion pill, to the state's list of Schedule 1 Controlled Substances, the list where substances find themselves if they have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. "What other drug could be more harmful (than one that takes) a life?" It's not a bad question: Salva, no stranger to substance abuse, was arrested for drunk driving last February; surely the sort of behavior that could wind up taking a human life.
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12:00 PM on Fri Mar 7 2008
By Moe
5,184 views, 207 comments

Latest by bruitdautrui: If you're down for feeling a sense of loss about the whole thing, if you're at all reflective, if you more »