• Yesterday, President Obama announced the 16 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. Along with Sidney Poitier and Harvey Milk, six women will be honored, including Billie Jean King, Chita Rivera, and Sandra Day O'Connor. • Here's some good news for the younger generation: The income gap has closed significantly for working women in their twenties. Women in most age groups have come closer to making the same as their male counterparts, with the exception of women ages 65 and older, who have gained no ground since 1979. • A Florida judge has ordered The Tampa Tribune to remove a story about four teens accused of sexually assaulting a classmate with a hockey stick. Judge Battles also requested that the newspaper refrain from printing any court statements until after the case has been tried. • Zoe Williams is just as annoyed with the "debonair non-parenthood" trend as we are. She takes her friend, named only as "X," and her birth partner, "C," to task for treating the birth process like a needless inconvenience. • According to a recent study, many college age dudes know little to nothing about HPV and the health risks associated with it. One participant even referred to HPV as "more of a joke" than other STDs. • Bad news, ladies: It looks like a world without men may be farther away than we hoped. The journal that reported on the human sperm created from embryonic stem cells was found to have contained several plagiarized paragraphs. Experts said that they plagiarism does not necessarily undermine the conclusions of the rest of the paper, but questions have been raised about the study's credibility. • New research has found that redheads are more sensitive to pain than the rest of the population, which may be the reason why gingers are twice as likely to avoid the dentist than people with dark hair. • A recent study indicates that cows are more dangerous than we ever imagined. In the U.S., about 20 people a year die from injuries inflicted upon them by charging cattle. • Cats are evil geniuses, according to new research. • Gerald H.F. Gardner, a physicist and mathematician who worked to eliminate sex bias in newspaper want ads, has passed away at the age of 83 from leukemia. • Police have arrested a 37-year-old woman for padding her bra, under charges of false advertising. Just kidding, she was really smuggling meth. • NPR reports on the Promise Keepers, a men's evangelical group, which has decided to allow women into their services for the first time in 20 years. •

Dorries' calls America "The Abortion Capital of the World" because the rate of abortion per 1,000 women is 19.4 to Britain's 18.3 (Australia's is the highest in the world, at 20.0). The Daily Mail has a chart comparing abortion laws in 9 different countries; in it, the newspaper lists the "Upper Limit" of legally-acceptable abortions in the U.S. to be 26 weeks. But the reality is that getting an abortion after 12 weeks in many states is outright impossible.

According to NARAL, the pro-choice organization, "23 states have unconstitutional and unenforceable bans that could outlaw abortion as early as the 12th week of pregnancy, with no exception to protect a woman's health." In addition, "15 states have unconstitutional and unenforceable near-total criminal bans on abortion." Zoe Williams points out that "If you really wanted more abortions to take place earlier in the pregnancy, then you would work towards improving access to terminations on the NHS." Similarly, if Americans really wanted fewer late term abortions, they would provide better sex education in public schools and easy and cheap access to birth control. As we said earlier, 87% of counties don't even have access to an abortion provider. And anyway, Dorries is just picking on America because we're so loud and crass and angsty over the abortion issue. If she were really being accurate, she'd go after those abortion-happy Aussies, who "kill babies" even more than we do.

Britain Is 'Becoming The Abortion Capital Of The World' Claims Tory MP Fighting To Lower Legal Limit [Daily Mail]
Fact, Fiction And Foetuses [Guardian]
Abortion Bans After 12 Weeks [NARAL]
We Had Our Babies Under The 24-week Abortion Limit - And They All Survived [Daily Mail]

Earlier: Pro-Life Teen Says "I Feel Like We're All Survivors Of Abortion"

And anyway, more stringent controls on drinkers isn't getting at the root of the problem. The problem is a culture of alcohol consumption. Williams posits:

The factors motivating drunkenness, or rather militating against a mature, long-term attitude to consumption and wellbeing, are vast and global and complicated. You could blame the 60s for destroying a shared understanding of morality, or the 80s for creating the financial disparities that make society functionally meaningless to people anywhere near the bottom.

Binge drinking doesn't even cause destructive behavior in all cultures, the New York Times noted yesterday. In a 1969 book called Drunken Comportment, social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote about drunkenness across the world, and according to the Times, they found " the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine...In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions."

More recently, social scientists in New Zealand studied the effects of drinking in teenage girls. The researchers observed two different cliques at a high school, according to the Times, and while both groups associated boozing with wild behavior, "one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more." In other worlds? If you're out flashing Joe Francis, it's probably the booze and the influence of your whorey friends in equal measures.

So what's the takeaway? A bottle of wine probably won't hurt you. A bottle of wine smashed over your head by a soccer hooligan will.

Sorry, I Binge Responsibly [Guardian]
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why [New York Times]

This leaves us with a committee addressing the issues of "what do they eat?" and "do they abuse drugs and alcohol?" Can you imagine the music industry tasked with coming up with guidelines like this? They would laugh in your face. Why are models different? Because they are mainly women, and it is fine to treat women like 8-year-olds, given that women are so often the driving force of this bilge. And because they are beautiful, and beautiful people often can't think rationally, since God doesn't bless them with brains as well as beauty.

Oy: Now we're all confused and stuff! We thought feminism was supposed to be straightforward; you know, visible ribs = the patriarchy!

Another Fake Controversy [Guardian]
Earlier: Fashion Models: Total Cows
Related: Watch Your Step: Fashion Industry Told To 'Grow Up' Over Models' Health And Safety

Over in England, there's a fine little brouhaha brewing up about, guess what, dieting.

The backstory is that well-respected journalist and self-confessed former fattie India Knight wrote a book with a friend called Neris and India's Idiot-proof diet.

Then in marched equally well-respected journalist Zoe Willams, who wrote an article criticizing the book, called 'You're Vain and Stupid'. Hey, don't beat around the bush, Zoe dear. Her argument is that anyone who cares about their weight forfeits the right to be thought of as intelligent.

And now India has come charging back with, well, with a bit of pathos really:

"One of the things about being fat - and I'm talking about being stones overweight, not about "needing" to shrink from a size six to a size two - is that, after a certain point, it makes you invisible. It's hard to understand how this might be considered any kind of achievement, feminist or otherwise.

You may occupy a great deal of physical space if you're very fat, but in everyday life, it's as though you weren't there. Sales assistants stare blankly through you. Men pretend you don't exist, or start calling you "mate".

You wonder whether your children are embarrassed to be seen with you in public (the answer to that one is yes, probably). You wish you could go for a bike ride with them, but you're too self-conscious, because you look like a potato balanced on an ant."

Ouch! We tend to think that dieting probably is unfeminist in the greater scheme of things, but then we don't want to look like Andrea Dworkin, either. So we'll go on feeling a wee bit conflicted, and lay off the cheescake.

[Zoe's not happy]
[Nor is India]