Just a quick hit today on a book I’m about to get my hands on, titled The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future, by Guy Garcia. Coming on the heels of Michael Kimmel’s most excellent Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, I’m eager to see how it, um, measures up.

From the Publishers Weekly review:

Garcia (The New Mainstream) explores disturbing trends of men leading increasingly socially isolated lives and dropping out of high school and college in record numbers, naming them victims of an invisible epidemic. According to the author, modern men have failed to forge a new and productive role in the 21st century. Garcia charts the rise of feminism and the changing societal roles of both men and women, illustrating how and why men have become so confused about what defines masculinity; having lost their traditional role as provider and protector, men flirt with hollow substitute identities—drawing on Jackass culture (men pretending to be boys), gangster culture (boys pretending to be men) and metrosexual obsessions with grooming and body image—that have reductively redefined manhood and led men away from compassion, responsibility and family. Garcia wisely avoids degrading feminism or pitting men against women; instead, he offers an astute and well-researched meditation on how men might reclaim their identity and place in modern America and why such a transformation is important to future generations of both men and women. (Oct.)

Paging Clark Kent?

My all-time favorite term of this race has just been coined: “The Feylin Effect.” Read more, over at The Guardian.

Do check out the newsy bits about female media personalities in this roundup, courtesy of the lovely Rebekah at the WMC:

Brown’s CNN Role: A Matter Of Opinion
October 21
Washington Post: When Campbell Brown left her high-profile perch at NBC and launched a nightly CNN talk show seven months ago, her luster seemed to dim amid the crackling cable landscape.

Fresh Face On Cable, Sharp Rise In Ratings
October 20
NY Times: Rachel Maddow, a woman who does not own a television set, has done something that is virtually unheard of: she has doubled the audience for a cable news channel’s 9 p.m. hour in a matter of days.

In Praise Of Peggy Noonan
October 20
Forbes: Every week on Saturday, I–like millions of others–turn in the morn to Peggy Noonan.

Ex-Times Reporter Judith Miller Joins Fox News
October 20
Hollywood Reporter via MSNBC: Pulitzer Prize-winner spent 85 days in jail for contempt during Plame affair

Online Campaign Asks NBC To Think Beyond Caucasian Males When Hiring Next Moderator Of Meet The Press
October 20
NY Observer: Last week, Margot Friedman, a public relations professional in Washington, D.C., launched a Web site encouraging NBC News executives to rethink their strategy for picking the next moderator of Meet the Press.

This influx of estrogenic news is making my head spin — in the good way, of course!  (Is estrogenic a word?  Do people use it? Oh dear.  Clearly I’ve got hormones on my mind.)

Here to bring you your monthly insight into the youth perspective is Courtney Martin with a post on how young people are getting involved in politics…by targeting their grandparents for the Obama vote. Courtney’s awesome column, Generation Next, appears the third Monday of every month. –Kristen

One of my favorite get out the vote efforts by youth this fall is, hands down, The Great Schlep. The young, civic-minded, and Jewish recognized that they had a profound power to influence a very special population in a very special swing state: grandparents in Florida. And thus the Great Schlep was born.

Here’s the always controversial Sarah Silverman on the basic concept:

There are a few things that I deeply admire about this project. First and foremost, I love that a bunch of young people took stock of the power they already possessed (being beloved by their well-intentioned, if not a bit conservative grandparents) and figured out a way to use that power for political leverage. This is the best of youth activism at work—a homegrown, grassroots exercise of power in innovative ways.

I also appreciate that, while it springs from a place of cultural and religious identity, it serves a much broader cause. Jewish youth didn’t wait until there was a fantastic Jewish candidate to start organizing, schlepping, and registering/influencing voters; they participated in a long, beautiful tradition of Jewish activists promoting the best interest of a “minority” and, in turn, their own vision of a more just society.

And finally, they used shocking humor and a sort of wonderful sarcasm about their own culture to get the word out. Some have found the racial implications offensive, which I totally understand. I happen to think it’s pretty amazing social commentary. In any case, they got your attention didn’t they?

–Courtney Martin

Check out the latter bit in particular, where Colin Powell speaks out against Republicans’ insinuations that Obama is Muslim. It’s up there, in my book, with Obama’s race speech.

Now that the group GWP is fully launched, we are finally getting around to some blog maintenance items that have long been on the to-do list. Like, ahem, expanding our blogroll. Our blogroll is on the left, scroll down. Are there sites that should be there but aren’t? And blogrolls that we should be on but aren’t? Your suggestions are most welcome! Please post em in comments and we’ll take it from there.

Thanks so much for your help!

Is there any way in which Palin’s dude appeal might ultimately be a good thing for future female candidates? An article in today’s NYTimes points to Palin’s appeal among “the dudes” and notes two contradictory impulses:

Yes, some men come to ogle the candidate, too. “She’s beautiful,” said a man wearing a John Deere T-shirt in Weirs Beach. “I came here to look at her,” he said, and his admiration for Ms. Palin’s appearance became more and more animated. Sheepish over his ogling, he declined to give his real name (“Just call me ‘John Deere’ ”).

But some male fans do seem to feel a deeper connection to Ms. Palin. To a surprising degree, they mention the unusual nature of her candidacy, the chance to make history, break the glass ceiling. (Read the rest here.)

Just as I’m starting to wonder, yet again, whether there might be a small leap forward for womankind embedded in Palin’s run, Michelle Goldberg sets me straight. Goldberg reminds us that by trying to “flirt her way to victory” (aka the Vice-Presidential debate), her farcical performance lowers the standards for both female candidates and US political discourse. Goldberg concludes,

In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn’t show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.

I wholeheartedly agree. But I still want to be convinced. Is there any way, do you think, that Palin’s run will make things better for future female candidates? Any way…at all?

(Thanks to Jackie for the heads up.)

Sarah Palin and Tina Fey do Sarah Palin on SNL!

And Amy Poelher does the Sarah Palin rap.

Joe Joe Joe. All we seem to be hearing about since Wednesday’s debate is Joe. Well, my colleague Linda Basch (Pres of the National Council for Research on Women) is leading us into a discussion of Jane the Plumber, cuz Jane’s got woes too. Specifically, Jane is worried about her retirement funds. As Linda notes,

So far, neither candidate seems to have woken up to the tough economic facts facing so many older women voters. Women represent 57 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries aged 62 and older and approximately 70 percent of beneficiaries aged 85 and older. Women who have been widowed, divorced, or never married are especially dependent on Social Security, which accounts for at least half the income of nearly three-fourths of non-married women aged 65 and older.

Read all about it in “What About Jane Plumber?” over at CNN.com . While I’m at it, I point you to this post by Cindy Hounsell (Pres of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement), “Why Women Are Poor in Retirement,” too.

While each candidate in Wednesday night’s debate gave his stump speech on Roe v. Wade, only Obama mentioned the need for better sex education in the school system, and that was quickly skedaddled by a change in topic. Put another way, as politicians are such fans of doing, the two candidates spent more time discussing whether Obama did or did not launch his campaign in Bill Ayers’ living room than discussing how they plan to battle rising teen pregnancy and STD rates. As Amy Schalet pointed out in a Washington Post article last week, “High teen pregnancy rates result in part from our inability to talk honestly and wisely about teen sexuality.” So where are we left if our two presidential candidates are never asked to talk about it at all?

Of course, part of the problem is that very few people besides the Religious Right, NARAL Pro-Choicers, and well, those who read this blog, are asking these questions. Sure, there are other things on our mind: the economy, Iraq, etc. But our general populace’s inability to ask basic, rational questions about the way their children are taught about sex in schools, and therefore their ceding of these decisions to a minority base, speaks to larger problems in our culture: an inability to approach sex in an individualized and normalized way.

Dagmar Herzog talks in Sex in Crisis about the anxiety with which America adults in the twenty-first century approach sex. In the nineties, most Americans seemed relatively satisfied with their sex lives. Sure it wasn’t always the best sex ever; sometimes there was boredom, or lack or desire, or lack of orgasm, or any of the other minor dissatisfactions that are normal in a human sexuality that can only be as perfect as the person experiencing it. Sometimes there were fears about love and emotional connection. But of course, again, why wouldn’t there be? Now, with articles and drug campaigns asking you whether you are experiencing a tepid orgasm, erectile dysfunction, porn addiction, you name it, American adults are constantly told to compare their sexuality to others and ask themselves, “Is there something wrong with my sex life?” As Herzog writes:

What is going on is an ideological assault on something pretty fundamental: the most intimate and personal aspects of sex. It worms its way into the core of the psyche by playing on the imperfections and emotional confusion that so often accompany sex. Rather than helping people get comfortable with the unruliness of desire, the current trendy idea is to freak people out.

Now, if adults are experiencing this level of anxiety about their own sexual lives, imagine how such over-scrutiny and neuroticism is translated to a population who has long been subject to excessive sexual observation in America. If sex can is psychologically and emotionally damaging for adults, given the especial “unruliness” of the teenage sex drive and a whole life during which this psychological damage can manifest itself, it must be doubly so for teens.

But what if we began to treat not only adult sexuality, but teenage sexuality, as normal? In a qualitative study comparing conceptions of teenage sexuality in the Netherlands and the United States, Amy Schalet documents how American adults dramatize teenage sexuality as hormone-raging, out-of-control, and irrational. (Part of the study is published as “Must We Fear Adolescent Sexuality? at Medscape General Medicine.) Dutch parents, on the other hand, recognize teenage relationships as legitimate and work to normalize sexuality.

Guess which country has the lower teenager pregnancy and STD rates.

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