“I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life – always vital, even torrid – is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own. But I don’t. I am far too busy worrying about what’s wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?” – Ayelet Waldman, New York Times. (Hat tip: Bidisha Banerjee.
POSEUR ALERT II: For every American feeling compassion for Schiavo, there are at least several more who feel a consolation and satisfaction, maybe even a sense of triumph. Events have complicated, peculiar resonances in the mind. As the instincts seem to be set loose to an unimaginable degree in American society and overseas, Schiavo’s unfathomably suffering face, with its strange beatific-seeming smile, is like a justification for all the carnage. This vale of woe is what life is, it seems to say–at least to those who want to keep her face just as it is, forever. It’s a chilling complement to “The Contender,” whose fixation on pummeling seems to say that this is what society is … So for the Christian right, Schiavo has become something like a human antidepressant… [B]y arguing, no, insisting that her story have a happy ending, they can cheer themselves up about the society they are helping to create every day, a society in which being able to celebrate the spectacle of the weak getting pummeled, and the weak wasting away from within in a vegetative state, is the measure of one’s strength. Nietzsche and Christ, together at last.” – Lee Siegel, The New Republic.
“SUPER-HIV”: The New York Times’ story today about the alleged new strain of HIV tells us a few things. No other person has been found with an identical strain; the patient is responding to anti-retroviral treatment; the bulk of his sexual contacts were already HIV-positive. So we had five days of hysterical coverage from the NYT for … this? The new story – tellingly – does not include the context that was provided in previous stories, i.e. that this new strain comes “as a growing number of gay men become infected despite warnings about unsafe sex.” Maybe that’s because the New York City Health Department has no statistics to support that claim. Is New York City alone in marking a decline in HIV infection rates? Nope. We were told a couple of years ago that Seattle was having a huge new increase. The Seattle Weekly recalls that “[King County’s] top AIDS official, Dr. Bob Wood, called the situation ‘frightening,’ ‘astounding,’ and ‘the most dramatic increase since the beginning of the epidemic.'” Hard data two years later show a stable rate of infections, despite a growing number of people living with HIV. Or a state like Virginia? A state-wide drop of 20 percent between 2003 and 2004. In Charlottesville, they saw a 67 percent drop. San Francisco? The same hype only a few years ago – “sub-Saharan levels” of infection, according to the head of the city’s public health department. The latest data show infection rates completely stable, along with a dramatic rise in the number of people getting tested. I’m waiting for evidence that will show that this new strain is new, that there is a resurgence of HIV infection among gay men in America, and that the New York Times is not a megaphone for whichever AIDS hysteric comes along next. As I said, I’m waiting.
The Dish 