Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Levy's Fresh Air interview on Raunch Culture

I really found Ariel Levy’s take on the Rise of Raunch Culture to ring true. She says so eloquently what I, and perhaps many of us, have been thinking for a few years now. Click the link below to listen:

NPR : Women in the Girls Gone Wild Era http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6549015&sc=emaf

My thoughts are on why men behave badly is because women let them. If women respected themselves, men would be forced to rise to the task. The rate of out of wedlock births has skyrocketed to 37% last year. This bodes sadly for the feminization of poverty and the shrinking middle class.

It seems that these are desperate times for women. The times may call for the desperate measures of encouraging women not to “give the milk away for free.” It seems like this may be only bargaining chip young women have left.

Securing reproductive rights is also paramount. Levitt in Freakonomics links the drop in crime from the 90’s on to the unwanted children who would have committed crimes but who were not born to do so. Levitt also found that the one predictor of child success was that the mother was over 30 at the birth of her first child. Women need time to grow up and get their education.

Finally, a lot of my friends with young children, like me, are now looking for low-paying education or service jobs. These women were executives and software engineers, and me – a Ph.D. But we all want to work school hours and don’t want to scramble on holidays or in the summer. We can’t find any companies to hire us under these constraints. The jobs just aren’t there. There aren’t even many job-sharing jobs. I’ve been encouraging my bright mother friends to do consulting instead of becoming a teacher’s aide or a lunch lady. We need to create more flex-time corporate jobs, one way or another. Right now our choices are the tyranny of housewifery or somewhat sacrificing our childrens’ well-being or at least some needed time with them.

Thank you for teaching, mentoring, and encouraging young women today. They need you more than you know!

Monday, November 13, 2006

Residents want a playground near (St. Pete Times)

Amy's in the paper again! This one is from the Neighborhood Times section, November 12, 2006. Check it out: Residents want a playground near - Archives: St. Petersburg Times