A Worthy Adversary

I read this article on the closing of Dr. George Tiller’s clinic yesterday and I can’t get it out of my head. It’s the final two paragraphs that I can’t stop thinking about:

As he explained himself, Mr. Gietzen did something unexpected. He spoke admiringly of the man he reflexively referred to as “Abortionist Tiller.” He said he was “very smart” and a “great businessman.” He said that if he had been in town he would have attended Dr. Tiller’s funeral to pay his respects.

“A worthy adversary,” he said. “He was right back at us.”

 

Mark Gietzen is the chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life. He made it his organization’s particular goal to shut down Dr. Tiller’s clinic. Speaking of his own work and that of other anti-choice activists, Gietzen said, ““We wanted it to get to the point where it was no longer feasible to stay open.”

Here’s my problem: If you think that abortion is murder, and if your objective is to eradicate it, shouldn’t you want an opponent to simply surrender?

Gietzen’s appreciation for his “worthy adversary”—not to mention his devotion to elaborate stagecraft and publicity—suggests that he is more invested in waging his battle than winning it. This, to me, unconscionable. I don’t have reason to suspect the sincerity of Gietzen’s opposition to abortion, but his comments make it seem very much as if his activism is not just about saving the “unborn”, but also about power and control.

Even a cursory look at the anti-choice movement shows that many—if not most—of its leaders are men, and that there is significant overlap between anti-choice groups and Christian churches that espouse a theological basis for the subordination of women. I will not be the first to argue that this is no coincidence.

Our Babies, Ourselves

When I first saw the cover of November 28 New York Times Magazine, I was eager to read Alex Kuczynski’s story about having a child via surrogate—not so much because I am especially interested in infertility, but because Kuczynski is a writer I love to hate. I was pretty sure that her first-person narrative was going to give me plenty of fuel for my antipathy.

I was pretty much right, but, after a couple of pages, though, I thought to myself, “This is only going to make you crazy and filled with spite, and then you are going to feel guilty and conflicted about the spite because you don’t actually know what it’s like to want a baby and not be able to have one, and that’s just no fun at all.” (I still have not processed all my thoughts and more instinctive reactions to Sarah Palin; indeed, I doubt that any feminist has, and I believe that there could be a whole women’s studies conference devoted to collectively navigating that cognitive and emotional thicket). So, I closed the magazine, but not before I looked at all the photos, which were—as has been noted by the Public Editor and others—outrageous.

I did read the letters to the editor in the latest issue of the magazine, of which there were many. I found this one to be the most interesting, as it raised some substantive, philosophical issues that hadn’t been addressed elsewhere:

In words that echo Aristotle’s view that a woman is a receptacle for the life force implanted by a man through intercourse, the author refers to Cathy Hilling as “the woman who carried our child” and explains, “Strictly speaking, she was a vessel, the carrier, the biological baby sitter, for my baby.” The title of the article, “Her Body, My Baby,” engages in the same obliterating action, with the author as the stand-in life-force impregnator, situated outside the nine-month process of creating a child but claiming responsibility for and complete ownership of the result. And Kuczynski perceives Cathy as participating in this reduction of her role when she likens herself to an Easy-Bake oven.

That simplistic formulation of so-called gestational surrogacy (“organ rental,” per Kuczynski) may have helped two strangers leap over chasms they couldn’t have traversed otherwise. But it is a shortcut that relies on denigrating concepts, concepts that have historically led to inhumane treatment. As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word “mother,” we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts.

A woman’s body and the growing being inside her participate in an astounding symphony for about 40 weeks to build from egg and sperm a human that can survive outside the woman’s body. The woman’s feelings, thoughts, meals and actions influence that symphony, helping create what the growing being experiences at every moment. Yet Kuczynski literally reduces Cathy’s whole self to her uterus. This is a disturbing denigration of a beautiful, astoundingly complex phenomenon that builds life and that bonds most living beings and their offspring for life.

JANET BENTON
Wyncote, Pa.

After reading this, I wondered what my favorite fertility-challenged blogger would have to say about Kuczynski’s article, and I was surprised—and somewhat chastened—by what I found. It was salutary to be reminded that, while Kuczynski’s wealth made it possible to afford 11 IVF cycles, it probably didn’t do anything to relieve the pain she experienced when those attempts to become pregnant failed. And I know that money didn’t help her overcome the grief of 4 miscarriages. I thought about this, and I also thought about the most elegant line from that very wise letter I quoted above: “As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word ‘mother,’ we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts.” My dislike for Kuczynski—which is, if I’m honest about it, mostly sour grapes—allowed me to take a shortcut through her story. It allowed me to dehumanize her, to ignore her very real pain and the complexity of her situation—a situation I have never had to confront. I like to think that I’m better than that, and it’s good to be reminded that I should be.

The Mommy Job

Here’s what I thought about when I read this New York Times article about the “mommy makeover,” a cosmetic-surgery package meant to undo the ravages wrought by pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.

When I read this passage

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.

I thought about how the medical establishment used to treat pregnancy and childbirth themselves as though they were a disease to be cured with drugs and forceps. I thought about how hard women’s health advocates—and mothers themselves—have fought to change attitudes and standards of care so that birth is regarded as a normal activity, one that most healthy women can accomplish with a modest amount of loving, respectful support.

And then I thought about Pushed, a book about the endangered state of physiological childbirth that I reviewed in the latest issue of Bitch. I thought about my own induction into motherhood, and the emergency c-section that I’m still very sad about. I thought about how we, as a culture, seem to be changing our minds about the naturalness and goodness of childbirth—or, and this may be worse, we’re letting our doctors change our minds for us.

I thought about how we use cute nicknames like c-section and tummy tuck and the word “procedure.” I thought about how doctors print up glossy, glamorous brochures describing surgeries as if they were no different than a haircut or a pedicure. I thought about how the popular media frame both the cesarean section and breast augmentation as just a couple more consumer choices. I thought about how this pathologizes a mother’s body, too. If I have sagging breasts and a flabby belly, it’s because I was too cheap, too lazy, too crunchy, too whatever to do something about it. It’s my choice, which really means it’s my fault.

And I thought about how, until really quite recently, womanhood itself was viewed as a deformity. Well into the modern era, the woman’s body was just a flawed copy of a man’s. It was weak, incomplete, and, above all, permeable, and pregnancy and childbirth were, clearly, just the most grotesque symptoms of the malady of womanhood. As I read this article, I thought about how maybe our conception of the female body hasn’t changed that much after all.

Unretouched: Jezebel on the Airbrushing of Faith Hill

I know that airbrushing happens. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to keep that in mind when I’m standing in the checkout line, staring at the covers of the women’s magazines and thinking, “Isn’t she, like, at least as old as me? Why doesn’t she have any crows’ feet? She doesn’t have back-flab pudging out over the top of her strapless dress, either. And look at those arms! They’re the arms of an undernourished adolescent. Jesus, I am such a fat, fucking hag.” That’s why Jezebel’s analysis of the July cover of Redbook is so awesomely valuable. I realize that this has already been all over the Internets—and even the TV—but I really consider it a public service to make sure every media-consuming woman in America sees it. So, here’s the original post, here’s a helpfully annotated version of the un-retouched photo, and here’s the Today Show segment with the adorably naïve title, “Are Magazine Covers for Real?”

The Sanctity of Human Life

Gonzales v. Carhart feels like old news already (which is not to say that its legacy won’t be with us for a long, long time), but I haven’t been able to think about it and write about it as much as I would like—well, I don’t really like talking and thinking about it, but I do feel compelled—because caring for my baby takes up so much of my time and energy. Of course, the fact that I care about my baby at nine months as much as I cared about her before she was born is one of the reasons I find the anti-choice ascendancy so upsetting.

This New York Times article about escalating rates of infant mortality in the South seems to be archived now, but Lawyers, Guns and Money and Feministe both offer succinct analyses of the material, and a brief look at Mississippi tells you pretty much everything you need to know: As a governor who has backed a number of anti-choice laws, Haley Barbour is proud to call his state “the safest place in America for an unborn child,” but he has also presided over welfare and Medicaid cuts that have made Mississippi a decidedly unsafe place for children who have actually been born. Barbour has commemorated the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by calling for “a week of prayer regarding the sanctity of human life,” but his policies are a perfect reflection of Barney Frank’s famous and sadly perfect formulation: While they might call themselves “pro-life,” most anti-choice advocates “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Fetuses are sacred. Babies are expendable.

Thank you, Justice Kennedy, for protecting me from myself.

You want to know what bothers me the most about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart? It’s not that doctors are confused about what, exactly, has been outlawed, since “partial-birth abortion” is not a medical term, but, rather, an inflammatory phrase concocted by the marketing department of the Christianist right. It’s not that it encourages the antichoice movement to launch even more audacious attacks on the American citizenry’s reproductive rights. It’s not even that there’s no exception protecting the health of pregnant women. It’s the breathtakingly paternalist rhetoric Justice Kennedy employed in his explanation of the ruling:

“Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child…. It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.”

If that doesn’t chill you to the bone, maybe you don’t get what Kennedy is saying.

He is saying that women are not fully rational. That they cannot be trusted to make vital decisions. That they must be protected from themselves. That they are, essentially, children.

I can’t help but wonder what’s next. Perhaps states might make it illegal for women to have sex outside of marriage, as a woman who engages in a one-night-stand might wake up the next morning and realize that she’s a slut. Maybe the professions should be closed to women, lest they reach their late 30s and discover that the corner office is not as fulfilling as they thought it would be and now it’s too late to have a baby. Maybe women should be barred from higher education, since men don’t like girls who are smarter than them. Maybe women should be denied access to desserts because, you know, they might feel all guilty and fat when they realize that crème brûlée has, like, a gazillion calories and three times the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat. I just don’t know. Maybe I better ask my husband.

“Anorexia of the Soul”

I read “For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too”—from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times—with interest and a mounting sense of despair. It’s a profile of high-achieving teenaged girls, and this quotation, I believe, captures the essence of the article:

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.

This is such a bummer. It’s a bummer because the idea that a girl can do anything was supposed to be—and, for many, has been—liberating. It was supposed to mean that a girl could take advanced science classes or run on the track team or be class president; now it seems to mean that a girl must take advanced science classes and run on the track team and be class president if she wants to get into Princeton or Stanford or Reed or Wellesley. Pursuits that should be passions, that should be a source of joy, become an exhausting exercise in brand-building.

Continue reading over at my other blog…

“Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?”

Nothing is easier to love than an unborn child.

An unborn child never cries all night. She never spits all over your shirt. An unborn child doesn’t bite the other kids at preschool. He doesn’t hurl food from his highchair to the floor. An unborn child doesn’t sneak out of the house at 3 A.M. An unborn child doesn’t get drunk and smash up the car. An unborn child never aggravates, upsets, or disappoints.

When I had a miscarriage, I lost an unborn child. Since having had a baby, I’ve thought a lot about the difference between the unborn and the born. One thing I can say for sure is that the born are a lot more work and a lot more mess. They make physical and emotional demands that the unborn do not. They’re not harder to love than the unborn, but it’s a different kind of love. My love for Frances is love for a real and willful individual, a human being who is changing and growing everyday and over whom I have little real control. The unborn child I lost was real, too, but what I mourned was a dream—my hopes for what she might become. The fact that those hopes will never be realized gives them a paradoxical power: They are impossible to fulfill, but also impossible to destroy. The unborn child is pure potential, and when she is lost, she attains a state of permanent perfection.

Emily Bazelon touches on this dynamic in “Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome ?”, her cover story for yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, as she describes a ceremony conducted at the end of a 10-week program for women—in this case, prisoners—who have had abortions:

Inside the Tom Baker Chapel of Hope at the jail, Harper and Kimbrough arranged long pieces of gauzy white cloth over the altar and onto the floor, so that the material lined a short aisle. Into the cloth they tucked white teddy bears with red hearts around their necks that read “Happy Mother’s Day” and “No. 1 Mommy.” Kimbrough sprinkled silk rose petals over the altar and floor. On a side table, Arias placed baskets of cloth “heritage dolls.” Their heads and hands were tied with thin ribbons. Their faces were blank. Heitzeberg erected a curved metal frame over the altar and draped it with more white cloth. Kimbrough climbed on a chair to hang a string of Christmas lights over the top. Arias surveyed the altar. “It looks like a bassinet,” she said approvingly….

Arias wove a sermon from Biblical stories: Jesus meeting the woman at the well in Samaria, Hannah praying to God to give her a child, Eve celebrating the birth of her sons. It was time, Arias told the inmates, to release their babies to the Lord. Kimbrough and Harper passed around the baskets of heritage dolls, telling the women to take one for each baby they’d aborted or miscarried. The women rocked the blank-faced dolls, many holding three or four. Their faces dampened with tears….

She instructed the women to stand up, speak in memory of their lost babies and take their heritage dolls to the altar. The women stood one by one. They clutched their dolls and said they were sorry. They imagined a baby with his father’s dimple or curly hair or green eyes. One woman mentioned a child who had been born and taken into state custody, and the woman who kissed the pictures of her daughters sent them her love. For the most part, though, the messy mothering of living children — and the reality of their lives outside the prison — did not intrude on the ceremony. The women focused on mourning the elusive, innocent loss represented by the dolls. They gave them fairy-tale names: Sarah Jewell, Angel Pillow, Xavier Dante. At a side table, Kimbrough and Harper wrote the names on certificates for children “expected to be born.” The documents promised, “By virtue of being conceived, the spirit of this child lives eternally with Jesus and in the heart and the mind of the mother, now and forevermore.”

I can’t think of a better symbol, a better embodiment, of the unborn child than this heritage doll. It’s a blank canvas onto which one can project a fantasy child, a perfect child. To the extent that it suggests anything, it suggests an angel. The extent to which this meshes with Rhonda Arias’s description of aborted babies hugging their mommies in heaven suggests that the resemblance is intentional.

Should the anti-choice movement decide to start using heritage dolls instead of blown-up photos of aborted fetuses, it’s going to be bad news for reproductive rights. Those photos are arresting, yes, but they are also gross, and I really do believe that some of the bad feeling they engender bounces back on the people who display them. I do volunteer work at the Planned Parenthood in my town, and we’ve had our share of protestors. I’ve had occasion to talk to a few people who are disturbed and offended by the fetus photos—not because they’re staunch defenders of a woman’s right to choose, but because they don’t think they should be subjected to horrifying images while they’re driving to work or to Wal-Mart. I’m guessing that if you show these same people the haunting absence of the heritage doll, they’re going to see their own baby or grandbaby or lost baby. If you show them a thousand heritage dolls, they’re going to see a holocaust.

Similarly, when the anti-choice movement depicts a woman who has had an abortion as a monster and a murderer, the hyperbole and lack of compassion demonstrated by such an image reflects poorly on the movement that creates it. Bazelon hints at a future in which the anti-choice movement will instead represent the woman who’s had an abortion as a grieving mother duped into killing her little angel. As Bazelon writes at the conclusion of her article, this is a very powerful trope:

At the prison the day before, I watched the inmates drink in Arias’s preaching…. Abortion-rights leaders would accuse her of manipulation, of instilling guilt in women to serve the anti-abortion movement’s political ends. But Rhonda Arias ministers from the heart; the lack of scientific support for her ideas merely underscores that she is a true believer.

Her ardor and influence is better explained, perhaps, by the theory of social contagion, which psychologists use to explain phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the wave of unfounded reports of repressed memories of sexual abuse. Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too — by preventing them from having the same choices.

And then there is the relief in seizing on a single clear explanation for a host of unwanted and overwhelming feelings, a cause for everything gone wrong. When Arias surveyed 104 of the prisoners she had counseled in 2004, two-thirds reported depression related to abortion, 32 percent reported suicide attempts related to abortion and 84 percent linked substance abuse to their abortions. They had a new key for unlocking themselves. And a way to make things right. “You have well-meaning therapists or political crusaders, paired with women who are troubled and experiencing a variety of vague symptoms,” Brenda Major, the U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor, explained to me. “The therapists and crusaders offer a diagnosis that gives meaning to the symptoms, and that gives the women a way to repent. You can’t repent depressive symptoms. But you can repent an action.” You can repent an abortion. You can reach for a narrative of sin and atonement, of perfect imagined babies waiting in heaven.

This is a powerful narrative, then, not just for women who have had abortions, but also for the rest of us—for everyone who gets to cast a vote for or against a ballot initiative outlawing abortion, for or against an anti-choice candidate. It’s an emotional appeal with an easy-to-follow plot that absolves us from making difficult decisions about abortion, and from dealing with the complex socioeconomic realities that make abortion such a huge issue in our country.

As Bazelon points out, just about half the pregnancies in America are unplanned. One would think that honest education and access to birth control would be the first steps in any attempt—private or public—to address the demand for abortions in this country. One would, of course, be wrong. Rhonda Arias, the preacher and activist that Bazelon profiles, discovered during the course of Bazelon’s research that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant (the father was a boy she met at church). This woman who had 4 abortions herself, and who has devoted her life to stopping other women from having abortions, explained that she talked to her daughters about chastity before marriage, but she didn’t talk to them about contraception. “‘Abstinence works better than birth control, really,’ she said. ‘It’s just that people don’t do it.’” This is one point on which Arias and I agree, even if we draw different conclusions from it. She doesn’t believe in birth control. I believe that making honest family planning and safe, effective contraception available to everyone is the best way to reduce the number of abortions performed in this country.

I don’t believe in “post-abortion syndrome,” but that doesn’t mean that I believe abortion is easy. Any woman who has ever had a child—or lost a child she desperately wanted to have—can tell you that it’s disingenuous to call a fetus “a blob of tissue,” and it’s equally misleading to refuse to acknowledge the fact that—for some women, at least—an abortion is more traumatic than, say, a bikini wax. Whether or not the anti-choice movement decides to shift its focus from the aborted fetus to the woman who aborts it, I think that pro-choice advocates need to make room for more open, more honest conversation about abortion. I know that a lot of activists are afraid that such a conversation would be a gift to anti-choice forces. I’m familiar with the slippery slope argument. But I would counter that, for most Americans, abortion is already a slippery issue. Polls affirm again and again that we don’t really want it to happen, but we do want it to be legal. I don’t see a position that reflects that ambivalence as a weak position. I think it’s an honest one, and I think anything less is a tragic disservice to the very women we hope to protect.

[PHOTO BY TOM SCHIERLITZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES]

Folic Acid and Pouilly-Fuissé

Ted and I had just placed our orders when my cell phone started vibrating. It was my mom, and she wanted to know how to use the bottle-warmer. I told my mom what she needed to know, hung up the phone, and almost started crying.

A detailed explanation of the planning and preparation that went into my lunch date would be instructive for anyone who is currently contemplating breastfeeding (and, for that matter, for anyone who would dare to judge a woman who chooses not to breastfeed), but the thought of composing such an explanation seems exhausting to me. Suffice it to say that, if Frances was awake and taking the bottle of milk I pumped for her just as Ted and I were sitting down to the table, a glass of wine with my lunch was out of the question, and a leisurely meal with my husband was in jeopardy.

As it turned out, Frances was happy with her bottle and I didn’t need to rush home to top her up. I was able to enjoy my sandwich—tuna, medium-rare, with wasabi mayo—rather than cramming it into my face, and I got to spend some time alone with Ted. Still, an experience that was supposed to be relaxing and restorative was slightly nerve-wracking. I loved being pregnant, and I love nursing my daughter, but I also kind of miss the days when my body was my own.

Which is why this New York Times article made me kind of nuts. It’s about new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending that women of childbearing years consider themselves perpetually “prepregnant”—that is, they should avoid alcohol and cigarettes and take prenatal vitamins. The reasoning behind this shift from prenatal to “preconception” care is not unsound: “The problem, doctors say, is that by the first prenatal visit, a woman is usually 10 to 12 weeks pregnant. ‘If a birth defect is going to happen, it’s already happened,’ said Dr. Peter S. Bernstein, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York who helped write new government guidelines on preconception care.” My problem is with the way these guidelines are meant to encompass even women who are not trying to get pregnant. The reasoning here is a little more shaky: Since more than half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, women should, essentially, plan for an unplanned pregnancy and birth.

Continue reading over at my other blog…

Little Bo Peep Show

I love Halloween. For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed being scared—at least a little bit—and the prospect of being someone else for a night has always been appealing. The main attribute I require in a Halloween costume has always been authenticity. This means that, when I was a 4-year-old Batgirl, I needed a costume painstakingly constructed—down to the utility belt—by my amateur seamstress mom and my fanboy Uncle Bobby, rather than a mask and plastic coveralls from Kmart. Anything, for example, with a picture of Batgirl on it would have been absolutely out of the question, as Batgirl would not wear a picture of herself. Duh.

With less iconic, more broadly conceptual costumes, my sense of authenticity was more subjective. For several years—starting when I was around 12, I think—I went as some kind of vampire. Obviously, there’s no precise template for vampire, so I would just construct an outfit that seemed like something a vampire might wear: the occasional cape, a lot of black, an—during my punk-rock teens, tattered stockings and boots with pointy toes.

As I got older, the vampire got a little sexier. Indeed, I would say that it’s no coincidence that my vampire years coincided with adolescence. Like any other fancy dress occasion—by which I primarily mean school formals—Halloween was a chance to become someone hot.

Given that Halloween is a liminal time, a celebration of topsy-turvy, and a last hurrah before the cold, dark winter sets in, going for hotness seems like a reasonable approach to the holiday. Of course, as someone who spends a lot of time around the children—I live in a university town and I am, myself, a student—I can report that the contemporary American young woman doesn’t wait for a special occasion to go for hotness: I see a lot of g-strings floating above lowrider jeans on every walk to and from Spanish class. I would argue that it’s the pornification of everyday life that has made the typical sorority girl’s Halloween costume indistinguishable from the get-ups worn by shticky strippers, or perhaps whores to whom one must pay a little bit extra for the role-playing.

I don’t have a coherent position on sexiness and feminism, and, as I’ve already stated, my position on sexiness and Halloween is pretty much, “Why not?” Thus, to the extent that I’m disturbed by costumes like “Temperature Rising Nurse” and “Sexy Nun”, it’s because I know that if I went as, say, “Evil Pixie,” I’d actually be going as “Woman Who Is About 15 Years Too Old and 30 Pounds Too Fat For Her Costume”—and “Evil Pixie” is relatively demure.

Actually, even if I were sufficiently delusional, I still couldn’t go as “Evil Pixie,” because the largest size in which this costume is available is 6-8. It is, however, available in teen sizes, which brings us to what I actually do find disturbing in the trend toward racier costumes: children dressed up to be sexy and adults dressed as sexualized children.

This ThursdayStyles article didn’t have a whole lot in the way of ground-breaking commentary, but it did offer the unsettling idea of college students dressed up as “va-voom Girl Scouts” and “girls’ costumes… designed in ways that create the semblance of a bust where there is none.” It was the latter image that sent me on a Froogle search for “bratz costume”, and, sure enough, I discovered that one can, in fact, dress one’s 8-year-old in a ersatz latex corset this Halloween.

The online shop where I found the Bratz get-up also sells something called “Lipstick Diva.” This hot little number not only induces unease, but also conceptual vertigo, as the plaid miniskirt seems to be schoolgirl, by way of Trash & Vaudeville, sold back to schoolgirls. In fact, all the girls’ costumes on this page are kind of gross. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t remember quite so many bare midriffs at Halloween when I was a kid.

I don’t really know what to say about all this, except that the peak of female sexiness—as judged from the outside, not the inside—seems to be a brief period between the ages of 12 and 19, and that, when the time comes, I think I will try to convince my own daughter that it would be good contrarian fun—rebellious, even punk—to use Halloween as an opportunity to celebrate her inner prude.

[THANKS TO GRIFFIN FOR THE NYTIMES LINK.]