Month: March 2006

The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The survey was conducted January 18–February 14, 2006.

The margin of error for this survey is +/-3.3 percentage points.It began with a bunker-busting missile barrage known as “Shock and Awe,” and now, three long years later, the war grinds inexorably on—no longer shocking, perhaps, but with an awful, ever-increasing number of injuries, casualties and fatalities on both sides of the conflict.

   As this eye-opening collection of surveys and statistics (painstakingly compiled by The Sacramento News & Review) clearly demonstrates, the war in Iraq continues to exact a fearsome (and growing) toll on our troops, as well as the ordinary Iraqis they were sent to protect.

   But beyond the raw numbers, a deeper story has, until now, gone untold—that of the U.S. soldiers who face the violent uncertainty of this war every day. In the first comprehensive study of active-duty military personnel in Iraq (recently released by Zogby International), one striking fact stands out: 7 out of 10 of our brave servicemen (and women) feel that the U.S. should be out of Iraq before the fourth anniversary rolls around.58% of U.S. troops say mission is clear in their minds

42% of U.S. troops say U.S. role is hazy to them

 93% said that removing weapons of mass destruction is not a reason for the U.S. troops being there

85% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11

77% believe a major reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al-Qaeda in Iraq”

68% believe the real mission was the removal of Saddam Hussein

24% think “establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab world” is a major reason for the war

11% see the mission as a way to secure oil supplies

6% think the mission is to provide long-term bases for U.S. troops in the region

 72% think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year

29% say the U.S. should leave Iraq immediately

22% say the U.S. should leave Iraq in the next six months

21% say U.S. should be out between six and 12 months

23% say the U.S. should stay “as long as they are needed”

 30% of U.S. troops think the Department of Defense has failed to provide adequate troop protections

 

Source: Zogby International

 

 

 

THE COST OF WAR

Average monthly cost of Iraq War: $5.6 Billlion

Average monthly cost of Vietnam War, adjusted for inflation: $5.1 billion

 

Source: The Institute for Policy Studies

 

Running total based on congressional appropriations:

$246,236,390,000+ and growing

 

Running total per person in the United States: $984+

Source: National Priorities Project

 

 

CASUALTIES OF WAR

UNITED STATES

Male: 2,199

Female: 48

 

AGE

Younger than 22: 654

22-24: 515

25-30: 557

31-35: 241

Older than 35: 280

 

IRAQ

Iraqi civilians killed: Between 33,489 and 37,589

Number of Iraqi civilians killed

year over year:

March 2003 – March 2004: 6,331

March 2004 – March 2005: 11,312

March 2005 – March 2006: 12,617

 

Source: Iraq Body Count

 

Number of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war in Iraq according to the British medical journal The Lancet: Over 100,000

 

 

THE GROWING THREAT

Insurgent attacks in 2004: 26,496

Car bombs: 420

Suicide car bombs: 133

Roadside bombs: 5,607

Insurgent attacks in 2005: 34,131

Car bombs: 873

Suicide car bombs: 411

Roadside car bombs: 10,953

 

Source: The Brookings Institution

 

It’s been three years since ground operations commenced in Iraq.

Where do you think we’ll be at the end of year four?

Kelley Midkiff

Age: 38

Occupation: Nurse Practitioner

“I just hope it’s over soon.”

 

Diane Oaks

Age: 42

Occupation: Marketing for Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

“Well, I think we’ll still be there. I would hope that some of the troops would go home. News that the president will be leaving it for the next president is not very encouraging.”

 

Ian Harris

Age: 20

Occupation: Computer Tech

“I’m not entirely sure ’cause I didn’t think it would last this long. I thought it would’ve ended because of military action in Iraq being taken out.”

 

Mary Johnston

Age: 47

Occupation: Judge

“I think probably I would see a troop drawdown of maybe one third. I don’t see civil strife lessening much. It’s been going on for millennia, so I see that being a continuing problem.”

 

Chris Mertz

Age: 28

Occupation: Student at UVA

“I think for the next year they’re gonna call it a low-grade civil war, but not a full-blown civil war. …I think it’s gonna get worse and I think eventually America’s gonna pull out.”

 

Maryanne Rodgers

Age: 60

Occupation: Teacher

“In spite of all the terrorists’ attempts, I think there will be a stronger indigenous government. I believe that America will provide support to all the different kinds of people that are over there. I’m expecting success.”

 

Righting wrongs
UVA Law School’s human rights clinic takes on Abu Ghraib and other international abuses

UVA’s Law School doesn’t exactly have a reputation for matriculating anti-authoritarian bomb throwers. Consider this: In the past four years, the school has graduated 1,314 students and only 82 (just 6 percent) have taken jobs in government or the public sector. Thus, it can come as quite a shock to outside observers when the work of the school’s Human Rights Law Clinic contributes to left-leaning headlines in the International Herald Tribune.

One can imagine, for instance, that (UVA grad and Supreme Court wannabe) J. Michael Luttig’s head nearly exploded when he heard that the Clinic supplied research for a German case holding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

   Established in 2001, the Human Rights Law Clinic was founded at the urging of professors Rosa Brooks and David Martin, who were well aware of the market demand for such law school programs—and appreciative of the real-world applications such training can provide.

   “[These issues] are on the front page of the newspaper everyday,” says Brooks. “Students are reading about them and they care about them and should care about them… It’s part of any law school’s duty to give students the skill to go out there in the world and understand these issues.”

   And, of course, publicity never hurts. While some of UVA’s more conservative students and faculty might dismiss the politics, they surely relish the attention—even if it comes from an international court action against Donald Rumsfeld.

   “When that case was filed, and got a tremendous amount of attention,” remembers professor Deena Hurwitz, “Students were really excited to see the discussion of it in the press. They said, ‘Look, we made this happen,’ and then [the students] keep following [the story].”

   The Law Clinic’s progress has been mirrored by similar programs nationwide. Hurwitz, who often teaches the class (and is the director of the law school’s Human Rights Program), estimates that there were only 20 other such programs at peer schools when UVA’s clinic began. Since 2001, however, there has been a proliferation, with approximately four times as many programs now up and running across the country.

   The appeal is easy to understand. Whereas most grad students spend their days absorbing theory and abstraction that may never find practical use outside of the library stacks, students inside the Massie Road classroom of the Law Clinic are thinking practically about how to help real people. People whose hands have been chopped off by their own governments, people plagued by stillbirths due to Vietnam-era Agent Orange exposure, and yes, people who are currently being tortured under the disinterested eye of the U.S. government. For the engaged, compassionate law student, the opportunity to make a real difference in the world is all but irresistible.

   “I don’t want the students to just be doing leg work,” Hurwitz says about selecting projects for the Clinic. “It’s got to be something real concrete. The students have to be able to see how what they do is going to be used. It doesn’t have to be used immediately. It doesn’t have to be used in the way that they will see the ‘victory of human rights,’ but they have to know that it’s practical and real.”

 

On a recent Tuesday afternoon in Hurwitz’s class, 13 law students sat around a table in a wood-paneled seminar room, laptops out and fingers tap-tap-tapping away, getting a fresh, if not entirely cozy, sense of the “practical and real.” Four of their classmates explained the brick wall they’d hit.

They had spent the past eight weeks working with the D.C.-based organization Earth Rights International to draft a submission to the U.N. that could help shape an upcoming resolution on transatlantic corporations operating in countries that commit human rights abuses. (Think Google voluntarily censoring their results in China.) But the students heard that John Ruggie—the U.N. representative they were purportedly trying to help—had called the propositions “out in left field.” He had dismissed them entirely. A little frustrating, to say the least.

   Well, sometimes that happens when you’re trying to change the world, so buck up, Katie Redford told them. She’s a UVA Law graduate, co-founder of Earth Rights, and currently adjunct professor for the class.

   “Sometimes the worst thing that can happen is the best thing that can happen from an advocacy perspective,” Redford says. She didn’t expect Ruggie’s decision, either, but now the students’ work can be used for advocacy purposes. Earth Rights can now present the ideas, perhaps not to the U.N., but to governments and corporations.

   It might not be exactly the victory the students sought, but hey it’s another day in the thorny world of human rights law. If these 13 had been looking for the easy way, they probably would have chosen the corporate route, like most of their peers.—Nell Boeschenstein

Dear Ace: Most every airport I’ve been to makes you go through security before you can sit at the bar or buy a magazine. How come Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport puts the convenience store before security?—Lee Vin Tomorrow

Dear Lee: Thanks for the great question! That’s what we love: truly inspirational source material. Finally, a chance to flaunt Ace’s observational-comedy genius. To Ace’s knowledge, nobody’s ever made sarcastic observations about airports before. (Cue Jerry Seinfeld—and thousands of “Improv” hacks before him—asking, “What’s the deal with airline food?”)

   Not that a lack of original material would thwart Ace’s investigatory impulses. And so, after taking a quick spin in the Acemobile (which, incidentally, is looking more like an Acejalopy these days), Ace screeched into the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport, ready to find an answer to your question (and a dirt-cheap fare to Miami. Deadlines be damned—they got e-mail in South Beach, right?)

   The first thing Ace observed about our airport is its diminutive size. Not to downplay its ability, but CAA isn’t exactly prime real estate for vendors. Though the 12 people inside might make for a decent pick-up basketball game, this airport can’t possibly hope to support a TGI Fridays or—where are the kids hanging out these days?—Chotchkie’s franchise anytime soon.

   With these limitations, it seems unfair to place the airport’s lone convenience store beyond the security gates. Airport Mar-keting Coordinator Terry Dean agreed. She revealed to Ace that before renovations in August 2004, “The Market” was indeed located beyond the security checkpoint on the “sterile side” of the airport. (In the interest of maintaining rapport with at least one source, Ace will refrain from making off-color jokes involving the word “sterile.”)

   “We get asked that all the time,” says Dean, in reference to your query, Lee Vin. “We had the same frustrations from people who didn’t have a ticket [i.e. friends and family waiting to pick someone up] but wanted a sandwich or a cup of coffee. Now it’s truly open to everyone.”

   So there’s your answer: A small-market airport simply trying to accommodate as many of its patrons as possible. Ace hopes you’ve found this answer most satisfactory. Ace knows that you have other question-and-answer alternatives, and thanks you for selecting “Ask Ace” for all of your inquisitory needs. In addition, Ace sincerely hopes that you will continue to do so in the future. On behalf of Ace, and the entire C-VILLE staff, thanks for your patronage, and enjoy your stay in the bright light of your newfound knowledge.

Dear Ace, I went to the 11th Street post office that’s near my house the other day to mail my boyfriend a mix CD as proof of my undying love and affection. However, when I got there the doors were locked, the lights were out, and the place looked empty. I was there well within normal business hours and it was not one of those crazy federal holidays. What gives?—Carrie Carepackage

Carrie: You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute, yesssssss, you gotta wait a minute, wait a minute, please, please Mistress Carepackage…and take in the clues. Closed during business hours? Empty? Granted, the federal government sometimes gets stuff done at a rate that would imply they are closed during business hours. However, the last time Ace checked, inefficiency, thy name is bureaucracy. So, honey, wake up and smell the glue: Your post office is closed, as in shut down, kaput, gone with the wind, finito.

   Ever the intrepid reporter, Ace donned his wire-rimmed glasses and phoned Lois Miller, Richmond District Communications Coordinator for the U.S. Postal Service, for confirmation.

   “Yessiree, Bob…I mean, Ace,” Miller said. “That post office has been closed since March 6.”

   Having been in at the 11th Street location since 1966, the 22903 post office has to be packed up and moved out by the end of March. The sudden evacuation is the result of a little landlord issue. No, the postal workers weren’t leaving junked cars in the yard. According to Miller, the landlord simply wanted to renegotiate the lease and the post office said, “Foggeta-boutit. We’re out.”

   As the post office looks for a new space to camp out—a search which Miller says may or may not land them a new location—those 400 to 500 people who had P.O. boxes at the 11th Street office have been transferred to the Downtown location where they have their very own section of the building, cordoned off behind a red rope, no doubt. For those just looking for stamps, packages and eye candy, the options are less limited. There are still post offices not only Downtown, but at Barracks Road and Seminole Trail that aren’t in any danger of calling it quits anytime soon.

  Art Spiegelman would have been like any other adolescent comic fan, losing interest in the form at about age 13, but for the fact that right about that time he discovered something that hijacked his attention—ka-pow!—and turned him into a lifelong comics reader. For Spiegelman, that was Marvel’s trippy, mystical Dr. Strange series by Steve Ditko. His editor at The Virginia Quarterly Review, which has been publishing a series by Spiegelman and is largely responsible for his headlining appearance at the Virginia Festival of the Book this week, had the exact same experience—roughly 20 years later. But for Ted Genoways, VQR’s top dog, it wasn’t Dr. Strange that hooked him, it was Spiegel-man’s own Maus. Spiegelman’s career, which segued from Dr. Strange to the underground “comix” scene of the 1960s, and eventually international acclaim, seems to have come full circle.

   Keeping people interested in comics, landing a ka-pow! to the brain, is what Art Spiegelman is all about. Widely regarded as one of the greatest graphic novelists out there, he has dedicated nearly his entire 40-plus-year career to learning about, working in and talking up a genre that most people dismissed as the stuff of second-graders’ Sunday afternoons. Thanks in large measure to him, comics are now sold just down the aisle from Shakespeare, Homer and Tom Wolfe at Barnes & Noble; comic characters are generating hundreds of millions of dollars through movies and TV shows; and comic art now hangs on the walls of the nation’s major art museums. On Saturday, at the Virginia Festival of the Book, Spiegelman will give his “Comix 101” lecture in an effort to enlighten any holdouts over the age of 13 as to why comics belong in more than just the funny pages.

 

Sounds corny but when you talk to Spiegelman you get the impression that he didn’t choose comics. Comics chose him.

   “I found myself wanting to be a cartoonist when I discovered that it was done by people, not a natural phenomenon like trees or grass,” he tells C-VILLE in an exclusive interview from his home in New York City. After his birth in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948 his parents immigrated to Queens, New York, and that’s where he discovered comics and humor books like Mad on grocery store magazine racks. “I said, ‘I want to do something like that.’ The die was totally cast when I was 11,” he says.

   But it wasn’t an easy roll. Spiegelman went on to attend the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and then enrolled in the art program at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, where he suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated at a mental hospital. Later that year his mother, Anja, an Auschwitz survivor, committed suicide.

   That life-shattering moment inspired what would become Spiegelman’s seminal work. In 1973 he channeled all the disparate emotions he felt over his mother’s suicide—grief, anger, guilt, despair—into “Prisoner on Hell Planet,” a four-page comic. This was not your typical superhero adventure. The stark black-and-white images and captions were like a primal scream captured on paper and ink; the anguish was almost palpable. Years later the strip would be incorporated into Maus, a full-length graphic novel that detailed his Jewish parents’ experiences during the Holocaust.

   Graphic novels were nothing new. Europeans had been collecting strips like Tintin and Asterix in books since the 1930s, and Will Eisner had been telling long-form stories by marrying pictures and words for years. But Maus was clearly different. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale (alternately known as My Father Bleeds History) was first published in 1986; the second part, And Here My Troubles Began, published in 1991. At the time few comics had attempted to tackle such confronting real-life issues in such a personal way. The work was undeniably serious, even as the manner Spiegelman chose to tell the story—transforming his cast into cute, almost Disney-esque animals, with Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats and the Poles as pigs—made it accessible to anyone.

   The mainstream response to Maus was unprecedented in the comic world. Widespread critical acclaim, a show at the Museum of Modern Art, the book becoming a staple of college and high school reading lists—the list goes on. The true watershed moment came in 1992, when Spiegelman was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for the entire work. Consider that again: A comic book had won the Pulitzer Prize. Could the world ever look at Superman’s inside-out underpants the same way again?

   Maus’ success, however, put Spiegelman in an awkward position. “I’ve been chased by a 500-pound mouse for the past 40 years,” he says. “There’s something great about spending 13 years on a project and then have it land that fully. But it leaves you wondering what to do as an encore.”

   But aside from Maus Spiegelman had been keeping busy, so he had a course he could continue to follow. From 1965 to 1987 he held a day job as a graphic artist for candy/card company Topps, where his work included designing for the delightfully disgusting Garbage Pail Kids cards in the 1980s. More importantly, during the Me Decade he helped create and edit the experimental comic anthologies RAW and Arcade. Through them he helped other young, indie comic creators get their work out there, including Robert Crumb and Charles Burns.

   After the Pulitzer, in 1993 he joined The New Yorker as a staff artist and writer; his wife, Francoise Mouly, also came aboard as the magazine’s art editor. In previous interviews he has related his ongoing difficulties with what he regarded as censorship at The New Yorker, which came to a head following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Spiegelman created The New Yorker’s now-iconic cover for the issue published six days after the tragedy—a seemingly completely black image that, upon closer inspection, reveals the outlines of the two towers in a deeper shade of black—and he wanted to further explore his strong reactions to the event and the politics he believes led up to it. He says the magazine’s management rejected him.

   Spiegelman says he wasn’t surprised by The New Yorker taking a pass on the piece, or other mainstream American newspapers. “But that’s why I had to find someplace else to hang my hat,” he says. “It was in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and it was a really frightening and pathetic media environment.” He eventually took the project to the German newspaper Die Zeit and the American Jewish weekly Forward, which published the 10 large-scale tabloid spreads that would eventually be collected by Pantheon Press as In the Shadow of No Towers in 2004.

 

Spiegelman’s current project continues his autobiographical streak. Titled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!” it examines what drew him to cartooning and is currently being published exclusively in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The series of strips started in the Fall 2005 issue of VQR and, according to editor Ted Genoways [for more on Genoways, see feature, p. 25], will run whenever Spiegelman has enough pages ready to publish. “He works slowly, but when the work is complete we’re always so happy with it that it’s hard to complain when he says he won’t have something ready for the spring issue,” Genoways says.

   His slow rate of work brings up an interesting dilemma when considering Spiegelman. For such an icon in the comic field, he has a remarkably slight body of work given his four decades in the biz—in addition to his New Yorker work, the two Maus tomes and No Towers he has the children’s book Open Me…I’m a Dog and illustrated adaptations of a few extant works, including The Wild Party. In a 1999 Village Voice piece, one of his critics, political cartoonist Ted Rall, questioned whether Spiegelman might not be “a guy with one great book in him.”

   Genoways sees Spiegelman’s significance more clearly. “Art found a way of taking on obviously extremely difficult subject matter but approached it in this autobiographical way and used a lot of the trappings of memoir,” he says. “For the first time for a general audience there were recognizable literary guideposts. The art doesn’t seem to get in the way. If anything it was something there to augment and increase the power of the work.” Spiegelman gave people “the chance to see for the first time the potential of the form rather than focus on the limitations of the form.”

   Genoways isn’t the only Spiegelman fan. In 2005 he was named one of Time magazine’s Top 100 most influential people in the world. The New York Times Magazine described him as being “to the comics world a Michelangelo and Medici both, an influential artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others.”

   That aspect of Spiegelman’s career has certainly been a boon for VQR, Genoways says. “It brings us a lot of credibility as we’ve been trying to build not only our identity as a literary and contemporary thought journal, but also a journal that has more focus on the visual side now than we ever did before.”

   It also means that a lot more of his contemporaries in the comics field are taking notice of the quarterly. In the short term those benefits include former New Yorker staffer Lawrence Weschler, who is now VQR’s art consultant, and graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), who will publish an excerpt of her upcoming Chicken With Plums in the Spring 2006 VQR. Genoways credits Spiegelman directly with making both connections possible.

 

Fourteen years after Maus won the Pulitzer, the popular comics landscape remains largely unchanged. The vast, vast majority of commercial American comic books feature superheroes tussling in brightly colored spandex. And with cover prices soaring to $2.99 per 22-page story, collecting them becomes more costly every month. You’d need X-ray vision to find the once-prominent comic racks in supermarkets, the very outlets that hooked Spiegelman himself more than 40 years ago. And interactive computer and videogames zap kids’ imaginations and free time instead of the passive pastime of reading about Captain America and the Avengers. Has the comic industry failed to live up to the promise of that momentous mainstream breakthrough?

   Spiegelman doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Comics are doing better than they have for a long time. The world is turning to shit and it’s great biz for cartoonists. The bar has been lifted—it’s possible to make anything. That can include, like, getting Batman to fight Osama bin Laden,” he says, referencing the planned DC graphic novel by Frank Miller, Holy Terror, Batman. “Or it could be something as sublime as anything literature ever took a stab at. It’s up to the artist what it will be and there’s a possible audience that will receive it.”

   And boy, are they receiving it. Spider-Man 2 grossed $373 million in the United States alone, and comic movies keeping coming down the pipeline—even more independent projects like Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, John Wagner and Vince Locke’s A History of Violence and currently Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. The New York Times Magazine is now running a series featuring Chris Ware of The Acme Novelty Warehouse fame. Writers who have found major success in TV, movies and novels, like Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” writing Astonishing X-Men), Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” writing Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine), Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game, writing Ultimate Iron Man) and Brad Meltzer (The Millionaires, penning Justice League America) are actually shifting over to comics because they love the medium so much. And the Best American series that previously focused solely on poetry, short stories and essays recently announced that they’re starting an annual anthology of graphic narratives.

   “More and more, I think at this point the things I was demanding happen for comics are happening,” Spiegelman says. “When we were doing RAW magazine it seemed insane to people that we were saying, ‘This is a serious medium, capable of as wide a range as any medium.’ Now they’re available in bookstores rather than comic shops.

   “They’re not all preadolescent male fantasies,” he continues. “Some of this work belongs on gallery walls, museums, and is worthy of the same analysis that one would give at any university to other work.”

 

Editor for a new age

Ted Genoways, the boy wonder of The Virginia Quarterly Review who has revamped the vaunted journal in only two years, is smart, nice, talented and successful, damn him.

By Nell Boeschenstein

nell@c-ville.com

 

It’s a view for which aesthetes the world over would sacrifice their silk neckties: One window looks out onto the façade of UVA’s picturesque 1883 stone chapel, the other window frames a scene of Jefferson’s Rotunda. Ted Genoways, the 33-year-old wunderkind editor of The Virginia Quar-terly Review, seems satisfied with his corner of this earth: Smiling from behind his hefty desk, hands clasped behind his head, some gentle prodding reveals his soft spot for Coldplay. Here’s the man who led VQR to six National Magazine Award (“Ellie”) nominations earlier this month—more than any other magazine, save Atlantic Monthly; here’s the man with the plan to get the famed author of Maus and graphic novel godfather Art Spiegelman to speak at this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book. Yet the first question that pops into my head concerns the appraisal value of his view.

   At a time when the average English grad is still debating whether waiting tables is a lucrative career, in the fall of 2003 at the tender age of 31, Genoways took over the reputable reins of VQR to much fanfare and media adulation.

   “This was the position I always wanted,” Genoways admits, grinning somewhat abashedly, and with a knowing look in his eye (he must get this question all the time). “It was not a job that I was necessarily expecting would come along as quickly as it did…[but] it was the job I had always imagined working toward and hoping to get by the time I was 50.”

   He succeeded retiring editor Staige Blackford who had led the magazine for nearly three decades, and Genoways immediately revamped the no-frills quarterly. He traded in the staid black-and-white design for four-color printing, lots of art, photography and a bold embrace of (gasp!) the graphic novel. The redesign clearly played to an audience accustomed to the Internet, TV, movies and tabloids. In short, a new generation.

   “Ted has a wonderful sense of design,” says the novelist and UVA professor Christopher Tilghman, who also serves as an advisory editor to the journal. “It’s really stunning to look at. In this quarterly business, [design] is far more than just glitter. Some of the old-school academics may miss the cream paper and letterset type, but [VQR] now speaks to a more assertive attempt to see what art and thought really are: They are broader.”

   Genoways also went to work right away milking big-name writers. He snagged, for example, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison as a contributor to his first VQR issue, Winter of 2004. As a result of Genoways’ vision, circulation has in-creased by more than half and the national awards and recognition have rolled in like dogs and dirt.

   “[Ted] has brought some authors that we might not have been able to go after,” says Nancy Damon, program director for the Virginia Festival of the Book. “He has a budget to help him get some of these important significant authors to publish in VQR and come to the Book Festival, which we could not do by ourselves.”

   Genoways’ picturesque office in the VQR headquarters on the West Range is surprisingly tidy. Orderly piles of books and stacks of paper all sit in their respective seats on his desk. Oriental rugs are scattered on the pine floors, and the two logs in the fireplace are just for show. They’ve never been lit and never will be because the fireplace doesn’t even work. Genoways, too, is neat as a pin: khakis pressed, nails clipped, goatee shorn.

   A complete set of leather-bound volumes of VQR dating from 1925 line one bookshelf—one volume per year—along with back issues of Granta, Harper’s and The American Scholar. Miscellaneous books in no particular order (Alfred Kazin’s America, Four Souls by Louise Erdrich, A Changed Man by Francine Prose, The Complete Poems of Claude McKay) and more than 25 different kinds of dictionaries (Russian-English, biographical, slang, classical, quotations) line the opposite shelf. Genoways doesn’t have much time to read for fun these days, though—what with the submissions up by 100 percent in the past two years to 5,500 manuscripts, his unfinished dissertation on Walt Whitman, and a wife and toddler keeping those home fires burning.

   The hiring committee that pegged Genoways to be Blackford’s torch-bearer knew from the get-go they wanted someone who could breathe that proverbial breath of fresh air into the admittedly musty—if hallowed—halls of the VQR. Incidentally, Blackford himself was on this committee, so draw your own conclusions.

   UVA English professor Jessica Feldman sat on the advisory committee. She says they wanted “someone who would have a really strong personal vision…[and] someone with a lot of good connections…Ted was pretty unique in that way. He is a superb networker and so he knows a ton of people. In that way he seemed to be an ideal candidate.”

   Moreover, despite his tender years, Genoways had significant experience: He’s a published poet himself, and he had started or helped start a magazine almost everywhere he’s been from the age of 13 on. In fact, he founded Meridian, another UVA lit mag, while an M.F.A. student here in the late 1990s. Arriving at VQR was Genoways’ opportunity not just to have a vision for a lit mag, but also to work with the freedom and financial means to see it through. Total, the journal has $800,000 to play with each year, funding that comes partly from Pres-ident John Casteen’s of-fice and partly from what Gen-oways calls a “significant” endowment.

   The Genoways faithful have not been disappointed.

   The quarterly has an illustrious history of contributors such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Jean-Paul Sartre and William Faulkner. Founded in 1925, it was at the forefront of the mid-century small magazine renaissance, which also saw the upcropping of The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and Ploughshares. Yet even given VQR’s history, Genoways’ track record is impressive: In two years he’s scored coup after coup, getting everyone from Salman Rushdie to Joyce Carol Oates to E.L Doctorow to Margaret Atwood to Tony Kushner to publish new work with him before it appeared anywhere else.

   And Genoways is get-ting the props he deserves. The six Ellie nominations are proof positive of this, and since the nominations were announced on March 15 the national media scene has sat bolt upright and taken notice of VQR. Everywhere from The New York Times to the New York Post to Media Life Magazine to the blog, Gawker, gave the quarterly its due. Even if, in some cases, that "due" was granted with some surprise. Moreover, the company VQR keeps with these nominations? The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. When asked what bar he’s reaching for, these are precisely the publications Gen-oways rattles off.

   With a full-time staff of only four, this is a not an insignificant achievement. Advisory editors, contributing editors and readers for poetry, fiction and nonfiction help out the full-time staff, but in the end it all comes down to taste.

   “I have the expertise only because someone said I do,” Genoways says in all seriousness. “I’m not trained as a writer in [all these] fields. All of us around here are discriminating readers but ultimately it comes down to taste: If I opened up another magazine and saw this, would I read it?”

   What’s good for VQR is good for the school that funds it. The access to literary glitz and glamour reflects well on the University’s national reputation as a place that fosters the written word. The asso-ciation especially works for UVA’s graduate writing programs. In 2005, UVA’screative writing M.F.A. program was ranked fourth nationally by U.S. News and World Report.

   Don’t, however, think this is just a bookish pissing contest. If you really do have only 10 seconds to grab someone’s attention, then marquee names and a little aesthetic spice are clear pluses—for everybody. Genoways likes to repeat a quip attributed to George Plimpton, the celebrated editor of The Paris Review, who likened big-money names to the poles that hold up the tent for younger writers to come in under.

Genoways’ magnanimity is no act. The man is just smart. And kind. And hard-working. A withering triumvirate.

   Janna Gies, Ted’s assistant who also worked under Blackford, calls Genoways, “one of the smartest people I have ever met.”

   John Casteen IV, a close friend of Genoways, who besides being the son of UVA’s president, is a member of VQR’s poetry board, calls his friend “a fundamentally sympathetic person.”

   “One of the hallmarks of the great mind is the ability to change,” says Casteen, “not being doctrinaire,” and Genoways, he says, has that turn of mind.

   Ironically, this is precisely the quality Genoways himself values in his magazine. For the record, VQR is not simply a literary magazine. Never has been. It’s a magazine that explores contemporary issues and debates—from desegregation to Iraq to AIDS in Africa to, as in the issue that comes out this week, Darwin and evolution—discussing and deconstructing each topic in essays, criticism, stories and art. In this sense, VQR is more akin to Harper’s than The Paris Review.

   “There are some issues that, to me, there aren’t two sides to,” says Genoways about how politics manifest themselves in the journal. “[For example], the question of whether we should be taking a greater role in trying to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa. It’s hard for me to see the argument against us doing that…I think that there’s a confusion between fairness and balance. We are absolutely committed to being fair. I don’t think we have any obligation to be balanced.”

 

Spiegelman, Morrison, Chabon, Kushner, etc. regardless, VQR may have readers that “matter”—discerning readers who appreciate the obscure instrument Geno-ways has mastered—but the quarterly still doesn’t have circulation with any significant real-world meaning. The circulation may have increased almost 60 percent since Genoways arrived, but that still means that whereas it used to hover around 3,400 per year, now it’s just short of 6,000. In contrast, Harper’s average circulation is 227,600 per month.

Luckily, those precious readers are enthusiastic. In a file near her desk, Gies keeps an inch-thick manila folder of letters—mostly from thankful readers and contributors, although a few are from bitter, rejected writers. The outpouring of appreciation can be summed up in the words of C-VILLE’s own book reviewer, Doug Nordfors, who in reviewing the latest issue of VQR said, “In today’s unsound world, to demand more fiction and poetry and less social commentary is heartless, not to mention wrong…Bless you, VQR, for doing what you’re supposed to do.”

In some ways, however, the greater meaning of the quarterly’s life in today’s literary landscape comes from the food chain: It feeds the mainstream media beast above it.

   Genoways cites, for example, how when the Johnny Cash biopic came out, National Public Radio picked up on photos of the Folsom Prison concert that VQR had run a year earlier, and linked the VQR text to the radio channel’s website.

   “There are occasions like that,” Genoways says, “when suddenly we can tap into something larger. Then, for a brief moment you think, ‘Wow, O.K., people are listening.’”

   For his part, Genoways appears to get the most satisfaction out of the nonfiction pieces he commissions to bolster the theme of each issue. Genoways may have gotten his M.F.A. in poetry, but his early mentors were journalism teachers and this is apparent in his passion for the medium.

   “We’ve provided a forum where these important opinions and analyses are put to paper,” he says, the customary vigor in his voice deepening into something slightly more thoughtful, ardent even. “These things wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t gone to the author…Then those pieces just exist. They’re in libraries and they’re part of the permanent record.”

   Of course, the biggest problem with being young, vigorous, and full-of-cool in the now, is that you’re gonna get old, fat, and out-of-date in the future. Genoways willingly admits he never wants to get booted from his chair with the gazillion-dollar view. Lucky for him, nobody I interviewed seemed at all concerned that time could chip away at El Genoways.

   “I don’t see my generation of editors becoming substantially more conservative as they age,” says Casteen, who places his friend into a category of esteemed young editors such as Heidi Julavitz of The Believer and Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s. “It’s a literary movement that doesn’t yet have a name but I think that in a generation we’re going to look back on this decade and say this was when all the new stuff was formed.”

   The remaining question, then, about this prince of the printed word is if he has the ingredients to become his generation’s Plimpton? Youth, charm, intellect, ambition, sparkle? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But does our culture—with its reality stars and celebrity sex tapes—still crown literary kings? Who can say?

   But hey, it’s nice work if you can get it.

Q: Why don’t women need watches?

A: There’s a clock on the stove.

The old joke is a sure-fire way for a guy to earn a jab in the arm from his girlfriend. In the public realm, however, questions of gender are no laughing matter. With his 2004 book Taking Sex Differences Seriously, UVA politics professor Steven Rhoads waded into the increasingly frothy debate over sex and gender. And though he doesn’t go so far as to say a woman’s place is in the kitchen, many of his female colleagues say that in a society where women still earn 76 cents for every dollar a man earns, his conclusions step perilously close to that punchline. And they’re not amused.

   Rhoads, 66, is a rising star of the conservative movement, but he would tell you he’s the real feminist out there, not women who advocate for their sisters’ professional advancement and greater earning power. He argues that the differences between men and women can be explained in biological terms—that hormones drive men to prefer competition and breadwinning and women to prefer nurturing relationships and housekeeping. What’s more, this biological explanation should underpin America’s public policy and cultural practice, Rhoads says.

   Indeed, as the title of Rhoads’ book suggests, sex differences are something people take very seriously these days, especially in the academy. Just ask Larry Summers. The former president of Harvard, who resigned last month, stirred up a furor in January 2005 when he alluded to the very ideas Rhoads presents in his book. Summers suggested that the dearth of women in science and engineering might be explained by their inherent dislike of math—as opposed to, say, tenure practices or gender-based childhood influences. He was met by protests and a vote of “no confidence” from Harvard faculty.

   Rhoads shakes his head at Summers’ fate, calling him “one of the most talented scholars in the world.”

   “He was a Harvard professor at 28. He was Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. He was no right-winger. If you ask most biologists, they would agree with what he was saying.”

   Closer to home, Rhoads’ sociology colleagues Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock have been all over the national media with their study of 5,000 married couples. Their conclusion: Women’s happiness with their marriage has nothing to do with their own earning power or their husbands’ willingness to assume an equal share of the domestic drudgery. Rather, women, nurturant souls that they are, feel best about their home lives if their husbands are loving and attentive. Betty Friedan must be rolling in her fresh grave.

   Here’s the idea that Rhoads wants America to take seriously: The so-called traditional family model (or is that the traditional American middle-class family model?), namely a man at work and a woman at home caring for children, is deeply rooted in human biology. By arguing that this arrangement is principally a social construction and therefore subject to change, feminism has actually done a disservice to women, says Rhoads. “In my most reckless moments,” he says, “I like to say that androgynous feminism is misogynist.”

   Rhoads is not hostile to women, he insists: “I want women and men to have happier lives. If I’m right—and I think I am—we’re never going to make women the same as men. I always feel like I’m defending women.”

   American culture, especially on college campuses, puts too much pressure on women to have careers, Rhoads says, and that’s wrong. “All the time, I hear from my female students that they really feel ashamed to say that when they get married, they just want to stay home,” he says. “We should give renewed respect to those women.”

   By turning feminism on its head, “defending” the right of women to not earn their own money, Rhoads is a hero of the new conservatism. He’s been a guest on NPR and the “Today” show, and his words are frequently quoted in The New York Times. With as many as 70 percent of mothers ages 25 to 34 in the workforce, by some estimates, some women can be forgiven for wishing Rhoads would just face reality about the new working woman, shut up and go away. “Oh, no,” sighed one UVA professor of women’s studies when called to comment on Rhoads’ work. “He gets too much publicity already.”

 

Father knows best

Steven Rhoads says he didn’t set out to be a culture warrior. He was born in Abington, Pennsylvania, in 1939. He graduated from Princeton in 1961, then served in the Navy. He earned a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University in 1972, and he has taught political and economic theory at UVA ever since. In the meantime he’s consulted for the City of Charlottesville, the State of Virginia, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

   While working on his 1994 book Incomparable Worth: Pay Equity Meets the Market, Rhoads concluded that men tend to earn more than women “because things that men do well, like math and spatial relationships, are more in demand in a modern economy. There’s something different about men and women that lead them to take different career paths.”

   He spent the better part of a decade investigating what that “something” could be.

   Rhoads spent lots of time in a small room in the basement of his home in Earlysville, where he lives and raised three sons with his wife, Diana, an English professor at Hampden-Sydney College. In Steven and Diana’s recently remodeled house, sunlight and Blue Ridge vistas pour into rooms decorated with oil portraits. Downstairs, where the exercise equipment has been appropriately confined, Diana has hung a collage of family pictures: summers at Lake Tahoe; a surprise party Steven threw for Diana; Steven with his brothers and sisters sprawled on a couch in 1971.

   The room Rhoads calls “my place” has the feel of a man’s last refuge in a house ruled by the woman’s touch; where another man might preserve his deer head trophy and foosball table, Rhoads keeps precariously tall stacks of articles and shelves of books on myriad topics, mostly gender. Rhoads knows mountains of research on the psychology, chemical biology and preferences of girls, but he’s never actually raised one.

   His UVA class called “Sex Differences: Biology, Culture, Politics and Policy” sounds like a mouthful. Indeed, topics include sexual harassment, working women, hooking up, women’s prisons, marital happiness, divorce and more, with a reading list ranging from The Washington Post to The Weekly Standard—what Fox News would call “fair and balanced.” The syllabus promises the class will “explore sex and gender differences and similarities from a variety of perspectives but with an emphasis on biological and evolutionary explanations. The success of the course will be heavily dependent on thoughtful class discussion.”

   The discussion is so popular that Rhoads asks students to send notes in an effort to weed out those who just want to butt heads. One year, he says, there was a group of “Neanderthals and women’s studies majors” whose arguments got so hot that “they would swear at each other. The women were sometimes in tears,” he says.

   Maybe Rhoads didn’t set out to be a hero in the conservative culture wars, but ideological combat is clearly his passion. Off the top of his head, Rhoads can tell you (and he will) a plethora of gender-related facts such as the percentage of women in short-term relationships who find the sex satisfying (7) compared to married women who find the same (41 percent). His 266-page Taking Sex Differences Seriously requires 95 additional pages to list all his cited sources. The book is published by Encounter Books alongside titles like Darwinian Fairytales and Red Star Over Hollywood; the company’s president, Roger Kimball, also publishes The New Criterion for highbrow conservatives.

   While critics question the scientific credibility of a book written by a professor of politics, Rhoads says his ambition is to feed a change in American culture.

   “There’s a whole ideology out there that goes against people’s feelings. It’s based on nothing,” he says. The whole thing may be an academic pissing match, “but my academic point agrees with the regular Joes.”

   Rhoads is looking for scientific proof that will determine, once and for all, what types of human behaviors are “natural.” At the end of his book, nature ends up looking like a 1950s television show. “In a way,” he says, “what was so bad about Ozzie and Harriet?”

 

You’ve come a long way, baby

  Amy Nichols-Belo, a fourth-year graduate student in cultural anthropology at UVA, describes herself as a “third-wave” feminist. “We recognize the achievements of women, and we call attention to the inequalities, without attacking men,” Nichols-Belo says.

   The only thing wrong with Ozzie and Harriet, she says, is Rhoads’ insistence that such an arrangement is “natural.”

   “There’s all kinds of non-Western examples that contradict that,” she says. Some Native American cultures, for example, believe that humans have three sexes, not two. Some Argentinean cultures don’t look at anatomy when assigning gender, but make distinctions based on whether a person penetrates or is penetrated in sexual congress.

   “There are so many examples of cultures doing sex differently. To start with this assumption that there are two fixed sexes ignores a lot of evidence from outside the West,” she says.

   Rhoads disagrees. He says his research has convinced him that across cultures there are basically two kinds of women and one kind of man. The male hormone testosterone makes men competitive, promiscuous and inclined to prefer hard-driving careers and predatory sex. Most women, in contrast, lack testosterone and therefore prefer personal relationships and nurturing babies.

   Rhoads says that a minority of women, however, have been exposed to testosterone in utero. These are the career-driven women who have pushed what Rhoads calls “androgynous feminism,” the idea that differences between men and women are the social constructs of patriarchal culture.

   Rhoads’ “two kinds of women” theory doesn’t account for the actual experiences of real women, Nichols-Belo says. “There are plenty of feminists who stay at home; there are women who are great nurturers who find that it’s not enough for them. A woman’s idea about what she wants can change over the course of her life.

   “The idea that you’re locked into one destiny because of these hormones is such a short-sighted view of human nature,” Nichols-Belo says.

 

What’s so bad about Mr. Mom?

  When Virginia Moran entered UVA in 1970 as the first class of women to enter the school, she says issues of women and work were major concerns. Her class was one of the first generations of American women to seek more opportunities for women beyond Harriet Nelson or Lucy Ricardo.

   “Back then, I thought we would have all these issues about women and work sorted out by now,” she says.

   As associate director of the UVA Women’s Center, Moran sees the issue as still as thorny as ever.

   On September 20, Moran read a story in The New York Times headlined “Many Woman at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood” about smart young women who say that despite their talent, what they really want is to make motherhood, not a career, the focus of their lives after graduation.

   The article supports many of Rhoads’ arguments. Namely, that young women are much more conflicted about how to balance work and family than men seem to be. Women feel proud of their academic accomplishments, but they also feel—more than men, generally—that a career is not worth long hours away from their children.

   Young women who say they’re embracing what Rhoads would call “traditional” gender roles represent a real trend, says Moran. In February, she convened a panel of experts to discuss women’s personal and professional concerns, and Moran added Rhoads to the bill for “inclusiveness.”

   “We’re extremely interested in all the points of view, because women have many different points of view,” says Moran.

   Rhoads’ presence gave the panel a tinge of “Celebrity Death Match” appeal, and he didn’t disappoint. After a fairly noncontroversial presentation about how even progressive academic parents fall into traditional gender roles, Rhoads stirred up the crowd by saying that the issue will never be resolved until women accept his biological explanation of sex differences: “We’re not going to get any farther on these issues unless we resolve the question of how deep these differences go.”

   Not true, says UVA professor Susan Fraiman. She joined the panel to describe her own experience raising a child while also seeking tenure in UVA’s prestigious and competitive English department.          Fraiman described how she and her former husband decided to split childcare duties as evenly as possible. “We wanted our son to establish a bond with both of us,” she says. Rhoads says that’s a recipe for unhappiness, but Fraiman says both her husband and son benefited from their time together.

   “Women do get a lot of pleasure from nurturing a child. We should pull anatomy away from that pleasure of nurturing,” she says. “There’s no reason biologically that men can’t have that pleasure, too.”

   This was a point echoed by another panelist, Jessica DeGroot, who runs a nonprofit called ThirdPath that studies the elusive work-life-family balance.

   Whereas Rhoads argues that public policy should reflect a conservative ideal of the “natural,” DeGroot advocates public policy that gives both men and women the freedom to pursue fulfillment outside work. There’s too much emphasis on “climbing” in American culture, DeGroot says, and both women and men are tired of feeling forced to choose between a decent life and a decent salary.

   The most progressive companies are ahead of the trend described in the Times article, she says. In the future, more companies will try to lure these high-achieving “dropout” women and their spouses by offering more flexible work schedules that will allow both parents to spend more time with their children. That desire cuts across gender lines, she says. “If you bring men into this conversation, you find that they want a lot of the same things that women want.”

   After the panel concluded, Fraiman approached Rhoads and conceded that she agreed with him, “up to a point.” She does not dispute that many men and women—even academics—prefer traditional gender roles. She agrees that anybody with a pair of eyes can see biological differences between men and women. She has a problem, however, with trying to determine the extent to which those biological differences drive a person’s decisions. A key problem with Rhoads’ model is that it works so hard to tell women and men what they ought to do without leaving enough room for individual choices. If conservatives succeed in defining certain behaviors as “natural” and others as “unnatural,” then the society is one more step closer to limiting human freedom.

   “The biology argument is the same kind of thing people used to justify slavery and Nazism,” she says. “We should be trying to help people choose options that are best for them, not using biology to put people in a box,” she says.

 

 

Are you happy?

  “I’m a family-oriented guy,” says Rhoads. “I’m not saying men don’t get pleasure from that. I’m just saying that I get bored taking care of a 1-year-old a lot faster than my wife does.”

   Rhoads says men and women would be a lot happier if they took his ideas seriously. College girls would be happier if they eschew casual sex; married women would be happier if they tend to the children instead of a job; men would be happier if women stop nagging them to do the dishes.

   “I want to see women and men have happier lives. I want to see families stay together more,” he says. “These are my ideas. I’m not trying to impose them on anyone. But I think that this would make our society better.”

   Rhoads may not be trying to impose his ideas on his students, but without a doubt he is connected to a larger conservative movement aiming to do just that. While he argues against a feminism he says puts too much pressure on women to work, he too seems quite concerned with pressuring women to realize what’s best for them.

   Start talking to real women, and you find that in some ways, Rhoads is right—many working mothers feel deeply conflicted and often guilty about their situation. Unmarried working women often say they would readily sacrifice their careers to raise children.

   But there’s more. “I would like to stop working when I have children,” says one unmarried working woman. “But we’d have to look at his career, and my career… we’d have to look at what we can afford to do.”

   It’s perhaps ironic that the conservative ascendancy has produced economic policies that make “traditional” marriages more difficult to achieve in real life. According to the Center for American Progress, the poverty rate in America is 12.5 percent, the highest since 1998. Median incomes have stagnated, while more than 45 million Americans lack health insurance. The average middle-class family is worse off than they were in 2000, and more families are working multiple jobs and assuming record amounts of debt to meet the demands. Tuition and fees for college are soaring, while federal aid programs are being cut.

   The argument over whether a “traditional” family is “natural” may never find resolution. But in a conservative world, Ozzie and Harriet seem like more of a fantasy, and less of a real choice, than ever before.

 

What’s old is NEW again
UVA student’s club for conservative

women goes nationwideWhen Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she gave voice to a generation of women who longed for a chance to live out their dreams beyond a woman’s “traditional” roles as wife and mother. Three years later, Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW), and penned their original mission statement: “The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society…in truly equal partnership with men.”

   Now, young conservative women say that Friedan’s feminism has gone too far.

   “Feminism is trying to turn women into something they’re not,” says Karin Agness, a UVA senior and founder of NEW—the Network of Enlightened Women. Started as a book club in 2005, NEW is becoming the conservative woman’s NOW. Agness says six other campuses, most recently at the University of Missouri-Columbia, have formed NEW chapters. Agness herself has become something of a celebrity, a target for praise and derision on right- and left-wing blogs, respectively.

   “By starting NEW, I’ve been surprised by how we have been stereotyped really quickly,” says Agness, who has been accepted to UVA’s School of Law. “My biggest problem is that every time I say that I want to be a lawyer, people see something hypocritical there.”

   Agness feels that feminism has changed. Once, feminists wanted women to have choices; now, she says, feminists try to tell women that careers are more worthwhile than homemaking. Where women were once fighting men for their right to work, now women are fighting other women for their right to stay home. “What women want to do with their ambition is their own choice,” says Agness.

   Her feelings crystallized in the summer of 2004, when Agness spent a summer working on Capitol Hill. Upon returning to UVA she looked in vain for a conservative women’s group, so she decided to start her own. She couldn’t even find a conservative woman to be the group’s faculty advisor; eventually she enlisted politics professor Steven Rhoads who has earned a reputation for promoting women’s “natural” need to stay home and raise babies. Since then, NEW has held a campus event honoring the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and most recently challenged The Vagina Monologues, an often graphic feminist play Agness considers degrading to both men and women.

   Last month, NEW squared off against the UVA’s Young Democrats in a debate over that play. The issues at hand: Is The Vagina Monologues empowering to women? Is the play an attempt by liberals to “hijack” Valentine’s Day?

   If these are the pressing questions for today’s women, Friedan herself would no doubt agree that feminism has taken a very wrong turn, indeed.—John Borgmeyer