The World News reader

When it comes to pregnancy prevention, there are certain solutions that seem obvious: Spread the word about safe sex, make contraception easily accessible and arm women with back up measures like Plan B. But, according to a recent study, giving women an advanced supply of the morning-after pill doesn't help prevent pregnancies.

The Cochrane Group, a U.K.-based non-profit, looked at 11 international trials involving a total of more than 7,500 women and found that having a stash of emergency contraception didn't have any impact on pregnancy rates. The women weren't any more likely or any less likely to get pregnant. It goes against common sense -- you would think, as many reproductive policy wonks have argued, that preparedness is key. But the BBC explains the laughably obvious: "The policy fails if women choose not to take the pills." Why did they choose not to take the pills? Now that's a question for another study.

The important thing to note, though, is that the advanced morning-after supply didn't noticeably influence women's sexual behavior. They didn't throw caution, and their clothes, to the wind and have reckless romps with tons of random men. They weren't any more likely to have unprotected sex or to catch an STD. Allowing women to be prepared in case of a condom breaking or a drunken mistake will not, as some conservatives fear, encourage a descent into sexual immorality and chaos. Just for the record.

This season, the University of Connecticut women's basketball team has won 72 games in a row -- breaking its own record, garnering excited new Huskies fans and national media attention. Van Chancellor, a former WNBA coach and current coach of Louisiana State's women's team told the New York Times it's "one of the greatest things ever to happen to women's basketball." Frank Deford recently said the team "may well be the most overwhelming power ever to dominate any major sport." This sounds like a happy story, right?

It depends on who you ask. Jeré Longman at The Times writes that the team's success has inspired a backlash: Instead of being praised for their talent and hard work,  "the UConn women are criticized for winning too often, by too many points." As I understand it, people are arguing that the Huskies' accomplishment is not, in fact, good news for the sport, because if one team is winning that much, others ostensibly at the same level must be terrible -- and once you believe that, you can circle back around and conclude that the UConn team isn't really as good as it seems. Ergo, the Huskies' terrific run actually proves that women are bad at basketball -- just like we've been telling you silly ladies all along!

Longman's having none of it. "At best, that growing suggestion is ignorant of college basketball history; at worst, it is a wearying, sexist attempt to diminish the achievement of women, who were too long excluded from sports and are still too often forced to apologize for sweating." Right on, dude. He goes on to point out that women's college basketball has only been around since 1982 -- which means it's had as much time to develop as the men's version had had in 1967, "as the U.C.L.A. dynasty kicked into full swing with Lew Alcindor, now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, consummating a 30-0 season and winning the first of what would become seven consecutive titles for the Bruins."

So let me get this straight. You're saying that when men's college basketball was starting up, at first there were some killer teams and breakout stars -- which built excitement and attracted more people to the sport -- before things balanced out? Kind of like...?  Yeah. "Essentially, there is zero difference in the trajectory of men's and women's college basketball," writes Longman. So why are women "held to a different standard, derided as somehow lesser or undeserving"? Take a wild guess.

As Phil Taylor wrote recently in Sports Illustrated "Sexism isn't confined to any sport or country. It's a universal language, spoken not so much with words as with action, or the lack of it." He was talking about female ski jumpers being shut out of Olympic competition and "lopsided spending" that gives male athletes an advantage, among other things, but the common denominator is a general attitude that women's sports not only aren't but will never be as intense, thrilling or important as men's. And as the uproar over the Canadian women's hockey team's celebration of their gold medal illustrated, a lot of people don't want their lady athletes acting more like men -- whether that means chugging beer, smoking cigars or, you know, winning a lot.

How can we begin to turn these attitudes around? (I mean, besides dismantling the patriarchy.) One small effort even the non-athletically inclined can participate in has sprung up on Facebook: You can take a pledge to attend at least one women's sports event in 2010. Writes Deford,

There are a lot of reasons why girls from all over the country decide to go play their college basketball in a chilly little backwater called Storrs, Conn. -- but a prime one is simply that UConn women's basketball is popular. The home games bang out. The glass grandstand has been smashed there. The players are celebrities. They are treated, well, like men.

If people were turning out like that to support women's teams all over the country, maybe the Huskies would soon have some real competition.

The Daily Mail's shocking tale of Donna Simpson, a 602-pound mother who wants to become the fattest person in the world isn't exactly a piece that screams "restraint." ("Attention-grabbing"? For sure. "Strange and sad"? Perhaps.) The story has already made the blog rounds as a grabby example of American gluttony, with its picture of Simpson gorging on McDonald's and doughnuts. But amazingly, the trashy U.K. tabloid did show restraint, by avoiding the most salacious aspect of this story: extreme fat fetishes.

A sex story that even the Daily Mail won't touch? It goes to show that despite our desire to be titillated through shock and horror, there are certain sexual subcultures that are truly forbidden. The piece briefly mentions that Simpson "runs a website where men pay her to watch her eat fast food," but it ignores the site's dark sexual undercurrents. The site, SuperSizedBombshells.com, shows her posing naked, in lingerie, wearing handcuffs and rubbing folds of her flesh against another obese woman. Men don't just "pay to watch her eat," they pay to get off. 

Her site is but a small part of a thriving online community for fat fetishists. Simpson actually met her current partner on a dating site for fat admirers. Innumerable porn sites delight in big-bodied women and folds of excess fat; and some take it farther, specializing in video clips of women struggling to do aerobics or otherwise demonstrating how their weight has incapacitated them. (For $12, visitors can buy a video clip of Simpson "testing her mobility" in her underwear.) Then, there are sites that cater to feederists, who like to watch super-sized women eat, sometimes to the point of painful fullness. Often times, there is a male "feeder" who gives a female "feedee" fatty junk foods.

It isn't just the tremendous health risks of feeder porn that most find unsettling. Several months ago, an excellent Bitch magazine article explained:

Feeders get off on the idea that their feedee might one day become too 'satisfied' -- and too obese -- to move, thus making them completely dependent on their feeder. It's an extreme manifestation of the idea that masculinity in men involves eroticized dominance over women.

It's that element of misogyny that makes extreme fat fetishism unpopular in the fat acceptance community.

Still, there is also a sad tendency to either (la-la-la) pretend such paraphilias don't exist or cast fetishists as "freaks." So, I talked to Dr. Fred Berlin, a leader in the study and treatment of sexual disorders, for some clinical illumination. "One of the things we're learning from the Internet is the remarkable spectrum and variability of human sexuality," he told me over the phone. What we have yet to learn is why people like what they like: "Nobody understands [the answer to] 'Why am I attracted to women rather than men?' or 'Why are there some people who aren't attracted to adults and are craving sex with children?' People don't decide the nature of their sexual desires, they discover them," says Berlin, who was prominently featured in Daniel Bergner's book, "The Other Side of Desire." 

It's tempting to play armchair psychologist -- particularly when a paraphilia involves bodily harm, which feederism certainly does -- and pick it apart in the same way one might do a feminist analysis of mainstream porn. On the same token, though, "we're talking about human beings," as Berlin puts it. "This has to do with a spectrum of sexuality and these are people who are perhaps struggling, or troubled in life, and it's all too easy to make a quick judgment and dismiss these folks as less than human." So, maybe we should be thankful that publications like the Daily Mail are spooked by the sexual aspect of Simpson's story -- but, of course, that doesn't mean she isn't still getting that "less than human" treatment.

Periods are never half as much fun as the feminine protection ads make it seem. In all my years of menstruation, I have never ridden a horse on a beach or stripped down to my underpants to go swimming with my friends. And white pants? Are you kidding me? Do you know how much those jeans cost?

And when advertisers aren't trying to convince us how awesome that time of the month is, they're taking the opposite tack, pitting us in a veritable war with Mother Nature herself. So it's refreshing to read in Tuesday's New York Times that Kotex's hip new line, Kotex U, is taking a page from Domino's recent self-flagellating "turnaround" series and launching a series of ads aimed at poking fun of the dainty genre of smiling girls and blue liquids.

The first new spot, which makes its television debut next week, gamely features clips from previous sporty, gleeful Kotex ads, updated to include self-mocking commentary. "Why are tampon ads so ridiculous?" they ask. Look at us! We're SO LAME! But our panty liners rock, we swear!

Another spot, set to roll out in a few weeks, sounds like the Aunt Flo version of the Old Spice "I'm on a horse" campaign – a pretty girl looks at the camera and declares, "Now I’m going to tell you to buy something. Buy the same tampons I use. Because I’m wearing white pants, and I have good hair, and you wish you could be me."

The campaign, aimed at young women 14–21, claims to be "tellin' it like it is," and you know that's for reals because of the apostrophe. Though the whole effort may be effusive to the point of trying too hard, kudos for striking a blow for upfront conversation about, you know, down there. Kotex's Web site actually dares to use the words "vaginal care" and brazenly invites visitors to spoof those cartwheeling, fields of daisies frolicking ads of recently bygone days.

And mixed with the lighthearted encouragement to "own it," period-wise, Kotex is also admirably teaming with the Girls for a Change organization to help young women create social programs in their own communities, and inviting girls to talk openly to their parents -- including Dad -- about what's going on in their bodies. There's straightforward advice on how to insert a tampon, and commentary from women's health doctor Dr. Tomi-Ann Roberts, who lays it all out -- "Vaginas are what make us women. They're beautiful and a natural part of a female's body. Our vaginas need our respect, because that's how they'll get respect from the rest of the world. " 

Kotex may be using all this empowerment to sell their bitchin' new pads in a cool black box, but if somewhere in the package they're also selling girls on the notion that their bodies and their functions are nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be afraid of, and they're no damn field of daisies either, that's just fine. It might even be worth doing cartwheels over.

If there's one surefire way to reboot a moribund franchise, it's to send it back to high school. It worked for Superman in "Smallville." It's happening for Spider-Man in the next installment of the webbed hero's adventures. And now, while "the girls" of the "Sex and the City" movies wobble into menopause on their Jimmy Choos, their creator, Candace Bushnell, is sending Carrie Bradshaw back to a time of youth, rebellion and crazy big hair – the '80s.

"The Carrie Diaries" doesn't hit stores until late April, but the opening pages debut in the new Teen Vogue, out today. Who, after all, comes as close to the adolescent equivalent of Carrie Bradshaw than a Teen Vogue reader? Perhaps that's why the teaser isn't so much a bit of whimsical nostalgia as a fairly shameless attempt at catching the eye of the "Gossip Girl" generation.

While it's mildly interesting for fans to consider exploring the back story of a character who appeared to have sprung fully formed wearing a tutu in the middle of Manhattan, Bushnell herself doesn't appear concerned with staying true to the clues of Carrie's previous life glimpsed during the run of the series. In just a few paragraphs, we learn that young Miss Bradshaw didn't have a boyfriend in junior year -- tell that to David Duchovny.  Likewise, her dad is pushing her to go to Brown -- despite the fact that future Carrie's string of toxic boyfriends can at least partly be attributed to her father abandoning her as a child.  There's also a (failed satirical?) reference to the nearly 500-page DSM-III as "this tiny manual about mental disorders," and a book cover that riffs on Stephen Sprouse's Louis Vuitton clutch, which any self-respecting fashionista knows debuted in the 2000s.

Maybe the average 16-year-old looking for a breezy spring break read won't care much about such anachronisms, but give her -- and those older ladies who are quietly gobbling up "Twilight" -- a little credit for preferring a good yarn. While the HBO series always offered occasional wit and indulgent eye candy, Candace Bushnell herself remains one of the most godawful writers in creation. "My heart pounds in my throat; if I open my mouth, I'm afraid it will jump out," she writes. "I shake my head." It's young adult writing, all right, in the sense that it's authentically juvenile.  And though Reagan-era Carrie is equally "obsessed with feminism" and her white patent leather boots, I couldn't help but wonder: Why the hell would anybody read about her?

Michael Murphy is an alleged womanizer who seduces women, uses them to satisfy his needs and then discards them like trash. What sets this player apart from the rest, though, is that he's done all of this while in the slammer -- with five female guards, a clinical therapist and other prison workers. The 36-year-old's exploits while at a Montana prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for burglary, forgery and theft, are detailed in new documents published Monday by The Smoking Gun. Prisoners are considered legally incapable of giving sexual consent -- seeing as they are, you know, prisoners -- but some of the women involved with Murphy see themselves as the real victims, according to the Associated Press.

One female guard admitted to "swapping spit" with him and exchanging sexy notes, one of which detailed how she "couldn't wait to screw him, fuck him, ride his dick." (She denied any actual sexual contact, although he says they had oral sex ten times.) Murphy tried to get her to bring him tobacco and a cellphone, but she claims to have resisted his requests. Another guard developed a "limited emotional attachment" to him, according to an official report, and sent him a card that began: "I'm in love with you." He also convinced his therapist to give him hundreds of dollars and both perform and receive oral sex several times. Two other employees also engaged in unspecified misconduct with Murphy. What's more, after these cases emerged, he was transferred to another facility, where a female food worker is already under investigation for being compromised by Murphy.

It seems likely the man has a skill for persuasion and manipulation -- many criminals do. He also may have a particular knack for charming women. But is it really reasonable to paint these women as his victims? Murphy's therapist tries to explain how this made-for-porn scenario played out: "He kissed me one day in my office and I just thought, 'What the fuck did I just do, what just happened?" she told investigators. "From that point on I just, I felt like I couldn't do anything, I couldn't say no to him, I couldn't get myself out of it. It's like he had that over me, and he continued to push." In the documents published by TSG, she doesn't mention any explicit threats or coercion from Murphy; it seems she felt imprisoned by her own embarrassment, shame and an understandable fear for her job.

An unnamed female employee, who lost her job due to her dalliances with Murphy, told the AP that the prison should have better protected its female workers from one-one-one time with Murphy, who was widely known as a skilled charmer and manipulator. "Everyone needs to be held accountable," she said on condition of anonymity. "I need to be held accountable, and I think I was. The prison needs to be held accountable, and Michael Murphy needs to be held accountable." Another worker, who was disciplined for failing to report Murphy's transgressions with one of her coworkers, said: "They need to do something about protecting women from predators like him, I know he's a predator," she said. "I know he's done it to several people before and, I didn't know until after the fact, after all this stuff happened, but I found out all about Michael Murphy."

The truth, though, is that workers go through training about how to respond in these types of scenarios, because these scenarios aren't all that uncommon; and female prison employees are behind a disproportionate percentage of sexual misconduct cases. It isn't clear why that is, exactly, or whether most feel victimized as a result -- but the argument that prisons need to do more to protect female jailers from being seduced by inmates makes me uneasy. Lady-guards are up against quite a challenge already in keeping under control a population of criminals, most of whom are probably bigger, stronger and scarier than they are. Do they really need to be treated as so emotionally fragile that they need extra-special protection against manipulation? Not to mention, the sexual double-standard at play is awfully unfair to men. What would be the response to a male prison guard who claimed to be a victim because a female inmate seduced and manipulated him? Riotous laughter, that's what.

Gabourey Sidibe is obviously unhealthy and needs to lose weight if she wants to have a successful career. There, I said it!

No, I don't really believe a word of that. But apparently, anyone who says it this week automatically becomes newsworthy, and what the hell, I could use some buzz to help sell my next book. Sorry, Gabs, you know I love you -- let's just keep that between us for the moment, though, OK?

The latest person to successfully garner attention for concern-trolling the Oscar-nominated actress is the CEO of AcaiSupply.com, who made TMZ, among other outlets, by offering Ms. Gabby a one-year supply of weight-loss pills "in return for her glowing testimonial after she sheds her unwanted pounds." (I'm not sure if this company is one of the ones Better Business Bureau spokesperson Steve Cox was referring to when he said, "they lure customers in with celebrity endorsements and free trial offers, and then lock them in by making it extremely difficult to cancel the automatic delivery of more acai products every month." But if you like, I'll wait while you go to the Acai Supply site and see how long it takes you to find a working link to the news that after paying shipping and handling for your free trial, "You will be charged $119.93 in 14 days for our Free Refill Program unless cancelled.")

"After viewing recent pictures of you strolling around Santa Monica earlier this week," begins the CEO's letter to Sidibe, "we at AcaiSupply.com have decided we can no longer sit back and keep our mouth's [sic] shut! ... the only way you can reach your goal of someday winning that Oscar is by being active, fit and most of all healthy!"

And clearly, the way to become "active, fit and most of all healthy" is by taking pills you bought off the Internet. Snark aside, though, the guy does have a point. I mean, Gabby -- can we talk? -- let's be real here.  Posthumous Oscars notwithstanding, we all know how hard it is to win major awards unless you're clearly in the pink of health. As concerned people have no doubt pointed out to you, obesity is correlated with Type 2 diabetes, and do you know who has that disease and has also never won an Oscar? George Lucas. Are you going to tell me that's a coincidence?

Or think of Jane Fonda, who struggled with anorexia and bulimia throughout a large portion of her career -- and only won two of the seven Oscars she was nominated for. While at his "lowest point in terms of addictions," Robert Downey Jr. only won Golden Globe and SAG Awards for some stupid, girly TV show -- that's a big step down after an Oscar nomination for work he did while less high, am I right? Speaking of "Ally McBeal," that show barely won anything important while at least three of the actresses on it were suffering from eating disorders -- just a single Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy and Golden Globes for the show and Calista Flockhart, stuff like that. Before her untimely drug-related death, Judy Garland merely landed a juvenile Oscar, though she was nominated twice more. Similarly, Marilyn Monroe's most noteworthy win was a Golden Globe, John Belushi earned but a single Emmy, and Chris Farley got practically nothing but a gazillion dollars and an MTV Movie Award. Patty Duke only won one Oscar at 16 -- years after her allegedly abusive managers started providing her with alcohol and drugs -- and later, just three Emmys before her bipolar disorder (which may have been related to her anorexia, ongoing substance abuse issues and suicide attempts) was finally diagnosed.

I could go on, but I trust you get the picture, Gabby: History shows that when the Hollywood establishment spots someone who's obviously in ill health and/or engaging in self-destructive behavior, they're loath to ignore it and hand that person more jobs and awards anyway. Actresses suspected of having dangerous relationships with food, in particular, have a notoriously difficult time finding work; as you surely know, the only extremely thin women really thriving in the industry are those who maintain their weight by eating sensibly and chasing around after their kids, not those who resort to starvation, surgery or drugs. (And when an already thin young woman loses a substantial amount of weight, it's truly heartwarming to see how folks express their sincere concern instead of judging and turning away.) This is because Hollywood cares, Gabby -- just like anonymous Internet commenters and serious journalists and Acai berry diet pushers care, deeply, about your health.

Me, I don't care so much about your health, if I'm being honest. I mean, I wish you comfort, happiness, longevity and other good things -- but since I've never seen you look anything but radiant, you never appear high or drunk in public, you've spoken about how you've never been skinny and regular exercise doesn't change your size much, you apparently aren't struggling anymore with debilitating body-related shame and anxiety, and when the word "infectious" is used to describe you, it invariably relates to your charm and good humor, I assume you're feeling OK. And if there comes a time when you don't, I can't imagine why you and your doctor would be interested in my opinion on the matter, so I've gone ahead and filed the whole issue under "Not My Business; Don't Care." Please forgive me, Gabby, if that makes you feel that I, as a serious lady journalist, am not taking a sufficient interest in your career.

What I am interested in is the lack of good roles out there for women in general, and for fat women and African-American women in particular. I'm interested in the fact that most of these people expressing such deep concern for your health and your prospects as an actress are completely uncritical of the forces that usually keep women who look like you from landing big roles, because it's so much simpler to criticize you instead. I'm interested in the fact that even if you somehow starved yourself down to a size 0, you still couldn't do a damned thing about the fact that in 82 years, no woman with your skin tone has ever won best actress -- only one has even been in the ballpark -- and how that data point gets ignored while everyone's saying only your weight will prevent you from being the next Meryl Streep. I'm interested in how you've already, on your first frickin' try, scored a leading role in an award-winning film and been nominated for a best actress Oscar (not to mention practically every other possible award) and how even articles fretting about your future are full of casting directors singing your praises and news about your upcoming projects -- while the "She has no future" side is represented only by Howard Stern and an entertainment columnist. (I also love how said entertainment columnist sniffs, "the only roles she'll have a shot at playing will be down-market moms and hard-luck girls working at Wal-Mart"; Mo'Nique and Jennifer Aniston might disagree that such roles are the sign of a dead career.) I'm interested in why, as that same columnist says, "no one in the executive world looks like [you]," much more than I'm interested in whether a hypothetical thinner you would be easier to cast, in fact.

But still, I have my own career to think about here, and I'm not about to let this opportunity to grab an easy 15 minutes pass me by. I'm sure you understand the importance of striking while the iron is hot, Gabby.

So I'm saying it: Gabourey Sidibe is obviously unhealthy and needs to lose weight if she wants to have a successful career! Do you hear me, people? She'll never work again, much less win an Oscar, if she doesn't learn to hate herself like a normal fat person and get rid of all that weight that's making her look like she's at death's door every time she appears in public. I know nobody likes hearing it -- and certainly, nobody likes saying it -- but sometimes, a serious journalist has to go out on a limb and express an unpopular opinion like "Fat is bad." And now that I've bravely done so, I expect this post to go viral by morning, folks. My agent and I are counting on you.

I have to admit, I'm captivated by the Rielle Hunter/John Edwards story. I have been for a while. I know it's wrong. I know it makes me some kind of leech or lecher or... loser? Something starting with an L. I just can't stop looking, and wondering.

And it gets worse. I feel bad for Rielle Hunter. I don't think she's a villain, a slut, an animal huntress who preyed on the slimy husband of a sick woman. I think she's dizzyingly naive and the ultimate product of the 90s New Age movement: someone who really thinks Being Is Free, that there's no cost higher than the cost of not being yourself. You put that woman anywhere near John Edwards, whose core belief seems to be that Being Is Whatever It Takes To Be President, and you're going to get not only fireworks but also first-degree burns.

Hunter sat down with a reporter from GQ for an interview, which the article purports is simply a transcript of Hunter's words. Yet, there's only a few pages in this transcript, though we're told early on that the reporter -- Lisa DePaulo -- spent the night with Hunter and her daughter, Frances Quinn. So yes, these are Hunter's words -- but they're her words filtered through a magazine and a reporter, and this is no ordinary reporter. Lisa DePaulo was originally hired to ghostwrite the tell-all memoir of Andrew Young, the man who pretended to be the father of Frances Quinn, back in the halcyon days when it still seemed like her real father might still be president, or at least politically significant.

So we have a reporter with a history (and a big incentive to get as many news-worthy quotable lines as she can) spending the night in a rented house with a woman that everyone thinks has an agenda: wreck John Edwards's home and get her hands on his money. Get famous in the process. Being may be free, after all, but living costs money.

Hunter comes off poorly in the interview, but not in the way you'd expect. She doesn't seem money-hungry or fame-hungry. She seems... fooled. She seems to be the only woman in the world who doesn't understand that John Edwards is capable of very bad things:

Why do you think he loves you? Um… How do I answer that? [long pause] I mean, I could give so many answers. I could give a spiritual answer, that I reflect back to him large parts of himself that were unconscious. Like, he's a huge, huge humanitarian. He is very kindhearted and sweet. He's very honest and truthful. And all of that was hidden. But the irony of what you're saying—right now, most people think he's the most untruthful person in America. You know, it's so fascinating to me how people perceive things. Everyone talks about how Johnny has fallen from grace. In reality, he's fallen to grace. He is integrated. He is living a life of truth. He has grown in awareness and humility. He had all these things within him, but they weren't the guiding, leading principles of his life. Now they are.

"He is living a life of truth." Who says that, after a man has gone on national television and denied he fathered your child? His child? No amount of cynicism accounts for that. Only simple, hopeless naivete -- only terrible, misguided love.

Did you and Johnny ever talk about wedding plans? No. To date [laughs], we have not spoken about any wedding plans.

I find myself a little bit heartbroken for Rielle Hunter. She made some very bad choices, but she doesn't even consider them choices. She believes the universe brought her to Johnny Edwards, and the universe brought them a child, and the universe will allow their love to last forever.

If Rielle Hunter didn't exist, I'm sure we'd have to make her up, just to ensure that we had someone to blame for John Edwards's implosion and for our own blindness to his narcissism. If Rielle Hunter didn't exist, there would have most likely been some other woman -- even Hunter seems to allow for this, as she mentions there had been affairs before.

So why is Rielle Hunter the one we hate? Why is she the one getting attacked? Reading her interview, I can see how the much-ballyhooed pantless pictures came to be -- how hard would it be to talk a woman this naive into taking a few sexy shots? How hard would it be to talk a single mother of a two year old, who's been stuck in her own house because of paparazzi threats, who's seen herself vilified and mocked in every possible national news venue, who's come down to living in a one-bathroom rental house after months of traveling as part of a glamourous political entourage, into doing a glamourous Jennifer Aniston-type photo shoot? Don't worry, honey, we'll never publish them. Don't worry, honey, this sex tape will never get out.

Is Rielle Hunter really the naive woman who appears in GQ's pages? Or is she the cynical, media-savvy huntress that she's more often portrayed as? I'm not actually sure -- but I think the first is as plausible as the second, at least until she signs a book deal or shows up on "Oprah."

There are plenty of surprises in GQ's candid interview with Rielle Hunter, John Edwards' mistress and the mother of his child. For starters, the accompanying photos, one of which shows the 45-year-old lounging on a bed in just an oversize dress shirt (could it be John's?) accompanied by a gaggle of stuffed animals and a human-size Dora the Explorer doll.

This happened. Like, this photograph actually exists, people.

Beyond that head-shaker, there is the revelation that Hunter -- who seems every bit the self-righteous, self-mythologizing New Age kook she's been portrayed as during her years of media silence -- fancies herself as a romance guru, a mistress turned relationship expert. Her romantic approach can be most succinctly summed up as: the exact opposite of Elizabeth Edwards'. In Hunter's view, she has gotten right everything that Elizabeth got wrong. Johnny, as she calls him throughout the interview, is 100 percent truthful with her, Hunter says, because "he has no fear that I'm going to abuse him." She continues:

And I believe what happened in his marriage is, he could not go to his wife and say, 'We have an issue.' Because he would be pummeled. So he had a huge fear. Most of his mistakes or errors in judgment were because of his fear of the wrath of Elizabeth. He's allowed himself to be pushed into a lot of things that he wouldn't normally do because of Elizabeth's story line. And the spin that she wants to put out there. He was emasculated. And you know, the wrath of Elizabeth is a mighty wrath.

Hunter clearly sees herself as Edwards' savior. (Their relationship seems built on dependency: He needs her and she needs him to need her.) Elizabeth is the punishing matriarch, whereas Hunter is the anything-goes maternal type -- she's basically like, "Sure, you can have a chocolate bar for breakfast, Johnny. Whatever my little prince wants!" She's seen her Johnny make poor decision after poor decision, but instead of saying anything, she remains mum and lets the little man figure it out in his own time. When the interviewer asks Hunter whether she ever encouraged Edwards to come clean about the affair, and his love-child, she replies:

Um, once again, in a male-female relationship, you can offer -- I mean, the way that I have learned to keep a relationship going is to offer your advice when asked for it, and love unconditionally when it's not taken. It's beyond difficult. To allow a man to be a man. The biggest mistake that I find is that women attempt to make men women. You know, we want them to be like we are. We want them to get it immediately and do things the way that we want them to do them. And men are men. And I love him for being a man. But oh, my God, yes, it's been infuriating so many times.

God forbid a woman challenge a man's masculine delusions. She explains that she is only now speaking publicly about the affair and the baby because "Johnny" has admitted to it all. "I didn't feel like I could ever speak until he did that. Because had I spoken, I would have emasculated him. And I could not emasculate him." No, never that -- then she would end up like Elizabeth: abandoned by her husband of 30-plus years and dying of cancer. Hunter continues, "Also, it is not my desire to teach my daughter that when Mommy's upset with Daddy, you take matters into your own hands and fix Daddy's mistakes. Which I view as one of the biggest problems in all female-and-male relationships." Instead, Mommy pats him on the head and smiles smugly as she waits for Daddy to figure it out for himself. Later in the interview, she explains that "he's doing the best he can ... with the awareness level he has." She continues with a laugh: "He's a man." 

You see, ladies: You can disrespect and emasculate your man, you just have to make him think he's king. I've never been so convinced that these two deserve each other.

Sure, Betty White will always be our first "Golden Girl" love. But coming in a close second, there was always Bea Arthur. She was droll as hell, she filled out a pantsuit like nobody's business, and when she died last year, she left $300,000 to a gay and lesbian youth group.  She ruled. You know what else is awesome? Pizza. And cool, green, snowcapped mountains.

And so, in the grand tradition of the self-explanatorily named Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, we take you now to your new happy place. It's called Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza -- and truly, it lives up to its claim of being "the definitive collection of pictures featuring Bea Arthur, mountains and pizza."

Happy Monday -- and you're welcome.

The image of a tiny baby nuzzling at her mother's breast is as iconic as the Madonna and child themselves. The image of a kindergartener doing likewise, however, is a lightning rod for heated discussion. Two years ago,a documentary on the "Extraordinary Breastfeeding" mother of an 8-year-old became a minor sensation in the UK. This weekend, the old "it's perfectly natural/ew that's gross" debate kicked up again when the Daily Mail ran a story on author Ann Sinnott, who's just written the provocatively entitled book "Breastfeeding Older Children."

Sinnott, who nursed her daughter past the age of 6, obviously has her own dog in the hunt here. "What thoughts come to mind at the notion of children aged eight and older breastfeeding?" she asks. "You will think of sex and possibly think the mother is sexually deviant. You will also think of emotional disturbance in both the mother and child. What is the basis for such thoughts? Is there any evidence? The answer to that, of course, is no. The basis for such judgments is cultural."

"Of course"? Really? Wow, I wish every controversial issue in life were that easily dismissed!

The World Health Organization recommends breast-feeding exclusively for the first six months of a child's life, and continuing to age 2 or beyond. And advocates of long-term breast-feeding say that the comfort and security their children get from it is worth the effort long after the nutritional benefits have diminished. They also claim it's really about taking cues from the kids, letting them decide when they're ready to wean.

But does that mean there's never a point at which comfort becomes creepy? Is squeamishness with the notion of a schoolchild who still breast-feeds automatically a sign of our own ingrained uptightness, or a genuine red flag that maybe it's not the child who's needy here?

I give the Daily Mail -- a newspaper that routinely puts down the personal choices of its female readership -- props for stepping up with a balanced, inquisitive story. Writer Barbara Davies doesn't judge, and she doesn't flinch. Instead, she reasonably says, "Surely the very least we should do is ask more questions -- however unpalatable the whole idea may be to many of us."

The story's commenters, however, were less circumspect. "You breast fed your child for your own emotional reasons. You OVER BONDED with your child," tut-tutted one writer, while another chimed in that "Okay, so our behaviour should be dictated by what animals do. Wish I'd known that when I was stressed just after giving birth. I should have just eaten my baby -- because this is what animals do." But others, including a woman who wrote, "My mother breastfed me until I was five. I really don't understand why everyone must judge," strongly disagreed. And Sinnott herself jumped into the fray, saying, "Critics, examine your thoughts and feelings: where do they come from, what fears do they express? In truth, they are nothing more than cultural prejudice."

Yet maybe cultural prejudice is getting a bad rap here. I'm all for subverting paradigms, but I'm a little skeptical when educated, well-heeled parents who enjoy all the benefits of living in the industrialized world seem eager to selectively glom on to the social mores of people living in an entirely different set of circumstances. If the oft-trotted out, largely unprovable statistic that the global average age for weaning is 4, it still doesn't give a DS-playing 4-year-old in London a whole lot in common with a 4-year-old in a rural community where the drinking water may be unsafe.  And despite the fact that breasts are built for nourishment, their erotic use is right up there too -- a distinction that plenty of school-age children are already capable of sussing out. What happens when they've had years and years of associating them with one thing only -- mom? And what happens to mom when she's spent so many years in such a symbiotic relationship with her offspring?

There are no hard and fast rules for motherhood – they change dramatically even from child to child within the same family. And there's no one-size-fits-all age at which to wean. But the murky reality of what's really appropriate for children – and their own increasing awareness of the cues their mothers give them – makes it all less clear-cut. And if it takes a village to raise a child, you've just got to be prepared for the whole village to have an opinion on how to do it.

It was the sort of scene you'd expect to encounter on the streets of 1950s Alabama, not on a public square in modern Israel. But on the evening of Friday, March 13, around a thousand protesters marched outside the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem to protest segregated buses that are mainly (but not exclusively) used by the city's Haredi or "Ultra-Orthodox" community. Shouting "Jerusalem isn't Teheran," the protesters demanded an end to gender-based seating policies and called for the transport minister's resignation. Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz of the progressive New Movement-Meretz Party (PDF) told the crowd: "If the segregated buses continue to operate, we will board them and not follow the segregation rules."

The controversy over the mehadrin or "strictly kosher" bus lines through Haredi areas began a decade ago when the government-subsidized Egged bus company decided to compete with the private companies that were already servicing these parts of town. Not only are female passengers required to sit in the back third of the vehicle, they face withering looks and vocal insults from men if they board the buses wearing "immodest" clothing, particularly trousers. 

Moving women to the back supposedly ensures the "purity" of the men in front, and women who ignore this masculine imperative do so at their own risk. In 2006, a woman claimed to have been "slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women." In 2007, a group of five Haredi men beat an Ultra-Orthodox woman and a uniformed IDF soldier for sitting next to each other. When police cars arrived on the scene, a crowd of Haredi men punctured their tires, allowing the attackers to escape. In another typical story,  

A pregnant woman got on the 318 midnight bus from B'nai Brak to Rehovot. She sat in the front because of motion sickness, explaining this to the other passengers. One Hareidi man stopped the bus by standing with one foot outside and one on the step up so the driver couldn't close the door. The woman finally fled into the street in the middle of the night. The other passengers went looking for her and found her under a tree, humiliated, hurt, and refusing to re-board.

Israel currently has as many as 63 segregated bus lines making 2,500 trips a day.

(Brooklyn residents may be reminded of a similar controversy last year concerning bike lanes through a Hasidic area of Williamsburg.)

In May 2008, Israel's High Court of Justice asked the Transport Ministry to establish a committee to investigate the legality and appropriateness of the segregated lines.Tensions have mounted in recent months, culminating in Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz's decision at the end of January to continue the segregated bus service on a "voluntary basis": "The public transportation operators should be allowed to put up 'conduct suggestion' signs that provide an explanation and a request from the passengers to sit separately -- while stressing that there is no obligation to do so." Apparently people will be allowed to enter at both the front and the back and then "choose for themselves" where they wish to sit without any input from government authorities.

The decision has split Israel along its familiar religious fault lines. Rebbetzin Yocheved Grossman from the Ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, who heads a lobbying group calling itself the "World Women's Lobby for Halakhic transportation," welcomed the minister's decision, which she said respected "hundreds of thousands of women who wish to maintain a normative lifestyle." She went on to say that "This is not religious coercion, but our way of life -- from kindergarten to marriage --that should be respected. If the municipality considers the Haredi public and operates separate public parks -- there is no reason why public transportation should not be that way. We are coming only from a position of understanding. Even the gentiles in New York accept this." For Grossman and her supporters, segregation on the basis of sex is nothing less than a basic human right. In an interview last spring, she asked "Why can't you respect the Haredi person, who is essentially your brother? A smoker would not light a cigarette if he thinks this would disturb the people around him, so why not be considerate on this issue?"

Anat Hoffman of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who has publicly demonstrated against the bus policy herself, disagrees:

The suggestion that a voluntary arrangement can be enforced is very funny. … I think the countdown started today about segregation as a religious expression in the Jewish state. … It's a slippery slope. If signage makes it kosher, then next we are going to find segregated post offices, HMOs and sidewalks, all of which we already know examples of. Either the court will decide that this has no room in the public sphere and we will not go down the slippery slope, or the court says signage makes it all right and we're going to float with these signs down the slippery slope and become a very extreme variety of Judaism. God help us if that is the case.

The mehadrin buses have become a cause célèbre across the country. In January a number of organizations established a hotline where women could call and complain about discrimination. Two weeks ago, in a campaign called "A stop in time," young activists in Jerusalem, Raanana, Holon, Tel Aviv, Beersheba, and Tiberias plastered leaflets on bus stops and bus windows warning against a segregated future for Israel. "This bus stop is mehadrin kosher," the poster says. "Thus, men enter and sit down in the front; women and all the rest [i.e. blacks and minorities] -- to the back." The leaflet displays an ironic kashrut stamp showing that the bus line has been classified as kosher "with the oversight of the transportation minister and subsidized by the State."

Minister Katz does not have the last word in the matter. In February a three-member Supreme Court panel issued a restraining order on new mehadrin bus lines, stating that the term itself ("going beyond the letter of the law"), "might apply to Chanukah candles, kosher laws or an etrog, but apparently does not necessarily mean that whoever is mehader in the laws of modesty and inter-gender mingling is also mehader in the laws of respect to others."

But what has spawned this sudden obsession with segregated buses in the first place? According to a remarkable editorial in the Jerusalem Post by an Ultra-Orthodox Sanhedria resident last year, the demand for private kosher bus services, which the Egged company is now encroaching on, may have more to do with profit than with prophecy. "From outside, in the secular world, it seems as if it is all about these things you may call fundamentalism. This is indeed how it started. But today, inside the Haredi society, it is mainly a matter of earning a living. People here ask, 'Why should we renounce such an opportunity for profit, especially in these days of economic turmoil, and leave the profit to Egged?'"

And yet you might wonder why this story is such a big deal. It's true that the mehadrin buses represent only a fraction of transportation lines in Israel, and only around nine percent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as Haredi. And yet, in this increasingly fragmented country the "kosher bus" flap may indeed prove to be as divisive as the Old South's "separate but equal" policy. At stake are the future of Israel and Judaism itself. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni presented the progressive case in a letter to the street protesters on Saturday, saying: "This is not an internal issue for a certain segment of the population … I see this struggle not only about transportation but also as a struggle for the character of Israel as a free, Jewish and democratic nation. ... Those who push women to the back of the bus wish to prevent them from being seen and from taking an equal and central place."

Or, as Israeli blogger Miriam Woelke wrote last year,

Why do I have to sit in the back of a bus just because some men cannot behave themselves and get immodest thoughts into their minds? Is this my fault ? Such men don't need a bus with separate seats but a psychologist. … The whole discussion has two sides but I tend more to feeling like second-class or even garbage by being seated in the back. It is just like women have a disease and need to be separated and I wonder [how] our foremothers, Beruriah, Devorah, Rashi's daughters or other great women would respond to this.

Livni and Woelke can talk all they want, but it doesn't sound as if the other side is listening. Saturday's demonstrators were met by a group of Haredi counter-protesters, who were bused in from the Mea Shearim district for the occasion. Their message? "Separation is a blessing."

Officials in Nevada refused to let Danielle Pauline Severson marry her partner, Rebecca Love. No surprise there, right? Same-sex marriage is illegal in the state. But here's where things get mind-bendingly complicated: California has actually approved Severson's marriage license, because the state considers her to be a he, according to the Associated Press. The 49-year-old was born a man and -- having taken female hormones, changed her name and started wearing feminine clothing -- she is now a pre-op transgender woman.

So, why the disconnect between the two states, both of which outlaw gay marriage? Nevada officials go by Severson's driver's license, which lists her as female; California relies on her birth certificate, which lists her as male. There is no national standard for which form of personal identification reigns supreme. In one state, you're a lady; in another state, you're a man. "I just wish all these states would come up with one law for everybody," Severson told the AP. What she really seems to mean is marriage rights for all: "Why should I not be allowed to get married? Why should I be lonely the rest of my life?" Yes, why, indeed.

The irony in Severson's case is that she actually benefits from the state denying her personal gender identity. It also magnifies the absolute absurdity of handing out marriage licenses based solely on sex or gender, which clearly can be fluid and difficult to define in the eyes of state officials.

Anyone who's paid attention to analysis of racial profiling from sources other than right-wing radio talk show hosts has probably gathered by now that it does not work so well. Kim Zetter and Patrick Smith have written about it for Salon, and Malcolm Gladwell famously compared it to (also misguided) legislation banning particular dog breeds. It unfairly targets innocent people, it's been shown to produce fewer accurate identifications of criminals than not profiling, it wastes resources and of course, it leaves out every baddie who doesn't fit the profile.

This last point is inevitably brushed away by proponents of racial profiling, who think it should be obvious that Arab men are far more likely to be terrorists than, say, middle-aged white ladies, and that justifies far more scrutiny of the former group. Stories about men of color being killed by police who presumed too much, or white English men boarding planes with explosives, or white Texan men flying planes into federal buildings never seem to make a dent in such opinions. But the indictment this week of American Colleen "Jihad Jane" LaRose, who along with foreign terrorists was involved in a plot to kill a Swedish artist, has produced an unusually large onslaught of commentary on the limits and dangers of the practice. Are people finally getting the picture?

They should be, since even LaRose herself pointed out the obvious. "On the Internet, she allegedly boasted that her appearance and nationality would allow her to travel freely and without scrutiny as she went about her mission," writes The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. As Patrick Smith has written in his "Ask the Pilot" column something like five billion times since September 11, 2001, the greatest weapon those 19 al-Qaeda members had going for them was not box-cutters but the element of surprise. That was also what made pregnant Irish woman Anne-Marie Murphy seem like a good choice to (unwittingly) carry a bomb onto an El-Al plane for her boyfriend in 1986. Obviously, it's not that hard for terrorist organizations to recruit someone who looks nothing like the men Newt Gingrich thinks should be "actively discriminated against" -- so what do you suppose their next strategy would be if racial profiling became official policy? (Or probably already is, given the unofficial discrimination happening at airports all over the place.)

And the idea that we all know what a terrorist looks like is dangerous not only because it means people like LaRose might teach us the hard way that we don't, or because it puts innocent people at risk of tragic overreactions by authority figures, but because it reinforces the idea that "terrorism" is only committed by one kind of person. Colleen LaRose is nothing but the latest in a long line of white American terrorists: Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Shelley Shannon, Eric Rudolph, Bruce Ivins, Scott Roeder, James von Brunn, Andrew Stack III -- the list goes on. This country is crawling with hate groups and disturbed loners with axes to grind, many of whom share a race and at least loosely a religion, but somehow, you never hear calls for increased scrutiny of white people or Christians. You never hear anyone suggest those groups should be expected to give up their rights, privacy and dignity for the good of us all.

Nor should anyone suggest that, since it would undoubtedly lead to -- get this -- wasted law enforcement resources, harassment of innocent people and missed opportunities to catch criminals who don't fit the profile. If all "looking like a terrorist" means is that you share a race with someone who's committed an act of terrorism, then guess what, every single American qualifies. So even if you believe racial profiling is appropriate, the only logical move is to treat us all as equally suspicious.

The gossip rags were buzzing yesterday about the Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning kiss in "The Runaways." Like, oh my gosh: The "Twilight" actress thought smooching her then-15-year-old costar was "cool" -- she kissed a girl and she liked it, maybe? -- and her "lips are sealed" about how her girl-on-girl lip-lock measured up to (giggle) snogging Robert Pattinson and, and, and ... she wasn't allowed to "grope" Fanning because of legal restrictions. Amid all this feverish, titillating coverage, that last bit was overlooked. Legal restrictions, you say? For an underage make-out scene? For some clarity, I called Amy Adler, a law professor at New York University who has extensively studied child pornography law.

"The basic definition of child pornography is a photo or a film of a child under 18 engaging in sexual conduct," Adler explains. "Sexual conduct can mean a range of things, including actual sex acts but it also means lascivious exhibition of the genitals. That in turn is a standard that is open to interpretation by courts and has been interpreted broadly at times." It's easy to see how such mounting legal jargon could quickly magnify even a marginally sexual scene involving someone underage into kiddie smut. "There have been numerous examples where the term 'lascivious exhibition' has been applied to pictures that were sexual but in which the children were wearing clothes," she says. "Without an overt sex act, without nudity, those cases usually involve marketing to pedophiles, not mainstream Hollywood movies." There are always exceptions, though, seeing as child porn law is rather "amorphous." Jeffrey Douglas, a criminal defense attorney, puts it in more basic terms: "A 15-year-old is deemed by the law incapable of consenting [to being touched sexually] and therefore [the filmmakers] can't allow it."

You might recall the controversy over a brief rape scene in another Fanning movie, "Hounddog," shot when she was just 12 years old. She didn't get naked, she wasn't shown naked on-screen, but some still deemed it child pornography and petitioned to have the actress's mother and agent arrested for allowing her to appear in the disturbing scene. The filmmakers and Fanning's guardians avoided criminal charges, but nonetheless had to weather a storm of bad press. The public reaction to "The Runaways" kiss is, unsurprisingly, very different: Not only is Fanning three years older (in a growth period where three years makes a vast difference), but the scene at issue doesn't feature a rape. Plus, it's girl-on-girl canoodling, which is generally seen as playful and nonthreatening; we tend not to see the same potential for corruption and harm.

Still, there is public perception and then there is child porn law -- and the two are not always in sync. As Adler says, the studio was smart to play it safe.