Family, Parenting

Suzy Lee Weiss

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I feel that someone should have warned her before she hit SEND on her computer keyboard. To put yourself out there like this brings much more negative energy than positive to her name and image. Does she want to be remembered for this for the rest of her life? If so, hey, knock yourself out. People, for some strange reason, love to be famous at any cost nowadays. What they don’t understand is the cost associated with fame.

She may have interesting points about the college admission process, but her op-ed wasn’t funny, and therefore not very good satire. She needs to take a few courses at her new college about what that really is.

What separates HER from the tens of thousands with the exact same resume on their application? There are hundreds of white girls her age that didn’t get in to her fave college too. She sounds like a brat and a whiner in my opinion.

I blame the culture of “everyone is a winner”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbvfizd3WlU&w=560&h=315]
Teen rejected by Ivy League schools writes controversial op-ed

Suzy Lee Weiss, a high school senior from Pittsburgh, wrote in a ‘satirical’ Wall Street Journal op-ed about how she should have “started a fake charity,” among other things, to get into an Ivy League school.

A high school senior’s “satirical” op-ed to the Ivy League schools that rejected her is being praised by supporters and slammed by critics.
In “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me,” which ran in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Suzy Lee Weiss wishes she had “started a fake charity” or gone to Africa to “scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life.”
Weiss, who is a senior at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, laments that the odds were stacked against her when it came to admission into an Ivy League school, partly because she offered “about as much diversity as a saltine cracker.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/teen-writes-controversial-op-ed-ivy-league-schools-article-1.1308211#ixzz2PcQqPKGF

Family, Reading List

What feminism has come to

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‘Princeton mom’ is more progressive than many critics in the media

by S.E. CUPP – New York Daily News

When Susan Patton wrote a letter to The Daily Princetonian last week, she probably had no concept of the controversy it would create. What she later described as merely “some good advice from a Jewish mother” has earned her the scorn of feminists everywhere.

Why? Because in 2013, you’re not supposed to talk to modern young women at an elite liberal university about the value of getting married.

Patton, a pioneering Princeton Class of ’77 grad herself, with two Princeton sons, advised the women of her alma mater to make the most of their opportunities there — and find a good Princeton young man to marry.

“Take a good look on campus now for a potential life partner,” she told CNN after her letter sparked outrage from self-appointed gender experts who cringed at the perceived elitism and provincial outlook in Patton’s kindly advice. “You have access to this extraordinary community of extraordinary people. Find a man who isn’t threatened by your capacity for greatness.”

Never mind that that hardly sounds like someone who wants to keep women in big skirts and baking aprons. It is quite clear that Patton wants women to match up with men who share their ambitious values.

Nevertheless, feminist commentators online — at Gawker, Jezebel, Slate and elsewhere — took her to task. New York magazine’s Maureen O’Connor derided Patton for an “excruciatingly retro understanding of relationships” and for “pushing women to define themselves by their spouses.”

And there’s the first rub. Patton’s advice acknowledges a reality that feminists don’t seem to want to believe: We are, whether we like it or not, defined by our spouses to some extent. The federal government, the tax code, mortgage lenders, health care providers and insurance agents all take great interest in who our spouses are.

Society, too, seems keenly aware, as any number of gay-marriage advocates will tell you. Getting married is, importantly, redefining yourself as “someone’s spouse.”

Now, I admit, Ivy League educations don’t guarantee good character. I went to an Ivy League school where many of the young men I met weren’t fit to be good lab partners, let alone good husbands.

But what’s so subversive and “retro” about the idea of talented, ambitious young women finding a suitable partner from a pool of talented, ambitious — and geographically accessible — young men? Isn’t that what we do later when we try dating someone from work, dating within our social circles or finding someone online who meets our customized criteria of height, weight, hairline and income? How is that experience any less elitist?

Read more HERE: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/feminism-article-1.1305920

Fatherhood

It’s not unusual to want your father

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The 24-year-old love child of the legendary Tom Jones says he desperately needed a father figure when he was growing up and wishes the “It’s Not Unusual” singer had just picked up the phone or written a letter.

Jonathan Berkery, an aspiring singer who now goes by the name of Jon Jones, says he fell in with a bad crowd when he was a teenager, developing unhealthy obsessions with drugs and guns. It became so bad, he said, he often slept on park benches and in homeless shelters.

“It all stems back to my dad,” Berkery told the Sun newspaper. “I don’t think I realized it for a long time, but I was one angry kid, crying out for a father.”

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Read more here: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/tom-jones-love-child-blames-father-anguished-childhood-article-1.1304383

Parenting

Touch Screen kids

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Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents’ bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. “Mom, everyone has technology but me!” my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldn’t he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids’ apps have been developed—the majority aimed at preschoolers like him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon.

Read more here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/the-touch-screen-generation/309250/

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Relationships

Blindsided: The exoneration of Brian Banks

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Has Brian Banks’ dream of an NFL career been delayed or even destroyed by a false charge of rape and 5 years in prison? James Brown reports.

A little more than a decade ago, Brian Banks was a star linebacker at Poly Tech High School in Long Beach, California. A well-known football powerhouse that’s sent dozens of players to the National Football League. He was being recruited by the best college teams in the nation, dreaming of an NFL career of his own. But then, in the course of a single afternoon, his life changed forever and eventually the 17-year-old landed in Chino State Penitentiary for raping and kidnapping a female classmate. However, even though he pled no contest, we now know that Brian was innocent.

 It’s a story that 60 Minutes has been following for close to a year, and as you’re about to hear, almost nothing about Brian Banks’ story — beginning, middle, or end — is what you’d expect.

Watch the video here. It is a MUST SEE.

Watch the entire video here? http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50143485n

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GDRrcfd7Uk&w=560&h=315]

Society

Rape Culture?

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I found an interesting article on Slate the other day. I’m curious to hear your thoughts

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My bad sex wasn’t rape

The outcry over a recent “Girls” episode startled me. What happened to a woman’s sexual agency?

BY 

Defining regret over a consensual experience as rape conveys the message that women who experiment with something sexually and do not like it means that a traumatic crime has been committed. Nonsense. Has everyone who has ever consented to trying anal sex and hasn’t liked it been raped? I think not. The next time we see Natalia she is again in bed with Adam, being very clear about what she wants and what she doesn’t want – and getting it. Isn’t that what sexual autonomy is? When did we get confused and start to think that everyone was going to like every single thing they consented to? Isn’t it valid to sometimes do some things you “don’t like,” either to simply try them or to please a partner? And to negotiate with your partner whether to repeat them or limit them or continue to do them?

The idea that what happened in Steubenville, with Natalia on “Girls,” and with me in the park 30 years ago are all rape is ridiculous. Not giving, or being able to give, consent and regretting consent given are two different things. Women and girls should be told they can chart their own courses. If they don’t take control of their own erotic development early, they may never take control — like the women I knew in college who blamed alcohol or drugs for their own sexual adventures or misadventures, or the adult women I know who are still using sex to “get” and “keep” men.

Our culture needs to make space for young girls, as well as young boys, to safely explore their maturing bodies and initial erotic longings. It’s critical to allow for sex roles that are broader than the ones that we have been clinging to for generations. Women and girls need to be able to make mistakes. Emerging sexuality needs to be approached honestly and openly, and not as a pathology. Sex should not be seen as something that girls and women engage in merely to please or keep a man, nor as something that sneaks up and takes them unawares in the night.

The more we learn to claim our own sexual power, the more we will contribute to changing the landscape of sexual violence.  We can say yes and we can say no. As feminist writer Mary Gaitskill writes about her own experience, “Many years after being raped, I finally understood that in failing even to try to speak up on my own behalf, I had, in a sense, raped myself.”

* * *

Discussing these issues over the past week, I have been reminded of how fraught with divisiveness they can be. When I shared some of my opinions – in both real-life discussions with friends and Facebook conversations – I was told that I needed to “talk to some actual survivors,” that I didn’t understand what rape was, that I was distracting from the “real” point of convincing men to stop raping, that I had no right to say what was rape and what wasn’t. In fact, I worked at an urban rape crisis center and helped launch the U.S.’s only nationwide sexual assault hotline, RAINN. I am a survivor of childhood sexual assault and have written about that in assorted publications, including here in Salon, but for my various opinions, I was told that I was not a feminist.

We need to stop cannibalizing one another over our differences, and instead invite broad discussion.  Yes, we must teach men not to rape, but it’s not as simple as that. In order to end sexual violence, a number of strategies must be employed and to talk about them too often gets incorrectly dismissed as victim blaming.  Men should be encouraged to take more active roles in the fight against sexual violence. Sex should be discussed in terms that describe a shared perspective rather than as something that is done to a person by another person.  It’s a pretty short walk from trying to “talk a girl into” sex to taking the sex, from cajoling to coercing to forcing. Let’s rewrite the story by respecting women’s sexual choices — even when those choices lead to sex that makes us feel bad, pretending that we enjoy things we don’t.

Read more HERE: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/my_bad_sex_wasnt_rape/