Stephanie Saye is one of my friends. She’s also the author of Little 15, which tells the story of a high school girl who has an affair with her basketball coach. Little 15 raises a number of provocative issues, like: whose fault is it anyway? What sort of moral culpability, if any, does the teenager bear? What kind of girl gets involved with a married man? What kind of married man violates all moral and legal precepts by sleeping with [...]
It’s low-lying fruit, and everyone else is wailing away at it like little kids swatting at a stuffed piñata, but I’m going to jump into the latest misogynistic controversy involving Missouri Rep. Todd Akin. The Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, Akin justified his opposition to abortion rights for victims of “legitimate rape” on the grounds that these victims have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy. Not wanting to be accused of exaggerating, I’ll let Akin speak in his own [...]
Did you ever yell at someone when you were mad at someone else? Or write about something or someone and realized after the words rang out with indignation and frustration that you weren’t really writing about that someone or something? That’s what happened last night. I spent the day reading about legislation since withdrawn in Virginia that requires a woman to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound (“TVU”), which is the latest attempt by the party I consider myself a part of [...]
Last night, I read an article written by Phil Taylor from Sports Illustrated called The Sandusky Effect, and like so many things written by ex-athletes and sportswriters regarding the Penn State scandal, it ignored the perspective of abused children. See SI, January 9, 2012, at 80. Taylor does not exactly defend Sandusky as much as he complains that because of Sandusky’s alleged rape of a boy, Taylor is afraid to give the boys he coaches a ride home from practice. [...]