Word: womens
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Once upon a time in the annals of women's stories, getting married was the fairy-tale ending. These days, marital ambivalence rules the literary scene. December brought Julie Powell's new memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession (Little, Brown; 307 pages), in which the Julie & Julia author tells the sad, sordid tale of the recent years she spent butchering pigs, cows and her husband's heart. Meanwhile, in a New York Times Magazine story, writer Elizabeth Weil detailed her efforts to subject her "perfect union" to every kind of therapeutic scrutiny available in Northern California...
Gilbert cites statistics, scientific studies and her painful experience with her first marriage - the impetus for the worldwide spiritual ramble of EPL - as her reasons for not wanting to tie the knot. She demonstrates how the institution threatens her independence and the well-being of many women. Her fears hold up even when she's considering union with a man who loves her, excuses her memoirist tendencies and has been known to tell her that the curves of her body "look like sand dunes...
...makes the book a supreme act of navel-gazing, even for a memoir. While the legal complexities are being worked out, the two kill time by traveling together. Along the way, Gilbert, ever the good journalist, gathers string on marriage and love from various sources, including the humble Hmong women of North Vietnam, seagulls, a humble frog-farming family in Laos and her humble 96-year-old Grandma Maude back in Minnesota. (Gilbert practices humility with vigor, even when sweetly patronizing Third World cultures.) Her process is exhaustive, and the results are exhausting, though some of her points are astute...
...recent years, studies by both Felitti and others have largely confirmed the association between sexual abuse - as well as other types of traumatic childhood experience - and eating disorders or obesity. A 2007 study of more than 11,000 California women found that those who had been abused as children were 27% more likely to be obese as adults, compared with those who had not, after adjusting for other factors. A 2009 study of more than 15,000 adolescents found that sexual abuse in childhood raised the risk of obesity 66% in males in adulthood. That study found no such effect...
...that laws forbidding gay marriage achieve no legitimate interest at all. And others have ruled that while same-sex marriage bans may be rational, they can't survive a higher scrutiny that courts reserve for special classes of citizens - such as racial minorities and, on a more limited basis, women. No federal appeals court has so far held that gays and lesbians as a class are entitled to the special protection that requires heightened scrutiny of laws that discriminate on the basis of race or religion, for example. That may sound like a fine legal distinction...