Bradley Cooper speaks at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
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Under the Affordable Care Act, people up to age 26 are eligible to qualify as dependents on their parents' insurance policies. This is great news if you're one of the thousands of newly minted graduates wallowing in un- or underemployed post collegiate hell, but it's less awesome news for women who, in their prime reproductive years, might find themselves SOL if they get pregnant — parental insurance plans, as a general rule, do not cover abortion or maternity costs. Better double up on both the Ortho Tri Cyclen and condoms, ladies. If you get knocked up while you're still on your parents' plan, you're both literally and figuratively fucked.
Employer-sponsored insurance plans aren't allowed to discriminate against women by refusing to provide maternity coverage, thanks to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. But no such rules apply to dependents of insurance policy holders. Pre-Affordable Care Act, this unpleasant reality only hit families with a teen daughter who got pregnant. But now that more women are spending the better half of their twenties as "dependents," a lack of prenatal care coverage can be financially devastating for an entirely new swath of the population.
According to the Washington Post, in 2008, 2.8 million women between the ages of 15 and 25 got pregnant. Some opted to carry the pregnancy to term; others terminated or had a pregnancy that ended due to natural causes. But almost all of them required some sort of medical intervention. And having babies ain't cheap — the Post reports that each uncomplicated pregnancy, from conception to delivery, costs more than $10,000. And a woman who doesn't receive adequate prenatal care — say, a teenager whose parents' insurance doesn't cover it — is much more likely to deliver prematurely or experience complications, which can add several thousands more dollars to the bill. A whopping 70% of insurance plans don't cover prenatal care or childbirth for non-spousal dependents. And these women who seek assistance from Medicaid are often denied as well, since living under their parents' roof or on their insurance plan may mean that their household income is too high to qualify for government aid.
But do private insurance plans cover abortion services for minor dependents? I reached out to the National Women's Law Center about abortion coverage for the children of policy holders, and while the NWLC doesn't have hard and fast numbers, according to Guttmacher, most non-government employees currently enjoy abortion coverage as part of their employer-provided insurance coverage. Anecdotally (and you know how reliable anecdata is!), my former employer, a large financial institution, covered abortion for policyholders and their spouses, but not for dependent children. The same restriction holds true for the insurance policy at my current employer.
Monday morning quarterbacks (Monday morning OB/GYN's?) would be quick to point out that if a woman doesn't have the money to pay for childbirth out of pocket and is still on her parents' insurance, then maybe she shouldn't be having potentially babymaking sex in the first place. A fair point, if you believe that sex should be something that's only available for people who can pay for every possible outcome of sex every time they have it — although something tells me that if a young man broke his penis during intercourse and found that his parents' insurance plan wouldn't cover his dick repair, there'd be a lot less tongue clicking moralizing and "maybe think of that before you have sex, you little strumpet!"s.
This issue should be disconcerting for a few reasons: first, as a person who considers herself "pro-choice," I am pro women being able to make the right choice for themselves, be that childbirth or abortion. Coerced abortion and coerced pregnancy are both deeply upsetting. And insurance plans that refuse to provide either childbirth or abortion coverage (or that cover abortion services but not pregnancy-related costs) for plan dependents are essentially making women's choice for them — when presented with the option of spending between $300 and 1,500 on an out-of-pocket early term elective abortion or spending upwards of $10,000 on childbirth, the "choice" stops looking like a "choice" and starts looking a lot more like financial coercion. Unless you're incredibly privileged, getting pregnant while dependent essentially leads to a choice between abortion/financial independence or childbirth/financial ruin.
Young women who get pregnant already start out behind the 8 ball. Allowing insurance companies to issue policies that deny prenatal coverage to dependents only adds to the burden of young motherhood, cruelly turning one of the Affordable Care Act's most attractive provisions into something that's neither affordable nor caring.
[WaPo]
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Researchers have finally figured out the reason why big, goofy Michael Phelps can score millions in endorsement deals while few companies even bother hiring female athletes to be their spokeswomen — sex appeal. Male athletes like Phelps that have a suitably disarming grins aren't heavily exploited for their sex appeal the way female athletes are. Advertising tactics right now (for anyone who doesn't ever see advertisements) revolve around youth and sex rather than athletic prowess, which means that, when advertisers use female athletes to sell things, they usually use them incorrectly.
According to two researchers from the University of Delaware, even on the rare occasions when companies make use of female athletes, the gambits often prove unsuccessful. Researcher John Antil explains that this advertising narrow-mindedness is closing all kinds of doors for athletes who only have a small window of time to capitalize on their marketing potential. "The way female athletes are being used as endorsers," he explains, "negatively impacts their effectiveness and reduces wider opportunities for other female athletes."
The researchers gathered their data through focus groups, asking participants to react to ads and discuss their insights. Ads that focused on an athlete's physical splendor were often viewed negatively because such ads emphasized the differences between the spokesperson and the viewer, rather than making that spokesperson relatable. For instance, study participants seemed to especially dislike a "Got Milk?" ad featuring Dara Torres in a bathing suit because, rather than highlight Torres' personal and athletic achievements as a 40-year-old world-class athlete and mother, the ad focused solely on her physique. Study co-author Matthew Robinson wrote,
Respondents suggested this was a poor image for an outstanding athlete who achieved so much while raising a family. Featuring Dara Torres as a middle-aged single mother, able to balance family with work commitments, might be more effective than highlighting her physical attractiveness at age 40.
The main problem is that advertisers made little effort to make female athletes relatable in the same way that companies have tripped over themselves to make male athletes like Peyton Manning America's Official Pitchman For Everything. Of course, advertising misuse isn't the only problem female athletes face — many of them simply aren't as well-known as their male counterparts. Since affability — or seeming affability — is the hallmark of advertising success, having a low-profile immediately puts female athletes at a disadvantage, especially once the glow of Olympic success fades at the end of the games. It's a shame, too, because I would definitely buy a swing set if Gabby Douglas told me to.
Why Female Athletes Usually Get Shafted In The Post-Olympics Hunt For Endorsers [Business Insider]
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Two Texas girls accused of creating a fake Facebook page and impersonating a classmate were detained (and may still be detained) on July 16 and have been charged with online impersonation, a third degree felony. Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds has compared the Facebook impersonation to identity theft, which, he explained when the girls were first arrested, is typically used for "financial gain." "This [the alleged Facebook incident] was just to try and get back at a person," said Deeds, "and ruin them socially, so it's a big deal.
The girls, 12- and 13-years-old respectively, allegedly used the fake page to threaten people in their school, making it seem like their 12-year-old classmate was casting aspersions on her peers as wantonly as one might cast dandelion seeds about a meadow, or some other similarly open plane of land. The victim's parents reported the Facebook page to the sheriff's office back in June, before the suspects' identities had been sussed out by some diligent gumshoeing. When Sheriff Deeds figured out that the architects of the fake Facebook page were really the victim's frenemies, he supposed that there would be some sort of reconciliation. The victim's parents, however, having seen their daughter endure some Count of Monte Cristo shit, weren't so conciliatory.
Since Texas law shields juvenile court records, no one quite knows whether the girls have been released from the detention center they were being held in or not, though Chris Hansen from the ACLU (which isn't involved in the Hood County incident) told NBC that there has been a recent uptick in punishments for childern and teens harassing each other online. He also added that the girls' ages are a little "striking," and wondered whether it was totally on the level to treat people so young as adults, even if they had used the internet to make someone else's life miserable.
2 girls, ages 12 and 13, face felony for fake Facebook account [MSNBC]
‘Facebook girls' remain in detention facility [Hood County News]
Image via karen roach/Shutterstock.
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Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who will most likely remain best-known for his fine work on the post-modern high school comedy Saved By the Bell, as well as for that time in Weeds when he had really nasty Showtime sex with Mary-Louise Parker, married a woman who wasn't named Kelly Kapowski at a winery in California. Gosselaar proposed to advertising exec. Catriona McGinn one year ago, a mere three months after divorcing Lisa Ann Russell, and apparently played a significant role in planning the wedding because that's the sort of thing you'd expect from Zack Morris. Always scheming, that one. [People, E!]
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It seems that the days of groupies getting traded between rock bands for $50 and a case of beer weren't left to James Cameron's nostalgic film lens. Professor William T. Bielby has examined the sociological roots of rock groupiedom and its continued pervasiveness in a piece entitled Rock in a Hard Place: Grassroots Cultural Production in the Post-Elvis Era.
From the beginning, girls were the primary consumers of amateur rock bands in the 1950s, arguably the golden age of what we now know as rock & roll (although, obviously, more than half of that shit was jacked from black musicians like Chubby Checker and Smokey Robinson).
By and large, white male groups emerged from this period as the mega-stars, likely due to the gendered parenting of that time: boys were given more free reign to hang out unsupervised for jamming and gigs, while girls were kept under a much closer watch lest they get "in trouble." Circa the rise of idols James Dean and Elvis Presley, and it took very few accoutrements for a boy to emulate the alluring teen rebel. Or, as Bielby puts it:
Teenage boys saw Elvis impress the girls, so they got their friends, other teenage boys, to start bands with them.
Even the most famous girl groups of that time, rather than emulating this tactic of eschewing authority themselves, rebelled by falling in love with the male rebels, as evidenced the lyrics of hits like "He's A Rebel" by the Crystals or "Leader of the Pack" by the Shangri-Las.
My folks were always putting him down
They said he came from the wrong side of town
They told me he was bad
But I knew he was sad
That's why I fell for the leader of the pack.
These origins continue to play into the modern consumption of rock music in sublimated, unexpected ways: on T-shirts, in fact, as one shopper noticed in a Toronto H&M. Where were the "I am a drummer shirts"? Oh, in the Ladies' Nowhere section. NBD. Not to mention that this is akin to branding yourself like the musician in question's commodity.
Bielby did note the prevalence of female bassists in alt rock bands, but said that this is the result of a typical gender role mechanism: as the bass became sidelined as a "female" instrument and not considered "men's work" (like, say, drumming or lead guitar), increasingly more room was made for female bassists.
To get the bad taste out of your mouth, here is a delightful live performance by Gilda Radner in the 1970s as female delinquent rocker character Candy Slice. Which, ironically, is still about a man (Mick Jagger). But it's satire!
'"I Fancy The Lead Singer": Bands, Fans and Gender' [The Society Pages]
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