Lily Salter's Blog, page 197

Video-game addiction may become an official mental-health diagnosis in 2018

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Do you love video games? Do you ever find yourself prioritizing video games over other interests? Would you choose gaming over spending time with family and friends? Well, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), you may have a mental health disorder.

In 2018, WHO plans to add “gaming disorder” as a mental health problem to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). There are of course stipulations, though, so don’t go slapping controllers out of everyone’s hands or cordoning off GameStop locations.

According to ABC, the update is not meant to suggest that anyone who plays video games is harboring a mental-health disorder. Rather, it posits that when a gamer loses the ability to control when and how they play games, or if someone is constantly prioritizing video games “over other interests in life and keeps playing despite negative consequences,” then it may be somewhat more than a hobby.

An example of such a state of personal affairs be if someone’s involvement with video games was such that they were fired due to skipping work because of their gaming habits, and then still continued to play.

A tentative draft of the ICD defines gaming disorder as “a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behavior, which may be online or offline.” The WHO did not specify how many hours classifies as “excessive,” and there isn’t yet a specified treatment. The disorder would be categorized along with substance abuse and addictive behaviors.

Marriage and family therapist Paula-Jo Husack told CBS San Francisco that gaming disorder is not only serious, but an “epidemic.” According to CBS, Husack “says the designation is long overdue and that addiction to video games is a hidden but widespread problem.”

Husack also told CBS that common symptoms to look out for are social isolation, reduction in empathy, loss of appetite or sensory perception and an inability to move from one thought to the next.

The WHO says symptoms are usually long-lasting, and that doctors should wait to diagnose someone until at least a year after symptoms emerge, unless they are really severe.

While WHO has reportedly not made a final decision on whether or not they will officially include gaming disorder to the ICD, adding it the list means that doctors and insurance companies must recognize it.

Certain experts have long blamed excessive gaming for depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, aggression and even childhood obesity. As well, a smaller group believe that violent video games spur violence and mass shootings in real life.

Still, there is no definitive proof that, when used by otherwise balanced individuals, video games represent a specific mental-health threat in and of themselves. Indeed, some studies suggest that certain games in the hands of the sufficiently healthy might help improve memory, coordination and problem-solving abilities. This is all to say that the science is very much out on video games, whether or not the WHO chooses to categorize the overuse of them as a disorder.

Sorry, Trump: Your arch-nemeses Obama and Clinton are still “most admired” Americans

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The current U.S. president usually ranks number one on Gallup’s annual “Most Admired” poll. Yet this year, former president Barack Obama snagged the spot as “Most Admired Man”—and Hillary Clinton won the title “Most Admired Woman.” Ironically, the two of them are perhaps Trump’s least-liked people on Earth. Between tweets, comments, and Trump’s “birther”-conspiracy obsession with Obama, it is often suggested that Trump has an inferiority complex.

This is Clinton’s sixteenth consecutive year winning the title, albeit she’s held it 22 times in total—more than any woman in history. Obama is only the second former president, next to Eisenhower, to place first after his presidency. Overall, this marks Barack Obama’s tenth consecutive year holding the title.

“Trump’s unpopularity is holding him back from winning the most admired distinction. The incumbent president is the usual winner, since he is arguably the most prominent figure in the country — but when the president is unpopular, other well-known and well-liked men have been able to finish first,” the report states.

Barack Obama trumped Donald Trump, who ranked second, 17 percent to 14 percent. Hillary Clinton surpassed Michelle Obama by 2 percent. Other names on the list of men include Pope Francis, Rev. Billy Graham, John McCain, Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates. On the “Most Admired Woman” list, Clinton is accompanied by Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Warren, Angela Merkel, Queen Elizabeth, Condoleezza Rice, and yes, Melania Trump, who ranked eighth out of the top ten.

The annual “most admired” poll has been published 71 times since 1946. According to the report, the incumbent president has won 58 of those 71 times. Donald Trump joins former presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush as among those who did not place first during their presidencies.

Votes for each winner, Obama and Clinton, mostly came from poll respondents who identified as Democrats. Twenty-two percent of Democrats polled chose Clinton; 12 percent chose Obama. Eight percent of Independents chose Obama, while 5 percent chose Clinton.

Trump won among Republican poll respondents: thirty-five percent named him as the man they most admire. One percent of Republicans named Obama.

This is Trump’s seventh time making the top 10 on the list.

It’s no secret that Trump considers Obama a nemesis. Trump’s crusade against Obama dates back to 2012, when Trump made it his mission to prove Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Likewise, Trump publicly made countless insults to Hillary Clinton during his 2016 campaign.

The poll of 1,049 adults was conducted Dec. 4–11, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

No holiday season for sex workers

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“It’s only rape when the check bounces.” The quip was from a sex worker who knows a bit about sexual harassment. Thanks to Hollywood movies and other myth-making, the public gets many things wrong about sex work, including the name itself. Women in the field are not hookers, prostitutes, call girls or ladies of the nigh — they are sex workers, because the sex they have is work.

Lately, the news is full of sexual harassment charges and admissions. But here is a group of women who cannot scream sexual harassment because their profession itself is consent. Women I interviewed tell stories about johns stealing the money they just paid, forcibly stealing services they have not paid for and hiding their buddies in the next room for a free gang bang. (They also talk about police sexual shakedowns.)

The earning life of most sex workers is short and declines rapidly, especially for women on the street. After a woman is no longer new on the streets and as she ages from the rough lifestyle and drug use, she will earn less and get fewer dates. In sex worker self-help groups, the decline of work possibilities is described as a transition “from the bedpost to the lamp-post.”

Johns are often to be feared. Many in the Chicago and northern Indiana area remember a sex worker reign of terror in the 1990s. The women victims, often lost to their families, were never reported missing and their bodies were found in abandoned buildings. At least four men were arrested in Chicago during that time. Only three years ago, seven more women’s bodies were found in Indiana, thought to be victims of a sex worker serial killer. Hammond police held a man in connection with the murders who was a convicted sex offender, possibly involved in six more murders under investigation.

Some women who survived the 1990s Chicago scourge appeared in a 2006 documentary called “Turning A Corner,” by the Prostitution Alternatives Roundtable and Salome Chasnoff. The film was part of a Chicago Coalition for the Homeless campaign and efforts to enact legislative change.

One woman in the film says nothing could stop her from sex work until a john dragged her two blocks with his car and she had her face “nearly scraped off” and almost lost an eye. Another woman stopped, she says, when her friend was found sexually mutilated and dead in an alley.

Murderers know that the easiest victims they can procure are sex workers because no one misses them. In Vancouver, British Columbia, pig farmer Robert Pickton was believed to have killed at least 49 sex workers.

A 2007 study by Freakonomics author and University of Chicago economics professor Steven D. Levitt with Alladi Venkatesh, found Chicago sex workers were victims of violence from pimps or clients once a month and forced into extorted sex with law enforcement officers or gang members in one out of 20 transactions.

Many women on the streets are feeding drug habits and cannot say no. And sadly, the dates themselves can be addictive. Getting in cars is both a compulsion and an addiction, say the women I have interviewed — they’re on auto pilot, in a kind of trance in which they ignore the dangers because they know they will get drugs or cash in minutes.

Chicago sex worker Pamela Bolton put it like this to a Chicago newspaper in 1995: “Prostitution is one of the worst addictions you can have out here. This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin.” Weeks later she was fatally shot.

Activists Fight Back

“How many of you admit to having bought the services of a sex worker,” asked sex worker Pussy Willow at a presentation at a Chicago library a few years ago. Two timid hands went up. Willow was a member of a Chicago group called Sex Workers, Criminalization and Human Rights or SWOP, formed about 10 years ago.

“When you’re a sex worker, everyone wants to be your friend, until it jeopardizes their family or standing in the community,” said Willow.

As long as sex workers are morally quarantined by illegality and stigma, they risk being robbed, cheated, raped, knifed, shot, beaten, strangled, abducted, arrested, and killed, said Willow. Not only are sex workers devoid of human rights, community activists turn their back too, she said. “They train workers to train workers to train workers to then go out and try to find ‘victims.’ Meanwhile who is handing out a bag of condoms to the outdoor sex workers on Belmont Avenue? Who is protecting women who are getting beat up?”

The true needs of the sex worker community are blinded by studies full of social scientist babble, Willow said, citing a recent, highly publicized report that “didn’t even interview sex workers, just occasional johns called ‘hobbyists.’ Hello?”

Drug industry spent millions to squelch talk about high drug prices

(Credit: AP Photo/Chris Post)

Facing bipartisan hostility over high drug prices in an election year, the pharma industry’s biggest trade group boosted revenue by nearly a fourth last year and spread the millions collected among hundreds of lobbyists, politicians and patient groups, new filings show.

It was the biggest surge for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, since the group took battle stations to advance its interests in 2009 during the run-up to the Affordable Care Act.

“Does that surprise you?” said Billy Tauzin, the former PhRMA CEO who ran the organization a decade ago as Obamacare loomed. Whenever Washington seems interested in limiting drug prices, he said, “PhRMA has always responded by increasing its resources.”

The group, already one of the most powerful trade organizations in any industry, collected $271 million in member dues and other income in 2016. That was up from $220 million the year before, according to its latest disclosure with the Internal Revenue Service.

PhRMA spent $7 million last year to prepare its ubiquitous “Go Boldly” ad campaign and gave millions to politicians who were up for election in both parties in dozens of states. It lavished more than $2 million on scores of groups representing patients with various diseases — many of them dealing with high drug costs.

Some of the biggest patient-group checks went to the American Autoimmune Related Disease Association, for $260,000; the American Lung Association, for $110,000; the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, for $136,150; and the Lupus Foundation of America, for $253,500.

PhRMA also gave big money to national political groups financing congressional, presidential and state candidates. The conservative-leaning American Action Network got $6.1 million. The Republican Governors Association got $301,375. Its Democratic counterpart got $350,000.

PhRMA’s state and federal lobbying spending rose by more than two-thirds from the previous year, to $57 million.

“That’s PhRMA. They do it all” to protect drug companies from potential policy risks, said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political financing. “And they’re going to marshal even more resources when they perceive that these threats or opportunities are most imminent.”

Threats seemed especially dire last year. Storms of bad publicity hit the industry in the form of stories about arrogant executives and thousand-dollar pills.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said some pharma companies were “making a fortune off of people’s misfortune.” Then-candidate Donald Trump, a Republican, suggested he could save $300 billion annually by requiring drugmakers to bid on business.

Nonprofit organizations such as PhRMA must file detailed disclosures with the IRS. PhRMA, which submitted its 2016 report in early November, shared a copy with Kaiser Health News.

The group also aimed dollars at states where policymakers were considering drug-related measures such as price limits or greater price transparency, the document shows.

It gave $64 million to a California fund established to defeat a proposal requiring state agencies to pay no more for drugs than does the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. Also supported by direct contributions from drug companies, the fund spent $110 million last year to defeat the initiative, California regulatory filings show.

This year, California established a less comprehensive law requiring drug firms to give notice and explanation when they substantially raise prices. PhRMA recently sued to block that measure.

In Louisiana, where policymakers were considering proposals to make drug prices clearer to consumers, PhRMA gave campaign contributions directly to scores of state legislators last year. The group also gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to help defeat a ballot proposal for single-payer health care in Colorado.

Last year’s massive mobilization underscores how besieged the industry felt over complaints about soaring medicine prices and high profits.

PhRMA’s $271 million in revenue for the year represented its biggest budget since 2009, when it recorded $350 million in dues and other revenue.

The $57 million it spent on lobbying was also the most since 2009, when the lobbying bill was $70 million. So was the $7 million spent on advertising, a cost that should rise this year, since the “Go Boldly” ads aired in 2017. PhRMA employed 237 people last year, up from fewer than 200 in 2011.

The association’s 37 members include the biggest and best-known drug companies including Johnson & Johnson, Celgene, Merck, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Amgen. Holly Campbell, a PhRMA spokeswoman, declined to make an executive available to discuss the report, saying it doesn’t comment on contributions.

“PhRMA engages with stakeholders across the health care system to hear their perspectives and priorities,” she said in an email. “We work with many organizations with which we have both agreements and disagreements on public policy issues.”

Patient groups receiving PhRMA money often deny that it influences their policies or keeps them from criticizing high drug prices.

The Lupus Foundation has policies to ensure there is no conflict of interest, a spokeswoman said. At the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, donors such as PhRMA “have no role” in the group’s decision-making process, a spokeswoman said.

“No funder influences our position, agenda or science-based messages” at the American Lung Association, its spokeswoman said.

The American Autoimmune Related Disease Association did not respond to requests for comment.

During negotiations over Obamacare, PhRMA agreed to support overhauling health care relatively early in the process, in mid-2009. Then it threw its muscle into promoting the measure, which promised billions in new revenue for members. President Barack Obama signed it into law in March 2010.

PhRMA shrank substantially after that, taking in around $205 million for several years in a row starting in 2010.

Last year it agreed to increase dues by 50 percent to raise an extra $100 million, Politico reported. In an attempt to distance itself from drug companies earning bad headlines, it also decided to bar members that didn’t invest a minimum in pharmaceutical research.

The day I put my bikini away

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“I love the beach, but the beach hates me,” was my mother’s mantra. And with that, I rarely visited the Pacific Ocean that roared and crashed just five miles from my house.

The sun will kill you, she insisted. It will burn you and suck you dry. You will get spots and cancer and the salt water will sting your eyes, and the sand will never get out of the rug.

My mother was a redhead with blue eyes. She wore large straw hats when she gardened, and as far as I knew, did not own a swimsuit. Solutions like beach umbrellas, sunscreen and long-sleeved coverups were available, of course, but once she made up her mind she couldn’t unmake it. She was not a beach person.

In high school, I started riding my bike along the San Gabriel River channel, a straight concrete shot of about four miles, to visit the neighboring town of Seal Beach. My friend Shelly lived on Third Street, just a few blocks from the ocean.

Her house was magic. A stained-glass window liquified the sun to blue streams on the living room floor. Her stepmother kept a steady supply of seashells in glass bowls and yogurt topped with granola and fresh fruit.

A mother and baby dolphin, painted by a local muralist, swam across Shelly’s bedroom wall. On long afternoons we listened to “Life in a Northern Town” by the Dream Academy, waves whooshing in the pauses between repeats. We weren’t in England or the north, and we lived in two separate towns, but the song made us catch our breath. We listened quietly, cheered when the crowd in the song cheers for the Beatles, and then fell into silence again.

I was mere miles from my Rossmoor doorstep but at the literal end of the path, the continent. In a decade we’d be at the end of the millennium and already felt that cosmic pressure, answering essay prompts like, “Where do you see yourself in the year 2000?” Like the waves themselves, the future washed over my feet with relief and anxiety. Cool, glistening, and full of hidden kelp that tangled my feet. California waters were dark.

*  *  *

I wasn’t a popular girl in high school. Awkward and artsy, I managed to escape being asked to any dances save my disastrous senior prom. But in my bathing suit, I was a tall and willowy clean slate with mile-long legs and breasts like half-oranges: not huge but cheerfully proportioned. When I put on a bathing suit, I could draw the attention of men and boys without having to talk to them. Their admiring looks were enough to get me started on my long, tedious education on the uneasy power of male-female dynamics.

The first swimsuit I bought was a white, black and silver speckled bikini. I had never been good at putting together outfits and hated buying shoes for my wide, size-10 feet. But with one hook of a strapless top, I looked good. The silver squares caught the light, and I wore that light with pride.

Soon I discovered that by visiting the department store clearance rack, I could gather up a number of bronze and snakeskin bikinis, teal bandeaus and strappy cherry-printed numbers with ties brushing my thighs. As I walked the sands of Seal Beach, Sunset and Huntington, I learned that seven dollars of fabric could wield tremendous power.

I’m light-skinned and burn easily, but I started to train myself into getting tan, gradually lowering the SPF number as the season progressed. When I reached SPF 4 and took on the sheen of a roasted marshmallow, I felt I had accomplished something, a teenage OC girl rite of passage.

To prepare for my beach days, I took to “laying out” in my own back yard on the chaise lounge in my original metallic bikini. I listened to music on my Walkman cassette player as our pet desert tortoises crept across the lawn chewing on fallen hibiscus petals. The occasional crepe myrtle petal flew into my hair.

One day I sensed a presence, a shadow over me. It was my father at the window, inside the house, holding a camera. He had been snapping pictures.

“What are you doing?” I asked him through the screen.

“Just curious,” he said. “I wanted to see how you were put together.”

I said nothing. Shame prickled my body, and my stomach sank in the same way it did when I had discovered the old Playboy magazines in his dresser drawer years before. When I first found them, I was thrilled, then scared, then numbed by the doe-eyed nude blondes I’d visit occasionally out of sense of somber duty. I was a woman now, not even immune to the gaze of my own father. The terror of my body had arrived. It had been seen, scrutinized and recorded on a film negative that would later be developed and placed before me on the kitchen counter. On that 4 x 6 glossy rectangle, my metallic speckled suit appeared suddenly ridiculous against the forced-caramel skin of my stomach and slightly pink tinge of my thighs. Something about my breasts and hair seemed tired, stuck on. I was a mousily sluggish centerfold.

I never sunbathed at my house again.

From that point forward, I didn’t want my father to notice me at all. Even on the night of the prom, the evening everyone stands in their front yards with their parents taking pictures, I hid in the bathroom fussing with my 50-color eyeshadow set. I didn’t want him to see me with my smoky plum eyes and teased hair. I was just short of 18, almost the age of the women in the magazines at the bottom of his dresser drawer.

I wore a black sequined, royal purple dress with a black bow at the waist and shoes I had dyed purple. When my date and our friends arrived in a borrowed Mercedes, I rushed down the driveway to spend the evening with a boy I would later find out wished he’d taken someone else.

For years I did not want my father to hug me, and when he did, I made sure the embrace was shallow and quick. I was afraid of my breasts making contact with his body, and even on my wedding day I did not make eye contact with him as he readied to walk me down the aisle.

I was afraid of my beauty while nurturing it. I wanted to hide from men while also pleasing them. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t know how to talk to them saved me from seeking their attention in a promiscuous manner. I attended a college with coed dorms and never laid a finger on a man or encouraged one to enter my room. But I walked the hallway smiling at everyone, wearing sweet floral sundresses without bras.

One male dorm-mate asked me what the deal was with that. “Because the straps poke out,” I said. “No one’s looking, anyway.” I didn’t think I was lying. The dress in question was a long ivory silky number with orange, teal and hot-pink paisleys and a thick sash at the waist. A bra got in the way of the flow, so I opted out. I was not large-breasted, flirtatious, or sexy. I was away from home for the first time, safe.

“No one’s looking?” he muttered. “Uh huh.” I crossed my arms and looked down.

I felt ashamed of my body but also of my innocence, which betrayed my ignorance of the male mind. Did all men have dark thoughts about women? Or was it just my father? I wanted to start a new life with men but found myself being used in spite of myself.

My freshman year I developed a crush on a dark-haired senior, Tom, who lived directly across the hall. He had a girlfriend in England whom he often fought with on the phone late at night after drinking. There was not much to see in him aside from his dark hair that hung over his eyes, his deep voice and the fact that he held an editorial position at the university paper. Mostly, he was close by and willing to interact with me without much effort on my part.

One night he charged into my room, angry with his girlfriend. He yanked my miniature Christmas tree from my shelf and hurled it across the room, ornaments shattering. He stormed back out, and I cleaned up the mess without a word.

Another time he sauntered over to my room to gaze at my Picasso print of “The Three Musicians” longingly.

“That would sure look good in my newspaper office,” he sighed.

I let him borrow the poster. As the school year neared its end, I asked him to return it. “Sure, tomorrow.” he’d say. He said it every time I asked. On move-out day, I reminded him once more. “Going to the office now,” he said, and disappeared. I waited there in my empty room, car packed. Of course Tom never returned. As I drove the 91 freeway back home for the summer, the first summer after my father left my mother, I hated myself. The sun blasted through the car window onto my bare thighs. It was in the high 90s, but suddenly I wanted to cover up.

Last spring, for the first time in my adult life, I visited California on my own, landing on an LAX runway bordered with wild orange poppies. I attended a writing conference in Los Angeles while bouncing from relative to relative and reprocessing my traumatic associations with freeways, faultlines and memory.

On a bit of a whim the last afternoon of my visit, I asked my mom if she and her longtime best friend Gary wanted to accompany me to Seal Beach. No swimsuits or water: just walking along the pier.

“Oh, I don’t know,” my mom said, her once-red hair framing her face in a ring of wisps escaping from a bun. “The parking has just gotten so expensive. Only the rich can go down there these days,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It will be my treat.”

My mother and Gary and I took the 10-minute drive and paid three dollars for parking. My mother couldn’t believe it, thinking for decades that not only was the beach dangerous, but cost-prohibitive. She looked around in wonder as seagulls swooped around the electric wires and waves beat against the barnacled pier.

“This is so fun!” she exclaimed. She was 80 years old and visiting the charming beach in her own backyard for the first time in perhaps 20, 30 years. Maybe longer. Gary, a slight man in thick glasses and a cardigan, eight years my mother’s junior, quietly walked alongside us with occasional remarks about the history of Seal Beach and its Naval Weapons Station.

We strolled to the end of Seal Beach Pier, the site of a few ill-fated high school dates, and, eventually, long walks with my husband-to-be, who would propose at water’s edge. Middle-aged men, most of them Hispanic and some of them playing soft music through portable radios, fished off the pier with buckets at their feet. Sadly, the once iconic Ruby’s Diner at the end of the pier was gone, replaced with a chain-link fence and building detritus. When we got to the fence, we turned around and walked back. The sun had started to sink to the west, which was not, amazingly, the ocean. Seal Beach faced south.

“I should do this again,” my mom said. “Gary, shouldn’t we do this again?” He nodded, scratched his gray beard, and gazed out at the water.

I offered to buy them coffee at a shop I didn’t recognize. To my mother, this was another major purchase, but she assented — plain coffee, black. Fancy drinks were always out of the question.

We sat on a bench on Main Street. My mother wore an oversized white T-shirt printed with puppies and kittens: a gift from the Humane Society, a place that receives her constant donations. Like my mother, I wore my hair in a bun, wispy hairs flying in the seaside breeze. Ever since turning 40, I’ve felt a little more attractive, happy with my tall stature and the way my glasses rest on the high cheekbones I used to think made me look like a child with a scrunched up smile and big nose. I have gained a bit of weight around my middle but now look people solidly in the eyes and when conscious of the second-halfness of my life, imbibe air as if it were the Holy Spirit baptizing my every cell. I allowed the cappuccino, too, to wash over me, the fears that I’d held in my body for so many years escaping like steam through the lid’s tiny window.

Now the power of my body is in the deciding. Deciding to fill it with good things and sweet things, adorning it with scarves the color of beach sunsets. Driving my body to an airport, putting my body on a plane and a car and bringing it into the rooms of people I love and people I decide to forgive.

Across the street, the ice cream and candy shop from my youth, Grandma’s, is gone, replaced with a Cold Stone Creamery. Businesses change with the generations, and although it’s sad when families hit hard financial times, I’ve never understood the almost angry nostalgia with which people regard new establishments. This new shop will be as important to the class of 2020 as the other was to the class of 1990. The lives that are the center of the universe spin on, memories made and memoirs written in these repurposed spaces.

A teenage girl walks out with a cardboard cup of ice cream. It’s too cold for bathing suits, but she works at what a SoCal girl on the beach is expected to do: look beautiful. She wears frayed shorts and a beige shawl-like sweater and short UGG boots. Streaks of green-dyed hair, now a mainstream look, twist into her elaborate ponytail. I’m almost the age my mother was when I began to spend hours at the beach seeking validation in my body while trying to escape it. I have a teenage daughter now whom I’m trying to teach to love her body. I watch what she eats with vigilance, not afraid of her gaining weight, but losing it.

The girl crosses the street toward us, her shawl caught up by licks of wind. She’s alone for now, but will most likely meet up with friends who’ve veered off to other snack shops. She turns the pink spoon upside down and scrapes off her ice cream with her teeth, something I learned to do when I was young so I wouldn’t smear my lip gloss.

“That’s a pretty girl,” my mom says as she passes, and I nod.

The sun drops even more, gold brushing our eyelids. I place my hand on my mom’s shoulder as she wraps her hands around the cup and the gulls screech at the waves. I doubt she’ll return until I visit California again. But today we’re here, enjoying life in a southern town, sipping and breathing. Today, the beach loves us.

We, Tonya: Disgraced skater finds redemption as symbol of 2017 feminism

Margot Robbie in "I, Tonya" (Credit: NEON)

My first thought upon walking out of “I, Tonya,” the recently-released indie film starring Margot Robbie as disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding, was: Tonya was wronged. My second thought was that “I, Tonya” is the greatest sports film I’ve ever seen.

Most sports films, even the classics, have two things in common: They’re about men and they buy uncritically into the romantic narrative about the athlete’s journey to find himself through the struggle toward greatness.

“I, Tonya” breaks the mold, not just by telling the story of the story of failure and loss, but by grappling with the role that gender and sexism played in ruining a woman who may at one time have been the greatest figure skater in the world at. Regardless of whether you believe Harding played a role in planning the attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 (I personally don’t think she did), what is apparent some 23 years after the fact is how well Harding’s story symbolizes the way that the world treats women who ask for something more out of life than being passive objects.

“You didn’t need to have taken women’s studies to see how nasty the coverage of Tonya was and how it just went through the playbook of every single bad thing you can call a woman,” said Lynn Harris, a writer and comedian who founded Gold Comedy, a school that teaches stand-up comedy skills to girls.

Even by modern TMZ-style standards, the media circus around Harding in 1994 was ridiculous. (The scene in which a tabloid journalist vandalizes Harding’s truck so he can get angry photos of her is 100 percent based on the truth.) Harris, who was not only a figure skater herself but a dead ringer for Harding, ended up spending much of that year working as a Harding impersonator, and actually won a celebrity impersonation contest on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show.

As Harris explained, most of the work she was offered was to mock Harding, who spent the months between the attack on Kerrigan and the Winter Olympics as the country’s biggest villain. It wasn’t just that Harding was assumed guilty of the attack on Kerrigan, which Harding’s then-husband, Jeff Gillooly, was convicted of arranging. Harding was reviled because of who she was: A working-class tomboy who angered people by insisting that female athletes be taken seriously as athletes, instead of hiding their power and hard work under the silly, feminine affectations of figure skating.

Harding was often, for instance, referred to as “thunder thighs,” which angers Harris to this day.

“If you can do a triple axel, show me your thighs,” she said, referring to a gravity-defying jump that Harding became the first American woman to pull off in international competition. (And the only one, until Mirai Nagasu did it in 2017.)

Harris was uneasy being asked to mock Harding — and refused to do any events that assumed Harding as guilty — but, in her words, was “young and innocent and naive and also ambitious.” She said she would try to stand up for Harding during events, saying that she was proud to be compared to “a plucky athlete who sewed her own costumes and became a world champion against all odds.”

Those odds were steep. “I, Tonya” (directed by Craig Gillespie, from a screenplay by Steven Rogers) clearly and compellingly makes the case that misogyny, intertwined with classism, crippled Harding’s ability to make the most of her god-given talents. It was the sexism of the world at large, which was all too ready to punish Harding for her transgressions against traditional femininity. But it was also the sexism at home. The abuse dished out by Gillooly (played by Sebastian Stan), who later went to prison for masterminding the attack on Kerrigan, is framed as the main reason Harding’s performances started to slip after she set the triple-axel record. He is portrayed as a man who cannot stand knowing his wife is the reason for her own success, and who tries to take control of her career and her life by planning an absurd crime that led to Harding’s lifetime ban from competitive figure skating.

To be clear, Tonya Harding is a difficult woman to like. As anyone who has seen the ESPN “30 for 30″ documentary “The Price of Gold” can attest, Harding is an exasperating and endless fount of self-pity. She seems incapable of taking responsibility for any of her own choices — a fact that “I, Tonya” doesn’t shy away from, and where at times it finds dark comedy.

Yet as I watched Robbie’s masterful performance of Harding’s relentless whining, it became hard not to notice that Harding has a point about nearly everything she complains about. It is unfair that skating judges prefer pretty princess types to rock-and-roll-loving tomboys. Gillooly does seem to have been controlling and abusive, as was Harding’s mother. Her laces really did break during the 1994 Olympics, and she did the right thing by asking for a do-over instead of risking a serious ankle injury by competing with a loose skate. I’m a capital-F Feminist, and even I have internalized sexist resentment against women who complain too much.

Between “I, Tonya” and the ESPN documentary that clearly influences it, it’s safe to say that Harding has finally gotten her media redemption. It’s too little, too late for Harding herself. But for the rest of us, there might still be salvation. It’s one more sign that Americans are finally starting to deal with women’s anger, instead of telling us to stuff it lest we come across as, heaven forbid, unlikable.

“Of all the feelings that have surfaced since January — sadness, depression, hopelessness, rare bits of joy — the one that has sustained, motivated and sometimes felt like it was destroying me, has been anger,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay writes for Mic. She notes that 2017 was the year when women’s rage, which “had been simmering for decades,” boiled over, starting with the Women’s March and continuing with the #MeToo movement that has outed hundreds of powerful men for sexual harassment and abuse.

Twenty-three years after her name became a punch line, Harding is now an emblem for our era: She’s angry, she’s messy, she’s incredibly flawed and she doesn’t apologize for it. Nor should she have to. In 1994, the worst person you could compare a woman to was Tonya Harding. Going into 2018, we all need to be more like Tonya, willing to call out unfairness when we see it and refusing to buckle under the pressure to be nice.

Sen. Orrin Hatch is a case study in why you should always read the article before posting

Orrin Hatch (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon)

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, woke up on Christmas morning to what he seemingly thought was a flattering editorial about him in Utah’s local paper, The Salt Lake Tribune, which named him the “Utahn of the Year.”

Call it the best “Fake News” snub to date, or simply a smart (albeit slightly misleading) headline: Hatch, one of President Trump’s most stalwart supporters, didn’t absorb the editorial. At all. In a sequence of two tweets, he took to Twitter to voice what appeared to be sincere gratitude for the article, which essentially asked him to retire — “if there is any justice.”

Grateful for this great Christmas honor from the Salt Lake Tribune. For the record, I voted for @SpencerJCox and @rudygobert27. #utpol pic.twitter.com/7iFOBK6TWf

— Orrin Hatch (@OrrinHatch) December 25, 2017

Great editorial from the @sltrib lauding our #TaxReform efforts: Reduction in corporate tax rate will boost the economy https://t.co/CgBcWHxknK #utpol

— Orrin Hatch (@OrrinHatch) December 26, 2017

Twitter followers responded telling him to “read the piece,” calling him a “dope,” and comparing his attention to detail to this piece to that of the GOP tax bill—a Trump initiative he vehemently supported.

You should actually read the piece.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) December 26, 2017

Guess you you posted this before you read it Erroneous Orrin.

— HopeSpringsATurtle (@HopeSprngsaTrtl) December 26, 2017

 

You must have read this with the same attention to detail you gave the tax bill. To say it’s an unflattering portrait of you is an incredible understatement.

— David Hudspeth (@djhudspeth) December 26, 2017

Reading comprehension is not your strength I see.

— Dan McLaughlin (@djmlaw1) December 26, 2017

it's almost as if he didn't he even skim the bullet points pic.twitter.com/st9TxcFjHa

— Tweak Softly (@r33lshimslady) December 26, 2017

There’s been no word yet if he’s sat down and read the thing. But as of morning on Dec. 26, he retweeted a tweet from Salt Lake County GOP which agreed that he should indeed be the man of year.

We agree @OrrinHatch should be the man of the year. Our nation sees over 30,000 suicides a year, many that are from veterans. Orrin Hatch made suicide prevention a focus this year. It’s worthy of our respect and gratitude.#utpol

— Salt Lake County GOP (@slcogop) December 26, 2017

In case it wasn’t clear, the Tribune editorial in question is anything but complimentary. In fact, it’s scathing.

The Tribune said that Hatch’s actions will have a serious impact on the lives of all Utahn’s, and specifically condemned his decision to support downsizing two national monuments.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the award is given to a Utahn who has “made the most news” or has “had the biggest impact” either “for good or for ill.”

The piece encourages Senator Hatch to retire.

“It would be good for Utah if Hatch, having finally caught the Great White Whale of tax reform, were to call it a career. If he doesn’t, the voters should end it for him,” it reads.

The biggest lesson in all of this, though? Read the article before you post it.

Singer Joy Villa alleges Corey Lewandowski sexually assaulted her: report

FILE - In this April 18, 2016 file photo, Corey Lewandowski, campaign manager for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, appears at a campaign stop at the First Niagara Center in Buffalo, N.Y. CNN has hired Lewandowski as a commentator on the campaign, only days after he was fired by Trump. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) (Credit: AP)

Singer Joy Villa has filed a police report against Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, for alleged sexual assault, according to Newsweek and CNN reports.

Lewandowski reportedly sexually assaulted Villa at a holiday party on November 28 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Villa told CNN he slapped her bottom twice while they were posing for a photo. Politico first reported the incident on Dec. 22;  according to the report, the two had never met prior to the party.

“I’m wearing this silver suit and stretchy pants, and after the photo, he smacks my ass really hard,” Villa said in the Politico report. “It was completely demeaning and shocking.”

Villa later tweeted about it, including a photo that was taken before the alleged incident happened.

Here’s the photo of @CLewandowski_ seconds before he slapped my ass, I told him to stop, and then he did it again. I was shocked and embarrassed by his behavior. https://t.co/61EYvOG4e9 pic.twitter.com/a8NgLnvCEZ

— Joy Villa (@Joy_Villa) December 23, 2017

Villa reportedly confronted him after the alleged incident and told him that she could report his behavior as sexual assault, to which he allegedly responded “I work in the private sector” and proceeded to slap her again.

Lewandowski “was drinking” and “appeared to be in bad spirits,” according to Villa in the CNN report.

The police report, which does not mention Lewandowski’s name, was reportedly filed on Christmas Eve. Newsweek obtained a copy of the report, and notes that “another partygoer confirmed Villa’s version of events as ‘100 percent’ true.”

This is not the first time Lewandowski has faced allegations of harassment or abuse. In March 2016, he was charged with simple battery after he allegedly yanked former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields’ arm backward at a Florida campaign event, though the charge was later dropped for lack of evidence.  Lewandowski was never prosecuted, and he publicly denied the alleged incident on Twitter, claiming that he had never even met the reporter.

Since the alleged incident, Villa, who is an avid Trump supporter herself, has been vocal about sexual harassment and assault on Twitter. On Dec. 26, she shared the following message:

To all survivors of #sexualassault its NOT your fault. It never was, it never will be. You are not to blame, they are. It doesnt matter if you were covered up or showing skin, drinking water or gin, if your famous or unknown. You deserve to be treated with utmost care & respect. pic.twitter.com/Bm37NvlXnc

— Joy Villa (@Joy_Villa) December 26, 2017

She also went on to share her thoughts on how sexual harassment and assault correspond to politics at the moment.

“This issue of sexual harassment and sexual assault is a non-partisan issue,” Villa told CNN. “Democrat or Republican, all of us should join to combat this.”

Edward Snowden’s new app helps ward off computer hijackers

(Credit: YouTube/Introducing Haven)

The world’s most famous whistleblower is turning his focus to personal computer security. In partnership with the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a developer collective known as The Guardian Project, Edward Snowden has announced a new open source app that can turn your Android phone into a digital watchman to guard your laptop, computer, or any other device or object that can be tampered with when you’re not looking.

“Haven turns any spare Android phone into a safe room that fits in your pocket,” Snowden says in the app’s launch video. “Haven does more than watch your back, it gives you peace of mind.”

The app operates under the assumption that intruders may break into your office, home or hotel room and tamper with your computer to obtain confidential information and passwords. According to the Guardian Project, a collective of mobile security app developers, the app watches for any intrusions in your physical space, and specifically can help protect against “evil maid” attacks — a (faintly sexist) term to describe a situation where an intruder installs a hacked boot loader on your device without your knowing. While the app can’t physically stop intrusions — it’s not a robot butler, after all — it can give the victim documentation of said intrusion. 

“If you’re the secret police making people disappear, Haven changes the calculus of risk you have to go through,” Snowden told Wired. “You have to worry that every possible cell phone might be a witness.”

The app is meant to be used on an old Android “burner” phone — a term used to refer to pay-as-you phones that can be easily bought or disposed of without a formal contract. Using the device’s camera, the app can capture photos, and using the microphone, it can capture audio too. Haven also has the capacity to use a smartphone’s accelerometer to monitor for motion. Besides being used as a tool for counter-surveillance, Haven also markets itself as “the most powerful, secure and private baby monitor system.”

In the announcement post, The Guardian Project explained:

“By tapping into the sensors and processing power on these devices with custom software, a system could feel the vibrations of someone walking, detect the shine of a flashlight, hear the sound of a door opening (or a child crying), or see someone entering into the view of a camera.”

 Wired tested the device in its beta version, and confirmed that when a staged intruder approached an unattended laptop in an office, they received automated photo alerts. However, Wired also noted that the app confused “stray office noise” for an intruder. Fortunately, users can set thresholds for the audio sensitivity. 

Life expectancy of Americans continues to drop

(Credit: Getty Images)

For the second year in a row, the average life expectancy for Americans has decreased. American men now live an average of 76.1 years — a slight decline from from 76.3 years in 2015 — and American women can expect to live an average of 81.1 years, the same life-expectancy average from 2015, according to a new CDC report.

While the slight dip in life expectancy is unusual, the report’s more startling revelation is that an increased number of younger Americans are dying. From 2015 to 2016, there was a 7.8 percent increase in deaths of those between the ages of 15 and 24; a 10.5 percent increase for those between 25-34; and a 6.7 percent increase for Gen X-ers in the 35 to 44 age group.

Conversely, death rates decreased for older Americans: there was a 0.5 percent dip in death rates for those between 65 and 74, a 2.3 percent decrease for people between 75 and 84, and a 2.1 percent decrease for those over 85.

According to the report, the leading causes of death in 2016 were: heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide. In 2015, they were the same, except chronic lower respiratory diseases ranked third and unintentional injuries ranked fourth. In 2016, they changed positions.

In 2015, unintentional injuries were the leading cause of death for the population between 1 and 44 years old, accounting for 31.3% of all deaths, according to a different CDC report. It’s unclear what the leading cause of death for this age group was in 2016.

“Unintentional injuries” is a vague term, but is used to describe accidents, such as motor vehicle traffic crashes, accidental poisoning (which could be accidental drug overdoses), and falls. Interestingly, the National Security Council released data last February calling 2016 the deadliest year on U.S. roads since 2007.

“With continued lower gasoline prices and an improving economy resulting in an estimated 3% increase in motor-vehicle mileage, the number of motor-vehicle deaths in 2016 totaled 40,200, up 6% from 2015 and the first time the annual fatality total has exceeded 40,000 since 2007,” the statement said.

Outlets such as The Atlantic have speculated that the opioid crisis is the primary cause for decreased average life expectancies. In 2016, more than 63,600 Americans died of drug overdoses, according to another CDC report— a 21 percent increase from 2015. The overdose rate was highest among men and people under 55.

In October, Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency. Policymakers have missed opportunities to implement strategies to combat this crisis in the last several years.

Compared to other developed countries, the U.S. ranks relatively low in terms of life expectancy rates. Countries like Monaco, Japan, Singapore, Iceland and Switzerland snag spots in the top 10, according to government data. The United States comes in at 43rd.