Lily Salter's Blog, page 263
October 22, 2017
Calculator guesses how many healthy years of life left
(Credit: Cheryl Savan via Shutterstock)
As the old saying goes, the only things certain in life are death and taxes. While death is inevitable, the quality of life you experience until death is often within an individual’s control.
This is what our team at the Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research chose to focus on by developing a rigorous measure of quality of life. How many healthy years of life do you have ahead before you become unhealthy?
Everyone understands the benefits of living a long healthy life, but this also has implications for industry and society. Medical costs, financial planning and health support services are directly related to the state of health of an individual or community.
We call this measure of quality of life “healthy life expectancy” and its complement “unhealthy life expectancy.” We define entering an unhealthy state as a severe enough state of disablement that there is no recovery, so you remain unhealthy until death.
It follows that life expectancy — a measure of the total future years an individual is expected to live — is simply the two added together.
Calculating
Imagine a healthy 60-year-old male who exercises regularly, has a healthy diet and healthy body mass index and sleeps at least eight hours a night. By our estimate, he could have an additional 13 years of healthy living compared to his unhealthy counterpart. That’s 13 more years of quality living with family and loved ones.
This is quite a startling revelation, not only because of the significant difference in healthy life expectancy between these two individuals, but also because this difference is driven by lifestyle choices within the individual’s control.
So what factors contribute to a better healthy life expectancy? Two factors that are not lifestyle-related are age and gender. All other things being equal, healthy life expectancy decreases with age. Women have a longer healthy life expectancy compared to men.
We have already seen that diet, exercise and sufficient sleep positively impact healthy life expectancy. Other positive factors that we have incorporated in our model include level of education, level of income, perception of one’s own state of health, moderate alcohol intake, not smoking and absence of Type 2 diabetes. The higher the level of education and income, the higher your healthy life expectancy. Having a positive perception of your state of health helps, too.
Try it yourself
Want to know your own estimate of healthy years ahead? We developed a free online tool that lets you calculate healthy, unhealthy and total life expectancy. This is work in progress.
This is the first time such a measurement tool has been developed. While it’s too early to validate the accuracy of our calculations with actual data, we have been careful to ensure that the model assumptions are based on established actuarial sources and the modeling results are logical and consistent.
It should be noted that healthy life expectancy is simply an educated prediction. Unforeseen incidents — like being hit by a truck – could render this estimate invalid, no matter how well you manage lifestyle habits. Also, there could be other nonmeasurable factors impacting healthy life expectancy that we have not included in our model, like level of stress, a positive attitude to life or social connections.
Putting our model to work
Our team plans to explore some of these practical applications of healthy life expectancy in industry.
For example, the concept of healthy life expectancy can help with retirement financial planning. Annual retirement spending should not be level across your life expectancy. More discretionary retirement spending should happen during healthy years and less during unhealthy years, while spending on basic expenses increases during unhealthy years.
Insurance products can be also designed using healthy life expectancy measures in mind. This can protect an individual against additional basic living expenses during the unhealthy period. One such product could be a deferred long-term care or temporary deferred life annuity, where the deferral period is for healthy life expectancy and the temporary coverage is for the unhealthy period. This can be a significantly cheaper and a more needed product compared to what is available in the marketplace currently.
Since healthy life expectancy is also related to quality of life and level of health, a relative index could compare an individual’s results against a benchmark healthy life expectancy for someone with “average” characteristics. This can then be used as an underwriting tool and to predict future health care costs. Our model could also serve as a patient screening tool for medical providers by incorporating more detailed lifestyle and dietary details as well as prior medical history information.
We hope that other researchers and practitioners will continue to build on this. Then society could focus on not just prolonging life, but prolonging quality of life using our model. As the saying goes, “In the end, it is not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
Jeyaraj Vadiveloo, Director of the Janet and Mark L. Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research, University of Connecticut
October 21, 2017
Just say know: Teens say pregnancy prevention programs are worth keeping
(Credit: Keeping It Real Together/Reveal)
LOS ANGELES — The seventh-graders filed into the room and took their seats. On the first day of Pio Pico Middle School’s teen pregnancy prevention program, the 12-year-olds weren’t learning about condoms and sexually transmitted diseases. They were learning about friendship.
There was a crackle of excitement as their teacher, vivacious in a bright cotton dress with flowers in her hair, handed out scripts for a dramatization of real-life relationships and sexual encounters, starting with the basics.
“How many of you have friends?” Hands went up. “How many of you like to have friends?” Hands again. “Today, we’re going to learn all about friends.”
Larissa Karan, a teacher with 16 years of experience who received extra training for this class, in August had the 28 students contemplating answers to personal questions they probably never had encountered before. Over the next two years, with a dozen sessions, these students will act out roles focused on how to say no to sex, how to talk to their parents about problems and how to keep healthy and safe.
But in July, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suddenly pulled the plug on this project and 80 others funded by the government’sTeen Pregnancy Prevention Program, as first reported by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The department eliminated the last two years of five-year grants awarded by the Obama administration. With the loss of nearly $214 million promised nationwide, the future of these programs remains uncertain.
The programs, which reach 1.2 million adolescents in 39 states, rely on medically accurate information and use techniques teaching abstinence and contraception that have been scientifically validated as effective. But they are controversial with abstinence-only advocates in the Trump administration.
Educators and health researchers now worry that teen pregnancies, which have been cut in half in the United States over the past 10 years, could increase again.
These programs are particularly valuable in cities such as Los Angeles with large low-income and minority youth populations. With a large proportion of Latino students and 80 percent of the student body coming from households that qualify for free lunches, Pio Pico is an example of the populations most at risk: Nationwide, the pregnancy rate for Latino and black teens between 15 and 19 is roughly twice the rate for white teens.
Overall, nearly 230,000 babies were born to U.S. teens in 2015.
“These kids are hungry for trusted information,” said Kristin Meyer, director of youth prevention programs at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. “This initiative was intended to provide a larger pool of approaches that are effective in teaching abstinence and safe sex.”
A dramatic teaching method
At Pio Pico, Karan leads the seventh-graders down the hall to the activity room and asks for volunteers to play roles in a class drama, “Jazmine Has a Secret.”
The students read the script. A worried Jazmine reluctantly shares a secret with her friend Gaby. Jazmine’s 15-year-old sister found out she’s pregnant. Her boyfriend broke up with her and she’s afraid to tell their mother.
“She’s really scared and doesn’t know what to do,” Jazmine tells her friend.
Jazmine leaves. Two other friends approach Gaby. Alicia repeatedly presses Gaby to reveal Jazmine’s secret.
The other friend, Jose, says, “Hey, Gaby, if Jazmine told you not to say anything, then maybe you shouldn’t.” Then he says to Alicia: “Man, you need to chill. Why are you getting into her business? If Jazmine wants you to know, don’t you think she’d tell you?”
The play ends with Gaby looking worried, saying, “Well . . .”
Now Karan jumps back in. She peppers the class with questions. “How many would want people telling a secret?” No hands. “How many would want Alicia as a best friend?” No hands. “If someone told a secret at Pico, it might end up at L.A. High tomorrow, right?” They nod their heads and laugh.
“What makes someone a good friend?” Karan asks. The descriptions stream in from the students: trustworthy, honest, encouraging, caring, loyal, nice. If you’re in a tough situation, they’ll be by your side. They don’t betray you.
“A bad friend?” They hate you. User, thief, bully, liar, evil, scary, twisted, gossipy, bossy. They talk behind your back.
Buried in this role-playing are messages telling the kids that they need to take care in forming intimate relationships. They are taught that they are free to say yes or no at any time, for any reason, to anything — and that includes sex.
The program, developed by the county public health department and University of Southern California’s Department of Preventive Medicine, received $2 million in federal health funds this year but will lose its $4 million in funding for the next two years. It serves 45 middle schools in the Compton and Los Angeles unified school districts plus 11 sites in high schools run by charter school Soledad Enrichment Action.
“This is practice for them to test out scenarios of real life and build confidence in saying no,” Karan said after class. “They are preparing against being caught off guard in risky situations, whether it’s drinking, making out on the couch, riding in a car with another teen or cutting school. It’s good to see them stand up for themselves. It’s hard to resist peer pressure.”
“A double hit to the community”
To qualify for the federal funds awarded by the Obama administration starting in 2010, the 81 teen pregnancy prevention programs had to provide evidence that they actually worked. They teach comprehensive sex education — abstinence as well as contraception.
In June, Trump appointed Valerie Huber, the former president of a national abstinence-until-marriage organization, as the chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health. A few weeks after her appointment, that office informed the teen pregnancy grant holders that their funding would stop at the end of the 2017 fiscal year.
The elimination of the funds was done outside the traditional federal appropriations process. Yet it is still possible that Congress will step in to save the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program: In July, 148 members of the House and 37 senators signed letters asking the health department to justify the cuts. The House appropriations bill would eliminate the program and substitute $20 million for abstinence-only programs. The Senate is leaning the other way so far: Its appropriations committee approved keeping the program for 2018.
Huber declined to be interviewed. But in August, she told a radio audience in Columbus, Ohio: “We’re hopeful Congress will eliminate the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. If they choose not to, we have every intention to improve this program so more young people are helped as a result. The program as designed and promoted simply isn’t working.”
As evidence, she pointed to evaluations that found 12 programs in the initial 2010-15 grant period reduced risky sexual behavior among teens, 16 did not and 13 were inconclusive.
However, social scientists with the Brookings Institution say those results show that the programs were making progress and that axing them is a “grievous and ill-considered decision.” Overall, major studies show that programs such as these contribute to drops in teen pregnancy when they incorporate contraceptive information; ones that rely entirely on persuading teens to abstain from sex are ineffective, waste money and are dangerous to their health.
Meyer, of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, called the loss of the grant funds “a double hit to the community. Not only are students going to be denied these programs, there also will be less evidence to help districts identify the best ones for their students.”
Reaching out in coal country
Deep in rural Appalachia, adolescent birth rates soar — they’re nearly four times the national average in some places.
Mission West Virginia, a nonprofit that serves youth and families, was using the federal funds to eventually reach 55,000 teenagers in sixth through 10th grades in 100 schools, group homes and juvenile centers with its THINK program, or Teaching Health Instead of Nagging Kids. The goal was to help every teen in counties where poverty and social problemsfuel high teen birth rates, particularly in rural areas that were once the center of mining.
In the coal town of Morrisvale, Alyssa Stone, now 15, has taken sex education classes since she was 12. She says the program has made it easier for her to talk to her mom and to boys.
“It made it a lot easier to explain how to say no. If you have a real friend, you can tell them you’re not going to be pressured and you’re not going to be that kind of person,” she said. “We thought it was going to be just another boring class, but everybody learned a lot. We had no idea how easy it was to get STDs.”
She is concerned that if the nonprofit group can’t find other funders to replace the $1.7 million annual grant, the health classes will disappear.
“I’d really like for my little sister to go through the program. She needs it and doesn’t realize it,” she said about her 12-year-old sister. “Kids that age think they know a lot.”
Alyssa’s mother, Hilary Stone, who gave birth to her at a young age, said people act like if you don’t talk about teen pregnancy, it doesn’t exist.
“It’s already in their heads,” Hilary Stone said about teens and sex. “Why not give them the right information rather than let them figure it out on their own?”
Religion is important in this Bible belt community, she said, “but I think parents around here would appreciate someone coming to teach. If they could push it off on someone else, they’d be glad.”
Talazia Walther, 17, a high school senior, lives in the former coal town of Madison. At 14, she learned she was pregnant. Her son, Grayson, is now 2.
“I had to depend all on my mom,” Walther said. “It does take away the life of being able to hang out with my friends. You do have a big responsibility on your hands. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Walther is a top student with straight A’s. She intends to go to college and study pediatric nursing. After school, she works at Wendy’s from 4 to 10 p.m., earning minimum wage.
The first sexual health class offered at her school came after she already had given birth. Nevertheless, she said, it helped her.
“The class taught me I was in an abusive relationship,” Walther said. “I ended up getting out of it, and I’m so much happier.”
Helping Miami’s immigrant teens
In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, the pregnancy prevention program focuses on neighborhoods with twice the national teen birth rate. Twenty ZIP codes there have a quarter of the county’s girls ages 15 to 19 – and more than half of the teen births.
Trinity Church developed its program, PlanBe, with input from Haitian, Cuban and Honduran immigrant teens. With its federal health grant of more than $1.4 million per year, the staff of mostly young health educatorsteaches 6,000 kids a year. But the program may have to be discontinued now that the funding has been withdrawn.
Marcus Carreño, a personal fitness teacher at Miami Senior High School in the predominantly immigrant neighborhood of Little Havana, said PlanBe classes encourage young people to come forward with hidden fears. He said one girl confided to a staff member that she had been raped and feared she had HIV.
“She might have lived her entire life without telling anyone,” Carreño said.
The PlanBe staff teaches not only about abstaining from sex, but also about life lessons, he said.
“They let the kids express what they feel and set up stories and plays, like trying to get a girl to smoke weed and go have sex,” he said. “Then they switch it and make the girl try to seduce the boy. The kids are interactive in the whole process.”
Youlynie Coriolan, 17, didn’t have sex education until she attended Miami Lakes Educational Center in Miami Lakes, one of Trinity Church’s target schools. She moved to Florida from Haiti when she was 9. During middle school, she heard the “secrets of the boys” from her father, who taught her how to say no and humorously described boys’ flirting and “what they want for this moment.”
Trinity Church’s program taught complete information on sex, Coriolan said, along with how to respond to situations such as other teens saying sex is better without condoms.
“The moment you leave your comfort zone and have sex, you could end up getting pregnant. That got me thinking a lot,” Coriolan said. “Friends will push you to do what they like to do.”
Fritz Casseus, 18, a senior at North Miami Senior High School, another target school, took the sex education class last year.
“Some kids think it’s cool to live in the moment and not think about the future. I think that’s really risky,” Casseus said. He praised the staff at the Trinity Church program for “knowing what it feels like to be a teenager” and making the classes enjoyable, not awkward.
Casseus came from Haiti when he was 2 to be adopted by family friends. His high school serves a community that is 99 percent Haitian American, with a large number of low-income families and little access to health care. Many of the teens don’t have doctors to ask questions.
Teacher Lauren Zelniker, who’s taught at North Miami for 20 years, has scheduled the class for 1,000 students each year. A registered nurse, she said the program is “medically accurate on abstinence and birth control. They do it so it’s age appropriate. They are spot on with statistics. They do an outstanding job. Because I teach it, I’m very critical.”
Modern media for modern kids
In western South Carolina, Spartanburg County teens have taken the pregnancy prevention message outside the classroom by using Facebook, Twitter, Thunderclap, Instagram and Snapchat to attract their peers to a website with information about health, including birth control services. Their recent Thunderclap campaign reached more than 50,000 people, according to its website.
Rebecca Turner, 17, a student at the Scholars Academy public high school in Duncan, is one of 10 youth ambassadors for the Connect program, which teaches abstinence to preteens and birth control methods to older students. The program has served more than 3,500 students and received about $1 million a year in federal funds.
“Teenagers can be empowered to take control of their health,” said Turner, who is a whiz on social media.
After the local Mary Black Foundation received its first federal funds to start Connect, the county’s teen birth rate fell dramatically. There were nearly 500 babies born to Spartanburg County teens in 2010, compared with fewer than 240 born in 2016.
Youth ambassadors for the Connect program show up at downtown concerts and food fairs in T-shirts that say, “I Got This,” and hand out information to teens about the program.
Turner and other teens are so upset over the federal cuts that they created a social media campaign to restore program funding, urging people to text “resist” to 50409 to connect them to their congressional representatives.
“We hope people will text that number and tell their representatives they care about teen health,” she said. “We do.”
Why hazing continues to be a rite of passage for some
(Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)
This fall has seen another tragic death due to hazing. Maxwell Gruver, an 18-year-old Phi Delta Theta pledge at Louisiana State University, died hours after participating in a mock quiz designed to get pledges disturbingly drunk – fast. Charges have been brought against 10 fraternity members — one with a negligent homicide charge.
Gruver participated in the facetiously named “Bible Study” quiz, taking a snort of 190-proof alcohol each time he gave a wrong answer to questions about Phi Delta Theta’s history — a drinking game associated with prior fraternity deaths at several universities.
It is true that fraternities, bands and team sports provide a welcoming atmosphere for students who value the support and mentorship of older peers. They contribute to school spirit, provide student leaders and produce loyal, generous alumni. However, as I’ve often seen in the 40 years since publishing my first research on hazing in collegiate groups, this bonding process can exact a price.
Data I’ve collected for my latest book,
“Hazing: Destroying Young Lives,” demonstrate that since 1954, with the exclusion of the year 1958, there has been at least one hazing death per year in U.S. colleges and secondary schools. Two deaths occurred prior to 1930 in elementary schools. The vast majority, however, have been in fraternities.
So why does hazing happen in the first place? And how can these unintentional homicides be prevented?
Hazing in the past
Before Gruver’s death, the most recent incident to hit national news was the death of 19-year-old Timothy Piazza. Piazza died after a drunken fall from internal trauma during a pledging event sponsored by the Beta Theta Pi chapter of Penn State. Initially, 18 Beta Theta Pi brothers were charged for manslaugher, but charges against four were dropped by a judge in the case.
Soon after Piazza’s death, Penn State threw Beta Theta Pi off campus and boarded up its building. Among the university’s new rules, listed by President Eric J. Barron in an article in USA Today, trained professionals with graduate degrees will monitor house activities and pledging has been slashed to only six weeks. Penn State also transferred governance from student to university oversight.
Other recommendations to curtail hazing include banning single-sex fraternities, clear-cut and enforced university sanctions (including expulsions) and mandatory posting of hazing infractions online — a practice now employed by a handful of schools.
For its part, Louisiana State University is no stranger to the hard-drinking culture of fraternity hazers. In fact, it was exactly two decades ago that Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge Ben Wynne died from alcohol poisoning in an initiation similar to Gruver’s. Now LSU is figuring out how to respond to this latest tragedy. The fraternity itself is shut down and the university’s president has convened a task force to study Greek life. Under the law in Louisiana, any student convicted of hazing must be expelled.
Why does hazing occur?
Due to the secrecy of modern initiations, few scholars have published legitimate hazing surveys. The most commonly cited study was conducted by education researchers at the University of Maine in 2011. In a survey of 11,482 undergraduate students from 53 colleges and universities, the researchers found that 55 percent of all students involved in collegiate groups witnessed or experienced hazing.
Moreover, the study indicated that only 5 percent of the hazings were reported to college or law enforcement authorities.
Anthropologist Aldo Cimino proposes an evolutionary theory for the act of hazing. He explains that veteran members of a group often wish to ensure that initiates don’t enter the organization with a free pass; the hazing rituals are a demonstration of worthiness through a series of challenges.
A second popular theory comes from sociologist Stephen Sweet, who explains the symbolic significance of hazing. At this crucial time in a young man’s life, he writes, hazing rituals and totems — such as pledge pins, paddles and even shared bottles of liquor — can all carry symbolic weight, linking pledges in their social interaction with each other.
My own theory is that fraternities exhibit cult-like behavior, sometimes with one or more “pledge educators” who restrict movements, isolate pledges from the campus community or even forbid them to speak or shower. I coined the term “Greekthink” — a play on Groupthink — to explain why hazers exhibit negligent and dangerous behaviors, act as if members and pledges were invincible, value group practices above individual human rights and deny when abuse occurs.
And in most cases, the hazing is a never-ending cycle of reciprocity; what was done to them, they now do unto others.
The wrong rites of passage
Indeed, though most hazing involves alcohol consumption, requirements often include more direct physical harm. College students have died from accidents during drop-offs in remote locations, beatings, drownings and even gunshot wounds – all alleged hazing incidents.
Often, defense lawyers try to convince the court that victims perform the tests willingly and, therefore, are as much participants as the hazers themselves.
Penn State student Piazza’s ordeal, uncharacteristically, was documented on video, showing that soon into the initiation, he seemed unable to make willing choices.
Until the late 1980s, courts tended to regard even deaths as unfortunate accidents, resulting in little or no jail time for perpetrators.
In the last 30 years, however, laws against hazing in 44 states have ruled that deaths and injuries should be regarded as crimes – not accidents.
A hazing death, for example, at Florida A&M in 2011 resulted in a 77-month sentence for hazing and manslaughter – although the conviction is under appeal in 2017. Louisiana is one of the states that has these laws on the books. It is, however, one of the weakest state hazing laws in the country, imposing in most instances a fine of only US$10 to $100 and a month or less of jail time.
What can stop hazing?
Although these expulsions and convictions are intended as a deterrent as well as punishment, serious hazing cases such as Gruver’s death continue to plague universities.
Penn State is not the only one to introduce new initiatives. Harvard, for instance, is a considering a ban on all fraternities. But many activists, including parents of Rider University’s Gary DeVercelly Jr., who died in 2007, are now looking to federal law to make a difference.
In June 2017 a bipartisan law was introduced to the House that requires colleges to report all instances of criminal hazing and to provide all students with an educational program on hazing.
Penn State is all for it. President Barron has publicly stated the university’s support for both the federal legislation and stricter state legislation.
What’s next?
Following Gruver’s death, LSU President F. King Alexander said,
“Maxwell Gruver’s family will mourn his loss for the rest of their lives, and several other students are now facing serious consequences — all due to a series of poor decisions.”
And, he continued, underscoring the “devastating” consequences of hazing, “We will . . . reevaluate the policies and procedures that educate and govern our Greek community.”
Grief-stricken parents, like the Gruvers and the Piazzas, are not the only ones to hope that their family tragedies may serve as clarion calls for change.
In fact, I believe it is possible to bring change. Prior to the late 1920s, deaths due to hazings of college freshmen by sophomores surpassed deaths by fraternity hazing. A nationwide movement by students resulted in a near-end to these dangerous nonfraternity hazings. There has been only one single death since 1928.
Activists for groups such as HazingPrevention.org, many of them fraternity members themselves, hope a similar paradigm shift can occur today.
And perhaps in 2018 we will be able to see the first year without a hazing death in the United States since 1961.
This piece incorporates material from an article on hazing first published on Aug. 28, 2017.
Hank Nuwer, Professor of Journalism, Franklin College
New film rethinks the rules of marriage
(Credit: Getty)
In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein movie industry harassment scandal, there’s something quaint about a director using the power of film to help him understand his painful divorce and his true feelings about sex and monogamy.
And amen for that.
Independent filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, who was married to actress Olivia Wilde (whose name is never mentioned in the film) for eight years, is an earnest searcher who picked up his camera and went on a personal odyssey, interviewing a wide array of people, including a sassy, outspoken neighbor, polyamorous couples, monogamous couples, sex columnist Dan Savage, and several of his own family members who come from Italian royalty.
The result is the documentary “Monogamish,” a term coined by Savage, in which Ruspoli questions the conventions of marriage and explores the subject of polyamory, a term he may apply to himself but that he thinks can be misleading.
“I don’t love the label,” Ruspoli told me recently on “Salon Talks.” “I’ve come to this after many years. The idea is that polyamory means many loves, so it’s not just the idea of sleeping around like swingers that you associate with Republican suburbia. Because that’s just about sex.”
Ruspoli, whose father was an Italian prince who once frolicked in a hippy commune and, at the age of 50, married Ruspoli’s mother, when she was 18, sat down in the Salon studio and revealed himself to be both erudite, referencing German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and personally open.
“Love isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said. “The reason you take your clothes off to have sex isn’t for practical reasons, it’s because I want you to see me as I actually am.”
Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.
Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.
A San Francisco court case could shift the legal status of sex work
A worker in prostitution who goes by the name "Violet," in downtown San Francisco. (Credit: AP/Darryl Bush)
On October 19, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals began hearing oral arguments on a constitutional challenge to California’s anti-prostitution law 647(b). The case, ESPLERP v Gascon, challenges the criminalization of sex work in California. If things go according to the plaintiff’s plan, the case has the potential to protect the health and safety of many vulnerable sex workers in the state.
ESPLERP argues that California’s anti-prostitution law “unfairly deprives adults of the right to private consensual activity, criminalizes the discussion of such activity, and unconstitutionally places prohibitions on individuals’ right to freely associate.” The case’s plaintiff is the San Francisco-based group ESPLERP, or the Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project, whose stated mission is to “empower the erotic community and advance sexual privacy rights through legal advocacy, education, and research.”
As Carol Leigh, a sex worker and longtime advocate, once told SF Gate, “The real issue is, the more prostitution is criminalized, the less recourse prostitutes have, and the more they are forced to rely on an exploitative underground, on people who are basically capitalizing on their vulnerability.”
At present, with no due law to protect sex workers from violence, workers in the industry are physically vulnerable to both unknown clients and aggressive police targeting and intimidation (such as the sex trafficking scandal in nearby Oakland, Calif.). Police are also more likely to arrest underage boys engaged in sex work, even when there exists the opportunity to refer these youths to social services.
Leigh started working as a sex worker in the late ’70s. But her advocacy in the community became even more personal in 1979, after she was raped by two men. In Leigh’s case and many others, the criminalization of her profession meant she had no ability either to turn in the two men or to seek other legal recourse. Stories like Leigh’s pose foundational questions to whose safety is being protected under the criminalization of prostitution.
In 1996, Leigh contributed to a San Francisco task force charged with studying prostitution, which recommended social and legal reforms. The task force argued that the “current prosecutorial response does a great deal of harm but little good. It has not solved the quality of life concerns voiced by neighborhood residents; it has cost the city millions of dollars;” and, “it deprives residents of positive services which would ameliorate the problems.” The task force argued for the establishment of sex worker food and drug treatment programs and for law enforcement to take seriously the crimes committed against sex workers.
Meanwhile, research on legalized sex work outside the U.S. could offer new perceptions and windows into the industry of consensual erotic services, as well as the economies and spaces it navigates.
Marlene Spanger’s work is one of the few ESPLERP espouses on its website. Her research follows the working lives of 14 Thai sex workers in Denmark, where prostitution is legal. She argues that mainstream representations of women she knows have been divided between gross subjugation and illusions of an uncompromised feminism, while their experience doesn’t corroborate either.
As she says, “Some of [the women] prefer to work at a massage parlor rather than cleaning corporate buildings at four in the morning. The massage parlor offers better working hours as well as a sense of community.”
Spanger’s work highlights the economic systems that are just as exploitative as the massage parlor itself, and perhaps gives another reason for their legalization in the U.S. As ESPLERP states, “Every person, including erotic service providers […] must be enfranchised to basic human rights such as the right to legally work in the profession of one’s choice.”
Some experts fear that decriminalizing sex work could lead to an increase in sex trafficking. In some cases, however, the criminalization of consensual sex has allowed the court to prosecute trafficked victims, and trafficked children have been treated as criminals despite federal law classifying anyone under 18 years of age a victim.
In all, the criminalization of sex work in California has resulted in misdirected money on expanded police power and forcing sex work into unsafe secrecy. Until recently, the carrying of condoms could be used as evidence of prostitution, transforming safe sex into a legal risk and putting sex workers’ lives and health at risk.
While consensual sex work has remained discursively and physically omitted in much of the U.S., many countries outside of the U.S. have legalized it or changed criminal responsibility to clients of sex work. As of 2016, 49 countries have legalized prostitution and 12 have limited legal rights in law. Countries like the Netherlands and Australia have become lauded models, lifting bans on brothels, implementing mandatory health and safety inspections, and arguing that the criminalization of sex work puts the public health at risk.
Already ESPLERP’s case has left progressive groups polarized, with all sides claiming to protect victims of the sex industry. Congresswoman Kamala Harris is a co-defendant in the case, while human rights groups like the ACLU and Lambda have each filed an amicus on behalf of ESPLERP. In 2015, Amnesty International put forward a resolution to decriminalize sex work.
Each debate should not undermine the experiences and lived realities of sex workers, a portion of which ESPLERP effectively represents. One could also hope that the representation includes the voices of those who have been victims of sexual trafficking, demystifying and clarifying the relationship between the legalization of sex work and cases of trafficking. Undoubtedly elements of the case could be rightly contested, especially by some victims and families forced into the dehumanizing world of sex trafficking. Though every account gives equal reason for better, not outdated, litigation. If so, advocates should give nuanced weight to the word consensual. In all cases, it is certain that all audiences will be listening to the ESPLERP case results.
The face of the machine: The emotional toll of working in social media
(Credit: Getty/BartekSzewczyk)
About once a week, with astonishing regularity, a major corporation makes a social media gaffe. Prominent snafus in the past year include the “Emoji Movie’s” “Handmaid’s Tale” mash-up tweet that seemed to imply its emoji were raped; a Dove soap GIF advertisement that “showed a black woman using the product and magically turning into a white woman,” as Salon’s D. Watkins wrote; a tweet sent from the official McDonald’s account that called Trump “a disgusting excuse for a president”; and IHOP retweeting a post that read, “Good morning to everyone except Americans who don’t want to accept the simple fact that Hillary had a major garbage campaign.”
These gaffes take different forms: some are simple employee error, tweeting from the wrong account, while others, like the Dove soap incident, are evidently part of marketing campaigns overseen by many that still somehow generate PR nightmares. Yet in all cases, there are professionals working behind the scenes to manage these PR disasters, mend the brand when something goes awry, and deal with the everyday wrath of the pseudonymous public. If you’ve ever been bullied online, you know how painful it can be; now think about how that would feel if you were running social media for a huge brand that everyone suddenly hated.
“Imagine having literally thousands of people screaming insults at you and not being able to reply,” Diana Crandall, who worked as a social media editor for a major online news site, told Salon. “It can be very emotionally draining … there are times you want to scream at people: ‘Just go outside. Make a new friend. Get a dog. Log off the internet.’” The stream of anger was ceaseless: “On a holiday or a weekend or whatever, people are still blowing up social accounts for any number of outlets or brands … it can breed cynicism in the social editors who send out the information,” she added.
Type “social media jobs” into your search engine, and you’ll see tens of thousands of results. Fifteen years ago, you would have found zero — the term didn’t exist yet, of course. Within a span of a decade, the job title “social media manager” went from nonexistent to normal. Having a social media presence is a requirement for pretty much all companies, and while some companies rely on contractors, others have their own in-house managers. Even small businesses live and die by their social media presence — and one rotten social media incident, left unmanaged, can sink a business.
Yet despite a social media presence becoming so normal, even required, for employees in certain fields like journalism, education seems not to have caught up. Working in media, I can say safely that my education did not prepare me for the psychological toll that accompanies having thousands of strangers harass you; few, if any, journalism schools prepare students to deal with the inevitable cyberbullying that they will face over their careers, and how to manage it — both practically and psychologically.
Crandall, who has a degree in journalism, agreed that she was unprepared. “Schools should teach entire semester-long courses on these topics,” she told Salon. “I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all to assume that students will soon be able to major in social media strategy and management.” (Indeed, USC, Rutgers and the University of Florida are but a few schools that have similar programs now.)
Being a social media manager means being a sacrificial lamb, doing emotional labor on behalf of these large corporations. Of course, many people have jobs that require emotional labor; it’s just that social media managers must serve as punching bags in a much more direct way. They are a mix of customer service and public relations agent rolled into one; and when posting and replying constantly is the only way keep one’s brand relevant, there is tremendous pressure not to fuck it up.
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“In the beginning, I often took any “mistake” as a personal one — even things that were completely out of my control, like how a web page rendered on a [user’s] computer or device,” says Victoria Reitano, a social media manager who now runs her own boutique digital marketing agency called CreatiVix Media. Prior to starting her own agency, Reitano ran social media for a few national talk shows, where she cut her teeth dealing with trolls and PR crises.
At first, Reitano says she took criticism too personally. She even learned how to code just so she could help fix website issues that angered consumers. “There was immense pressure at every one of my full-time positions to fulfill these requests, and it did take a toll on my personal life,” she adds.
“My worldview was negatively affected,” said Crandall of her experience as a social media editor in a newsroom. “If you hang out in a room all day with 10 million people — many of them negative or complaining — it changes the way you see things.”
Emotional stress is one thing, but the stress can also become physical. I asked Reitano if she found the work emotionally draining, or if it affected her physically or made her seek therapy. “Yes, yes and uhhh, yes,” she said. “It is totally emotionally draining work, but as I had prepared for a career as a journalist, this is no more draining than that.”
“A past position was so taxing that it did start a period of hair loss for me,” said Nicole Schuman, who currently works as a community manager for a major test prep company. That was a learning experience for Schuman: “I now know how to say when I need help, and when not to take on too much. Learning to say no is important for everyone,” she added.
For those who work in social media for newsrooms, the stress can be compounded by having to constantly post about gruesome, even traumatic stories. “Covering mass shootings and terrorist attacks affected my life much more than I thought it would,” Crandall told Salon. “People who read stories and watch clips on the news can turn that off any time they want to. Social media editors, like many others in the newsroom, read every single story, every single update, and often times we are combing through social media as an attack is unfolding.
“And of course, after a social editor finishes updating the stories about the initial horrific attack, the victim profiles come,” Crandall continued. “And when you have hundreds of mass shootings a year in the United States, this can happen two or three times a week. I didn’t anticipate that at all.”
The idea that “corporations are people” is an oft-cited, yet technically incorrect maxim that American liberals are fond of spouting. Yet if brands are considered to be people in any sense of the word, their faces are these social media managers. While the boardroom managers and CEOs are the ones who make the decisions that often infuriate a company’s customer base, the social media managers are the ones who must deal with the wrath stemming from these decisions. Unlike the CEO or the board, they are uninsulated. And sometimes those attacks become personal.
“Most of the time, people didn’t [know] who was managing the accounts,” said Crandall. “So I would get away without having to deal with any personal attacks.” But there were exceptions — particularly when Crandall had to appear on video to cover a protest or event. When this happened, attacks on her personal appearance came in waves. “Comments about my looks or my reporting definitely toughened me up, and also showed me how uninterested I am in engaging with that type of hate,” she told Salon. She keeps a lower profile as a result: “To this day, my Twitter avatar is a picture of me as a little girl at a computer, and my professional Facebook page has a picture of me wearing a snorkel.”
Still, many of those who have made social media their profession say that despite the stress and the emotional toll, it is worth it. “There is always a lot of pressure in a breaking news environment,” said Crandall. “With the amount of pressure that surrounded the 2016 election, it was definitely pulse-quickening, but that was a lot of what made it exciting.” And of course, there’s the thrill of the share: “When you share a story that’s important for a lot of people to see and you watch it get shared a thousand, two thousand, fifty thousand times, that’s powerful. In situations where there’s imminent danger — like in a shooting — having the tools to know precisely where and when an attack is occurring and then tweeting out the information to a massive audience can truly save lives,” Crandall added.
“I kind of love tackling the issues that arrive in our social media inboxes, or on our page,” Schuman told Salon. “It’s a challenge. Most of the time commenters don’t even think there is another person on the other side…. It brings me a strange kind of joy to turn them from irate to happy customers.”
Crandall agreed that it could be rewarding. “I’ve watched social media hold people accountable, warn of danger and bring massive amounts of people together, sometimes in the span of three minutes. Ultimately, working with editors and journalists to tell important stories that wouldn’t make it out into the world without social media makes this job worth it, no matter where I’m working.”
Our silent Civil War: Debate over statues didn’t come out of thin air
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Though the first sudden and unexpected crisis of Civil War monuments has passed, communities across the North and South will struggle for months and years to confront the hundreds that remain. Debates over Civil War statues allow those statues, after a long silence, to speak to us again. It turns out that we still have things to learn from them, though not always what their builders hoped they would teach.
The statues, built mainly between 1880 and 1930, portrayed the history they commemorated in the most flattering light. Like centuries of monuments before them, the men on horseback or standing in vigilant solitude elevated leaders, ennobled soldiers and celebrated sacrifice.
They also erased history. The statues of the South, monuments to the brief military glory of the Confederacy, masked slavery and defeat. The statues of the United States, for their part, said nothing of the millions of men who refused to vote for Abraham Lincoln in the crisis of 1864 or rioted against the draft. The statues could maintain their silence on these fronts because they arose amid conversations that said what they could not or would not say. Cemeteries across the nation murmured incessantly of hundreds of thousands lives lost. Veterans, gathering in immense numbers for parades and reunions, told stories of the war to those who would listen. People remembered the way their neighbors had voted and acted during wartime.
Black people were an unacknowledged part of the conversations, an audience intended to listen but not speak. Formerly enslaved people and their descendants had built new lives amid the rubble of slavery, beneath poverty, injustice and violence. They had seen their brief moment of political power ended by the determined imposition of poll taxes, fraud and restrictive constitutions. The statues to the Confederacy built during the decades of Jim Crow reinforced the dominion over public spaces that white Southerners had temporarily lost during Reconstruction.
The meanings invested in the Civil War statues of the turn of the century slowly fell silent. Cities of carriages became cities of automobiles. As new wars demanded new sacrifices and new monuments, the Civil War statues faded from view, relics to the passions of increasingly distant decades. The Civil War itself, though more costly in lives than all of America’s wars of the twentieth century combined, became patronized and sentimentalized as a quieter war, a more human war, than the mechanized and anonymous slaughter of modern times.
Though the statues spoke less clearly to white Americans over time, black Southerners remembered what the Confederate statues were meant to say to them. The Civil Rights struggle confronted them with the resurgence of Confederate flags and celebrations of Confederate heroes. One generation of black parents after another had to explain to their children why statues of men who had warred against the United States to create a new nation based on perpetual slavery still stood in public places meant to be shared by all citizens.
Today, many Americans, unaware of the earlier conversations, express surprise at the intense debates over the monuments. The arguments by those who attack and those who defend the monuments puzzle and annoy people who see the blocks of granite and the horses of bronze as quaint, Victorian decorations of public space. To them, the statues seem so much left-over civic furniture, useless and thus harmless. They see no harm in leaving monuments that acknowledge Lee and Jackson as worthy of respect for their character and bravery, their virtues separable from the cause for which they fought.
To such Americans, today’s fights over Civil War monuments seem to come out of nowhere. Instead, those fights rise out of American history, a history full of buried force that suddenly surges to the surface when its plates shift. Suppressed memories, stories half-told or lied about, carry greater power for having been suppressed. History — apparently fixed, solid and settled — can suddenly erupt. When perpetrators of hate crimes pose beneath Confederate flags and march with torches around Confederate statues, hopes of racial justice can suddenly seem as hollow as the long-ignored statues.
Cities and towns across America will continue to confront their particular Civil War, grappling with what has been forgotten or suppressed where they live. Perhaps some communities will decide that their old memorials can be put to new uses, telling who erected the monuments, quoting the words and showing the images that defined their original purpose. Other communities may decide that the older monuments do more harm than good and that different sorts of memorials can better speak to our own time and do fuller justice to the past.
People who listen to current conversations will discover that the historical record is far richer than the few stories we have chosen from it, more monumental in scale and consequence than the statues we have built to contain it. New kinds of films and histories, new kinds of museums, new voices in our ears and new images before our eyes will do work that statues alone cannot. The defining event of our nation’s history will continue to speak to us if we will listen.
Bring on the “libertarian paternalism” diet
(Credit: Salon/Ilana Lidagoster)
I started smoking to impress a girl. She and her friends, all into the amoeba punk rock scene in my suburban hometown, smoked cigarettes in a parking lot across our high school every morning before the first bell. Casually approaching her to ask for a light seemed like the best move, considering that I was as punk as my favorite songwriters, Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp.
One of my friends, an aspiring photographer who I met on the high school newspaper, smoked Camels. I asked if I could bum one, and he warned me that I might soon find myself addicted. I was sixteen. I didn’t care. There wasn’t any coughing or vomiting, only enjoyment. It seems that some people are natural smokers.
The plan worked, but only temporarily. It turned out that I had a better relationship with tobacco than I did with the punk rock girl. We dated for two months. I smoked for nine years.
Cigarettes were still a helpful accessory for my generation of men who wanted to look cool and attract girls. We saw ourselves in the tradition of the great smokers — James Dean, Paul Newman, as well as the older, hipper and tougher guys in town.
My 18- and 19-year-old students find smoking repulsive. The massive transformation in personal and social attitudes toward tobacco is largely the result of education and the “evils” of big government. With awareness campaigns in public schools, warning labels, taxes driving up the cost of packs and cartons, and indoor bans against smoking, the nanny state has successfully caused people to quit a lethal habit and prevented many more from ever starting.
In 2002, the year that I had my first cigarette, the smoking rate in the United States was 22.5 percent. It is currently 15 percent, and the Centers for Disease Control predicts that in 2020, it will drop to 12 percent. Over 40 percent of American adults were smokers between the years of 1970 to 1975.
It seems unlikely that candy bars, cans of soda and bags of potato chips will become glamorous, but countless Americans consume awful and poisonous food, apparently, without much concern for the consequences.
A new report from the CDC demonstrates that obesity is no longer just a problem in the United States. It is a raging medicinal and financial crisis. Nearly 40 percent of Americans are obese, and almost 20 percent of adolescents suffer from obesity. Given that an additional 30 percent of Americans are overweight, those in the healthy weight range are now a skinny minority.
Obesity is a contributing cause to five of the ten leading causes of death in the United States. It significantly reduces mobility, enhances pain and lowers quality of life, even for those who do not eventually have to deal with heart disease, stroke, or diabetes. It also amounts to a crushing weight on the American health care system. The estimated annual health care costs of obesity-related illnesses are $190 billion, $14 billion of which is a result of childhood obesity.
Despite the devastation of poor dietary choices and sedentary habits, the American people have proven themselves committed, with indignation and aggression, to the cause of their downfall.
Gore Vidal once said, “I love stupidity. It excites me.” Regular viewers of the world’s greatest reality television program — The United States of America — might remember the episode when conservatives reacted with rage and hostility to Michelle Obama’s campaign to convince public schools to adopt healthy standards for school lunches. Republicans in politics and the media would regularly claim that Mrs. Obama was “taking away our freedom.” The Trump administration has already “relaxed” the cafeteria regulations.
In Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, the county board recently passed a “soda tax,” levying an additional charge on all high-sugar beverages in grocery and convenience stores. Opposition to the tax was so swift and severe that the county board, likely for fear of their jobs, unanimously voted to repeal the tax only two months after its implementation.
On the radio and television, I often heard testimonials from angry Chicago residents describing their drive over the border into Indiana to buy cases of Coca-Cola. All politics and economics aside, it never seemed to occur to them to save themselves the time by trying another beverage — perhaps, one without 39 grams of sugar in every 12 ounce can.
Even if they ended poorly, Michelle Obama’s school lunch program and the Cook County soda tax represent the right approach to the governmental intervention now necessary to mitigate the social emergency of obesity.
Since many Americans appear unwilling to reconsider their unhealthy lifestyles, it is time to call the nanny to duty.
Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler coined a term to capture the best set of policies governments can follow to “nudge,” people, using the title of their book on the subject, into making better choices: “libertarian paternalism.”
The phrase might sound odd and contradictory, but its logic is sound and its record is strong. Adults should have the freedom to make their own choices, even when they are unhealthy, but, in the words of Sunstein and Thaler, “it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.”
Smoking is legal, but someone who is contemplating quitting might feel a nudge in that direction after observing that the cost of a carton has significantly increased, and that his favorite restaurants and bars no longer permit the indoor use of tobacco products.
Taxes on unhealthy food, government-sponsored educational programs, and policies as simple as placing healthy snacks at eye-level in the cafeteria, while making junk food hard to find, can create similar success stories in the struggle of the American diet.
Libertarian paternalism, most significantly, has the likelihood of shifting social norms. Just as it is no longer cool for a teenager to light a cigarette, as I did in my attempt at courtship, it might soon become out of fashion to slug Mountain Dew and eat Twinkies.
Predictable paranoia, roaring with comparisons to Orwell and Huxley, will ensue, but serious people have more pressing matters to consider, such as life and death.
How should I talk to my kid about sexy Halloween costumes?
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Add the word “sexy” to pretty much anything and you have the inspiration for any number of women’s Halloween costumes. Sexy nurse, sexy cop, even sexy Olaf! It’s bad enough that party stores separate kids’ costumes into dated, strict gender roles (policemen for boys, princesses for girls). But when you get a costume catalog, go to the store, or do a Google search, you’re bombarded with the sexed-up versions of getups designed only for women.
At some point, your kids will start to notice that most of the options for women are ridiculously revealing. More than simply explaining that these disguises are for grown-ups, you can take the opportunity to help kids understand the sexy-costume phenomenon, how it sells women short, and how they can reject it and replace it with positive role models who communicate strength, intelligence — or anything else they want to be for Halloween (or in life).
Talk back. You’re not the only parent who’s fed up. Write the company selling this merchandise (like this mom did), and give them a piece of your mind. If your kids are old enough, encourage them to write letters.
Find positive role models. From Mayim Bialik to Mother Theresa, there are plenty of female role models for kids to dress up as. In fact, Halloween is a great time to really get into character. Look for inspiration from pop culture, history, books, and video games — the sky’s the limit.
Explain that some industries are behind the times. Just as many Hollywood movies reinforce dated stereotypes, mainstream Halloween costumes stubbornly refuse to see women for anything other than their potential for sexiness. Tell your kids that these ideas are limiting and insulting — and that your family doesn’t agree with them.
Separate “sex” from “sexism.” Sex between consenting adults is OK. And it’s natural for teens and even tweens to want to experiment with sexuality on a night when anything goes. Make sure older kids understand that you’re complaining about costumes that reduce women to the sum of their parts, not judging people for wanting to wear those costumes. And if your teen wants to be a little daring on Halloween, that’s a different conversation.
Explain how sex moves products faster. The Halloween selling season is short, about three months. In that time, costume companies need to make as much money as possible. The outrageousness of sexy Halloween costumes helps move merchandise quickly, since many folks choose to go all out on this night of all disguises.
