Steve Grand’s ‘All-American Boy’ and the End of the Gay-Panic Defense.

First published in The Daily Beast, July 10, 2013. Read the original (with comments) here.

Just in time for July Fourth, Steve Grand—a singer-songwriter who hopes to become the first gay male country icon—released his debut video on YouTube. “All-American Boy” is a paean to everything country: bonfires, whisky, pickup trucks, the American flag, skinny-dipping, and trying to make out with your best friend as soon as the girls are gone. In just a week it’s already racked up nearly a half million views on YouTube. Not bad for a 23-year-old kid from Chicago with no label, no agent, and no management.

Grand has the voice to make it, not to mention the face and the abs (especially the abs). But is country music ready for him? Who knows? Artists like k.d. lang and Chely Wright have proven that the world is ready for lesbian country singers, at least in a limited capacity; after all, neither of them is (or aspires to be) Miley Cyrus or Carrie Underwood. A true gay country star in his prime still seems as far away as a gay leading man. But even if Grand is just a sexy flash in the pan, the video for “All-American Boy” is still noteworthy.

In the video, we watch as Grand’s puppy-dog eyes stare longingly at his best friend across the campfire, in a pickup truck, and, finally, while splashing in the local swimming hole. As the music climaxes, he kisses his friend full on the mouth while they both tread water naked. For a long moment, everything is suspended as we wonder what will happen next. Is “All-American Boy” in the spirit of a “gay is good” mid-’90s independent film, where the rules of fantasy dictate that love can overcome all obstacles, even good-old-boy heterosexuality? Or are we about to watch the sort of brutal smackdown that’s all too common in both film and real life?

As it turns out, neither. The boy pulls away and returns to the party, as does Grand. The vibe between the two is unchanged. Sure, tomorrow at the rodeo there might be a few awkward moments, but you get the sense that that’s it. Grand gets to be disappointed without being disparaged, disowned, or disemboweled. And somehow, like nearly every living woman on earth, Grand’s love interest is able to handle a man’s unwanted advance without going ape shit and killing him. Astonishing, right?

The tradition of killing a man because he hits on you is so enshrined in our culture, it even has a name: the gay-panic defense (see: Matthew Shepard, Richard Barrett, Scott Amedure, etc., ad nauseum—very nauseum). “All-American Boy” is a sign that perhaps, just perhaps, the fragile flower of American masculinity has finally toughened the fuck up. Not that I don’t cherish my supposed ability to drive men crazy, but I’d like the crazy in question to be a little more metaphorical and a little less murder-y.

If there is a sea change in the making, it’s good news for straight guys as well as us predatory homosexuals. Just this June, the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section announced a proposal to urge the banning of the gay-panic defense in criminal proceedings, which will hopefully pass at its national meeting in August. The relevant text of the agenda for the meeting reads:

The Criminal Justice Section ... urges ... governments to take legislative action to curtail the availability and effectiveness of the “gay panic” and “trans panic” defenses, which seek to partially or completely excuse crimes on the grounds that the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity is to blame for the defendant’s violent reaction.

In recent years, the gay-panic defense has rarely carried the day in court, making this move somewhat symbolic. But homophobes, consider this a warning: very soon, you may have one less excuse in your arsenal. (Or maybe not very soon, considering the state of Congress at the moment.)

This change isn’t happening in a vacuum. Just a decade ago, the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 would have been unimaginable, in large part due to arguments that same-sex marriage would, in some ineffable way, damage straight marriages—or perhaps the very institution of marriage itself, not to mention the family, masculinity, femininity, religion, America, puppies, and apple pie. Today one need only Google around for a few seconds to find any number of amusing essays about what a ridiculous idea this is, many of them written by straight, married people.

Of course, these changes are all well and good in paper and pixels, but the real test will come when the rubber hits the road, or in this case, when the boy hits on the boy. And it should be noted that while the bar association urges banning the “trans panic defense” as well, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Program’s 2012 report, transgender people are 167 percent more likely to experience anti-LGBTQ hate violence than their gender-normative LGB counterparts. In fact, in 2012, 54 percent of all anti-LGBTQ homicide victims were transgender. In many states, anti-transgender discrimination in housing, employment, and other matters is still legal. Though the ABA’s resolution is a step in the right direction, given the magnitude of the problem, it is tantamount to putting a Band-Aid on a flesh wound. The lack of transgender legal protections in this country should be criminal, and it seems depressingly unlikely that the vast apparatus of anti-anti-marriage campaigns will transform any time soon into a broader movement for social justice for all LGBTQ individuals.

But still, I can’t watch “All-American Boy” without smiling, even if the boy doesn’t get the boy in the end. Unrequited longing is the essence of youth. Indeed, without it, Taylor Swift would have no career, and Twilight would have no audience. “All-American Boy” welcomes gay boys into the club.

The Boy in the Suitcase Review

First published on The Daily Beast on January 4 2012. Read the original here.

Until recently, the term “Scandinavian import” evoked blond wood and incomprehensible instructions, not tightly packed and darkly intricate crime novels. Stieg Larsson’s Swedish shockwave The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo changed that, making northern Europe a hotspot for mystery—and misogyny, as reviewers worldwide debated whether his books exposed violence against women, or recreated it. Now, thanks to Danish novelists Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis, there is an alternative for readers who want twists and thrills without Larsson’s undercurrents of sexual sadism—The Boy in the Suitcase.

(Just to get it out of the way, the title isn’t a rip-off. Kaaberbøl says “in our part of the world, the Larsson books don’t all have titles that start with ‘The Girl Who.’” The original Swedish title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women. The English title didn’t come about until 2008—the same year that The Boy in the Suitcase won the prestigious Harald Mogensen Award for best crime novel. And was short-listed for the Scandinavian Glass Key Award for crime fiction. And began being translated into 10 languages. And … well, you get the picture.)

The protagonist of The Boy in the Suitcase is Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse with a passion for dangerous circumstances. Equal parts humanitarian and adrenalin junkie, she works at a refugee center for undocumented women and children in Copenhagen. Her job brings her into contact with an unending stream of human misery, but it’s an old friend from nursing school that nearly gets her killed, when she asks Nina to retrieve a suitcase from a locker in a busy train station—the suitcase contains a boy. Alive, drugged, and nonverbal, the pursuit of his identity leads Nina to the edges of Danish society, where the ultrarich take whatever they want from the poorest of the poor, including their children.

While the plot is made up, it’s not implausible. Friis and Kaaberbøl did extensive interviews and research into the lives of undocumented children in Denmark. “What we discovered was really rather frightening,” says Kaaberbøl. “Over the past seven years more than 600 have quite simply disappeared from the refugee centers.” Through Nina, Friis and Kaaberbøl explore the chilling possibilities behind these disappearances.

For a book set in such a dark demi-monde, where teen prostitutes, human trafficking, and sexual abuse are frequently referenced, The Boy in the Suitcase is remarkably empathic. Much of the violence happens offstage, and what remains is neither sugar-coated nor wallowed in. We experience brutality’s aftermath (both physical and psychological), and Nina notes injuries in a nurse’s clinical tone. But Jucas, the Lithuanian petty thug who enacts most of the novel’s violence, is more likely to spend a beating thinking about his victim’s psychological sense of safety than the face beneath his fists. This was a conscious choice by the authors.

“When you’re very graphic about how people are being killed, and raped, and tortured and so on,” says Friis, “it’s almost as if what you’re writing is a how done it, where the how is almost more important than the who—and certainly more important than the why.”

The Boy in the Suitcase is haunting precisely because it is less interested in the mechanics of violence, and more interested in the causes. You feel as much the tragedy of lives wasted as the brutality of lives ended. But don’t worry, this isn’t some moody continental novel where the characters chain smoke and argue quietly about existentialism. The Boy in the Suitcaseratchets along at a breathless pace, skillfully switching points of view in a tightly choreographed arrangement. Perhaps this comes from the fact that Friis and Kaaberbøl are both acclaimed young-adult novelists, accustomed to writing for audiences that don’t do boring.

But more than the pacing, or even the actual mystery itself, the character of Nina is Friis and Kaaberbøl’s triumph. Socially responsible but parentally negligent, caring but capable of clinical detachment, she has a very real mix of flaws and strengths. Unlike many mystery protagonists, she is both someone we admire, and someone we feel we could be. She is not intrinsically, impossibly more skilled than we are (unlike a certain girl with a certain tattoo). But she does the things we only imagine doing.

“Like most people,” says Kaaberbøl of herself and Friis, “we just pay a certain amount to charity organizations and hope other people do the dirty work.”

Nina Borg is the fulfillment of that hope. At the end of The Boy in the Suitcase, when a panicked phone call brings a fresh mystery in the middle of the night, we know she cannot help but act. It’s what we wish she would do. It’s what we wish wewould do. Thankfully, the next Nina Borg book has already been published in Denmark, and should be on American shelves late next year, so we won’t have long until our hopes are realized.

Trafficked Women’s Second Chance

First published on The Daily Beast on October 14, 2011. Read the original here.

For 10 years, Maria (not her real name) was beaten, raped, and forced into prostitution by her husband, a New York City resident. He often refused to allow her food, locked her in a room without a toilet for days at a time, and made her buy drugs for him. As a non-English speaker induced to enter this country by the very man who tortured her, she had few options or resources.

“I was made to be a sexual slave,” Maria said, “to make him money.”

Over the course of a decade, she was arrested repeatedly on prostitution and drug charges, garnering a long and damning criminal record before her husband finally disappeared, leaving her with psychological scars—and a criminal record.

Maria, now a professional in the health-care field, is a survivor of human trafficking, a crime that may affect as many as 12 million people worldwide, according to the International Labour Organization, a U.N. human-rights agency. The most extraordinary part of Maria’s story is not the hell she went through,  but the fact that she escaped and put that life behind her.

Or at least, she tried to. Unfortunately for Maria, a criminal record stays with you forever. On every job interview, loan form, credit check, or visa application, she must disclose her arrests. In this Kafkaesque twist of the legal system, Maria is a victim indelibly marked as a criminal. Few offenses carry a greater stigma than prostitution, which makes finding work (or becoming a citizen) a near impossibility for her and other survivors.

Until recently, their options were few: lie, or find work in the shadowy world of undocumented labor. But this past spring, Maria became the first person in the country to have her record wiped clean of crimes she was forced into as a result of trafficking, thanks to a new state law that is the culmination of years of political organizing.

“There was no way to go back and erase a criminal conviction in New York,” says Sienna Baskin, co-director of the organization that helped Maria, the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center. SWP is a legal advocacy organization that helps sex workers of all kinds, from trafficked individuals to those who freely engage in commercial sex. In 2007, SWP helped create the New York Anti-Trafficking law, which made human trafficking a statewide offense.

“We wanted to have as part of that law a remedy for people who’ve been convicted of prostitution,” said Baskin, but it wasn’t included in the final bill. So in 2010, they drafted and were instrumental in passing Criminal Procedure Law §440.10(1)(i), which allows judges to vacate convictions directly related to an individual’s history as a trafficked person. This law, the first of its kind in the nation, gave Maria and other survivors the chance to truly leave their pasts behind. It also sparked a wave of similar organizing around the country.

“We were really interested in the law because we were seeing the same types of issues coming up with the clients we work with,” said James Dold, policy counsel at Polaris Project, a national group that tracks and assists state-level anti-trafficking organizing. Within a year of the New York law, vacating bills were passed in Nevada, Illinois, and Maryland, and other bills are pending or being organized in California, DC, Hawaii, Virginia, and Washington. These bills have wide bipartisan support, but certain provisions have caused some lawmakers to balk. Virginia’s bill, though it was Republican-sponsored, failed to pass on its first try because of concerns about “decided cases” being “re-opened.” Because prostitution is a state-level offense, Polaris Project and other organizers must adapt their bills to local realities.

“In all the states, we start out with something that is similar to the New York model,” said Dold, who referred to Criminal Procedure Law §440.10(1)(i) as the “gold standard.” Similar, however, doesn’t mean identical. For example, under the new Maryland law, Maria’s criminal charges would have been expunged, not vacated. What’s the difference?

“Expungement does not effect your criminal record for purposes of immigration,” said Baskin. “Immigration can still look at those criminal records and use them to deport you.” As many survivors, like Maria, are not U.S. citizens, this is a potentially dangerous loophole, which organizers like Baskin hope will be closed through amendments to the bill. These and other issues (including lack of funding for lawyers working with survivors) have slowed the implementation of these laws to a crawl.

Even in New York, with the “gold standard” law, only three survivors have seen their convictions vacated in the year the bill has been on the books. “We could bring a hundred of these motions tomorrow, if we had a hundred attorneys to work on them,” said Baskin. Although trafficked individuals are likely just a small portion of those involved in commercial sex, more and more have come forward as legal remedies have been created to help them. But funding, assistance, and education around the new laws take time.

As for Maria? “My whole life is different now,” she said. She has been reunited with her family, holds a T-visa (a special visa created for individuals trafficked into this country), and is in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen.

“When the door opens for you, your whole life changes.”

Storm King Turns 50

First published in The Daily Beast on June 4, 2010. Read the original, with photos, here.

In putting together Storm King Art Center’s 50th anniversary exhibit 5 + 5, David R. Collens faced a difficult task: designing a show that celebrated the sculpture park’s storied history, while also laying out a road map for Storm King’s next five decades.

Collens, who has been the director and curator of Storm King for more than 35 years, admits to not having done many group shows. For the anniversary, however, Collens worked with 10 artists—five with major exhibitions at Storm King already under their belts, and five mid-career sculptors whom he hadn’t shown before. The resultant exhibit, on view now through November 14, is filled with work by some of today’s most well-known outdoor sculptors.

Alice Aycock , Chakaia Booker, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, and Ursula von Rydingsvard represent the park’s history. To anyone acquainted with modern sculpture, their names conjure up distinct images: Booker’s repurposed tires and wearable pieces; di Suvero’s large-scale steel constructions. But it took more than just name recognition to secure a place in 5 + 5.

“I selected those five artists to represent people who really understood the landscape at Storm King and did something very different,” says Collens. With 500 acres of manicured grounds in the rolling Hudson Valley, Storm King offers a wide variety of sites for installation, yet many artists go no further than the area around the museum building. Collens looked for those sculptors who would do something more innovative.

Goldsworthy has taken one of the park’s existing stone walls and used it to create one of his natural compositions. Visitors are invited to walk the length of the wall (which Storm King calls a “sketch in stone”) and observe the way in which Goldsworthy seamlessly blends natural dilapidation and ephemeral construction.

But Collens’ curatorial vision shines brightest in his selection of the five new artists—John Bisbee, Maria Elena González, Darrell Petit, Alyson Shotz, and Stephen Talasnik. “It was time to pass the torch to a younger generation,” says Collens, an idea with which all of the more experienced artists in the show agree.

5 + 5 brings in not just new sculptors, but ones who embrace daring forms, innovative uses of the space, and original concepts for what outdoor sculpture can be. The show is stretching the dimensions of Storm King and playfully changing the ways in which works on display can coexist.

Sixteen platforms were designed by González to be arrayed throughout the grounds. When viewed from one, visitors on another will look to be part of sculptures in the permanent collection. For instance, from the vantage of platform three, visitors on platform four will look to be perfectly balanced atop Menashe Kadishman’s Suspended sculpture as González incorporates observers into the roles of artist and art.

In Stream: A Folded Dream, Talasnik has created a 12-foot-high, 90-foot-long structure made of more than 3,000 bamboo rods. Throughout the exhibition, it will serve as a backdrop for both music and dance performances, something Storm King hasn’t done before.

“It’s quite a counterpoint to stone and steel and other materials we have,” says Collens. In curating 5 + 5, he wanted to avoid just bringing “more metal into Storm King—[as] we have plenty of it.” The 10 selected artists use everything from metal nails, cedar, and granite to reflective plastic, rubber, and earth.

5 + 5 is as diverse for its sculptors as it is for its works. Talasnik, a visual artist by training, has only been showing sculpture since 2000, while di Suvero had his first museum pieces in 1959. And while the recent documentary Who Does She Think She Is? laments the woeful underrepresentation of women in most major museums, half the artists in 5 + 5 are female.

When asked if this gender parity is purposeful, Collens says: “From my perspective, I’m trying to find the best I can in terms of sculpture, male or female, national or international.” Though if there is one way the exhibit is lacking, it is in terms of geographic and ethnic diversity. All of the artists are American, Canadian or European (though di Suvero was born in China, and Gonzalez in Cuba), all but Goldsworthy live in the United States, and only two are people of color. Storm King, like the art world in general, still has some distance to go.

“I think we need to adapt and change like all institutions,” Collens says. If 5 + 5 is any indication, Storm King’s next 50 years are up to the challenge.

Storm King Art Center is located in Mountainville, New York. Visiting hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 10:30 a.m.—5:30 p.m. More information is available at www.StormKing.org.

Pigs' Blood in Cigarettes?

This gallery was originall published on The Daily Beast on 5/25/2010. Read it in its entirety, with comments, here.

As Vegetarian Week kicks off in the U.K., it’s more difficult than ever to observe it faithfully. From horse fat in fabric softener to crushed insects in fruit juice, Hugh Ryan locates animal products in 11 unlikely places.

1) Fabric Softener
What could possibly make your sheets feel more Downy fresh than a nice schmear of rendered animal fat? Dihydrogenated tallow dimethyl ammonium chloride—a roundabout way of saying fat from animals like horses and sheep—is used by some commercial fabric softeners to coat your clothes with a soft, fluffy layer of lipids.

2. Pink Drinks
Cochineal, natural red 4, crimson lake, carmine, carminic acid—call it what you will, but the additive that gives many drinks their distinctive pink color, from wine coolers to ruby-red grapefruit juices, is made from crushed South American bugs. The female cochineal insect has been harvested for dye since the era of the Aztecs. Depending on the way in which the insect is killed (methods include boiling alive, exposure to sunlight, steaming, and baking), it produces a range of reddish tints. It takes approximately 70,000 insects to make one pound of dye.

3. Wine & Beer
Some people drink like fish. Others just drink fish—or at least, the dried, ground-up swim bladders of fish. Isinglass, derived mostly from sturgeon and cod bladders, is used to clarify and remove impurities from many varieties of wine and beer. Small amounts of isinglass remain in the products when finished. For thirsty vegans, the website Barnivore maintains a list of animal-friendly wines, beers, and spirits.

4. Flu Vaccine
A variety of vaccine rumors and conspiracy theories abound. One true one, however, is this: flu vaccines aren’t vegetarian. Fertilized chicken eggs in the embryonic phase are used to cultivate the inactivated flu virus that is injected into millions of people every year. The vaccine was originally developed by the U.S. military for use in World War II, to help prevent a recurrence of the Spanish Influenza that killed 50 million people in the wake of World War I.

5. Cigarettes
The multitude of sins that can be hidden under the phrase “processing aids”—a catchall term for ingredients used to control tar and nicotine content in cigarettes—apparently includes pigs’ blood. New Dutch research from March of this year has found traces of porcine hemoglobin in the filters of some brands of cigarettes. In blood, hemoglobin bonds to oxygen to transport it throughout the body; in filters, it bonds to passing toxins and removes them from the smoke before it enters the lungs.

6. Lipstick
Some shimmery lipsticks owe their twinkle to a rather lowly source—fish scales. According to The Straight Dope, a syndicated question-and-answer column published in over 30 newspapers nationwide, herring scales, a byproduct of commercial food fishing, are processed into a product called “pearl essence,” which can be found in lipsticks, nail polishes, ceramic glazes, and other sparkly stuff. The fish are caught in giant nets and pumped into boats, a process that flenses the scales from their bodies, often while still alive. The scales are then sold to cosmetic companies.

7. Sugar
When it comes to sugar, the phrase “bone white” isn’t a metaphor. According to the non-profit Vegetarian Resource Group, cane sugar is often bleached using bone char from horses and cows, a.k.a. “natural charcoal.” Bone particles don’t end up in the final product; rather, the bone char is used as a filter, like a piece of cheesecloth made from ponies. An average sugar filter contains about 70,000 pounds of bone char from approximately 7,800 animals. To avoid bone char entirely, buy sugar derived from beets, not sugar cane.

8. Hormone Replacement Therapy
Premarin, the popular estrogen-replacement drug for menopausal women, takes its name from its main ingredient: PREgnant MARes’ urINe. Since 1942, female horses have been impregnated and fitted with the equine equivalent of colostomy bags. These gather their urine, which is then processed to produce estrone, equilin, and equilenin. Historically, the foals were eventually sent to slaughterhouses, though today, many pregnant mares’ urine (PMU) operations also act as traditional horse breeders.

9. Bloody Marys
Sometimes it’s the ingredients in the ingredients that make a product not vegetarian. Bloody Marys, the reliable brunch standby, are usually made with tomato juice, vodka, celery, and Worcestershire sauce, which contains anchovies, making it literally bloody. Some Bloody Mary recipes also call for beef consommé. There are vegetarian Worcestershire sauces out there, so just ask to see the label before you order.

10. Heparin
The anticoagulant drug heparin is derived from the slippery mucosal tissue found in pig’s intestines and cow’s lungs. Used to treat blood clots, it was originally isolated in dog livers in 1916, and has since been found in a long list of animals, including sand dollars, humans, camels, whales, mice, fresh-water mussels, lobsters, and turkeys. Its natural purpose in the body is still not fully understood.

11. Green Motor Oil
“Green” doesn’t always mean animal-free. Some companies have taken to replacing traditional petrochemical-based motor oil with cow fat. Companies claim to be able to make as much as one barrel of oil per barrel of tallow, as compared with the three barrels of petroleum needed to make one barrel of traditional motor oil.

The Books Powerful Women Love

Originally published on The Daily Beast on 4/27/2010. Read it in its entirety, with comments, here.

In a few days, one of America’s most beloved teens turns 80. Nancy Drew, girl detective, first appeared in print on April 28, 1930, in The Secret of the Old Clock. With her two best friends, George Fayne and Bess Marvin, she tooled around River Heights in a dark blue roadster, solving crimes, exploring secret passages, and foiling bad guys.

Three hundred books, a dozen video games, five films, and two TV series later, Nancy’s still at it. These days, she drives a sky-blue hybrid and carries a cell phone, but River Heights still depends on her to prevent everything from identity theft to political assassinations. Her books don’t follow any of the hot trends in young adult fiction: Nancy fights no zombies, owns no designer clothes, and lusts after nary a vampire. Yet each new book has a print run of 25,000 and, cumulatively, the books have sold more than 200 million copies. It’s hard to imagine another cultural icon that could bring together Sonia Sotomayor and Laura Bush, both of whom cite Nancy as an inspiration.

What is it about this octogenarian detective that keeps girls coming back, generation after generation?

“Nancy Drew is chicken soup,” laughs Emily Lawrence, associate editor at the Aladdin imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing. For the last two years, Lawrence has been the woman at the heart of the Nancy Drew machine, overseeing the current series, Nancy Drew Girl Detective. She’s in charge of keeping Nancy contemporary. To this end, the books are now written in the first person and published in trilogies, to give modern readers the sense of character growth and story line they’ve come to expect. Like another longstanding crime brand, Law & Order, they use a “ripped from the headlines” approach to modernize the stories, which include crimes set in reality-television shows and social network cyber-bullying. Lawrence attributes many of these plot advancements to the variety of writers who have written Nancy Drew over the years (spoiler alert: Carolyn Keene never existed). But Lawrence believes Nancy remains popular mostly for the ways in which she hasn’t changed.

“People know what they’re getting,” says Lawrence. “You’re visiting your old friends every time you crack open a book.” This consistency has created what Lawrence calls “megafans”: women (and some men) who are almost evangelical in their love for Nancy Drew.

Jennifer Fisher, writer and president of the Nancy Drew Sleuths Fan Club, is perhaps the queen of the megafans. For the last decade, she’s organized an annual Nancy Drew convention that has drawn upward of 100 fans from around the world. This year, to celebrate the 80th anniversary, she also put together a “Sleuths at Sea” cruise.

“Nancy Drew’s a good role model,” says Fisher. “She was always very kind and good to others—unless they were criminals.”

In a word, Nancy is wholesome, a concept that rarely equals popularity among today’s mainstream tweens. But for parents, educators, and megafans, this means being able to pass along the books—even ones they haven’t read—without worrying about the content.

Everyone agrees that part of Nancy’s continued popularity is this legacy effect. But many things, from Peter, Paul & Mary records to Mary Jane shoes, have been passed down without catching on. What makes Nancy different is that she is one of the last bastions of innocence. As young adult fiction becomes more R-rated with each passing year, Nancy remains resolutely asexual and noncommercial.

“Ned and Nancy just hug. That’s a conscious choice. Her character was never about boys or clothes or makeup. She’s always been the smart girl who uses her head,” says Lawrence, commenting on the lack of sex and product placement in the books. An effort was made in the 1980s to tart Nancy up, in a series called Nancy Drew Case Files, which Lawrence regards as a failure. “It’s a great cautionary tale,” she says. “Don’t mess with the formula.”

In Nancy-land, a girl’s first priority is justice, with friendship a close second. Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s boyfriend, is a distant third—if he’s even in a particular book at all.

This asexuality attracts a different kind of reader from, say, the girls who are picking up Private, a popular modern series about young women at boarding school. Like many titles aimed at girls, it focuses primarily on sex, clothes, and backstabbing. It’s the anti-Nancy, and its prevalence goes a long way to getting at the heart of why Nancy is still popular.

“Reading itself is an outsider activity,” says Carolyn Dyer, author of Rediscovering Nancy Drew and professor emeritus at the University of Iowa. “Girls who read, especially voraciously, are not the girls most focused on popular culture.” And this is even truer, she believes, for the girls who read Nancy Drew.

Although Dyer and Lawrence dance around the subject, they see the girls drawn to Nancy Drew as emotionally younger than their counterparts, perhaps more naïve, and markedly less interested in sex and relationships. The Nancy Drew novels are kids’ books written for kids, not for tweens who long to be teenagers or teenagers who long to be in college. For these girls, Nancy Drew is one of the few mainstream, grade-level-appropriate options out there.

“They’re going to turn to Twilight when they want one thing and they’re going to turn to Nancy when they want something else,” says Lawrence.

That something remains, as it has always been, the adventures of a young woman and her friends, fighting for justice, having fun along the way, and not giving a damn what the boys think.

The Problem With Pro-Choice Men

Originally published on The Daily Beast on 2/5/2010. Read it in its entirety, with comments, here.

This weekend, Tim Tebow, the Florida Gators quarterback, will star in a contentious anti-abortion Super Bowl ad sponsored by the conservative Christian group, Focus on the Family. The ad comes just over a week after another man, Scott Roeder, was found guilty of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, one of the only doctors in the country providing legal and safe third-trimester abortions.

As usual, it seems men have a lot to say about the things women shouldn’t do. Indeed, the pro-life camp seems to have little trouble finding men who will stump for it loudly and forcefully. Mel Gibson, Ben Stein, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas have all lent their voices to the anti-abortion movement, to say nothing of more radically religious actors like Stephen Baldwin and Kirk Cameron. Male professional athletes have also been willing to speak out against abortion—besides Tebow, Washington Redskins cornerback Darrell Green and three-time Super Bowl winner Chad Hennings have both done so. In 1989, six members of the New York Giants Super Bowl-winning team went so far as to make a video called Champions for Life for the anti-abortion group, American Life League.

When male celebrities talk about abortion, they’re usually saying that it should be illegal. The pro-life side of the debate has far outpaced the pro-choice side in lining up strong men’s voices. The Tebow ad threw this into relief, and in response, Planned Parenthood Federation has crafted its own video featuring former professional athletes Al Joyner and Sean James.

But in a way, the spot only seems to highlight how far behind in the gender game the pro-choice side is. Tebow is a Heisman Trophy-winning QB in the prime of his career, while Joyner and James have considerably less star-power. James was a rookie free agent with the Minnesota Vikings for one season in the early 1990s, and Joyner, brother of track star Jackie, is best known for his Olympic gold-medal win—in 1984.

Outspoken pro-choice men are in such short supply that when Scott Fujita, the linebacker from the New Orleans Saints, offered a few tepid comments about how he and Tebow “might not see eye to eye” on the issue, it was treated as the pro-choice camp’s official (and most forceful) masculine response. Though all three of these men should be commended for speaking up for freedom of choice, the fact that they are the defining male retort doesn’t paint a strong picture of men in the movement.

Tait Sye, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, says that even these few celebrities (and other outspoken men) “help to get our message out. They add a little bit of buzz.” He cites The Sporting News, a respected online sports outlet, which summarized the ad as “male athletes preaching to think twice before following the preachings of another male athlete.”

But is it too little, too late? The pro-choice movement has been losing male supporters at an alarming rate for at least a decade. A 2009 Gallup poll found that only 39% of men identified as pro-choice—a drastic 10 percent decrease from 2008.

Pro-choice activists argue that there’s more to the issue than one poll, however. Ted Miller, Communications Director at NARAL Pro-Choice America, points to South Dakota. When a legislative ban on abortions was defeated in 2006, anti-abortion activists claimed that a similar bill, with exceptions for rape and incest, would pass in the next legislative cycle. In 2008, the bill, now with exceptions, was handily defeated again, and both pre- and post-polling showed men and women equally against it.

Perhaps in the privacy of the ballot-box, men are able to “woman up” a little and vote to protect freedom of choice. Yet many men seem unwilling to identify with the “pro-choice” label, and when it comes to the work of the movement, men are scarce on the ground...

Read the rest here. Read what the John Birch Society thinks of me here. Yes, they do group me together with murdered doctor George Tiller. Should I worry?