i am angry at slate

no doubt the site's staff are weeping into their macchiatos about it, too, but i won't hide it for their sake. i'm too disappointed to care about sparing anyone's feelings.

the idea of a filmed execution was always, in my mind, one of those morbid jokes thrown out at the tail end of a conversation about a society's ethical and intellectual decline; you know, "if they keep it up with these reality shows, there won't be anything left to put on the air but people eating babies and live executions." the image of a mob of townsfolk gathering around the gallows was a symbol of a darker age, one which we, in our triumphant role as citizens of The Fucking Greatest Fucking Nation Fucking Ever, could laugh about disparagingly from our pre-fab homes with their bleach-coated counters and ultracivilized sofa sets. but i haven't been watching the reality shows, and so i didn't realize how far down the chute things had slid. the cell phone footage of saddam hussein's execution is all over the internet, and while i would expect it to crop up on independent pages and wouldn't have been at all surprised to find it front and center on, say, the fox news site (where, in actuality, it occupies no such position), i was deeply creeped out to see links pointing to pages with names like FunnyVideoSpot.com and comic2.com, and i was terribly unhappy to find the video smack-dab in the center of slate, with its eye-catching red and yellow "graphic content" banner giving the finger to the idea of journalistic decorum. i never looked to jacob weisberg and his apple dumpling gang for even-tempered objectivism, but i did believe i could count on them to not be morally bankrupt sensationalists. sometimes i had to squint to get it to pop up out of its verdana background like a typographic autostereogram, but there was, as a rule, some worthwhile information in almost every piece of work they put up.

almost.

william saletan's "human nature" column, slate's version of a scientific catch-all, may or may not live up to its title. all but one of the ten headlines in the current list involve drugs, fat, or the human reproductive system. i like to think that my own personal nature encompasses a somewhat broader variety of interests and activities, but who knows? i could be kidding myself.

today's column sports the heading, "mop vs. mastectomy: does housework prevent breast cancer?" you, being the astute between-the-lines reader that you are, may already have guessed at the alternate title: "hey, angry feminist! over here! you will not believe how pissed off you're about to get!" the blurb is about a research article recently published in cancer epidemiology biomarkers & prevention which reports a correlation between the amount of housework women perform and breast-cancer risk. there are a number of important factors that should be mentioned in relation to the data reported, such as that the data on housework only included past-year activity and that there was no record of the frequency, duration, and specific intensities of reported occupational activities. i'd also be very curious to know how many children each of the subjects had had, whether any of them underwent fertility treatment in order to become pregnant, whether or not they had breastfed and for what duration . . . things that were, according to its authors, outside the scope of this particular study, which aimed only to explore the relationship between activity levels and cancer, but which are every bit as relevant as other variates that were included, such as age at first pregnancy and education. besides, if they only collected activity data from the past year, they don't have much of a case for that specific relationship, anyhow. women do not get breast cancer because eleven months ago they started vacuuming the house every other sunday instead of twice a week.

or do they? e-zine enthusiasts may never know. saletan, in his skimpy overview of the work, doesn't seem to have any interest in the study's merit or lack thereof. of all the things he could have brought up in this column he is paid to maintain, he chose to close with this zinger:

Male spin: See, women belong in the home. Female spin: Now, for that study of housework and prostate cancer…

oy. maybe we get breast cancer from dismissive un-jokes. i hope it isn't positively correlated with eye strain, because i am squinting and squinting, but i just can't see the sailboat . . .


update, 1/4/07, 1:28 PM: could one tiny blogger have so much power? i wouldn't bet the lint in my pocket on it, but slate has taken the execution footage down and replaced it with frames from comic books about the human toll of the iraq war, and the two newest "human nature" references are to south carolina's proposed intention to start collecting dna from anyone and everyone arrested in the state and nasa's, um, nasa stuff. no pot! no gonads! still a semi-weak one-two close, but with a far more embraceable tone. nothing more than a happy synchronicity, i'm sure, but the sky is very blue and i'm willing to try to forgive and forget. don't think this means you can slouch, though, guys; weisberg, saletan--i've got my eye on you. my squinty, piercing eye.