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Week of
December 01, 2011 | | RAGING HORMONES An allegation that Herman Cain had a 13-year extramarital affair has compelled the GOP candidate to “reassess” his campaign. But why, with all of these alleged skeletons in his closet, did Cain run for president in the first place? The Daily Beast’s Michelle Cottle on a possible culprit: testosterone, a hormone that’s been shown to make men become more selfish and entitled. MAMA DRAMA As the new blog Dadding boldly enters the booming mommy blogosphere, writer Amy Reiter asks: why are women are still defined by motherhood? Men have long been allowed to wear their “dad” label loosely, tucking that persona wherever they like on the long list of things that define them. “Once we leave the home or the playground,” says dad blogger Nathan Thornburgh, “we get to be captains of industry, drunks, amateur fishermen, whatever the hell we want to be.” Not so for women, Reiter writes, arguing that the time has come for women to resist being identified solely as mothers. EXCLUSIVE With their father, Keith Brown, behind bars for molesting them as children, sisters Desirae and Deondra Brown of the classical quintet the 5 Browns talk publicly for the first time about their ordeal, how their family reacted to the news, their father’s denials—and why they went to the police. PHOTOSHOP WARS In fashion and beauty magazines, photographs of celebrities and models are constantly retouched with Photoshop to make lips look fuller and hips smaller—but readers, feminists, and scientists are eager to reverse the trend. Computer scientists at Dartmouth are proposing a software tool that will measure how drastically photos are altered, based on realistic human-body proportions; the research, being published this week, intends to address concerns about how airbrushing can contribute to body-image anxiety and eating disorders. Lesley Jane Seymour, editor-in-chief of More magazine, says readers have developed a keen eye for Photoshopped images and would prefer celebrities to look “real.” Want to get involved? Check out the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which works to change female portrayals and gender stereotypes in children's media and entertainment. BATTLE Elena Reynaga, the head of two of Latin America’s biggest charities that aim to help sex workers, is calling for the creation of a union for sex workers. Reynaga spent 30 years a prostitute until she left to head up Redtrasex (Latin American and Caribbean Sex Workers Network) and Anmar (Female Sex Workers’ Association of Argentina), which operates as an unofficial trade union. But Reynaga wants to take it one step further and make sex workers officially unionized. “We consider ourselves working people,” Reynaga says. “We want to get all the rights that people who work enjoy: the right to a pension, social security …” As World AIDS Day approaches on Thursday, Reynaga said she hopes a union would help combat the spread of the deadly virus among sex workers. | | 
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