Stand by your man

No wonder they call women ''nurturers.''

When Dr. Marc Chamberlain, a Seattle oncologist, was treating his brain cancer patients, he noticed an alarming pattern. His male patients were typically receiving much-needed support from their wives. But a number of his female patients were going it alone, ending up separated or divorced after receiving a brain tumor diagnosis.

Dr. Chamberlain, chief of the neuro-oncology division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, had heard similar stories from his colleagues. To find out if these observations were based in fact, he embarked on a study with Dr. Michael J. Glantz of the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute and colleagues from three other institutions who began to collect data on 515 patients who received diagnoses of brain tumors or multiple sclerosis from 2001 through 2006.

The results were surprising. Women in the study who were told they had a serious illness were seven times as likely to become separated or divorced as men with similar health problems, according to the report published in the journal Cancer.

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If couples are happy before the diagnosis, it appears that men are more likely to abandon wives who become seriously ill. If couples are already troubled before a partner becomes ill, the finding suggests that women in unhappy marriages are less likely to proceed with a divorce if their husbands become ill.

“All these patients were couples when we met them, but we don’t know about pre-diagnosis marital conflicts that had been festering,” Dr. Chamberlain said. “But the striking part is with life-threatening illness, how often women are abandoned compared to men. That does not speak very well of my gender.”

Now I can hear many readers going, yeah, right, just when she needs him, he's out the door, the bastard.

But I'm going to be charitable here with my theory, based purely on my experience, while acknowledging that it is a gross generalization, okay?

Most women mull over problems, get emotional, call all their friends, go to their shrinks, get 70 opinions. This is why they have to try on everything in their closet before they go out and then ask if they look fat in this.

Men, on the other hand, are ''fixers'' and ''doers.'' They take action, pull out the tool box, get things out of the way, decide instantly, ensure that's ''taken care of.''

If you tell a guy you have heartburn, he will think you're expecting him to perform open heart surgery. Tell a woman that, and she'll get you an antacid, lecture you on chowing down on that Triple Bacon and Sausage pizza and soothe your fears that your having a heart attack.

See how it goes?

If men can't fix things, they feel like failures.

This is the very worst fate than can befall a man, that feeling of inadequacy, of not measuring up. He has been brainwashed since birth to achieve and to never lose points. Because he tends not to have emotional support systems like women do, he keeps that failure bottled up inside. Sometimes it leads to terrible tragedy -- substance abuse, suicide, murder-suicide in the case of men whose wives walk out.

Because of all this, I am not surprised that so many men feel they can't cope and quit just when they're most needed.

The uncharitable view? They're just something-the-Star-won't-let-print-here.

And that dear reader, is your 2-bit psychology lesson for today.

H/T Unrepentant Hippie

Glamour Shot

My Facebook friend Alisa asks a good question: 

I read in the paper that Rihanna got named "woman of the year" by Glamour magazine. So all you need is to get beaten up by you by your famous boyfriend and that makes you a woman of the year?

Why yes, apparently so.

Although Rihanna is very accomplished for a woman so young, it's a safe bet that she was honoured this year because of the much-discussed pummeling she received from former longtime love Chris Brown.

Note however that she is not the only ''Woman of the Year.'' She's joined by a dozen others, including Michelle Obama, Maya Angelou and Serena Williams. 

Still, Rihanna has a hot new CD coming out, and, on it, she has a look that seems to exploit the publicity she received after being beaten. Bet that's the biggest reason for her landing Glamour's cover.

Glamour: If you could offer a message to the millions of young women who look up to you, what would you tell someone who found herself in a similar situation?

Rihanna: Domestic violence is a big secret. No kid goes around and lets people know their parents fight. Teenage girls can’t tell their parents that their boyfriend beat them up. You don’t dare let your neighbor know that you fight. It’s one of the things we [women] will hide, because it’s embarrassing. My story was broadcast all over the world for people to see, and they have followed every step of my recovery. The positive thing that has come out of my situation is that people can learn from that. I want to give as much insight as I can to young women, because I feel like I represent a voice that really isn’t heard. Now I can help speak for those women.

Glamour: I think that’s a great message. What about your new album? What’s it like?

It is a great message.You can't repeat it often enough.

But do tell us about your album anyway ... and your shoes ... and your hair ...

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Another take, by Broadsheet's Tracy Clark-Flory.

It's inevitable that every song and video released by Rihanna in the near future will be subject to a critical exegesis. She's been elected the new poster-child for domestic violence and, as such, is expected to deliver the appropriate public service announcement -- but let's not forget that it's her experience. She owns it; not us. As she told Glamour: "Even if people don’t love [the album], I made exactly the piece of art that I wanted to make. It’s super fearless -- which is exactly how I feel right now. I am in a really good place."

Press Stalk

Apologies for light posting but all kinds of personal goings-on have been going down.

Most important, a cherished friend and very special person died. I will be writing more about that later this week.

Meantime, enjoy:

TIRED UPPITY WOMAN UPDATE: I posted this late, and in haste. I should have added that, while this video is amusing, it's also alarming. Click here and you'll see why.

Facebook him

For all the lovers out there who stalk each other on Facebook -- and you know how dangerous that is --  this from Throw'd TV:

Heh.

Sex, Lies & Videotape

(Okay, so the headline is a cliché. So shoot me.)

Via Dammit Janet, this stunning decision by Quebec Superior Court Justice Sylvianne Borenstein.

It's in the other official language so we'll quote from Law in Quebec.

A Quebecer who filmed and took pictures of sexual escapades with a 20-year old woman and then distributed it on the Internet was condemned to pay $39,000 in damages.

In a brief four-page ruling, Quebec Superior Court Judge Sylviane Borenstein held that the man breached her fundamental rights by intentionally and illicitly invading her privacy, and that his conduct cannot be tolerated or trivialized by the courts. “The actions were ignoble and the Court expresses its indignation over these actions. One can understand that the woman, who is only 20 years old, feels betrayed and humiliated.”

The Court issued a publication order that forbids media from identifying the parties in order not to aggravate the harm she has suffered.

Judge Borenstein barred the man from communicating, distributing, publishing, reproducing, or transmitting pictures, e-mails or videos of the filmed events as well as prohibited him from reaching her in any way. Further, the Court prohibited him from having in his possession photographs and videos of the plaintiff.

As deBeauxOs puts it, ''good.''

This is no one-off kind of situation, a rarity, in which a guy shoots himself with a woman doing the squishy thing and then posts it online. It happens a lot.

For those 250 YouPorn "ex-girlfriends" who made private sex videos for strictly personal use, only to find them released online, their rights to privacy will likely go unprotected.

People post sexually explicit images without consent all the time, says Janine Benedet a professor in the UBC faculty of law. "It is a devastating attack. There is no legal mechanism for victims to get their pictures back once they're out there, despite the fact that there is lingering harm."

Any Canadian who posts online content is subject to obscenity laws laid out in the Criminal Code of Canada. Even if the server that hosts the content is outside Canada, if there is a connection to Canada, the offender can be charged.

But Benedet, who specializes in pornography law, says there are very few cases where Internet posts have been deemed illegal by the courts. In one Ontario case, a man was charged with distributing child porn. In another Ontario case, a man was charged with extortion for threatening that he would post nude pictures of a woman on the Internet if she didn't continue to sleep with him.

I know of one victim, as well as another young woman whose ex-boyfriend threatened to post a video (shot without her knowledge or consent) if she would not get back together with him. In the latter case, I will just say that it got handled in a way that was legal, but just legal, if you get my drift.

While I suppose it can work both ways with the occasional vengeful woman posting compromising pics of her ex online -- and I know one woman who did that too -- let's not kid ourselves. It's all about slut-shaming and humiliating women.

What I don't get is why this decision hasn't received more publicity.

It should be front page news.

Chew him up and spitzer out

Provocative, as usual, column from my friend and colleague Rosie Dimanno today, about ''cuckolded''  wives such as Elizabeth Edwards and Veronica Lario Berlusconi not ''manning up'' and suffering their cheating husbands silently.

Both have been profoundly wronged, certainly to hear them tell, which each is doing via the vehicle of biography and TV confessional, for one, and ambushing emails to the media, for the other.

Say what you will about husbands who are cads – as their respective spouses, disgraced Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – appear to be. Yet males, even those who have been on the violated end of infidelity, are rarely wont to open a vein in public.

There are exceptions to this generalization, of course. But for the most part, men do not go whingeing to Oprah or pen avenging memoirs that simultaneously mortify a couple's children or wash the dirty BVDs out in the open.

I suspect this comes from the social conditioning of boys, who are still raised to not shed tears in public or otherwise reveal themselves as pussies. Girls, by comparison, are nurtured in the culture of tattle and tell-all grievance from the time they're subjected to their first schoolyard name-calling.

Females are inundated with mass media messaging – subliminal and overt – about bred-in-the-genes persecution, the biological and manifest destiny of their X chromosome, the gender for whom offence is endlessly done to.

The consequence, too often, is a kind of emotional indigestion with public burping as the antacid, especially for women who can command an audience.

They seek public validation for their pain.

Ummm ... and feel free to jump in here Rosie if you read this -- a guest post would be awesome -- but I don't think it's so simple.

For one thing, I don't think Senora Berlusconi is all that tearful. Instead, she's out kicking billion dollar butt.

For another, Edwards handled the situation when it happened with discretion and aplomb.

Like so many other politcal wives who are forced to stand by their man while they make tearful public mea culpas after being caught with their pants down with hookers or in men's rooms -- remember Eliot Spitzer's wife Silda? -- she is not curling up into a fetal position.

Maybe it was political opportunism on the Edwards' part -- although how anybody could believe this would never come out is kinda crazy. I truly believe Elizabeth took a ''this is nobody's business but ours'' approach.

Now she's cashing in. Good for her.

Of course I can't say how many male pols have been cheated on because, after all, the media aren't interested in what non-elected people do. Besides, cuckolded men tend not to hold news conferences. 

The only reason anybody cares what Edwards and Lario have to say is because their husbands were/are famous cheaters.

P.S.I know the origin of the word cuckold relates to the cuckoo but I liked this photo better.

Family ties

And so, Bristol Palin, daughter of would-be vice-president Sarah Palin, becomes another single teen mother statistic. Or so it would appear according to this story I found via Dammit Janet! and that Unrepentant JJ: 

The teen romance that prompted a pregnant pause in Sarah Palin's bid to become U.S. Vice President is reportedly over.

Bristol Palin and fiancé Levi Johnston have broken up after she referred to his family as "white trash," the hockey-playing  hunk's sister dished to Star magazine.

Mercede Johnston says the 18-year-old daughter of Alaska's Republican  governor dumped her brother, Levi, an out-of-work high school drop out.

 And she said Bristol Palin, who took her beau to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., has made it tough for him to spend time with his 2-month-old son, Tripp.

"Levi tries to visit Tripp every single day, but Bristol makes it nearly impossible," Mercede Johnston told Star Magazine.

"She [Bristol] tells him he can't take the baby to our house because she doesn't want him around 'white trash'!" she said.

In December, Levi Johnston's mother, Sherry, was busted in an undercover drug sting and charged with six felonies involving the pain killer oxycontin.

<SNIP>

The sister said Bristol Palin's demeaning attitude  has been bolstered by Sarah Palin.

"I used to love Sarah," she said. "But I've lost lots of respect for her."

So many set-up lines, which punchline to choose?

Looking back, I guess the wolf-shootin-tootin Sarah managed to get out her shotgun for last fall's political campaign, even though, right off the bat, there were doubts that Dude Jr., whose MySpace page gave us all the willies,  would make the political scene.

But he did and it was a photo opp bonanza.

A wedding date was set, for after the birth of the baby.

Ah, puppy love.

Frankly, I am happy that Bristol, who recently piped up against abstinence education, isn't getting hitched to this young man...but only if it's her choice.

Mama Bear is very overbearing, as we have seen.

However I am waiting for all the men's rights types to weigh in on Johnson's access to his son.

Incidentally, will Ann Coulter take up her anti-single mother cudgel here?

UP YOURS LEVI DATE: AP has confirmed the split.

Kid you not

Just one of those things that made me snarf my coffee all over my monitor a few moments ago:

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

No profound reason for posting it. It just cracked me up.

Til death do them part!

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

On December 19, Ken Starr, defender of truth and justice and morality, and his band of homophobes and haters the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed the papers to annul all gay and lesbian marriages performed in California between May and November of last year.

Now there's a petition to stop these ''pro-family'' and ''sanctity of marriage'' hypocrites from destroying people's lives. It's here.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, 2009, with a decision expected within the next 90 days. We, the undersigned, ask that the Court invalidate Prop 8 and recognize the marriage rights of these 18,000 couples -- and all loving, committed couples in California -- under our state's constitution.

I don't know if Canadian signatures count but they can't hurt. As for my American readers, you know what to do.

Cover your assets, kids

Quick slap-up here of today's treeware column, about that palimony case in Montreal involving the billionaire and his ex, the Brazilian ''model'' who mothered his three kids.

I've added a few links and notes for your edification.

It's a pity that the case that may end up testing common-law family property rights involves a Quebec billionaire father and a Brazilian beauty fighting for a $50 million settlement.

That plus a $21,000 bump in his current monthly support payment of $35,000 for their three kids, on top of the already paid-for $2.4 million house (which is like $6 million in Toronto dollars), plus the two nannies, the cook, the chauffeur, the luxury condo overseas, the paid vacations. ... Who can relate?

And yet, this much-talked-about case that, like all family law cases in the province, can only be publicly discussed without naming names in order to protect the children, raises many issues about marriage, or the absence of it.

That's because this couple never formally got hitched, despite their repeated couplings over a decade.

Now understand: I am all for a fair division of property between couples, married or not, especially if children are involved. Furthermore, if one partner helped the other get wealthier (or in a position to become wealthier) over the course of the relationship, that too should be taken into account.

But, in this case? It would be pretty difficult for the lady to prove she contributed in any significant way to this man's fortune.

And, just to let you know, Quebec Family Law has a prohibition against naming names -- in order to protect the kids. I am all in favour of it. Poor kids suffer enough when their parents are at war.

That said, it seems that everybody in Montreal knows who the principals are. What's more, some Internet gossips have spilled all over cyberspace. But I am not linking to any of it.

To continue:

Common-law property division is a complex matter, varying from province to province. It is impossible to get into the specifics here. In Ontario, unless you can prove "unjust enrichment" – for example, she puts him through med school and then he dumps her – chances are you leave only with what you came with, what you acquired during the relationship and your personal debts.

Long story dangerously short, keep receipts and cover your assets.

This means that, if you're a woman who takes time out to have babies, you are screwed in more ways than one. Not only do you interrupt your earnings and your career, but your pension will suffer as a result.

Of course, this last bit happens to married women as well, or any spouse who stays at home to keep house and look after the kids.

Funny how feminism worked out that way.

Why do I say that? Because common-law couplings really only began to burgeon in the 1970s, when women like me rejected giving up our names, independence, identity, careers and saw marriage as part of the old patriarchal system.

A blast from the early women's lib past: In Montreal in 1974, I moved in with the man who would eventually become my first husband. My family freaked because, back then, "living together" was "living in sin."

This was back when federal election voters' lists were posted on telephone poles for all to see. So, as a novice reporter, I got the brilliant idea – well, I thought it brilliant – of going through a random sample of these lists to see how many other couples were then doing it without I-doing it.

Turned out it was about one in 10 households, at least in the student 'hoods I surveyed.

Not scientific but pretty prescient.

Since then, francophone Quebecers have abandoned both Rome and marriage. For every couple that walks down the aisle, some 100 others don't. Nearly two-thirds of children are now born to unmarried parents.

And yet Quebec, which has an organized feminist movement unlike most of Canada, offers them no legal protection.

Not that there is much more protection elsewhere -- and that includes guys, guys!

Which brings us back to this controversial case.

The woman, often described as a "model," would be hard-pressed to prove that her taking the time to have and raise the children prevented her from having a $50 million career. It's her only hope, in my not-so-expert opinion, of getting that kind of settlement on top of everything else.

Her mistake was that she hung in there, knowing full well that the father refused to marry her, and kept making babies.

She had a choice. She made her bed. She has to lie in it.

Hey, if the guy won't marry you, and you think that having more babies will change his mind, chances are you are deluding yourself, girlfriend.

The Montreal Gazette's Janet Bagnall sees it differently:

There is no longer any reason for Quebec to treat cohabiting couples differently from married couples. In this province, cohabitation is no longer a marginal state, embarked on lightly by a deviant few. It is fast becoming the norm in Quebec. Its status should be recognized and legally protected.

Those who want freedom of choice could be allowed to opt out. That has the virtue of protecting the unwary and insuring that those who want to forego their rights know that that's what they're doing.

Maybe she has it right. Maybe I have it wrong. I just feel women can't be asking to have it both ways -- while men get to shirk their responsibilities. (Please know that the sexes can be reversed here. I am not picking on men but it's usually men who get to walk.)

One thing's sure. I am not in synch with this ''pro-family'' anti-choice, anti-same sex marriage front woman. Not because what she says about stability isn't fundamentally sound -- although some might describe it as entrapment. It's just that it comes from an anti-woman ideology which subscribes to kinder-kuche-kirke

Living together is by definition a "let's see how this goes" agreement. The "big question" goes unasked, a ring is not given, a white dress is not purchased. You get the point. But marriage is not living together for more than the lack of symbolic (and fun) things a wedding brings. Marriage confers stability - socially and economically.

It is an egregious infringement on freedom to tell couples just living together that simply because they've done the time, their decision is made. It is also the wrong direction to go, when what our economy and communities need most are strong families. The state should not encourage cohabiting couples to think they are married, or make it really easy by offering even greater benefits.

Get married or don't. And if we choose not to, we shouldn't expect the same benefits as if we had chosen marriage.

And on that, I give the last word to Mom.

... as my mother said to me in 1974 as I was walking out the door, "He's not going to buy the cow if he gets the milk for free."

Or, as one reader wrote today, ''Why buy the whole pig when all you want is a little sausage?''

UPPITY DATE: On a somewhat related note, here's The Star's Tracey Tyler today on a significant ruling that will influence many divorces.