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Monthly Archives: September 2014

Are You (as a woman) Ready for Some Football?

September 27, 2014

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff I don’t have an answer to the question many women are asking about their relationship with the NFL. I cannot say, however, that I ever assumed that the NFL particularly valued women. The fact that the most prominent women on the field are cheerleaders, who are paid $500-$700 per season but reportedly generate one million dollars in revenue, has something to do with that. We can rightfully lambast the way the league disciplines its players who’ve broken the law, not only with violence against women but also other offenses. But the sport is violent, and instead of focusing on how the league handles what happens after a player has assaulted a woman, I’d like to… Read More

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You’re Wearing That?

September 19, 2014

By Sarah Vander Schaaff What adolescent girls wear to school is a subject of much consternation, judging from the parent meeting I attended at my children’s school today. The conversation was lead by a psychologist trained in the treatment of eating disorders, body image and trauma, but voices rose highest when talking about whose skirt had been measured with a ruler. The three-fold theme of the talk, Gender, Body Image and Dress had complex implications, from distinguishing our understanding of “gender” from that of “sex” to looking at the effects of negative body image on depression, low self-esteem and eating disorders. But the logistics required for a school to enforce a dress code took priority over these fundamentals, and I… Read More

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Concussions: There’s an App for that

September 11, 2014

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Ben Harvatine had been practicing hard before he hit the mat and couldn’t get up. He’d been dizzy for a while during wrestling practice, but that hadn’t alarmed him: it’s what happens when you’re cutting weight in a 100-degree room. The twenty-year-old MIT student wound up in the hospital and spent months recovering. It was a concussion, the first he said he’d gotten in more than a decade of wrestling. “For a week or two I struggled to carry on conversations,” he told me when I interviewed him by phone a few weeks ago. He couldn’t keep up in his mechanical engineering and architecture classes. And he was sensitive to light. “I effectively didn’t go… Read More

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Stop Asking, “How was your day?”

September 5, 2014

By Sarah Vander Schaaff “How was your day?” I am going to go out on a limb and guess that if you asked your children this question after their first or even fiftieth day of school, you got this answer: “Good.” End of story. I confess that I spring the question on my two girls the moment I see them after school. Perhaps what I am really yearning for is a fulfillment of my own wishes. I hope you had a day of intellectual discovery, meaningful exchanges with friends, and ate something more than cream cheese for lunch! That’s a lot of unspoken pressure, and it’s no wonder they keep the lid on the discussion with the impenetrable and irreproachable… Read More

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