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October 27, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Will Play for Food
By HARLAN COBEN

Ridgewood, N.J.

ENOUGH with the organized snacks.

When did this start anyway? I'm at my 7-year-old's soccer game. The game ends and this week's designated "snack parent" produces a ginormous variety pack of over-processed chips and an equally gargantuan crate-cum-cooler. Our children swarm like something out of the climactic scene in "The Day of the Locust."

Do our kids need yet another bag of Doritos and a juice box with enough sugar to coat a Honda Odyssey? Can't they just finish playing and have some water?

Call me a spoilsport, but I don't want to bring a team snack. I hate that first day, when the coach's spouse passes around the sign-up sheet so we can schedule what parent brings the communal snack on what day. It's too much pressure. Suppose I'm away? Suppose we want to visit relatives and miss that week? Now we have to find "snack coverage." And heaven forbid you forget altogether and then the little darlings look longingly for the expected goody and you're the social pariah who didn't come through and that one mom, the one who always has the perfect after-school arts 'n' crafts project, gives you the disapproving eye and head shake.

The scheduled snack is yet another way we cater to our child's every whim. Guess what? Precious can go an hour -- maybe more! -- without eating. And if your child can't make it that long, bring your own snack. Feed your kid's need, not mine.

Are none of us reading about the obesity of our young people? Do you think it helps their well-being that after every sporting event our children gorge themselves Fall-of-Roman-Empire style on extra calories, extra sugar, extra hydrogenated fat? I recently sat down with Annette O'Neill, a registered dietitian and bona fide nutritionist, and asked her, "Do you think it's a good idea for our kids to have Cheetos and Kool-Aid after a sporting event?" Her response: "Uh, no."

And please don't get on me about bringing so-called alternative or healthy snacks. I barely remember to put on my son's shin guards and cleats, not to mention those long socks and that black soccer eye makeup -- I don't have time to slice up 50 orange wedges that the kids will never eat because last week's cool parent brought Ho Hos and Hawaiian Punch.

This isn't about ruining anyone's fun or being the food police, but does the fun always have to revolve around food? Do you know what should be fun when your kid plays soccer? Playing soccer.

While we are on the subject, when your child celebrates a birthday during the school day, maybe we can try for a small cookie or cracker and a rousing, even multicultural, rendition of "Happy Birthday." Stop with the cupcakes the size of softballs. Have you ever seen the leftovers brought into the school's main office? By two in the afternoon, the place looks like the San Gennaro festival.

Where did this organized snacking start anyway? Is it a holdover from the toddler years, those half-hour library story times when we trot out Goldfish and those cute Cheerios containers and use the small foods as calming pellets? Is it the Old World philosophy of food-equals-love? Or are we just trying to keep them quiet for our own sake?

I don't know. I don't care. But I want you to join me in banning these organized parental sports snacks. Let's do something for the youths of this country right now and end the American Snack Tyranny.

I will start by asking my friends at the Ridgewood Soccer Association to stop the snacks. Furthermore, I am asking all sport associations in my hometown to follow suit. I encourage the rest of you around the country to contact your league officials and join the fight.

Instead of spending those last few athletic minutes forcing down a fruit roll-up (what mentally malnourished monster, by the way, invented those?), why not have your child gather with his coach, have him or her explain some of the fundamentals (like how being active is healthy!), talk about teamwork or the important life lessons of sports? Maybe even try listening -- instead of trying to sneak an extra Chips Ahoy for his younger sibling?

And hey, enjoy your water.

Harlan Coben is the author, most recently, of "Promise Me."

October 22, 2006
Nip and Tuck
By TONI BENTLEY

By Alex Kuczynski.

" 'IT'S only liposuction' are the three most dangerous words in the English language," screams an outraged former patient played by Jill Clayburgh. She's standing on a street corner in a business suit, shoving fliers at alarmed pedestrians. Each flier features a gruesome photograph of her botched stomach liposuction. It looks as if a pit bull was the doctor.

This scene appears in "Nip/Tuck," the subversive television drama that, in the words of its creator, is "anti-plastic-surgery" because "for the most part, plastic surgery does not solve your problems." The word seems to be getting around. Now we have Alex Kuczynski's "Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery," just in time to protect a few other bellies from butchery.

But it may well be a losing battle. Cosmetic surgery is now so prevalent that it could qualify as a national epidemic. And under all that Botox -- the gateway procedure -- as well as the face-lifts and tummy tucks, lies a sinister story, as deep as it is shallow. In exploring it, Kuczynski, a former reporter for The New York Times who now contributes the Critical Shopper column to Thursday Styles, has performed a real service. She gives you everything you need to know -- the menu of procedures (right down to toe liposuction), the price tags, the names of doctors and dentists, the drugs, the implements and implants, the celebrity patients. She also lays out the dangers, the disasters and the deaths.

Along with the reporting, Kuczynski provides delicious tidbits for the cocktail-party circuit: that, for example, the synthetic collagen called Cosmoplast is manufactured from fetal foreskin stem cells harvested from a single baby boy, who would now be a teenager. (It's probably a good thing, she notes, that he doesn't know that cells from his penis are filling "the lips of hundreds of thousands of men and women around the planet." He might need as many therapists.)

Kuczynski manages to sustain that light tone, and doesn't spoil the illusion inherent in her subject by looking very far below the surface for the "why" of it all. She neglects, for example, to mention the sobering recent studies suggesting that women who have had cosmetic surgery are three times as likely as their sagging peers to kill themselves. In other words, depressed women are the most common beauty junkies.

Make that depressed women with extra cash. Cosmetic surgery is still mostly an elitist preoccupation, though some plucky girls take up collections on the Internet, promising their benefactors pictures of their new breasts. Indulging in just a few of the procedures outlined in Kuczynski's book can cost more than $50,000.

How did this practice of self-mutilation, masquerading as a search for beauty, become not only a society-sanctioned addiction but a $15 billion industry? Economic greed and insecure women are such a potent combination that plastic surgery now rivals, economically, the far less disingenuous, much-criticized pornography industry. Which one, you have to wonder, hurts women more? Kuczynski connects the two, proposing that the desire to look like a porn star is one of the most prevalent motivations for the society ladies who indulge in the most cosmetic surgery. "Beauty Junkies" documents, in morbid detail, an obsession that represents a failure in the 150-year battle of American feminism to empower women. One of the faces of so-called third wave feminism may be the literally paralyzed mask of the surgically remastered woman.

Kuczynski is well equipped, given her own surgical dabbling, for her subject. Her book is, in fact, a curious hybrid -- half investigation, half memoir. "I was myself a beauty junkie," she has admitted in an interview, adding: "I think of myself as a method journalist. ... I couldn't have written this book without knowing intimately the experience of the cosmetic surgery patient. I don't think anybody at The Times would say, She's shallow because she had puffy upper eyelids and had them fixed. The extent of the procedures that I subjected myself to was not so over-the-top that it invites ridicule."

This is debatable. Two-thirds of the way into her book, Kuczynski takes a detailed detour into an account of her own adventures, lasting almost a decade, with "what we refer to in New York as maintenance." This personal story -- in which she moves from microdermabrasion to collagen treatments to Botox injections to liposuction, eyelid surgery and Restylane-plumped lips -- may sell more books, enliven the gossip columns and provide a necessary pre-emptive strike against her critics. But Kuczynski's objective-subjective straddle can be compromising; at the very least, it argues against the supposition, in this age of the memoir, that one's vanity is expiated by self-exposure. This bright, well-employed, sophisticated woman confesses to being "honest and brutal and bitchy" and then proves her claim while cruelly assessing the sewn-up skin flaps on a formerly obese lawyer, a doctor's "prize patient" at a medical conference in New York. This vulnerable and brave woman is, in fact, one of the few truly poignant characters in the book, but Kuczynski demonstrates no compassion for her.

In addition to the story of the $6,000 she spent to suction fat "out of my rear," Kuczynski tells a tale of her two eyelids. She had them lifted -- the "puffy" problem -- though she displays, with admirable humility, one of her pretty blue "before" eyes on her book's jacket. Sixteen times. At nearly 40, she has now sworn off surgery and informs us not only that aging is inevitable -- "time's winged chariot will catch up to you and march all over your face" -- but that she gets "smarter every year." Her surgical obsession, she confesses, did not achieve "its ultimate goal: happiness and satisfaction."

Kuczynski's book is most interesting when she switches from the confessional to the informative, as in her brief but fascinating chapter on the history of plastic surgery. In the second half of the 16th century, an ingenious method of rhinoplasty was devised by an Italian doctor, Gaspare Tagliacozzi, for a Knight of Malta whose nose had been mangled in a duel. Tagliacozzi cut two parallel incisions in one of the man's upper arms, encouraging the wound to heal with the flap hanging loose. Two weeks later, he secured the flap onto the man's face, holding the arm in place with a sling. After several weeks of this inconvenience, when the arm tissue had grown into the remaining nose tissue, the arm was cut free. Thus began the first of six surgeries to shape the lump of scar tissue into something resembling a nose. (This elaborate procedure was admittedly imperfect. A sneeze could blow the whole thing right off your face and across the dinner table.)

Kuczynski's story of the beauty regimen of Mrs. X, the wife of a film-industry executive, demonstrates just how far we've come since the knight's battle of honor -- although there's very little honor here. The compulsive activities of this "Hollywood housewife," suggest a kind of cosmetic Münchausen syndrome. Her basic maintenance routine involves hair coloring and styling (twice a week), facials (once a week) and full-body waxing (once a week), as well as periodic use of tanners, regular manicures, teeth cleaning and whitening. Her face and body are slathered with expensive creams made from caviar, 24-karat gold, human growth hormone or wild yam extract. For keeping her muscles toned, there's Pilates, tennis and Rolfing. Mrs. X also visits two or three plastic surgeons about three times a year to discuss what needs fixing. She has been injected with Gore-Tex, Botox and Artecoll, and is a member of a Restylane frequent-user awards program. (How many miles of Restylane gets you a freebie?) She has had liposuction and breast augmentation -- in, out, then in again, but bigger -- and has "done" her eyes and brows. "She is," Kuczynski notes, "among her peer group, considered the norm."

Last year, Mrs. X crossed the final frontier with labiaplasty -- getting that whole mess down there cleaned up, tightened up and, as it were, re-virginized. Genital cosmetic surgery is, according to Kuzcynski, one of the most rapidly growing "areas in the field." Finally, the doctors have located the original sin and defanged the vagina dentata. This creation of an alternate surface through surgery -- the Jungian shadow side taking a walk on the outside -- raises interesting spiritual questions. At the pearly gates -- and many Americans claim to believe in heaven -- will St. Peter turn a blind eye to your body and see your soul? Or will he fail to recognize your reconstructed self and direct you to the unknown-persons department for all eternity?

At its most extreme, this craze for plastic surgery is more than a display of culturally conditioned self-hatred. It is, rather, a current manifestation of female masochism -- a sister compulsion to anorexia, bulimia, cutting and excessive tattooing and piercing. Here ritual, aesthetics, theatrics and exhibitionism are ceremonious enactments of self-annihilation in the hope of transcendence (if you're a romantic) or escape (if you're a realist). These are death and resurrection exercises. Self-loathing, on the other hand, keeps you firmly in the eternal hell of the here and now.

But unlike religious or sexual masochism, which is free (except for the occasional dominatrix), plastic surgery is expensive -- even if, as more and more people do, you put it on a credit card. It has become a perversion of a perversion, thanks to the cynicism of the pharmaceutical and medical industries, dynamo publicists and doctors who on occasion perform what one of Kuczynski's sources calls a "P.W.B." or "positive wallet biopsy." How paradoxical that in our society masochism is considered a pathology to be cured, while cosmetic surgery is celebrated and encouraged, especially in popular women's magazines.

Dare one note that this particular form of self-mortification intimates a kind of subcutaneous eroticism? Perhaps unwittingly, Kuczynski titles her own confessional chapter "My Love Affair With Dr. Michelle." After all, the doctor is an authority figure (whether male or female) who inserts various instruments into the body in order to implant "injectable fillers." It's difficult not to recall that in the late 19th century, doctors were the first to offer the vibrator cure for hysterical women. That too was once considered a legitimate "medical" practice.

Kuczynski finishes her book having sworn off surgery herself -- after her Restylane "large yam" lip debacle. "By the time this book comes out," she writes proudly, "I won't have had a Botox shot or a collagen shot for a year." You go, girl! However, her simplistic admonishment to "stop and think. And think and stop," will deter no one intent on surgical self-improvement. It doesn't even begin to confront the hunger being assuaged by external alteration.

Asked if she ever considered a career, Mrs. X, the film-colony wife, replies: "No, because I was never going to be that good at anything. Or at least I was never going to be so good at anything that I would have made a difference." The disguise of a woman who has sewn, injected and scraped her surface into a masked carapace is only a distraction from her profound, perhaps unconscious sadness. Here the pathos in the Bride of Frankenstein's agonized cinematic scream finds a brand-new face.

Toni Bentley, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, is the author, most recently, of "The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir."

October 15, 2006
Editorial
Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty

When President Bush rammed the bill on military commissions through Congress, the Republicans crowed about creating a process that would be tough on terrorists but preserve essential principles of justice. "America can be proud," said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill's architects.

Unfortunately, Mr. Graham was wrong. One of the many problems with the new law is that it will only make it harder than it already is to separate the real terrorists from the far larger group of inmates at Guantánamo Bay who were bit players in the Taliban or innocent bystanders. Mr. Graham and other supporters of this dreadful legislation seem to have forgotten that American justice does not merely deliver swift punishment to the guilty. It also protects the innocent.

Mr. Bush ignored that fact after 9/11, when he tried to put the prisoners of the war on terror beyond the reach of American law and the Geneva Conventions. For starters, he dispensed with one of the vital provisions of the conventions: that prisoners must be screened by a "competent tribunal" if there is any doubt about who they are and what role they played in hostilities. As a result, hundreds of men captured in Afghanistan and other countries were sent to Guantánamo Bay and other prisons, including the network of illegal C.I.A. detention camps, without any attempt to determine whether they were any sort of combatant, legal or illegal.

The Bush administration showed not the slightest interest in fixing this problem until the Supreme Court said in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that the president cannot simply lock up anyone -- even a foreign citizen -- without giving him a real chance to challenge his detention before a "neutral decision maker."

In response, Mr. Bush created Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which gave the most cursory possible reviews of the Gitmo detainees. These reviews took place years after the prisoners were captured. They permitted the use of hearsay evidence, evidence obtained through coercion and even torture, and evidence that was kept secret from the prisoner. The normal burden of proof was reversed: the tribunals presumed prisoners were justifiably detained and the prisoners had the burden of disproving government evidence -- presuming they knew what it was in the first place.

The new law leaves this mockery of justice stronger. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it virtually impossible to contest a status tribunal's decision. It prohibits claims of habeas corpus -- the ancient right of prisoners in just societies to have their detentions reviewed -- or any case based directly or indirectly on the Geneva Conventions. Even if an appeal got to the single appeals court now authorized to hear it, the administration would very likely argue that it cannot be heard without jeopardizing secrets, as it has done repeatedly.

The new law dangerously expands the definition of illegal enemy combatant and allows Mr. Bush -- and the secretary of defense -- to give to anyone they choose the authority to designate a prisoner as an illegal combatant. It also allows Mr. Bush to go on squirreling prisoners away at secret C.I.A. camps where none of the rules apply.

Mr. Bush wants Americans to trust him to apply these powers only to truly dangerous men. Even if our system were based on that sort of personal power and not the rule of law, it would be hard to trust the judgment of a president and an administration whose records are so bad. The United States has yet to acknowledge that it kidnapped an innocent Canadian citizen and sent him to be abused in a Syrian prison. In another case, a German citizen has accused the United States of grabbing him off the streets of Macedonia, drugging him and sending him to Afghanistan, where he was brutally treated. Then there is the Ethiopian living in London who said he was grabbed by American agents and brutalized by Moroccan torturers until he confessed to plotting with Jose Padilla to set off a "dirty bomb." Mr. Padilla was never charged with the crime. The Ethiopian remains at Guantánamo Bay.

Republicans who support the new law like to point out that it only covers foreigners. But Americans have never believed that human rights are just for Americans. Our nation is outraged when an authoritarian government jails an American, or one of its own citizens, on trumped-up charges and brings him or her before a phony court. Surely that is not the model we want to follow in our nation's prisons.

October 15, 2006
To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered
By SAM ROBERTS

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.

The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation's 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples -- with and without children -- just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.

"It just changes the social weight of marriage in the economy, in the work force, in sales of homes and rentals, and who manufacturers advertise to," said Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. "It certainly challenges the way we set up our work policies."

While the number of single young adults and elderly widows are both growing, Professor Coontz said, "we have an anachronistic view as to what extent you can use marriage to organize the distribution and redistribution of benefits."

Couples decide to live together for many reasons, but real estate can be as compelling as romance.

"Owning three toothbrushes and finding that they are always at the wrong house when you are getting ready to go to bed wears on you," said Amanda Hawn, a 28-year-old writer who set up housekeeping near San Francisco with her boyfriend, Nate Larsen, a real estate analyst, after shuttling between his apartment and one she shared with a friend. "Moving in together has simplified life," Ms. Hawn said.

The census survey estimated that 5.2 million couples, a little more than 5 percent of households, were unmarried opposite-sex partners. An additional 413,000 households were male couples, and 363,000 were female couples. In all, nearly one in 10 couples were unmarried. (One in 20 households consisted of people living alone).

And the numbers of unmarried couples are growing. Since 2000, those identifying themselves as unmarried opposite-sex couples rose by about 14 percent, male couples by 24 percent and female couples by 12 percent.

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said gay couples were undercounted because many gay people were reluctant to disclose their sexual orientation. But he said that inhibition seemed to be fading.

"I would say the increase is due to people feeling more comfortable disclosing that they are gay or lesbian and living with a partner," he said.

The survey did not ask about sexual orientation, but its questionnaire was designed to distinguish partners from roommates. A partner was defined as "an adult who is unrelated to the householder, but shares living quarters and has a close personal relationship with the householder."

Some of the biggest gains in unmarried couples were recorded in unexpected places. In the rural Midwest, the number of households made up of male partners rose 77 percent since 2000.

The survey revealed wide disparities in household composition by place. The proportion of married couples ranged from more than 69 percent in Utah County, Utah, which includes Provo, to 26 percent in Manhattan, which has a smaller share of married couples than almost anyplace in the country. But Manhattan registered a 1.2 percent increase in married couples since 2000, in contrast to the rest of New York City and many other places.

Among counties, the highest proportion of unmarried opposite-sex partners was in Mendocino, Calif., where they made up nearly 11 percent of all households.

The highest share of male couples was in San Francisco, where, according to the census, they accounted for nearly 2 percent of all households. In Manhattan, they made up 1 percent of households. Hampshire County, Mass., home to Northampton, had the highest proportion of female couples, at 1.7 percent. Some of the highest numbers of unmarried couples were recorded in the South, which as defined by the census, has the largest population of any region.

David Blankenhorn, president of the marriage advocacy group the Institute for American Values, said married couples had become a minority largely because of the growing number of households made up of people who planned to marry or who used to be married.

Steve Watters, the director of young adults for Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group, said that the trend of fewer married couples was more a reflection of delaying marriage than rejection of it.

"It does show that a lot of people are experimenting with alternatives before they get there," Mr. Watters said. "The biggest concern is that those who still aspire to marriage are going to find fewer models. They're also finding they've gotten so good at being single it's hard to be at one with another person."

But Pamela J. Smock, a researcher at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, said her research -- unaffiliated with the Census Bureau -- found that the desire for strong family bonds, and especially marriage, was constant.

"Even cohabiting young adults tell us that they are doing so because it would be unwise to marry without first living together in a society marked by high levels of divorce," Ms. Smock said.

A number of couples interviewed agreed that cohabiting was akin to taking a test drive and, given the scarcity of affordable apartments and homes, also a matter of convenience. Some said that pregnancy was the only thing that would prompt them to make a legal commitment soon. Others said they never intended to marry. A few of those couples said they were inspired by solidarity with gay and lesbian couples who cannot legally marry in most states.

Jennifer Lynch, a 28-year-old stage manager in New York, said she had lived on the Lower East Side with her boyfriend, who is 37 and divorced, for most of the five years they have been a couple.

"Cohabitating is our choice, and we have no intention to be married," Ms. Lynch said. "There is little difference between what we do and what married people do. We love each other, exist together, all of our decisions are based upon each other. Everyone we care about knows this."

If anything, she added, "not having the false security of wedding rings makes us work even a little harder."

With more competition from other ways of living, the proportion of married couples has been shrinking for decades. In 1930, they accounted for about 84 percent of households. By 1990 the proportion of married couples had declined to about 56 percent.

Married couples have not been a majority of households headed by adults younger than 25 since the 1970's, but among those aged 25 to 34 the proportion slipped below 50 percent for the first time within the past five years. (Among Americans aged 35 to 64, married couples still make up a majority of all households.)

"It's partially fueled by women in the work force; they don't necessarily have to marry to be economically secure," said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, who conducted the census analysis for The New York Times. "You used to get married to have sex. Now one of the major reasons to get married is to have children, and the attractiveness of having children has declined for many people because of the cost."

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, attributed the accelerated trend to the lifestyles of baby boomers.

"It's the legacy of the boomers that have finally caused this tipping point," Dr. Frey said. "Certainly later generations have followed in boomer footsteps, with high levels of living together before marriage, and more flexible lifestyles. But the boomers were the trailblazers, once again, rebelling against a norm their parents epitomized.

"This would seem to close the book on the Ozzie and Harriet era that characterized much of the last century," he said.