I have a cold so I’m watching a lot of television. The dogs drift in and out of the room, pleased that I’m home from Readercon but subtly disappointed I’m not Howard Waldrop. I am watching a television show called The Secret Lives of Women. Each show is an hour long and consists of several interviews, interspersed documentary style, with several women who have some sort of social issue. One episode is about women in plural marriages. One episode is about eating disorders. One is about women with Munchhausen Syndrome By Proxy (those women are all in jail and decline to be interviewed so the show interviews police, experts and two women whose mothers had MSP.) The shows tend to be very straight forward and rather superficial. The show on Munchhausen Syndrome By Proxy has an expert talking about how we have to be on the look out for MSP because the death rate for children abused this way is 10%. There’s no discussion of the rarity of the syndrome or of the growing controversy that it is apparently often applied to women who do in fact have sick children, particularly if those women are working class, poor, and/or minorities. Read More »