@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2007/02/lenos_running_against_migden_1.html@@
News and Politics | San Francisco Bay Guardian
News & Opinion
&from=business){kind=link}
Spectator pumps
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Most of the sex I’ve had with my girlfriend has been pretty bad, all thanks to my stupid brain. I go back and forth between impotence and premature ejaculation. Initially, I thought it was physical, but it’s become evident that it’s primarily a mental thing. You know how if someone says, "Don’t think about elephants," all you can think about are elephants? This is the same idea. If I’m confident and stay in the moment, everything goes well and lasts more than long enough for us both to be happy. If I think, "What if my boner goes away?" — it usually does. If I stress that the sex is going to be bad and my girlfriend is going to be unsatisfied, I usually come too quickly. I’ve looked into counseling and hypnotherapy, but they’re expensive and I’m broke. Can you offer any advice?
Love,
Mind-Bending Sex, but Not the Good Kind
Dear Kind:
You are such a textbook case of the classic performance dysfunctions (performance anxiety and spectatoring) that I immediately thought of the big-name researchers and writers on the subject. On my way to getting you some links to Helen Singer Kaplan and Masters and Johnson, though, I was distracted by a book called You Can Be Your Own Sex Therapist. I haven’t read it, but I like the title and appreciate the sentiment. (Felled by god-awful neck pain, I eschewed chiropractors, acupuncturists, and conventional doctors and went the DIY route with a foam pillow and a book called Heal Your Own Neck. I also diagnosed my own depression and used to clean my teeth with dental tools I bought at the flea market, so make of this what you will.) I also like and often recommend The New Male Sexuality, by the unfortunately late Bernie Zilbergeld, PhD.
If you could afford to see a sex therapist, chances are the therapist would introduce you to the concept of "sensate focus," the exercises designed to encourage you and your partner to give and receive touch for its own sake, without getting all goal-oriented about erection or orgasm. The therapist would help you identify what is distracting you and coach you through learning to stay present and enjoying what’s actually happening instead of projecting your anxieties into the uncomfortable near future. While working with a therapist is probably ideal, even seeing an intern for a sliding-scale fee can end up costing you some serious bucks. See if there’s such a clinic handy and if you can afford some sessions with an intern (don’t worry, they’re supervised); and if that doesn’t seem feasible, get a book and do it yourself. Your dysfunction is supernormal. It should be superfixable too.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
My boyfriend is 18 and less sexually experienced than I am. I find myself constantly spelling out to him what to do. I can see how this could occasionally be erotic, but we’re both getting frustrated. He doesn’t seem to be learning how to satisfy me very fast. Even worse, I’m taking antidepressants, and one of the side effects is delayed orgasm. Is it fair for me to expect more effort from him? Should I just accept that sex is going to be mediocre for a while?
Love,
Tappy-Foot
Dear Tappy:
Is that an "until I’m off the pills" while or an "until my boyfriend shapes up" while? You didn’t mean a "sex will be mediocre as long as I’m with this guy but I’m going to stick it out until something better comes along" while, did you? I hope you didn’t, but I fear you did.
Sex educators are forever bugging people to communicate more during sex. "Tell him what you want," they urge, "He can’t read your mind!" I say it too, of course, but I also often imagine an outcome much like yours: two essentially unsuited people endlessly nagging each other (or one nagging the other, whichever) to do it a little harder, slower, longer, or better. Helpful suggestions are all very well (vital, actually), but if there’s no spark, you’re not going to ignite one by rubbing two things together until everybody’s exhausted and dispirited.
I don’t mean to say you should give up right now. You should talk to him sometime when he isn’t down there grinding away in whatever dull and vaguely irritating way he’s grinding. And don’t tell him you need to talk to him about how lousy he is in the sack, either. Raise it as a communication issue, and see how that goes. Then you can give up.
I should caution you, however, against making it his problem that you are experiencing some extremely common, but regrettable, side effects of medication. That is not his fault, any more than being so tragically young is his fault. Both will get better with time.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.
Lisa Nowak, astronaut
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I live in a world where there are sensationalistic news stories about female astronauts going on possibly murderous rampages. Let me tell you why this makes me a happy person.
But first let’s recap. Lisa Nowak is a former astronaut who two weeks ago attacked Colleen Shipman, a woman whom she considered a romantic rival. What Nowak did was violent, stupid, and wrong — as well as fairly typical for a crazed stalker. But the facts of the case were undeniably salacious headline bait. Nowak is famous for flying in the space shuttle, so you’ve got the celebrity angle. She committed a crime for love, which is always sort of thrilling; and the way she did it was bizarro. As you’ll recall from newspaper accounts, she zoomed to a rendezvous with Shipman in a grueling, 12-hour cross-country trip, wearing adult diapers so she wouldn’t have to take bathroom breaks (something she no doubt learned on the shuttle). She’d packed her trunk with a BB gun, a mallet, rubber hoses, and garbage bags. When she attacked Shipman with pepper spray, she was wearing a strange wig and freaking out.
Now charged with attempted murder, Nowak has been widely described in the press as having developed some sort of post-space traumatic syndrome because she knew she would never fly the soon-to-be-retired shuttle again. And this is where I start to feel happy. It would have been easy for pundits and sensation-loving journalists to paint Nowak’s situation as an example of why women crack under the pressure of being astronauts. But you know why they couldn’t do that? Because there are too many female astronauts, such as Eileen Collins and Bonnie Dunbar, who didn’t crack and are leading perfectly normal lives. Even better, there are men such as early astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who did crack up — in a big way — when he got back to Earth and had to shed his "hero" identity. Aldrin became an alcoholic and was consumed with depression for many years after his moon walk, and he’s talked about this openly in some of the stories about Nowak.
Nearly every story I’ve read about Nowak’s actions — in both small and large publications — has attributed her breakdown to stress over having such a high-profile job. There are no hints that she suffered from girly nerves or that women can’t juggle home life and work life. Instead, the entire situation is reported exactly the way it would have been if she’d been a famous man who lost it for reasons that have nothing to do with gender. I like living in a world where we explain women’s sensational crimes in the context of their careers rather than their gender or their families.
The other thing that makes me happy about the Nowak case is that it confirms something I’ve always known to be true: women can be as physically dangerous as men. In courtrooms and pop culture, women have traditionally been viewed as essentially passive, capable of violence only under extraordinary circumstances. As a result, women have often gotten lighter sentences than men for everything from murder to battery. Ann Jones’s sociological study Women Who Kill is in large part a chronicle of how judges have refused to convict women of murdering their children because the ladies are considered victims of postpartum depression. (Men under similar circumstances are given harsh penalties for filicide.)
In a twisted way, the public reaction to Nowak’s assault on Shipman — the fact that she was accused of attempted murder and that her violence was taken seriously — is heartening. Nobody is framing this incident as a catfight; nobody is saying Nowak is innocent because she was going through menopause or something absurd like that. She is being treated like the dangerous and potentially homicidal person that she is. Nobody is fishing around for a way to let her off the hook because she’s a chick.
I like living in a world where women are dangerous. Even better, I like living in a world where people acknowledge that women are dangerous, so they’re less likely to fuck with us. By the same token, when women do go on violent rampages, I want them held responsible for their actions and punished the same way men are. That’s not p.c. equality. That’s the real thing. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has paid for her violent crimes.
The guns have won
With President George W. Bush proposing to push the price tag for the Iraq War up to nearly $600 billion — more than was spent on the Vietnam War — while seeking new cuts in our health care safety net, it would appear the debate over guns and butter is over. The guns have won.
Polls before the last election found that the two issues foremost in voters’ minds were the war and our ever-worsening health care crisis. More than ever, the two issues seem linked. With record budget deficits, substantially inflated by spending on the war, resources for health care and other critical domestic needs are increasingly starved.
On the same day the president was proposing another $245 billion to prosecute the war this year and next, which would bring the five-year total since the war began to a staggering sum of $589 billion, he also called for slashing $78.6 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years.
In addition, Bush wants Medicare recipients to pay higher premiums for prescription drugs and doctors’ services and is proposing to eliminate annual indexing of income thresholds, effectively another $10 billion in cuts.
Expanding children’s and preventive health programs and addressing "personal responsibility" by tackling childhood and adult obesity are supposedly atop everyone’s short list of health care priorities. But these now appear to be collateral damage.
Bush is seeking a $223 million reduction in spending for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the elimination of a preventive health services block-grant program, $99 million a year to the states, used for obesity prevention and programs for chronic health conditions.
He’s also seeking millions in reductions for the National Cancer Institute, at the very moment some progress has been made in fighting cancer, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for disease surveillance monitoring of bird flu and other approaching epidemics.
That’s just the cuts. There’s no mention of additional funding to address the national blight of 47 million uninsured Americans, another 17 million underinsured, the increased closure of public hospitals and clinics, including in half of the nation’s poor counties that no longer have a health center, and all the other dismal statistics that have dropped our country to 37th in the world in health care indicators.
Imagine for a moment how else we could have spent $589 billion.
With those same dollars you could buy health insurance for all the nation’s uninsured people for the next three years. Or you could fund the current federal program of spending on HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drugs for the next 60 years. Or you could cover the cost of educating an additional 39.2 million registered nurses.
And while there’s plenty of money to send more troops into harm’s way, veterans are feeling the pain of cuts in our nation’s health spending. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 263,257 veterans were denied enrollment for Veterans Benefits Administration health coverage in 2005. To cut costs, enrollment has been suspended for those deemed not to have service-related injuries or illnesses.
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," Dr. Martin Luther King said. And, he might well have added, endangering the health security of its citizens at home. *
Deborah Burger
Deborah Burger is president of the California Nurses Association.
The next mad rush to the sky
EDITORIAL For much of the history of this newspaper, the battle to keep San Francisco from turning into another Manhattan was a defining element in local politics. It had all the makings of urban drama: shifty-eyed developers looking to make a fast buck, sleazy politicians willing to bend over in any direction for campaign cash, a corporate power structure devoted to greasing the path for unlimited growth, citizen activists revolting over the block-by-block destruction of their neighborhoods … all played out on the stage of one of the world’s greatest cities.
We watched while Joe Alioto moved forward with redevelopment south of Market and office buildings downtown in the early 1970s. We joined anti-high-rise activists twice in ballot measure campaigns to slow the building boom, without success. We saw Dianne Feinstein push through in just a few short years more new office space than in all of downtown Boston, an entire new city of glass and steel towers — and we helped promote the campaign to slow down with Proposition M in 1986.
We exposed the fundamental lies behind the developers’ arguments by demonstrating that intensive office development cost the city more in services than it provided in revenue, reporting on how the boom would drive up rents, choke the streets with traffic, overwhelm Muni, and create ugly canyons where there were once human-scale business districts.
Then we showed that all those new buildings weren’t even creating jobs.
In the 1990s we spoke out against the economic cleansing that came with the dot-com boom.
But of late, the development battles have shifted a bit. Progressives, who were once united against downtown growth, are a bit more slippery around the latest construction boom, because this time the massive skyscrapers are set to be filled not with corporate offices but with housing. And in San Francisco today, it seems difficult for almost anyone to be against new housing.
But it’s time to take a hard look at the new rush to the sky.
When the folks at the Planning Department talk about the new urban area that’s being discussed for South of Market, they use words such as "slender, graceful towers." The idea: high-rises aren’t that bad if they’re less bulky; that way, they don’t interfere with view corridors and don’t block out the sun. In fact, the way some planners are talking about these new buildings is almost rapturous — tall condo complexes, they say, will stop suburban sprawl, prevent global warming, create exciting new neighborhoods and public spaces, and give new definition to the city skyline.
But let’s look at what they’re really talking about here.
There are, at the moment, at least 11 new buildings either proposed, under construction, or in the planning pipeline in South of Market that would bust the city’s current height limits. (And those limits are hardly skimpy — in most areas they range from about 350 to 500 feet.) And that’s just the start: the Planning Department is moving quietly to substantially raise height limits in a broad swath of San Francisco, making way for the biggest high-rise rush since the 1980s.
If the move succeeds, the skyline will develop what the Planning Department calls a new "mound" south of downtown, anchored by at least one building 1,000 feet high (almost a third taller than the Transamerica Pyramid). A single slender tower is one thing; when you put more than a dozen (and they aren’t all slender) in a cluster, you get a wall — a wall that cuts the city off from the bay, shatters the natural topography of the area, and frankly, makes the city feel less like a community and more like a concrete jungle.
Just look at the picture on this page, part of a graphic presentation the city planning staff has put together. That hardly appears to be a few shapely structures. It’s a huge new conglomeration of New York–style high-rises, and they don’t fit in San Francisco.
And what’s the point of all this? The way the developers and their allies would have us think, this is all about solving the city’s housing crisis and creating vibrant new neighborhoods. But take a look at what sort of housing is being proposed here.
All the new high-rises the Planning Department is reviewing will contain what’s known as market-rate housing. That translates to condos selling for prices far beyond the reach of most San Franciscans. So far, not one developer has agreed to put a single unit of affordable housing in the new towers; all of them plan to meet the city’s demands for below-market units by building cheaper apartments somewhere else. The new neighborhoods are going to be nothing but very wealthy enclaves, the equivalent of vertical gated communities. Families who are being driven out of San Francisco by high housing costs won’t find refuge here; the housing is designed for singles, childless couples, retired people — and world travelers who want a nice San Francisco pied-à-terre.
Is this really the kind of new neighborhood the city ought to be creating?
Then there are the economics of this madness. Providing the infrastructure for all these new residents (and we’re talking more than 10,000 new residents in this one part of town alone) will be expensive — and if anyone really thinks that development fees will cover those costs, they haven’t paid attention to four decades of San Francisco budgets.
Environmentalists and urban planners these days love to talk about density, about building more residential spaces in urban cores. That’s the best alternative to suburban sprawl: Dense neighborhoods encourage transit use and walking. Housing near workplaces translates to less driving, less pollution, less congestion.
All of which is fine and actually makes sense. But density doesn’t have to mean 80-story buildings. North Beach, for example, is a very dense neighborhood, one of the densest urban areas in the United States. It’s also a wonderful neighborhood, with open space, friendly streets, and a human-scale feel.
And it’s a diverse neighborhood: everyone in North Beach isn’t young, single, and rich. There’s a mix of rental and owner-occupied housing and, despite years of brutal gentrification, still something of a demographic mix. It’s a place that feels like a neighborhood. This new conglomeration of high-rises won’t be.
If, indeed, San Francisco wants to add 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 new residents, they don’t have to live 1,000 feet above the ground. There are ways to do density — on perhaps a slightly less massive scale — that don’t impact on the views, skyline, and economics of the rest of the city.
But city officials need to ask some tough questions first. Why are we doing this? Are we rezoning South of Market to meet the needs of developers and high-profile architects, or is there a real urban plan here?
The answer seems alarmingly simple right now. Dean Macris, who led the Planning Department in those awful high-rise boom years under Feinstein, is at the helm again, and although he’s supposed to be an acting director, he shows no sign of leaving. The department is in full developer-support mode — and that has to end. The Planning Commission needs to hire a new director soon, someone who understands what a neighborhood-based planning vision is about.
Meanwhile, most of this new rezoning will have to come before the supervisors, and they need to start holding hearings now. This is a transformation that will be felt for decades; it’s sliding forward way too fast, with way too little oversight. And it needs to stop. *
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I made it through the week without anyone calling to complain about my analysis of the mayor’s race, so maybe for once I got it right: unless Gavin Newsom drops out or a third strike drops and it’s pretty bad, we already know what things are going to look like in the fall.
So we might as well get on with it: Matt Gonzalez and Ross Mirkarimi should get together and talk it out, then one of them should just go ahead and announce.
For a long list of reasons, there has to be a real mayor’s race this fall — and Tony Hall plus a few nutcases against Mayor Newsom doesn’t count. The progressives need someone to rally around, to get the old troops out and in the streets and some new ones trained and energized. We need to keep Newsom on the defensive, to keep our issues out there, to hold him accountable not just to his donors but to the rest of the city.
Never discount what a good challenge can do: there are a lot of reasons why Sup. Bevan Dufty has moved a few steps to the left over the past few months, but one of them is absolutely the fact that he had a progressive candidate running against him in the fall.
Besides, I actually think Newsom can be defeated.
Just look at his record. Since he hasn’t accomplished much of anything, he’s vulnerable on almost everything. Other than same-sex marriage, his major legacy at this point seems to be trying to hand out the city’s information technology infrastructure to Google and EarthLink. Go team.
And the city’s two leading Greens both have a distinct advantage at this point — nobody is going to accuse them of jumping into the race to take advantage of Newsom’s personal problems. Long before city hall got all steamed up, Mirkarimi and Gonzalez were talking about running — on the issues.
Gonzalez can raise a lot of money. Mirkarimi has done something few progressives ever pull off: turning public safety into one of our top issues. Like almost all candidates, they both have strengths and weaknesses, but in the end, it looks like one of them is going to be our contender this fall, and that’s not at all a bad thing.
We went after District Attorney Kamala Harris a couple weeks ago when she tried to make some changes in the pretrial diversion program that would have cut back on its effectiveness. Harris did the right thing; she and Public Defender Jeff Adachi reached an agreement that preserved the best of the program, which tries to steer first-time misdemeanor offenders into counseling and out of the criminal justice system.
Harris didn’t have to do that; the program is entirely under her control, and she could have told Adachi (and us) to take a hike and done it her way. But she showed that she’s a reasonable DA who is willing to listen.
Now, however, the thugs at the Police Officers Association are attacking her for her willingness to include misdemeanor noninjury assaults on cops as crimes that are eligible for diversion. (This is typically stuff like someone spitting at an officer or brushing against him or her during an arrest. We’re not talking about serious assaults here.)
Harris is standing up to the POA, but the rest of the city, including the mayor, needs to get behind her. *
I’ve got a secret
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
My newish husband and I are madly in love. We’re extremely experimental and both love porn. We share a healthy sex life (five-plus times a week) and talk about everything — except the fact that he secretly jerks off after I leave for work or when I’m in the bath, whether we have sex or not. (The signs are all there, so I know I’m not mistaken.) It’s not so much that I’m upset about it (I’d love to watch!) but that it decreases his volume and ability to achieve orgasm with me. Though he does come every time, he seems to struggle. But on the weekends, sex is amazing because he hasn’t released beforehand. So should I tell him I know? Am I wrong to want to talk to him about it?
Love,
Hands Off!
Dear Hands:
Wrong? No. But before broaching such a discomfiting subject, it’s a good idea to ask yourself exactly what you want by bringing it up — and if your chosen route is the best way to get there.
So what is it you need? Your sex life is already about 200 times better than that of the average married couple, so don’t tell me you want to do it more. (When would you catch up with all the shows on your TiVo?) You did mention volume, but how much fluid comes out is a nonissue. Your partner’s struggle to orgasm may be a problem, but you should ask yourself why it matters to you before you go bugging him about his private pursuits. (He is coming, after all, so it’s not like there’s some big dysfunction that needs fixing.) And keep in mind that if he’s OK with the struggle (I’m sure he knows what’s causing it and has chosen to carry on regardless), he’ll be unmotivated to change.
Also consider that at a certain level this isn’t even really your business. He’s doing it for himself (in both senses of the phrase). There’s a limit to how much you can reasonably expect a partner to change long-standing habits and preferences to suit you. Sometimes you just have to accept who you chose, and try to remember how great that person is — even if that person doesn’t do everything the way you’d like, when you’d like, and just for you.
If you do broach the subject, be mindful. Saying "I know you masturbate as soon as I leave the room" may not inspire your husband to do anything but feel his privacy’s been violated. (Nobody wants to hear that their spouse is tracking them around the Internet or riffling through their used Kleenex, no matter how loving, trusting, and shame-free the relationship is.) The best gambit I can see, in fact, isn’t even aimed at getting him to stop. But it might address your grievance about having to wait for the weekend to see Old Faithful go off: you say you’d really love to watch him sometime? Don’t tell me. Tell him.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
My boyfriend is a flirt. We have a good relationship, but the flirting bothers me — and has for the whole course of our relationship. Recently, when I was on his computer, he’d left his inbox open, and I found a slightly juicy e-mail from a girl. His response was that he has a girlfriend and was sorry if she thought otherwise. But now I’m addicted to reading his e-mail; and though I’ve been reading a lot, I’ve found nothing. I don’t even know what I’m looking for or what I’d do if I found it. I want to stop this nasty habit. I feel untrustworthy and sneaky. Be as harsh as you want. I deserve it.
Love,
Snoopy
Dear Snoop:
Way to take the fun out of harshing on you, dudette.
Look. You know this is wrong and stupid. And it’s not like I can prescribe you some kind of magic no-sneak pills. It would be tricky to explain wanting to start using passwords on your home computers — not unlike saying all of a sudden "You know what would be fun? Using condoms!" and expecting your honey not to think you’ve been cheating. You could try buying him a nifty new laptop with fingerprint recognition, but that’s a pretty expensive fix.
No, I think you’re just going to have to quit cold turkey. If you must, put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it when you have the urge to sneak around his inbox. (And not one of those wimpy Livestrong wristbands either. They don’t hurt enough.) Or whenever you feel the itch to snoop, you could just remind yourself of the two foolproof ways to wreck a relationship in no time: one, betray his trust; and two, demonstrate that you consider him unworthy of yours. Then, voilà! You’re done.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.
Peeing by design
› techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION If you think it’s hard to find a decent public bathroom in the city, try finding a bathroom for the gender ambiguous. People who appear androgynous, whether unintentionally or because they’re going for that cool genderqueer look, know that finding a bathroom is an ordeal. It sucks to walk into the women’s room and have the ladies tell you to get out just because you’ve got short hair and like to wear ties. Same goes for short, girly boys who get the hairy eyeball in the men’s room. Sometimes these nasty encounters get violent or lead to indignant bathroom patrons contacting security to get the androgynous interloper out of their binary gender space.
Luckily, this is one social problem that has a technical solution. A genderqueer hacker collective has created one of the best map mashup Web sites I’ve ever seen: Safe2Pee.org. It’s a dynamic, constantly updating map of publicly accessible, gender-neutral bathrooms throughout the United States. Just plug in the name of your city or town, and up pops a Google map with bathrooms marked with those spermy-looking markers that Google favors. Most of these are unisex, single-person bathrooms. But some are just gender free, as site co-developer Bailey puts it.
Visitors at Safe2Pee can plug in the location, gender status, and accessibility of the bathroom on a handy form. Even if the bathroom isn’t gender free but is simply in a nice spot, you can note that it’s gendered but really clean or available to anyone who comes into the place where it’s located.
As somebody who often has to pee while going for walks, I can’t recommend Safe2Pee enough — I can plot my course around the city based on where I can get to nice public bathrooms. And though I rarely get hassled for my gender presentation in bathrooms, I also hate having to declare my gender just because I need to take a piss. I’d rather just use the toilet without having to decide whether I look more like the stick figure in a dress or the stick figure without one.
What’s really great about Safe2Pee, however, is the matter-of-fact way it suggests that technology can help encourage gender tolerance. If merchants realize that having gender-free bathrooms will pull in more paying customers, there will be more incentive for people to build such bathrooms. Having a map of those bathrooms available online makes it far easier for consumers to make choices that nudge merchants in that direction.
Plus, just from a nerd point of view, Safe2Pee is full of yummy Web 2.0 goodness There’s a tag cloud for cities included in the database, in which the names of cities with more categorized bathrooms appear much larger than cities with fewer. You can also search the database by proximity to where you are or for particular types of bathrooms (i.e., ones you can use for free versus ones where you should buy something before asking to pee). Programmable Web, a blog about mashups, gave Safe2Pee a Mashup of the Day Award. And Bailey says the genderqueer hacker collective behind the site is growing. "The collective has morphed, at least geographically speaking," Bailey said via e-mail. "It has grown beyond the Bay Area and now it’s just me here. Others are in Seattle, Portland and Boston."
Not surprisingly, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Boston are also well represented in the bathroom database. But Bailey says the group plans to stick with it and keep expanding. The site coauthor draws a comparison between gender fluidity and geek attention spans when it comes to finishing projects. "When conventional notions of gender and sexuality are always blurred or challenged or in flux, I think perhaps all the fluidity carries over to form a particularly post-modern attention span." Or maybe Bailey is just a new breed of gendernerd, whose attachment to one particular gender identity morphs as often as an attachment to a particular flavor of Linux — or a particular API.
In my old workplace I frequently pasted over the gender markers on the single-room bathrooms — I printed "Carbon-based lifeforms only" on a piece of paper that was just big enough to cover the stick figure in a skirt. Luckily my coworkers enjoyed the joke, and we all made it an unwritten rule that we would use whatever bathroom was available, no matter what our genders. Now I plan to spread the genderfree bathroom meme online by adding good bathrooms to the database. When I can write a sentence like that, I really do feel like I’m living in the future. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who really has to pee right now.
Too many big buildings
Housing is now being stuffed into downtown blocks, more than 7,000 units in the stretch running from Market Street to the Bay Bridge. This means less driving, less subdivision sprawl and fewer car-dependent office parks in the outer ‘burbs, all worries that older high-rise foes had.
"A Skyscraper Story," by Marshall Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/29/07
EDITORIAL Actually, no.
There are indeed a lot of new housing towers under way in San Francisco, some of them soaring to heights that will block the sun and sky and wall off parts of the city from its waterfront. But there’s not a lot of evidence that they’re doing much to cut down driving and office parks.
In fact, when we went and visited a few of these spanking new buildings a year ago, we found that few of the residents actually worked in downtown San Francisco. They were mostly young Silicon Valley commuters who slept in their posh condos at night but got up in the morning and drove their cars (or in some cases, rode vanpools) to jobs at office parks or car-dependent corporate campuses 20 to 30 miles south.
There were a few former suburbanites around — but again, they weren’t San Francisco workers. They were retired people with plenty of cash who wanted to move back to town after the kids left home.
As Sue Hestor reports in "San Francisco’s Erupting Skyline" on page 7, the Planning Department is quietly but aggressively moving to raise the height limits around the edges of downtown, particularly in the South of Market area. There’s been little protest, in part because so many of the new towers are largely for housing, not offices.
Some of the giant new buildings are very much the same sort of projects we — and much of progressive San Francisco — have been fighting against for 30 years. The Transbay Terminal will be anchored by a 1,000-foot-high commercial building that will soar far above the Transamerica Pyramid. But somehow activists seem willing to accept high-rise housing in a way they would never tolerate offices — if it’s presented as a cure to sprawl.
But that requires a big leap of faith: you have to accept that San Franciscans who will walk or take transit to work are going to wind up living in those buildings. And since much of the housing is going to consist of very high-end condos — in the million-dollar range — that almost certainly won’t be true.
The new wave of development has tremendous problems and needs far more careful scrutiny than it’s getting. The Planning Commission ought to demand a demographic study to determine whether this housing actually meets the city’s needs — and put a halt to it if it doesn’t. *
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
If the Matier and Ross report in the San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 11 is to believed, then Mayor Gavin Newsom is actually taking his alcohol problem seriously. Mimi Silbert, who runs Delancey Street, told the dynamic duo that Newsom has been showing up every night for three or four hours of intense counseling and therapy. Good for him. If his problem is bad enough that he needs that much help, he’d probably be better off taking some time away from work, but I’m not him, and at least he’s trying.
Or so they say.
Of course, if the whole "treatment" thing is just an attempt to gain sympathy from the public and take the story away from his sordid affair, I suspect Newsom’s visits to Delancey Street will start to taper off fast — in which case a lot of people who have friends and family who truly have struggled with alcoholism will be properly pissed at his honor the mayor.
It’s going to sound like a cliché at this point, but I kinda think it’s true enough to make it our mantra for the fall: Newsom has been doing a rotten job of late, and if his personal problems are to blame for that, then he needs to get the hell out of politics until he’s a lot stabler, and if his personal problems aren’t to blame, then he’s just a weak and lame mayor. Either way, four more years doesn’t work.
Which brings us to the real question that was on everyone’s mind at the Guardian‘s 40th anniversary party last week: who?
Let me throw out some thoughts.
I’ll start with the wild card. There isn’t one. I see nobody hiding in the bushes who can run as a progressive and mount a serious campaign. We’ve got what we see. (Don’t talk to me about Art Agnos; the guy would have to enter a political 12-step, make a lot of amends, and admit all the things he did wrong as mayor last time around, and it ain’t happening.)
So here’s Scenario One: Newsom toughs it out, nothing else awful drops, and he stays in the race. Honestly, very few people are going to challenge him. Not Mark Leno, not Carole Migden, not Dennis Herrera, not Aaron Peskin. They don’t want to look like they’re exploiting Newsom’s personal problems, so they all wait four years.
So the left candidate is Ross Mirkarimi or Matt Gonzalez. If Gonzalez wants it, Mirkarimi steps out of the way. That could set up Matt vs. Gavin, round two, with Gonzalez as the candidate of the left and the Residential Builders Association, leaving people like me (who think land use is supremely important) tearing our hair out. And let’s remember that Jack Davis, the political mastermind, is going to be a player this time, and it won’t be with a loser like Tony Hall.
Scenario Two: Newsom decides, for whatever reason, to withdraw — and it’s a free-for-all. Gonzalez is suddenly not the leading candidate; that’s probably Leno, Herrera, or, on the outside, Kamala Harris. Which leaves the progressives with a sticky choice: stay with Gonzalez or accept someone who on paper (and on the record) is more centrist but will promise a whole lot to get our support and could be the odds-on favorite.
Throw in public financing and ranked-choice voting, and the election’s going to be like nothing there ever was in this town. I can’t wait. *