It's hard to draw too many conclusions right now, but we do know this: Thursday night, authorities shot and then apprehended the lone suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. A psychiatrist who was set to deploy to Iraq at the end of the month, Hasan reportedly opened fire around the Fort Hood Readiness Center, where troops are prepared for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And though this scene is a most extreme and tragic outlier, it comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers individually that it makes it increasingly difficult for the military as a whole to deploy for wars abroad. In an abrupt news conference, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the top commander at Fort Hood, said in response to the shooting that authorities would "increase the security presence" on the military base. On the surface, it seemed like a logical enough plan. But it makes one wonder how much any kind of lockdown will either get at the root causes of soldier stresses or better prepare them for more battle.

By Leigh Bond

Kat B., I have a confession: remember that time freshman year when you went home early and my boyfriend was in town so we stayed out late? We came home thankful you happened to fall asleep with music on, and that beds on cinder blocks don’t squeak. Because even though you were only a few feet away, and you could have woken up at any time … no big surprise, but we were doing it.

You were probably already clued in, as evidenced by the sheepish smiles we shot one another over our Saturday-morning dining-hall waffles. But guess what? We all got through it. Then two weeks later, when you invited an entire band to crash in our room during the fall music festival, I went with it, gladly offering up extra pillows to scrawny boys in tighty whities. Because let’s face it: (1) they were pretty cute, and (2) I owed you big. You let me being a tacky lush slide and I let you live out your indie-band groupie dreams, no strings attached.

In other words, we worked it out on our own like budding grown-ups because isn’t that the point of having a college roommate?
   
Apparently though, if I were a student this year at Tufts University, my late-night bad manners would be not only mine and Kat’s weird, blush-inducing problem, but the resident adviser's, the dorm's, and the school's: a new regulation prohibits students in dorms from having sex while their roommate is in the room.

On the surface, it's a good rule: it goes without question that having sex while your roommate desperately cranks up the iPod in the bunk above you is gross and inconsiderate. At the same time, learning to handle the situation is a vital part of growing up into a personally accountable adult. Having a surrogate parental crutch (à la the poor RA) around to finagle the situation for you equals passive immaturity at its most detrimental.

According to CNN.com, the handbook's rules on overnight guests directs students to "not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room. And sexual activity within your assigned room should not ever deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time." (In other words, no "sexiling.")

That’s not unreasonable, but is it really necessary? Why not just buck up and grow up? Learn roommate ground rules early. Don’t be routinely inappropriate, and don't expect your roommate to be a paragon of moral virtue. If it becomes a recurrent, life-altering roommate problem, then address it—by calling your roommate out on her behavior and setting up a twin-bed tango schedule, not calling the campus police. Getting the university involved seems so opposite of what college is supposed to teach you: how to handle reality without a protective shield. If you can’t learn to live with quiet, awkward sex from your roommate in college, how do you deal with loud, floor-banging sex from your roommates in apartments postgrad? (It happens.)

Knowing how to stand up for yourself is an integral part of transitioning to adulthood, where even more difficult and uncomfortable situations inevitably arise. Learning when to let things slide versus when to confront a legitimate problem—while recognizing that you still have to interact every day with the source of said problem—is a skill vital to social and professional experience. Your RA can’t get you a raise when you feel you deserve one, your mom won’t be there to tell future roommates to pay for the shoes their dog ate, and your college handbook won’t have tips on how to dump your sweet-but-clingy boyfriend.

Tuft’s giggle-inducing rule isn’t even really about sex. It’s about life—stepping up to it, preparing for it, experiencing it, and creating a personal threshold of the acceptable and the intolerable. In other words, finding your own voice and using it with legitimacy, and knowing when to tell your roommate "Dude, inappropriate!" or "Girl, you owe me," or simply thinking "Hey, that’s gonna make for a funny story over breakfast tomorrow."

College is chock-full of awkward, problematic moments and weighty issues. As far as roommate relations go, if they're not having sex while you're in the room, they're probably downloading music on your computer without asking, eating your food, helping themselves to your closet, or using your toothpaste. People overstepping their bounds, taking what's yours, and thinking of their pleasure instead of your rights happens—in college, at work, in marriage, and throughout life.

The good news: no matter how tricky the problems of the real world, if you make it through dorm living, you’ll probably never have to share a narrow room with a near stranger ever again. The bad news: if you don’t learn to deal with/laugh at/change the problems that this living situation creates, if you never learn how to assert yourself, you’ll find yourself getting screwed in an entirely different way after graduation.

Kat B., I owe ya.

BOND is a student at NYU, a NEWSWEEK intern, and an occasional tacky lush. 

Now that you've had time to read Jessica Bennett's fascinating piece on women's sexual motivations, we want to hear your stories. Do you think that sex is something that should be done only when you're in love—except for that one time you wanted to get back at your ex? Are you happy to use sex just as a tool for physical release, and not attach any emotion? Have you ever used sex to get a job, get over an ex, or get validation that you rocked that bridesmaid dress? Did it do the trick, or leave you feeling you'd let yourself down? Men, have you ever had sex for reasons more complicated than you'd like to admit? Do you feel the idea that you have sex only for pleasure has led to your physical and emotional needs being ignored?

Let's be honest: the idea that men and women are on totally different planets when it comes to love and sex seems less and less likely the more we learn (and the more we talk) about our sexual motivations. And with that new understanding comes less shame, more clarity, and a better experience—in and out of the bedroom—for all of us. So let's keep talking. Send your stories of why you've had sex—for pure or less-than-pure reasons—to newsweek@tumblr.com.

Or submit them on our Tumblr page. We'll print some of the best stories (anonymously, of course) on Friday.

Update 11:45 a.m.: If you tried to submit your story and found a broken link, it's fixed. Submit your stories here.

(stevendepolo/Creative Commons)

 

by Johannah Cornblatt

First came the news that the average computer keyboard was five times as filthy as a toilet seat. Then came the reports that flip-flops played host to more than 18,000 bacteria.Now, after you’ve stocked up on Purell and started wearing closed-toeshoes—even on the beach—there’s a new report soon to be published inthe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documentingthe billions of microbes lurking in your shower, the last clean placeon earth. What are we supposed to do now? Stop by CVS on the way homeand purchase a lifetime’s supply of spray body cleaner? Hardly. Thoughthese studies are captivating in their disgustingness, the microbesliving on your daily possessions don’t do much to compromise yourhealth.

The latest panic-inducing study, conducted by researchers at theUniversity of Colorado, Boulder and released today, looked at 45showerheads from across the United States. The researchers found thateach showerhead was home to, on average, several billion microbes persquare centimeter—pretty gross considering that tap water usuallycontains 90 percent less bacteria per liter. About half of particlesthat come out of a showerhead are sufficiently small to penetrate thedeep airways, say study authors, meaning that each supposedly cleansingbreath we take while showering could be full of foreign microbes.

Don’tlet yourself get too sucked in by the visual that suggests, though. Ifyou’re otherwise healthy, chances are that a grody showerhead won’t beyour downfall. In fact, very few people have probably ever died of—orgotten sick from—showerhead microbes. As the report notes, we movethrough a “sea of microbial life” in our daily lives, so most of usdon’t need to give up showering just yet.  Norman Pace, the author ofthe study, says that only those with suppressed immune systems shouldopt for a bubble bath. “The most frequently asked question is, ‘Is itdangerous to take a shower?’” Pace says. “No, it’s not dangerous.” 

Then why are we so freaked out? Find out after the jump.

A few weeks ago we ran a series called "The Fat Wars" that looked at the way we talk about obesity in this country, and whether our current methods of fighting the war on fat were working. Within the course of the articles, we made a few unsubstantiated remarks about fat people being just as able to run or bike as thin people. (Unsubstantiated because we wrote them as fact, without citing backup evidence.) In doing so,  the article generated lots of comments from people basically calling it bull. This was expected: a point we researched but didn't articulate in the article about why America is so darned angry with fat people is that the anonymity granted by the Internet tends to bring out the worst in people; the points we did articulate argued that fat people are easy targets for rage, which people like expressing, and projected self-loathing, since we all worry about weight. Still, it seemed like what President Obama refers to as "a teachable moment," an excuse to solicit reader participation, and also a chance to do a photo gallery, which are fun and pretty and get lots of clicks. 

With that in mind, we solicited photos of healthy, heavy readers─an exercise that was not without its own controversies. Some fat people were energized by the chance to disprove stereotypes, while others felt like they shouldn't have to prove anything to anyone, nor should they have to strap on climbing gear or a bike helmet to "earn" a little human kindness and respect. (I believe "dancing monkey" was the term one reader of Shapely Prose used when discussing our request). 

Nevertheless, we received a lot of great submissions, and picked some of the best images (and by best, we mostly mean "best photographic quality") for our Happy, Healthy, and Heavy gallery.

What is the meaning of Matthew? At a time when the gay community is struggling to secure the right to marry, Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming student who died after being violently beaten because he was gay, may seem like an emblem from days long past. And though Shepard's death was seen as a turning point─a point when the majority of Americans decided that no one should be targeted because of whom they chose to love─the truth is, Shepard was not the last gay American to die from a hate-motivated attack.

It's been a little more than 10 years since Shepard died at age 21. Those 10 years have seen an increased visibility of gay Americans and increased acceptance of gays and lesbians by mainstream society, but the struggle still continues: both for equal civil rights, fought in courtrooms and legislative halls across the country, and basic human rights, fought every day with dignity by gay men and women everywhere.

In her moving new memoir, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed (Hudson River Press), Judy Shepard writes about her family: first the joy and frustration of parenting a complicated teenager, then the horror and resolve when that child is the victim of an unspeakable crime, and how it felt to watch her dying son  become a symbol for the entire nation. The book is beautiful: heartbreaking, honest, and written with a lovely open voice that makes the familiar story of the Shepard family's loss all the more devastating. (Read an excerpt from the memoir on Newsweek.com.)

Judy Shepard, who is now the executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, spoke to NEWSWEEK about her decision to offer more personal details about her family, why she wanted to revisit the past, and how she hopes to move forward while working to honor her late son. Excerpts:

Why did you decided to write this book now?
For a long time I had wanted to publish a book of letters that were sent to [my husband] Dennis and I while Matt was in the hospital, and then soon after he died. There were beautifully written notes and letters from all walks of life. I acquired a book agent who thought it would be good to start with my story, or our story, and then do the book of letters.

Was writing the book a collaboration with the whole family?
It was. I had to send Dennis memories and say, do you remember any more about this, or is this even right? Because people tend to forget and sometimes change what they remember.

Was the process it therapeutic, or just difficult?
It was really hard. I found myself remembering even more things as we started to unlock doors, and so did Dennis and so did [son] Logan. I said to Dennis, there may be a time I never really can finish this book. We just might remember forever and I might never be happy with it. Finally it just became, we've got to let it go and be what it’s going to be.

Therapeutic? I think maybe it was. It was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, and things that you wouldn’t think would make me break down made me break down. I do deal with Matt’s death and that quite a lot in my work, and it was the little things that really broke my heart

Like what?

Just memories about Matt when he was growing up, and Logan and Matt’s high-school friends, going back and talking to them─see, I’m doing it right now─it was really hard. It was great to know how much they loved him, but it was really hard,
 
In the book you talk about the difficulty having to "share" Matt with the rest of the country while he was in a coma, and even after he died: on one hand being grateful that so many people supported him, on the other being overwhelmed by everyone who wanted to claim him. How has that feeling evolved over the years?
There are still some things that as a family that we’ve chosen to keep to ourselves. We’ve loosened up a little bit, but there just doesn’t seem to be a need for the world to know everything about us or Matt. The reason I wrote the book was because I wanted to reconcile the public Matthew with our Matt. As I said in the book, he had a life before he was killed.

The book is a very realistic portrayal of a teenage kid figuring himself out, and it's not always flattering.
We get so much mail and e-mail from young kids who say how much they admire Matt and want to emulate his life, and how they wish they could straighten out their drug use or their depression or whatever. They seem to have the misconception that Matt never went through all that angst, and he totally did. He’s just an everyday kid.

He was not by any means a perfect child─he would be the first to tell you that. Depression was a huge problem for Matt, from his younger years, even in junior high. It was something he was always battling.

I just want people to know that he just wasn’t that angelic young man that some have tried to portray him as or want him to be. It wouldn’t be fair to Matt to not remember him with all the foibles and wrinkles of his real life.

As you said, a lot of your job has to deal with talking about Matt and his death. Do you feel like that forces you to look back? Are there days where you'd rather just be moving forward?
Of course. It's yin and the yang, which has become my favorite thing: the yin and the yang to everything.  It does force me to go back when I’d kind of like to move on. In fact, sometimes I don’t even talk about the event anymore: I talk about where we are now and where we should be and where we're not.

On the other hand, I could tell stories about Matt endlessly, and no one says, "But Judy, I’ve heard that story a hundred times." I can keep him as close as I want and remember and tell stories as much as I want, so this whole last 11 years in my work and my private life and my grieving for Matt, it’s allowed me to grieve but also feel that I’m making a difference in Matt’s name.

Many people saw Matt’s death as turning point: never again. But of course, Matt isn't the last gay person to die at the hands of an attacker. Have things gotten better?
I think at the grassroots level, things have honestly gotten better. Legislatively, legally, I question that. There are pockets of this country where we will never be able to be totally accepting of the gay community, but I think that’s true of every minority.

I don’t think we’re any worse off than another minority. I think there’s a higher level of ignorance about the gay community out there, but that’s because people aren’t out. They don’t talk about their lives, and we absolutely need to do that. When I went to see Milk, even Harvey Milk was saying back then, "We need to tell our stories, we need to talk about who we are, because people never get to know us."

Can you talk about the legislative level, and specifically the hate-crimes bill?
We’ve been at it for a long time. Senator Kennedy was of course a great champion of our causes. We really lost a leader when we lost him.

Right now the legislation has passed the House on a stand-alone bill. It was in the Senate attached to the Department of Defense bill and it passed. Now because it changed from the House version, it's in committee.  We’re looking at maybe October before it’s actually out of committee. We know the president will sign it if gets to him, but we may run into more wrinkles like we did last time.

In the book you talk about not being completely convinced of the need for the bill at first. Why is it necessary? How do you legislate thought?
Hate crime is different on such an elementary level from other crimes. I didn’t realize that until I actually was part of one. You actually have to be a part of it to understand that the fear created by that crime doesn’t come from an ordinary─from a crime that’s not a hate crime. Hate crimes are committed to terrorize a collection of people, not an individual.

The part of the hate-crime bill that I think is most important and I wish was in every hate-crime legislation is education. If we find people doing basic things like graffiti on a synagogue, where there’s no actual person that’s the victim, you can educate them about what diversity is and how respect moves our country forward. If we could change one person’s mind, that’s brilliant. So like driver’s school: you get a speeding ticket, you go to driver’s school.

If laws prevented crimes, we wouldn’t need jails. On a very basic level, [the bill] sends a message of respect to the gay community that we realize this is a problem. Members of the gay community are singled out for violence above and beyond, so it’s actually a recognition factor.

If you're comfortable, can you talk about your son Logan and some of the challenges in devoting your life to protecting Matt’s legacy, while making sure your other son didn't feel overshadowed?
Logan works for the foundation and he wrote a blog on Matt’s birthday and sort of explained his journey of being─because he’s very shy─of being very afraid of people singling him out, and his friends being his friends for reasons other than him. It took him a while to get comfortable with the idea that Matt doesn’t dominate his life.

We’ve tried to do that with both boys when they were here: they were both so totally different in character that we tried to make sure neither one was overshadowed by what the other one was doing. I hope we laid a good groundwork for that. We knew Logan supported us in everything we did for Matt, but we also made a point of including Logan in all our decisions. Many things we didn’t do because Logan was uncomfortable with them.

He’s very comfortable with it now. He has many friends who are gay who sort of set him down and said, look, this is what’s going on, the work that your family is doing is really important to us. I think up until then he didn’t really understand what we were doing. He knew what we were doing, but he didn’t really understand the impact of what we were doing. It was a journey for him, for sure.

Often when a death occurs, especially one that's violent or traumatic, families are unable to stay together. They can't deal with emotions and responses as a family unit. How did you stay cohesive?

We all were very comfortable in our standing with Matt when he died. There was no blame put on anybody or on ourselves. We all felt we were in a good place with him when we lost hm. There was no talk about, well, my last conversation with him was angry.

We were very cognizant in our understanding that our family unit may very well suffer from what had happened to Matt if we weren’t careful about each other. We honestly made a really, really diligent effort to keep in contact with each other and talk things over and make sure everybody was comfortable with what was going on. We were scattered─Dennis was working in Saudi Arabia still because somebody had to have a real job, I was doing the work here, and Logan was in school─so it was a matter of e-mails and phone calls and an understanding that we had to be aware of what was going on.

Some of my friends even asked me, why do I want to keep this going in the press? Because they would have been a family who would have retreated rather than moved out. I knew that wouldn’t be right for Matt or for me. I would have gone crazy, we’d all have gone crazy. We thought there was a small amount of time, this window of opportunity for maybe our name, Matt’s name, could make a difference. We wanted to take advantage of that.

By Michelle Allison

Let’s start with this: I identify as fat because, well, I’m fat, and also because I don’t think being fat is necessarily a bad thing─it’s just a thing.

But calling myself a nutritionist feels like a fantastic act of audacity. I’m still technically a student, though I’ve completed the work core to my nutrition degree and am now taking a psychology minor.

I initially got interested in nutrition by going on a diet to lose weight when I was 21. I did it to feel better about myself, because I hated my body, hated being fat. What I told everyone, naturally, was that I was losing weight for the good of my health.

Except I didn’t get healthy. I was constantly injured from overexercising, and I came down with a virus that developed into really nasty pneumonia that I couldn’t seem to shake.

What kept me on the diet was the intoxicating sense that, for the first time in my life, I was following the rules. I was doing it right. I was compliant. I was a model eater and exerciser. My habits were above reproach.

In the end, I lost 30 pounds and gained a bunch of disorder behaviors. And I hated my body more intensely than before.

I knew that wasn’t how it was supposed to work─you were supposed to lose weight and feel great about yourself and be healthy.

But when I asked all of my dieting friends, no one could give me an answer. We were all so focused on eating the right number of calories and getting the right amount of exercise that no one had managed to figure this part out yet─how to actually be healthy? How to stop hating yourself?

Around this time, I stumbled onto fat acceptance and Health at Every Size.

In a nutshell, fat acceptance is the idea that human bodies naturally come in a range shapes and sizes, and that being fat is not necessarily pathological. It recognizes that there is a strong prejudice in our culture against fat people, resulting in yet another form of appearance-based discrimination─which is morally wrong, and requires a political response.

Health at Every Size is complementary to fat acceptance─it’s the belief that people can do positive things for their health (like eat well and exercise) in a positive, compassionate, nonpunishing way, without pursuing weight loss, and that even fat people can be healthy by all other objective measures. It’s the belief that self-acceptance, whatever your size, is good for you─especially when combined with other health-promoting behaviors.
 
After discovering these things, I decided to make nutrition my profession, and no one has ever questioned my credibility or competence based on my body size.

Even when I worked in one of the more traditional areas of nutrition practice, diabetes, my superiors never seemed bothered by my weight. I was hired even after competing against thin applicants, after all. And I believe my presence in the diabetes clinic as a nice-looking, intelligent fat lady, often with doughnut in hand, was perhaps comforting to patients, and deeply subversive to the notion of “nutrition equals weight control.”

I think people assume nutritionists all eat “perfectly.” Well, I don’t, and I don’t know any dietitians, even thin ones, who do. I’ve been lucky to work with dietitians who have all loved food and would never turn down a homemade brownie.

As for myself, I’m genuinely positive about food and my body. I’m no longer at war with either one.

When I stopped dieting, it was extremely difficult to relearn “normal” eating. I read a lot of books and struggled on my own for five years. In the end, it was a dietitian who practiced Health at Every Size who taught me how. I learned to eat lovely, nourishing food without worry and stress, and my weight finally settled into a stable, happy place.

Four years after being her client, I’m still doing well, and I want to help other people the way she helped me, now that I have the education and experience to do so.

I’ve done some hard thinking about what it means to be healthy. First, I learned to separate a person’s state of health from their value as a human being. Second, I stopped seeing healthiness as an end in itself, or as a reward for good behavior.

Instead, I now define health as a combination of the cards you’ve been dealt, and the way you choose to play them. Even if you’re dealt a s--tty hand that can’t be changed, you can still play your cards well enough to enjoy a meaningful life.

Acceptance─that is, learning to accept the things you cannot change─is key to health. This philosophy is embodied by the Serenity Prayer, by Jean-Paul Sartre’s concepts of facticity and transcendence, by mindfulness theories, and, lastly, by fat acceptance and Health at Every Size.


─Allison blogs at The Fat Nutritionist.

On Wednesday, Abby Ellin and I wrote about the increasing animosity towards fat people in America. One of the researchers quoted, Marlene Schwartz, said something in our interview that stuck with me, but that didn't make it in the article. Fat, she said, is so personal - it's something we can see right away, from a distance. There's no hiding it. Unlike HIV or mental illness or other stigmatized conditions, she said (or for that matter, bad breath, a nasty personality, split ends, the propensity to tell off-color jokes) fat makes itself known right away. And therefore, all the assumptions we have about fat people - that they're lazy, nonathletic, slow, lethargic - come to mind before that person has even opened her mouth.

Part of the problem with the war on fat is that it denies healthy fat people their agency: if you're fat, you must be unfit. And yes: there are absolutely some very fat, very unfit people out there. But there are also just fat people who live pretty healthy lives. We tried to point that out in our article, to which one reader scoffed, "Show me one highly overweight person that runs marathons."

Well...ok. I know some 5k-running, triathlon-competing, marathon-running fat people, and I know I'm not alone. Which is why we're calling for photos of healthy, heavy people: if you have a picture of your hefty self on top of Mount Everest, or crossing the finish line after a century ride, or working up a good sweat in your garden, please submit it to Newsweek's tumblr page

 We'll collect photos for the next few weeks, and then post them online when we revisit this topic after Labor Day. 

 A few ground rules:

1. Keep your clothes on.

2.  Let us know what's going on in the photo (finishing my first half marathon, on the top of Pike's Peak) and your first name. If you feel comfortable, say how much you weigh.

3. By submitting the photo, you're giving me the OK to post it on the site in some capacity. 

If you're heavy, and healthy, we want to see it. Post your photo today. 

Updated question: should I turn off the comments when the photos eventually run? Let me know your thoughts below.