Tuesday, November 9, 2010

05/11 For Long Term, Men Favor Face Over Figure

Studied
For Long Term, Men Favor Face Over Figure
Joerg Steffens/Corbis
By PAMELA PAUL
Published: November 5, 2010


THE GIST Men keen on a short-term relationship are more interested in checking out a woman’s body than are those looking for long-term love.

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THE SOURCE “More Than Just a Pretty Face: Men’s Priority Shifts Toward Bodily Attractiveness in Short-Term Versus Long-Term Mating Contexts” by Jaime C. Confer, Carin Perilloux and David M. Buss, Evolution and Human Behavior.

Never mind those last 10 pounds. According to a new study, men care more about a woman’s face than they do about her body when seeking a long-term relationship.

To determine how men and women rank the relative importance of face versus body, the authors — Jaime C. Confer, a graduate student of psychology; Carin Perilloux, another graduate student; and David M. Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin — showed 375 heterosexual college students an image of a person with head and body covered up, and described the person as either a potential short- or long-term mate.

Participants then had the option of looking at either the head or body, but not both. Later, they were asked to rate how much more important the face or body was, depending on which they elected to reveal.

Women treated bodies and faces alike, independent of short- or long-term interest. Men, however, made a distinction between face and figure, depending on their intent. Among male participants, 25 percent of those who were told to consider the person as a long-term partner chose to see the figure, compared with 51 percent who chose the body if they were looking at a potential short-term partner.

Here is how the authors explain it: a woman’s face and body signify different things, they say. To put it in clinical terms, facial features are cues of youth and health, and features like large eyes are feminine because “they are sensitive to the rise in estrogen levels that accompanies puberty and persists through a woman’s reproductive lifespan.” This would indicate long-term reproductive value; that is, the time a woman has left to reproduce.

The body, meanwhile, signifies fertility in the here and now. A young and comely pregnant woman, for example, would have a high reproductive value but zero current fertility potential — she is clearly already taken. Evolutionary psychology theory holds that men value current fertility (body) more in a short-term mate and reproductive value (face) in the long term.

But there may be more to a pretty face. “The face is a signifier of emotion and character,” said Roy F. Baumeister, the author of a new book, “Is There Anything Good About Men?” (Oxford University Press). “Men who want a long-term relationship aren’t just interested in reproductive value; they’re also looking for emotional intimacy.”

Does the study sell men’s sights short? “One of the biggest limitations is we didn’t ask participants why they chose face or body,” Ms. Confer said. “We just assumed they were looking to evaluate attractiveness, but it could have been many other things — personality type, whether there would be a connection. We didn’t even think of it afterward — it was an oversight.” Seems as if it’s not only what men look at in potential mates, but also how they view them that counts.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2010, on page ST6 of the New York edition.

Tax Cut Timing Is Proving Problematic for Democrats

Political Memo
By JACKIE CALMES
Published: November 8, 2010

WASHINGTON — When one party controls the White House and Congress, it controls the calendar for what gets done and when. So how is it that Democrats ended up in such a fix over what to do about the expiring Bush-era tax cuts?

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Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, was urged not to push for debate on the Bush tax cuts before the midterm elections.

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2010)
No. 2 House Democrat Will Try to Retain Post (November 9, 2010)
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That is what many Democrats are asking.

By dint of calculation and miscalculation, after mixed messages and missed signals, President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders delayed debate until before the midterm elections. They dared Republicans to fight for extending the tax cuts for the rich and, in so doing, “hold hostage” those for the middle class. But it was Democrats who blinked as their ranks splintered in the heat of a worsening electoral climate, and they delayed any vote until after the elections.
Now, with the tax cuts due to expire Dec. 31, the debate finally commences next week in a lame-duck session, with Democrats weakened, Republicans emboldened by the election results and the tepid economy continuing to provide some argument against letting rates rise even for the highest income levels.

For every election since the Bush tax cuts became law in 2001 and 2003, a central plank of Democrats’ campaign platforms has been to repeal them for high-income brackets — to pay for other programs, like expanded health care, or to reduce budget deficits.

By Mr. Obama’s election, however, the financial system had nearly collapsed and the economy was in recession. He and Congressional Democrats quietly decided to let the Bush tax cuts remain in place for income above $250,000 for couples, and $200,000 for individuals, until their scheduled expiration at the end of 2010.

The economy’s continued slow growth largely explains why ending those tax cuts, which apply to about 2 percent of Americans, proved easier said than done for Democrats. But other factors also explain their vacillation this year, including a crowded legislative agenda, the worsening political headwinds and, perhaps most of all, Democrats’ chronic insecurity about dealing with tax issues.
A year ago this month, political and economic advisers at the White House first held a series of meetings on what to do about the tax cuts in the coming year. There was no consensus; advisers would shift positions with time and circumstances.

And a vicious circle took hold, according to interviews over past months with Democrats in the administration and Congress: Mr. Obama largely deferred to Democratic leaders — the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was among those in tough re-election races — while Democrats looked to the president to take the lead and make the case against extending the tax cuts for high incomes.

Mr. Obama’s budget early this year called for permanently extending the tax cuts except on high incomes, but administration officials signaled to Democrats that he could support a short-term extension of one or two years. That would reduce deficit projections and, the officials reckoned, provide an impetus for overhauling and simplifying the tax code before the middle-class tax rates expired again.

In February, Democrats believed the issue was effectively settled when they passed and Mr. Obama signed the so-called pay-go law, for “pay as you go,” requiring that the cost of new spending or new tax cuts be offset by spending cuts or tax increases of equal value to avoid adding to annual deficits.

Among the law’s major exceptions: The tax rates for income up to $250,000 could be extended without offsetting savings, at a cost of roughly $3 trillion over 10 years. Not so for rates on higher income. The fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats persuaded liberals to support the pay-go bill partly by arguing that Republicans could not find the $700 billion needed to offset a long-term extension of top rates.

The tax issue remained on a backburner month after month as Democrats were preoccupied with the health care law, the overhaul of financial regulations and other issues. Still, the administration remained confident that the House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ultimately would block any extension of the top rates.

But by summer, with the recovery stalled and more of them on handicappers’ endangered lists, House Democrats refused to vote on the tax cuts before the Senate did. They feared they would endure Republicans’ charge that they had voted to raise taxes on some small businesses, only to see the legislation languish in the Senate like other bills had.

Ms. Pelosi informed the White House of the House Democratic position. At a meeting before Congress recessed for August, to the surprise of others, Mr. Reid assured her and Mr. Obama that the Senate would vote in September to extend only the middle-income rates.

But when Congress returned, party pollsters and consultants battled over the right course, each side interpreting polling data to its advantage.

One camp believed, as Stan Greenberg and James Carville wrote in a Sept. 15 memorandum, that “Democrats Should Want This Tax Cut Debate.” They argued that it would define the election as a choice between Democrats for the middle class and deficit reduction, against Republicans for Wall Street and more debt.

Another camp countered that in an already bad year, Democrats were especially vulnerable to the “tax and spend” label. As the pollster Mark Mellman summed the argument in an interview, “An election that’s dominated by the tax issue is a bad election for Democrats everywhere, anywhere and always.”

By then several moderate Senate Democrats who were not up for re-election — Evan Bayh of Indiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — had expressed opposition to letting the top rates expire because of the economy’s fragility. That suggested Senate Democrats could not muster the 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, further unnerving Democrats struggling for re-election.

Several, including Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Patty Murray of Washington, implored Mr. Reid not to force the debate. He agreed. All three won re-election.

The day after the election, Mr. Obama said he was open to compromise with Republicans.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 9, 2010, on page A24 of the New York edition.

AuFeminin Looks to Expand Its Reach

By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 7, 2010

PARIS — Got a question about work, parenthood, sex or shopping? About how to balance all of these in a 24-hour day? Or, perhaps, about whether to serve red, white or rosé with a blanquette de veau?

For 12 million French women, there is a single place to turn: auFeminin.com, a Web portal that offers advice on all of these things and many more, from its own editorial staff and from other women who visit.

AuFeminin, which was started in 1999 by a French husband-and-wife team, has grown into a rare example of a European Internet company that is a world leader in its field. With a global following of more than 37 million, according to ComScore, an audience measurement firm, auFeminin rivals American women-focused Web destinations like iVillage.com and Sheknows.com.

Increasingly, sites like these are filling the role once played in many women’s lives by glossy magazines, whose circulation has stagnated in many developed countries. Web sites like auFeminin add an interactive element, in the form of online discussion forums.

“The real difference between men and women is that women need to talk, and that is the same everywhere in the world,” said Marie-Laure Sauty de Chalon, chief executive of auFeminin, during an interview at the company’s Paris headquarters.

The growth of auFeminin is underpinned by favorable demographic trends in the digital world. According to ComScore, women account for 46 percent of the global online population, but that portion has been growing, and in North America women are already in the majority. Female Internet users spend 8 percent more time online per month than men, an average total of 24.8 hours, according to ComScore.

Now auFeminin, having conquered its domestic market, is thinking bigger. Over the next year, it wants to open sites in Brazil, China, India, Russia and the Arabic world, with a substantial investment from Axel Springer, the German publisher, which acquired a controlling stake in the company three years ago.

“There are only 30 million women in France, so our growth is going to have to come from somewhere else,” Ms. Sauty de Chalon said.

So far, international expansion has been had mixed results for auFeminin. Spinoff sites like goFeminin.de in Germany and oFeminin.pl in Poland have done well, for example, while soFeminine.co.uk in Britain has struggled in a crowded English-language market. AuFeminin also has established a presence in several countries with geographical, linguistic or historical ties to France, like Canada, Vietnam and Morocco.

France still accounts for a majority of the business, and it is generating strong growth in advertising, the company’s primary source of revenue. For the first nine months of this year, auFeminin reported net income of €6.4 million, up 92 percent from the level of a year earlier, as revenue rose 39 percent, to €27.6 million.

While shares of auFeminin, which are traded in Paris, have slumped since the takeover by Axel Springer, the company’s contribution to Springer’s bottom line has encouraged Springer to pursue another French Web company, the classified real estate advertising service SeLoger.com.
“They have hit on a very successful content proposition,” said Mike Shaw, director of marketing solutions at ComScore, which counts auFeminin among its clients. “They understand the female mind-set, and that is scalable. You don’t have to rediscover the secret sauce in every language.”

As it expands, auFeminin is bumping up against tougher competition, both internationally and at home. In France, the company’s success has attracted imitators like the Web sites Journal des Femmes and Terrafemina, as well as revamped online efforts from women’s magazines like Elle and Marie Claire.

At home and abroad, auFeminin increasingly finds itself competing with Glam Media, a U.S. operator of online advertising networks. Glam operates only a handful of its own sites, but groups together other women-focused sites so that marketers can reach large audiences with a single ad purchase. Its networks reach 180 million people worldwide, according to ComScore.

Outside the United States, Glam is strong in Germany, where it has a partnership with the magazine publisher Hubert Burda Media, and it recently set up shop in France. Glam is racing auFeminin to enter China and India, and it has a fast-growing network in Japan.

“One of the advantages we have in the long term is that we are a global company, and digital advertisers are starting to look more for international solutions,” said Ernie Cigogna, general manager of Glam Media International. “AuFeminin is primarily European.”

Ms. Sauty de Chalon said auFeminin had no plans to enter the biggest Internet market, the United States, saying competition there was already too fierce. With articles, videos and user contributions on topics ranging from current affairs to cooking, AuFeminin is also similar to iVillage, part of NBC Universal, which counts more than 45 million monthly visitors, ComScore says.

But three-quarters of iVillage’s audience is in the United States. In France and other markets, auFeminin competes with U.S. Internet companies like Google and Facebook for advertisers’ spending and women’s attention.

While auFeminin relies heavily on Google’s search engine as a source of traffic, Ms. Sauty de Chalon was quick to point out what she described as philosophical differences between auFeminin and U.S. Internet companies.

While Google and Facebook have drawn criticism in Europe for their handling of consumer data, for example, auFeminin treats privacy as a top priority, she said. Contributors to its forums are allowed to use pseudonyms.

And, in contrast to the anything-goes discussions that take place in some Internet forums, moderators of auFeminin’s discussions wield considerable power to direct or censor them according to local standards. In France, for example, where surrogate pregnancies are against the law, auFeminin bans discussion of the topic.

Talk of race or ethnicity is also frowned upon, and certain terms are blocked by the moderators. “I don’t believe in absolute freedom of speech,” Ms. Sauty de Chalon said. “It cannot be put ahead of human rights.”

Ms. Sauty de Chalon makes no apologies for her French worldview. As her company expands into new markets, she said, the best marketing for auFeminin may be its users.

“I think French women represent something,” Ms. Sauty de Chalon said. “We don’t defend feminism. Women of 30 are done with that. We want to be treated fairly, equally. What we defend is femininity. That, I think, is a French specialty.”

Where Marijuana Is a Point of Pride

Nederland Journal
Where Marijuana Is a Point of Pride

Matthew Staver for The New York Times
Susan Eisman inside Grateful Meds medical marijuana dispensary in Nederland, Colorado.
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: November 7, 2010

NEDERLAND, Colo. — Millions of Americans expressed their feelings about marijuana last week. In Colorado, 24 communities voted to ban or restrict shops selling legal medical marijuana. In California, voters wrestled with the question of legalization for recreational use — with issues of health, crime and taxes all coming into play — then voted no.

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Downtown Nederland, Colorado.


But here in Nederland, it was just another beautiful day high in the mountains.

Marijuana has been mainstream in this outpost of the counterculture, 8,000 feet in the Rockies and an hour northwest of Denver, since the days of Bob Marley’s cigar-size “spliffs” and the jokes of Cheech and Chong.

And to judge by the numbers, things have not changed all that much.

An explosion of medical marijuana sales over the last year in Colorado as well as the District of Columbia and the 13 other states where medical use is allowed has certainly brought a new element into the mix. Dispensaries like Grateful Meds, one of seven medical marijuana providers in Nederland, population 1,400, now have legal compliance lawyers on retainer and sales tax receipts in the cash drawer.

But marijuana is still marijuana, and Nederland’s perch overlooking what John Denver immortalized as “the Colorado Rocky Mountain high” has not budged.

State records show that by some coincidence, the concentration of medical marijuana patients and dispensaries selling medicinal cannabis is higher here in Colorado’s old hippie heartland than in any other corner of the state.

In Gilpin County, for example, which begins at Nederland’s doorstep, almost one in 20 residents qualify for cannabis treatment — the highest level in Colorado and more than three times the statewide average. State law, passed by voter referendum in 2000, allows marijuana treatment for a list of maladies, from cancer to chronic pain, if a doctor verifies the need.

And doctors have obliged. The sick-enough-for-marijuana pattern extends in a broad band from Nederland west through an archipelago of communities that were equally tinctured by tie-dye a generation ago and are now cornerstones of the state’s resort and tourism industry.

Summit and Pitkin Counties, home to ski towns like Breckenridge, Keystone and Aspen, pride themselves on a healthy outdoor youth culture, but they also have a disproportionate amount of debilitating pain diagnosed in men in their 20s, state records show.

“Who would think there would be such severe pain among young men in Colorado?” said Ron Hyman, the state registrar of vital statistics and director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s medical marijuana program.

Nederland residents like Hal Mobley, 56, who was on his way to get a haircut on a recent morning, asked pretty much the same thing. Marijuana is part of the life here, he said — no more available, no less, and no different in its use, he thinks, than it has been for decades.

“It’s for pain?” he said, squinting into the bright sun.

Well, it is also good medicine for the Nederland town budget. Tax revenues are way up, in ways that would make many a more buttoned-down town treasurer envious — partly from more tourists spending money in the restaurants and shops, but even more so from marijuana sales.
In June alone, while many communities around the nation were still sputtering through economic doldrums, sales taxes collected in Nederland came in a robust 54 percent above those of June 2009. Without the tax collected on marijuana, the increase would have been 22 percent.

“It’s been here, probably in an illegal capacity, for a long time, but now there’s an opportunity for industry,” said Nederland’s mayor, Sumaya Abu-Haidar. “There’s an opportunity for free enterprise, an opportunity for people to make a living in a way that wasn’t available before.”
Philip Dyer, 45, a local musician, put it another way. The government, he said, “has finally gotten smart enough to regulate it and get their piece.”

Supporters of medical marijuana say the pattern — medical use most predominant in places of historically high recreational use — is simply a reflection of better knowledge about the drug and its properties. People in communities where marijuana has been accepted, they say, know more about its medical benefits than those in other parts of the state where medical marijuana patients are rare.

Still, residents here say that despite a kind of marijuana status quo on paper, things are changing.

A demographic shift in recent years, with more families, professionals, tech workers and telecommuters moving here, has created tensions, town officials say, over questions of growth, development, tourism — and marijuana, with many of the newcomers less enthusiastic than the old guard about Nederland’s ganja-tinged reputation.

Earlier this year, Nederland became the third community in Colorado to decriminalize recreational marijuana use. But the vote, mostly symbolic because recreational use is still illegal under state and federal law, deeply divided the community. Legalization passed, but by only 41 of the 477 votes cast. A proposal to hold a cannabis festival in town hit a bigger wall of opposition and was voted down.

“When people think of Nederland as this stoner town, if you will, that is not accurate,” Mayor Abu-Haidar said.

But the town still has a reputation for having good marijuana, a point of pride that the legal compliance lawyer for Grateful Meds, Susan Eisman, was happy to talk about during a tour of the shop. Whereas many dispensaries have perhaps five strains of marijuana to choose from, Grateful Meds has 30, and serves about 300 patients.

“We have patients coming from all over Colorado,” Ms. Eisman said. “And a lot of it is the quality and quantity and the selection and the reputation.

“A patient just the other day came all the way from Longmont, an hour away, because he liked a particular strain and he can’t get it anywhere else.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 8, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.

For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Farzana, left, at the Herat burn hospital with her mother. She set herself on fire when her father-in-law belittled her.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: November 7, 2010
HERAT, Afghanistan — Even the poorest families in Afghanistan have matches and cooking fuel. The combination usually sustains life. But it also can be the makings of a horrifying escape: from poverty, from forced marriages, from the abuse and despondency that can be the fate of Afghan women.

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Suicide in Herat
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Lynsey Addario for The New York Times


Juma Gul weeps as he visits his mother, Gul Zada, about an hour before her death
in the burn center of the Herat Regional Hospital in Herat, Afghanistan.

The night before she burned herself, Gul Zada took her children to her sister’s for a family party. All seemed well. Later it emerged that she had not brought a present, and a relative had chided her for it, said her son Juma Gul.

This small thing apparently broke her. Ms. Zada, who was 45, the mother of six children and who earned pitiably little cleaning houses, ended up with burns on nearly 60 percent of her body at the Herat burn hospital. Survival is difficult even at 40 percent.

“She was burned from head to toe,” her son remembers.

The hospital here is the only medical center in Afghanistan that specifically treats victims of burning, a common form of suicide in this region, partly because the tools to do it are so readily available. Through early October, 75 women arrived with burns — most self-inflicted, others only made to look that way. That is up nearly 30 percent from last year.

But the numbers say less than the stories of the patients.

It is shameful here to admit to troubles at home, and mental illness often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Ms. Zada, the hospital staff said, probably suffered from depression. The choices for Afghan women are extraordinarily restricted: Their family is their fate. There is little chance for education, little choice about whom a woman marries, no choice at all about her role in her own house. Her primary job is to serve her husband’s family. Outside that world, she is an outcast.
“If you run away from home, you may be raped or put in jail and then sent home and then what will happen to you?” asked Rachel Reid, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who tracks violence against women.

Returned runaways are often shot or stabbed in honor killings because the families fear they have spent time unchaperoned with a man. Women and girls are still stoned to death. Those who burn themselves but survive are often relegated to grinding Cinderella existences while their husbands marry other, untainted women.

“Violence in the lives of Afghanistan’s women comes from everywhere: from her father or brother, from her husband, from her father-in-law, from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” said Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, a plastic surgeon at the burn hospital, which usually has at least 10 female self-immolation cases at any one time.

The most sinister burn cases are actually homicides masquerading as suicides, said doctors, nurses and human rights workers.

“We have two women here right now who were burned by their mothers-in-law and husbands,” said Dr. Arif Jalali, the hospital’s senior surgeon.

Doctors cited two recent cases where women were beaten by their husbands or in-laws, lost consciousness and awoke in the hospital to find themselves burned because they had been shoved in an oven or set on fire.

For a very few of the women who survive burnings, whether self-inflicted or done by relatives, the experience is a kind of Rubicon that helps them change their lives. Some work with lawyers who are recommended by the hospital and request a divorce. Most do not.

Defiant and Depressed

Engaged at 8 and married at 12, Farzana resorted to setting herself on fire when her father-in-law belittled her, saying she was not brave enough to do so. She was 17 and had endured years of beatings and abuse from her husband and his family.

Defiant and depressed, she went into the yard. She handed her husband their 9-month-old daughter so the baby would not see her mother burning. Then she poured cooking fuel on herself.

“I felt so sad and such pain in my heart and I felt very angry at my husband and my father- and mother-in-law, and then I took the matches and lit myself,” she said.

Farzana’s story is about desperation and the extremes that in-laws often inflict on their son’s wives. United Nations statistics indicate that at least 45 percent of Afghan women marry before they are 18; a large percentage before they are 16. Many girls are still given as payment for debts, which sentences them to a life of servitude and, almost always, abuse.

A bright child whose favorite subjects were Dari language and poetry, Farzana dreamed of becoming a teacher. But she had been promised in marriage to the son of the family that was providing a wife for her brother, and when she turned 12, her in-laws insisted it was time to marry. Her future husband had just turned 14.

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Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Zahra, 21, tried to commit suicide by self-immolation six years ago because she objected to her arranged marriage.

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(November 8, 2010)

“On the marriage day, he beat me when I woke up and shouted at me,” she said. “He was always favoring his mother and using bad words about me.”

The beatings went on for four years. Then Farzana’s brother took a second wife, an insult to Farzana’s in-laws. Her mistreatment worsened. They refused to allow her to see her mother, and her husband beat her more often.

“I thought of running away from that house, but then I thought: what will happen to the name of my family?” she said. “No one in our family has asked for divorce. So how can I be the first?”

Doctors and nurses say that especially in cases involving younger women, fury at their situation, a sense of being trapped and a desire to shame their husbands into caring for them all come together.

This was true of Farzana.

“The thing that forced me to set myself on fire was when my father-in-law said: ‘You are not able to set yourself on fire,’ ” she recalled.

But she did, and when the flames were out, 58 percent of her body was burnt. As a relative bundled her raw body into a car for the hospital, her husband whispered: “If anybody asks you, don’t tell them my name; don’t say I had anything to do with it.’ ”

After 57 days in the hospital and multiple skin grafts, she is home with her mother and torn between family traditions and an inchoate sense that a new way of thinking is needed.

Farzana’s daughter is being brought up by her husband’s family, and mother and daughter are not allowed to see each other. Despite that, she says that she cannot go back to her husband’s house.

“Five years I spent in his house with those people,” she said. “My marriage was for other people. They should never have given me in a child marriage.”

A Common Option

Why do women burn themselves rather than choose another form of suicide?

Poverty is one reason, said Dr. Jalali. Many women mistakenly think death will be instant. Halima, 20, a patient in the hospital in August, said she considered jumping from a roof but worried she would only break her leg. If she set herself on fire, she said, “It would all be over.”

Self-immolation is more common in Herat and western Afghanistan than other parts of the country. The area’s closeness to Iran may partly explain why; Iran shares in the culture of suicide by burning.

Unlike many women admitted to the burn hospital, Ms. Zada showed no outward signs of distress before she set herself on fire. Her life, though, was hard. Her husband is a sharecropper. She cleaned houses and at night stayed up to clean her own home — a nearly impossible task in the family’s squalid earthen and brick two-room house buffeted by the Herati winds that sweep in a layer of dust each time the door opens.

To her family, she was a constant provider. “Before I thought of wanting something, she provided me with it,” said Juma Gul, 32, her eldest son, a laborer who earns about $140 a month. “She would embroider our clothes so that we wouldn’t feel we had less than other people.”

As he spoke, his 10-year-old twin sisters sat near him holding hands and a picture of their mother.

In the hospital, Ms. Zada rallied at first, and Juma Gul was encouraged, unaware of how hard it is to survive such extensive burns. That is especially true in the developing world, said Dr. Robert Sheridan, chief of surgery at the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston and a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The greatest risk is sepsis, a deadly infection that generally starts in the second week after a burn and is hard to stop, Dr. Sheridan said. Even badly burned and infected patients can speak almost up to the hour of their death, often giving families false hopes.

“She was getting better,” her son insisted.

But infection had, in fact, set in, and the family did not have the money for powerful antibiotics that could give her whatever small chance there was to survive. Juma Gul eventually managed to beg and borrow the money, but not before the infection spread.

Two weeks after his mother set herself on fire, he stood by her bed as she stopped breathing.


A version of this article appeared in print on November 8, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.