August 2011
1 post
FINALLY →
June 2011
2 posts
girl to the front - a brief love letter
I’ve been reading Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus, and gosh do I love it. As someone who had sought out the riot grrrl scene (with mixed success) in my own youth, I feel a little silly that I’ve waited this long to pick up Marcus’s exhaustively researched account of the movement. It’s not like I hadn’t been meaning to, but when I got out West I remembered why....
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
5 posts
the end of something
All My Children is my soap, for whatever that’s worth. I am prone toward believing that everyone has a soap opera. Maybe that’s kind of false, but I am prone toward believing. Maybe you had a soap and you didn’t realize it. Some arc on Bold and the Beautiful that really could have sung for you in the nineties, but you missed it…
I have a friend who was born the same day...
CALL YOUR SENATORS
NOW
Betty please don't go
Matthew Weiner and AMC just can’t seem to work things out, and these are darks days for Mad Men.
If we ever get a glimpse at it, the fifth season promises more change and oddness. Don’s new marriage, SCDP without Lucky Strike, the Draper/Francis home no more, motherhood for Joan and I know not what for Peggy but I cannot wait.
I’ve been trying not to get all that caught...
March 2011
10 posts
Ahead of the pack...
…and miles behind In South Dakota, as the state became the first in the nation to pass legislation requring women who are seeking abortion to attend a session at a “pregnancy help center.” Many states have laws requiring counseling before an abortion, “(w)hat makes the new South Dakota law different is that the mandated counseling will come from people whose central...
Shine on
you crazy diamond.
A lovely, loving tribute to Liz - from Nikki Darling
Peeing all over sacred cows/A very sexy baby
Rebecca Traister I Salon
When I have more than one beer at home, and perhaps I’m watching television, sometimes I start in on an impassioned monologue about 30 Rock, how it keeps my TV feminist. How having our Tina Fey write our Jenna Maloney helps me get up in the morning (I’m a cheap date at home, who digs her TV and popular feminism).
I’ve been so busy with work this...
“That is not viewpoint-based; it’s about deception,” Ms. Lieberman said....”
– NY Times
February 2011
2 posts
Comically Spoken
I read comics as a kid, titles from the States mostly. Marvel. Lots of X titles. I was a bit of an outsider, and to quote Liz Lemon: “Rejection from society is what created The X-Men.”
The comic book bubble that swelled up in the early/mid 90s isn’t really remembered as a golden era. I got into the X-men right after Claremont, so maybe that’s weird timing.
There was a...
redefining rape
don’t worry, according to the gop it wasn’t actually rape.
August 2010
6 posts
F.D.A. Approves 5-Day Emergency Contraceptive - NY... →
Can Queer Women Be Sluts? - Jezebel
“But we’re not so much worried about a so-called slut’s emotional well-being as we are afraid of her being used up, spoiled, pregnant with a fatherless baby — because all of that stuff is bad for women, individually and collectively.”
Take Back the Night
It’s been a tricky summer, for me at least.
And while the heat has been wearing on me considerably, it’s kept me close to my couch, and afforded me the laziness to re-watch most of the fourth season of 90210.
The fourth season of 90210 is a hazy in between. The first year of college. The last year of Brenda.
High school was all about losing your virginity at the Spring Dance,...
October 2009
4 posts
Please Advise | Nikki Darling
Friend and writer Nikki Darling has words for your advice column:
“5. If you go to the gym or have a gym membership take the New Yorker or a book and a bag of chips. Read and eat them while sitting on the bike machine. Then take a shower and go home.”
Michigan Introduces Anti-abortion Personhood... →
Telling "Real" Sex Ed Stories
From Our Bodies Our Blog, a reluctant student of Our Whole Lives (OWL), recalls her story as a participant in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s comprehensive sexuality education curriculum.
I myself was a Young Religious Unitarian Universalist before the OWL curriculum replaced the controversial About Your Sexuality (AYS) course. Launched in 1970, AYS went through several revisions...
April 2009
2 posts
Dude You've Got Problems | NY TImes
“It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained?”
March 2009
1 post
Plan B Must Be Made Available to 17-Year-Olds | NY...
“It is a complete vindication of the argument that reproductive rights advocates have been making for years, that in the Bush administration it was politics, not science, driving decisions around women’s health,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a non-profit group that was one of the plaintiffs in the case against the F.D.A.
January 2009
5 posts
Moving on, moving on
I am a homebody. I like to be home, get cozy and nest. For the past three years, almost four years now, we have been making our home in the same place. It’s a big, old quirky apartment with strange excuses for doors and windowpane cabinets in our kitchen. I have an office and so does he. There is always a draft.
The old tenants painted this place some pretty wild colors. We never...
The Myth of Lost Innocence - NY Times
The myth of the oversexed adolescent female plays into something perversely tantalizing, and gets some folks there jollies. It also obscures the real lives of young people and the decisions they make about their sexuality - as it obscures the decisions that others make for them.
Judith Warner has her say.
A Reversal, Again
Hey, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but President Obama’s impending reversal of the Global Gag Rule (the “Mexico city policy”) really sets the tone for the kind of administration we are in for. And history being history, I don’t just mean a Democratic one.
Obama to Issue Executive Order on Global Gag Rule Today - Our Bodies Our Blog
Robert Coles, a 2000 Conversation Revisited
I am often a creature of habit. This does not necessarily translate to my blogging habits.
My Sunday evenings are also without ritual, making my NPR affiliate’s weekly broadcast of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith a lovely - if infrequent - surprise. This week’s program featured a 2000 interview with Robert Coles; child psychologist, researcher, author and one of my favorite,...
October 2008
4 posts
choice in the balance 2008
Cynthia Gorney discusses the politics of abortion in election 2008, earlier today on Fresh Air.
Meddling with Women's Reproductive Health | Our...
In the final months of George W. Bush’s second term, his administration advances a global effort to interfere with women’s reproductive health.
“In the latest instance, the U.S. Agency for International Development has told six African governments that they must stop giving U.S.-donated contraceptives — including condoms, birth control pills and intrauterine devices — to Marie...
Gay Marriage is Ruled Legal in Connecticut | NY...
A Connecticut Supreme Court ruling concluded on Friday that the state’s civil union law did not provide gay couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, in violation of constitutional equal protection guarantees.
And baby (CT) makes three.
With New York anticipating significant democratic gains within the state legislature this election year, we do appear poised to be next.
getting frightened about the economy
has kind of been my thing as of late. i am not alone in this, and i know that none of us are better off for it. the most recent episode of this american life gave us “another frightening show about the economy” and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you should. you will be better off for it.
September 2008
4 posts
The Luxury of True Reproductive Choice - Mother...
I don’t know how I missed this gem earlier in the month. Maybe I’ve just been out of the habit of blogging, though I rarely find myself out of the habit of reading MJ. I guess it’s been a wild news cycle these past few weeks. Real wild.
it's so hard, to say goodbye to yesterday
Feminist Comedienne #1 Amy Poehler is departing from Saturday Night Live after the election season this fall. Rebecca Traister over at Salon.com offers this send off, mirroring many sentiments of my own. Poehler’s contributions to late night television have been a constant bright spot for me throughout her tenure, her own brand of lady humor sneaking up and adding an unexpected gravitas to...
"Protecting the Conscience" of Health Care...
Blocking Care For Women - Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards - NY Times
Hillary weighs in our current administration’s most recent effort to deny women access to their reproductive options, a proposition from the department of Health and Human Services that would allow any federally funded health organization to refuse to aid in providing care (in the form of not only abortion, but...
July 2008
4 posts
Enter: Caterwaul Quarterly
A new kind of Internet periodical. Issue one of Caterwaul Quarterly has arrived. In the words of the publication’s #1, “Caterwaul Quarterly is a web-based journal about politics, life, art, society and the physical universe.” It is clearly a labor of love, a rich and heterogeneous e-publication that satisfies this reader.
For all of us; the intellectually curious, the news...
Because our Vaginas are in Want of Beautification
Oh boy. I don’t even know where to get started on this one. Today’s NY Times style section has a neat little feature on Manhattan’s first “medical spa”, with services devoted to the pelvic fitness of our fair city’s women. Of course, pelvic fitness is code for the faux-medicalization of women’s insecurities about their vaginas. Which is terribly heart...
Paul Fusco - RFK Funeral Train -...
In 1968 Paul Fusco, on a Look Magazine assignment, rode RFK’s funeral train from New York to Washington. The result is a tremendous documentation of the spontaneous gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people as they came to pay their respects. An exhibition of Fusco’s body of work is running at Danziger Projects through July 31.
RFK has always loomed large in my understanding...