Many are celebrating today, ourselves included. But being the level-headed, pragmatic feminists that we are, we can’t help but temper the festive mood with a healthy dose of analysis. Eager to see just how far we’ve come in the 15 years since Hillary Rodham Clinton famously declared women’s rights to be human rights, we’ve been closely following this week’s session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, where delegates are conducting a 15-year review of the implementation of the Platform for Action, a global agenda for women’s empowerment created in 1995.
Author: Catherine A. Traywick
Catherine is an assistant features editor at Hyphen magazine and a first year student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She interned at Ms. in the spring of 2010, and has since reported on the gendered impact of immigration enforcement in Arizona, the rights of health care workers in the Philippines and indigenous women's struggle against Big Oil in Canada. She has a B.A. in English and a minor in Women & Gender Studies from Arizona State University.
Who Ravished Robert Pattinson?
In her March 5 column – rather sensationally titled “The Ravishing of Rob Pattinson” – Wall Street Journal columnist Nancy de Wolf Smith admonishes the young star’s women fans for their age-inappropriate obsession with him, criticizes the media for promoting his hyper-sexualization, and bemoans his rapidly dying innocence. Hmm. And here I thought he was just another chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, 20-something-year-old celebrity jerk who talks about hangovers and vaginas during magazine interviews.
Australia’s War on Small Breasts
Since childhood, men, magazines and our mothers have ridiculed our relative lack of endowment, so maybe it was only a matter of time before whole governments made our bitty busts their business.