Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. … John Carpenter My love of horror movies is a product of both nature and of nurture. My mother loves them. My older brother says I ended up in theaters as a child watching movies that were definitely not rated for my age [...]
Watch it while you can: Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project, which premiered last week to mixed reviews, may or may not have a long life. Most of Kaling’s hardcore fans watched it online before it was on TV, so it probably has more devoted viewers than the disappointing ratings it received suggest. But FOX clearly [...]
As a theater director, the first person I thought of when I heard the news from Michigan was Eve Ensler. I’ve directed The Vagina Monologues twice and, despite unsettling doubts that the play does not actually work as the V-Day events intend (to end violence), I loved doing it both times. In theater speak, The Vagina [...]
I have never really understood Sandra Bernhard. It’s not that I haven’t tried. After admiring her fantastic turn as ballsy sexual harassment lawyer Caroline Poop on Ally McBeal, my absolutely favorite show at the time (1997) about my absolutely favorite “dead feminist,” I told a friend, “I’ve never really gotten the Sandra Bernhard thing.” “Have [...]
The Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, initially passed in 1994 and reauthorized in 2000 and 2005, is up for reauthorization again. To many, reauthorizing VAWA seems like a no-brainer. The federal law (a) declares that domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking are federal crimes (b) aids criminal justice and community-based responses to such violence [...]
It’s the year 1917. Susan B. Anthony has been dead for 11 years, Elizabeth Cady Stanton for 15. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, currently led by Carrie Chapman Catt, has been agitating since 1890. But women in America still do not have the right to vote. Fed up, a group of militant suffragists called [...]
The moment she enters, walking quickly, in her masculine work boots and jeans, you know that she is a woman in charge. That’s what a real stage manager is, after all, but in most productions of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize winning classic, Our Town, the Stage Manager is an old white man, replete with gray hair, [...]
It was said that during times of chaos, this female force came down to earth to put things right again. — Roadwoman, New Fire Before there was intersectionality, there was Cherríe Moraga, playwright and co-editor of the feminist classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She recently told the Ms. [...]
UPDATE 2013: Project Girl Performance Collective is now Girl Be Heard. A couple of weeks ago, the staff of Ms. magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation were treated to a live, in-office performance by five members of New York’s Project Girl Performance Collective. They had us at “Girl Power.” That was the title of their opening song, which [...]
Today, as expected, FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg approved a pharmaceutical application to make emergency contraception Plan B available over the counter without an age restriction. Then, flabbergasting reproductive-health advocates, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled that decision, ruling to keep Plan B “behind-the-counter.” Plan B’s status has been the subject of [...]
