A Look Back at “The Feminine Mystique”

If you were to pick up The Feminine Mystique today, I suspect you’d wonder what all the fuss was about. Written in 1963, it was directed at college-educated, married white women who felt strangely unsatisfied with their lives for no good reason. They had achieved the American Dream–a husband, children, a comfortable home, enough money. [...]

Empowered and Sexy

Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality and Popular Culture by Tulane University professor Shayne Lee (Hamilton  Books, 2010) revolutionizes the politics of black female respectability. Instead of writing about how hypersexualized representations hurt black women, Lee celebrates black female pop culture icons who purposefully hype uninhibited sexual agency. He defends Karinne Steffans, Tyra Banks, Alexyss Tylor [...]

Is Women’s Empowerment Really the Problem?

Women’s empowerment has become a problem. Again. According to Katrin Bennhold of The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune, women’s empowerment may be killing romance. Bennhold writes: Sexual attraction in the 21st century, it seems, still feeds on 20th-century stereotypes. Now, as more women match or overtake men in education [...]

We Heart: The Real Housewives of SNL

Bravo’s The Real Housewives reality show is everywhere, whether you watch it on TV or not. On the radio you can hear Kim Zolciak or the Countess LuAnn singing about money or parties. At the supermarket you can see Teresa Giudice on the cover of a tabloid, refuting claims that her husband is cheating, or [...]

Where Are All The Atheist Women? Right Here

Is it accurate when the media portrays the atheist movement as a club for old white men? It’s undeniable that most of the time men outnumber women, whether you’re looking at conference attendees or conference speakers, blog readers or best-selling authors. But when Monica Shores wrote that “no women are currently recognized as leaders or [...]

Concluding Thoughts on Love Your Body Week

Today marks the last day of “Love Your Body Week,” and the blogosphere has been actively posting useful tips on how to love one’s own body even if it does not live up to the marketed ideal. Of course many women find it hard to love their bodies when they’re “overweight,” even though the fashion-model [...]

Are Women More Aggressive These Days?

For a book that might be mistaken for a treatise on violent women, Maud Lavin’s recent Push Comes to Shove covers territory of another kind: specific case studies of women’s aggression as heard in pop music, seen in films and increasingly experienced in professional and private settings over the course of the last decade. Lavin [...]

Sexualizing Young Girls Is Nothing to Cheer About

Last week’s MSNBC news story about the Michigan six-year-old booted off the cheerleading squad after her mom objected to a risque routine got me thinking. This has been a strange season for news stories concerning the sexualization of young girls. Back in April, the UK’s Primark department store was taken to task for selling padded [...]

Yoga’s Feminist Awakening

The online yoga community is still feeling the aftershocks of a recent debate about the use of women’s bodies in asana-related advertising, and the conversation is far from finished. It all started when the grand dame of U.S. yoga and Yoga Journal co-founder Judith Hanson Lasater wrote a letter expressing her unhappiness with the increasing [...]

No Comment, Vintage Edition: You Can’t Set Her Free

Is your patient trapped behind metaphorical bars of household cleaning equipment? Is she “anxious, tense and irritable,” “beset by the seemingly insurmountable problems of raising a young family,” and “confined to the home most of the time?” Clearly, there’s nothing you can do about her social predicament—but you can pump her full of drugs to [...]

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