If Saturday Night Live’s fake ad for “Estro-maxx” last night had any purpose–or punchline–besides transphobia, we missed it. http://www.hulu.com/watch/211062/saturday-night-live-estro-maxx Shouldn’t fake advertising be an opportunity to satirize mainstream ads to, you know, humorous effect? Maybe the SNL writing staff needs a refresher course from Sarah Haskins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzLWn3xTGL4 Update: GLAAD has started a petition campaign demanding […]
Author: Jessica Stites
Jessica Stites is the former associate editor at Ms. magazine. Today she's the editorial director of In These Times, where she runs the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting and edits stories on labor, neoliberalism, Wall Street, immigration, mass incarceration and racial justice, among other topics.
BREAKING: U.S. Poised To Send Salvadoran Woman Back to Her Abuser
The fate of Irma Medrano, the woman seeking sanctuary in the U.S. from her abusive husband in El Salvador, hangs in the balance. Yesterday, the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed her motion for a stay of deportation. The 44-year-old Medrano fled El Salvador in 1995 to live with her sister in California after years of […]
How I Picked 10 Best Feminist Teen Books of All Time
For my new Ms. magazine article on feminist young-adult fiction (YA), I set out to pick 10 Must-Reads–those books which every 13-year-old with a spark of gender consciousness should have on her (or his) bookshelf. Or, as I say in the piece, those books that offer young protofeminists “refuge or escape–or provide our first ‘click!’ […]
Hey, Remember How Kobe Bryant is Probably a Rapist?
In 2003, when Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a hotel employee–who later refused to testify after her name was dragged through the mud–I first contracted Kobe-Bryant-is-a-Rapist Tourette’s. The condition consists of blurting out at inopportune times (such as the current Lakers vs. Celtics NBA championship finals) and to unsympathetic audiences (such as the denizens […]
We Heart: Sinead O’Connor
“This month, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology—of sorts—to Ireland to atone for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests whom those children were supposed to trust. … Astonishingly, he suggests that Ireland’s victims can find healing by getting closer to the church—the same church that has demanded oaths of silence from molested children.”
We Heart: The Newsweek Three
Three young women editors at Newsweek—Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison and Sarah Ball—have written a brave and candid piece calling out sexism at the magazine and in the publishing industry as a whole. They ask how much has changed since 1970, when a pioneering group of women Newsweek editors filed a landmark gender-discrimination suit for, among other things, being routinely called “dollies” by their male bosses.