Tonight’s premiere of the new CBS drama “Unforgettable” brings to mind another cable show, “Monk” (2002-2009). “Monk”‘s detective lead had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which was both a blessing and a curse–not very practical for trying to enjoy the ordinary parts of life, but really helpful for catching criminals. Now CBS riffs on this concept […]
Author: Paula Kamen
Paula Kamen is the author of four books and the play Jane: Abortion and the Underground, which has been performed at many college campuses. Her first book, Feminist Fatale, was about the importance of consciousness raising for the post boomer generation. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Women’s Review of Books and McSweeney’s, among others. She tweets @paulakamen.
Lynn Peril’s Fiendish Study of the Secretary
When I started to collect kitschy advice books to women from thrift-store bargain bins in the 1980s, their main attraction was a good laugh. My stash included some gems from the 1970s, such as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the New Single Girl, featuring advice about conducting office affairs with married men, or Partridge Family […]
Dear NBC and ABC: I’ve Seen “Mad Men,” And Your Shows Are No “Mad Men”
An ad in the new Entertainment Weekly proudly proclaims a feminist slant for one of NBC’s most touted fall dramas: The Playboy Club, on the 1960s’ birth of Hugh Hefner’s empire. In an accompanying “interview,” lead actor Laura Benanti elaborates: These ladies were making more money than their fathers, putting themselves through school, running away […]
Rivka Solomon Acts Up, Chronic Fatigue Be Damned
Rivka Solomon’s 2002 anthology, “That Takes Ovaries!,” still inspires action. That book (and play of the same name) even spurred its own international movement, serving as a blueprint for at least 600 open-mike speak-outs and performances in which girls and women celebrate their own “ovarian acts.” But Rivka has done much of this from bed.
What’s Behind Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper?
Today, Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre, the subject of a big Hollywood film, is not the only 19th-century woman writer newly capturing the public imagination with her portrayal of a “madwoman” in an attic. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935, is also re-emerging in the spotlight with a bevy of recent books about her, including […]
How an Ill Woman Found Common Ground with a Wild Snail
What appears at first to be a simple creature is actually a complex being, capable of everything any other animal form is capable of: a complex love life, an epicurean appetite, finding a comfortable place to sleep, skilled locomotion, multiple defense mechanisms…
A (Very Incomplete) Feminist Poetry Syllabus for 2011
Recently, I have been hearkening back to my literary year–1988. That was in college when I had a feminist poetry class, and also the last time I read such material in depth. Not that it was a chore back then. I was intrigued by the irreverent, political, intellectually fierce and nakedly honest material, which grabbed me […]
The Vagina Dialogues, Circa 1970
Before there was The Vagina Monologues, there were the pelvic instructors. These women, from Boston’s Women’s Community Health Center, were radical in not only instructing medical students in female sexual anatomy but in also using their own bodies as models. Their short-lived yet highly symbolic program took place from 1975 to 1976 at Harvard Medical […]
The New Face of “Jane” in Chicago
Like with Jane, most of the women served by the Chicago Abortion Fund are poor African American women, But a change with CAF is that African American women are those actually running things.
The Gen X Male-Only Midlife Crisis: Hot Tub v. SATC
The men of “Hot Tub” are funny, while the women of SATC are “desperate.”