Five Ways to Have a Feminist Valentine’s Day

Frustrated by the patriarchal, heteronormative, gendered conventions of Valentine’s Day? This year, celebrate V-Day in feminist fashion, without becoming a slave to commercialism. Here are a few ideas for a very feminist Valentine’s Day: 1) Scrap the manufactured “holiday” altogether. Celebrate V-Day instead. Contrary to popular usage, the “V” in V-Day is not just a […]

Curious Tension: Feminism and the Sporting Woman

As a former athlete and a graduate student in sports studies, I embraced feminism in the 1970s. It seemed to be a natural alliance because I had experienced sports as personally liberating and felt that it offered females the possibility to become accomplished athletes, develop strong and healthy bodies and defy societal views of females […]

Top 100 Feminist Non-Fiction Countdown: 20-11

  Nearing the top 10, we’ve got some heavy hitters. Famous feminists Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Naomi Wolf, Eve Ensler and Jessica Valenti appear along with revolutionary self-help manual, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and popular books by Julia Serano, Marjane Satrapi and Yoani Sanchez. Now is the time to submit your guesses in the comments […]

Click! Everything I Needed To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

I was 5 years old when I first had that sensation that comes from your gut when you know something isn’t right. Not a feeling of danger, but of righteous anger at injustice. It comes from deep inside, where instinct resides. There I was, in my mud-stained jeans and forever-disheveled hair, playing in the kindergarten […]

Crying (Naomi) Wolf Over Rape

Naomi Wolf has been making the media rounds lately on the Julian Assange case, beginning  with three pieces on The Huffington Post and then in a debate on Democracy Now! She claimed that the governments involved in prosecuting Assange for rape are only “pimping feminism” to go after him in retaliation for WikiLeaks, and that […]

The Cross-Dressing Girls of Afghanistan

Life & Style is not happy with Angelina Jolie’s daughter, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, and her boyish new look. The four-year-old’s short hair, boy’s pants and total lack of frilly summer dresses has got the tabloid crying child abuse. And as Feministing notes, this media frenzy over a young girl who dresses like a boy reminds us […]

Serious Laughs: Laura Linney in “The Big C”

In the opening scene of The Big C, a new series that premiered this week on Showtime, suburban schoolteacher and mom Cathy Jamison (played by Laura Linney) wears a bright, strained smile. It’s the people-pleasing, trying-to-be-nice smile that many women put on when they try to negotiate for what they want. In this case, Cathy […]

Can Feminism Liberate Men?

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.” The male corollary, a much older aphorism, is usually framed as an imperative: “Be a man.” Or its inverse: “Don’t be a pussy.” So what is a man? Don Draper is a man; James Bond is a man. We’re told pretty […]

Blog Roundup: Editors’ Picks, June 21-25

It’s time once again for another installment of our weekly blog roundup! This week, Ms. brings you weekend reading on Jon Stewart, Harper Lee, Helen Mirren, Gaga, Sartre and Beauvoir. From The New York Times Opinionator: Just when we thought our relationship with Lady Gaga couldn’t get any more complicated, Nancy Bauer–with help from Simone […]