At six months short of my sixtieth birthday I have a six pack. Well, practically. I can see the ripples of muscle more clearly than I ever had before even if they are covered in a small layer of post C-section, well-past menopause fat. The muscles are discernible. My arms are strong, too, the bat wings of old age less distressing than they might be. My legs can carry me… Read More »At Six Months Shy of Sixty, A Six Pack
I am sitting in a Five Guys mindlessly shelling peanuts and waiting for my hamburger when in a sudden and nearly breathtaking moment I miss my father. I realize I will never again see him, talk to him, try to understand him, make him understand me. His laugh so distinctive and infectious floods my mind. I miss his cockeyed smile, the way for so long I believed everything he told… Read More »Missing Daddy
Hey you. Yes, you. Come here. Yes. Closer. I have something to tell you. Are you ready? Are you sure? Can you handle it? Ok. Here it is. Women over 37 have sex. They have relationships. They are attractive. They have sex with men their own age, too. Or older. Or younger. In the real world. In Hollywood, not so much. Only in the bizarro world of Hollywood dog years… Read More »Psst! You Can’t Handle the Truth About Women!
In a recent Sunday issue of the New York Times two very different articles on women and their households appeared. One, “Poor Little Rich Woman,” is already stirring up controversy for the so-called “wife bonuses” that some of these uber wealthy stay-at-home-moms supposedly receive from their husbands if they perform well as wives and mothers (although that notion has been pretty thoroughly debunked as something of a one-off.) The other,… Read More »Wife Bonuses, Mad Men and The Mommy Wars
Better than Keri Russell who is tough but on the wrong side, way more interesting than any Wonder Woman incarnation, more fully realized than any of the female FBI agents or cops who abound in television dramas, and far less neurotic than Lucy Liu’s Dr. Watson, Téa Leoni is the best thing to happen to feminism on television since I don’t know when. Like the television shows The West Wing… Read More »Téa Leoni Saves the World
A couple of days ago a “Dear Abby” column had a letter in it from a 16-year-old girl who works in the food service industry and reveals that a coworker quit because the boss told her he had “feelings” for her. Now the young girl is uncomfortable working there and doesn’t know what to do. Abby, in all her pre-feminist glory, tells the young girl to “keep her distance” and… Read More »I Was a Teenaged Feminist?
I figure I have maybe fifteen good years left. That’s an odd thing to have to wrap your head around but when your grandmother and mother were both diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in their early to middle seventies it is an inescapable fact. It took me some years to just wrestle with my mother’s diagnosis and realize my grandmother’s “senile dementia” was the same thing before I began to think about… Read More »Do I Want to Know if I’ll Get Alzheimer’s?
Do you know what pisses me off? Warren Buffett calling out Elizabeth Warren for being angry. As I’ve grown older I do indeed try to temper my anger, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get mad; I just try to save my mad for the things which are really worth it. And injustice, inequity, power-grabbing one-percenters, those things are worth getting mad over. As are the banks and the banksters… Read More »Warren Buffett Says Elizabeth Warren’s “Too Angry”
(This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post) Tom Junod’s recent Esquire article on the sexual viability of 42-year-old women would be just silly if it weren’t for it being part and parcel of the “new” misogyny taking hold in both American culture and American politics. When white men still make the rules, get pissed off when they can’t make the rules and punish women for wanting to make their… Read More »8 Things Middle-Aged Women Think About Far More Than Whether They’re Still F*ckable by Middle-Aged Men
(This post originally appeared in the Washington Monthly) Those of us who can actually remember the Vietnam War well remember the slogan: What if they gave a war and nobody came? It was used to protest the most modern of our useless wars, until the most recent misbegotten two, of course. In those days people actually took to the streets to try and do some good: bring the boys home,… Read More »What if They Gave a March and Nobody Came?