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) In yesterday’s staff memo by New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., he wrote that in last week’s firing of Abramson “compensation played no part whatsoever in my decision that Jill could not remain as executive editor. Nor did any discussion about compensation.” I believe that one small part of that memo about this whole brouhaha: the actual monies involved were… Read More »Women,Money and Power
For some reason, and no one intelligent knows why, far too many conservative men think that women talking about insured and covered birth control and available abortion means we are whores. Sluts. Loose women who cannot control our libidos. The most obvious question is just who IS it all these loose women are screwing, anyway? Because clearly, it isn’t the men who are screaming the loudest about keeping us virgins… Read More »Why Talking About Birth Control and Abortion Does Not Make You a Slut
I am doing nothing. I am doing so much nothing that I have wrapped a cocoon of nothing around myself so as to make the doing of nothing easier and less stressful. I am at a writers’ and artists’ colony and have two weeks in which to do nothing — except my work, which is not nothing, but is the kind of nothing that I haven’t had much time to… Read More »I Am Doing Nothing!
Before the bombings in Boston and the explosion in Texas and the ricin-laced letters to the president and congressmen, two women quietly committed suicide, not I think so much because they had been raped — a traumatic enough event in itself — but because the crime had been broadcast all over the Internet by the perpetrators. The women in question had not only lost control over their bodies and their… Read More »Why We Cannot Be Part of the 54 Percent of Women Who Do Not Report Sexual Assault
Someone recently said to me that the reason something is in the news, what makes it newsworthy, is the huge chance that it won’t happen to you. For example, most people, thank God, will not be shot in a shopping mall or a school, will not die when a sinkhole takes their bedroom, and will not end up in the hospital with the flesh-eating bacteria. And conversely, most people won’t… Read More »The Rise (Again) of the Celebrity Feminist.
A few women I know were discussing, lamenting, the state of women and the women’s movement a couple of days ago, wondering why it seems that for every step we take forward we take two steps back. They were wondering, much like the Republicans seem to be, whether feminism’s messaging is off rather than whether or not what we are doing as women is somehow misdirected. Fifty years after the… Read More »Marissa Mayer and the Great Class Divide