Two roads diverge …

Yes, we know. That old yellow wood is the time-worn commencement cliche — not to mention perhaps the first crystallization of the choice conundrum that plagues us all. But in her 2009 commencement address, Barnard grad Sarah Besnoff takes that old metaphor and peppers it with generous dashes of insight– and hope — for a [...]

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Women Are Sort of More Tentative Than Men, Aren’t They?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before–women are less assertive than men, as evidenced by the way we soften strong statements with “hedges” (sort of, maybe, kinda, pretty much), “disclaimers” (I feel, I don’t know, I’m not sure, That’s just my opinion), and “tag questions” (Don’t you think? Isn’t that right?). It’s a favorite [...]

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Midlife Crisis, For Her

The other day, I got an interesting email from a good friend of mine. She was walking home from work, she said, having what she referred to as a “low self-esteem day,” when she came upon a big sign in a storefront, picturing three smiling (appropriately diverse, yet all perfectly coiffed) women, “around our age,” [...]

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Holding Up Half the Sky

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine was devoted to women, and if you’ve not read it yet, I implore you to do so. Granted, it won’t be much fun, but I think the issues it raises are critically important for all women. The cover lines give fair warning of what’s to come, as well as why [...]

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Are We All Outsiders?

Do we still want to be Molly Ringwald? A recent retrospective of the late John Hughes’ eighties work by New York Times writer A.O. Scott made me start thinking that the answer might be, um, maybe. Were those coming-of-age stories etched in our psyches when many of us were, well, coming of age (okay, I [...]

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The Zeitgeist, Part 2: More

Yesterday, some chat about feminism. Today, a little bit more — on a little bit more. On “As In Sit-coms, So In Life”: I was born in 1965, am African-American and grew up going to parochial schools and living on the southside of Chicago. When I was in highschool, I did not take any home [...]

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The Zeitgest: Apparently, You’re Feminists

A flurry of interesting comments blew in over the last couple weeks. Many of them in answer to Shannon’s loaded question: Are You A Feminist: This reminds me of something I studied in a sociology class in college–it was the idea that the majority of gay men were beer-drinking, sports-watching, suit-wearing so called “normal” guys, [...]

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Oh, the irony: what’s hot and what’s not

Apparently, pot bellies are the new cool. If you happen to be a young male hipster. Stay with me here: This is all about the way the media treat women as opposed to men, and why it appears that women can’t win. According to The New York Times Style section, the Ralph Kramden look is [...]

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Funny People… Unfunny Women

I’m going to begin with a caveat here: I like Judd Apatow’s movies. They make me laugh. And part of me feels a little sorry for him, as it seems he’s maxed out his cool outsider cred as of late and is now veering into the territory of the overexposed love-t0-be-hated. But. I also confess [...]

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Further Adventures of Women At Work

Or, “Why Women?” redux. Apparently, women on the job greatly underestimate their bosses’ opinion of their work. That’s the word from a new study out of the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management. Scott Taylor, the study’s author, found that men tend to assume their bosses think more highly of them than they [...]

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