Playboy Bunnies: Hollywood’s Vision of Female Empowerment?

Fast in the wake of the success of “Mad Men”, TV’s retro series on the advertising industry circa 1965, come two new period series for the fall season:  “The Playboy Club” on NBC and “Pan Am” on ABC. What these two new series have in common is the insistence by their producers that when you […]

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“Hollywood and The Curse of the Double X”

If it sounds like the above could be the title of a horror flick, well, you’re not far off. I came across the following bit of clever repartee between Mick LaSalle, our often irreverent film critic, and a loyal reader in our local paper this Sunday and was suddenly loaded for bear. I feel obliged […]

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The Year of The Woman, and The Hefty Burden of Making Choices

The Year of the Woman? Oy vey. It’s a phrase that’s always struck me as ridiculous. It would be one thing to declare it the Year of the Short, Redheaded, Left-Handed Woman, or the Year of the Unmarried, Urban-dwelling Thirtysomething Woman, or the Year of the Woman Who Doesn’t Want to Have It All, but, […]

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Just Like Us

In an epic case of What-Goes-Around-Comes-Around, Janice Min, founding editor of Us Weekly magazine (a magazine which traffics in “cute mum and baby” porn and is nearly singlehandedly responsible for introducing terms including “baby bump” and “post-baby body” into the lexicon) who helmed the junkreading juggernaut for six years and now collects her paychecks from the […]

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Ladies First: Studies Show Women Are Better Leaders. So Why Aren’t There More of Us Leading?

When, over the span of little over a week, two huge studies find that, based on rankings by peers, supervisors, and direct reports, women are viewed as better leaders than men — and that, the higher the professional level, the wider the gap between the woman and her male counterpart (i.e., if you’ll pardon the […]

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The Real Lessons We Can Learn From Mad Men

Sure, there’s been a lot of chat about everything that’s wrong with Mad Men and why women in general and feminists in particular should hate its unrepentant misogynystic guts.  And let’s face it:  this is a show that glorifies gin, Lucky Strikes and getting laid (by anyone but one’s spouse). What’s not to hate, right? […]

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Stop Fucking Up Your Faces!

So, while I was playing armchair fashion police during Sunday’s Oscars, “Private Practice” actress Kate Walsh was tweeting. And into the umpteenth hour of statues and montages and Cirque de Soleil, she dropped this twitbomb: …dear Hollywood actresses, stop fucking up your faces, it’s looking the the bar scene in Star Wars.— Kate Walsh (@katewalsh) February […]

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You Are Your Brand?

In the era of information overload, of Facebook, of “personal branding,” of Rachel Zoe–a woman famous for dressing other famous, ahem, grown women–how do we define ourselves? Have the little things come to mean too much? Have we sacrificed nuance in favor of a slick and quick elevator pitch, or swapped the legwork of figuring […]

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Do We Do It To Ourselves?

The other day, I heard from Hilary, a former student who forwarded a pdf of the Letters page in the January issue of Washingtonian Magazine.  The top letter, which called out the editors for choosing to feature a naked woman on the cover, was hers: Your magazine is cutting edge, informative, and entertaining without being superficial.  […]

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She’s Just Not THAT Into You

Face it, fellas. She’s hot. You’re not. Walk away. Right? Nope. At least, that’s what an upcoming study in Psychological Science suggests.   In a study of 200 undergrads at University of Texas, lead author Carin Perilloux found that the least attractive men were the most likely to think that the attractive women in a “speed […]

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