Why We Are All Fashion Victims

In the ever-escalating fetishization of the female form, I was left scratching my head once again when I opened the latest issue of Newsweek to find a quick take on Paris Fashion Week. The story focused on the untimely collapse of a few high-rent benches at the Balenciaga show. News, right? But what sent me […]

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Do the Clothes Make the Woman? The Fashion of Feminism

Throughout the course of a woman’s life, a question that never ceases to be relevant is the one so many like to say isn’t–or shouldn’t be–relevant at all: What should I wear? But the fact is, it is. Clothes, of course, do more than keep us warm and safe from indecent exposure citations: they are […]

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Moving On…

Lest you thought feminism‘s battle was over, let me reassure you, we’ve only just begun. And, despite all the work we’ve left to do, many facets of feminism, facets that are, by all proper measure, actually settled by now continue instead to rerun, like so much sitcom syndication. Consider: How is it that, in the […]

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Woo What Women?

With the election looming, we decided to write this one together. Call it our endorsement. Because we’re women! Two generations of them. And between the two of us, we’ve held all kinds of roles: daughter, sister, wife, mother, employee, self-employee, employer of others, homeowner. We are upstanding members of society, participate in the economy, and, […]

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It’s Not Me… It’s You.

The other day, a good friend who is Swedish emailed me a link  to post by Ann Charlott Altstadt, a Swedish writer who suggests that when life gets us down, we’d sometimes be better off ditching the trip to the yoga studio or the psychologist and seeing a sociologist instead. Funny, my friend said, 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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Feminist in High Heels

I confess: I love shoes.  Especially when they’re high.  Until they wore out, my go-to faves were a pair of black leather ankle boots with dangerously high heels. They were actually pretty comfortable, but I would have worn them anyway because they looked damn good. I’m also a feminist. I bring this up because I […]

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What Girls Can Learn From Olympic Grrrrrrrrrrrl Power

The other day after I got home from my run (I use the term advisedly), I got a call from the local NBC affiliate asking for a quick interview on the overall impact of “girl power”  in this year’s Olympics.  Within ten minutes, the reporter and her cameraman were on their way. While dashing around […]

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The Trouble with iComm

I sometimes wonder whether our uber-connection has left us more than a little disconnected. There’s no denying the ubiquity of iComm.  Long ago, we gave up talking in favor of typing.  (My land line rarely rings.  Does yours?) More recently, email conversations -– thanks to the seductive buzz of the smart phones in our pockets […]

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Are We What We Wear?

Does fashion reflect the culture, or does it sometimes shake it loose? I bring this up because we were recently on a decadent vacation and somewhere between a tamarind smoothie and a full body massage, I picked up the latest issue of Vogue and flipped to a fashion spread entitled “Risky Business.” And what did […]

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