Freedom, Fertility and Feminism (Redux): The Real Cost of The Pill

At long last: your birth control pills will finally be covered by insurance! The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced sweeping new guidelines for women’s health care to take effect Aug. 1, 2012. Among other things, these new guidelines will classify birth control pills as preventative medicine, meaning they’ll be covered without […]

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Feminism is Healthy For Men and Other Living Things

Did ya hear? Men’s Health magazine–rag that launched a thousand Eat This, Not Thats–has birthed a feminist blog. Seriously. And I don’t mean a feminist-ish blog, I mean one who’s title leaves no question as to its raison d’etre…. it’s called “The Men’s Health Feminist.” Pretty cool, no? Here’s a tad from reporter Kiera Aaron’s […]

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Freedom, Fertility, and Feminism

Today’s post is one of those ones that I’ve thought about writing often, but been happy to shy away from. It’s tricky territory. But over the past week, fate intervened: first, in the form of the New York Magazine in my mailbox, which screamed from the cover: Fifty years ago, the pill ushered in a […]

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Feminism’s Anti Heroine

ACK! She’d say, in cartoon bubble text, generally while agonizing over her weight, or her boyfriend, or whether she was supposed to be avoiding carbs or fat that week, or some other neuroses over which women of her era–the first beneficiaries of feminism of the mid 70s–were taught not to agonize. Cathy. She of the […]

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Botox Feminism

This week’s Newsweek poses the interesting question: Is your booty in your beauty? That is to say, do pretty people make more money (short answer: yes), and if so, should women, to quote Ru Paul, work it at work? An interesting debate, to be sure. Not least given feminism’s real–and imagined–history of trashing (and burning–that’d […]

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Feminism Needs Sarah Palin Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

Guess who’s calling herself a feminist? I’ll give you a hint: she doesn’t read much but cooks a mean moose chili, and while she isn’t a big fan of hopey changey stuff, she has been known to engage in such enlightened chants as “Drill, baby, drill.” (Though she’s been conspicuously quiet on that subject as […]

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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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Feminism 2010: We’ve Only Just Begun

Are We There Yet? asks a recent Newsweek headline, with the kind of slug that leaves you with a distinctive sense of dread: In 1976, 46 women filed a landmark gender-discrimination case. Their employer was NEWSWEEK. Forty years later, their contemporary counterparts question how much has actually changed. It’s a great piece, as it shows […]

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Feminista: Undecided Talks Feminism, Choices, and Having It All with Author Erica Kennedy

Readers, we’ve missed you, but we promise we’re back — and we’ve returned bearing gifts, in the form of a Q&A with the sharp, funny, honest, and slightly potty-mouthed author Erica Kennedy, whose first novel, Bling, is a New York Times Bestseller. But we bring her to you because Sydney, the main character in her […]

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Feminism 2.0: Enough?

When everything is on the menu, it takes an awful lot of willpower to say, you know, I’m not really that hungry. Even if you’re really not that hungry. Even if, in fact, you’re stuffed. This being the season of the cocktail party, I’m unable to think in anything other than food metaphors, but, in […]

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