I’m A Mess; You’re A Mess

Or, as Wavy Gravy put it, we’re all just bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. That’s all well and good in theory (and coming from the man who gave brown acid a bad name–and ice cream a good one), but who wants to admit to being […]

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Life, According to Alice

Well, I never thought of Alice In Wonderland as a particularly feminist fairy tale of a movie, what with Johnny Depp and all. Alice is, you might note, not much taller than a teapot. But HuffPo blogger Marcia Reynolds apparently sees past the Mad Hatter to find several models of womenpower jumping off the 3D […]

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One Flew Over The Chicken Coop: The Femivore’s Dilemma

What do you think Betty Freidan–or Betty Draper for that matter–might say to the idea that, come 2010, women everywhere would be finding their purpose right in their own backyards? Tending to the chicken coops in their own backyards, that is? Don’t think that would fly? Peggy Orenstein offers an interesting take on the Extreme-Homemaking-as-Feminism […]

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Expectations? Check.

So clearly, you don’t often start the day thinking of “The Graduate.” But I was reminded of the iconic film about post-grad angst this A.M. via an op-ed from the Daily Pennsylvanian, written by Juliette Mullin, a senior at Penn, where, Mullin writes, students tend to equate the Penn seal on their diplomas with a […]

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Too Many Options? Let Your Sisters Decide For You

So, if you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that the issue of too many choices tends to come up from time to time. (Like, daily.) As do the kind of offhand musings that naturally follow a riff on the perils of option overload: like, oh, it would be so much easier if […]

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Ditching the Seventh-grade Self

Let’s revisit your school picture from seventh grade, shall we? No doubt, it’s tragic. Beyond the unfortunate hair, what you probably see is a very uncertain self lurking behind that all-too-eager smile. For many of us, life took an abrupt left once adolescence reared its awkward head. Maybe we were one of the cool kids. […]

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The Office Mom

And then, reader, there’s this. Allow me to reference a piece titled “The Office Mom,” which ran on Forbes‘ web site Tuesday with the slug: Women are ditching the stereotype of the imperious, tyrannical boss in favor of the nurturing “office mom.” Is that a good thing? According to writer Laura Sinberg, it is a good […]

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Oh, Grow Up. And Could You Please Do it in Three Years?

One of the problems with decisions is we sometimes make them before we’re ready. Sometimes we’ve forced ourselves into a box. Sometimes we entered that box with a skip and a smile. Sometimes it’s been a full-court press to please the iconic self. But as the saying goes (or did I make this up?): Decide […]

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Approve This!

So when I was a little kid, I had an imaginary friend named Francine. (Okay, what kind of five-year-old comes up with a name like Francine for a pretend playmate? Maybe that speaks to why I had to make one up. But at least I came up with a better moniker than my brother-in-law, who […]

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Perfection: A Zero Love Game

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Barbara’s post from last week, Choosing the Iconic Self, about how women–now freed from the simple definitions of either wife or daughter–struggle to define our authentic Self, and wind up trapped by the iconic image of whatever dream-self we aspire to become, saddling each choice with a […]

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