Declaring a Ceasefire Against Our Sisters

So, the Mommy Wars. They’re back. Again. Or still. A superquick recap: As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, last week Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said on CNN that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s wife Ann, a stay at home mom, had “never worked a day in her life.” Naturally the Romney campaign latched on to [...]

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Let’s Talk About Sex

Everyone else seems to be. They’re talking about women and sex and “Girls” and sex and feminism and sex and HBO and sex and the sexual revolution as failure and the sexual revolution as success. It feels a little weird to be writing this, honestly, being that it’s 2012 and all. But with whom and [...]

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Either/or: Two Words That Underlie the Ambition Gap

We’ve been hearing a lot about the ambition gap lately: the fact that, as Sheryl Sandberg notes, only a paltry 15 to 18 percent of women occupy the top spots.  But there’s a dirty little secret that impacts the number of women who ultimately become leaders, or who hope to ascend to leadership positions, and [...]

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Does your Female Boss Really Have your Back?

According to a new report out of Sweden, the answer may be no. Sigh. Can’t you just hear the backlash? The ugly comparisons to the odious Miranda Priestly of “The Devil Wears Prada” fame?  The rousing chorus of “I told you so”? Sorry, folks, but we don’t buy it. What we think this report speaks [...]

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Why Every Issue Is a Women’s Issue

With Herman Cain’s candidacy on suspension and Occupy Wall Street protests being shut down (though not silenced), I got to thinking about some things. Things like inequality, male privilege, and the circumstances that allow them to continue–and which are the forces that tie such seemingly disparate things as political sexual scandal and outrageous economic inequality [...]

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I’m Not Mad!

“I’m not mad!” …but maybe I should be. Gloria Steinem thinks so. In a recent interview with the Observer, Steinem is quoted as saying: I think we need to get much angrier about childcare, about flexible working patterns. It’s alarming to me that women are still encouraged to blame themselves. No one can do it [...]

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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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Meet Me Off the Grid, Please.

So this might reveal my age, but my favorite image of Superman — other than his affinity for lycra — was the way he could fly out into space and whack the Earth with his hand to stop it from spinning.  Don’t you just wish someone could do that for reals? I do.  Just for [...]

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The zipless post

So have you heard about the big dust-up caused by the Wall Street Journal essay written by Erica Jong in which she castigates what she calls “motherphilia?”  I’m sure you know exactly what she means, but let’s let her spell it out: Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you know that we have endured [...]

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F*ck, yeah!

Replace the asterisk with the vowel of your choice and what you have is the sound-bite that goes along with Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum’s famous fist pump. Lincecum, in case you’ve been living on another planet this baseball season, is the Giant’s pitching ace, the long-haired little kid who looks like a skate-punk, even when [...]

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