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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Tipping the Scales: Our Measure of our Worth?

And so today, as I was trolling for intelligent life out here in cyberspace, I came across a few quick hits that had me scratching my head when I tried to connect the dots. First was a great piece in Newsweek by Jessica Bennett, reviewing a new book on sex by neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and [...]

Read Full Post »

Woe Be The Lady Role Models

…For they shall be ripped apart. And no one, it seems, is immune. Not even Tina Fey. The very first piece of commentary I read about Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants, which Barbara wrote about last week, was in Newsweek. And, written by Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, it was fairly critical. Check it: Edging up [...]

Read Full Post »

Analysis Paralysis, anyone? Anyone?

Thanks for the offer.  But let’s just have some chocolate cake and call it a day. More about this cake business later, but first, there’s this:  Newsweek is the latest to hop aboard the streetcar named Can’t Decide — our own trek for the past two years — with its current cover story on the [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

A Knuckle Sandwich?

The strangest thing popped into my inbox the other day: a BCBG ad for this season’s statement jewelry. Front and center were a couple of iterations of what you see on your left: a knuckle ring. I kid you not. Look closely and you’ll find that the “ring” is actually two of them linking your [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Conduct Unbecoming: Playing Like the Boys

You can just imagine my glee when I flipped through this week’s Newsweek to find an essay headlined “Who You Callin’ A Lady?. The deck read “The soft bigotry of high expectations.” Holy jumpin’ Undecided, Batman! Isn’t this what we’ve been talking about in this space for months? Enter the buzzkill. I realized that the [...]

Read Full Post »