This originally appeared at Laurel Hermanson’s blog. Republished here with permission. An ongoing controversy in publishing tackles the disparity in representation of male and female authors. Women comprise a fraction of published, reviewed, and award-winning authors. Solid data support this, and it is outrageous that women are still fighting this battle to be recognized as […]
Why does society often view childless women as sad or bitter? Just because you can doesn’t mean you want to or even should have children. Michelle Rabil responds to a recent Slate.com article about the public perception of child-free women. When I got the OK to write a response to Katie Roiphe’s Slate article “Do We Secretly […]
This originally appeared on The Current Conscience. Republished here with permission. Last week, I was sitting in a hotel lobby waiting to meet with a friend. As I waited, I noticed a woman having coffee with her mother. During this meeting, the woman was excitedly presenting her mother with an e-reader. After the present was […]
An increasing number of American women are trying to breastfeed their babies, but without proper models to learn from, their attempts rarely last long. Misty McLaughlin, an avid proponent of breastfeeding, discusses the benefits for mother and baby, and urges more women to talk about the process. There’s a soundtrack that I hear in my […]
In response to Kerry Cohen’s “I’m Not Fat, But What If I Were?” piece on Role/Reboot last week, Jenn Leyva refutes the myths about the fat body, and shares how she came to accept—and even love—herself the way she is. Last week, Kerry Cohen wrote a piece about what it would be like if she […]
Stephanie Hlywak rejects the claim that Lena Dunham, the 20-something creator and producer of HBO’s new series Girls, has had success because of her famous parents. Did your cultural seismograph register a disturbance in the tectonic plates of society at approximately 10:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time Sunday night? That tremor was the premiere of Lena […]
There is no way to measure whose lot is harder, and it shouldn’t matter anyway. In the wake of Hilary Rosen’s comments about stay-at-home mother Ann Romney, Kate McGuinness urges women to stop letting political rhetoric interfere with solidarity. The latest skirmish in the battle for women’s votes centers on whether it’s “harder” to be […]
Kerry Cohen is not fat. But like many women, she struggles almost daily with what she sees in the mirror. She shares her lifelong battle with feeling “kind of fat,” knowing she’s not, and trying to accept herself for who she is. The one time anyone called me fat was when I was in the […]
This was originally posted at CharlieGlickman.com. Republished here with permission. In all of the discussion and debate about Rush Limbaugh’s recent attack on and pseudo-apology to Sandra Fluke, there’s a piece that I want to call out: If you don’t respect sluts, you don’t respect women. There have been other articles, like Yasmin Nair’s In […]
Despite having difficulty navigating the classrooms and hallways of her prestigious university, Jenn Leyva accepts her fat body. She just wants the world to start accepting it, too. I go to one of the most prestigious universities in the world in one of the greatest cities in the world, and I spend a good chunk […]
This originally appeared in slightly different form at Not So Secret. Republished here with permission. When it comes to sex and sexuality, words can get in the way of expressing things that really matter. Especially when expressing ideas that we use to define our worlds and our place in them. As someone who writes about sex and […]
Despite his anti-feminist views, Rick Santorum has still managed to cultivate a faction of female Conservative supporters. But how? Hugo Schwyzer points to Santorum’s “soft patriarchy” as one possible answer to that question. Why do so many women love Rick Santorum, arguably the most anti-feminist major party political candidate in a generation? The New York […]
