Are you a mother? Do you know someone who is? You probably do, and that’s why you should be very concerned about Alabama’s chemical endangerment clause, which aims to protect fetuses from mothers who abuse drugs. Alabama’s law — and others like it — signify a wave of legislation aimed at granting fetuses more rights and women less, effectively treating mothers as second class citizens.
Last week, The Frisky told you about the New York banker who was charting the waves of Match.com and came up with a novel way to keep the women he was talking to on the site straight—he made a spreadsheet of the eight women he was corresponding with. He included their name, a photo, his initial impressions after viewing their profile, the dates when they’d exchanged winks, the dates of when they’d exchanged emails, and impressions of their first date. He color-coded the women according to who he wanted to “monitor closely ASAP” and who he wanted to “monitor casually.” He, of course, gave each woman a numerical score based on her appearance, getting so specific as to dole out three 7.5s and a 9.5. For one woman, he wrote, “Ok girl, but very jappy; one and done for me.” Keep reading »
Another day, another bombastically link-baity piece on the Internet to get everyone’s feathers ruffled!
Today’s linkbait comes courtesy of The New York Daily News op-ed page, in which writer S.E. Cupp hammers away at Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen for a foot-in-mouth comment she made on “Anderson Cooper 360″ last week, that stay-at-home mother (SAHM) of five Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” Rosen later clarified that she meant Ann shouldn’t be her millionaire husband’s earpiece for issues on women and the economy; alas, her point was lost by inelegant phrasing.
The rudeness of Rosen’s comments were chastised by everyone from First Lady Michelle Obama, members of the president’s staff, and feminists such as myself. But that fact has been conveniently ignored by S.E. Cupp. Instead, she wants to pat Ann Romney on the back for “marrying up,” writing:
[W]hile liberal women may praise Ann for (at least) getting herself an education, where is the praise for Ann’s best decision of all — to marry well? Keep reading »
A few weeks ago, an article in the Orthodox Jewish newspaper The Jewish Press began to make waves in the religious community. Yitta Halberstam, a well-known Jewish author, wrote about the process of trying to find her son a wife. In her part of the Jewish community (a right-wing faction of Orthodoxy sometimes known as yeshivish), it’s not uncommon for a professional shadchan (matchmaker) to pair up young eligible men and women. A shadchan who makes a successful shidduch (match) can be paid well for their services. However, there has been a recent “shidduch crisis,” which is that there are more prospective brides than grooms. Orthodox boys are waiting longer to marry, while girls are essentially considered over the hill if they’re not married by 18 or 19.
One way that shadchanim (the plural of shadchan) have tried to solve this issue is by hosting events where mothers can meet and interview prospective daughters-in-law. Halberstam attended one of these events and she admitted that the whole process made her uncomfortable. However, as the mother of an eligible bachelor and therefore someone in a position of relative power, Halberstam could have called off the whole thing and pointed out how awkward and unfair it was to the young women involved.
Instead, she penned a long rant about how young women should wear more makeup and their families should be willing to pay for plastic surgery if that’s what it takes to land a husband. Keep reading »
Bondage/dominance/sadomasochism (BDSM) erotica novel Fifty Shades Of Grey has swept the nation, landing itself on many a Kindle and launching a feeding frenzy for the movie rights. More digital ink has been spilled on What Does This All Mean? for women and our sexual desires than will ever be spilled on the people killed by a tornado in Oklahoma this weekend.
So naturally, Newsweek/The Daily Beast hired Katie Roiphe, who both loathes contemporary feminism and does not understand BDSM in the slightest, to write about it. Keep reading »
Hello, my name is Alexandra Gekas and I am a single woman living in New York City who used to watch “Sex and the City.” I can assure you that I did not come to New York City to live the life of “Sex in the City.” But I also did not know just how unrealistic and off-base that show was when I arrived five years ago, otherwise I probably would have stayed away.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this city. Its power, its energy, its diversity… That’s why people are willing to sacrifice so much to stay here. New York is like that insanely hot guy who’s kind of mean to you, but the sex is great and when he’s on he makes you feel so good, you just keep coming back for more. But he’s not exactly Mr. Right, now is he? Having watched the new ABC show “Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23” and in anticipation of the upcoming HBO show “Girls” (which premieres on Sunday night), I’ve realized that A) I have not let myself admit just how hard it really is and B) not only am I not alone, but there are so many of me that my life has become a television cliché. Keep reading »
On Thursday night, I had what seemed like a pretty good first date. By Friday lunchtime, any chance of a romance between that guy and I had fallen spectacularly to pieces.
I wrote about what went down in a post called “An Open Letter To The Guy Who Called Me ‘Crazy.’” I’ve been pretty thrilled by its reception, particularly all the messages from women who’ve said they totally relate to what happened with Mean Crazy Bitch Guy. However, something in the comment thread has caught my eye: a (new) commenter penned a lengthy comment insinuating Mean Crazy Bitch Guy was actually the victim in the entire scenario and that he lashed out and called me horrible names because he “[felt] creep shamed.”
“Creep shamed”? I thought. I know that term from somewhere. Where is it …? Oh, right, it’s a “men’s rights activist” term. But I wanted to know more. Keep reading »
According to an article in this month’s issue of Esquire, the blow job is all but becoming extinct in favor of cunnilingus. In an informal poll, conducted by the writer Geoff Dyer, eight out of 10 of his “more mature male friends” preferred “eating p**sy to having their dicks sucked.” And guess what? The two who preferred BJs were gay! He uses this data to assert that the excitement that surrounded fellatio beginning in the ’70s has all but faded.
Clearly, that must be the case, if his friends say so. But it’s not just his friends. He says blow jobs are out in pop culture as well. I mean, Michael Fassbender’s character in “Shame” tells a man in a bar that he wants to go down on his wife. It’s of no consequence that he’s a sex addict, I suppose. And in a scene from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Joey Berglund says he considers getting a blow job as “little more than a glorified jerk off.” Should we talk about how he had been sleeping with his neighbor since he was 13 or something? Perhaps I should remind Dyer of the entire page in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot dedicated to the sucking of Mitchell Grammaticus’ c**k. That came out just this year.
Dyer says of his perceived decline of the blow job:
“[Cunnilingus] was regarded in much the same way as paying for a round at the bar: You had to do it, but if you could avoid it, you did. It would be a mistake, though, to see this change as meaning that men have gone from being selfish recipients to selfless givers of pleasure; it’s just that what constitutes pleasure has shifted.”
Franca Sozzani excels at many things. She is the long-standing editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia and, in 1994, she was even made the editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Italia in its entirety. She is acknowledged as a contemporary and collaborator to, among others, Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber, Peter Lindbergh, and Paolo Roversi, unarguably the most influential fashion photographers of the past two decades. She is credited as the driving force, alongside Meisel, behind the groundbreaking “supermodel” movement in the ’90s. Last year, she launched Vogue Curvy, a branch of the magazine’s Italian edition geared towards plus-sized women. Sozzani has accomplished a great variety of things, but despite her apparent devotion to targeting her publication towards a medley of body shapes and sizes, she herself champions thinness. It’s a true study in contradiction: she encourages others to appropriate acceptance of all body types, but at the bottom line, the girls that land the coveted cover of her magazine — not to mention Sozzani herself — are built like greyhounds.
Which brings me to my point: Vogue Italia has a history, more so than any other Vogue publication, of promoting the emaciated look, so why, in the name of all that is good and holy (which is nothing, these days), did Franca Sozzani, notorious for her use of strikingly thin models, give a speech about anorexia, obesity, and body image at Harvard?
By now, many of you may have read Vogue’s annual “Shape” issue and had some reaction to the story of Bea, a seven-year-old girl whose mother was intent on curing her “obesity,” which was, in reality, 16 extra pounds of baby fat.
“One day Bea came home from school in tears, confessing that a boy at school had called her fat. The incident crushed me, but it was a wake-up call. Being overweight is not a private struggle. Everyone can see it,” said Bea’s mother, Dara-Lynn Weiss.
Weiss immediately put Bea on a Weight Watchers-type diet designed for children. Reading this, I felt a familiar pang in my gut. I was also an overweight child who came home from school and complaining about being teased. It was fifth grade, and I was the new kid in school. I didn’t know I was overweight until one of the popular boys spit on my new pair of Vans and called me “fat ass.” The girls were even worse. They attacked me in the bathroom with a barrage of spitballs. I spent most of the school year alone, writing in my journal. There’s one heartbreaking entry I’ll never forget: Dear Diary, Please let me be popular. Please let me not be fat anymore.
Although I’ve moved on and healed from these experiences, which happened more than 20 years ago, it still hurts to write about them. They’re a reminder of how cruel people can be, perhaps without even meaning to. What’s more painful for me, though, is remembering how my mother reacted to these incidents. Keep reading »
