Activism
Ladies First: ...to protest with style and humor, of course
It was 1984. Ronald Reagan was running for reelection and Phyllis Schlafly—conservative gadfly, ardent foe of the Equal Rights Amendment, and self-identified “little homemaker”—was presiding over a fashion show at the Republican National Convention in the sweltering heat of a Dallas August. As a... Read more »
My Meidel Is the Centerfold: Is Playboy's first Jewish bunny a role model?
Growing up, I learned a few things about Jewish girls from the copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes my brother kept in our bathroom. In addition to being frigid and cheap, I learned that we love Bloomingdale's, dislike oral sex, and prefer circumcised penises—as the joke goes, we like everything better... Read more »
O is for the Other Things She Gave Me: Jonathan Franzen’s "The Corrections" and contemporary women’s fiction
As every tabloid reader knows, it’s a short step from a celebrity marriage to a publicity-filled divorce. When Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, The Corrections, was published this fall, critics waxed hyperbolic over its wedding of character-driven family drama and up-to-the-nanosecond cultural... Read more »
Grrrl, You'll Be a Lady Soon
Last fall, at a reading for Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, a 50-ish audience member questioned the thirtysomething authors’ ever-so-casual usage of the word “ladies.” To this woman (who turned out to be tireless second-wave activist Laura X, creator of the Women’s History... Read more »
Sex, Lies, and Videotape: An Interview with <em>The Center of the World</em>'s Molly Parker
Reviewers have likened it to a dot-com Pretty Woman, but The Center of the World, the latest film from director Wayne Wang (Smoke, Blue in the Face, The Joy Luck Club), is a far more complex rumination on the intersections of sex, love, and commerce. Set in southern California, the story follows... Read more »
Sister Outsider Headbanger: On Being a Black Feminist Metalhead
“I wasn’t ashamed of my love for metal (well, except for maybe hair metal). I just couldn’t explain it to most people.”
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Solid Gold Dancer
gina gold is a writer and filmmaker who spent five years in San Francisco's sex industry, starting out as a phone sex operator, then becoming an exotic dancer at the Lusty Lady, the Market Street Cinema, and the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theater. Her first film, Do You Want Me to Stay?, grew out... Read more »
Go Forth and Multiply: Pronatalist imperatives on film
ah, movie magic. hollywood always manages to make difficult situations turn out well after two hours—and nowhere is this more apparent than with cinematic treatments of unplanned pregnancy.
Unexpected conceptions occur onscreen with surprising frequency, but filmmakers routinely play it safe,... Read more »
Humor in the Heartland: Tales of a small-town feminist
Imagine the jolt to my feminist sensibilities when I arrived, ready to serve, at the local Taste of the County dinner event and was presented with a plastic apron that had housewife emblazoned under my name. Shame heaped upon humiliation when I noticed—slack-jawed—that a potted plant, needle and... Read more »
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