Culture

Douchebag Decree: Special tabloid gender-panic edition!

  Let me just say right up front that I don't expect any of the following from Life&Style, Us Weekly, or any of the other mags barfing their neon coverlines all over the Safeway checkout line: Accuracy, subtlety, reason, nuance, intelligence, imagination, responsibility, or feminism. They're... Read more »

Seeking: Dynamic Women Who Don't Need A Hero

Confession time: I love me a good low budget fantasy series. If it's on a second rate cable network, and it features magic, medieval times, and roaming adventures, I'm in. I lived for Xena: Warrior Princess and all its chakram throwing, ululating battle crying, lesbian subtext possessing glory... Read more »

The Biotic Woman: The Dirty Politics of Coal

Here's a reality check the next time someone wants to tell you about clean coal: They're still cleaning up the biggest fly ash spill in U.S. history that occurred in December 2008, which occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)... Read more »

Adventures in Feministory: Wilma Mankiller

First of all, Happy Women’s History Month! (Adventures in Feministory is, after all, kind of like Women’s History Month only it’s weekly and year-round). And this week we’re journeying into the not-so-distant history of Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the... Read more »

Reproductive Writes: Get With The Program!

Slate's DoubleXX recently hosted a discussion entitled 'That Not So Fresh Feeling: Marketing Embarrassing Products To Women' in which they analyzed adverts for tampons and sanitary... Read more »

The Biotic Woman: What Natural Disaster Means for Chilean Women

Natural disasters are gendered, with women facing aid discrepancies at every step of the recovery process. Particularly in areas that are already impoverished, there are simply fewer opportunities to rebuild after a disaster. If women are already largely shut out of the more lucrative jobs, this... Read more »

The Marriage Ref: Not worth fighting for.

After viewing roughly 1.2 million promos for it during the Winter Olympics, I decided to give NBC’s new prime time show The Marriage Ref a chance during last night’s “special sneak preview.” Sure, the promos made it look like a boring,... Read more »

Need another reason to love Johnny Weir?

A recent PR scuffle proved that ice-skating champ Johnny Weir is the bigger man when it comes to commentary…not that he gives a sh** what a man should or shouldn’t be. In response to two Quebecois commentators who... Read more »

Sapphic Salon: "Law & Order: SVU" to feature Kathy Griffin as a lesbian

Next week's episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit will feature Kathy Griffin playing a lesbian activist named Babs Duffy. The comedian and self-professed friend of the gays has been talking up... Read more »

The Biotic Woman: The Goode Family makes for good TV

Because I currently have to rely on the internets for my American TV shows (save the ridiculous smattering of FBI/cop shows they export to Danish television), I'm only now catching the recently-canceled reruns of the short-lived animated sitcom by Office Space/Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge... Read more »

Pages

Know & Tell: The Literary Renaissance of Trans Women Writers

For so long, the people who wrote about us were not us. Finally, that is beginning to change. Read more »

Saying Goodbye to Maria and the End of a Sesame Street Era

Growing up, Sesame Street's Maria was one of the best Latina role models I had. Read more »

In a Bizarre 1976 Comic Book, Spider-Man Fought the Villain of Misleading Sex Education

Last week, I came across a very strange comic book: in 1976, Planned Parenthood teamed up with Marvel to publish a one-off comic in which... Read more »

What I Learned About Gender and Power from Sailor Moon

My life began in 1995 — the year I turned eight and became a divorced kid.    Read more »