Wedding Crashing

Confession time.  My current guilty pleasure is the TLC show Say Yes to the Dress. Yes, Friday night Professor Bean and I are curled up watching brides try on gown after gown, break down in tears when they find “their dress,” and spend thousands of dollars. So what do I, a rabid feminist, get out [...]

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I’m unhappy, you’re unhappy

Apparently, women aren’t very happy. “Each year since 1972, the United States General Social Survey has asked men and women: ‘How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being very happy, and 1 being not too happy?’” And since 1972, women’s happiness has dropped steadily. And this isn’t just the [...]

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More to Love finale gets it (sort of) right

The finale of More to Love was this week and I’m glad I stuck with the show because in the end, it turned out to be about something other than women obsessing about their weight and falling in love way too fast with a guy who actually admires curves. Don’t get me wrong–there was plenty [...]

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Street gawking

If you saw this woman on the street, how would you react? Wondering why I’m even asking this question? Yesterday, the DoubleX blog posted an article by Troy Patterson called A Dandy’s Guide to Girl-Watching and the comment page exploded. Patterson rhapsodized about the joys of checking out women. The article itself is rather annoying [...]

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Age is a feminist issue

I wasn’t going to write about More to Love. I don’t want this blog to turn into the “ranting about reality dating shows blog” and Professor Bean has already written about it. But he’s away for a week, which means I have to come up with all the ideas (how do other bloggers do this?). [...]

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One Step Forward?

I’ve been listening to a lot of the media coverage of Sarah Palin’s resignation and it occurred to me that, in a very odd way, Palin has broken the glass ceiling more completely than Hilary Clinton. Palin is a crazily unrealistic candidate for president; I suspect the leaders of the Republican Party will do everything [...]

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Feminisn’t

Last week, Slate’s Culture Gabfest mentioned a column in the New York Times Magazine about UrbanDictionary.com.  Curious to explore this cultural phenomenon, I started by looking up “feminism” at the largely youth-authored site.  After sifting through 71 definitions (some near-duplicates), my initial disgust turned to confusion and eventually a realization that UrbanDictionary.com’s babel may eventually [...]

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Fun, Fearless, Frightening

I have a Cosmo confession of my own to make.  Reading Cosmopolitan magazine has been a guilty pleasure in our household for quite a few years.  Lately, however, the guilt has far outweighed the pleasure, and I think I know why.

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A Grill-ish Figure

Perhaps even more than fireworks, the barbeque is the “tradition” most associated with the Fourth of July.  And grilling, apparently, is a man’s job.  The curious calculus that transforms a stereotypically feminine endeavor, cooking, into an uber-masculine pursuit is a topic for another post, but today what I’m thinking about is what we tend to [...]

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But Tell it Slant

This is a feminist blog.  We base many of our posts on a few key assumptions that might be worth stating here, before we all get too involved: 1)    Gender is culturally constructed – biological sex (male/female) is largely fixed, but gender (masculine/feminine) is constructed by the societies in which we are inculturated.  Myriad examples [...]

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