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beyond the bricks to the beauty shop: lego goes girlie
A friend circulated this ad on facebook. Maybe you saw it as it made the rounds? The ad is from 1981, not a year particularly celebrated for female achievement (although it was the year Britney Spears...
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Monday Listicles: things i said i would NEVER do
Somewhere in the U.S., it’s still Monday even though here I’ve just put the kids on the bus to Neckerchief Academy for their Tuesday. For yesterday’s listicle--which I’m going to pretend is today’s...
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vaginas
so. vaginas. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “oh good lord, here comes a post about the idiot in Michigan …” But this post is not that post. You can write that post in your head: just say...
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Dear Eighteen: A Linkup with Chosen Chaos
Over at Chosen Chaos, Jamie has been running a series called “If I Could Turn Back Time,” in which writers are asked what they would tell their eighteen-year-old selves. I posted this piece on her...
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underpants for the underage
I will not be the only blogger who writes about this latest “ooh aren’t we edgy” marketing campaign; there are bloggers with far bigger platforms than mine who will draw attention to the latest entry...
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The F word
“You’re a feminist? But you’re so…calm!” A male college student of mine said that to me years ago, when we were discussing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s brilliant novella The Yellow Wallpaper, in which...
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because we all know that girls can’t do math, right?
Here we go again: This t-shirt is for sale just in time for “back to school.” Isn’t that just the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? A girl’s t-shirt that tells her (and us) that she can’t do math but...
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What’s In a Beard?
I’m traveling this week and so I’m bringing up some of my favorite old posts to keep you company while I’m gone. Circus Amok used to be one of our favorite NYC summer traditions, but I’m not sure...
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in which teaching becomes a metaphor. or something.
Next week I am teaching Virginia Woolf’s brilliant and amazing essay A Room of One’s Own. So on my list of “to do” for the weekend is this note, jotted down while I was in a meeting: “find a way in to...
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happy birthday, gloria steinem. I wish you didn’t matter.
Gloria Steinem spoke at my college graduation back in 1986. At the time, as a graduate of a woman’s college, I thought to myself “oh good lord, her. Couldn’t they find someone more relevant?” It was...
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Ladies Night at the Ice Rink
The image of the veiled woman remains a potent symbol of the “mysterious” Middle East and the question of “do you have to cover…” is almost always the first question that anyone asks me when I tell...
View ArticleTraveling While Female…
Hi there blogosphere…. I seem to have taken an inadvertent hiatus from blogging for a while … it’s the kind of thing like forgetting to write your grandmother: the longer you wait, the more it becomes...
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Whose Family Values Are They, Anyway? Happy Adoption Day!
I wrote this post almost four years ago. In that four-year time, gay marriage has become law in almost half the states in the Union and yesterday Tylenol ran a new ad that celebrated all the different...
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Elizabeth Warren, Planned Parenthood, and Me…Redux
Six years ago, I wrote a post about Dr George Tiller, who was murdered by someone who called himself “pro-life.” I’ll leave you a minute to savor the horrific ironies in that statement. And now, six...
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Melania Shares Our Pain
Poor Melania Trump. All she wanted was to marry a millionaire and settle down to an untroubled existence in a gold-leafed penthouse. Once she’d produced the requisite heir—the double-barreled Barron,...
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Vanity Fair, Elon Musk, AI, and Frankenstein’s (unexpected) Monster
Vanity Fair magazine recently ran a profile of Elon Musk that focused on the ways that Musk is at odds with other tech gurus about the relative merits of artificial intelligence (AI). Musk, who thinks...
View ArticlePerimenopause: Nature’s Way of Reminding Us that Adolescence Was Hell
The amazing Viola Davis was on Jimmy Kimmel the other day, talking about, among other things, the care-and-tending of an Afro, the dangers of an MRI, and menopause. Jimmy asked her how long menopause...
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