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What happens when you take one delusional nostalgia-peddler in a twinset, one accomplished young female journalist, and one public radio host, mix in a few splashes of princess culture, a liberal application of slut-shaming, a twist of incoherence, and a backhanded, condescending ad hominem attack? You get a matronly lecture from the fuzzy mind of Caitlin Flanagan, who warns radio listeners that unless they're careful parents, their daughters might end up like Salon writer Irin Carmon. More »
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Ever wonder why so many automated voices—think the iPhone's Siri, your GPS lady, the woman who gives you your voicemail—are female? NPR's Scott Simon did a little digging into this topic, and the consensus seems to be that women's voices are used because they're perceived as being more comforting. As one expert put it, More »
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"Some people want to be heard," explains Kevin Collier. "Other people just have an urge to talk." Good to see that the train from 1999 has finally pulled up to the station. More »
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Hearst magazines chair Cathie Black explains Cosmo's sex-tips app to NPR. Unfortunately, not everyone's clear on the prevailing rate for such services. More »
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At least, that's the message of these album covers. Alternatively: Sex sells everything. More »
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Or, when the intersection of your highly-predictable blue state media diet and obsession with the well-being of your pets becomes a (well-deserved) punchline on Family Guy. More »
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Via NPR's Alyson Hurt. Learn more here. More »
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In an effort to be extremely (overly?) sensitive, NPR has instructed staffers to no longer use the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life." They're not "neutral" enough, apparently, so they're going to tiptoe around from here on out. More »
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Yup, people are still talking about "big women," "curves," and plus-sizes in fashion. And some of what they're saying is pretty great: More »
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Gossip columnist Liz Smith, nearly 87, looks back with NPR. "I had a lot of gender confusion when I was younger," she says of her affairs with women. She still goes out at least three nights a week. [NPR] More »
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In 1955, photographer Robert Frank snapped a picture of a girl in her uniform, working the elevator in a Miami hotel, as she looked toward the camera with an unreadable expression. Her name was Sharon Goldstein. More »
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Wondering why women get all that special treatment? Tina Tchen (right) tells NPR why we need a White House Council on Women and Girls, and why issues like health care and small-business ownership present unique problems for women. [NPR] More »
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"People think listening is easy. Listening is hard. It's easy to be distracted by a headache, or worries over a family member who's ill. You have to not allow yourself to be distracted." — NPR's Terry Gross [Seattle Times] More »
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I'm Anbna LaSelva, reporting from the Land of Internet Time-Wasting, where one Linda Holmes has just discovered a new and potent time-waster: your NPR name. More »
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Mark Blankenship from NPR's blog Monkey See reviewed the new "Hannah Montana" movie and found a "sinister hidden message" lodged in at the end. Spoiler alert! after the jump. More »
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Former Jezebel editor Jessica here! Anna has kindly allowed me to shamelessly promote the book I co-wrote with Doree Shafrir, Love, Mom. In honor of its publication tomorrow, Doree and I are offering our own moms… More »
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Today on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show guest host Kerry Nolan talked with actress Mary Stuart Masterson about her directorial debut The Cake Eaters, which opens today in limited release. More »
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On Tuesday, NPR featured a segment on the difficulties of balancing work and family, but this time with an interesting twist: all the women interviewed were in the military. More »
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"I've come from where I've come from in life the hard way, like most people. I was never one to spend any money that I hadn't earned, and I never envied what anyone else had." More »
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High-definition broadcasting is a brave new world of detail — including some we might not want to see. Makeup artists are concocting all manner of techniques to save entertainers from visible brush strokes and pancake. More »
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Glamour's Cindi Leive played Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me's "Not My Job" last Saturday. She talked about inaugural fashions, and the importance of resisting the temptation to use her pages to nominate bogus trends. More »
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Co-creator of Sesame Street Joan Ganz Cooney, spoke to NPR this morning about how in 1969 she came up with the idea for the show that changed children's television forever. More »
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With China's economy booming, factories are springing up all over the country, and, in one of the largest migrations in human history, poor, young villagers are streaming into the makeshift cities that emerge around the factories. Earlier this afternoon, NPR interviewed author Leslie Chang about her new book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, which explores the corruption and opportunity young women encounter when they move to these cities. Though Chang says she does not sugarcoat the extremely tough conditions, many of the girls actually find upward mobility and freedom when they leave their homes. Being the sole breadwinner changes their status within their families, and many girls decide they want to learn to drive, buy apartments with friends, and stay in the city. [NPR] More »
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Yesterday marked the 45th anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four little girls were killed; white supremacists were responsible. Christopher McNair, who lost his 11-year-old daughter in the blast, spoke with NPR yesterday. "I didn't even cry for 3 or 4 months after the bombing," he said. "I guess I felt I had to hold everyone else together." Mr. McNair still lives in Birmingham: "Where would I have gone, 45 years ago, where things would have been any different? I was still black." [NPR] More »
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Improv comedian Dennis O'Toole has noticed a trend in people he sees as "the greatest Americans," they are all short men: Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Dylan, Tom Cruise, and even that melting ball of dough, John McCain, all clock in around 5 feet 7 inches. O'Toole is himself a man of shorter stature and sees his lack in height as the reason for his moxie and success (some call it a Napoleon complex). The fact that other successful dudes are also around his height makes him believe that they are part of an "elite" group of Americans and also motivates him to vote for McCain, even though he disagrees with all of his policies. Okay, dude, we get it: being short is some sort of issue for you, but any man voting for McCain solely based on height deserves to have his voting booth step-stool revoked on Election Day. [NPR] More »
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Ever since the Liberian civil war ended in 2003, reports of how the country is rebuilding have focused on reintegrating "warriors" into society and treating sexual abuse victims, but many women are both. A new documentary, Women of Liberia: Fighting for Peace, focuses on the 30,000 women who made up nearly 1/3 of the armed forces during the war. Yesterday afternoon on NPR, former fighters Jackie Redd and Florence Ballah explained that after being kidnapped and brutally assaulted, they decided that joining the fighting was the only way to defend themselves. "I never joined saying in my heart 'I will be cruel,' or 'I will be wholly armed and be killing other people," said Jackie. "I felt that if I had a gun, nobody would be able to do that to me... I decided to join to protect my life." [NPR] More »
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An anonymous until yesterday blogger, Robyn Okrant, was on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday to discuss her website, Living Oprah. Okrant's mission? To "live as Oprah advises on her television show, on her website and in the pages of her magazines" for one year in order to potentially "find bliss." We were totally prepared to hate this woman and her gimmicky site, but we actually found her charming. Yeah, the site is a gimmick, but it's an entertaining one and a comment on the vaunted place the big O has in our society. What's more, Okrant (formerly known as "LO" before she ditched the anonymity) is always willing to call Oprah out on her smugness and her penchant for shaming people (see: Frey, James). [NPR, Living Oprah] More »
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So far, our coverage of Russian women on this site has been limited to the fuchsia excesses of teen billionairess and burgeoning fashionista Kira Plastinina. Well, an NPR report that aired this morning shows a sobering reality of Russian womanhood that's so far from Plastinina and her rancid materialism as to be rendered absurd. Gregory Feifer reports from Moscow that 14,000 women die each year in Russia at the hands of their male partners. What's more: wife beating is not considered a crime, and 50% of women in a recent survey say they have been physically abused by their spouses. "The real number of victims is impossible to count as [domestic violence] is seen as a private matter, not to be aired in public," Feifer said. In fact, Feifer notes that there is an old proverb that many Russian women seem to have internalized: "If he beats you, he loves you." More »
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NPR reporter Jamie Tarabay witnessed and experienced awful and frightening things while she was in Baghdad. So she turned to her heroine: Buffy Summers. From Buffy The Vampire Slayer. "Buffy always managed to remind me that in the end, she was just a girl, like me," Tarabay declares. It's been eleven years since The Slayer first hit American televisions, but she remains not only one of the most popular characters, but — unlike so many of the sitcom moms and lovelorn teens on other shows — a young woman that other young women actually relate to. So what does Buffy have to do with Baghdad? More »
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A lot of work goes into creating a non-white television character! Creating everyone's favorite little Spanish-speaking explorer, Dora, took a year of planning with research, consulting and rounds of screenings with "tough" preschoolers. Not only that, the non-Latino creators have to be careful not to, you know, make any accidentally racist characters. When conceiving of Tico, Dora's friend, the creators were going to make him chronically fatigued until the show's "cultural consultants" told them that a lazy, sleepy-eyed Latino character was probably not best stereotype to be promoting. Also: the marketers were worried that a shorts-wearing, backpack-slinging (ethnic) girl would not appeal to a mass audience. Glad to see they were proven wrong! [NPR] More »
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NPR's Peter Sagal took his wife and three "excited and happy" daughters to see Horton Hears A Who and left super pissed. The number one-grossing film of the year so far caused Sagal to be "irritated by something even more annoying than Jim Carrey's tics." See, the filmmakers added a subplot to the Dr. Seuss story. Now the mayor of Whoville has 96 daughters and one son. Says Sagal: "Guess who gets all his attention? Guess who saves the day?" Ugh, yeah, it's the son, of course. Sagal's commentary (as a father with daughters) is only three minutes long but so full of ire and rage it's totally worth listening to. [NPR] More »
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On NPR's Morning Edition today, there was a piece about why kids start cussin'. Mostly, reporter Allison Aubrey concludes, they are mimicking phrases heard from their parents and their peers. Aubrey interviewed Julia Gordon, a lawyer and mom of a 4-year-old, who said "He totally screwed me," in front of her daughter when she was cut off in a parking lot. A few minutes later, her daughter repeated, "he totally screwed me," and Gordon laughed at first, because seriously, how cute is it when a four-year-old says shit like that? My parents definitely giggled when I cursed, and that has made me into the regularly profane individual I am today. I had an older brother, so I remember cursing at a pretty young age. When did you start getting your mouth washed out with soap? More »
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On the Daily Show last night ,correspondent Samantha Bee decided to come clean about her involvement with a prostitution ring. Bee discussed the first rule of political press conference admissions: bring a date. She trotted out her husband, fellow Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones, to accompany her while she exposed her own transgressions. Watching this clip along with this NPR gallery of disgraced politicians and their wives makes us wonder: has a female official ever stood in front of her constituents, flanked by her main man, and admitted to wrongdoing? More »
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When I think of Iraq, I tend to think of the "obvious" tragedies: unwarranted deaths, the fate of children growing up in a violence-torn community, the increasingly tyrannical insurgents. I never ponder the quotidian liberties that have fallen by the wayside, like the freedom to joyride down a sun-dappled street, a mild wind wafting through an open car window. According to this NPR report from today's "Morning Edition" program, driving is not something most Iraqi women have the luxury to do safely anymore, and most of them miss it deeply. College student Samar Nihad, who lives in South Baghdad, tells NPR that insurgents "have stopped women in the streets and warned them not to drive again, because as far as they were concerned, it was forbidden in the Koran. We are afraid." Ahlam al-Wakeel, an Iraqi doctor, says she stopped driving after she was shot at by American servicemen for getting too close to their convoy. More »
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Every week, the NPR program Tell Me More features parenting commentary from the women behind Mocha Moms, a national network of stay-at-home mothers of color. This week, the ladies are discussing the Girl Scouts with the first African-American president of the organization, Dr. Gloria Randall Scott. Scott took the helm at the Girl Scouts in 1975, and all the women present keep coming back to a singular theme when discussing the scouts: Leadership. No wonder Hillary Clinton was once a Scout! And don't forget, folks: it's cookie season, but only until March 29th! Get your Samoas while you still can. [NPR] More »
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NPR's "Morning Edition" ran a segment this morning on what a groundbreaking work of young adult fiction Harriet the Spy was when it debuted in 1964. According to NPR correspondent Neva Grant, heroine Harriet M. Welsch was considered controversial because "Harriet saw too much, said too much. She even had to see a psychiatrist." Some schools banned the book, explains Grant, and some critics hated it, but readers, especially those who felt that they were outside the mainstream, appreciated that Harriet loved herself, disheveled hair and all. (You can get some more Harriet love in last Friday's Fine Lines column). Readers like Kathleen Horning, now a librarian in Wisconsin, liked the fact that Harriet was a tomboy who, unlike many 50s and 60s heroines, didn't have to go through a girlified redemption by the end of the book. In fact, as Grant reports, like Harriet, Horning was a "tomboy who didn't want to reform." Later on, Horning realized she was a lesbian. More »
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"[Tyra Banks] is into crunching numbers and she's so methodical that she even writes down her menstrual cycles." That's what editor Cynthia Good said on the NPR show Tell Me More yesterday, when discussing Pink magazine's Jan/Feb 2008 cover girl. Pink is "the magazine for professional women," and by that, they don't mean hookers. [NPR] More »
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