Lynne Murray and Debbie say: Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, blogs about her struggle with the creeping princess contagion: When I first started writing about the Disney Princesses, people assumed my beef was with the girl waiting around to be rescued by [...]

Debbie says: I’m not an early adopter and I didn’t know that Google Glass was coming out. I don’t even have a smart phone. I am, however, a lifelong science fiction reader and I think that having an earpiece that hooks to your glasses and gives you the internet is essentially–at least theoretically-super-cool. I want [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: cross-posted on Feministe Melissa Gira Grant has an excellent article in Reason this week, laying out exactly what’s wrong with the war on “sex trafficking,” which is conducted largely by women who identify as feminists, and how and why it is really a war on sex workers. The last paragraph of [...]

cross-posted on Feministe Laurie says: RISE (Racism Still Exists) is an anonymous artist group putting up powerful posters in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It’s a very long time black neighborhood and is now rapidly gentrifying. I used to visit a good friend of my grandmother’s there years ago. It sounds like I wouldn’t recognize much of [...]

Debbie says: Philip N. Cohen blogs at Family Inequality, where he has written recently here and here about how the older-mother phenomenon is misrepresented in articles and data. In this Sociological Images post, he takes on the visual imagery that goes with the misrepresentations. This picture is sold by a stock photo agency as a [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: If you live in the U.S., and you’re not watching the news extremely carefully, you probably don’t know that a powerful Hungarian politician, Marton Gyongyosi, made a speech in the Hungarian parliament at the end of November, calling for “the authorities to compile a national list of Hungarian Jews, especially those [...]

Lynne Murray says: We value children in America, but some more than others. Many, if not most, fat children learn very early that approval and sometimes even affection will be withheld unless and until they lose weight. Since no reliable method exists that will guarantee weight loss or prevent weight gain for most people, children–even [...]

Dr. Lisa Freitag is a former pediatrician in Minneapolis/St. Paul (the “Twin Cities”), in the north midwest of the United States. We hope to feature some of her thoughts and observations in this space from time to time. Lisa Freitag says: All along the highways leading to the Twin Cities, a billboard advertising North Memorial [...]

Since 2005, we’ve been writing posts about news to be thankful for. This year, we have a lot to celebrate. The bulk of our good news this year (but not all of it!) comes from the U.S. elections, but before we get to that, here’s breaking good news. Israel and Hamas have agreed to a [...]

Lynne Murray says: A zombie character popped up among the vampires and ghosts in a book I’m writing so I have been looking into their lore. Paranormal creatures obey the rules of the story they live in. As a non-fan of gore, I’m creating a zombie with better table manners than the mindless, chewing-on-the-general-public zombies–more [...]