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: One of the many good things about Nicholas Day’s article in Slate about the science of breast milk is that, pretty close to the beginning, he goes out of his way to say that “conversations about lactation always seem to require disclaimers,” and his is that lack of breast milk has never been [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Debbie says: I work in a reasonably liberal, forward-looking intelligent office in San Francisco (as long as we don’t get into classism issues, which is a whole different post). Yesterday, as part of “Wellness Week,” our wonderful office manager hired a local speaker (Dr. Terrance Stackwood, a chiropractor in San Francisco) to talk about nutrition [...]

Debbie says: I never blogged Alice Dreger‘s fascinating TED talk, “Is Anatomy Destiny?” on biology, bioethics and gender when I watched it last year, but her name stuck in my memory. The talk is available at the link, and I recommend it highly. Now she and two co-authors have published a truly horrific situation in [...]

Lynne Murray says I always ask “who benefits” from any given “social problem.” The $60 billion diet industry or, as Dr. Deb Burgard has called it, “The Weight Cycling Industry” is in the business of cashing in on a problem of its own creation. Any truly efficient method of changing body size would put them [...]

Debbie says: If you can’t blog your friends really good posts, what’s the point of having a blog at all? I’m a frequent visitor in Lori Selke’s household, so I can confirm that when they (Selke’s preferred pronoun) say, “I am a butch biological mother in a queer parenting threesome in which the other two [...]

Debbie says: We got out of the habit of posting lists of links, and we want to get back into it–there is so much interesting stuff out there that we don’t have time to write about. Here’s a bunch from the last few weeks. Well, it got people’s attention: Femen, a Ukranian feminist organization, expresses [...]

Debbie says: This post is part of the My Planned Parenthood blog carnival, hosted by What Tami Said. I used Planned Parenthood for gynecological health and birth control as a young woman without much money when I was in my 20s. That’s a long time ago, but what I remember is spartan offices, good service, [...]