As Rachael Larimore said at Double X, it's not like there's "a burning need for affirmative action in the meaningless-year-ending-attention-grabbing awards department. I don't care who Time picks. (And, believe me, I'm not sad it wasn't Nancy Pelosi this year.) But if Time is so uncomfortable with itself because its 'Carbon-Based Life Form of the Year' award comes across as sexist, it should, you know, give the honor to a woman once in a while." Time did award Pelosi runner-up status for 2009, but like Larimore, we knew there were even better candidates going ignored. "If ladybloggers were in charge," we asked ourselves, "who would be the Female Person of the Year?" And then we set about answering that question.

Four women tied for the most nominations (three each) in a highly scientific poll of noted women writers who responded promptly to my e-mail. "I know it's an obvious answer, but I must vote for Hillary Clinton," said Double X's Jessica Grose. "She's just done a fantastic job as Secretary of State. She hasn't showboated, she's just put her head down and worked -- without compromising any of her core beliefs. No wonder her approval rating is soaring. Also, I think Americans don't put enough stock in being able to handle defeat gracefully. It's all about the winners. Clinton lost the election and yet has become the consummate team player." Shakesville's Melissa McEwan added, "she gave us a hell of a gander at what a feminist looks like during her first year in President Obama's cabinet, whether it was delivering some major pwnage on reproductive rights or speaking out against sexual and gender-based violence while doing a little globetrotting awareness-raising. She also showed what it looks like to keep a campaign promise, by making good on her vow to make global gay rights an active 'part of American foreign policy,' in response to proposed legislation in Uganda to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death." "The Curse of the Good Girl" author Rachel Simmons also called Clinton the "duh" answer, but Bitch Ph.D's M. LeBlanc countered, "Duh! It's fucking Sonia Sotomayor. Obviously" -- a sentiment reinforced by Veronica I. Arreola, director of Women in Science and Engineering at University of Illinois at Chicago (and Viva la Feminista owner) and Pamela Merritt, the Angry Black Bitch.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing went with yet a third "duh": "Um, Maddow. That is all," and her colleague Ann Friedman elaborated, "Over the past year, Rachel Maddow has proved that there is still an audience for substantive television. She balances a serious news-anchor persona with a friendly and down-to-earth off-camera image. Plus, she manages to be openly and proudly gay, but not defined by her sexuality. It's a feat far too few people have managed to pull off. She is truly a journalist for the Obama era." Friedman was also among the three who named Neda Agha-Soltan -- "the young Iranian woman who died on YouTube a million times over," in Simmons' words -- as a contender for woman of the year. In fact, she expanded that nomination to encompass all "Iranian Women Activists. Yes, that includes Neda Agha-Soltan -- but is certainly not limited to her. When Iranians rose up to demand democracy and rights in June, women led the charge. And they paid the price -- the government is cracking down on women's rights organizers now more than ever. I know this isn't a stand-alone woman nomination, but -- despite the attention Neda garnered -- this just goes to show that sometimes women can't stand alone. We are more effective when we fight together."

Two women who changed the American pop culture landscape in 2009 garnered two nominations apiece. Women and Hollywood's Melissa Silverstein and Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle both picked "The Hurt Locker" director Kathryn Bigelow, for, in Doyle's words, "making a really great movie, blasting down stereotypes about which movies women can and cannot direct, and presenting us with a future in which a woman, FINALLY, might win a Best Director Oscar. For an action movie!" Doyle also suggested Lady Gaga, "for winning over all haters, claiming her feminism, being perhaps the only non-runway model in the history of the world to successfully wear those terrifying lobster-looking McQueen heels, and turning pop music into a venue for a funny, fun, powerful, daring expression of female sexuality that doesn't just recycle the same handful of boring old sexy-virgin tropes."  Friedman adds, "Rah rah ah ah ah roma romama gaga ooh lala. Duh." (To recap: We are now at four wildly different nominees who have  earned a "Duh.") Silverstein gave an additional nod to Meryl Streep, "for making 60 look fantastic on the screen," and Salon's Sarah Hepola offered a love letter to "Twilight's" Kristen Stewart: "She may be famous for playing an irritating heroine -- hey, even she makes fun of "Twilight"! -- but at 19 years old, she's on the cover of every tabloid, starring in the biggest movie so far this year, and has rammed a stake into a boring rut of bubbly, gleamy-toothed teen queens like the (I'm sure she's lovely) Vanessa Hudgens and the (does a lot for charity) Hayden Panettierre. Kristen Stewart is smart, talented, dark, slightly pained by gobs of attention and hugely successful. She's playing Joan Jett, OK? I don't give a damn about her bad reputation."

Friedman wasn't the only one to violate the "stand-alone" rule. Arreola's second choice was "The Nobel Prize winning women, especially the women who won the Nobel in Medicine. When I heard that Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider had been awarded the Nobel Prize and that Greider had been Blackburn's graduate assistant, I immediately sent it out to my students. The win is not just a win for women but also a win for mentoring." And after acknowledging that Sonia Sotomayor was the first name to spring to mind, Merritt added, "But there is a huge part of me that thinks the woman of the year is the re-awakened feminist -- the women who pulled together in coalition to protest Stupak and defeat Nelson, the women who are now organized to demand reproductive justice in a way that has never happened before."

Simmons had two other picks, "The retroactive: Claudette Colvin, the woman who was the 'real Rosa Parks' but who has lived her life in anonymity even though she was the first to refuse to move to the back of the bus. An award-winning children's book was published about her this year" and "The slightly undeserved but so was Barack's Nobel: Michelle Obama." Lesley Kinzel of Fatshionista suggested breakout star Gabourey Sidibe, who's consistently charmed audiences in interviews just as much as she moved them in "Precious." M. LeBlanc and The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman agreed with Time that Nancy Pelosi deserved a nod; said LeBlanc, "The house has passed all manner of incredible legislation this year." Most of my selections have been mentioned at least once, but I'll throw two more into the mix: Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the journalists who, while reporting on trafficking of women along the North Korean border, accidentally crossed it themselves and spent nearly five months in prison there.

Who, then, is Broadsheet's official pick for Female Person of the Year? None of them. Which is to say, all of them -- and undoubtedly many more we and our prompt responders didn't immediately think of. (If more responses come in, I'll update the post throughout the day.) But we can agree on one thing: as Friedman put it, "these are my Person of the Year nominations," not just women of the year. Too bad Time didn't consult us.

Updates: Nona Willis Aronowitz, co-author of "Girldrive," checked in to say, "I second Rachel Maddow and Sonia Sotomayor, but I'd also like to give a nod to Sarah Palin, solely for providing a platform for feminist writers and activists everywhere to call out exactly what's wrong with the GOP's opportunistic, hypocritical co-opting of feminism. (I guess that's 2008, too, but her memoir just drove the nail in deeper.)" Dodai Stewart of Jezebel made a similarly contrarian choice: "Most of my picks -- HRC, Lady Gaga -- are in there, but instead of Kristen Stewart, I'd say Stephenie Meyer -- I don't think the "Twilight" books are very well written, but she had the ability to energize a huge fanbase and get girls and moms reading and going to the movies. We haven't seen that since, well, J.K. Rowling, ha!"

Finally, two other nominations came in via Twitter and Facebook: Canadian activist Muriel Duckworth, who passed away in August, and Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in a suit against the U.S. federal government for mismanagement of the Individual Indian Trust. After 13 years of litigation, the suit was finally settled this month, and according to Mother Jones, although Cobell says "Indians did not receive the full financial Settlement they deserved," what they did receive is "believed to be the largest ever against the federal government and dwarfs the combined value of all judgments and settlements of all Indian cases since the founding of this nation." 

In the spot, which has a low budget, Cassavetes-like vibe, Jungers sits behind a desk and gamely endeavors to recite her lines. "All I ask is what I do and what's happened between the golf legend and I to be between us, and spare me and let me shop." Prepositional phrase mangling -- that's so edgy.

She then explains that they have the latest gadgets, "from Nikons to iPods to hair straighteners" -- at which point she absently touches her own straight hair. And when she says, "Seriouslyguysthisisfunyououghttotrythisatleastonce," it's the bravest triumph of chutzpah over ability since Pierce Brosnan opened his mouth to sing in Mamma Mia!

Proving that the goodwill of the Ginger Spice era has long expired, The UK retail chain Tesco found itself red-faced this after launching a massive dud of a holiday card.  Depicting a red-haired child on St. Nick's lap, it reads, "Santa loves all kids. Even GINGER ones." The card enflamed the ire of Davinia Phillips, the British mother of three redheads, who took her case to the court of public opinion. Despite earning the nickname "ginger whinger" (okay, that's pretty funny), Tesco withdrew the cards. They did however helpfully explain that they were "intended to be humorous." 

In further flame-haired news, the British Advertising Standards Authority upheld its first ban based on offensiveness to a group's hair color today after pulling Virgin Media's ad for a dating show that asked, "How do you spot a ginger in the dark? Looks or personality, who wins?" Virgin explained that the campaign was meant to "challenge people's perceptions of attractiveness and encourage decisions based on personality as well as looks".

Coming so soon on the heels of last month's Facebook motivated "Kick a Ginger Day," which resulted in the schoolyard beating of a California child, well, it's enough to make one's Viking blood boil over.

Redheads have been feared and reviled since the Middle Ages, of course. Looking for a fall guy for your blighted crops? That dame with the devil hair looks pretty suspect, don't you think? But this new spate of gingerism – yes, there's a word for it -- seems to stem from an old episode of South Park that was a satire of the very thing it has become. In a classic, hate-speech filled half hour about people who look different, Cartman declared, "Ginger kids have no souls." Good one South Park! Flash-forward a few years, and I have yet another reason to get my ass kicked today by people with no sense of irony.

I don't take the red rage so personally, because I'm a ginger not by birth but by Clairol. But while I find it entertaining when South Park suggests a connection between red tresses and being "vile and disgusting," I also think it's pretty freaking sad that any corporation would get traction out of the notion that a) Santa has work harder to love us and b) that we represent some triumph of personality over looks. You tell that to Julianne Moore! Or David Caruso! We happen to be a thriving specialty porn genre, I will have you know.

There will always be those who judge a pale, freckled book by its auburn-tressed cover. And when there's nobody left to make fun without seeming politically incorrect, people will still make fun of redheads. Soon there may not even be redheads to make fun of – in 2007, National Geographic reported that natural born redheads – who represent only two percent of the world's population -- are dying out, and may be extinct within a few generations.  In the meantime, the Weasleys and Tori Amoses of the world will do their best to stand tall. Just watch out for those famous tempers. As one of literature's great gingers, Anne of Green Gables, said, "You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair. People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is."

"That would be rape culture," Anna North at Jezebel reminds us. The kind "in which people are quick to deny or explain away a rape as soon as it's reported." Also, the kind in which "violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent... women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself" and "both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes," according to the authors of "Transforming a Rape Culture." For a stomach-churningly long list of other defining features, please see Melissa McEwan's "Rape Culture 101", or try Jaclyn Friedman's "This Is What Rape Culture Looks Like." Or, you could just read the local ABC station's coverage of what happened after those two witnesses intervened in the rape of a 12-year-old girl by a 14-year-old schoolmate.

Marquita Dones, "one of four paid site supervisors at El Cerrito's Portola Middle School," believes that the girl was too quiet to have been a real victim. "If she was being raped, why didn't she scream? Why did these students have to come up and tell us that somebody's down there?" she asked. Her colleague Mustapha Cannon added, "It was hormones going wild... I know the girl and I know the guy. I know... and I know the girl's family. I know for a fact that that girl could've knocked that guy out with one hand tied behind her back." So, despite neither of these people having been there when it happened -- and the fact that under California law, there is no such thing as consensual sex with a 12-year-old -- they're apparently confident that she must have wanted it. 

Obviously, the case hasn't gone to trial, and thus no one has been convicted of rape. But regardless of whether this kid is found guilty, the response of the security guards to the account of the girl and the witnesses is part of a disturbing pattern. Going back to McEwan: "Rape culture is victim-blaming... Rape culture is tasking victims with the burden of rape prevention. Rape culture is encouraging women to take self-defense as though that is the only solution required to preventing rape. Rape culture is admonishing women to 'learn common sense' or 'be more responsible' or 'be aware of barroom risks' or 'avoid these places' or 'don't dress this way,' and failing to admonish men to not rape." In light of the school security guards' comments, I think it's safe to add "Claiming that if the victim didn't scream, came from a questionable family, or would have been physically capable of fighting her attacker under normal circumstances, she must not have been raped" to that list. Also, "Cravenly covering your ass by claiming an alleged rape must have been consensual, when it was your job to make sure nothing like that happened."

For those inclined to look for a silver lining, the fact that two other kids did step in to stop and report this assault is encouraging. But as North says, for the young girl "It was probably too little too late." And the fact that the very authority figures charged with protecting students are now trotting out every victim-blaming cliche in the book to avoid responsibility is just one more outrageous example of how rape culture operates. "She probably wanted it" has become such a standard, accepted response to nearly any reported sexual assault, it's not even a surprise to hear it said about a 12-year-old who says she was raped in front of two witnesses who were moved to seek help for her. And sadly, infuriatingly, it won't be a surprise when that account is taken just as seriously as the victim's -- if not more so.

More precisely, Procter and Gamble is being blamed for Photoshopping the hell out of her face in an advertisement for an Olay eye cream, erasing crows' feet and under-eye bags with the flick of a mouse rather than diligent long-term application of the cream in question. The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned the ad, on grounds that "the post-production re-touching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve."But interestingly, the ASA rejected the idea that such images might harm women, beyond fleecing them out of a few bucks. 

"We considered that consumers were likely to expect a degree of glamour in images for beauty products and would therefore expect Twiggy to have been professionally styled and made-up for the photo shoot, and to have been photographed professionally," it said. "We concluded that, in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience and was not socially irresponsible." (Not surprisingly, that's pretty much what Procter and Gamble is saying as well.) But actually, says Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson, who's launched a campaign against out-of-control retouching, "Experts have already proved that airbrushing contributes to a host of problems in women and young girls such as depression and eating disorders."

In November, leading authorities on body image sent a paper to U.K. advertising authorities (available as a Word document here) outlining the relevant research. Over 100 published studies have documented "a detrimental effect of idealised media images" on girls and women -- and increasingly, boys and men. Body dissatisfaction is linked to damaging behaviors such as "unhealthy dieting regimes and problematic eating behaviours (starving, bingeing, and purging), clinical eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia), cosmetic surgery, extreme exercising, and unhealthy muscle-enhancing behaviours in boys and men (such as taking steroids or other supplements). It is also linked to depression, anxiety, sexual dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem." And as for claims that a "mature audience" should be savvy about what goes into creating a print ad, the paper says, "Although most people know in some abstract, general sense that media models are 'artificial' as a creation of make-up artists, hair stylists, and flattering clothing and camera angles, people are typically not aware of the extent to which models are altered, particularly by digital retouching and imaging techniques that reduce or enhance the size of virtually any body part, making eyes larger, waists slimmer, and legs longer and thinner."

Even when you are aware, in theory, of how much is possible via Photoshop, it can still come as a shock to see the difference between that ad and a current picture of Twiggy, or a Vanity Fair portrait of 60-year-old Meryl Streep and a shot of her with only the benefit of professional hair, make-up and photography. Of the latter, Susannah Breslin at the Frisky writes, "I understand Photoshopping. I really do. But I just don't get the point here. Increasingly, it seems like women who really don't need to be Photoshopped to death are getting altered into unrecognizable oblivion." And over time, those of us who consume these images get so used to seeing a particular look, we can lose sight of the fact that it's not only unrealistic for the average woman to aspire to, but literally impossible. Twiggy and Meryl Streep have teams of professionals to make them look their best in person and erase any "imperfections" in post-production, but the rest of us can only shell out for miracle eye cream, cross our fingers, and hate our aging bodies. I applaud the ASA for acknowledging that the Olay ad promised more than it could possibly deliver -- but to say the ad isn't socially irresponsible is to ignore a growing mountain of evidence that images "altered into unrecognizable oblivion" have far-reaching and sometimes devastating effects on real people.