Last week, Disney announced that it was adding the headstrong, flame-haired heroine to its "Princess" collection. But it was the revamped image of Merida -- her waist nipped, her eyes elongated, her messy tangle of hair a sexy tumble, her plain dress a shimmer of bling and her trademark bow and arrow nowhere to be seen – that set parents' jaws dropping. Disney blandly told Yahoo Shine that "Merida exemplifies what it means to be a Disney Princess through being brave, passionate, and confident and she remains the same strong and determined Merida from the movie whose inner qualities have inspired moms and daughters around the world." But it didn't quell the disgust.

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"I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain," she explained in a weekend statement. "I want instead to sit on a sunny field and admire the very gifted women — and OK, some men too — who will be taking my place." But Barbara Walters, if nobody's managed to take your place yet, what makes you think it'll happen now?

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And at the same time, as the world around us seems to change more often than my daughter changes outfits, it can be hard to not lump Mother’s Day with some nostalgic, soft-focus-sense of June Cleaver as the idealized mother image toward which we all strive.

Somewhere between the good and bad of modern society lies the real Mother’s Day — in which we must simultaneously celebrate the wonderful diversity of families in the 21st century while condemning the real violence and harm done to so many of those families every day.

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The Jewish holy site has been a scene of reoccurring unrest as women defend their right to worship freely. As Salon previously noted, an Israeli court ruled last month that there was no halachik (legal interpretation of the Talmud) reason to prevent women from praying at the holy site while wearing prayer shawls and reading aloud from the Torah

But the court ruling has not put an end to clashes between female worshipers and Israel's ultra-Orthodox community, as the Jerusalem Post reports:

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I swear to God, no ice cream for anybody today, Twitter.

Nobody really thinks a hashtag is a serious call to genocide. One doesn't go looking for great pearls of wisdom in a form whose crowning achievement is the motivational #risenandgrind, either. And Twitter is already a reliably rich trove of trending topics that are openly hostile to females, usually employing some version of the word "slut."  I fully believe that if we could convert all the misogyny on Twitter into a fuel source, we could reverse climate change in one hour. But there's nothing quite like gleeful shoe-on-the-other-foot bullying disguised as satire to give the most tiresome elements of the men's right's lobby – and they are legion -- fuel for their own self-righteous sense of victimhood.

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Silverman had been going through a period of intense personal stress lately – his death came just one day after he packed up his recently sold home. Just last month, he'd closed the shelter because he could no longer afford to maintain it. He had said he was struggling to keep up with his heat and grocery bills.

In his dogged efforts to help men and to raise public awareness, Silverman worked to remove the stigma that can often prevent men from speaking out because of pride and fear and misunderstanding. Yet where Silverman came up short was in perpetuating the Men's Rights movement's fiction that there's any gender equity as far as violence and victims. The Calgary Herald recalled, in its coverage of his death, Silverman's oft-repeated insistence that "men are about as likely as women to say they have been the victims of domestic abuse."

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As for me, I’ve been learning to can jam, bake bread from scratch in my Dutch oven (though my husband is better at it), and make my own tomato sauce from a bushel of ugly tomatoes I bought at the farmer’s market.

My grandmother, were she not dead (the cigarettes), would no doubt look at me like I’m crazy.

“Don’t you know that you can buy that stuff ?” she’d ask.

But it’s not about buying stuff these days, it’s about making it (if you’re middle-class, liberal, and white, that is). Homemade, from scratch, DIY, straight from the backyard, fresh baked, artisan.

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I've tried to ignore it. I've tried not to say anything. Not just to you, today, but to lots of female celebrities, for years. I want to believe that if you were to go out and get a tattoo that said "I LOVE CHEESE" across your forehead, I would support your right to do whatever makes you happy. And as someone who keeps a stock of hair color in her closet in case there's ever a Feriapocalypse, and who doesn't own an item of makeup or moisturizer that doesn't boldly feature the word "youth" on the packaging, I'm not one to espouse growing older gracefully. I'd never sell anybody on the nobility of looking like you just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photograph.

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The decision comes after a series of clashes between female worshipers and the Orthodox rabbis who manage the Wall according to a strict interpretation of Jewish law. The rabbis' enforcement of Orthodox tradition barred women from wearing tallit (prayer shawls), reading aloud from the Torah and entering certain areas around the Wall, all of which significantly restrict women’s ability to pray. Women were often arrested for defying these restrictions.

But the court ruled on Thursday that their presence did not pose a threat and did not violate "local custom," as the Washington Post reports:

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I’ve been hearing comments like this for much all my life. Maybe someone else would have yelled at them, or shrunk inside. But I don’t get upset when this happens.

I pulled out my camera, and set up a shoot.

For about a year, I’d been taking pictures of strangers’ reactions to me in public for a series I called “Wait Watchers.” I was interested in capturing something I already knew firsthand: If the large women in historical art pieces were walking around today, they would be scorned and ridiculed.

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That's the question that has set British gym shorts in a proverbial twist in recent weeks, after a man decided to sue London's Kentish Town Sports Centre for offering 442 hours a year for women-only hours.

Writing last week in the Daily Mail, patron Peter Lloyd explained his beef with the gym, noting that "they still charge them the same full-price membership fee as women, but refuse to offer the equivalent option of male-only sessions." Jezebel promptly labeled Lloyd a "jerk," who should "give us our 442 hours a year and stop crying." Wonkette, meanwhile, less charitably referred to him as a "Limey nutsack."

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Korean children get a lot of fuss made over them, I guess because life was tough in the old country, and it was a big deal if you survived. There’s a big party thrown when you are 100 days old, followed by another when you make it to one whole year. My parents took a lot of pictures of me at these parties, although I don’t remember a thing as I was really drunk at both. From the pictures I see the cake, though — all these big multicolored rice cakes, each pastel stripe a steamed layer of pounded and steamed rice flour, not sweet like birthday cake but a delicious treat all the same. It looks like a chewy Neapolitan ice cream, or a gay pride flag made of carbs. It’s the best and I want it, but I think wanting that cake isn’t enough reason to have a baby.

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In an interview Friday on the "Today" show, Reece, who is married to surfing superstar Laird Hamilton, discussed her new book "My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper" and went at least a few shades of grey by declaring her submissiveness.

Reece, who was OF COURSE introduced as a "mother, model and former pro beach volleyball star" in that order, explains in the book, "to truly be feminine means being soft, receptive and – look out, here it comes – submissive."

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"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have," she says in the spot. "We haven't had a very collective notion of, these are our children. We have to break through our private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's, we start making better investments."

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And a compromise may be on its way, as Jane Eisner at Forward reports:

If implemented, the proposal, a product of months of deliberation, would mark a dramatic acknowledgement by the state of Israel that prayer at the Wall — regarded as Judaism’s holiest site and a modern-day symbol of national sovereignty — should include non-Orthodox practice in which men and women pray together. But it is uncertain whether the proposal will satisfy Women of the Wall, who for years have tried to hold full prayer services in the women’s only section and may see this compromise as a betrayal of their mission...

Under the proposal, sources said, the area now known as Robinson’s Arch on the southern end of the Wall will be greatly expanded to create a prayer space roughly equivalent to the existing men’s and women’s sections. Egalitarian prayer is currently permitted at the Arch, which is an archaeological site, but that prayer is only available at limited times and with an entrance fee. The expectation is that the enlarged space would be free and open around the clock, as the Kotel is now, but that could not be confirmed.

The plan also calls for the plaza surrounding the Wall to expand, so that visitors approaching the site in the Old City could clearly chose between praying at the egalitarian section, or the existing sections reserved only for men and for women. Still under discussion is governance of the new prayer area, but several sources said that they thought it would be run by something other than the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the organization that currently controls the Kotel.

Women of the Wall head Anat Hoffman has signed off on the proposal while expressing her reservations about its "separate but equal" premise, but the measure still requires approval from the Netanyahu government, "where it may face resistance from Orthodox groups unwilling to share authority over the holy site," Eisner notes.

h/t Adam Chandler at Tablet Magazine

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For decades, Thatcher's gender provided some public relations cover for her most noxious politics. That was true even today in the White House's statement on her death, which included the following treacly sentence: "As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered."

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So why does the word "feminist" scare them so? Don't they know that, per Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams: "If you believe in the strength of women ... you’re soaking in feminism"?

A list of other high-profile, force-of-nature women who may "run the world," but won't cop to the F-bomb.

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In a new interview with British Vogue, the 31-year-old hedged when asked if she considers herself a feminist. "That word can be very extreme," she said, before acknowledging, "I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality." Unlike those old-school feminists who are totally opposed to equality, that's what I guess. Beyoncé went on to explain, "I do believe in equality and that we have a way to go and it's something that's pushed aside and something that we have been conditioned to accept. But I'm happily married. I love my husband. I feel like Mrs. Carter is who I am, but more bold and more fearless than I've ever been."

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First, there was the head-scratchingly nonsensical, Liz Wurtzel-level self-indulgent tantrum that the paper ran over the weekend, by high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss. Weiss' qualifications for gaining the editorial real estate for an open letter "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" in the Journal? Being the "sassy" sister of former Wall Street Journal editorial features editor Bari Weiss, and having a conniption that she "failed to get into the colleges" of her dreams.

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