My younger sister is a 21-year-old college student who is "trapped" in an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who is 35 years old. She first met him when she was 19, fell in love with him and eventually moved in with him. After they started living together, she discovered that he was emotionally and verbally abusive, to the point that after six months, she had had enough, broke it off and moved out. The problem now is that for over a year, he refuses to accept that their relationship is over. Although he has not physically abused her, he has "forced" her into his car, screamed at her in public, in front of her professors and classmates, snatched her cellphone out of her hand to see if she has been talking to/texting other guys. He stalks her, physically, following her around town, staking out her apartment, and electronically, constantly checking her cellphone, email, Facebook, Amazon accounts, etc. (During the time that they were living together, he managed to get access to these accounts, and somehow manipulate the password access such that he continues to have access, despite my sister's attempts to change passwords, etc.) 

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While I wouldn't assume there's a vast amount of historical and social accuracy to "Hysteria," it's a lot of fun, and could definitely provide a viable moviegoing alternative for adult women eager to move on from "Iron Man" and "Captain America." Gyllenhaal's character, the crusading feminist and social worker Charlotte Dalrymple, who becomes the comic and romantic foil to Hugh Dancy's stuffy, stammering Granville, might be described as a supporting character who takes over the movie. Charlotte effectively becomes the modern viewer's window into the world of "Hysteria," insisting as a matter of course that women indeed enjoy sexual pleasure (but are often plagued with partners who don't know how to deliver it) and espousing then-outrageous views about women's right to vote, go to college, work outside the home and so on.

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My mother would have none of that. She was gassed into a twilight sleep and shot up with opiates for the pain. Flat on her back and feet in the stirrups, she pushed on command until I fell into the doctor's arms. My arrival – another girl! -- was announced to my dad, who sat with other bored men in the waiting room. He would first see me through a window, where I was displayed among the other newborns, swaddled tight and sleeping.

One final detail I insisted that my mom include with each retelling: "And then you got a shot?"

"That's right," she would say, referring to the heavy dose of estrogen once routinely injected after a birth. "That way my body wouldn't make milk, and I could go back to work." I couldn't help myself; I cheered.

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The topic of that 1994 event, headlined by Ann Romney and the Children's Defense Fund's Marian Wright Edelman and held during Romney's Senate race against Ted Kennedy, was women and children’s safety and rights, according to Dushku. The audience, she recalls, was predominately African-American and Latina women with young children in tow. They asked about welfare benefits, as reform and "welfare-to-work" were hot topics at the time. Ann Romney’s position, according to Dushku, was to be a stay-at-home mom at all costs -- consistent with Mormon doctrine, if off-message for the campaign. When one audience member asked about community service, Ann Romney said, “I would just say no...You have no business going around in your community when your children are young,” Dushku remembers. She says now, “People almost booed and hissed.”

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It’s an early, lovely moment in "Girls," the new HBO series created, directed, written, produced and, really, detonated onto the pop landscape by 25-year-old Lena Dunham. Dunham stars as Hannah, who is joined in bed by Marnie because Marnie is avoiding having to be touched by her over-kind swain, and because both girls like to stay up late watching reruns of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

These details, along with the image of two friends snoozing happily entwined, make the moment emblematic of a dynamic central to "Girls’" appeal and its importance. Despite Dunham’s protestations about not wanting to be some symbolic emissary from the land of young ladies (Sorry, kid, you’re it!), this is what she’s telling us about Women Right Now: that the lives of contemporary Mary Richardses and Rhoda Morgensterns are not based on pursuit or enjoyment of hetero congress; rather, they are often most firmly and warmly wrapped around each other.

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My discomfort will come to an end soon. “The B---- in Apt. 23” debuts tonight. The billboard will be replaced, but what it tells us about how we talk about women isn’t going anywhere.

According to Google Books, the word “bitch” appeared 170,710 times in the decade beginning in 2000, almost always in an up-with-women way. (Compare that to the 1930s, when the 11,369 entries ran more to issues of animal anatomy and veterinary medicine.)

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That’s also around the time the gynecologist says, in a scene clipped for the trailer, “You could not pay me enough to be 24 again,” and Hannah says, “Well, they’re not paying me at all.”

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In the past few weeks, Radar has lamented that she's gone from "pretty to puffy" and "fattened her face with fillers" while Us declared her "nearly unrecognizable." SheKnows hit her even harder, complaining that "the pretty face we're used to [has been] replaced by a puffy disaster." And when her reps declared that her swollen look was the result of steroids for a sinus infection, they only fanned the flames, leading The Stir to snap of her "way chubbier than usual" look, "Come on, Ashley, we may be dumb, but we're not stupid."

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A dry, whimsical and finally sweet film that tries to turn the conventional teenage sex comedy inside out (at least in gender terms), this debut feature from writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen is one of those rare movies that gets better and more complicated the more you think about it. Watching the film is a thoroughly charming experience on its own terms, and then you're left puzzling over all kinds of thorny questions that fail to yield clear answers. Is female sexual desire fundamentally different from male desire? If so, why is that true? Is a teenage girl's sexuality, as one female friend put it, mainly a question of "playing around with her newfound power over the desires of others, rather than an expression of her own desire"?

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I thought this antiquated expression had gone the way of “arm candy” and “trading up” as part of the second-wave agreement that likening your lady to something you consume or drive is just not cool anymore.  But perhaps even in 2012, our “Mad Men”-fueled nostalgia-fest is making us long for an era of clear-cut sexist distinction, when wives were wives and mistresses, mistresses. The AMC show's fifth season premiere explored this dichotomy, as Don Draper’s secretary-turned-wife Megan bridged the divide separating working women from their marriageable counterparts.

These days, concerns like Megan's seem absurdly anachronistic, but they also raise a bigger question: In an age of increasing divorce rates and single ladies celebration, what does this wife material “compliment” really mean?

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I'm not exactly scrawling "slut" on my forehead, but suddenly, reclaiming the word seems potentially exciting. I'm not the only one recognizing a shift in the conversation about reclamation. Megan Gibson of Time wrote, "While the motivation [for SlutWalk] was inarguably sound ... the protest caused controversy, in part because many were wary to associate themselves with the word slut." She continues, "Remarkably, thanks to Limbaugh’s ignorant vitriol, we're seeing a marked change in that wariness."

That said, in identifying with Sandra Fluke, the target of Limbaugh's rant, some women have instead chosen to distance themselves from the term, which perfectly illustrates how complicated reclamation can be.

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Where once angry feminists flooded the streets of New York with photogenic protest marches and vowed to “take back the night” on campuses across the nation, now they’re grateful that their penetrator is not the government they elected. Where abortion was legalized and protected in every state in the nation, now they fight the government they elected not to empower their employers to deny them birth control insurance. Where once feminists combined support for the Equal Rights Amendment with campaigns to address the scourge of breast cancer, now they fight their own cancer charity, the Komen Foundation, not to victimize Planned Parenthood.

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83-year-old Dodson still dispenses sex advice on her website, dodsonandross.com, and now Three Rivers Press is issuing "Sex for One" as an e-book for the first time ever. To mark the occasion we called Dodson to talk about how our attitudes toward masturbation have changed since 1974, when her book first appeared.

Your book has been out for 38 years, and people are still using it as a resource. That's kind of incredible. 

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I grappled for a few moments over what anyone would find sexy about an eye patch. It implied my eyeball had been gored in a fearsome bayonet fight with a British grenadier. I asked the manager whether I should look for a parrot. She was not charmed.

But by God, I was. I’d grow up on a steady diet of country club sandwiches and tennis lessons, and this was what I came to New York for: to do odd things, and see interesting people. People who went to pirate bars, for fun. I had been a model for art classes, but I had never been a pirate. I kept thinking of the Dorothy Parker poem “Song of Perfect Propriety” where she wrote:

I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew . . .
But I am writing little verse
As little ladies do

There would be time for a little verse years later, once I doffed my absolutely hilarious eye patch. Before I went in for my first day, I received a list of rules on ways to be a good shot girl. The first was:

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As a feminist who started my career at Ms. and wound my way through Glamour and Playboy before winding up at CosmoGIRL! — the exclamation point was part of the name — finding Jezebel shortly after its 2007 launch was delicious. I enjoyed it as a reader, and I enjoyed it even more as a worker in the industry they frequently critiqued, especially as I learned that some of their writers had been in my position: simultaneously excited and dismayed to be in the “pink ghetto,” eager to up the feminist content in glossy lady mags but frustrated by the conditions that Gloria Steinem labeled a “velvet steamroller.”

So it’s not surprising that I’m more kindly disposed to ladyblogs than n+1’s Molly Fischer appears to be. I was 30 when Jezebel launched, and still eager for what blogs of any sort provided; Fischer, at 20, had gone through adolescence with public critique a click away. I’ve also contributed to two of the four sites Fischer critiques (Jezebel and the Hairpin), undoubtedly coloring my attitude toward them. I cannot pretend impartiality.

I admit to being both excited by and uneasy about the n+1 piece. The whole article is worth a read, but in a nutshell, she looks at the evolution of ladyblogs, sites that give traditional women’s topics signature treatment. (Seventeen assures you that masturbating is totally normal; Rookie tells you how to do it.) The bigger the sites get, the more they adhere to what Fischer frames as a particular form of triteness endemic to ladyblogs, in which Zooey Deschanel is shunned but eco-friendly cat bonnets are squeal-worthy. Drained of the gravitas of other alternative women’s media, like explicitly feminist spaces, the potential for ladyblogs to become a true alternative to women’s glossies becomes watered down; the tool for revolution is rendered in scratch 'n' sniff. “The Internet, it turned out, was a place to make people like you: the world’s biggest slumber party, and the best place to trade tokens of slumber party intimacy—makeup tips, girl crushes, endless inside jokes,” Fischer writes. “The notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests, a notion on which women’s websites would seem to depend—'sisterhood,' let’s call it—has curdled into BFF-ship.”

What this argument overlooks is that a slumber party is sisterhood. Junior high slumber parties might have brought anything from makeovers to pained sobs over family dysfunction to raging tear-downs of pervy gym teachers. The adult slumber party touches on these, with our adult wisdom added to the mix. The voices of women online have brought me my birth control (“Ask Me About My Mirena!”), lessened my shame about my belly bulge, shined an uncomfortable light on the way social and personal notions of beauty can collide, and opened my mind to what I, as a biological woman, can learn about my own position in society from trans women. There’s fluff, of course (“Watch Kristen Bell Adorably Lose Her Shit Over a Sloth”), but just as silliness coexists alongside our more meaningful concerns, fluffy pieces can comfortably coexist alongside essays on healing from sexual assault. (In fact, for some of us, the fluff was a way to heal.) The slumber party goes all night, after all.

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My search for the perfect shade of red took me to a SoHo store on Spring Street. The boutique was far from welcoming: a cavernous black-walled room with a black floor, black leather chairs, and spotlights that shined from high above. It was far more theatrical than I've ever thought of myself.

“Hi, welcome to MAC,” an assistant greeted me, as I began to glide carefully around the shiny, foreign objects.

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I'm not saying my male students are not sensitive. Some have detailed abuse at the hands of relatives; years spent in the foster system; hunting trips with their fathers; the thrill of learning to race motorcycles; but only once or twice in the nine years I've been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.

But the women do. They write reams about The One, or the One Who Got Away. Sometimes, the student outlines in heartbreaking detail the lengths she went to maintain a relationship — transferring schools so they could be closer, putting up with poor treatment, and so on — all to no avail. At some point, the relationship ends, and she's left mourning the person she imagined to be her great love. Another common theme — and this one never fails to shock me — is the young woman who discovers her boyfriend is cheating by reading his texts on his cellphone. So he's cheating, but she's invading his privacy. I have to still my hand from writing "WTF?" in the margins.

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Vanity Fair just published an adaptation from a new biography of Romney that offers what (I believe) is a previously unreported anecdote about Romney's time as a Mormon leader. Authors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman report that Romney told off a woman with feminist leanings who was a member of the stake (equivalent to a diocese) of which Romney was then president:

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It seems that everywhere the Republican hopefuls go, they're confronted by supporters of gay rights, who may or may not themselves be gay. And every time it happens, their equivocations or evasions or sputtering give birth to another viral moment, primed for Facebook sharing and coalescing around the view that the Republicans are hopelessly out of touch on an issue of growing consensus. That narrative gets reinforced even without the candidates' help -- just last week, there was the instantly iconic image of a sailor, first off the ship, passionately kissing her partner, and the enduring popularity of Zach Wahls' earnest speech about his mothers before the Iowa Legislature.

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