Confused? Of course you are.

Journalist Dan Slater wrote a piece for the Atlantic print edition about a man named Jacob who, through the magic of online dating, has been able to meet and sleep with many women and he is no longer interested in getting married.  In response, Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal took to the Atlantic's website to refute Slater and his "spineless" argument with a lot of data and somewhere around 1,800 words.

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Ask a woman why she endures the awkwardness and discomfort, and she’ll probably respond, “They make me look, and feel, more attractive.” Newly published research suggests this perception is accurate, but perhaps not for the reason you’d expect.

It’s not the artificially increased height that turns heads. Rather, it’s how such footwear changes the mechanics of a woman’s gait.

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Such testing tends to happen at the discretion of the hospital. "Private hospitals in rich neighborhoods rarely test new mothers for drugs, whereas hospitals serving primarily low-income moms make those tests routine and sometimes mandatory," concludes The News' Oren Yaniv. This is true more broadly. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, "More than eighteen states now address the issue of pregnant women’s drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and a growing number of these states make it possible to remove a child based on nothing more than a single positive drug test."

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Right now, if you’re a woman in the military, which has startlingly high rates of sexual assault, and you get raped, you face the added insult of having to pay for an abortion out of your own pocket. That’s because the military's health insurance plan is the only one in the federal government that does not cover abortion in the case of rape or incest. It'll only cover the procedure if the woman's life is in danger

Democrats in the Senate have tried to change this, but House Republicans have so far resisted, thus producing two different bills -- one with the change and one without. Yesterday, the House named its representatives to a bicameral committee that will hammer out the differences between the two bills, including this provision. While killing the amendment could reignite the explosive abortion and rape debate of the summer, Republicans generally oppose the expansion of reproductive rights, even for raped female soldiers.

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I'm a young, vibrant woman. A feminist, you could even say. I'm the first to speak out against a womanizer or misogynist. I sign petitions and spread the news about anti-women politicians. I believe in women's rights above anything else. I reject old ideas about gender roles or the customs surrounding them.

When I'm having sex, all I want is to be objectified.

It doesn't make any sense. It isn't as if I want a man I'm sleeping with to think I'm nothing more than something for him to use, but I do want him to tell me that. It's puzzling because, like I said, I would classify myself as a feminist. It makes me upset to think I might be just like all the other women out there who allow themselves to be nothing more than an object for men.

But I can't help what I want -- even if I don't really want it.

Why are my kinks so not in tune with the rest of my personality? I grew up feeling like the boys around me were all judging me in their heads, and that, for whatever reason, I wasn't good enough for them. I constantly felt -- and still feel, sometimes -- like I'm not good enough for the men I want relationships with. Could that be why my sexual kinks are so off? I'm so sensitive to sexism that I think my view of men has become skewed.

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"How can you top that?" asked Bradbury, a New York City neonatal nurse who had helped evacuate infants from a hospital that lost power during the height of Superstorm Sandy. She was amazed that she was being honored at the same event as a Supreme Court justice — the annual Glamour Women of the Year awards, where stars of film, TV, fashion and sports share the stage with lesser-known women who have equally impressive achievements to their name.

Few events bring together such an eclectic group of honorees, not to mention presenters. At the Carnegie Hall ceremony Monday night, HBO star Lena Dunham, creator of "Girls" and a heroine to a younger generation, was introduced by Chelsea Handler and paid tribute in her speech to Nora Ephron, who died earlier this year. Ethel Kennedy was praised by her daughter, Rory, who has made a film about her famous mother. Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, 17, was honored along with swimming phenom Missy Franklin, also 17, and other Olympic athletes, introduced by singer Mary J. Blige and serenaded by American Idol winner Phillip Phillips. Singer-actress Selena Gomez was lauded by her friend, the actor Ethan Hawke.

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But, as Daily Dot's Aja Romano points out, this is not the first year that Businessweek has issued polls rating the attractiveness of students:

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The piece by Elizabeth Landau looked at unpublished research that suggested female voting behavior was affected by whether a woman was ovulating on Election Day, or as our own Jillian Rayfield  put it Wednesday, whether "their lady parts might be doing the voting for them." As Poynter noted Thursday, CNN has taken down the post and put up a notice stating that "after further review it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN."

Poynter notes that CNN has not elaborated on which precise elements in Landau's post fell short of its standards.

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OK, so that's not exactly what Barack Obama said. But despite the actual proper nouns having been the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Iranian nuclear program, the president lost no opportunity to bring up the ladies. Both candidates know there's a historic gender gap; both candidates have seen the data that shows that Obama's initially massive lead with women is narrowing while Romney retains a general advantage with men. Are those women happy when they hear that Romney wants "gender equality" (his words, not mine) after the Arab Spring? Might as well try, after the missed opportunities of the first debate and the frantic catch-up of the second.

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You know it the easily exploitable moment it happens. It's when Mitt Romney trains his cool cyborg eye on Jim Lehrer and says, "I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I like PBS. I love Big Bird." It's when Uncle Joe from Scranton cannot keep a straight face around the guy with the backward baseball cap. It's when a candidate declares his commitment to moving women forward in the workplace by stating, "We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.  I went to a number of women's groups and said, 'Could you help us find folks?' And they brought us whole binders full of women."

Binders full of women. Whaaaaaa?

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And Romney? He had "binders full of women" that became an instant meme for Obama's re-energized voting base, and he blamed single parents -- women, really -- for gun violence.

The inevitable question about women came, somewhat surprisingly, in the form of a query about the wage gap. Obama was asked by an "undecided voter," "What new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?" (Voters who care about inequality are historically torn!) That gave him the chance to talk, more energetically than he did in the last debate, about his grandmother and the discrimination she suffered, and of signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

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Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn't I get to enjoy this time of joy and 'blue water' and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn't wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen .....you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger

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“It’s an advantage to have two parents," Romney said at NBC News' Education Nation Summit, "but to have one parent to stay closely connected and at home during those early years of education can be very, very important.”

Important? Maybe. Feasible for the vast majority of American families, be they two-parent or another configuration? Ha, ha, ha, as Romney himself might put it. As the National Organization for Women's Erin Matson tweeted with some understatement, "This is not a gender-neutral statement." Romney's rhetoric, if not his policy prescriptions, was getting at something fundamental, something that even in the mostly substance-free fracas over whether Ann Romney staying at home was "work," hasn't been part of the national discussion.

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If you’re a follower of online feminism, you’re most likely familiar with the conversation around the article. It dominated conversations both online and off for weeks, sparking debate and dialogue about a number of issues including work-life balance, maternity and paternity leave, privilege in feminism, and the direction of our movement for equality. If you need a refresher, you can read a roundup of responses to the article here.

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See here:

While many responses to my book were positive, the tone of some of the critiques—from “mystic woo woo about the frou frou"  to “bad news for everyone who has one” — suggests to me that our culture, even one in which Fifty Shades of Grey is being devoured by millions of women, still has problems discussing women’s sexuality in a positive, empowering way. And we need — perhaps women especially — to be able to have that conversation.

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When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way. I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, "Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?"

"I wish she could have been here at the convention and heard leaders like Governor Mary Fallin, Governor Nikki Haley, Governor Susana Martinez, Senator Kelly Ayotte and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"As Governor of Massachusetts, I chose a woman Lt. Governor, a woman chief of staff, half of my cabinet and senior officials were women, and in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies.

Again, not a word on policies that specifically affect women. Meanwhile, at a Salute to Pro-Life Women event earlier today, Michele Bachmann (who notably is not on that list of speakers cited by Romney) called Barack Obama "the most anti-woman, anti-life president ever in the history of the United States."

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