Gloria Steinem spoke to the New York Times on Sunday and said of the book, “It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives … It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”

Even as women made strides toward equality, French continued her campaign against patriarchy. The Telegraph describes her 1992 book, “The War Against Women,” as “an attempt to debunk the idea that feminism had managed to free her sisters from their traditional yoke, addressing the subjugation of women by fundamentalist religions and patriarchal systems; sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace; and domestic violence, rape and incest.”

Carol Jenkins, French’s longtime friend and president of the Women’s Media Center, wrote about first meeting French at a late 1970s women’s event in Long Island, N.Y. She describes French as “breathtakingly brilliant, vibrant and sharp — and outspoken in a way that was unusual in those days. Then, there were still many women who muted their opinions, smiled often, and perfected the skills of ‘getting along.’ I may have been one of them. Marilyn, on the other hand, was among first women I’d met who were ‘having none of it.’ The ‘it’ being a reflexively submissive attitude. Marilyn definitely left an impression.”

French women still thin, not satisfied: Yes, they’re the thinnest women in Western Europe, with the lowest average body mass index, but French women don’t consider themselves slim and worry more about their weight compared with other Western European women. Oh, go bask in the sun of the Mediterranean coast and eat some fromage already!

Sex in the classroom: In Britain a study conducted at Bristol University found that mixed-gender classrooms hinder the achievement of elementary school boys in English classes but have little to no effect on either gender in math and science. The study’s author, Steven Proud, suggests that it may be beneficial to teach English in single-sex classrooms.

Meanwhile, a study in California has found that the state’s mandatory high school exit exam is keeping a disproportionate number of girls and minorities from graduating despite these students’ ability to perform at the same academic level with white boys on other tests. The exam was implemented in 2007 and is used for state and federal accountability programs like No Child Left Behind. 

Diet torture or torture diet?: While we’ve spent the week reeling from the release of the Bush administration’s torture memos, Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein homed in on a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of the Legal Counsel. It seems the Bush attorney general’s office looked to commercial diet programs (you know, the ones you drink out of cans or get delivered to your homes) to justify extreme caloric restriction for detainees. The note explains that, “While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustained periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision.” The restrictive, liquid-diet routine was meant to enhance other techniques, like sleep deprivation.

Faster than a speeding bullet bra: Underwires really can save your life.

Also up for debate today in front of the State Senate Judiciary Committee is a bill backed by Republican Rep. Leslie Fossel that would expand the rights and responsibilities offered by a domestic partnership registry that was introduced in 2004.

Who will decide the fate of the gay marriage bill is still undetermined; the Legislature has the option of sending the issue to voters or they could simply approve it, at which point opponents could initiate a “people’s veto.” According to the AP, “The earliest a Judiciary Committee vote is expected would be April 28.”

Reports are just coming in that a near-capacity crowd has filled the 4,000 seat Augusta Convention Center, where the hearing is being held, and the hearing was delayed for 30 minutes due to traffic jams. But, to keep the proceedings professional, the legislative committee enacted rules limiting “hooting and hollering” and banned signs and placards inside the building. Wait, so what do I do with my “Giant Gay Repellent Umbrella“? 

Let’s take a trip through recent headlines: An 18-year-old from Orlando, Florida, has been sentenced to five years and forced to register as a sex offender after sharing a naked picture of his 16-year-old girlfriend with his friends. He is fighting to get his name removed from the registry, but for now, will remain on it until he’s 43 years old. Over at CNN, Mike Galanos, host of CNN’s “Prime News,” adds his name to the list of critics concerned that labeling kids as adult pedophiles might be taking all of this a bit too far. As he writes, “It’s clear we need to change our laws to catch up with technology.”

Galanos quotes a ubiquitous statistic, one that has been used in nearly every sexting article to date, bolstering parents’ worst fears: a poll conducted last fall by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com found that 20 percent of teens had sent or posted online nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves. But the Wall Street Journal is questioning the reliability of those numbers. Apparently, the same adolescents who are comfortable using technology to explore their sexuality may be more likely to respond to a poll conducted online, thereby inflating the poll’s conclusions.

But whether it’s one in five or one in a thousand, it’s quite clear that at this point, some teens are going to bare all (or some) digitally. As Tracy Clark-Flory wrote in her February feature story on sexting, “These digital offerings bring the potential for humiliation and blackmail if the photos or video get into the wrong hands — and, let’s face it, they often do.”

She donned these costumes for “Green Porno,” an endearingly oddball series of short, educational films made for the Sundance Channel. The first season, about the sex lives of bugs, premiered last year. Created, written and acted by Rossellini, the two-minute movies were designed to be viewed on computers, cellphones and MP3 players. In each episode, Rossellini dressed up as one of those tiny insects, giving viewers a human-size look at the animal kingdom’s hidden sexual dramas. With a commitment to anatomical accuracy and utmost sincerity, Rossellini played opposite giant paper cutouts, which served as inanimate partners for her vigorous copulation. On April 1, the series begins its second season, this time focusing on the sexual habits of marine animals. Rossellini talked to us about her unintentional male-animal fetish and the naughty side of nature. 

How did you come up with the idea for the series?

Robert Redford [founder of the Sundance Film Festival] came up with the idea that the Internet might offer the opportunity to relaunch the short film series format, which had disappeared. The other thing is that Sundance is very interested in the environment. I’d just worked with them on a project called “My Dad Is 100 Years Old,” that I wrote about my father, Roberto Rossellini, and they offered me the opportunity to do these short films about the environment.

How did you end up deciding on marine animals for this season?

The first series I did on animals that I knew, that were in my garden and I had studied –  I could just lift a stone and find my earthworms. I wanted animals that everybody knew. We did the same for the sea creatures with the starfish and barnacle and clams, everything that people know. And the third series that comes out in the fall is again about fish, but this time it’s called “Bon Appetit Green Porno.” It is about animals we eat,  but again it has sea animals, because I found an incredible accomplice in a marine biologist called Claudio Campagna. I get the information from  books, but then to verify that I really understood it — when we do the costume, is it plausible that he has antennae like this? — it’s nice to have a real scientist collaborating.

You played male creatures in most of the first season, or a hermaphrodite, and you stuck with that this time around. Why?

You know, sometimes I play male because they move more. Like the spider, the female is four, five times bigger than the male and she just sits there on her spider web and it’s the male who has to walk and approach her.  So, I never really thought, “Oh, I’m playing male” — I was already playing spider. But after that people say, “You notice that you’re always playing male?” “Oh,” I say, “really? I played hermaphrodites too. I played female, I played the queen bee.” I think it’s more dictated by the costume. This series the costumes are sometimes 6 feet tall, 9 feet tall, you know, 10 feet tall!

The series is intended for online viewing or cellphones. What can you do online that you can’t do on TV or film? Is it a more flexible medium, or is it just cheaper?

The fact that it was mostly going to be seen on a small, mobile screen made me feel that it gave it this cartoonish look, four or five colors per film. So we have the background that is one color, and then I am the animal and I might have two or three colors, very contrasted. Because we saw that when you look at animation it looks very good on film, on television, and on a mobile. But if you see “Lawrence of Arabia,” you know, already on television you miss half of the film and if you see it on mobile, forget it, better not watch it. So that dictated the look of it: strong, vivid colors, simplicity in the art direction.

Have you ever wanted to do an animal whose sexual behavior was deemed too raunchy for the series?

No! I mean, there’s no censorship, you know, and I think that my commitment is to tell it as it is, the way it is in nature, and nature is infinitely scandalous.

Listen to the conversation here.