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.

Continue Reading...

The dim assessment came in response to tabloids that on March 29 printed photos of what is supposedly Houston’s Atlanta bathroom, littered with crack pipes, cocaine-coated spoons, cigarette butts, Budweiser cans and garbage. The photos were taken, and sold to the magazines, by Houston’s sister-in-law, who provided an accompanying tale of the singer’s cracked-out habits, from hallucinating violent demons, to biting and hitting herself, putting her hand through walls, and locking herself away to smoke rock cocaine and pleasure herself with an apparently prodigious collection of vibrators. Speaking about the mess on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Billboard executive editor Tamara Conniff said, “I think that she was a really well-manicured diva star and she just turned a little ghetto.”

Continue Reading...

Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency -- armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

Continue Reading...

Apparently, not today.

On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius unexpectedly overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that emergency contraception be sold on drugstore shelves and made available without a prescription to women under the age of 17. The move came as a surprise blow to healthcare and women’s rights activists, the kinds of people regularly counted as supporters of the Obama administration.

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

Continue Reading...

Hollywood, perpetually on the verge of never making another movie for anyone but teenage boys, was in need of a slap in the face, reminding it that women buy tickets, fill theaters, tell friends they loved it -- and know men who are occasionally eager to see the opposite sex portrayed compellingly on celluloid. "Bridesmaids" delivered a wallop, bringing in more than $280 million worldwide, and drawing an audience reported to be a third male, and largely over 30.

But has it actually whetted the film business's appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like "Sleepless in Seattle," "Contact" and "How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days," the television show "Hot in Cleveland," the author of "Hello, He Lied" and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.

Continue Reading...

This week, with a viral enthusiasm usually applied to marches on Washington, grass-roots presidential campaigns or saving Planned Parenthood from House Republicans, women (and men) who believe in a future that includes movies for and about women have turned the comedy "Bridesmaids" -- written by "Saturday Night Live's" Kristen Wiig and her collaborator Annie Mumolo, and starring a passel of funny women -- into a cause. "Bridesmaids" activists want to send a bracing message to a business that has become increasingly oppressive for the women who work within it as well as for those who consume its product. That message must be delivered in the form of box office receipts, which means that for a certain set, seeing "Bridesmaids" this weekend -- and encouraging others to do the same -- is more than a trip to the theater; it's a social responsibility.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

This is a big win for Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican whose deficit-minded crusade against Planned Parenthood hinges not on the argument that taxpayer money shouldn't pay for abortions (the Hyde Amendment put a stop to that in the mid 1970s), but on the conviction that taxpayer money should not go to organizations that provide abortion services, regardless of what else they might do.

Pence's plan, which will likely stall in the Senate, would mean the end of federal support for an organization that each year provides more than 800,000 women with breast exams, more than 4 million Americans with testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and 2.5 million people with contraception, which, not for nothing, is the stuff that prevents unintended pregnancy, and thus abortion, to begin with.

Continue Reading...

That’s a question I was asked approximately 10 times a day this fall, as I traveled the country discussing my book about women and the American presidency, talking to audiences and on television and radio throughout the bitter midterms and the gales of Mama Grizzly media.

Answering the query meant that the name on my lips, all day every day it sometimes seemed, was Gabrielle Giffords'.

I am no Giffords acolyte; her blue dog politics are more centrist than my own, especially on issues of guns and border security (though she opposed Arizona's horrifying immigration law S.B. 1070). But given that most successful Democratic politicians don’t actually share my politics these days, everything else I knew about her was promising: a young, charismatic, former Fulbright scholar who had grown up racing motorcycles and married an astronaut in 2007, a Democrat who had won her Republican congressional district (Arizona’s 8th voted for George Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008 by 52 percent to 46 percent) by 54 percent in 2006. Giffords was so charismatic, so winning that she -- unlike many of her congressional colleagues -- had made the politically risky decision to vote with her party on electric issues like healthcare, cap and trade and the stimulus bill. Still, somehow, in a terrible year for Democrats, she was managing to hang on in a tight race.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

All those years ago, I didn't think it unusual to spend so much time making stuff. This had a lot to do with my grandmother, a woman who, when she was not preserving produce, was ceaselessly creating other kinds of goods. She spent her evenings at her handwork: The needlepoint and cross-stitch samplers she'd frame and hang on walls; she hooked rugs and sewed the odd quilt, made Christmas ornaments and wine cozies and doorstop covers. As a little kid, I followed her lead, pulling thick yarn through big-holed plastic patterns of butterflies and strawberries, later graduating to friendship bracelets, some small needlepoint and, briefly, origami. But eventually I graduated altogether, and grew into a young adult who did not spend the bulk of her time in the production of material goods, instead wiling away evenings reading, talking on the phone, watching television. I was not a maker.

Continue Reading...

Now, I don’t want to get into any kind of bad-summer pissing match here. I give you 1968, and I’ve gathered that 1977 wasn’t much fun for New Yorkers. But I don’t need to prove unequivocally that 2010 has been the worst of the worst to know that it has been pretty damn bad.

Continue Reading...

But where Kornacki and Heilemann get it wrong is in conceiving of Clinton’s presence on the ticket only as a corrective to Obama’s perceived shortcomings, rather than considering that Clinton would function as a sparking energy-generator of her own. They seem to forget that aside from her imagined ability to tidy up Obama’s frayed demographic ends, or somehow speak more skillfully to working-class Americans than the current vice-president, Hillary’s presence on a presidential ticket would bring a little something else to the equation, a little something different, not like the others ...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

When it was announced this week that Obama would become the first sitting U.S. president ever to appear on a morning talk show, critics were quick to fly into a hanky-waving frenzy more intense than any since the one that greeted Katie Couric's gravitas-defying move to prime time.

You'd think that the recent surge of female Republican candidates and Tea Party hustlers laying siege to female voters might make a president's decision to appear on a show watched by lots of women perfectly understandable, but no. No one seemed to get that, so intent were they on further dismissing the still-exotic merging of politics and femininity.

Continue Reading...

What's that, you hadn't heard about the event that the former first daughter and her family have gone to great lengths to keep private, that her mother has emphatically stated is supposed to be "a family wedding"? You missed the three pieces in the New York Times, the AP story, the Washington Post's On Faith blog featuring Deepak Chopra? The multiple New York magazine, People and ABC updates on leaked guest lists, costs, security, tents and how much weight Bill Clinton has lost? What about TMZ's reported playlist of songs for Chelsea's band, or the Daily Beast's slide shows of her exes and of other presidential family weddings! What a shame to miss that last one, with it's bone-rattling American Gladiator setup about how "the countdown is on" to find out whether Chelsea's "rumored Rhinebeck blowout [will] best JFK Jr's secluded glamour." No doubt it's exactly what young Clinton was thinking, when she first sat down with boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky, their parents and an event planner to discuss their marriage: "OK, guys, do whatever you have to do, I just want to beat John-John!"

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

1. Of course we only see publicly performed versions of political couple-hood, but the Gores' public performance was pretty damn heart-warming, even if it did tilt a touch too far on the ew-gross-mom-and-dad-are-making-out spectrum. But that's the point! Mom and dad made out and they still couldn't make it?
2. Forty years. You get through forty years -- of ill-behaved children and ill-behaved bosses and stolen elections -- and then you split? This is precisely the kind of mysterious and inexplicable narrative of marriage thing that scares the bejesus out of people who are newly or not yet married. Forty years?
3. Relatedly: so soon after Robbins and Sarandon? Really? Couldn't divorce have taken the Bushes, or maybe the Broderick-Parkers, first, and given us some respite from confounding and embarrassingly inappropriate sadness over the personal decisions of celebrity couples whose marriages we didn't even realize we had any emotional investment in until they dropped this bomb all over our post-Memorial Day Tuesday and now we can't work because we're really, stupidly sad?
4. Good god, does this mean that Al Gore is going to date? And plus, oh please please please tell me he has not already been dating. Do not want to know. Nyah, nyah, nyah. I cannot hear you. I cannot heeeeaaaar you.
5. Relatedly: they were supposed to be the functional couple. The ones who personally disapproved of the cigars and the thongs and the rest of the ridiculousness so mightily that they eschewed the Big Dog's help in 2000 and look what happened! All because they were the functional couple!
6. It had never occurred to me that it would bother me in the slightest if Al and Tipper Gore got a divorce mostly because it had never occurred to me that Al and Tipper Gore would ever get a divorce.

Continue Reading...