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Pulitzer Prize-winner David Finkel has written a truly heart breaking book about the war that just won't end in Iraq. In The Good Soldiers, he follows the 2-16, a battalion of army infantry soldiers nicknamed the Rangers, as they head into "the surge" in January of 2007. He follows them as they say goodbye to their girlfriends and two-year-olds, as they arrive at the base and face the football field-sized trash pit that surrounds them (especially disconcerting in a war where IEDs are so rampant), as they grow anxious and bored, as they get injured and killed, as the lucky ones return home. The Good Soldiers is truly in a class with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a vivid, nonpartisan portrayl of what real soldiers are facing in this war.

Much of the fifteen-month narrative is built around Ralph Kauzlarich, a U.S. Army Liutenant Colonel who is known for his catch phrase, "It's all good." Well, of course, it's not "all good" in Iraq circa 2007. Insurgents are planting IEDs in trash heaps on the side of the road so powerful that they rip through vehicles and tear off limbs. The moral force of the war feels lost on most of the soldiers. Attempts to do nation-building within Iraq--schools, a sewage system, build up the local police force--are all slow at best and impossible at worst.

I have never understood the war so well, despite reading quite a bit about it. The Good Soldiers paints a living, breathing picture of what the 19-year-old kids who put on the American army uniform actually face, and in turn, gives the reader a sense of her own responsibility like nothing else. It's not all good. And we're all to blame.

If you're sick of hearing about Sarah Palin's new biography, Going Rogue: An American Life, consider checking out the anthology, Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare.

Edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed of The Nation, Going Rouge is like the liberal intervention to Palin's oh-so-tiresome narrative.

The book has contributions from Max Blumenthal, Juan Cole, Eve Ensler, Michelle Goldberg, Jane Hamsher, Christopher Hayes, Naomi Klein, Dahlia Lithwick, Amanda Marcotte, Rick Perlstein, Katha Pollitt, Frank Rich, Hanna Rosin, Rebecca Traister, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Patricia Williams, and even one from me!

If you're interested, check out this episode of GRITtv after the jump where Laura Flanders chats with Rebecca Traister, Richard Kim, Max Blumenthal and Shannyn Moore about Palin and the book.

We've blogged a few times about this awesome, on-the-road project from Nona Willis Aronowitz and the late Emma Bee Bernstein, but I wanted to give the official thumbs up after having finally had the chance to read this fascinating tour-de-force cover to cover.

I was most struck by two elements of this unique book (and major brava to Seal for taking a chance on publishing something so unorthodox). First, the breadth of voices was astounding. Whether I was in Sioux Falls listening to a bartender bitch about the irrelevance of her degree or Portland hearing Banji scoff at the label of feminism, I was learning something. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes about in one of the latest issues of the New Yorker, one of the disappointments of the internet is that it allows us to retreat into our ideological bubbles even further--only visiting blogs and websites that support the view we already hold. I'm a big believer that this kind of balkanization of thought is not good for us. Period. But what Nona and Emma's book does is breaks out of that balkanization and get us face-to-face with folks all over the country who we may or may not have much in common with. I'm so grateful for that gift.

The other thing that's undeniably striking about this book is the authenticity of Nona and Emma's voices through out. They are infinitely likable and obviously flawed. They smoke a lot of weed. They even drop acid. They write--sometimes with more romance, sometimes less--about the journey of thought and geography that they undertake together at this critical moment in both of their lives. Their voices struck me as distinctly young and alive and unapologetic, another huge gift to a lady looking ahead at her 30s and feeling a bit less wide-eyed than I used to. Nona and Emma recaputure that spirit for me. The sound of their voices are a testament to how the feminist movement reinvigorates itself. Neverending.

Thanks girls.

Woot.

A. S. Byatt, or Dame Byatt as she's officially known, is a Booker Prize-nominated novelist who writes stories about intelligent, complex women - in other words, the kind of women we love here at Feministing. Byatt has written almost a dozen novels and numerous short stories, but her best-known work is Possession: a Love Story. Possession, which she wrote in 1990, is a fascinating story about the interaction of gender, history, literature and love. It was named one of Time's Best 100 Novels of All Time, and is required reading in colleges and high schools all over the world.

In a 1995 interview with Salon, Byatt offered an explanation for her tendency to create educated, willful female characters. "I'm a political feminist," she said. "I think women's lives need quite a lot of improving, some of which has now happened. I'm interested in feminist themes, women's freedom." Despite her political leanings, however, when it comes to teaching literary history, Byatt has very little patience for the practice of reading women novelists simply because they're women. "If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men... Women should be truthful and then it will be more often done by women, or as often done by women." Given the quality of Byatt's work, it would seem that this prediction has, in part, come true.

Dame Byatt is in the States promoting her new novel The Children's Book, for which she received a Booker Prize nomination. She'll be reading from it, and speaking about her work, this Thursday the 29th at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Tickets are $10 if you're under thirty-five, and $19 for everyone else. You can (and should!) book a seat here.

And now, without further ado, The Feministing Five, with A. S. Byatt.

It's been a spell since I last posted, y'all!

I caught one of those wicked flu bugs and this illishness has lingered for weeks.

Ugh.

Anyhoo, I'm finally feeling like myself again and glad to be back on the internets.

Shall we?

Cool!

September was National Literacy Month. I had planned to post about literacy, but caught the flu-plague and...well, yeah. This message isn't month specific, so...

I couldn't read until I was in the second grade. I'm not dyslexic. Rather, I was one of many people who don't respond to the traditional methods of teaching folks how to read.

My inability to read wasn't discovered until midway through second grade and, in keeping with the tone of things throughout my grade school career, the discovery was theatrically humiliating and took place in front of the entire class.

My second grade teacher, who I remember as an absolute horror who only spoke to me twice and smelled sharply of bleach (don't ask, 'cause I sure as shit don't know why she smelled that way), hauled me in front of the class to read something or other. Trapped, I confessed that I couldn't read the material. After some grilling in front of my peers, she then half dragged half hauled me out the door and yelled at me for lying to her for most of the year. She sent me to the principal's office and my mother was called up to the school and then all hell broke out as my mother went off on every adult present for failing to teach her child to read.

She pulled me out of that school and then spent two weeks teaching me how to read...the hard way.

Pause...wince at the memory...continue.

Basically, my mother taught me to read through threats, yelling and humiliation.

She checked Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak out of the library and told me that if 3 year old chil'ren could read it so could I. Since she used the term "dumb ass" liberally throughout her speech, it wasn't exactly inspirational. I sat there, mortified and nauseous, staring at those damn wild things and the strange groupings of letters on the page and was convinced I'd never understand how they all fit together.

My childhood friend Mollie sent me not one, but two copies of her former professor's book, when she noticed that I was thinking and writing a lot about work/family balance issues (thanks Mollie!). Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All by Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers is a deeply-researched, very practical guide to getting real about some of the most critical unfinished business of contemporary feminism.

Unlike Linda Hirshman's Get to Work, which leaves many readers feeling judged and misunderstood, or Leslie Bennett's The Feminine Mistake, which leaves many readers thinking doomsday thoughts, Strober and Meers approach the subject with healthy doses of both realism and optimism. They are women who have been through it, and lived to tell the tale. (Both are heterosexual, and so their own life examples are from this perspective. Unfortunately they didn't do much to look at non-hetero couples or non-marrying types).

After reviewing all the research that proves that dual working families are actually healthier, happier, and more economically viable, they go on to talk about some of the roadblocks to making it work and their suggestions for getting past those roadblocks.

One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.

One of the few remaining feminist bookstores, Women and Children First in Chicago, celebrated it's 30th anniversary this weekend.

Happy 30th, WCF, and here's to another 30 years.

Via Alison Bechdel

Rachel Simmons is a writer and a teacher who has penned two New York Times bestsellers. Not too shabby.

In 2002, Simmons' wrote Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, which shed light on the "mean girls" phenomenon and examined for the first time the cliques and codes of teen girl culture in an academic but accessible way. Like Odd Girl Out, Simmons' second book The Curse of the Good Girl, is based on hundreds of hours spent interviewing and teaching young girls, which Simmons does all over the world. At her summer camp the Girls Leadership Institute, during the months she spends every year teaching at a girls school in South Africa, Simmons gets a rare, honest look inside the torturously complex inner workings of Girl World. The Curse of the Good Girl was written for the parents of young girls, so that their daughters can not only survive Girl World, but emerge as authentic and self-aware young women.

Simmons lives in Brooklyn and, during the course of our phone interview, managed to parallel-park her car according to that borough's complex alternate-side parking rules, while also answering questions about the many challenges facing the modern feminist movement. Again, not too shabby. As you'll see from her interview, Simmons is a very impressive lady.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Rachel Simmons.

I went to a great book party last night for Emily Pilloton's Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People. Emily, a visionary designer still in her late 20s, started Project H Design in January 2008, a nonprofit aimed at supporting product design initiatives "for humanity" (such as more vivid and engaging foster home facilities, playgrounds that double as math teaching laboratories etc.). In Design Revolution, she has gathered together 100 products from all over the world and profiled them. It is not only beautiful and charged with an undeniable spirit of outrage and imagination, but there is so much for the non-designer to learn.

In the introduction, Emily writes:

As a whole, today's world of design (specifically product design) is severely deficient, crippled by consumerism and paralyzed by an unwillingness to financially and ethically prioritize social impact over the bottom line. We need nothing short of an industrial design revolution to shake us from our consumption-for-consumption's-sake momentum. We must elevate 'design for the greater good' beyond charity and toward a socially sustainable and economically viable model taught in design schools and executed in design firms, one that defines the ways in which we prototype, relate to clients, distribute, measure, and understand. We must be designers of empowerment and rewrite our own job descriptions.

Amen. When you flip through her book, you really get a sense of the breadth and purpose that she's talking about. Everything from sugarcane charcoal to montessori toys make sense for real people; they simply make our lives better and healthier. What a refreshing re-visioning of the design and consumer market place, one where conspicuous consumption is replaced by quality-of-life enhancing tools for the world over, not just "stuff and things" for the top 5%.

As if the book weren't inspiring enough, Emily will be taking it to the streets next spring in her very own traveling museum of sorts--a biodiesel-powered truck and an airstream filled with many of the products she writes about. To meet her in a city near you, check out the schedule here.

Love this story:

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz writes about a courageous school librarian in Norman, Oklahoma who made sure that local teenagers smitten with young adult novelist Ellen Hopkins got to hear her speak. After realizing that she used the f-word and wrote honestly about meth addiction--which Hopkins own daughter had suffered from--in her wildly popular novel Crank, parents and local radio loud mouths called for Hopkins' book to be banned. Not only that--the superintendent disinvited Hopkins from speaking, despite the fact that she explores some key social issues affecting the Norman community and brings a definitively anti-drug message.

Middle-school librarian Karin Perry to the rescue! Schultz reports:

Perry asked Hopkins if she would still come. The answer was yes. Then she asked Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College -- love the name -- if she could move Hopkins' talk to their campus. The college said yes. About 150 students, parents, teachers and librarians attended last week's speech.

Go Perry! I love librarians. And it's a good week to love 'em. As Schultz reports, "This is Banned Books Week, which is sponsored annually by the American Library Association to celebrate the freedom to read. The library group says there were at least 513 challenges to books last year." Cool added bonus: check out this blog, Future Feminist Librarian-Activist.

Thanks to the Women's Media Center for the heads up.

Chris Hedges' War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning was a book that really changed the way I thought about, well war, for starters, but also about the kinds of choices we make as human beings in search of purposeful lives. After years of war reporting, and then divinity school, he seemed uniquely equipped to comment on the death and destruction that is war, but also the ways in which it becomes a "meaningful project" for people.

So I was really looking forward to reading his new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Unfortunately, what worked so well for me in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning--Hedges' compassion for people and deep understanding of what makes us tick on a psychological, spiritual level--is almost completely absent from this new book. He takes readers through five grand illusions: of literacy, of love, of wisdom, of happiness, and of America. Each one is more depressing and argued with less empathy than the next.

In the Illusion of Love, for example, he reports on the proliferation of porn, re-traveling ground that so many smart feminist thinkers have already tread without half the insight. "Porn is about reducing women to corpses," he writes. Um, okay. And what about it? It was insufferable to read page after page about "face fucking" without any new learning. Why are men and women drawn into this world? What does it really say about our larger culture and their inner psychology? None of this is really explored. It becomes one big shock-and-awe session. Trust me Hedges, most of us feminist readers already been done shocked and awed.

I agree with a lot of what Hedges is arguing here. I've also written, for example, against the cultish embrace of the power of positive thinking because it invisbilizes systemic inequality (think The Secret, in which a gay guy who was being sexually harassed by homophobes is suddenly freed from oppression by just imagining them being nicer to him). But unfortunately, Hedges presents his arguments in such an insufferable, unempathic tone, that the reader just ends up feeling preached to, judged, or bored to death. I hope that Hedges manages to reclaim some of his earlier empathy, because it's really what set him apart as an extraordinary writer. In this book, he's more of a ranter.

Two years after Nona Willis Aronowitz and the missed Emma Bee Bernstein hit the road for a journey across the country and into the minds of young women on the many states and forms of feminism, their book on their findings has been released. Here's the description:

What do young women care about? What are their hopes, worries, and ambitions? Have they heard of feminism, and do they relate to it?

These are just a few of the questions journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz and photographer Emma Bee Bernstein set out to answer in Girldrive. In October 2007, Aronowitz and Bernstein took a cross-country road trip to meet with the 127 women profiled in this book, ranging from well-known feminists like Kathleen Hanna, Laura Kipnis, Erica Jong, and Michele Wallace, to women who don't relate to feminism at all. The result of these interviews, Girldrive is a regional chronicle of the struggles, concerns, successes, and insights of young women who are grappling--just as hard as their mothers and grandmothers did--to find, define, and fight for gender equity.

Check out their blog (which documented their adventures) for more info and to buy the book.

Check out Kate Murphy, Fordham University senior, on The Women's Room over at the Women's Media Center. An excerpt:

As I plunged headfirst into The Women's Room, the most famous novel of the late feminist Marilyn French, I found myself submerged in a foreign world, or so I thought. Beginning in the 1950s, the novel follows Mira Ward through her teenage years, her young marriage, her life as a stay-at-home mother, and her subsequent feminist rebirth during her forties, while a student at Harvard University. Hers was a world where women were second-class citizens; where all that many young women had to look forward to was a life of suburban discontent and servitude. I found it shocking. But at first I just couldn't relate to it.

The New York Observer reports that Naomi Wolf's new book will be "a cultural history of the vagina." Which is funny, because I was totally planning on writing a history of my left tit! (Kidding, kidding.)

Hanne Blank - amazing author of Virgin: The Untouched History - pointed out on my Facebook wall that Wolf has a tough act to follow: Catherine Blackledge took on the history of the vajayjay in The story of V: a natural history of female sexuality (which I have yet to read).

I'm more interested in what the title will be... Come up with a title for Wolf's new vag book and share in comments! The commenter with the most "likes" at the end of the day wins a book (your choice of Full Frontal Feminism; He's a Stud, She's a Slut; Yes Means Yes or The Purity Myth.)

Elizabeth Wurtzel, of Prozac Nation and Bitch fame, has a truly nasty review up at Double XX today about Rachel Simmons' new book, The Curse of the Good Girl. Rachel, as many of you know, blew apart the world of girl bullying with Odd Girl Out and started the Girls Leadership Institute. I was going to write a big ol' review of Rachel's new book after Labor Day, but I couldn't wait to respond a bit to Wurtzel's vitriol.

Wurtzel begins her review with a big classist, racist bang:

Elite institutions are not merely supposed to produce intelligent alumni--they are also supposed to teach rigorous thinking and create beautiful minds. Plainly, this is a mistaken notion on my part. Ever since the fancy schools started recruiting in the shtetl and the hood, elitism as a coherent narrative has declined to meaninglessness. It's now perfectly Princeton to be, say, a fitness-equipment infomercial mogul, clever and determined but also, in some deeper way, crass and wrong.

Crass and wrong? Try assuming that letting in a more diverse student body and/or encouraging diverse passions, points of view, ways of writing and interacting with the world is somehow debasing. Apparently Elizabeth longs for the good ol' days of overtly racist and sexist admissions and dead white men as the only philosophers that anyone thought worth reading. Seriously?

Then Wurtzel goes on to claim that Simmons has missed the boat in identifying what's really wrong with the kids these days:

In some cases the horror is that there is no horror. The good high-schoolers, the ones with Ivy League futures, are positively babied by their overprotective parents, who don't want their sons and daughters to do the things they did. Having gone through herpes-and-cocaine phases of their own, the Boomers and Xers who are rearing Dakota and Madison these days have scheduled them to death with cello lessons and tennis team--or a trip to the Girls Leadership Institute--until they have no time or energy for bad behavior.

Um, that's exactly Simmons' point, actually. She talks at length about the ways in which a girl's quality of life is diminished when she isn't able to take risks, fail and recover, go against the grain (whether it be her parents' or peers'), and speak her truth. She is essentially encouraging "bad behavior"--at least defined as behavior that is growth-producing, independent, scary, and, ultimately, rewarding. Perhaps Simmons prose was so straight forward that Wurtzel's elite-educated brain couldn't even understand the argument.

For me, this stinks of one woman trying to tear another one down out of pure jealousy and snobbery. To Wurtzel, it's only beautiful minds that matter. To me, beautiful hearts are pretty essential as well. (Rachel's got both, for the record.) Wurtzel seems to think that trying to write an accessible book based on tons of experience with real girls and a decade-long dedication to not just postulating or waxing poetic about girls, but really making their lives better, is beneath her and any bonafide authors.

Well, if that's the case, count me among the unbonafides. I'm much more invested in reaching people than sounding smart. That may make me dumb in Wurtzel's book, but come to think of it, I don't think I care. I learned that from Rachel, whose book advocates building a core made of something more solid than Ivy League diplomas, fancy vocabulary, or the approval of haughty intellectuals.

Thanks Rachel.

In anticipation of our weekend at the Omega Institute, I've been reading and re-reading some of my favorite Isabelle Allende. She's just one of the amazing speakers. Here's a quote I ran across yesterday in Paula, the memoir about her late daughter:

"The mind selects, enhances and betrays; happenings fade from memory; people forget one another and, in the end, all that remains is the journey of the soul, those rare moments of spiritual revelation. What actually happened isn't what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks."

Adrienne Rich is going to be speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York on Monday, Sept. 21 at 8 pm, and the venue was gracious enough to give Feministing two free passes for a lucky reader. I'm sure most of you know about Rich, but just in case:

She was hand-picked by W.H. Auden as a poet to watch. She refused to accept the National Medal of Arts, offered to her by former President Clinton. And at age 80, she is still prolific - as evidenced by her recent book, A Human Eye: Essay on Art in Society (W.W. Norton, April 2009). She is none other than Adrienne Rich, and she will kick off the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center 's 71st season by reading select works from her vast poetry oeuvre. "...Rich is still uncannily curious and idealistic, someone who continues to struggle to understand love and life and politics and war and male aggression, and what drives us apart from one another," wrote The Forward.

When Rich won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974, for her collection Diving Into the Wreck, she refused to accept it individually. What other two poets did she join with in accepting the award on behalf of "all silenced women?"

Journalist Thrity Umrigar's novel, The Space Between Us, is the kind of story weighted down with the familiar heaviness of real emotions, family drama, regrets, hopes, and misplaced anger, but it still flies by. It is set in modern day India, where Umrigar grew up, and is essentially a novel analyzing gender and class through the lens of two compelling characters: Sera, an upper-middle class Parsi housewife and Bhima, Sera's longtime servant. They are each others unlikely anchors through 20 years of drama, much of it brought on by asshole men.

Umrigar is a beautiful storyteller, taking time out to reflect on some of life's largest, most universal questions. Passages like this took my breath away:

Perhaps time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones--the angle of your head, the jutting of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile--has collapsed under the weight of your grief.

Umrigar isn't opaque about her intentions. In an interview in the back, she explains: "...a kind of unlikely friendship, a trust, an unspoken language of understanding, springs up between the women. But there is always a formality, a ritualized 'space' that can never quote be bridged. Each woman is governed and restricted by class divisions." Interestingly, Bhima, the servant character, is actually based on a real woman who worked in Umrigar's home while she was growing up in India. Umrigar is quick to point out that, while this is quintessentially a story about class in contemporary India, it has dynamics that can be seen in almost any modern country.

I won't do an spoiling here, but I have to admit that the one piece of this novel I felt estranging and a bit unbelievable was the end. I'd be curious to see if other people were struck this same way. Overall, a wonderful read and a great study in gender/class dynamics.

For the Buffy fans in the house, and I know there are a lot of you, a remix. The creator explains it this way:

In this re-imagined narrative, Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward's character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy's eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed - in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.

Thanks to reader Jerelyn for the heads up.

I am a few weeks late to this, but that doesn't take away the gag factor one bit. It is amazing to me as I have done research for my book, which is a feminist intervention on dating, how many of the terrible books that support antiquated ideas of how women should behave in pursuit of their romantic lives, are supported BY women. The newest in line by another woman that clearly hates women, Jordan Christy, is a book about how women can find love. How to Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World, is a nice dive into history when women were slut shamed for being sexual and chastised for their wanton lust for men. There is an excerpt from her book on MSNBC and I have picked two paragraphs here that give a little context to the "type" of woman she is talking about.

It's no secret that we girls start fantasizing about a fairy-tale wedding and happily-ever-after love story around the same time we start teething (I still have a wedding book that I compiled at age six!). Relationships are a big deal to us. We want to hear all about our roommate's new boyfriend, have to get every detail of our coworker's upcoming nuptials, and lament right along with Jennifer Aniston over Brad Pitt as if he cheated on us. We love to watch TLC's A Wedding Story, feverishly scan Us Weekly for the latest blossoming celebrity romance, and sob every time we see Sleepless in Seattle. We spend hours prepping ourselves for a date and even more time obsessing about what our potential children will look like and whether or not our initials mesh nicely. Conclusion: girls love love.

So why would you subconsciously sabotage all those efforts through your modern-day attempts at ?nding true love? This question baffles me daily. I'd like to think that it's out of sheer naiveté -- most girls don't appear to be in a lucid mental state when they're throwing themselves at some circus clown off the street and clearly aren't aware that they are actually driving that poor boy further away. But luckily, you will no longer have to be the victim of such careless ways in love, because we're going to start doing things the right way -- the old-fashioned way! And it starts by not messing with nature.

That is right ladies, not only is dreaming about perfect weddings natural, so is patriarchy and male dominance over your feelings, love life and dating choices. And if you act on how you feel, you are ruining your own chances at finding love (idiot!!!). It makes you wonder who is really being naive.

As I have talked to people about my project, I have come across the shame that women feel for wanting to ask men out, but feel like they can't because of myths such as those portrayed in the book above that make them feel stifled. And men, time and time again say, they like it when women ask them out. Now, I suppose any empirical evidence Christy or myself have collected is subjective since clearly she hangs around girls (not women incidentally as she continually refers to women as "girls,") that dream about weddings when they are "teething" (huh?) and I hang around people that have highly politicized and/or queer weddings, even if they may still be somewhat traditional. So naturally our evidence will be skewed by this subjectivity. That is the thing with love and dating, everyone has a different idea of what works for them, whether it is along or against the grain or somewhere in-between.

I guess what baffles me is not so much that many women feel pressured to follow these restrictive rules that ultimately make them unhappy. It is that we live in a culture that rewards this type of behavior. On some level they are right, there are some men that may prefer to ask women out because they want all the control--but is that the type of men we want to be with? Cultural norms around dating change with us and if we want egalitarian partnerships, our only hope is to do as we please with little regard to what we "should" do.

Similar to sentiments voiced in He's Just Not that Into You, and Why Men Love Bitches, many of these dating books only make sense if you believe that women are inferior to men. I am sure the authors of all of these books would say I am kidding myself, after all, I am 31 and unmarried, but I would much rather hold out for someone that recognizes me as a fully realized human being, rather than a possession that must play inferior and passive to get someone to like me and be with me. Just saying.

An excerpt from Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's forthcoming book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, is up at the New York Times. It begins:

In the 19th Century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

You likely recognize Kristof's name from his dogged reporting on women and trafficking around the world, rape in the Congo, and so many other issues facing poor women throughout the globe. I have to admit that I sometimes find his style repetitive, and therefore not as effective as I believe it could be, but I'm thrilled that he's calling attention to these issues (and has been with such precious column inches). It's cool that he and his partner collaborated to put this book together, as well.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but wanted everyone to be aware that's it has launched, along with a couple of interesting contests that feministing readers may want to enter.

While in residency at the Bellagio Center, I spent almost the entire time reading Astra Taylor's Examined Life. I've written about the film version of this project previously. In short, Astra has complex, accessible conversations with eight of the world's most interesting philosophers (Judith Butler! Martha Nussbaum!) about ethics--all while in various kinds of motion. The second the credits ran, I leaned over to my movie buddy and said, "I really wish I could read all of that."

Oila! The New Press has put out this great book--a compilation of the transcripts of all of these conversations. Everything from ecology to disability to poverty to gender expression to phenomenology show up here. As Astra herself describes it in the introduction: "The salient message maybe be that the multiplicity of perspectives presented here does not lead to a quagmire of moral relativism, as some fear, but instead to an expansive ethic of intellectual inquiry, compassion, and political commitment."

I'll leave you with just a few of my favorite insights:
"Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with."
-Cornel West

"Your destiny is to remain ignorant of your destination."
-Avital Ronell

"Much of what is interesting about what humans do comes not from purity but from contamination."
-Kwame Anthony Appiah

"Unless we are willing to be vulnerable to one another, we will not be capable of love, and the denial of vulnerability is one of the sources of aggression and violence."
-Martha Nussbaum

"You are active all the time just to prevent some traumatic thing, the real thing, from happening."
-Slavoj Zizek

"I sometimes think that the social violence that affects people who look more permeable, who look more dependent, who look less defended, is a way in which impermeability on the side of the people who are violent is managed: you be the permeability of the body, you stand for the vulnerability of the body, and I will be the impermeable."
-Judith Butler

An excerpt from the movie:

Karen Pittelman--poet, author, musician, activist, and writing coach extraordinaire--guest reviews for us this week. Thanks Karen!

It's the mark of a good poem when you absolutely must pull it out of your bag in the middle of the street and start reading out loud to a friend. Which is what I found myself doing last week with the title piece of Katha Pollitt's new collection, The Mind-Body Problem. As I recited her lines on the body's struggle to assert its simple desires--"wanting to be touched the way an otter/ loves water, the way a giraffe/ wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling/ the tender leaves at the tops of the trees"--my friend and I slumped contentedly against the wall of the corner grocery and sighed. Who says poetry has to be esoteric? Pollitt's language here is as lucid and accessible as the prose in her well-known essays. Columnist for The Nation and author of four books of essays including the recent Learning To Drive: And Other Life Stories, Pollitt also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1982 collection of poems, Antarctic Traveller. The Mind-Body Problem heralds her first return to the form since then, and it's about time.

Pollitt has a masterful way with the details of daily life. More than just graceful observations, these are the moments on which her poems turn. Casting an unflinching eye on a world at war, "a world whose predominant characteristics are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment," the poems nevertheless search ceaselessly for moments of everyday beauty strong enough to sustain us. There is "a woman coming out of the subway carrying an immense bouquet of white lilac wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch." In "Near Union Square," peddlers sell "Windex-blue ices" and "three-dollar lime-translucent sandals," and "suddenly out of nowhere the roof of every/ flaking office building flares gold." People are still, "saved every day/ by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth." Even the dead are drawn to return, in the poem "Visitors," "not to startle us with fear or guilt or grief," but just for the simple pleasure of "hefting and sniffing cantaloupes at Key Food."

In her essay, "Webstalker," from Learning to Drive, Pollitt writes of the "small ordinary word, like 'orange' or 'inkstain'... that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but... if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core." That's a good explanation of what is at work in these poems, the quiet glint of life and language she is mining here as fuel for a more passionate engagement with the world. It may not always be enough. Still, in one of the book's most powerful moments, "Trying to Write a Poem Against the War," Pollitt reminds us, with a bit of a sly smile, that though the task may be as futile as "mailing myself to the moon/... yet what can we do/ but offer what we have?"

Hey everyone--I'm back from my month long hiatus in the land of book writing, homemade pasta, and internet disconnection (otherwise known as the Bellagio Centre in Italy). It was truly an incredible, life-changing month for all sorts of reasons, and I plan on writing about some of them over the next few weeks (especially the incredible international artists that I met). I wanted to start by reflecting a bit on Virginia Woolf's old idea about women needing their own space and time. I have never felt this more acutely than when I finally got it. Woolf wrote:

Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.

The Bellagio Center was actually created because an Italian princess who owned the villa bequeathed it to the Rockefeller Foundation with the explicit instructions that it be used as a place for international artists and scholars to come and have interdisciplinary interactions aimed to promote social justice. On my residency alone there were women and men from Kenya, South Africa, the Netherlands, India, Nigeria, Japan, Azerbaijan, and more from the U.S. They came from a variety of class and ethnic backgrounds, and worked in a wide variety of fields--from law to international development, from sculpture to anthropology.

Thanks to my peeps here for picking up my slack, and thanks to that Italian principessa for having the vision to provide people, especially women, with a room of one's own. I feel so honored to have had the opportunity and will do my damndest to make sure others get the same kind of affirmation, time, and space. Admissions is currently closed, but will reopen in the fall. Here's info on the process. And feel free to add info about other residencies in the comments section!

If you haven't read Michelle Goldberg's The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World yet, you really should. It takes a comprehensive look at reproductive rights and justice worldwide. (Yeah, I know - no small feat!) Michelle was kind enough to answer some questions from Feministing about her book by video - above is the first part of a two-part interview. (Part two coming tomorrow!)

If you've read The Means of Reproduction, feel free to start a discussion about it in comments...

Transcript forthcoming.

Every once in awhile, as a writer, you read a book that raises that bar in your own mind about what is possible in your profession. Enrique's Journey is such a book. In it, Pulitzer Prize winner Sonia Nazario, follows the journey of a 17-year-old boy from Honduras as he tries to make his way to America to be reunited with his mother--who left when he was a small boy to pursue the American dream. As he rides on top of trains, tries to avoid gangsters and police, begs for food, sleeps in graveyards and abandon homes, struggles with drug addiction etc., I got the most lucid, gripping portrait into the journey of the child immigrant that I've ever been exposed to.

Nazario's reporting bowled me over. Her story originated as a Los Angeles Times feature, and continued to expand from there. She's spent months retracing Enrique's journey, exhaustively reporting all of those who he met along the way, in addition to the various members of his own family. This dedication allowed her to make the journey really come alive--from the smell of the mangoes thrown onto the train by rare, generous poor folks living along the tracks to the local politics in a tiny church in Nuevo Laredo.

Enrique and his mother, Lourdes', story is not uncommon. From the book:

In Los Angeles, a University of Southern California study showed, 82 percent of live-in nannies and one in four housecleaners are mothers who still have at least one child in their home country. A Harvard University study showed that 85 percent of all immigrant children who eventually end up in the United States spend at least some time separated from a parent in the course of migrating to the United States.

I simply can't recommend this incredible book enough. Especially at this moment, when the news is filled with headlines about both immigration and Honduras, this book sheds light on the real lives being affected. Enrique's Journey not only engages your heart, but fills your mind with ideas about the power of tenacious storytelling.

Check out this awesome new social network for writers that my good friend Deborah Siegel and new friend Kamy Wicoff just started using the Ning software. You can create your own profile, start groups and discussion threads about anything and everything literary, and find out about upcoming workshops. Already on the books: Twitter for Writers and Blogging for Writers. Groups include Memoir Enthusiasts, Changing the World, and the dangerous sounding, Writers on Fire.

It seems like one mighty solution to "the ambition condition," as Anna Clark dubbed it in an issue of Bitch Magazine a ways back. Clark wrote:

There's no simple gender indicator for the weird fusion of insecurity and ambition, of the feigned nonchalance and quiet competitiveness that's common in writers of all sorts. But these traits are complicated by the cultural caricatures of ambitious women and the uneven historical patterns that have dictated whose talent is rewarded and whose isn't.

Ambitious women unite at She Writes, unabashedly sharing their recent publications and reviews, unashamedly asking for help when they need it, and--here's hoping--creating a truly successful, collaborative community in the process. Can't wait to see how this story develops...

As I researched for my book, I came across these awesome quotations from Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark that I wanted to share:

War is easy to abhor, but it takes a serious passion to unravel the tangles of financial manipulations and to understand the pain of sweatshop workers or displaced farmers. And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication.

What's missing...is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished.

A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.

Exciting bit from my publisher's news this morning:

The Iranian-American journalist who was sentenced in April, 2009 to eight years in Iranian prison and freed on appeal in May following broad based international pressure, Roxana Saberi's account of her six years in Iran, her imprisonment, her trial, and her ultimate release, providing a look at Iranian society and culture, and the political tensions which have sparked debate across the globe, to Harper for publication in March, 2010.

We just got this letter from a reader:

Help out a newbie!
I just new to feminism, thanks to my psychology of women class I'm taking this summer. It inspired me to read Full Frontal Feminism - now I'm hooked! But...I have no idea where to go from here. What should I read next? And what can I do as someone who's still pretty clueless but would like to change that and get involved?
Thanks for any suggestions!

My two cents:
On reading, you can't go wrong with Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Backlash by Susan Faludi, and This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (among SO many others). Seal Press also has a new series called Seal Studies designed to be an introduction to a lot of different topics that you might want to check out.

Reading blogs is a great thing too. Make sure to look for voices with perspectives that are unlike your own, allowing you to stretch your definitions of what constitutes a feminist issue and even how you might look at the same ol' things.

On getting involved, I think starting locally is a great way to get your feet wet in feminist activism. Is there a feminist group on your campus or on in your town that you can get involved in? The people you meet there can probably key you into other activist networks. Activism, just like everything else in life, is about relationships, so start meeting other feminists and they'll lead you to the action. Also, be sure to check our events page to look out for other feminists in your area doing great work.

Alright community, what suggestions do you have for this self-declared newbie?

Each year, the Lambda Literary Foundation honors authors who write on LGBT topics. This year's winners were announced at the end of May.

About the awards:

The Lambda Literary Awards seek to recognize excellence in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender literature. Each year, over 80 judges -- writers, booksellers, librarians, journalists -- assess the entries in more than 20 categories.

I love this particular award because I find it a good suggested reading list for LGBT books.

Full list of winners after the jump.

Check out the books: Poems from the Women's Movement by Honor Moore and The Little Book of Meaning by Laura Berman Fortgang.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

If you're in the NYC area, Jessica will be at Bluestockings this Sunday at 7pm for a reading and discussion about The Purity Myth. Come by!

If you want to chat with me about The Purity Myth feel free to hit me up directly or use #puritymyth to talk to me or others about the book. (Not sure what a hash tag is? Check out Deanna's great post, A non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter.)

Just a reminder that I'll be doing a reading from The Purity Myth tonight at Revolution Books in Berkeley. Come and say hi if you're in the area! (RSVP to the event on Facebook.)

For other feminist events, don't forget to check out our calendar.

Check out Same Kind of Different As Me, Front Lines, and Black Women's Lives.

Remember that thoroughly researched and eye-opening book I reviewed a few weeks ago called Quiverfull? Well, despite the fact that author Kathryn Joyce wrote an exhaustively detailed and accurate portrayal, free of the kind of snark that so often seeps into subculture journalism, she is being attacked by right wing fear-mongers. Doug Phillips, the director of Vision Forum Ministries, awards Kathryn with, I kid you not, "the 2009 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award." The explanation:

The first mission of the book is to warn the radical left about America's real threat -- pregnant mothers who quote Psalm 127 and submit to their husbands. The second mission is to paint certain ministries and Christian parents as intolerant racists with a penchant for spousal abuse, and other even more unconscionable crimes (Message to Barack Hussein Obama: "Fearless Leader -- forget, the fundamentalists in Iraq; these prolific Christians are the real bad guys!") The idea here is to throw blood into the water and whoop the press sharks into a feeding frenzy.

None of this should surprise us, because Beacon Press, Joyce's publisher, is well-known as a purveyor of ultra-radical, pro-homosexual, feminist, anti-Christian propaganda, including such books as: The Female Man; Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions; and Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality as well as other titles too vile to name.

I say congrats on Kathryn for such a powerful and, in my opinion, respectful book, and congrats to Beacon, specifically editor Amy Caldwell, for being brave enough to publish ground breaking investigative journalism. It's sad that leaders like Doug Phillips can't acknowledge the quality of a book like Quiverfull and use it as the catalyst for a dialogue among those in his community and outside of it. Until we can speak respectfully (which is what I truly believe Kathryn was trying to do) across religious lines, we will never find common ground.

From the NYTimes:

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist activist whose debut novel, "The Women's Room," propelled her into a leading role in the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan.

With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinion maker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. "My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world," she once declared.

That's a goal I can get behind.

More thoughts about French's work and life at Isak.

Just a reminder for folks in and around New York that we're having our monthly happy hour tonight - and as an extra special bonus, are celebrating the release of Jessica's new book, The Purity Myth.

Check out deets here and RSVP to our Facebook event! Hope you can make it.

Binary gender systems are constructed. They rely on the repetition of dominant narratives via psychology, music, popular culture, film and of course children's books. This gem comes from a children's book called, "I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl! It is from the 1950's and I almost appreciate how blatantly obvious it is, since there is no question what it is trying to do. Gender-based messaging is much more subtle and nuanced these days.

You can see the whole book here. I am very glad no one read this book to me as a child, I probably would have set it on fire.

Whenever I see vintage sexism now all I can think of is Mad Men.

I was on the Laura Ingraham show yesterday morning to talk about The Purity Myth; it was a trip. One listener even called in to say that I was just pissed about not being a virgin anymore so I wrote the book to spread my sluttitude around. It was awesome.

If you want to listen (and check out my brand spanking new website!), click here.

Hey West-Coasters, I'll be doing a reading of The Purity Myth next week at Revolution books. Come by and say hello!

Wednesday, May 6
7pm
Revolution Books
2425 Channing Way
Berkeley, CA

RSVP on Facebook.

Check out my piece in The American Prospect about how Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic shook up my feminism.

The New York Times is talking about how friends are good for our health, so I thought I'd finally post this video of author Kelly Corrigan reading a piece about women in community. My mom, the best friend I know, forwarded it to me awhile ago. Get the Kleenex ready kids.

Another video version of Not Oprah.

Check out Jess' book, RH Reality Check, and Shelby Knox's work.

Transcript after the jump.

Pic via Deanna.

Last night, after finding out about the Amazon craziness, I immediately called my editor, Brooke Warner, over at Seal Press. (Especially because Full Frontal Feminism and Yes Means Yes were two of the books affected.)

She spoke to their Amazon rep today, and he told her it was definitely not a glitch. From Brooke's email to me:

Basically he said that amazon has been experimenting with the way they dole out content specifically so that people who are searching Harry Potter or whatever won't run into links to products that might be offensive.

...It's super fucked up, but apparently he's saying that Amazon is a bully when it comes to stuff like this and it's all about sales for them and it's not about censorship. [He said t]hat they love you, love Seal, but that this is mandated from their bosses, who essentially want to be Walmart.

...He also said no human is responsible for the decisions per se, and that it's all about tagging and feeds which are constantly being tweaked. He does think that amazon will retweak the tags based on the uproar that happened over the weekend.

It's also worth noting that some folks, like the fabulous Deanna Zandt, believe that the reps may not know what they're talking about. "I'm almost positive at this point that it was a scripted (automated) thing someone figured out how to exploit," Deanna told me via email.

So that's what I know so far. Will update this post again if I hear anything different...

An AP reporter received an email from an Amazon's director of corporate communications saying that "there was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed." A glitch that's been there since February?

This is an update from the story that developed over the weekend about Amazon identifying LGBT books and more (for example, feminist books like Jessica's Full Frontal Feminism) as "adult" and therefore deranked on the website. This is not to mention the fact that (hetero)sexually explicit books like Ron Jeremy's autobiography weren't deranked, while Ellen Degeneres' autobiography was.

tehdely has an interesting take on the situation; I agree that it seems hard to believe that the company is simply being run by Christian fundamentalists. But we do know one thing; there is anti-queer, ant-feminist motivation behind this and Amazon has got to step the fuck up. Craig Seymor even pointed out the problem to them in February and it's only now, when folks are up in arms, that they're taking action on this. Not okay.

Deanna has more.

We will have more to say on this tomorrow, but for now read Jezebel here and here; the LA Times; Meta Writer; Alterdestiny; Trish Wilson; Daily Kos; Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; Heather Corrina; and TONS of folks on Twitter.

This is kind of an insider conversation on the publishing industry, but Courtney's opinion is super important--and relevant to all of us young and hopeful writers, This also has a big impact on whose writing gets noticed.

Her piece in Publisher's Weekly tackles the old and hallowed system of book blurbing--getting a famous someone to write a short (and hopefully glowing) review of your book for the back cover. From Courtney:

Let's be honest. Rare is the blurb that genuinely evolved from an established writer sitting down with the manuscript of a new writer (not a former student, best friend's child, or shared agent's new golden boy) and being inspired to offer a few words on the quality of the work. This is what my mom thinks happens. This is what the majority of the American book-buying public believes.

The reality is more like this: one of my young writer friends couldn't get a single literary novelist to blurb (such an ugly verb) her new book, not because they read it and thought it undeserving, but because they didn't recognize her name. It wasn't until her supervisor at work asked one of his famous friends to do him a favor and offer a few words that she finally got a books-flying-off-the-shelf blurb. Good boss. Crappy system.

Courtney doesn't only have criticisms, she's also got ideas about how to change the system.

Let's team up--the bestsellers and the first timers--and imagine a new system. Maybe each author informally agrees to read (at least in part) five new manuscripts a year by unknowns, thinking of it as their dues for succeeding in a difficult industry. Even better, maybe we throw a big party, get some whiskey company to sponsor it and do short readings from new manuscripts. Authors who've heard something special can follow up right then and there with their genuine praise. Everyone interacts face to face. Everyone gets a shot at the literary dream of having random readers like my mom find their book on a shelf, flip it over and say, "Wow, if Zadie Smith likes this, I've definitely got to pick it up."

Check out the whole piece here.

Via Isak

Hey y'all, just thought you might want to check out the awesome book club that TPMCafe put together on The Purity Myth.

Lila at TPM got a great group of women together to discuss the book, and I couldn't be more excited to hear their thoughts: Hanne Blank, Katha Pollitt, Emily Bazelon, Amanda Marcotte, Echidne of the Snakes, Jennifer Baumgardner, and Leora Tanenbaum.

My post introducing the book is here, and Leora, Echidne, Amanda, and Hanne have already weighed in. Make sure to check it out!

From one of my favorite graphic artists, Alison Bechdel, a new take on the traditional book review. Bechdel reviews A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, a memoir by Jane Vandenburgh for the NYTimes. Instead of the typical book review Bechdel presents us with a graphic version of her review--reminiscent of the style of her graphic novel, Fun Home. I love Bechdel's work and found it a fun way to read a review.

Read the review here.

In case you missed it!

Most industries are facing difficult times right now. Media, and independent media in particular, have long faced uphill battles, but the economic emergency is pushing many state and local newspapers to fold. As the bad news continues, I wanted to speak with someone about the possible ramifications of these losses.

Tracy Van Slyke, former publisher of the progressive, independent magazine In These Times, is the program director of the The Media Consortium, a network of the country's leading independent journalism organizations. (Full disclosure: Feministing is a member.) From their website:

"Millions of Americans are looking for honest, fair, and accurate journalism. We're finding new ways to reach them. Our strategy has three focal points: Making Connections, Building Infrastructure, and Amplifying Our Voice."

Here's Tracy...

I'm really excited to announce that The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women is out. (Though super nervous too!)

And while I'm anticipating some backlash - shit, even the title/cover of the book generated some conservative hand-wringing - I'm hoping that it will further the conversation about how the conservative movement uses young women's bodies and moral panic myths to push traditional gender roles and punish women who don't fit into the "pure" ideal.

If you want to get more of an idea of what the book is all about, you can download the Introduction here. Hope you enjoy it!

You can buy The Purity Myth on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's or Indiebound.

Check out this fascinating essay from the latest issue of Mother Jones on the Christian patriarchy movement. And excerpt:

...the movement offers a "separate but equal" division of duties and authority. Men, the embodiment of Christ, are the breadwinners and spiritual leaders in worship, decision making, finances, and sex. Women, representing the church, are encouragers, "completers," and helpmeets, bound to transform the culture by example and to sacrifice in God's honor.

Reaching this austere conviction via shared women's study is a process that oddly parallels the protofeminist consciousness-raising groups of the '60s and '70s, in which women recognized their common complaints as part of a larger pattern of oppression. Gloria Steinem called those groups "the primary way women discover that we are not crazy, the system is." But the Titus 2 message is precisely the opposite: The Lord's system is righteous, ungrateful feelings are sins to be surmounted, and feminist rebellion is a cultural scourge to be eradicated. The radical leap taken by Titus 2 women is unconditional surrender--an army of Phyllis Schlaflys, fighting for their own subordination based on the promise that the meek shall inherit the Earth. "It is a revolution that will take place on our knees," writes author and Peace's contemporary Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

Whoa. I've already ordered Kathryn Joyce's new book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement from Beacon Press and plan on reviewing it soon!

If you're in New York, you can see Joyce read from her book at Bluestockings on March 10 and at the Flying Saucer (along with Michelle Goldberg and Jennifer Baumgardner) on March 31. Check out our events calendar for more details.

Check out this reading by Eve Ensler of a section of her upcoming book, I'm an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World. It's called "The Teenage Girl's Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery" and in it she speaks in the voice of a former sexual slave from the The Democratic Republic of Congo:

First let me say that I admire Eve's bold insistence on speaking truth, on writing deeply emotional pieces, on insisting that we talk about and stay conscious of and do something about the most horrific suffering on this planet--things that the rest of us often don't have the strength to face on a regular basis. V-Day is such an unbelievably successful movement--unparalleled in contemporary feminism. The idea that she got a nation of girls and women, and even a healthy number of men, thinking and talking about vaginas--as a metaphor for femaleness and violence and sexuality and so many other buried issues--is nothing short of a modern miracle. For all of this, I give her infinite props.

But I have to say that I find this piece really problematic and it makes me worried about the rest of the book that she's almost finished with.

The girl does sound real in many ways, authentic in her interactions with her friends and her experience of being abducted and raped. It's clear that Eve had spent a lot of time with these women, that she has talked to them about their lives and experiences in great detail. It's clear that Eve has the best of intentions, that she sees her own voice, her own persona, as the most effective way to amplify the messages that these young women from the Congo need the world to hear.

But no amount of reporting adds up to understanding, adds up to truly inhabiting the lives and experiences of others. As a journalist, I have continuously struggled with this reality. The most painful part of my job involves attempting to tell others' stories with empathy and clarity and honesty, while still respecting the living, breathing human being who owns them. I have a higher purpose--to paint a picture, for example, of the new normalcy of body hatred, to enrage people so they try to stop it, to lure people into a social issue with a good old fashioned story--but I also have an ethical commitment to respect people's ownership over their own stories, and quite connected, respect my own limitations.

I feel like Eve has lost sight of her own limitations, like this piece reveals this story of a girl, but also the story of an activist and storyteller who has forgotten to be humble in the process. I haven't read What is the What by Dave Eggers, but it seems that he tried to do something similar and he called it a novel (though he made clear that it was very grounded in reality). I totally get the impulse. You're an activist, a writer, a well-intentioned, empathic human being who feels like the most important stories aren't being told, so you think of the most immediate, palpable way to get them into the world. But it's not that simple.

Why not write a personal essay in her own voice about the experience of getting to know this girl, of hearing these stories? Why not publish an anthology of these women's stories or a collection of oral histories where we hear their voices exactly? Why not bring these women to the U.S. and let them stage their own play about what they've experienced? Why not make a documentary?

For me, Eve is taking too many liberties. She has the power to get these women's voices and stories out into the world, and instead, she has usurped them.

In a talk I gave a couple of weeks ago in Virginia, I mentioned how the covers of anti-"hook up culture" publications often depict women as disheveled and distraught. Since I didn't get to show folks what I meant then, I thought I could post a couple now for your viewing pleasure (or perhaps more accurately, viewing horror).

Here's a study funded by the Independent Women's Forum, Hooking Up, Hanging Out and Hoping for Mr. Right.

The cover of Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked is a bit more subtle, simply showing a faceless woman taking her shirt off.

But it's Miriam Grossman's Unprotected that really takes the shaming cake, with two different covers relaying the same sad message.

I wonder why Grossman decided to go with such a decidedly upbeat cover for her publication with the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute - Sense & Sexuality. (Since she's pretty grim in the book - telling readers that young women who have pre-marital sex are likely to end up depressed, diseased drop outs.) I'd like to think it's because the word 'rectum' looks so pretty in cursive.

If anyone has any more anti-hook up covers, link them in comments!

On Saturday I went to a reading by Tristan Taormino and Jenny Block, both talking about their recent books about non-monogamy. The event was hosted by Whole DC, a soon to be opening feminist sex shop and community center sex positive community center and boutique in Washington DC (so excited to have one in my town!).

It was great to see these two authors together, whose books really complement one another but provide very different perspectives. Jenny, in her book Open (read an excerpt here) shares her personal story of being in an open marriage with a man and how she came to that relationship style. Tristan, in her book Opening Up (Q&A here), shares the stories of more than 100 couples she interviewed who were in non-monogamous, open or polyamorous relationships.

The conversation that occurred after the reading was really interesting. I'm generally fascinated by discussions about relationships and I think there is a lot to learn from different models that people are using to make their relationships.

Some food for thought from the conversation:

• From Tristan: "Cheaters do one honest thing. They acknowledge that their current partner isn't meeting all their needs. Then they fuck it all up by lying."
• A main difference between monogamous and non-monogamous relationships is that non-monogamous ones don't have limits or boundaries that are established by society. They have to do the work of establish the terms themselves.
• Monogamy works for those who choose it, but not so well for those who enter into by default.
• Non-monogamous people are every where, in every walk of life. These relationships are extremely diverse, there are no standards for how they work.

I know conversations about non-monogamy have been quite heated at Feministing in the past, but I thought it was worth continuing the dialogue. I highly recommend both their books as well.

Jennifer Egan's byline on a New York Times Sunday magazine piece always draws me in because she writes such eloquent, complex takes on issues that I tend to be really interested in. So it was about time that I got around to one of her novels. Cozied up in my parents' house in Santa Fe, I found Look at Me--a National Book Award Finalist--on their shelf and devoured it in front of the kiva fireplace.

It's the kind of novel that worries you about half way in. You think: I'm loving this writing, but I'm afraid there is no possible way for this author to bring the plot together in some palpable way. Egan is a master at metaphor and the sort of novelist that brings vivid images to mind every few lines or so. Though it's a relatively long novel, I felt like I was swimming through it, flipping page after page. The other thing that I LOVED, is that she writes about a bunch of teen girl characters and, with the exception of a few ancillary supporting actresses, no one is reduced to the usual "I'm a teen girl look at my whine and act really shallow" crap of so many other books. Her girls are all human beings, struggling with important challenges of self-discovery.

The themes in this book are wide-ranging--history, image, alienation, money, friendship, infidelity, consumerism, mental health, beauty... It goes on and on, and doesn't end until the last triumphant scene where everything--indeed--is brought eerily and palpably together.

Look at Me is the kind of book you read and know that you will need a lot of time to process. I really wish I'd read it with a book group or in a class, because there's so many twists and turns--both plot-wise and thematically. But alas, it was just me, myself, and I. Maybe you'll read it and leave some comments here...

Check out the rest of the line-up for Yes Means Yes' blog tour after the jump!

The book, He's Just Not That Into You, inspired me to write a book about dating, because I was deeply disappointed in the messaging geared at young women on what they should be doing to meet a guy, the games we are taught to play and the constant stream of sexist rejection we have to deal with. I realized that there was no language for young feminist women that want to date, but think heteronormativity is bullshit. The most frustrating part of the-he's just not that into you-attitude is that the author of the book, Greg Behrendt, believes he is helping women by reinforcing women's ongoing desire for heteronormativity and men's constant asshole-like tendencies. I guess for some the book is like a bible, but the entire market of books and magazines geared towards young women telling them what they can and should do to meet the "man of their dreams," is at best annoying and at worst leads women to live really unfulfilled lives.

But all of that aside, I am even more shocked that He's Just Not That Into You, has been turned into a movie.

Latoya has more on the reliance of black women's stories as the backdrop of telling the story for the lives of white women.

You best believe I will be writing a long, long review. Will keep you updated. Has anyone read the book? Thoughts?

Photo by Ilana Panich-Linsman

If you're in New York and missed Monday's reading at Bluestockings, you should come down to KGB bar for the Yes Means Yes launch party!

7 to 10pm
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street

I'll be there with Jaclyn Friedman and contributors Jill Filipovic, Brad Perry, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Anastasia Higginbotham & Thomas Millar.

Hope to see you there!

I'll be at Bluestockings bookstore tonight reading from Yes Means Yes, along with my co-editor Jaclyn Friedman, writer Anastasia Higginbotham and Jill Filipovic of Feministe fame. Come and say hi!

Bluestockings
172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington
7-9pm

(But of course, if you've checked out our brand spanking new calendar, you already knew all this.)

Jenny Block, author of Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage, was kind enough to let Feministing excerpt her book. Her guest post here last year generated a lot of discussion, so I'm sure this section of her book will do the same!

My venture into open marriage is ongoing. But at this point in my journey, what strikes me as most intriguing is the fact that I knew, from very early on, that traditional marriage wasn't compatible with me. I was always interested in "and," rather than "either/or," and I was never sure that love offered any guarantees. And yet I dove headfirst into marriage. Why? I thought that being committed and doing the thing I was supposed to do would help me come to my senses, but even early on in my marriage, I realized that love is a state, and a constantly fluctuating one at that. It is affected by changes in ourselves, our partners, and the world at large. So when the black-and white options we're presented with look like a huge splotch of gray, what are we to do? We must understand and accept that we don't have to live within the confines and rules that society presents for us as "the only way." We have a right to find our own happiness and our own truth.

Love and sex, much to the discontentment of so many who believe in happily ever after, are not constant companions. And those who believe they are will likely run into disappointment somewhere along the way. It's an ideal that sets us up for all kinds of falls. Most of us have had a number of partners by the time we get to that point, and any of those people may have offered qualities that we sought or wanted in a significant other. Yet suddenly there we are, bound to one person for the rest of our lives. Part of being sexually free prior to marriage, assuming that we aren't saving ourselves for The One, involves going through a period of sexual exploration and, if you're lucky, sexual enlightenment. All of which, again, is considered valid, even good, by modern standards.

Young women today are generally encouraged to explore, to find themselves, to be sexually open, but then are expected to somehow simply shut down as individuals when they get married and "settle down." But they don't actually, naturally shut down. They simply have an enforced response because of social conditioning, which demands that we stop being people and start being wives. And so one-night stands and casual sex are socially acceptable at certain points in our lives--college, certainly, and afterwards, as long as we're not married--and then, all of a sudden, sex isn't "just sex" anymore once two people commit to each other. As a result, we are left with an entire society of people trying to conform to an extremely recent social dictate. Truth be told, it's amazing that we aren't failing even more than we already are.

There is a great post on the Yes Means Yes blog (inspired by Jessica and Jaclyn Friedman's new book, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape and maintained by the book's contributors) asking what your "real" first time was.

Thomas Macaulay Miller references to Hanne Blank's essay in Yes Means Yes the book, where she discusses the notion of rejecting the general or more "objective" form of what losing your virginity means and looking at it from a more subjective perspective. And then Thomas asks:

What was your first time? Not what other people say, not what "counts" by anyone else's definition; but your own.

Looking at it from this perspective, mine was - hands down - the first time I had an orgasm with a partner. Not because an orgasm legitimized it - but because it was the first time I really let go of all the bullshit and my insecurities. (Sorry mom if you're reading this.)

So let's have it, folks - when was your first time?

There are a bunch of books that have been sitting on my shelf for too many months and they look amazing. I don't want you all to miss the opportunity to give awesome books to your nearest and dearest this holiday season, so...

I haven't read these in full, but I've spent some time with each of them, and here are my thoughts.

Homefront by Kristen J. Tsetsi

This beautiful and stark novel by Kristen J. Tsetsi makes real the agonizing waiting that so many Americans must do while their loved ones are at modern war. The protagonist's voice--that of a young, heady woman--is so familiar, so real, so intimate that I can almost imagine it were my own, though I've never had anywhere close to the same experience.

It seems like there have been a real lack of narratives out there about the experiences of those who love those in the military, especially this time around. We get a sense of their struggles at times with the coverage of vets' injuries and rehab processes, but even then, the partners and spouses of military folks are usually treated as accessories, not given their own authentic voice.

Reading Homefront will give you such insight into the daily battles at home caused by this messy war abroad, but even more universal, a deep sense of appreciation for your own loved ones. As I was reading it, I felt blessed to hear the snore beside me in the bed at night.

Third Wave Feminism and Television by Merri Lisa Johnson

If you know a sucker for any of the following--Six Feet Under, the Sopranos, vampires--then you may want to pick up this awesome anthology for them, published over the pond by I.B. Tauris Press. Johnson, the Director for the Center for Women's Studies at the University of South Carolina-Upstate, brings together a range of totally intriguing and theoretically rigorous essays on the intersection between popular television and new feminisms.

She introduces:

As riddled with stereotypes as media culture admittedly is, television can also provide rare insight into alternative ways of living in the world. The small screen paradoxically provides a broader horizon. For rural adolescents, television can be the sole window into big-city subjects like homosexuality, singlehood-by-choice, multiculturalism, and, I'm not kidding, existentialism--my philosophy minor may well have stemmed from a certain episode of Family Ties in which Alex's little sister, Jennifer, reads Kierkegaard at the kitchen table.

Campus Calm University by Maria Pascucci

If you know a college student knee-deep in finals and Xanax, get him or her this book. Maria Pascucci, founder of Campus Calm, has written a guide to reducing stress and creating a happy life that's actually useful (as opposed to googling term papers in a hurry). Pascucci looks at everything from perfectionism (a section I'm quoted in) to creativity to work/life balance to relationships to spirituality in this one little book. She's got exercises if you're into that sort of thing, and lots of input from experts across the nation.

What I love so much about Pascucci's work is that she's obsessively pragmatic. Whereas with my book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, I sometimes feel like the reader gets a whole lotta analysis and only a little bit o' advice, Pascucci is dedicated to suggesting real solutions for real perfectionists and stressballs. She recognizes that being overwhelmed, overworked, and self-hating is not just a crazy college kid problem, but a matter of a life well lived or a life wasted on stress and misplaced priorities. In that way, her text even has a spiritual undertone--making that link between how we spend our precious energy and the quality of our very quickly passing life. I love that she gets deep on the subject while still managing to be very nuts and bolts about it. The girl's got range.

Daughters of India by Stephen P. Huyler

One in every six women living in the world lives in India. Amazing, right?

So is this book. It's a gorgeous collage of richly colorful and unique photographs of the women of India, and inspired writing about art, identity, and gender that is complex enough for this complex country. Author and photographer, Stephen P. Huyler, has spent much of his life documenting India--past and present--and writes in the author's note:

Women's issues and concerns have always been deeply instilled in me. I was raised and have always been guided by strong, self-reliant, and self-aware women. My great-grandmother and great-aunt were both pioneers of women's rights in 19th and 20th century Korea...Beatrice Wood, an American artist and potter who defied social taboos of the last century, befriended me just before I began college. As my mentor, Beatrice had a profound effect on my life, introducing me to India and arranging for me to be sponsored there by two powerful Indian women--both members of India's first parliament...

I am beyond thrilled to announce that Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, an anthology I co-edited with the Jaclyn Friedman, is out.

I'm incredibly proud of the book, which I think is really made by its amazing contributors: writers, bloggers and activists like Julia Serano, Latoya Peterson, Jill Filipovic, Tiloma Jayasinghe, Coco Fusco, Kate Harding, and Feministing's own Miriam Zoila Perez and Samhita Mukhopadhyay. (Among many awesome others.)

In addition to the great essays, I'm also really excited about the way we formatted the anthology. Because so many of the topics covered are related and intersect in various ways, we didn't want to group certain essays together in a traditional linear fashion. So we took a cue from blogging and tagging and gave each piece multiple themes.

So after reading Latoya Peterson's essay, "The Not-Rape Epidemic," if you want to read something else about youth sexuality, you'll be directed to essays from Heather Corrina ("An Immodest Proposal") and Hanne Blank ("The Process-Oriented Virgin"). But if you want to follow up on another theme Peterson writes about - the role of government in policing female sexuality, for example - you can skip to a different essay instead.

This way, the reader can create the narrative they want to - Jaclyn and I started calling it a "choose your own adventure" anthology! (Check out the preview on Google Books if you'd like to see what I mean.)

So please consider buying (or borrowing from the library or a friend!) Yes Means Yes - a book I hope will add to the discourse surrounding rape culture, a book I hope will spark positive action.

Related: If you want to follow some of our contributors and the ongoing conversation started in book, you can check out the Yes Means Yes blog, or come to one of the upcoming book events!

Ann already posted about the dire situation of In Other Words, a feminist bookstore in Portland. But I wanted to follow up: Some of the staff there created this video/call for donations. Please forward it widely, and give if you can.

Rinku Sen's new book The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization is an amazing feat of intersectional analysis. She takes one man's story (her co-author, Fekkak Mamdough) and uses it as the narrative vehicle for an analysis of the ways in which immigration, nationalism, racism, globalization, September 11th, worker's rights, community organizing, gender dynamics are threaded together in an inseparable knot. Overwhelmed already? Don't be. The impressive thing about Sen's writing is that, despite the fact that she is juggling so many story lines, themes, and transnational issues, she manages to keep the language very clear and the structure very simple.

She argues that the current framing of the immigration debate--keep "them" out or let "them" in so they can provide much-needed labor--is limited and, in essence, immoral. Her key thesis is this:

Captive to the rhetorical status quo, both sides have decided, for various tactical reasons, to ignore three important realities. First, globalization is incomplete, creating a situation in which corporations are free to move jobs, operations, and capital anywhere they wish, while workers' mobility is limited by borders and immigration laws. Second, a permanent, unchanging American identity is neither possible nor desirable; the culture of the United States has changed many times over the course of its history, and further transformations are always already in motion. Finally, the current debate posits immigrants and U.S. residents as foes, when in fact our destinies are closely tied together. Without focusing attention on these three blind spots, we cannot gather enough information to make rational, innovative choices.

In large part, this book serves to expand these three realities--looking at each through the real life experiences of Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who once worked in the World Trade Center's restaurant Windows. But even more profoundly, it argues for and serves as a model of humanizing the immigrant in a very deep way. She writes, "The dominant frames of crime and work, which in turn influenced the actual policies being debated, didn't allow immigrants to claim a fuller humanity that would entitle them not just to come to the U.S. and work, but also to come and be."

Sen's contributions with The Accidental American are many. She's given us a primer on the nitty gritty, day-in-day-out of community organizing. She's brought a fresh big picture perspective on the national conversation about immigration, pre and post September 11th. But her biggest gift with this book is the way in which she's brought fragile, real, tender humanity to this hot button political issue. She writes, "Without a frame that emphasized their full humanity, immigrants couldn't effectively counter the argument that their interests were fundamentally opposed to those of Americans." Sen has offered the frame, and in so doing, opened a window into a kinder, more just future for all Americans.

Over a few long airline flights this week I finally had a chance to read the latest from Curtis Sittenfeld (of Prep fame): American Wife. It's a fictionalized account of Laura Bush's life based on many of the real biographical details. As it weaves its way from her young discovery of an abiding love for books, a car accident in her adolescence that would influence the trajectory of the rest of her life, and her inevitable connection to rich kid politico "Charlie Blackwell," the reader develops a deep empathy for the woman that would be first lady.

The power of the narrative had me constantly looking at Laura Bush' wikipedia page to get a sense of which pieces came from Sittenfeld's imagination and which were drawn from real life events. It turns out that many of the most interesting parts were straight from real life. As usual, the truth is much stranger than fiction.

The book is long, and I felt it dragged a bit about a third of the way through, but I was otherwise riveted. It turned out to be a perfect time to read it. As the Bush era begins to dim, there is much talk about what his legacy and hers will really be. Having this novelistic insight into their emotional lives, her motives and passions, the complexity of fame and marriage and, well, just trying to live a life right give me a totally different read on the public conversation about the Bush family.

The added bonus? Sittenfeld is a feminist, so there are a lot of fascinating feminist twists. I won't go into them because it will spoil some surprises, but here are some of my fave excerpts:

I would not marry a man unless I could show myself to him truly--I had no interest in tricking anyone--but I couldn't imagine showing myself to most men, revealing myself as someone more complicated than I seemed. If thinking of the exertion and explanations that would require discouraged me, it almost made me calm. I didn't work myself up, as other women I knew did, panicking over finding Mr. Right. I accepted that the years to come would unfold in their way, that I could control only a few aspects of them. To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

If I were to tell the story of my life...and if I were being honest...I would probably feel tempted to say that standing that night just inside my apartment, me in my nightgown and Charlie in jeans and a red shirt, I made a choice: I chose our relationship over my political convictions, love over ideology.

His fixation with his legacy (I even grew to hate the word) I found intolerable. It seemed so indulgent, so silly, so male; I had never heard a woman panic about it. I once, in the most delicate manner possible, expressed this observation about gender to Charlie and he said, 'It's because you're the ones who give birth.' I did not find this answer satisfying.

As you all know, I read A LOT of serious nonfiction. Slap a Samantha Power book or an old political philosophy text in my hand, and I can be happy for a few hours. But sometimes my brain is in overdrive and my schedule is in overwhelm and what I really crave is a good, speedy novel--the kind you can devour in one or two sittings.

I was in that mode recently and had the chance to race through Run by Ann Patchett. With the clouds floating outside the airplane window, I immersed myself in a world of family secrets, long held relational patterns, race, class, and politics. The nice thing about Run was that, while it was a really fast, easy read, it also had some major substance to it.

Essentially it is about a family colored by death and adoption. The former mayor of Boston (a white dude) has one biological child and two adopted children (both black) and is forced to raise them alone after his wife dies. His relationship with the three boys, and later on some surprise characters that come (back) into all of their lives, are the center of the book. Throw in some mystical healings, a few ghosts, and a couple of car accidents and you've got yourself a suspenseful, if not always sophisticated, sociological thriller. My one reservation about this book was that sometimes it felt like the race and class elements played out a little too black and white. It sometimes reminded me of a less evolved On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Which is one of my favorite books ever.

This just looks really good. Aaronette M. White, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz has a book out called, "Ain't I a Feminist? African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom," that delves into the intersection of race, manhood, sexism, family and feminism. It is a series of in-depth interviews with man who have transformed their relationship with themselves and the women in their lives by embracing feminism. White's main point being, sexism hurts everyone.

For black men, feminism can be a positive force that enhances romantic relationships, friendships with other men, and relationships with children, said White, whose findings are based on in-depth interviews and an extensive written survey administered to each participant. Her subjects, whose identities are not revealed in the book, were hand-selected from a pool of about 50 men, all of whom were self-identified feminists.

"These men have defied the odds," said White, whose book breaks new ground in the empirical study of black feminist men. "Their lives help define what it means to be a feminist and an ethical human being."

Via.

And as her title suggests borrowing from Sojourner Truth's pivotal speech, she calls her subjects the sons of Sojourner because, "they refuse to place race above gender, or gender above race."

This looks like a powerful read, and I appreciate the juxtaposition of black masculinity and feminism as they are usually diametrically opposed. I guess the question begs to be asked, which is what makes this a controversial book on some level, is can men be feminists? I think they absolutely can, but what do you think?

Thanks to George for the link!

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a groundbreaking, Cuban-American visual artist who tackled issues of body image, identity politics, and gender with unparalleled ingenuity and immediacy. The new book, out on Prestel, of her too short-lived career is totally riveting--from the tracks made by the artist dragging her blood-covered arms down a wall to the pigment-filled void of her silhouette pressed into a sandy beach. The images speak for themselves:

For an "oh scary f-word" review of Mendiata's work, check out this Washington Post piece from awhile back. Despite being generally disappointing, I did think these lines were fascinating:

Mendieta wants to assert the possibility of a female presence in the world, but that means also insisting that the "feminine" can include the kind of macho, ego-boosting gesture that has been the preserve of male artists. If there's no choice but to spell it out in old symbolic archetypes -- and that is just how art has almost always spelled things out -- the vagina has to be allowed to have its phallic side.

If we stay together, we will die together," she says quietly, "but if they cannot find us, they cannot kill us." Her voice shakes when she speaks. "You three have to leave and go far away. Geak is four and too young to go. She will stay with me." Her words stab my heart like a thousand daggers. "You three will each go in different directions. Kim, you go to the south; Chou will head to the north; and Loung to the east. Walk until you come to a work camp. Tell them you are orphans and they will let you in.

Loung tells the story of going from being one of seven children in wealthy family in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh to being practically starved to death by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army in what has become known as the killing fields. At least 200,000 died there. Including Loung's own father and mother. Loung has survived to tell the tale.

And she tells it so starkly that it punches you in the gut. From her childlike perspective (she was five when the Khmer Rouge first stormed Phnom Penh), she makes the nawing force in her belly that pushed her to steal uncooked rice from her own family, stuffing it into her tiny mouth in the middle of the night, real. She gives a profound psychological sketch of the survivor--someone who must turn her sadness into absolute rage in order to have the energy to survive. She provides the reader--withstanding all of this incredible terror--to see that humans have the most profound capacity for resilience and transformation.

Today Loung Ung continues her activist work, is writing on the balance of masculine and feminine, and running a bar and restaurant with her husband in Ohio. I had the gift of hearing her speak at the Omega's Women & Courage conference, and sharing some meals and chats with her afterwards, and I was profoundly moved by her capacity for both deep sadness and ebullient joy. She is a testament to how one little body can hold so very much honest, conscious life within it.

I'm sorry, I know I've already posted about the wacko responses to my book (excuse me, my book cover), but I just came across this and I just couldn't help myself.

Ericka Andersen at LadyBlog has written a post that has brought intellectual dishonesty to a new low. She even starts off lying:

For some thought-provoking reading, check out Jessica Valenti's "The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women." Cassy Fiano's post on the book today lead me to check it out for myself.

Thought-provoking reading...really? You checked it out for yourself, did you? May I ask how? Because the book isn't going to be released for another five months. So, Ms. Andersen, if you've somehow stealthily broken into my apartment or hacked into my computer, I'd really like to know.

I grew up in a Christian environment where sex before marriage was frowned upon but never was the act of sex condemned. I was never told women don't like sex as much as men or that we were supposed to use it to get husbands. I doubt Jessica has really been in the midst of this environment but as someone who has, I can tell you women and men were both encouraged to be disciplined in their sexual urges. And...I've never once heard a church leader say you were a slut or a whore if you did choose to have sex. This is an assumption Jessica makes. (Emphasis mine)

Right, I make a whole book full of assumptions. Women are never ever told they're sluts or sullied or or less than or diseased if they have sex. I must be making stuff up!

But here's the part that had me screaming to my poor boyfriend about what fucking liars people are.

The real purity myth is what Jessica is telling women: that sexual consequences be damned as long as you feel good. God forbid you have guilt. Girls Gone Wild is better for young women that purity rings, she claims, but I doubt many people would sign up for that argument.

Sexual consequences be damned? I've spent my entire writing and feminist career advocating for young women to have medically accurate and unbiased information about sex so they can make the decisions that are best for them. I have never, never, said that Girls Gone Wild is anything but a fucked up organization run by a rapist. For people like Fiano and Andersen to warp - and just lie! - about this work that I do, it's just beyond disgusting. I understand that they have no actual argument to make (being that, you know, they haven't read the book), but simply making stuff up to suit their theories is not only dishonest, it's stupid. Because I'm not going to sit quietly and let people lie about me, about feminism, about this blog, or about The Purity Myth. Every time someone publishes some bullshit like this, I'm going to call it out. Welcome to my new post series, Pure Lies.

So bring it, assholes.

Careful, my book may give you VD!

I figured that my new book would get some negative attention from conservative blogs, but I kinda thought that would happen once the book was, you know...published.

But it seems that there's no reason to wait for pesky things like the actual content of the book to start blogging about what The Purity Myth is all about. So apparently, the purpose of my book is to "turn America's teenagers into raging whores." Woo hoo!

Right Wing News: "But, these hardcore liberal feminists? For them, it's not enough to say that, 'I'm not a virgin' or 'I like to sleep with a lot of guys,' they have to come up with some kind of justification for why it's the best way to live."

Say Anything Blog: "The point is that because of feminists, our society is becoming one huge "Girls Gone Wild," with even little girls being sexualized in our culture."

The Network of Enlightened Women (remember them?): "The feminist movement has formed a strong alliance with the sexual liberation movement, although it wasn't necessary. This book represents this alliance."

Dad Reformed: "The cover says it all. I mean...... who is going to read that garbage??? Is it geared toward a mother and father to push their kids to refrain from abstinence???? I can barely type right now I'm so fired up. ...I can only wonder where she comes up with her standards, or lack there of. ALL of her stances are selfish. What is good for me RIGHT now. I am going to puke."

House of Eratosthenes: "Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one."

But Cassy Fiano's post was my fave, "Putting out is SO much better for girls than abstinence." (And it's not just because her blog design uses a rose/gun combo that speaks volumes.)

I had the good luck to meet Liza Donnelly, cartoonist and Vassar professor, at the Omega Institute a few weeks ago and she had the generosity to send me a couple of her books: Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons and Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love...in 200 Cartoons.

Funny Ladies is literally an illustrated history. If you're a New Yorker fan, you'll love it. If you think the New Yorker is elitist and stodgy, you might prefer Donnelly's Sex and Sensibility. In any case, I loved what she wrote about women and humor in the introduction:

Some theorists believe that women humorists are more often storytellers than joke tellers, more interested in communication than in presenting cleverness. This has perhaps been true because of the marginal position of women's humor. However, as humor from women has become more acceptable in society, as it is today, such statements of difference no loner ring true. Huguette Martel believes all cartoonists are "moralists," and Alice Harvey sought "to be true."

Nothing says it better than the medium itself. Check out these goodies:

"Just a warning: I'll leave you if you ever take up wearing suspenders."

"I hope my meteoric rise in the company isn't just because I am a man."

There is no doubt that I am a gender studies geek. I live and breath it like several of my Feministing co-editors. So here you go, my ten favorite feminist books.

1. Dawn by Octavia Butler

2. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks

3. to be real edited by Rebecca Walker

4. Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank edited by Suha Sabbagh

5. Making Face, Making Soul edited by Gloria Anzaldua

6. The Decolonial Imaginary by Emma Perez

7. Dangerous Liasons edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat

8. The Eloquence of Silence by Marnia Lazreg

9. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

10. Between Woman and Nation edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem

These are books I go back to over and over. They have had tremendous impact on what I write, how I write and who I am writing for. And I can't claim these books without also giving thanks to the amazing professors I have had at San Francisco State and SUNY Albany that helped me understand what was captured by each of these authors.

What are your favorite feminist books?

I am *this* close to handing in my book on purity to my editor, and I'm just so happy that it's done! And it's not just that I'm stoked to get my life back (though finally seeing my friends will be a treat!), it's that this book is incredibly important to me. It's something I've been thinking about and working on for so long - to know that it's finally going to go out into the world is just the best. (Can you tell I'm in a good mood?)

If you want a sneak peek at the cover, it's after the jump!

The other day I was having a beer with a few guys--one of whom didn't know the other two very well--and they started talking about the Mets. Their newness seemed to fade away in a flurry of familiarity built around sports. And it got me thinking...almost every guy I know--whether they're hip hop heads, indy hipsters, computer science geeks, city kids, farm boys--seems at least mildly interested in sports.

I brought this up, and the three of us tried to come up with a female parallel, but quickly realized that there wasn't one. There are certainly interests that a lot of women share, but there's nothing as generalizable as sports. (Then we proceeded to have a feminist vs. sports trivia competition. Let's just say that I knew that the tie goes to the runner and they had no idea what intersectional feminism was).

While reading Michael Kimmel's new book, Guyland, I couldn't stop thinking about this moment, and so many others that I've shared over the years with my various, amazing, if not sometimes lost guy friends. It's a book that delves deep into the world of boys becoming men (for his purposes, ages 16 to 26, and predominantly white) in an attempt to describe just how limiting and inauthentic it can be. An important note: Kimmel is not talking about all guys. The majority of the dudes he's writing about are the ones that you probably steer clear of whenever possible--the jerky hockey player who posts up in your high school hallway and makes comments about girls' bodies, the guy who lived on your floor and insisted on hanging posters of half naked women outside his door, calling you a bitch when you suggested he keep his porn inside his own room, the ex-boyfriend you can't believe you ever dated. In Kimmels' view, those are the bonafide guys of Guyland, but there are traces to be found on most males.

There were two parts that resonated the most for me. The first was focused on young men's framing of adulthood, this notion that "freedom is equated with a lack of accountability--not having to answer to anyone--and so being irresponsible becomes a way of declaring your freedom and, hence, your adulthood." Though most of my guy friends are too enlightened to hang out in traditional Guyland with a straight face, they do seem pulled by the black hole force of no expectations. Far more than the women I know, the guys seem totally petrified of having others expect things of them--whether it's a phone call the next day, a solid yes or no on a party invite, or an on time arrival. As an extension, they are often fearful of "settling down" with one partner. Suddenly, it's like the girl who has been really fun to hang out with and really interesting to get to know becomes an expectation ogre, even if she doesn't change her tune one little bit.

The other part of Kimmel's analysis that I found riveting was his look at young men's twin emotions--entitlement and anger. He picks up this thread at various moments. When looking at white teenagers' obsession with hip hop music: "In some of their media consumption--rap music or some video games--they do it in blackface, symbolically appropriating the idiomatic expressions of the racialized 'other' to gain access to and express their own emotions." When critiquing rape culture: "...while psychologists and feminists and the entire legal system see male sexual aggression as the initiation of violence, guys describe it in a different way--not as initiation but as retaliation. What are the retaliating against? The power that women have over them." And the only way to counter these cultures of misappropriation and scapegoating: "The only way to transform Guyland is to break the culture of silence that sustains the Guy Code...the majority of guys are bystanders. And so it is the bystanders, the ones who know, and yet do nothing, whom we have to engage."

So why immerse yourself in this world of cowards and posers for 289 pages? Because it's such a huge part of all of our lives. As Kimmel puts it, "Girls have to contend with Guyland just as much as guys do. Just as Guyland is the social world in which boys become men, so too is Guyland the context in which girls become women. How they navigate those troubled waters will do a lot more than raise or lower her self-esteem. It can determine what sort of life she will have."

*Feministing bonus: my super smart friend Chloe Angyal, feministing newsletter editor, is quoted in the book. Check out her new blog here.

So the last time I wrote about American Apparel's use of mock tribal prints and the name, "Afrika" for a line of clothing, it was a little bit controversial. Some folks didn't understand why putting thin, white models, in faux tribal and animal prints with the title, "Afrika" was racist. So be it.

UPDATE: I think one of our commenters put the argument for why the use of "African" symbolism is problematic and racist best here.

She says,

For people who have not been exposed to critical race theory or the study of colonialism and cultural appropriation, the new Afrika line probably doesn't look racist to you. The reason it doesn't look racist to you is because the attractiveness of the line is meant to play on the unconscious attitudes that non-African westerners have about Africa. Here's a set of association words:

exotic
primitive
tribal
jungle
wild
animalistic
hypersexual

I can go on, but you get the point.

This is too neat. Blogs can now embed books available on Google Books for readers to peruse. I hope Feministing can use this to highlight awesome feminists texts... So in honor of Samhita's recent post, check out Barbara Smith's great book, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, after the jump. (And don't forget to support feminists by buying their books!)

Many of you undoubtedly saw Jennifer Baumgardner and Gillian Aldrich's awesome documentary film, Speak Out: I Had an Abortion. I am a huge fan and have written about it in the past.

Well, now Jen has taken her radical work from the screen to the page, with lots of additional analysis and framing. Abortion & Life, written by Jen and containing gorgeous photographs by Tara Todras-Whitehill, just came out on Akashic Books. In it, Jen sets the scene of the contemporary abortion debate, not just between pro-lifers and pro-choicers, but between feminists of different generations and perspectives, women and men, mothers and daughters, and all of the other complex subgroups that struggle with the abortion issue ever day. As she writes, "The majority of Americans don't want abortion to be recriminalized but are uncomfortable talking about and even facing the realities of the procedure."

Jen soothes that discomfort with personal stories--stories that are as diverse as women's abortion experiences, all inciting empathy and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which reproductive justice policy influences every day lives. But she does even more than that here; she also gives a brand new frame within which we can understand these stories. She authors a thorough history of abortion rights and then she writes honestly and entertainingly about the reoccurring question: "Can you be a feminist and prolife?" She also flips the old scripts, tracing the recent rise of the provoice movement where women's authentic experiences, not just their political ideologies, are brought to bear on the future of the movement.

Add to all of this a vast resource guide and a reprint of Rebecca Hyman's fantastic Bitch Mag article on the topic, and you've got yourself one of the most innovative, contemporary, and inclusive conversations about abortion that exists today, right on the page. I leave you with Jen's own words:

Some of what I write might be seen as turning away from the radical history of abortion rights in search of a compromised "middle ground." But I would argue, however, that the cornerstones of a new feminist theory of abortion rights will be created by those whom unplanned pregnancy most urgently affects--women born post-Roe. Still, as in the past, abortion is a part of life--just as sex and death are.

I think for me it was a slow process, starting from when I was in the womb...

We were reading the Great Gatsby in high school English, and I came across this line: 'That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.' I felt enraged, but none of my classmates even seemed to notice.

It was a rainy Take Back The Night rally my first year of college... I looked around at the women on every side, and thought about how strange it was that I'd ended up here, given my conservative Republican upbringing. I realized that if I don't identify as a feminist, no one really does.

One movie: Girls Town. Amazing.

A generation ago, feminists talked about their "click" moments: those split-second experiences that led them to join the women's movement. Today's young feminists come to the movement--which is looking less like a protest march and more like a blog--in myriad, often piecemeal, ways. It can be as simple as reading a book or attending an event or talking with one person or witnessing a horrendous act of sexism. (You told us about some of your amazing "clicks" here.)

Deciding to identify as a feminist often requires a lot of learning and unlearning these days; so many of us have been exposed to the well-oiled machine of the anti-feminist movement. According to Newsweek, feminism might be dead. Charlotte Allen tells us that we're stupid, via the Washington Post. Some older women within our own movement wonder if we even exist.

J. Courtney Sullivan and I are editing a new anthology for Seal Press on the topic, and we want your ideas. Send us a couple of paragraphs--in the style and voice that you'd use in a full-fledged essay--proposing what you would write, along with your name, email address, phone #, age, and ethnic background (we understand that this might seem a little reductive, but we are committed to including diverse authors). We'll look them all over, then get back to you once we've accounted for a range of moments, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds.

We hope it will be a historic document, a totally entertaining gift, a course adoption text, and, most of all, a collection that makes young women who already identify with the movement feel seen and heard, and welcomes all those just growing into the still unfolding story of feminism.

Send your ideas to: clickmoment@gmail.com
DEADLINE: October 15, 2008

Bonus: We've already got some great feminist writers on board that you may have heard of, including (in no particular order):

Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan (well, obviously)
Jessica Valenti
Miriam Perez
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Curtis Sittenfield
Rebecca Traister
Anna Holmes
Rachel Simmons
Winter Miller
Deborah Siegel
Alissa Quart
Hannah Seligson
Latoya Petersen
Shelby Knox
Jennifer Baumgardner
Amy Richards

Deborah Stone, a professor at Dartmouth and one of the founders of the American Prospect, has a fascinating book out that lays to rest a lot of the anxiety I've carried with me about good works and unintended side effects since I first stepped into a political science classroom as a wide-eyed undergrad. She writes, "I wrote this book to challenge the attack on help and to reunite politics with doing good. I started from the intuition that what real people care about is not what social scientists by and large tell us we care about. We care most about relationships with other people."

She goes on to examine the many theories that privilege self-interest about altruism, that attempt to naturalize meanness and cruelty, that essentially make even the most tender of us become skeptical of people's intentions. The most obvious and universal example, which Stone uses often, is that of the homeless person you walk by on the street. He or she asks you for money, and you feel an initial, natural impulse to help--because you are human and have the capacity for empathy. But then, if you're like me and so many other strategic progressives, you think, "Well, maybe they'll use the money for liquor. I should just donate my money at the end of the year to an organization that does this work systematically." Sure, you may have won on strategy, but you've lost on humanity. You feel like shit. The potentially good and hungry homeless person doesn't get a slice to eat that night.

The book isn't actually focused on these interpersonal exchanges, but rather on the macro picture of government and public morality. Stone masterfully lays out the ways in which the GOP has turned government assistance and social programs into evil over the last few decades, and in so doing, has stripped citizens of one of their most natural and basic instincts--to want a government that helps us all live sustainable, healthy lives, maybe even with a little help. "Mutual dependence," she writes, "is the essence of democracy."

I can't tell you how much I LOVED this book. Reading it was one of those experiences where all of these lurking suspicions that I had trouble articulating were brought to light in the most eloquent, sensical, passionate words. I leave you with some of her best:

We need to untwist our notion of personal freedom by acknowledging that dependence is the human condition. Genuine freedom can't be had by denying our individual limitations. Freedom comes from understanding them and working around them, and from building a community where bonds of loyalty compensate for the things we can't do ourselves.

I announced my new book project here last week. If you missed it, feel free to check out all the info at the Do Greaters blog. I just found out that the donation process is a bit different than I originally explained, so...

If you want to support the multimedia platform for Do Greaters: The Kids These Days and How They're Changing the World, please send checks to: Amy Caldwell, Beacon Press, 41 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston, MA 02108.

Thanks a bazillion.

I'm a big fan of Soft Skull press, which is sort of a haven for the kind of creative stuff that the mainstream publishing industry is notoriously scared of--graphic novels, photojournalism, queer lit, youth political analysis. Check them out, if you haven't already.

One of their latest releases is Bad Habits: A Love Story by Cubana artist Christy C. Road. It's a mostly autobiographical graphical novel about her "personal revolution" from bad habit-prone, self-punishing punk wanderer to independently-minded, self-protecting punk philosopher. You can't help but sort of fall in love with the angsty, gritty drama of it all. Like when she writes passages like this:

And, like Brooklyn, the human heart is divided into several humble portals, each with a function, relevance, history, and culture distinct to its region. Every developmental blow cripples the antiquity of its boroughs, and every imperfect experience cripples the wellbeing of every corner of the heart. But the city doesn't stop and the human heart trudges with clandestine motivation.

The book is filled with feminist polemic brought down to the palpable level of everyday reflection. It's most searing when she contrasts traditional power structure's perspective of her versus her own gorgeously drawn, deeply felt reality: "According to the law, I'm just some bipolar junky who happened to have been sexually assaulted once or twice, and later mind-fucked by some crass romantic I shouldn't have trusted anyway...the the conservative many, I was the scum of the earth, and my allies were just numbers. To me, we were the things that went bump, rack, and hump, in the night."

Bump on Road, bump on.

UPDATE: Celina interviewed Road, along with Diane DiMassa, back in June.

The past couple of weeks have been big book weeks for yours truly.

First it began with the release of the memoir I co-wrote with the amazing Marvelyn Brown, The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive. Marvelyn in a 24-year-old HIV activist with the sort of charisma and authenticity that are born from surviving hard times. Here is Marvelyn being interviewed at the recent International AIDS Conference in Mexico:

Being able to play a role in getting Marvelyn's story out in the world has been one of the most profound honors of my life. Thanks M.

And, as if that wasn't enough, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters just came out with a new cover and a new subtitle on September 2nd!

I can't tell you how excited I am that my book is only $15 (as opposed to the 25 big ones it cost in hardback). I always intended this book to reach young women first and foremost. I know I rarely shell out $25 for a book, so I knew teenagers and, well, just about anyone, couldn't afford such a price tag. Thanks to Penguin/Berkeley, my paperback publisher, for all of their faith in the book and gallant effort to give it a renewed life in the literary world!

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters has been an incredible catalyst for me to meet young women (many of them feministing readers), educate mothers, teachers, and coaches about what's really going on with young women, visit tiny towns across America that I might never have seen otherwise, be interviewed on television, radio, and in print and online publications through out the world, but more than any of that, it has allowed me the rare opportunity to speak a truth, to turn pain into polemic, to experience the personal as the political. It has been one of those rare experiences of feeling like you actually have the capacity to make a difference, just by paying acutely close attention to your genuine feelings and observations of the world around you, researching and reflecting on these feelings and observations, and stringing some words together. Thank you to everyone who I've met along the way. Can't wait to meet many more of you this fall...

I had been meaning to read this journalistic classic by Janet Malcolm for years, after having read an excerpt of it in grad school, but, you know, life happens. I finally picked it up and devoured it on a plane a few days ago on my way home to visit my parents.

Essentially, Janet Malcolm revisits the case against Joe McGinniss, a journalist who was sued after publishing a book about convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. MacDonald felt that McGinniss had deliberately lured him into thinking that they were friends, that he believed in his innocence, and then written a scathing indictment. McGinniss denied intentional subterfuge and, also, argued that it is the writer's practice to coax the subject into comfort, however false. It explores the complexity of the writer-subject relationship, truth and justice, and the thorny psychology involved in making the personal public.

This book is a journalistic classic for a reason; it pushes writers to come to terms with the insanity of trying to write about real people's lives with integrity. What you learn in journalism school these days is fairly limited to networking and logistics--new media techniques, the craft and art of writing, journalistic protocol, but rarely are the psychological incongruities of the profession brought to light and discussed openly.

I have struggled with the drive to write the emotional truth of a person's story so as to illustrate my analysis in the most cogent, inspiring way and my deep commitment to honoring that person's humanity and privacy. The two are often at odds in a way that I suspect non-writers wouldn't predict. It's painful and murky and fraught with human frailty.

Through a feminist lens, this is very related to the personal being the political. On the one hand, for example, women's struggles with perfection and their own bodies is entirely personal--right up there with sex and money and religion in terms of unspeakables. On the other hand, I had a conviction that there was a collective story to our individual pain, and I wanted to bring that to light in my book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. So I asked these women--many of them my friends, all of them people I care about--to share their stories with the world. I encouraged/pushed/coaxed (depending on your perspective) them to bare their souls (personal) for the betterment of the public (political). Many experienced unanticipated consequences (angry mothers, a sense of being horribly exposed). Some also experienced a deep sense of freedom, courage, a letting go. I stood, morally, in between these two experiences, feeling a bit helpless and also totally responsible.

I leave you with Malcolm's own words (pronouns admittedly annoying):

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

Today the Washington Post covers a new book with the earth-shattering thesis that, if women want to "keep a man" they should start scrubbing floors in lingerie, learning to cook steaks to order, and giving blowjobs in between.

Is that cover condescending or what? And that's not even getting into the content of the book...

Moore's slim treatise purports to explain how women should go about sex, relationships and marriage -- according to men. Here is his mission as a self-described reeducator: "I want to express my anger and frustration as a man with the women I feel are miseducated, misinformed, and ill-prepared about their responsibilities in getting and maintaining a relationship with a man of quality," he writes in the introduction.

Moore, of course, considers himself just such a man. Read his book, ladies, and you can snag a catch just like him. Your responsibilities include cooking, staying skinny, wearing sexy things around the house and doing whatever your man tells you to do (because, Moore writes, "Here's a little secret, ladies: men never really ask for anything. They command. . . . And believe me, what you won't do, ten broads around the corner will.")

Ugh. The sad part is, he's found this method successful:

Moore's girlfriend, Khanequa Tuitt, who's at the book-signing, recalls that when she first read his manuscript, she only got past the first couple of pages before calling him to curse him out. But now she's come to terms with his views. She's started "trying to stay away from wearing frumpy, flannel stuff," even when she's cleaning, for example.

Moore also keeps it classy with a "no fatties" message:

In his book, size matters -- a lot: "The fatter you get, the more you decrease your potential single-man pool. Let me give you an example. When you go to the grocery store to shop, do you pick out the nastiest-looking, most rotten, smelliest fruit or meat you can find? Oh, you don't? Why not? . . . It's the same with men when they see baby elephant-sized, out-of-shape women."

The interesting thing is that (as you may have noticed from the cover above), the book is "presented by" Zane, a best-selling writer of black erotica. (As M.Dot at Model Minority writes today, "Zane sells because her fiction allows Black women to be sexual in a culture that refuses to acknowledge that we are sexual, a culture that calls us ho's if are so inclined to be sexual, talk about sex, or even look like we are human and have a sexual appetite.") But Zane says her name on the book is not an endorsement -- it's a warning: "There are some men who feel exactly like he does. I feel like women should be forewarned and realize what's out there."

As you've probably noticed, the editors at feministing tend to be pretty fascinated and outraged by the state of sex education in this country. Well, so is sociologist Jessica Fields, and she's done an amazing, comprehensive, visionary study of the ways in which our pedagogy on sex shortchanges all of us. Her book, Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality, is the best I've read on the subject--excelling on both the nitty gritty level (she's really in classrooms, really observing teachers and students wrestling with poor curriculum) and the big picture level. Where the latter is concerned, she basically lays out a liberation philosophy for sex education. You think I'm kidding?:

...if education is an opportunity for students and teachers to face and reimagine those constraining definitions, then sex education insists upon the importance of young people's desire, pleasure, and power in that reimagining. Young people's desires and pleasures have the potential to remake the world.

Warning: Fields is an academic, so there are times when the prose doesn't exactly sing, but I was actually pretty transfixed the entire time. She doesn't do any insecure academic posturing (big words, over-referencing of Foucault etc.) and she seems to really emotionally engage with this material. There's even some personal narrative sprinkled in.

Thanks Jessica Fields. I hope this book is read far and wide.

I read a lot of anthologies, and I'm just embarking on the hard task of editing one, so I understand how varied the quality of them can be. Sometimes I pick one up, and I'm immediately struck by the unevenness of the submissions--the diamonds in the rough sparkling, but too much rough to make the diamonds worth the searching. Sometimes, I am immediately drawn in, struck by the originality and veracity of the words. A good personal essay is one of my favorite things on the planet Earth.

The latter was absolutely the case with The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, a new anthology by Shari MacDonald Strong. As the title suggests, it features a range of essays by women contemplating the ways in which their mothering is part and parcel of their activism, how changing diapers is not opposed to developing a political conscience, and is in fact, intertwined with it.

Although there are some big names (Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto etc.) on the cover, with the exception of Barbara Kingsolver's awesome essay, all the best were by those that are not household names (or at least not outside of the mother's movement). They explore work/life balance, welfare, adoption, caregiving conflicts, relationships between mothers and nannies, race, love, and ten million other interesting threads.

Read the Q&A I did with the editor for Alternet here. And congrats to all the moms who wield both pen and so fiercely.

So I've been reading this book called How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein and I'm finding myself perpetually vacillating between "That's amazing!" and "Wait a minute..." Let me explain.

Bornstein, an extremely thorough journalist, decides that he'll travel around the world and profile "social entrepreneurs" connected to the Ashoka Foundation, starting with the founder of Ashoka himself, Bill Drayton. I first heard about this idea of "social entrepreneurship" a few years ago at an NYU conference, and my interest was immediately piqued. At that time I was feeling especially depressed about the state of the world and my capacity to do anything about it.

Here's the definition, in part, provided on Ashoka's site:

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

So on to the confusion. Sometimes I see these entrepreneurial projects as mind-blowingly amazing. They often abandon the old charity model (third world poor need wealthy western help) and instead embrace the idea that those in community know what their community needs and how to get it--they just need help getting the resources in the right places at the right times. For example, I just read a profile of Jeroo Billimoria, the founder of Childline, a 24-hour helpline and emergency response system for children in trouble--completely run by children! Totally frickin' amazing. Jeroo basically had the wisdom to fund and formalize what street children in India were already doing--sharing resources and looking out for one another.

This works for me entirely, but other profiles seem to operate on the idea that poor people just need to be turned into "a market" and then they will uplift themselves. It's a little like the boot strap ideology with a patronizing altruistic twist. We can't just give malaria nets away; we have to sell them so that people will be incentivized to take them seriously.

So the way to "save the world" is to import more capitalism? What about a systemic analysis of our economies and the ways in which they fail so many people? Is this a little like importing democracy? We've seen how wise that turned out to be.

Maybe I'm overreacting. Will someone help me out here?

*Hey, thanks to all of those that confirmed in the reader's survey that they liked this feature!

I get so many amazing books and I only have so many hours in the day, so I thought I would direct you all to other reviews/posts about some of the great books on my shelf that I'll never get to (at this rate, anyway):

a review of
No Seat at the Table: How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom by Douglas M. Branson

a blog post on Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renee Bergland

Righting Feminism: Conservative Women & American Politics by Ronnee Shreiber recommended by the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics

Firedoglake on The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism of the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet

a review of The Saint of Kathmandu and Other Tales of the Sacred in Distant Lands by Sarah LeVine

some harrowing real life analysis from What About Our Daughters? on Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence by Jody Miller

Marvelyn Brown, my brilliant and courageous friend, was on the CNN special, "Black in America," last night. If you didn't catch it, there should be clips available shortly, but meanwhile you can check out the book she and I co-wrote of her life: The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive. It will be released August 19th, but you can pre-order whenever. In it, she very frankly explores how she was infected with HIV while in a committed relationship with "prince charming" and all that happened after. Don't sleep: AIDS is the number one killer of black women aged 25-34.

And on a far less serious note, Marvelyn got us a blurb from none other than Ludacris for the cover. Just rap it: "Marvelyn Brown takes a bold approach to speak to our youth with enough honesty and frankness, everybody should be listening! She is an inspiration to men and women everywhere!" Word Cris.

Most of the feministing crew met Marvelyn last summer when we all won ChoiceUSA awards.

Besides having the best title ever--You're Amazing! A No-Pressure Guide to Being Your Best Self--this Girls Inc. sponsored, young adult nonfiction book is also the shiznit (come on, this is for the tweens) because it's written by Claire Mysko, feministing fan and awesome young feminist upstart.

In an age when every 13-year-old is made to walk the tightrope of high-pressure adolescence--make out but don't be slutty, worry about your weight but don't become a bore, do well in school but don't become a total nerd--this book is so needed. It's, in some ways, a reaction to the Supergirl Dilemma study that Girls Inc. conducted, which showed that girls today are feeling more empowered, but also way more anxious.

Mysko walks girls through all sorts of different rough patches--rejection, gossip, parents' fighting--with the cool ease of a big sister. She's not patronizing or cheesy about it, just compassionate and real. And what's even better--she quotes real girls through out the entire thing. Their voices are totally honored--like this heart breaker section where she asks, "If you could tell older adults in your life one thing you need to hear from them...what would it be?":

"Even if we make you angry or do something wrong, we always want to be told that we're loved and appreciated. Nobody's perfect." -Emma, 13
"Respect our opinions and help us, don't control us!" -Tabitha, 12
"Tell me I'm important!" -Rose, 11

You're important! You're important! Is that my inner 12-year-old crying? Okay, seriously, this book is amazing. You should get it for your little sister, niece, next door neighbor, bad ass lemonade saleswoman.

*There are also places to journal, quizzes (gotta love the quizzes), and feminist history worked in all sneaky like.

Saunter over to your women's studies bookshelf and open up that first flap to discover who published your favorite feminist tomes. Chances are it wasn't Random House or Simon & Schuster, or one of the other major biggies (with a few exceptions). Instead you were probably introduced to feminism thanks to the ingenuity of publishers like the Feminist Press, Seal Press, or one of the other many, many small, independent publishers that takes a chance on feminist lit.

I just sold a new book (stay tuned for details), so I've been thinking a lot about ye ole publishing industry and the way it works. It is an industry that started out with a deep commitment to Ideas--to giving people the goods on how to live a great life, to challenging the status quo, to the development of long careers of writing, reading, and editing. But because of market forces hard to explain in one little blog post (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the rise of less literary forms of entertainment etc.), the publishing industry is not heavily dependent on dollars and cents.

This isn't to say that some books aren't published simply because they contain brilliant ideas, but it is to say that we would naïve if we really bought the idea that publishers aren't primarily interested in the bottom line these days. Did my editor at Simon & Schuster buy Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters because she felt a moral obligation to spread the word about food and fitness obsession? In part. But in truth, she was able to convince her publisher to buy it because they thought it would sell. Point blank.

Feminist presses, on the other hand, still strain to juggle the bottom line with a higher calling. They are committed to spreading the feminist gospel, to challenging traditional notions of gender, to finding new voices who are marginalized and/or left out all together by mainstream publishers. For this--and for Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation, Riverbend's books out of Iraq, and Brown Girl, Brownstone etc.--we thank them from the bottom of our big, feminist hearts.

If there is a book, published by a feminist press, that changed your life, please let us know in the comments.

Jessica's new book, He's a Stud, She's a Slut, is reviewed in tomorrow's New York Times -- alongside Kathleen Parker's ode to gender difference, Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care. (Not familiar with Parker? She's said that women having sex without going through courtship rituals first is a "mental health crisis." And she looooves to talk about how women in the military should expect to get raped.) It makes for quite the contrast:

Both of them cite a study that shows that women are "biologically" programmed to like housework more than men do. Ms. Valenti denounces it as rank anti-feminism. "In our happy little sexist world, things run much better when women are relegated to the home," she writes.

Ms. Parker applauds it: "Allow me again to translate. There's no way to make men into women."

Read the rest here. You can buy Jessica's book here.

Photo of Diane DiMassa by Love Alban

Photo of Cristy C. Road by Amos Mac

Diane DiMassa and Cristy C. Road are contributors of the new anthology, Live Through This. Edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev, Live Through This is a collection of original stories, essays, artwork and photography that explore the use of art to survive many of life's lows, traumas and struggles. Both illustrated and contributed real-life personal pieces to the anthology.

Diane DiMassa is best known as the creator of the comic heroine Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. She recently illustrated a graphic novel written by Daphne Gottlieb called Jokes and the Unconscious, and regularly contributes to anthologies.

Cristy C. Road's works and publications include the punk rock zine, Greenzine; illustrated storybook, Indestructable; a series of illustrated novels based on filmmaker Esther Bell's upcoming film, Flaming Heterosexual Female; and is currently working on Bad Habits, an illustrated love story.

Here are Diane and Cristy...

It's shameless self-promotion time. As many of you probably already know, I have a new book out: He's a Stud, She's a Slut...and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. After writing FFF, it was difficult to know what to write next, so I figured why not go back to basics.

I like to think of this book as a sexism handbook of sorts, it gets into the everyday misogyny that so many of us face - whether it's the sexual double standard or a million other daily inequities women are expected to put up with. It's a fun book, one that that I'm hoping will be a bit subversive - it doesn't look like a feminist book, 'feminism' isn't in the title - so my goal is that a lot of women will pick it up. Think of it as stealth feminism.

I've excerpted the Introduction of the book, and one of the double standards, if you'd like a sneak peak.

I hope you'll pick up a copy and pass it around to your friends. And, of course, huge thanks to all of the incredible readers and supporters of Feministing for making my writing possible.

Judy Norsigian is co-founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and co-author of the ground breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves published in 1970. Since its publication, women's groups around the world have developed cultural adaptations of, or other publications inspired by, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Most recently, women's groups in Albania, Russia, South Korea, and Tibet have produced new publications in book and other formats. Judy is also the co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause and most recently, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth. Check out the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog when you can: http://ourbodiesourblog.org/

Judy speaks and writes frequently on a wide range of women's health concerns, including abortion and contraception, sexually transmitted infections, genetics and reproductive technologies, tobacco and women, women and health care reform, and midwifery advocacy.

Here's Judy...

Speaking of (Un)Feminist Guilty Pleasures, last night Nik and I are watching The Real World, yes, it's a habit I don't seem to break, and one of the girls on the show admits to her alcoholic friend that she struggled with an eating disorder. Didn't think much of it.

Then this morning my friend Kate sends me an email:

I'm watching the Real World, and one of the girls in it (Sarah) is lying on her bed in front of a bookshelf. And I see an acid green and book spine and think, "Hey, I know that book." I slowed it down frame by frame and guess what it is? I took a picture because I was so tickled.

Yeah, that's my book people. Mind is blown. Now if we can just get Jess' books on that blonde girl's shelf...she needs a serious dose of feminism 101.

If you're looking for an outlet for some of your no doubt brilliant feminist writing, consider this opportunity: Think Girl's newest project - "I Was There: Stories from the Feminist Front." Sarah Morgan writes:

I was inspired to begin this project after reading Susan Brownmiller's description in Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs of her work on reproductive rights during the Roe v Wade fight. Her first person account of rallying, flyering, marching and, finally, celebrating struck a cord with me and I wanted to read more. I soon learned about the 1998 book The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation. I now want to deepen the dialogue on feminism and anti-racism, to cull past and present stories of activism, and to bridge generational divides between feminists.

In this spirit, Think Girl asks women of all ages, races and backgrounds to submit stories of their work as activists for women's issues. (Think: A Radical Chicken Soup for the Feminist Soul.) These first person stories of strength, perseverance and courage will serve as inspiration to women and girls as they continue their work in or enter the movement.

And more on the organization: Think Girl believes in feminist activism that is both global and local. We aim to center women of color in our dialogues and activism, and to represent the ways in which all social justice movements intersect.. Globally, our web site links activists with women's news, educational resources, and personal writings. We hope to help girls and women understand feminism's past and present, and encourage them to contribute to its future. We are co-organizing The Feminist Summit, a national conference coming to Detroit in May 2009.

Locally, Think Girl bridges women in Metro Detroit: women of all races and ethnicities, of low- and middle-income, of all body abilities, of spiritual and secular beliefs, and from Detroit and the suburbs. We present educational workshops for preteen girls on media literacy and body image, women's history and feminism, and challenging stereotypes.

I saw one of my favorite writers this weekend at Politics and Prose in DC. She's a Young Adult fiction writer named Sarah Dessen, and she happens to be from the town where I grew up. We even went to the same high school (although a lot of years apart). When I was a kid I read a lot--and much of it was young adult fiction. There are a lot of books in that genre, but what I love about Sarah Dessen is that her books have substance. Her characters (almost all of whom are young women) are strong, independent, smart and interesting. She tackles real issues, like divorce, intimate partner violence and substance abuse, but without it feeling forced or like a public service announcement. You might know her work from the Mandy Moore movie, How to Deal (which is based on two of her books combined).

I still read her new books as they come out, even though I'm much out of her target audience age. While I still enjoy them, I do wish they had more to say about things like race and sexual orientation. While Sarah does a good job of portraying women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, the main characters of the books are generally straight and white. Kind of like the town we grew up in.

Did you read YA Fiction growing up? Who were some of your favorite authors?

From a recent performance at The Whitney Biennial. Photo by Eduardo Aparicio.

Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, and editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (with Brian Wallis). Her work on military interrogation was selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

"In the guise of a CIA manual, Coco Fusco's provocative A Field Guide for Female Interrogators offers an unflinching look at women's role in the military and at America's use of torture in the War on Terror"-- (from the book's back cover copy).

Here's Coco...

This is completely indefensible. These images are flat-out racist. Not. Okay.

I want to echo Holly's sentiments, and her call for more information about how the hell this happened. And I'll be writing a letter to Seal that's very similar to Barry's.

UPDATE: Seal Press has issued an apology, and will be removing the images from future printings of the book.

UPDATE II Amanda has also apologized.

Martha Ma is a food and media educator and producer, community chef and health counselor. She is the host and producer of "The Tasty Life," a bi-weekly television show on Manhattan Public Access channel 57, and the editor of the e-newsletter, "Eater's Digest."

Martha is also executive producer of the Food for Thought Film Festival. If you're in the NYC area this weekend, check out the last weekend of the festival at Cooper Union's Wollman Auditorium, 51 Astor Place at Third Ave. Feature films include King Corn, Black Gold, and Life and Debt. Shorts include The Meatrix I, II and II 1/2 and The True Cost of Food.

Here's Martha...

A new children's book, My Beautiful Mommy, (being released on Mother's Day, no less) aims to explain to kids why their mom is getting plastic surgery.

It features a perky mother explaining to her child why she's having cosmetic surgery (a nose job and tummy tuck). Naturally, it has a happy ending: mommy winds up "even more" beautiful than before, and her daughter is thrilled.

Okay, I can understand the need to explain to children why a parent is getting surgery, but this...well, it's just ridiculous.

"My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

Superhero, huh? I suppose that should come as no surprise, given the book is written by a Florida-based plastic surgeon, Dr. Michael Salzhauer. Now, I'm certainly not going to sit in judgment of those who get plastic surgery - but do we really have to teach our kids that we need it to "feel better" and be "beautiful"? Ugh.

Thanks to Alexis for the link.

I will admit that the blog Stuff White People Like is no doubt one of my guilty pleasures, (maybe even an (Un) Feminist Guilty pleasure), but I, like most with a sense of humor certainly laugh along with the uncanny amount of humor in that blog and all those "aha" moments you have when reading it. The first time I read it I was sure a person of color was writing it and was honestly surprised and pretty happy that it was being written by a white man. I mean what makes a person of color feel better than a white person that can totally laugh at themselves and not take it personally? Well a lot of things, but it is definitely up there.

But jokes aside, I have some deeper feelings that I am trying to work out about this blog that make me not think it is as great and groundbreaking as many have hailed it to be. The real question being, what does this blog do for actual dialog on race?

I guess one simple answer is that it names, marks and makes visible the assumed invisibility of white culture. I grew up hearing, "you are so lucky to have a culture," and I remember thinking, dude you have a culture too. So on a basic level the calling out of white culture for what it is, is in fact powerful and will get you a lot of unexpected fans.

But if you believe that culture is not a static thing, but something that moves and changes and takes in and drops different participants as you go, than maybe it is not as salient. I am all about poking fun at the dominant culture, but if you are a person of color that is reading this blog and you can relate to a lot of the stuff white people like, does that make you white? Are you not a hard-core enough "person of color" if you like the things on that list?

For me, despite the humor (and yes, I see the humor and LMAO to different entries all the time) I don't see how marrying the concept of white-ness to the concept of material is actually helping us get to a new place. And as a friend of mine pointed out, the opposite effect of this is that the underlying assumption of stuff white people like is that the stuff they like is not cool, so then is everything that people of color do totally cool? Does that mean that we should look to people of color for what is cool (insert "wow you are such a good dancer!")? So in a way it is perpetuating that same thing we are trying to get away from. A hyper fascination with the things that white people like.

What sealed the deal for me was when I heard the author got a $300,000 dollar book deal. That is fucking crazy. If he had been a person of color he would have never gotten so much attention or such a hefty book deal. People would have said, omg, that is racist! They wouldn't have given it so much cred. My point being, there are a lot of people that call out racism and whiteness, but they don't get huge book deals for it because they are not white. So despite the potential transformative nature of calling out whiteness for what it is, the author is still getting rewarded for being white, even though he is making fun of white people. And let's not forget, white people also get paid for making fun of people of color. And what exactly do people of color get paid to do. . . ? To also make fun of people of color or to create characters that fit into white people's comfort levels of what is acceptable people of colorness. Because as the blog points out subtly, white people have the most capital to be the biggest consumers of everything, so all the images we see are tailored to their sensibilities.

This may be a total stretch, but this is where I am at with the whole thing and just had to put it out there. I see how many people LOVE this blog and how many people of color love it. And I see how uncomfortable it makes white people, which I also think is good. Being uncomfortable can often motivate you to think outside yourself. But is it really leading to this transformative conversation for a racially just world or is it perpetuating our assumed differences, realigning them with a gaze on what is considered white?

If you haven't had a chance to check out Sarah Seltzer's awesome piece in Bitch on sexism in The New York Times Book Review, pick up a copy today (or read it online). A sharp and savvy excerpt:

Recently, Times editors—in both the daily paper and the Sunday section—have trotted out a particularly insidious formula for bashing feminist authors. First, hire a female reviewer to unleash misogynist tropes in her piece and then, lest she appear prejudiced against her own gender, throw in an illogical, contradictory statement about the importance of a less threatening version of feminism that isn’t so “polarizing,� “provocative,� or “strident.� 


Allison Kilkenny describes herself as "a political humorist, a fancy way of saying writer, who makes shitty world news funny." She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, The Beast, Alternet.org's Wiretap Magazine, and Timothy McSweeney's. Her work has appeared on The Nation and SIRIUS radio.

Here's Allison Kilkenny...

The title of this post is in honor of the fact that I learned yesterday that Fran Drescher has an organization called Cancer Schmancer. For serious.

Anways, Amanda over at Pandagon blogged about this today too, but it was just too ridiculous to pass up. One of my all-time favorite books, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (if you haven't read it, GO PURCHASE NOW) is being censored by a group of students at the University of Utah. Because Alison is so freaking great, her response to this news was "awesome!"

"This sort of bullshit will pretty much permanently fuck up any attempt of feminists to start a reasonable discussion about why so many men are attracted to a flavor of pornography that is as much, if not more, about humiliating and hating women as it is about getting men off. Which is not even all porn, but certainly doesn’t encapsulate novels like this. Hell, we’re stuck in definitional hell, with the right wingers defining porn as “any material that portrays sexuality in a way that I don’t approve of�, and most everyone else in liberal land defining it as, “sexually explicit materials designed to sexually arouse the reader/viewer�, and radical feminists defining it as “photos and videos where the humiliation and pain of the woman is considered an essential part of the erotic experience for the viewer�. Which is, to be fair to radical feminists, the majority of the material available through your internet channels or “Girls Gone Wild� videos. I’m not getting into the discussion of censorship from feminists, since it’s a red herring, since the number of feminists willing to talk censorship is a minority of a minority."

Yea, what Amanda said.

On my way to WAM this last weekend I ate french fries and caught up on my New Yorkers. One article, in particular, really struck me and I wanted to write a bit about it here: "Exposure: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib" by Philip Gourevitch (of the amazing book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families) and Errol Morris (one of my favorite documentary filmmakers.

In it, they look closely at the life of Sabrina Harman, the young soldier who took the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that have come to haunt us. The piece is so powerful, in part because the authors rely heavily on quotations from those involved, particularly Hartman. Unlike most New Yorker pieces, which I find sometimes err on missing the voices of those at the center of the issue, this one is full of organic wanderings by the soldiers who got caught up in that horrendous place and time.

What becomes clear very quickly is that Harman used her camera as a way to process the dissonance between what she felt was right--a small but nagging sentiment--and what she was watching happen all around her to the point of normalization. The lens becomes her way of organizing the world, of making sense of the nonsensical. Interestingly, she is known as the one who won't even let people kill a bug, but she never speaks out directly about the abuse being heaped on detainees. Clearly this contrast tells us something even more frightening about the power of conditioning. She wasn't seeing bugs tortured day in and day out. She was seeing people endure that to the point that it no longer seemed like something to endure or end.

They write of her: "Nobody called Sabrina Harman Mother Theresa at the Abu Ghraib hard site. But even on the Military Intelligence block she retained her reputation as the blithe spirit of the unit, obviously not the leader and yet never a true follower, either--more like a tagalong, the soldier who should never have been a soldier."

Harman writes in a letter home: "They've been stripping 'the fucked up' prisoners and handcuffing them to the bars. Its pretty sad. I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. I kind of feel bad for these guys, even if they are accused of killing US soldiers. We degrade them but we don't hit and thats a plus even though Im sure they wish we'd kill them."

I am fascinated by the processes by which we dehumanize one another, the slow crawl of corruption into even the most well-intentioned souls, what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." This article is not to be missed by those with similar interests. Gourevitch and Morris manage to present Harman and the action surrounding her with a deep compassion, but also a sharply focused, unforgiving lens of their own.

I don't know about you, but I was obsessed with Sweet Valley High when I was a kid. (Though I was always pissed that the Jessica character was the vapid one, while Elizabeth was the cool, smart reporter type.)

Well, it seems that Random House is re-releasing the series with a new modern twist: skinnier twins.

To publicize the re-release of teen fiction series Sweet Valley High, Random House Children's Books sent a letter to journalists highlighting the changes made to the content of the 1980s paperbacks. New cover girl Leven Rambin (pictured) was not mentioned, but just to make sure preteen and teenaged girl readers are sufficiently insecure about their bodies, the publisher made the "perfect" clothing size a couple of notches more restrictive.

In a side-by-side column comapring the 1983 version of the book with the present one, publishers write that the previous characters were a "perfect size 6." Now, they're a "perfect size 4." Charming. The next SVH book? Nipping it in the Bud: Elizabeth's Designer Vagina.

I’m reading an amazing little book by one of my new favorite authors, Parker Palmer (see my review of The Courage to Teach from a couple of weeks ago). This one's called Let Your Life Speak and in it he explores how one truly finds a vocation, a calling, a purpose in life. He writes:

Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled. But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

Two childhood memories popped into my head…1) lying on the cold, tile kitchen floor, holding my mom’s toes while she talked on the phone to her friends, listening to their stories and the way she consoled them and 2) setting my stuffed animals up in a group and then reading to them aloud, careful to show them the pictures when I turned the pages very patiently and deliberately. What did I become? A professional eavesdropper (i.e. writer) and a teacher.

Watching his granddaughter, Parker writes:

She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or “that of God� in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price.

So today, I ask you, where does your “deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?� What is your “pearl of great price?� I think these questions are particularly important in a society that still clings to inauthentic gender norms, especially when it comes to career. If you were neither man nor woman, if you didn't get caught up in "shoulds" or "oughts", if you had a break from economic fears...who would you be?

Next week: some literary take on the Women, Action, & Media conference and the week after, Complications by by Atul Gawande

Deborah Brenner is the author of Women of the Vine and proprietor of Women of the Vine Cellars. While writing the book, Deborah and winemaker, Signe Zoller met and teamed up in 2006 to launch a first-of-its-kind wine company; bottled and produced by Women of the Vine Cellars.

From 2002-2005, Deborah ran her own marketing and public relations firm, SmallFishBigPond, and worked with such companies as Cinecitta Studios of Rome, Quantel, NBC and CNBC. Prior to that, Ms. Brenner spent over 16 years working in the film, television and the post production industries and was involved in four technology startups.

Here's Deborah...

My girl Kate has a blue streak in her hair. She digs obscure music and was raised by a feminist historian. She's a vegetarian with a yoga teaching dad. Oh, and she wrote a badass book on the subculture of competitive college cheerleading.

A total contrast, I know, but that's why her new book, CHEER!, is so cool. Kate is a journalist fascinated in all the ins and outs of how people become obsessed with sports and identified with the cultures surrounding them. When she first did some reporting on college cheerleading for Jane Magazine, where she was working at the time, she didn't expect to be too drawn in. And then she started to get to know the fearless women and men involved, she started to see that cheerleading was far from rah-rah siskomba and all the other stereotypes. It was leaping thirty feet in the air, concussions, and almost bizarre dedication.

In CHEER! she follows three teams through out the year on their way to Nationals, the Super Bowl of cheerleading. She eats in diners with them, sits in the hospital with them, parties with them, and, of course, watches a lot of frickin' cheerleading. In the process drugs, race, eating disorders, class, and a host of other issues come up.

Kate creates fascinating, empathy-inducing portraits of this culture and each of its characters. If only we were all so curious about the world and so passionate towards other people. Check out Kate on Good Morning America below:

Next week Oprah and I are taking a little break, but I'll be back the week after with something thrilling.

If you haven't seen Searching for Angela Shelton, you've missed out on a truly powerful work of art that interrogates the linkages between diverse women--both triumphant and depressing. Faced with a writer's strike and a bit of a psychic crisis, Californian Angela Shelton hits the road in her RV and visits all the other Angela Sheltons in the U.S. that will speak with her. Very quickly she realized that one of the things that too many of them have in common is a history of abuse and interpersonal violence. The film really comes to a head when Angela, the original, finds her own father who molested her and her siblings when they were all young, and confronts him. I have to say that I've seen few moments caught on film that are that powerful--not in a cathartic way, mind you.

Now Angela has graced us with a book to go alone with the documentary, this one called Finding Angela Shelton. It is a glorified diary of her film journey, complete with far more comprehensive accounts of the lives of the Angela Sheltons along the way and her healing process with her family and her own soul. She ends with this reflection:
My survey of women in America showed me that we are all pretty amazing and we've been through hell, but most of us are breaking the cycle and leading awesome lives."

Amen Angela.

Next time: CHEER! by Kate Torgonick and then I'm on the road so I may take a week off. Can you stand it?

I stand in front of a classroom of 50 some odd skeptical faces and introduce myself. I can see it in their faces. They can’t believe that this woman, who looks like she is a student, is actually the teacher. They immediately wonder: Is she straight or gay? Single or married? How old is she? Is she one of those feminazis or will we be able to express dissenting opinions?

Such is my experience of teaching Intro to Women’s Studies at Hunter College. It is one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever faced, and also, one of the greatest opportunities for making me a smarter, more inclusive, more dynamic thinker and writer.

I was reminded of this (I haven’t been able to teach since I’ve been touring for my book) while reading The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. It is an incredibly moving perspective on what it takes to be a truly enlightened, committed, effective teacher.

Palmer bravely argues that teachers must bring themselves—authentically and fearlessly—into the classroom if they want to change students’ lives. He denounces the defensive posture of old-school teaching, the notion that there is one body of knowledge, a solid and unchanged Truth, and that it is the teachers job to impart this knowledge on the student. Instead, he writes: “To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced…the hallmark of the community of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality only by being in community with it.�

I turned the last page on this gut-twisting dystopic novel, authored by ex-politico Joe McGinniss Jr., yesterday while cramped in an airplane, headed west, and I felt trapped. I couldn’t get the amoral world of artificial sexuality and economic exploitation, set (surprise, surprise) in Vegas, out of my mind. And a question kept buzzing—like the neon found all over that rough city—in my brain: why do we read?

If we read, if I read, to learn something—than this novel has failed me. I learned nothing new about sex or the quarterlife crisis or exploitation. What I already knew was exaggerated and put in my face in freakish proportions, but it was not new (it may be new to an older reader). If we read to be inspired, uplifted, called-to-action then hot damn has this novel failed me. It was so depressing near the end that part of me wanted to just shut it and shove it in the seat pocket in front of me, not waste another precious minute of my life feeling so sad. But if we read to be moved, to feel something potently and undeniably, than the novel has succeeded.

Miki Fujiwara, aka Urban Envy, is a self-employed visual artist/community activist based in New York City.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Miki is known to be one of the original members of the New York Tributary Art Movement. The majority of her work, mostly paintings, has been categorized as "Cultural Surrealism," often said to be in the "tradition of Cynthia Tom and Frida Kahlo."

Urban Envy's works can be seen in local galleries of New York City.

Here's Miki...

My mom—the lady with her finger on the pulse--saw Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core on one of the morning shows and told me I should check it out. As someone fascinated by youth and political culture and spirituality, it’s totally my cup of chai.

The Core, according to the website:

aims to introduce a new relationship, one that is about mutual respect and religious pluralism. Instead of focusing a dialogue on political or theological differences, we build relationships on the values that we share, such as hospitality and caring for the Earth, and how we can live out those values together to contribute to the betterment of our community.
The Interfaith Youth Core is creating these relationships across the world by inspiring, networking, and resourcing young people, who are the leaders of this movement. We provide young people and the institutions that support them with leadership training, project resources and a connection to a broader movement.

Through the site, I realized that Eboo Patel, the founder of the Core, has a new memoir out called Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. It is a rare and beautiful intertwining of a person, a conscience, and a big idea all coming of age at the same time.

My interview with Benjamin Percy, the author of Refresh, Refresh--that great short story collection I reviewed awhile ago, is up at Alternet today. Check it out--he's a smart dude.

I can still remember the way my attic smelled (like cardboard boxes and old crinkly photo albums where the sticky stuff has worn off and turned brown) as I crept up the stairs with my best little guy friend in my childhood home. We were on a mission—to find my dad’s dusty stack of Playboy’s hidden in a tiny closet, to open up the pages and quietly giggle, to have our first visual experience of naked, overt sexuality.

I wish opening the books that DK publishing generously sent me—Sex 365: A Position for Every Day and Kama Sutra by Tracey Cox, no less—gave me that same feeling. But now I’ve lived in a pornified culture, developed my own relationship with my body and the body of a hot partner, generally grown weary of anyone trying to sell me a version of sex they think I can “benefit from.�

My cynicism is warranted. For starters, all you’ll find in these books is heterosexual couples, and in DK publishing land, apparently no one sleeps with anyone outside of their race. (For more on why I think this sucks, read my op-ed in the New York Daily News today). They also all have pretty perfect (by media standards) bodies.

Setting aside the offensively narrow definition of “sex� depicted in the book—heterosexual, monoracial, tight and toned—I can see how flipping through it could liven things up in a couples’ sex life.

Social psychologist Bella DePaulo’s book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After gave me one of those “click� moments—after reading these words, suddenly the world just looked different:

…the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person—sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

You wouldn’t know that, of course, if you just took a quick glance around at our consumer culture and familial expectations. DePaulo writes, with great humor, about the sad face and sigh that people give single people—especially ladies—when they hear the oh so sad news that they haven’t coupled. She also talks about the legal ramifications of living in a society that glamorizes marriage to the point of absurdity (um, 50% failure rate people) and the scientific bunk that’s out there claiming only coupled people can lead fulfilling lives.

I like to imagine Ms. Wilkerson—turtleneck, cardigan, unremarkable haircut—writing the Pythagorean Theorem on the chalkboard as her students text message, fall asleep, and take notes. They probably think Ms. Wilkerson is “cool� or “okay,� but assume she has no life outside of the four walls of their underfunded classroom. Little do they know she was once a violent, anti-establishment radical who survived an explosion in her own family’s Manhattan town house.

Cathy Wilkerson, the author of the exhaustively detailed and fascinating memoir, Flying Close to the Sun, has been a math teacher for the last 20 years in New York City schools, but prior to that she was a member of the Weathermen, SDS, and a civil rights and anti-war protester.

The memoir is amazing if you’re the kind of person who is obsessed with the nitty gritty of social change and the ins and outs of shifting consciousness. Wilkerson takes the reader through her childhood, marking the moments when she first became aware of injustice and reflected on violence, into her college experience at Swarthmore during the increasingly radical mid 60s, and into her really intense days of career protest and SDS leadership. The most interesting questions for me, as I was plodding through, were: (1) How did a girl from a conservative Quaker background become convinced that violence was the only answer? (2) How did the activists of the 60s logistically build a movement? And (3) How did they handle the intersection between all the different hot issues of the time: race, gender, war, poverty etc.?

It’s no secret among my friends and colleagues that I am a bit angsty when it comes to social change. It never seems to be happening fast enough. It never seems to be happening big enough. I’m generally dismayed at how not-urgent most of the nation seems when it comes to the very urgent issues of violence, inequality, sexism etc.

Rebecca Solnit, as if answering this angst directly, wrote a book called Hope in the Dark, which was published in the fairly dark time of 2004. It is her manifesto of poetic activism, her argument that even in times that seem stagnant and cruel on the surface, there is a thumping, passionate movement afoot…slowly gaining steam, haphazardly creating momentum, dreaming big dreams. You’ll miss it, she argues, if you only look for the fast, big stuff, as I sometimes do. It can be painfully slow and almost imperceptibly small. But it is there.

We all have these stories, even if they’re not our own—stories of friends or aunts or mothers. Stories of women who have faced the miracle of the human body in less than miraculous circumstances, women who have starred their own power dead in the eyes and made a decision, women who have considered “life�—not as existential philosophy—but as a pragmatic and urgent (more urgent than anything has ever been) question.

It’s breathtaking and devastating to see a handful of these stories gathered in one place. The new anthology, Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion, edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont, is not to be missed. It adds dimensions to the word “choice,� to the question of pregnancy, even to the field of what it means to be female.

In consistently original voices and beautifully crafted writing (not always such a hallmark of anthologies), these stories enfold you in a dark but deeply compelling fog and remind you of how totally powerful and pained we sometimes are. Some stories literally had me in tears on the subway, some smiling on my couch, a few outraged and angry at a world that still causes women so much suffering with its callous bureaucracies and hypocritical politics.

I was tipped off to Benjamin Percy’s work by a great article in Poets & Writers magazine that highlighted this young short story writer’s poignant grasp on contemporary masculinity and war. When the collection arrived, I was so not disappointed.

These short stories, especially the title story, literally pull you in to the high desert of central Oregon and drop you off, to feel, process, and face the emotional upheaval of our time, usually through the rich inner life of a young male character.

The effect is devastating, as in the title story where the young man trades blows with his best friend every day after school in the backyard—clearly an attempt to physicalize some of their mutual pain over having dads in Iraq indefinitely. He hits refresh over and over on his computer, praying for an email from his pops letting him know that he is, indeed, alive. The terrain is as unusual and vivid as the emotions that seem to echo it through out every carefully chosen word in this story. I felt like that kid was sitting on my couch and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hug him because he was already too invested in not letting on how fucking hard life is.

Other stories explore domestic violence, rape, thwarted love, miscarriages, familial relationships etc. Basically there isn’t a hot button issue concerning masculinity and violence that this volume doesn’t touch, although always in an artful, complex way.

I can’t frickin’ wait to see what this guy writes next.

Up next: Choice by Karen Bender and then Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.

Turkey's first feminist bookstore, founded the Amargi Woman Academy, has just opened in Istanbul. Hotness.

We've received a ton of responses to our call for submissions for Yes Means Yes, and we're so psyched that everyone is so invested in the project. Some of the feedback has been encouraging and some of it has been critical, and we've been grateful for both sorts of responses. We've also taken some of the criticisms to heart and have integrated them into a new, Version 2.0 Call for Submissions which says more of what we meant and (hopefully) less of what we didn't, and fills in a few blind spots that were rightfully pointed out.

Here she is in all her glory after the jump-- hope she makes you even more excited about submitting something!

~Jaclyn and Jessica

UPDATE: Ravenmn has asked us to unlink to her roundup of the critical discussion, so we have. You can follow that conversation at the following folks' blogs: Tekanji, Magniloquence, Sylvia, Sudy, Fire fly, Veronica, Theriomorph, I'm falling up. As the conversation was wide-ranging, we know we didn't get a chance to read all of it -- we apologize if we've missed yours. Feel free to link to it in the comments.

I’ve been following these Two Girls Working, as Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki call themselves, for awhile. They are just so damn interesting and original—think fraternal twin Miranda Julys with an overtly feminist bent. For years they’ve been traveling the country, having little parties (which they liken to community models like Mary Kay and Tupperware, but with 70s-style consciousness raising thrown in) and asking women one seemingly simple (but obviously complicated) question:

What do you wear that makes you feel powerful?

As they make clear in the introduction to their new book, Trappings: “This book is not about fashion and to a large extent not even about clothing.� Instead it is about power, gender, class, race, color, sensuality, sexuality, globalization—you know, the whole gamut of what we express through our aesthetic choices. Clothing was just the way in.

The book has 61 women’s stories and pictures. There are eight year old girls in track suits and old women in ruffled blouses and police uniforms and lots of black and hats and dashikis and ponchos and hockey uniforms and…and…and…

I feel like I’m way late to this party (or is it a roller derby match?) but nonetheless, I wanted to put my two cents in on Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive.

When the book initially launched in September, Pollitt got some nasty reviews claiming that the essays only amounted to undignified groaning and moaning. I smelled an anti-feminist rat then, but the stench was totally confirmed when I read this moving, hilarious, brave collection over the last week.

First of all, these are personal essays not political manifestos. There is political content, and of course Pollitt is known for her biting systemic analysis in The Nation, but why would any reader be so inflexible as to not give her room to play?

And play she does. This is a beautiful example of a brilliant woman being unafraid to be self-effacing, birthday suit honest, and still exhibit her trademark wit and sense of humor.

I know, you’re already sick of holiday gift guides, but I promised (and a feministing reader suggested) so I’m delivering. These are my top five books to buy your feminist gals and guys:

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
This is an oldie but a goodie. Northrup—both an MD and a feminist guru—elucidates the links between our bodies, minds, and hearts in a way that makes even the most devoted of western medicine fanatics go “Ooooooooh, so that’s why that happens.� A great gift for a little sister or mentee, or even a mom who doesn’t seem to realize why she gets super sick every time the holidays hit (um, she’s taking care of everyone else but herself.)

Composing a Life
Another oldie but goodie. In this little book, the whole darn complicated world of women’s lives are laid bare. Bateson—an anthropologist and the daughter of Margaret Mead—follows the lives of a few fascinating friends to uncover the day-to-day choices, feelings, and struggles that women face. I wish someone would write an updated version…

The Daring Book for Girls
This is the buy for the little gals in your life. Feminist moms and downright cool ladies, Peskowitz and Buchanan, wrote this response to The Dangerous Book for Boys. It includes all kinds of activities for daring girls, including everything from how to put your bun up with a pencil to negotiating a fair salary. Word.

The Complete Stories Flannery O’Connor
People don’t read enough short stories. Period. O’Connor is the master of them—funny, surprising, the guts of humanity laid out in 12 pages. Don’t let your favorite reader sleep on the old masters.

The Dispossessed
If you don’t think of yourself or your beloveds as people who can get down with science fiction, think again. Ursula K. LeGuin is an amazing, feminist writer who creates wild imaginary worlds that make for perfect consideration of our contemporary gender politics.

*Jess and I won’t be mad if you buy our books for someone special: Full Frontal Feminism and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, respectively.

Next up, Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt and then Trappings by Two Girls Working.

Sometimes doing feminist activism can feel isolating--like you are standing in the middle of Times Square, dwarfed by towering skyscrapers draped in objectifying build boards, trying to shout above the hustle and bustle, "Yo! The dehumanization and exploitation of women is not coooooool!"

Women Who Light The Dark is a resounding, restorative chorus of women shouting right back: "Word! This is what we're doing about it!" Photojournalist Paola Gianturco is able to silence the hustle and bustle of this misogynistic, corporatized world with the exquisite beauty of her photographs and the gentle wisdom of her prose. She visits grassroots organizations in 15 countries across the world, seeking to capture a snapshot of what girls and women are doing to heal one another, create community, and end injustice.

Hey y'all, if you or anyone you know is interested...submit something!

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren't shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Some of you might be wondering why the hell I chose to review Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate--not particularly feminist. Ah contraire. What is so feministy and fun about this book is that it is written by a veteran feminist journalist, Alicia C. Shepard, who got the first stab at going through the Woodward and Bernstein archives at the University of Texas. UT bought the whole kit and caboodle in 2003 for a record $5 million, the most ever paid for a living writer's archive (it was rumored that Bernstein pressured Woodward into it because he needed the dough.) I also think that the state of journalism is inherently a feminist concern (truth! equality! justice!), but let me not go off on that rant.

Instead let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I felt like my father's daughter--he's a big ol' history buff--reveling in all the wonderful details and juicy quotations of this pivotal moment in American history. A couple of the things that will really stick with me:

Woodward and Bernstein, and the coverage more generally of Watergate, was the moment when journalists stopped placating the American presidency and started telling the truth. As Shepard wrote, "The White House press corp would never be the same." It gives new meaning to what we know about the Bush administration and the ways in which it has shut down journalists' capacity to ask real questions and get real answers.

The whole Deep Throat business brought anonymous sources to light. Journalists continue to fight over this issue to this day--Is it ethical to use anonymous sources? Does it lead to more truth or less in reporting? How can the public trust a source they can't know? On the on hand, yes, anonymous sources can take pot shots at politicians they detest without consequences, but on the other, vital issues that wouldn't otherwise surface (discriminatory hiring practices, sexual abuse etc.) can be exposed because the source is guaranteed safe anonymity.

These guys were frickin' young--in their late twenties and early thirties when it all went down. It's exciting to think about such newbies hunting down the truth so fearlessly. What might we discover if we don't accept the pat answers and, instead, seek the difficult, messy ones?

Thanks to Alicia Shepard for being a great role model for all of us young feminist journalists to go out there and get the big story. Too often magazine editorial board meetings and newsroom pow-wows are littered with lingering misogyny, i.e. "The new girl can cover these women's issues for the Style section." Uggh. Everything is a "women's issue," including Watergate, and Style is not synonymous with women/psychology/family/fashion/gender/consumption.

Next week: Women Who Light the Dark by Paola Gianturco and on the 20th I'll do a little holiday book buying guide.

For most of my young life, I’ve avoided thinking about or watching pornography. Sure there was that time that my gal pals and I got a porn flick in a hotel room on spring break “just to see� or the afternoon Gareth and I spent researching feminist porn and finding scary titles like Dungeon Mistress. I’ve browsed Nerve.com and I like to check out Bust’s one-handed read, but generally I’ve steered clear of porn or, even, truth be told, erotica. (Somehow I even missed studying pornography in college or grad school.)

I never made a conscious decision; it was just one of those subconscious, self-protective moves. I think I sensed that there was a “point of no return� quality to being aware of what was really out there and I was scared to go down that road just as I was developing my sexual identity and getting involved in relationships (in my case, heterosexual).

But I’ve really loved Robert Jensen’s work on Alternet and I’m obsessed with masculinity studies, so when I saw that his new book was Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, I had to read it.

I was right about the “point of no return� thing…

The only feminist bookstore in Texas, BookWoman, is in danger of closing and needs your help. Feminist bookstores are dwindling (sadly); we can't afford to lose another one, so please consider donating or spreading the word.

So, obviously when I posted last week saying I would review Robert Jensen's book on porn this week, I wasn't exactly thinking about turkey and family togetherness. Tune in next week for my take on Jensen's really powerful book.

Today, I'm just feeling thankful so here are 25 books I am deeply grateful for:
1. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
2. Pearl by Mary Gordon
3. Appetites by Caroline Knapp
4. Beauty by Zadie Smith
5. Night by Elie Wiesel
6. The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois
7. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
8. One City by Ethan Nichtern
9. Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
10. My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan
11. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
12. Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson
13. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
14. A Problem from Hell by Samantha Powers
15. On Violence by Hannah Arendt
16. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
17. Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach
18. The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor
19. Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti
20. Okay, I have to admit it, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney E. Martin
21. the complete stories of Flannery O' Conner
22. Rousseau's Basic Political Writings
23. Beginning to the See the Light by Ellen Willis
24. Native Son by Richard Wright
25. American Music by Chris Martin (that my brother and he's a genius)

Feel free to make your own lists.

From left to right: Megan Kocher and Heather Ites

Circa 1970-something, "two women decided to gather some books on women's topics and offer them for sale on the front porch of their living collective," and according to its website, Amazon Bookstore has been around ever since. It remains the oldest independent feminist bookstore in North America.

Megan Kocher and Heather Ites help run and own Amazon Bookstore Cooperative. Here's Megan and Heather...

I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book (note the new and improved title), which is due this week. So you won't be seeing that much of me till I'm all done--at which point I'll be very cranky so expect some super-snark. In the meantime, I hope you'll settle for shameless self-promotion: you can pre-order the book here. Feel free to do you own self-promoting in comments.

I was a serious bookworm as a child. I actually used my mother's library card, because my local public library would only allow you to check out 10 books at a time with a kid's library card -- the adult card netted you 20. I had a "Read to Succeed" poster in my bedroom -- stolen, I believe, from the school library. (My brother still mocks me about that. Rightfully so.) And among all the Judy Blume and Lois Lowry, I consumed a great deal of the Sweet Valley and Baby-Sitters Club series.

So imagine my joy upon finding these retro-lit sites, which re-read the ghost-written classics of my childhood and mock them when appropriate:

• The Dairi Burger, devoted to re-reading Sweet Valley High, of course.
• Claudia's Room, blogging the Baby-Sitters Club series.
• And What Claudia Wore, where blogger Kim actually critiques the outfits of "artsy" baby-sitter Claudia Kishi. Amazing.

Claudia was always my favorite member of the BSC. Case in point: I had a Baby-Sitters Club themed birthday party in the second grade (ok, shut up), at which all of my guests were assigned a character. I, of course, wanted to be Claudia. But, no. My mother made me be Logan, the boy, because "none of the guests should have to be the boy." I was pissed. Since when does the birthday girl have to be Logan?

Aaaanyway, if you were a serious bookgeek as a child, you'll love these sites.

Sister Outsider is the latest project of novelists, screenwriters, and entrepreneurs Elisha Miranda and Sofia Quintero who have been collaborating since 2000. They co-founded the nonprofit Chica Luna Productions and its project, The F-Word, that is working to train the next generation of women of color filmmakers.

Julia Carias is an actor, educator, filmmaker, and Sister Outsider's Director of Operations and Productions.
Among her list of works and activism, Julia co-wrote, produced and directed her first play in 2002, "Roots," a production by La Casa Latina, an organization dedicated to promoting Latino culture throughout the college community.

Here's Julia...

After reading Phoebe Connelly's moving analysis of Doris Lessing at TAP, I knew that she was just the gal to give us the straight dope on The Golden Notebook. Here she is, in all her glory. -CEM

Guest Post by Phoebe Connelly

Let's get this out of the way right now--you probably haven't read The Golden Notebook because it was:

• a) Tarred by the fact that you heard Doris Lessing said it wasn't feminist (I've already addressed those concerns here.)
• b) Dense, from the '70s and had had this cover image:

  

• c) No one ever told you it existed.

But Doris Lessing won the Nobel a few weeks ago, she offered a suitably flippant reply to the reporter who informed her of that fact, and now, you're newly excited by the idea of her. Well good. Welcome to a "classic feminist text" that's readable, relevant, and engrossing.

Lessing's novel is, as she her self puts it in the introduction, "a novel of ideas," which is to say that she's grappling with what it means to be a woman, to have plans and talent and desire, and then struggle to fit those pieces together into a life.

Louise Sloan and her publisher have very generously donated five books to Feministing to give away to our readers. Fun!

To make things interesting, the first five people to email me with the correct answers to all three Feministing trivia questions will win a copy of Knock Yourself Up: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom:

What was the first feminist organization that we wrote about on the site?

Name the two one of the co-founders of Feministing who no longer write for us...

Happy answering!