Comments & Commentary on Women in Pop Culture

This is a slightly leaner version- trying to have some down time this week

Topic of the Day
China for the first time has outlawed sexual harrassment and domestic violence and established gender equality as a national policy.
CHINA POLICY ON GENDER EQUITY

News
Another obstacle to women running for office in Afghanistan is lack of access to funds to make campaign materials to let people know they are running. Men control the finances and are not eager to give women money that would possibly have them not only work outside the home, but be a part of the government.
AFHGAN ELECTIONS

The FDA once again put off its decision as to whether emergency contraception should be available over the counter. This government is unbelievable. It gets scarier each day. But if you really need the morning after pill just hop a place to these states and pick it up- no prescription necessary. Alaska; California; Hawaii; Maine; New Hampshire; New Mexico; Washington.
EC
EC 2

Not only can women not get emergency contraception, its getting worse and worse for getting abortions in states throughout the country. The battle is on and the antis are passing many different measures to restrict abortions.
ABORTION AT THE STATE LEVEL

Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, a twenty year veteran of army procurement was recently demoted because she criticized a several 2003 decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq. Whistleblower anyone?
BUNNATINE GREENHOUSE

It's been the summer of the mothers for the Iraq war.
MOTHERS AGAINST IRAQ WAR

Where are we with women's rights in the new Iraqi constitution? What are people dying for?
WHAT ARE OUR WOMEN FIGHTING FOR?

Women who want to take accutane for acne now have to sign a pledge saying they are not pregnant and will not get pregnant on the drug.
ACCUTANE

DVD
Just in time for the lazy labor day weekend, the first season of Roseanne is out on DVD for the first time.

Sports
The WNBA begins playoffs this week. One team that was eliminated is the Washington Mystics. They have a big fan in new owner, Sheila Johnson- the only female owner in the WNBA.
SHEILA JOHNSON

The US Open starts today. Chances are people will be more focused on the celebs and fashion rather than the tennis. For the first time in a long time, there is no real favorite on the women's side.
WHO WILL WIN?
US OPEN

Good News
Comedian Laura Solon has become only the second woman in 25 years to win the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award in England.
LAURA SOLON
She's already being courted for TV jobs.
DON'T LET IT GET TO YOUR HEAD

Topic of the Day
Happy Women's Equality Day. This is the day women got the right to be full citizens of this democracy in 1920. Thank you to Bella Abzug for getting this date officially recognized.

News
The Sri Lankan Supreme Court has ruled that President Chandrika Kumaratunga's term ends in December creating national elections.
SRI LANKA ELECTIONS

The FDA has put off again a ruling on whether emergency contraception should be available over the counter- weasels!
MORNING AFTER PILL

Rebecca Traister of Salon has another great in-depth piece about the long summer of how the pro-choice movement has dealt with the Roberts nomination.
PRO CHOICERS AND ROBERTS

Shocker
Hostile attitudes and inappropriate treatment of women persist at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and at the Naval Academy.
POOR TREATMENT OF WOMEN AT MILITARY ACADEMIES

Books
11,100 women now serve in Iraq - or about 8% of the total US force. At least 37 have been killed and more than 300 wounded. Kayla Williams, a former military intelligence officer has written, I Love My Rifle More Than You, a book describing life for women in the military.
KAYLA WILLIAMS

TV
Former WB programming chief Susanne Daniels has been appointed president, entertainment, Lifetime Entertainment Services. A 20-year TV veteran, Daniels was responsible for developing such WB hits as Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek. In her new role, Daniels will be responsible for all programming on Lifetime Television and Lifetime Movie Network, as well as Lifetime Real Women. She will be based in Los Angeles.

Gillian Anderson (aka Scully from the X-Files) resurfaces in London. Give this woman her own TV series.
GILLIAN ANDERSON

Sports
Cammi Granato, the face of US women's hockey and former team captain has been left off a pre-Olympic team roster effectively ending her international hockey career.

Dan Hughes, the coach of the WNBA San Antonio Silver Stars, the team with the second worst record in the league, has been promoted to coach and general manager. So, the WNBA is another place where men can fail and still get a promotion.

Topic of the Day
Muslim women in Southern India are beginning a revolution. They have created a female jamat (community of elders), traditionally an all male body, to adjudicate community issues. Their goal is to have an all female mosque.
FEMALE MOSQUE

Women's Rights in Iraq
The heat in Texas must be getting to George Bush cause he keeps insisting that Iraqi women will have basic fundamental rights in the new constitution.

This comes from the bi-partisan Congressional Iraqi Women's Caucus leaders Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, and Kay Granger, R-Texas.
They "warned the president that rolling back the rights of any group in Iraq would threaten the country's long-term stability and its ability to become a functioning democracy. If the document remains unchanged, it holds the potential for codifying discrimination against women as well as limiting fundamental human rights for all Iraqis in a manner that may threaten the growth of democracy and freedom in Iraq.''

Why don't we care more about this? I don't think there has been enough outcry on this situation.
IRAQI WOMEN'S RIGHTS

Supreme Court Update
Senator Dianne Feinstein is still planning on stepping up to the plate in the hearings next month.
“As the only woman on the committee, I have an additional role to play: representing the views and concerns of 145 million American women during this hearing process,” Feinstein said. “It is my hope that Judge Roberts would play a role similar to Justice O'Connor's … and bring with him a voice defined by temperance and open-mindedness.”
FEINSTEIN ON ROBERTS
FEINSTEIN ON ROBERTS #2

Don't Miss
In honor of Women's Equality Day (which is tomorrow), Ellen Goodman hands out her sexism awards for the year. Great column.
ELLEN GOODMAN

Highlight for today
Check out Gloria Steinem's new piece on NPR - A Balance Between Nature and Nurture.
GLORIA STEINEM

Supreme Court Update
The Roberts hearings will not only be about Roe v. Wade at the federal level. The conversation will also be about laws that are bubbling up at the circuit level and what those cases will mean for Roe v Wade.
ROBERTS

In a study to be released today by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have determined that fetuses are not able to feel pain until the third trimester. This is guaranteed to make the antis go crazy.
FETAL PAIN

TV
The women (and men) of Desperate Housewives are cashing in on Madison Avenue by appearing in ad campaigns for a variety of items. Take it while yuo can get it- who know when the bubble will burst?
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES CASHING IN

Sports
Beth Mowins becomes the second woman (after Pam Ward) to call play-by-play for college footaball games. She will be calling Western Athletic Conference games this fall on ESPNU.

Books
Carly Fiorina, former CEOof Hewlett-Packard, has signed a deal to write a book for Penguin Group to be published in autumn 2006. Penguin said the book will combine a memoir of Fiorina's career so far with her views on a variety of issues, including what makes a leader, how women can thrive in business and how technology will continue to reshape the world.

Myla Goldberg author of Bee Season (a great book - which is coming out as a movie later this year with Ricahrd Gere and Juliet Binoche- I'm so frightened of this casting) has written a new book, Wickett's Remedy, that takes place during the 1918 Influenza outbreak in Boston.
MYLA GOLDBERG

More on Andrea Mitchell's new book. She's getting some damn good press. A piece in both Time and Newsweek- usually never happens.
ANDREA MITCHELL

Theatre
Eve Ensler is taking her latest show The Good Body on tour to cities across the US and Canada. For info and tickets: THE GOOD BODY

Great idea
Hairstylists are being trained to recognize the signs of domestic violence to help their clients get out of abusive relationships..
STOP ABUSE

Lesbian parents have the same rights and responsibilities towards their children in the event of a break-up, California's highest court has ruled.
LESBIAN PARENTS

A Phillipines Congress is due to take up impeachment proceedings against President Gloria Arroyo this week. She is charged with corruption and electoral fraud.
GLORIA ARROYO

Dianne Feinstein is gearing up to ask John Roberts significant questions on is abortion record when the hearings begin next week. According to Feinstein, the confirmation process is a "big, big deal."
FEINSTEIN

Sports
More on the lack of women coaches in the WNBA
Ann Donovan, coach of the Seattle Storm, the first woman WNBA coach to reach 100 wins says:
“There’s been little respect given to female coaches in this league,” Donovan said. “The opportunities, when in doubt, have gone to a male or an NBA guy – some with (coaching) experience, some without. To have been given an opportunity also is a responsibility. I don’t take it lightly. The big picture is the more opportunity women have in this league, the more success women will have.”
WNBA COACHES

Topic of the Day
So I was watching the end of Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert is off on vacation and David Gregory subbed. The last panel focused on the Iraqi Constiution and Reuel Marc Gerecht who is the Director of the Middle East Initiative at the Project for the New American Century and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute had a doozy to say about the importance of women's rights in the creation of the Iraqi constitution.

"I mean, one hopes that the Iraqis protect women's social rights as much as possible. It certainly seems clear that in protecting the political rights, there's no discussion of women not having the right to vote. I think it's important to remember that in the year 1900, for example, in the United States, it was a democracy then. In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled. I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they're there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective."

Women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy? Aren't women's rights essential to the creation of a democracy? What the fuck is he talking about and how did this idiot get on Meet the Press?

Supreme Court Watch
Last week's document dump has revealed some more disturbing news about our new justice to be.
"John Roberts scoffed at the notion of elevating Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice as a way to close a political gender gap, calling it a 'crass political consideration.'

Why is it always the quiet white guys who always inflict the most damage.
ROBERTS

• It hasn't gotten any better for women and girls in Afghanistan. According to a new UN Population Fund report nearly half of all marriages in Afghanistan are thought to involve girls under age 16. The report also states that girls as young as six years old are married off by their families and traded to resolve conflicts between tribal families.
  

• Women will for the first time be deployed on the front lines in the Australian army, but not in direct combat. So they can get close to the battlefield, just not on it.

WOMEN IN COMBAT

• Ellen Goodman on the most visible peace activist, Cindy Sheehan.

ELLEN GOODMAN

MAGS
More Magazine, targeted to women in their 40s has grown from its launch subscriber base of 320,000 in 1998 to 1.1 million today. I'm almost 40 and I read More, the stories are so much more worthy of my time than the other women's mags like Glamour and Self.
MORE MAGAZINE

Sports
Latasha Byears was a dominant physical inside presence during her years on the Sacramento Monarchs and LA Sparks, but an accusation of sexual assualt (she was never arrested or charged) that lingered for two years ended her career in the WNBA. One of the taboo issues related to her firing and that has made her poison for other teams is her sexuality.

The WNBA, which has a huge lesbian audience, still tries to keep the lesbian players in the closet. Its interesting to note that at the same time Byears was cut by the Sparks, the same organization supported another player accused of sexual assualt- Kobe Bryant.
LATASHA BYEARS

A rare major study of sports sections in American newpapers, was released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluding that they are a "passive and reactive space, one dominated by game previews and recaps with little room for enterprise reportage."

It also finds very little coverage of women's sports, few women sources, and very few female sports writers. Female athletes were the main figures in stories only 5% of the time, female teams only 3% (compared to 33% for men's teams).

The study of more than 2,000 articles in 16 newspapers of varying sizes last year found that 88% of the stories revolved around “planned events” with 70% of that total related to actual games. Newsroom-initiated stories or enterprise pieces made up only 10% of the total, and this lack extends to all papers, big and small, right up to USA Today and The New York Times.

It also found that the big three sports (baseball, basketball and football) made up a full 65% of the stories covered on the front pages. Sports “issues” made up less than 4% of stories.
BOX SCORES AND BYLINES

Shocker
Women still face bias in science.
SCIENCE BIAS

Former Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam has died. She was 55. She was instrumental in developing the Good Friday Agreement.
MO MOWLAM

Supreme Court Watch
No shocker here but Judge John Roberts wrote opinions against advancing women's rights and roles while he was a lawyer for the White House in the 80s.

"In internal memos, Roberts urged President Ronald Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were 'highly objectionable'; and he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue -- of directing employers to pay women the same as men for jobs of 'comparable worth' -- was 'staggeringly pernicious' and 'anti-capitalist.'"
ROBERTS

More from Susan Estrich on Roberts
SUSAN ESTRICH

Does the new Dove ad really show "real" women?
DOVE

Unbelievable
A woman who was married to a sailor needed an abortion in 2002 because her fetus had no brain. The insurer refused to pay and after suing a judge ordered the payment for the procedure. The government, OUR GOVERNMENT!, sued the woman to get the money back saying that Federal law prohibits payment for abortions except "where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term." A regulation putting the law into effect specifically excludes payments for situations involving "fetal abnormalities" and mentions anencephaly- which this woman had.

A three judge panel ruled that the Navy did not have to pay so now this woman has to pay back the government. I think we should all chip in. I'll try to get more details.
ABORTION

It's gotten wild and crazy in Sweden with Ireen von Wachenfeldt, a former government official who is one of Sweden's best-known feminists calling men animals.
SWEDEN

From Today's NY Times
"THE world knows that Africans bear the brunt of the AIDS pandemic and that nearly two-thirds of the people infected with H.I.V. live here. The disease is devastating households and crippling economies across the continent. Though data show that girls and women are far more vulnerable to infection than men, we have yet to summon the courage and the political will to empower and protect them."
AIDS IN AFRICA

Theatre
One of the legends in theatre, Marian Seldes, is opening tonight in Terrence McNally's new play, Dedication of the Stuff of Dreams. She turns 77 next week.
MARIAN SELDES

Chita Rivera is bringing her show "Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life" to the Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway for an opening on Dec. 11, after previews beginning Nov. 23. With a ast of 11, this celebration of Ms. Rivera's life and career will have a book by Terrence McNally and direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele.

Sports
Seattle Storm's Anne Donovan became the first female coach in the WNBA to reach 100 wins with a win last night over Minnesota.

A new recruit to the WNBA.
LOVING THE WNBA

Shay Doron is a breakout basketball star at the University of Maryland. She was just named one of the 25 best female college basketball players and recently played for the US in the Maccabiah Games in Israel and earlier in the summer for her native Israel in another tournament.
SHAY DORON

Women in combat related positions (cause we can't fight) don't have a higher stress level than men a new study shows.
WOMEN IN COMBAT

How Cindy Sheehan has gone from a grieving mom to peace icon in under 2 weeks. I smell a movie of the week and a book contract. In 11 days, Cindy Sheehan has been mentioned 20,585 times in television news broadcasts.
CINDY SHEEHAN

Books
NBC Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell has written a memoir entitled Talking Back. She talked to Time.
ANDREA MITCHELL

Movies
Rachel McAdams who made a big splash last year in The Notebook is the "it" girl of the summer with Wedding Crashers and this week's Red Eye.
RACHEL MCADAMS

TV
Janeane Garofalo will have a three-episode arc on NBC's The West Wing.
Thesp-activist plays a controversial media strategist hired by Democratic presidential candidate Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits). Her first seg is slated to air Oct. 2.


In a early look at fall TV, AP has a story that lists Commander in Chief as a possible hit.
Commander-in-Chief bears certain similarities to The West Wing: For instance, both are dramas about a U.S. president. But ABC’s commander in chief is neither a Democrat nor a male — she’s an Independent and a woman. Elected vice president, Mackenzie Allen becomes chief executive upon the death of the man who made her his running mate as a ploy to win female voters. Now can she weather foes in Washington plotting her downfall — particularly the sly Speaker of the House (Donald Sutherland), who wanted her to step aside so he could claim the Oval Office? With Geena Davis as the very presidential President Allen, this show seems electable as a hit."

Also on the list is Bones- a drama about a female forensic anthropolgist.

WNBA
The LA Sparks promoted Joe Bryant (Kobe's dad) after only three weeks as an assitant coach, to be the coach of the team after they didn't "officially" fire Henry Bibby. Give me a break, the guy was canned cause a team with that much talent just sucks.

TEXT

Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas is forcning the left to get back into an anti-war stance.
SHEEHAN AND THE WAR

The left wants Democratic Senators to get some backbone regarding the Roberts nomination. Will there be voter backlash for some Senators who refuse to stand up against Roberts?
THE LEFT AND ROBERTS

"All Illinois pharmacies that carry contraceptives must fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill after legislators Tuesday backed making permanent a temporary order by Gov. Rod Blagojevich." Score one for the midwest.
MORNING AFTER PILL

Advertisers are starting to use everyday regular women in ads, not just supermodels. It seems that regular working women in ads resonates more than supermodels. Are these people just beyond dumb?
ADS

According the the Guardian - "L'Oréal was yesterday told to withdraw a multimillion-pound television advertising campaign starring the model Claudia Schiffer after the advertising watchdog found it could not back up the claims made for creams to combat cellulite and wrinkles." So can I get my money back for all the makeup and other crap I've bought over the years? Who do I send the bill to?

The world is just going to hell in a hand basket- from today's Independent in London
Veteran BBC News Anchor Michael Buerk has complained that "almost all the big jobs in broadcasting [are] held by women," and that men have been reduced to "sperm donors."
MICHAEL BUERK

Women are the victims of the "New Iraq."
WOMEN OF THE NEW IRAQ

Kate Michaelman talks about the Roberts nomination.
MICHAELMAN

Anna Quindlen's column this week talks about the importance of female role models like Eileen Collins and Sandra Day O'Connor.
QUINDLEN

Things are looking up- not! The percentage of women syndicated columnists has gone up frm 24.4% to 25.5% in the last five months.
WOMEN COLUMNISTS

I haven't commented on the NARAL ad debacle because it is too damn depressing. I'm gonna let everyone else blow hard on this one.
Joan Vennochi

Science
Women who regularly take acetaminophen, ibuprofen or similar painkillers have as much as double the normal risk of developing high blood pressure
WOMEN AND PAINKILLERS

TV
I have a bone to pick with the NYTimes. In yesterday's Arts notes section Kate Aurthur wrote a piece on cable TV ratings. In describing The Closer which has gotten high ratings, she wrote, "The police drama in which Kyra Sedgwick, plays a detective who is also a compulsive eater, brought in 6.13 million viewers and was the most watched show of the week."

Here's my problem, if you have actually watched the show you would know that they have toned down her eating issue. And if this was a show that starred a man, they would never have written about her eating at all. They would have written that she is a detective who specializes in getting confessions. Right?

Nina Bernstein writes in today's NYTimes about the hidden world of women immigrants. "Women make up 44 percent of the nation's low-wage immigrant work force, and worldwide, studies show, more and more women are migrating for work."
WOMEN WORKERS

Dahlia Litwick in Slate about how judges have become doctors in making decisions on who can and can't get abortions.
LITWICK

Time Magazine has a list of the 25 most influential Hispanics in America. Women on the list include: talk show host Cristina Saralegui; chick lit writer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez; actress Jennifer Lopez; museum director Mari Carmen Ramirez; health care activisit Aida Giachello; actress Salma Hayek; and CEO of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Sara Martinez Tucker.
TIME MAGAZINE


Wish this weren't a big deal- but it still is
The first woman and minority has been appointed executive chef at The White House.
After a six month search, they gave the job to one of the assistant chef's Cristeta Comerford.

The 42-year-old Comerford is form the Phillipines and has been an assistant chef at the White House for 10 years.

Dove soap has a wildy unconventional ad campaign out now that features "real" women meaning not unbearably skinny women. In Today's NYTimes, Jessica siegel applauds that campaign and asks Dove to come clean on its anti-cellulite creams which in her opinion, just don't work. PS- is it me or has it been a while since there was a woman's by-line on the op-ed page of the Times?
DOVE

TV
Check out Oscar winning documentary Born Into Brothels August 16 at 7 on Cinemax

"Photojournalist Zana Briski handed children of Calcutta prostitutes cameras so they could capture the world as they see it—but as this surprisingly hopeful, Academy Award– winning documentary depicts, she found herself knee-deep in their lives, fighting to make space for their potential."

Ellen Degeneres returns as the host of the Emmy Awards to be broadcast on September 18th.

Books
Women's bookstores are disappearing from the landscape save for a few stalwarts.
WOMEN'S BOOKSTORES

Supreme Court Watch
Gloria Feldt, former head of Planned Parenthood Federation weighs in with a thoughtful piece on John Roberts via Alternet. The headline: "Am I saying that John Roberts condones violence? No -- but I am saying that when he had a chance to explicitly oppose the rising tide of abortion clinic bombings, he did not."
GLORIA FELDT

Politics
From our Indian feminist friends - The Prevention of Domestic Violence Bill was finally agreed to in the Cabinet on 4 August 2005. Lobbying efforts are on to get the bill tabled in the parliament in the current session.

The battle for same sex marriage has begun in Britain. A lesbian couple who were married in Canada in 2003 want a legal declaration of the validity of their marriage.
SAME SEX MARRIAGE IN THE UK

Katha Pollitt talks to the head of Feminists for Life
KATHA POLLITT

Six months on Condoleeza Rice from Slate.
SLATE ON RICE

Unbelievable
From the LA Times - "Elysa J. Yanowitz, a regional sales manager for L'Oreal USA Inc., said her boss ordered her to fire a female sales associate with a strong performance record because the dark-skinned employee was not attractive enough." He wanted somebody "hot." Yanowitz sued and the CA Supreme Court ruled Thursday that workers were protected from having to perform duties that violate the state's anti-discimination laws.
DISCRIMINATION

Movies
Women's roles in film have been at best lacking. Here's a good analysis of the four categories of women's films (chick flick; earnest social commentary; cancer weepie; and action figure- great categorization) and ten that stand out.
WOMEN IN FILM

Ziyi Zhang is on the cusp of being a big big star. Look for her at the end of the year in Memoirs of a Geisha.
ZIYI ZHANG

Science
Early period not a key to obesity later in life.
MENSTRUATION

Politics
Bob Woodward predicts a Hillary Clinton vs. Dick Cheney 2008 presidential race.
CLINTON VS.CHENEY?

Maureen Dowd on Bush, Cindy Sheehan and his two hour workouts.
MAUREEN DOWD

They can do this in Norway, but I doubt they could do it here.
from Today's Guardian
"Last year, the Norwegian parliament passed a bill forcing private firms to have at least 40% women on their boards. Companies had until July to boost participation of their own accord. If the numbers are insufficient, which the state will decide by August 15, sanctions will be applied and they won't just be a slap on the wrist."

Ansgar Gabrielsen proposed the law when he was trade and industry secretary. He is currently the health secretary and had this great quote.

"To me, the law was not about getting equality between the sexes, it was about the fact that diversity is a value in itself, that it creates wealth," he said.

"From my time in the business world, I saw how board members were picked: they come from the same small circle of people. They go hunting and fishing together, they're friends." GREAT QUOTE!
WOMEN DIRECTORS IN NORWAY

Each Wednesday former World War II sex slaves protest in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea. The women want the Japanese government to acknowledge what happened to them and offer compensation for their rape and torture. Sounds reasonable to me.
SEX SLAVES FIGHT BACK

Don't you love it when irony bites you in the ass?
Mona Lisa Smile a movie starring Julia Roberts set in a 1950s women's college whose character encouraged the girls to seek out life's options beyond just getting married and having kids, seems to have discriminated against the female musicians who worked on the film's score. The EEOC decided the case yesterday in favor of the musicians. Pathetic.

File this under I can't believe people like this exist.
From the Associated Press
"A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.

'The defendant struck his wife approximately 70 individual blows after spending a happy interlude with her,'the judge said. He confessed to a bartender at a sports bar before his arrest. He told investigators that his wife had been nagging him to come back to bed."

TV
I've always loved Lauren Ambrose who plays Claire Fisher on the HBO drama Six Feet Under (which has been so great these last two weeks.) As the show wraps up its fifth and final season Amborse spoke with Salon. (Remember you must get a site pass to view the whole article)
LAUREN AMBROSE

Movies
Glamour Magazine has teamed up with Moxie films to create several shorts from essays submitted by Glamour's readers. The director's include: Gwenyth Paltrow; Mary Wigomore; Jenny Bicks, (Sex and the City); the director Trudy Styler (you know- Sting's wife); Rosario Dawson and Debi Mazar.

The set of films will eventually be shown in 25 markets starting in October, and a DVD containing them will also be inserted into the December issue of Glamour.

Glamour will donate money to FilmAid which will use the money for women in refugee camps in Kenya.

From today's NYTimes
"The brand is about the empowerment of women," Leslie Russo, Glamour's associate publisher said of the magazine's involvement in the project. "Today, with the culture being so celebrity-obsessed, how do we extend that message? How do we support the telling of real women's stories in Hollywood?"

Gwenyth Paltrow seems to me to have a healthy perspective on Hollywood. "The men in Hollywood make it hard for women. I really believe that. What it means is that it's kind of like the old-boy industries. It's mostly run by men."

"Still, Ms. Paltrow insisted, 'it takes women to write short films about women or features about women.'"

"'There's no reason why," she said, "if there's 'Wedding Crashers' for boys, there can't be something really funny yet intelligent for women, that has something to say for women.'"

Meryl Poster, former head of prodcution at Miramax, who is involved in the project has a shame on you quote in the story: "'Women aren't directing films in large numbers, she said, because it's an all-encompassing job that is not often compatible with the complexity of women's lives.'" Bad quote, Meryl.
WOMEN MAKING MOVIES

If you're in Dallas between now and August 28th, the Women's Museum is showing an exhibition on Suffrage where you can dress up as a suffragette and see screenings of Iron Jawed Angels.
SUFFRAGE EXHIBIT

Books
Judith Rossner, author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, had died. She was 70.

Hilarious Amy Borkowsky has a new book out Statements: True Tales of Life, Love, and Credit Card Bills, (Chamberlain Bros. 2005) which goes through a decade a credit card statements to give a take on a single girls life.
AMY BORKOWSKY

Bebe Moore Campbell's latest book, 72 Hour Hold, is a story of a divorced mother dealing with her bi-polar daughter.
BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL

Politics
Republican prosecutor Jeanine Pirro will seek the nomination to challenge NY Senator Hillary Clinton in 2006. The press is going to make this into a girlfight- guaranteed.

More on Cindy Sheehan and her vigil to get an audience with GWBush
From yesterday's Daily Kos
"Cindy Sheehan phoned me from Texas a few minutes ago to say that she's been informed that beginning Thursday, she and her companions will be considered a threat to national security and will be arrested. Coincidentally, Thursday is the day that Rice and Rumsfeld visit the ranch, and Friday is a fundraiser event for the haves and the have mores. Cindy said that she and others plan to be arrested."
MEET WITH CINDY
Joan Vennochi has an editorial in today's Boston Globe about Cindy Sheehan.
JOAN VENNOCHI
ALTERNET ON SHEEHAN

Magazines
A funny rant on the patheticness of women's magazines and how pathetic they are.
WOMEN'S MAGS

Brandon Holley, founding editor of Elle Girl, has been named editor of Jane.

Sexism in the Orchestra World- really?
One area where women are still lagging (there are so many others) is in learning-- and even applying to learn-- to become conductors. There are very few women at the top tier and last month when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra appointed Marin Alsop as its new musical director, a torrent of sexist issues were released.
ORCHESTRA

Movies
Great Cast- Gwenyth Paltrow, Meryl Streep and Annette Bening will star in "Dirty Tricks" a movie about Watergate.

Teen actress Evan Rachel Wood thinks that adults should allow kids to explore their sexuality is a responsible way. Smart girl. She opens in Pretty Persuasion on Friday in limited release.
EVAN RACHEL WOOD

Theatre
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has been tapped to pen the new Ray Charles project heading to Broadway.

DVD
Pick of the week- Off the Map - by director Campbell Scott and starring Joan Allen.
Netflix description- "A coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old girl, Bo (Valentina d'Angelis), who spends the summer of 1974 watching her father (Sam Elliott) battle a bout of depression that proves to be crippling. Bo's parents (Joan Allen plays her mother) moved to New Mexico to escape the stresses of the big city (as part of a 1960s-'70s exodus that saw similar moves across the country) and now find they're being investigated by the government for tax evasion."

Sports
100 meter Olympic Silver medalist Lauryn Williams, won the gold medal in the same race at the World Championships this weekend in Helsinki.

Women Coaches in the WNBA
The slow and steady decline of women in the ranks of coaches in the WNBA continues. Former Charlotte Hornets player Tyrone "Muggsy" Bogues takes over for Trudy Lacey as coach of the Charlotte Sting. He has no previous coaching experience. The Sting are the worst team in the League, yet there are several women who have been head coaches and are now assistants around the League who are much more qualified for the job. Question- would a woman professional player with no coaching experience get a job as head coach in the NBA? Fat Chance.

The trend of former male players taking over women's team will continue next season - Dave Cowen's was named head coach of the expansion Chicago team.

This trend is disturbing yet predicatable. Once women's coaching jobs become more lucrative, the men think, huh, I could do that. It's been moving that way in the college ranks since right after the passage of Title IX when the women's and men's athletic departments were combined.
WNBA COACHES

Politics
Another Hillary is a centrist article- even I'm starting to believe it.
HILLARY CLINTON

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq has camped out near the "Western White House" in Crawford, Texas. She will stay until she has an audience with President Bush to tell him how wrongsided his politices are. You go Girl!
CINDY SHEEHAN
CINDY SHEEHAN #2

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has her first post court assignment -- chairing a national civics lesson sponsored by the American Bar Association. The Civics lesson co-chaired by Bill Bradley will hopefully educate Americans about the three branches of government - things most American can't identify. Don't you think it would be better to focus on the fact that people are graduating from high school thinking that the three branches of government are republican, democrat and independent? Makes me want to cry. We are so frickin dumb.
CIVICS

Time Magazine's current piece on Condoleeza Rice's six month anniversary as Secretary of State. How can she gets us out of Iraq? Does she give a shit?
CONDI RICE

More on networks and cable covering only missing white girls
MISSING


Science
Screening works! Breast Cancer deaths are down because tumors found are smaller. Have you gotten your mammogram this year?
BREAST CANCER

Does the press pay more attention to missing white girls? duh

Dateline NBC, takes on the same topic tonight. "What's Missing," which examines why disappearances of minority women aren't covered extensively (much less obsessively) in the media, unlike the cases of white women such as Natalee Holloway and Laci Peterson. The program follows the family of Tamika Huston, of Spartanburg, S.C., which had had difficulty garnering media coverage of her suspicious disappearance.

PRESS COVERAGE

SPORTS
Sue Gunter, one of the most revered women's basketball coaches in the country died at 66. She took LSU to the NCAA tournament 14 times.

TV
ABC News senior correspondent Carole Simpson and longtime CNN journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault will both be inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Hall of Fame at the organization's 30th anniversary convention this week.

FILM
Six underappreciated and excellent actresses according to Jon Bonné on MSNBC. He has good taste.
6 ACTRESSES

Newsweek has an article on Evan Rachel Wood from Thirteen and my favorite cancelled TV show Once and Again. She will be a big star- guaranteed.
EVAN RACHEL WOOD

Kudos to the Boston Globe. Today, 3 out of 4 op-ed columns were written by women. I wish I agreed with all of them.

A little hope for Roberts? LA Times reports that he provided pro-bono legal advice on the landmark gay rights case Romer vs. Evans, which struck down a voter-approved 1992 Colorado initiative that would have allowed employers and landlords to exclude gays from jobs and housing. Seems Roberts also forgot to include this work on his questionnaire that Senate Judiciary committee members submitted.
ROBERTS

Mo Mowlam, former Northern Ireland Secretary and member of Parliment who helped push through the Good Friday agreement is critically ill in a London hospital.
MOWLAM

Women in Dubai- getting into the workplace
DUBAI

The Glass Ceiling is just starting to crack- celebrating 50 years of the Financial Women's Association of San Francisco
GLASS CEILING

POP CULTURE
Salma Hayek will star in Paradise, the four-hour telepic adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel for Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films and ABC.

Mary Louise Parker who was so awesome on The West Wing finally gets her own series as a pot-selling mom on Showtime's Weeds. Buzz is good. Starts Sunday night.
PARKER

Interview with Marin Alsop- new conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the rocky road to acceptance.
ALSOP

Rosie O'Donnell is expected to join the cast of Fiddler on The Roof on Broadway as Golde right after Labor Day. Makes me laugh to have two of the biggest homos on the planet Harvey Firestein and O'Donnell playing Tevye and Golde. Zero Mostel would love it!

You gotta love the BBC- they are spending all week talking to women in traditional male jobs. Today, Sandra Aguebor Edokpayi, Nigeria's first female mechanic.
BBC

Say What?
A guy has been appointed chair of the women's studies department at the University of Washington. Seems that no women wanted the job.
NPR (Day to Day- NPR audio story)

Next week Wal-mart will argue that the landmark class-action gender discrimination lawsuit filed against the company should no longer be classified as a class action suit. They contend that because it applies to so many people it would open up other companies to an avalance of lawsuits. Well, yeah, isn't that the point?
WAL-MART

TV
Oprah's next TV movie for ABC will be Paradise by Toni Morrison.

SPECIAL WNBA ANALYSIS
I've been ruminating for over a week on some issues related to the WNBA- specifically The Detroit Shock. I watch basically every WNBA game that is available on TV. I don't know if it's just scheduling issues but the Shock has been on at least 4 broadcasts in the last 2 weeks. One of the attractions to the Shock is its coach- Bill Laimbeer, a former professional basketball player with the Detroit Pistons.

I am all for getting people interested in the League, but my problem is the intense focus on the coach during these games. There are stories about him, features on him, news about him- the sportcasters seem obsessed with him. They are obsessed because he is very vocal and has a tendency to act like a petulant child and it seems that we cannot enjoy sports without someone acting like an idiot.

Enough about Bill Laimbeer! He was known as one of the "Bad Boys" when he was in Detroit. His bad attitude has certainly rubbed off of his team. The women on his team even posed for a picture under the heading of "bad girls." Competition is one thing, but a bad attitude- which the Shock has, is another.

They have the most fouls in the league and two weeks ago they got beaten by 40 points! Get over yourselves! Swagger is one thing but Elaine Powell, their point guard, got suspended for five games for elbowing an opponent in the face.

I worry that the women's game is becoming too much like the men's game. Lisa Leslie of the LA Sparks seems to get into tiffs on a regular basis- recently, she pushed Sheryl Swoopes of Houston in the back after a play.

Personally, the reason why I like women's sports is because they are competetive, exciting and DIFFERENT from the men's game.

My last rant about the Shock is over the trades they recently made. Earlier in the season they got Plenette Pierson (from Phoenix) for just a draft pick and another player which Phoenix then releases and Detroit resigned. This week they got Katie Smith, arguably the best shooter in the game, for 2 role players and another draft pick. What is up with this? The talent on this team is out of control. They had the best bench to begin with and now with Smith...Is someone else watching this besides me? There is something screwy going on here. If anyone know what's going on, pleas tell me.

POLITICS
Dianne Feinstein is the only woman on the Senate Juiciary Committee who will be questioning Judge John Roberts on his nomination to the Supreme Court.
FEINSTEIN

Ron Brownstein at the LA Times analyzes Hillary Clinton's new role with the DLC. Can this work out for anyone?
BROWNSTEIN

In keeping with the typical presidential flip flop in order to appease conservatives- George Pataki, Governor of NY, will veto the bill that will allow women to buy emergency contraception without a prescription. Pathetic!
EC VETO

The Pro-Choice Movement and the Roberts Nomination
CHOICE AND ROBERTS

Ellen Goodman's latest column on whether we can read anything into John Robert's views by his wife's views- she thinks not
GOODMAN

MAGS
How to be a best-selling author and the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan- life as Kate White
KATE WHITE

These girls rock at science
GIRLS AND SCIENCE