26 Feb 2013
Seth MacFarlane performed what is likely Hollywood’s most thankless job Sunday night — hosting the Oscars. Right on cue, his bad reviews came in. Buzzfeed, among many other publications such as Daily Beast, did a takedown of his “juvenile” material and his nine most sexist moments. Not being familiar with Mr. MacFarlane’s work, I have no stake whatsoever in defending or attacking him, but have a different...
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20 Feb 2013
Images of Rihanna nestled close to fiancé Chris Brown at the Grammys last week were disturbing, considering he had previously punched her in the face, bitten and beaten her, even tattooing what appeared to be an image of the same on his neck. Beyoncé’s recent half-time show at the Super Bowl was called “sexy” by pundits, but could just as easily be called hyper-sexualized. No...
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24 Jan 2013
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave 5-1/2 hours of patient and thorough testimony before the Senate and House yesterday regarding the events surrounding the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Not surprisingly, Wesley Pruden of The Washington Times published a smear piece entitled “Hillary’s Last Hurrah.” He offered a photograph of the one moment she became frustrated with Republican Senator Johnson of Wisconsin, who...
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04 Dec 2012
“Good News for Hillary 2016: New Study Says Media Gender Bias Has Almost Disappeared” …so reads The Grindstone headline to Ruth Graham’s latest article. Quoting research from Jennifer Lawless and Danny Hayes covering 4,748 newspaper articles in the 2010 congressional races, Ms. Graham finds much to celebrate. I am loathe to argue with her, since she was kind enough to interview me regarding this...
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27 Nov 2012
Suzanne Venker, author of the new book, ‘How to Choose a Husband (and Make Peace with Marriage),’ insists feminism has been bad for women and good for men: “Men can have sex at hello” with “no responsibility whatsoever,” she states. So marriage makes a man automatically “take responsibility”? Quoting Pew Research Center, Venker offers that more women today want to get married than they did...
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19 Sep 2012
These past two years, we have been stunned by a pundit class offering everything from grudging to glowing praise of Hillary Clinton, a candidate they had roundly excoriated four years earlier. What changed? And will the men and women in mainstream media who exhibited a reckless, cruel bias toward not only Hillary, but her supporters, now pretend the debacle of the 2008 primaries never occurred?...
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29 Aug 2012
At Best Buy one lazy Sunday afternoon six years back, I sampled my first Ipod. The pre-programmed music selections featured India.Arie singing “I Am Not My Hair,” a magnificent composition written, in part, to honor Melissa Etheridge, who appeared bald at the Grammys after her chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer: I am not my hair I am not your expectations, oh no. I am not...
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14 Aug 2012
There is a reason why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fights for the empowerment of women and girls around the world. Even in the 2012 Olympics, we were not immune from institutionalized sex bias. At 16, Gabby Douglas became the first African American to win a gold medal in gymnastics. She subsequently received Twitter-bashing about her hair so widespread, it was reported by CNN and...
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20 Jun 2012
by Anita Finlay “Men Rule Media Coverage on Women’s News,” Abigail Pesta’s recent Daily Beast article, makes clear that men still control the news narrative at all levels. The data presented is taken from Silenced: Gender Gap in the 2012 Election Coverage, a six-month study detailing researchers’ troubling findings after tracking thousands of print articles and TV segments, logging almost 51,000 quotes. Here’s what I think… And a picture is worth...
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