Love / Shove

Sister Spit: the Next Generation just started their Fall '09 tour! This year's tour features Ben McCoy, Kirya Traber, Sara Seinberg, Ariel Schrag, Beth Lisick, Rhiannon Argo, and of course, Sister Spit and RADAR founder Michelle Tea. This month's article from the Bitch archives is a flashback to Issue #11 (before there were even themes!), where a young Kira Garcia tags along for 1990's Sister Spit tour. Check out her tour diary, "Why Don't We do it on the road" online! Read on for tour dates or visit their official site (they're also heading out again next April).

Dear Women,

We realize that we're already making you feel bad about your hair, breasts, lips, butt, legs, and overall body type, but our work is far from over. We would now like to introduce you to a new, hopefully self-esteem-lowering, chock-full-o-side-effects cosmetic designed to make you feel like your F*ING EYELASHES aren't good enough. Please watch the following video, feel the requisite amount of inadequacy, ignore the dangers, and write your doctor a big fat check for some LATISSE today.

Sincerely, Your Beloved Beauty Industrial Complex

"[The word "feminist"] has an ugly ring to it. I actually stopped using the term a while ago because it sounds so mean. It sounds so unsexy. I think it's come to [indicate] angry women who don't like men at all and don't like having sex, so I can see why people stray away from it. It's not one of those things you want to bring up in everyday conversation. But I know I am one....

"Feminist misinformation is pervasive," Christina Hoff Sommers writes in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education.“Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship” is the latest from the author of Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminisim is Harming our Young Men, adding to her legacy of anti-feminist feminism and raising a stink over the contemporary feminist movement in academia.

Wednesday's New York Times Fashion & Style section featured an article on the recent "outpouring of fashions aimed at trend-driven, round-figured teenagers and young women." Round-figured? Outpouring? Is that model in the frozen food section of a grocery store?

Read more after the jump!

…come to us via VideoGum! First up is country ballad against porn (and strip clubs, and dirty thoughts) “Somebody’s Daughter.” Are your jerk-off sessions more like tearjerkers? Is your daughter going to become a "college casualty" at an "institute of higher learning"?! Read on!

 The murder of Kansas physician George Tiller is a devastating and, unfortunately, perfect illustration of the stupid, hypocritical, blindered self-righteousness of the anti-choice movement. And just as painful as the news itself is seeing the variety of twists and dodges with which the mainstream media does—or doesn’t—cover it.

I almost don’t want to give the New York Times the pageviews it was obviously courting in publishing Ross Douthat’s stunningly underthought and journalistically sloppy column “Liberated and Unhappy.” But those of you who’ve read Beth Skwarecki’s article “Mad Science: Deconstructing Bunk Reporting in 5 Easy Steps” will immediately recognize the tricks Douthat uses in his “analysis” of the supposed link between the gains of feminism and the sad, benighted women it’s left in its wake.

The 2007 study on which Douthat hangs today's column is called  “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” and was authored by two economists from The Wharton School of Business; reading it, it seems fair to say that, like many an interesting study, it makes a sweeping hypothesis — “By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s declining relative happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men” — and then spends much of the following 44 pages explaining that it’s not actually that simple, and exploring the many variables that may contribute to this decline. For instance, the social pressure on women of the 1960s and ‘70s to put on a happy face (even one that was chemically induced) is very likely a factor in the study’s self-reporting; so is the probability that, as revealed in a study by another economist published around the same time as “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” men have over the past several decades cut back on activities they don’t like and, as a result, have more true leisure time; women —whose leisure time, particularly if they have families, is not their own—have less.

If you haven't checked out the Midwest Teen Sex Show yet, it's not too late. When it comes to frank yet funny sex talk, this video cast is so good it almost makes me wish I was a clueless, awkward teen again (Say it with me now, "♪ Allllllll-most! ♪"). Read on for more about this awesome web show and where it's headed!

NPR reported on a new candy bar from Mars--its first in 20 years--called the Fling. Wrapped in a shimmery pink and silver package, it's not just its low calorie count that is catering to women. The campaign behind it has taken an unsubtle approach to marketing the candy bar as more of a marital aid than an item from a vending machine. While "finger" may be an industry term for a thin and slender, it takes on a whole different meaning with the catchphrase "Pleasure Yourself" (Also gross and awkward: "Serving Size: 1 Finger"). Other taglines like "Naughty, but not that naughty," "Have a FLING™ in private, or wave it all around town; in the office, the bedroom, or the great outdoors," make no ambiguous implications that the Fling satisfies better than a Snickers. But how?!