Shonda Rhimes

Did this week go by fast or what? Here's what we're reading on this fine Friday...

• When a woman performs oral sex on a man without his express consent, is it rape? If not, why not? At the Daily Beast, Amanda Marcotte considers the case of rapper Danny Brown and the unwanted onstage blowjob. [The Daily Beast]

• This past Sunday, thousands of protestors marched in Morocco after the brutal sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl, in order to raise awareness of, as one particpant put it "victims not only of rape but victims of silence and society's inaction as well." [allAfrica]

• The New York Times considers the success of showrunner Shonda Rhimes in an age of network television's declining viewership. [New York Times]

• Transgender high-school student Isaak Wolfe will not have his chosen name called at his graduation ceremonies; his Pennsylvania school district is insisting on calling his birth name instead. The ACLU is appealing to the school's administration on behalf of Wolfe and other transgender students. [Huffington Post]

• A team of British feminists will relaunch Spare Rib, the radical magazine that began publishing in 1972 and folded in 1993. New editor Charlotte Raven promises that it will "revive the spirited and soulful vision of feminism that SR once embodied, not the timid liberal one that dominates the mainstream media." [The Guardian]

• It has long seemed that the quickest route to consideration as a "serious" female actor is playing evil. At the Women and Hollywood blog, Melissa Silverstein asks why. [Women and Hollywood]

• Why don't more women run for office? (Spoiler alert: money and sexism, mostly.) [The Cut]

• Thoughts, inspired by the douchebag comments of Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries, on being a feminist in a world of fat shaming. [International Design Times; Sin City Siren]

• A fascinating look at Bertha Alexander, the woman who started one of America's biggest, most beloved doll companies, Madame Alexander. [Tablet]

I've eagerly anticipated the series premiere of Scandal, Shonda Rhimes's new foray into DC politics and the people who manage political personalities (and their many issues) behind the scenes. Led by Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope—a legendary game changer with connections all the way to White House leadership—a lawyer-heavy, fast-talking team of People Who Excel have become a kind of Leverage-like problem solvers. (It's just that these problems and situations don't require nearly as many rappel lines or night vision goggles.) I was curious to see what kind of woman Rhimes would create to unravel the misdeeds of political figures, since she's given us other strong-minded, independent women of color in Cristina Yang and Callie Torres on Grey's Anatomy. And with one huge, gaping caveat, I wasn't disappointed in the first episode.

I thought it might be fun to start this series by exploring some female creators who are shaking things up in their industries. These women are a sign of great things to come, like some shifts in the way that women are treated as creators both by fellow creative professionals and the general public.