Actually it was having had that abortion that was my first tie to Ms. and the women’s movement. The Preview Issue of the magazine, which was excerpted in New York magazine, included among such classics as “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” by Jane O’Reilly and “I Want a Wife” by Judy Syfers, a list of celebrity names under the headline “We Have Had Abortions.” It took a lot of courage back then to admit to what was a crime. In the corner was a coupon which readers could fill out to add their name to the list. I filled it out with pride and relief (I hadn’t admitted to my crime before), and by the time those coupons were being counted and processed several months later, I was managing editor of Ms.

Many of the social, economic, and political restrictions that held women back were overthrown during the 17 years I was there, and Ms. was a prime mover in that wave of change. Every day at work I was learning a lot about women and about myself. I know for sure that I would not be the person I am today had I not been part of the Ms. experience, and I certainly would not have had the expertise to draw on when I started writing about Second Adulthood (Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, Fifty Is the New Fifty, and out this month How We Love Now). Without the women’s movement, I wouldn’t have had the courage or the confidence to even draw on that expertise and go public with my ideas.

This year Ms. celebrates its fortieth anniversary. It’s hard to believe that it has been so long, and when I look at photographs I am amazed at how young we were! My daughter is 25, the age of most of the staff back then. She wears whatever she pleases—but never a girdle (do they still exist?); she has several credit cards in her name; she has maintained a commitment to volleyball throughout her school years and now plays on a (co-ed) New York City team; and if she needed an abortion, she could get one (though women, especially rural women, in other states, would have a much harder time).

The battles we fought are won, but not over. Women still earn less for the same job than men; the fashion and beauty industry still makes us feel we should look a certain way and if we don’t—especially if we are over forty—we should be ashamed. Title IX, which made women’s sports viable, is under siege from those institutions that think their athletic budgets are better spent on football. And as every election and legislative session reminds us, the right to choose abortion is under siege. Her generation will undoubtedly be called upon to hold onto these gains.

As she moves through her life, my daughter will also come up against still unresolved inequities. If she marries and has children, she will quickly learn that no matter how much of the work and family responsibilities her partner shares, the workplace is inhospitable to the needs of working parents. Sure, we now have family leave policies, but since frequently they are unpaid, time off is a luxury most can’t afford. And although work hours have eased up somewhat, there is a price for that flexibility too—a gentle shove off the fast track. That will have to change.

Caregiving in general, she will learn, is still women’s work. Studies show that when a family is called upon to take care of an aging or ailing relative, it is almost always a female (an unmarried female is usually the first choice—as if she didn’t have pressures and responsibilities of her own, including being her own sole financial support) who gets nominated. I see care-getting as a new frontier that I hope my daughter’s generation will cross; it is time for our society to step in where individual (unpaid) caregivers are toiling, and it is essential for all those caregivers to be encouraged to give the same degree of care that they are expending on others to their own well-being.

Her generation will also have issues of their own. But thanks to the strength and confidence they have absorbed from the changing world Ms. has been celebrating—and chastising—for 40 years, I have no doubt that they will prevail.

Stanford University will mark the 40th anniversary of Ms. magazine with a winter quarter of more than 25 events titled: “Ms. at 40 and the Future of Feminism.” The symposium, which will run from January through March, will feature lectures, panel discussions. performances, exhibits and an international, multigenerational essay contest.

This post originally appeared at Huff/Post 50. Reprinted with permission.

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Lee Standish is a quick-witted and likable family man. His best friend, Angel Ortiz, is a hotheaded ladies’ man with no filter. The two of them worked at Pontiac–Lee as a top salesman and Angel as head mechanic–until the company went out of business. Out of work for a year, their job prospects don’t look too bright. They’ve learned the hard way that the current recession is more of a “man-cession” and their skills aren’t in high demand. Then the almost-broke Lee finds out that Coreco Pharmaceuticals is looking to hire sales reps–female sales reps. He takes a chance and goes into the interview dressed in heels, a skirt and make-up. The transformed Lee gets hired–as a woman.

“Work It” is a network TV comedy, so it would be unreasonable to expect the plot to be plausible, let alone realistic. However, the term “man-cession” has been bandied about in earnest, and “Work It” has the potential to keep it in circulation. So I’d like to set the record straight about the current relationship between gender and unemployment.

“Man-cession” refers to the first few years of the recession, in which men lost 2.5 times as many jobs as women. But in February of 2010, the trend reversed, yielding what’s been called the “he-covery“: Men have since picked up 2 million jobs, while women have lost another 164,000.

Today, the jobless rate for adult men is 8.3 percent, vs. 7.8 percent for adult women. In keeping with the he-covery, unemployment fell for adult men in November by .05 percent. The jobless rate for adult women, teenagers (23.7 percent), blacks (15.5 percent), and Hispanics (11.4 percent) stayed the same.

As you can see, unemployment remains high across the board. However, with less than one percentage point separating men and women in the unemployment stats, claims of a “man-cession” are more fantasy than fact. If you want an awkward buzzword to sum up our complex economic reality, you’d be better off with “youth-cession” or “race-cession.” Times are tough for everyone, but youth and people of color are really bearing the brunt.

Where “Work It” goes from merely inaccurate to downright offensive is with the notion that Lee and Angel are so marginalized and put upon by our female-dominated society that they are forced to adopt an unconvincing drag act to get a job. The local pharmaceutical company is hiring, but not men. Why? According to one of the reps, it’s because, “The doctors don’t want to nail them.” In the world of “Work It,” medicine is the last preserve of male employability–in fact, all doctors are presumably men or lesbians. By that logic, Lee and Angel should have donned white coats instead of wigs.

The notion that artless and transparent drag is a golden ticket to upward mobility flies in the face of the very high unemployment rates in the transgender community. A survey [PDF] of 6,450 transgender people by the National Center for Transgender Equity found that respondents had double the unemployment rate of the population at large. An astonishing 90 percent of respondents reported either experiencing harassment or discrimination at work or taking careful steps to avoid it, such as hiding their gender identity. Twenty-six percent reported that they had lost jobs because of their gender presentation.

Advocates for transgender rights have called on ABC to pull “Work It” for disseminating negative stereotypes about transgender individuals. Defenders of the show disingenuously counter that “Work It” couldn’t possibly be trafficking in negative stereotypes about transgender people because Lee and Angel aren’t really transgender, they’re red-blooded cisgendered males who are forced to pretend to be women to get ahead in our man-hating, female-dominated society.

The premise of “Work It” is that men impersonating women have it easier in today’s job market. The reality for transgender people in the workplace is exactly the opposite.

You can sign here to ask that ABC pull “Work It”:

Read more from Lindsay Beyerstein on the race and gender impact of job creation strategies in the current issue of Ms–available on newsstands, or direct to your door if you join the Ms. community.

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We should be worried about the infantilization of women for two reasons:

First, it’s directly related to the sexualization of young girls. As I wrote in a previous post:

…on the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and maturity. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.

Second, the need for women to look like babies to be beautiful, along with the requirement for women to be beautiful, turns aging into a trauma for women. Susan Sontag, in her (truly beautiful) essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” put it this way:

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man… A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another …

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.

That feeling of defeat may well be very lucrative for Maybelline, if we buy into it.

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But to transgender women, these images are no laughing matter. Their femaleness is no masquerade, yet they often experience discrimination for not being able or not desiring to “pass “as women. Trans men, who are typically less distinguishable from other men, likewise are frequently subjected to discrimination if their transgender histories are known. Individuals who do not identify as either women or men face even greater obstacles.

Our book, The Lives of Transgender People, confirms that gender nonconforming individuals experience widespread discrimination. In surveying close to 3,500 transgender people, we found that more than a fourth of the respondents and a third of the transgender respondents of color had experienced subtle or overt harassment in the previous year. In addition, nearly a fifth of the participants had been denied employment or advancement because of their gender identity or expression. The participants who were widely known to be transgender had the greatest difficulties; more than a third indicated that they experienced ongoing employment discrimination.

Common was the experience of Lynn, a 35-year-old transsexual female interviewee. She was fired from two jobs when she told her supervisors that she would be transitioning from male to female, and she has not been able to find work since then. Because she is unemployed, Lynn does not have health insurance and can no longer afford hormones. She faces an impossible dilemma: she encounters anti-transgender discrimination because she does not look like other women, but without a job she cannot afford to alter her body to look more traditionally female. Robert, a 51-year-old trans man, chose to take his chances finding other work, stating: “I walked out on the job I had when I was diagnosed because [my supervisors] would not let me transition at work and I would not put up with one more day of trying to pretend to be female. ”

The discrimination Lynn and Robert experienced remains completely legal. There is no federal law protecting transgender workers, and only 16 states and the District of Columbia ban employment discrimination against individuals because of their gender identity or expression. Absent government action, most employers have failed to take the initiative themselves. Although a growing number of businesses and educational institutions are recognizing the importance of this issue, they remain the minority. Only about one-third of Fortune 1000 companies and, appallingly, just one-tenth of colleges and universities currently have trans-inclusive nondiscrimination policies.

Work It makes a mockery of transgender experiences. It portrays “men in dresses “(a common caricature of transgender people) as comically absurd, while, at the same time, depicting a world in which the difference between one’s gender presentation and gender at birth is a non-issue. If only it were that easy for individuals assigned male at birth to be accepted as they see themselves: as women.

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

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But it’s not all sunshine and roses. Despite an overall improvement in the quality of television, even the best shows sometimes fall back on tired clichés about gender and sexuality. The reasons vary dramatically, but at the end of the day, these moments of tired sexism are most jarring not because they’re “politically incorrect,” but because they come across as false and push the audience away from maintaining their suspension of disbelief. So here’s a list of eight WTF sexist moments that hurt–or in some cases, permanently destroyed–otherwise good television shows.

***SPOILER alert: This post contains details about past episodes of “Community,” “Mad Men,” “30 Rock,” “The Killing,” “Veronica Mars,” “The Walking Dead,” “Parks and Recreation”  and “Sex and the City.”

1. Britta Perry declares her love for Jeff Winger on “Community.” Britta Perry is the token leftist feminist of an eclectic group of friends in this show about the comical goings-on of a Colorado community college. Most feminists don’t mind the constant potshots taken at Britta for her often-childish and self-centered take on feminist and liberal politics. The show leaves no sacred cow untipped, and feminists are certainly not off-limits for ribbing. But Britta has also been consistently characterized as breezily assured of her sexuality and her right to indulge in casual sex, in contrast to tedious sitcom stereotypes that would have you believe all women mistake sex for love.

So why then did the writers have her humiliate herself in the finale of the first season with a public declaration of love for Jeff simply because they had a one-night stand? Until that moment, there had been no indication that Britta felt anything for Jeff besides naked lust combined with a bit of fraternal camaraderie. Why would the audience think she would turn to a simpering romantic just because she touched his penis once?

Luckily, the writers seemed to grasp just as quickly as the audience how out of character this behavior was for Britta, and simply dropped the romance storyline, replacing it with indications that Britta and Jeff have nothing more than a friends-with-benefits relationship.

2. Joan Holloway on “Mad Men” doesn’t get an abortion. “Mad Men,” a drama about a 1960s-era advertising firm, is renowned for its thoughtful, pro-feminist view, so this failure is especially disappointing. When Joan got pregnant, the pro-choicers in the audience collectively grew anxious. Already, “Mad Men” had engaged in the cliché of having a character, Betty, consider and then abandon the idea of an abortion, even though it seemed like the smartest choice. With Joan, the possibility of keeping a pregnancy seemed even stranger. Not only were the stakes higher in her situation, as she’s married to a violent rapist who is likely to react poorly if he finds out she’s pregnant with another man’s baby, but the show had already established that Joan had prior abortions and no moral qualms about the procedure.

After leading the audience to believe for several episodes that Joan did, in fact, get an abortion, the show’s writers punked out in the season finale, putting her in a scene where she’s chatting about her pregnancy with her husband while he’s stationed in Vietnam. While there were prior efforts to show how much Joan wanted a baby with her new husband, the moment still felt false in an otherwise great episode. Joan Holloway has always been portrayed as a survivor and an eminently pragmatic person; it’s hard to imagine she’d be this eager to put herself in danger just to have a baby right now.

3. Liz Lemon steals a baby on “30 Rock.” While “30 Rock” employs a lot of traditional sexist tropes to create comic situations in its setting behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show at NBC, they are usually tweaked in some way to subvert expectations and avoid the typical sexist themes. Sure, Liz may be a loser at love, but you discover that it’s not because of TV’s steadfast belief that “career women” can’t find husbands, but because Liz herself is a misanthrope who sabotages every potential relationship because deep down, she has no real desire to share her life.

Would such a woman be baby crazy enough that, when given a random baby to hold at work, she loses her mind and wanders home, coochie-cooing the baby for half an hour until she realizes her terrible mistake and returns the baby in shame? It doesn’t make any sense, but this happens in one of the least funny incidents on the fast-paced sitcom. Sure, babies are cute, but there’s no way they’d try that story line with a male character. The show seemed to be suggesting that because Liz is female, she can barely control her baby lust or her strong desire to stay at home instead of hold an income-generating job. The show is much better off when it portrays Liz as a workaholic who can’t quite accept that she’s married to her job, rather than a baby-hungry, single-woman stereotype.

4. Detective Linden has stupid problems on “The Killing.” “The Killing” had one of the most promising pilot episodes of any TV series in recent memory, immediately drawing hopeful comparisons to luminary programs such as “Twin Peaks,” with its portrayal of a sharp detective trying to solve a single murder that has implications for an entire city. To add to the excitement, the show was built around a normal-seeming but highly competent female detective, setting expectations high that we would see a female professional portrayed honestly on television.

Unfortunately, the show demonstrated in a few episodes that it had no chance of living up to the high expectations. One of the most prominent demonstrations of its lack of imagination is the stereotypical, sexist problems the writers gave Sarah Linden in her personal life. She had a nagging son and fiancé, and while she clearly loved her work, we were expected to believe she was ready to throw it all away for marriage without really thinking it through. The ready assumption that professional women necessarily struggle with unsupportive families and a desire to head to the kitchen seemed like it was straight from a ’70s-era reactionary film, and no amount of grim determination on actress Mireille Enos’ face could cover up the flaws in her characterization.

5. Evil feminists fake a rape on “Veronica Mars.” The first two seasons of “Veronica Mars” nicely helped feminist TV fans minimize the withdrawal symptoms from the end of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The show followed a teenage girl who chooses to live a life of a private investigator instead of simply being content with high school and college. Sure, Veronica could never fully compete with Buffy in a one-on-one competition of witty, badass ladies with surprising vulnerabilities, but as a 21st-century Nancy Drew, she still provided the audience with mysteries to solve and a fun and clever heroine to root for.

Well, the writers must have realized they’d cultivated a feminist audience and feared they’d get cooties, because they spent the third season portraying feminists as evil bitches set on destroying the supposed wonderland of the college Greek system. Feminists on the show faked a rape specifically to take down the fraternities at Veronica’s college, and only Veronica has the wits to stop them.

A word to every television writer who thinks it’s clever to write a plot where a woman “cries rape,” is instantly believed, and turns out to be a liar: you’re not clever. That may be the stupidest cliché ever on television. To watch TV, you’d think all rape victims are instantly believed and comforted, and that the vast majority of them are lying. In reality, the percentage of rape reports that are false is 2-8 percent, in line with false reports of other crimes. Victims who speak out don’t actually face a warm bath of social acceptance; more often they get mostly hostility from friends, family and law enforcement. Because of this, only an estimated 6 percent of rapists actually spend a day in jail. TV writers who want to do something daring and interesting about rape would actually be going against the grain by showing a determined crime fighter getting justice for a rape victim who is being stonewalled at every turn. Learn from the failures of “Veronica Mars,” which was summarily canceled after the feminists-are-evil plot of season three.

6. The baffling would-be abortion on “The Walking Dead.” Lori Grimes on “The Walking Dead” is pregnant, and for very good reasons, doesn’t want to be. After all, the show follows a band of people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, which ranks at the top of least ideal situations in human history for bringing forth new life. Zombies are known to pick off the slowest member of the group, so waddling along heavy with child simply isn’t in your best interest. To make it worse, Lori might be pregnant by her husband’s best friend, whom she sought comfort with while mistakenly believing her husband dead.

The show deals with this in the worst possible way. First of all, Lori is shown trying to take a box of pills comically labeled “Morning-After Pills,” even though that’s just a nickname for emergency contraception. This, even though the morning-after pill is not abortion, and taking it after testing positive for pregnancy is likely to work as well as jumping up and down. But even allowing for the slim possibility that the writers were trying to show that the characters are stupid enough to believe this, the way the entire plot goes down is unforgivable. The writers employ the standard “woman gets talked out of an abortion” cliché that follows every time someone has an unintended pregnancy on TV, right down to using a sad and desperate husband bully his wife into having a baby by saying, “We’ll find a way.” Oh really? A way around the zombie apocalypse? If you actually had such a way, you wouldn’t be holding back until someone has an emergency pregnancy situation to break open the glass labeled “finding a way to raise a happy family during a zombie apocalypse.”

7. April Ludgate and Andy Dwyer get married on “Parks and Recreation.” Fans love “Parks and Recreation” for its warm-hearted but satirical take on life inside small-town, middle-America government agencies. After countless jokes about how April is too young to do much of anything, including go into a bar with her over-21 boyfriend Andy, the writers decided that the best thing to do with these two characters is marry them off. That wasn’t so much of a problem, since there’s no rule on television against characters doing profoundly stupid things (and in fact, you need characters to make bad decisions to make sure the plot keeps churning).

The problem is that the show clearly wanted the audience to root for immature marriage as an objective good. The main character Leslie Knope plays the role of the curmudgeon throughout the episode, and her wise reminders to take your time and not rush into marriage are portrayed as clueless moral scolding. The climax of the show centers around Leslie giving up her cherished feminist beliefs about delaying marriage until maturity and joining in a sentimental celebration of two very immature people making an important decision they’re clearly not ready for.

The episode hinted at the decline of what was once the best sitcom on TV. The most recent season has featured a drift away from the satirical approach to the characters and toward a sentimental goopiness that doesn’t allow that the characters could ever really be wrong in their decisions, even when it’s something as foolish as getting married too young.

8. Miranda Hobbes dashes out of an abortion clinic on “Sex and the City.” It’s a wonder abortion clinics in TV Land stay in business, since it seems most of their traffic comes from women coming in, sitting down for two minutes, and then dashing out the door in a vale of tears. Perhaps abortion clinics charge a cover at the door on TV. “Sex and the City” practically set the template for this kind of storyline in 2001, when Miranda decides at the last minute to forgo an abortion on the grounds that this pregnancy might be her last chance to have a baby.

“Sex and the City” disappointed feminists in many ways, but the show was usually stalwart in its support of women’s reproductive, social and economic rights. Viewers could tell the writers were reluctant to give that distinction up, even while engaging in the cliché of having a character reject the possibility of abortion, and so Miranda’s story was accompanied by Carrie reflecting on a past abortion and Samantha mentioning having had two in passing. While it was nice having the writers go out of their way to validate both the choices to have an abortion and to keep the pregnancy, they still managed to do so in a way that avoided showing a character actually choosing an abortion during the course of the show. For a show that was supposed to be revolutionary in its approach to women, Miranda’s choice felt like a punt.

While television is becoming more daring and more feminist all the time, it’s clear from this list that there are many basic feminist ideas that still read as taboo on the small screen: the realities of rape, women’s ability to choose abortion without shame; the fact that not all women are hungry for marriage and babies; and women’s genuine experiences of having passion for their work. If you’re a TV writer looking to break some boundaries and do something genuinely interesting, may I recommend tackling these issues bravely and honestly?

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Photo from Flickr user *USB* under Creative Commons 2.0.

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I served as the Sexual Harassment Officer for the City of Chicago for 16 years and know all too well that harassment remains a widespread problem impacting workplace safety and equality for both women and men. I have listened to hundreds of accounts of harassment, ranging from graphic sexual propositions to stalking and sexual assault.

I am also acutely aware that there are rampant misconceptions about the issue, which this article does absolutely nothing to dispel. After supervising almost 1,000 investigations, I am frustrated by Ms. Parker’s misleading and overly simplistic argument that in sexual harassment cases, “perception” is everything. The conclusions of sexual harassment investigations, whether sustained or not, have to be based on evidence gathered through review of documents, the work site, handwriting, crime lab results and exhaustive witness testimony. This evidence can’t be based on mere perception; it has to stand up to the scrutiny of union grievances, administrative hearings, arbitrations and federal lawsuits. In all the complaints I handled, not one involved a book deal and most complainants never received a cent; they simply wanted the harassment to stop so they could remain on their jobs and feed their families.

Just because perception isn’t everything does not mean it is nothing. I agree with Ms. Parker that people have different perceptions of allegedly sexually harassing behavior, just as they do about many things in life. Some people perceive that exposing oneself to a co-worker or grabbing a co-worker’s breasts is just a joke, while the person to whom this is directed, more often than not a woman, perceives it as a deep personal violation. When Ms. Parker and I entered the workforce, there was a widespread perception that this behavior was something that just had to be tolerated. It was certainly not legally actionable. That has changed, and I perceive that a step forward for workplace rights.

When Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Thomas confirmation hearings, the country experienced what many referred to as a “national teach-in on sexual harassment.” At that time I was working at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and vividly recall being riveted to the television with a group of other attorneys watching Professor Hill’s testimony. The serious allegations against Herman Cain could present another watershed opportunity for a publication like Newsweek to educate its readers about the development of sexual harassment law in our country, but that opportunity was missed with Ms. Parker’s editorial.

Photo of Herman Cain addressing allegations of sexual harassment at a press conference in Arizona by flickr user Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons 2.0

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Our rape culture, our misunderstanding of the way assault and harassment demean and hurt victims, is worse than ever. Denial is running rampant.

You’d think our national op-ed pages would rush to publish feminist-minded pieces by victim’s advocates, arguing that we take sexual assault and harassment more seriously, that we update our attitudes to reflect our laws, and update those laws, too, if needed.

What we got instead, in The New York Times, was a column by professional antifeminist Katie Roiphe, with the essential message that sexual harassment is just ladies who can’t take a joke. The headline is, “In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks,” and the URL spells out “Sexual Harassment? What on Earth is That?”

I knew that ’90s nostalgia was in style again, but I didn’t expect this type of Anita Hill-era retread.

These kinds of contrarian arguments—so popular at The New York Times and like publications—are dangerous. They get swallowed up and absorbed by the mainstream culture and become used as weapons, allowing people who should know better to dismiss those who raise legitimate concerns about rape and harassment and abuse of power as “no fun,” “man-hating” and “anti-sex.” This stereotype, as anyone who has seen or heard about a SlutWalk (or talked to most self-identified feminists in the last 50 years) can tell you, is simply not true.

Before we deconstruct the argument, let’s take note of its arguer’s history. Katie Roiphe has been described by Rebecca Traister as the “enfant terrible” of the feminist movement, dogging women’s advocates ever since 1991 when she published The Morning After, a book that tried to discredit the notion of acquaintance rape on campus. (Parodying the content of that book, the Awl’s Choire Sicha once memorably introduced her thus: “Katie Roiphe—whose first book, You’re Actually Just a Whore: Raping Doesn’t Happen at College, was so ridiculous that she should never have been published again.”)

You get the idea. Insert feminist idea and expect a knee-jerk Roiphe retort, one filled with allusions to her own delightful rapport with the male gender, unlike those other feminists who are always killing the buzz with complaints like “rape is bad.”

This weekend, in the classic Roiphe vein, she writes, essentially, that sexual harassment laws mean that dirty jokes have been criminalized, no one can have any fun at work and the long arm of the law now prohibits flirty, bold women (presumably like herself) from parrying innuendo for innuendo. Instead, in a world as bleak as 1984‘s dystopia, all would-be wits must become silent desk-drones lest they and their repartee-partners be hauled off and booked at their local precinct.

Except that’s not what sexual harassment is. It’s not about conversation, but about abuse of authority or privilege.

Ask nearly any woman who worked in an office environment before those laws Roiphe decries came into effect and they will tell you that it wasn’t very much fun, and it wasn’t mutual—each day was a gauntlet, in fact. At the Daily Beast, Leslie Bennetts explains why what Herman Cain is accused of doing was wrong, and why it should be taken seriously:

Sexual harassment is about the lust for sexual gratification, obviously, but it’s also about power. When a man in a position of authority pressures a woman to service him sexually even if she doesn’t want to, and her ability to refuse is compromised by … her dependent status, the man is committing an egregious abuse of power. For him, that’s a large part of the point: he’s demonstrating his dominance and demanding that the woman acknowledge her subservience.

Beyond the sort of quid pro quo (or implied quid pro quo) behavior Bennetts describes, there’s the notion of a hostile environment. Roiphe makes the ignorant assumption that all ribald or sexual chatter in the office is an actionable offense (it also assumes that most people are dying to talk dirty at work, but that is another story) and that office environments are dominated by prudes who yell “see you in court!” when they hear any reference they deem impure.

In reality, a hostile environment is described as a repeated and protracted problem that is ignored or not addressed. Amanda Marcotte wrote a rebuttal of Roiphe, noting her utter misunderstanding of this basic legal and workplace concept:

Roiphe is, without a shred of evidence, claiming that sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits are generally about a single comment or quickly dispatched advance. In reality, for something to rise to the level of sexual harassment, it has to be a ‘hostile work environment,’ aka persistent abuse. No one is getting [sued] for one day saying something a little off-color, and it’s intellectually dishonest for her to suggest otherwise.

Marcotte also notes that the vagueness of words like “hostile” and “uncomfortable” are there not to be able to qualify everything off-color as sexual harassment, but to allow people to discern the difference:

As the Clarence Thomas situation showed, sexual harassers are endlessly inventive with their euphemisms or gestures. If anything, they deliberately act as weird as possible in an act that is so common that psychologists have a name for it: gaslighting, i.e. acting strange to disorient the victim so that she doubts herself. … Thus, the language of ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘hostile’ is good language, since a reasonable person can see that putting a pubic hair on a Coke can is a hostile gesture designed to make the victim uncomfortable.

At Slate, Roiphe’s colleague KJ Dell’Antonia also has a response, taking on Roiphe’s assertion that no smart and competent woman would be “derailed” by an unwanted advance. This is true, she writes, noting that harassment laws and protocols have helped those smart and competent women:

Real sexual harassment happens. That it happens less than it once did is because as a society, we’ve legislated against it, actively discussed it, and attempted, however ambiguously, to define it. That gives smart, competent young women the ability to whack their colleagues upside the head (harassment!) and say, as I once did to a friend: Dude, you just cannot forward that joke to everyone on your team.

Indeed, the existence of those laws and discussions has empowered women to be able to speak up when they feel a colleague is nudging a line—and often in a friendly way, without resorting to suing.

One advantage of this column is that it’s brought out Roiphe’s opponents’ wit. Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan mocks Roiphe by taking her rhetoric to the extreme:

If we simply laughed and acted charmed when men did stuff like speculate on our cup sizes in front of each other, there would be so many more female CEOs right now. … It is truly an outrage that so many men have been put to death for telling women in the elevator that they’re pretty.

Exactly. The idea that there’s some sort of office-to-courtroom pipeline for everyday encounters is risible.

Sexual harassment is a genuine bar to equality, and the onslaught of denial in both the Herman Cain situation and, even worse, the Penn State rape coverup scandal, shows that we need to talk about these dynamics in the places we work and play seriously.

In the Nation, Dave Zirin has a chilling series of anecdotes about the denial of rape culture that took place under Penn State’s Joe Paterno.

In 2003, less than one year after Paterno was told that Sandusky was raping children, he allowed a player accused of rape to suit up and play in a bowl game. Widespread criticism of this move was ignored. In 2006, Penn State’s Orange Bowl opponent Florida State, sent home linebacker A.J. Nicholson, after accusations of sexual assault. Paterno’s response, in light of recent events, is jaw-dropping. He said, ‘There’s so many people gravitating to these kids. He may not have even known what he was getting into, Nicholson. They knock on the door; somebody may knock on the door; a cute girl knocks on the door. What do you do? Geez. I hope—thank God they don’t knock on my door because I’d refer them to a couple of other rooms.’ [The local branch of NOW] called for Paterno’s resignation and short of that, asked to dialogue with Paterno and the team. Neither Paterno nor anyone in the power at Penn State accepted the invitation.

Paterno’s comments are the kind of flip, obnoxious, victim-blaming that oils the wheels of a much more insidious rape culture. And so, while it’s necessary to make fun of Roiphe’s reactionary writing, it’s also important to remember that the culture she aids and abets is neither witty, ribald nor clever. It’s tragic.

Excerpted with permission from AlterNet. Read the full version here.

Part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.

Cover of Ms. magazine, November 1977. Copyright Ms. magazine.

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Blending fairy tale allusions and hardboiled criminal procedural, Grimm, set in Oregon, focuses on a male detective and thus far has put women on the sidelines. When they appear, it is as potential victims who had better “stay out of the forest” if they want to stay safe. The season premiere opens with a young woman jogging in a red hooded sweatshirt while listening to the Eurythmics coo, “Some of them want to abuse you.” Sure enough, our Little Red Jogging Hood soon meets a wolfish attacker. Never fear, though: The intrepid male detective duo of Nick Burckhardt (David Gntoli) and Hank Griffin (Russell Hornsby) are on the trail, serving as would-be woodsmen-to-the-rescue.

The one strong woman in the premiere is Mary, Nick’s guardian since he was 12, who dispenses wisdom and battles a monstrous baddie. Unfortunately, there are clues Mary may not be around for long–too bad, as putting a strong woman at the helm of a fairy tale is a rare occurrence (unless you consider finding a prince a particularly strong character trait).

The most intriguing moment in the premiere comes when Nick targets the wrong creature, a reformed werewolf. The wolf insists on his innocence, angrily telling Nick, “You people started profiling us over 200 years ago.” It will be interesting to see if the show builds on ideas of racial profiling … or if it includes some strong women.

Until it does, I will get my strong-women-in-fairy-tales fix watching Once Upon a Time. Once features not only a re-vamped Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), but her kick-butt daughter, Emma Swan. In an intriguing premise, the characters, who live in a town called Storybrooke, are trapped between two worlds–a fairy-tale past and the modern day. An evil spell cast by (who else?) a wicked Queen has transported all the fairy-tale characters into the contemporary world and made them forget who they are. Now the Queen is Storybrooke’s dictatorial mayor, Rumpelstiltskin is the uber-capitalist Mr. Gold, the newfangled Snow is an elementary school teacher, little Red and Fairy Godmother are hotel proprietors and Jiminy Cricket is a child therapist. The Queen’s adoptive son Henry is on a quest to save the day, enlisting the help of his real mother, bail bondswoman (and daughter of Snow White) Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison). Thus far, it is not clear who knows they are stuck fairytale characters and who doesn’t, but the lavish costumes, special effects and attention to fairy-tale detail weave a dark and potent spell.

The themes and content of the show thus far circulate around issues of gender, class, education, mothering/parenting, beauty, aging and power–common fairy tale tropes, but Once appears committed to giving them a feminist twist.

Yes, the show uses the “evil stepmother” trope, but complicates it by suggesting that “evil” women may be the result of a society that stigmatizes single mothers and powerful women in the workforce. Maleficent (played by True Blood’s Kristin Bauer van Straten) is a woman stuck within capitalist patriarchy–where Mr. Gold (Rumplestiltskin) calls the shots.

The show also puts an interesting twist on that fairy tale fetish object: true love. When the Queen wants to release her dark curse, Rumplestiltskin tells her she must sacrifice “the heart of the thing you love most.” That turns out not to be some Prince Charming character, but her father.

Henry’s quest for true motherly love is another major theme. However, the show is careful not to suggest that Emma’s love is “better” or “natural” because she is his biological mother. It also avoids demonizing her for putting Henry up for adoption, noting the age and class factors that contributed to her decision. Moreover, it opens out what “mothering” means–it is not about having money and power (like the Queen), but about the type of nurturing that Snow White (Henry’s elementary school teacher) offers.

The most exciting piece of the show is Emma Swan as feminist heroine. Her pursuit of a “happy ending” is not about finding a man or going to a ball all gussied up, but about detective work, about building a relationship with her son Henry, and about seeking the “truth” as to why time stands still in the corrupt Storybrooke world. Emma doesn’t believe she can save the day, but, as Henry points out,  “The hero never believes at first, if they did, it wouldn’t be a very good story.” For once a female is poised to be the hero–and with no Prince Charming by her side. Woot!

I believe this is going to be one heck of a good story, and I hope against hope for the happy ending of finally having a mainstream fairy-tale that doesn’t sideline women or suggest they are only good for cleaning up after dwarves, marrying princes, or sleeping attractively. As for me, I am not awaiting “true love’s kiss”–nope, I am counting the days until the next episode of Once Upon a Time.

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The newly created pages include such “jokes” as “you know she is playing hard to get when she resists the chloroform” and “you know she’s playing hard to get when you use another roll of tape.”

Obviously, it would be next to impossible for Facebook to prevent these pages from being created. But there’s also little cause for optimism that once the pages are reported, Facebook will be diligent about deleting them.

When Facebook removed some of the offending pages last week, it made no official comment or clarification of policy. Activists responded by calling for the company to issue a formal statement that rape is never funny and that such pages will be deemed a violation of Facebook rules (which bar speech that is “hateful, threatening or incites violence.”)

Instead, Facebook has done just the opposite: released a statement clarifying that in the future, such pages will be allowed to remain as long as they are clearly labeled as humor.

If Facebook thinks this is all about a misunderstanding, they have not been paying attention. The problem has never been that feminists missed the point that the pages were intended as jokes. We never mistook them for a serious call to go out and commit rape. Our point is that sexual violence is not funny and that reducing it to a punch line perpetuates rape culture.

Statistically, someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes in America (though it is difficult to ever know the accuracy of such statistics in a society that renders so much assault invisible). Many women are harassed or assaulted in some way so regularly—from catcalls to being groped to enduring suggestive innuendo or worse from co-workers to being date-raped—that these things have become normalized as an inevitable part of the experience of being a woman. This is what it means to live in a rape culture. 60 percent of sexual assaults are not reported, often because they assume they will not be believed or taken seriously. This is a culture that allows sexual violence to happen in large part by silencing victims and treating their tales as jokes.

I’ve never met a feminist without a sense of humor, though we are often accused of never being able to “lighten up and take a joke.” This is just one way in which women are silenced in our culture–by being labeled as uptight and prudish when we actually attempt to point out misogyny. In fact, I am a huge believer in both the power and the importance of humor. Satire can be an extremely potent, especially when it takes risks. I have seen laugh-out-loud funny Onion headlines that manage to drive home a point better than any serious journalism I have encountered on some subjects.

But the fact that humor has powerful potential does not mean everything labeled as humor has an inherent value. And when so-called humor uses violence against a specific race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity as its punch line, at some point it crosses a line and becomes hate speech. Misogynist, racist or homophobic jokes are never “just jokes.” They reflect and reinforce actual hateful attitudes. When do we say “enough is enough”? If Facebook is bombarded by a multitude of “jokes” about violence against people of a particular race or ethnicity, will a note in the headline that this is meant to be “humorous” make those jokes okay?

Facebook’s belief that you can nullify the harms of hate speech by labeling it a “joke” is simply a cop-out. The corporation’s behavior so far has been condescending and dismissive of women’s concerns. And so we continue to call on Facebook to issue an apology and take a firm stance against the promotion of sexual violence. Anything less is simply unacceptable.

You can add your name to this Change.org petition to let Facebook know that we won’t let up until takes a firm policy against sexually violent hate speech:

Facebook screen shot taken November 10, 2011.

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Here’s a look at ten historical women whose authentic and intimate writing styles would have made them surefire stars of the blogosphere:

1. Sei Shōnagon (966 -1017) In her Pillow Book, court lady Shōnagon jotted down witty observations, complaints and opinions about the Japanese imperial court at the turn of the first millennium. A realist who acknowledged the sexual liaisons going on among the emperor’s courtiers, some of her sharpest writing was her advice for lovers on how to pen “morning-after letters.”

2. Abigail Adams (1744-1818) This first lady wrote hundreds of letters to her husband, John, that provide an exhaustive and personal look at the life of an early American woman. Never formally schooled, Adams had a creative approach to spelling that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Twitter feed. But that didn’t detract from the urgency of her reminders to her powerful husband to “remember the ladies”: “If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

3. Charlotte Forten Grimké (1837-1914) Grimke’s extensive journals offer one of the few existing accounts of a free black woman in the antebellum North. The African American activist, poet and teacher recorded the life and death of her infant daughter, her work as a nurse and educator during the Civil War and her travels on behalf of the abolitionist cause. The only non-white student in her grammar school and the first African American teacher in the Civil War’s Sea Islands mission, Grimké made history, then wrote it down.

4. Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891) In the first known copyrighted book by a Native American woman, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, Winnemucca documented her Paiute people’s initial encounters with white explorers. The settlers, she wrote, “came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since.” One of the first Paiutes to learn English, she spent her life as an interlocutor, lecturer, activist for Native rights, school organizer and author, working to protect and advance the causes of her people while promoting understanding between them and the white newcomers.

5. Nellie Bly (1864-1922) An outraged letter in response to a sexist newspaper column launched the journalism career of Elizabeth Jane Cochran. Under the pen name Nellie Bly, she became famous for her undercover exposé of the broken mental-health-care system, for which she feigned madness and was committed to an asylum. Her report on her time there–“What,” she asked, “excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?”–prompted a grand jury investigation and a dramatic increase in state mental-health-care funding. She later earned further renown for a then-record-breaking 72 day trip around the world.

6. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) The great modernist novelist also penned memoirs, essays, letters and diaries that provide rich emotional descriptions of her subjects and the author herself.  Over the years, her public writing became increasingly feminist, anti-war and anti-imperialist. In her famous treatise on the obstacles faced by women writers, “A Room of One’s Own,” she wrote, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

7. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) A lifelong diarist, Nin offered a woman’s-eye-view of a world of prominent men. In both her famous journals and her groundbreaking erotica, Nin shared revealing insights into both her life and her sexual exploits. Her writing continues to be celebrated by women who identify with her account of self-discovery: “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

8. The Mitford Sisters (1900s to present) In the years leading up to the Second World War, these six political British sisters–with stances ranging from communist to fascist–wrote hundreds of letters that detailed their daily lives and serve as a kind of cliffs notes to the conflicting ideologies of 1930s Europe. One can only imagine the dinner-table conversations.

9. Betty Friedan (1921-2006) Before writing The Feminine Mystique and founding the National Organization for Women, Friedan spent years as a journalist, interviewing women and reporting on “the problem that has no name.” Her writings offer unrivaled snapshots of the lives of many mid-20th century American women and a call to arms for women to discover their own voices: “The only way for a woman…to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.”

10. Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) Best known for her countless columns and books on the not-so-glamorous life of a suburban mother, Bombeck strove to bring women who worked at home into the feminist fold, eventually launching a national speaking tour in support of the (still unpassed) Equal Rights Amendment.

These are just ten of the innumerable women who have used writing to build community and make their voices heard, whether to an audience of one or of thousands. Personal, immediate and honest, their writings connect them not only to other women of their time, but also to the contemporary world of blogging, which continues to democratize the marketplace of ideas in a way that empowers women.

What is a blog, after all, if not a room of one’s own?

All photos from Wikimedia Commons.

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