March 18-24 is International Anti-Street Harassment Week and it should be taken seriously as a matter of equality, access to public space and civil rights. "Meet Us On The Street" is the rallying call for International Anti-Street Harassment Week, a movement started by...

In the wake of Rick Santorum's three-state primary and caucuses win this week, Republican candidates have agreed to debate whose sperm is actually most sacred.

The debate, scheduled to coincide with the simultaneous annual meetings of the Quiverfull movement and the National Pessary Association,...

Is the Super Bowl the largest child sex trafficking event in the U.S.?

The Big Game is known for the bacchanalia that surrounds it. However, we don't typically think of the illegal prostitution of minors at the same time. It's a buzz kill if ever there was one. But,...

Diablo Cody's razor-sharp wit and compelling, idiosyncratic humor first bubbled to our culture's collective surface with her critically acclaimed 2004 memoir "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper," which chronicled her year-long adventures as a bored-ex-Catholic-school-girl-typist-whimsically-turned-stripper. Three years later, she broke, with great success, into the...

There is hardly a more garish example of hyper-gendered and sexualized display in sports than American Football. A game the whole family can enjoy. Not just the uber-masculinity of the game itself, but the uniform alone: it is the quintessence of machismo, a celebration of extreme he-ness, a veritable sartorial...

This week, ten movies were nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Pictures. Many media critics have pointed out that the nominated movies notably harkened back to an older Hollywood. We aren't nostalgic for a bygone era ... we are, Hollywood movie-wise, stuck in a bygone era: the...

How many movies have you watched in which rape is a notable, if not integral, part of the plot? Not sure? Well, I started thinking about it and poked around. The short list I compiled is at the end of this article.

Amazing, right? I personally have spent probably...

What girls say to each other on Facebook matters more than the possible threat of cyberbullying. It reflects what we teach kids about what's important and has real consequences.

Have you ever seen what happens when a teenage girl posts a new picture on Facebook? If she's popular, friends,...

Today the FBI updated it's circa 1920 definition of rape. Until today, rape was still defined as "The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." It was changed to one that makes no reference to gender and that will include male, mentally impaired and non-consensual...

The U.S. ranks 40th in the world for women's political empowerment and we're losing ground.

Fortieth. This ranking, based on 2010 data, is a comparative measure of the gap between men and women in political decision-making at the highest levels. (Here is the entire report.) Not...

One morning early this year, I was in my kitchen with my three daughters, at least two of whom were simultaneously singing while the third was talking. So I was surprised when they suddenly stopped making any sounds at all. The TV was on, and Peggy Orenstein was being interviewed...

Abstinence-only education creates a petri dish for bullying in schools. There is always a lot of back and forth about the efficacy of these programs, and I fall on the side that they demonstrably fail to reduce teen pregnancy, the rate of incidence of teen sex, or the...

Fair warning -- this is not for the faint of heart. It involves girls and their hair.

Guess what an increasingly common and popular form of plastic surgery is? In case you haven't heard, it's called "the Barbie" and prestigious surgeons in the US and around the...

Given the world we live in, there is simply no way to stop kids from talking about, seeing and enjoying what are clearly overwhelmingly gender biased stories being told by their entertainment media, movies (and related derivative products) in particular. As I recently couldn't help but...

Violence against women is a global pandemic? Like H1N1? Like in Contagion? No way. Think of your instinctive response to the idea of a worldwide bio-terror -- that's what your response should be to the normalized level of violence against women around the world. Because, here's the thing: women are...

The Holiday movie season is here! And, true to form, as revealed in USC's Annenberg School's most recent study of gender in the 100 top grossing films of 2009, we will blithely consume great movies that consistently marginalize and sexualize girls and women. The male to female ratio...

"Did you see what that girl was wearing?"
"Someone should tell her she looks like a streetwalker."
"She's going to get a reputation if she's not careful."
"What a slut."

Sound familiar? Everyone does it.

It's hard to describe the breadth of what the...

This morning the Washington Post reported the findings of a Washington Post/ABC poll that revealed the following:

• 25% of women report being sexually harassed at work (9% of men do)
• Nearly 2/3rds of Americans think that sexual harassment is a problem in the workplace

The winner of this week's stupid gendered kids clothes contest is...

Gymboree's baby onesies that read:
Smart Like Daddy.
Pretty Like Mommy.

Or is that Smart Like Daddy, Sweet Like Mommy. Oh, no, that's another one.

By the time this post runs...

There's Dakota Fanning...'going bad' so Marc Jacobs can sell some perfume. It smells great, by the way. Why did she do that? I mean, she was SUCH A NICE GIRL.

The other day I was buying a pair of stacked heel, thick soled, black lace up, never mind, you...