It’s always difficult to be critical of someone who you’ve always thought of as one of the good guys. For the most part, I look forward to Leonard Pitts’ op ed pieces, they are usually an island of sanity amidst the innane drivelling of some of his counterparts. In particular, he usually has […]

The CBS Evening News ran an appalling piece on June 24 about a clinic in Encino, CA where parents can use PGD (Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis) to decide if it’s a boy or a girl. According to reporter Vince Gonzales, “there is a fear that people will overselect boys.”
While the doctor who runs […]

A week ago, I wrote about an important report, “Women: Hard Hit.”
The other report largely ignored by national media that I want to draw your attention to is In The Shadows: Sexual Violence in U.S. Detention Facilities. Researched and released by Stop Prisoner Rape for the U.N. Committee Against Torture, this report highlights the very […]

Lately I’ve been thinking that the Matt Groening cartoon Futurama may be eerily accurate with regard to marketing practices.
The cartoon is set in the 31st century, but a main character, Fry, is a time refugee from the 1990s. In one episode, Fry becomes upset after his dreams are infiltrated by advertisements. Leela, the […]

A visit to the EU’s largest women’s prison.

Since the Guadalupe Cultural Center’s new presidente arrived, R. Bret Ruiz, last summer in San Antonio, ten women have resigned, been fired, or terminated. The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, once the proud and mighty leader of Mexican-American and Chicana/o art and culture in the country, has no artistic directors left - except for dance.
These ten […]

Women: Hard Hit … and left to fend for themselves.

An IRIN story earlier this week reports that an Iraqi NGO, the Women’s Rights Association (WRA), is reporting a rise in cases of sexual abuse in Iraq. Actually there is nothing new in this. Madre, the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) and Code Pink have been sounding the alarm about this […]

Honestly, I was never gung-ho about Commander-in-Chief. But last night’s season finale, with it’s feminism-is-for-everybody plot points, made me decide that we need to appreciate the brief flashes of feminist rhetoric that hit the networks, even when they’re dressed up in the most obvious trappings.
In a nutshell, the finale’s plot involved the death of an […]

Having the Murdoch-owned NY Post as one of my hometown papers, I’ve always considered the tabloid a “newspaper,” not a newspaper. Today, that impression was underscored by the rag’s own fun-with-quotation-marks, in a headline about the sexual assault of a teenager:

TV-REPAIR FIEND ‘RAPES’ TEEN

A headline like that conjures the usual blame-the-victim tropes running through […]