Former Reason Editor, Virginia Postrel’s Bloomberg column was not happy with the new Margaret Thatcher biopic “Iron Lady”:

Hollywood has no trouble with public women as long as they are hereditary monarchs, who have no choice about their role. It can deal with the power of Elizabeth I, who had to rule to survive. But the more democratic, liberal power that arises from the combination of ambition, competence and popular appeal — the power of a Margaret Thatcher … is more problematic. A grocer’s daughter who becomes prime minister could be anyone (even if she is in fact an extraordinarily gifted person). Her ambition thus casts doubt on the audience’s own choices, or at the very least poses an alternative to them. Some people do in fact die regretting their unfulfilled ambitions and uncompleted work….”

So, OK. Thatcher herself, at least in my mind, is a feminist icon. She took on a career in which women were not allowed to enter. A female Prime Minister was not even a consideration and she turned that notice on its head. Screenwriter Abi Morgan described “The Iron Lady” as a “very feminist film,” noting that it had a female writer, director and star. She also acknowledged Thatcher’s “extraordinary” ability to combine homemaking and child-rearing first with her legal studies and later with her political career. “What’s interesting about her,” Morgan said, “is that I don’t think she felt the guilt that I think we feel. I think there’s an inherent guilt that most people feel. The thing I think most women struggle with mostly is feeling guilty.”

Protrel said “these supposedly feminist filmmakers could have portrayed Thatcher as an ambitious woman who had nothing to feel guilty about. Instead they chose to inject guilt where it did not belong. They obscured Thatcher’s public accomplishments in a fog of private angst. The portrait of dementia isn’t the problem. The way the film uses old age to punish a lifetime of accomplishment is.”

Which is a fair argument, but Postrel, to my knowledge and Google research, has never spent any time with Thatcher. So one could argue that everyone has guilt and regret and that Hollywood biopics are not, in fact, documentaries. I do believe the disclaimer “based on” tells people that this is not the entire, completely accurate story, and possibly not even a true story, it just happens to be based on this woman. Anyone who is using a Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep (who is phenomenal as always) as their basis for history isn’t someone you should be listening to anyway.

In my humble opinion, this is why feminists get a bad name. Many take everything too literally. It’s a film, not a historical text. That’s a problem with American culture: we celebrate Hollywood as if it actually mattered. It doesn’t. Can’t we just enjoy the popcorn and flashing lights of Hollywood and stop making everything so serious?

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There’s a definite dichotomy between the vision of Mary as a demure, peaceful virgin mother and a single, frightened unwed mother.

This past Christmas season, one church’s depiction of an obviously stunned Mary holding a positive pregnancy test led to a rather … well, decidedly un-Christian response from a more traditional

From CNS News:

A liberal Anglican church in New Zealand has denounced as “Christian intolerance” the defacing of a large billboard it erected outside its premises to mark the Christmas season. The billboard shows an apparently shocked Virgin Mary examining a home pregnancy test kit.

A Catholic activist damaged the billboard on Sunday, during a prayer protest by around 100 Catholics outside the St. Matthews-in-the-City Church, located on a busy intersection in downtown Auckland.

The man responsible for ripping the image, Arthur Skinner of the Catholic Action Group, said the church was welcome to have him arrested, and warned that if the provocative image was replaced he would damage it again.

“Even people who aren’t Catholics know instinctively you don’t attack the Blessed Virgin who gave us the savior of the world,” Skinner told New Zealand television. “To see this at this time is an absolute abomination.”

The pseudo-Renaissance style picture of Mary carried no tagline and the church leaders, vicar Glynn Cardy and associate priest Clay Nelson, invited people to offer their own thoughts.

“This billboard portrays Mary, Jesus’ mother, looking at a home pregnancy test kit revealing that she is pregnant,” they wrote when the billboard went up. “Regardless of any premonition, that discovery would have been shocking. Mary was unmarried, young, and poor. This pregnancy would shape her future. She was certainly not the first woman in this situation or the last.

“As in the past it is our intention to avoid the sentimental, trite and expected, to spark thought and conversation in the community.  This year we hope to do so with an image and no words. We invite you to wonder what your caption might be.”

Unsurprisingly, as caption ideas were …

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They say the English language is one of the hardest to learn simply because we have so many words for one thing. Miss, Ms., Mrs. – all of these are prefixes for women, each meaning something different. Miss, unmarried; Ms.- could be unmarried, could be married; Mrs.- definitely married. Bottom line, Americans cover our asses when it comes to language. The French, on the other hand, do not, and this has been bothering some feminists of Cesson-Sevigne. Special corespondent for the LA Times, Kim Willsher, brought this issue to the attention of Americans with her wonderful, through article on Sunday.

“Mademoiselle,” which is the Gallic form of “miss,” and is normally used for young, unmarried women, and so, feminists say, openly declaring them either available or unwanted. But that’s not the only issue with the title, before the French Revolution, the use of “mademoiselle” had little to do with whether a woman was married; a laywoman or commoner was always called “mademoiselle” to indicate she was of lowly status. Only women of high birth were addressed as “madame.”

Feminists were fed up with marking “mademoiselle” on forms and so they they started making noise about it, and finally they were heard. “It’s about eliminating all terms that could be discriminatory or indiscreet,” the town hall at Cesson-Sevigne, a suburb of the western town of Rennes, in Brittany, said in a statement explaining that the title “mademoiselle” had been banished from all official forms since the beginning of …

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So, before we even get into it, here’s some background information on the aforementioned book that I just finished reading and reviewing for BlogHer’s book club:

To Ella Beene, happiness means living in the northern California river town of Elbow with her husband, Joe, and his two young children. Yet one summer day Joe breaks his own rule-never turn your back on the ocean-and a sleeper wave strikes him down, drowning not only the man but his many secrets.

For three years, Ella has been the only mother the kids have known and has believed that their biological mother, Paige, abandoned them. But when Paige shows up at the funeral, intent on reclaiming the children, Ella soon realizes there may be more to Paige and Joe’s story. “Ella’s the best thing that’s happened to this family,” say her close-knit Italian-American in-laws, for generations the proprietors of a local market. But their devotion quickly falters when the custody fight between mother and stepmother urgently and powerfully collides with Ella’s quest for truth.

Ahem. OK. So when this book was brought to my attention and it was asked if I’d be interested in reading it and reviewing it on Zelda Lily, I responded with a resounding “Hell yes!” It sounded exactly like something I’d enjoy, and once again, I was completely right in assuming my own tastes.

The Underside of Joy is the debut novel by Seré Prince Halverson, and reviewers at the BlogHer Book Club were one of the first to be chosen to read this fabulous piece of work. After reading it, I felt changed. I felt fortified in my own “contingency” plans, but I felt more paranoia (if that’s possible) that something bad would happen to someone I love, someone I share my life with, and I wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Would I be OK fundamentally? Financially? Independently? Yes, sure. Would I be stable enough to be the rock that I’d need to be like Ella herself had to be for two small children (not unlike my own) should something happen? It was a gut-wrenching theme to consider.

The Underside of Joy weaves a tale a grieving wife and an estranged mother (NOT the same person) and how their lives intertwine. Halversen’s tone and pace is excellent and the story line pulled at my many, many heartstrings.

We will be discussing The Underside of Joy for the next month over at BlogHer! Please come join in the conversation.

This is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are my own.

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Every once in a while people come into your life and they knock your socks off. When I started writing for Zelda Lily, I started thinking about women who inspire me. Jo Kimberly came to mind. Jo was raised by a single mother, is a successful business woman, is completely self-made, and is most definitely one of kind. I spent time with Jo Kimberly when I was writing for another website. I was reviewing her restaurant “The Griddle,” I could go on for days about my experience at The Griddle Cafe, but I’ll save some time and just say that it boiled down to one word: Foodgasm. She is a remarkably talented woman, who is also kind and brave.

Those words aren’t easily combined in one person. If you’re a successful business woman you’re usually hard, abrasive, and selfish. But Jo is none of those things. She runs one of the best restaurants in LA and she’s branching out into Vegas soon. She also has television shows in the works so to call her “successful” almost feels like an understatement.

As I said, Jo was raised by a single mother, and her time alone actually inspired the menu for The Griddle. “I wasn’t allowed to have sweets. I was raised by a single mother and when she would go to work I would bake. We had every thing in the house to make a cake, I had corn flakes and I’d add sugar, way too much I’m sure (laughs), those were my frosted flakes. So, this place is an homage to breakfast, because I was never allowed the sweet stuff. Maybe, subconsciously I’m living out my childhood dream of big plates of it.” While most kids would be out getting into trouble, she spent her time being creative in the kitchen.

Her waitstaff is incredible, which is just another compliment to Jo, they are super-servers. When I was there the place was packed, I talked to almost all of them and said, “Wow, this place is so busy!” and the overwhelming response was, “Nah, this is pretty slow.” They don’t bat an eyelash at every table filled, even with a line. They don’t rush anyone – they are happy, friendly, well-informed and fun. The waitstaff directly impacts your dining experience (bad waiter, bad time, and I’m always afraid they’ve done something to my food) but these waiters I could hang out with all day. They’re calm, polite and I asked if they ever get sick of the food I was met with a resounding “No!” from every one of them. “It gets better and better every time” was one waiter’s response. They are a dinning patron’s dream. You can always tell if someone is happy when …

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A 4th year university student from Montreal, Quebec wrote a guest blog in which she denounced the “ever-limiting title of ‘feminist’.” Here’s why: over the the Christmas holidays, there was a news story that two abortionists in New Jersey and Maryland would be charged with multiple counts of murder for committing illegal late-term abortions. Authorities reported that, in addition to having broken the law regarding abortion post-viability both within New Jersey and Maryland, Steven Brigham and Nicola Riley allegedly also kept the corpses of the children they had murdered at their abortion facility in freezers. The guest blogger that brought this story to my attention, said only one site, Jezebel, covered the story and that’s why she’s done with being a “feminist.” Well, now she has two sites covering it.

This is a disturbing story, and it gets worse – the reason these two doctors are getting attention is one particular case – the case of an 18-year-old woman, identified only as “D.B.” D.B sought an abortion at 21 weeks gestation, which is three weeks later than the upper gestational limit in New Jersey. D.B went to the New Jersey facility where the procedure was to be completed. The procedure outlined that it would induce immediate fetal death via injection of digoxin into the baby’s heart, and it was to be completed the following day at the facility in Maryland. D.B., who was accompanied by her mother “C.B.,” was then “operated on” by Riley.

Like someone out of a movie, D.B.’s mother reported that she heard her daughter “screaming and hollering” for two hours. As reported by Live Action, while Riley was trying to find fetal cranial tissue from what she had removed from D.B., she discovered that she had “perforated D.B.’s uterus, shoved the remains of [her] baby into her abdominal cavity, and pulled out part of her bowel.”

D.B.’s mother, requested that …

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There’s a new play by playwright Young Jean Lee called “Untitled Feminist Show,” which features six women who perform the entire play nude. Completely nude. “My jumping-off point for all my shows is like ‘What’s the worst idea I can think of?’ or like, ‘What’s the last show in the world I would want to make?’ And then I force myself to make that show,” Lee said. “Feminism – when I first had the idea for the show – really did seem like a dirty word.” Feminism has, indeed, been described as a “loaded term,” and even Lee admits that “It’s gone through this phase of people not wanting to be identified with it, and seeing it as this ’60s hairy armpit kind of thing.”

Lee grouped together a slew of performers to kick around some ideas, and it turned into month-long, six-hour chat sessions that kept returning to one issue: Young Jean Lee.”One of the big problems for us was the fact that because you are born with a certain type of biological body, it kind of dictates what is OK, how it’s OK for you to be,” Lee said. “The show is basically that,” she said. “What that looks like.” She explained that this idea was mind-bending to her because “while some people claim to have freed themselves from gender expectations, it’s very hard to do.” She retells a story of a male friend who found himself inexplicably enraged when on the subway a man sitting near him pulled out some wool and started knitting. So Lee …

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