Elisabeth Badinter has written a new book called The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines The Status of Women, and it’s intriguing. The book’s title seems a bit harsh, but when you talk to Elisabeth and hear her side of things, it’s actually not as bad as it would suggest. We all know that a catchy title is a marketing ploy more than an actual representation of the story inside, anyway—in short, don’t judge a book by the cover. We’ve all probably learned this lesson in some way, shape, or form by now.

In the book, Elisabeth takes issue with someone becoming a mother and then automatically taking a backseat to her own children. In my opinion, that’s what motherhood is: you start to live for your child. Having a baby is an amazing responsibility and it’s a 24/7 job, so it’s only natural that you would give all of yourself to this all-consuming being. Right? No—not according to Elisabeth Badinter.

In her book, she talks about how a working mother is looked down upon for not spending time with her children, and if they’re not there for them, there’s massive anxiety and guilt. Now, I don’t have children but I have two “fur babies” and I work a full-time job and sometimes I look at them and think, “I’m a bad pet parent to you guys, I’m never here,” so I can only imagine what it’s like to have that resonating feeling when it comes to rearing a child. Elisabeth, however, is telling women “you’re a human too, you also have needs and that’s okay.” It’s a very healthy way to look at motherhood.

Badinter’s book is telling women that you can be both a mother and a person, that you don’t have to give up everything, and that’s it’s okay to take some time for you. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind (yes, I rely heavily on advice from 80’s songs) and that’s apparently what Elisabeth is doing with her new book. It’s a harsh wake-up call telling women that they aren’t bad parents if they take time for themselves, because in fact you’ll be a better-balanced role model for your children in the long run. Isn’t that what it’s all about in the end, anyway?

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Actress Ashley Judd has been an activist for women and an advocate for mental health for several years. Recently she wrote an essay that was posted on The Daily Beast that went viral. In it, Judd called out society’s misogyny and harsh judgment of womens’ appearances, and all of this was due because a picture of Judd (who looked beautiful in said photo) was released, and because she looked a little fuller-faced than normal, critics said she appeared “puffy” or “bloated” or that she “must’ve had work done.” The media went mad and called plastic surgeons who never worked on Judd but stated that she must’ve had this, that, and the other, done to her gorgeous face. She simply can’t just be naturally that beautiful, and God help a woman that’s puffy on film. The audacity. She should have stayed home!

Since then, nearly 16,000 people have shared the essay on Twitter, and 374,000 people have liked it on Facebook. Hopefully, this is a step in the right direction – women standing up and saying, “I’m not just a pretty face and it’s okay to have flaws.” Guys, flaws are the interesting parts! I live in Los Angeles where almost everyone looks the same, and I find it rather refreshing to see a girl with an interesting face and a fresh take on life – someone who steps out and says “I’m a bit weird in a certain way and that’s okay.”

Other celebrities weighed in on the topic, too - ”There is so much negativity online, so even if the content on a website is positive, the community is often incredibly negative,” Zooey Deschanel, actress and cofounder of HelloGiggles.com, and poster child for hipster semi-awkward geek girls, tells Mashable. “I was always shocked by how mean people could be when they were allowed to make comments anonymously online.”

“It’s easy to hide behind a computer screen and it’s nice to see that people are coming out from behind “posting as a guest” and showing that there is still kindness and caring out there. We all have such a short time together, you would think in 2012 we would’ve learned to not waste our time on such petty negativity. I once read something that said, (and I’m paraphrasing here) “that which makes us angry is simply a reflection we see in ourselves.” So those who attacked Judd for looking “puffy” aren’t attacking Judd, they’re attacking their own insecurity and it makes them feel better to take down a successful person by bringing them down to their level. Instead of knocking someone else down, why don’t we elevate ourselves? We can all take a lesson from Judd and her strength and belief in herself.

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25-year-old filmmaker Lena Dunham first caught everyone’s attention when she won Best Narrative at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 for her film Tiny Furniture. Judd Apatow took notice, and is now producing her HBO show Girls. The show has been described as “raw and unflinching”-  the anti-Sex and the City.

The show follows four girls into sexual conundrums, financial woes, and the mandate to make something of themselves. There’s a common theme coming to television along with Girls; there’s 2 Broke Girls, Whitney, and The New Girl. These shows portray women in a true light, with issues, opinions, ideas, and also, as extremely capable.

Despite the fact that the creator of Two and Half Men recently said “we’ve reached labia saturation level” and “we get it ladies, you get periods” when asked what he thought about all these girl-centric shows, they haven’t gone away, and Two and a Half Men’s popularity has plummeted (we won’t even bring the topic of Ashton Kutcher into this). Me? I took this as a sign that things are changing. Gone are the days of sitcoms and series featuring all leading men, because here come the leading ladies. Girls appears to be a breath of fresh air, a step in the right direction, and yet another crack in the glass ceiling.

Are you guys watching this yet?

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Lila Rose made headlines for her role in an attempted anti-Planned Parenthood sting earlier this month. She is an anti-abortion, anti-birth control activist who identifies herself as a feminist. Rose recently wrote a long piece for Politico, and in it she talked about the pornification of culture. She states that she is pro-woman, but only if they agree with her. It all boils down to a growing trend—a lot of women are identifying as feminist who “hate sluts.” Only girls that sleep around would want birth control and abortions. There’s no medical reason for these things, otherwise: these chicks just love to get railed.

In her piece she writes, “We are women who believe that something precious is lost when fertility is intentionally excluded from marriage, a sacred bond and a total giving of each spouse to the other.” First things first, fertility is not the same as sex, and what about women who were born sterile? They can never experience a sacred bond? Basically what she’s saying here is if you have sex before marriage, or have a child outside of marriage, you are damaged goods and undeserving. And if you’re infertile to begin with? Well. You must have pissed someone in the cosmic beyond off.

She goes on and says that “[there is a] threat to religious liberty posed by the Obama administration’s mandate that religious employers underwrite their employees’ abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives and sterilization procedures.”

My opinion? Lila Rose needs to get her facts straight before she starts mudslinging. Abortion-inducing drugs are not and never were to be covered as preventative care under the Affordable Care Act’s Preventative Care Mandate. Emergency contraception is, but that’s because it’s contraception, not abortion.

This line is by far my favorite one from Rose: “… And we are women who love everything about being a woman, including being mothers. We have noticed that the rise in the availability and use of cheap birth control coincided with increases in the rates of sex addiction, divorce, unmarried childbearing and abortion.” You must be joking. There is no correlation between the availability of birth control and sex addiction, divorce, or unmarried child bearing. In fact, in countries that make birth control available, cheap, and without stigma, generally have lower abortion rates, teen pregnancies, and divorces. So take that, Lila.

And I’m not the only one completely confused by a lot of what this woman says—even Rose can’t get her facts straight. “Studies show pregnancy, birth and abortion rates among young women have decreased lately.” Are they up or are they down? How can it be both?

You can’t be a meat-eating vegetarian, or a feminist who hates women, and clearly Lila Rose hates women, or at the very least: women who have their own opinions that happen to differ from those of Lila Rose.

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley went on the few and made the claim that “women don’t care about contraception.” Um, the hell we don’t! I’ve written odes and sonnets to birth control—I care very deeply about birth control. I’d build an altar and worship it daily if I was into that kind of thing. Here’s what Haley said:

HALEY: Women don’t care about contraception, they care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all those other things–
BEHAR: Well, they care about contraception too.
HALEY: But, that’s not the only thing they care about. The media wants to talk about contraception.
BEHAR: But when someone like Rick Santorum says he’s going to take it away, we care. [Applause]
HALEY: Well, while we care about contraception, let’s be clear. All we’re saying is we don’t want government to mandate when we have to have it or when we don’t. We want to be able to make that decision. We don’t government making that decision for us.

Okay, she got that last part right, we certainly don’t want that. But there’s something that Nikki doesn’t get there is no government mandate that dictates when women have to have birth control or when we don’t. That’s not the concern, though—the concern is that insurances don’t have to cover it. Some officials are trying to make it so that employer can ask for medical proof that you need it for something other than contraceptive. That’s what we care about!

Now, most insurance companies do cover birth control. It’s good economics to do so at no additional cost because it’s good public health policy. But they do not force them down anyone’s throat. If you need or want them you can have them, to insinuate that Obamacare is forcing women on the pill (which might not be a bad thing) is insane.

The fact that Haley brought up the idea that the media just wants to talk about contraception is laughable as well. Studies show that the majority of Americans (all races, genders, religions and political parties) are for a mandate that covers birth control. Of course we want to talk about it—it’s an important issue—but let’s be clear: Haley’s party made it an issue to begin with! You made your bed, Governor, and I hope you have protection when you lay in it.

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Pornography is a touch subject for anyone; it’s extremely touchy for feminists, and I doubt most of them will like my stand on this. I think pornography has become a very feminist industry. Yes, there are still young girls with issues that get into for all the wrong reasons, but there are also successful, smart, businesswomen that come out of it as well.

There was a huge uproar when Sasha Grey read to children; Jenna Jameson has been called a number of things. Both of these women say they got into the industry for their own reasons. Sasha wanted to explore her sexuality, and Jenna wanted to become more confident. Both retired at early ages very wealthy women. Sasha has moved into more mainstream roles and Jenna started a company that sold to Playboy for 30 million dollars.

That’s a whole lot of girl power in two girls, and I haven’t even gotten to Katie Morgan yet. Or the 12 other college-educated “porn stars” I can name off the top of my head. I’ve also visited porn sets as a writer and the girls have been some of the sweetest I’ve worked with. When the director yells “cut” they usually start discussing everyday matters: what their kids are going to be for Halloween, the price of gas, etc. They’re normal girls making a living in a taboo way. They walk around being judged all the time and yet, they remain very strong in their convictions to do the work they want to. Selling sex is the oldest profession in the world – it’s not going anywhere anytime soon and finally, women have found a way to make it on their terms. That’s pretty feminist to me.

So naturally, it irritates me that newcomer James Deen is being hailed as a “feminist porn star.” Deen very well may be a feminist – I don’t know him personally – but it’s not the man that’s bothering me, but the reasons that the media are giving for his feminism. They say because he “looks his partners in the eye” and “whispers a constant stream of presumably sexy things in their ears.” Oh yes. He must love women.

The truth is most men in porn love women. They tend to prefer the company of women to men and are extremely …

(more…)

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Amina Filali was a 16-year-old girl who was raped. When her story was brought before a judge, he ordered that Amina marry her rapist, which fell under something called Article 475 in the Moroccan penal code. It allows judges to contract underage marriages in certain circumstances. This one was contracted out of a religious stand point that a woman must remain chaste.

After the marriage, Amina committed suicide, and her death has prompted Moroccan feminists to act. Fatima Outaleb is one of those feminists; she sits on the board of directors of Union de L’Action Feminine, an organization in the Moroccan city of Rabat that is aimed at stopping discrimination against women. She is also in charge of a shelter that helps women victimized by domestic violence, rape, incest and other forms of abuse.

Fatima and other activists are pushing to get Article 475 banned. She says, “Just think of a perpetrator who is supposed to be punished and go to jail, instead he can marry that girl?  But the government is still debating it. It’s a violation of children’s rights, in the name of honor, I don’t know what, to put a girl in the hands of her perpetrator.”

Fatima says it’s important for Morocco to take this step in banning Article 475, because it has been seen as a leader in changing legal framework to be fairer when it comes to women. But this law, and the fact that judges can still contract marriage sometimes for girls as young as 14, is still practiced today. The loophole in this would be that the marriages are done with “the child’s consent,” but can a 14-year-old or in this case a 16-year-old rape victim, make that kind of decision? Hardly.

Fatima also says that Morocco needs to work on guardianship laws. As of today, it’s all in the hands of the men. “I am a professor, but I cannot sign anything related to my child. If I want to move my daughter from school to school, I need my husband’s permission because he is the one who is the guardian of the family,” says Fatima. But this does not take away from what Morocco has done so far, and according to her, “Morocco is still the leader or in a leading position with regard to the reforms made so far. But there are some obstacles. Public opinion, that’s the big problem. Sincerely speaking, the king on many occasions has been more courageous than all those political parties and other decision-makers.”

But it seems there is still a long way to go.

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