AddieStan

Your blogstress had the great pleasure of spending last weekend at WAM!, the Women, Action & Media conference that's become an annual spring-break confab rooted at MIT's Stata Center -- a Frank-Gehry designed oddity -- and sponsored by the legendary Center for New Words. While there, your Webwench found herself in the company of a number of women who, dissatisfied with the offerings of today's media, just up and made their own. At the Women's Media Center Web site, you may find your ecrivaine 's rundown , complete with links to lots of cool, independent media products. CLICK HERE TO READ "THANKS, WE'LL MAKE OUR OWN MEDIA" AT W.M.C.

Today, the Rev. Jerry Falwell bid farewell to the earthly plain and wafted into the arms of his Maker. Hopefully the Maker, presumably now in face-to-face contact with her errant son, can correct the son (as only a mother can) on his ridiculous assertion that she made the entire Universe in a week. Where, you may ask, has gone your blogstress's customarily gentle disposition toward the recently deceased? Well, mes amis , your Webwench has her human foibles with which to contend, and she has yet to transcend herself to forgive the reverend for blaming the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the likes of her and her compatriots. Let us revisit the appearance of Rev. Falwell on the television program hosted by his rival, the Rev. Pat Robertson , on September 13, 2001: JERRY FALWELL : The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this. PAT ROBERTSON : Well, yes. JERRY FALWELL : And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the h...

Melissa Silverstein of the Women's Media Center offers this take (quoting your blogstress's fabulous former colleague, Mary Kay Blakely) on the new media war between right-wingers and the feminist bloggers who were hired by the John Edwards campaign, only to relinquish those appointments after the noxious Bill Donohue -- a first-rate mysogynist and anti-Semite -- made great hay out of the posts of Pandagon 's Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister : As the drama unfolded, others enthusiastically joined the attack, and disturbing sexualized comments flooded into the women’s blogs. "Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man," read one posting. Another was, "It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little." Sexualized threats against women, and especi...