AddieStan

The best thing about the film, Last Chance Harvey , is the acting. What's not to like about a cast such as this: Dustin Hoffman , Emma Thompson , Eileen Aitken , Richard Schiff , Kathy Baker ? Then there's the added bonus of seeing an actress of your blogstress's vintage playing a romantic lead. How often does that happen? Joel Hopkins 's script manages to give off warm and fuzzy feelings despite the fact that it hangs together by only the thinnest of threads. We are asked to suspend disbelief and curiosity throughout the film. Never are we to truly know why the Hoffman character's daughter possesses such contempt for him that she pushes him to the very margins or her wedding. "I wasn't a good father," is about all Harvey Shine, the character played by Hoffman, gives us to chew on, and the script nowhere fills in the blanks. Following the travails of Shine, a washed-up musician on the verge of losing his jingle-writing job, we are asked to believ...

Your blogstress is still wrestling with the decision of Barack Obama (whom her feminist self supported all the way back in the primaries) to anoint the right-wing, anti-gay, anti-woman Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the presidential inaugural ceremonies. Mon Dieu, mes amis ! How to make sense of it? One hopes that Mr. Obama has a trick or two up his sleeve in bestowing this honor on one who has compared pro-choice people to Holocaust deniers, equated gay marriage with polygamy and marriage between an adult and a child (and later denied having done so), and preaches that wives should submit to their husbands. To many liberals, Warren's words are hard not to take personally, especially if you're a woman and/or a member of the LGBT community. This is no mere game of "dozens"; reports come in daily of LGBT people assaulted or killed for no other reason than being queer; meanwhile the terrorism of anti-choice forces has reduced abortion, in many are...

cross-posted from The Huffington Post Can you be a supporter of Sarah Palin and still be a feminist? Well, I guess you could call yourself a feminist -- that is, if you think that, as a woman, you still have rights equal to those of a man when: * You do not have the right of self-determination over your own body * Even if impregnated through rape or incest you are forced to bear a child * You're told you're entitled to equal pay, but forbidden to sue for it under most circumstances * Information on how to prevent your own pregnancy is withheld from you in sex education classes * If you're a spiritually powerful or otherwise unusual woman, your harassment can justified as protection from "witchcraft" In that case, I guess it could be said that Elaine Lafferty, a former Ms. magazine editor proudly stumping for Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, is a feminist. Otherwise, it just doesn't add up. In an apparent diversion from answering the questi...

Forgive your blogstress, mes amis , for having neglected you for so long. Your cybertrix, of course, was off doing worthy things, such as attending the National Conference on Media Reform (thanks to a scholarship from the outstanding organization, Free Press, Inc.), getting marooned in the Atlanta airport for a day on her way back to DC from Minneapolis, and then doing a lot of sweating in her 100-plus-degree oppo factory, which happened to lose its air conditioning on the hottest day of the year. But now -- rejoice -- your Webwench returns with a new collaboration in The Huffington Post. In answer to Linda Hirshman's instruction to the feminist movement (something of a white woman's manifesto) that ran in the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post , Shireen Mitchell and your ecrivaine today responded with our defense of what has become known as "intersectionality." (Kinda sexy, non ?) To find out what that means, check us out in HuffPo: CLICK HERE TO RE...

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.

Your blogstress has spent the better part of a week examining the fascinating phenomenon of alpha-feminist participation in the top Democratic campaigns for the presidency. In fact, the campaigns of Hillary Clinton , Barack Obama and John Edwards each feature a leader in reproductive rights movement as senior advisers; in Clinton campaign, Ann Lewis , who once served communications chief for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, is a top strategist. The Edwards campaign is graced by the presence of Kate Michelman , who ran NARAL for more than 20 years, and her predecessor at NARAL, Karen Mulhauser , is Barack Obama 's senior advisor on women's issues. This is truly amazing -- that each of the campaigns has taken up a feminist agenda, not just on reproductive rights, but an a range issues, including family leave and Social Security. But with a woman in the race, there is also a risk of division within the feminist movement between those who believe that the only tru...

Blogger Andrew Sullivan , the contrarian champion of gay rights, is driving Hillary-hating to new heights with his latest post on the subject: [S]he pretends to be a feminist. She wants to include in her "experience" her attempt to get everybody's healthcare under her beatifically benign control in the early 1990s. But in turn he insists that her failure to achieve anything - because of her reflexive secrecy, paranoia and over-reach -- was actually his fault, not hers. She wants credit for being a feminist, while still running in part on her husband's record -- both claiming credit for the good parts and disowning the bad parts. They will keep playing this game - arguing every which way, passing the buck from one to the other, never accepting responsibility, for as long as it gets them past the latest news cycle...Another term of the two of them could well lead to the same kind of sexual scandals that distracted and near-paralyzed affairs of state in the 1990s. If yo...