1. A piece I wrote for the Guardian goes live tomorrow. Stripping poles, charred bras, third-wave feminism, fourth waves, and more. Plus, a photo of me that I haven’t yet seen. Let me know what you think. (Not about the photo, thank you, but the article!)

2. Come say hello next week if you’re in Brooklyn! I’ll be reading from Sisterhood, Interrupted at Barnes and Noble in Park Slope on Friday, Sept. 7 at 7pm. (Thank you, Sam! Karaoke, when?!) Come for discussion, come to say hi, or, come for chocolate. I recently learned there’s this place down the block, called Cocoa Bar, that has rather stellar chocolate cake.

I seem to have caused a little tussle over in Broadsheet’s comments section yesterday, resulting in another Anonymous (not the one I spent part of yesterday answering, I suspect) calling me “babelicious” and a “FILF” (Mom, Dad, please don’t ask), and the original Anonymous challenging my scholarly integrity. This is my first time being labeled with those monikers, and I’m not sure if I should be flattered or freaked. These semi-flattering, semi-lewd comments rarely come up about men who post. Officially irked on that. But challenging scholarly integrity is a trap we all fall into from time to time when we profoundly disagree with someone, so I’m just gonna let that one go.

On a lighter note, as Broadsheet’s Lynn Harris reminds us in her roundup today via AlterNet, it’s the 100th anniversary of the bra! Wait–again, do we celebrate, or curse?

Man, do I need a latte.

Phewph! After spending part of today conversing with Anonymous in the comments section at Broadsheet (love the broads over there!), I’m back here at Girl with Pen. A few quickie updates about two fellow crossover-y types I adore:

Megan Pincus Kajitani, who has participated as a story editor for the forthcoming Daring Book for Girls, has also started a really interesting blog project called Having Enough. Megan asked me to answer 4 questions about having enough in a having-it-all (and never enough) world. Our interview is up now, here. Thank you, Megan, for making me think!

One thing one can never have enough of, of course, is lunch with fine feminists. I’m taking time out tomorrow for lunch with Alison Piepmeier, English/Women’s Studies prof extraordinaire down in South Carolina, coeditor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, and girl with excellent hair. Alison is one of my early bloggy mentors, and for that I’m forever grateful. In tribute, I stole (er, shall we say, borrowed?) the title of this post from her.

So just a quick update on that traveling panel I’m helping organize this year for Women’s History Month, cause I’m too darn excited not to share. As some of you know, I’m teaming up with three amazing women / girls / ladies this March:

Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent Zook, Courtney E. Martin

We’re taking it on the road to continue the conversation that I started in Sisterhood, Interrupted, and that these women have been having of late too. Together, we want to spark discussion about women’s lives, power, entitlement, and the future of feminism, from a generational perspective. Sound good? If you’d like to bring us to your organization or school, please feel free to contact any of us (I’m deborahsiege AT gmail DOTCOM). But hurry — our schedules are booking up quickly!

One of the versions we’re offering is described thusly (is thusly really a word?):

We Won’t Always Have Paris:
A New Conversation about Young Women and Pop Culture

Why do teen girls dress and dance so provocatively? Do they really think that drinking and drugging at the club is empowering? How can they worship airheads like Paris and Nicole?

Why don’t older women see that there is more to our culture than Britney Spears? Have they ever heard of the World Wide Web? Was it really that different in their day or have they just romanticized it?

Sound familiar? Too often finger-pointing statements like these get thrown around by women of different generations when it comes to conversations about pop culture. With all the injustices yet to be challenged, it’s time that women of all ages talked and listened to one another instead of rehashing the same cliquish complaints. It’s time to reopen a dialogue about women’s lives, power, pop culture, and entitlement — from a generational perspective.

Issues that we’ll address include:
• Does liberated sexuality equal Paris Hilton? Madonna? Bisexuality? Girls Gone Wild?
• Are young women really charmed by today’s pop icons?
• Where are the strong, smart young celebrities without addictions or eating disorders?
• How can we get more positive images of women in the media?
• What do power and empowerment look like to women of different generations?
• What is the major unfinished business for women in the media and pop cultural arenas today?
• How do we keep our eyes on the prize of more complex, diverse, and healthy representation of women?

Another version we’re doing goes like this:

Womengirlsladies: A Fresh Conversation Across Generations

Many of the young female students in my classes seem to think empowerment means short skirts and high heels! Even young women who say they are feminists often don’t know what’s still at stake—from pay equity to Title 9 to reproductive justice– and they are unwilling to put in the hard work necessary to fight for change!

Older female professors act like it’s a crime against the Goddess to have a little fun! Women’s Studies classes are just too pc. I’m not a feminist but I totally believe in equality. Doesn’t everybody? And by the way, weren’t those battles already won by our mothers, so why do we have to fight them again?
Do these complaints sound familiar?

With all the injustices yet to be challenged, it is time that women of all ages talked and listened to one another. It is time to reopen a dialogue about women’s lives: our power, our entitlement, and our futures — the future of feminism. Among issues to be addressed:

•Power and Parity: What do power and empowerment look like to women of different generations, and to women of different races and cultural backgrounds? What can we envision achieving together for women in the future? What might a powerful woman look and act like twenty years down the road?

•Unfinished Business: What are the major loose (or lost) ends of the feminist movement today? And how can we get what we need now?

•The F-word: Why are so many younger women afraid of being identified as feminists? Do older women secretly resent the entitlement of their younger, female employees and students?

•A Stripping Pole in Every Living Room: Does liberated sexuality equal lap dances? Free love? Bisexuality? Are Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan good role models for sexual empowerment? Were Madonna or Lil’ Kim?

•The “Opting Out” Fiasco: How has the media slashed and distorted real women’s choices about balancing work and family? Could listening to popular myths about your options in the workplace and the home topple your career choices?

•Passing the Torch without Extinguishing the Flame: How can younger women learn from older women while speaking in their own language about the issues that matter most to them?

We’ll be offering these panels throughout 2008, but please do get in touch soon, as our schedules are filling up fast: taryn.kutujian@gmail.com

Would love to bring it your way!

I love this story. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune has a nice little feature by reporter Rohan Preston on Dorothy Marcic, a former a professor of management at Vanderbilt University, who quit her secure job to indulge her teenage passion: theater. The professor – turned – playwright then did something equally bold. She created a jukebox musical, “Respect: A Musical Journey of Women,” based on research she did for her book, Respect: Women and Popular Music. The show — which had its more humble beginnings as a lecture with music — has now played in more than a dozen venues in the United States and Australia and is currently playing in Minneapolis. The show’s music, which includes swing and jazz, show tunes, rock and country, “Respect,” and “I Will Survive,” tracks the evolution of the social consciousness of American women in each decade of the 20th century. Says the 58-year-old Marcic, “You have to go with your passion, no matter how long it takes.” Check out Dorothy’s blog here.

And here’s something to sing about:

This week marks the 87th Anniversary of women’s suffrage in the US. Yep, that’s right. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified granting women the right to vote. (Hey – if you’re anywhere near New Jersey, go celebrate with a trip to Paulsdale!) Now, if we can just use that vote to get our country a real President next time.

Straight from the gals at Broadsheet comes this annoyingly newsworthy tidbit: There has not been a woman author of a Shouts and Murmurs piece in The New Yorker for over three years. The last one was in 2004. Reports Catherine Price,

[W]e just found a link to a blog post from the World’s Fair in which the author takes a break from his academic pursuits to examine the male-female breakdown of Shouts and Murmurs authors. (The post is arguably more amusing than most S&M columns.) His conclusion: “Out of the 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era), 17 have been women. That’s 12.782%.” To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women.

Love that it was an academic who did the calculations. Hate that it’s true. Wonder if , in addition to other (ahem) factors, women are submitting in smaller numbers, as they do when it comes to op-eds? That’d be interesting to find out. If anyone finds that out, please send a shout and a murmur over to G w/ P and we will broadcast the news far and wide.

Are you a scholar (or someone with their fingers on the pulse of current research about women or girls) seeking to enter the blogosphere and give blogging a try? Read on! Hey, if my grandmas (left) can do it, you can too.

Submission Process
Email me a 1-paragraph overview of the post you’d like to propose. When I greenlight it, please send the full post to me at deborahsiege AT gmail DOT com at least one day before you ideally would want me to run the post. Depending on how many submissions come in any a given week, I may not be able to run every post right away. But I will certainly do my best to try. Submissions should be pasted in the body of your email or attached as a MS Word document.

GUIDELINES FOR POSTING ON GIRL WITH PEN

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research, popular reality, and the public. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, and somewhat personal.

LENGTH. The strongest blog posts read like mini, hypertexted op-eds. Op-eds are generally 700-1000 words; posts on Girl with Pen (and most blogs) are shorter (300-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

TIMELY. Posts must have a news hook. A news hook can be new research (your own, or someone else’s), an interesting news item, an event, an upcoming holiday or anniversary, a happening from pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news. The news hook must come at the beginning of the post, to capture the scanning web reader’s attention.

UNEXPECTED. Go for the counterintuitive, that little known reality that is the opposite of what we all think! There are so many myths out there about the lives of women and girls. Set us straight. Clarify reality. Go beyond the obvious. Surprise us.

PASSIONATE. Tell us what you really think. If you care passionately, others will. Take a stand. Be controversial. Go out on a limb.

PERSONAL. Personal stories keep us reading. Include a personal anecdote or, if you aren’t comfortable writing about yourself, include an anecdote about someone else.

LINKS. Posts should include links. When submitting a post, if you’re comfortable using the html code for links, please use it to embed your link in the text. If not, please include the link in brackets following the word(s) that you’d like to see in hypertext. Put the word(s) that you’d like to hypertext in bold.

EXAMPLE (w/o hypertext): Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.” If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.

PICTURE AND BYLINE. Be sure to send a jpeg or gif (either a photo of you, or another relevant image related to the post) that you’d like to run with the post, along with a byline that includes your affiliation and anything else you’d like readers to know.

Questions? You can always post ’em in the comments section of this post, because chances are, others will be wondering the same thing. I’ll run additional tips and tidbits in response.

And speaking of heros, Naomi Wolf has a new book out called The End of America: Letter to a Young Patriot. As Naomi recently asked on HuffPo, “Is it still America if the president ignores or deliberately eviscerates the Constitution?”

Along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, MoveOn.org, and
True Majority, Naomi is spearheading a new grassroots and grasstops democracy movement, the American Freedom Campaign, and has asked us all — as well as each of the presidential candidates — to sign the American Freedom Pledge. The pledge reads:

“We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people’s phones and emails without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power.

“I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President.”

Now if a candidate can’t sign that, then I for one sure as hell can’t vote for her (ok, ok, or him). I heard on MSNBC the other day while on the treadmill that the campaign has already had 20,000 hits. Go Naomi, and go America. The America that believes in the Constitution, that is.

Join us in signing the pledge!

An extremely off the mark, nudge nudge wink wink article on the so-called collapse of feminism (“At Times Like This, It’s Better to Just Be One of the Boys”), by Magnus Linklater, appeared in the Times Online (UK) last week. Writes Linklater,

“Sometimes it’s a relief to be a man. Watching, at a safe distance, the collapse of feminism is a bit like seeing a huge chunk of melting glacier falling into the sea. You know it’s a sign of something serious going on, but you’re glad not to be anywhere near when it happens.”

The commentors in the comments section are doing an excellent job setting ole Magnus straight. My favorite is from “PN,” from London, who writes:

“This article is based purely on two feminist thinkers [Fay Weldon and Germaine Greer] who have made comments in the last week which have been jumped on and to some extent distorted by the media. Strangely enough, I don’t think my only choices of feminist icon are Anne Hathaway or Diana purely because Germaine Greer happens to have said something about them.

There are things to be said in defense of both Weldon and Greer, but I think the more important point is that the opinions of these two people hardly constitute the collapse of feminism. Perhaps you need to get on the internet and investigate some of the blogs and comments on feminist sites which seem to have missed the newsflash that their movement has collapsed.”

Aside from the comments, the most interesting tidbit I gleaned here was that Germaine Greer has a new book out called Shakespeare’s Wife. One of my all-time favorite moments in literature is Virginia Woolf’s speculation about Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own. (He didn’t have one, but Woolf imaginatively speculates about her fate nonetheless. What if she had wanted to write?) Anyway, back in real life, apparently men from James Boswell to Anthony Burgess had all assumed that Anne Hathaway (aka Shakespeare’s wife) was either “a lustful, scheming woman who lured Shakespeare into a loveless marriage, or an ugly harridan who drove him away by making his life a misery.” Greer takes a new look. The book sounds intriguing.

Now, if only Greer and Weldon (heros, truly!) could stop commenting all over the place that feminism is dead among young women long enough to get themselves online and to a bookstore and take a new look themselves, perhaps they’d reconsider. Or maybe not. Either way, though, it would make for a much fresher article. Then again, Magnus may not be the person to write it. He’s too busy dreaming of ice chunks and thanking god (or whoever) for having made him a man.

A quick shout out of gratitude to the folks who are posting their favorite blogs by women scholars in the comments section of the post below! Keep em coming! Meanwhile, I’m rushing off to go hear some of my favorite city girls (including Lusty Lady Rachel Kramer Bussel) read at McNally Robinson in celebration of a new anthology from Seal (hi, Laura M!). Come join me, if you’re here in NYC… Here’s the deal:

Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Seal Press)

Monday, August 27, 7 pm, Free
McNally Robinson Bookstore, 52 Prince Street (SoHo, between Lafayette and Mulberry), NYC

The popular media give us shoe shopaholics, ditzy desperados, and wannabe brides forever making cow eyes at The Bachelor. But what do single women have to say about their own lives? In the myth-busting tradition of anthologies like The Bitch in the House, the impressive roster of writers of Single State of the Union set the record straight about the experiences of single women in America. Rachel Kramer Bussel is a popular writer and teacher of erotica and the editor most recently of erotica anthologies Caught Looking and Cross-Dressing. Lynn Harris is the author of the smart New York mystery Death by Chick Lit. Judy McGuire is an advice columnist and author of How Not To Date. Susan Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Lighting Up and most recently Only As Good As Your Word. Join us for a discussion with these and other smart single (and formerly single) women that will give you a new perspective on the single state.