Is this what happens when a woman’s bid for president and a writers strike coincide?

This spring, Fox will air a new reality show called “When Women Rule.” Here’s how reality guru Mike Darnell, who’s overseeing the project, describes it for Variety:

“You take 12 attractive women who feel like it’s still a man’s world and who think they’ve hit a glass ceiling, and you give them their own society to run. Then you take 12 macho, chauvinistic guys who also think men rule the world and see how they survive in a world where they’re literally manservants. … They’ll have to obey every command from the women.”

The cliches at play here are so tired they’re not even worth commenting on. Ok, one comment. Can you imagine anything more counterproductive? Master’s tools, master’s house and all that. Jeesh. But don’t worry. These man-eaters aren’t ugly feminists. They’re “attractive women.” Phew. And we all know that women who think that sexism still exists are really just out to punish men.

“Payback can be a bitch,” Darnell said.

According to Fox Entertainment prexy Peter Liguori (what’s a prexy??), the show is a sociological experiment:

“What it’s doing, in a very Fox-like fashion, is testing social mores,” he said. “This is a social experiment and not a sexual experiment. We decided, why not create this Petri dish of a society and see what happens.”

Fox-like indeed. But here’s my favorite part:

“The other part of the show becomes, what will the women do,” Darnell said. “Will they be able to create a great society or will they fight with each other?”

Oh goodie! I can hardly wait for the ensuing catfight, cuz catfights are so sexy. Catherine Price over at Broadsheet does a great takedown, based on the press release. I join her in prayer: May the writers strike be resolved soon. Save us from more bad “reality” tv.

Check out this upcoming series for professionals who are looking to get back into the workforce, called Opting Back In: A Program for Professionals Re-entering the Workforce.

When : Wednesdays, January 9th, 16th and 23rd, 2008
Where : Newman Conference Center, 151 East 25th Street, NYC

Offered by the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, Opting Back In is a program for women (and men) who want to relaunch their careers after stepping out of the workforce. For three intensive days, professional coaches, line managers, and Baruch faculty will help participants re-assess their career interests and goals, refresh their negotiating skills, re-energize their careers, and renew and update their knowledge of current business trends.

Speakers include current employers who have hired re-entry professionals, authors of recent books on career re-entry issues, award-winning business school faculty, and professionals who have successfully relaunched their careers after years at home.

My gal Lori Rotskoff is moderating one of the panels, and authors Leslie Bennetts and Pamela Stone are among the speakers. Psst…pass it on!

Not one, but two calls for you this morning, sent to me via Bitch cofounder Lisa Jervis:

1. Yes Means Yes!

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008. Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”

Please submit your essays to yesmeansyes2008@gmail.com no later than March 1, 2008. Essays should be from 2000 to 5000 words, double spaced and paginated. Please include your address, phone number, email address and a short bio.

2. Kicked Out is a new anthology edited by Sassafras Lowrey which uniquely seeks to tell the tales of former queer youth and current queer youth who were forced to leave home because of their sexuality and/or gender identity. This anthology will tell our collective stories of survival, weaving together descriptions of abuse, and homelessness with poignant accounts of the ways in which queer community centers offered sanctuary, and the power and importance of creating our own chosen families in the face of losing everything we have ever known. Kicked Out offers advice and wisdom to the queer youth of today from those who have been in their shoes. Additionally, it provides the opportunity for readers to get a glimpse into the world of those queer youth who as a result of circumstance have to leave home, while simultaneously shattering the stereotypes of who queer youth are, and what they have the potential to become.

Submissions should be between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length and previously unpublished. Submit your piece via e-mail in .doc format to KickedOutAnthology@gmail.com. Multiple submissions per contributor are welcome. Please include a short biography and contact information with your submission. Submissions must be received no later than March 1, 2008. Visit us online at www.myspace.com/kickedoutanthology.

A new blogger friend of mine, J.K. Gayle, recently posted this awesome quiz. He’s also got a great meme going around on “favorite teachers,” reminding us of the value of giving personal and public credit to one’s best teachers. (I’m going to post mine soon!)

For those of you unfamiliar with J.K.’s blog, Speakeristic, I urge you to check it out. J.K. is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Texas Christian University, working on “translating Aristotle’s Rhetoric, rhetorically, feministically.” As he writes, “The whole project works against the nature Aristotle appears to suppose: ‘rhetoric is subservient to logic; women are subservient to men; translation is subservient to the original authored text.'”

Amen.

Yesterday I learned that Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild has been named one of the top 20 best sellers in sociology for 2007!

For the record, I am not a trained sociologist but happy to have written a book that is categorized as such. My doctorate is in literature/cultural studies, but disciplines blur these days, and categories do, it seems, too.

Also, I’m booking up for Women’s History Month (March 2008). Bring me to your campus, company, or organization! I love to yap about the book, and talks spawn the kind of intergenerational dialogue I (and many others, I know) crave, so I’m very, very excited and feel quite fortunate to be on the speaking circuit this year.

To book me, please email Taryn Kutujian at taryn.kutujian@gmail.com. (And for the academics among you, as a member of the academic community, you are entitled to a free desk copy, to encourage you to consider adopting the book in your course! If interested, again, please contact Taryn.)

And borrowing a tactic from my fave blog feministing, please share your own shameless plugs in comments. I’d love to hear.

On this rainy grey morning in NYC, I’m putting together a short list of writers residency programs/retreats that are available, by application, during the summers. In addition to McDowell and Yaddo, do you know of ones to add to the list? Please post ’em in comments, and I’ll post the complete list in a post down the road!

Here are some I recently learned about, to get us started:

Well Spring House
Ashfield, MA (pictured above)

Ragdale Foundation
Lake Forest, IL

World Fellowship Center

Blue Mountain Center

Leave it to the savvy ladies over at the Women’s Media Center to spearhead this stellar opportunity:

The Progressive Women’s Voices program builds on the Women’s Media Center’s mission to make women more visible and powerful in the media. Through this program, we will identify, train, support, and promote progressive women to become sought-after media resources and opinion leaders. Progressive Women’s Voices will infuse the media with women experts who are prepared to deliver their message and information through mainstream and non mainstream media platforms, educating the public and working to gender-balance the journalistic lens.

To that end, WMC is seeking participants who represent diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, and levels of experience to apply for the program, which entails in-person intensive training, 10 weekly issues briefings, ongoing conversation with other participants, a web platform, ongoing WMC strategy and support, mentoring, and 12 Months of Promotion and Pitching.

Read more about it at HuffPo in this post by WMC President, Carol Jenkins, which begins:

Quick: Name five progressive women who you would consider household names in America today.

Can’t do it? Then tell us five progressive women whose voices should be prominent in the national media dialogue, and the Women’s Media Center will help put them there.

Ready to apply, or tap someone who is? Spread the word!

No matter what you think of her, you couldn’t ask for a better book promoter than Rosie O’Donnell (ok, maybe Oprah, but Rosie’s not far behind). And watching Rosie talk to a group of 11 year olds at a feminist anniversary conference, well, I’ll admit, it gives me the chills.

In the clip posted here, a bespeckled 11-year old African American girl named Nia asks Rosie what inspired her to be at the conference. And Rosie answers, “Bella Abzug.” When Nia says she has no idea who that is, Rosie hands her Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom’s new book, Bella Abzug, and says sternly: “You are going to write me. You understand missy? You are going to learn who Bella Abzug was and then, in about 15 years, I’m going to vote for you when you’re running for office.” Vintage Rosie.

And the new oral history just out from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is vintage Bella. It makes sense that a history of this wonderfully raging feminist who a Time Out New York reviewer calls the “progressive grand dame” with just a touch of the Mommie Dearest relies on cumulative testimonial. Says lifelong friend Gloria Steinem, lovingly I am sure: “She scared the shit out of me.”

I never had a chance to meet Bella personally, but after reading this book, I feel like I have. The authors, Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, edited scads of interviews into a “conversation.” In their words:

[T]he story unfolds through anecdote, embellishment, contradiction, flashback and flash-forward, asides, commentary, speculation–as if the wide-ranging and ill-assorted cast of characters were gathered around a fireplace reminiscing about someone who stomped into their lives and left an indelible mark.

It’s an interesting way to tell the story of a life. And the story revealed sheds light on many compelling personalities who shared moments in Bella’s political legacy–feminist and beyond. As Levine and Thom highlight in their introduction, the book “speaks to a particularly powerful moment in which vital social movements converged in the second half of the twentieth century, every one of which featured Bella as a catalyst and creative force.” It’s that larger story, as much as the story of this remarkably human super-shero, that makes this book required reading for anyone seeking to learn more about an era that indelibly shaped our own.

If you don’t know who Bella was, ya need this book. If you know who she was or knew her personally, you’ll definitely want this book. And for those looking to take Bella Studies a step further, the Jewish Women’s Archive has great material just waiting to be mined.

Ok, folks, here’s an award that many journalists I know would be eligible for, so please please send your nominations in! (Self-nomination is totally acceptable.)

Council on Contemporary Families 2007 Media Awards for Outstanding Coverage of Family Issues — CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

CCF announces the opening of nominations for its Sixth Annual Media Awards competition. We honor outstanding journalism that contributes to the public understanding of contemporary family issues, in particular the story behind the story: how diverse families are coping with social and economic change ; what they need to flourish; and how these needs can best be met.

The Council will issue two awards for journalism in text form (print- or web-based) and one for broadcast journalism. The awards will be presented at the 11th Annual CCF Conference on Friday, April 25th in Chicago , Illinois

CCF believes that America needs a balanced national conversation about the cultural, legal, and psychological issues that shape both private life and public policy. Essential partners in this process are the reporters and producers who present complicated family issues in their broader social context.

Criteria: Submissions must draw on traditional journalistic techniques of interview, observation and documentation. Opinion pieces are not eligible. Work must have been published, broadcast, or posted during calendar year 2007. Video and radio submissions must not exceed 30 minutes. Written submissions must not exceed 2000 words; excerpts are acceptable. Single pieces or a series that covers a particular issue over time are eligible.

Deadline for nominations: Friday, February 8, 2008

For more info or to request a submission form, contact applewhite@earthlink.net.

Check out this piece from The Onion, “Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement.” Highlights:

“All the feminist movement needed to do was bring on someone who had the balls to do something about this glass ceiling business,” said McGowan, who quickly closed the 23.5 percent gender wage gap by “making a few calls to the big boys upstairs.” “In the world of gender identity and empowered female sexuality, it’s all about who you know.”

McGowan, who was selected from a pool of roughly 150 million candidates, made eliminating sexual harassment his first priority before working on securing reproductive rights for women in all 50 states, and promoting healthy body images through an influx of strong, independent female characters in TV, magazines, and film.

“It’s about time,” McGowan said upon returning from a golf game with several “network honchos” in which he brokered a deal to bring a variety of women’s sports to prime-time television. “These ladies should have brought me on years ago.”

(Thanks to my man Marco for the heads up. Photo cred.)