A friend - a male friend - sent me this link, an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, commenting:

“Leave it to the Washington Post to set feminism back twenty years with one op-ed piece. And, of course, just like Thom Yorke [of Radiohead] said, ‘You do it to yourself…’ Terrible. Just terrible. Like black-on-black crime.”

This op-ed piece really is just breathtaking. I’m speechless.

Here are a few choice extracts:

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?

I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

(Note: Plenty of men claim to have Morgellon’s - I’ve interviewed them myself. Click here for a piece on the controversy.)

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This isn’t motivated by anything in the news, anything in the world of ideas, or anything that has happened to me. This is just something that has been kicking around my head for a while, that I just feel the need to say.

We talk a lot on this blog about what is lacking in our lives, and in the lives of women all over the world: equal pay, reproductive choice, justice and support for victims of sexual assault – this list is long, depressing, and infinitely worthy of our attention.

But as many barriers as we still face, I don’t want any of us to forget just how incredibly lucky we are.

We are – arguably – part of the first generation of women (if not the very first) to know freedom like this. It is unprecedented. For all of human history, stretching back tens of thousands of years, has any group of women had so many choices open to them? And, for that matter, do most women on this planet today share this luxury?

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I was out with a couple of my best girlfriends earlier this week, both of whom have suffered, and continue to suffer, from acute anorexia. You wouldn’t know it to look at them - they both make efforts to eat properly, so they don’t look underweight - but inside their heads they say it’s a constant battle. In the spirit of tackling their problem head-on, they’ve agreed to meet up once a week to eat an entire meal together. Which, they joked, will usually consist of steamed veggies, brown rice and fish, “A typical anorexic dinner!” I laughed as well. Often humour is the best way to deal with our problems.

It’s such a terrible shame that for so many women today food is such a problematic issue. While for centuries most people struggled just to get enough to eat, in the west today, where food is cheap and plentiful, different problems have become ubiquitous: chronic overeating and chronic undereating, particularly among women. For both groups, food becomes an enemy, not a friend.

Which is such a heartbreaking shame: food - along with sleep and sex - should be one of the joyful cornerstones of each of our lives. We should love to eat, and to eat well. And yet for so many of us, the simple act of consuming food is fraught with guilt and pain. Compulsive under-eating, just like over-eating, can become like an addiction.

These problems are so complex, and can be so difficult to alleviate. And yet for all the self-help books out there, endless diet tips in glossy women’s magazines, and countless exercise regimes advertised, there seems to be a real dearth of healthy and helpful information that deals with the issues. Not just from a nuts-and-bolts perspective regarding nutrition and health, but also from a psychological and - dare I say it - feminist perspective.

Which is why it’s so great to see The Guardian‘s new series on weight loss, authored by the editor of the women’s pages, Kira Cochrane. Click here for the first installment - she’ll be putting out a new column every two weeks for the foreseeable future. It’s a wonderfully atypical perspective.

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I got my period this morning, and I’m - pardon the pun - over the moon.

Not because I thought I was pregnant (although I am indeed glad not to be pregnant right now). No, my menstrual joy derives from two sources.

One: I’m not on the birth control pill right now. I was on the pill until this past winter, and since coming off it, have had very irregular and sparse periods, which is - although not unusual - a bummer. It’s not nice to feel like your body isn’t working properly, and particularly not nice to feel that an artificial pill you took messed you up good and proper. But I was greeted by a throbbing uterus this morning, and damn, it’s nice to feel my body working like it should. I didn’t realize how much I liked ovulating until I stopped. Now that things are up and running as normal, I can’t help but feel like there’s something pretty magical about my cyclical peaks of progesterone and estrogen - it’s like there’s a little alchemical lab right in my tummy.

And,

Two: Eco-friendly menstrual products. My eagerly anticipated package arrived in the mail last week, with a collection of re-usable cotton panty liners (in a variety of shapes and colours), reusable panties - which have the cotton padding sewn right in, and - that most awesome of menstrual products - a reusable cup.

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Check out this piece from The Guardian about a new trend in finance: “female-oriented” banking, which “is not about frivolity and bows but profit and the bottom line.”

Emotion Banking’s chief executive, Christian Rauscher, says that until now banks have failed to tap into the lucrative female market. “Fifty-one per cent of [banking] clients worldwide are female … more women are standing on their own feet and deciding their own finances … [banks] tend to address men in their communication, which is not necessarily the best way to be successful.”

The article is pretty vague about exactly what female-oriented banking actually looks like, or how it differs from “conventional” banking.

Catherine Tillotson, a partner at the wealth management consultancy Scorpio Partnership, says private banks are often guilty of “wrap[ping] up their services in pink … now it’s becoming [clearer] the issue is not about whether women should be treated differently. [Banks need] a different marketing approach, rather than different service.”

I don’t think I like the idea that women require different banking services or different marketing strategies compared to men. And I kind of find it a bit, um, weird that the consultancy firm first mentioned is called Emotion Banking - is my savings account supposed to ask me about my feelings when I make a withdrawal because I have ovaries?

But the article does mention some heartening stats:

A 2006 Centre for Economic Business Research study estimated 53% of millionaires are likely to be female in 2020 … [Morevoer], the wealth gap between males and females is narrowing. In 2006, the average female millionaire was worth £1.97m, while the figure for men was £2.96m. This compares with £1.28m for women in 1998 and £2.71m for males … No longer reliant on divorce settlements or inheritances, women are now making their own money. Some 38% of Coutts’ clients gained wealth through salary, 19% did so from their spouse, 7% inherited it and the remainder acquired it through unknown means.

The article also mentions some Canadian figures:

As in Britain, Canadian women’s financial power is growing: between 1991 and 2001, women’s self-employment grew 43%, and there are some 821,000 female entrepreneurs in Canada, contributing in excess of C$18bn (£8.58bn) to the economy.

We’re not quite there yet - but nice to know we’re on our way.

I didn’t really want to like Natalie Portman - her image is a bit too cutesy for me, I think her acting is overrated, and the stain of the last three Star Wars movies is awful hard to wash off. What can I say, I’m human, and all humans have some bias in their soul.

But after putting in the effort to learn a thing or two about her, she has earned my respect. She once said “I’d rather be smart than be a movie star,” and she apparently meant it. She speaks five languages (and is learning more), and has taken time out of acting for her education - first a BA at Harvard, then graduate studies at Hebrew University. She has also done some work to promote micro-lending for women-owned businesses in poor countries.

I particularly respect her latest dabbling: acting as guest editor for Scholastic MATH, a mag that helps teens appreciate the fun and relevance of mathematics.

This is what she has to say:

“Math was one of my favorite subjects in school. It always gets a bad rap and I’m not sure why. I always found math to be such an exciting avenue to think about the world in new and different ways.

Sure, you need to use math daily for knowing how much tip to leave at a restaurant or how much flour you need to make double the amount of cookies in a recipe, but it is the less obviously practical parts of math that are most fun for me—like considering the principles of infinity. It made me excited about life to consider the limitlessness of the mind and what we can do with it.”

Nicely put. It’s always wonderful to see women promoting math and busting up the “girls are no good at math” stereotype.

This weekend I had the wonderful chance to see an exhibit here in London, England of the art of Lee Miller (1907 - 1977), feminist icon and one of the twentieth century’s greatest photographers.

Born in upstate New York, she actually began her career at 19 as a model for American Vogue - she made history when she appeared in the first advertisement for menstrual products that featured an actual woman in the picture. She was captured on film by some of the world’s greatest photographers, and was considered one of the greatest beauties of her day - her breasts were thought so perfect, champagne glasses were modeled after them.

But so much more than just a pretty face, she was much more passionate about working behind the camera than in front of it.

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Ah, statistics. There was no course I hated more at university. And yet, sometimes, if you want to make a point, all you need is some good, clear numbers.

Voila:

Number of countries that ban abortion (except in cases of rape/incest/life of the mother is threatened): 69

Percentage of the world’s population that live in those countries: 26

Percentage of the world’s population that live in countries that restrict abortion in some way: over 60

Fun, huh?

Let’s all take a moment to be glad for Canada’s liberal attitude towards abortion. There are no questions asked, and it’s free (except if you are unfortunate enough to live in pockets of this country where access is difficult/nonexistent, such as New Brunswick).

If you live in the US you have to pay - and it is not easy to secure in many states.

If you live in the UK you require the written approval of TWO doctors.

If you live in New Zealand, believe it or not, you are only able to get one if you can prove it will protect your “mental health,” such as in cases of rape, or if your economic circumstances are too dire.

But if you live in any of those 69 countries, you probably won’t be able to get one without flying discreetly away (certainly impossible for the vast, vast majority of the world’s women).

And if you are unlucky enough to live in one of the world’s three countries that will not even allow you an abortion if your life is threatened - Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador - well, then you’re S.O.L.

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We all know that models have been getting skinnier and skinnier over the past twenty years. We all know that bone-thin women are neither healthy nor sexy, yet models have just kept getting thinner and thinner, and it really is hard to understand why. Rail-thin models were originally considered ideal because they could act like coat-hangers on the catwalk - their small frames would allow you to better appreciate the cut of the clothing. But somehow the idea that bone-thin is the ideal shape for a woman infected the mainstream, and ever since models seem to keep getting smaller and smaller.

Check out this wonderful piece in the Observer Women’s magazine, which explores the idea that models have also been getting thinner because their status in the world of fashion has diminished. The author explains her point so well, I’ll just quote some extracts:

Raise the issue of eating disorders during Fashion Week, and someone will inevitably bring up that lost, glorious era of the supermodel: Christy, Naomi, Cindy, Linda, the four-headed stompy-legged beast with big shiny hair, the one that wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000. Those were the days when models took up space. They were stars. They made demands. And their faces were everywhere. To paraphrase from Sunset Boulevard, sometimes it feels like it’s not the clothes that have got small, it’s the models.

Nowadays, it seems that the most common faces you see in magazines and catwalks are Eastern European girls, often from poor backgrounds with little education, who are easily exploited by their powerful agencies in Paris and New York. They are often faced with the choice of either losing as much weight as possible, or losing work.

One of the interesting things about these models today is that they get used and spit out so quickly,’ says Magali Amadei, a model who has been open about her recovery from bulimia. ‘The era of the supermodel is over, so girls working today don’t have the earning power. These girls come into the business young, and they are disposable. On top of that, people often talk about your appearance in front of you, as if you can’t hear them.’

…

‘It’s a far more complex issue than people realise,’ Suzy Menkes, the British fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune, told me. ‘You know, many of these girls were brought up in the postcommunist years on an extremely bad diet. From childhood, they’ve not been properly nourished. That may make them very appealing to designers, but they don’t start off with a healthy body. And nothing is simple. I think it must be incredibly difficult to come from a vegetable stall in the Ukraine and find yourself in Paris among Ladurée macaroons. People have to accept that it’s a much bigger picture than terrible fashion folk starving to get into frocks.’

…

If Fashion Week is about reinforcing hierarchies, skinniness has always been a way to compete. Being thin means control and, symbolically, that you are rich, that you are young, that you are beautiful, that you are powerful. And yet…the models themselves, who are skinnier and younger than anyone, can seem like the weakest people here: manual labourers with short working lives. And whatever their eating habits, the girls in the gowns attract, like anorexics, an unstable mix of envy, anxiety, and scorn, a cultural response reserved for women reduced (or maybe elevated) to their bodies.

And for observers of the catwalk, there remains the nagging question: why this skinny? And why now? I hear two dominant theories. The first is that fashion is aspirational. There’s make-up; there’s lighting; it is intended to be extreme, not realistic - to inspire envy. The other theory is that the girls need to be skinny because they need to be invisible. Clothing stands out best when the body is a blank. And the better the clothes are, the more extreme the skinniness must be. But, of course, these two explanations are diametrically opposed. In the first vision, the models must be thin so people look at them. In the second, they must be thin so that no one will notice them. And when I ask the buyers and the customers, they seem baffled about the reason for it all.

…

And isn’t there something a little creepy about using teenage girls from poor countries to model gowns that get bought mainly by incredibly wealthy adult women?

There’s one more point that the author doesn’t make, although she comes very close to it. When you look at it this way - poor, naive, young girls brought from former eastern bloc countries to work long hours, in incredibly unhealthy conditions, with little ability to get into another line of work - it really is just another form of human trafficking.