Feminist eruptions about Sarah Palin have been stunning. Eve Ensler went ballistic. NOW endorsed an all-male ticket and disavowed Palin. Gloria Steinem contradicted her January op-ed argument. Naomi Wolf spun off into a paranoid fantasy. Feminists urgently circulated petitions full of false claims about Palin. When I sent friends information and links correcting these claims—shouldn’t that reduce fear and allow a saner conversation?—two who wrote back were outraged. Friends who normally speak in dulcet tones were suddenly pitched an octave and decibels higher, unable to converse in the normal rhythm …

Amy Siskind, co-founder of The New Agenda, appeared on Fox News today to discuss the sexism in Barack Obama’s latest ad:

The latest ad out of the Obama campaign quotes John McCain saying how he might have to rely on the Vice President he selects for expertise on economic issues.
“His choice?” asks the ad, and it cuts to an clip of Sarah Palin, winking.

In the clip, Governor Palin is talking, but we can’t hear what she’s saying. There is no sound, no voice. The ad implies that Governor Palin is nothing more than a flirtatious and inconsequential woman.
This is the equivalent of the McCain campaign running an ad that asks how …

Bear witness to the continued disintegration of the moral fiber of our country. The festival of misogyny is in full swing. What small and muted protests rise can hardly hold back the vitriol by those who want to see Sarah Palin look-alike porn, who want to demean her intellect, her accomplishments, her fitness as a mother, who want to see her humiliated, knocked to the ground by a man twice her size, hung in effigy, burned, stoned, dead.
This is no longer about Governor Palin. Nor is it any longer about …

Members,
We truly can make a difference. We are continuing to speak out against the blatant sexism in our country and getting results!
Click here to read the GretaWire story on a recent initiative and its satisfactory outcome.
Congratulations to us all!
Now, despite our successes around the edges, we still have a lot to bring us down these days. The election is tense, the economy is in the tank, and many of us are struggling to get by. What better time to get together and vent!
Join us on Monday, …

We’d like to call out a Yay! to Judy Muller of The Huffington Post, who, rather than join the rest of the media in their feeding frenzy on the latest juicy half-truth about Sarah Palin, instead spoke up about the sexist bias at play in the latest controversy about Palin’s hair and wardrobe expenses.
“[B]eneath this ‘controversy’ is a troubling fact: when it comes to judging female politicians, we are still a deeply sexist culture. Hillary Clinton was certainly subjected to this relentless scrutiny. The result: she actually looked better and …

Members: It’s nice to be able to write about some good news for a change.
Last week, we posted an article, Kitty Genovese and Sarah Palin: The “Bystander Effect” and Women of the Democratic Party, in which we cited some fairly disturbing examples of the misogyny feast aimed at Governor Palin. One of the examples of offensive sexism was a video called “Drill Baby Drill” produced by Ezra Stead which featured inferences of the rape of a number of politically prominent women, including Governor Palin, Barbara Bush and Tipper …

It’s hard to remain open-minded toward John McCain when he’s steering a discussion about recently out-of-work 50-something women who are afraid of losing their health care back to Joe the Plumber and his vexing tax problem (or math problem—depending), or when he’s putting scare-quotes around “women’s health”, but for many feminists who intend to do so, voting for McCain/Palin is not about McCain. It’s about abandoning a party that doesn’t represent their interests. It’s about supporting a woman running for public office. It’s about the realization that if we keep …

So let’s see: a video depicting a violent attack on Governor Palin is not only okay and but just hilarious since she’s a public figure and is therefore fair game (asking for it). That’s different from hurting regular women, because violence against women is wrong.
Got it? Fictional violence against Governor Palin is fine, but real violence against regular women is wrong, because one is fiction (ha ha—awesome!), and the other is real (very very bad), and there is absolutely no connection between the two.
Riiiiiiiiiight—and football players never beat up …

A fireside chat with Ophelia.
Thank you to those of you who joined us for our first week of “Chewing the Fat with Ophelia.” The show was a resounding success with callers from PA, OH, FL, IN, NM, WI, MN, NJ and NY buzzing in to let their hair down and chew some fat!
Please join us tonight, Monday, October 20th, from 10-11 p.m. EST for our second show.
This is a new kind of radio: internet podcasting. The “radio” is your computer – all you have to do is …