Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent

A few hours after Susan Boyle stunned audiences on Britain’s Got Talent, a commenter at my blog posted the link. “Have you seen this?” she asked. Six days later, everyone has seen it. Everyone with a TV or an internet connection, that is.
When I first watched the clip, I was disturbed by the audience’s initial eye-rolling and derisive laughter. This, I thought, is why I have so little tolerance for pop culture. The twits were laughing at Susan Boyle for …

 
It was two years ago today that Seung-Hui Cho went on his murder spree at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people, wounding 17 others, and finally turning the gun on himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
A few days after the massacre, Sarah Baxter put her finger on what was troubling Cho in an article that must surely rank as one of the most brutally inane things ever published by the Times: it was feminism made him do it! What the shooting revealed, said Sarah, was “the crisis …

Only four days from now! This Saturday, April 18, The New Agenda will be hosting a Violence Against Women Forum from 3-5 p.m. at the Benjamin Hotel in New York City. A cocktail hour will follow from 5-6 p.m. Please let us know you’re coming! RSVP to tnavawforum@yahoo.com.
The Violence Against Women Forum will feature four of the New York area’s preeminent experts on domestic violence. Each expert will speak about a specific topic that she feels is currently noteworthy.
One of the four panelists, Leslie Crocker Snyder, Retired Justice …

It’s only one week from today! On Saturday, April 18, The New Agenda will be hosting a Violence Against Women Forum from 3-5 p.m. at the Benjamin Hotel in New York City. A cocktail hour will follow from 5-6 p.m. Please let us know you’re coming! RSVP to tnavawforum@yahoo.com.
The Violence Against Women Forum will feature four of the New York area’s preeminent experts on domestic violence. Each expert will speak about a specific topic that she feels is currently noteworthy.
One of the four panelists, Rosemonde Pierre-Louis, Manhattan Deputy …

Tina Fey promoted sexist stereotypes with her parody of Sarah
Palin last year, depicting the Alaska Governor as a brainless bimbo.
As we all know, patriarchy bestows its smiles and kisses on the women who do its bidding, especially those women who take on the front-line enforcer jobs of shredding other women to bits. Last year a whole bunch of women signed up for duty on the Sarah Palin Evisceration Squad, none more prominently than Tina Fey. And the rewards for her efforts keep pouring in. She’s been on …

So here are two thousand words, all about the state of gender equality in the 21st century. Both courtesy of Tennessee Guerilla Women:
The G20 Wives — not husbands
Well, there are only two husbands anyway. Funny, that.
They let women in the room?
That’s Hillary at one of the G20 meetings — Hillary and a whole bunch of dudes. Wonder if she’s carrying her jar?*

*Jar: At an unnamed university several years ago, one female professor got so fed up with the sexism that at the next department meeting, she …

The New Agenda is sponsoring a Violence Against Women forum on April 18, 2009.
Keira Knightley is appearing in a new ad campaign about domestic violence for the British charity Women’s Aid.
In the shocking two-minute film, Knightley is shown being brutally assaulted by her partner (warning! violent content):

At the end of the clip, you’ll notice that the tagline says “2 women die from domestic violence every week.” That’s the figure in the U.K. In the United States, it’s ten times that number: at least 20 women …

Help us spread the word! We’re pleased to present the online invitation and brochure for our upcoming Violence Against Women Forum in New York City:

We’ve created a new section on the website for the forum, as you’ll see if you look up on the top menu bar. In that section we’ve made the entire brochure available for download as a pdf or jpeg, and we’ve also created separate pages for each panelist with individual jpegs and pdfs.
You can download the invitation above as a jpeg or …

Results from the Boston Public Health Commission’s survey of teens on the Rihanna/Chris Brown caseThere’s an essay by Judith Timson in today’s Globe and Mail that is so much in line with my own thinking, I could almost have written it myself. Timson is grieving over the lack of feminist consciousness in the young women who are busy blaming Rihanna for getting beaten to a pulp by Chris Brown:
Recent events have made me wonder despairingly whether decades of modern feminism have made any significant dent at all in the …

There were a few scary moments last year when it seemed a woman might actually be the next President of the United States, but then the patriarchy got things back under control with Barack Obama. Just as Obama’s inauguration was an aggressive and carefully calculated display of male dominance, the media coverage of his White House is like a nightmare rerun of Ozzie and Harriet. Yesterday’s puff piece in the New York Times on Michelle Obama is positively gleeful:
On the president and her wardrobe:
“He’s always asking: …