Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

I know this is a bad (un)feminist guilty pleasure. . . . But ever since I discovered spanx (recommended by another feminist blogger actually) I have been addicted to them. What are they? Basically, a girdle, a "power panty" if you will, something that holds in all in so you can put those super ultra tight unforgiving dresses on.

Alright, full confession. I think I am sexy with or without spanx. But feeling sexy everyday is sometimes difficult. I have things to do, like go to work, blog, eat, hang out with my friends, etc. What I don't have time to do is obsess over how I like in this or that which I do my best not to do as a feminist, but it is hard when you are constantly inundated by images of thinness, whiteness and richness. And frankly, if you saw me on the regular you wouldn't think I give it that much thought, I dress pretty casually. But when Friday night rolls around and I want to go out on the town, sometimes I like to look extra fancy and sometimes it feels better to wear something that holds it all in. It just gives me that ounce more confidence. So I go from "damn I look good" to "DAMN, I look HELLA good."

-- SAMHITA

Let me ask you a question, ladies: when was the last time you did something spontaneously romantic?

I'll guess rarely - and holding hands with Toby in third class after he offered you a mangled daisy doesn't count. There's a very good reason for this: women are actually far less romantic than men . . . they just kid themselves it's the other way around.

It's a common misconception that when it comes to intimacy men are merely grunting steam engines, focused only on the destination, never the journey.

-- SAM de BRITO

Imagine this: You are running for Congress, campaigning and trying to carry out all your usual obligations. Then one morning your home burns down. While you and your family escape unharmed, almost every single thing you owned has disappeared. How long would you take before you'd start campaigning again? Six months? A year? Never?

These events are not imaginary, but something which happened to Darcy Burner and her family on the first of July. She took a campaign break of eighteen days. Eighteen days. Now that is some determination! We might even call this political ambition, a great desire to serve the public no matter what.

Burner is not the only woman who has demonstrated such stamina and focus in political life. Madeline Albright, the first female Secretary of State of the United States, once said that she wanted to do more than to just maintain the achievements of earlier Secretaries of State: she wanted to aim higher. Carol Moseley Brown had enough political ambition not only to become the first female African-American Senator in the United States Congress, but to run for the president of the United States. And we are all familiar with Hilary Clinton's recent presidential run and political ambition.

Yet Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post columnist, thinks that it is the lack of political ambition which keeps women away from participating in political life. It's not discrimination that keeps the number of American women in Congress at 16 percent; the problem, she writes, is that women have an "inner glass ceiling": a tendency to give up too soon and too easily, a tendency to shirk away from the feistiness of political battles, a tendency to underrate their own abilities.

-- J. GOODRICH

A study conducted by sociologists from Cambridge University seems to suggest that the support for working mothers is weakening. The researchers compared survey results from the 1980s till recently, and found "growing sympathy for the old-fashioned view that a woman’s place is in the home, rather than in the office," caused by "mounting concern that women who play a full and equal role in the workforce do so at the expense of family life."

-- INGRID ROBEYNS

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

-- ADRIAN BLOMFIELD

I'm five months pregnant, and I'm obsessed with money. Lest you think I'm some kind of über-confident gold digger or super materialist, let me assure you that I'm neither. I'm just a middle-class professional woman who's scared to turn on the news many days because I know the financials will be terrifying. And I know I'm not alone.

-- MORRA AARONS-MELE

Is sex work a feminist act? Not in itself, no, IMO. Any job is feminist in the limited sense that women working and supporting ourselves is feminist. But unless a type of work actively promotes women’s equality, I don’t think it’s affirmatively feminist. It’s not antifeminist either, though, unless it involves coercion of unwilling participants or marketing a typically very temporary career to those who otherwise might choose options offering longer-term security.

But hey – there are still plenty of feminist lessons to be learned.

The club I worked at in Vegas in ‘99-2000 is called the Magic Carpet. Or, that’s what I call it in the various “stripper stories” I have at my blog. If you’re a Vegas aficionado, you can probably figure out which one I mean. Hint – we had male strippers on the second floor.

So without further ado, here are the Lessons . . .

-- OCTOGALORE