Go Red for Women

I was surprised to find out that heart disease is the number 1 killer of women. Kills more women than all kinds of cancer combined. (Wow.) In an effort to raise public awareness of this, The American Heart Association encourages you to wear red this Friday (2/6) to show your support for Go Red for Women.

I don't know anyone who doesn't look good in red, so there's really no excuse to do something so simple! In addition, you might also consider visiting www.goreadforwomen.org to make a donation to support vital research and education efforts. Every little bit helps.

Pet Peeves: Ho-ing it up for Halloween

Halloween (or All Hallow's Eve) used to be a time to take stock of and celebrate the harvest, a time when people believed the divide between this world and the underworld became permeable, allowing the dead to cause havoc amongst the living. During celebrations, people would often dress like ghouls, goblins, and other scary creatures to mimic and placate or scare the ghosts away.

Now? Well, now we dress like whores. The movie Mean Girls captured this beautifully. Remember Lindsay Lohan's character Cady's big faux pas when she dressed up like a zombie bride for a high school Halloween party? Cady's inner dialogue: "In 'Girl World,' Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it. The hard-core girls just wear lingerie and some form of animal ears."

And nothing's sacred. Even the most chaste and honorable costume ideas have a "sexy" twist nowadays. Angel? How about a bad angel? A nun? How about a naughty nun? Judge Judy? How about Judge Do-Me?

And me? I'm no better. That's me dressed like a belly dancer in college in the picture to the right here. . . . And didn't I just comment about being sick of the objectification of women as eye candy in a recent post, using the U2 belly dancer as an example? Yes, yes I did, Internet.

Hmm. Have I become a complete and utter hypocrite? Have I just become a finger-wagging prude in my 30's? Or was I just a young girl who was susceptible to societal gender stereotypes who has since matured? Ya, . . . I'd like to argue for the latter, . . . but, if I'm honest, the truth is probably closer to a combination of all three of those theories. Nevertheless, it's still the latter that bothers me the most . . . because it starts so early. Unless you've been in a coma for the past few years, you have to be aware of the most recent generation of little girls' unhealthy obsession with Disney princesses these days. (See a great Target Women video post regarding this too.) There they are to the left, each coquettishly tilting her head for the "camera." Yikes. Just when I think we've made so much progress, I realize how much things are still so gender-typed. Parents might as well just cut to the chase and dress their kids like this for Halloween! Boo, indeed.

One to Watch: Sarah Haskins

I think we'd all like to think that we've come a long way since these days:


Most product marketers nowadays don't need to be reminded that women have real buying power, but, unfortunately, there are still a glut of them out there who haven't quite figured out that we're real people too. Thankfully, Sarah Haskins over at http:current.com's infoMania does a nice job of pointing out these ridiculous stereotypes and insults to our intelligence in her "Target Women" video segments. If you haven't seen one, you're missing out:

And it's not just me; Kate Harding over at Broadsheet has a girl crush on Ms. Haskins too. She's only been in L.A. for under a year, but people have already started to take notice, calling for her to be added to the cast of The Daily Show, and The Bastion and NPR have already cornered her for interviews. In the Bastion interview, she's asked if she's a feminist. Her answer: "Yes, I’m a feminist. . . . To me it means that as women we are individuals before we are gendered people and that we're not defined by our gender except in the ways we chose to appropriate that definition." Very nice. There are too many women out there who think feminism is a dirty word. I think Sarah, a Harvard grad, could easily join the ranks of smart comediennes like Tina Fey, also a product of Chicago's Second City. And that just makes me very very happy. There aren't nearly enough women of this ilk getting air time, if you ask me.

Blogging Community

So, I’m new to this blogging thing, but really enjoying it. Well, technically, I guess I started a blog with my husband (my boyfriend at the time) back in 2004 to journal our restaurant experiences in Pasadena (we called it . . . PasaDiner. Yes, how clever.). But we never really wrote much and ended up abandoning it altogether when we moved out to Ventura County. (Although I did add a couple of my entries from that blog to this one, so you can check them out here if you like.)

While, I’ve been new to blog writing, I’m not new to blog reading. Over the past couple of years, I’ve stumbled across quite a few good ones, some of which I’m totally addicted to reading on a daily basis now (see the list in my sidebar to the right). One of those is a blog I encouraged an author of mine to create back when I was an acquisitions editor for a textbook publisher. (Without me there to prod him, however, I do fear that his blog may go the way of my PasaDiner blog . . . .)

Blogs come in so many flavors – personal, professional, topic-specific – but there does seem to be at least one unifying element to each and every one of them – they are created for sharing and connecting with other people. I haven’t quite figured out what I want my blog to be yet, but I do hope it connects with people. I imagine that group of people will be comprised primarily of my friends and family, but, if that generates some organic growth, I say the more the merrier! In the meantime, I’m also looking into getting involved with some blog communities. For instance, recently, I discovered BlogHer, an online blogging community for women who blog.

For my female reader friends who also blog, here’s info from BlogHer’s “about” page:

“Founded in February 2005 as a labor of love by three bloggers, BlogHer's mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today, BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, via annual conferences, a Web network, and an advertising network of more than 1,400 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates. BlogHer Inc. is majority-owned by three co-founders and has backing from Venrock.”

I won't likely make it this year, but, for anyone interested, they’re also having their annual conference in downtown San Francisco July 18-20:

The Westin St. Francis Hotel
Union Square
335 Powell Street
San Francisco, CA
(415) 397-7000

They offer opportunities to carpool and different, reasonable pricing packages, including student pricing.

International Women's Day

Women have made great strides over the past century to achieve equal rights, opportunities, and protections against maltreatment. I’m very grateful to the brave and brilliant women who have come before me who blazed that trail, making it possible for me to live the life that I do. On Saturday, International Women’s Day, I think we should all take a moment to appreciate those women – both the famous and the personal female role models in our lives – and perhaps make a commitment to take action on initiatives that will further our progress. It can be as simple as calling your aunt and thanking her for teaching you that women can be successful in the science professions or calling (301-443-1083), writing a letter (address below) to, or e-mailing Robert McSwain, Director of Indian Health Services, to demand quality health care for Native American and Alaska native women (1 in 3 is raped in her lifetime).

Sadly, it’s easy to take for granted all that has been achieved in the name of women’s rights, especially in the United States where things aren’t anywhere near as bad as they still are in many other regions of the world (e.g., dangerous, life-threatening female genital cutting is still practiced in the name of tradition in some regions of the world). We can’t forget that our fellow women come from all countries, all walks of life, and many of them do not yet enjoy the rights, opportunities, or protections against maltreatment that we do; and we can’t forget that, even though we may have made great strides in the United States, we still have obstacles to overcome here as well, like the “glass ceiling” in the workplace. In short, our work is not done, sisters!

IHS Address:

Indian Health Service (HQ)
The Reyes Building
801 Thompson Avenue, Ste. 400
Rockville, MD 20852-1627

Additional info on events and actions can be found via the following links:

Amnesty International’s Women’s Human Rights

National Organization for Women

Famous Feminists

Test your knowledge of famous female feminists.