feminist blogs

Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking by Deanna Zandt
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

Back in ‘08, when the conventions of social networking were still maybe a little wonky (because of course they’re perfectly logical now), my husband wasn’t invited to a party because the invitations were sent out through Facebook and he didn’t have an account. Ever the 21st century writer, he quickly penned the following blog post, which I’ve reprinted in its entirety for your amusement:

Cakeboof; or, A Good Anagram Is Hard to Find
-A brief parable on the electronic age

Scene: The electronic mailroom.  Tomemos approaches the Postmaster.
Tomemos: Hi there.  I don’t think I’m getting my mail.
Postmaster: I’m terribly sorry, sir.  What makes you say that?
T: Well, I keep hearing about events that I was supposed to be invited to, but I never get the invitations.
P: Hmm, that’s odd.  Is your membership in Cakeboof current?
T: …Cakeboof?
P: You know, Cakeboof, the social club.  Pictures, hatching eggs.  Lots of Scrabble.  Don’t tell me you’re not a member of Cakeboof!
T: I guess I’m not.
P: That explains it! Nowadays, no one uses the mail anymore when they need to communicate.  They just go into Cakeboof, write out a message, and yell it as loud as they can.  That way, all of their friends who are members will know!
T: Couldn’t they just put invitations in the mail, like everyone used to do?
P: Oh, listen to Mr. Big over here!  They’re already contacting everyone who’s a Cakeboof member; is it fair that they should have to use a whole new way of contacting people who aren’t Cakeboof members?
T: No, I mean, couldn’t they just mail everyone who they want to come?
P: How are they supposed to remember you?  They never see you down at the Cakeboof!
T: That’s fair, I guess.  So is it easy to be a member of the, uh, that club we’re talking about?
P: Sure!  Just go down and register as a member.  They’ll give you your own room, which you meticulously decorate.  Then you just have to come to the club every day to see if you have any messages from your friends or from anyone who’s known you since high school.  Also, watch your walls carefully in case someone comes into your room and writes something on them.  It’s that simple!
T: I don’t have time to devote to some social club!  I’m a very important person—I’m a widely-published author, plus the manager of two baseball teams!
P: Well, sir, I tell you what.  If you won’t join Cakeboof, your friends could just mail you a picture of the message they sent everyone else via Cakeboof.  That would probably be the most efficient thing.
Finis

Remember when hatching eggs were a thing? I had a bunch of those.

I think my husband – who, I should mention, still doesn’t have a Cakeboof account – is the exact audience Deanna Zandt is trying to reach in her book Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking. The book makes a case for the usefulness of social networks for activist work, and gives practical advice on using them to further causes and build useful relationships. One of the most interesting ideas she explores is that of using networks to build empathy. One-on-one conversations have been a staple of organizing since forever, but Zandt demonstrates how having a one-on-one with two hundred people at once, in the form of wall posts and similar forms of mass communication, can in some ways be as intimate as sitting down with someone in person. She illustrates her point with the example of the country club in Philadelphia that banned a group of black children from swimming in its pool, saying that her social networking sites “lit up” with friends telling stories of similar experiences they’d had. Reading a story of discrimination or bigotry by a friend of yours, even a distant one, takes the situation out of the often abstract realm of mass media and plunks it squarely into your life – and you can do the same when you’re the one being discriminated against. Posting status updates or tweets on how an issue affects you personally is an effective way to build empathy before putting out a call to write a representative, participate in a rally, or sign a petition.

But it isn’t as simple as convincing your friends to sign a petition because they already know it’ll affect you. Zandt also explains the importance of authenticity in social networking spaces – that is, posting the right mix of personal and professional status updates and links so that more distant people in your network come to feel like they know you personally, and respect you enough to listen when you tell them to take action.

Zandt also covers the importance of avoiding “slacktivism,” resisting racist hierarchies, and creating and documenting history on Wikipedia; in the appendices, she offers a few quick words on fundraising and gives some advice for organizations. Again, it’s one-on-one tactics updated for new forms of communication, and anyone who’s already been utilizing social networks for activism will find it pretty pedestrian. If you’re someone like me, though, who tended until recently to keep my activism and my Facebook accounts separate (and I can’t even wrap my mind around Twitter yet), much of the advice is quite useful.

With all that said, though, the book misses an opportunity to really connect with committed activists. She includes few examples, and even fewer actually related to organizing, of how this stuff plays out in reality. Throughout the first half of the book, all the scenarios she describes seem to be more about business connections than organizing. Her section on tactics for organizations even assumes a nonprofit model, referring to employees rather than members. Overall, the book sits squarely in the middle of the privileged sphere, assuming that its readers want to repair the world because it seems like a good thing to do, not because their own well-being depends on it.

Furthermore, the way the book frames its premise is deeply troubling. Can social networking do some good? Certainly, depending on the work you’re doing. Will it change the world? No more than enthusiastic consent will end rape. Using hyperbolic language for relatively safe forms of social justice work isn’t just a minor irresponsibility; it gives privileged people the impression that they can make monumental change with little or no sacrifice, and that’s a very dangerous idea.

So take it with a grain of salt. If you’re already using Facebook like a pro, you can skip it. If you find yourself scratching your head at everyone’s obsession with these newfangled means of communication, though, this book is worth picking up.

Disclosure: I count Deanna as a friend and colleague. While she interviewed me for this book, it wasn't included. She also asked me if I would review this book and obviously I said yes. Now on to my review...


Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking by Deanna Zandt is a must read for everyone who hates on social networking, who isn't sure why the hell anyone would engage in social networking and for those of us looking to use social networking for good. That's a lot of people, I know. But it's a quick read! Barely 100 pages, if you don't count the significant extras she puts in the resource section. But still a quick read.

As someone who uses social networking/media for fun and good, it was a breezy read. It was far too social networking for me, but I know far more people who need this book than who could have been quoted in this book. There is a need for this book. I understand that statement each day someone asks me if foundations should be online. Yes! Can they fundraise there? Yes! Will they fulfill their capital campaign by Tweeting? Probably not.

That naunce of using social networking is what Deanna gets spot on and explains well.

For most of my blogging career, I did it under a tiny veil of anonymity. The last few years of doing just that made me uncomfortable for many reasons including the fact that I wasn't getting the props I deserved and that those around  me didn't know the resource that had in me. OMG how many times I've been in the "We should start a blog!" or "Why should we buy the dot com if we just use the dot org domain?" conversations. I wasn't just holding myself back, but others by proxy. Deanna digs into this as well and dares us all to use our own names and pictures of us.

What I appreciated the most from this book was the death of clicks = popularity. There is no way to measure your influence online due to social networking. Yes, sometimes you can see when someone clicks over from Facebook or via Twitter, but sometimes your links and story get disconnected from your bit.ly account. Viral is not easily measurable. Everyone needs to realize that. Marketers, swag pushers and politicos. It's like porn, you know a great connector when you see it.

There is also a good segment that deals a death blow to personal branding and a section on why parents shouldn't be scared of what is online. Hooray!

Bottomline is that this is a great book for the newbies. Don't fall for people telling you that they are a social media guru and can help you raise a shit load of money online. Don't warp your message to fit what someone told you is your brand. Just be you and have fun.

Please purchase a copy from an indie bookstore or Powells.com and hand it to your favorite troublemaker.

* Book links are affiliate links. If you buy your book here I could make a very small amount of money that goes towards this blog.

You would think that I wrote Pink Brain, Blue Brain the way I'm obsessed by it. But I just had to share with you the fact that Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers, authors of Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs, have an excellent review in Women Review of Books.

AND I got special permission to share it with you!

It's a PDF file, but it's well worth the download and read. Enjoy.

When my daughter was old enough for chapter books, I couldn't wait to get her a Nancy Drew book, specifically a young readers version of Nancy called "Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew." She fell in love!

It's precisely this handing down of Nancy Drew from mother to daughter, aunt to niece and super cool friend of Mom's to a young girl that has allowed Nancy Drew to remain one of the best selling children's book series of all time. In Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, Melanie Rehak does an excellent job at outlining the birth and rise to world domination of our beloved Nancy Drew.

The birth of Nancy Drew came from a combination of "father of only daughters finds feminism" and a new found attention of the massive buying power of teens. In 1922 "the Stratemeyer Syndicate [which birthed Nancy Drew] earned $9.1 million, $1 million of which was from [one of their girls series] (page 98)." Which leads to one of the themes of this double biography - the evolution of girlhood in the USA. How did such a strong girl character catch in the years between the first and second wave of feminism?

Girl Sleuth is the story of the two women who did indeed craft Nancy's character and sustained our appetite for more and more Nancy Drew mysteries. One woman charted her own path in writing and journalism, the other found a career opportunity out of her father's untimely death. Both were partners in crime, yet also were antagonistic to each other over the years.

What made me smile was the way that Rehak weaved in feminist history into Nancy's history. Rehak doesn't say that Nancy is a feminist character, but she does show us how the role of women in the workforce, girlhood and the emergence of the second wave of feminism all impacted Nancy's development.

This isn't a new book. In fact the series my daughter likes to read isn't referenced as it started in 2006 and this book was published in 2005. But it's a book that I've been meaning to read for years. Fellow book worm, Rachel read it years ago and said I had to read it and that I would love it. She was right. I received this book through PaperbackSwap.com.

I would add this to any summer reading list. It's an easy read, enjoyable and if you loved Nancy as a girl, you'll love this book. Purchase a copy from an indie bookstore or Powells.com and toss it in your bag.

* Book links are affiliate links. If you buy your book here I could make a very small amount of money that goes towards this blog.

Working for Justice: The L.a. Model of Organizing and Advocacy edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro
(Cornell University Press)

I first found out about this book when I got an email from one of my activist friends, which she had sent out to all her activist friends, about the release party. I couldn’t make it that night, but the book seemed like the perfect thing to review for a political feminist website, so I ordered a copy as soon as I could. (You may think that, as a book reviewer, I get free copies of books. Very often this is true – in fact, some publishers like to send me two, even three copies of a new title, just to show they’re serious – but most of the university presses are too high and mighty for the likes of us.) Working For Justice argues that Los Angeles has its own distinct style of union and worker center organizing – that the transformation of the labor market through globalization and deregulation has led organizers to find creative new strategies for achieving fair working conditions. As a union member and labor activist (who worked on one of the very campaigns discussed in the book), I opened it hoping for – nay, expecting – a cornucopia of ideas and tactics that I could take to the organizers of my own campaigns.

I should probably mention that I fall prey to wishful thinking pretty easily.

What I didn’t know – and, in my defense, what the book’s ambiguous subject heading of “labor” doesn’t make incredibly clear – was that the book was written by sociologists for sociologists, and thus is almost unreadable to someone outside of academia. By unreadable, I don’t mean that it’s full of jargon or discipline-specific grammar; a college-educated reader shouldn’t have a problem parsing its sentences. I mean, rather, that most of the essays focus more on documenting the evolution of various organizations than tackling any specific problems, which makes for some of the most mind-numbingly boring prose I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve read the unabridged Moby Dick! I’m sure the essays are valuable to some activist somewhere, but over and over again I found myself slogging through quotidian details like the hiring of new staff members and the scheduling of coalition meetings, and then wiping my brow and groaning in exhaustion. Again, I don’t think that this types of minutiae is of no use to anyone; rather, I think the authors failed to demonstrate why it’s useful.

Look, the book is what it is; I know I shouldn’t criticize it for being a different genre than I expected. I won’t claim that sociologists should apologize for writing essays that further the field of sociology. I do think, though, that there’s an interesting problem at work here. It’s no secret that scholarly writing often feels sterile and irrelevant to a reader outside of a particular field, and I suppose in many fields that’s unavoidable. But is it possible to blur the boundaries between scholarly and popular writing without sacrificing the usefulness of a text for either scholars or laypeople? (If you’re reading this, bell hooks, feel free to chime in.)

Furthermore, I wondered about the book’s relationship to the workers around which it revolves. A back cover blurb boasts that the book “provide[s] access [to labor movements] that academics rarely achieve,” but is the field of sociology so backwards that writers get pats on the back for merely interacting with the people they write about? In the forward, Joshua Bloom mentions “an ongoing national dialogue among scholars, advocates, and activists,” but I wonder what happens when rank-and-file workers read the book. Are they, like me, left scratching their heads?

In any case, I did get some useful tidbits out of it. My favorite essay was Jong Bum Kwon’s “The Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance: Spatializing Justice in an Ethnic ‘Enclave,’” which chronicled the rise and development of KIWA, a worker center that serves low-wage workers of various ethnicities in Koreatown. First off, Kwon does a great job of highlighting what makes KIWA an effective organization, emphasizing its shrewd mix of aggressive direct actions and more flexible, subtle tactics. One especially impressive moment was KIWA’s ability, as they were facing defeat in a campaign to unionize Assi Market workers, to use their failure as a springboard to a larger living wage campaign. They couldn’t help the workers at Assi, but they did manage to start normalizing the idea of fair wages in the community. Even more intriguing, though, is Kwon’s insight into how labor organizing has changed Koreatown’s very concept of itself, from a space inhabited by wealthy entrepreneurs where low-wage workers, especially Latinos, are made invisible, to a multi-class, multi-ethnic community. Chinyere Osuji, in her study of “noncitizen citizenship,” highlights a similar phenomenon in the annual May Day marches, during which the very act of publicly displaying one’s ethnic heritage can be a potent strategy for changemaking.

All in all, if you’re looking for the type of material that’s included in Working For Justice, then Working For Justice is where you’ll find it. As for the editors’ claim that “the L.A. model” differs from organizing around the country – well, some comparisons to other cities would have made that difference more clear to me, but then, I think it’s obvious by now that I wasn’t the audience most of these writers had in mind.

Stella looks like and usually acts like your run of the mill grandma. But she has a secret that is protected not by her, but also by the women she helps. Stella spent years in an abusive marriage and busted out of it in the most literal sense. Now she dedicates her life to busting other women out of abusive relationships.

A Bad Day for Pretty by Sophie Littlefield held my attention like no other mystery novel. Not only did I want to learn the conclusion of the murder mystery, but I also wanted to know more about Stella. I wish we all had a Stella in our lives and not just because she kicks ass. I want to share a beer with her.

This book was pitched to me as a feminist mystery novel and there are certainly a lot of feminist messages. What I loved even more was a debate between Stella and her partner-in-crime in training, Chrissy about which women deserve to be saved. There's even an awesome scene where Stella goes off on Working Mother magazine. But in the end, I'd say it is a sisterhood book. Tales of sisterhood. Sprinkled with murder, lust, love, broken hearts and fresh bread.


I give this book a big thumbs up! It was fun, smart and a quick read. Purchase a copy from an indie bookstore or Powells.com and toss it in your beach bag.

Disclaimer: The only payment I received was the copy of the book.

* Book links are affiliate links. If you buy your book here I could make a very small amount of money that goes towards this blog.

Sometimes, people surprise you. In the case of Katherine Heigl's character in Killers, people surprise you by revealing that they are are CIA-trained spies and killers. In the case of this reviewer, they surprise you by making a not-horrendous movie despite being named Katherine Heigl. Perhaps it's because after Knocked Up, 27 Dresses and The Ugly Truth, my expectations of a movie starring Heigl were lowered so far that it would have been hard for Killers to truly disappoint. And it didn't - not totally.

Heigl plays Jen, a software salesperson of some kind who has recently been dumped by her boyfriend and is vacationing in Nice with her parents. We learn in the first thirty seconds that she's been dumped, and in the first two minutes we learn why: As her mother says, she's too "safe" and "predictable" and "not spontaneous enough." Jen, whose parents are played by the hilarious but underused Katherine O'Hara the still-mustachioed Tom Selleck, are polar opposites: He likes to play it safe, and she likes to play it fast, loose and drunk. Almost as soon as they arrive, Jen meets Spencer, a CIA agent who is in Nice on a job that conveniently involves lots of driving along cliff top roads in a red Ferrari convertible (subtle!) and swimming (shirtless!). They fall in love and he decides to quit his line of work which, he confesses to a sleeping Jen, he doesn't really like. He doesn't particularly enjoy killing people, and he wants to get out of the spy game and "put down some roots." So he gets out, and they go home and get married.

Three years later, they're living a dreamy suburban life, but Jen is worried that the relationship is going stale. Meanwhile, Spencer's former boss has contacted him to bring him out of retirement. He resists, and then people start trying to kill him. All the people in his neighborhood. As it turns out, Jen's dad is also a spy and, mad that Spencer tried to kill him in Nice, he planted sleepers in their neighborhood and has now put at $20 million bounty on Spencer's head. Spencer is forced to reveal his true identity to Jen, who is predictably less than thrilled. Much shooting, exploding and car crashing ensues as Jen and Spencer spend the day running from the many trained assassins and money-hungry amateurs who live in their quiet suburban community (I know, it's like the screenwriters read your journal!). In the end, all ends happily, with the two former spies reconciling their differences and Jen forgiving her husband and father for their secret identities. And of course, there is an adorable baby boy who, tragically, is born without a Selleck mustache.

Perhaps one of the most upsetting things about this movie is the rather graphic violence against women. It's nice to see women get in on the action, literally: The majority of the assassins who come after Spencer and Jen are women. But it's not nice to note that the assassins who are most brutally killed are women. When the women are killed - impaled on chandeliers made of antlers or shot point-blank - we see it in gory detail, and we see close-ups of their bleeding bodies. When the men are killed, there's no such attention to detail.

As we've come to expect from a character played by Heigl, Jen is uptight, socially inept and hyper-organized. When she and Spencer first meet, she is holding a huge tub of Maalox. Apparently, showing her lifting vacuum-packed Ziploc bags of clothes out of her suitcase and wearing a button-down and pearls on a beach vacation wasn't quite obvious enough; they had to script this so that Jen quite literally has something stuck up her ass. She's horrified to be single, self-pitying in the extreme, and incapable of sticking up for herself. I'm not sure quite how we ended up with this particulary rom com portrayal of the modern woman - desperate for a man, desperate for order, desperate to be anyone but herself - but I do know that I hate it.

That said, Jen and Spencer's relationship is generally a respectful and collaborative one. They both have careers, they both do housework and when Jen's father expresses his concerns about Spencer's inability to take care of Jen, Spencer says, "Jen's not some fragile china doll... I depend on her, sir, it's not the other way around." Given this, it's frustrating to see Jen occasionally relegated to the role of nagging wife or buzzkill. On several occasions, her horror at killing people and lack expertise with guns are portrayed as getting in Spencer's way, and he gets frustrated with her. Apparently, it's unreasonable for a woman to stop and ask questions when her husband says "I used to work for the CIA, please go into the living room and get the small cache of weapons I've hidden under the floorboards, as people appear to be trying to kill us."

Of course, in action movies, that reaction is unreasonable. In action movies, women simply say "OK, let's lock and load!" and turn out to be quite good with a gun, despite having no firearms training at all. And at its core, Killers isn't really a romantic comedy. It's an action movie with a relationship at the center, an escapist fantasy for people - men, specifically - who feel suffocated by their quiet suburban existences and their comfortable, happy marriages. And it's not as sexist or as train-wrecky as we've come to expect from Katherine Heigl movies. Don't get me wrong, it's still sexist in that, as usual, Heigl plays a risk-averse, highly organized, socially awkward, single-and-hating-it woman whose voice enters canines-only upper registers when she's upset. True, it doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but it's nowhere near as egregious as Heigl's previous movies. So the real question is: Why was this movie marketed as a typically sexist Heigl rom com?

The trailers highlight the naggy, uptight, miserably-single Heigl moments instead of the ones where she's helping her husband escape from assassins or kicking a little butt herself. They show the scenes where she's struggling with her gun or freaking out about a car chase, just to emphasize the fact that while Kutcher is playing a suave former spy, Heigl is playing a silly woman. In reality, both Jen and Spencer have moments of suave and moments of silly. But as we know from recent rom com experience (I'm looking at you, hell-bound people responsible for The Bounty Hunter and The Proposal), sexism sells. It's far easier to market a movie about a badass former spy and his uptight wife than a movie where husband and wife love each other, work together and blow some stuff up. Talk about safe, predictable and not spontaneous enough.

In light of yesterday’s discussion of SatC, I thought I’d direct your attention to Muslimah Media Watch’s discussion of the film.

If any non-Arab, non-Muslim readers are itching to say (or repeat), “Well, I don’t think it’s racist, and my opinion is valid, too, and also you’re just looking for stuff to complain about!” just please, please remember that these women may have a wee bit more expertise on the subject than you do. Do you enjoy it when a member of a privileged group lectures you on what is and isn’t offensive to your group? No, it’s frustrating and insulting! Stay civil, all.

It never fails. When I see Bitch magazine on the floor in the pile of mail, I squeal. And rarely does the issue fail me.

I'm still getting use to the color thing and the yellow isn't helping, but hey, if that's the worst I can say about this issue...

First, Andi Zeisler in her letter to the editor addresses the "we don't need feminism" bullshit from Venus. Gotta say that I never got into Venus. I have friends who lived by it, but I'm a music dork. And not even Venus could make me cool.

There's an excellent interview with Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell Out of the Sky on page 10. I read the few chapters in a book store and fell in love. I really need to get that book. There are awesome pieces on Italian TV and hip hop that acknowledges that us chicks have orgasms too.

But the all out best piece in this issue is a kick ass essay about the hot mom phenomena and how it needs to die.

My mom blogging/tweeting friends know that I say 'Hell Yes!' to this. I feel that women have enough pressure to look hot all the time, to be sexually available all the time and that for moms to also be that way? Fuck that. Correction, fuck the prescriptions that come from blogs, books and magazines about how I should behave, dress and look in order to be a MILF. I'm so tired of being made feel like I'm not sexy just because I don't do this or wear that. I feel that in order to feel sexy, you do what makes you feel sexy. Of course, I won't get a book deal from that line.

But there's more! There is also a great interview with Jen Sorensen about her comics. A look at priv-lit - literature/media that tells women that all they need is to spend a lot of money for their lives to be better. I don't usually read best sellers, so I totally missed the whole "Eat, Pray, Love" mania and after reading this article, I'm kinda happy! But also very curious about how one book could cause such a stir.  For the vocab focused of us is a mind scratching piece about the use or lack of use of the word lesbian.

And of course there are always some wonderful book, DVD & music reviews!

Bitch magazine is independent media. It is feminist media. And we need to support it. So please, if you aren't a subscriber, do it today!

I haven’t seen the latest Sex and the City movie, and I don’t plan to because I’m sure it will be terrible. It also sounds a little bit racist! And, like the rest of the franchise, shallow and kind of silly.

However, Choire makes some good points here:

It used to be that we loved rich people; then recently we came to find them distasteful, or at least wasteful. And now America burns with a weird, left- and right-wing resentment. It’s been a long time since our country has been angry enough to come close to redistributing the wealth.

It is true, in my experience, that a surprising number of rich people are actually fairly terrible (and spoiled and short-sighted and ugly on the inside). But the four rich women of Sex and the City are of a different ilk. They love clothing, each other, homosexuals, intercourse, and their feelings, in that order. Have we forgotten that these are fantastic qualities? Apparently so, because that is what is now being used to trash them.

Also:

Even more important, the movie provides a first-wave feminism flashback the likes of which we haven’t seen anywhere. Charlotte and Miranda, getting drunk, and telling the socially unutterable truth about how they sometimes hate their children? Hello, it’s a much-needed refresher course straight from 1971.

I asked Andy Cohen—Bravo executive/host and Friend of Sarah Jessica Parker, and defender of Sarah Jessica Parker—what he thinks about all the spite. “Given the amount of actually stupid/ridiculous movies that come out every year, I was amazed by the degree of vitriol leveled at a good one (of very few) that celebrates women,” he wrote to me through Facebook.

It is pretty amazing. But then, some topics—fashion and morals and rights and responsibilities and sex with strangers on the beach, that great American pastime—still make people pretty uncomfortable.

A lot of the criticism of Sex and the City is valid, but some of it — or at least the criticism that appears in mainstream media sources — is also mean-spirited and sexist. And a lot of it is silly — like the criticisms of the clothes. Of course the clothes are ridiculous and over the top. It’s Sex and the City! Remember the giant flower? And the tutu? I’ll admit that I enjoyed the show well enough, and I even think it was groundbreaking insofar as it featured women on TV talking about sex honestly, with female experiences centered. The characters also prioritized their female friendships and, while most of their conversations were about sex and men, they all had individual identities and perspectives. They were funny. They were raunchy. Sure, they were a little shallow with the adoration of clothes and shoes, but so am I, to a point. Was it a feminist TV show? No. Did it have its moments? Yes.

I’m not surprised to see the movie being raked across the coals, though. And I’m not exactly heartbroken over it. Sex and the City had its moment; it was groundbreaking ten years ago, when explicit sex talk from women didn’t have much of a place on television, and it was fun and indulgent in a thriving economy and in a culture that embraced excess. Those things have changed, though, and SATC has not changed with them.

Choire’s right that a lot of the vitriol targeted at SATC is sexist and ageist, and that the film is receiving disproportionate criticism in part because the story is centered around older women; in American culture, we like the women in our movies to be young and pretty, at least if they’re talking about having sex. Women with wrinkles and handbags full of condoms are just unseemly. The film also challenges our ideas about marriage and motherhood — and those challenges are rarely met with enthusiasm in a culture that lionizes both, without actually taking steps to support the individuals who make up (or wish to make up) those institutions. And while I’m also critical of the emphasis on consumption in the show and in the movies, SATC seems to draw disproportionate criticism for celebrating wealth and stuff. You don’t hear the James Bond or Oceans-whatever-number-we’re-on-now movies being taken to task because the lead characters are obsessed with money and toys.

But some of the better criticism centers on the fact that SATC is only concerned with the rights and experiences of a certain class of women. Muslim women? Oppressed, but, of course, silent. American women, by contrast, have everything going for them and are fully “free.” When Muslim women do take any sort of action, it centers around… shoes. And rescuing our heroines, of course. The movie is “good for women” insofar as it features some women, but that doesn’t stop it from being racist and sexist.

My Louboutins for a decent popular movie about lady-stuff.