Archive | Feminist Matters

Second Chakra Ladies and Germs

I had a piece to write for money today and I wrote it. This is newsworthy only because I threw out my back on Friday and even a few years ago this would have incapacitated me for at least a week. These days, I know the drill, though not well enough to stop me from throwing out my back in the first place. The morning I’d done so, I’d been too busy to go to the gym or the dance studio so I’d gone running instead.

I called Beztie upon returning from the track. “I went running,” I said triumphantly.

“Dummy,” she said. “It always throws out your back.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette, and I smiled.

Then I went into spasm, and lay flat on the floor. After I stopped crying and permakitten Grace stopped licking my paws sympathetically, I took four Advil and did the stretches my old trainer Leslie taught me. My regular acupunk–the brilliant, elfin Tim–is abroad for the rest of the year, so I looked up C., his replacement. That’s when things got hairy.

C., as it turns out, was working out of a communal space, which was perfectly fine in theory but precarious for a radioactive witch like me. Continue Reading →

The Hollywood Firsts of Sherry Lansing: Q&A

Sherry Lansing is the Queen of Hollywood firsts. When appointed president of production of 20th Century Fox in 1980, she became the first woman to run a Hollywood movie studio. Going on to run Paramount Studios during one of its most successful decades, she prevailed as a Tinseltown superpower through the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. She even became the first female studio head to leave her hand- and footprints on the sidewalk in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Standing five foot ten, Lansing worked as an actress mentored by the legendary director Howard Hawks (she appeared in his “Rio Lobo” with John Wayne) before joining MGM as a script reader. Married to director William Friedkin since 1991, she left the film biz in 2005 to launch the Sherry Lansing Foundation, which is dedicated to funding and raising awareness for cancer research, health, public education, and encore career opportunities. Now she’s the subject of Leading Lady, an authorized biography by Stephen Galloway. On a deliciously long phone call, we talked about her many hats as well as feminism, the changing movie industry, and “Fatal Attraction,” which she produced. Continue Reading →

‘Lady Macbeth’ and the Unlikeability Paradox

The “female likeability” mandate has been holding women hostage in literature, as in life, since the Ancient Greeks gave us Medea and Clytemnestra. But it was Shakespeare who really enforced the myth that girls had to play nice. Though he authored some beautifully complex women, he also introduced a bevy of thorny female characters who either sweetened up or met a brutal fate–in King Lear and The Taming of the Shrew, especially. Then there’s Lady Macbeth. As a woman who notoriously did not know her place, she was doomed to go mad before offing herself entirely.

Though she is never name-checked except in its title, the Lady haunts William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s classic 1865 novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk. About a young woman sold into marriage to a man more than twice her age, this “Lady Macbeth” is a feminist screed that doesn’t just politely nudge at expectations that adult women should be good little girls. It rips them up while glaring at us defiantly. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy