#MeToo: My story (ies) of sexual harassment

October 19, 2017

I once had a movie producer kiss me on the neck.

How’s that for an opening sentence? Pretty good, huh? Got your attention, right?

It was at the end of an interview when, shaking my hand goodbye, he suddenly lurched forward and kissed me on the neck. (It may have been more of a bite than a kiss, but I don’t actually remember and don’t want to overstate what was a pretty bizarre sendoff.)

Afterward, the embarrassed publicist apologized, concerned that I would be writing about this. But I was a young journalist and had, as a woman, been raised to soldier on. So I said, wrote and did nothing about this. And I hadn’t thought about it until Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of, well, just about every woman on the planet opened the floodgates of ew-ness. ...

Men at deuce

October 10, 2017

In Anna Ziegler’s new play “The Last Match,” opening in Manhattan Oct. 24, she uses the rivalry between two male tennis players – think an American Roger Federer and an early Novak Djokovic – to tell the story of life at deuce, never advancing without retreating, never retreating without advancing.

Perhaps the reason the world is at deuce is because the people who created it – primarily men – are at deuce. (It’s the score in tennis, at 40-40, from which the player must win two points in order to win the game.)

Think about it: Most of the world’s great creations were made by men (as men like to point out as a way to explain their superiority to women). All but 49 of the 923 Nobel laureates have been men.

And yet – you know there’s always an “and yet” – they have consistently destroyed the worlds they have created. You could say that this is the human condition, but in fact it’s the male condition. ...

The beauty trap, continued

September 18, 2017

Amanda Hess’ Sunday New York Times Magazine piece about our ambivalence toward anti-aging is but the latest commentary about the disconnect between ourselves and our bodies, and by “ourselves” I mean women and their bodies. It is a disconnect that affects men as well – though not to the extent that it does women.

Hess describes how Allure magazine has declared war on “anti-aging,” featuring Helen Mirren on the cover, draped in a boy-toy – the same Helen Mirren who played Cleopatra, of whom Shakespeare wrote, “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

And yet, Hess notes, the same issue of Allure carried an ad for the new L’Oréal Paris moisturizer, part of its Age Perfect brand (of which I’m a big fan), featuring – you guessed it, Helen Mirren. ...

‘The Beguiled’: A fox in the henhouse (Beware the hens)

July 2, 2017

Much has been made about how Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” is a feminist reimagining of a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie that was itself an adaptation of Thomas P. Cullinan’s Southern Gothic novel, “A Painted Devil.” But the well-crafted remake turns out to be less about feminism and the female perspective than about the sacrifice of the individual – male or female – to the survival of the group. ...

No bull: ‘Fearless Girl’s’ ancient Greek evocation

April 17, 2017

The controversy over the faceoff between “Fearless Girl” and “Charging Bull” on Wall Street has raised all sorts of psychosexual and political implications.

Some have seen the 4-foot-girl – hands on hips, chest puffed like a sail heading into the wind – as a symbol of feminist ideals. Apparently, that’s what sponsor State Street Global Advisors, which wants to encourage more women in the boardroom, had in mind. ...

Mary Tyler Moore and feminism, after all

January 27, 2017

Mary Tyler Moore – who died Wednesday of cardiopulmonary arrest after pneumonia at age 80 – was the Jackie of TV. And like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she road the wave of feminism from chic wife and mother to career woman.

If Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was White House Jackie in Capri pants, Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was Jackie O, the Doubleday and Viking editor, a sweater draped nattily over her shoulder. But Mary was not only a career woman, she was a certain kind of working woman, one who, unlike Jackie, had to go home and cook and face being alone. ...

Why women marched

January 22, 2017

Initially, President Donald J. Trump was confused. Why the Women’s March?, he tweeted. Didn’t we just have an election? (Yes, Mr. President. And here’s the rebuttal. A representative democracy is not a one-and-done deal but more of an ongoing conversation.)

Later, Trump – or his handlers – tweeted that this was democracy at work blah, blah, blah. But he wasn’t alone in wondering: What gives? Why march, particularly in the United States, where women enjoy such a high standard of living?

Some women, presumably Trump supporters, were mystified, too. ...